Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  I wore cotton shirts, only cotton. No nylon, no polyester, no creaseproof, never any wash-and-wear. But no Egyptian cotton, not ever, not after Israel and the war of 1948. When Milo Minderbinder and his M & M Enterprises went big into Egyptian cotton, I stopped carrying their M & M toilet bowls and sinks in my plumbing business and their building materials in my lumberyard. Winkler knows I don't like the idea, but he still buys Minderbinder cocoa beans for the chocolate Easter bunnies he's into, but we throw them out when he sends them as gifts.

  I discovered cheese when I discovered the Caribbean, French cheese. I loved French cheeses from the day I found them. And Martinique and Guadeloupe and later Saint Barts became our favorite vacation spots in the Caribbean in winter. Because of the cheeses. I was not hot for Europe. I went once to France and once to Spain and Italy and never cared to go back to any place that didn't speak my language and couldn't get a good idea of the kind of person I thought I was. And then one day on Saint Barts, while having just a grand time with Claire after picking up two neat parcels of land in Saint Maarten at what I just knew would turn out to be a very good price, I ate a piece of cheese I always liked on a piece of bread I liked too, a Saint Andre cheese, I think I remember it was, and then a little while later felt coming up that taste of green apples I'd never forgotten, a burning, sour taste that I remembered from very far back when being sick as a kid, and I was scared that something not right might be going on inside me. And my neck felt stiff, like it was swelling up. Sammy would say that it had to swell up, because it couldn't swell down. I can smile at that now. It was something more than just indigestion. Till then I almost never felt nauseous, no matter how much I ate and drank, and I don't think I'd ever felt anything but good as a grown-up. In the army I was cold and dirty a lot and wanted more sleep and better food, but I don't think I ever felt anything but safe and healthy, or that anything that was bad and unusual was ever going to happen to me. Even when that sniper got that corporal named Hammer in the head when we were standing near that recon jeep and talking to each other just a foot apart. The town looked clear, that's what he was reporting back to me, and he was sure we could move on in. It didn't surprise me that it was him, not me. I didn't feel it was just good luck. I felt it had to happen that way.

  "Honey, let's go back tomorrow," I said to Claire, when I felt that old, sick taste of green apples bubble up, and later gave her some baloney after we were back in our room and had balled each other again. "I thought of something I might do in Newburgh that might turn out pretty good for us."

  I was feeling fine after the sex together and even after we were home. But just to make sure I dropped in at the doctor's. Emil looked and found nothing. I still don't know if he should have looked harder, or if it would have made any difference. Emil could easily believe that what I had on the island was not what I have now.

  I'm not afraid of people but I'm getting more afraid of green apples. The first time in my life I remember getting sick, my mother told me I was sick because I had eaten some green apples she was keeping in a bowl to bake or cook something with. I don't know if I'd even really eaten them. But every time I got sick that way again and felt nauseous and threw up, from mumps, from chicken pox, from a strep throat one time, she put the blame on those same green apples, and after a while I began to believe her, even though I'd eaten no green apples, because that taste of throwing up was always the same. And I believe it still. Because each time I get sick to my stomach, before the radiation or chemotherapy and during the radiation or chemotherapy and after the radiation or chemotherapy, I taste green apples. I tasted my green apples with the surgery for the double hernia. And when I got really sick that first time driving back from a weekend at Sammy's house on Fire Island with a couple of some of Sammy's lively friends from Time and felt my neck swell so that I couldn't turn my head to keep driving and then went faint over the steering wheel and threw up just outside the car and began to babble to myself a little deliriously, it was about green apples I was babbling, Claire told me. And the kids in the back of the station wagon, we had just three then, said so too. We told people who wondered why we weren't home till late that it was only an upset stomach, because that's what we thought it was. Later we said it was angina. Then mononucleosis. Then tuberculosis of the glands. When I had my first real collapse seven years later and was in a hospital in the city and Claire told Glenda what it really was, it turned out she and Sammy both already knew or guessed. Glenda had some experience with an ex-husband with a different kind of cancer, and Sammy, as we knew, was smart, from reading Time magazine every week.

