Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 11

  Relationships

  So there they are, three men and two women of different backgrounds, periods, life-styles, political leanings, religious or irreligious inclinations and diversely strung nerves, crammed together in a few square yards for how long God alone knows, and even that’s not sure. They’re forced to tolerate one another, no choice in the matter. And resist temptation. Margaret and Louis do their best.

  Margaret constantly feels the burning focus of God’s eye on her. She struggles against carnal burning. She has made a holy vow of chastity to Him and knows that the slightest trespass in act or thought on her part can result in instant exit. Already by a second inexplicable miracle God had spared her despite her scandalous behavior with the blond blue-eyed beautiful naked muscular vigorous, incredibly vigorous, man called Louis Forster, stop thinking of it, stop thinking of him.

  Margaret had never confessed in her sinful first existence. She longs to do it now. But spiritual comfort is on a par with physical comfort here. No religious services are held in the Prefecture. No sacramentally empowered ear can relieve her of the burden of her sins. She turns to Helen for next-best psychological relief. She doesn’t even get that. Helen prudishly interrupts the tearful account of her earliest major offence (at the age of fourteen with a friendly vigorous plumber) even though her roommate does go on rocking her consolingly in her arms.

  Margaret knows her flesh is inflammable and that the sight of it inflames. So she hides it. She gets rid of her incendiary knit dress. She extemporizes underclothes out of strips of a drab French flag, once gay tricolor, salvaged from one of the corridor storerooms. She converts her bed sheet into a poncho-like floor-sweeping garment: a hole for her head and two holes for her arms. She conceals her cascade of hair, no longer fiery but still sexually potent, in a dust-rag bandana.

  Eventually, Margaret abandons the ghost outfit when she’s docked five (5) points for willful deterioration of state property. If they’d suspected to what intimate use she’d put their national banner she’d probably have been exited on the spot. The Administration issues her a decent gray garment like the female functionaries wear.

  In the meantime, clad in that sheet, she looks spooky. Sudden encounters with her in the corridors are unsettling, for her even more than for the other party. At the beginning, before she’s scared away by her encounters with the Prefect there (dreamed or possibly not dreamed), she spends much of her time wandering about in the corridors, trying to put distance between herself and the men. She doesn’t always succeed.

  Once, turning a corridor corner, Seymour bumps into soft whiteness. They both go down flat on their backs, which gives him a good view of her breathtaking bared legs, nothing ectoplasmic about those legs. But her spread thighs converge on absurd anticlimax: what looks like a scrap of the flag of France.

  Wide-eyed with fear, she scrambles to her feet and adjusts her sheet. Before she can run away, he says: “Hey Maggie, I just remembered an old Christmas dinner: roast goose with chestnut and raisin and oyster stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy, let me tell you about that gravy…” He goes on with it. Her breathing quickens. Her moist lips part.

  “Maggie,” he says and reaches out.

  She backs away, mumbling: “I’m not Maggie, I’m Margaret.”

  Then she runs away from him, those marvelous legs, rhythmically outlined under the sheet, that sweet darling bitable wagging butt of hers. He thinks of it intensely for a few miles of corridors and then returns to the old Christmas dinner, salivating with desire at the memory of the chestnut and raisin and oyster stuffing and, Jesus, that gravy.

  Another time, turning a corner, Max comes upon Margaret face to face. He shouts “whaaa!” at the spectral sight and nearly runs the other way. She does run the other way in panic, not taking Max for a ghost but for worse: another flesh-and-blood man here in this solitary place. She desperately wants to avoid the temptation of flesh-and-blood men in solitary places, above all Louis. Would she have run away like that if she’d encountered Louis instead of Seymour and Max?

  Temptations assailed even saints, she knows. She recalls a painting in the Louvre where Jean had taken her long ago: Saint Somebody in the desert with his eyes rolled up white toward the heavens, refusing the corrupting sight of a devil-dispatched lascivious woman. “Me with you,” Jean had commented, as a joke, maybe. She’d never been sure when he joked and when he didn’t.

  That’s what she should do in the presence of Louis, look away, like Saint Somebody. But she’s no saint. Whenever Louis catches her gaze on him he blushes grayly and looks away himself. She knows he’s made the connection between her and Maggie kneeling before him in no prayful way. Mortified, she rectifies her gaze. She tries to concentrate on spiritual things. Sometimes her eyes brim over. After a while, out of the corner of a wet eye, she catches him gazing at her with an expression of spiritual love for the Margaret she is now.

