Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

  Chapter 3

  Where?

  The first of the remaining Four to focus on outside things is MAX PILSUDSKI, the squat hairy man standing next to a pillar. He looks like everybody’s idea of a naked truck-driver, which is exactly what he is: naked and a truck-driver. More exactly, had been. For the moment, though, he doesn’t realize he’s a had-been. He vividly recalls the tree gigantic in the splintering windshield of his truck and then nothing. A terrible accident, he understands, and maybe coma, but now he’s come out of it and is standing in what must be a rehab center. They’ve done a goddam good job on him too. He feels a little woozy (who wouldn’t?) but otherwise like a million bucks. Funny thing though about his body: buck-naked and no more sag and flab to it and the hair on it not grizzled anymore but black.

  Who’s making that racket? That jabbering don’t sound like English. Sounds like Mexicans with bad head colds. Standing where he is, next to the pillar, the only person he can see is a guy in the raw with the cut of a Yid. Looks like an egg-head too with those horn-rimmed glasses.

  The young man in horn-rimmed glasses who looks like everybody’s idea of a naked futile New York intellectual is SEYMOUR STEIN. He now opens his eyes and comes up with exactly the same matter-of-fact materialistic interpretation of his present situation as Max Pilsudski: he’s a patient in a rehabilitation center. He feels tremendous bitterness at survival. He’d fucked up his life and had even fucked up his would-be departure from it. How he’d hungered for no-being! Instead, he’s back to being Seymour Stein, the crown-prince of shmucks, the only man in history to have screwed up a ten-story dive onto a sidewalk. How had he possibly survived? Maybe he’d overshot the targeted sidewalk and plunged into an open sewer manhole, shit unto shit, and had been fished out? He starts weeping at this latest of a lifetime of failures and gropes for a handkerchief. Instead of pockets he finds skin everywhere, vastly improved skin, the grossness of his mid-fifties effaced. A real medical miracle.

  But why is he naked? And what’s that racket going on? Isn’t that French?

  Helen Ricchi, the plain sad-faced girl with the small but witty breasts, awakens to banging and cries in French, not the French of Québec, the city of her birth, but the French of France. Helen had been a high-school teacher of French in Denver, Colorado. She opens her eyes and notes that her white hair is back to mousy brown now, no great improvement, and her body back to what she takes to be youthful unattractiveness. Helen accepts the new situation – the mysterious place she’s in, nudity and rejuvenation – with incurious fatalism as she’d accepted everything after the tragedy that had befallen her as a two-week bride forty years before. She’d never asked questions. She waits now without impatience for whatever might happen next.

 

  LOUIS FORSTER is lingering in a badly distorted memory of a close to final thing. Paralyzed, he’s undergoing a toilette – the last one before the funeral toilette two days later – at the hands of a shy young nurse who suddenly loses her shyness and her uniform. He tries to pull away from her caressing hands and her sharp-pointed breasts grazing his thighs and her mouth, her mouth. But he has no muscles to do it. He tries to cry out: “What in tarnation are you doin’? Are you tetched? Stop doin’ that! Let go of me!” But he has no breath to cry it.

  Louis escapes the avid naked nurse as his open blue eyes shift from inward to outward focus. He emerges.

  But things are still going on here, wherever here may be. He stares down at a closely associated nude woman kneeling as in adoration before him. Louis lets out a great cry of revulsion, lots of breath to do it this time.

  “What in tarnation are you doin’? Are you tetched? Stop doin’ that! Let go of me!”

  Lost to the world, she persists in adoration. He pulls back and she follows on her knees like a penitent. He places his hands on her shoulders and pushes free of her with a moist pop. Maggie staggers back on her knees, sprawls and encounters a stunning wall.

  Horrified at his state and cupping it inadequately with both hands Louis dodges behind a pillar.

  By this time the deputized lower-echelon female functionary has returned, holding a heap of towels and a box of safety-pins. She apologizes to the functionary with the iron-gray bun and explains that this was all she’d been able to come up with in the way of clothing. Her superior shrugs and then commands: “Gloves!” The lower-echelon functionary removes gloves from her pocket and pulls them on. They are long rubber gloves of the kind that protect those who are in unavoidable contact with the mortally contagious. Her superior closely supervises the parsimonious distribution of towels to the Arrivals.

  The hairy truck-driver and the archetypal New York intellectual are each issued a single towel. “Hey, what the fuck’s going on here?” the truck driver growls to the horn-rimmed Yid. “This is one hell of a rehab center.”

  “I’m beginning to think it isn’t a rehab center,” Seymour Stein replies, wrapping the towel about his loins.

  “This is Las Vegas, Nevada, ain’t it?” says Max.

  “I don’t think it is,” says Seymour.

  He totters over to a dingy closed window. His last window had been wide open. Through the grime he thinks he can make out celebrated landmarks. He totters back, shaken to the core of his new being.

  “N-no, it’s definitely not Las Vegas, N-Nevada. Looks a lot like P-Paris, France.”

  Max feels better. “Naw, it’s Las Vegas, okay. We got a Eiffel Tower too. Twice the size of theirs.”

  But Max still can’t understand why they don’t speak English here. He scowls and tries to puzzle it out.

  Two towels are issued to Helen Ricchi. The middle-echelon female functionary herself takes care of the garbing of the guilty couple. She pulls on the long rubber gloves and then throws a towel at Louis and tosses two safety-pins on the floor at his feet. She commands sobbing Maggie to cease sobbing and stand up. She muffles the girl’s lovely body, still shaken by sobs, with no fewer than seven towels. She pulls the uppermost towel vengefully tight to flatten Maggie’s breasts, no easy task.

  At that moment, propelled by an imperious shove, an ornate door bangs open dramatically.

  The functionaries freeze to attention.