Closing Time

  It took him less than a week, I think, before those inauguration balls were even half over, and I don't think Sammy has voted again either since maybe Lyndon Johnson.

  I don't spend much time keeping track of the world and can't see that it would change anything if I did. I mind my own business. What's important I hear about. What I learned I remembered, and it turned out to be true. It didn't mean a thing, me being in the army, it didn't count at all. It would have happened the same way without me--the ashes, the smoke, the dead, the outcome. I had nothing to do with Hitler and nothing to do with the state of Israel. I don't want the blame and I don't want the credit. The only place I've counted is at home, with Claire and the kids. Somewhere for whoever wants them later on, maybe the grandchildren, I've put away my Bronze Star, my combat infantryman's badge, my unit citation, the sergeant's stripes I had when I got out of the army, and the shoulder patch with the red number 1 of the First Division, the Big Red 1, which went through hell before I joined them and went through more hell after I was gone. We've got four grandchildren now. I love everyone in my family and feel I would demolish, maybe really kill, anyone who threatened to hurt any one of them.

  "You would break his back?" Sammy said this with a smile the last time he visited.

  "I will break his back." I smiled too. "Even now."

  Even now.

  When it starts popping up again in one spot, the radiation sharpshooters at the hospital can take aim and burn away what they like to call another new growth and I know is another tumor. If it pops up again in what they call the diaphragm and I call the belly, I am nauseous before and nauseous afterward, with that nausea I can't stand the thought of that I really think might finally put me away someday if I have to keep living with it. Unless I'm with Sammy, and then I am "nauseated," because he likes to play at what he calls a pedagogue and I call a smartass.

  "Lew, tell me," he asked. He laughed softly. "How many backs have you broken in your lifetime?"

  "Counting that guy on the car who grabbed that purse?"

  "That wasn't a fight, Lew. And you didn't break his back. How many?"

  I thought a minute. "None. I never had to. Saying I would was always enough."

  "How many fights have you had?"

  "In my life?" I thought hard again. "Only one, Sammy," I remembered, and this time I laughed. "With you. Remember that time you tried to teach me how to box?"

  BOOK

  EIGHT

  22

  Rhine Journey: Melissa

  Like the hero Siegfried in Gotterdammerung, he supposed, Yossarian himself began what he was later to look back on as his own Rhine Journey with a rapid clutch of daylight lovemaking: Siegfried at dawn in his mountain aerie, Yossarian around noon in his M & M office in Rockefeller Center. But he ended his pleasurably in the hospital four weeks later with another clean bill of health after his aura and hallucinatory TIA attack, and with five hundred thousand dollars and the sale of a shoe.

  Siegfried had Brunnhilde, now mortal, and the rocky haunt they shared.

  Yossarian had his nurse, Melissa MacIntosh, most human also, and a desktop, the carpeted floor, the leather armchair, and the broader windowsill of olden times in his office in the newly renamed M & M Building, formerly the old Time-Life Building, with a pane of glass looking down on the rink of ice on which Sammy and Glenda had gone skating more times than Sammy could remember now, and who subsequently had become man and wife, until death did them part.

  Yossarian, nodding as he groped, did indeed agree that the door to the office was not locked, when he knew that it was, and that somebody might indeed walk in on them while they were thus lustfully teamed, when he knew that no one would or could. He was titillated by her apprehension; her tremors, doubts, and indecisions electrified him fiendishly with mounting passion and affection. Melissa was flustered in her ladylike terror of being come upon uncovered in those disarraying exertions of vigorous sexual informalities and, blushing, wished him, for a change, to finish fast; but she laughed when he did and disclosed the ruse as she was checking his baggage for his medicines and preparing to ride with him to the airport before his flight to Kenosha at the start of his journey. Along with basic toilet articles, he wanted Valium for insomnia, Tylenol or Advil for back pain, Maalox for his hiatus hernia. Much to his wonder, there were direct jumbo-jet flights now to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

  The phone rang as he zipped closed his carry-on bag.

  "Gaffney, what do you want?"