  Claire had never met a family like ours, with Brooklyn accents and Jewish accents from my mom and pop, or gone out with a guy like me, who had picked her away from someone else on a double blind date and was able to do whatever he wanted to do, and whose future was in junk. I didn't like that last idea, but never showed it until we were already married.

  "There's no future in junk, because there's too much of it," Winkler would say to us before his first business failure. "Louie, a surplus is always bad. The economy needs shortages. That's what's so good about monopolies--they keep down the supply of what people want. I buy Eastman Kodak surplus army aviation film for practically nothing that nobody wants because there's too much, and I turn it into regular color camera film that nobody has. Everybody's getting married and having babies, even me, and everybody wants pictures in color and can't get enough film. Eastman Kodak is helpless. It's their film, so they can't knock the quality. I use the Kodak name, and they can't come near me for price. The first order I got when I mailed out my postcards was from Eastman Kodak for four rolls of film, so they could find out what I was doing."

  He and Eastman Kodak soon found out that army aviation film, which was good at ten thousand feet, left grainy splotches on babies and brides, and then he was back driving a truck for us on days we needed him before he began making honey-glaze and chocolate-covered doughnuts for the first of the bakeries he went into next before he moved to California and bought the first of his chocolate-candy factories that didn't work out either. For twenty years I slipped him money now and then and never told Claire. For twenty years, Claire sent them money when they needed it and never told me.

  Before I got out of the army, Claire, still just a kid, talked seriously to me about reenlisting because she liked the opportunities to travel.

  "You must be joshing," I told her, back from Dresden and flat on my back in the hospital after my operations. "My name is Louie, not screwy. Travel where? Georgia? Kansas? Fort Sill, Oklahoma? You've got no chance."

  Claire helped at the junkshop with the telephone and business records when my big sister Ida had to be home with my mother. And she helped with my mother when Ida was in the shop. She could make her smile more than we could. The old lady was getting stranger and stranger with what the doctor told us was hardening of the arteries of the head, which was natural with age, he said, and which we now think was probably Alzheimer's disease, which maybe we now think of as natural too, like Dennis Teemer does with cancer.

  Claire is still not much good at math, and that worries me now. She can add and subtract all right, especially after you give her a hand calculator, and even divide and multiply a little bit, but she is lost with fractions, decimals, and percentages and doesn't understand the arithmetic of markups, markdowns, and interest rates. She was good enough for the bookkeeping then, though, and that's about all the old man wanted her to do after the time she began throwing pieces of brass and copper into the last paper bale of the day to help us finish up sooner. The old man couldn't believe it, and his groan shook the walls and probably drove all our rats and mice and cockroaches jumping out in a panic onto McDonald Avenue.

  "I'm trying to help," she gave as an excuse. "I thought you wanted the bales to be heavier."

  I laughed out loud. "Not with brass."

  "With copper?" asked my brother, and laughed also.

  "Tchotchkeleh, where did you go to get educated?" t
he old man asked her, scraping his dental plates, with the different noise they made when he was feeling jolly. "Copper, brass too, sells for fourteen cents a pound. Newspapers sell for bubkes, for nothing by the pound. Which is worth more? You don't have to go to Harvard to figure that out. Here, tchotchkeleh, sit here, little darling, and write numbers and say who must pay us money and who we got to pay. Don't worry, you'll go dancing yet. Louie, come here. Where did you find such a little toy?" He took my arm into that grip of his and pulled me into a corner to talk to me alone, his face red, his freckles big. "Louie, listen good. If you were not my own son, and if instead she was my daughter, I would not let her go out with a tummler like you. You must not hurt her, not even a little."

