Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

Christopher Maxon was absent, having been told by his wife he could be no use there. Milo, bored by this replay of the event taking place in the future, had wandered outside to the surrounding balcony. Anything but at ease so near transvestites at the railing above looking with shining iniquity on the figures below, of which he understood he was one, he had coasted down the escalator to the main level below, to wait and go with Yossarian on the tour of the terminal that now was authorized for all of them and which some in his family thought he should make. With the income from his plane now assured, he had skyscrapers in mind. He liked his M & M Building and wanted more. He was perplexed as well by a nagging enigma: upstairs on a screen, he'd been disoriented to observe himself at the wedding in white tie and tails delivering a short speech he had not yet seen, and then dancing with that dark-haired woman Olivia Maxon, whom he'd only just met, when he still did not know how to dance. He was not sure where he was in time.

Before drifting down, he had taken Yossarian outside for a word in private. "What is the fucking problem," he had wondered absently, "with the fucking caviar?"

"It's not the money," Yossarian informed him. "It's the fucking fish. But now they think they've caught enough."

"Thank God," said Olivia, hearing that news again.

In the social archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were precedents with guidelines and milestones to be emulated and exceeded. The Minderbinder-Maxon affair would surpass them all. Even in a recession, the country was awash in money. Even amid poverty, there was room for much waste.

Although it was spring, the florist in charge had installed eighty Christmas trees in the five banquet halls and had surrounded them with thousands of pots of white narcissus. There were two sections with dance floors and bandstands on the main and second floors of the South Wing, and one on the main floor of the North Wing. From midafternoon on, spotlights illuminated the entrances on Eighth Avenue and Ninth Avenue and the lesser, more secluded doorways along the side streets. The effect inside through the smoked plate-glass windows of the major outside wall for two whole city blocks was of lots of sunlight on stained glass. Rolling buses seen through the panes were acclaimed as a clever approximation of the real world. Lauded equivalently as an impression of reality was the occasional wafting scent of diesel fumes filtering in through the natural clouds of perfumes from the women and emitted by fragrances infused into the central ventilating system. All of the subcaterers, florists, and other workers contracting with M & M Commercial Catering, Inc. were required to sign confidentiality agreements with the Commercial Killings division of M & M E & A, and the secrecy of these confidentiality agreements was publicized widely.

The bottom floor of the North Wing, which was separated from the South Wing by a city street that the bride with her procession would have to cross, was converted into a chapel and select banquet area. Effecting this renovation had required the removal of massive staircases leading to the floor below, together with an information booth and the enormous activated sculpture of moving colored balls that normally occupied much of the floor space. The staircases, information booth, and work of sculpture were put on exhibition under a temporary canopy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the place where the Great Hall of the museum normally stood, and these attracted respectable attendance and decent reviews from ar

t critics. The Great Hall of the museum had itself been transferred into the bus terminal, on loan for the occasion for a consideration of ten million dollars. Uprooting the staircases and sculpture from the North Wing made room for pews and rows of walnut benches, and, of more moment, for the installation there in the bus terminal of the Temple of Dendur from the same Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, through the peaceful application of much persuasive pressure and a fee of another ten million dollars, was also lent out temporarily by the museum for the evening. It was in the North Wing of PABT that those now watching in the Communications Control Center would soon observe the wedding ceremony enacted. There was space left as well in that area for a small head table for the principal participants in the ceremony and their two guests from the White House, and for six round tables, each with seats for ten people who were most closely connected with the proceedings and with those eminences at the oblong table in front of the columns of the Temple. The altar inside the Temple of Dendur was banked with flowers and blowing candelabra.

One million, one hundred and twenty-two thousand champagne tulips had been procured as door prizes and souvenirs. A massive variety of fabulous hanging chandeliers from different epochs was installed throughout all five banquet sections, and these were wrapped in curly willow branches. Wisps of raffia were added to the willow branches, and there were tiny twinkling lights in all of the leaves and in the boughs of all eighty Christmas trees. Ravishing tapestries for tablecloths, masses of staggered candles, antique cages full of live birds, and rare books and silver plate from different periods were in abundance everywhere. Thickets of summer asters in the twenty-two hundred Malaysian pots flanking all of the entrances into the principal terminal halls helped turn half the South Wing of the main floor of PABT into a miniature Versailles, with thousands of flickering lights in the terra-cotta pots simulating millions of candles. In one hundred and four vitrines along the sides of all banquet areas were living actors in poses and activities re-creating the hustlers, whores, drug dealers, child runaways, panhandlers, drug addicts, and other derelicts who regularly inhabited the terminal. Shops still surviving profitably in the terminal were paid to remain open all night, enhancing the novelty of the surroundings and setting, and many of the guests enjoyed spending time in the intervals buying things. Sixty-one sets of attractive female identical twins, all that could be found in the world for that work, posed as mermaids in the fifty or so artificial pools and fountains created, and thirty-eight pairs of male identical twins performed as heralds and banner wavers and offered humorous responses to questions.

