Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 7

  Here Now, There Then

  They turn again.

  A window on the world outside dazzles them.

  They halt before it.

  Certain details differ for the transfixed onlookers but all of them see the essential blue sky arching over golden domes and white facades, white bridges arching over the celebrated river.

  They see gay striped shop-awnings, yellow and white and red and blue stripes tempered with white stripes.

  Max doesn’t, but the others see slow lovers advancing along the tree-shaded cobble-stoned quays.

  They see bright summer-clad couples sipping at sidewalk café tables.

  The distant onlookers thirst for those green and amber drinks and the world the colored drinks belong to. Except for Max, tears spring to their eyes. They are profoundly thankful for what they see. It’s only later that they’ll wonder if the sight of once-possessed things isn’t punishment.

  The clump-jangle goes on ahead but the Five remain like statues before the window. A flic behind them commands: “Avancez. Y a rien à voir. Du brouillard.” Max wants to know what the cop (the so-called cop) said. Helen tells him: “He says there’s nothing to see. Just fog. He wants us to go on.”

  They go on reluctantly, herded past the window into a stretch of more gray blistered walls with illegible graffiti.

  But they cling to the torturing blessed vision. Except for Max, who has never been in the celebrated city before, they are all back there again, in space and in time, in the city of their twenty-fifth year.

  The clopping of the orthopedic shoe accelerates into the clopping of hooves on wooden paving blocks, the jangle of the keys into harness jangling and Louis Forster sees the elegant carriages, not yet horseless, thronging the avenue. He sees the archaic manure droppings and imagines he can smell the rural fragrance that will be replaced by exhaust fumes in a decade or so. Louis sees flights of pigeons in the blue sky, no trace of the square rigid-winged aeroplanes that will buzz in the skies of Louis’ middle-aged future.

  And there, the elegant flower-shop where for months he’s pretended to admire seasonal flowers in the display window: first daffodils like gay yellow telephones and then tulips, red like her cheeks when she catches his gaze on her, for his gaze is focused past the flowers on one of the three florists, honey-blonde and slim, more graceful than all the flowers in the world, and then, finally, one June day (roses displayed now), he summons up courage and pushes the door open, another jangle, the bell, the three aproned girls twittering in French no more comprehensible to him than the twittering of the two love-birds in the great gilded cage and Louise (he is Louis and she is Louise, he’ll say to her later and say it couldn’t be coincidence) smiles shyly and in lovely fragmented English counsels his bouquet and later tells him she was jealous of the girl the bouquet was for, not knowing then that it was a pretext.

  A pretext. Once outside the shop what can he do with a bouquet? He takes it back to the Embassy.

  They wink and poke their elbows in his ribs. “Margie,” they guess and say. So he gives it to Margie. He’s already gone out with her. There aren’t many female employees at the Embassy in those days. Margie is one of the telephone operators, pretty in a wholesome mid-western way, corn-flower blue eyes, corn-tassel blonde hair, off an Iowa farm like himself and Methodist too and inevitably he’ll end up by marrying her, which he doesn’t suspect at the time because of Louise behind the flowers and whom he soon gets to know away from the flowers.

  In the drab corridor Louis goes on thinking, in guilt and longing, of his first knowledge of Louise in the hotel-room and the unassumed consequences of that knowledge. A crazy notion occurs to him. (Why crazy, though? Isn’t he already in the middle of a crazy miracle?) If by a second much better crazy miracle he was returned to the Paris of his twenty-fifth year (he’s been given the body for it), couldn’t he keep that bouquet for the slim honey-blonde girl at quitting time instead of going back with it to the Embassy and giving it to his unsatisfactory future wife? Change the future and the wife that way? Couldn’t that be done?

  In a grave relapse from spirituality Maggie remembers long-ago times out there enjoying herself greatly and being greatly enjoyed. Margaret again, she banishes those scandalous memories. Maybe it’s the golden domes that remind her of the jewelry shop. The domes are the same color as the ring they caught her with (just a single tiny diamond for all that fuss). The director arrives and they convoy her into his office. She weeps with convincing despair. I’ll lose my job. They’ll expel me from France. I’m American. He understands English and speaks it with a half-French half-Oxford accent, very distinguished. His office is full of books, classics she guesses, because leather-bound and behind glass. He looks like he’s read them all. He wants to know what she does for a living. Surely not stealing jewelry? Artistic dancing, sir. Where, if I may ask? At the Cabaret Arc-en-Ciel, she says, embarrassed, and adds: a little like ballet but free style. Please. I’ll lose my job. Please, please.