  She wasn't as easy to fool as he thought, although I probably could have done everything I wanted with her. She'd heard from a cousin nearby about the Coney Island boys and their social clubs, that they would dance you into the back room with the door and the couches and get some clothes off you fast so you couldn't go back out without feeling ashamed, until you gave them at least some of what they wanted. When she said she wouldn't go back there with me the first time, I just picked her up off her feet while we still were dancing and danced her around down the hall into our back room just to show her it wasn't always true, not with me, not then. What I didn't let her know was that I had already been there with a different girl about an hour before.

  She was weak at arithmetic for sure, but I soon found out I was better off leaving business things in her hands than leaving them with any of my brothers or my partners, and I always trusted my brothers and partners. None of them ever cheated me that I know of, and I don't think that any of them would have wanted to, because I always picked men who were generous and liked to laugh and drink as much as I did.

  Claire had good legs and that beautiful bust, and she still does. She spotted before I did that nearly all the Italian builders we did business with always showed up for appointments on the site with flashy blondes and redheads for girlfriends, and she would pitch in by tinting her own hair back closer to blonde when I brought her along to something maybe more important than normal. She would load on the costume jewelry, and she could talk to them all, men and girls alike, in their own language. "I always wear this when I'm with him," she would say with a bit of a tired sneer about the wedding ring she was sporting, and about the low V neck of the dress or suit she had chosen to wear, and all of us would laugh. "I don't have the license with me to prove it," she'd answer, whenever any of them asked if we were really married. I'd leave those answers to her and enjoy them, and sometimes if the deal was good and the lunch went long, we would sign into the local motel also for the rest of the afternoon and always leave before evening. "He has to get home," was the way she would put it. "He can't stay out all night here either." In restaurants, nightclubs, and vacation spots she was always great at starting up conversations in the ladies' room and scoring chicks for any of the guys with us who didn't have any and wanted one. And she spotted before I did what I was beginning to have in mind for one knockout of a tall Australian blonde girlfriend of one of the Italian builders, a lively, swinging thing in white makeup with high heels and another great pair of boobs who couldn't stand still for wanting to dance, even though there was no music, and who kept making broad wisecracks about the naughty toys she had in mind for the toy manufacturers she worked for.

  "She's got a roommate," the guy said to me without moving his lips. "She's a nurse and a knockout. They both put out. We could go out together."

  "I'll want this cookie," I said for her to hear.

  "That's okay too. I'll take my chances with the nurse," he said, and I knew I would not want to pal around with him. He couldn't see my fun was in charming her, not in getting her as a gift.

  Claire guessed it all. "No, Lew, not that," she let me know for all time, as soon as we were in the car. "Not ever, no, not when I see it happening."

  I took the message, and she never saw that happening again, as far as I know.

  And in the hospital at Fort Dix, she faced me down over Herman the German. I knew then she was right for me, after I cooled off and stopped simmering.

  "Who takes care of you here?" she wanted to know, on one of her weekend visits from the city. "What do you do when you need something? Who comes?"

  I'd be enchanted to demonstrate, I assured her. And then I bellowed, "Herman!" I heard the frightened footsteps of the orderly before I could roar out a second time, and then Herman my German was standing there, slight, timid, panting, nervous, in his fifties, no Aryan superman hero he, no Ubermensch, not that one.

  "Mein Herr Rabinowitz?" he began immediately, as I'd taught him I wanted him to. "Wie kann ich Ihnen dienen?"

  "Achtung, Herman," I ordered casually. And after he clicked his heels and snapped to attention, I gave the order he understood. "Anfangen!" He began to tell me about himself. And I turned to Claire. "So, honey, how was the trip down? And where are you staying? Same hotel?"

  Her eyes boggled as the man recited, and she couldn't believe it when she caught on. And she didn't look pleased. I almost had to laugh at her comical expression. Herman reported his name, rank, and serial number, and then his date and place of birth, education, work experience, family background and situation, and everything else I'd told him I wanted from him each time I stood him at attention and asked him to begin telling me about himself again. And I continued chatting with Claire as though I didn't see him and certainly didn't care.

  "So I'll tell you what I've been thinking. I'm not going to reenlist, so forget about that one. The old man might need me back in the junkshop for a while."

