Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "She'll want me to marry her?"

  "Of course. I do too."

  "Listen--you too, Winkler!--not a word about this," commanded Yossarian. "I don't want anyone else to know."

  "Who would I tell?" asked Winkler, and immediately told me. "I know what I would do," he offered, with the pompous demeanor he likes to affect as a businessman.

  "What would you do?" I asked.

  "I don't know what I would do," he answered, and we both laughed again.

  Finding Yossarian there in the hospital and seeing all that he's up to, with that enthusiastic blonde for a friend and that pregnant nurse who wants him to marry her, with Patrick Beach and his wife there, and with something secret going on between Beach and that blonde, as well as between Yossarian and the woman married to Patrick Beach, and with McBride with his fiancee dropping in regularly too, and their talk about the bus terminal and the crazy wedding scheduled there, and with those two tons of caviar on order--all that and more leave me with the sheepish remorse that I've missed out on much, and that now that I no longer have it, mere happiness was not enough.

  31

  Claire

  When it reached his stomach again, he decided to give up and let himself pass away. There was nothing he could think of anymore that was worse than the nausea. He could take losing his hair, he said, trying to raise a laugh, but he wasn't sure anymore about the other. There was so much around him now he was sick of. He was nauseous from the cancer, he was nauseous from the cure, and then there was something new they called lymphoma. He just didn't want to fight it anymore. He'd had pain of every kind. He said the nausea beat them all. I'd had the feeling right off there was something different about him this time. As soon as we were home, he started in with the arithmetic. He wouldn't let up.

  "Which is more--eight percent or ten percent?"

  "Of what?" I answered him back. "Ten percent. What did you expect me to say?"

  "Yeah? Then which weighs more--a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?"

  "I'm not an idiot, you know. You don't have to start all over from the beginning again."

  "Which is worth more--a pound of copper or a pound of newspapers?"

  We both smiled at that memory.

  "I know the answer to that one too now."

  "Yeah, big-tits? Let's see and make sure. How many three-cent stamps in a dozen?"

  "Lew!"

  "Okay, then, which is more--ten percent of eighty dollars or eight percent of a hundred dollars?"

  "Let me get you something to eat."

  "This time they're the same. Can't you see that?"

  "Lew, leave me alone. The next thing you'll want to hear is seven times eight. It's fifty-six, Lew, right?"

  "That's wonderful. Is seven times eight more than six times nine? Come on, baby. Try. How do they measure?"

  "For Christ sakes, Lew, ask me things I know! Should your omelet be runny or well cooked, or do you want your eggs turned over today?"

  He wasn't hungry. But the smell of cheese always brought him a smile. He might not eat much, but his face sure turned bright, and it was a way to get him to let up. It was like he thought that if I couldn't remember those multiplication tables of his, I wouldn't be able to hold on to a penny he left me. There was no more Scrabble or backgammon or rummy or casino, and he couldn't sit through a movie on the VCR without losing interest and falling asleep. He liked getting letters; he got a kick out of those letters of Sammy's. That's why I asked him to keep writing them. He didn't want visitors. They tired him. He had to entertain them. And he knew he made them sick too. Emil came to the house to treat him for anything else whenever we felt we needed him, unless he was out playing golf. He wouldn't give that up for hardly anyone now, that family doctor of ours, not even for his own family. I really let him have it once. But he's tired too. By then we were all sick of Teemer, and I think Teemer had given up on us as well. That going crazy stuff is just a dodge he's using. He just can't stand his patients anymore; he just about said as much to Lew. He thinks we've come to blame him for everything. So we decided to use the hospital near home, since Teemer couldn't think of anything different anymore. Lew would go in whenever he had to and come back home whenever he felt like it. He always felt more at home in our own house, but he didn't want to end there. And I knew why. He didn't want to lay that extra misery on me. So he went back in when he knew it was time. The nurses there were all still crazy about him, the young ones and the old married ones. With them he could still find the mood to joke. With them he could still find things to laugh about. Nobody might believe it--he would believe it, because I always let him know when I was angry about it--but I was always proud that women always found him so attractive, although I could get pretty worked up when some of the other wives at the club came on to him too openly and I'd see him leading them on and begin wondering where it was going to stop. What I liked to do was go out and buy the most expensive dress I could find and have them all in for a great big party just to let them see I was still the lady of the house. On vacations I always got a kick out of the joshing way he could start talking to other couples we thought we might want to hang around with. But this time there was really something different about him, and those lessons in arithmetic could drive me crazy. He was angry I couldn't learn things like he wanted me to--it was something to see what that face of his could turn into when his temper was starting to boil, and that nerve on the side of his jaw would begin to tick like a time bomb, and then I would get angry too.

