Yossarian was sixty-eight and somewhat vain, for he looked younger than many men of sixty-seven, and better than all women of his approximate generation. His second wife was still divorcing him. He did not think there would be a third.
All his children had come from his first.
His daughter, Gillian, the judge, was divorcing her husband, who, despite a much better income, was not achieving as much and was unlikely ever to amount to anything more than a reliable husband, father, family man, and provider.
His son Julian, the braggart and oldest of the lot, was a minor major hotshot on Wall Street still with insufficient earnings to move regally into Manhattan. He and his wife now occupied separate quarters of their obsolescent suburban mansion while their respective lawyers made ready to sue and countersue for divorce and attempted, impossibly, to arrive at a division of property and children that would supply entire satisfaction to both. The wife was a good-looking and disagreeable woman of fashionable tastes from a family that spent money recklessly, as loud as Julian and as despotic in certitude, and their boy and girl were bullying too and odiously unsociable.
Yossarian sensed trouble brewing in the marriage of his other son, Adrian, a chemist without a graduate degree who worked for a cosmetics manufacturer in New Jersey and was spending much of his adult working life seeking a formula for dying hair gray; his wife had taken to enrolling in adult education courses.
He fretted most about Michael, who could not seem to make himself want to amount to
anything special and was blind to the dangers lurking in that lack of goal. Michael had once joked to Yossarian that he was going to save money for his divorce before starting to save for his marriage, and Yossarian resisted wisecracking back that his joke was not a joke. Michael did not regret that he never had tried hard to succeed as an artist. That role too did not appeal to him.
Women, especially women who had been married one time before, liked Michael and lived with him because he was peaceful, understanding, and undemanding, and then soon tired of living with him, because he was peaceful, understanding, and undemanding. He resolutely refused to quarrel and fell silent and sad in conflict. Yossarian had a respectful suspicion about Michael that in his taciturn way, with women as with work, he knew what he was doing. But not with money.
For money, Michael did freelance artwork for agencies and magazines or for art studios with contract assignments, or, with clear conscience, accepted what he needed from Yossarian, disbelieving a day must dawn when he would no longer find these freelance assignments at hand and that Yossarian might not always choose to safeguard him from eventual financial tragedy.
All in all, Yossarian decided, it was a typically modern, poorly adjusted, new-age family in which no one but the mother truly liked all the others or saw good reason to; and each, he suspected, was, like himself, at least secretly and intermittently sad and regretful.
His family life was perfect, he liked to lament. Like Thomas Mann's Gustav Aschenbach, he had none.
He was still under surveillance. He could not tell by how many. By the end of the week there was even an Orthodox Jew pacing back and forth outside his building on the other side of the avenue, and a call on his answering machine from the nurse Melissa MacIntosh, whom he had all but forgotten, with the information that she'd been rotated to the evening shift for a while, in case he'd been planning to take her to dinner--and to Paris and Florence too for lingerie, she reminded with a caustic snicker--and with the incredible news that the Belgian patient was still alive but in pain and that his temperature was down almost to normal.
Yossarian would have bet his life that the Belgian would already be dead.
Of all those tailing him, he could account for only a few--the ones retained by the lawyer for his estranged wife and those retained by the estranged, impulsive husband of a woman he'd lain with half-drunkenly once not long before, a mother of adolescents, and thought halfheartedly he might wish to lie with some more, if ever he was graced with the urge to lie with a woman again, who had detectives shadow every man she knew in his craze to obtain evidence of fornication to balance the evidence of fornication she had earlier obtained against him.
The idea of the others festered, and after another few spells of aggravated embitterment, Yossarian took the bull by the horns and telephoned the office.
"Anything new?" he began, to Milo's son.
"Not as far as I know."
"Are you telling me the truth?"
"To the best of my ability."
"You're not holding anything back?"
"Not as far as I can tell."
"Would you tell me if you were?"
"I would tell you if I could."
"When your father calls in today, M2," he said to Milo Minderbinder II, "tell him I need the name of a good private detective. It's for something personal."
"He's already phoned," said Milo junior. "He recommends a man named Jerry Gaffney at the Gaffney Agency. Under no circumstances mention that my father suggested him."
"He told you that already?" Yossarian was enchanted. "How did he know I was going to ask?"
"That's impossible for me to say."
"How are you feeling, M2?"
"It's hard to be sure."
"I mean in general. Have you been back to the bus terminal to look at those TV monitors?"