The Two Keys
Willows outside are filling with green mist, so early April, when Seymour sets to work on coaxing the key to Room 147 from the cleaning girl. He’s careful to wear his own key on a string outside his turtleneck sweater.
First he has to reconstruct their old relationship, like a survivor in a bomb-blasted city digging up serviceable bricks from the rubble of once-home to start all over again. Of course the relationship can’t begin the way it had begun long ago. She’s unlikely to upset a second pail of dirty water over his leg. She maintains too much distance from him now. But his renaming of her happens the same way as the original naming except that it takes much longer for her to acknowledge it.
She’s on her knees, scrubbing the floor in mournful slow motion in the corridor opposite the men’s room. Seymour stands on the threshold of the empty room. To leave the field free, the other men disappear now whenever she comes.
“Bonjour, Gentille.”
She goes on scrubbing. She goes on scrubbing even when he repeats his greeting four or five times. It’s like trying to get a reaction from the cots and the chest of drawers.
The following week he repeats the attempt. He tries again and again, week after week.
Except for Helen, the others harry Seymour for quick results. Helen doesn’t know about the key strategy. They suspect that she’d disapprove if she found out. But she’s not likely to find out. Helen has lost contact with the world outside printed pages. She doesn’t even glance at window-framed Paris any more.
The chestnut trees outside are bearing candelabrums of white blossoms, so May, when the cleaning girl finally reacts to his patient “Bonjour, Gentille.” She raises her head painfully and looks around for someone called “Gentille.” It’s true he hasn’t called her that or anything else for years and her memory is terrible.
He repeats her name. Now she looks at him quickly and then down at the scrubbing brush. She seems to be making a terrific effort with her lips as though to break catgut stitches. Finally she whispers to the scrubbing brush: “Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore.” Her memory isn’t as bad as he’d thought. Then she grabs up her cleaning tools and flees.
The next day she pushes the food cart in like an automaton. She doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t reply to his greeting. Her lips move soundlessly, though. He thanks her for all that chocolate she used to bring him and hasn’t for years. She still doesn’t answer.
He keeps it up. She ends by a tight-lipped whispered “Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore” to the tray or the scrubbing brush each time he greets her with his “Bonjour, Gentille.”
One day he finds a big lump of chocolate hidden under the hash. The chocolate is even moldier than before but it’s a good sign. He gets rid of it in the WC.
Roses are blooming in the public gardens, so June, when she starts fearfully greeting him on sight.
Shortly after July Fourteenth rockets she begins telling him things she’d told him a hundred times years before. She recites the nicknames of the functionaries as if it’s news to him: “Hedgehog”, “Pédale”, “Nasty”, “Little Napoleon”, etc. She tells him again and again about the ban on direct prayer and gazing out of the windows, about the hopelessness of love here.
He hardly listens to all that. But he listens very closely and with growing tension each time she recites her catalogue of chores: scrubbing the corridor floors, cleaning the toilets, doing the guest rooms, pushing the food carts, washing mountains of dishes.
She doesn’t mention the big thing. Seymour doesn’t dare allude to it and raise suspicions in her mind. Maybe she’d lost that chore and no longer has access to Turnkey’s monstrous collection of keys. He feels faint at the thought.
There’s another big thing she doesn’t mention, a second big thing necessary, he thinks, for the success of the operation. He dares bring that particular subject up. One day he asks her if she still sees the sea in the window. She looks blank and asks: “What sea, Monsieur Saymore?”
She’d lost her sea, a vast thing to lose.
Not basically out of altruism, he tries to help her recover it. She’d once shared her poor scraps of memory of the sea with him. Couldn’t the sharer of a deleted image reinstall it a little? He describes what she’d told him. Each time he evokes the village with the name of a saint in it, dunes and a lighthouse and sails on the horizon, she stares past him and then goes back to work, saying nothing.
But one day she stands on tiptoe in front of the wine-stained wall map of France, her face almost touching it, and starts scrutinizing the long Channel and Atlantic coastline. Her face and her body follow the plunge of the coastline from Finistère down to the Pyrenees. As she goes past Lorient, Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux and finally reaches Biarritz and the Spanish border, her knees slowly flex. It’s like a slow-motion preliminary to forbidden prayer.
“Are you looking for something, Gentille?”
“I lost something, Monsieur Saymore. Sometimes I remember remembering what it is, a little. But my head hurts so bad when I do.”
Fingering the key about his neck, he tells her that it’s her seaside village of course, the village with the name of a saint he’d drawn on a wall for her, the sea and the dunes and the lighthouse and the sails on the horizon, doesn’t she remember? It’s all in Room 1265.
He hopes she’ll ask to see it again but she doesn’t. She looks scared.
Maybe she has bad associations with that room or with the corridor outside it. Clump-jangle. Clump-jangle.
A few days after, Gentille complains about her work again. Finally Seymour dares ask the big question. He’s rewarded.
“Oh yes, Monsieur Saymore, the keys. The keys are almost as bad as all those dirty dishes. Skull has hundreds of rooms and the keys hang on the walls from top to bottom, thousands of keys in every room and hundreds and hundreds of rooms. I have to climb a tall tall ladder to clean the high keys. I get dizzy. One day I’ll fall. And when I finish dusting the last keys the first ones are dusty again. It’s like the toilets and the corridors. Nothing ever stays clean.”
But when Seymour asks her to lend him one of the keys, number 147, she turns her back on him, snatches up her pail and cleaning things and quickly leaves the room she’s only half cleaned.
The next day, he says (forgetting that she has no sense of time) that the loan of the key to Room 147 would be for an hour or so, no longer. Nobody would ever know. Please.
