Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 21

  Sandstone Clobbering

  Three more seasons have rolled round since Seymour Stein started sketching his sweetheart’s street. The repetitious trees are green again outside. He’s finished the antique shop and, finally, the fish store. Tedious, tedious, those thousands of scales on all those mackerel. He could have chosen to portray scaleless eels. But mackerel was what he remembered and he wanted to be faithful to memory.

  That day (a day none of the Five will be able to forget), Seymour finishes the horsemeat butcher’s golden horse head. It’s not golden in his drawing of course and it looks more like a camel than a horse, but he’s done his best. He takes a deep breath and begins sketching the massive door of the building where Marie-Claude lives.

  He suddenly feels dizzy and weak. All work and no play.

  Pocketing his pencils, he murmurs: “Tomorrow, my darling.” He can almost believe she’s standing behind that door and can hear him. He sets out for the distant Living Quarters.

  He takes a long time getting there. Repeatedly he has to sit down in the middle of a corridor and catch his breath. He feels puffy. He stretches the neck of his turtleneck sweater and lets out his belt. The dizziness and weakness worsen. Far doors are a distorted blur.

  “I’m coming down with something,” he pants to himself over and over.

  It’s the first time any of them have been ill in all these quasi-years, he reflects. The place is terrible for mental health but in purely physical terms it’s fairly salubrious, despite the lack of fresh air, what with the ban on tobacco and alcohol and absolutely no temptation to overeat. So there are microbes here after all. No cats or dogs or even spiders or roaches but at least other living creatures to keep them company. Invisible though. Too bad. Seymour imagines the microbes dog-size and affectionate, wagging their tails.

  I’m delirious now, he mutters. Microbes have no tails. Anyhow, who wants them, billions of them, dog-size?

  Approaching the Living Quarters he hears sobs.

  The four of them are in the Common Room. Seymour sees them in a worsened blur. Standing unsteadily before one of the full-length tarnished mirrors a distorted Margaret is staring at her image and sobbing. A distorted Louis is staring in despair into another full-length tarnished mirror. Helen, distorted too, is seated at the table staring down at her hands.

  Seymour thinks: what’s the matter with my eyes? Why do they look different? He tries to squint them into familiarity. A different Max is tossing his Stetson in the air and trying to catch it on his fist. Buttons on his deerskin vest have burst over his strange sagging gut. His face is different too but joyous.

  What’s happened now? Seymour asks.

  They look at him hard and long. Louis tells him to look at himself in a mirror.

  Seymour looks at himself – can that be myself? – hard and long.

  Not myself, not possibly myself, he argues mentally with the mirror just as the others had with their mirror.

  After a while they turn their backs on the veracious mirrors. They march in a daze to the table. They sit down heavily. It’s as though a ten-ton block of granite has fallen on their heads. A sandstone block, rather. Time here, the mirrors had just taught them, isn’t the familiar grain-by-grain trickle of an open-ended hourglass, each grain of sand doing its work of attrition on you imperceptibly. Time here waits patiently in temporary suspension. The billions of grains of sand patiently agglomerate and then the sudden sandstone block clobbers you and you’re older, much older, in seconds.

  Silent, they avoid looking at each other’s faces, mirrors too. At the far end of the room Max whirls his Stetson up at the ceiling. He catches it triumphantly on his fist. His breath rasps asthmatically.

  How many years, do you think? one of them finally asks.

  They’d all been on the verge of asking that question. They aren’t sure who actually does ask it. They all participate in what follows but it’s out of collective distress. They aren’t sure who speaks between the long pauses.

  Twenty-five years?

  Maybe twenty?

  Not twenty-five years. Not even twenty. Developed a wart on my neck when I was forty-four. Haven’t got it yet.

  You’ll get it all right. And lose things too.

  Like hair. Mine’s thinner. Don’t look.

  Lose our minds.

  Lose everything.

  Already have lost everything.

  So say fifteen years.

  That makes us forty then.

  We look older than that.

  Natural after what we’ve been through. I’d say forty.

  Roughly forty.

  On the bad side of forty though.

  Could be worse.

  Will be worse, that’s for sure.

  “But it’ll get better before it gets worse. That’s for sure too.”

  Helen says that, still staring down at her hands. She usually consoles. Is what she said a consolation? Her hands have aged too of course.

  Inconsolable, they sit there in silence.

  Max tosses his Stetson the wrong way. It sails onto the table.

  Louis opens his eyes. He stares at the hat.

  “Pilsudski, you quit that foolishness with your hat and wipe that grin off your fat face. You got no more call to grin than the rest of us. Go and have a look at yourself the way you are now.”

