GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (20 page)

So the way is free again and the door wide
open on a sunny square happens over and over, each time her longing
for it stronger. But the fear is stronger too.

The last of those encounters the temptation
and the fear are so strong that she cries out: “No, I’ll never
dance for you.”

The next day the terrible thing happens to
her.

It happens to all of them (poor Louis) but
she’s sure it’s collective punishment because she’d said no for all
time to Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque.

Chapter 21

Sandstone Clobbering

Three more seasons have rolled round since
Seymour Stein started sketching his sweetheart’s street. The
repetitious trees are green again outside. He’s finished the
antique shop and, finally, the fish store. Tedious, tedious, those
thousands of scales on all those mackerel. He could have chosen to
portray scaleless eels. But mackerel was what he remembered and he
wanted to be faithful to memory.

That day (a day none of the Five will be
able to forget), Seymour finishes the horsemeat butcher’s golden
horse head. It’s not golden in his drawing of course and it looks
more like a camel than a horse, but he’s done his best. He takes a
deep breath and begins sketching the massive door of the building
where Marie-Claude lives.

He suddenly feels dizzy and weak. All work
and no play.

Pocketing his pencils, he murmurs:
“Tomorrow, my darling.” He can almost believe she’s standing behind
that door and can hear him. He sets out for the distant Living
Quarters.

He takes a long time getting there.
Repeatedly he has to sit down in the middle of a corridor and catch
his breath. He feels puffy. He stretches the neck of his turtleneck
sweater and lets out his belt. The dizziness and weakness worsen.
Far doors are a distorted blur.

“I’m coming down with something,” he pants
to himself over and over.

It’s the first time any of them have been
ill in all these quasi-years, he reflects. The place is terrible
for mental health but in purely physical terms it’s fairly
salubrious, despite the lack of fresh air, what with the ban on
tobacco and alcohol and absolutely no temptation to overeat. So
there are microbes here after all. No cats or dogs or even spiders
or roaches but at least other living creatures to keep them
company. Invisible though. Too bad. Seymour imagines the microbes
dog-size and affectionate, wagging their tails.

I’m delirious now, he mutters. Microbes have
no tails. Anyhow, who wants them, billions of them, dog-size?

Approaching the Living Quarters he hears
sobs.

The four of them are in the Common Room.
Seymour sees them in a worsened blur. Standing unsteadily before
one of the full-length tarnished mirrors a distorted Margaret is
staring at her image and sobbing. A distorted Louis is staring in
despair into another full-length tarnished mirror. Helen, distorted
too, is seated at the table staring down at her hands.

Seymour thinks: what’s the matter with my
eyes? Why do they look different? He tries to squint them into
familiarity. A different Max is tossing his Stetson in the air and
trying to catch it on his fist. Buttons on his deerskin vest have
burst over his strange sagging gut. His face is different too but
joyous.

What’s happened now? Seymour asks.

They look at him hard and long. Louis tells
him to look at himself in a mirror.

Seymour looks at himself – can that be
myself? – hard and long.

Not myself, not possibly myself, he argues
mentally with the mirror just as the others had with their
mirror.

After a while they turn their backs on the
veracious mirrors. They march in a daze to the table. They sit down
heavily. It’s as though a ten-ton block of granite has fallen on
their heads. A sandstone block, rather. Time here, the mirrors had
just taught them, isn’t the familiar grain-by-grain trickle of an
open-ended hourglass, each grain of sand doing its work of
attrition on you imperceptibly. Time here waits patiently in
temporary suspension. The billions of grains of sand patiently
agglomerate and then the sudden sandstone block clobbers you and
you’re older, much older, in seconds.

Silent, they avoid looking at each other’s
faces, mirrors too. At the far end of the room Max whirls his
Stetson up at the ceiling. He catches it triumphantly on his fist.
His breath rasps asthmatically.

How many years, do you think? one of them
finally asks.

They’d all been on the verge of asking that
question. They aren’t sure who actually does ask it. They all
participate in what follows but it’s out of collective distress.
They aren’t sure who speaks between the long pauses.

