Catch As Catch Can

by Joseph Heller

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Come with me,” she said. “I want you to help me pack.”

  He squeezed her arm joyously and they began walking quickly. He felt as though a great burden had been lifted and he wanted to laugh out loud. But then, when the first flair of exhilaration passed, he was saddened by an immovable thought that stood like a dark sentinel beneath his feelings. He remembered what the man in the pet shop had told him, and he kept thinking of the young, little bird that would soon die in the cold.

  THE DEATH OF THE DYING SWAN*

  Before he was married Sidney Cooper gambled excessively. Louise often reproached him, but secretly she was intrigued. After they were married, she proceeded with grinding persistency to cure him of this habit and to purge him of all others which she found displeasing, and after eighteen years of marriage, she had succeeded in making him the type of man she had always wanted for her husband, a man who was successful and proper and showed it in his appearance. Cooper had rebelled at first, but through the years he had learned that submission ultimately yielded the best results. By remaining passive, he at least achieved the domestic tranquility which soon became his outstanding pleasure. He did not enjoy the life she laid out for him, but, as a rule, he did not mind it. This evening, however, he was finding it unbearable.

  He looked at Ed Chandler and shook his head slowly with mild disgust. Chandler was the most successful of the lot. Before the war he had been a cattle buyer for a packing house, and during the ensuing confusion he had somehow contrived two packing plants of his own, a tanning business, and an undisclosed fortune in cold cash. He reminded Cooper of a perverted Buddha as he sat back in expansive comfort and showered his compla cency upon those around him, a large diamond glittering on the little finger of his left hand. Cooper smiled wryly and shook his head.

  “What a waste,” he thought sadly. “What a shameful waste.” His lips formed the toneless words. “Sidney Cooper, the intellect, the sybarite. If the walls of this room could talk, they wouldn’t have a thing to say.”

  The party was obviously a success. A woman had already thrown up on the bathroom floor and he had been assigned the task of cleaning up. When he finished, he closed the windows vindictively so the odor would remain, and he returned to the living room for a strong drink. Everyone was drinking and talking a lot, so he imagined the party was successful. Louise had already cautioned him.

  “I wouldn’t mind so much if it was someone else’s party,” she had said, “but it doesn’t look right for the host to pass out.”

  “All right,” he replied. “I won’t get drunk.”

  “I know you won’t, darling,” she had concluded, flashing him her party smile. “Now have a good time.”

  He sat in a corner by himself now, glad in being ignored by the others. The house was cluttered with Ed Chandlers and Louises, and he was completely alone. He was just about fed up. He was fed up with all the tedious routines required by his artificial existence, with all the dull people he met at all the dull parties, with being nice to people he secretly despised.

  He longed for people who were real, people who lived with honest passions and found vigorous pleasure in the mere event of existing, people for whom death came too soon. Occasionally, he came in contact with them. Some evenings he would see the couples making love in shadowed corners or come across people quarreling in the street. He would often hear careless laughter roll out to him through open bar room doors. On buses he would listen to young people discussing Huxley or Schoenberg in eager voices, and he had many times noted the students walking near the library with sad, serious faces, blind to everything but the hideous enchantment of some hopeless dream. And in France, near the Spanish border, what remained of the Loyalists, a ragged group of men, were dying daily from tuberculosis, neglected and forgotten, a fading handful of forgotten heroes, and in his living room there were men with diamond rings on their pinkies and women who never read an editorial page.

  “Oh, here you are.” He looked up, startled, and saw Louise smiling at him. “What are you doing all by yourself?”

  “I’m resting,” he replied. “Everyone seems happy.”

  “And drinking, I see. Please don’t get drunk.”

  “I won’t get drunk,” he said. He found it difficult to mouth his words and he knew that he was getting drunk. “I wouldn’t dream of getting drunk at our party. It wouldn’t look right.”

