Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "Have we anything better to do?" Frances Beach said sweetly to her husband. "It gets us invited to so many other things that are even worse, doesn't it? And it helps keep our name in the newspapers, so that people know who we are."

  "It's so we know who we are."

  "I think that's divine."

  "I have promised to kill her if she uses that word."

  "Let's get to the point," said Frances seriously.

  "He could not possibly have meant it."

  "Yes, he could. Did you mean it, John, when you suggested a wedding in that bus terminal?"

  "Of course," lied Yossarian.

  "And you think it could be done? A big one?"

  "I have no doubt," he lied again.

  "Olivia Maxon." Frances made a wry face. "She's giving a wedding for a stepniece or someone and wants fresh ideas for an original venue. That word is her own. The museum isn't good enough since those two Jews had their reception there and those two other Jews were named trustees. Those words are also hers. Poor Olivia just isn't able to remember when talking to me that I might be Jewish."

  "Why don't you remind her?" Yossarian said.

  "I don't want her to know."

  All three chuckled.

  "You certainly wanted me to know," chided Patrick affectionately. "And everyone in my family."

  "I was poor then," said Frances, "and an angry actress who thrived on dramatic conflict. Now that I'm married to a man of wealth, I'm loyal to his class."

  "With a gift for stilted repartee," said Patrick. "Frances and I are happiest together when I'm away sailing."

  "What I never could trust about high comedy," Yossarian mused, "is that people say funny things and the others don't laugh. They don't even know they are part of a comedy."

  "Like us," said Patrick.

  "Let's get back to our agenda," ruled Frances. "I'd like to see that wedding at your bus terminal, for Olivia's sake. For mine, I'd like it to be the disaster of the century."

  "I might help with the venue," said Yossarian. "I don't guarantee the disaster."

  "Olivia will pitch in. She's sure she can attract our newest President. Christopher gives plenty since he received a suspended sentence and escaped community service."

  "That's a good start."

  "The mayor would come."

  "That would help too."

  "And the cardinal will insist."

  "We're holding all the cards," said Yossarian. "I'll start casing the joint if you really want me to."

  "Who do you know there?" Frances was eager to learn.

  "McMahon and McBride, the cop and a supervisor. McBride was a detective at the police station there--"

  "They have a police station there?" Patrick exclaimed.

  "That should be novel," Frances remarked. "We've got our protection on hand."

  "And convenient too," said Yossarian. "They can fingerprint the guests as we all arrive. McBride should know if it can be done. We've all gotten pretty close since my son Michael was arrested there."

  "For what?" Patrick demanded.

  "For coming out of the subway and stepping back in when he realized he had mistaken the stop he wanted. They shackled him to a wall."

  "Good God!" Patrick reacted with a look of wrath. "That must have been horrifying."

  "It almost killed both of us," Yossarian said, with a nervous, depressed laugh. "Come there with me, Patrick. I'll be going to look at something new. You'll see more of what modern life is really like. It's not all just the museum."

  "I'd rather be sailing."

  Patrick Beach, four years older than both, had been born rich and intelligent and was early made indolent by the perception of his own intrinsic uselessness. In Britain, he had remarked to Yossarian, or in Italy or one of the few remaining republican societies with a truly aristocratic tradition, he might have sought to distinguish himself academically as a scholar in some field. But here, where intellectual endeavors generally were rated menial, he was sentenced from birth to be a dilettante or a career diplomat, which he felt was almost always the same thing. After three quick superficial marriages to three superficial women, he had finally settled permanently on Frances Rosenbaum, whose stage name was Frances Rolphe, and who understood easily his recurring attraction for solitude and study. "I inherited my money," he was fond of repeating with overdone amiability to new acquaintances to whom he felt obliged to be civil. "I did not have to work hard to be here with you."

  He was not disturbed that many did not like him. But that patrician face of his could freeze and his fine lips quiver in powerless frustration with people too obtuse to discern the insult in his condescension, or too brutal to care.

  "Olivia Maxon," said Frances in summation, "will agree to anything I want her to, provided I let her think the initiative was hers."

  "And Christopher Maxon is always agreeable," Patrick guaranteed, "as long as you give him something to agree with. I have lunch with him frequently when I feel like eating alone."

  When he felt like eating with someone, he thought often of Yossarian, who was content to chat disparagingly with him about almost everything current and to reminisce about their respective experiences in World War II, Yossarian as a decorated bombardier on an island near Italy, Patrick with the Office of War Information in Washington. Patrick was still always respectfully enchanted to be talking to a man he liked who knew how to read a newspaper as skeptically as he did and had been wounded in combat once and stabbed in the side by a native prostitute, and who had defied his immediate superiors and compelled them at the last to send him home.

  Frances went on with good cheer. "Olivia will be delighted to know you're assisting. She's curious about you, John," she volunteered archly. "Here you've been separated now a whole year, and you're still not attached to another woman. I wonder about that too. You say you're afraid of living alone."

  "I'm more afraid of living with someone. I just know the next one too will like movies and television news! And I'm not sure I can ever fall in love again," he observed, pining. "I'm afraid those miracles may be past."

