Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

"It's easy to win debates as a nihilist," he'd said, "because so many people who ought to know better absurdly take positions."

  He spoke slickly of things like Ewing's tumor, Hodgkin's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, TIAs, and osteogenic sarcomas, and talked freely about his dying with an objectivity so matter-of-fact that Michael had to wonder if he was kidding himself, or faking it. Michael did not always know when he was serious and when he was not, and when he was right and when he was mistaken, and when he was right and wrong at the same time. And Yossarian would profess that he did not always know that about himself either.

  "A problem I have," his father had admitted penitently, but with a hint of pride, "is that I'm almost always able to see both sides of almost every question."

  And he was almost always too eager to be friendly with one woman or another, obsessed still with the dream to find work that he wished to do and the need to be what he called "in love." Michael had never found work that he wished to do--the law was no worse to him than anything else, and art was no better. He was writing a screenplay but did not want his father to know that yet. But with one thing central, Yossarian seemed right on the button.

  "Before you know it, you damned fool," he'd snapped at him irascibly in a tender bad temper, "you'll be as old as I am now, and you won't have a thing."

  Not even children, Michael could add ruefully. As far as he could see, that was not in the cards for him either, not in Marlene's tarot cards or any others. Michael again looked down narrowly at the blueprints before him, pulled his pad closer, and took up a pencil. He did not envy people who wished to work much harder to get much more, but had to wonder afresh why he was not like them.

  15

  M2

  "You like Michael, don't you?"

  "Yes, I like Michael," said M2.

  "Give him work when you can."

  "I do that. I will want to work more with him on those video screens at the bus terminal. I'll pay him for another year in law school."

  "I'm not sure he'll want that. But go ahead and try."

  All the parents he knew with grown children had at least one about whose doubtful prospects they were constantly troubled, and many had two. Milo had this one, and he had Michael.

  Irritation mingled with puzzlement as he studied the new messages from Jerry Gaffney of the Gaffney Agency. The first advised him to call his answering machine at home for good news from his nurse and bad news from his son about his first wife. The good news from his nurse was that she was free for dinner that evening to go to a movie with him and that the Belgian patient in the hospital was making a good recovery from the bad dysentery generated by the good antibiotics administered for the bad pneumonia provoked by the salutary removal of a vocal cord in the invasive effort, successful thus far, to save his life. The second fax reported that he had now qualified for the mortgage. Yossarian had no idea what that meant. "How did he even know I was here?" he heard himself thinking out loud.

  "Mr. Gaffney knows everything, I think," M2 answered, with faith. "He monitors our fax lines too."

  "You pay him for that?"

  "Somebody does, I think."

  "Who?"

  "I've no idea."

  "Don't you care?"

  "Should I?"

  "Can't you find out?"

  "I'll have to find out if I can find out."

  "I'm surprised you don't want to know."

  "Should I want to?"

  "M2, Michael calls you Milo. Which name do you prefer?"

  Milo's only son turned ill at ease. "I would rather," he said, breathing noisily, "be called Milo, even though that's my father's name. It's my name too, you know. He gave it to me."

  "Why haven't you said so?" asked Yossarian, resenting the implication imposed upon him to feel at fault.

  "I'm timid, you know. My mother says I'm rabbity. So do my sisters. They keep asking me to change my personality to be strong enough to take over when I have to."

  "To be more like your father?"

  "They don't think much of my father."

  "Who then? Wintergreen?"

  "They hate Wintergreen."

  "Me?"

  "They don't like you either."

  "Then who?"

  "They can't think of any man who's good enough."

  "Let me ask you," said Yossarian, "if you still have your catering company."

  "I think we do. It's your company too, you know. Everybody has a share."

  The M & M Commercial Catering Company was the oldest continuous catering service in the history of the country, having origins in Milo's labors as a mess officer for his squadron in World War II, wherein he contrived the fruitful and abstruse financial strategies for buying fresh Italian eggs from Sicily in Malta for seven cents apiece and selling them to his mess hall in Pianosa for five cents apiece at a handsome profit that increased the squadron's capital supply, in which everybody had a share, he said, and bettered the quality of life and the standard of living of everyone there, and for buying Scotch whisky for Malta at the source in Sicily, eliminating middlemen.

