GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (8 page)

Helen gently takes the gaff out of Richard’s
hand and gives it back to the child. The mother comforts her child,
explaining: foreigners. Helen comforts Richard, explaining: the
French. She coaxes Richard back to the bench saying that you can
see all of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower. He says he wants
to buy a pack of cigarettes, he’ll be right back. She wants to go
with him. Sometimes I like to be alone for a minute, he says and
leaves. The other people stare at her, an unusual thing here. The
French come across as a discreet basically indifferent people.
Helen gathers up her guidebooks and takes another seat further
off.

Time goes by without him. She tries to
reason herself out of panic, keep it out of her face. At the end of
an hour he returns. He doesn’t see her. He sees her empty chair.
His face is filled with the same panic she’d tried to keep out of
hers, that terrible wonderful lost helpless expression of his when
he doesn’t find her, when he thinks she isn’t there. She always
tries to be there. She waves and calls him over. She smells
forbidden alcohol on his breath as he suddenly kisses her and calls
her his nice keeper. She doesn’t like that term. She’s his wife. A
girl goes by. Isn’t she beautiful, Richard? Don’t you wish you’d
married her instead of me? No, I need a keeper, he says and starts
laughing and holds her tight and everything is all right again.

Advancing in an obscure corridor half a century
later (she guesses at the distance from it) Helen tries to remain
in that moment of embrace with the joyous cries of the children,
the billowing sails, the jet blown into a faint rainbow, the
tarnished leaves of the pruned lindens blown into twinkling points
of silver. But of course she can’t. It’s not possible to stave off
the evening of that same day.

After an hour of no response to her remarks
and questions, he speaks about the Catacombs again. They’d been to
the Eiffel Tower in the afternoon, the pedestrians and traffic tiny
below. She’d kept close to him all the time. Tomorrow, if you
really want to, sweetheart, she says. After a while he says he
wants to buy a pack of cigarettes. He leaves the hotel room with
pictures of soaring birds on pale blue walls. A few minutes later
he calls up to her from the sidewalk: “Helen! Helen! Throw my
wallet down!” She finds the wallet on the washbasin, next to the
three spat-out pills. She can’t convince him to come back up for
the wallet (secretly for the pills, of course, but that can’t be
shouted publicly). She throws the wallet down to him. He picks it
up, waves to her and walks away.

She never sees him
again
.

The view framed by the window (like a
color-slide) brings back the lost street to Seymour. It’s Saturday,
noon. After lunch they’ll take the coach to
Les Cossons
. He
hurries past correctly gray rabbits and hares dangling head-down at
the butcher’s. Then the fish store with a heap of shiny black
mussels decorated with sprigs of parsley and boxes of oysters with
lemons. But something’s wrong with his memory. The parsley should
be green and the lemons bright yellow instead of the shades of gray
he sees them in. And the horsemeat butcher’s life-size horse head,
bright gold in reality but another shade of gray in his memory. At
first he thinks his brain has been contaminated by this dusty space
hostile to color. But in the window he’d seen the sky blue and the
domes golden. Then he recalls that he’d photographed the fish store
and the horse head and all the other things with the
black-and-white film of 1951 (Panchromatic XX). What he remembers,
he now understands, isn’t the original scenes but his eight-by-ten
enlargements of them. Back then he’d been in his photography phase.
There’d been the painting phase and before that the poetry phase.
Seymour had thought life wasn’t worth living without artistic
creation. He’d had problems with priorities.

So in memory he goes down a second-hand
Panchromatic XX black-and-white street. Now the massive
porte-cochere. The door buzzes open for him on the shabby courtyard
with irregular paving-stones. He spirals up to the fourth floor
where a dark varnished door opens at his first knock. Marie-Claude
shakes his hand formally. Much less formal contact is for his hotel
room. He follows her into the shabby clean living room with lace
curtained windows. For months, in his lonely outsider days, he’d
wandered about the streets of Paris looking with longing at all
those doors that had no reason to open to him and at all those
opaque windows. Now he’s on the right side of doors and windows,
thanks to Marie-Claude and thanks to what Marie-Claude’s parents
(and maybe Marie-Claude herself) assume his regular presence
implies, although he’s been careful not to pronounce the word
“fiancé.” He’d been briefly married in New York and believes that
institutionalized involvement spells the death of love.

