Closing Time (21 page)

I don't tell Claire.

I say nothing to Sammy.

I'm well into my sixties and we're into the nineties, and this time I'm beginning to feel, like my father felt when he got old, and his brother too, that this time things are beginning to come to an end.

12

Noodles Cook

The ascent to the throne room of the White House by the man with the code name Little Prick was not without its ceremonial falterings and sundry spiteful amusements, as G. Noodles Cook could have documented in detail were it not for a lifelong propensity to be guarded, self-serving, calculating, mendacious, and mercenary-all qualities commending him as a soul singularly qualified for his exalted post as the tenth of nine senior tutors to the man who had eventually become the country's newest President. Yossarian had informed the FBI that his old friend and business colleague G. Noodles Cook was a sneak and a snake and that the administration was not going to find a much better person to fill whatever position he was being considered for. Noodles Cook was a man who could always be trusted to lie.

He got the job.

As far back as seminars in graduate school, where they had met, Noodles had unmasked himself as a person with a tendency to display his gifts only in the presence of a designated mentor, who could note that anything original emerging had originated precociously with him. Noodles, who'd done well at a less-than-elegant preparatory school while Yossarian was away at war, labored on to obtain his doctoral degree and soon found out there was not much for him to do with it but teach.

By that time, Yossarian, who had dropped out of graduate school with just a master's degree, was already in a position to hire Noodles for his group in the public relations agency where he was at work when Noodles wisely decided to give that kind of business a shot. He had good family connections, and the public relations agency seemed to him a good launching pad for something bigger and better.

Coworkers soon smelled out that Noodles never proposed an idea save when Yossarian was close enough to hear and, more frequently, would postpone suggesting anything even to Yossarian until both were in the presence of the client or with a superior official of the company. Too often when they were collaborating on their screenplays and television scripts, Noodles would supply the pregnant line in a way that aroused suspicion that the key to the problem had been lying in his grasp the day before. Telling him to change, Yossarian would tell himself, would be like telling a hunchback to stand up straight. A noodle was a noodle. In his way he was loyal to Yossarian, who did not like him but did not mind him, and they persisted as friends.

Departing graduate school with the matter-of-fact discovery that he did not want his higher education to go any higher, Yossarian had done some teaching and then moved into advertising. He did well, enjoyed his annual raises and small promotions, liked the people there better than those at the university, received a small raise again at the end of his third year, and decided to go out exploring for a better-paying job doing work of a different kind. He found a new better-paying job quickly with a different agency that handled accounts pretty much the same as the one he had just left. He remained until he received his annual raise and then went looking for another new job, and another quicker increase in salary.

Each time he took leave of one place for another, it was with the discouraging resolution that he did not want to spend the balance of his life exercising his intelligence, ingenuity, and good looks furthering the progress of products he did not himself use and of publications he would not normally read. On the other hand, he could not think of a product or cause with which he did wish to become involved that paid enough for the things he had learned to want for himself and his wife and children. The dilemma was not agonizing.

There was no need to rationalize.

He worked because he had to.

In Wall Street, of course, lay the exotic attraction in quantities unimaginable of a distilled product denuded of all complicating attributes. It was called money, and mountains of it could be manufactured out of nothing, as magically, almost, and as naturally, as a simple tree manufactures tons of wood out of thin air, sunlight, and rainwater. Money might be shit, as every college student with some knowledge of Freud might point out perversely at parties and family gatherings; but it was shit that could buy things: friends of rank and means; a coat of arms in the furriers' and jewelers' and in the fashion hubs of the world; baronial estates in Connecticut, Virginia, Mexico, East Hampton, and Colorado; and titles of knowing distinction that admitted the truncating of first names into the mere initial and the graceful relocation of accent onto the middle name, as in G. Noodles Cook and C. Porter Lovejoy, that most gray of graying eminences in the Washington Cosa Loro.