  "M2," said Yossarian, and remembered he had forgotten. He had no wish to hurt him. "What will you want me to call you when you're here with your father? Two Milos may prove one too many, maybe two."

  "I'll have to find out."

  "You really don't know, not even that?"

  "I can't decide." M2 was writhing. His hands turned red as he wrung them together. The rims of his eyes reddened too. "I can't make a decision. You remember the last time I tried."

  One time far back, just before Yossarian went begging to Milo for help in keeping Michael out of the Vietnam War, a much younger M2 had attempted to make up his mind independently on a subject of transcendent importance. He thought his idea a fine one: to answer the call of what he'd been told was his country and enlist in the army to kill Asian communists in Asia.

  "You'll do no such thing!" determined his mother.

  "The way to serve your government more," responded his father, in a manner more deliberative, "is to find out who the draft boards are not drafting, and then you'll see who's really needed. We'll look into that for you."

  The two and a half years M2 spent in divinity school had scarred him for life and instilled in him a traumatic aversion to all things spiritual and a fear and distrust of men and women who did not smoke or drink, swear, wear makeup, walk around anywhere even partly disrobed, did not make sex jokes, smiled an awful lot, even when nothing humorous was said, and smiled when alone, and manifested a shared, beatific faith in a hygienic virtue and self-esteem they thought exclusively their own and which he found malicious and repulsive.

  He had never married, and the women he'd kept company with were invariably ladies approximately his own age who dressed plainly in pleated skirts and prim blouses, wore very little makeup daintily, were shy, colorless, and quickly gone.

  Make effort as he might, Yossarian could not put to rest the low surmise that M2 belonged to that class of solitary and vindictive men that largely comprised the less boisterous of the two main classes of resolute patrons of prostitutes to be seen in his high-rise apartment building, riding up the elevators for the sex cures in the opulent temple of love on top or downward into the bowels of the structure to the three or four massage parlors of secondary dignity in the sub-basements underlying the several general cinema houses on the first sub-level down from the public sidewalk.

  Michael had remarked lightly already to Yossarian that M2 seemed to him to possess all the typical attributes of the serial sex killer: he was white.

  "When we went to the terminal," he confided, "he was only interested in looking at the women. I don't think he could recognize the transvestites. Is his father that way?"

  "Milo knows what a prostitute is and didn't like us going after them. He's always been chaste. I doubt he knows what a transvestite is or would see much difference if he found out."

  "Why did you ask me," M2 asked Yossarian now, "if we still have our catering servi
ce?"

  "I might have some business. There's this wedding--"

  "I'm glad you mentioned that. I might have forgotten. My mother wants me to talk to you about our wedding."

  "This is not your wedding," corrected Yossarian.

  "My sister's wedding. My mother wants my sister married, and she wants it done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She expects you to arrange it. She knows you're in ACACAMMA."

  Yossarian was genially amazed. "The ceremony too?"

  "It's been done before?"

  "The actual ceremony? Not that I know of."

  "You know trustees?"

  "I'm with ACACAMMA. But it might be impossible."

  "My mother won't accept that. She says--I'm reading now, from her fax--that if you can't manage that, she doesn't know what else you're good for."

  Yossarian shook his head benignly. He was anything but insulted. "It will take money, and time. You would have to begin, I would say, with a donation to the museum of ten million dollars."

  "Two dollars?" asked M2, as though repeating.

  "Ten million dollars."

  "I thought I heard two."

  "I did say ten," said Yossarian. "For the construction of another new wing."

  "We can handle that."

  "With no strings attached."

  "There'll be strings attached?"

  "I said no strings attached, although of course there will be strings. Your father specializes in string. You're practically out-of-towners, and they just don't take ten million from every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to give it."

  "Couldn't you persuade them to take it?"

