GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (15 page)

The hope that one of the doors will open on
the real world outside is too fantastic to be consciously harbored.
How can unlocked doors possibly conceal something so precious? But
occasionally the Five encounter other doors in the corridors, thick
metal doors that are always locked and the locks tamper-proof.

Behind certain of those doors they sometimes
hear a whine and clatter of what must be an elevator. At first they
conjure up behind the other silent tamper-proof locked doors modest
things like nice painted landscapes, Balzac, rye, rope, tools,
maps, Bibles. Later, much later, the hope emerges into conscious
formulation that somewhere in the labyrinth of corridors behind one
of those tamper-proof locked doors lies something immeasurably
better than painted landscapes: the way out to the real landscape
on the other side of the window.

So the Five don’t find much in the corridor
rooms. Above all, they don’t find responsible officials, the
ostensible main object of the search. Finally, they deputize Helen
with her soft pleasant voice to dial the emergency number
(appropriately, 000 for all the good it does). She gets a toneless
female voice. When the functionary learns that the so-called
emergency call isn’t motivated by legitimate things like fire or
attempted suicide but by complaints, she tonelessly informs Helen
that the Five will be collectively sanctioned by the loss, for each
of them, of five (5) points.

However some time later (a week? a month? a
year?), Turnkey wordlessly comes with a Complaint Form. They argue
about what should be given priority. Louis and Margaret are in
favor of the Bible. They’re outvoted. The others place the
religious requests after secular concerns like showers and gentle
toilet paper.

But Number One on the Complaint Form
concerns an unkept promise.

How much longer will they have to wait for
the promised Advocate to come and prepare their defense before the
promised Administrative Review Board?

Chapter 15

The Window

Outside of sleeping and wandering in the
maze of corridors, the Five spend most of their time in the Common
Room side by side in front of the window. Even in periods of acute
intergroup tension, the physical proximity involved doesn’t bother
them. They’re never as distant from one another as seated there
practically shoulder to shoulder in the semi-arc of lumpy
armchairs, eyes riveted to the glass rectangle in search of a
private face. Some of the longed-for faces are decades apart. So
the spectators are decades apart.

The window is like a TV screen featuring
three different channels for selective vision with no need to zap.
Anyhow they can’t zap. They’re permanently tuned into Channel 1900
or Channel 1937 or Channel 1951 depending on their Paris sojourn
date. It’s like armchair time-travel.

Sometimes they exchange notes on their
time-bound vision, except for Max. Max has nothing to exchange. He
goes on seeing empty streets, empty buildings and the empty river.
It’s static, like a jammed color-slide in a travelogue devoted to a
dead city like Petra. He listens, though, to their accounts of
happenings.

Louis once describes a brawl in the summer
of 1900 with smashed shop windows and white-eyed bolting
horses.

Margaret tells about a pair of lovers in the
late spring of 1937. They always meet at the same café and kiss and
then quarrel or quarrel and then kiss. Their emotional ups and
downs are like a TV serial for most of the Five. Then one day the
girl comes and waits. Her lover doesn’t show up. She comes five
more times and waits. She weeps. Margaret weeps telling it. Seymour
succeeds in keeping back tears.

Sometimes they press their faces against the
frigid pane and make out, barely, far below to the right, the main
entrance of the Prefecture, not this ghost Prefecture but the real
familiar Prefecture they’d known back then, with its irritated
female functionaries bossing the confused foreigners about and
stamping their carte de séjour with an aggressive bang and rudely
thrusting it at them in dismissal.

So there are two Prefectures, the phantom
one they’re imprisoned in and the material one, side by side.
Logically, assuming logic here, somewhere a wall must separate
them. Somewhere there has to be a door – one out of the perhaps
million doors here – that opens on that real Prefecture. That
thought occurs to them fairly often but hasn’t become obsessional
yet.

One day (day out there, you can’t tell what
it is here) Seymour too has something to recount out of his 1951
Paris. He’s by himself in the Common Room. At one point he leans
forward in his armchair and cries out. He leaps to the window and
presses his palms and face against the cold surface, making little
throat-sounds. Then he goes limp, practically collapses. He has to
tell it to someone. He goes to the women’s room.

