Joseph Heller - Closing Time

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 amp; 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.