Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

  Chapter 16

  Merry-Go-Round

  Time, then, stands still here and grinds on relentlessly on the other side of the window, they think in despair, the spiral of seasons like a bit biting into their hearts. Still, there’s something strange about what’s going on out there. Or rather about what’s not going on out there.

  If so many years have gone past, maybe a decade or more, why haven’t skirt-lengths and hairstyles changed in supposedly post-1937 and post-1951 Paris? Where are the new car models? How come horses continue to monopolize the streets of supposedly post-1900 Paris? Where are the new motor omnibuses?

  Above all, there’s the enigma of what Margaret continues to see in her terrible decade. Her 1937 is just two years from war, less than three years from debacle. Why doesn’t she see German occupation troops? Where are the deformed crosses of the victors flapping over French public buildings?

  The answer to these riddles comes four burned-out bulbs later.

  One rainy day in autumn out there (judging by the trees) Seymour is sitting by himself before the window searching for a particular aging face in the crowd. Suddenly he leaps to his feet, yelling with joy.

  Without knocking, he bursts into the women’s room where Helen is lying on her bed staring up at the ceiling. He’d done that before. But this time he’s incoherent with joy. She thinks he’s lost his mind, joy in this spot, and then understands: he’s seen his Marie-Something, Marie-Claude. For his sake she tries to share his senseless joy. What use is seeing if there’s no possibility of being? He practically wrenches her off the bed to see.

  But there’s nothing joyous about what she sees out of the window. A crowd has gathered about a black Citroën Traction with a smashed windshield. A smashed woman lies crumpled in front of the car. Helen looks away from all that blood.

  Seymour is joyous at it. He stammers: “It doesn’t matter for her. She already died. She’ll die again. It’s all happened before. It’ll all happen again. I saw it all. I’ll see it all again. It’s the same year, 1951, our year, it goes round and round. Marie-Claude is there. Your husband – what’s his name again? – is there too. It must be the same for the others too.”

  Sure enough, it’s the same year, going round and round, not just 1951 but 1900 and 1937 too. That same day, miraculously (or was it planned that way, they’ll wonder later), Louis sees the once-witnessed brawl and the bolting white-eyed horses. Margaret again sees the kissing bickering lovers in the café and, knowing how it will end, weeps again.

  So their lovers are preserved for them in that unchanging repeated year outside like long-ago dragonflies perfect in amber.

  Max has no cause for celebration. But by a strange coincidence (or was it planned that way?) that very day, hours before, he’d discovered four dusty bottles of wine in Room 1452: Pétrus 1922, and Pomerol 1919. Knowledgeable, Seymour proclaims their excellence. They take Max’s discovery as an auspicious portent and get drunk. Seymour stands up unsteadily, toasts the window and extemporizes:

  Not a train

  No dark funeral express train

  But a merry-go-round

  Be merry

  Be merry

  O see how they go round and round

  The merry painted wooden horses!

  Back then, in another existence, Seymour had tried his hand at poetry for a year before he gave it up as a bad job.

  It’s the first moment of joy since their arrival in this place. They drain three of the bottles dry, even though this prohibited act can cost them they can’t recall how many precious points. “I don’t drink,” Helen keeps on saying as Seymour keeps on pouring and she keeps on drinking, desperately.

  Later, Helen sees them slumped in their tattered armchairs, after the cheers and babble and laughter, staring at the window in a beatific stupor. It’s clear that, in fantasy, they’re reunited with their lovers. Don’t they realize (Helen does in spite of all the wine) that basically they’re simply back to starting point, the desired year of Paris outside, but no way to reach it? Now asleep, they mumble, mutter, whisper, explain, defend, justify, their faces wet with joy.

  Helen tries staring at the window, which slowly rotates, but she sees nothing. She hears Richard’s reproachful voice: Why didn’t you look for me in the right place? Soundlessly, her lips shape the answer: I looked everywhere. Richard’s voice, distant now and fading: Why didn’t you go down to the Catacombs? Her lips soundlessly form: I didn’t want to then, I liked sunshine too much, but I’m there now. Where are you? His answer is an unintelligible whisper. It fades out.

