Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

It is a miracle of sorts that she grew up to be lighthearted, with little self-doubt, and was competent and decisive, which was much what I needed.

In her secondary school, with some support from her mother and much encouragement from her younger sister, she succeeded in winning a place on the cheerleading squad. However, still somewhat shy and not then by nature gregarious, she was never inducted wholeheartedly into the buoyant social life the other girls enjoyed among themselves and with the school athletes and their gross acolytes. There were many parties and social rallies she did not attend. She was shorter by an inch or two than most her age, with dimples, brown eyes, and honey-colored hair; thin when young but with a noticeable bosom. She did not date much, mainly because she was not always comfortable when she did, and in this too lay the occasion for mixed signals from her father. He was vexed when she went out unchaperoned, as though she were guilty of indecency merely by going; and on the other hand, he spoke in self-referential humiliation, as though himself shunned, when she was home evenings on weekends. He prophesied in dire admonition of the lifelong, bleak pitfalls inherent in becoming a "wallflower" early, as he was inclined to feel he himself had been, and of the misuse he had made of his chances when young. Wallflower was a word he spoke often. Personality was another; it was his grim conclusion that a person always ought to have more. Neither she, her brother, nor her sister could recall ever being held by him in a hug.

She was not sexually active. One time in the front seat of the automobile of an older football player she allowed her panties to be slid down before she could realize what was happening and was stricken with terror. She pulled his penis; she would not kiss it. That was her first sight of semen, about which she had heard girls in school titter and talk with grave understanding, she remembered uneasily, when I asked. I would assume a blase objectivity in these explorations into her past, but my dilemma was ambivalently both prurient and painful. After the football player, she dated more warily and schemed to avoid being taken off somewhere alone by any boy older who was self-assured and experienced. Until she met Richard in college. She enjoyed petting and of course was aroused, but detested being forced and mauled, and throughout almost all the rest of her teens, as far as I could find out, rather strong erotic surges and powerful romantic yearnings were unfulfilled and, with clean, religious rectitude, repressed.

In her first year at college, it was her very good fortune to fall in as friends with two Jewish girls from New York and one beautiful blonde music major from Topanga Canyon in California. She was astonished and enthralled by what she took to be their savoir faire, their knowledge and experience, their loud voices and brash self-assurance, by their unconstrained humor and bold and unabashed disclosures. They took pleasure in coaching her. She could never adapt without diffidence to their heedless sexual vocabulary, which seemed the university norm. But she was their equal in wit and intelligence, and in the integrity and fealty of friendship too. By her second year the four were living in rather carefree circumstances in a large house they united to rent. They remained in touch thereafter, and all three came to see her in that final month. All had more money from home than she did but shared it bountifully.

Richard was the first man she slept with and both were gratified, because he competently and proudly did the needed work well. He was two years older, already a senior, and by then had been to bed at least one time with all three of the others, but no one back then thought anything about that. They saw each other some more in Chicago, where she went to work summers, because he was already employed there and could introduce her to other people in an interconnecting cluster of social circles. He was in the regional office of a large Hartford insurance firm, where he was doing very well and quickly establishing himself as an outstanding personality and go-getter. Both liked to drink evenings after work, and often lunchtimes too, and they usually had good times together. She knew he had other girlfriends there but found she did not mind. She dated others too, as she had been doing in college, and more than once went out with men from the office she knew were married.

Soon after graduating, she moved to New York, where he had joined another company in a significant promotion, and found herself in her own small apartment with an exciting job as a researcher with Time magazine. And soon after that, they decided to try marriage.

She was ready to change and he would not. He remained charming to her mother, much more than he had reason to be, and produced chuckles from her father, and she began to find his habitual outgoing friendliness irritating and unworthy. He traveled a lot and was out late often even when back home, and when the third child, Ruth, was born with

conjunctivitis that stemmed from an infection of trichomonads, she knew enough about medicine and the techniques of medical research to verify it was a venereal disease and enough about him to know where the affliction had come from. With no word to him, she went one day to her gynecologist and had her tubes tied, and only afterward did she tell him she wanted no more babies from him. Largely because the infant was new, it took another two years for them to part. She was too principled then to take alimony, and this soon proved an awful misjudgment, for he was incorrigibly tardy with the child support agreed to, and deficient in amount, and soon was in arrears entirely when involved with new girlfriends.

They could not talk long without quarreling. After I was on the scene, it grew easier for both to allow me to speak to each on behalf of the other. Her mother came east to help in the large, rent-controlled apartment on West End Avenue with the many large rooms, and she was able to go back to work with good income in the advertising-merchandising department of Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, and that was where I met her. She sat facing a low partition, and I would lean on it and gossip when neither of us had anything important to get done. She was smarter than the man she worked for and more responsible and particular, but that never made a difference for a woman back then at that company--no female could be an editor or a writer in any of the publications or the head of any department. Without me she would not have been able to manage expenses and possibly would have had to retreat from the city with her mother and three children. Naomi and Ruth would not have had time or money to go through college. There would have been no funds for the private schools in Manhattan or, later, despite the excellent Time Incorporated medical plan, the expensive personal psychotherapy for Michael, which in the end did no good.

I do miss her, as Yossarian observed in our talks in the hospital, and make no attempt to hide it.

I miss her very much, and the few women I spend time with now--my widowed friend with some money and a good vacation home in Florida, two others I know from work who were never successful in resolving their own domestic lives, none of us young anymore--know I will continue to miss her, and that now I am pretty much only marking time. I enjoy myself a lot, playing bridge, taking adult education courses and subscribing to concerts at Lincoln Center and the YMHA, making short trips, seeing old friends when they come to town, doing my direct-mail consulting work for cancer relief. But I am only marking time. Unlike Yossarian, I expect nothing much new and good to happen to me again, and I enjoy myself less since Lew finally, as Claire chose to phrase it, "let himself" pass away. His family is strong and there was no weeping at the funeral services, except by an older brother of his and a sister. But I cried some tears myself back home after Claire gave me her account of his final few days and told me his last words, which were about me and my trip around the world.

