Closing Time (59 page)

"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 youw 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 Bor 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.

Yossarian now eased himself alongside one of these men posing as a statue and asked,
sotto voce:

"Where the fuck is he?"

"How the fuck should I know?" the man shot back, hardly moving his lips. "Ask her."

"The cocksucker won't come out of his office," said the woman, without moving hers.

There was no information to account for the delay.

Meanwhile, the festivities progressed. Coordinating the multiple movements of equipment and supplies and the divisions of personnel was as exacting a procedure as a military invasion in the Arabian Gulf, with a lower margin for observable error. Experienced logistical experts from Washington were dispatched to work with McBride and executives on the Planning Committee of Milo Minderbinder's Commercial Catering, Inc.

Strategy was mapped out in the Operations Room of C.C. Inc. and put into action in the kitchens and shops there, as well as in the extensive food rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the facilities of the numerous nearby food shops with storage room and processing machinery enlisted for the emergency. Because the designers of the PABT building had not anticipated a future in the catering business, they had failed to include kitchens, and it was necessary to effect alliances with numerous individual food establishments in the vicinity.

On the day of the event, the principal caterers would start, Yossarian saw, and did start, Yossarian also saw, arriving at the terminal hours before sunrise, and the inner areas of the floors to be utilized were occupied by armed men in civilian attire and sealed off to the public.

By 7:30 A.M. fifteen hundred workers were on station in assigned places and moving into action.

By 8:00 an assembly line constructed by a corps of engineers had been set up in C.C. Inc. to make the canapes and other small sandwiches, and for the trimming and slicing of the smoked salmon. Work there did not cease until four hundred dozen of these tea sandwiches had been completed and dispatched.

By 8:15 sixty cooks, seventy electricians, three hundred florists, and four hundred of the waiters and bartenders had reinforced the original landing parties in both places.

By 8:30 crews began scrubbing the fifty bushels of oysters and fifty bushels of clams, boiling two hundred pounds of shrimp, and making fifty-five gallons of cocktail sauce.

By 9:00 A.M. the tables, chairs, and furnishings were arriving at the terminal, and electricians and plumbers were on site for the extensive work required, while back at C.C. Inc. and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the choppers were attacking and cutting up at record speed the vegetables for the crudites: a thousand bunches of celery, fifteen hundred pounds of carrots, one thousand and one heads of cauliflower, a hundred pounds of zucchini, and two hundred pounds of red peppers.

By 10:00 A.M. all one hundred and fifteen thousand red, white, and black balloons printed NEWLY WED were bobbing triumphantly over all the passageways of the bus ramps and the doorways of all the side and main entrances.

At noon the electricians had completed hanging the special chandeliers.

At 1:00 P.M. the portable toilets were delivered and set up unobtrusively in their designated places. There were over thirty-five hundred of these portable toilets, all in pastels of the season, more than one for each guest, behind the false fronts of millinery boutiques for women and haberdashery boutiques for men, and the guests took note with a frisson of enchanted awareness that no person would have contact with a toilet previously tainted through use by another. Each of the units was hurried away instantly and invisibly through egresses in the rear by stevedores, teamsters, and sanitary engineers to be trucked out, loaded on waiting barges in the Hudson River, and carried to sea with the ebbing tide to be thrown into the ocean, with no one any the wiser until a day or so later; the foresight with the individual Portosans was another hit of the genteel bacchanal, and many guests crept back twice, merely for the novelty of the experience, as though riding for a second time on a diversion at a germ-free amusement park. "Why didn't anybody else ever think of that?" was an expression repeated frequently.

Early in the afternoon, at 2:45 plus 10, five tons of ice were delivered as ordered, and as the clock struck 3:00, two hundred waiters, then two hundred more waiters, when the first contingent had advanced and cleared out of the way, then two hundred more when these latter two hundred had pushed into the area and fanned out, all began setting up tables, while the remaining six hundred held in reserve were icing down white wine, water, and champagne, and setting up supply posts of one hundred and twenty service bars on the main and second floors and on the spacious third floor too, where loud music and wild dancing were scheduled for the late hours.

