Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  Port Authority Patron Aides in red jackets were on duty everywhere to assist with instructions and directions. The AirTransCenter of the terminal was held open to transport to the city's three major airports those guests rushing directly from the lavish Minderbinder-Maxon affair to lavish parties in Morocco and Venice, music festivals in Salzburg or Bayreuth, and the Chelsea Flower Show or Wimbledon tennis matches in England.

  Sophisticated managerial headhunters had ensured through intensive interview procedures that only well-bred models and thespians from good families, with degrees from good colleges, were hired for the parts of the male and female whores and other penurious, degenerate inhabitants of the premises who normally made their residences and livelihoods there, and they threw themselves into these roles with a wholesome waggery and an endearing enthusiasm for good, clean sport that won the hearts of all in the several audiences. Toward party's end, as those observing on the video screens could see, these mingled with the guests in their costumes and feigned vocations, and this was another innovation contributing much to the general hilarity.

  Other actors and actresses and male and female models outfitted to resemble figures in famous paintings and motion pictures strolled through the several galleries, striking the characteristic poses of the characters they were aping. There were a number of Marilyn Monroes, a couple of Marlon Brandos playing Stanley Kowalski, a Humphrey Bogart here and there, a pair of dying Dantons, and at least two Mona Lisas, whom everyone recognized. Waiters wore flowing white blouses and embroidered tunics of different periods. The Off-Track Betting parlor and Arby's restaurant on the second floor and the Lindy's Restaurant and Bar below were reconstructed to resemble seventeenth-century Flemish eating-drinking houses, with bric-a-brac and artifacts of that time filling the taverns appropriately. In one of these tableaux, smoking a cigarette rather than a pipe and scrutinizing everything shrewdly, was a lean man with milky skin, pink eyes, and copper hair. He wore Bavarian lederhosen and had a hiking staff and green rucksack, and Yossarian, who was vaguely sure he had seen him somewhere else, could not tell whether he was there at work or as an outfitted element in the decor. There were several Rembrandt self-portrait look-alikes and one Jane Avril. There were no Jesus Christs.

  After dinner, the guests would find themselves free to dance or drift past Greek and Roman antiques to buy Zaro's bread at Zaro's Bread Basket, Fanny Farmer candy, or New York State Lottery tickets, or peer into a Drago shoe repair shop or one of the Tropica Juice Bars, where the pyramids of oranges were decorated in French Directoire, with swags, rosettes, and tassels. Many had never laid eyes on pyramids of oranges before. The centerpieces of their dining tables were of gilded magnolia leaves and spring branches, and the upright columns supporting the Communications Control Center were majestic in silver floodlights, with fountains tumbling whitely around them, and with the multitude of hoisted sail-like corporate banners and pennants luffing and snapping in the artificial breezes. One hall leading to gates outside to long-distance buses heading west to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and north to the Pole was decorated in the Greek Renaissance style and furnished with Italian tapestries, Japanese lanterns, medieval armors, and carved-walnut wainscoting from a French chateau. Opposite this was another passageway for departures; this one featured Regency furniture, overstuffed chintz cushions, and mahogany woodwork, all just inside the wrought-iron gates of a medieval court. The Charles Engelhard Court, also on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was ablaze with pink and gold light and featured fifty thousand French roses, with almost as many gold-dipped magnolia leaves, and a dance floor hand-painted for just that evening in harlequin blocks of green, yellow, red, and black.

  Forty-seven chiefs of protocol from the Foreign Service had assisted with the sensitive matter of seating arrangements, making sure the thirty-five hundred guests were properly, though not always contentedly, placed. The basic seating attack ultimately agreed to left many of the thirty-five hundred unfulfilled and displeased, but propitiated to an extent by the disappointment evident in others.

  There was no head table anywhere other than the privileged small one facing outward from the Temple of Dendur in the North Wing for the principals and, of course, the President and his First Lady, with Noodles Cook sitting in already for the chief executive until he made his entrance.

  The First Lady had arrived early to collect autographs from celebrities.

  "I wonder where the President is," said Olivia Maxon, watching with impatient expectation. "I wish he'd come."

  He would journey, some knew, by speedy special train to PABT directly from the secret MASSPOB underground terminal in Washington. And he would, of course, be among the last to appear, materializing only in time to wave with a broad smile and shake but few hands before giving the bride away while simultaneously taking his stand beside the groom as M2's best man. This was another first in matrimonial procedure and promised to set a standard for wedding ceremonies, perhaps even for royal families with traditions centuries old.

  All of the other tables were round, in order that no one person be in a dominant place, and the chairs, ostensibly, were democratically equal. And each of the remaining three hundred and forty-four round tables outside the North Wing featured an important public figure and a multimillionaire, or a woman married to one. The multimillionaires were not entirely happy, for all would have preferred the President himself, or failing that, one of the eight billionaires invited, who well understood their metaphorical dimensions as deities, trophies, inspirations, and ornaments. A few of the billionaires had bought hotels in Manhattan that same week merely to possess facilities for private parties for friends.

