Closing Time (30 page)

I can't be positive, but I don't think I finally did get laid until I was already overseas. There, it was effortless, as one in a body of guys all doing the same things with youthful self-assurance and a general taste for rowdy good times, near bunches of local girls in the main city of Bastia close by who did not speak our language and then especially in Rome, where the women we met on the streets smiled to let us know what they were doing there and expected us to approach with solicitations and cash and cigarettes and chocolate bars and with careless gaiety and our flies already half open. We could not think of them as prostitutes or whores, only as streetwalkers. I can't be positive I'd not really done it before because of that incident with a sweet southern girl in the dance hall in West Palm Beach, Florida, where we'd been flown to check out the plane given us for the flight overseas and to calibrate the various instruments for faults and deviations.

I still don't know if that one counted or not. She was perky as could be, with very black hair and eyes almost lavender, an inch shorter than I, with dimples too, and very much dazzled by my sharp New York lindy hop routines, which she had never beheld and wanted to learn. Schroeder had not seen them either, or Lieutenant Kraft, who had requisitioned from the motor pool the jeep in which we had gone there. After a while we went outside for some air. I walked with my arm still around her waist and we drifted without talking about it to one of the darker areas of the parking lot. We passed couples embracing in different sheltered places. I gave her a helping hand up to a seat on the fender of a low sports car.

"Oh, no, Sammy honey, we are not going to do that thing tonight, not here, not now," she let me know very strictly, holding me off with her hands on my chest, and placed a quick friendly kiss on my nose.

I had eased myself in between her legs, close enough to keep kissing, and I had just slid my hands up under her dress along her thighs to the elastic band of her panties, with my thumbs rubbing on the insides. Until she spoke, that was almost as far as I hoped to get in that parking lot.

Staring into her eyes, I confessed with a smile, "I wouldn't even know how, I think. I've never done it before." We were leaving the following day for the hop to Puerto Rico, and I could risk being truthful.

She laughed at that one as though I were still making wisecracks. She could hardly believe that a sharpie like me was still a virgin.

"Oh, you poor boy," she commiserated with me mellifluously. "You've been greatly deprived, haven't you?"

"I taught you to dance," I hinted.

"Then I'll show you how we do it," she agreed. "But you mustn't put it in. You must promise me that. Now stand back a minute and let me twist myself a little. That's better. See? Oh, that's a very nice one you have, isn't it? And all ready to go like the best little boy, ain't he?"

"I was circumcised by a sculptor."

"Now, not so fast, Sammy honey.
And
not so quick. Not there, baby, not there. That's almost my belly button. You've got to learn to give me a chance to put my thing up there where you can get at it. That's why we call it putting out, honey, see? Now, I'm not going to do that for you tonight. Understood? Come back a little closer. That's more like it, right? But you mustn't put it in!
Don't
put it in!
You're putting it in
!"

This last was a cry that could have shaken the neighborhood. She bounced about under me wildly for about fifteen seconds or so, trying frantically to wriggle free, and all I was trying to do was raise my weight to help, and then the next thing I knew I was up and watching myself shoot in midair across the hood of the car. The stuff spurted a mile. Shoot is just the right word for a boy of nineteen or twenty. When a man is past sixty-eight, he comes. When he can. If he wants to.

I never thought I'd be this old, wake with stiff joints, and have nothing really to occupy myself with most days but my volunteer fund-raising work for cancer relief. I read late at night, as the poet said, and many mornings too, and go south in the winter with a lady friend with a house in Naples, Florida, to be near the ocean, and sometimes to a daughter who lives in Atlanta and sometimes to Houston, Texas, to visit my other daughter, who lives there with her husband. I play bridge and meet people that way. I have a small summer house in East Hampton, near the ocean, with one guest room with a private bathroom. Each time Lew goes back into treatment, I travel to see him at least once a week by bus from the bus terminal. It takes all day. I never thought I'd live longer than he would, and maybe I won't, because in the long remissions he's enjoyed in the more than twenty years I've known about his Hodgkin's disease, he is hardier than I am and does much more. This time, though, he seems thinner longer, downhearted, fatalistic, but Claire, who talks to Teemer, is more concerned about his mental attitude than his illness.