The forbearing Noodles Cook was tireless in repeating that his mother had been a daughter of the Goodman Noodles family of Goodman Noodles fame and his father a collateral descendant of the British Cooks of Cook's Tours, and that he himself was something of a scion of the Noodles and the Cooks, with some means and property devolving upon him through the normal processes of heritage. Noodles Cook had been Goody in college, Goodman in business, and Noodles in newspaper gossip coverage of such social doings as are reported regularly. And today he was G. Noodles Cook in
Who's Who
and on official White House stationery.

Noodles, beginning in government as the tenth of nine senior tutors to the freshman Vice President, never failed to respond on the rare occasions Yossarian had need to telephone him, and Yossarian had found that this access still obtained, even in his present post as one of the more trusted confidants of the new man recently installed in the White House.

"How's the divorce going?" one or the other of them was certain to inquire each time they spoke.

"Fine. How's yours?"

"Pretty good. Mine's having me followed anyway."

"So is mine."

"And how are you getting along with that guy you're working for?" Yossarian never failed to ask.

"Better and better-I know you're surprised."

"No, I'm not surprised."

"I don't know what to make of that. You ought to join us here in Washington if I can find some way to worm you aboard. Here at last is a real chance to do some good."

"For whom?"

The answer always was a self-effacing laugh. Between these two it was not necessary to put more into words.

Neither back then at the public relations agency was troubled ethically by the work they were doing for corporate clients who never had the public interest in mind and political candidates they would not vote for, and for a large cigarette company owned mainly by New Yorkers who did not have to grow tobacco to scratch a livelihood from the earth. They made money, met people of substance, and generally enjoyed succeeding. Writing speeches for others to deliver, even people they abhorred, seemed but a different form of creative writing.

But time passed, and the work-like all work to a man of open intellect-turned tiresome. When there was no longer doubt that tobacco caused cancer, their children looked daggers at them, and their roles took a subtle turn toward the unsavory. They separately began thinking of doing something else. Neither had ever tried pretending that the advertising, public relations, and political work they were accomplishing was ever anything but trivial, inconsequential, and duplicitous. Noodles revealed himself first.

"If I'm going to be trivial, inconsequential, and deceitful," announced Noodles, "then I might as well be in government."

And off he moved to Washington, D.C., with letters of recommendation, including one from Yossarian, to utilize his family connections in an aspiring endeavor to slither his way into the Cosa Loro there.

While Yossarian had a second crack at high-finance easy money with an insider on Wall Street who sold sure things at a time when there were sure things. He continued writing short stories and small articles of trenchant satirical genius just right for publication in the prestigious
New Yorker
magazine; each time his pieces were rejected, and each time he applied and was turned down for an editorial post there, his respect for the magazine escalated. He was successful with two screenplays and half successful with another, and he outlined ideas for an acerbic stage play that he was never able to finish and a complex comic novel that he was not able to start.

He made money also by consulting with clients profitably on a personal freelance basis for fees, percentages, and commissions and by participating on a modest scale in several advantageous real estate syndication ventures, which he never understood. When national affairs again took a turn toward the menacing, he found himself going as a father in anguished consternation to his old wartime acquaintance Milo Minderbirider. Milo was elated to see him.

"I was never even sure you always really liked me," he revealed almost gratefully.

"We've always been friends," said Yossarian evasively, "and what are friends for?"

Milo showed caution instantaneously with a native grasp that never seemed to fail him. "Yossarian, if you've come to me for help in keeping your sons out of the war in Vietnam-"

"It's the only reason. I have come."

"There is nothing I can do." By which Yossarian understood him to mean he had already used up his quota of illegal legal draft exemptions. "We all have our share to shoulder. I've seen my duties and I've done them."

"We all have our jobs to do," added Wintergreen. "It's the luck of the draw."