  I don’t know what I should do, he says, staring down at his desk. She says she’ll do anything, anything at all, if he withdraws the charges. She expects him to announce the price and his price is hers. It’s no problem; on the contrary, he’s young with curly gold hair, not balding and fattish like Guy, no problem at all. But instead, he talks about America and the war his father died in and how the Americans helped save France in 1917-18. He measures her by that heroic standard. How could an American young lady possibly do a thing like that? He makes her feel like a traitor. It’s a sickness, sir, something-mania they call it, I see something nice and I have to have it for a while. Just hold it for a while. I would have brought it back, sir, I swear I would have. Tears come again with hardly any effort. She knows they enhance her green eyes. He stares down at the desk.

  Finally he says she can go. She blinks. He reaches for the pile of letters and opens the first one as though she’d already gone. “You may go,” he repeats, without looking at her. “Charges will be withdrawn.” He’s intent on the letter. Maggie goes, thankful but offended.

  The next day, Saturday evening, he’s there at the Cabaret Arc-en-Ciel. The spotlight is blinding but she can see him at the table way back in the rear, staring down at it as he’d stared down at his desk. She feels offended again and ashamed of her dance. Ignoring the wailing signal of the clarinet, she omits the final split-second flourish of the fans that gives the customers total exposure. Most of them applaud anyhow, even if some protest. He doesn’t move, doesn’t look up. Soon he’s gone. Guy is angry. How come she forgot the climax and disappointed the customers like that? Later they leave by the side entrance. Guy’s arm is around her waist, his hand near her groin. Steered toward the taxi-stand on the avenue, she sees the jeweler seated at the sidewalk café table staring at the gaudy cabaret entrance with her name in medium-size print. She removes Guy’s arm. What’s the matter? Guy asks alongside her in the cab. Nothing’s the matter, she says.

  She returns to the jewelry shop. Yes? he says, looking up from papers on his desk and then back again. I forgot to thank you, she says. She adds: That wasn’t my artistic dance. I do that just to earn my living. Why doesn’t he look at her? Why doesn’t he say something? Of course you go to the ballet, he says finally. All the time, she says although she never did. He invites her to the ballet.

  She feels deeply humiliated by that controlled perfection on the stage, no wailing clarinet. He maintains strict distance from her in the dark during the performance. After, he comments on the dancers, using terms she’s never heard of. He shakes her hand and says good night to her before her hotel. The ballet invitation was to humiliate her. Back in her furnished room she weeps bitterly, no effort at all, the effort is to stop. But three months later Jean Haussier offers her a gold ring like the one she’d tried to take but with a much bigger diamond on it. She accepts it but not the permanent thing that’s supposed to accompany it. She’s already met Harry, no, George, Harry was later.

  Why di
dn’t I? she now thinks, stumbling down another shadowy corridor. Everything would have turned out differently in her life. And the idea occurs to her too: if by some second miracle she could return out there and back then (she’s been given the marvelously renewed body for it), wouldn’t it happen all over again? Except that this time, guided by miraculous hindsight, given a second chance, she would know what to do and what not to do, would know that she should say yes this time to what Jean Haussier offered with the gold ring and the two-carat diamond.

  For Helen, it’s a bright windy October morning in the Luxembourg Gardens with Richard, in one-sided discussion of guide-book places for the third afternoon of their honeymoon. She suggests the Eiffel Tower and gives many reasons. He wants the Catacombs and gives no reasons. He stares at the basin and the well-dressed children with gaffs sailing sleek model sailboats. The wind pushes the splashing jet about. Sudden gusts decapitate it to spray with a hint of a rainbow. The spray wets the billowing sails of the veering sailboats.

  “They’ll swamp if they let them sail into the fountain,” he predicts somberly. Certain days he sees disaster everywhere. She asks him, not for the first time that morning, if he’s taken the pills. Usually she makes sure he does, looking at his throat to make sure he’s swallowed them, swallowing herself to encourage him to, like a mother with a small child. He still doesn’t answer her question. He keeps on staring at the sailboats. She tucks in his blowing tie and combs his blowing hair with her fingers. I look old, don’t I? he says. On the bad days he thinks he’s getting old and ugly, his bones brittle as chalk. He’s twenty-six. The handsomest young man on earth, she says sincerely.

  After a while he gets up and goes over to the basin. He tells one of the children that his boat is heading for disaster. The child doesn’t understand English. Richard takes the gaff out of the child’s hand. The child protests. The mother rushes up, pop-eyed with outrage. What are you doing, are you drunk? Are you crazy? Luckily Richard knows almost no French, not even easy words like “fou.” He leans over the rim, trying to grapple the boat away from disaster. Helen tells the woman that her husband is just trying to be helpful. She’s already used to explaining him. The boat tacks about, heads straight toward them and bumps against the rim of the basin.