  "I think he's getting ready to die, Mom," my daughter Linda told me when I said I couldn't stand it anymore, and our Michael was right there with her and agreed. "That's why there's all that accounting now, and all that stuff about banking."

  I had missed that part of it, and I'd always been able to read him like a book. Oh, no, I told them, Lew would never stop fighting. But he did, and he didn't deny it.

  "You want to know what Linda thinks?" I said to him, fishing. "She says she thinks you've made up your mind to get ready to die. I told her she's crazy. People just don't decide like that, not normal people, and not you. You'd be the last person for something like that."

  "Oh, baby, that's my good girl," he said with relief, and for a minute he looked happy. I think he actually smiled. "Claire, I'm tired of fighting it," he said right out, and then I swear I thought he was going to cry. "What's the use?" I remember his blue eyes, how pale they were, and I remember they were suddenly misty. He wouldn't let himself, not while I was there to see, but now I'll bet he did, at least a little, when no one was around to see, maybe more than a little, maybe all the time. What he did tell me was this: "It's been a lot of years now, Claire, hasn't it? I've made it to almost seventy, haven't I? Even Teemer thinks that's pretty good. I can't stand feeling nauseous so much, feeling weak now all the time. Sammy would like to hear I was saying nauseated instead of nauseous, but what does he know about this? It wasn't all that long ago I grabbed that guy stealing a purse and lifted him up onto the hood of the car. What could I do with him now? I can't stand looking so skinny. That's why I want to go back into the hospital so often. I can't stand having you see me this way, or the kids too."

  "Lew, don't talk to me that way."

  "Claire, listen good. Always keep lots of cash in a safe-deposit box in case you have to do something real quick. You'll find plenty in two of these. They'll seal the safe-deposit boxes when I go, so rent a couple now in just your own name in two different places and move some money into them. You know I always like to plan ahead. Give the children a set of keys so they'll have them, but don't tell them where they are until it's time. Let them find that out from the lawyers, and don't let the lawyers know everything. Never trust a lawyer. That's why I always have two. When they start trusting each other, get rid of both. There's a big piece of beachfront land we have on one of the islands I never told you about, and it's now all in your name, and there's another very good hunk of land out in California that you also didn't know about. Sell that one s
oon to help you with the inheritance taxes. You can trust the partner you'll find on that one. You can trust Sammy Singer too on things like advice when you aren't sure about the kids. And Marvin Winkler too. But hold on to the apartment house if you can. Don't give a thought to what we used to say about landlords. The coins from the laundry machines--those alone make that one worth keeping."

  "I know that much, Lew. I saw that before you did."

  "Sure. But tell me this if you're really so smart. Claire, if you have a million dollars invested in triple-tax-free bonds at six percent, how much income will that give you?"

  "Annually?"

  "That's my baby. You've got a head on your shoulders."

  "With capped teeth. And a little face work too."

  "So why can't you learn numbers?"

  "Sixty thousand dollars a year, with no taxes to pay."

  "Great. That's my sweetheart. And that's where the beauty of being really rich comes in. If a Rockefeller or anyone else has a hundred million in those same bonds, he'll make--"

  "Six hundred thousand? That's some bundle!"

  "No, a bigger bundle! Six million a year in interest for doing nothing, and no taxes, and that's better than you or I will ever do. Isn't finance wonderful? Now then, if instead of a million tax-free you have only nine hundred thousand invested at that same six percent--"

  "Oh, Lew, for God sakes, give me a rest!"