  He already has. Max already has looked at himself in a mirror. He goes on grinning like an imbecile. All that wonderful flab and sag and grizzle. He likes the way he is now. Later they learn why. He explains it over and over.

  Explains that, before, he’d been twenty-five and Bess eleven. Way things stand now, with him forty, Bess is twenty-six. All he’ll have to do is find her once he breaks out of this place.

  The others realize that Max is in the phase where he doesn’t believe that time out there is circular. What he sees outside is a dead empty city where nothing occurs and so nothing can reoccur. He assumes that time out there is linear like the time he’d known back then. So Bess, synchronized with him, has moved forward in time too, out of tabooed childhood into attainable nubility.

  Sometimes, exasperated by his happiness, the others are tempted to remind him that, like a dog chasing its tail, outside time goes round and round in a twelve-month cycle for their beloved and so for his too. Bess is still a distant eleven years old with him forty now, even further from her. But they don’t tell him that. His new moronic grin is better than his former howls.

  Like everything that happens here, that savage aging (“savaging” they call it) was programmed, Helen thinks. Had to be programmed because the next day indifferent functionaries come equipped to measure their advance toward decrepitude. Philippe, the fussily dressed young functionary (still young, after all this time), stares briefly at Louis with a grief-stricken expression and then avoids looking at him. New ID photos are snapped. Protected from contact by long rubber gloves, one of the functionaries measures them with a tape. Another functionary tacks an alphabet-soup chart to the wall. The Arrivals peer at it and chant out the diminishing letters.

  A few days later Seymour is fitted with new cruelly corrective lenses. He can see the inroads of age on their faces and on his own even more clearly now. Helen is issued reading glasses. She says yes, they must be forty. She’d needed reading-glasses “back then” at that time of life. So now she has reading glasses here. “But nothing to read.” It’s still her major regret outside of having been pulled out of void in the first place.

  A week after the tape measurements, they’re issued better-fitting clothes except for Margaret who doesn’t need any. Her stunning figure defies those sudden years. She’s the one who takes things the hardest but she has the least cause to, the others think enviously. But Margaret has to cope with guilt as well as grief at incipient wrinkles. She’s certain that she’s brought this savage aging upon the others by saying no to Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque. It’s not nearly as bad as her wrinkles, but bad enough.

  For a
long time they avoid the Common Room and its sarcastic mirrors and the window on the city with an unaged sweetheart in it who might not even recognize them now if, by miracle, they were ever transferred out there. Seymour dreams about it repeatedly. In the long-ago street the heavy door buzzes ajar. He spirals up to the somber fourth-floor door. At his knock it opens on Marie-Claude. Radiant in her twenty-third year she stares blankly and inquires “Monsieur?” to the middle-aged stranger he’s become to her. He can’t know that the others have parallel dreams.

  After the initial prostration, during which they remain in bed for what must be three days, eyes shut and wordless except to refuse food, they feel crushing humiliation. They try to avoid each other. But it’s not easy, crammed together as they are. When they’re confronted with one another, what can they say to that faintly familiar stranger? They’d spent their whole life together (this poor simulacrum of a life) so they can’t even resort to those pathetic minimizing ploys of old acquaintances meeting, secretly aghast, for the first time in fifteen years: “You’re looking just great!” or “Haven’t aged a day!” Most of the time they look away and pass each other without saying anything.

  Sometimes, though, trying to salvage scraps of his former identity, Margaret steals glances at the stranger they go on calling Louis. Finally, she finds he’s not at all bad the new way he is. But Louis hardly looks at her at all. She’d been, bewilderingly, two different (if related) girls before. Now there’s a third woman in their place, who answers to their name but that’s practically the only resemblance. At first he’s indifferent to this vastly different woman. That indifference may be due more to a weakening of desire on Louis’ part than to a loss of beauty on Margaret’s. Helen tells her over and over that she’s never been so beautiful. But Margaret weeps endlessly.

  Seymour agrees with Helen. Margaret possesses a less blatant, a finer menaced kind of beauty now. Maybe with his own additional years, his taste has evolved and he now prefers maturing women. But his appreciation of her beauty is largely cerebral. Seymour too experiences a weakening of desire. It’s the same with Max. He doesn’t seem to notice Margaret anymore. When you’re forty how can you be twenty-five?

  Margaret has a tragic sense of this weakening of desire in her presence.

