Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "We're unhappy with ourselves when we're young, and unhappy with ourselves when we're old, and those of us who refuse to be are abominably overbearing."

  "That's pretty good dialogue you give her," Yossarian challenged Hacker, with belligerence.

  "I like that too. I got it from Mr. Gaffney here. It sounds pretty real."

  "It should sound real." Yossarian glowered at Gaffney. "She and I already had that conversation."

  "I know," said Gaffney.

  "I thought so, you fuck," Yossarian said without anger. "Excuse me, Olivia. We say things like that. Gaffney, you still keep monitoring me. Why?"

  "I can't help doing it, Yossarian. It's my business, you know. I don't make information. I just collect it. It's not really my fault that I seem to know everything."

  "What's going to happen to Patrick Beach? He isn't getting better."

  "Oh, dear," said Olivia, shuddering.

  "I'd say," answered Gaffney, "he's going to die."

  "Before my wedding?"

  "After, Mrs. Maxon. But, Yo-Yo, I would say that about you also. I would say that about everyone."

  "About yourself too?"

  "Sure. Why not?"

  "You aren't God?"

  "I'm in real estate. Isn't God dead? Do I look dead? By the way, Yossarian, I've been thinking of writing a book too."

  "About real estate?"

  "No, a novel. Maybe you can help. It begins on the sixth day of creation. I'll tell you about it later."

  "I'm busy later."

  "You'll have time. You're not meeting your fiancee until two."

  "Are you getting married again?" Olivia looked pleased.

  "No," said Yossarian. "And I have no fiancee."

  "Yes, he is," answered Gaffney.

  "Don't listen to him."

  "He doesn't know yet what he's doing. But I do. On with this wedding, Warren."

  "He still hasn't come," reported Hacker, puzzled, "and no one knows why."

  Thus far there had been no hitch, except for the absence of the President.

  McBride, dutifully, tirelessly, had seen to parking space for the automobiles and coordinated their comings with the arrivals and departures of the commercial buses, routing many in both groups to the ramps and gates on the third and fourth floors. The one thousand and eighty parking places in the garages overhead provided room for most of the nearly seventeen hundred and seventy-five limousines expected. Most were black and the rest were pearl gray. Other cars were diverted to the parking lot across the avenue, where the sidewalk was lined with shish kebob and peanut vendors and clusters of shoeshine stands with convivial old black and brown men who sometimes spent the balmy nights sleeping at their stands beneath beach umbrellas. They made use of the basins and toilets of the terminal, ignoring the enduring artwork of Michael Yossarian explicitly banning "Smoking, Loitering, Shaving, Bathing, Laundering, Begging, Soliciting," oral sex, and copulation. The shabby street scenes were amusing to many crossing the avenue to enter beneath the block-long metal-and-smoked-glass canopy, who assumed they had been staged expressly for them.

  Photographers covered every access on all streets of the landmark, as though the structure were under siege, and journalists had come from foreign countries. A total of seventy-two hundred and three press passes had been issued to accredited newsmen. This was a record for an American wedding. Forty-six owners of foreign publications had come as guests.

  Invitations to the gala occasion had been delivered in envelopes that were stiff and square, for they were on platinum, and only Sammy Singer on the primary list of thirty-five hundred invited declined to come, courteously pleading prior commitment to a trip to Australia. Yossarian thought better of Sam Singer than ever before. The secret agents Raul and carrot-topped Bob and their wives were on hand as guards as well as guests. Yossarian had exiled them deliberately to distant tables far apart from each other; now he saw with indignant surprise at the wedding ahead taking place just then that both were nevertheless seated right there with him at his own table in the inner sanctum of the North Wing, close enough to keep watch while taking in the epic spectacle of which they themselves were a part, and that Jerry Gaffney, who'd not been invited, was there with his wife at his table too! Someone somewhere had countermanded orders without letting him know.

  As expected, the limousine crush began to form earlier than expected. By 6:00 P.M. many arrived who did not wish to waste an opportunity to be photographed before the thicker crush of people more important began. And many of those coming soonest, the First Lady among them, were eager to be there to ogle everything.