  "Think. Work on it."

  "That's six times nine all over again, isn't it?"

  "Yes, right, that's the only difference. So how much money will you earn at six times nine?"

  "The kids will know."

  "Forget the kids! I don't want you to have to depend on them and I don't want them to have to depend on you. People change, people turn crazy. Look at Teemer. Look at all the fuss and fighting that went on with Glenda and her sister over that farmhouse after her mother died. You remember what happened to my father with the ten thousand I borrowed, and you saw what happened to my mother's head before she even got old."

  When his father loaned him the ten thousand dollars to start up the secondhand-plumbing business that then became our lumberyard too, the money he produced was all in cash, and none of us knew where it came from or where he kept it before he set the terms and had the papers drawn up, all official and very legal, so it would go to Minnie and then to all of the others if anything happened to him first. There had to be papers, and there had to be interest. The old man, old Morris, who was never afraid of anyone in his life, was afraid of being poor in his old age, and he was already over eighty.

  God, how I remember that junkshop like it was only yesterday. It was small, small quarters, about the width of a truck garage, about the size of the restaurant in the city Sam Singer and I had lunch in, although the truck was always parked outside because there was always so much junk inside, and out in back. Heaps of metal, sorted into brass, iron, and copper, and a big scale large enough to hold a bale of newspapers, and so much dirt, filth. The clean newspapers were hauled from the cellars of the janitors all over the houses in Coney Island, who saved them, for a price, and these were put on the outside of the big bales. Inside them could be anything. At the end of the day, all of them--Lew, his father, the brothers, the brothers-in-law, and even Smokey Rubin and the black guy--they scrubbed their bodies and fingernails with cold water from the hose, a big industrial scrub brush, and lye soap. And I'd be waiting there all dressed up, ready to go out with him on a date.

  His one fear was rats, not just the rats themselves, but the thought of them, in the army too when he was overseas, and then in the prison camp. In the slaughterhouse in Dresden it was all very clean, he said.

  All of that, all of those people and all of that work, was as foreign to me as I'm going to find the Israelis if I do buy a house and ever start living there. Lew would have liked the idea of me in Israel, although I never could get him to go--I hardly ever could get him to go anywhere abroad where he didn't know the language and they didn't know who he was. It's just about the farthest part of the world I think I can find to live in and relax and maybe enjoy some memories while I try to experience some new kind of adventures in a place of old lore for me with people with a morale that has some kind of hope and meaning. I want to enjoy it.

  I was brought up Jewish too, but my home life in a small family upstate was nothing like that one. My father was a bookkeeper. And then he was a bookmaker like Marvin's, and he gambled a lot, but he always wore a suit and shirt and tie and liked those panama hats and fancy black-and-white shoes they used to wear, I remember, with those large perforated holes. This big, loud, hardworking family of Lew's, with their Yiddish and Brooklyn accents, confused me and appealed to me. And so did that whole open, noisy, fast bunch of guys in Coney Island. I met him on a blind double date with my cousin, who lived there, and I was supposed to be with someone else, but once he made his play for me and let me know he'd kind of like to go on, no other fellow I ever met anywhere else ever had a chance. We were just the right type for each other. We never brought the subject up, but I guessed I would want to marry again, whether he would have liked the idea or not, and I think I do. We married young, and I've always been married, and I don't know if I can ever get used to living alone, but where am I ever going to find a guy who will fill his shoes?

  "Don't count on me," said Sammy, when I poured all this out to him.

  "You didn't have to tell me," I snapped. I have that habit: it sounded ruder than I'd meant. "Sam, no offense, but I could never share a bedroom with you."

  "I don't think so either," Sam said, with his soft smile, and I was pleased to see his feelings weren't hurt. "He's going to be a tough man to replace."

  "Don't I know it? But he used to envy you, envy you a lot, for your life in the city. Or for what he thought was your life. Even after you married Glenda he had this picture of you drinking it up every night and scoring with all those fancy girls in the office and those others you kept meeting in advertising."