Yossarian remembered that Wintergreen's jobs in the last big war had consisted mainly of digging holes as a stockade prisoner and filling them back up for having gone AWOL one time after another to delay going overseas into danger; selling stolen Zippo cigarette lighters once there; and serving in a managerial capacity in military mailrooms, where he countermanded orders from high places that fell short of his standards, simply by throwing them away.

"I'm talking about one kid, damn it," pleaded Yossarian. "I don't want him to go."

"I know what you're suffering," said Milo. "I have a son of my own I worry about. But we've used up our contacts."

Yossarian perceived dismally that he was getting nowhere and that if Michael had bad luck in the draw, he would probably have to run off with him to Sweden. He sighed. "Then there's nothing you can do to help me? Absolutely nothing?"

"Yes, there
is
something you can do to help me," Milo responded, and for the moment, Yossarian feared he had been misunderstood. "You know people that we don't. We would like," Milo continued, and here his voice grew softer, in a manner sacramental, "to hire a very good law firm in Washington."

"Don't you have a good firm there?"

"We want to hire
every
good law firm, so that none of them can ever take part in an action against us."

"We want the influence," explained Wintergreen, "not the fucking law work. If we had the fucking influence we'd never need the fucking law work or the fucking lawyers. Yossarian, where could we begin if we wanted to get all the best legal connections in Washington?"

"Have you thought of Porter Lovejoy?"

"C. Porter Lovejoy?" At this, even Wintergreen succumbed to a state of momentary awe.

"Could
you
get to C. Porter Lovejoy?"

"I can get to Lovejoy," casually answered Yossarian, who'd never met Lovejoy but got to him simply with a phone call to his law office as the representative of a cash-rich corporate client seeking the services of someone experienced in Washington for an appropriate retainer.

Milo said he was a wizard. Wintergreen said he was fucking okay. "And Eugene and I agree," said Milo, "that we want to retain you too, as a consultant and a representative, on a part-time basis, of course. Only when we need you."

"For special occasions."

"We will give you an office. And a business card."

"You'll give more than that." Yossarian turned suave. "Are you sure you can afford me? It will cost a lot."

"We have a lot. And with an old friend like you, we're prepared to be generous. How much will you want, if we try it for a year?"

Yossarian pretended to ponder. The figure he would name had jumped instantly to mind. "Fifteen thousand a month," he finally said, very distinctly.

"Fifteen dollars a month?" Milo repeated, more distinctly, as though to make sure.

"Fifteen
thousand
a month."

"I thought you said hundred."

"Eugene, tell him."

"He said thousand, Milo," Wintergreen sadly obliged.

"I have trouble hearing." Milo pulled violently at an earlobe, a though remonstrating with a naughty child. "I thought fifteen dollars sounded low."

"It's thousand, Milo. And I'll want it on a twelve-month basis even though I might be available for only ten. I take two-month summer vacations."

He was delighted with that whopper. But it would be nice to have summers free, maybe to return to those two literary projects of yore, his play and comic novel.

His idea for the stage play, reflecting
A Christmas Carol
, would portray Charles Dickens and his fecund household at Christmas dinner when that family was at its most dysfunctional, shortly before that splenetic literary architect of sentimental good feeling erected the brick wall indoors to close his own quarters off from his wife's. His lighthearted comic novel was derived from the
Doctor Faustus
novel of Thomas Mann and centered on a legal dispute over the rights to the fictitious and horrifying Adrian Leverkühn choral masterpiece in those pages called
Apocalypse
, which, stated Mann, had been presented just once, in Germany in 1926, anticipating Hitler, and possibly never would be performed again. On one side of the lawsuit were the heirs of the musical genius Leverkühn, who had created that colossal composition; on the other would be the beneficiaries to the estate of Thomas Mann, who had invented Leverkühn and defined and orchestrated that prophetic, awesome, and unforgettable unique opus of progress and annihilation, with Nazi Germany as both the symbol and the substance. The attraction to Yossarian of both these ideas lay in their arresting unsuitability.