Everything’s perfect as it is. He has his
own habitual place at the table, between Marie-Claude and her
radical teenage brother Laurent. Her father smells faintly of the
cod-liver oil he anoints his body with for immortality. He speaks
to Seymour of the necessity of orienting one’s bed south-east to
counter the effects of telluric waves and counsels the purchase of
a compass. Her mother smiles timidly at Seymour and hopes he
doesn’t find the roast overdone. Marvelous, says Seymour. She’s
probably the worst cook in France. But she has the kindest face in
the world and the tremendous prestige of having tended cows at the
age of six in the Massif Central and speaking patois as fluently as
French. How can Seymour possibly resist such authenticity?

Bearing wicker baskets filled
with essential odds and ends, they take the 38 bus to the Porte
d’Orléans and then the coach, battered of course. He wouldn’t have
it any other way. He loves basic banged-up things. The coach
rattles along the poorly paved National Twenty Highway. Like
Seymour France is ill-at-ease in the twentieth century. The thirty
kilometers of countryside are familiar to him by now. The first
trip out she’d initiated him to the names of the villages and the
names in French of crops and flowers and trees. It was like a
baptism. Now the two-mile trudge past rye and oats and woods to the
ramshackle slap-dash country place they call
Les Cossons
and which he calls
paradis
. How could he, born and bred and unhappy
in Manhattan, resist the warped old wooden gate photographed in
skimming light at f 32 to get all of the marvelous details of
dilapidation? Or the genuine well, thirty meters deep, a favorite
subject for his f 4.5 Zeiss-Tessar? Or the roof with its sheets of
galvanized iron secured against the wind by rusty parts of a Model
T? He’d risked his life high up in an elm to click it. Or the
wicked scythe Marie-Claude taught him to wield against high grass?
When he holds Marie-Claude in his arms he embraces all
that.

He has it all down on seventy-three
eight-by-ten black-and-white enlargements. He sends some to a New
York publisher who expresses qualified interest. That same week
Marie-Claude tells him she’s expecting a child. It isn’t the right
time. He assumes she’ll agree to postponing the child. She doesn’t
agree at all. They start disagreeing about lots of other things.
One day he explains that he’ll have to return briefly to New York
to sort things out with the publisher. Two weeks at the most. She
says she knows he’s leaving for good. No more than two weeks, he
repeats, perfectly sincere about it. He leaves his camera and
enlarger and other stuff in their place as proof of his sincerity.
He’ll write her as soon as he arrives, he says. I won’t answer your
letter, she says. I won’t even read it.

He leaves, taking with him the
other enlargements. Not counting imperfect knowledge of the
language, which soon fades, the photos are all he salvages from his
stay in France. Finally the publisher decides he doesn’t want
them.
Seymour sends Marie-Claude six letters.
He can’t imagine a
return to France without a return to the way things had been. But
she keeps her word and doesn’t answer. There’s no return to France,
not in that life anyhow. He loses the original things even if he
has the rejected black-and-white images of them. He stares down at
the gray one-dimensional enlargements (terrible reductions,
actually) for hours on end in another continent. It’s probably then
that they usurp the place of the originals in his mind. He suffers
intensely for a few months and is already tempted by high
windows.

Two years later she does write
him a letter informing him of the death of her mother, the move out
of the apartment with the tarnished gilt-framed mirror and the
impending sale of
Les
Cossons
. She
wants to know what she should do with the camera and the enlarger
he’d left in their apartment. He could have written back but with
the loss of the apartment and her marvelous mother (he weeps at
that) and their country place, Marie-Claude is faint and
impoverished, one-dimensional, like the photos, stripped of the
great associations. Besides he’s with another woman now. And
anyhow, the camera and enlarger don’t matter anymore. He’s out of
photography now, into a novel. The novel, vaguely autobiographical,
is about his experiences with the family in France. He gives the
story an ambiguous happy ending in hope of publication.

