Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 9

  Rules And Regulations

  Shyly, back to back, Seymour and Louis unpin their loin-towels and pull on their new clothes. They find themselves clad in obsolete garb, a little too insistently typical, as in a period-film where the clothing as well as the props (like spittoons for 1900 and tommy-guns for the thirties) are calculated to inform the most dull-witted of the spectators where they stand time-wise. Seymour had d**d in 1980 but is now attired in a turtleneck sweater and corduroy cuffed trousers of archaic 1950 cut. Louis had d**d in 1927 but is tricked out in a turn-of-the-century costume with tight trousers, narrow lapels, a string tie. He’d worn something vaguely similar during his sojourn in Paris when he wasn’t wearing his Marine uniform. Apparently the functionaries in charge of the costume wardrobe hadn’t been able to come up with a Marine uniform for him.

  Both of the men are happy at their garb. It gives reality to a possible transfer to the Paris of their youth and reunion with their lost sweethearts.

  But then they start reading the graffiti, mainly bitter, that covers the blistered gray walls. A century of other Americans of questionable goodness had wound up here in Administrative Suspension and had waited. Very few of the graffiti bear signatures or even initials, potentially incriminating, given the nature of the remarks on their hosts. But there’s nearly always the scratched date, the supposed date in most cases, because followed by a question mark. It’s as though the inscribers had been here so long they’d lost count of the years.

  Only four more centuries to go,” announces one inscription. Surely an exaggeration. But how about: “Here seven fucking years. Fuck Prefuck de Hautecloque. (1929?)” Was that one an exaggeration? And this: “To those who died waiting for Paris: RIP. (1962?)” Certain graffiti express bitterness toward the host country. Seymour makes out: “The French fight with their feet and fuck with their faces. (1918?)” and “French Food Sucks! (1998?)” Pathetic, this one: “I was killed on Omaha Beach in 1944 to liberate France and this is how the bastards thank me! (1953?)”

  There’s a scattering of tarred rectangles. Louis and Seymour assume even worse insults to France and the French. The notion doesn’t occur to them (yet) that what has been carefully censored are vital messages to future generations of administratively suspended Americans.

  Not all the graffiti address the problem of quasi-incarceration. There’s the inevitable “Conroy was here. (1945?)” There are a few arrow-pierced hearts with initials. The initials of lost and yearned-for firm-breasted Paris sweethearts, as for Seymour and Louis? Or faithful evocation of dumpy widowed wives?

  Other graffiti are political in nature. The slogans urge and denounce on these alien walls although none of the slogans could possibly influence the world the scratchers had left behind in space and, irrevocably, in time. There are numerous “I like Ike!” and a few dissenting “Stevenson for President.” That was the early fifties. “Solution to the fuel crisis: don’t burn oil, burn Iranians.” That was 1979. “Better Dead than Red.” The forties. “God Bless America, Goddam France.” (1962). “America, Love it or Leave it!” The inscriber had himself contradicted the stark alternative of his injunction: he’d left it but went on loving it.

  But the graffiti that rivets the duo’s attention are these ominous scratchings: “Welcome to the new Arrivals. Oh you poor bastards. (1921?)” Also: “If this is heaven, O Lord, give me hell.” The year 1909? is scratched under that. Twenty-three years later, (1932?) the refutation: “Where the hell do you think you are?”

  Also, this one: “Going into my thirty-fourth year here I think. Who wants transfer now? They say there’s nothing after exit. Hope they’re right.” Finally, this one: “Goodbye to all. Keep up the work on Independence Day!”

  Louis and Seymour wonder at the reference to the Fourth of July. Above all they wonder at the meaning of that farewell. Had the inscriber fared well himself? Out to color or back to blackness after all those years of grayness? They search for some hint of the fate of the other inscribers. Many had waited a long time for an end to Administrative Suspension. That much was clear. But what had happened to them finally? Maybe transfer and exit sometimes occurred without warning, so fast that they had no time to scratch their joy or despair on the walls.

  The worst of all the inscriptions is this in big print: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS!! The meaning is clear, they think. The promise of possible transfer is a fraud. You’re plucked, young, out of blackness and you waited and waited for the good things outside and then you’re chucked, shriveled, back into blackness.

  The only note of theoretical gaiety on the walls is a chalk-white life-size clown-face. The clown has a gigantic bulbous nose. He wears a cockeyed conic hat and an ear-to-ear smile baring all thirty-six teeth. But the smile is disturbingly mirthless, more a grimace than a smile, like the ultimate grimace of a tetanus or strychnine victim.

