Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"Don't I know it? But he used to envy you, envy you a lot, for your life in the city. Or for what he thought was your life. Even after you married Glenda he had this picture of you drinking it up every night and scoring with all those fancy girls in the office and those others you kept meeting in advertising."

Sam looked very pleased. "I never did," he said, looking a little proud, and a little ashamed. "Not once after I married Glenda. I stopped wanting to while she was alive. And hey, Claire, you know Glenda was right there in the office with me for a good couple of years too, so how did he think I was going to get away with that? Where do you think you're going to find someone, Claire? You may not know it, but you've got very strong standards."

I had no good ideas. I still owned most of that art school in Italy outside Florence Lew bought me as a surprise birthday present. How many other women ever got a birthday present like that one? But I don't trust Italian men on the whole or take to artists as anything but artists. I don't trust Israeli men, but they at least come right out and let you know they want your body for the night or half an hour and would like your money too. I've outgrown Coney Island men by now. They're all gone anyway. I'll have to lie about my age, and for how long can I get away with that?

"Sam, remember the junkshop on McDonald Avenue?"

He remembered the junkshop but only some in the family, because they weren't too cozy with outsiders, or even always with each other. There were always at least a couple of families living in close quarters in that small apartment building Morris bought and owned. They did not necessarily always like each other-his brother-in-law Phil went out of his way to be a pain in the ass to everybody, and even voted for Republicans like Dewey and Eisenhower and Nixon-but they were loyal in defense of each other, like no others, including in-laws, and then me, once I came there for dinner now and then and began sleeping over in the room of one of his sisters, even before we were married. God help anyone who ever hurt my feelings or said anything impolite, even when I was wrong. Except maybe Sammy and then Marvin, with their needling, and then a couple of those other wise guys with their cracks to Lew about my full bosom. I didn't enjoy hearing from him that they were kidding around about my breasts as big tits, but he could never figure out whether it might really be a compliment, as sly Sammy Singer kept arguing. The old man took a fancy to me, and set out to protect me because my father had died. He considered me an orphan. "Louie, listen to me, listen good," he told him, even when I was right there. "Either marry her or leave her alone." He did not want Lew to sleep over at my house, even when my mother was home. "Maybe her mother can't see, but I can."

And Lew did listen. He listened to him good until we were married, and then we started right in and hardly ever stopped, not even in the hospitals, almost until the last time. Lew was a rake and a big flirt, but he was a strict prude when it came to family. He was never really comfortable or forgiving with the girls with their bikinis and short skirts and their schoolgirl affairs. For that matter, I didn't like it either. And I didn't like the bad language. It was worse than boys used, and they didn't even seem to think it was dirty. But I could not let them know, because I did not want them to see I was as old-fashioned as their father while trying to talk some sense into them. That's how I got to him in Fort Dix finally when he was bullying that poor German orderly we called Herman the German and I was trying to make him stop. I finally stopped him by telling him I would strip off my clothes and straddle his hernia-operated-on body right there with Herman the German at attention and looking on. With no humor, without any laughter, did he finally let Herman leave. And that was after maybe close to half an hour of Herman standing there and reciting his past. He had a true mean streak when it came to Germans, and I swear I had to practically beg him to stop. But that's what finally got him, because Lew had seen me undressed but no ether guy ever had, and I was still a virgin then. We got married in 1945, soon after he was back from the prison camp and had the hernia operation. And that was after three years of mailing him packages of kosher salamis and cans of halvah and other foods he liked that would keep, and even lipsticks and nylon stockings for the poor girls he said he was running into overseas. I was too smart to be jealous. Anyway, most of the packages never got to him, none after he was taken prisoner.

God, how they worked in that junkshop, worked their heads off with their thin rods of baling steel that sometimes snapped and were as dangerous as hell. The old man had the strength of three men and expected his sons and sons-in-law to have that much too, and that's why buying modern baling equipment for the old newspapers was always put off. They had baling claws and pliers for twisting the baling rods, and they had their pipe cutters for the plumbing junk they got hold of, but most of all they had their hands. And those big shoulders. And there was Lew, still just a kid, you know, stripped to the waist, with a baling hook in his right hand and a wink of encouragement to me while I helped with the paperwork or waited for him to finish so we could go out. A nasty thrust of the hook into the bale-a yank of arm, a twist of knee-and the bale was tumbled up and over, lying right on top of the one underneath and both of them quivering, and to us it was a reminder of sex.

Morris knew the value of money and did not want to waste any. Before he loaned us the ten thousand we needed to get started, he came up to inspect the building we wanted to lease, a condemned mousetrap factory, infested with mice, no less, poor Lew, at seventy-five dollars a month rent, our budget. He loaned us the money -we knew he would-but at ten percent interest, when banks were charging four. But he took the risk when the banks wouldn't touch it, and the money he wanted for his old age was also there for the rest of us too when we needed it. Shylocks asked less, we joked with him, but the old boy never stopped worrying about the money for his old age. Even after he got out of bed after his stroke, he would have someone drive him to the junkshop to do as much work as he could.

Lew was the sixth child, the second son of eight kids, but he was already making the decisions when I met him. After the war Morris expected Lew to keep working there and maybe someday take over to look after the place and everyone in the family. I, like a fool, thought I wanted him to stay in the army, but it was absolutely no go. He had a few thousand saved from his sergeant's salary, most of it banked-they paid him for all the time he was a prisoner of war-and the money he sent home from gambling. His father offered him a raise to keep him there-from his prewar thirty dollars a week or so to sixty-five a week. Lew's laugh was as kind as could be.

"Listen, Morris, listen good, because I will do better for you. I will give you a year, free, but then I will decide my salary. I will decide where, when, and how I will work."

"Accepted!" said Morris, with the soft grind of his dental plates. Everyone old had false teeth then.

Of course, Lew always had extra cash in his pockets for bargaining with janitors and with dealers of scrap. Sometimes you could remove a steam boiler from an apartment building intact.

Repair it somehow and then sell it to a different landlord as something used in good condition. The shortages made many such opportunities, along with kitchen sinks, pipes, radiators, toilet bowls, everything that goes into a house. Junkers did not think as far ahead as we did. Janitors-Lew always called them mister and spoke of them as managers or superintendents when he called on them to work something out-always liked the idea of making a little extra on the side. There was so much of that stuff around, and that's what gave us the idea of starting a business selling used building supplies in some place outside the city where there wasn't enough. I think the idea first came from me. It was a time to take chances. What we needed most was a sense of humor and a strong sense of self, and by then we both had plenty of that.