Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 18

  While Waiting For Advocate

  One of the Five can’t wait. One night the others are jolted out of sleep by a distant thud and severe breakage. It goes on and on. They pull on their clothes and, guided by the racket, find Max two floors below destroying a wall in Room 869. He’s white with plaster. He heaves his sledgehammer high and bashes a star-shaped hole in the wall. The debris rains down on the other side.

  Seymour and Louis grab him. Louis yells: “You gone plain crazy?” He lowers his voice to a fearful whisper. “You want Turnkey should come and report you? You already lost seven points for smashin’ that dish. You’ll lose a thousand points for smashin’ a wall. They’ll exit you one second flat.”

  Max wrenches free. “I’m gonna exit all right, but my own way.” He grips the ragged edges of the hole and sticks his head through it as a preliminary to total exit, his own way, into what he thinks is the space of freedom.

  He remains paralyzed in that position for long seconds. Then he slowly withdraws his head. He seems to have aged. But it’s probably the plaster dust in his hair. He sits down on the floor and stares ahead blankly. Helen looks through the hole. She sits down alongside Max, places her hand on his arm and talks and talks to him.

  Louis and Seymour can’t help laughing when they stick their heads through the hole and see the urinals.

  Louis and Seymour and Helen spend the rest of the night pushing filing cabinets in front of the mutilated wall and cleaning up the toilets on the other side. Max remains seated on the floor while they do it. Then they pick up the crowbar, the sledgehammer, the pick-ax and the shovel, his crude map and the compass. They coax Max to his feet and they all return to their rooms.

  Later they learn his reasons for doing that crazy thing. From the window in the Common Room they can see that building they call the Pray-Fek-Toor alongside this one, he explains. So he’d figured that if he located a room next to the Pray-Fek-Toor all he’d have to do is make a hole and pass through. He must have screwed up his calculations.

  When they see him scribbling figures on a piece of paper, at it again, they confiscate his tools and stash them away in a distant room. They notice something strange about the compass he’d used. At irregular intervals the needle trembles and creeps northward and then whirls a second and creeps southward. There’s no pole of orientation here. It’s not surprising Max screwed up his calculations.

  So Max has to wait too, like the rest of them.

  While waiting for the Advocate and watching the repetition of their season of long-ago love, their past grabs them by the throat in unexpected ways. Seymour Stein is particularly vulnerable.

  One day Louis extemporizes a shower out of a pierced can, a rubber hose and a pair of bellows he’s found in the corridor rooms. Yankee ingenuity can turn even hell into a half-way comfortable place Seymour remarks to Helen, half-humorously. Louis is extraordinarily prudish for a Marine, even an ex one. He wants privacy for their “ablutions” and ferrets about for the equivalent of the folding screen the women have. In a room devoted to artifacts of the French Communist Party, probably confiscated by the police from clubbed demonstrators, he salvages a long white propaganda banner of the sort that is tacked to stout poles and militantly borne down avenues. He nails it from wall to wall in the men’s room to conceal the washing area.

  The slogan on the banner, constantly visible, often makes Max and Seymour weep: U.S. GO HOME!! What else does Max want to do? On bad days he suspects that the operation, although urged in two-foot black letters, is impossible.

  Seymour’s tears at the sight of that banner have nothing to do with homesickness. He hadn’t really been a Good American. He tells the story to all of them over and over and that’s mainly the times the tears come and they find excuses for fleeing (as he does when it’s their turn to recount and, sometimes, weep).

  One day way back then, he explains, he’d been photographing wall graffiti at the Place de la République. Most of the good graffiti was low (maybe inscribed by militant dwarfs) and he had to kneel to them. For kneeling shots he used a threadbare hotel rug, red unfortunately. He’d been caught in a communist demonstration that had featured an avenue-wide banner bearing that very slogan: U.S. GO HOME!! He’d been minding his business but the flics took his rug for a red flag and clobbered him.

  One of the demonstrators had taken him to a hospital and then to his apartment where he’d met the boy’s sister, his darling, Marie-Claude. So the sight of that banner (maybe the identical one, who knows?) brought it all back poignantly. The sight of other banners borne by the demonstrators (such as RIDGEWAY POISON! and OUI AU VIN FRANÇAIS NON AU COCA-COLA YANKEE!) would have stabbed him in the heart the same way, he explains.

  One day before the window Helen calls Seymour’s attention to a shrub with bright yellow flowers in a distant public garden. Forsythia, she says. Seymour says that he’d never paid attention to flowers or shrubs before he met Marie-Claude. She’d taught him all about them as soon as they flowered. When does this thing flower? What’s the month out there? March or April, says Helen.

  Seymour stammers, too early, too early, his face screwed up. Seymour had been a hair-trigger weeper back then. The tendency has carried over intact. What’s too early? says Helen, her hand on his arm. Finally he’s able to say: March or April. I met Marie-Claude in May. I left in November. So I missed out on it. I didn’t give her time to teach me whaddyacallit. He can’t go on.

  Well, says Helen, now you know what it looks like and the name, forsythia. She says it apologetically for having been the one to have introduced forsythia to him and not his Marie-Claude. She knows his sad story by heart, he’s told it so often. She can’t help thinking: his own fault if Marie-Claude hadn’t had time to introduce forsythia to him.

  Seymour wipes his eyes with his sleeve. She’s a very nice girl, he thinks, not knowing what Helen’s thinking about him. Maybe he could make an effort and fall in love with her a little. It might liven things up here. A little sex wouldn’t be bad for his physical and mental tone.

  One day, who knows how long after their whaddyacallit dialogue – maybe years counting by outside time – they meet in a corridor. That rarely happens. There are just five of them, motes in the boundless universe of corridors. They’re both exploring rooms for books. They agree to join their efforts.