  Claire couldn't figure out which of us to pay attention to. I kept a straight face. The room went quiet. Herman had finished and stood there blinking and sweating.

  "Oh, yes," I said, without turning, as though I had just remembered him. "Noch einmal."

  And he began again. "Mein Name ist Hermann Vogeler. Ich bin ein Soldat der deutschen Armee. Ich bin Backer. Ich wurde am dritten September 1892 geboren und ich bin dreiundfunfzig Jahre alt."

  "Lew, stop--it's enough already," Claire broke in finally, and she was angry. "Stop! Stop it!"

  I didn't like her talking to me that way, in front of Herman or anyone else. That vein in my neck and jaw started ticking. "So I think I'll begin with the old man again," I said right past her. "Just to have some kind of income while I try to decide what we want to do with ourselves."

  "Lew, let him go," she ordered. "I mean it!"

  "My father raised cows and sold milk," Herman was reciting in German. "I went to school. After school I applied for college, but I was not accepted. I was not smart."

  "It's okay," I told her innocently, while Herman went on as obediently as the first time. "It's what he's trained to do. They trained him to bake. I trained him to do this. When he's finished I'll have him do it a few more times, so that none of us will ever forget. We can live with the folks for a while in the top-floor apartment. We're the youngest, so they'll make us climb stairs. I don't think I want to take time to go to college, not if we're married. You want to be married?"

  "Lew, I want you to let him go! That's what I want! I warn you."

  "Make me."

  "I will. Don't push me."

  "How?"

  "I'll take my clothes off," she decided, and I could see she meant it. "Right here. I'll undress. It's enough! I'll take everything off and get on the bed on top of you, right now, if you don't let him stop. I'll sit on top of you, even with your stitches, even if they open. I'll let him see everything you've seen, I'll show it to him, I swear I will. Send him away."

  She knew how I felt, that slick one. When bikini bathing suits came in, I didn't have to tell her not to wear one, and I finally gave up trying to talk to my daughters about them and just did not want to go to the beach when they were there.

  She began unbuttoning. She kept unbuttoning, and she unbuttoned some more. And when I saw the white slip with the low n
eck and lace and the swell underneath of those really big tits that I never wanted any other man in the world ever even to take notice of, I had to back down. I could picture her unzipping and stepping out of her skirt with him still in the room, and then raising her slip, and I was afraid of that and just couldn't stand the thought, and I had to stop Herman, and I did it as though I were angry with him instead of her, like it was all his fault, not hers, or mine, and I had to send him away.

  "Okay, enough, button up." I was in a rage with her too. "Okay, Herman. Genug. Fertig. Danke schon. Go out now! Schnell! Mach schnell! Get the hell out."

  "Danke schon, Herr Rabinowitz. Danke vielmals." He was quivering, which embarrassed me, and backed out bowing.

  "That wasn't funny, Lew, not to me," she was letting me know as she buttoned up.

  "I wasn't doing it to be funny." I felt nasty too.

  "Then why?"

  I didn't know why.

  By the time he left, I actually had a soft spot for the poor old guy, and I went out of my way to wish him luck before they shipped him off for what they called repatriation.

  By then I felt pity for him. He was weak. Even by other Germans he would be considered weak, and at his age he would never be strong. He'd reminded me already in certain ways of Sammy's father, a sweet old quiet man with silver hair who all summer went off for a long dip in the ocean as soon as he came home from work. Sammy or his brother or sister would be sent out by Sammy's mother to keep an eye on him and remind him to come home in time for supper. Sammy and I were both lucky. We each had an older sister to take care of the parents at the end. Sammy's father read all the Jewish newspapers, and in his house they all liked to listen to classical music on the radio. At the Coney Island library, Sammy would put in reservations for books for him that had been translated into Yiddish, novels mostly, and mostly by Russians. He was friendly. My father was not. My folks hardly read at all. I never could find the time. At the beginning when Sammy tried writing short stories and funny articles to sell to magazines, he tried them out on me. I never knew what to say, and I'm glad he stopped using me.