GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE by Howard Waldman Page B

Margaret
and Louis do their best.
    Margaret constantly feels the burning focus
of God’s eye on her. She struggles against carnal burning. She has
made a holy vow of chastity to Him and knows that the slightest
trespass in act or thought on her part can result in instant exit.
Already by a second inexplicable miracle God had spared her despite
her scandalous behavior with the blond blue-eyed beautiful naked
muscular vigorous, incredibly vigorous, man called Louis Forster,
stop thinking of it, stop thinking of him.
    Margaret had never confessed in her sinful
first existence. She longs to do it now. But spiritual comfort is
on a par with physical comfort here. No religious services are held
in the Prefecture. No sacramentally empowered ear can relieve her
of the burden of her sins. She turns to Helen for next-best
psychological relief. She doesn’t even get that. Helen prudishly
interrupts the tearful account of her earliest major offence (at
the age of fourteen with a friendly vigorous plumber) even though
her roommate does go on rocking her consolingly in her arms.
    Margaret knows her flesh is inflammable and
that the sight of it inflames. So she hides it. She gets rid of her
incendiary knit dress. She extemporizes underclothes out of strips
of a drab French flag, once gay tricolor, salvaged from one of the
corridor storerooms. She converts her bed sheet into a poncho-like
floor-sweeping garment: a hole for her head and two holes for her
arms. She conceals her cascade of hair, no longer fiery but still
sexually potent, in a dust-rag bandana.
    Eventually, Margaret abandons the ghost
outfit when she’s docked five (5) points for willful deterioration
of state property. If they’d suspected to what intimate use she’d
put their national banner she’d probably have been exited on the
spot. The Administration issues her a decent gray garment like the
female functionaries wear.
    In the meantime, clad in that sheet, she
looks spooky. Sudden encounters with her in the corridors are
unsettling, for her even more than for the other party. At the
beginning, before she’s scared away by her encounters with the
Prefect there (dreamed or possibly not dreamed), she spends much of
her time wandering about in the corridors, trying to put distance
between herself and the men. She doesn’t always succeed.
    Once, turning a corridor corner, Seymour
bumps into soft whiteness. They both go down flat on their backs,
which gives him a good view of her breathtaking bared legs, nothing
ectoplasmic about those legs. But her spread thighs converge on
absurd anticlimax: what looks like a scrap of the flag of
France.
    Wide-eyed with fear, she scrambles to her
feet and adjusts her sheet. Before she can run away, he says: “Hey
Maggie, I just remembered an old Christmas dinner: roast goose with
chestnut and raisin and oyster stuffing and mashed potatoes and
gravy, let me tell you about that gravy…” He goes on with it. Her
breathing quickens. Her moist lips part.
    “Maggie,” he says and reaches out.
    She backs away, mumbling: “I’m not Maggie,
I’m Margaret.”
    Then she runs away from him, those marvelous
legs, rhythmically outlined under the sheet, that sweet darling
bitable wagging butt of hers. He thinks of it intensely for a few
miles of corridors and then returns to the old Christmas dinner,
salivating with desire at the memory of the chestnut and raisin and
oyster stuffing and, Jesus, that gravy.
     
    Another time, turning a corner, Max comes
upon Margaret face to face. He shouts “whaaa!” at the spectral
sight and nearly runs the other way. She does run the other way in
panic, not taking Max for a ghost but for worse: another
flesh-and-blood man here in this solitary place. She desperately
wants to avoid the temptation of flesh-and-blood men in solitary
places, above all Louis. Would she have run away like that if she’d
encountered Louis instead of Seymour and Max?
    Temptations assailed even saints, she knows.
She recalls a