  Louise studied him for a moment. Then, as she always did when she saw he was annoyed, she smiled gaily to indicate that nothing was really wrong. “But that isn’t what I want,” she continued. “Darling, something terrible has happened. I’m all ready to serve cold cuts and there’s no mustard.” She waited expectantly.

  “Do you want me to go for some?” he asked.

  “Would you?”

  “Of course,” he said. “You know there’s nothing I like better than running down for mustard.”

  “Please, darling,” she pleaded. “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Before I met you it was my favorite pastime.”

  She glared at him with her eyes, keeping her face calm. “You’ve been drinking too much,” she said, in a stern, low voice. “I warned you against drinking too much. Now please be reasonable. I can’t serve without mustard, can I?”

  “No,” he said. “You can’t serve without mustard.” He rose slowly and handed her his glass.

  “And please hurry, darling. We can’t keep them waiting.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “We can’t keep them waiting.”

  He made his way to the foyer and walked slowly to the bathroom. He washed his face with cold water and combed his hair. As he came back, a woman turned from the living room, walking unsteadily, and stopped before him. It was Marcia Chandler, Ed’s wife.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” she said, smiling up at him. “And now I’ve found you.”

  He smiled at her dutifully and stood patiently as she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek.

  “You always look so beautiful,” she giggled. She was tall and thin, with a sharp face and large teeth. “So clean and sweatless. I bet you never sweat, not even in the summertime.” She looked at him provocatively, and when he didn’t speak, she said, “I wish you worked for me. God, how I wish you were my chauffeur.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I could kiss you as much as I wanted to.”

  He bent his head toward her. “Do you want to kiss me?”

  “It could be fun,” she answered softly. She ran her hand up the side of his face, closing her eyes and raising her face. He placed his hand flat on her chest and pushed her back hard against the wall. He heard her gasp with surprise as he strode away.

  The night air kindled with the liquor and set him aflame with a surging sensation of youth and vigor. He crossed the street in the middle of the block so that he could pass the cabaret near the corner, walking comfortably in a slow, aimless stride, delighting in the silent rippling of the crisp, clean air and in the happy glow of being alone and content and feeling young and in good health. He was sorry now that he had pushed Marcia. Maybe he should have an affair with her, he thought, just for an apology. He had always meant to have an affair with another woman, but an affair required so much preparation. It was the same way with divorce; at the last moment there would come a deceiving rush of affection—and later, regret.

  Outside the cabaret, a man stood near the curb talking to someone in a cab. The car moved away and the man stepped back, bumping into him.

  “I beg your pardon,” Cooper murmured, smiling.

  The man stepped back and studied him. “ Quo vadimus, friend?” he demanded loudly.

  Cooper stopped with surprise. The man was big, and his florid face shone with alcoholic vitality. Cooper liked his frank good-humor and he thought back through the years and remembered. “Ubinam gentium sumus?” he answered.

 
“A scholar!” the man exclaimed with delight. “Scratch the man on the street and you find a scholar. Come inside, friend, and have a drink.”

  Cooper hesitated, tempted. It was a long time since he last spent an evening in a bar, a long time since he had gambled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m on an errand.”

  “An errand? Forget it.” The man took his elbow and led him toward the door of the cabaret. “Schwoll’s the name. Harry Schwoll, the brassiere king. I make brassieres. I make more brassieres than any man in the country, which probably means I make more brassieres than any man in the world. It may not mean anything to you but it means a hell of a lot to the institution of marriage.”

  Cooper laughed and he let himself be guided through the door to the bar. Schwoll disdained a seat, pushing it aside with his hip and raising his foot to the rail as he set his arms on the bar and leaned toward him. “Money, money, money,” he said loudly. “What’s the good? What’s your name, friend?”

  “Cooper,” he said. “Sidney Cooper. I publish books, books about brassieres. You may not realize it, but your product is the hero of every story that pleases the American public.”

