Joseph Heller - Closing Time

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 bridegroom'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 Leverkühn 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 La tour 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 eath table three frozen moids 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 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."