It’s the first time he’s ever said please to her. She seems aware of the tremendous honor. She doesn’t run away this time. She stares down at the floor and it tumbles out breathlessly: “No no Monsieur Saymore I couldn’t do that Skull finds out everything he’d report me and I’d be punished again the Black Men would take me to the Hospital it hurts worse than having a tooth pulled and without a I don’t remember the word a kind of needle so it won’t hurt so bad they pull things out of your head and no needle O it hurts I don’t want to lose the lighthouse and the sail on the horizon again.”
It’s a critical moment. Won’t she remember that the lighthouse and the sail and lots of other precious things are stored safely outside her vulnerable brain, on the drawing in Seymour’s room? Won’t she ask again if she can accompany him to Room 1265 and look at the sea he’d drawn for her?
Seymour fingers his key, ready to hold it up, intricately indented like the Brittany coast, ready to say yes, Room 1265 against Room 147, his key against her key. It sounds like a fair swop, but of course it’s not. His key opens on an incompetent sketch of an imagined sea. Her key opens on renewed life.
It doesn’t happen that way. She goes wildly beyond his poor key. Like him, after all, she wants renewed life too.
“Take me with you, Monsieur Saymore.”
Stammering that insanity, she goes over to the wall map, jabs her finger at it and stammers other things he can hardly make out with her gasped torrent of words. She seems to be begging him to accompany her, not to the room with the sketch of the sea, but to the real sea itself, to look
for it with her, protecting her by his presence, exploring the coastline carefully, on foot, from Belgium to Spain, every indentation, every island, every estuary and fiord.
Seymour panics at the thought of it. He cries out stupidly: no, impossible, impossible. He pulls the key free from his neck. “Take it, you can have it.” He throws it on the floor, unconditionally surrendering the one-dimensional sea of Room 1265, maybe in the hope that she’ll be satisfied with that after all. He practically runs out of the room.
Why did he react like that? he’ll wonder later. It was senseless.
When he returns a few hours later she’s gone and the key is still lying on the floor. Max and Louis are there. Max almost lynches him when he tells them the story, part of the story, just that she wants to go with them outside, not the craziness of exploring 2000 kilometers of coast with him there.
“You said no, you dumb bastard?” Max bellows.
At the uproar, Margaret comes in. “Oh no, you didn’t, Seymour, you didn’t say no to her!”
Louis takes charge. “Say yes next time Stein, you hear? Say we’ll take her. ’Course we won’t.” Louis adds that it’s double good news. First, it means that she can get at the key. Second, if she wants to come with them – but of course they won’t let her – it means that the door to Room 147 opens on the real tunnel and she knows that.
The Lord has answered our prayers, Louis says. He sinks to his knees and thanks Him at length.
Seymour keeps on asking for the key. But on his terms, not hers: limited escape for her via his key and the drawing it unlocks, not total escape through the tunnel with them. Why doesn’t he say yes to her on any terms as Louis had ordered him to? Because this might be one of the traps? Punishment of his own making? Say yes to her and be condemned to trudge an endless coast with this zombie, himself a zombie? Or is it that he’s unwilling to slam the steel door in her face at the last moment after that great promise?
Without mentioning her terms any more (she’s no bargainer) Gentille keeps on saying no, begging his pardon in a stammer.
Seymour stops talking to her. He ignores her “Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore” when she comes in and doesn’t answer her timid “Au revoir, Monsieur Saymore” when she leaves. He gets wild amounts of chocolate with each meal, including breakfast. He leaves them untouched on the tray. He feels terrible hurting her like that but she’s holding back the key that opens a door on real life.
One day, instead of gathering up the dirty dishes, she sits down on the floor alongside the cart and her body shakes and shakes. She hasn’t got the safety valve of tears so it goes on and on. Seymour’s on the point of saying: don’t try to cry, Gentille, of course I’ll take you with me and of course we’ll explore the coast line together for that village with the name of a saint in it.
But before he can lure her with that lie she looks up at him and says, yes, she’ll give him the key to Room 147 just as soon as she can. She doesn’t mention accompanying them. She doesn’t even ask for the key to the room with the sketched sea. Seymour feels lousy at his total triumph.
Then it wears off and he feels a great surge of energy. He has to expend it or burst. He starts jogging then running down the corridors, maybe for the last time. He has a vision of Marie-Claude’s street as he’d never been able to imagine it here, with a wealth of new-remembered details. A fat cat on a windowsill. A Delft clock with canals and a windmill in the antique dealer’s window. A wall covered with graffiti: arrow-pierced hearts with entwined initials, a pencilled scribble, “Marie, je t’aime!!!” and a gigantic red phallus aimed like a Nazi V2 rocket at a high-placed constellation of stars in yellow crayon.
Lots of other things, a torrent of things for the slightest of which, before, he’d have got up in the middle of the night and trudged down miles of corridors to add it to the wall drawing he’d been laboring over for decades.
It doesn’t matter now. He’ll never go to that drab copy again. The original is awaiting him.
When he reaches the Living Quarters he waits for the others to gather in the Common Room in front of the window on Paris and announces the great news in a casual voice for greater impact: “Gentille says yes. She says she’ll give me the key to Room 147.”
Strange coincidence, before the others have time to react (with tears or cheers) Philippe minces in with his petulant tragic mask and informs them that Advocate will be arriving any minute now with great news.
“Great news for you,” he says, staring at Louis. “Terrible news for me. Try to think of me back here a little,” he says to Louis. “While you are savoring a dozen 00 Marenne oysters. With a minced shallot and vinegar sauce.”
So it turns out that they won’t need Gentille’s key after all. They won’t have to try to escape illicitly from this place and suffer the stipulated fatal consequences if they fail. An official door is about to open for them on the world of color and love that they can see, startlingly close it seems to them now, through the window.
Even Helen looks eager, jolted out of her world of books. It’s an extremely encouraging sign for the others.
Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die Page 35