Joseph Heller - Closing Time

He had never married, and the women he'd kept company with were invariably ladies approximately his own age who dressed plainly in pleated skirts and prim blouses, wore very little makeup daintily, were shy, colorless, and quickly gone.

Make effort as he might, Yossarian could not put to rest the low surmise that M2 belonged to that class of solitary and vindictive men that largely comprised the less boisterous of the two main classes of resolute patrons of prostitutes to be seen in his high-rise apartment building, riding up the elevators for the sex cures in the opulent temple of love on top or downward into the bowels of the structure to the three or four massage parlors of secondary dignity in the sub-basements underlying the several general cinema houses on the first sub-level down from the public sidewalk.

Michael had remarked lightly already to Yossarian that M2 seemed to him to possess all the typical attributes of the serial sex killer: he was white.

"When we went to the terminal," he confided, "he was only interested in looking at the women. I don't think he could recognize the transvestites. Is his father that way?"

" Milo knows what a prostitute is and didn't like us going after them. He's always been chaste. I doubt he knows what a transvestite is or would see much difference if he found out."

"Why did you ask me," M2 asked Yossarian now, "if we still have our catering service?"

"I might have some business. There's this wedding-"

"I'm glad you mentioned that. I might have forgotten. My mother wants me to talk to you about our wedding."

"This is not your wedding," corrected Yossarian.

"My sister's wedding. My mother wants my sister married, and she wants it done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She expects you to arrange it. She knows you're in ACACAMMA."

Yossarian was genially amazed. "The ceremony too?"

"It's been done before?"

"The actual ceremony? Not that I know of."

"You know trustees?"

"I'm with ACACAMMA. But it might be impossible."

"My mother won't accept that. She says-I'm reading now, from her fax-that if you can't manage that, she doesn't know what else you're good for."

Yossarian shook his head benignly. He was anything but insulted. "It will take money, and time. You would have to begin, I would say, with a donation to the museum of ten million dollars."

"Two dollars?" asked M2, as though repeating.

"Ten million dollars."

"I thought I heard two."

"I did say ten," said Yossarian. "For the construction of another new wing."

"We can handle that."

"With no strings attached."

"There'll be strings attached?"

"I said no strings attached, although of course there will be strings. Your father specializes in string. You're practically out-of-towners, and they just don't take ten million from every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to give it."

"Couldn't you persuade them to take it?"

"I think I could do that. And then there's no guarantee."

"There's a good guarantee?"

"There is no guarantee," Yossarian corrected again. "You and your father seem to have the same selective hearing impairment, don't you?"

"Collective hearing impairment?"

"Yes. And it will have to be wasteful."

"Tasteful?"

"Yes. Wasteful. It will have to be lavish and crude enough to get into the newspapers and high-fashion magazines."

"I think it's what they want."

"There might just be an opening they don't know about yet," Yossarian finally judged. "The wedding I mentioned will be in the bus terminal."

M2 reacted with a start, just as Yossarian had expected. "What's good about that?" he wanted to know.

"Innovation, Milo," Yossarian answered. "The museum isn't good enough for some people anymore. The bus terminal is just right for the Maxons."

"The Maxons?"

"Olivia and Christopher."

"The big industrialist?"

"Who never set foot in a factory and never laid eyes on a product any company of his ever manufactured, except maybe his Cuban cigars. I'm helping Maxon out with the logistics," he embroidered nonchalantly. "All the media will cover it, naturally. Will you take the bus terminal if we can't get the museum?"

"I'll have to ask my mother. Offhand-"

"If it's good enough for the Maxons," tempted Yossarian, "with the mayor, the cardinal, maybe even the White House amp;"

"That might make a difference."

"Of course, you could not be the first."

"We could be first?"

"You could not be first, unless your sister marries the Maxon girl or you want to make it a double wedding. I can talk to the Maxons for you, if your mother wants me to."

"What would you do," M2 asked, with a gaze that seemed circumspect, "with the whores at the bus terminal?"

The white light in M2's gray eyes as he said the word whores invested him instantaneously with the face of a ravenous man blistering with acquisitive desire.

Yossarian gave the answer he thought most fit.

"Use them or lose them," he answered carelessly. "As much as you want. The police will oblige. The opportunities are boundless. I'm being realistic about the museum. Your father sells things, Milo, and that's not elegant."

"My mother hates him for that."

"And she lives in Cleveland. When is your sister getting married?" j "Whenever you want her to."

"That gives us latitude. Who is she marrying?"

"Whoever she has to."

"That might open it up."

"My mother will want you to make up the guest list. We don't know anyone here. Our dearest friends all live in Cleveland, and many can't come."

"Why not do it at the museum in Cleveland? And your dearest friends could come."

"We would rather have your strangers." M2 seated himself gently in front of his computer. "I'll fax my mother."

"Can't you phone her?"

"She won't take my calls."

"Find out," said Yossarian, with more mischief in mind, "if she'll take a Maxon. They might just have an extra one."

"Would they take a Minderbinder?"

"Would you marry a Maxon, if all they have is a girl?"

"Would they take me? I have this Adam's apple."

"There's a good chance they might, even with the Adam's apple, once you fork over that ten million for another new wing."

"What would they name it?"

"The Milo Minderbinder Wing, of course. Or maybe the Temple of Milo, if you'd rather have that."

"I believe they would choose that," guessed M2. "And that would be appropriate. My father was a caliph of Baghdad, you know, one time in the war."

"I know," said Yossarian. "And the imam of Damascus. I was with him, and everywhere we went he was hailed."

"What would they put in the wing at the museum?"

"Whatever you give them, or stuff from the storeroom. They need more space for a bigger kitchen. They would certainly put in a few of those wonderful statues of your father at those stone altars red with human blood. Let me know soon."

And as M2 beat a bit faster on his keyboard, Yossarian walked away to his own office, to cope on the telephone with some matters of his own.

"She wants more money," Julian told him right off in his no-nonsense manner.

"She isn't getting it." Yossarian was equally brusque.

"For how much?" challenged his son.

"Julian, I don't want to bet with you."

"I'll advise her to sue," said his daughter, the judge.

"She'll lose. She'd have money enough if she called off those Private detectives."

"She swears she isn't employing any," said his other son Adrian, the cosmetics chemist without the graduate degree, whose wife had concluded, through an adult education course in assertiveness training, that she wasn't really as happy as she'd all along thought herself.

"But her lawyer might be, Mr. Yossarian," said Mr. Gaffney, when Yossarian phoned and brought him up-to-date.