GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (49 page)

The old man and woman chant the word in
chorus and stop, exhausted.

Advocate stares at them out of his mask of
powerless goodness. His rheumy eyes seem on the point of
overflowing. His lips tremble.

“
Transfer is a choice. It cannot be
imposed. But it is impossible for you to remain here in
Administrative Suspension. Exit is the unavoidable alternative to
transfer. I would humbly suggest, humbly implore, that, before you
formulate, through the necessary administrative channels, your
decision to exit, rather than to transfer, you should sleep upon
the matter and then decide.
La nuit porte
conseil
.”

They think it’s another trap and say so but finally
agree to sleep on the matter (what else can they do, anyhow?) sure
that nothing during their last night here could make them change
their minds and choose transfer to more suffering.

That night they are visited by their loved
ones, never so close, never so urgent, imploring, an imploration
impossible to refuse.

Seymour is walking down his sweetheart’s
street, not the copy drawn in painful black and white on a plaster
wall in half-life, but the real one in true color: there, the
decorative dish with the rose-encircled peasant-lass, there, the
yellow lemons on the boxes of oysters and there, the golden horse
head. The heavy
porte-cochere
clicks open and she steps out as he best remembers her,
ponytailed with a gold crucifix on a high-buttoned white blouse and
implores him to come, she’s been waiting for him for so
long.

Helen encounters Richard standing bewildered
in the middle of the sidewalk with a guidebook in his hand. “I’ve
been looking for you for so long,” he says. “Where were you all
this time? I want to go with you to … to …” She’s afraid he’ll say
the Catacombs but he ends by saying he wants to go to the
Luxembourg Gardens which is exactly where she wants to go and she
imagines them both sitting there near the basin, embracing, with
the joyous cries of the children sailing model sailboats, the
billowing sails, the jet of the fountain blown into a faint
rainbow, the leaves of the pruned lindens blown into twinkling
points of silver.

The next morning, they wash and dress
blindly and go into the Common Room. The functionaries are waiting
and accompany them to the cubicles. They sign the release papers in
triplicate without reading them, hardly seeing them, their vision
still inward and prophetic of things outside. They don’t even say
goodbye to one another despite all that time spent together.

***

Part Five

Chapter 50

June 23, 1951

She emerges nauseous to sunshine flooding
her hotel room, glaring sunshine that makes her temples throb
painfully but disperses the fragments of the long nightmare,
mid-morning sunshine (her watch marks 9:45) and she’s still in bed,
something which never happens and today of all days, won’t she be
late for the appointment? She knows she’s ill but forces herself
up, goes over to the table, unsteady on her feet, and squints at
the administrative-blue summons enjoining her to present herself at
the Visa Department of the Préfecture de Paris at 11:30am in view
of obtaining her Permanent Resident
carte de séjour
. She sits down, waiting for the dizziness to go
away, and tries to focus on her mother’s letter received the day
before, confirming the earlier jubilant phone call: now that her
father had rallied and was out of danger there was no point her
returning to Denver, all that expense.

She washes from head to foot at the
washbasin, carefully avoiding her poor image in the mirror, and
dresses quickly. She decides to skip breakfast. Maybe fresh air
outside will settle her stomach and clear her head. She takes her
book and leaves the hotel. Halfway down the block her brain starts
to function and she realizes the metro is in the other
direction.

She takes a few steps down the metro stairs.
The nausea worsens at the idea of underground corridors instead of
sky. She pulls back and up and decides on surface transportation to
the Prefecture.

Near the bus-stop bystanders have gathered.
She hears a tense American voice and calming French voices.

A woman says: “Don’t get excited, it’s not
our fault if you don’t speak French.”

Another bystander says in English: “Combs?
You want perhaps to buy combs?”

The American voice, tense to the breaking
point: “No! No!”

Helen joins the group. He’s a tall very
nice-looking young man, a little wild-eyed with frustration.
Holding a heavy valise in one hand and clutching a guidebook in the
other, he looks as if he’d gotten off the boat train from Le Havre
that very morning.

“Can I help you?” At her question, in
English, the bystanders drift away, leaving them by themselves.

“Nobody understands me here. No, they
understand but they won’t tell me where it is. I don’t want to buy
a comb.”

He could use one, she thinks. His hair is as
wild as his eyes. But he looks nice that way. She asks him just
what it is he’s looking for. His eyes are blue.

“They refuse to tell me where the Catacombs
are.”

“It’s not worth visiting. I’ve been there.
Nothing but bones and skulls. I was glad to get out of it into the
sunshine. It’s such a nice day. Have you ever been to the flower
market by the Seine? Or to the Eiffel Tower? Or the Luxembourg
Gardens?”

She breaks off, embarrassed. Won’t he think
she’s trying to maneuver him into going to the flower market or to
the Eiffel Tower or the Luxembourg Gardens with her? Isn’t that
exactly what she’s trying to do? He’s so lost. That appeals to her
even more than his good looks. Maybe she’ll be able to calm him
down. All her friends back in Denver said she was good with lost
bewildered people. It’ll get you into trouble one of these days,
they often said.

But she has to go to the Prefecture
immediately. And he’s set on going to the Catacombs, God alone
knows why. He says it again, that where he wants to go is to the
Catacombs.

Stupidly (as she’ll soon realize) she
walks with him back to the metro she hadn’t wanted to go down to.
She shows him the big map under glass, points at the line to take,
the station to get off at, change for this other line and then get
off here at
Denfert-Rochereau
.
Denfert-Rochereau
is where there’s a big green lion.

“I don’t want to go to the zoo. I want to go to the
Catacombs.”

“It’s a statue, a big old bronze lion.
That’s why it’s green. Anyhow a real lion at the zoo wouldn’t be
green would it? An Irish lion maybe.”

