JOYCE CAROL OATES
573
FUCK, NUKE, PRAY) which Philip photographs with a tireless
grim pleasure. The enormous tenth-century Romanesque cathedral
which Cecilia finds fascinating, if rather damp and oppressive, Philip
dismisses as old Teutonic
kitsch,
preserved solely for German and
American tourists; the Mainz Hilton he finds a monument to im–
perialist vulgarity, a happy confluence of German and American
ideals of fantasy, efficiency, sheer bulk; even old St. Stephen's
Church, partly restored after having been bombed, offends him with
its stylish Chagall stained glass windows ... the blue so very pretty,
so achingly pretty, like a Disney-heaven.
Cecilia is surprised at his tone, and begins to challenge him.
Why say such things when he doesn't really mean them, or when
they can't be all he means?- why such hostility? "I have the cari–
caturist's eye, I suppose," Philip admits, "-of looking for truths
where no one else cares to look."
But Philip is beginning to find fault with Cecilia as well. His
objections are ambiguous, likely to be expressed half-seriously, chid–
ingly.... Frankly, he says, she puzzles him when she isn't exacting
enough by ordinary American standards; when she's overly tolerant;
quick to excuse and forgive. In the hotel's newspaper and tobacco
shop, for instance, Cecilia returned a few German coins to a clerk
who had, in ringing up her purchase, accidentally undercharged
her by about sixty cents; and the man-heavy, bald, bulbous–
nosed- became inexplicably angry with Cecilia and spoke harshly to
her in German, in front of several other customers. Whatever he
said hadn't included the word
Danke,
certainly. "And you think the
incident is amusing?" Philip says irritably. "How can you take such
an attitude?"
"I'm in a foreign country, after all," Cecilia says. "I expect
things to seem foreign."
Walking in Mainz on their first evening, trying to relax after
the strain of the Frankfurt airport, Cecilia and Philip find them–
selves in a slightly derelict section of town, across from the railroad
station, by the Hammer Hotel, where a number of black American
soldiers are milling about in various stages of sobriety. They are
touchingly young, Cecilia thinks-nineteen, twenty years old, hardly
more than boys. And self-consciously rowdy, defiant, loutish,
black,
as if challenging respectable German pedestrians to take note of
them.
One of them, laughing loudly, tries to grab hold of a Binding
Bier sign affixed to the hotel's veranda roof, but falls heavily to the
