Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"You really don't know, not even that?"

"I can't decide." M2 was writhing. His hands turned red as he wrung them together. The rims of his eyes reddened too. "I can't make a decision. You remember the last time I tried."

One time far back, just before Yossarian went begging to Milo for help in keeping Michael out of the Vietnam War, a much younger M2 had attempted to make up his mind independently on a subject of transcendent importance. He thought his idea a fine one: to answer the call of what he'd been told was his country and enlist in the army to kill Asian communists in Asia.

"You'll do no such thing!" determined his mother.

"The way to serve your government more," responded his father, in a manner more deliberative, "is to find out who the draft boards are not drafting, and then you'll see who's really needed. We'll look into that for you."

The two and a half years M2 spent in divinity school had scarred him for life and instilled in him a traumatic aversion to all things spiritual and a fear and distrust of men and women who did not smoke or drink, swear, wear makeup, walk around anywhere even partly disrobed, did not make sex jokes, smiled an awful lot, even when nothing humorous was said, and smiled when alone, and manifested a shared, beatific faith in a hygienic virtue and self-esteem they thought exclusively their own and which he found malicious and repulsive.

He had never married, and the women he'd kept company with were invariably ladies approximately his own age who dressed plainly in pleated skirts and prim blouses, wore very little makeup daintily, were shy, colorless, and quickly gone.

Make effort as he might, Yossarian could not put to rest the low surmise that M2 belonged to that class of solitary and vindictive men that largely comprised the less boisterous of the two main classes of resolute patrons of prostitutes to be seen in his high-rise apartment building, riding up the elevators for the sex cures in the opulent temple of love on top or downward into the bowels of the structure to the three or four massage parlors of secondary dignity in the sub-basements underlying the several general cinema houses on the first sub-level down from the public sidewalk.

Michael had remarked lightly already to Yossarian that M2 seemed to him to possess all the typical attributes of the serial sex killer: he was white.

"When we went to the terminal," he confided, "he was only interested in looking at the women. I don't think he could recognize the transvestites. Is his father that way?"

"Milo knows what a prostitute is and didn't like us going after them. He's always been chaste. I doubt he knows what a transvestite is or would see much difference if he found out."

"Why did you ask me," M2 asked Yossarian now, "if we still have our catering servi

ce?"

"I might have some business. There's this wedding--"

"I'm glad you mentioned that. I might have forgotten. My mother wants me to talk to you about our wedding."

"This is not your wedding," corrected Yossarian.

"My sister's wedding. My mother wants my sister married, and she wants it done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She expects you to arrange it. She knows you're in ACACAMMA."

Yossarian was genially amazed. "The ceremony too?"

"It's been done before?"

"The actual ceremony? Not that I know of."

"You know trustees?"

"I'm with ACACAMMA. But it might be impossible."

"My mother won't accept that. She says--I'm reading now, from her fax--that if you can't manage that, she doesn't know what else you're good for."

Yossarian shook his head benignly. He was anything but insulted. "It will take money, and time. You would have to begin, I would say, with a donation to the museum of ten million dollars."

"Two dollars?" asked M2, as though repeating.

"Ten million dollars."

"I thought I heard two."

"I did say ten," said Yossarian. "For the construction of another new wing."

"We can handle that."

"With no strings attached."