  Seymour decides the moment has come for a decisive gesture. It takes effort on his part. It isn’t that he finds Helen unattractive. She’s a little on the skinny side but has (as he’d once seen clandestinely through the clown’s eyes) genuine breasts, nothing explosively sensational like Margaret’s breasts, but well-perched small witty breasts anyhow. She’s a very kind person too and cultured as well, in an upper-middle-brow out-of-town earnest high-school-teacherish way. But she carries about a perpetual dampening aura of sadness, a force field of melancholy that does nothing to counter the general atmosphere here. Sometimes she reminds him of an intelligent version of the cleaning-girl who had spilled dirty water over his leg so long ago.

  And of course there’s her enviable status as sole obvious candidate for transfer. Later, Seymour will wonder guiltily if his supposedly decisive gesture hadn’t been motivated by an unconscious desire to involve her in transgression, pulling her down to his own hopeless status.

  He begins with a classic ploy, observing that it’s the first time they’ve ever been alone. She says that she hadn’t noticed. After a few minutes of silence he observes that they could easily have met back there in 1951 Paris. She says that Paris is a big place.

  After more silence he tries another tactic, downplaying her husband’s importance in a sly metaphysical way, saying that, funny, the way the big things in your life depend on a million little things and that if just one of those million little things misses out so does the big thing. Suppose, he said, her father’s condition had improved and she’d never returned home. She’d never have encountered her future husband.

  She doesn’t reply. He realizes that
he isn’t supposed to know the details of her encounter with her crazy husband. Margaret had told him the story. He doesn’t break the silence this time, depressed by the thought that his own great love had been at the mercy of contingency too. Suppose he’d arrived at the Place de la République an hour later with the communist demonstration in full swing. He’d never have dared photograph that wall and deploy the red rug that had triggered the clobbering and led to his meeting with his darling.

  They open a door and see the usual files and administrative volumes. The defective ceiling bulb blinks on and off at long intervals. In one of the long dark intervals he resorts to wordless action. He takes her in his arms and kisses the top of her head (she’s small). In the dark he can imagine her gray hair back to original color.

  She’s absolutely passive in his embrace, doesn’t return anything, doesn’t even pull or push away, as though, with her fabulous patience in the face of adversity, she’s waiting for this too to end. It’s like holding a corpse, Seymour thinks, a terrible thought. The light blinks back on for another interval. He releases her. Her sad eyes scan the heap of books as though nothing’s happened. But something had happened and she should have at least acknowledged it. He returns to words.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice, Helen, if we fell in love?”

  “It doesn’t happen like that, Seymour. I’m no expert on the subject but I don’t think it’s something you can calculate.”

  “We could try, couldn’t we? I’m really trying. You could too, it seems to me. At least make a little effort. Already I like you,” he says, sincere about it. “Like you an awful lot,” he adds with exaggeration. He hopes she’ll take it for understatement.

  She takes it for exaggeration. “I like you too, Seymour. Look, isn’t that a map of Paris over there?”

  “What we need is a map of this place, to get out of it,” he says bitterly, thinking of his French sweetheart, passionately responsive in his arms back then, and available in that circular year outside if he can only break free of these corridors.

  Max suffers from periodic fits of despair, like all of them, except that his are severer and maybe even more justified. Rigid for hours he stares sightlessly at a wall with the discouraging graffiti. Then he sobs and occasionally howls. “Helen! Helen!” the others cry if she isn’t there, and the thin dependable girl comes and soothes him as she does the others when it’s their turn to sob (almost never howl, though).

  Why does he howl? Sometimes Max believes what the others say about time out there, that it’s the time of their twenty-fifth year, time marking time for all time, going round and round, the same things happening over and over. Sometimes he isn’t sure. How can he tell with what he sees through the window: a dead city where nothing at all happens outside of the trees going from bare to green and back to bare? How can you tell it’s the same bareness and the same green? Sometimes he thinks the others see the same dead scene he sees and to torment him invent a live city with crowds and lovers.

  It’s easier, though, for him to believe what they say about time on this side of the window, their intimate biological time: that it stands still, that they don’t age here. As the burned-out bulbs accumulate and Max’s image, bleak but unchanged, stares back at him in the mirror year after year, he has to believe he’s still twenty-five and will be twenty-five for as long as he’s stuck here.

  But if you believe them, believe that time outside, like time inside, has been set back to their twenty-fifth year then the dead city he sees has to be dated 1975. That means that all other cities, real live cities, have to be dated 1975 too. Including Las Vegas, the only real live city that matters to Max. Which means …

  It’s at this point, grappling with the terrible logic of that version of time, that Max sometimes starts howling.

  Once Seymour is there when it happens. He searches for Helen but she’s wandering in a distant corridor. So he has to try to calm Max down himself and ask him what’s the matter.

  The answer he gets is fragmented by sobs. Finally Seymour pieces it together. If the others have the prospect of being reunited with a person they’d loved at the age of twenty-five here in Paris, Max’s only possible return is to Las Vegas. But Bess hadn’t lived in Las Vegas in 1975 when he was twenty-five. He didn’t remember in what city she’d lived then. When he’d met her, and two months later married her, he’d been thirty-six and she’d been twenty-two.

  That means (and he howls again) … means … means … that even if he escapes tomorrow and finds her, what good would it do, what good, he aged twenty-five and she eleven?

  Hearing him blubber that out, Seymour feels very sorry for Max but has to stifle laughter at the imagined spectacle of that grotesque and possibly pedophilic encounter.

  Much later, Seymour will bitterly remember his cruel reaction to Max’s grief.