  But when he perceives her furtive backsliding peek at him, she’s back to Maggie for him, that mouth, that bosom of hers, and he turns his back on her.

  For Louis too feels the burning Eye of God upon him and struggles against carnal burning. He too knows that the price of transgression in deed or thought can be instant exit. So he commands himself to stop thinking of that mouth that bosom that mouth that bosom of hers, stop thinking of it, stop thinking of her.

  Louis and Margaret avoid each other as best they can. For a long time they don’t exchange a single word. Margaret tries to keep her thoughts on Jean Hussier but he’s theoretical, on the other side of time and fracture-proof glass. Louis Forster is real and close. Louis and Seymour too try to keep their thoughts on their long-ago theoretical sweethearts but Margaret is real and close. The pattern of faithlessness has resurrected too.

  Finally Margaret and Louis manage to establish a relationship. It’s a safely pious one. Margaret wants to atone and pray for forgiveness but she’s forgotten the wording of her childhood prayers. Knowing the right formula is a necessary, if insufficient, condition for salvation, she thinks.

  She turns to the others for assistance. She’s shocked to learn that Helen doesn’t pray. Max either. All Seymour Stein knows is the opening words of Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer he’d had to learn by heart at ten for his mother. He refuses to recite it to her. He doesn’t want to be his own mourner. The only one of the Five who has prayers at tongue-tip is Louis.

  She learns that at dinner time shortly after materialization. Louis stares down at the hash and mumbles and mumbles. At first Margaret thinks he’s cursing the poor quality of the fare, then realizes he’s expressing thankfulness for it. Shyly, not looking at him, Margaret asks him to teach her the words of Grace. Shyly, not looking at her, he does.

  From then on, Margaret joins in whenever the Five eat together. It’s a kind of spiritual union with Louis. And with God too, of course.

  Margaret pumps Louis dry of prayers and still isn’t satisfied. She determines to explore all of the thousands (maybe millions) of storerooms in quest of a Bible. All of those prayers and supplications would be precious ammunition in the campaign for salvation and transfer. She doesn’t know that the Law of December 9, 1905, separating Church and State in France, strictly forbids religious literature in government buildings.

  At night Margaret and Louis lie side by side in their exactly aligned beds (almost a double bed), separated only by the thin partition. Whenever one hears the other praying inches away he/she joins in. They do it softly but still it disturbs the others.

  One night, Margaret starts reciting the Lord’s Prayer. She gets as far as And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us, but can’t remember the rest.

  “Louis,” she whispers to the partition. “Are you awake?”

  He’s awake, trying not to think of her. He recites the rest of the Lord’s Prayer to the partition.

  And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glo
ry, for ever and ever. Amen.

  They recite the Lord’s Prayer together, waking Seymour again.

  He can’t take it any more. He gets up and gropes his way to the Common Room. He sinks into an armchair in front of the dark window. Forgetting where he is and by what miraculous means he got there, he groans: “Jesus, Jesus, I’m so goddam sick of religion.”

  “What did you say?” comes a voice in the darkness.

  Badly frightened, Seymour replies automatically: “Praise the Lord.”

  “Oh God,” says Helen from a neighboring armchair, “Not you too, Seymour. I came here to try to get away from it a little.”

  Religion isn’t Seymour Stein’s only problem. Relationships are tense in the men’s room. Seymour suffers greatly from the rooming arrangements. How can a late New York intellectual comfortably room with a Marine and a truck driver? They have different Weltanschauungen as Seymour once points out to Max. But Louis, not Max, is the real problem.

  Louis treats the two of them like Marine recruits. He bans emotional as well as physical laxness. When they weep he commands them to stop and they have to sneak to a distant corridor to grieve in peace. Mental health goes along with physical health, he says. Stay a minute too long in bed, then it’d be an hour, then the whole blamed day and you’d end up with the wrong outlook on things. It starts with little things and ends with big things, he says.