  “What’s the good?” Schwoll said. He pulled a chair to him and sat down, his face growing serious. “Despite all intelligent reports, money is a great potentiality. When I was a kid selling newspapers a man once gave me a dime and brought the happiest moment of my life. So much happiness for a dime. It still amazes me. Now I have a wife and two daughters, God bless them, and not one of them can appreciate anything under a hundred dollar bill. So what’s the good? What’ll it be?”

  “Scotch. With water.”

  Schwoll turned to the bartender, who was waiting patiently for the order. “Make it two, Frank,” he said. The bartender smiled and turned away. “His name is Frank Costello,” Schwoll said confidentially. “No relation to the gambler.”

  “That’s too bad,” Cooper said.

  “It keeps him awake nights.”

  Costello returned with the drinks and set them on the bar.

  “I forgot to ask you,” Schwoll said to him. “How’d I do today?”

  “You did fine,” Costello said. “One of your horses was scratched, so you saved some money. Gregg is in the back. He wants his money.”

  “Okay,” Schwoll said. “I’ll go see him.” He raised his glass to Cooper. “To you, friend.”

  Cooper swallowed the shot straight and smiled as the glow burned in his belly and flared through his veins. Schwoll was good company and he was able to relax. “Ready for another?” he asked.

  “Order them. I’ll be back.” He stood up and made his way through the people around the bar, disappearing behind the partition that led to the dance floor.

  Cooper ordered another round. He poured the scotch into the water and took a long swallow. The room was crowded with people milling about in loud, laughing groups and mingling easily with a wanton lack of restraint. It was the free atmosphere he had always enjoyed, but he was now consciously a stranger to it. In one booth, a boy and girl were facing each other, and the girl was going to cry. The boy’s words were lost in the noise, but he gestured with finality while the girl watched him sadly, her face moulded weakly into melting lines as she lost her struggle with composure. She looked up suddenly and their eyes met. Cooper turned quickly, flushing with shame, degraded because he had been caught spying on an intimate scene.

  A woman sat at the curve of the bar, smoking, a drink before her, and her face stared straight ahead with a stone expression of sorrow. He studied her closely, noting each detail of her head and shoulders and the slender slope of her neck. There were lines of torment in her face. Her lips formed a thin, red line that glared morosely against her white face. In the darkness of her eyes there was deep melancholy. She sat motionless, like a carven image. He wanted her. It was academic, he knew, but he needed her because she was a sad woman. He watched the people around her, trying to determine if she was alone. A hand dropped on his shoulder and he looked up with surprise.

  “You don’t want her,” Schwoll said. He was surprisingly sober. “Her teeth are bad and she talks too much about her husband.”

  For a moment Cooper was embarrassed. “Where’s her husband?” he asked.

  “He’s dead. Knocked off in the war. It makes you feel bad afterward when she starts talking about him.”

  Cooper nodded, watching her through the corner of his eye.

  “You a stranger in town?” Schwoll asked.

  “Yes,” Cooper said. “Just about.”

  “Know anybody here?”

  Cooper signalled to Costello for another round. He looked into the mirror behind the bar and shook his head slowly. “Not a soul.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Here.”

  “All alone?”

  “Just about.”

  “Don’t you know anybody?”

  “I know a lot of people.”

  “But no friends. Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” Cooper said. “No friends.”

  “Married?”

  “She’s upstairs. I live down the block. There’s a big party in my house. People I don’t like. She sent me down for a jar of mustard. She can’t very well serve without mustard.”

  “I figured you something like that. It’s very odd. There’s a party in my house also, but my wife doesn’t even bother inviting me anymore. You look unhappy—what was your name again? I never remember names the first time.”

  “Cooper. Sidney Cooper.”

  “That’s right. You look unhappy, Cooper. I don’t like despondent people around me.” A slight smile played with his mouth. “Let me have men about me who are fat and happy. You’ll never be fat, but maybe I can make you happy. You wait here and I’ll bring you some interesting company.” He stood up and left.