  "Aren't you going to congratulate me?" Gaffney spoke merrily, ignoring Yossarian's evident tone of rancor.

  "Have you been listening in again?" asked Yossarian, looking furtively at Melissa.

  "To what?" asked Gaffney.

  "Why'd you call?"

  "You just won't give me credit, will you, John?"

  "For what? I got a bill from you finally. You didn't charge much."

  "I haven't done much. Besides, I'm grateful for your music. You don't know happy I am to play back the tapes we record. I love the Bruckner symphonies at this darkening time of year, and the Boris Godunov."

  "Would you like the Ring?"

  "Mainly the Siegfried. I don't hear that one often."

  "I'll let you know when I schedule the Siegfried," said Yossarian, acidly.

  "Yo-Yo, I'll be so obliged. But that's not what I'm talking about."

  "Mr. Gaffney, said Yossarian, and paused to allow his point to sink in. "What are you talking about?"

  "We're back to Mr. Gaffney, are we, John?"

  "We never passed John, Jerry. What do you want?"

  "Praise," answered Gaffney. "Everybody likes to be appreciated when he's done something well. Even Senor Gaffney."

  "Praise for what, Senor Gaffney?"

  Gaffney laughed. Melissa, reposing upon the arm of the leather sofa, was rasping away at her fingernails with an emery board. Yossarian gave her a menacing scowl.

  "For my gifts," Gaffney was saying. "I predicted you'd be going to Wisconsin to see Mrs. Tappman. Didn't I say you'd be changing in Chicago, for your trip to Washington to Milo and Wintergreen? You didn't ask me how I knew."

  "Am I going to Washington?" Yossarian was amazed.

  "You'll be getting Milo's fax. M2 will phone to the airport to remind you. There, that's the fax coming in now, isn't it? I'm on target again."

  "You have been listening, haven't you, you bastard?"

  "To what?"

  "And maybe watching too. And why would M2 be phoning me when he's right down the hall?"

  "He's back at the PABT building with your son Michael, trying to decide if he's willing to be married there."

  "To the Maxon girl?"

  "He'll have to say yes. I have another good joke that might amuse you, John."

  "I'll miss my plane."

  "You've plenty of time. There'll be a delay in departure of almost one hour."

  Yossarian burst out with a laugh. "Gaffney, you're finally mistaken," he crowed. "I had my secretary call. It's leaving on schedule."

  Gaffney laughed too. "Yo-Yo, you have no secretary, and the airline was lying. It will be late taking off by fifty-five minutes. It was your nurse you had call."

  "I have no nurse."

  "That warms my heart. Please tell Miss MacIntosh the kidney is working again. She will be happy to hear that."

  "What kidney?"

  "Oh, Yossarian, shame. You don't always listen when she telephones. The kidney of the Belgian patient. And as long as you're going to Washington, why don't you invite Melissa--"

  "Melissa, Mr. Gaffney?"

  "Miss MacIntosh, Mr. Yossarian. But why don't you invite her to join you there? I bet she'll say she'd really love to go. She's probably never been. She can go to the National Gallery when you're busy with Milo and Noodles Cook, and to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution."

  Yossarian covered the telephone. "Melissa, I'm going to stop in Washington on the way back. How about taking time off to meet me there?"

&
nbsp; "I'd really love to go," Melissa replied. "I've never been. I can go to the National Gallery when you're busy, and to that aeronautical museum of the Smithsonian Institution."

  "What did she say?" asked Jerry Gaffney.

  Yossarian replied respectfully. "I think you know what she said. You really are a man of mystery, aren't you? I haven't figured you out yet."

  "I've answered your questions."

  "I must think of new ones. When can we meet?"

  "Don't you remember? In Chicago, when your connecting flight is delayed."

  "It will be delayed?"

  "For more than an hour. By unpredictable blizzards in Iowa and Kansas."

  "You predict them already?"

  "I hear things and see things, John. It's how I earn my living. May I try out my joke now?"

  "I'll bet you do. And you have been listening, haven't you? Maybe watching too."

  "Listening to what?"

