Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"And some copy for a leaflet. Who can we get?"

"Yossarian?"

"He might object."

"Then fuck him," said Wintergreen. "Let him object. We'll ignore the fuck again. What the fuck! What the fuck fucking difference does it make if the fuck objects or not? We can ignore the fucking fuck again, can't we? Shit."

"I wish," said Milo, "you wouldn't swear so much in the nation's capital."

"Nobody but you can hear me."

Milo looked hesitant. The gentle sun shower sprinkled raindrops around him through a prismatic haze that circled his brow like a wreath. "Yossarian has been objecting too much again lately. I could murder my son for telling him it was a bomber."

"Don't murder your son."

"I'd like to get some second-rate hack with a good position in government who's not too scrupulous when it comes to making money."

"Noodles Cook?"

"N

oodles Cook is who I had in mind."

"Noodles Cook is much too big for that stuff now. And we'd need Yossarian to make the contact."

"I worry about Yossarian." Milo was brooding. "I'm not sure I trust him. I'm afraid he's still honest."

BOOK

THREE

7

ACACAMMA

Yossarian went crosstown by taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the monthly meeting of ACACAMMA, arriving in time for the reading of an anonymous proposal for the creation of a deconstruction fund to reduce the museum from the farcical dimensions to which it had now grown preposterously. He heard the motion ruled out of order, seeing Olivia Maxon turn to fix her glowing black eyes upon him severely while he was turning to gaze with a suppressed smile at Frances Beach, who raised her eyebrows with admiring inquiry at Patrick Beach, who was looking down at his fingernails and paying no attention to Christopher Maxon, who, all jowls and chortles beside him, rolled an imaginary cigar between his fingers, wet its imaginary tip, relished the imagined fragrance he inhaled, inserted the imaginary cigar into a mouth that was real, and puffed himself deeply into a soporific delirium.

ACACAMMA, the select Adjunct Committee for the Advancement of Cultural Activities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was an exclusive body of which only thirty or forty of the seventy or eighty members had come that day to deal with the same thorny question: if and how to increase revenues from the utilization of the premises for social events like weddings, bridal showers, bridge classes, fashion shows, and birthday parties, or whether to discontinue those incongruous ceremonies altogether as crass.

The potent need as always was for money.

Introduced and tabled for more comprehensive discussion at future meetings were such topics as the art of fund-raising, the art of the deal, the artistry of publicity, the art of social climbing, the art of fashion designing, the art of the costume, the art of catering, and the art of conducting without dissension and bringing to a close on time a meeting lasting two hours that was pleasant, uneventful, unsurprising, and unnecessary.

What dissonance appeared was managed neatly.

A final anonymous proposal that all anonymous proposals no longer be given even perfunctory consideration was referred to the executive committee for consideration.

At the bar of the hotel nearby to which Yossarian escaped afterward with Patrick and Frances Beach, Frances began a gin and tonic and Patrick Beach looked bored.

"Of course I'm bored," he informed his wife with ill-tempered pride. "By now I hate the paintings as much as I hate hearing them talked about. Oh, Frances"--his sigh was the whimsical plea of a martyr--"why must you keep putting us both into settings like that one ?"

"Have we anything better to do?" Frances Beach said sweetly to her husband. "It gets us invited to so many other things that are even worse, doesn't it? And it helps keep our name in the newspapers, so that people know who we are."

"It's so we know who we are."

"I think that's divine."

"I have promised to kill her if she uses that word."