GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (50 page)

She gives him a quick touch meant to comfort.
Visibly it doesn’t. She gets up and hurries into the cubicle.

Her processing is laborious. The
severe-faced female functionary confuses her with another Helen
Ford. By the time she gets out, the weeping young man is gone. She
assumes he’s been processed by the other functionary. But his
tripod is still there on the floor. Next to it, there’s a little
reddish pool. She takes it for strangely anemic blood and then, as
the sour smell of wine registers, remembers the sound of
breakage.

She takes the tripod and leaves the gray
processing room. Like tracing a wounded animal, she follows the red
drops in the corridor to a massive door marked
Entry Strictly Forbidden to All
But Authorized Personnel
. She guesses that he’d wanted to hide the shame of
uncontrollable tears. She pushes the door open on a long dusty
corridor and follows the drops, more widely spaced now, up a steep
rickety staircase and sure enough, there he is, in a huddle, back
against the wall, still at it.

“Can I help you?” she asks for the fourth
time that day. At first she thinks he’s bringing out “No” between
sobs and then realizes it’s “Don’t know.”

“You forgot your tripod. You’ve got wine all
over your clothes.”

He comes out of it. He looks at the shopping
net and mumbles: “The rug’s full of glass. I’ll cut my knees,
kneeling.”

“Oh, you’re a Moslem?” she says, for the
sake of diversion.

“My name is Seymour Stein,” he mumbles, “but
I’m nothing.”

He works the sodden rug out of the net and
begins to pick out shards and crumbs of glass. He looks like he
needs more diversion, badly.

“Silly question. How could you possibly be a
Moslem with that wine? Why do you kneel on the rug, though?”

“I photograph wall graffiti. Some of them
are low. I saw nice ones this morning. I don’t remember the street,
I’ve lost the street.”

Weeping again, he stuffs the rug into the
net, grabs the tripod, scrambles to his feet and heads the wrong
way, not back but towards another staircase.

“
Where are you going, Seymour?” she says,
following him. He jabs his finger at a faded inscription
Toilettes
on the wall with an arrow
pointing at the stairs. She wonders if it isn’t an excuse to get
rid of her but she says, “Yes, me too,” and joins him on the
staircase.

They hunt about for the toilets in a maze of
corridors and end up getting lost. She looks for the wine drops to
guide them back but they must have evaporated.

They explore still another shabby corridor.
It ends at a closed iron door. He pushes it open. They take a few
steps down an immensely long poorly lighted corridor which
terminates in darkness. A cold dusty draft starts up, as if
somebody in the distant zone of darkness ahead has opened another
door. The draft rises to gale force; the iron door clangs shut
behind them and goes on clanging in echo before them.

They turn around and find their door locked.
They try to walk forward again and haven’t the strength to prevail
against the wind. She sinks down into a squat against the wall.
“I’m not well,” she says in a faint, apologetic voice.

He joins her in that posture and says he
thinks he’s dying. He mumbles the symptoms, starting with the
terrible nightmare and then splitting headache, nausea, unmotivated
tears and now this weakness. He can’t get up, can’t move.

She tells him that her symptoms are the
same. They’re coming down with something, that’s sure. But it can’t
be dying, she says, to comfort him. It does feel like dying,
though.

“
We’ll have to find our way out,” she says
but doesn’t move. He doesn’t move either.
They can’t.

Another metal
door slams faintly far down the corridor, arousing more phantom
closures. The wind dies abruptly.

Distant irregular footsteps approach. They
open their eyes and see a policeman limping out of the zone of
darkness. Attached to his belt is a great metal ring with dozens of
big keys that jangle with every swaying step. Time goes by.
Finally he stands above them,
immensely tall and gaunt.

“What are you doing in this place? Papers!”
His voice is imperious and rusty.

They hand him their brand new
carte de
séjour
. He moves
clumsily to a bare bulb and examines the documents. Then he goes
over to the iron door, unlocks and opens it.

“Your papers are in order. You have no
business here. Leave immediately.”