  Helen gently takes the gaff out of Richard’s hand and gives it back to the child. The mother comforts her child, explaining: foreigners. Helen comforts Richard, explaining: the French. She coaxes Richard back to the bench saying that you can see all of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower. He says he wants to buy a pack of cigarettes, he’ll be right back. She wants to go with him. Sometimes I like to be alone for a minute, he says and leaves. The other people stare at her, an unusual thing here. The French come across as a discreet basically indifferent people. Helen gathers up her guidebooks and takes another seat further off.

  Time goes by without him. She tries to reason herself out of panic, keep it out of her face. At the end of an hour he returns. He doesn’t see her. He sees her empty chair. His face is filled with the same panic she’d tried to keep out of hers, that terrible wonderful lost helpless expression of his when he doesn’t find her, when he thinks she isn’t there. She always tries to be there. She waves and calls him over. She smells forbidden alcohol on his breath as he suddenly kisses her and calls her his nice keeper. She doesn’t like that term. She’s his wife. A girl goes by. Isn’t she beautiful, Richard? Don’t you wish you’d married her instead of me? No, I need a keeper, he says and starts laughing and holds her tight and everything is all right again.

  Advancing in an obscure corridor half a century later (she guesses at the distance from it) Helen tries to remain in that moment of embrace with the joyous cries of the children, the billowing sails, the jet blown into a faint rainbow, the tarnished leaves of the pruned lindens blown into twinkling points of silver. But of course she can’t. It’s not possible to stave off the evening of that same day.

  After an hour of no response to her remarks and questions, he speaks about the Catacombs again. They’d been to the Eiffel Tower in the afternoon, the pedestrians and traffic tiny below. She’d kept close to him all the time. Tomorrow, if you really want to, sweetheart, she says. After a while he says he wants to buy a pack of cigarettes. He leaves the hotel room with pictures of soaring birds on pale blue walls. A few minutes later he calls up to her from the sidewalk: “Helen! Helen! Throw my wallet down!” She finds the wallet on the washbasin, next to the three spat-out pills. She can’t convince him to come back up for the wallet (secretly for the pills, of course, but that can’t be shouted publicly). She throws the wallet down to him. He picks it up, waves to her and walks away.

  She never sees him again.

  The view framed by the window (like a color-slide) brings back the lost street to Seymour. It’s Saturday, noon. After lunch they’ll take the coach to Les Cossons. He hurries past correctly gray rabbits and hares dangling head-down at the butcher’s. Then the fish store with a heap of shiny black mussels decorated with sprigs of parsley and boxes of oysters with lemons. But something’s wrong with his memory. The parsley should be green and the lemons bright yellow instead of the shades of gray he sees them in. And the horsemeat butcher’s life-size horse head, bright gold in reality but another shade of gray in his memory. At first he thinks his brain has been contaminated by this dusty space hostile to color. But in the window he’d seen the sky blue and the domes golden. Then he recalls that he’d photographed the fish store and the horse head and all the other things with the black-and-white film of 1951 (Panchromatic XX). What he remembers, he now understands, isn’t the original scenes but his eight-by-ten enlargements of them. Back then he’d been in his photography phase. There’d been the painting phase and before that the poetry phase. Seymour had thought life wasn’t worth living without artistic creation. He’d had problems with priorities.

  So in memory he goes down a second-hand Panchromatic XX black-and-white street. Now the massive porte-cochere. The door buzzes open for him on the shabby courtyard with irregular paving-stones. He spirals up to the fourth floor where a dark varnished door opens at his first knock. Marie-Claude shakes his hand formally. Much less formal contact is for his hotel room. He follows her into the shabby clean living room with lace curtained windows. For months, in his lonely outsider days, he’d wandered about the streets of Paris looking with longing at all those doors that had no reason to open to him and at all those opaque windows. Now he’s on the right side of doors and windows, thanks to Marie-Claude and thanks to what Marie-Claude’s parents (and maybe Marie-Claude herself) assume his regular presence implies, although he’s been careful not to pronounce the word “fiancé.” He’d been briefly married in New York and believes that institutionalized involvement spells the death of love.

  Everything’s perfect as it is. He has his own habitual place at the table, between Marie-Claude and her radical teenage brother Laurent. Her father smells faintly of the cod-liver oil he anoints his body with for immortality. He speaks to Seymour of the necessity of orienting one’s bed south-east to counter the effects of telluric waves and counsels the purchase of a compass. Her mother smiles timidly at Seymour and hopes he doesn’t find the roast overdone. Marvelous, says Seymour. She’s probably the worst cook in France. But she has the kindest face in the world and the tremendous prestige of having tended cows at the age of six in the Massif Central and speaking patois as fluently as French. How can Seymour possibly resist such authenticity?