  "You think I'm simpleminded, Gaffney? Would you like to hear my joke? Jerry, go fuck yourself."

  "That's not a bad one, Yo-Yo," said Gaffney, sociably, "although I've heard it before."

  The opera Siegfried brought to mind, Yossarian was recalling in the pearl-gray limousine, that the heldentenor in that one, after a mere touch to his lips of the blood of the slain dragon, illustriously began to understand the language of birds. They told him to take the gold, kill the dwarf, and dash to the mountain through the circle of fire to find Brunnhilde lying there in charmed sleep, this message in bird notes to a youth who had never laid eyes on a woman before and needed more than one look at the buxom Brunnhilde to make the startling discovery that this was not a man!

  Siegfried had his birds, but Yossarian had his Gaffney, who could report, when Yossarian phoned him from the car, that the chaplain was passing tritium in his flatulence.

  Nurse Melissa MacIntosh had not heard of an intestinal condition like that one before but promised to ask a number of gastro-enterologists she was friendly with.

  Yossarian was not certain he wanted her to.

  He was wounded and abashed by the question that leaped to mind, and too shamed to voice it: to ask if she'd dated these doctors and slept with them too, even with only four or five. It told him again, to his inconceivable delectation, that he indeed thought himself in love. Such pangs of jealousy for him were extremely few. Even far back in his torrid affair with Frances Beach, though almost monogamous himself, he had indifferently assumed that she, in the vernacular of the age, was at that time also "boffing" others who were potentially supportive of her aspirations as actress. Now he reveled like an epicure in the euphoria of impressions of love that were again rejuvenating him. He was not embarrassed or afraid, except that Michael or the other children might find out, while it was still in the outlandish character of a rapture.

  In the car she held his hand, pressed his thigh, ran fingers through the curls at the back of his head.

  Whereas Siegfried from the start was in the evil hands of a wicked dwarf greedy for dragon's gold and drooling to liquidate him as soon as he had collared it.

  Melissa was preferable.

  She and her roommate, Angela Moore, or Moorecock, as he now called her, disapproved righteously of married men in quest of secret girlfriends, except for the married men who had quested specifically for them, and Yossarian was glad his newest divorce was final. He thought best not to divulge co her that, even with ravishing women, the seduction over, there was only the infatuation and sex, and that often in men of his years, caprice and fetishism were more arousing than Spanish fly. He was already scheming to take the last shuttle plane back with her from Washington and in the semidarkness of the interior attempt, while she sat near the window, to succeed in removing her underpants in the fifty or so minutes they had. Unless, of course, she wore jeans.

  Unlike Angela, she herself never verbally tendered evidence of the versatile range of amatory experiences her roommate and best friend had bawdily claimed for them both. Her vocabulary tended toward the pristine. But she seemed a stranger to nothing and evinced no need for guidance or definitions. In fact, she knew a trick or two he had not imagined. And she so stubbornly resisted conversing about her sexual history that he soon left off searching for it.

  "Who is Boris Godunov?" she asked in the car.

  "The opera I was listening to the other night when you came in from work and then had me turn it off because you wanted to hear the fucking television news."

  "When you get back," she next wanted to know, "can we listen to the Ring together?"

  Here again, he considered, they both enjoyed another large advantage over the Wagnerian prototypes.

  For good Brunnhilde had savored little delight once Siegfried set out on his mission of heroic deeds and had experienced only betrayal, misery, and jealous fury after he returned to seize and deliver her to another man. It did not once cross her mind while conspiring in his death that he might have been slipped a potion that caused him to forget who she was.

  Whereas Yossarian was making Melissa happy.

  This was a thing he had not been able to do for long with any other woman. He was hearing bird notes too.

  Melissa found him expert and benevolent when he concluded she could indeed give up her staff job and have more money and time as a private-duty nurse, if--and it was a big if--she was willing to forgo her paid vacations and an eventual pension. But for her future security she must make up her mind that she must soon marry a man, handsome or not, even a boor, a dolt, forget charm, who did have a pension plan and would have a retirement income to bequeath when he died. Melissa listened blissfully, as though he were caressing and celebrating her.