"I'm sick of feeling nauseous," he told me last time, when we were talking alone, as though getting ready to give up, and I could not tell if he was intending a joke.

So I tried one of my own. "The word is
nauseated
."

"What?"

"The correct word is
nauseated
, Lew. Not
nauseous
."

"Sammy, don't be a prick again. Not now."

He made me feel foolish.

It's not in the cards for me to live with my children when old. so I've put money away for my nursing home. I am waiting for my prostate cancer. I might marry again soon if my well-off widowed lady friend ever overcomes her pecuniary mistrusts and tells me we ought to. But for how long? Seven more years? I do miss family life.

Glenda decided the one outside the dance hall didn't count "Cheese!" she said with a laugh, shaking her head in disbelief whenever we recalled that experience. "You didn't know anything, did you?"

"No, I didn't."

"And don't try that come-help-me act now."

It was not always solely an act. Just about all the women I've ever been with seemed always to have had more experience than I did. There are two kinds of men, I think, and I belong to the second kind.

She herself had done it: first in college her first time away from home, with the man she married soon after graduation, who came down with cancer before she did, with his melanoma, and then married two more times, and even fathered another child. I didnw get my chance to go to college until after the war, and by then it was hardly much trouble getting a girl to go to bed, because I was less inexperienced, and most girls were doing it too.

Appleby made it to Ascension Island from Natal in Brazil navigating all the way by radio compass, with an auxiliary fue tank installed in the bomb bay for the extended journey. He had no, faith left in Yossarian's compass directions. Yossarian had none either and was offended only slightly. Appleby was the one with the growing grudge. The gamble in relying only on the radio compass, I found out from Yossarian, who'd learned at least that much, was that we approached the island eight hours away on a circular path instead of straight on and consumed more gasoline.

I learned more about war and capitalism and Western society in Marrakech in Morocco when I saw affluent Frenchmen drinking aperitifs on the terraces of luxurious hotels with their children and well-turned-out wives while they bided their time complacently until others invaded at Normandy and later in southern France to recapture their country and enable them to return and regain their estates. At the immense American replacement center in Constantine in Algeria, where we waited two weeks for our final assignment to a bomber group, I first learned a little bit specific about Sigmund Freud. There, I shared a tent with a medical assistant, older than I, also waiting assignment, who also wished to write short stories like William Saroyan and was also positive he could. Neither of us understood that there was no need for more than one Saroyan. Today we might conclude from the insignificance of Saroyan that there had not been great need for even one. We exchanged books we had finished.

"Do you ever have dreams your teeth are falling out?" he inquired of me slyly one day apropos of nothing else we were discussing. We had nothing to do while we sat around waiting. We could play softball or volleyball if we chose. We'd been cautioned against going into Constantine to roam about carelessly for whiskey or women, cautioned by the tale of a murdered GI who'd been found castrated, with his scrotum sewn into his mouth, which we thought probably apocryphal. We ate from mess kits.

His question hit home. I reacted with a start, as though discovering myself with some magical mind reader. "Yeah, I do dream that!" I admitted gullibly. "I had one last night."

He nodded smugly. "You jerked off yesterday," he alleged, with no hesitation.

"You're full of shit!" I answered right back heatedly, and wondered guiltily how he had found out.

"It's no crime," he defended himself reassuringly. "It isn't even a sin. Women do it too."

I put no trust in that last part then. I would be surprised, he guaranteed.

After landing at Pianosa we looked around with enchantment at the mountains and woods so near to the sea as we waited for the vehicles that would drive us with our bags to the orderly room of our squadron to report with our orders and receive our tent assignments. It was May and sunny, and in all ways beautiful. Not much was stirring. We were relieved to find ourselves safely there.

"Good job, Appleby." Yossarian commended him humbly speaking for all of us. "We would never have made it if you'd had to rely on me."

"I don't much care about that part," Appleby told him unforgivingly, in his moderate Texas accent. "You broke regulations and I said I would report you."