  Now the sleepers thresh about in their armchairs. The tears keep coming but they aren’t tears of joy anymore. Something has gone wrong. Only half awake, they slowly get up and march stiffly, each of them, into a corner where they huddle, not looking at the window. The tears come faster. Sobs wrack their bowels. Helen automatically goes over, unsteadily, and tries to comfort them. She learns from Seymour and Louis, in a moment of guilty confession, that both men had abandoned their lovers pregnant. She makes an effort and goes on comforting them.

  Despite the comforting, or because of it, they end by glaring at her, pushing her away and stopping their ears. She still doesn’t understand that by relativizing their unforgivable act (pretending to) she seems to be flaunting her own goodness, emphasizing that she’s the only one of the Five to stand a chance of being transferred back to that Paris she keeps telling herself she doesn’t want.

  Minutes later she finally learns about the image they have of her from Margaret. Margaret runs moaning out of the Common Room. Helen finds her face down on her bed repeating over and over: “Jean, Jean, O Jean.” Helen mechanically comforts her, wipes the tears off her face and even kisses her. Margaret pulls away. “You never cry. You don’t have to. You were good. You’re going out there. Not like the rest of us.”

  No, Helen whispers, that’s not true. Margaret, sobbing again, hears her say something confused, about how it’s all a sham, shammed goodness, comforting people in distress, a kind of reflex from long habit, how as a child already, an ugly child, she’d been jealous of beautiful people (“like you”), had never come to terms with her skinny plainness, how she’d learned very early that niceness, sympathy and forgiveness could be a lure, a means of attracting men who were in bad need of niceness and sympathy and forgiveness.

  So (Margaret vaguely hears her say) she specialized in flawed handsome men, dispensing calculated comfort and sympathy until she became their indispensable drug. There’d been a dying man, then a cripple, then a homosexual, others. Of course it never worked out. Couldn’t possibly have. Finally there was Richard.

  She’d been in Paris working on a thesis. Her father fell ill and she’d returned to Denver. She’d encountered a startlingly handsome young man standing on a corner, confused and angry because nobody could direct him to where he wanted to go. She couldn’t either (it sounded almost like a description of a sewer) but she spoke to him about Paris and suddenly that’s where he wanted to go, with her.

  Everybody warned her about him, a hopeless case, cyclically suicidal and perhaps lovingly homicidal too in that phase. Keep away from him in that downward phase, they warned. Instead, she married him. She wasn’t afraid when the cycle operated dangerously. He was much closer to her, totally dependent, in the downward phase than in the lucid phase. They didn’t understand. In that lucid phase he was indifferent. Cured, he was sure to leave her. Secretly she feared the upward phase more than the downward phase.

  Helen whispers: “You’re wrong about me. Why do you think I’m still here after all this time?”

  But Margaret’s breathing is deep and regular now. She’s asleep. Her face is peaceful. It’s not sure she’s heard Helen’s confession. Helen hopes she hasn’t. Still unsteady on her feet, Helen goes back to the Common Room. Slouched in their corners the others are asleep. Their faces are peaceful now. It must have all turned out well for them, after all, in their minds.

  Normally th
ey should have suffered from a bad morning-after. They don’t, at least not from a conventional one. Seymour samples what’s left in the fourth bottle and makes a face. The vital essence of the wine had evaporated, probably decades earlier. But their joy had been so great at the discovery of eternal return out there that they’d got drunk on a prestigiously labeled placebo. Sober, the others sip and have to acknowledge that it’s no more than old water. Their joy has evaporated too.

  The merry-go-round, they realize, goes round and round but they’re not on it, probably never will be.

  It’s a terrible morning-after after all, worse than the worst conceivable morning-after alcohol could have produced.

  They go on trying to kill time while waiting for the Advocate who’s supposed to find ways of getting them out of here into a better place.

  Sometimes, though, they wonder if the Advocate isn’t a myth, pure invention to lull them into a sense of false security. It might very well be that one day (one year, one decade) the Administrative Review Board would finally meet and a button would be pressed and without warning, no fuss or bother, the administratively suspended Five would fall out of suspension into void or, very unlikely for all but one of them, into color and sunshine.

  In the meantime all they can do is hope for the best and wait for the hypothetical Advocate.