Port Authority Patron Aides in red jackets were on duty everywhere to assist with instructions and directions. The AirTransCenter of the terminal was held open to transport to the city's three major airports those guests rushing directly from the lavish Minderbinder-Maxon affair to lavish parties in Morocco and Venice, music festivals in Salzburg or Bayreuth, and the Chelsea Flower Show or Wimbledon tennis matches in England.

Sophisticated managerial headhunters had ensured through intensive interview procedures that only well-bred models and thespians from good families, with degrees from good colleges, were hired for the parts of the male and female whores and other penurious, degenerate inhabitants of the premises who normally made their residences and livelihoods there, and they threw themselves into these roles with a wholesome waggery and an endearing enthusiasm for good, clean sport that won the hearts of all in the several audiences. Toward party's end, as those observing on the video screens could see, these mingled with the guests in their costumes and feigned vocations, and this was another innovation contributing much to the general hilarity.

Other actors and actresses and male and female models outfitted to resemble figures in famous paintings and motion pictures strolled through the several galleries, striking the characteristic poses of the characters they were aping. There were a number of Marilyn Monroes, a couple of Marlon Brandos playing Stanley Kowalski, a Humphrey Bogart here and there, a pair of dying Dantons, and at least two Mona Lisas, whom everyone recognized. Waiters wore flowing white blouses and embroidered tunics of different periods. The Off-Track Betting parlor and Arby's restaurant on the second floor and the Lindy's Restaurant and Bar below were reconstructed to resemble seventeenth-century Flemish eating-drinking houses, with bric-a-brac and artifacts of that time filling the taverns appropriately. In one of these tableaux, smoking a cigarette rather than a pipe and scrutinizing everything shrewdly, was a lean man with milky skin, pink eyes, and copper hair. He wore Bavarian lederhosen and had a hiking staff and green rucksack, and Yossarian, who was vaguely sure he had seen him somewhere else, could not tell whether he was there at work or as an outfitted element in the decor. There were several Rembrandt self-portrait look-alikes and one Jane Avril. There were no Jesus Christs.

After dinner, the guests would find themselves free to dance or drift past Greek and Roman antiques to buy Zaro's bread at Zaro's Bread Basket, Fanny Farmer candy, or New York State Lottery tickets, or peer into a Drago shoe repair shop or one of the Tropica Juice Bars, where the pyramids of oranges were decorated in French Directoire, with swags, rosettes, and tassels. Many had never laid eyes on pyramids of oranges before. The centerpieces of their dining tables were of gilded magnolia leaves and spring branches, and the upright columns supporting the Communications Control Center were majestic in silver floodlights, with fountains tumbling whitely around them, and with the multitude of hoisted sail-like corporate banners and pennants luffing and snapping in the artificial breezes. One hall leading to gates outside to long-distance buses heading west to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and north to the Pole was decorated in the Greek Renaissance style and furnished with Italian tapestries, Japanese lanterns, medieval armors, and carved-walnut wainscoting from a French chateau. Opposite this was another passageway for departures; this one featured Regency furniture, overstuffed chintz cushions, and mahogany woodwork, all just inside the wrought-iron gates of a medieval court. The Charles Engelhard Court, also on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was ablaze with pink and gold light and featured fifty thousand French roses, with almost as many gold-dipped magnolia leaves, and a dance floor hand-painted for just that evening in harlequin blocks of green, yellow, red, and black.

Forty-seven chiefs of protocol from the Foreign Service had assisted with the sensitive matter of seating arrangements, making sure the thirty-five hundred guests were properly, though not always contentedly, placed. The basic seating attack ultimately agreed to left many of the thirty-five hundred unfulfilled and displeased, but propitiated to an extent by the disappointment evident in others.

There was no head table anywhere other than the privileged small one facing outward from the Temple of Dendur in the North Wing for the principals and, of course, the President and his First Lady, with Noodles Cook sitting in already for the chief executive until he made his entrance.

The First Lady had arrived early to collect autographs from celebrities.

"I wonder where the President is," said Olivia Maxon, watching with impatient expectation. "I wish he'd come."

He would journey, some knew, by speedy special train to PABT directly from the secret MASSPOB underground terminal in Washington. And he would, of course, be among the last to appear, materializing only in time to wave with a broad smile and shake but few hands before giving the bride away while simultaneously taking his stand beside the groom as M2's best man. This was another first in matrimonial procedure and promised to set a standard for wedding ceremonies, perhaps even for royal families with traditions centuries old.

All of the other tables were round, in order that no one person be in a dominant place, and the chairs, ostensibly, were democratically equal. And each of the remaining three hundred and forty-four round tables outside the North Wing featured an important public figure and a multimillionaire, or a woman married to one. The multimillionaires were not entirely happy, for all would have preferred the President himself, or failing that, one of the eight billionaires invited, who well understood their metaphorical dimensions as deities, trophies, inspirations, and ornaments. A few of the billionaires had bought hotels in Manhattan that same week merely to possess facilities for private parties for friends.