  The naked bulb starts blinking furiously for a few seconds. It dies. Louis climbs up on a wobbly chair and replaces the dead bulb with the first of the twenty new bulbs. The outer gloom is dispelled but their inner gloom deepens.

  Louis and Seymour are about to leave the room, as ordered, when they remember Max Pilsudski. He’s still huddled prostrated in his corner. He starts groaning between hoarse gasps, back to his first hopeless no-escape understanding of his situation. Louis coaxes him to his feet and starts steering him to the window to cheer him up with something not gray. Going past him, Max looks fearfully at Seymour. He whispers something in Louis’ ear. Probably that he (Seymour) is a corpse, a Jew corpse, a Jew corpse with horn-rimmed glasses to make things worse. Louis himself looks very much alive to Max.

  Louis asks Max what he sees outside. A city or fog?

  A city, Max says tonelessly. Not Las Vegas though, he says. He wants to return to his corner. Sure, says Louis, holding him back, no fog at all, a city, but the folks in the streets of the city? How are those folks dressed and does Max see horse-drawn carriages or horseless carriages, real cars?

  No people, no cars, no carriages, says Max. Empty streets and sidewalks. It’s like a big ghost-town. Just buildings and a river. What’s the direction of the airport? He has to get out of here and get to the airport, has to right away, right away.

  Max explodes into frantic energy. He’s back to the conspiratorial interpretation of the situation, back to the possibility of flight, the double flight, flight from this place and winged flight to Las Vegas.

  He grabs a chair and hurls it at the window. The chair flies into pieces against the panes. Whining like hammered sheet-iron, the panes are now covered with a dense network of cracks, like a smashed but still intact windshield, opaque and whitish, like a cataract-blinded eye.

  The city has vanished and the gloom in the room has deepened.

  “Doggone you,” Louis yells. “You’ve gone and spoiled our window! We can’t see a blamed thing now.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Max yells. He kicks the window with all his might. The panes are unaffected but not Max’s foot. Max doubles up, howling. The other two take it for a howl of pain, with him hopping about on his good foot, clutching the foolish one. It’s that too, but mainly a howl of triumph. He hops over to Seymour and sprays his face with shouted certitudes.

  “I’m not dead! I can’t be dead! Jesus, it hurts like all hell. If it hurts you gotta be alive. It’s all a hustle, trying to make me think I’m dead, a sect, that’s what it is, a sect or maybe spies.”

  Seymour steps back from the glaring proselytizing eyes, the saliva-specked gray lips.

  “Wake up, for Chrissake,” Max yells at Seymour. “You’re not dead either. Ya want proof?” Max picks up a chair-leg and whacks Seymour over the shin all his might. It’s Seymour’s turn to howl but no triumph to it: rage and pain. “You fucking fascist Polack anti-Semite shit-head!”

  But Max embraces him. “Don’t believe the tag, you’re alive too! It hurt! I’m telling you, that’s how you know you’re alive, you hurt!” He hugs him tighter.

  “Let go of m
e you crazy bastard.” Seymour breaks free and sinks to the floor. He cradles his shin and rocks with pain. Dark gray liquid drips thickly down his leg onto the floor. He jabs his finger in the pool and holds it up, as though bearing somber witness.

  “Look, it’s not even blood, for Chrissakes. It’s embalming fluid. I’m dead, you’re dead, everybody’s dead, you dumb Polack bastard.”

  “Hey, you fellers quit scrappin’ like that and usin’ foul language,” Louis orders in a Marine voice. If his eyes had retained their original blue they would have snapped. “They’ll put in new panes and we’ll see again. Tough glass, all right. Max, you just calm down and slip into your new togs. We got an appointment with the Prefect.”

  Max painfully struggles into his new clothes. They’re grotesquely inappropriate. Since he’d never been to Paris at any period, the functionaries had no sojourn date to go by. They’d chosen something they thought was typically and timelessly Yankee: a cowboy outfit with a deerskin vest, a Stetson hat and leather boots with useless spurs. There was little prospect for a horse here. Max regrets the absence of a six-shooter to shoot his way out or a lasso to support his weight.

