Closing Time (41 page)

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 preliumed 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.

She had turned on the television set and was listening to the news!

There was no war, no national election, no race riot, no big fire, storm, earthquake, or airplane crash-there
was
no news, and she was listening to it on television.

But then, while dressing, he caught the savory aromas of eggs scrambling and bacon frying and bread warming into slices of toast. The year he'd lived alone had been the loneliest in his life, and he was living alone still.

But then he saw her putting ketchup on her eggs and had to look at something else. He looked at the television screen.

"Melissa dear," he found himself preparing her two weeks later. He had his arm atop a shoulder again and absently was stroking her neck with his finger. "Let me tell you now what is going to happen. It will have nothing to do with you. These are changes I know will occur with a man like me, even with a woman he cares about very much: a man who likes to be alone much of the time, thinks and daydreams a lot, doesn't really enjoy the give-and-take of companionship of anyone all that much, falls silent much of the time and broods and is indifferent to everything someone else might be talking about, and will not be affected much by anything the woman does, as long as she doesn't talk to him about it and annoy him. It has happened before, it happens to me always."

She was nodding intently at each point, either in agreement or in worldly perception.

"I'm exactly the same way," she began in earnest response, with eyes sparkling and lips shining. "I can't stand people who talk a lot, or speak to me when I'm trying to read, even a newspaper, or call me on the telephone when they've nothing to say, or tell me things I already know, or repeat themselves and interrupt."

"Excuse me," interrupted Yossarian, as she seemed equipped to say more. He killed some time in the bathroom. "I really think," he said, upon returning, "I'm too old, and you're really too young."

"You're not too old."

"I'm older than I look."

"So am I. I've seen your age on the hospital charts."

Oh, shit, he thought. "I have to tell you also that I won't have children and will never have a dog, and I won't buy a vacation house in East Hampton or anywhere else."

Off the entrance to his apartment in each direction was a good-sized bedroom with a bathroom and space for a personal television set, and perhaps they could start that way and meet for meals. But there again was the television, turned back on, and voices were at work to which she was not listening. She never could tell when there might come something interesting. Although television was the one vice in a woman he could not abide, he believed that with this woman it was worth a try.

"No, I won't tell you her name," said Yossarian to Frances Beach, after the next, tumultuous meeting of ACACAMMA, at which Patrick Beach had spoken out dynamically to second the anonymous proposal by Yossarian that the Metropolitan Museum of Art settle financial problems by getting rid of the artwork and selling the building and real estate there on Fifth Avenue to a developer. "It's not a woman you know."

"Is it the friend of the succulent Australian woman you keep talking about, the one named Moore?"

"Moorecock."

"What?"

"Her name is Moorecock, Patrick, not Moore."

Patrick squinted in puzzlement. "I could swear you'd corrected me and said it was Moore."

"He did, Patrick. Pay no attention to him now. Is it that nurse you mentioned? I'd be saddened to think you sank so low as to marry one of my friends."

"Who's talking about marriage?" protested Yossarian.

"You are." Frances laughed. "You're like that elephant who always forgets."

Was he really going to have to marry again?

No one had to remind a doubtful Yossarian of a few of the blessings of living alone. He would riot have to listen to someone else talking on the telephone. On his new CD player with automatic changer, he could put a complete
Lohengrin, Boris Godunov
, or
Die Meistersinger
, or four whole symphonies by Bruckner, and play them all through in an elysian milieu of music without hearing someone feminine intruding to say, "What music is that?" or "Do you really like that?" or "Isn't that kind of heavy for the morning?" or "Will you please make it lower? I'm trying to watch the television news," or "I'm talking to my sister on the telephone." He could read a newspaper without having someone pick up the section he wanted next.

He could stand another marriage, he imagined, but did not have time for another divorce.

23

Kenosha

Such portentous food for equivocal thought weighed heavily on Yossarian's mind as he flew west on his journey for his rendezvous with the chaplain's wife, the sole purpose of which visit now was commiseration and a mutual confession of ignominious defeat. Her face fell with a disappointment she was not able to suppress when she picked him out at the airport.

They each had hoped for somebody younger.

The hero Siegfried, he afterward remembered, had cruised into action like a galley slave, rowing Brünnhilde's horse in a boat, and was soon tete-a-tete with another woman, to whom he was swiftly affianced.

Yossarian had his first-class seat on a jet and no such demented daydream in mind.

Siegfried had to climb a mountain and walk through fire to claim the woman Brünnhilde.

Yossarian had Melissa fly to Washington.

Looking back when it was over and he was thinking of a parody for
The New Yorker
magazine, he considered he had fared pretty well in comparison with the Wagnerian hero.

Half a million dollars richer, he was on the horns of a dilemma but alive to deal with it.

Siegfried was dead at the end; Brünnhilde was dead, even the horse was dead; Valhalla had collapsed, the gods were gone with it; and the composer was elated while his voluptuous music subsided in triumph like a delicate dream, for such is the calculating nature of art and the artist.

Whereas Tossarian could look forward to getting laid again soon. He had his doctor's okay. All his life he had loved women, and in much of that life he had been in love with more than one.