  It was a feast for fashion editors.

  Women were aided beforehand by a proclamation from Olivia Maxon that "no dress would be too dressy." They were grateful as well for a tip sheet from leading fashion stylists of trends in their forthcoming collections. The result was a glorious extravaganza of up-to-the-minute dress designing recaptured on camera with exceptional brilliance, in which the ladies took part confidently as both spectators and spectacles. While numerous tastes in fashion were displayed by the nearly two thousand women there, none of the women were out of style.

  They wore everything from cocktail dresses to ball gowns, arriving in a blissful and iridescent shimmering of unlined linen with gold pinstripes and with fringes of Indian beadwork, in palettes that were pale, ranging in the main from ivory to peach and sea green. Leopard spots were a favorite pattern in chiffon skirts, or in organdy dresses with fringed hems, and on silk jackets. There were women in long evening dresses who were thrilled to see many other women there in long evening dresses, especially in dresses with fragile embroidery on crisp, pale silks. Short skirts were of prismatic chiffon too. Jackets were in pink, orange, and chartreuse satin decorated with rhinestones instead of nailheads, while sweeping black point d' esprit overskirts showed the knees in front and dripped to the floor in back, and those bold enough to have guessed right were especially proud of their sexy matte jersey evening clothes.

  After champagne, caviar, and cocktails, and well before the bride and M2 had appeared, the lights in all wings of the bus terminal were lowered sacramentally and everyone took a seat around one of the five stages closest at hand to listen to a gifted violinist the age of a young Midori and four clones play Paganini caprices in each of the places. It was not possible to tell the original from the clones, and no prizes were awarded for correct guesses. Christopher and Olivia Maxon could be seen in the flesh and also larger than life on the closed-circuit television screens as huge as those in a cinema house. They were in the front row on the far right on the main floor of the North Wing, and all guests there and elsewhere suddenly noticed that a single spotlight seemed to have been positioned to shine directly down upon Olivia, who sat with her hands clasped together and a look of poised rapture on her illustrious face. As those in the Communications Control Center could see on the screens flashing to newsstands, she was already being described in a current future issue of U.S. News & World Report as "the queen of nouvelle society." And Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine would write, as they saw displayed at the newsstands inside the terminal kept open just for them, that "Olivia Maxon is a princess in the new social order, and the bus terminal is her palace."

  The fantasy quintessence of the wedding joining two billionaire families was accentuated by a candlelight ceremony in stylish white-on-white, with all the dresses of the dozens of women and little girls in the bridal party designed by Arnold Scaasi. The bride herself wore an off-white taffeta dress, delicately embroidered in gold, with a twenty-seven-foot train. Her tulle veil was held in place by a diamond-and-pearl tiara. Her maid of honor was a former Miss Universe she had not met before. She had twenty auburn-haired and forty flaxen-haired attendants taller and more stunning than herself in her entourage of bridesmaids, and all were dressed in off-white moire shot with gold. One hundred and twenty children under twelve recruited from friends and members of both families were done up as flower girls and ring bearers. The bridegr
oom's mother, Regina Minderbinder, was nervous in designer beige, while Olivia Maxon, in peach satin with overlapping ruffles beaded with tens of thousands of seed pearls, looked simply stunning with her huge, dark eyes and retrousse nose, and in the glistening cabochon emeralds that adorned her white throat.

  The bridal congregation assembled in privacy below in the Greyhound Bus Company package express area on the subway level. There, the silent girl and her complete retinue, which consisted of her Miss Universe, sixty gorgeous bridesmaids, and one hundred and twenty flower girls and ring bearers, were bathed, groomed, and otherwise made ready for the grand event by personal couturiers and makeup artists. On time, they took their places in very long lines at the base of the matched escalators and, on musical cue timed to a fraction of a second, stepped aboard the rising staircase to be borne upward into the expectant assembly awaiting them. An exultant, heartwarming fanfare of imperious Wagnerian chords gave notice of their ascent onto the main floor of the South Wing, and the bride, on the arm of her stepuncle, Christopher Maxon, emerged and stepped forward to a ceremonious tribute of respectful applause from those seeing them first from the tables outside the police station near the Sport Spot Lingerie Shop and Jo-Ann's Nut House.