  One night, perhaps not in a dream, Margaret sees the Prefect at the end of a corridor marching stiffly toward her. She runs away, out of fear as before, but now too out of shame at her new aging face. Later, she turns a corner and finds herself face to face with him and the smell of rotting flowers. His hollow voice formulates the familiar request as he tugs off the glove from his long white hand.

  Margaret runs away again. Fear is still involved in it but now, also, sinful joy at the survival of desire in her presence.

 

  Helen wonders if it isn’t also programmed that just at this critical stage, never further from transfer to Paris – not even sure that they want it on these new terms – they witness legitimate Arrivals, indisputably Good Americans, rapidly recycled out there. Louis is the first to see it one day as he passes by the Reception Room where they too had been materialized so long ago.

  The great bureaucratic room has been summarily prepared. A banner with the words BIENVENUE A PARIS is clumsily stretched between two pillars. The rest of the Welcome to Paris consists of a few mournful functionaries wearing conic New Year’s Eve caps and mechanically tossing handfuls of gray confetti on the batch of Good Americans, five of them, standing before a table with bottles of alcohol-free mousseux and stale-looking cookies. Louis can’t know this but the five must have sojourned in the Paris of the early seventies. They’re already attired for the return to it.

  Louis is shocked at the extent of bare thigh the two girls display below their gray miniskirts. From a corner, ragged Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini stares at resplendent Prefect D’Aubier de Hautecloque who, from another corner, is staring at those bare thighs. Two of the Good Americans, a man in a polo shirt and a shorthaired girl, are gazing at one another with parted lips. Can love at first sight exist here? They are led away. Louis runs back to the Common Room to alert the others.

  Minutes later, four of the poorly chosen Five press their faces against the cold windowpanes. Of course none of them should be able to see the indisputably Good Americans recycled. Their Paris isn’t the Paris of 1970. But for a few seconds they’re granted that vision. They see the well-chosen Five emerge from the other Prefecture and flame into color, the young man’s gray polo-shirt into sunny yellow, his gray-jeans into blue-jeans, the short-haired girl’s mini-skirt from ash-gray into fiery red, a miraculous reversion of process, ashes back to flame.

  The couple, surely unknown to each other in had-been time, turn to one another and embrace passionately. The gray middle-aged spectators at the window of the phantom Prefecture weep, even Helen a little. Then the lovers vanish along with the rest of 1970 and the weepers are back to their repetitious Paris of 1900, 1937 and 1951.

  But not for long.

  They thought they’d been allowed another fifteen-year respite from physical deterioration. But one day, surely not fifteen years later, Margaret brings out with difficulty: something funny’s happening to my face, it’s, like, paralyzed. God, my face is getting paralyzed. Helen and Seymour say with difficulty: no, no, it’s all in the head. But it seems to be happening to them too, to all of them. It’s a stiffening, like an invisible plaster mask setting, a death mask, they think. It’s hard to smile and even speech is an effort. They tell themselves that maybe it’s because they’re out of practice: so little reason to smile and less and less to say.

  “We’re becoming like them,” Margaret repeats with difficulty.

  Maybe it’s just imagination, they tell themselves, except for Margaret.

  Margaret is secretly sure it’s more collective punishment for her having run away from the Prefect once again.

  One day they look out of the window and see fog in the place of the city. They wait for the fog to lift. It doesn’t lift, that day or the next. They think: this is the functionaries’ vision and now it’s ours. We’re becoming like them. But later the city comes up bit by bit like a latent image in a developer bath. With great relief, they understand, think they understand, that it had been real fog.

  But they see that blankness more and more often. It lasts longer and longer. It can’t be fog but a programmed defect in their eyes, like a growing cataract. All that’s left of the city, from time to time, are colorless tatters of buildings and spectral trees perceived through the window and, for Seymour, a clumsily sketched street in black and white on the wall of a distant room.

  Margaret wanders in the corridors in search of the Prefect and implores God to tell her what she should do if she meets him. She doesn’t meet him.

  Once, in the Common Room, the girl Seymour calls Gentille approaches him timidly and looks with unbearable pity at the decline of his face. Again she asks him to describe what he sees through the window, probably hoping he’ll finally see her longed-for sea. He doesn’t, that or anything else. He sees the blankness she sees every day when she dares to risk punishment and look.

  He’s frightened at sharing her infirmity. To conceal it, he describes the lost golden domes, the gaily-colored awnings and the enlaced lovers as he’d seen them in earlier better days. It’s an unsatisfactory compensatory act of imagination like his penciled mural drawing of Marie-Claude’s street. Gentille stares at the white window. Fantasizing too, she claims she can make out breakers and the lighthouse.