“There are no lions in Ireland. Or snakes
either. I’ll get lost. Come with me to the Catacombs.”

A small cloud veils the sun. A chilly wind
starts up.

“I can’t. I have an appointment,” she says to his
back. Already he’s going down the steps. He’s sure to take the
wrong line. Strongly tempted to join him, she takes three steps
down out of the sunshine, which has returned, and then pulls back
and up again.

“
Line Eight,” she cries to his dwindling
back. Somebody will tell him how to get to
Denfert-Rochereau
and somebody else, once he gets there, how
to get to the Catacombs, opposite the metro station, on the other
side of the
Avenue du Général Leclerc
.

She walks back and takes the bus. It’s only when the
big green recumbent lion looms in the windshield that she realizes
she shouldn’t have sent him down into the confusing metro
corridors. She wonders what’s wrong with her brain today, acting
like a brand-new tourist herself. She sees the entrance to the
Catacombs and scrutinizes the crowd even though she knows he’s
still wandering in the corridors below.

When she gets out at the
Cité
stop in sight of the
Prefecture, she starts trembling badly. Weak and dizzy, she goes
into a café and orders a cup of coffee in a voice she doesn’t
recognize as her own. The tremble aggravates to shudder. Something
rises up in her that she can’t keep down. Face screwed up, lips
compressed, she walks fast to the women’s toilets, locks herself in
a cubicle, kneels to the toilet bowl and waits for
relief.

But no vomit comes. What comes is a terrifying
eruption of tears, painful as though shedding blood. Why is she
crying? “Don’t know, don’t know,” she gasps between sobs until
she’s able to attach her grief to old things: the loss of her rag
doll, the dead kitten, the melting snowman, her beloved grandfather
laid out in his best suit, hopeless loves, all those past tears
renewed and multiplied, a deluge.

The deluge stops as suddenly as it began.
After a while she’s able to get up off her knees. She wipes her
face with her handkerchief, leaves the toilets and pays for the
untouched coffee. Gripping her book tightly, she slowly walks to
the Prefecture.

The place wasn’t far. He’d hoped walking
would make things better. But not even halfway there he has to
lower himself on a bench for the third time since he left the hotel
and wait again for the giddiness and nausea to let up. Between the
cars and passersby he catches interrupted glimpses of himself,
reflected wavy and insubstantial in the store window across the
street, slumped as with the weight of the single-lens Voigtländer
reflex around his neck, the wooden tripod like a strange crutch,
the shopping-net with the rug and the bottle of wine. The distorted
ghost-like image seems to confirm his fear that he’s coming down
with something serious.

He finally gets up and wanders blindly in
the general direction of the Seine. In an unfamiliar street,
signaled by the golden effigy of a horse head, a butcher in a
bloody apron is hacksawing a hooked haunch of meat. The sight
unleashes a new wave of nausea as he thinks of raw horsemeat sticky
with raw egg.

He walks past it and then halts at the
sight of a good stretch of wall across the street: arrow-pierced
hearts with entwined initials, a high-placed constellation of stars
in yellow crayon, a penciled scribble, “
Marie, je t’aime!!!”
and a gigantic red phallus
aimed like a Nazi V2 rocket at the constellation of stars. He
decides to photograph it, moves and collides with a young woman
stepping out of a building.

For a second they clasp each other for the
sake of equilibrium. Then they pull back from that clumsy embrace
(he with the tripod and shopping-net, she with a shopping basket),
both apologizing. The young woman (pale, plain, ponytailed, with a
gold crucifix on a high-buttoned white blouse) turns about and
reaches for the heavy door half-open on a cobblestoned courtyard
and a shop-window with the scrolled words
Tailleur pour Dames et
Messieurs
. She pulls it
shut, apologizes again, and walks down the street the way he has
come.

He leaves the street behind him. A quarter
of an hour later he halts, sure he’s forgotten something important,
vital even. He examines the contents of his pockets. The blue
convocation to the
Préfecture de Police
is there. His passport and his
carte de séjour
too. So is his wallet. Finally, he
realizes he’s forgotten his handkerchief. But he doesn’t have a
cold and is unlikely to weep: the two uses of a
handkerchief.
He walks
on, trying to feel relieved at having attached his malaise to
something concrete, but finds it insufficient.

The malaise goes on, strengthens, even. Did
he miss a class at the Fry-Fitz Academy of Foreign Languages
yesterday? Lose the homework? Then he recalls that good stretch of
graffitied wall. He hadn’t noticed the name of the street. Unless
he returned it would be lost forever. His watch tells him he hasn’t
time to return. He hails a cab, feeling even worse.

She sits on a
rear bench, absorbed in her book, much closer to the cobblestones
and the fog-wreathed gas lamps of London than to the fellow-aliens
in the big bureaucratic room awaiting their turn to be processed.
At intervals one of the stern-faced female functionaries pops out
of one of the cubicles up front and calls out a name, irritated
when the foreigner doesn’t instantly respond to her stubbornly
Gallicized version of it.

Someone sits
down noisily alongside her, jarring her out of the London street a
few seconds. The spectacled young man with a camera around his neck
places a tripod and a strange shopping-net on the bench. The
shopping-net contains a red rug and a bottle of wine. She returns
to her book.

A few pages later, a clatter and a muffled
crash pull her out of it again. The young man is sitting rigid,
staring ahead stiff-faced, ignoring the shopping net and the tripod
fallen to his feet. His face slowly collapses, an ugly mudslide
into grief. She hesitates between him and the book. When he starts
making disquieting sounds, she leans over and asks if she can be of
help. Just as she repeats her question one of the female
functionaries barks out her name. She remains seated, waiting for
reaction. He doesn’t know she exists.
With even greater asperity, the female functionary
cries: “
Mademoiselle Ford, Hélène
!”