  “That girl,” Cooper said to Costello, when he arrived. “Who is she?”

  “A tramp,” Costello said, grimly. “Through and through.”

  “She lost her husband in the war, didn’t she?”

  Costello nodded. “She talks about him all the time. All of a sudden it’s love. She was a tramp before and she’s a tramp now. A guy gets killed and all of a sudden she loves him. Yours was water, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. The girl was watching him and their eyes locked in a tight stare. He waited for some flicker to shake the calm of sorrow and show him he was welcome. She turned away, her face immutable, and he knew she had not seen him. He did not want her now. She was too clean to touch, a trollop in a bar with black hair blending into the gloom of night and cigarette smoke and a white, bony face that was cast in despondency, and she was too clean for him to touch.

  And upstairs, smug men with diamond rings on fat pinkies talked about sex and success, and wanting women discussed clothing designers and women with more money. A man had died in the war and a slut was filled with grief. They were dropping like flies near the border in France. They needed artificial limbs also, he remembered. There had been pictures of them in the paper, pictures of bearded men staring with dull apathy in gaunt faces, faces sapped dry of the will to live, empty of hope, sallow-faced, living skulls, sculptured skulls gleaming beneath dirty skin, like that woman there, beaten numb with sorrow. They needed dentists also, he remembered, and now they needed doctors, and iron lungs, and good food, but most of all, they needed a place to go, a home, a homeland, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door, a forgotten race growing extinct on a barren strip of barren ground awarded them for a burial ground, dropping like flies from the silent gnaw of T.B. The reward for courage against tyranny was a rotten molar and a capsuled coccus; and upstairs there was Ed Chandler and Louise, and Marcia, with large teeth and a thin, cold body made warm by the cry against age and mediocrity, and in the limbo of doubt and discouragement was a man named Sidney Cooper who once rolled a ten spot up to eighteen hundred dollars and lost it all the next day on a pitcher named Rube Marquard who before then had won eighteen or nineteen consecutive gam
es. He had looked up at the sky that night, and in the sparkling myriads he had discovered the Big Dipper, and he had burned with the knowledge that the air was his to breathe, that the world spun and the minutes passed for him alone, and he had curled his toes around the equator. Byron had already died in Greece, but there was a man named Hemingway who wrote a book he understood and a man named Wagner who wrote music that almost made him cry, and a man named Cooper who stared up at the sky and drank the air like wine as though it held some anodyne, and a man named Oscar Wilde who wrote some fairy tales and was thrown in jail, and then, suddenly, Sidney Cooper no longer owned the world but was biding his time patiently as he waited to die, like the men near the border in France, but for a different, a much different reason.

  When he looked up, a man who reminded him instantly of Ed Chandler was talking to the woman, and the young girl in the booth was crying at last while the boy tried ineffectually to console her, and the happy stranger who had called him in the street was leading a young girl toward him. The melancholy woman had not yet moved and the boy in the booth had not yielded to the girl’s tears and there was still hope.

  “Here she is,” Schwoll said. “Sit down, honey, and have a drink with my friend.”

  The girl looked at Cooper and turned to Schwoll. “I’ll bet he thinks I’m a prostitute,” she said.

  “No, he doesn’t. Why should he think you’re a prostitute?”

  “I don’t know why, but every time you introduce me to a man he thinks I’m a prostitute.”

  “Not Cooper,” Schwoll said. “He’s an expert on frustrations.” He turned to Cooper. “How does she look?”

  Cooper smiled self-consciously. “She looks frustrated.” The girl was young and small and her wide, round face was lax with disinterest.

  “Sit down, honey,” Schwoll said. “This is Esther Gordon. Honey, my lonely friend, Sidney Cooper.”

  She gave him a small smile and sat down. “Any friend of Harry’s,” she announced, “is degenerate.”