  To the prelude to Die Meistersinger and the "Dance of the Apprentices," the bride and Christopher Maxon, to everyone's tremendous relief, led the one hundred and eighty-one others faultlessly down the center of the South Wing to the Walgreen's drugstore and the turn toward the exit to the street outside, on which motor and pedestrian traffic had been detoured--even the buses were rerouted--and then, to a sentimental orchestral rendition of the "Prize Song," into the North Wing and finally to the chapel and the Temple of Dendur.

  The rites of ceremony discharged, and the Leverkuhn interlude of children's lament and heinous laughter from the Apocalypse over--it was the Apocalypse, Gaffney's absurd insistence to the contrary--the multiple areas transformed into banquet halls filled gently with music. Much sedate dancing of a bygone day ensued while people found their places and prepared for their first dinner--the second dinner was planned as a dumbfounding surprise! The thirty-five hundred close friends of the Minderbinders and the Maxons twirled and dipped to ballads between courses of poached salmon with champagne aspic, trio of veal, lamb, and chicken, orzo with porcini, and spring vegetables. The wines for this main meal were Cordon Charlemagne Latour 1986 and Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne 1978.

  Sets of music were timed to twenty minutes. In the ten-minute breaks between, there was the lively performance of the musicians in each group transferring to a different bandstand in the five different locations to play for a different audience. They moved singly up and down the escalators without missing a beat noticed by anyone but themselves. The waiters riding up and down behind them carrying trays kept time with their hips and their shoulders, and the busboys went flitting about like spirits of the wind to clear the tables noiselessly and rush the remains outside to the mammoth garbage trucks ready on the ramps, which tore away when fully loaded from their reserved parking spaces between the refrigerator vehicles discharging new edible treats at top speed. A number of old-timers in high fettle took to following the musicians up and down the escalators in a dance of their own, singing a tune of their own they called "The Hully-Gully." Soon all the bands were playing "The Hully-Gully" every time they rotated. Satellite video reruns of this part of the affair accelerated the tempos to simulate the effect in silent movies of people moving in jerky haste, and Milo Minderbinder, in tails, with his mustache and pained smile, looked to many who did not know him like Charlie Chaplin.

  Immediately following the poached salmon with champagne aspic, trio of veal, lamb, and chicken, orzo with porcini, and spring vegetables, before the coffee and any dessert, there came to each table three frozen molds of mango-orange sorbet, each in the shape of the big sphinx in Egypt, except that one had the face of Milo Minderbinder and the other wore the face of Christopher Maxon, even to the unlit cigar. The third Egyptian sphinx--everyone jumped erroneously to the guess that it would be the President--wore the unknown face of a man later identified as someone named Mortimer Sackler. Not many knew who Mortimer Sackler was anymore, and this ruse was received as another of the zesty jokes of the evening. With no warning, the voice of a woman on the public-address system announced:

  "Due to congestion on Route 3, all bus departures and arrivals are subject to delay."

  The gathering roared with laughter and clapped again.

  Hardly had the reveling crowds recovered from their titillation over this one when there commenced to their shocked delight the serving of the first course of another full meal: a second dinner, or surprise supper. This one consisted of lobster, followed by pheasant bouillon, followed by quail, followed by poached pear with spun sugar. And this meal, said the rousing voice of an anonymous, hooraying master of ceremonies on the speaker system, was "on the house." That is, it was provided at no cost to the Maxons by the parents of the groom, Regina and Milo Minderbinder, to express their love for their new daughter-in-law, their undying friendship for her stepuncle and stepaunt, Christopher and Olivia Maxon, and their deep gratitude to every single person present who had taken the trouble to come. After the poached pear and spun sugar, when the time was at hand for Milo's brief speech that had not yet been written for him at the time those in the Communications Control Center watched him deliver it, he recited, stiffly, this tribute to his wife:

  "I have a wonderful woman and we're very much in love. I've never done this into a microphone before, but there is only one way to say it. Yahoo."

