GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (7 page)

The stern-faced female functionary’s hand
moves toward one of the whistles. The girl wildly gathers up the
rags and the sponges and the scoop and the bottle of cleaning
liquid. She thrusts them clumsily into a plastic shopping-bag. She
grabs the mop and the broom leaning against a wall.

In her haste she upsets the pail. The filthy water
spatters on Seymour’s bare leg. She lunges at the pail, as if the
spilled water could be undone, loses her balance and collides with
Seymour. The freezing contact lasts a fraction of a second. She
shrinks back, horrified, as a whistle shrills.

The stern-faced female functionary removes
the whistle from her lipless mouth and commands: “Inspection!”

A pair of policemen drag the girl beneath a
naked bulb. One of them twists her arms behind her back. The other
grabs her stringy hair and pulls her head back, exposing her long
skinny throat. Turnkey’s bony fingers pluck at the lids of her
right eye, exposing her eyeball, white and gigantic, like a
terrorized horse’s. He peers at it for a few seconds and steps
back.

“Negative,” he reports to the stern-faced female
functionary. The policemen release her.

“
Oh,
Monsieur
,” she sobs, turning to Seymour. The stern-faced
middle-echelon female functionary cuts her short.

“You will be reported, for the contact and
for speaking a second time, although warned, to an Arrival. Your
case will be judged.”

“
Oh
Madame, Madame
, please don’t take the sea away from me. Leave me the
dunes and the lighthouse, I beg you.”

Ignoring the plea, the female functionary
pulls out a notebook and notes the transgression.

“Moreover, Toilets 34, 36 and 42 have been
poorly cleaned, not for the first time. There have been more
complaints. After you have prepared the rooms for the Arrivals you
will clean those toilets again.”

The girl’s shoulders start shaking. She
seems to be crying although there are no tears in her funereal
eyes. She limps past them, gasping hard as though her shopping bag
and mop and broom and scoop and empty pail weigh a ton. Despite his
wet leg Seymour is glad for her that the pail is lighter now.

Turnkey leads the way past the spreading
pool of dirty water. Dust has already settled on the moist swathes
left by the mop. Or maybe she’s done as poor a job on the corridor
as on the toilets and will be reported for that too.

Closely escorted by the silent
flics
, the Five
trudge on, their pace regulated by the clunk-jangle of the pitching
and tossing turnkey. More turns, left turns, right turns, more
obscure staircases, long flights up, long flights down. More long
corridors, some windy, most stagnant.

How long? How long?

Chapter 7

Here Now, There Then

They turn again.

A window on the world outside dazzles
them.

They halt before it.

Certain details differ for the transfixed
onlookers but all of them see the essential blue sky arching over
golden domes and white facades, white bridges arching over the
celebrated river.

They see gay striped shop-awnings, yellow
and white and red and blue stripes tempered with white stripes.

Max doesn’t, but the others see slow lovers
advancing along the tree-shaded cobble-stoned quays.

They see bright summer-clad couples sipping
at sidewalk café tables.

The distant onlookers thirst for those green
and amber drinks and the world the colored drinks belong to. Except
for Max, tears spring to their eyes. They are profoundly thankful
for what they see. It’s only later that they’ll wonder if the sight
of once-possessed things isn’t punishment.

The clump-jangle goes on ahead but the
Five remain like statues before the window. A
flic
behind them commands: “
Avancez.
Y a rien à
voir.
Du
brouillard.
” Max wants
to know what the cop (the so-called cop) said. Helen tells him: “He
says there’s nothing to see. Just fog. He wants us to go
on.”

They go on reluctantly, herded past the
window into a stretch of more gray blistered walls with illegible
graffiti.

But they cling to the torturing blessed
vision. Except for Max, who has never been in the celebrated city
before, they are all back there again, in space and in time, in the
city of their twenty-fifth year.

The clopping of the orthopedic shoe
accelerates into the clopping of hooves on wooden paving blocks,
the jangle of the keys into harness jangling and Louis Forster sees
the elegant carriages, not yet horseless, thronging the avenue. He
sees the archaic manure droppings and imagines he can smell the
rural fragrance that will be replaced by exhaust fumes in a decade
or so. Louis sees flights of pigeons in the blue sky, no trace of
the square rigid-winged aeroplanes that will buzz in the skies of
Louis’ middle-aged future.