  "And how do you think a woman my age feels?"

  "But what would you say," Yossarian teased, "if I said I was in love now with a nurse named Melissa MacIntosh?"

  Frances welcomed this game. "I would remind you that at our age, love seldom makes it through the second weekend."

  "And I'm also attracted to a shapely Australian blonde who shares her apartment, a friend named Angela Moorecock."

  "I might fall in love with that one myself," ventured Patrick. "That's really her name? Moorecock?"

  "Moore."

  "I thought you said Moorecock."

  "I said Moore, Peter."

  "He did say Moorecock," said Frances, reproachfully. "And I would also accuse you of ruthlessly exploiting innocent young working girls for degenerate sexual purposes."

  "She isn't innocent and she isn't so young."

  "Then you might as well take up with one of our widows or divorcees. They can be manipulated but never exploited. They have lawyers and financial advisers who won't allow them to be misused by anyone but themselves."

  Patrick made a face. "John, how did she talk before she went on the stage?"

  "Like I do now. Some people would say you were lucky, Patrick, to be married to a woman who speaks always in epigrams."

  "And gets us talking that way too."

  "I find that divine."

  "Oh, shit, darling," said Patrick.

  "That's an obscenity, my sweet, that John would never use with both of us."

  "He speaks dirty to me."

  "To me too. But never to both of us."

  He glanced with surprise at Yossarian. "Is that true?"

  "You can bet your sweet ass," said Yossarian, laughing.

  "You'll find out what you can? About our wedding at the bus terminal?"

  "I'm on my way."

  There were no cabs outside the hotel. Down the block was the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, a redoub
table mortuary catering to many of the city's perished notables. Two men out front, one in the sober attire of an employee, the other plebeian in appearance with a knapsack and a hiking pole, were rasping at each other in muted disagreement, but neither gave him a look as he lifted an arm and caught his taxi there.

  8

  Time

  The structure housing the M & M offices, to which Yossarian would be going later that same day, was an edifice of secondary size in the Japanese real estate complex now known as Rockefeller Center. Formerly, it was the old Time-Life Building and the headquarters of the publishing company Time Incorporated, the company for which, in that same building long before, Sammy Singer had gone to work as an advertising-promotion writer shortly after giving up a teaching position in Pennsylvania rather than sign a state loyalty oath to keep a job paying just thirty-two hundred dollars a year, and where he met the woman who five years later would become his wife. Glenda was a year older than Sammy, which would have disqualified her with his mother, had his mother been still alive, and was not Jewish, which might have unsettled her even more.

  And she was divorced. Glenda had three young children, one of whom, sadly, was fated to evolve into a borderline schizophrenic of weak will with an attraction to drugs and an incipient bent toward suicide, the other two surviving, it developed eventually, with potential traits marking them especially high risks for neo-plastic disorders. Sammy's only regret about the long marriage was its tragic and unexpected termination. Sammy had no strong opinions about loyalty oaths but a passionate dislike for the people advocating them. It was much the same with the Korean War and the Vietnam War: he had no profound convictions either way but developed a hostile revulsion for demagogues in both political parties who demanded threateningly that he believe as they did. He disliked Harry Truman after reveling in his victorious campaign in 1948 and did not care afterward for Eisenhower and Nixon. He cared no more for Kennedy than he had for Eisenhower and ceased voting in presidential elections. Soon he stopped voting altogether and felt smug on election days. Glenda had stopped voting years before he met her and found all campaigning candidates for public office vulgar, boring, and loathsome.

  At Time magazine his starting salary was nine thousand dollars annually, just about three times more than he would have earned as a college instructor, and he had a four-week summer vacation. And at the end of his third year there he felt blessed to discover himself with a vested interest in a magnanimous company pension and profit-sharing plan. With a university education, paid for and made possible by the federal government under the GI Bill of Rights, and a position with an illustrious, nationally known firm, he was judged already at twenty-five a fabulous success by all his childhood friends from Coney Island. When he moved into Manhattan to a small apartment of his own, he ascended with charisma into the empyrean realm of the elite, and even Lew Rabinowitz eyed him with a kind of savoring envy. Sammy liked his surroundings, he liked his life. After he married, he loved his wife, he loved his stepchildren, and, though Lew refused to believe it, he did not go to bed with another woman for as long as he and Glenda were together.

  In his work in the city Sammy found himself among Republicans for the first time in his life. Nothing in his background or higher education had conditioned him to expect that anyone but a bandit, sociopath, or ignoramus would ever want to be a Republican. But these coworkers weren't ignorant, and they were not bandits or sociopaths. He drank martinis at long lunches with other men and women in the company, smoked pot frequently at night for a few years with old friends and new ones, lamented the acquaintances back in Brooklyn now addicted to heroin. It seemed incredible to the Gentile men and women with whom he drank whiskey and smoked marijuana that Jewish youths in Brooklyn, New York, should be drug addicts. He brought friends from Manhattan to Brooklyn to meet them, to eat clams at Sheepshead Bay and hot dogs in Coney Island, to ride on the Parachute Jump and the Wonder Wheel and watch others brave the frightening roller-coasters. He took them to George C. Tilyou's Steeplechase Park. In daylight and darkness he went to bed with young women who used diaphragms and contraceptive vaginal foam, and he had still not gotten over that. Unlike the friends with whom he had grown up, he did not marry immediately upon returning alive from the war, but not until he was almost thirty. He was often lonely in this single life and hardly ever unhappy.