  Profoundly depressed at this further similarity with her, Seymour leaves Gentille in front of her fictitious sea. The idea of suicide crosses his mind, but very briefly. He’d tried that already and had wound up here. Second time around might be worse. How could it possibly be worse, though?

  The others see little of Seymour now. He gets up while they’re still sleeping and winds his way to distant room 1265. He’s furnished it with a chair and brings scraps of food to last the whole d
ay. There’s an inside bolt on the door and he uses it for privacy. Sometimes he hears Gentille’s dragging footsteps in the corridor and then a timid knock. He stops working and is careful to make no sound. She knocks again, no louder. After a while she tries the door, very timidly and just once. Her dragging footsteps fade away and then he goes back to the street.

  When he returns to the Living Quarters the others are asleep or trying to sleep. He himself gets little sleep, tossing about, trying to recall more details of the real street. When he succeeds, he incorporates the triumph into his wall street the next day.

  Gradually the one-dimensional street takes on more reality than the corridors or his fellow prisoners, now reduced to dim recumbent shapes on their cots when he returns from the street or goes back to it.

  One day, facing the street on the wall of Room 1265, imagination and yearning project him into that other space and time. The flat monochrome opens up to him in colored three dimensions. He’s there, at last passed into it, standing in sunshine, almost beneath the golden horse head, pressing the bell.

  The heavy door buzzes ajar. He pushes it open and steps into the familiar shabby courtyard with irregular paving stones and the workshops between the battered bikes leaning against peeling walls. And yes, there, the cat, meditating in front of her father’s shop which bears the scrolled words “Tailleur pour Dames et Messieurs.”

  He goes past the concierge in her lodge. He spirals up to the fourth floor, breathing in the staircase fragrance of cabbage and wax and knocks on the dark varnished door. It starts opening.

  In his back another door opens. He’d forgotten to lock it.

  “Monsieur Saymore. Monsieur Saymore.”

  He recoils at the sound of that wrong voice, expelled from the street, back here. He blunders against Gentille, loses his balance and for support grabs her skinny bare arm, intensely cold above the rubber glove.

  She cries out, recoils from him, her features congealed into a mask of horror at that touch. He stands there petrified, his mind frighteningly blank, as though his outrage at being treated like a leper had driven everything else away (as, a minute later – once again in possession of his identity – he’ll analyze it).

  For a few seconds he stands in a windowless room with a poorly drawn street on a wall, not knowing where he is or who he is, stared at by a strange gaunt girl, her chalky face divided between horror and revelation. He hears the girl mumble senseless things: “The mole, the nets, the fishermen, Momma, don’t go, Momma.”

  She utters a cry, turns and runs out of the room. He emerges from the queer blankness, recalls who he is, who she is, where they are, and, dimly, as though it had happened a long time ago, that he, the leper, had touched her. Later he recalls the notice that Turnkey had stuck on the wall enjoining the functionaries to avoid all contact with the Arrivals sous peine de ZTV3.

  She avoids him after that, just as he avoids her.

 

  But one day turning into either end of a short corridor they meet. Neither dares insult the other by retreating.

  Going past him with her washing tools, her eyes fixed on the floor, she presses against the wall to maintain maximum distance from him. The outrage at being treated like a leper by this stupid zombie returns.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t touch you. You won’t catch my disease.”

  She stops and looks up at him.

  “Oh, sir, don’t think that. I would love to touch you and would love you to touch me but we mustn’t, ever, either of us, either way. I try not to remember the nets and the fishermen you gave me.”

  She steps back from him and runs away, her empty pail bonging against her fast bony knee.

  He doesn’t understand her reference to nets and fishermen. He finds her imbecilic wide-eyed sexual frankness repellent. He doesn’t want to touch her or be touched by her. The other men’s quips and jibes come back to him: “Your sweetie-pie” and “Get into her yet?”

  He goes on trying to avoid her, systematically now. He ducks behind the U.S. GO HOME screen when he hears her squealing chariot and ventures out only when the squealing fades away down the corridor. He remains barricaded in his room when he hears her scrubbing that corridor. Of course he’s vulnerable when he’s in bed and she wheels in their wrong-time lunch in what is the middle of the night outside. Not wanting to disturb their sleep she unloads the trays by the light of the corridor. She’s a shadowy figure. Sometimes she stands there for minutes looking, he thinks, at him. He must be a shadowy figure too to her.

  Seymour can’t imagine that one distant day a great discovery will make Stupide central to them all and that he will have to approach her again, careful though not to touch her this time or be touched by her.