Twenty-five years?

Maybe twenty?

Not twenty-five years. Not even twenty.
Developed a wart on my neck when I was forty-four. Haven’t got it
yet.

You’ll get it all right. And lose things
too.

Like hair. Mine’s thinner. Don’t look.

Lose our minds.

Lose everything.

Already have lost everything.

So say fifteen years.

That makes us forty then.

We look older than that.

Natural after what we’ve been through. I’d
say forty.

Roughly forty.

On the bad side of forty though.

Could be worse.

Will be worse, that’s for sure.

“But it’ll get better before it gets worse.
That’s for sure too.”

Helen says that, still staring down at her
hands. She usually consoles. Is what she said a consolation? Her
hands have aged too of course.

Inconsolable, they sit there in silence.

Max tosses his Stetson the wrong way. It
sails onto the table.

Louis opens his eyes. He stares at the
hat.

“Pilsudski, you quit that foolishness with
your hat and wipe that grin off your fat face. You got no more call
to grin than the rest of us. Go and have a look at yourself the way
you are now.”

He already has. Max already has looked at
himself in a mirror. He goes on grinning like an imbecile. All that
wonderful flab and sag and grizzle. He likes the way he is now.
Later they learn why. He explains it over and over.

Explains that, before, he’d been twenty-five
and Bess eleven. Way things stand now, with him forty, Bess is
twenty-six. All he’ll have to do is find her once he breaks out of
this place.

The others realize that Max is in the phase
where he doesn’t believe that time out there is circular. What he
sees outside is a dead empty city where nothing occurs and so
nothing can reoccur. He assumes that time out there is linear like
the time he’d known back then. So Bess, synchronized with him, has
moved forward in time too, out of tabooed childhood into attainable
nubility.

Sometimes, exasperated by his happiness, the
others are tempted to remind him that, like a dog chasing its tail,
outside time goes round and round in a twelve-month cycle for their
beloved and so for his too. Bess is still a distant eleven years
old with him forty now, even further from her. But they don’t tell
him that. His new moronic grin is better than his former howls.

Like everything that happens here, that
savage aging (“savaging” they call it) was programmed, Helen
thinks. Had to be programmed because the next day indifferent
functionaries come equipped to measure their advance toward
decrepitude. Philippe, the fussily dressed young functionary (still
young, after all this time), stares briefly at Louis with a
grief-stricken expression and then avoids looking at him. New ID
photos are snapped. Protected from contact by long rubber gloves,
one of the functionaries measures them with a tape. Another
functionary tacks an alphabet-soup chart to the wall. The Arrivals
peer at it and chant out the diminishing letters.

A few days later Seymour is fitted with new
cruelly corrective lenses. He can see the inroads of age on their
faces and on his own even more clearly now. Helen is issued reading
glasses. She says yes, they must be forty. She’d needed
reading-glasses “back then” at that time of life. So now she has
reading glasses here. “But nothing to read.” It’s still her major
regret outside of having been pulled out of void in the first
place.

A week after the tape measurements, they’re
issued better-fitting clothes except for Margaret who doesn’t need
any. Her stunning figure defies those sudden years. She’s the one
who takes things the hardest but she has the least cause to, the
others think enviously. But Margaret has to cope with guilt as well
as grief at incipient wrinkles. She’s certain that she’s brought
this savage aging upon the others by saying no to Prefect d’Aubier
de Hautecloque. It’s not nearly as bad as her wrinkles, but bad
enough.

For a long time they avoid the Common Room
and its sarcastic mirrors and the window on the city with an unaged
sweetheart in it who might not even recognize them now if, by
miracle, they were ever transferred out there. Seymour dreams about
it repeatedly. In the long-ago street the heavy door buzzes ajar.
He spirals up to the somber fourth-floor door. At his knock it
opens on Marie-Claude. Radiant in her twenty-third year she stares
blankly and inquires “
Monsieur
?” to the middle-aged stranger he’s become to her. He can’t
know that the others have parallel dreams.

