Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  I do miss her, as Yossarian observed in our talks in the hospital, and make no attempt to hide it.

  I miss her very much, and the few women I spend time with now--my widowed friend with some money and a good vacation home in Florida, two others I know from work who were never successful in resolving their own domestic lives, none of us young anymore--know I will continue to miss her, and that now I am pretty much only marking time. I enjoy myself a lot, playing bridge, taking adult education courses and subscribing to concerts at Lincoln Center and the YMHA, making short trips, seeing old friends when they come to town, doing my direct-mail consulting work for cancer relief. But I am only marking time. Unlike Yossarian, I expect nothing much new and good to happen to me again, and I enjoy myself less since Lew finally, as Claire chose to phrase it, "let himself" pass away. His family is strong and there was no weeping at the funeral services, except by an older brother of his and a sister. But I cried some tears myself back home after Claire gave me her account of his final few days and told me his last words, which were about me and my trip around the world.

  I find myself looking forward to the trip I've started planning, to see sights everywhere of course, but mainly to see people I know in Australia, Singapore, and England, and in California too, where I still have Marvin and his wife, a nephew with a family, and some other acquaintances left from the days in Coney Island. I will begin, it's been decided, with short stops in Atlanta and Houston, to visit Naomi and Ruth, with their husbands and my grandchildren. The two girls have long since come to think of me as their natural father. Richard raised no objection to my adopting them legally. From the start I found myself dealing with them psychologically as my biological children, and I've felt no regrets about not siring my own. But we are no closer than that. As in most families I see, we find only desultory entertainment in each other's company and are soon all of us mutually on edge. Richard never showed jealousy because we grew close so quickly, and he eased himself away from all pretense of family life as soon as he decently could. In just a couple of years he had some new wives of his own and with the last one a child.

  I am also looking forward to finding out more about that grotesque wedding in the bus terminal, the Wedding of the Close of the Century, as Yossarian and others now name it, to which, while I snorted humorously, he said I would be invited.

  "I was robbed once in that bus terminal," I told him.

  "My son was arrested there."

  "I was too," I told him.

  "For being robbed?"

  "For raising a fuss, a hysterical fuss, when I saw the police doing nothing."

  "He was put in a wall chain."

  "So was I," I informed him, "and I still don't think I'll ever want to go there again."

  "Not even for a wedding? A wedding like this one? With four thousand pounds of the best beluga caviar on order?"

  I won't want to go. There are some compromises left I just don't want to make. Although Esther, the widowed lady I see most often, "would die" to attend, just to be on the scene and gape at others.

  By the time I met Glenda, her loose days were behind her. I occasionally felt at least a little bit cheated because I had not been there in her bohemian heyday to enjoy her sexually then too, as more others had done than she wished comfortably to recall, and enjoy her roommates and other female friends too. The thought of the freedom with which those four had lived continued to titillate, and torment, me. I'd had my own good promiscuous years too, with girls from student days at New York University and Greenwich Village and then from the company, and with others I'd met through people in the company, and even on a lark or two each semester while I was teaching at my college in Pennsylvania for two years. Nevertheless, for a little while about the time of our marriage, I could still find myself temperamental, privately jealous and petulant, over her entire erotic past, and resentful of all the males, the youths, that high school football player, and then of all the men who had played their fornicating roles as partners with her. I hated especially the ones I imagined who could bring her always and simply to dizzying climaxes. Virile performances did not seem to matter to her. They mattered to me, and among those rogues of whom I had some knowledge, or was otherwise motivated to invent, I had to put her husband Richard. I saw him in these demeaning dramas as a conquering cavalier and irresistible adversary, and this was true even after I'd grown to discount him as a bothersome, vain man, shallow and empty-headed, always brimming with energetic plans of narrow ambition, and one whom Glenda also now considered only boring and exasperating. That she had harbored a long passion for the likes of him was a shameful recollection almost too distressing for either one of us to bear.

  I still don't know how a guy with melanoma was able to keep working and get raises and new girlfriends and even a couple of wives. But Richard did. Lew could have told me, I'd always thought; but I did not want Lew to guess what I had come to understand about myself, that I had never fully grown up, not even with Glenda, when it came to that matter of a man's way with a woman.

  Richard's first new girlfriend that we laid eyes on was the nurse in the office of his oncologist. She was perky and knew everything about his physical state; yet she was soon sleeping with him anyway and answering the phone in his apartment as though the place were her own. His next was her closest friend, to whom she gave him up in good spirit, who also knew about his malignancies but married him anyway. While that marriage was breaking up, there were girls in succession and concurrently, and then came the willowy, intelligent woman from good family he married next, a successful lawyer with a large firm in Los Angeles, to which city he packed himself up and migrated, into an even better job than the one he resigned from, to set up house with her there and move farther away from any familial claims upon him here. And these were only the ones he went to extremes to make sure we learned about, the attractive ones he had call for him in our apartment when he showed up on his visitation rights while he still chose to exercise them, or to haggle once more over money for maintenance or the problems with Michael, which grew more marked as he grew older. Richard had already gone west before we heard that horrifying word schizophrenia ventured and learned from the Time library and research files what a borderline case was then presumed to be. Glenda disdained my awe of Richard.

