GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE Read Free Page B

lift it. It is
black and reposes under a vast glass bell like a giant version of
the glass bell employed to protect orchids or ripe Camembert. She
gives it the widest of berths. Heedless contact with the bell could
have terrible consequences.
    The authoritarian female functionary seizes
the pale gray telephone and dials with two brief zips. She
painfully manages an obsequious smile and makes deferent little
bows as she recounts the scandalous blunder in the Reception
Department to her hierarchical superior. The term “indescribable
indecency” is recurrent.
    More functionaries burst into the gigantic
room.
    In the meantime, with all that racket, no
surprise, the remaining Four awake one by one.

Chapter 3
     
    Where?
     
    The first of the remaining Four to focus on
outside things is MAX PILSUDSKI, the squat hairy man standing next
to a pillar. He looks like everybody’s idea of a naked
truck-driver, which is exactly what he is: naked and a
truck-driver. More exactly, had been. For the moment, though, he
doesn’t realize he’s a had-been. He vividly recalls the tree
gigantic in the splintering windshield of his truck and then
nothing. A terrible accident, he understands, and maybe coma, but
now he’s come out of it and is standing in what must be a rehab
center. They’ve done a goddam good job on him too. He feels a
little woozy (who wouldn’t?) but otherwise like a million bucks.
Funny thing though about his body: buck-naked and no more sag and
flab to it and the hair on it not grizzled anymore but black.
    Who’s making that racket? That jabbering
don’t sound like English. Sounds like Mexicans with bad head colds.
Standing where he is, next to the pillar, the only person he can
see is a guy in the raw with the cut of a Yid. Looks like an
egg-head too with those horn-rimmed glasses.
     
    The young man in horn-rimmed glasses who
looks like everybody’s idea of a naked futile New York intellectual
is SEYMOUR STEIN. He now opens his eyes and comes up with exactly
the same matter-of-fact materialistic interpretation of his present
situation as Max Pilsudski: he’s a patient in a rehabilitation
center. He feels tremendous bitterness at survival. He’d fucked up
his life and had even fucked up his would-be departure from it. How
he’d hungered for no-being! Instead, he’s back to being Seymour
Stein, the crown-prince of shmucks, the only man in history to have
screwed up a ten-story dive onto a sidewalk. How had he possibly
survived? Maybe he’d overshot the targeted sidewalk and plunged
into an open sewer manhole, shit unto shit, and had been fished
out? He starts weeping at this latest of a lifetime of failures and
gropes for a handkerchief. Instead of pockets he finds skin
everywhere, vastly improved skin, the grossness of his mid-fifties
effaced. A real medical miracle.
    But why is he naked? And what’s that racket
going on? Isn’t that French?
     
    Helen Ricchi , the plain sad-faced girl with the small but
witty breasts, awakens to banging and cries in French, not the
French of Québec, the city of her birth, but the French of France.
Helen had been a high-school teacher of French in Denver, Colorado.
She opens her eyes and notes that her white hair is back to mousy
brown now, no great improvement, and her body back to what she
takes to be youthful unattractiveness. Helen accepts the new
situation – the mysterious place she’s in, nudity and rejuvenation
– with incurious fatalism as she’d accepted everything after the
tragedy that had befallen her as a two-week bride forty years
before. She’d never asked questions. She waits now without
impatience for whatever might happen next.

    LOUIS FORSTER is lingering in a badly
distorted memory of a close to final thing. Paralyzed, he’s
undergoing a toilette – the last one before the funeral toilette
two days later – at the hands of a shy young nurse who suddenly
loses her shyness and her uniform. He tries to pull away from her
caressing hands and her