Catch-22 (21 page)

   He lit cigarettes for both of them. She was enchanted by the
deep suntan covering his whole body. He wondered about the pink chemise that
she would not remove. It was cut like a man’s undershirt, with narrow shoulder
straps, and concealed the invisible scar on her back that she refused to let
him see after he had made her tell him it was there. She grew tense as fine
steel when he traced the mutilated contours with his fingertip from a pit in
her shoulder blade almost to the base of her spine. He winced at the many
tortured nights she had spent in the hospital, drugged or in pain, with the
ubiquitous, ineradicable odors of ether, fecal matter and disinfectant, of
human flesh mortified and decaying amid the white uniforms, the rubbersoled
shoes, and the eerie night lights glowing dimly until dawn in the corridors.
She had been wounded in an air raid.

   ‘Dove?’ he asked, and he held his breath in suspense.

   ‘ Napoli.’

   ‘Germans?’

   ‘Americani.’ His heart cracked, and he fell in love. He
wondered if she would marry him.

   ‘Tu sei pazzo,’ she told him with a pleasant laugh.

   ‘Why am I crazy?’ he asked.

   ‘Perchè non posso sposare.’

   ‘Why can’t you get married?’

   ‘Because I am not a virgin,’ she answered.

   ‘What has that got to do with it?’

   ‘Who will marry me? No one wants a girl who is not a virgin.’

   ‘I will. I’ll marry you.’

   ‘Ma non posso sposarti.’

   ‘Why can’t you marry me?’

   ‘Perchè sei pazzo.’

   ‘Why am I crazy?’

   ‘Perchè vuoi sposarmi.’ Yossarian wrinkled his
forehead with quizzical amusement. ‘You won’t marry me because I’m crazy, and
you say I’m crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?’

   ‘Si.’

   ‘Tu sei pazz’!’ he told her loudly.

   ‘Perchè?’ she shouted back at him indignantly, her
unavoidable round breasts rising and falling in a saucy huff beneath the pink
chemise as she sat up in bed indignantly. ‘Why am I crazy?’

   ‘Because you won’t marry me.’

   ‘Stupido!’ she shouted back at him, and smacked him loudly
and flamboyantly on the chest with the back of her hand. ‘Non posso sposarti! Non
capisci? Non posso sposarti.’

   ‘Oh, sure, I understand. And why can’t you marry me?’

   ‘Perchè sei pazzo!’

   ‘And why am I crazy?’

   ‘Perchè vuoi sposarmi.’

   ‘Because I want to marry you. Carina, ti amo,’ he explained,
and he drew her gently back down to the pillow. ‘Ti amo molto.’

   ‘Tu sei pazzo,’ she murmured in reply, flattered.

   ‘Perchè?’

   ‘Because you say you love me. How can you love a girl who is
not a virgin?’

   ‘Because I can’t marry you.’ She bolted right up again in a
threatening rage. ‘Why can’t you marry me?’ she demanded, ready to clout him
again if he gave an uncomplimentary reply. ‘Just because I am not a virgin?’

   ‘No, no, darling. Because you’re crazy.’ She stared at him in
blank resentment for a moment and then tossed her head back and roared
appreciatively with hearty laughter. She gazed at him with new approval when
she stopped, the lush, responsive tissues of her dark face turning darker still
and blooming somnolently with a swelling and beautifying infusion of blood. Her
eyes grew dim. He crushed out both their cigarettes, and they turned into each
other wordlessly in an engrossing kiss just as Hungry Joe came meandering into
the room without knocking to ask if Yossarian wanted to go out with him to look
for girls. Hungry Joe stopped on a dime when he saw them and shot out of the
room. Yossarian shot out of bed even faster and began shouting at Luciana to
get dressed. The girl was dumbfounded. He pulled her roughly out of bed by her
arm and flung her away toward her clothing, then raced for the door in time to
slam it shut as Hungry Joe was running back in with his camera. Hungry Joe had
his leg wedged in the door and would not pull it out.

