Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"Let him give you the details. You were in Dresden?"

"He'll give you those details." Rabinowitz let his eyes linger again on Angela. "Young lady, you look like someone I met once and can't remember where. She was a knockout too. Did we ever meet? I used to look younger."

"I'm not sure I know. This is my friend Anthony."

"Hello, Anthony. Listen to me good, Anthony. I'm not joshing. Treat her real fine tonight, because if you don't treat her good I will find out about it, and I will start sending her flowers and you will be out in the cold. Right, darling? Good night, my dear. You'll have a good time. Anthony, my name is Lew. Go have some fun."

"I will, Lew," said Anthony.

"I'm retired now, do a little real estate, some building with my son-in-law. What about you?"

"I'm retired too," said Yossarian.

"You're with Milo Minderbinder."

"Part time."

"I've got a friend who'd like to meet him. I'll bring him around. I'm in here with a weight problem. I have to keep it low because of a minor heart condition, and sometimes I take off too much. I like to check that out."

"With Dennis Teemer?"

"I know Teemer long. That lovely blonde lady looks like something special. I know I've seen her."

"I think you'd remember."

"That's why I know."

"Hodgkin's disease," confided Dennis Teemer.

"Shit," said Yossarian. "He doesn't want me to know."

"He doesn't want anybody to know. Not even me. And I know him almost thirty years. He sets records."

"Was he always that way? He likes to flirt."

"So do you. With everybody. You want everybody here to be crazy about you. He's just more open. You're sly."

"You're cunning and know too much."

In Rabinowitz, Yossarian saw a tall, direct man with a large frame who had lost heavy amounts of flesh. He was almost bald on top and wore a gold and graying brush mustache, and he was aggressively attentive to Angela, with an indestructible sexual self-confidence that overrode and reduced her own. Yossarian was amused to see her bend herself forward to take down her bosom, lay her hands in her lap to hold down her skirt, tuck back her legs primly. She was faced with an excess of overbearing friskiness, of a kind she did not take to but could not defeat.

"And he's not even Italian," Yossarian chided.

"You're not Italian, and I don't mind you. The trouble is I do know him from somewhere."

"Aha, Miss Moore, I think I may have it," said Rabinowitz with a probing smile, when he sauntered in and saw her again. "You remind me of a lovely little lady with good personality I met one time with a builder I was doing business with out in Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. An Italian named Benny Salmeri, I think. You liked to dance."

"Really?" answered Angela, looking at him with eye-shadowed eyelids half lowered. "I used to know a builder named Salmeri. I'm not sure it's the same."

"Did you ever have a roommate who was a nurse?"

"I still do," answered Angela, now more flippant. "The one on duty here before. That's my partner, Melissa."

"That nice-looking thing with that good personality?"

"She takes care of our friend here. That's why he's in. She fucks old men and gives them strokes."

"I wish you wouldn't say that to people," Yossarian reproved her mildly, after Rabinowitz had gone. "You'll destroy her prospects. And it wasn't a stroke. You'll ruin mine too."