  "He's a salesman, for God sakes, and a show-off," she would exclaim in condemnation, when she heard me speculating enviously. "If he pitches a hundred women, he's bound to find a few who would find him better than nothing, or than the dopes they're already tied up with. He can talk, we know that."

  We knew he had a certain persevering charm, though none for us. At times when she was moping, I would clarify things for her, in the argument we'd first used with each other over the morning newspaper about whichever man was then in the White House: he was base, self-centered, conceited, bogus, and untruthful, so why expect him to behave any other way? I still can't tell whether the little prick we have there now is a bigger little prick than the two little pricks before him, but he certainly seems big enough, what with Noodles Cook as a confidant and that gluttonous, silver-haired parasite C. Porter Lovejoy, just out of prison on another one of those presidential pardons, his moral supervisor.

  I always managed the mediation with Richard craftily. With me too he was driven to come across as likable and worldly, and I never let him feel positive he was succeeding.

  "Set up a lunch," I volunteered, not long after Glenda and I started telling each other things and singling each other out to talk to at parties. "Let me speak to him for you."

  "To who?" she asked.

  "To whom," came out of me spontaneously.

  "Oh, Lord!" she cried, her dark mood lifting. "You're a pedant, you know. Singer, you're a nice bright man, but what a pedant you are!"

  It was the first time I'd heard that word pedant spoken. It was then, I believe, maybe at just that moment, that I consciously began to put to sleep my resistance against ever allowing myself to feel much lasting connection
to any woman, even to those with whom I'd been feverishly enthralled for a while. My fear was not of commitment but of entrapment. But any woman who could use that word pedant, I reasoned, call her ex-husband "duplicitous" and a "narcissist," and describe an assistant manager we both worked for as a "troglodyte" was a woman I felt I could spend time talking to and perhaps even want to live with, despite the three kids, a first husband, and her extra year in age. And a Christian too. Guys from Coney Island thought I was going crazy when they heard who Sammy Singer was finally marrying, a girl with three children, a Gentile, one year older than he was. And not even rich!

  Glenda had another trait I never mentioned to anyone until after she was gone, and then I told only Lew, one time when both of us were drinking, me with my Scotch on ice, he still with his Carstairs and Coke: she was amorous and daring when drinking and out for a good time, full of mischievous fun, and all the more so after we were married, and there was no end to her spontaneity and my exhilarating surprises right up until the time she fell sick and slowed down. More than once in the back of a car coming home from a party with people we hardly knew, she would begin to neck and grope and rub, and she would go farther and farther, and it was up to me to strain to continue a level conversation with the couple in front, making inordinately loud jokes to supply an explanation for my laughing and talking loudly and brokenly, for she would bob up with remarks and answer questions also before ducking down again to work on me some more, and it was something to keep more than the catch out of my voice when she finally made sure I came. I had stupefying orgasms, she knew, and I still do. They are slower in starting but last much longer. Lew told Claire I had tears in my eyes when I reminisced about that part, she let me know the last time we saw each other, at lunch in a restaurant, not long after Lew died, when she was flying off to Israel the first time on the chance she might buy a seashore house there for vacations for herself and any of her children who might want to come.

  Glenda and I never courted each other, and that's one of the reasons our marriage happened the way it did. She took me ice-skating downstairs one afternoon in the rink in Rockefeller Center. I'd been a whiz on metal roller skates as a kid, playing our kind of hockey in the street, and I mastered the ice skates so adeptly she was tempted to believe I'd been hoaxing. I rented a car one Sunday in spring and took her and the children to Coney Island, where they'd never been. I guided them through Steeplechase. They all of them rolled around in the Barrel of Fun and hooted at their deformed reflections in the magic mirrors, and afterward I led them across the avenue to show them the two-story Tilyou house of the founder. I showed them the chiseled name on the stone face of the bottom step that was continuing to bury itself in the sidewalk and was already all but submerged. They were skeptical of my impression that the house was sinking too and had earlier been a level higher. A week later I rented a larger car and took her mother along too when we went back and then had early Sunday dinner at a big seafood restaurant in Sheepshead Bay called Lundy's. When Glenda and I kissed goodbye that time, there was a second kiss in which we pressed into each other, and we knew it had started. I felt a powerful sentimental affection toward her mother. I missed my own. I lived downtown and Glenda lived uptown, and one late evening when she did not feel like journeying home, following birthday cocktails after work for a different girl that stretched into a long dinner with about twelve of us and after that into a club with jazz and a dance floor in Greenwich Village, I said she could sleep at my place. She said sure. I had a platform bed and a long sofa too.

  "We don't have to do anything," I promised reassuringly, when we were there. "I really mean it."

  "Yes, we do," she decided, with laughing determination. "And don't try that bashful-little-boy act on me. I've seen you work."