   ‘Let me in!’ he begged urgently, wriggling and squirming maniacally.
‘Let me in!’ He stopped struggling for a moment to gaze up into Yossarian’s
face through the crack in the door with what he must have supposed was a
beguiling smile. ‘Me no Hungry Joe,’ he explained earnestly. ‘Me heap big
photographer from Life magazine. Heap big picture on heap big cover. I make you
big Hollywood star, Yossarian. Multi dinero. Multi divorces. Multi ficky-fic
all day long. Si, si, si!’ Yossarian slammed the door shut when Hungry Joe
stepped back a bit to try to shoot a picture of Luciana dressing. Hungry Joe
attacked the stout wooden barrier fanatically, fell back to reorganize his
energies and hurled himself forward fanatically again. Yossarian slithered into
his own clothes between assaults. Luciana had her green-and-white summer dress
on and was holding the skirt bunched up above her waist. A wave of misery broke
over him as he saw her about to vanish inside her panties forever. He reached
out to grasp her and drew her to him by the raised calf of her leg. She hopped
forward and molded herself against him. Yossarian kissed her ears and her
closed eyes romantically and rubbed the backs of her thighs. She began to hum
sensually a moment before Hungry Joe hurled his frail body against the door in
still one more desperate attack and almost knocked them both down. Yossarian
pushed her away.

   ‘Vite! Vite!’ he scolded her. ‘Get your things on!’

   ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ she wanted to know.

   ‘Fast! Fast! Can’t you understand English? Get your clothes
on fast!’

   ‘Stupido!’ she snarled back at him. ‘Vite is French, not
Italian. Subito, subito! That’s what you mean. Subito!’

   ‘Si, si. That’s what I mean. Subito, subito!’

   ‘Si, si,’ she responded co-operatively, and ran for her shoes
and earrings.

   Hungry Joe had paused in his attack to shoot pictures through
the closed door. Yossarian could hear the camera shutter clicking. When both he
and Luciana were ready, Yossarian waited for Hungry Joe’s next charge and
yanked the door open on him unexpectedly. Hungry Joe spilled forward into the
room like a floundering frog. Yossarian skipped nimbly around him, guiding
Luciana along behind him through the apartment and out into the hallway. They
bounced down the stairs with a great roistering clatter, laughing out loud breathlessly
and knocking their hilarious heads together each time they paused to rest. Near
the bottom they met Nately coming up and stopped laughing. Nately was drawn,
dirty and unhappy. His tie was twisted and his shirt was rumpled, and he walked
with his hands in his pockets. He wore a hangdog, hopeless look.

   ‘What’s the matter, kid?’ Yossarian inquired compassionately.

   ‘I’m flat broke again,’ Nately replied with a lame and
distracted smile. ‘What am I going to do?’ Yossarian didn’t know. Nately had spent
the last thirty-two hours at twenty dollars an hour with the apathetic whore he
adored, and he had nothing left of his pay or of the lucrative allowance he
received every month from his wealthy and generous father. That meant he could
not spend time with her any more. She would not allow him to walk beside her as
she strolled the pavements soliciting other servicemen, and she was infuriated
when she spied him trailing her from a distance. He was free to hang around her
apartment if he cared to, but there was no certainty that she would be there.
And she would give him nothing unless he could pay. She found sex
uninteresting. Nately wanted the assurance that she was not going to bed with
anyone unsavory or with someone he knew. Captain Black always made it a point
to buy her each time he came to Rome, just so he could torment Nately with the
news that he had thrown his sweetheart another hump and watch Nately eat his
liver as he related the atrocious indignities to which he had forced her to
submit.

   Luciana was touched by Nately’s forlorn air, but broke loudly
into robust laughter again the moment she stepped outside into the sunny street
with Yossarian and heard Hungry Joe beseeching them from the window to come
back and take their clothes off, because he really was a photographer from Life
magazine. Luciana fled mirthfully along the sidewalk in her high white wedgies,
pulling Yossarian along in tow with the same lusty and ingenuous zeal she had
displayed in the dance hall the night before and at every moment since.
Yossarian caught up and walked with his arm around her waist until they came to
the corner and she stepped away from him. She straightened her hair in a mirror
from her pocketbook and put lipstick on.

   ‘Why don’t you ask me to let you write my name and address on
a piece of paper so that you will be able to find me again when you come to
Rome?’ she suggested.

   ‘Why don’t you let me write your name and address down on a
piece of paper?’ he agreed.

   ‘Why?’ she demanded belligerently, her mouth curling suddenly
into a vehement sneer and her eyes flashing with anger. ‘So you can tear it up
into little pieces as soon as I leave?’