I find myself looking forward to the trip I've started planning, to see sights everywhere of course, but mainly to see people I know in Australia, Singapore, and England, and in California too, where I still have Marvin and his wife, a nephew with a family, and some other acquaintances left from the days in Coney Island. I will begin, it's been decided, with short stops in Atlanta and Houston, to visit Naomi and Ruth, with their husbands and my grandchildren. The two girls have long since come to think of me as their natural father. Richard raised no objection to my adopting them legally. From the start I found myself dealing with them psychologically as my biological children, and I've felt no regrets about not siring my own. But we are no closer than that. As in most families I see, we find only desultory entertainment in each other's company and are soon all of us mutually on edge. Richard never showed jealousy because we grew close so quickly, and he eased himself away from all pretense of family life as soon as he decently could. In just a couple of years he had some new wives of his own and with the last one a child.

I am also looking forward to finding out more about that grotesque wedding in the bus terminal, the Wedding of the Close of the Century, as Yossarian and others now name it, to which, while I snorted humorously, he said I would be invited.

"I was robbed once in that bus terminal," I told him.

"My son was arrested there."

"I was too," I told him.

"For being robbed?"

"For raising a fuss, a hysterical fuss, when I saw the police doing nothing."

"He was put in a wall chain."

"So was I," I informed him, "and I still don't think I'll ever want to go there again."

"Not even for a wedding? A wedding like this one? With four thousand pounds of the best beluga caviar on order?"

I won't want to go. There are some compromises left I just don't want to make. Although Esther, the widowed lady I see most often, "would die" to attend, just to be on the scene and gape at others.

By the time I met Glenda, her loose days were behind her. I occasionally felt at least a little bit cheated because I had not been there in her bohemian heyday to enjoy her sexually then too, as more others had done than she wished comfortably to recall, and enjoy her roommates and other female friends too. The thought of the freedom with which those four had lived continued to titillate, and torment, me. I'd had my own good promiscuous years too, with girls from student days at New York University and Greenwich Village and then from the company, and with others I'd met through people in the company, and even on a lark or two each semester while I was teaching at my college in Pennsylvania for two years. Nevertheless, for a little while about the time of our marriage, I could still find myself temperamental, privately jealous and petulant, over her entire erotic past, and resentful of all the males, the youths, that high school football player, and then of all the men who had played their fornicating roles as partners with her. I hated especially the ones I imagined who could bring her always and simply to dizzying climaxes. Virile performances did not seem to matter to her. They mattered to me, and among those rogues of whom I had some knowledge, or was otherwise motivated to invent, I had to put her husband Richard. I saw him in these demeaning dramas as a conquering cavalier and irresistible adversary, and this was true even after I'd grown to discount him as a bothersome, vain man, shallow and empty-headed, always brimming with energetic plans of narrow ambition, and one whom Glenda also now considered only boring and exasperating. That she had harbored a long passion for the likes of him was a shameful recollection almost too distressing for either one of us to bear.

I still don't know how a guy with melanoma was able to keep working and get raises and new girlfriends and even a couple of wives. But Richard did. Lew could have told me, I'd always thought; but I did not want Lew to guess what I had come to understand about myself, that I had never fully grown up, not even with Glenda, when it came to that matter of a man's way with a woman.

Richard's first new girlfriend that we laid eyes on was the nurse in the office of his oncologist. She was perky and knew everything about his physical state; yet she was soon sleeping with him anyway and answering the phone in his apartment as though the place were her own. His next was her closest friend, to whom she gave him up in good spirit, who also knew about his malignancies but married him anyway. While that marriage was breaking up, there were girls in succession and concurrently, and then came the willowy, intelligent woman from good family he married next, a successful lawyer with a large firm in Los Angeles, to which city he packed himself up and migrated, into an even better job than the one he resigned from, to set up house with her there and move farther away from any familial claims upon him here. And these were only the ones he went to extremes to make sure we learned about, the attractive ones he had call for him in our apartment when he showed up on his visitation rights while he still chose to exercise them, or to haggle once more over money for maintenance or the problems with Michael, which grew more marked as he grew older. Richard had already gone west before we heard that horrifying word schizophrenia ventured and learned from the Time library and research files what a borderline case was then presumed to be. Glenda disdained my awe of Richard.

"He's a salesman, for God sakes, and a show-off," she would exclaim in condemnation, when she heard me speculating enviously. "If he pitches a hundred women, he's bound to find a few who would find him better than nothing, or than the dopes they're already tied up with. He can talk, we know that."

We knew he had a certain persevering charm, though none for us. At times when she was moping, I would clarify things for her, in the argument we'd first used with each other over the morning newspaper about whichever man was then in the White House: he was base, self-centered, conceited, bogus, and untruthful, so why expect him to behave any other way? I still can't tell whether the little prick we have there now is a bigger little prick than the two little pricks before him, but he certainly seems big enough, what with Noodles Cook as a confidant and that gluttonous, silver-haired parasite C. Porter Lovejoy, just out of prison on another one of those presidential pardons, his moral supervisor.

I always managed the mediation with Richard craftily. With me too he was driven to come across as likable and worldly, and I never let him feel positive he was succeeding.

"Set up a lunch," I volunteered, not long after Glenda and I started telling each other things and singling each other out to talk to at parties. "Let me speak to him for you."

"To who?" she asked.