  So there are long sessions of push-ups (“Keep that back straight, Stein!”), toe-touching (“Don’t bend them knees, Pilsudski!”), deep knee bends (“Squat all the way down, both of you!”). The worst is the forced jogging in the corridors. Louis’ sharp voice sounds reveille and rouses them out of bed. He imposes miles of corridor jogging on them, hun-two-hun-two, wake up, Stein! Quit draggin’ your feet, Pilsudski!

  When they totter back to the room, streaming with sweat, all three of them collapse on their beds, exhausted. Exhaustion is the secret reason for the exercises. Louis hopes that, exhausted, he’ll stop thinking of Margaret’s mouth and bosom, her mouth and bosom. It does help a little. Cold showers would have been better but there are no showers here.

  Finally Seymour revolts. “This isn’t boot-camp. I used to have crazy ideas but enlisting in the Marines wasn’t one of them for chrissakes.”

  “Don’t take the name of Our Lord in vain, Stein!” Louis snaps, his gray, once blond, moustache bristling. He adds that if Seymour had enlisted in the Marines he wouldn’t be in the mental and physical shape he is. But they’d never have taken him. “Anyhow, never seen one of your kind in the Marines.”

  Seymour broods over that last crack. Just his luck to be rooming with two anti-Semites. Back then, Seymour Stein had been paranoid on that subject. The trait has carried over in resurrection.

  Louis disciplines them even at night. He can’t see them but he has a sharp ear and nose. The corridor toilet is a long way off. It’s unhygienic maybe but human to urinate in the nearby washbasin. (At least Seymour runs the water into the bowl after. He isn’t sure Max does.) But finally Louis hears Max relieving himself that handy way. He leaps out of bed, snaps the light on and barks inches from Max’s scared face: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a man who micterates in a washbasin!” Louis is six foot three and armored with muscles. Max and Seymour go the long way after that.

  Louis censors what little sex-life they have. It’s restricted to the eyeballs but is better than nothing, just about. Max makes the discovery. He starts monopolizing the washing-area. One morning Seymour surprises him standing with his face pressed against the sinister face of the grinning clown. At first Seymour thinks Max is weeping and trying to hide it. Then he discovers that tiny holes had been bored – maybe decades earlier – in the clown’s pupils, providing the peeper with a restricted view of the women’s toilette area.

  Max describes Margaret in crude graphic terms. Maybe it’s all sex-starved fantasy. But maybe not. Seymour wants his turn at the clown face. Max lets Seymour peep too in exchange for the lumps of moldy chocolate the frightened cleaning girl continues smuggling through to him.

  Most of the time Seymour sees nothing at all. And his nose gets in the way of comfortable viewing of nothing at all. Once, though, he catches Helen, bare to the waist, brushing her teeth vigorously with a finger. Her small pointy breasts quiver vigorously. It’s nice but nothing sensational. But can beggars be choosers? He never catches even a glimpse of Margaret, the star attraction.

  The peeping sessions come to an end when Louis discovers what the two of them are up to all of the time in the washing area. He presses his face against the clown’s face for half a minute and then withdraws with a shocked expression. Grim-faced, he hammers wooden pegs into the clown’s pupils, blinding the voyeur for good. Seymour guesses that, beginner’s luck, he’d seen Margaret at her intimate ablutions.

  Louis decrees a daily shave. But the Administration has allotted the men an archaic straight razor (not archaic for Louis of course). Seymour doesn’t know how to strop properly and his angle of attack is wrong. The nicked blade draws blood each time. That’s terrible because the gray ooze really does look like embalming fluid.

  To escape the depressing chore, Seymour decides to grow a beard. In had-been time he’d occasionally been tempted by a beard for dignity and concealment. But he’d been afraid of looking like an orthodox rabbi. Louis is hostile to beards in general, not just to beards worn by orthodox rabbis. Beards had gone out circa 1890. Imagining a bearded Marine is grotesque. And for Louis, Max and Seymour are Marine bootcamp fodder.

  Things come to a head over the beard issue. One morning Seymour refuses to cut his throat again with the nicked straight razor.

  “No, I won’t. Won’t do pushups and kneebends or jog anymore either. Won’t. This is a concentration camp all right, but you’re not the head fuehrer. I don’t know who the head fuehrer is but you’re sure as hell not. You’re just an inmate, like the rest of us. So enough already.”

