Joseph Heller - Closing Time

Claire had never met a family like ours, with Brooklyn accents and Jewish accents from my mom and pop, or gone out with a guy like me, who had picked her away from someone else on a double blind date and was able to do whatever he wanted to do, and whose future was in junk. I didn't like that last idea, but never showed it until we were already married.

"There's no future in junk, because there's too much of it," Winkler would say to us before his first business failure. "Louie, a surplus is always bad. The economy needs shortages. That's what's so good about monopolies-they keep down the supply of what people want. I buy Eastman Kodak surplus army aviation film for practically nothing that nobody wants because there's too much, and I turn it into regular color camera film that nobody has. Everybody's getting married and having babies, even me, and everybody wants pictures in color and can't get enough film. Eastman Kodak is helpless. It's their film, so they can't knock the quality. I use the Kodak name, and they can't come near me for price. The first order I got when I mailed out my postcards was from Eastman Kodak for four rolls of film, so they could find out what I was doing."

He and Eastman Kodak soon found out that army aviation film, which was good at ten thousand feet, left grainy splotches on babies and brides, and then he was back driving a truck for us on days we needed him before he began making honey-glaze and chocolate-covered doughnuts for the first of the bakeries he went into next before he moved to California and bought the first of his chocolate-candy factories that didn't work out either. For twenty years I slipped him money now and then and never told Claire. For twenty years, Claire sent them money when they needed it and never told me.

Before I got out of the army, Claire, still just a kid, talked seriously to me about reenlisting because she liked the opportunties to travel.

"You must be joshing," I told her, back from Dresden and flat on my back in the hospital after my operations. "My name is Louie, not screwy. Travel where? Georgia? Kansas? Fort Sill, Oklahoma? You've got no chance." Claire helped at the junkshop with the telephone and business records when my big sister Ida had to be home with my mother. And she helped with my mother when Ida was in the shop. She could make her smile more than we could. The old lady was getting stranger and stranger with what the doctor told us was hardening of the arteries of the head, which was natural with age, he said, and which we now think was probably Alzheimer's disease, which maybe we now think of as natural too, like Dennis Teemer does with cancer.

Claire is still not much good at math, and that worries me now. She can add and subtract all right, especially after you give her la hand calculator, and even divide and multiply a little bit, bat she is lost with fractions, decimals, and percentages and doesn't understand the arithmetic of markups, markdowns, and interest rates. She was good enough for the bookkeeping then, though, and that's about all the old man wanted her to do after the time she began throwing pieces of brass and copper into the last paper bale of the day to help us finish up sooner. The old man couldn't believe it, and his groan shook the walls and probably drove all our rats and mice and cockroaches jumping out in a panic onto McDonald Avenue.

"I'm trying to help," she gave as an excuse. "I thought you wanted the bales to be heavier."

I laughed out loud. "Not with brass."

"With copper?" asked my brother, and laughed also.

"Tchotchkeleh, where did you go to get educated?" the old man asked her, scraping his dental plates, with the different noise they made when he was feeling jolly. "Copper, brass too, sells for fourteen cents a pound. Newspapers sell for bubkes, for nothing by the pound. Which is worth more? You don't have to go to Harvard to figure that out. Here, tchotchkeleh, sit here, little darling, and write numbers and say who must pay us money and who we got to pay. Don't worry, you'll go dancing yet. Louie, come here. Where did you find such a little toy?" He took my arm into that grip of his and pulled me into a corner to talk to me alone, his face red, his freckles big. "Louie, listen good. If you were not my own son, and if instead she was my daughter, I would not let her go out with a tummler like you. You must not hurt her, not even a little."

She wasn't as easy to fool as he thought, although I probably could have done everything I wanted with her. She'd heard from a cousin nearby about the Coney Island boys and their social clubs, that they would dance you into the back room with the door and the couches and get some clothes off you fast so you couldn't go back out without feeling ashamed, until you gave them at least some of what they wanted. When she said she wouldn't go back there with me the first time, I just picked her up off her feet while we still were dancing and danced her around down the hall into our back room just to show her it wasn't always true, not with me, not then. What I didn't let her know was that I had already been there with a different girl about an hour before.

She was weak at arithmetic for sure, but I soon found out I was better off leaving business things in her hands than leaving them with any of my brothers or my partners, and I always trusted my brothers and partners. None of them ever cheated me that I know of, and I don't think that any of them would have wanted to, because I always picked men who were generous and liked to laugh and drink as much as I did.

Claire had good legs and that beautiful bust, and she still does. She spotted before I did that nearly all the Italian builders we did business with always showed up for appointments on the site with flashy blondes and redheads for girlfriends, and she would pitch in by tinting her own hair back closer to blonde when I brought her along to something maybe more important than normal. She would load on the costume jewelry, and she could talk to them all, men and girls alike, in their own language. "I always wear this when I'm with him," she would say with a bit of a tired sneer about the wedding ring she was sporting, and about the low V neck of the dress or suit she had chosen to wear, and all of us would laugh. "I don't have the license with me to prove it," she'd answer, whenever any of them asked if we were really married. I'd leave those answers to her and enjoy them, and sometimes if the deal was good and the lunch went long, we would sign into the local motel also for the rest of the afternoon and always leave before evening. "He has to get home," was the way she would put it. "He can't stay out all night here either." In restaurants, nightclubs, and vacation spots she was always great at starting up conversations in the ladies' room and scoring chicks for any of the guys with us who didn't have any and wanted one. And she spotted before I did what I was beginning to have in mind for one knockout of a tall Australian blonde girlfriend of one of the Italian builders, a lively, swinging thing in white makeup with high heels and another great pair of boobs who couldn't stand still for wanting to dance, even though there was no music, and who kept making broad wisecracks about the naughty toys she had in mind for the toy manufacturers she worked for.

"She's got a roommate," the guy said to me without moving his lips. "She's a nurse and a knockout. They both put out. We could go out together."

"I'll want this cookie," I said for her to hear.

"That's okay too. I'll take my chances with the nurse," he said and I knew I would not want to pal around with him. He couldn't see my fun was in charming her, not in getting her as a gift.

Claire guessed it all. "No, Lew, not that," she let me know for all time, as soon as we were in the car. "Not ever, no, not when I see it happening."