Stumbling down the gloomy corridor, the same
thought occurs to Seymour Stein as to Margaret Williams and to
Louis Forster. If time past could miraculously become time present,
couldn’t he salvage that wrecked love thanks to the hindsight
wisdom he hadn’t possessed at the time?

There’s no sentiment at all to Max’s
relation to the window, no past involved, no need for nostalgic
italics. He’s confronted with a strictly technical problem
involving not the past but the future. So, for the moment, he’s the
luckiest of the Five. What can you do with the past? You can always
handle the future until it comes in unwanted configurations and
congeals unsatisfactorily into the past.

Max’s future, as immediate as possible, is
to escape. He observes that there are no bars to the window.
Already he’s calculating the height of the window in order to
determine the length of the rope or knotted sheets that will allow
him to reach the sidewalk and then the American Embassy and then
just as fast as possible a Boeing to Las Vegas, to Bess and
Rickie.

But now he sees that Margaret’s hair isn’t
like fire any more but like ashes. He sees the looming tree again
and remembers the terminal date on the tag with all those zeros and
realizes that he’s a zero himself and that there’s no escape from
that.

The
clump-jangle
stops. The stern-faced woman functionary stops. The
flics
stop. They order the Five to
stop. Turnkey chooses a big key and unlocks a door. He chooses a
second big key and unlocks a second door next to the first
door.

“
Voilà
,” he says rustily. “This is the place where you
will live while awaiting final decision.”

Chapter 8

Can’t You See It?

The men and women are allotted separate
rooms, practically identical except that the women have a bidet,
concealed by a folding screen. The men’s room is plunged in gloom.
It looks like a disaffected jail. But there are no bars in front of
the tiny window which torments them with the same view as the big
corridor window.

The severe-faced middle-echelon female
functionary clicks a big toggle-switch. A naked bulb dangling from
the ceiling awakens reluctantly. It sheds poor light on four rusty
cots with thin lumpy mattresses. There are urine stains shaped like
continents on them. Graffiti is scratched all over the dingy
walls.

Max sinks down in a corner and stares at the
dirty plank floor between his ankles. Yawning and trembling,
Seymour and Louis sway on their feet like goose-pimpled metronomes.
As from a great distance they hear the female functionary droning
out that they will shortly receive food and drink and appropriate
clothing. The room will be cleaned and the beds made up. They had
not been expected.

The naked bulb starts blinking. She strides
over to a chest of drawers, yanks out a drawer and calls their
attention to rows of bulbs wrapped in tissue-paper. Beneath
drooping lids their eyeballs sluggishly roll in the direction
indicated by her rigid forefinger. Now she points to the blinking
bulb.

“When a bulb burns out it is your
responsibility to replace it by a new one. There are twenty new
ones here. When you get to the nineteenth bulb you must be sure to
notify the relevant functionary and you will receive a new
lot.”

That shocks the two men out of
somnolence.

“The nineteenth!” Seymour exclaims.

“The nineteenth!" Louis exclaims. “We could
be in this here place long enough to have to change nineteen
burned-out electric-light bulbs?”

“How long does a bulb last?” Seymour
asks.

The female functionary’s face withdraws into
frigid infinite distance, as though the requested statistics are a
state secret or as though she hasn’t understood the question
involving the passage of time.

“Six months?” Louis ventures.

She doesn’t confirm it but she doesn’t deny
it. The two men, secretly afraid the life-span of an electric light
bulb is much longer than six months, choose to take her continuing
silence for tacit confirmation. Six months, then. But multiplied
nineteen times.

“Six months, nineteen bulbs …” says
Seymour.