Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

  Chapter 39

  Searching

  The bolt shoots home like a rifle in his back.

  Once again Seymour Stein finds himself imprisoned in the cramped space of Cubicle 6. With almost no hope it will happen, he wants the knobless door to buzz open on something safe this time. Forget the Rue du Regard with its torturing distortions and deprivations, try to forget it. Concentrate on one of Advocate’s recommended landmarks.

  Napoleon’s tomb? Tombs have bad associations. So, like a dutiful tourist, Seymour mentally contemplates the Eiffel Tower for maybe half an hour. He ends by finding the prospect boring and can’t resist a dangerous sneak revisit to a marvelous hotel room memory of his darling. A second there and he returns to the safe tower. Persistence of vision, though, operates even for the mind’s retina and he can’t help transporting her in double exposure to Eiffel’s erect structure in the blushing nude posture he’d coaxed her into long ago.

  A prudish girl like her in such a private attitude in that most public of places? Absurd. Perilous too, Advocate had warned. Seymour manages to efface her from the tower, just in time.

  The door buzzes open.

  Ten seconds to leave, Turnkey had warned, otherwise exit. Seymour’s tempted but at the seventh second steps out, fast.

  Steps out into swirling mist that hides everything except the grass he’s standing in, close trees looming spectrally and the low sun reduced to a faint red disk. He thinks he’s in one of the two big public parks of Paris at dawn: the Bois de Vincennes or the Bois de Boulogne.

  The sun asserts power. The mist thins and now rises like a tattered curtain, revealing things incompatible with civilized public parks. From his sloping meadow he can see green forest to the horizon. A stone’s throw away, a slow broad muddy river pushes past him. Just opposite is a long island covered to the shores with tremendous trees except for a clearing with a miserable huddle of skin-and-branch huts. A crude raft lies pulled half way up the muddy beach. Wooden stakes impale two shattered skulls.

  Seymour lets himself down in the grass. He stares at the bugs and the flowers, thankful that at least the grass and the bugs and the flowers are the same. He waits patiently for the voice in the sky to do something about the things that aren’t the same.

  He knows exactly where he is. He knows the name (the later name) of that island. How does he know it? How can he be sure? He knows. He’s sure, sure it’s the Île de la Cité, the historical heart of Paris, and the river the river Seine, of course.

  But even the names (like himself here in his 1950 turtleneck sweater and corduroy pants) are anachronisms, because the French language is unborn. By what guttural phonemes do the hut-dwellers name the island and the river?

  What he sees is clearly prior to the lithographed illustrations he recalls from the 1950 edition of the Michelin Guide de Paris: the stone walls, baths and forum of the Romans, prior to the palisades of the Celtic tribe of the Parisii in the 3rd Century BC. To say nothing of the later things he’d visited there so often with Marie-Claude and so didn’t need a guidebook for: Notre Dame, the flower and the bird markets, the Conciergerie, those future things and that future girl maybe only a few hundred yards from where he sits, now weeping, separated from her by thousands of years and death.

  He goes on waiting for the voice in the sky to pull him out of this useless time.

  From the sky comes no voice but tragic hoarse cries and the ghostly sound of wings working the air. Above, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of long-necked cranes or storks or geese in V formations flap by. They have a place to go, somewhere in the direction of the sun. They keep coming, arising like smoke from the green horizon behind him, honking overhead, disappearing beyond the green horizon before him. Seymour stretches out on his back and stares up at their endless passage, which darkens the sky.

  When he awakens the sun is higher. Stragglers are flapping by overhead. In the island clearing, in front of the miserable huts, dirty wild-haired Proto-Parisians in tattered skins are gathered about a fire. They have fire at least. It’s more than he has.

  How will he ever survive here without fire? For he realizes now that he’s stranded for good in this time by the fault of those sozzled transfer technicians (or by dead-sober malevolence on a much higher level?). There’ll be no voice in the sky to summon him back. He’s like a relay satellite intended for earth orbit but launched with exaggerated thrust and now, beyond recall, captured by a distant icy planet.