  The cardinal had requested the President or, if not him, the governor and the mayor, one owner of a major metropolitan newspaper, at least two of the eight billionaires, and one Nobel physicist to convert. Yossarian gave him Dennis Teemer instead, to teach him the facts of biological life, one newspaper publisher, and one dejected multimillionaire who had hoped for tete-a-tete access to a billionaire. He set them at a table with a good view of the bride on the Ninth Avenue side of the South Wing, not far from the police station and the table with Larry McBride and his new wife, and Michael Yossarian and his old girlfriend Marlene, between the Sport Spot Lingerie Shop outside the doors of the police station and Jo-Ann's Nut House. McMahon was there too, emerging from his cell to honor McBride and his new missus, on duty in his police captain's dress uniform instead of a dinner jacket.

  McBride was in line for a presidential commendation for his masterful achievement in finding space for the three hundred and fifty-one tables for the thirty-five hundred closest friends of Regina and Milo Minderbinder and Olivia and Christopher Maxon, who had no close friends and did not want any, and for the Temple of Dendur and other monumental structures in the five refulgent halls, along with sites for the bandstands and dance floors. He was responsible as well for the coordination of activities by others in disciplines with which he had no previous experience.

  Of crucial priority in the planning was the need for a clear passage for the bridal procession to move from the Ninth Avenue side of the South Wing almost all the way through to the Eighth Avenue side as far as the Walgreen's drugstore, around which corner the party then turned uptown through exits to cross Forty-first Street beneath an overhead shelter and advance into the chapel and dining hall in the North Wing to the altar set up just inside the Temple of Dendur. The Temple of Dendur, the Blumenthal Patio, the Engelhard Court, and the Great Hall of the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art, the four hallowed areas of the museum consecrated to parties and other social and promotional events, had all been relocated to the bus terminal for the evening and allocated in a way that afforded all guests their own celebrated monument with a history of glorious catering.

  As laid out by McBride, all guests could obtain at least a partial view of the bride and her retinue as they rose to the top of the escalators from the Subway Level on the Ninth Avenue side of the terminal and made their digni
fied way toward Eighth Avenue and eventually into the North Wing. This route of some duration allowed for an unusual program of music to aggrandize the occasion as unique. Yossarian listened with amazement to the first familiar notes.

  The opening piece for the matrimonial celebration was the prelude to the opera Die Meistersinger.

  And it was to the first, blaring, jubilant chords of this that Yossarian watched the bride come levitating up into sight, as though over a horizon, at the head of an escalator. The music, which was of adequate span for the long walk, was handclapping perfect in bouncy spirit. The flower girls and ring bearers were especially stimulated by the quickening and changing tempos and came into their own when the "Dance of the Apprentices" was added for the two minutes and six seconds needed for the last in the bridal party to turn into the passageway to the side exit to the North Wing. There, after the bride had completed her turn outside and crossed the street into the North Wing, the music changed to a ceremonious orchestral rendition of the "Prize Song" from that same Wagnerian opera, which ended on a soft, palpitating note when the bride was in the chapel and came at last to a stop where the cardinal, a Reform rabbi, and six other prelates from different faiths stood waiting with the groom and their primary attendants. Here, while the recitations were made, the music diminished to underlying refrains of the Liebesnacht duet from Tristan, while the cardinal tried to ignore that the music was both heavenly and carnal, and the rabbi tried to forget that it was composed by Wagner. In that part of the ceremony, the lucky couple was pronounced man and wife nine times, by the eight clergymen and Noodles Cook, who was still standing in for the overdue President. When they turned from the altar to kiss chastely before moving to the dance floor, the soaring melodies chosen, Hacker announced before they began, were those of the closing measures of Gotterdammerung, with their soulful, soaring strains of the "Redemption Through Love" theme.

  "Do you know it?" asked Hacker.

  "I know it," said Yossarian, in surprised appreciation, and was tempted to whistle along with the peaceful violins and somnolent brass now rising and softening into so holy a conclusion. "I was about to suggest it."

  "Was he really?" the kid asked Gaffney, and with a button put a pause to the activities.

  "No, I wasn't," recanted Yossarian before Gaffney could answer. "But I think it's perfect. It's peaceful, sweet, melodic, erotic, and certainly climactic and final." He gave no voice to his shifty and vindictive presentiment that he was seeing on the video monitors another Gotterdammerung, that it was almost closing time for all of the people he was watching in oblivious revelry on the video screens, including himself and Frances Beach as he watched himself dance with her, maybe for Melissa too and McBride and his new wife, for the bride and M2. "Your guests will love it, Olivia. They'll walk out to the dance floor humming that Gotterdammerung tune."

  "No, sir," corrected smugly the patronizing young man. "No, sirree. Because we come up with something better as they break away. Wait till you hear it."

  Gaffney nodded. "I think you said you already have."

  "It's a children's chorus," said the computer technician. "As the Wagner fades, softly underneath it and rising steadily we introduce a chorus of children that most people have never heard. It's angelic. And just when it's most moving, we blast in comedy, a chorus of musical laughter, to set the new mood we want for the rest of the evening. It's a chorus of laughing men that overpowers and drowns out the kids, and we're off. They're both by a German composer named Adrian Leverkuhn. Do you know him?"