  "I think I could do that. And then there's no guarantee."

  "There's a good guarantee?"

  "There is no guarantee," Yossarian corrected again. "You and your father seem to have the same selective hearing impairment, don't you?"

  "Collective hearing impairment?"

  "Yes. And it will have to be wasteful."

  "Tasteful?"

  "Yes. Wasteful. It will have to be lavish and crude enough to get into the newspapers and high-fashion magazines."

  "I think it's what they want."

  "There might just be an opening they don't know about yet," Yossarian finally judged. "The wedding I mentioned will be in the bus terminal."

  M2 reacted with a start, just as Yossarian had expected. "What's good about that?" he wanted to know.

  "Innovation, Milo," Yossarian answered. "The museum isn't good enough for some people anymore. The bus terminal is just right for the Maxons."

  "The Maxons?"

  "Olivia and Christopher."

  "The big industrialist?"

  "Who never set foot in a factory and never laid eyes on a product any company of his ever manufactured, except maybe his Cuban cigars. I'm helping Maxon out with the logistics," he embroidered nonchalantly. "All the media will cover it, naturally. Will you take the bus terminal if we can't get the museum?"

  "I'll have to ask my mother. Offhand--"

  "If it's good enough for the Maxons," tempted Yossarian, "with the mayor, the cardinal, maybe even the White House ..."

  "That might make a difference."

  "Of course, you could not be the first."

  "We could be first?"

  "You could not be first, unless your sister marries the Maxon girl or you want to make it a double wedding. I can talk to the Maxons for you, if your mother wants me to."

  "What would you do," M2 asked, with a gaze that seemed circumspect, "with the whores at the bus terminal?"

  The white light in M2's gray eyes as he said the word whores invested him instantaneously with the face of a ravenous man blistering with acquisitive desire.

  Yossarian gave the answer he thought most fit.

  "Use them or lose them," he answered carelessly. "As much as you want. The police will oblige. The opportunities are boundless. I'm being realistic about the museum. Your father sells things, Milo, and that's not elegant."

  "My mother hates him for that."

  "And she lives in Cleveland. When is your sister getting married?"

  "Whenever you want her to."

  "That gives us latitude. Who is she marrying?"

  "Whoever she has to."

  "That might open it up."

  "My mother will want you to make up the guest list. We don't know anyone here. Our dearest friends all live in Cleveland, and many can't come."

  "Why not do it at the museum in Cleveland? And your dearest friends could come."

  "We would rather have your strangers." M2 seated himself gently in front of his computer. "I'll fax my mother."

  "Can't you phone her?"

  "She won't take my calls."

  "Find out," said Yossarian, with more mischief in mind, "if she'll take a Maxon. They might just have an extra one."

  "Would they take a Minderbinder?"

  "Would you marry a Maxon, if all they have is a girl?"

  "Would they take me? I have this Adam's apple."

  "There's a good chance they might, even with the Adam's apple, once you fork over that ten million for another new wing."

  "What would they name it?"

  "The Milo Minderbinder Wing, of course. Or maybe the Temple of Milo, if you'd rather have that."

  "I believe they would choose that," guessed M2. "And that would be appropriate. My father was a caliph of Baghdad, you know, one time in the war."

  "I know," said Yossarian. "And the imam of Damascus. I was with him, and everywhere we went he was hailed."

  "What would they put in the wing at the museum?"

  "Whatever you give them, or stuff from the storeroom. They need more space for a bigger kitchen. They would certainly put in a few of those wonderful statues of your father at those stone altars red with human blood. Let me know soon."

  And as M2 beat a bit faster on his keyboard, Yossarian walked away to his own office, to cope on the telephone with some matters of his own.

  16

  Gaffney

  "She wants more money," Julian told him right off in his no-nonsense manner.

  "She isn't getting it." Yossarian was equally brusque.

  "For how much?" challenged his son.

  "Julian, I don't want to bet with you."

  "I'll advise her to sue," said his daughter, the judge.