  Stranded for life here. A life bound to be nasty, brutish and very short. Unless the tribe takes him in. Would they? If so, take him in how? The two staked skulls stare back at him. He tries to make out what the Proto-Parisians are devouring.

  What marvels does he possess to impress them into better than digestive welcome? Passive heir to the technology of the 20th century, he’s stripped of the inheritance here. At the Prefecture they hadn’t even issued a penknife. So how can he stagger these stone-age savages with the sharp miracle of steel? No cigarette lighter either to wow them with flame at the twitch of a thumb. He does have bank notes. But those tokens of an advanced economy would be no more than exotic toilet paper for them. The bus and metro tickets, additional tokens of triumphant technology, are too small for even that use. The nine Belgian condoms of the brand Le Costaud? Blow them up into balloons for their kids? Didn’t they already do that with fish bladders?

  He doesn’t even have comic-book knowledge of an imminent eclipse to extinguish the sun with phony incantations and make them kneel to him by commanding it back.

  A solitary goose (or crane or stork) labors across the sky, miles and miles from the nearest yearned-for communal V. It honks with a profound melancholy that echoes in Seymour’s heart. He badly misses the others, even dumb Max, maybe 20,000 years distant.

  Wait. Hadn’t the same drunken time blunder been committed on them too? Helen shares his 1951 time, so maybe, probably, certainly, she shares this prehistoric time too. She’s not 20,000 years away but here, maybe just a hundred yards away in the forest, probably, certainly searching for him.

  Stupidly, he shouts her name. The Proto-Parisians squatting about their fire leap up, point at him, grab fire-hardened spears and Neolithic axes. They run to the raft, drag it into the river and four of them scramble aboard. A snarling broken-toothed hungry-looking savage poles it toward the shore.

  Seymour stumbles toward the trees, yelling: “Helen! Helen!”

  Helen sits blank in the silence of Cubicle 3. She’s driven out of her mind the dangerous split-second image of the Luxembourg Gardens with the splashing fountain and Richard restless by her side. Out of her mind too (she thinks) the even more dangerous honeymoon hotel room with pictures of soaring birds hanging on the pale-blue walls. Knowing that choice is suffering, she’s chosen no landing point out there.

  The door buzzes open. Stepping out, she remembers, too late, that she could have ignored the buzz and kept sitting beyond ten seconds for the only landing point she really wants.

  The unwanted landing point proves to be a noisy crowded street.

  She pulls back against a shabby hotel, prepared for chaos, freezing shade and broiling sun and enforced breasting of crowds for years like the last time out.

  Instead, everything is right. The costumes and cars and advertising posters are mid-century. Everything is clearly focused and stable. There’s the first genuine sun on her face in this second lifetime, a dangerous joy: resist it. The colors are true, the sky correctly blue, the shrubbery in the square correctly green: resist them. The faces in the passing crowd must be clear and stable too but she’s careful not to look at those faces, not to let herself get caught and swept away for years in the currents and eddies of wrong faces. Not again.

  She negotiates it intelligently this time. Turning her back on the lure of direct sky and sunshine she slips into the hotel.

  The door closes behind her, shutting off the street noises. The transition from sunshine to gloom is so violent that it takes he
r a while to make out the old man behind the reception desk myopically bent over a newspaper under a green-shaded lamp. Next to his frayed elbow is a gutted stub of candle in a chipped saucer and a box of matches.

  At her third cough, he finally looks up. Hardly greeting her, he takes her carte de séjour and copies things from it into the big register. The pigeonholes behind him are empty. The guests receive no mail. Are there guests, outside of very transient prostitutes and their customers, in such a run-down place? All thirty of the massive bronze keys dangle from the numbered hooks.

