Joseph Heller - Closing Time

I've picked safe countries and neutral airlines. But I'll probably be hijacked by terrorists anyway, Esther jokes, and then shot to death because of my American passport and Jewish origin. Esther probably would marry me if I could bring myself to ask, but only if she could safeguard all her widow's assets. She's officious and opinionated. We would not get along.

Yossarian is better off than I am because he still has big decisions to make. Or so says Winkler, who was there in the hospital room reporting on his business agreement with Milo Minderbinder for his new state-of-the-art shoe-I still laugh when I remember those days as kids when Winkler was starting up his new state-of-the-art breakfast-sandwiches-for-home-delivery business and I was writing the copy, headlined SLEEP LATE SUNDAY MORNING! for his advertising leaflets-when the flashy blonde woman came bursting into the hospital room with the news for Yossarian that had to be a shocker. Approaching age seventy, he was faced with the daunting prospect of becoming a father again, or not, and marrying a third time, or not.

"Holy shit," were the words Winkler remembered emerging from him.

The woman thus fertilized was the dark-haired nurse. It was obvious to everyone they'd been close for some time. If ever she was going to have a child, she wanted it to be his. And if she didn't have this one now, they both might soon be too old.

"Doesn't she realize," exhorted Yossarian, "that when he asks me to run out for a pass, I'll be eighty-four years old?"

"She doesn't care about that."

"She'll want me to marry her?"

"Of course. I do too."

"Listen-you too, Winkler!-not a word about this," commanded Yossarian. "I don't want anyone else to know."

"Who would I tell?" asked Winkler, and immediately told me. "I know what I would do," he offered, with the pompous demeanor he likes to affect as a businessman.

"What would you do?" I asked.

"I don't know what I would do," he answered, and we both laughed again.

Finding Yossarian there in the hospital and seeing all that he's up to, with that enthusiastic blonde for a friend and that pregnant nurse who wants him to marry her, with Patrick Beach and his wife there, and with something secret going on between Beach and that blonde, as well as between Yossarian and the woman married to Patrick Beach, and with McBride with his fiancee dropping in regularly too, and their talk about the bus terminal and the crazy wedding scheduled there, and with those two tons of caviar on order-all that and more leave me with the sheepish remorse that I've missed out on much, and that now that I no longer have it, mere happiness was not enough.

When it reached his stomach again, he decided to give up and let himself pass away. There was nothing he could think of anymore that was worse than the nausea. He could take losing his hair, he said, trying to raise a laugh, but he wasn't sure anymore about the other. There was so much around him now he was sick of. He was nauseous from the cancer, he was nauseous from the cure, and then there was something new they called lymphoma. He just didn't want to fight it anymore. He'd had pain of every kind. He said the nausea beat them all. I'd had the feeling right off there was something different about him this time. As soon as we were home, he started in with the arithmetic. He wouldn't let up.

"Which is more-eight percent or ten percent?"

"Of what?" I answered him bade. "Ten percent. What did you expect me to say?"

"Yeah? Then which weighs more-a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?"

"I'm not an idiot, you know. You don't have to start all over from the beginning again."

"Which is worth more-a pound of copper or a pound of newspapers?"

We both smiled at that memory.

"I know the answer to that one too now."

"Yeah, big-tits? Let's see and make sure. How many three-cent stamps in a dozen?"

"Lew!"

"Okay, then, which is more-ten percent of eighty dollars or eight percent of a hundred dollars?"

"Let me get you something to eat."

"This time they're the same. Can't you see that?"

"Lew, leave me alone. The next thing you'll want to hear is seven times eight. It's fifty-six, Lew, right?"

"That's wonderful. Is seven times eight more than six times nine? Come on, baby. Try. How do they measure?"

"For Christ sakes, Lew, ask me things I know! Should your omelet be runny or well cooked, or do you want your eggs turned over today?"

He wasn't hungry. But the smell of cheese always brought him a smile. He might not eat much, but his face sure turned bright, and it was a way to get him to let up. It was like he thought that if I couldn't remember those multiplication tables of his, I wouldn't be able to hold on to a penny he left me. There was no more Scrabble or backgammon or rummy or casino, and he couldn't sit through a movie on the VCR without losing interest and falling asleep. He liked getting letters; he got a kick out of those letters of Sammy's. That's why I asked him to keep writing them. He didn't want visitors. They tired him. He had to entertain them. And he knew he made them sick too. Emil came to the house to treat him for anything else whenever we felt we needed him, unless he was out playing golf. He wouldn't give that up for hardly anyone now, that family doctor of ours, not even for his own family. I really let him have it once. But he's tired too. By then we were all sick of Teemer, and I think Teemer had given up on us as well. That going crazy stuff is just a dodge he's using. He just can't stand his patients anymore; he just about said as much to Lew. He thinks we've come to blame him for everything. So we decided to use the hospital near home, since Teemer couldn't think of anything different anymore. Lew would go in whenever he had to and come back home whenever he felt like it. He always felt more at home in our own house, but he didn't want to end there. And I knew why. He didn't want to lay that extra misery on me. So he went back in when he knew it was time. The nurses there were all still crazy about him, the young ones and the old married ones. With them he could still find the mood to joke. With them he could still find things to laugh about. Nobody might believe it -he would believe it, because I always let him know when I was angry about it-but I was always proud that women always found him so attractive, although I could get pretty worked up when some of the other wives at the club came on to him too openly and I'd see him leading them on and begin wondering where it was going to stop. What I liked to do was go out and buy the most expensive dress I could find and have them all in for a great big party just to let them see I was still the lady of the house. On vacations I always got a kick out of the joshing way he could start talking to other couples we thought we might want to hang around with. But this time there was really something different about him, and those lessons in arithmetic could drive me crazy. He was angry I couldn't learn things like he wanted me to-it was something to see what that face of his could turn into when his temper was starting to boil, and that nerve on the side of his jaw would begin to tick like a time bomb, and then I would get angry too.

"I think he's getting ready to die, Mom," my daughter Linda told me when I said I couldn't stand it anymore, and our Michael was right there with her and agreed. "That's why there's all that accounting now, and all that stuff about banking."

I had missed that part of it, and I'd always been able to read him like a book. Oh, no, I told them, Lew would never stop fighting. But he did, and he didn't deny it.

"You want to know what Linda thinks?" I said to him, fishing. "She says she thinks you've made up your mind to get ready to die. I told her she's crazy. People just don't decide like that, not normal people, and not you. You'd be the last person for something like that."