  Max is still thinking about escape via the chair-and-foot-proof window. Tough glass all right, a problem, but he’ll crack it, the problem and the window. Max bulges in the ill-fitting costume. With all that outdoor exercise cowboys had been notoriously lean. Max, even in his twenties, had been inclined to paunchiness with his daily gallon-plus of lager plus sedentary long-distance hauling.

  Seymour and Max hobble badly. To help and also to separate them, Louis steps between the two groaning men. He hooks his arms in theirs. The linked trio staggers out into the corridor and enters the Common Room.

  It’s a big shabby room, made even bigger by a number of tarnished full-length wall-mirrors. Dust lies thick on a long massive library-style table. There are no books anywhere, though. Dilapidated leather armchairs face a big window framing the city. It’s like a set-up for TV viewing.

  The women are there already, standing at attention as for a military review.

  Like the men, they’ve exchanged their towels for costumes. For one of them it corresponds to the reigning fashion of her Paris sojourn. The girl called Helen, as Seymour observes with a twinge of nostalgia, is wearing the proper-proper good-little-girl dress of the early fifties with a bell-shaped skirt ending at mid-calf.

  Then the men see Margaret. They react vigorously to the sight.

  Normally she should be attired in the tight long skirt of the thirties. (Seymour had often recalled that tight hobbling ankle-long sheath-like skirt that transferred impeded forward motion to rotary motion of the hips and tukkis. Ah, that intoxicating practically coital sway of women’s hips and tukkis in those days of teenage desire.)

  But Margaret’s costume is even better than that for male beholders if not for her. She stands martyred in the radical mini-skirt and décolleté of the liberated late sixties.

  Not only is the period wrong but also the size. The knitted dress was meant for a girl far smaller and thinner than Margaret. On her, it looks like an inadequate paint job on total nudity. The skirt is mini to the point of non-existence. It barely covers what must absolutely be covered, for she is naked beneath it, no lingerie having been provided. She wears it, bears it like a cross, in far greater discomfort than the most penitential of convent rough-spun.

  Her hands are frantic in the service of decency. She pulls the front of the skirt down. The tug hikes the rear of the skirt up. Standing back to a full-length mirror, she can see that indecent image of twin moons in another full-length mirror opposite. She yanks the skirt down front and back. The movement aggravates her décolleté and her breasts spring forth totally denuded. She lets go of her skirt to reestablish decent concealment above and the stretched knitwear below springs back, navel-high now.

  As her frantic hands go on and on, tugging and pulling up and down, front and back, concealing and involuntarily disclosing, Margaret perceives a squat cowboy and a man in a turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed glasses. They are staring at her with all too visible lust.

  Max and Seymour have forgotten their outlying injured parts in favor of more private, centrally located, parts. Max bulges even worse now in his cowboy outfit. Seymour is in the same urgent state. He exults at it. Not pain but rigidity of this type proclaims the persistence of life. Rigidity as vital attribute not mortuary essence. Strategically stiff, so not a total stiff.

  Louis too is staring at Margaret. Not with lust (or if so, severely repressed), but horror, as she can see, despairingly.

  Horror at the return of the first girl, the lascivious one who had publicly shamed him. She is almost as naked now as then. Where was that lovely second girl in the decent white towels and modestly compressed bosom, the one with the spiritually illuminated face pleading on his behalf, taking upon herself the sins of this present girl, her depraved sister? Louis persists in his Manichean dissociation of the girl into distinct embodiments of Vice and Virtue.

  But now he notices that this shameless girl possesses attributes of the modest one: gray hair and a tear-stained face. The two incompatible images of Vice and Virtue merge impossibly into one girl. Louis is forced to recognize that there’s only this one girl, subject to periodic radical transformations. Louis had seen the first movie version (silent, of course) of Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece and he thinks: Miss Jekyll and Miss Hyde.

  Maggie perceives the Prefect standing motionless in the doorway. His gaze is fixed on her too. She imagines the gaze is censorious. Much later she will wonder if it wasn’t Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque himself who had chosen her anachronistic garb and vetoed the issuing of undergarments.

  The Prefect enters the room stiffly. He goes over to each of the four other Arrivals and pronounces a few words of perfunctory greeting. In each case his gaze is beyond his interlocutor, fixed on Margaret and perhaps on the peeping-tom mirror behind her.

  Then he goes over and speaks to her for long minutes. He stands at stiff attention. He maintains his ungloved long bloodless hands clamped to his side. The stern-faced female functionary stares at them intently.