Helen is lying on her bed, staring up at the
blankness of the ceiling, trying to achieve the same blankness in
her mind. Seymour spoils it. He’s pale and stammering. She has to
respond to his anguish. All her lives, past and present, people
have expected that of her. Helen imagines he’s seen his
Marie-Something out there, arm-in-arm with another man.

Actually, what he’s seen isn’t nearly as
terrible as that. A car accident, he says, a young woman lying
smashed in the street. He doesn’t tell her that he took the victim
for Marie-Claude until he deciphered her features beneath the blood
and realized it wasn’t his sweetheart. Helen doesn’t want to see
the sequel to the accident. Seymour doesn’t want to return to it.
Anyhow, by this time the useless ambulance must have come, taking
the girl away.

Sometimes a spectator breaks the silence
with O!! in fear and joy, followed by a disappointed Ohh… The first
time it happens the others imagine that the privileged spectator of
another decade has caught a glimpse of the lost lover, (O!!) and
then has lost sight of her/him in the crowd (Ohh…). But one day it
happens to them too and the initiated others, hearing their
joyful-fearful exclamation, know that the flock of pigeons has
wheeled and is heading straight for the window in a loom of
retracted claws, white wing-pinions, metal-fire neck, ruby eyes,
the outside world never so close.

When they hear the cry of disappointment
they know that the looming pigeons have vanished. There’s no
contact between the two worlds. “It happened to me too,” say the
others. “I don’t know how long ago.” They have no way of knowing
when. There are no real clocks or calendars here.

The window in the Common Room is their only
clock. They see the night sky paling. They watch the long morning
shadows of monuments wheeling and shrinking and then lengthening
again past noon and finally vanishing with dusk. As a timepiece
it’s no more satisfactory than a giant sundial. The approximate
time is available only on sunny days and Paris is a largely
overcast city.

The window in the Common Room is their
only calendar. It’s a pretty bad one except for two of the days.
When they see the church doing a brisk business, pulling in
well-dressed women, mostly elderly, for morning Mass, they’re sure
it’s Sunday. Confirming the day, another ritual: the same women
coming out of the pastry-shop with ribboned boxes that contain
(behind their window the deprived onlookers guess at this, saliva
flooding their mouths) rum-cake with whipped-cream topped by a
candied cherry, multi-layered Napoleons (
mille-feuilles
), chocolate éclairs, like delectable
turds. Sunday, then. Monday is the day the food-shops are closed
and the work-bound crowds wear glum harried expressions.

Theoretically, Sunday and Monday provide
them with bearings for the other days. But sometimes they wake and
see the trays of their three missed meals on the table, the food
moldy. That throws calculations out of kilter. How many days have
they slept through? Of course the cleaning-girl doesn’t know. She’d
come with other meals but they were still asleep and so she’d gone
away with those meals. She never recalled how many times that
happened. Like the other functionaries, she has no sense of time
and is quite stupid as well. So the Five have to wait for the
rituals of morning Mass and
patisserie
to situate the day they’re in (or think they’re
in).

The window does keep them roughly posted
about the time of year. They’re not dependent on the sun for that
and you can’t sleep through a whole season. But they don’t want
seasons. They dread the cycle of seasons. The hour and the day,
yes, for short-term orientation. But they want permanence to that
scene they’d witnessed, dazzled, in the dark corridors God alone
(perhaps) knows how long ago: the bright summer-clad couples
sipping colored drinks at sidewalk café tables, and slow lovers
advancing along cobble-stoned quays, shaded by the fresh foliage of
lime trees.

But the seasons wheel past. Bastille Day
rockets burst in the night sky and they know it’s mid-July. The
foliage of the lime-trees rusts and falls. The sun weakens daily.
Snow fills the window like static in a TV screen. Garlands of
colored bulbs span certain streets and the shop-windows are filled
with tinsel and green wreaths.