  Just as she finishes signing in, the lights go out. More strikes, the old receptionist mutters, lighting the candle. A second after, the electric lights blink back on. Strikes, strikes, strikes, he mutters, staring at the green-shaded lamp for a minute. Finally he blows the candle out, hands her the key to Room 408, points to the dim staircase and returns to his newspaper.

  She spirals up the dirty staircase. Each dimly lit floor is empty. When she reaches the fourth floor the lights go out again. In the absolute darkness she gropes from door to door. They refuse her key. She loses count of the number of intractable doors, sure she’s blindly tested fifty keyholes on just this one floor. Yet there are only thirty keys in all. She begins to understand.

  Finally one of the locks yields. She knows what to expect. She turns the knob, prepared for a dim Prefecture corridor.

  The door opens blindingly on a sun-filled room. She gropes, this time from excess of light, to the open window, pushes it shut, draws the heavy drapes, walks over to the big bed with two pillows and lies down in the gloom. She stares up at the ceiling as she’d done for so long back in the Prefecture prison, waiting for an end to Administrative Suspension. Here she waits, beyond temptation, for an end to the second trial run. Better yet, for incompatibility and an end to everything.

  She closes her eyes and dozes off.

  When she awakens, a thin ray of sunshine, eluding the drapes, illuminates the room. At the sight of framed soaring birds on pale blue walls she struggles upright. From the street she thinks she can hear a long-lost voice: “Helen! Helen!”

  Louis stands there beneath blue sky in the first tame sunshine of his second life. Even before his eyes focused, harness jangling and the clopping of hooves and stable fragrance had announced the right time, confirmed now by those elegant carriages and the double-decker horse-drawn omnibus with the words on it (“Madeleine-Bastille”) telling him it’s the right city, if not exactly the right neighborhood.

  The passing crowd, too, tells him the time is right. He hardly glances at the soldiers with flowery epaulettes and cone-shaped short-brimmed caps like operetta soldiers or at black-clad gentlemen with elegantly pommeled walking sticks. The young women are what he looks at with their long-sleeved high-necked blouses, their voluminous pleated skirts cascading down to their shoes, their long hair swept up past their pretty denuded ears and done up in a big flat crowning knot, sometimes concealed by a great flowered hat.

  Flowers.

  Louis looks longingly at their faces. But of course she can’t be here.

  Where is here? In Cubicle 9 he’d concentrated on the Embassy, the most important of Paris landmarks because even though he doesn’t remember the name of her flower-shop or the name of the street it was located in (is located in, is: past is present again), he’d known the way to it from the Embassy. A century after, his feet would remember.

  He turns to passersby for guidance but discovers that his question can only come out in English. He’s left his miraculously acquired post-mortem French behind him. The French he’d swum in like a fish back in the Prefecture has become thick opaque ice now, absolutely impenetrable, the way it had been in his first lifetime in 1900 when all he’d known how to say (taught by her) was “Tu es jolie, Louise” and “Je t’aime, Louise.” He couldn’t say that to these strangers. They shrug and blink apologetically when he says, very slowly in clear mid-western English, “Where is the Embassy, please?” (“The Embassy,” he says, not “The American Embassy” as though there could only be one Embassy that matters in Paris).

  He wanders about, sweating in the hot sun, asking and asking and getting more blank looks and shrugs.

  Finally he recalls that, of course, he has a landmark to guide him, a holy skyline two-in-one landmark: the spire of the American Church in Paris where he’d thank the Lord not only for this steady blue sky and sunshine but also and mainly because if he finds that right church he’ll know the way to the Embassy and then to her flower shop.

  But the spire of the Victorian Gothic American Church in Paris (consecrated in 1887) apes the older authentic spires of Paris, over a hundred of them. The law of probabilities sabotages his quest. Louis wanders toward spire after spire. Each broadens into another wrong church with stone saints and black priests. He goes back to asking, over and over, “The American Church in Paris, please” and continues to get blank looks and shrugs or incomprehensible replies.