And there, the elegant flower-shop where for
months he’s pretended to admire seasonal flowers in the display
window: first daffodils like gay yellow telephones and then tulips,
red like her cheeks when she catches his gaze on her, for his gaze
is focused past the flowers on one of the three florists,
honey-blonde and slim, more graceful than all the flowers in the
world, and then, finally, one June day (roses displayed now), he
summons up courage and pushes the door open, another jangle, the
bell, the three aproned girls twittering in French no more
comprehensible to him than the twittering of the two love-birds in
the great gilded cage and Louise (he is Louis and she is Louise,
he’ll say to her later and say it couldn’t be coincidence) smiles
shyly and in lovely fragmented English counsels his bouquet and
later tells him she was jealous of the girl the bouquet was for,
not knowing then that it was a pretext.

A pretext. Once outside the shop what can he
do with a bouquet? He takes it back to the Embassy.

They wink and poke their elbows in his ribs.
“Margie,” they guess and say. So he gives it to Margie. He’s
already gone out with her. There aren’t many female employees at
the Embassy in those days. Margie is one of the telephone
operators, pretty in a wholesome mid-western way, corn-flower blue
eyes, corn-tassel blonde hair, off an Iowa farm like himself and
Methodist too and inevitably he’ll end up by marrying her, which he
doesn’t suspect at the time because of Louise behind the flowers
and whom he soon gets to know away from the flowers.

In the drab corridor Louis goes on thinking, in
guilt and longing, of his first knowledge of Louise in the
hotel-room and the unassumed consequences of that knowledge. A
crazy notion occurs to him. (Why crazy, though? Isn’t he already in
the middle of a crazy miracle?) If by a second much better crazy
miracle he was returned to the Paris of his twenty-fifth year (he’s
been given the body for it), couldn’t he keep that bouquet for the
slim honey-blonde girl at quitting time instead of going back with
it to the Embassy and giving it to his unsatisfactory future wife?
Change the future and the wife that way? Couldn’t that be done?

In a grave relapse from
spirituality Maggie remembers long-ago times out there enjoying
herself greatly and being greatly enjoyed. Margaret again, she
banishes those scandalous memories. Maybe it’s the golden domes
that remind her of the jewelry shop. The domes are the same color
as the ring they caught her with (just a single tiny diamond for
all that fuss). The director arrives and they convoy her into his
office. She weeps with convincing despair. I’ll lose my job.
They’ll expel me from France. I’m American. He understands English
and speaks it with a half-French half-Oxford accent, very
distinguished. His office is full of books, classics she guesses,
because leather-bound and behind glass. He looks like he’s read
them all. He wants to know what she does for a living. Surely not
stealing jewelry? Artistic dancing, sir. Where, if I may ask? At
the
Cabaret
Arc-en-Ciel
,
she says, embarrassed, and adds: a little like ballet but free
style. Please. I’ll lose my job. Please, please.

I don’t know what I should do, he says,
staring down at his desk. She says she’ll do anything, anything at
all, if he withdraws the charges. She expects him to announce the
price and his price is hers. It’s no problem; on the contrary, he’s
young with curly gold hair, not balding and fattish like Guy, no
problem at all. But instead, he talks about America and the war his
father died in and how the Americans helped save France in 1917-18.
He measures her by that heroic standard. How could an American
young lady possibly do a thing like that? He makes her feel like a
traitor. It’s a sickness, sir, something-mania they call it, I see
something nice and I have to have it for a while. Just hold it for
a while. I would have brought it back, sir, I swear I would have.
Tears come again with hardly any effort. She knows they enhance her
green eyes. He stares down at the desk.

Finally he says she can go. She blinks. He
reaches for the pile of letters and opens the first one as though
she’d already gone. “You may go,” he repeats, without looking at
her. “Charges will be withdrawn.” He’s intent on the letter. Maggie
goes, thankful but offended.