  Inaudible to the others, Margaret whispers: “Oh sir, I’m so grateful to you, sir, but I couldn’t. I don’t dance anymore. I don’t do that ever, now. My dancing days are over. It’s a vow I’ve made to God. But I’m so grateful to you, sir.”

  The Prefect’s white bloodless hands rise slowly to a level with the girl’s bare neck. The stern-faced female functionary stares at those hands even more intently. The hands hesitate and then open in a magnanimous acceptance of her desire.

  He makes a gallant bow and leaves.

  Hedgehog puffs into the room bearing a small wooden podium. The stern-faced female functionary mounts it and claps her hands sharply to gain their attention. Hedgehog hands out a clipboard and a ball-point pen to each of the five guests (guests, not prisoners, they remind themselves with little conviction). The female functionary claps her hands again and drones out information.

  An advocate, she announces, will be assigned to them to gather biographical particulars in order to defend their case before the Administrative Review Board. This body will meet in due course to rule on their disposal. She urges them to practice total frankness with the advocate. The advocate has their best interests at heart. She calls their attention to the clipboard.

  Rusty iron jaws bite a poorly mimeographed sheet with carbon paper for a duplicate. “Rules and Regulations” stands in tiny print above a great number of rules and regulations in even tinier print. Each of them is followed by a figure. The female functionary explains the figures.

  Arrivals in a state of Administrative Suspension possess a reserve of fifty points. Transgressions and violations, weighted in accordance with their degree of gravity, involve loss of points. When the original fifty points are exhausted the offender is automatically exited. Good behavior, au contraire, is rewarded with a bonus of additional points, whi
ch, in certain cases (notably a tied decision on the part of the Administrative Review Board) can tip the scales in the direction of transfer rather than exit. Collaboration is therefore essential.

  She starts reading.

  Violence against the functionaries is sanctioned by instant exit.

  Any attempt to reach the Outside without official approval is sanctioned by instant exit.

  Sabotage is sanctioned by instant exit.

  She stares at them for long silent seconds. Her features are like iron. Slowly, emphasizing each syllable, she continues.

  Any physical contact, however short and superficial, with a functionary is sanctioned by instant exit for the guest and maximum punishment for the functionary.

  Again she stares at them for long silent seconds before going on.

  The imbibing of alcoholic beverages is strictly forbidden. Violation of this ban entails a loss of five (5) points. Intrusion into forbidden zones entails a loss of ten (10) points. Deterioration of state property entails a loss of from fifteen (15) to thirty (30) points, depending on the gravity of the act. Violation of curfew entails a loss of six and a half (6.5) points. She calls their attention to an old-fashioned wall phone next to the doorway. It is strictly forbidden to utilize the phone save in cases of emergency. They are entitled to one emergency call per month. Violation of this regulation entails the loss of five (5) points.

  She drones on and on and they doze off for a while. When they jerk back to the room, the stern-faced female functionary is still reading out forbidden acts and their numbered sanction.

  She invites them to sign the document. Refusal to do so entails instant exit.

  They all sign except Max. “I don’t sign nothing,” says Max. “I don’t know what it’s all about.” He says it over and over. Helen repeatedly urges him to sign. Finally he signs.

  Hedgehog collects the papers and the pens. The Five are dismissed. They stagger back to their rooms, yawning and bleary-eyed.

  Louis hardly has the strength to support his hobbling companions. The three of them are too exhausted to notice that the room has been cleaned during their absence. It’s true the job is so bad you can hardly tell the difference. The cots have been sloppily made up with patched sheets and rent old blankets, probably virtual khaki. The three men collapse on their cots.

  Again they try to resist sleep. Despite the talk about all those possible electric light bulbs to come they’re afraid their hopeless case has been examined and that sleep will be the portal to a second death. But sleep comes.

  Seymour sees Marie-Claude’s smiling face, very close to his, in enlarged black and white. She’s undone her ponytail and has swept her hair up as he often asks her to do to get the perfect oval of her face and all of her neck. Her off-the-shoulder blouse reveals the clean understated lines of her collarbones with the exquisite faint shadowed gap between them. Her eyes, a dark shade of gray representing original brown, are wide-pitched with a little slant to them, a western-world reverse-slant.

  You haven’t changed at all, he says even though she has, diminished by that loss of color. He approaches his lips to her parted lips and smells her cold ashen breath and awakes to a gray starved face hovering inches above his.