  Hours pass. His head is aching badly from the sun, his feet aching from the miles of streets and avenues leading to dozens of wrong churches. He’s about to try another unlikely spire when he remembers that, of course, the American Church in Paris is riverside. All he has to do, then, is find the river and stand in the middle of a bridge and he’ll be sure to see, upstream or downstream, the spire of the right church that will lead him to the Embassy and then to the flower shop and Louise and allow him to use his two surviving phrases in French.

  His new question is easier to understand, he thinks, than “The Embassy,” way easier than “The American Church in Paris” but he gets the same uncomprehending or incomprehensible response to “River? River?” When he makes swimming motions with his arms they stare at him queerly and shake their heads.

  He’ll have to find the river on his own. He knows it winds through the middle of Paris. If he follows a sloping street he’s sure to find it, sure to find a bridge and from the bridge see the spire of the right church and from the right church find the Embassy and from the Embassy find the street with the flower shop between the toy shop and the corset shop and finally he’ll be able to say: “Tu es jolie, Louise. Je t’aime, Louise.” In his pocket he fingers the gold ring he’d found long ago in the muck of a tunnel that led nowhere.

  He wanders about, blind to everything but the pitch of the streets. He finds no lasting pitch to any of them. Finally, dizzy from all that sun on his bare head after a lifetime of shade, he drags himself (slightly uphill, so the wrong way, but he’s dead tired) into an elegant public garden with pruned trees and a splashing fountain and ornate wrought-iron chairs. Nurses with white aprons and perilously perched straw hats sit next to baby carriages. Well-behaved children in sailor suits with high dark stockings and vast straw hats roll hoops. In growing confusion, Louis chooses an iron chair in the shade of a linden and sits down heavily.

  Opposite him in another iron chair an elegantly attired old gentleman with a flowery white beard is quietly snoring. He wears a pince-nez and a straw hat with a black band. His buttonhole displays a decoration resembling a miniature red fez. The overall impression of dignity is marred by his shiny black shoes, which stand unlaced to one side of his stocking feet.

  Louis is on the point of following suit and liberating his own aching feet when a big white splotch silently appears on the old man’s left shoe.

  The old gentleman reacts instantly. His head jerks back, beard jutting out aggressively. His pince-nez catches the light of the sky in a twin glare as though the lenses were emitting rays. A few seconds later a pigeon plops down in front of his stocking feet and doesn’t move. The old gentleman stares down at it vindictively and mutters: “Pigeons, pigeons, bad mistake. Doves yes, certainly doves, but not pigeons, terrible mistake.”

  Strangely, Louis understands the irascible old gentleman perfectly, yet he can’t say he’d spoken in English, or in French, for that matter. Whatever, if Louis understands he’ll be understood. He knows he wants to ask a question. But his head
is aching and whirling so badly that all he can recall is the quest for a sloping street.

  Why though?

  He makes a terrific effort and remembers the quest for a river, but can’t go beyond it. He doesn’t know why he wants the river, can’t remember it’s for a bridge to see the right spire to get to the Embassy to get to the street with the flower shop between the toyshop and the corset shop to give his sweetheart the gold ring.

  He gets up with difficulty and approaches. The splotch of white has strangely vanished from the old gentleman’s left shoe. There’s a peculiar smell of incense, struck sulfur matches and burned feathers. His dizziness worsens. He’s barely able to bring out: “Sir, please, where is the river?”

  “The liver? Where is the liver? Where I placed it, of course, in the upper left-hand side of the thorax, between the pancreas and the lung.”

  Louis repeats his question much louder: “River, sir, river, where is the river?”

  “Why are you shouting? River. The river. Why didn’t you speak up and say so in the first place instead of mumbling?” The irascible old gentleman glares at Louis and then points at the exit.

  “Upon leaving the park, as you shall do immediately, you will turn right, then right again and a third time right. Then you will continue straight on, never left, never right, but straight on until you reach the river. Do you understand?”

  Louis nods fearfully. It seems more like a command than information.

  “Straight on, straight on, deviating neither to the left nor to the right. The way is sometimes narrow but is true.”