  Bearing wicker baskets filled with essential odds and ends, they take the 38 bus to the Porte d’Orléans and then the coach, battered of course. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He loves basic banged-up things. The coach rattles along the poorly paved National Twenty Highway. Like Seymour France is ill-at-ease in the twentieth century. The thirty kilometers of countryside are familiar to him by now. The first trip out she’d initiated him to the names of the villages and the names in French of crops and flowers and trees. It was like a baptism. Now the
two-mile trudge past rye and oats and woods to the ramshackle slap-dash country place they call Les Cossons and which he calls paradis. How could he, born and bred and unhappy in Manhattan, resist the warped old wooden gate photographed in skimming light at f 32 to get all of the marvelous details of dilapidation? Or the genuine well, thirty meters deep, a favorite subject for his f 4.5 Zeiss-Tessar? Or the roof with its sheets of galvanized iron secured against the wind by rusty parts of a Model T? He’d risked his life high up in an elm to click it. Or the wicked scythe Marie-Claude taught him to wield against high grass? When he holds Marie-Claude in his arms he embraces all that.

  He has it all down on seventy-three eight-by-ten black-and-white enlargements. He sends some to a New York publisher who expresses qualified interest. That same week Marie-Claude tells him she’s expecting a child. It isn’t the right time. He assumes she’ll agree to postponing the child. She doesn’t agree at all. They start disagreeing about lots of other things. One day he explains that he’ll have to return briefly to New York to sort things out with the publisher. Two weeks at the most. She says she knows he’s leaving for good. No more than two weeks, he repeats, perfectly sincere about it. He leaves his camera and enlarger and other stuff in their place as proof of his sincerity. He’ll write her as soon as he arrives, he says. I won’t answer your letter, she says. I won’t even read it.

  He leaves, taking with him the other enlargements. Not counting imperfect knowledge of the language, which soon fades, the photos are all he salvages from his stay in France. Finally the publisher decides he doesn’t want them. Seymour sends Marie-Claude six letters. He can’t imagine a return to France without a return to the way things had been. But she keeps her word and doesn’t answer. There’s no return to France, not in that life anyhow. He loses the original things even if he has the rejected black-and-white images of them. He stares down at the gray one-dimensional enlargements (terrible reductions, actually) for hours on end in another continent. It’s probably then that they usurp the place of the originals in his mind. He suffers intensely for a few months and is already tempted by high windows.

  Two years later she does write him a letter informing him of the death of her mother, the move out of the apartment with the tarnished gilt-framed mirror and the impending sale of Les Cossons. She wants to know what she should do with the camera and the enlarger he’d left in their apartment. He could have written back but with the loss of the apartment and her marvelous mother (he weeps at that) and their country place, Marie-Claude is faint and impoverished, one-dimensional, like the photos, stripped of the great associations. Besides he’s with another woman now. And anyhow, the camera and enlarger don’t matter anymore. He’s out of photography now, into a novel. The novel, vaguely autobiographical, is about his experiences with the family in France. He gives the story an ambiguous happy ending in hope of publication.

  Stumbling down the gloomy corridor, the same thought occurs to Seymour Stein as to Margaret Williams and to Louis Forster. If time past could miraculously become time present, couldn’t he salvage that wrecked love thanks to the hindsight wisdom he hadn’t possessed at the time?

  There’s no sentiment at all to Max’s relation to the window, no past involved, no need for nostalgic italics. He’s confronted with a strictly technical problem involving not the past but the future. So, for the moment, he’s the luckiest of the Five. What can you do with the past? You can always handle the future until it comes in unwanted configurations and congeals unsatisfactorily into the past.

  Max’s future, as immediate as possible, is to escape. He observes that there are no bars to the window. Already he’s calculating the height of the window in order to determine the length of the rope or knotted sheets that will allow him to reach the sidewalk and then the American Embassy and then just as fast as possible a Boeing to Las Vegas, to Bess and Rickie.

  But now he sees that Margaret’s hair isn’t like fire any more but like ashes. He sees the looming tree again and remembers the terminal date on the tag with all those zeros and realizes that he’s a zero himself and that there’s no escape from that.

  The clump-jangle stops. The stern-faced woman functionary stops. The flics stop. They order the Five to stop. Turnkey chooses a big key and unlocks a door. He chooses a second big key and unlocks a second door next to the first door.

  “Voilà,” he says rustily. “This is the place where you will live while awaiting final decision.”