In despair they watch the tipsy midnight
crowd celebrate the new year outside: 1901, 1938, 1952. The
garlands of colored bulbs vanish. The sun timidly rallies and
shadows shorten. Their despair deepens when joyous children go
past, their faces grimed with colored chalk. That’s Mardi Gras,
they know, so February. Willows fill with a fine green mist and
they guess at late February or early March. Chocolate bunnies and
eggs in the confiserie window announce the approach of Easter, that
earlier, more successful, resurrection. The sticky swollen buds of
chestnuts confirm late March. They unfurl green in April.
Candelabrums of white chestnut blossoms illuminate May. They fade
in early June.

And now the Five are back to café couples
sipping colored drinks and slow lovers on the quays, but certainly
different couples and lovers. Once more, from their posthumous
Bastille no mob can possibly ever storm to liberate them, the Five
witness the July 14 fireworks and the final sparks drifting past
the stars. In no time, from the no-time of their space, they again
see the garlands of colored bulbs spanning the streets.

They’re tortured on the wheel of the
seasons.

By the start of the first of those new
years, 1952, Seymour had been back in New York, writing imploring
letters to Marie-Claude and getting no reply. What good would it do
being transferred to the Paris of 1952 (or worse, later),
everything wrecked beyond repair?

By the summer of 1938 Margaret – Maggie then
– had met someone else and then had been expelled from France. Had
Jean survived her departure? She recalls his wild threats of
suicide. Wouldn’t return be to his grave?

By 1901 Louis had been transferred to the
States and had foolishly married at the end of that year.

During 1952 and most of 1953 Helen had
wandered about Paris in search of Richard. The Paris she stared at
through the window had to be situated long past 1953. She’d
returned home in November, 1953.

What point was there for any of them to be
transferred to this later Paris?

Time goes on and on out there, enlarging the
gap between them and 1900 and 1937 and 1951. Over and over they
observe the sun creeping closer and closer to them. At summer
solstice the sun marks the high tide of the year on a particular
pavement-crack and then begins retreating from it and them day
after day. Shadows lengthen. Trees go bare. Christmas decorations
fill the shop windows. Trees break into leaf again, the same
wearisome cycle all over again.

They realize that their year in Paris –
1900, 1937, 1951 – has been left behind for all time, that they are
on a train supposedly local but turning out to be wildly express, a
ghost train powering past the local station with their sweetheart
on the station platform, dwindling to a dot, no return ever.

They can’t accept the loss of their year of
love, the loss of possible return to it with the hindsight power of
undoing fatal things done in that former existence, the hindsight
power of doing essential things undone back then.

They clutch at theories to explain away the
relentless flow of time outside. They try to believe that the
rotation of seasons is largely an illusion attributable to their
unimaginative dreams, largely carbon copies of their daytime
activities. In those dreams they often sit before the window and
watch seasons. Sometimes in the dreams they go to bed and dream of
watching seasons. So with dreams within dreams within dreams, how
can they tell how many times the trees have really lost green and
recovered it or how many times fireworks have celebrated that
enviable liberation of prisoners from a distant Bastille? It’s like
seeking a bouquet in a room filled with mirrors. Out of that
multitude of reflected bouquets, which is the real one?

But the burned-out bulbs accumulate,
contradicting the optimistic theory of dream seasons. Seymour
realizes that if ever, by miracle, he’s transferred outside it
wouldn’t be to the spring of 1951 and his twenty-three-year-old
sweetheart, but to some later year, who knows, maybe the late
seventies and his darling in her fifties. How could she still be
his darling in her fifties, he still twenty-five? How could he
imagine shaming her with his unchanged youth?

He tries to derive poor consolation from the
possibility that maybe only ten years have wheeled by outside and
that if he’s transferred now Marie-Claude would be thirty-three,
still desirable. If married she was probably dissatisfied with the
state (as he himself had been after a few years of it) and so he,
Seymour, would be promoted in her mind from an object of rancor
into an object of nostalgic desire. But how would she react to his
unchanged youth?