  He repeated this three more times for three more sets of video cameras and microphones and had difficulty each time with the word Yahoo. Christopher Maxon, his round face wreathed into a smile, was more to the point, orating:

  "My mother always said, 'Don't tell people you love them, show them.' And this is my way of saying 'I love you' to my wife, Olivia, who tonight has done so much for the economy. Anyone who is talking about a recession--well, forget it."

  At a distant table in the South Wing outside, the mayor of New York City rose to a smattering of applause to announce that Olivia and Christopher Maxon had just donated ten million dollars to the bus terminal to construct kitchen facilities for use for future events, and another ten million dollars to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their generous cooperation in supplying for the occasion the Temple of Dendur, the Blumenthal Patio, the Engelhard Court, and the Great Hall.

  Olivia Maxon sprang up to announce: "No wonder--after this! I've never seen my husband so excited about making a gift to any institution."

  Then came the wedding cake, on which legions of master bakers and apprentices had toiled for months at the Cup Cake Cafe just down the block on Ninth Avenue at Thirty-ninth Street. The earlier applause was as nothing compared to the spontaneous effusion of shrieking veneration when the wedding cake was wheeled in on a hoist, lowered, and unveiled to an applauding audience in the large bandstand area in the South Wing in front of Au Bon Pain, where a bank had been formerly and the ceiling was high. The cake was a wondrous monument of whipped cream, spun sugar, innumerable icings, and airy platforms of layers of weightless, buttery angel food with ice cream and liqueur-flavored chocolate fillings on a scale no one had witnessed before. The wedding cake stood forty-four feet high, weighed fifteen hundred pounds, and had cost one million, one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars.

  Everyone thought it a pity it could not be preserved in the Metropolitan Museum.

  The bride herself could not cut this cake, for she was not tall enough.

  In a spectacle befitting the occasion, the cake was sliced from the top down by teams of gymnasts and trapeze artists in white tights with pink bodices from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, then at Madison Square Garden just several blocks downtown. It was served on thirty-five hundred plates, each decorated with a spun-sugar sprig of sweet peas. The china was Spode, and the pieces of Spode were thrown out with the
garbage to save time and comply with the tight schedule of catering trucks and commercial buses speeding in and out without collision. There was more than enough cake for the thirty-five hundred guests, and the eight hundred pounds left over were carved into blocks and sped to the shelters for the evacuated reprobates to gorge on before the whipped cream and the ice cream fillings could melt and putrefy.

  Limousines and delivery and refuse trucks were making use of half the terminal's four hundred and sixty-five numbered gates, synchronizing precisely with the arrival and departure schedules of the forty bus companies with their two thousand daily trips and two hundred thousand daily passengers. Travelers going out were allowed to ride free as an inducement to leave fast. Passengers coming in were steered directly away to their sidewalks, subways, taxis, and local buses, and they also seemed to be calculated particles of movement in a clever dumb show.

  While it was predictable that the President would delay arriving to avoid exchanging pleasantries with all of the thirty-five hundred other guests, it was not expected that he would be so late as to miss the nuptial ceremony itself and the start and finish of the two meals. Unprepared and unrehearsed, Noodles Cook, reluctantly, stood up for the groom as best man and also took the bride from Christopher Maxon to give to M2. He got it done but did not look presidential.

  Yossarian, in the Communications Control Center, could see himself lucidly in white tie and tails watching Noodles Cook glancing more and more nervously up toward him at his table and then down at his wristwatch. Yossarian, in both places simultaneously at different hours on different days, began to reel in both places with bewilderment too. In both locations he could overhear the First Lady complaining to Noodles Cook that it was often hard to know what was in the President's mind. At last he understood Noodles and rose alone.

  In the main ticketing area of the South Wing was the work of art by the famed sculptor George Segal of three life-sized human figures symbolizing bus passengers, two men and one woman, walking in toward a doorframe. Yossarian knew that in dead of night the three statues had been replaced by three armed Secret Service agents noted for tenacity and cold-blooded passivity, impersonating the statues. They carried concealed walkie-talkies and without moving had stood listening all day for intelligence from Washington as to the whereabouts and estimated time of arrival of the most honored guest.