At four the musicians were setting up at their bandstands and dance floors.

By five, fifty dessert buffets had been erected securely and the twelve hundred or more security guards from the city, federal government, and M & M Commercial Killings, Inc. had taken up positions on the high ground of the terminal. Outside, trucks with units from the National Guard were on watch for disturbances from protest groups that might be in dissonance with the celebratory mood of the gala.

After the hoisting, lowering, and cutting of the wedding cake, there was more dancing and congratulations. For the several finales, everyone mingled together in the Great Hall from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where still more tables were heaped with dessert confections of spun sugar.

There, before the party dispersed into smaller, friendlier, almost conspiratorial groups, a number of toasts were offered to the Minderbinders and Maxons and short speeches made. Greed was good, proclaimed one Wall Streeter in risk arbitrage. There was nothing wrong with waste, boasted another. As long as they had it, why not flaunt it? There was nothing tasteless about bad taste, roared another, and was cheered for his wit.

"This was the kind of event," crowed a spokesman for the homeless, "that makes one proud to be homeless in New York."

But he turned out to be fake, a spokesman from a public relations firm. :

The formal end of activities was signaled by a sentimental repeat of the "Redemption Through Love" music played by all five of the bands for the evening, the violinist and her four clones, and the earlier orchestral recordings, and many there locked arms shamelessly and hummed the melody boisterously, as though in a wordless rendition of the newest replacement of "Auld Lang Syne" or that other immortal popular favorite, "Till We Meet Again."

For those madcaps and hell-raisers who had chosen to linger on to bowl in the alleys on the second floor or dance the night away or otherwise avail themselves of the fascinating attractions and facilities of the bus terminal, a third meal was provided at each of the auxiliary serving stations remaining open all night, and this, as displayed on all screens, was in store:

ALTERNATE MENU

Fricassee de Fruits de Mer

Les trois Roti Primeurs

Tarte aux Pomrnes de Terre

Salade a Bleu de Bresse Gratinee

Friandises et Desserts

Espresso

Yossarian, still musing on the Alternate Menu, was next startled to see himself speaking to the video cameras for a network television show in white tie and tails between Milo Minderbinder and Christopher Maxon and saying:

"The wedding was the highlight of a lifetime. I don't think any of us here will live to see anything like it again."

"Holy shit," he said in the flesh, and hoped his laconic irony was obvious.

There was little doubt that Minderbinders and Maxons had that night boosted the Port Authority Bus Terminal into the forefront of great catering halls for the close of the century and the dawning of the new one. Everyone leaving was given a colorful brochure published jointly by PABT and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with which PABT now had so many interests in common. For as little as $36,000, anyone in the world could engage space for a party in either place.

It was anticipated that most guests would depart at 1:00 A.M. They did, and the million, one hundred and twenty-two thousand champagne tulips there as souvenirs and door prizes were quickly depleted. A younger, livelier bunch stayed on to bowl, eat, and dance madly to the recorded music provided by an all-night disc jockey on the floors above. Eventually, those who still could not tear themselves away went to sleep on sturdy clean cabana lounges moved into the ticketing areas or bedded down in one of the emergency stairwells, where new, unused mattresses had been laid out on the landings and stairs. When they awoke, there was fresh orange juice for them at the juice bars and pancake-and-egg breakfasts in the coffee shops. The stairwells had been emptied and scoured thoroughly; instead of disinfectant, the odors in the air were of aftershave lotion and designer perfumes. For the stairwells, a one-legged woman with a crutch was hired to go wandering about mumbling she'd been raped, but she was a minor actress with a pretty face that had modeled cosmetics, and a shapely leg that had modeled panty hose. A large, gracious, maternal black woman with moles that looked cancerous and a rich contralto voice hummed spirituals.