  Max joins in the revolt and says he won’t either, won’t do pushups and kneebends or jog anymore either, won’t.

  Their voices rise. By now they know they can afford to do it without the risk of serious consequences. Helen is sure to propose her sad mediating services before friction ignites into brawl.

  She does it this time too, knocking timidly at their door. She explains to Louis that in Seymour’s time, her time too, beards had come back in style. It seems to her (but it’s just her opinion) that Seymour is justified in wanting to grow a beard even if he wouldn’t look very good in one. In her opinion, she adds apologetically to Seymour.

  She convinces Louis to let Seymour grow his beard (which he doesn’t do after all since she said he wouldn’t look good in one). She also tells Louis that pushups and jogging are very healthy activities, but that maybe (“I don’t know, I may be wrong but it seems that way to me”) they ought to be on a volunteer basis.

  Predictably, Louis ends by seeing things her way. Seymour, a little guilty at such total victory, says that maybe they could go on doing deep knee bends. He quickly adds: “Say ten a day.” Helen wonders if perhaps she could join in on the knee-bends. “Basically Louis’s right,” she says. “We don’t get nearly enough exercise here.”

  So that’s an end to daily shaving and pushups and toe-touching and dawn jogging for Max and Seymour. Louis goes on with it, inhumanly tripling the dose, taking on the others’ share and trying to sweat Maggie out of his brain. He also goes on disciplining his roommates emotionally, cracking down on tears and sobs. They’re secretly glad of that. He saves them, they realize, from mental collapse. He’s their stern pillar of strength.

  As usual, Seymour and Max express their gratitude to Helen for her arbitration. They suspect that they’re being tested on their behavior here. Without her soft-spoken interventions coexistence would be impossible. Maybe a brawl was a serious debit in the ledger-book.

  As usual, they’re careful to hide the resentment that accompanies the gratitude. Each one of Helen�
�s selfless interventions, they sometimes think, illustrates a goodness that’s sure to be rewarded by transfer out there. It emphasizes their own unworthiness, the details of which had been publicized by the hedgehoggish functionary the day of their arrival. They can’t forget that Helen was the only one of the Five that the ragged Napoleonic Sub-Prefect hadn’t sentenced to instant exit.

  They have another cause for resentment. If she comforts them when they weep and listens sympathetically to their yearnings, she never gives them the opportunity to return the favor and so chalk up good points for commiseration. She never weeps or confides or yearns as they do. Oh, how they yearn for transfer to the world of color, yearn and hunger and thirst for it! They want and want and want.

  Helen yearns for nothing, wants nothing. Isn’t indifference to reward a saint-like attribute? More deserving goodness. Behind her back, Seymour sometimes refers to her as “Saint Helena.” Sometimes he expands the name to “Saint Helena, Rock of Lonely Exile.”

  The Five often find each other’s company unbearably oppressive. Not just Helen with her enviable status as a well-placed candidate for transfer plus her nearly physical aura of sadness. There’s Max with his sobs in the middle of a dirty joke, heard a hundred times, the joke and the sobs. Seymour’s interminable stories of times with his Marie-Claude, going into all mentionable details. Louis’ mechanical gymnastics with orders to himself to keep his knees stiff and his back straight. Margaret’s great-eyed recoil from male contact.

  When that happens once too often and they can’t bear the sight and sound of one another, the longing for solitude becomes insurmountable. They flee the Common Room in solitary secession and wander in the tangle of corridors or poke about in dusty unexplored rooms with the same contents as the explored ones.

  But sooner or later solitude too becomes unbearable (the whisper of their soles on the floor, the sound of their breathing and hearts) and they try to find their way back to company.

  They often get lost. They shout for rescue from solitude: “Hellooo…” and are answered by the echo, a mournful ghostly “O … O … O …” Or else, to improve the echo, they shout, “Where … are … you?” and get back nothing better than “Oow … oww … oww …” a cry of pain, ghostly too.

  A few hours later, the others in the Common Room, alarmed at being reduced to four, scatter in the corridors and shout the same things: “Hellooo…” and “Where … are … you?” They get the same multiplied replies.

  Or else they shout the missing companion’s name.

  It gives them better, neutral, echoes except for “Helen! Helen!”

  That shout gives them: “Hell…In .… Hell… In…

  Hell …”