She picks herself up and helps the young man
to his feet.

“We’re lost. What is the way out?” she says
feebly as they both cross the threshold.

“Your problems on that side of the door are
not my concern,” says the policeman. The door clangs shut.

Strength seeps back. They find the
wine-drops and soon the way out.

In the sunshine they feel a little better.
They slowly walk toward the Latin Quarter. Neither of them has
anything particular to do there. Each thinks it’s the other’s
way.

Between the Prefecture and the
Saint Michel
fountain, as they breast
insolently healthy crowds, he makes her go carefully into her
symptoms, which are his. She’d have preferred other subjects, such
as where he comes from and what he does in Paris when he’s not
kneeling on a rug. But she has to recite those symptoms a second
time.

It’s her fit of unmotivated weeping (it
happened half an hour before his, he learns) that particularly
alarms him. Doesn’t it mean their central nervous systems are
affected by the disease, whatever it is? They both must have it, he
tells her.

She almost feels happy at having a
connection with him, even that one. A few minutes later she begins
to wonder if there isn’t maybe another, less pathological,
connection developing between them. She’s noticed that every few
seconds he keeps glancing at her. Also, over and over he asks how
she’s feeling. Isn’t that a sure sign of interest? She tries to
forget that she’s not the type of girl good-looking men look twice
at and that he doesn’t even know her name, hasn’t asked.

He stops before a newspaper kiosk. The
tripod falls out of his grasp onto the pavement. It’s Shanghai Flu,
he brings out. She has to support him. People have already died of
it, he says. Flu in summer time? she says dubiously. She picks up
the tripod and looks at the newspaper closely. Not here, she
assures him. In Australia. It’s winter down there.

They reach the Saint Michel fountain. She’s
still holding the tripod. To get him onto a different subject she
asks about his graffiti shots. In an hour, if he’s still alive,
he’ll be going to the Place de la République, he says. Last week
he’d discovered marvelous graffiti on a disaffected garage wall
there.

She asks questions, which she hopes sound
intelligent, about non-representational photography and wonders if
perhaps she might watch him work. If you like, he says, not really
enthusiastically, she judges. But then, nicely, he asks again how
she’s feeling. A little tired, she says.

By now they’ve reached the Luxembourg
Gardens. She suggests resting a little. “A few minutes,” he says.
He has to make it to the
Place de la République
. What’s the hurry? she asks. Won’t the graffiti
stay put? He explains that the sun has to strike the wall at a
glancing angle to bring out the irregularities, the pits and poster
wrinkles and in late June that happens between noon and
one.

They sit down
on green iron chairs near the splashing fountain. He looks at the
children sailing boats with billowing sails, the jet of the
fountain blown into a rainbow, the pruned trees twinkling with
points of light and for the first time that day he feels at
peace.

He turns to her to say that he’s feeling
better. She’s slumped forward, deathly pale, mouth half-open,
staring down at the ground. Deeply alarmed at what’s awaiting him
(that half-hour lag between their symptoms), he touches her
shoulder. She looks up slowly into his anxious face. His sympathy
makes her feel a little better and color returns to her face. He’s
deeply relieved at her quick recovery.
He’d probably experience her relapse in half an
hour, but a short non-fatal relapse.

There’s no direct bus line to the
Place de la
République
. They get off
at the
Boulevard Saint Martin
stop. At the end of the boulevard looms the giant statue of
the Republic with its proffered sprig of laurel. Not a car is in
sight but the sidewalks are crowded with onlookers facing the
square where police whistles shrill above a murmur like distant
surf.

“Sounds like a demonstration,” she says. “You’d
better call it off.” He doesn’t answer and strides forward. She has
trouble keeping up with him. He must have changed his mind and
wants to photograph the action, she thinks.

As they progress, the sound of distant surf
slowly strengthens to the chant of a multitude, like a crowd at a
football game. He stops and then steps on a bench for a better view
of what’s going on ahead. She joins him.

