Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

Off the entrance to his apartment in each direction was a good-sized bedroom with a bathroom and space for a personal television set, and perhaps they could start that way and meet for meals. But there again was the television, turned back on, and voices were at work to which she was not listening. She never could tell when there might come something interesting. Although television was the one vice in a woman he could not abide, he believed that with this woman it was worth a try.

"No, I won't tell you her name," said Yossarian to Frances Beach, after the next, tumultuous meeting of ACACAMMA, at which Patrick Beach had spoken out dynamically to second the anonymous proposal by Yossarian that the Metropolitan Museum of Art settle financial problems by getting rid of the artwork and selling the building and real estate there on Fifth Avenue to a developer. "It's not a woman you know."

"Is it the friend of the succulent Australian woman you keep talking about, the one named Moore?"

"Moorecock."

"What?"

"Her name is Moorecock, Patrick, not Moore."

Patrick squinted in puzzlement. "I could swear you'd corrected me and said it was Moore."

"He did, Patrick. Pay no attention to him now. Is it that nurse you mentioned? I'd be saddened to think you sank so low as to marry one of my friends."

"Who's talking about marriage?" protested Yossarian.

"You are." Frances laughed. "You're like that elephant who always forgets."

Was he really going to have to marry again?

No one had to remind a doubtful Yossarian of a few of the blessings of living alone. He would not have to listen to someone else talking on the telephone. On his new CD player with automatic changer, he could put a complete Lohengrin, Boris Godunov, or Die Meistersinger, or four whole symphonies by Bruckner, and play them all through in an elysian milieu of music without hearing someone feminine intruding to say, "What music is that?" or "Do you really like that?" or "Isn't that kind of heavy for the morning?" or "Will you please make it lower? I'm trying to watch the television news," or "I'm talking to my sister on the telephone." He could read a newspaper without having someone pick up the section he wanted next.

He could stand another marriage, he imagined, but did not have time for another divorce.

23

Kenosha

Such portentous food for equivocal thought weighed heavily on Yossarian's mind as he flew west on his journey for his rendezvous with the chaplain's wife, the sole purpose of which visit now was commiseration and a mutual confession of ignominious defeat. Her face fell with a disappointment she was not able to suppress when she picked him out at the airport.

They each had hoped for somebody younger.

The hero Siegfried, he afterward remembered, had cruised into action like a galley slave, rowing Brunnhilde's horse in a boat, and was soon tete-a-tete with another woman, to whom he was swiftly affianced.

Yossarian had his first-class seat on a jet and no such demented daydream in mind.

Siegfried had to climb a mountain and walk through fire to claim the woman Brunnhilde.

Yossarian had Melissa fly to Washington.

Looking back when it was over and he was thinking of a parody for The New Yorker magazine, he considered he had fared pretty well in comparison with the Wagnerian hero.

Half a million dollars richer, he was on the horns of a dilemma but alive to deal with it.

Siegfried was dead at the end; Brunnhilde was dead, even the horse was dead; Valhalla had collapsed, the gods were gone with it; and the composer was elated while his voluptuous music subsided in triumph like a delicate dream, for such is the calculating nature of art and the artist.

Whereas Yossarian could look forward to getting laid again soon. He had his doctor's okay. All his life he had loved women, and in much of that life he had been in love with more than one.

The small port city of Kenosha on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, just twenty-five miles south of the much larger small city of Milwaukee, now had a jet airport and was experiencing an upturn in economic activity that the town fathers were at a loss to explain. Local social engineers were attributing the middling boom, perhaps waggishly, to benign climate. Several small new businesses of somewhat technical nature had opened and an agency of the federal government had established laboratories rumored to be CIA fronts in an abandoned factory that had long lain idle.

In the lounge in New York, Yossarian had taken note of the other travelers in first class, all men younger than himself and in very good spirits. Only scientists were so happy in their vocations these days. They held pencils at the ready as they talked, and what they talked about most--he was startled to hear--was tritium and deuterium, of which he now knew a little, and lithium deuteride, which, he learned when he asked, was a compound of lithium and heavy water and, more significantly, was the explosive substance of preference in the best hydrogen devices.

"Does everyone know all this?" He was amazed they talked so openly.

Oh, sure. He could find it all written in The Nuclear Almanac and Hogerton's The Atomic Energy Handbook, both perhaps on sale in the paperback rack.

Boarding, he'd recognized in business class several prostitutes and two call girls from the sex clubs in his high-rise building and as streetwalking attractions near the cocktail lounges and cash machines just outside. The call girls were fellow tenants. In economy class he spotted small clumps of the homeless who had somehow acquired the airplane fare to leave the mean streets of New York to be homeless in Wisconsin. They had washed themselves up for the pilgrimage, probably in the lavatories of the PABT building, where posters Michael had once designed still warned sternly that smoking, loitering, bathing, shaving, laundering, fucking, and sucking were all forbidden in the washbasins and toilet stalls, that alcohol could be harmful to pregnant women, and that anal