   ‘Who’s going to tear it up?’ Yossarian protested in
confusion. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

   ‘You will,’ she insisted. ‘You’ll tear it up into little
pieces the minute I’m gone and go walking away like a big shot because a tall,
young, beautiful girl like me, Luciana, let you sleep with her and did not ask
you for money.’

   ‘How much money are you asking me for?’ he asked her.

   ‘Stupido!’ she shouted with emotion. ‘I am not asking you for
any money!’ She stamped her foot and raised her arm in a turbulent gesture that
made Yossarian fear she was going to crack him in the face again with her great
pocketbook. Instead, she scribbled her name and address on a slip of paper and.
thrust it at him. ‘Here,’ she taunted him sardonically, biting on her lip to
still a delicate tremor. ‘Don’t forget. Don’t forget to tear it into tiny
pieces as soon as I am gone.’ Then she smiled at him serenely, squeezed his
hand and, with a whispered regretful ‘Addio,’ pressed herself against him for a
moment and then straightened and walked away with unconscious dignity and
grace.

   The minute she was gone, Yossarian tore the slip of paper up
and walked away in the other direction, feeling very much like a big shot
because a beautiful young girl like Luciana had slept with him and did not ask
for money. He was pretty pleased with himself until he looked up in the dining
room of the Red Cross building and found himself eating breakfast with dozens
and dozens of other servicemen in all kinds of fantastic uniforms, and then all
at once he was surrounded by images of Luciana getting out of her clothes and
into her clothes and caressing and haranguing him tempestuously in the pink
rayon chemise she wore in bed with him and would not take off. Yossarian choked
on his toast and eggs at the enormity of his error in tearing her long, lithe,
nude, young vibrant limbs into any pieces of paper so impudently and dumping
her down so smugly into the gutter from the curb. He missed her terribly
already. There were so many strident faceless people in uniform in the dining
room with him. He felt an urgent desire to be alone with her again soon and sprang
up impetuously from his table and went running outside and back down the street
toward the apartment in search of the tiny bits of paper in the gutter, but
they had all been flushed away by a street cleaner’s hose.

   He couldn’t find her again in the Allied officers’ night club
that evening or in the sweltering, burnished, hedonistic bedlam of the
black-market restaurant with its vast bobbing wooden trays of elegant food and
its chirping flock of bright and lovely girls. He couldn’t even find the restaurant.
When he went to bed alone, he dodged flak over Bologna again in a dream, with
Aarfy hanging over his shoulder abominably in the plane with a bloated sordid
leer. In the morning he ran looking for Luciana in all the French offices he
could find, but nobody knew what he was talking about, and then he ran in
terror, so jumpy, distraught and disorganized that he just had to keep running
in terror somewhere, to the enlisted men’s apartment for the squat maid in the
lime-colored panties, whom he found dusting in Snowden’s room on the fifth
floor in her drab brown sweater and heavy dark skirt. Snowden was still alive
then, and Yossarian could tell it was Snowden’s room from the name stenciled in
white on the blue duffel bag he tripped over as he plunged through the doorway
at her in a frenzy of creative desperation. The woman caught him by the wrists
before he could fall as he came stumbling toward her in need and pulled him
along down on top of her as she flopped over backward onto the bed and
enveloped him hospitably in her flaccid and consoling embrace, her dust mop
aloft in her hand like a banner as her broad, brutish congenial face gazed up
at him fondly with a smile of unperjured friendship. There was a sharp elastic
snap as she rolled the lime-colored panties off beneath them both without
disturbing him.

   He stuffed money into her hand when they were finished. She
hugged him in gratitude. He hugged her. She hugged him back and then pulled him
down on top of her on the bed again. He stuffed more money into her hand when
they were finished this time and ran out of the room before she could begin
hugging him in gratitude again. Back at his own apartment, he threw his things
together as fast as he could, left for Nately what money he had, and ran back
to Pianosa on a supply plane to apologize to Hungry Joe for shutting him out of
the bedroom. The apology was unnecessary, for Hungry Joe was in high spirits
when Yossarian found him. Hungry Joe was grinning from ear to ear, and
Yossarian turned sick at the sight of him, for he understood instantly what the
high spirits meant.

   ‘Forty missions,’ Hungry Joe announced readily in a voice
lyrical with relief and elation. ‘The colonel raised them again.’ Yossarian was
stunned. ‘But I’ve got thirty-two, goddammit! Three more and I would have been
through.’ Hungry Joe shrugged indifferently. ‘The colonel wants forty
missions,’ he repeated.