  "Do you have a pension plan?"

  "Forget about me. It must be someone else."

  She thought his brain immense.

  A simple discharged promise made shortly after they'd met in the hospital affecting outdated silver fillings in two upper teeth meant more than he would have guessed; they were exposed when she laughed; and he'd pledged to have them replaced by porcelain crowns if she kept her eyes out for oversights and he came out of the hospital alive. And this, when done, went farther with her than all the long-stemmed red roses and lingerie from Saks Fifth Avenue, Victoria's Secret, and Frederick's of Hollywood, and suffused her with an exhilarated gratitude he had never witnessed before. Not even Frances Beach, who had so much from Patrick, knew how to feel grateful.

  John Yossarian lay awake some nights in a tremulous agitation that this woman with whom he was entertaining himself might already be somewhat in love with him. He was not that positive he wanted what he wished for.

  Since the shock in the shower, the course of this true love had run so smoothly as to beguile him into a presumption of the notional, fictitious, and surreal. On the memorable evening following his talk with Michael, in the movie house down from the lobby level of his apartment building, she showed no surprise when he put a hand on her shoulder to fondle her neck awhile, then another on the inside of her knee to see what good he could do for himself there. He was the one surprised when her resistance this time was perfunctory. With the coming of spring she wore no panty hose. Her jacket lay folded in her lap for tasteful concealment. When he moved upward to arrive at the silken touch of the panties and the feel of the lacework of curls underneath, he had come as far as he had aspired to and was content to stop. But she then said:

  "We don't have to do that here." She spoke with the solemnity of a surgeon rendering a verdict that was inevitable. "We can go upstairs to your apartment."

  He found he preferred to see the rest of the movie. "It's okay here. We can just keep watching."

  She glanced about at others. "I'm not comfortable here. I'll feel better upstairs."

  They never did find out how that movie ended.

  "You can't do it like that," she said in his apartment, when they had been there a very little while. "Don't you put something on?"

  "I've had a vasectomy. Don't you take the pill?"

>   "I've had my tubes tied. But what about AIDS?"

  "You can see my certificate of blood work. I have it framed on the wall."

  "Don't you want to see mine?"

  "I'll take my chances." He put a hand on her mouth. "For God sakes, Melissa, please stop talking so much."

  She bent up her legs and he pressed himself down between them, and after that they both knew what to do.

  Counting back late the next morning, when he had to believe they finally were through, he found himself convinced he had never in his life been more virile and prodigious, or more desirous, amorous, considerate, and romantic.

  It was wonderful, he whistled through his teeth while washing up after the last time, then switched in a syncopated, swinging beat to the foreplay and orgasmic love music from Tristan. It was more marvelous than anything in all his libidinous experience, and he knew in his heart that never, never, not once, would he ever want to have to go through anything like all that again! He presumed she understood that there would be a rather sheer falling off: he might not, in fact, find the wish, the will, the actual desire, and the elemental physical resources ever to want to make love to her again, or to any other woman!

  He recalled Mark Twain in one of his better writings employing the simile of the candlestick and the candleholder to emphasize that between men and women sexually it was not close to an equivalent competition. The candleholder was always there.

  And then he heard her on the telephone.

  "And that one made it five!" she was confiding exuberantly to Angela, her face flushed with prosperity. "No," she continued, after an impatient pause to listen. "But my knees sure hurt."

  He himself would have fixed the tally subjectively at five and three eighths, but he felt a bit better about the near future to hear that her bones were aching also.

  "He knows so much about everything," she went on. "He knows about interest rates, and books, and operas. Ange, I've never been happier."

  That one gave him pause, for he was not sure he wanted again the accountability of a woman who had never been happier. But the fillip to his vanity sure felt good.

  And then came the shock in the shower. When he turned it off he heard men murmuring in wily discussion outside the closed bathroom door. He heard a woman in the obvious cadence of assent. It was some kind of setup. He knotted the bath towel around his waist and moved out to confront whatever danger awaited. It was worse than he could have foreseen.