  "I've heard of him," said Yossarian, wary, feeling strangely as though he were wobbling about in time again. "He's a character in a work of fiction," he added nastily.

  "I didn't know that," said the young man Hacker. "Then you know how great he was. Both these choruses are from his cantata called The Lamentations of Faust, but we don't have to tell people that."

  "Good," snapped Yossarian. "Because they're not. They're from his oratorio called Apocalypse."

  The computer whiz smiled up at Yossarian pityingly. "Mr. Gaffney?"

  "He's wrong, Hacker," Jerry Gaffney said, shrugging at Yossarian with a shade of courteous apology. "Yo-Yo, you keep making that mistake. It's not the Apocalypse. It's from his Lamentations of Faust."

  "God damn it, Gaffney, you're wrong again. And I ought to know. I've been thinking of writing a novel about that work for something like fifteen years."

  "How quaint, Yo-Yo. But not thinking seriously, and not a serious novel."

  "Cut the Yo-Yo, Gaffney. We're in an argument again. I did the research."

  "You were going to have Thomas Mann and Leverkuhn in scenes together, weren't you? And put that Gustav Aschenbach in with Leverkuhn as one of his contemporaries. You call that research?"

  "Who's Gustav Aschenbach?" said Hacker.

  "A dead man in Venice, Warren."

  "Gentlemen, I can settle it easily for both of you, right here on my computer. Hold on three ten-thousandths of a second. Ah-ha, come see. There, Mr. Yossarian, Lamentations of Faust. You are mistaken."

  "Your computer is wrong."

  "Yo-Yo," said Gaffney, "this is a model. It can't be wrong. Go ahead with the wedding. Let them see how it went."

  On the largest screens the sun turned black, the moon turned the color of blood, and the ships in the rivers and the harbor were overturned.

  "Warren, stop kidding." Gaffney was displeased.

  "It's not me, Jerry. I swear. I keep deleting that. And it keeps coming back. Here we go."

  The Leverkuhn music, Yossarian saw, went over well. As the dying harmonies ending Gotterdammerung neared conclusion, a tender children's chorus Yossarian could not remember having heard before came stealing in ethereally, at first a breath, a hint, then rose gradually into an essence of its own, into a celestial premonition of pathetic heartbreak. And next, when the sweet, painful, and saddening foreshadowing was almost unbearable, there smashed in, with no warning, the shattering, unfamiliar, toneless scales of unrelenting masculine voices in crashing choirs of ruthless laughter, of laughter, laughter, laughter, and this produced in the listeners a reaction of amazed relief and tremendous, mounting jollity. The audience quickly joined in with laughter of its own to the barbaric cacophonous ensemble of rollicking jubilation that rebounded from speakers everywhere, and the festal mood for the gala evening was ready to commence gleefully, with food, and drink, and music, and with more ingenious displays and aesthetic delicacies.

  Yossarian was there and laughing too, he saw with a shock. He frowned at himself in reproach, while Olivia Maxon, at his side there in the Communications Control Center of the terminal, saw herself laughing with him in the chapel of the North Wing and said it was divine. Yossarian now looked contrite in both places. He was scowling, in this place and that place, in peevish detachment. Staring into this future, Yossarian was mesmerized to find himself in white tie and tails: he had never in his life worn white tie and tails, the costume prescribed for all males in that elite group of insiders in the North Wing. Soon he was dancing a restrained two-step with Frances Beach, then in succession with Melissa, the bride, and Olivia. What displeased Yossarian often about himself, he remembered now, seeing these pictures of himself looking silent, acquiescent, and accommodating at that wedding awaiting him, was that he did not truly dislike Milo Minderbinder and never had, that he thought Christopher Maxon congenial and unselfish, and found Olivia Maxon, though unoriginal and unchanging, grating only when expressing strong opinions. He had an abstract belief that he ought to be ashamed, and another abstract idea he should be more ashamed he was not.

  He was seated with Melissa and Frances Beach at a table close enough to communicate with the Minderbinders and Maxons, near Noodles Cook and the First Lady, awaiting the arrival of the President. The chair reserved for Noodles at the table adjacent to Yossarian's was vacant. Angela, who wanted desperately to come, was not there, because Frances Beach would not allow her to be.

  "I don't like myself for feeling that wa
y," Frances confessed to him. "I just can't help it. God knows, I did that same thing myself, more than once. I did it with Patrick too."

  Dancing with Frances, for whom he preserved that special shared friendship some might call love, he felt only bone, rib cage, elbow, and shoulder blade, no fleshly thrill, and was uncomfortable holding her. Dancing equally inexpertly with pregnant Melissa, whose plight, stubbornness, and irresolution were agitating him at present into an almost ceaseless fury, he was aroused by the first contact with her belly in her sea-green gown and lusting to lead her away into a bedroom once more. Yossarian peered now at that belly to ascertain if the plumpness was fuller or whether the corrective measures restoring her to normal had already been taken. Gaffney regarded him with humor, as though again reading his mind. Frances Beach at the wedding spied his difference in response and ruminated dolefully on her sad facts of life.