  Sam looked very pleased. "I never did," he said, looking a little proud, and a little ashamed. "Not once after I married Glenda. I stopped wanting to while she was alive. And hey, Claire, you know Glenda was right there in the office with me for a good couple of years too, so how did he think I was going to get away with that? Where do you think you're going to find someone, Claire? You may not know it, but you've got very strong standards."

  I had no good ideas. I still owned most of that art school in Italy outside Florence Lew bought me as a surprise birthday present. How many other women ever got a birthday present like that one? But I don't trust Italian men on the whole or take to artists as anything but artists. I don't trust Israeli men, but they at least come right out and let you know they want your body for the night or half an hour and would like your money too. I've outgrown Coney Island men by now. They're all gone anyway. I'll have to lie about my age, and for how long can I get away with that?

  "Sam, remember the junkshop on McDonald Avenue?"

  He remembered the junkshop but only some in the family, because they weren't too cozy with outsiders, or even always with each other. There were always at least a couple of families living in close quarters in that small apartment building Morris bought and owned. They did not necessarily always like each other--his brother-in-law Phil went out of his way to be a pain in the ass to everybody, and even voted for Republicans like Dewey and Eisenhower and Nixon--but they were loyal in defense of each other, like no others, including in-laws, and then me, once I came there for dinner now and then and began sleeping over in the room of one of his sisters, even before we were married. God help anyone who ever hurt my feelings or said anything impolite, even when I was wrong. Except maybe Sammy and then Marvin, with their needling, and then a couple of those other wise guys with their cracks to Lew about my full bosom. I didn't enjoy hearing from him that they were kidding around about my breasts as big tits, but he could never figure out whether it might really be a compliment, as sly Sammy Singer kept arg
uing. The old man took a fancy to me, and set out to protect me because my father had died. He considered me an orphan. "Louie, listen to me, listen good," he told him, even when I was right there. "Either marry her or leave her alone." He did not want Lew to sleep over at my house, even when my mother was home. "Maybe her mother can't see, but I can."

  And Lew did listen. He listened to him good until we were married, and then we started right in and hardly ever stopped, not even in the hospitals, almost until the last time. Lew was a rake and a big flirt, but he was a strict prude when it came to family. He was never really comfortable or forgiving with the girls with their bikinis and short skirts and their schoolgirl affairs. For that matter, I didn't like it either. And I didn't like the bad language. It was worse than boys used, and they didn't even seem to think it was dirty. But I could not let them know, because I did not want them to see I was as old-fashioned as their father while trying to talk some sense into them. That's how I got to him in Fort Dix finally when he was bullying that poor German orderly we called Herman the German and I was trying to make him stop. I finally stopped him by telling him I would strip off my clothes and straddle his hernia-operated-on body right there with Herman the German at attention and looking on. With no humor, without any laughter, did he finally let Herman leave. And that was after maybe close to half an hour of Herman standing there and reciting his past. He had a true mean streak when it came to Germans, and I swear I had to practically beg him to stop. But that's what finally got him, because Lew had seen me undressed but no other guy ever had, and I was still a virgin then. We got married in 1945, soon after he was back from the prison camp and had the hernia operation. And that was after three years of mailing him packages of kosher salamis and cans of halvah and other foods he liked that would keep, and even lipsticks and nylon stockings for the poor girls he said he was running into overseas. I was too smart to be jealous. Anyway, most of the packages never got to him, none after he was taken prisoner.

  God, how they worked in that junkshop, worked their heads off with their thin rods of baling steel that sometimes snapped and were as dangerous as hell. The old man had the strength of three men and expected his sons and sons-in-law to have that much too, and that's why buying modern baling equipment for the old newspapers was always put off. They had baling claws and pliers for twisting the baling rods, and they had their pipe cutters for the plumbing junk they got hold of, but most of all they had their hands. And those big shoulders. And there was Lew, still just a kid, you know, stripped to the waist, with a baling hook in his right hand and a wink of encouragement to me while I helped with the paperwork or waited for him to finish so we could go out. A nasty thrust of the hook into the bale--a yank of arm, a twist of knee--and the bale was tumbled up and over, lying right on top of the one underneath and both of them quivering, and to us it was a reminder of sex.