After the initial prostration, during which
they remain in bed for what must be three days, eyes shut and
wordless except to refuse food, they feel crushing humiliation.
They try to avoid each other. But it’s not easy, crammed together
as they are. When they’re confronted with one another, what can
they say to that faintly familiar stranger? They’d spent their
whole life together (this poor simulacrum of a life) so they can’t
even resort to those pathetic minimizing ploys of old acquaintances
meeting, secretly aghast, for the first time in fifteen years:
“You’re looking just great!” or “Haven’t aged a day!” Most of the
time they look away and pass each other without saying
anything.

Sometimes, though, trying to salvage scraps
of his former identity, Margaret steals glances at the stranger
they go on calling Louis. Finally, she finds he’s not at all bad
the new way he is. But Louis hardly looks at her at all. She’d
been, bewilderingly, two different (if related) girls before. Now
there’s a third woman in their place, who answers to their name but
that’s practically the only resemblance. At first he’s indifferent
to this vastly different woman. That indifference may be due more
to a weakening of desire on Louis’ part than to a loss of beauty on
Margaret’s. Helen tells her over and over that she’s never been so
beautiful. But Margaret weeps endlessly.

Seymour agrees with Helen. Margaret
possesses a less blatant, a finer menaced kind of beauty now. Maybe
with his own additional years, his taste has evolved and he now
prefers maturing women. But his appreciation of her beauty is
largely cerebral. Seymour too experiences a weakening of desire.
It’s the same with Max. He doesn’t seem to notice Margaret anymore.
When you’re forty how can you be twenty-five?

Margaret has a tragic sense of this
weakening of desire in her presence.

One night, perhaps not in a dream, Margaret
sees the Prefect at the end of a corridor marching stiffly toward
her. She runs away, out of fear as before, but now too out of shame
at her new aging face. Later, she turns a corner and finds herself
face to face with him and the smell of rotting flowers. His hollow
voice formulates the familiar request as he tugs off the glove from
his long white hand.

Margaret runs away again. Fear is still
involved in it but now, also, sinful joy at the survival of desire
in her presence.

Helen wonders if it isn’t also programmed that
just at this critical stage, never further from transfer to Paris –
not even sure that they want it on these new terms – they witness
legitimate Arrivals, indisputably Good Americans, rapidly recycled
out there. Louis is the first to see it one day as he passes by the
Reception Room where they too had been materialized so long
ago.

The great bureaucratic room has been
summarily prepared. A banner with the words
BIENVENUE A PARIS
is clumsily stretched between
two pillars. The rest of the Welcome to Paris consists of a few
mournful functionaries wearing conic New Year’s Eve caps and
mechanically tossing handfuls of gray confetti on the batch of Good
Americans, five of them, standing before a table with bottles of
alcohol-free mousseux and stale-looking cookies. Louis can’t know
this but the five must have sojourned in the Paris of the early
seventies. They’re already attired for the return to it.

Louis is shocked at the extent of bare thigh
the two girls display below their gray miniskirts. From a corner,
ragged Sub-Prefect Antoine Marchini stares at resplendent Prefect
D’Aubier de Hautecloque who, from another corner, is staring at
those bare thighs. Two of the Good Americans, a man in a polo shirt
and a shorthaired girl, are gazing at one another with parted lips.
Can love at first sight exist here? They are led away. Louis runs
back to the Common Room to alert the others.

Minutes later, four of the poorly chosen
Five press their faces against the cold windowpanes. Of course none
of them should be able to see the indisputably Good Americans
recycled. Their Paris isn’t the Paris of 1970. But for a few
seconds they’re granted that vision. They see the well-chosen Five
emerge from the other Prefecture and flame into color, the young
man’s gray polo-shirt into sunny yellow, his gray-jeans into
blue-jeans, the short-haired girl’s mini-skirt from ash-gray into
fiery red, a miraculous reversion of process, ashes back to
flame.