  The old gentleman makes a dismissive gesture and closes his eyes.

  Unsteady on his feet, head whirling, Louis longs to return to his iron chair but doesn’t dare disobey the injunction. “Thank you, sir, thank you, thank you,” he stammers to the snoring old gentleman and leaves the elegant public garden, trying to recall why it’s so important for him to get down to the river.

  In Cubicle 3, time running out, Margaret tries again to conjure up Notre Dame Cathedral, the most celebrated and holy of Parisian landmarks. As once before, she manages the postcard outside, those sooty spires and gargoyles and flying buttresses, but inside is what she wants, to implore the Lord for permanent release from the Prefecture.

  The image of inside doesn’t come. It’s been so long since she visited a church that the wellspring of sacred images has dried up. She’s sure she is going to be subjected to more distortion and torture.

  But when the door buzzes open she steps out of bureaucratic dust and gloom into religious dust and gloom, soaring arches, incense, niched saints, stained-glass windows, soft organ chords.

  The presence of the Lord is overwhelming. Eyes brimming, she halts abruptly and sinks to her knees. Before she can formulate her supplicating question(s) somebody barges into her from behind and sends her sprawling. A testy quavering voice admonishes: “Woman, signal your intention to stop and kneel. Moreover, the nave is not a kneeling station. There are any number of appropriate kneeling stations here.”

  She picks herself up, robbed of God’s presence by the impact and the trivial scolding voice. She sees a white-bearded old man, still muttering, rubbing his thigh, and hobbling into a side pew.

  Margaret quits the nave and poses her questions to the Lord in various appropriate side-aisle stations, kneeling before stone saints, before Christ on his Cross, before banks of lighted tapers dedicated to the blue and white effigy of the Mother of God. She (Margaret) doesn’t dare hope for vocal manifestation of the Divine. She’s unworthy of such direct communication, she knows. Moreover, she imagines that God can only vocalize in thunder. Dreaded “No!” to her question lends itself more naturally to that mode of expression than yearned-for “Yes.”

  Instead, the message would be transmitted by subtle signs. Perhaps the hint of a smile on the plaster lips of the Mother of God. Or a softening of the suffering expression of Her Son on the Cross, of the stony expression of the saints. Or a heavenward leap of those static taper flames. She might even be picked out by a sudden beam of religiously colored light – violet or purple – from the stained-glass window, the organ swelling into a crashing triumphant chord.

  Any of these signs would signify “Yes” to the question, “May I stay out here in Paris, not be pulled back to the Prefecture?” and, failing response to that question, “Yes” to the next-best question, “Should I dance for the Prefect? Dance in order to allow Seymour and Max and Helen and Louis to be transferred into happiness and myself too transferred, not for selfish happiness but to minister in black to the little monsters, the halt, the blind, the dying, to save Jean Hussier from despair? Should I dance for the Prefect for these self-sacrificing things and more, much more?”

  She poses these questions in ardent whispers over and over in station after station. The saintly visages remain petrified. There’s no alteration to the lips of the Mother of God, no abatement of the expression of suffering of her Son. The organ goes on muttering to itself. The taper flames don’t budge. No colored beam transfigures her.

  Margaret turns back to the nave in search of the brutally interrupted sense of Divine Presence. She glances fearfully behind her. Seeing no one, she sinks to her knees and repeats her imploring questions. She gets no response. No sign, no voice, no sound except for the introspective organ and a faint snoring from a slumped figure in a pew.

  The organ hushes. Back turned on the tapers and the stained glass window, she breathes in choking dust. That and the silence and dank gloom reminds her unbearably of the Prefecture. Hungering for sunshine, she arises and walks toward the padded door. A bejeweled lady pulls it open from outside and for a second Margaret sees behind her a fountain with a jet of water splashing into the brimming bronze basin and a tree green against blue sky with a pigeon alighting on a branch, spread wings backlit and incandescent.

