Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"I might help with the venue," said Yossarian. "I don't guarantee the disaster."

"Olivia will pitch in. She's sure she can attract our newest President. Christopher gives plenty since he received a suspended sentence and escaped community service."

"That's a good start."

"The mayor would come."

"That would help too."

"And the cardinal will insist."

"We're holding all the cards," said Yossarian. "I'll start casing the joint if you really want me to."

"Who do you know there?" Frances was eager to learn.

"McMahon and McBride, the cop and a supervisor. McBride was a detective at the police station there-"

"They have a police station there?" Patrick exclaimed.

"That should be novel," Frances remarked. "We've got our protection on hand."

"And convenient too," said Yossarian. "They can fingerprint the guests as we all arrive. McBride should know if it can be done. We've all gotten pretty close since my son Michael was arrested there."

"For what?" Patrick demanded.

"For coming out of the subway and stepping back in when he realized he had mistaken the stop he wanted. They shackled him to a wall."

"Good God!" Patrick reacted with a look of wrath. "That must have been horrifying."

"It almost killed both of us," Yossarian said, with a nervous, depressed laugh. "Come there with me, Patrick. I'll be going to look at something new. You'll see more of what modern life is really like. It's not all just the museum."

"I'd rather be sailing."

Patrick Beach, four years older than both, had been born rich and intelligent and was early made indolent by the perception of his own intrinsic uselessness. In Britain, he had remarked to Yossarian, or in Italy or one of the few remaining republican societies with a truly aristocratic tradition, he might have sought to distinguish himself academically as a scholar in some field. But here, where intellectual endeavors generally were rated menial, he was sentenced from birth to be a dilettante or a career diplomat, which he felt was almost always the same thing. After three quick superficial marriages to three superficial women, he had finally settled permanently on Frances Rosenbaum, whose stage name was Frances Rolphe, and who understood easily his recurring attraction for solitude and study. "I inherited my money," he was fond of repeating with overdone amiability to new acquaintances to whom he felt obliged to be civil. "I did not have to work hard to be here with you."

He was not disturbed that many did not like him. But that patrician face of his could freeze and his fine lips quiver in powerless frustration with people too obtuse to discern the insult in his condescension, or too brutal to care.

"Olivia Maxon," said Frances in summation, "will agree to anything I want her to, provided I let her think the initiative was hers."

"And Christopher Maxon is always agreeable," Patrick guaranteed, "as long as you give him something to agree with. I have lunch with him frequently when I feel like eating alone."

When he felt like eating with someone, he thought often of Yossarian, who was content to chat disparagingly with him about almost everything current and to reminisce about their respective experiences in World War II, Yossarian as a decorated bombardier on an island near Italy, Patrick with the Office of War Information in Washington. Patrick was still always respectfully enchanted to be talking to a man he liked who knew how to read a newspaper as skeptically as he did and had been wounded in combat once and stabbed in the side by a native prostitute, and who had defied his immediate superiors and compelled them at the last to send him home.

Frances went on with good cheer. "Olivia will be delighted to know you're assisting. She's curious about you, John," she volunteered archly. "Here you've been separated now a whole year, and you're still not attached to another woman. I wonder about that too. You say you're afraid of living alone."

"I'm more afraid of living with someone. I just know the next one too will like movies and television news! And I'm not sure I can ever fall in love again," he observed, pining. "I'm afraid those miracles may be past."

"And how do you think a woman my age feels?"

"But what would you say," Yossarian teased, "if I said I was in love now with a nurse named Melissa MacIntosh?"

Frances welcomed this game. "I would remind you that at our age, love seldom makes it through the second weekend."

"And I'm also attracted to a shapely Australian blonde who shares her apartment, a friend named Angela Moorecock."

"I might fall in love with that one myself," ventured Patrick. "That's really her name? Moorecock?"

" Moore."

"I thought you said Moorecock."

"I said Moore, Peter."

"He did say Moorecock," said Frances, reproachfully. "And I would also accuse you of ruthlessly exploiting innocent young working girls for degenerate sexual purposes."

"She isn't innocent and she isn't so young."

"Then you might as well take up with one of our widows or divorcees. They can be manipulated but never exploited. They have lawyers and financial advisers who won't allow them to be misused by anyone but themselves."

Patrick made a face. "John, how did she talk before she went on the stage?"

"Like I do now. Some people would say you were lucky, Patrick, to be married to a woman who speaks always in epigrams."

"And gets us talking that way too."

"I find that divine."

"Oh, shit, darling," said Patrick.

"That's an obscenity, my sweet, that John would never use with both of us."

"He speaks dirty to me."

"To me too. But never to both of us."

He glanced with surprise at Yossarian. "Is that true?"

"You can bet your sweet ass," said Yossarian, laughing.

"You'll find out what you can? About our wedding at the bus terminal?"

"I'm on my way."

There were no cabs outside the hotel. Down the block was the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, a redoubtable mortuary catering to many of the city's perished notables. Two men out front, one in the sober attire of an employee, the other plebeian in appearance with a knapsack and a hiking pole, were rasping at each other in muted disagreement, but neither gave him a look as he lifted an arm and caught his taxi there.

The structure housing the M amp; M offices, to which Yossarian would be going later that same day, was an edifice of secondary size in the Japanese real estate complex now known as Rockefeller Center. Formerly, it was the old Time-Life Building and the headquarters of the publishing company Time Incorporated, the company for which, in that same building long before, Sammy Singer had gone to work as an advertising-promotion writer shortly after giving up a teaching position in Pennsylvania rather than sign a state loyalty oath to keep a job paying just thirty-two hundred dollars a year, and where he met the woman who five years later would become his wife. Glenda was a year older than Sammy, which would have disqualified her with his mother, had his mother been still alive, and was not Jewish, which might have unsettled her even more.

And she was divorced. Glenda had three young children, one of whom, sadly, was fated to evolve into a borderline schizophrenic of weak will with an attraction to drugs and an incipient bent toward suicide, the other two surviving, it developed eventually, with potential traits marking them especially high risks for neo-plastic disorders. Sammy's only regret about the long marriage was its tragic and unexpected termination. Sammy had no strong opinions about loyalty oaths but a passionate dislike for the people advocating them. It was much the same with the Korean War and the Vietnam War: he had no profound convictions either way but developed a hostile revulsion for demagogues in both political parties who demanded threateningly that he believe as they did. He disliked Harry Truman after reveling in his victorious campaign in 1948 and did not care afterward for Eisenhower and Nixon. He cared no more for Kennedy than he had for Eisenhower and ceased voting in presidential elections. Soon he stopped voting altogether and felt smug on election days. Glenda had stopped voting years before he met her and found all campaigning candidates for public office vulgar, boring, and loathsome.