In the orderly room, where we were welcomed by the obliging first sergeant, Sergeant Towser, Appleby could hardly restrain himself until the formalities were completed. Then, through tightened lips in a face just about quivering with insulted fury, he asked, demanded, to see the squadron commander about the daily insubordination of a crew member who'd refused to take his Atabrine tablets and had disobeyed direct orders to do so. Towser repressed his surprise.

"Is he in?"

"Yes, sir. But you will have to wait a bit."

"And I would like to speak with him while all of us are still here together, so the others can bear witness."

"Yes, I understand. You can all sit down if you wish."

The commanding officer of the squadron was a major, and his surname was Major too, I saw, and was amused by the oddity.

"Yes, I think I will sit down," said Appleby. The rest of us kept silent. "Sergeant, about how long will I have to wait? I've still got a lot to get done today so that I can be fully prepared bright and early tomorrow morning to go into combat the minute they want me to."

To me it peemed that Towser could not believe his ears.

"Sir?"

"What's that, Sergeant?"

"What was your question?"

"I About how long will I have to wait before I can go in to see the major?"

"Just until he goes out to lunch," Sergeant Towser replied. "Then you can go right in."'

"But he won't be there then. Will he?"

"No, sir. Major Major won't be back in his office until after lunch."

"I see," Appleby decided uncertainly. "I think I'd better come back after lunch, then."

Schroeder and I stood mute, as we always did when the officers were settling things. Yossarian was listening with an appearance of incisive inquiry.

Appleby walked first out the door. He stopped abruptly as soon as I stepped out behind him and drew back against me with a gasp. My gaze followed his, and I was sure I saw a tall, dark officer wearing the gold leaf of a major come jumping out the window of the orderly room and go scooting out of sight around the corner. Appleby was squeezing his eyes closed and shaking his head as though in fear he was ill.

"Did you-" he began, and then Sergeant Towser was tapping him on the shoulder and telling him he could now go in to see Major Major if he still wished to do that, since Major Major had just gone out. Appleby regained his good military posture.

"Thank you, Sergeant," he replied very formally. "Will he be back soon?"

"He'll be back after lunch. Then you'll have to go right out and wait for him in front till he leaves for dinner. Major Major never sees anyone in his office when he's in his office."

"Sergeant, what did you just say?"

"I said that Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office."

Appleby stared at Sergeant Towser intently a few moments and then adopted a stern tone of rebuking formality. "Sergeant," he said, and paused, as though waiting until certain he was commanding his undivided attention, "are you trying to make a fool out of me just because I'm new in the squadron and you've been overseas a long time?"

"Oh, no, sir," answered Towser. "Those are my orders. You can ask Major Major when you see him."

"That's just what I intend to do, Sergeant. When
can
I see him?"

"Never."

But Appleby could make his report in writing, if he chose. In two or three weeks we were practically veterans, and the matter was no longer of consequence even to Appleby.

Appleby was soon a lead pilot and was paired with a bombardier of longer experience named Havermeyer. Yossarian was good enough at first to be lead bombardier and was matched with a sweet-tempered pilot named McWatt. Later I preferred Yossarian for his quicker bomb runs.

We had everything, it seemed to me. The tents were comfortable and there was no hostility that I could see toward anyone. We were at peace with each other in a way we would not find feasible; anywhere else. Where Lew was, with the infantry in Europe, there was death, terror, blame. We were all of us fun-loving for the most part and did not grieve deeply over our occasional losses. The officer in charge of both our mess halls then was Milo Minderbinder, the industrialist and big export-import man now, and he did an excellent job, the best in the whole Mediterranean Theater of Operations, everyone knew. We had fresh eggs every morning. The workers in the kitchen under Corporal Snark were Italian laborers recruited by Milo Minderbinder, and he found local families nearby who were pleased to do our laundry for practically nothing. All we had to do to eat was follow orders. We had ice cream sodas every weekend, the officers had them every day. Only after I ditched off France with Orr did we find out that the carbonation for the ice cream sodas from Milo was coming from the carbon dioxide cylinders that were supposed to be in our Mae West life jackets to inflate them. When Snowden died, we found out Milo had taken the Syrettes of morphine from the first-aid kits too.