  And after that we seldom went out without fitting into our schedule the chance to be alone unobserved. We went to movies, we went to plays, we went off for weekends. One time she wanted to take the girls to see The King and I.

  I said, "You mean the king and me, don't you?"

  After a second of surprise, she saw I was joking and let out a hoot. "Oh, God!" she cried, with disbelieving praise. "You still really are a pedant, aren't you! Even just to think of a crack like that one. But I'd rather be married to a pedant than a prick, especially to a pedant who can make me laugh. Sam, it's time. Move in with me. You're practically living there now, and I've got room. You don't mind my kids, you spend more time with them than Richard ever did. You take them to Coney Island, and to see the king and me, and you get along better with Michael than the rest of us. Naomi and Ruth look up to you, even though Naomi is already taller. And you get along better with my mother than I can when I'm having my periods. Don't argue. Just move in and give it a try. You don't have to marry me."

  "You know that's not true. You know it's a lie."

  "Not right away."

  I was not sure I wanted to see her every day.

  "You see me at work every day now. We're together every weekend."

  "You know that's different."

  "And when I quit and you're supporting me, you'll have more time away from me, in the office, than you have now."

  She was not as good a housekeeper as my mother had been and only ordinary as a cook. Even her own mother made better food, and she was not good either. I told her staunchly I would not consider it.

  But as we continued going off weekends, I began leaving spare clothes in her apartment, and when we had a late night, it was easier to sleep over, and when I slept over, it soon became easier and then easy to sleep with her. She had her clothes in mine, and a cosmetic bag too, with a diaphragm inside. No one in her family seemed to find my being there novel. Only Michael was occasionally curious and might murmur something cryptic, or droll, but Michael could turn spontaneously curious about almost anything and not sustain that curiosity long. Sometimes Michael could lose interest in what he was saying even as he was saying it and change subject in midsentence. The rest of them thought it was his special way of teasing. He pretended it was, but I took him seriously and began to feel it was something more.

  The household collaborated to simplify our trysts: soon the living room too was privileged space when the hour was late and we had closed the door. And it was just as well, for if we were both still animated by drink, we might start in there with a casual embrace and then finish there too, and it was anybody's guess where our clothing might fly. And in the beginning, and for a good many years afterward, there was rarely a night we were alone together, even those that were late, or hardly a morning or afternoon on a trip away, that we did not make love at least once, even during menstrual periods. We slowed down later and skipped chances, too often because she might turn miserably depressed and brood with the worries and troubles we had with Michael. By then we'd written Richard out of our lives as useless. She would talk solemnly and weep quietly in my arms until we kissed to console each other, and even then, when she'd feel I had gotten hard, we would make love with a different spirit, in a way that was solicitous and tender. I would delay long enough to gauge her responses and then yield myself into release, and she might or might not have hers, but she would be pleased I was contented, and grateful I had helped divert her again somewhat from the oppressive weight of our problems with Michael, as much mine now as hers. It is still my conviction that I have not in my lifetime met a person less selfish, more kindhearted, and less self-centered than she was, or less demanding or troubling, and I cannot even conceive of a woman who would have been better for me as a wife and a friend than she had been. And that was true for all the years we were married, even through Michael's flip-outs and eventual, inevitable suicide, right up until the time she began feeling sick too often in her stomach and intestines and the doctors, after tests, agreed she had cancer of the ovary, and only then was the honeymoon over.

  And those were the best, and I mean best, years of my life, with not one minute of regret. It was better than the war. Yossarian would know what I meant b
y that.

  She died in thirty days, as Teemer determined she would, fading weakly away into illness, with little acute pain, as he had all but guaranteed, and I still felt indebted when I met him again in the hospital taking care of Lew and learned with bemusement that he had put himself into the psychiatric ward there for help with the relentless stress of the idiosyncratic "theology of biology" he was formulating, which was proving too difficult for him to cope with unaided. He continued working daytimes, but slept there evenings, alone. His wife could reside there with him, but she preferred not to.

  Teemer, intent, industrious, melancholic, was older too and, as Yossarian described him, a disabled casualty in his war against cancer. His was now a view of the world that decoded living cancer cells and expiring societies as representations of the same condition. He saw cancers everywhere. What he saw in a cell he saw enlarged in the organism, and what went on in the human he found re-created in groups. He shouldered a bewildering conviction, a conviction, he maintained, as healthy and vigorous in growth as a typical malignancy of the kind in which he specialized: the conviction that all the baleful excesses he spied multiplying unstoppably everywhere were as normal and inevitable to our way of life as the replications of malignant cells he knew of in animal life and vegetation.

  Dennis Teemer could look at civilization, he liked to joke in pessimistic paradox, and see the world as just a microcosm of a cell.

  "There are two more things about these cancer cells you might like to know. They live forever in the laboratory. And they lack self-control."

  "Hmmmmm," said Yossarian. "Tell me, Teemer, does a cancer cell live as long as a healthy cell?"

  "A cancer cell is a healthy cell," was the reply that came back and displeased us all, "if strength, growth, mobility, and expansion are the standards."