  His boss was an articulate man of elegant mannerisms who had contempt for the editors, principally because he was not one of them and because he was better read than all, and he would contend eloquently at meetings that the business and promotion writers in his department were better writers than those on the editorial staff and knew much more. At that time every copywriter there, Sammy too, was writing, or talking about writing, books and articles and stories and scripts; the men and women in the art department did painting and sculpture on weekends and dreamed of exhibitions. The gadfly supervisor, of whom they all were proud, was eventually jostled into early retirement. Not long afterward he died of cancer. Right after he left the company, Sammy, a Coney Island Jew in a Protestant organization dominated by Class A suburbanites, found himself a manager of one of the smaller departments and the stepfather of three children of a Protestant woman from the Midwest of decisive emotional poise, who'd gone off one morning to have her tubes tied to avert bearing more children in a troubled marriage to a philandering husband she saw was certain to break up. She could adjust to the philandering, she'd said--and Sammy had not believed her--but detested his absence of tact. Shortly after the divorce he was stricken with melanoma. He was living still when Sammy moved in with Glenda and was alive when they married.

  Sammy stayed on at Time contentedly, writing promotion copy to increase the advertising business of a magazine he appreciated only as a superior consumer product and thought little of otherwise. He liked the work, he liked the people he worked with, he enjoyed the increasingly good salary and the comfortable knowledge that he was economically secure. His involvement with the international editions of the magazines Time and Life gave him opportunities to travel and brought him into lasting friendships with people in other countries. Like others of his generation, he was brought up with the practical ideal that the best work to do was the best work to be found.

  He stayed on until he too was nudged into early retirement, at the age of sixty-three, by a thriving company electing to thrive more abundantly by reducing staff and eliminating aging deadwood like himself, and he departed serendipitously with a guaranteed good income for the rest of his life from the organization's liberal pension and profit-sharing plan, plus three thousand shares of company stock valued at more than a hundred dollars each, and with generous hospitalization and medical insurance benefits that took care of just about all the bills incurred by Glenda in her last illness and that would cover him for his lifetime and, had they still been young enough to qualify, the two surviving stepchildren until they reached nineteen or had completed college.

  9

  PABT

  The luggage hustlers at curbside stared through him icily when he alighted without any. Inside the bus terminal things looked normal. Travelers streamed toward goals, those departing descending to buses below that carried them everywhere, or upward to the second, third, and fourth levels to buses that carried them away everywhere else.

  "I'll do you for a nickel, mister," a thin boy of about fourteen spoke up to him bashfully.

  A nickel was five dollars, and Yossarian did not have the heart to tell the lad that he did not think he was worth it.

  "I'll do you for a nickel, mister," said a flat-chested girl immediately beyond, a few years older but lacking the ballooning contours of budding female maturity, while a stout woman with painted lids and rouged cheeks and dimpled faces of fat around the chubby knees exposed by her tight skirt looked on from ahead, laughing to herself.

  "I'll lick your balls," the woman proposed while Yossarian walked by, and rolled her eyes coquettishly. "We can do it in the emergency stairwell."

&n
bsp; Now he tensed with outrage. I am sixty-eight, he said to himself. What was there about him that gave these people the notion he had come to the terminal to be done or have his balls licked? Where the fuck was McMahon?

  Police Captain Thomas McMahon of the Port Authority police force was inside the police station with civilian deputy director Lawrence McBride, watching Michael Yossarian draw with a pencil on the back of a broad sheet of paper, looking on with that special reverence some people of inexperience bestow upon the ordinary skills of the artistic performer which they themselves lack. Yossarian could have told them that Michael probably would stop before finishing his sketch and leave it behind. Michael tended not to finish things and prudently did not start many.

  He was busy executing a horrified picture of himself in the wall cuff to which he had still been chained when Yossarian had come charging into the police station the day he was arrested. With looping strokes he had transformed the rectangular modes of the prison cells into a vertical pit of sludge with spinning sides into which one peered slantwise, and in which the stiff human stick figure of himself he had just outlined stood engulfed and forlorn.

  "You leave him right where he is!" Yossarian had thundered on the telephone half an hour before to the officer who had called to establish identification because the receptionist at the architectural firm for which Michael was doing elevations did not know he'd been taken on for a freelance assignment. "Don't you dare put him in a cell!"

  "One minute, sir, one minute, sir!" broke in the offended cop, in a high-pitched outcry of objection. "I'm calling to establish identity. We have our procedures."

  "You go fuck your procedures!" Yossarian commanded. "Do you understand me?" He was mad enough and scared enough and felt helpless enough to kill. "You do what I say or I'll have your ass!" he bellowed roughly, with the belief that he meant it.

  "Hey, hey, hey, one minute, buddy, hey, one minute, buddy!" The young cop was screaming now in a frenzy almost hysterical. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"