  The door closes behind the elegant lady. She halts before a poor box with photos of gnawed lepers, fumbles in her purse and extracts a coin, which she holds benevolently over the box, her small finger crooked as at tea. The coin tinkles into the box and she enters the merited space of piety.

  At the sight, Margaret, in another illumination, understands her recent failure. Her promises of selfless acts are just words, undeserving of reply. She’s being tested and tried here and now for acts, not words.

  Margaret acts. She slips a fifty-franc note into the box, one thousand times the expensively dressed woman’s stingy five-centime contribution. The residual faces of the lepers on the photos acknowledge nothing, naturally. Margaret longs to do good to gratefully responsive flesh-and-blood sufferers outside. She pulls out of her bag the remaining banknotes and pushes the padded door open.

  Out of the traffic cacophony three automobile horns emerge and collaborate on a triumphant triad as Margaret Williams is transfigured by sunlight into real life for the first time since death. She feels gloriously naked, clothed in nothing but sunshine. It caresses her offered body to a glow, quickens her blood, surely red now, past her inner ear with the sound of the sea.

  At the sight of the striking young woman standing on the church steps with her lovely radiant face and fiery hair and breasts straining against tight silk, a passing young man immobilizes into a statue. The handsome statue smiles at her.

  Frightened at that wrong sign which dangerously defines where she is as a space of desire instead of a space of sacrifice, Margaret censors her heart. Scowling at the handsome young man and clutching the banknotes, she steps out of the sunshine into shade.

  Margaret wanders about in search of visible suffering, easy to find, she imagines, in the depression-stricken Paris of 1937. She encounters nothing but block after block of cruel opulence: powerful motorcars, distinguished façades, elegant understated shop-windows, and, in perfect harmony with all this, impeccably smart men and stylish women.

  Finally she catches sight of an authentic sufferer, thank God for that. Twisted and shabby between crutches, the cripple swings himse
lf with incredible speed away from her. Margaret breaks into a stuttering high-heeled run down the strangely familiar street, trying to narrow the gap between her and the indispensable object of charity.

  The gap widens. She halts, bends down and removes her hobbling shoes. She runs much faster now in her stocking feet, holding the shoes in one hand and the banknotes in the other, but still outstripped by the piston-strokes of those overcompensated arms. Stared at by the pitilessly well-dressed passersby, she cries out (in English for she’s reverted back to pre-mortem ignorance of French): “Stop! Stop!”

  Margaret trips and sprawls. By the time she picks herself up, panting, the cripple has disappeared. She sobs “Where are you, goddam you?” and resumes her pursuit of salvation with bleeding palms and soles and wild red hair.

  She reaches a side street and sees the cripple there, working himself into a tiny wooden stall, a lottery stall, next to, oh God, can it be l’Assiette Bleue? The white-and-blue corner plaques confirm that she’s standing in the Rue de l’Assumption, looking down the Rue du Docteur Blanche, at the four-star restaurant where Jean had taken her so often back then, at the corner of his tiny street, the Rue Mallet Stevens with the elegant private two-story dwelling and its quietly superior flower-beds and wrought-iron railing.

  A sign! A sign from the All High! She slips her shoes back on and stutters up the Rue du Docteur Blanche to the lottery stall, crudely decorated with garish stars, ringed planets and smiling suns. There’s also a Wheel of Fortune. She almost throws the wad of bank notes at the wizened cripple, exclaiming “For you, for you, God bless you!” and then runs past the restaurant and turns into a mistake, an impossibly long street with no sign of an elegant private two-story dwelling and its quietly superior flower-beds and wrought-iron railing.

  The blue-and-white corner plaque says Rue de l’Yvette. But that’s not possible. The Rue de l’Yvette is the street after Jean’s street.

  What’s happened to the Rue Mallet Stevens, Jean’s street?

  The cripple leans out of his stall, brandishing lottery tickets and yelling incomprehensible things at her as she hurries away in bewildered search of the missing street.