The
Place de la République
is strangely empty of passersby and traffic. From
the windows and the wrought-iron balconies of the surrounding
buildings spectators are looking down as at a great oblong
bullfight arena. Hundreds of policemen block the avenues and
streets converging on the square. Beyond the blue ranks guarding
the
Boulevard Voltaire
thousands of shabby demonstrators advance under a sea of
windy French flags punctuated by a scattering of red flags bearing
the inscription
Parti Communiste Français
. An avenue-wide white banner commands in gigantic
letters:
U.S. GO HOME!

He goes on standing on the bench pale and motionless
like a statue. To make him snap out of it she says: “We don’t want
to go home yet. We’ve just got our Permanent Resident
carte de
séjour
.”

He doesn’t reply. She steps down.

Suddenly he jumps off the bench and
disappears in the crowd.

“Seymour, wait!” To justify the cry for him
to wait for her (after all, he doesn’t even know her name, hasn’t
bothered asking) she cries: “I’ve got your tripod.”

She weaves through the crowd, running
after him, hampered by the heavy wood tripod. She reaches
the
Place de
la République
just as
the head column of the demonstrators debouches from the
Boulevard
Voltaire
on the other
side of the square. They surge forward. Shouts and cries and
whistles become deafening. Flocks of pigeons cowering on balconies
and windowsills arise in flapping panic and circle overhead. The
police fall back and then counterattack. Long supple blackjacks and
tightly rolled-up lead-weighted cloaks rise and fall.

She skirts the buildings, running past
onlookers in doorways, shops with lowered iron curtains, a butcher,
puffy and white among quartered steers and decapitated calves,
grasping the bars of his lowered grill possessively as though
fearing their imminent expropriation by the communists. She looks
around for the strange boy called Seymour, imagining him kneeling
before low graffiti, the remaining bottle-shards in the rug
lacerating his knees, police clubs bashing his head. A wave of
sympathy for the poor bewildered boy effaces her lingering memory
of the earlier bewildered boy with the guidebook whose name she
hadn’t learned and who, like this one, hadn’t learned hers.

A group of demonstrators, one of them
bleeding, runs towards her, pursued by cops with upraised clubs
like exclamation-marks. A cop with a face like a fist veers toward
her. Doesn’t he take the tripod for a weapon? For a second she
wants to throw it away. But it’s not hers. He keeps on coming.
Still gripping Seymour’s tripod, her only connection now, she runs
into the
Rue
du Temple
, fleeing the
tumult. She keeps running till her lungs ache and then
stops.

He’s there on a tree-shaded bench, head
bowed, asleep. She sits down quietly, props his tripod against the
bench between them and waits for him to wake up and take it.

A hard poke in the ribs awakens her. She pulls
away from the bunched wooden legs as they jab toward her again. On
his side of the bench he’s bent over the tripod, cradled in the
crook of his arm like a three-legged lover. He’s screwing or
unscrewing something with a penknife. “Damn you,” he mutters and
shakes the tripod. “Ow!” she says, not that the second poke in the
ribs really hurt but to let him know she’s there on her side of the
bench. The screw bounces off the bench and rolls under it. “Damn
you,” he mutters and glances at her but of course he’s addressing
the tripod. She leans over, recovers the screw and hands it to him.
He thanks her. Eyes focussed on the screwing job now, he says:

“It was a relief to see you on the bench
when I woke up a while ago. I looked for you back there.”

“Yes, the tripod must be expensive.”

“A fortune new. Genuine cherry wood. Picked
it up cheap second hand.”

He finishes the job and looks at her.

“
The tripod had nothing to do with it. I
was scared for you. Those
flics
.”

“I was scared for you too. Glad you didn’t try to
photograph the garage wall after all. You can always go back
another day when things are calmer. How are you feeling now?”

“Jesus, I forgot all about that.” He stares
unseeing at a building and she guesses he’s attentive to inner
things. “Can’t be sure but I think that maybe I’m feeling a little
better. How about you?”