  "She'll lose. She'd have money enough if she called off those private detectives."

  "She swears she isn't employing any," said his other son Adrian, the cosmetics chemist without the graduate degree, whose wife had concluded, through an adult education course in assertiveness training, that she wasn't really as happy as she'd all along thought herself.

  "But her lawyer might be, Mr. Yossarian," said Mr. Gaffney, when Yossarian phoned and brought him up-to-date.

  "Her lawyer says he's not."

  "Lawyers, Mr. Yossarian, have been known to lie. Of the eight people following you, Yo-Yo--"

  "My name is Yossarian, Mr. Gaffney. Mr. Yossarian."

  "I expect that will change, sir," said Gaffney, with no decrease in friendliness, "once we have met and become fast friends. In the meanwhile, Mr. Yossarian"--there was no insinuating emphasis--"I have good news for you, very good news, from both the credit checking services. You have been coming through splendidly, apart from one late alimony check to your first wife and an occasional late separate maintenance check to your second wife, but there is an overdue bill for eighty-seven dollars and sixty-nine cents from a defunct retail establishment formerly known as The Tailored Woman that is, or has been, in Chapter 11."

  "I owe eighty-seven dollars to a store called The Tailored Woman?"

  "And sixty-nine cents," said Mr. Gaffney, with his flair for the exact. "You might be held responsible for that charge by your wife Marian when the dispute is finally adjudicated."

  "My wife wasn't Marian," Yossarian advised him, after cogitating several moments to make sure. "I had no wife named Marian. Neither of them."

  Mr. Gaffney replied in a coddli
ng tone. "I'm afraid you're mistaken, Mr. Yossarian. People frequently grow befuddled in matrimonial recollections."

  "I am not befuddled, Mr. Gaffney," Yossarian retorted, with his hackles up. "There has been no wife of mine named Marian Yossarian. You can look that one up if you don't believe me. I'm in Who's Who."

  "I find the Freedom of Information Act consistently a much better source, and I certainly will look it up, if only to clear the air between us. But in the meanwhile ..." There was a pause. "May I call you John yet?"

  "No, Mr. Gaffney."

  "All the other reports are in mint condition, and you can obtain the mortgage anytime you want it."

  "What mortgage? Mr. Gaffney, I intend no disrespect when I tell you categorically I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about when you mention a mortgage!"

  "We live in encumbering times, Mr. Yossarian, and sometimes things befall us too rapidly."

  "You are talking like a mortician."

  "The real estate mortgage, of course. For a house in the country or at the seashore, or perhaps for a much better apartment right here in the city."

  "I'm not buying a house, Mr. Gaffney," replied Yossarian. "And I'm not thinking of an apartment."

  "Then perhaps you should begin thinking about it, Mr. Yossarian. Sometimes Senor Gaffney knows best. Real estate values can only go up. There is only so much land on the planet, my father used to say, and he did well in the long run. All we'll need with your application is a specimen of your DNA."

  "My DNA?" Yossarian repeated, with a brain bewildered. "I confess I'm baffled."

  "That's your deoxyribonucleic acid, Mr. Yossarian, and contains your entire genetic coding."

  "I know it's my deoxyribonucleic acid, God damn it! And I know what it does."

  "No one else can fake it. It will prove you are you."

  "Who the hell else could I be?"

  "Lending institutions are careful now."

  "Mr. Gaffney, where will I get that sample of my DNA to submit with my mortgage application for a house I don't know about that I will never want to buy?"

  "Not even in East Hampton?" tempted Gaffney.

  "Not even East Hampton."

  "There are excellent values there now. I can handle the DNA for you."

  "How will you get it?"

  "Under the Freedom of Information Act. It's on file in your sperm with your Social Security number. I can get a certified photocopy--"

  "Of my sperm?"

  "Of your deoxyribonucleic acid. The sperm cell is just a medium of transportation. It's the genes that count. I can get the photocopy of your DNA when you're ready with your application. Leave the driving to me. And indeed, I have more good news. One of the gentlemen who is following you isn't."