  He gives a startled jerk away from the ashen breath of the cleaning girl who had upset the pail over his leg in the corridor. She too jerks back. She’s wearing rubber gloves. Behind her is a trolley of the sort used in hospitals to bring in basins and ether and meals. On the table lie three trays with dishes of indeterminate food. Max and Louis are snoring away on their beds.

  “Oh sir, don’t be alarmed,” she whispers. “It’s only me. I’ve brought your meal.” She points at one of the trays. “I hope it’s not cold. The kitchen is two kilometers from here. But I ran all the way. I brought you a sweet little present that I stole at the risk of more punishment so that you will forgive me for what I did to your leg. I’m so terribly sorry, sir. (Je suis désolée, désolée, Monsieur.)”

  She has her pail on the floor beside her. She dips a sponge in it, looks about fearfully and begs him in a breathless whisper to allow her to clean his leg. With her guilty expression she’s like an Untouchable begging a Brahmin for a touch, a single touch in this disgraced life. Seymour says it doesn’t matter. She looks even more désolée at that. She takes it, he understands, as refusal to forgive her for her terrible act.

  Feeling sorry for her, Seymour consents to unwanted reparation. He sits uncomfortably on the edge of the bed while she kneels before him. He pulls up the trouser leg. At the sight of gray crusted blood, she gasps fast little in-gasps: O! O! O! Did I do that, sir? Did I injure you like that? She’s on the verge of tears. He reassures her. Water, even dirty water, can’t draw blood.

  The sponge looks filthier than his leg but he lets her wash it. She seems to be in a withdrawn second state now, like a somnambulist. He winces at the pain and she apologizes in a droning elsewhere voice. O … your … poor … leg … your … poor … poor … poor … leg, she says over and over in that sleepwalker’s voice. She touches his knee and then his calf and ankle, inquiring tonelessly whether it hurts there or there or there. It doesn’t hurt but her hand is ice-cold beneath the rubber.

  She snaps out of her sleep-walker state. She awakens to where she is and to what she’s doing. Eyes widening, she gives a cry and shrinks back from his leg. She must have heard Turnkey’s clump-jangle in the corridor, Seymour supposes.

  She leaps to her feet, almost upsetting the pail on his other leg, grabs the trolley and to Seymour’s vast relief, flees.

  Seymour draws up a chair before the tray the girl had pointed to. He’s tempted to wake the others before the food gets cold. But it turns out to be cold already despite her breathless two-kilometer run, much colder than the chlorine-tasting luke-warm water in the pitcher. It’s some kind of gray hash. It tastes gray too.

  There’s a lump of chocolate with white fuzz on the tray. It tastes moldy. He’s on the point of spitting it out when he remembers that the girl is sure to come back for the dirty dishes and see how he’s treated her present, stolen for forgiveness for what she thinks she’d done to his leg. He swallows it.

  Seymour limps into the Common Room and sits down in one of the dilapidated leather armchairs facing the big window. With the taste of mold persistent on his tongue, he stares out at the river and the trees, the domes and the bridges, the crowded cafés and the quay-side lovers.

  The sky slowly darkens and the city loses its colors and forms.

  His eyes close. He starts losing everything, like the city. Again he resists sleep. Then he remembers that he’d already slept and it hadn’t been a second death but a dream of Marie-Claude out there and back then. He wants to return to her.

  But sleep when it comes seconds later isn’t permanent void or Marie-Claude’s lips.

  Sleep is like a broken record.

  Seymour materializes in the vast bureaucratic room again and the long day of arrival plays back in the minutest details of shock, grief and confusion till the moment when, with the nauseous taste of the moldy chocolate on his tongue, he’s about to fall asleep again in the leather armchair in front of the darkening city and dream, identically, he’s certain, of dreaming of the long arrival at the phantom Prefecture.

  Frightened, he makes a tremendous effort to break free of a threatened cycle of endlessly diluted reality.

  This time there’s no repetition of arrival. He has a split-second vision of Marie-Claude, too brief for his lips to touch hers.

  Then nothing.

  But not permanent nothing Seymour realizes thankfully when he opens his eyes on the splendor of Paris at dawn on the other side of glass.

  Thankful too that the long first day at the Prefecture is behind him. He hopes there won’t be too many days like that to come.

  He gazes at the brightening city for a long time.

  Finally he gets up, goes into the men’s room and tries to wash the taste of mold out of his
mouth.

  ***

  Part Two

  Waiting