The cardinal had requested the President or, if not him, the governor and the mayor, one owner of a major metropolitan newspaper, at least two of the eight billionaires, and one Nobel physicist to convert. Yossarian gave him Dennis Teemer instead, to teach him the facts of biological life, one newspaper publisher, and one dejected multimillionaire who had hoped for tete-a-tete access to a billionaire. He set them at a table with a good view of the bride on the Ninth Avenue side of the South Wing, not far from the police station and the table with Larry McBride and his new wife, and Michael Yossarian and his old girlfriend Marlene, between the Sport Spot Lingerie Shop outside the doors of the police station and Jo-Ann's Nut House. McMahon was there too, emerging from his cell to honor McBride and his new missus, on duty in his police captain's dress uniform instead of a dinner jacket.

McBride was in line for a presidential commendation for his masterful achievement in finding space for the three hundred and fifty-one tables for the thirty-five hundred closest friends of Regina and Milo Minderbinder and Olivia and Christopher Maxon, who had no close friends and did not want any, and for the Temple of Dendur and other monumental structures in the five refulgent halls, along with sites for the bandstands and dance floors. He was responsible as well for the coordination of activities by others in disciplines with which he had no previous experience.

Of crucial priority in the planning was the need for a clear passage for the bridal procession to move from the Ninth Avenue side of the South Wing almost all the way through to the Eighth Avenue side as far as the Walgreen's drugstore, around which corner the party then turned uptown through exits to cross Forty-first Street beneath an overhead shelter and advance into the chapel and dining hall in the North Wing to the altar set up just inside the Temple of Dendur. The Temple of Dendur, the Blumenthal Patio, the Engelhard Court, and the Great Hall of the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art, the four hallowed areas of the museum consecrated to parties and other social and promotional events, had all been relocated to the bus terminal for the evening and allocated in a way that afforded all guests their own celebrated monument with a history of glorious catering.

As laid out by McBride, all guests could obtain at least a partial view of the bride and her retinue as they rose to the top of the escalators from the Subway Level on the Ninth Avenue side of the terminal and made their digni

fied way toward Eighth Avenue and eventually into the North Wing. This route of some duration allowed for an unusual program of music to aggrandize the occasion as unique. Yossarian listened with amazement to the first familiar notes.

The opening piece for the matrimonial celebration was the prelude to the opera Die Meistersinger.

And it was to the first, blaring, jubilant chords of this that Yossarian watched the bride come levitating up into sight, as though over a horizon, at the head of an escalator. The music, which was of adequate span for the long walk, was handclapping perfect in bouncy spirit. The flower girls and ring bearers were especially stimulated by the quickening and changing tempos and came into their own when the "Dance of the Apprentices" was added for the two minutes and six seconds needed for the last in the bridal party to turn into the passageway to the side exit to the North Wing. There, after the bride had completed her turn outside and crossed the street into the North Wing, the music changed to a ceremonious orchestral rendition of the "Prize Song" from that same Wagnerian opera, which ended on a soft, palpitating note when the bride was in the chapel and came at last to a stop where the cardinal, a Reform rabbi, and six other prelates from different faiths stood waiting with the groom and their primary attendants. Here, while the recitations were made, the music diminished to underlying refrains of the Liebesnacht duet from Tristan, while the cardinal tried to ignore that the music was both heavenly and carnal, and the rabbi tried to forget that it was composed by Wagner. In that part of the ceremony, the lucky couple was pronounced man and wife nine times, by the eight clergymen and Noodles Cook, who was still standing in for the overdue President. When they turned from the altar to kiss chastely before moving to the dance floor, the soaring melodies chosen, Hacker announced before they began, were those of the closing measures of Gotterdammerung, with their soulful, soaring strains of the "Redemption Through Love" theme.

"Do you know it?" asked Hacker.

"I know it," said Yossarian, in surprised appreciation, and was tempted to whistle along with the peaceful violins and somnolent brass now rising and softening into so holy a conclusion. "I was about to suggest it."

"Was he really?" the kid asked Gaffney, and with a button put a pause to the activities.

"No, I wasn't," recanted Yossarian before Gaffney could answer. "But I think it's perfect. It's peaceful, sweet, melodic, erotic, and certainly climactic and final." He gave no voice to his shifty and vindictive presentiment that he was seeing on the video monitors another Gotterdammerung, that it was almost closing time for all of the people he was watching in oblivious revelry on the video screens, including himself and Frances Beach as he watched himself dance with her, maybe for Melissa too and McBride and his new wife, for the bride and M2. "Your guests will love it, Olivia. They'll walk out to the dance floor humming that Gotterdammerung tune."