The next day, Saturday evening,
he’s there at the
Cabaret Arc-en-Ciel
. The spotlight is blinding but she can see him at
the table way back in the rear, staring down at it as he’d stared
down at his desk. She feels offended again and ashamed of her
dance. Ignoring the wailing signal of the clarinet, she omits the
final split-second flourish of the fans that gives the customers
total exposure. Most of them applaud anyhow, even if some protest.
He doesn’t move, doesn’t look up. Soon he’s gone. Guy is angry. How
come she forgot the climax and disappointed the customers like
that? Later they leave by the side entrance. Guy’s arm is around
her waist, his hand near her groin. Steered toward the taxi-stand
on the avenue, she sees the jeweler seated at the sidewalk café
table staring at the gaudy cabaret entrance with her name in
medium-size print. She removes Guy’s arm. What’s the matter? Guy
asks alongside her in the cab. Nothing’s the matter, she
says.

She returns to the jewelry shop. Yes? he
says, looking up from papers on his desk and then back again. I
forgot to thank you, she says. She adds: That wasn’t my artistic
dance. I do that just to earn my living. Why doesn’t he look at
her? Why doesn’t he say something? Of course you go to the ballet,
he says finally. All the time, she says although she never did. He
invites her to the ballet.

She feels deeply humiliated by that
controlled perfection on the stage, no wailing clarinet. He
maintains strict distance from her in the dark during the
performance. After, he comments on the dancers, using terms she’s
never heard of. He shakes her hand and says good night to her
before her hotel. The ballet invitation was to humiliate her. Back
in her furnished room she weeps bitterly, no effort at all, the
effort is to stop. But three months later Jean Haussier offers her
a gold ring like the one she’d tried to take but with a much bigger
diamond on it. She accepts it but not the permanent thing that’s
supposed to accompany it. She’s already met Harry, no, George,
Harry was later.

Why didn’t I? she now thinks, stumbling down
another shadowy corridor. Everything would have turned out
differently in her life. And the idea occurs to her too: if by some
second miracle she could return out there and back then (she’s been
given the marvelously renewed body for it), wouldn’t it happen all
over again? Except that this time, guided by miraculous hindsight,
given a second chance, she would know what to do and what not to
do, would know that she should say yes this time to what Jean
Haussier offered with the gold ring and the two-carat diamond.

For Helen, it’s a bright windy October
morning in the Luxembourg Gardens with Richard, in one-sided
discussion of guide-book places for the third afternoon of their
honeymoon. She suggests the Eiffel Tower and gives many reasons. He
wants the Catacombs and gives no reasons. He stares at the basin
and the well-dressed children with gaffs sailing sleek model
sailboats. The wind pushes the splashing jet about. Sudden gusts
decapitate it to spray with a hint of a rainbow. The spray wets the
billowing sails of the veering sailboats.

“
They’ll swamp if they let them sail into the
fountain,” he predicts somberly. Certain days he sees disaster
everywhere. She asks him, not for the first time that morning, if
he’s taken the pills. Usually she makes sure he does, looking at
his throat to make sure he’s swallowed them, swallowing herself to
encourage him to, like a mother with a small child. He still
doesn’t answer her question. He keeps on staring at the sailboats.
She tucks in his blowing tie and combs his blowing hair with her
fingers. I look old, don’t I? he says. On the bad days he thinks
he’s getting old and ugly, his bones brittle as chalk. He’s
twenty-six. The handsomest young man on earth, she says
sincerely.

After a while he gets up and goes over to the
basin. He tells one of the children that his boat is heading for
disaster. The child doesn’t understand English. Richard takes the
gaff out of the child’s hand. The child protests. The mother rushes
up, pop-eyed with outrage. What are you doing, are you drunk? Are
you crazy? Luckily Richard knows almost no French, not even easy
words like “
fou
.” He leans over the
rim, trying to grapple the boat away from disaster. Helen tells the
woman that her husband is just trying to be helpful. She’s already
used to explaining him. The boat tacks about, heads straight toward
them and bumps against the rim of the basin.