The small port city of Kenosha on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, just twenty-five miles south of the much larger small city of Milwaukee, now had a jet airport and was experiencing an upturn in economic activity that the town fathers were at a loss to explain. Local social engineers were attributing the middling boom, perhaps waggishly, to benign climate. Several small new businesses of somewhat technical nature had opened and an agency of the federal government had established laboratories rumored to be CIA fronts in an abandoned factory that had long lain idle.

In the lounge in New York, Yossarian had taken note of the other travelers in first class, all men younger than himself and in very good spirits. Only scientists were so happy in their vocations these days. They held pencils at the ready as they talked, and what they talked about most-he was startled to hear-was tritium and deuterium, of which he now knew a little, and lithium deuteride, which, he learned when he asked, was a compound of lithium and heavy water and, more significantly, was the explosive substance of preference in the best hydrogen devices.

"Does everyone know all this?" He was amazed they talked so openly.

Oh, sure. He could find it all written in
The Nuclear Almanac
and Hogerton's
The Atomic Energy Handbook
, both perhaps on sale in the paperback rack.

Boarding, he'd recognized in business class several prostitutes and two call girls from the sex clubs in his high-rise building and as streetwalking attractions near the cocktail lounges and cash machines just outside. The call girls were fellow tenants. In economy class he spotted small clumps of the homeless who had somehow acquired the airplane fare to leave the mean streets of New York to be homeless in Wisconsin. They had washed themselves up for the pilgrimage, probably in the lavatories of the PABT building, where posters Michael had once designed still warned Sternly that smoking, loitering, bathing, shaving, laundering, fucking, and sucking were all forbidden in the washbasins and toilet stalls, that alcohol could be harmful to pregnant women, and that anal intercourse could lead to HIV and hepatitis infections. Michael's posters had won art prizes. Their carry-on luggage consisted of shopping carts and paper bags. Yossarian was sure he saw sitting far back the large black woman with the gnarled melanoma moles he had come upon swabbing herself clean in only a sleeveless pink chemise on the emergency staircase the one time he had gone there with McBride. He looked for but did not find the addled woman with one leg who, as a matter of common practice, was raped by one derelict man or another perhaps three or four times daily, or the pasty blonde woman he also remembered from the stairwell who was sewing a seam in a white blouse listlessly.

From the physicists on the plane, Yossarian also thought he heard, without understanding any of it, that in the world of science, time continuously ran backward or forward, and forward
and
backward, and that particles of matter could travel backward and forward through time without undergoing change. Why, then, couldn't he? He also heard that subatomic particles had always to be simultaneously in every place they could be, and from this he began to consider that in his nonscientific world of humans and groups, everything that could happen did happen, and that anything that did not happen could not happen. Whatever
can
change, will; and anything that doesn't change, can't.

Mrs. Karen Tappman proved a slight, shy, and uneasy elderly woman, with a vacillating attitude on many aspects of the plight that had brought them into communication. But of the meaning of one thing there could soon be no doubt: the understanding they shared that he was sorry he had come and she regretted having asked him to. They would soon not have much to say to each other. They could think of nothing new to try. He had recognized her, he stated honestly, from the snapshots he remembered the chaplain had carried.

She smiled. "I was just past thirty. I recognize you now too from the photograph in our study."

Yossarian had not guessed the chaplain would possess a picture of him.

"Oh, yes, I'll show you." Mrs. Tappman led the way into the back of the two-story house. "He tells people often you just about saved his life overseas when things were most horrible."

"I think he helped save mine. He backed me up in a decision to refuse to continue fighting. I don't know how much he told you."

"I think he's always told me everything."

"I would have gone ahead anyway, but he gave me the feeling I was right. There's a blowup of that picture of you and the children he used to carry in his wallet."

One wall of the study was filled with photographs spanning almost seventy years, some showing the chaplain as a tiny boy with a fishing pole and a smile with missing teeth, and some of Karen Tappman as a tiny girl in party dress. The photograph he remembered displayed the Karen Tappman of thirty sitting in a group with her three small children, all four of them facing the camera gamely and looking sadly isolated and forsaken, as though in fear of a looming loss. On a separate wall were his war pictures.

Yossarian halted to stare at a very old fading brown photograph of the chaplain's father in World War I, a small figure petrified by the camera, wearing a helmet too massive for the child's face inside it, holding clumsily a rifle with the bayonet fixed, with a canteen in canvas hooked to his belt on one side and a gas mask in a canvas case on the other.

"We used to have the gas mask as a souvenir," said Mrs. Tappman, "and the children would play with it. I don't know what's become of it. He was gassed slightly in one of the battles and was in the veterans hospital awhile, but he took care of himself and lived a long time. He died of lung cancer right here in the house. Now they say he smoked too much. Here is the one he has of you."

Yossarian stifled a smile. "I wouldn't call that a picture of me."

"Well, he does," she answered contentiously, showing a streak he had not thought existed. "He would point it out to everyone. wAnd that's my friend Yossarian,' he would say. 'He helped pull me through when things were rough.w He would say that to everyone. He repeats himself too, I'm afraid."