Closing Time (6 page)

"Loan me fifty now, Louie, will you?" Smokey begged as a favor. "There's some good smoking stuff from Harlem outside that I want to invest in."

"I can only lend you twenty." I could have given him more. "That's funny," I said when they'd gone out the door. I was flexing my fingers. "Something's wrong with my hand. When I gave him that twenty I could hardly bend it."

"You were holding the sugar bowl," Winkler said. His teeth were shivering.

"What sugar bowl?"

"Didn't you know?" Sammy snapped at me almost angrily. "You were gripping that sugar bowl like you were going to kill him with it. I thought you would squeeze it to pieces."

I leaned back with a laugh and ordered some pie and ice cream for the three of us. No, I hadn't known I was gripping that cylindrical thick sugar shaker while we were talking. My head was cool and collected while I looked him straight in the eye, and my arm was ready for action without my even knowing it. Sammy let out some air and turned white as he lifted his hand from his lap and put back down the table knife he had been holding.

"Tiger, why were you hiding it?" I said with a laugh. "What good would that do me?"

"I didn't want them to see how my hands were shaking," Sammy whispered.

"Would you know how to use it?"

Sammy shook his head. "And I don't ever want to find out. Lew, I've got to tell you right now. If we're ever together and you feel like getting into a fight, I want you to know that you can positively count on me not to stand by you again."

"Me neither," said Winkler. "Red Benny wouldn't do nothing with me around, but I wasn't so sure about the others."

"Gang," I told them, "I wasn't counting on you this time."

"Were you really going to hit him with that sugar shaker?"

"Sammy, I would have hit him with the whole luncheonette if I had to. I would have hit him with you."

I was already past sixty-five, two years to the day, when I nabbed that young purse snatcher, a tall, swift guy in his twenties. It's a cinch to keep track because of my birthday. As a present to me, I had to bring Claire down into the city to one of those shows with songs that she wanted to see and I didn't. We got there early and were standing outside with a bunch of other people under the marquee of a theater that wasn't too far from that Port Authority

Bus Terminal. That bus terminal is a place that still gives me a laugh whenever I remember the time Sammy had his pocket picked coming back from a visit to us and was almost thrown in jail for yelling at the police to try to make them do something about it. By then I'd already made peace with the Germans and drove a Mercedes. Claire had one too, a nifty convertible. All of a sudden a woman let out a
geshrei
. I saw a couple of guys come racing away just in back of me. Without thinking I grabbed hold of one. I spun him around, lifted him up, and slammed him down on his chest on the hood of a car. Only when I had him down did I see he was young, tall, and strong. He was a brown guy.

"If you move a muscle, I'll break your back," I said in his ear. He did not move a muscle.

When I saw how careful the cops were in searching him I kept shaking my head with what should have been fear. They combed through his scalp with their fingers for a blade or some kind of pick. They pinched through his collar and pockets and through all of the seams of his shirt and his pants, feeling him everywhere from top to bottom for a gun or a knife or anything small and sharp. I realized I could have been killed. Only when they got down inside his sneaker tops and finished did they all relax.

"You were very lucky, sir," said the young cop in charge, who was the oldest one there.

People kept smiling at me and I kept smiling back. I felt like a hero.

"Okay, Lew, your show is over," Claire said to me dryly, as I could have bet she was going to. "Let's get inside now for the real show."

"One minute more, Claire," I answered her loudly and swaggered. "There's that nice-looking blonde girl over there who I think might like to get to know me better."

"Lew, will you come inside already, for God sakes," she said, "or do I go in without you?"

We walked in laughing. Just two weeks later my symptoms returned, and I was back in the hospital for chemotherapy.

5

John

Outside the hospital it was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. Interior decorators were culture heroes, and fashion designers were the social superiors of their clientele.

"And why wouldn't they be?" Frances Beach had already replied to this observation of Yossarian's, exercising an enunciation so nearly perfect that others often pondered how anyone could pronounce English so flawlessly and escape sounding adenoidal. "Have you forgotten what we look like naked?"

"If a man said that, John," said Patrick Beach, her husband, pleased with her once more, "he'd be flayed alive."

"Men do say that, darling," said Frances Beach, "at their spring and fall collections, and make billions dressing us."

There were still plenty of poor people.

Yossarian looked askance at a bunch sprawled on the sidewalk outside the hospital as he strode out to the curb and the stretch limousine with black windows waiting there to transport him to the luxury high-rise apartment building across town in which he now made his home. He had reserved a sedan; they had sent the limousine again; there would be no additional charge. The high-rise apartment house he lived in was called a luxury building because the costs of living in it were large. The rooms were small. The ceilings were low, there were no windows in his two bathrooms, and no space in the kitchen area for a table or a chair.

Less than ten blocks from this home was the bus terminal of the Port of New York Authority, a structure stacked with landings seven stories high. On ground level was a police desk with three principal holding cells continuously in use, which overflowed with new prisoners several times each day, and into which, a year earlier, Michael Yossarian had been hauled upon emerging from a subway exit and attempting to step back in after realizing he had got off too soon on his way downtown to the architectural firm for which he was doing drawings.

"That was the day," he still recalled, "you saved my life and broke my spirit."

"Did you want to be locked up with all those others?"

"I would have died if that happened. But it wasn't easy, seeing you blow up and bamboozle all those cops and get away with it. And knowing I could never do the same."

"We get angry the way we have to, Michael. I don't think I had much choice."

"I get depressed."

"You had an older brother who bullied you. Maybe that's the difference."

"Why didn't you stop him?"

"We didn't know how. We didn't want to bully him."

Michael responded with a token snicker. "You were really something to watch, weren't you?" he accused with envy. "You had a small crowd. There was even clapping."

Afterward they were both devitalized.

People lived in the bus terminal now, a resident population of men and women and wayward boys and girls, most of them sleeping at night in the darker depths and emerging like commuters for much of each day to conduct in the open what normal business affairs were theirs to attend to.

There was hot and cold running water in the lavatories on the different levels, along with an abundance of whores and homosexuals for every appetite, and plentiful shops close at hand for such basic daily necessities as chewing gum, cigarettes, newspapers, and jelly doughnuts. Toilet tissue was free. Fertile mothers in flight from idealized hometowns arrived regularly with small children and took up lodgings. The terminal was a good home base for streetwalkers, beggars, and young runaways. Thousands of business commuters, along with hundreds of visitors, tried paying them little mind as they passed through each morning on their way to employment and back to their homes at the conclusion of the working day. None were rich, for no one who was rich would travel to work by bus.

From the lofty picture windows in his high-rise apartment, Yossarian commanded an unobstructed view of another luxury apartment building with an even higher rise than his own. Between these structures ran the broad thoroughfare below, which teemed more and more monstrously now with growling clans of bellicose and repulsive panhandlers, prostitutes, addicts, dealers, pimps, robbers, pornographers, perverts, and disoriented psychopaths, all of them plying their criminal specialties outdoors amid multiplying strands of degraded and bedraggled people who now were actually
living
outdoors. Among the homeless were whites now too, and they also pissed against the walls and defecated in the alleyways that others in their circle eventually located as accommodating sites to bed down in.

Even in the better neighborhood of Park Avenue, he knew, women could be seen squatting to relieve themselves in the tended flower beds of the traffic islands in the center.

It was hard not to hate them all.

And this was New York, the Big Apple, the Empire City in the Empire State, the financial heart, brains, and sinews of the country, and the city that was greatest, barring London perhaps, in cultural doings in the whole world.

Nowhere in his lifetime, Yossarian was bound often to remember, not in wartime Rome or Pianosa or even in blasted Naples or Sicily, had he been spectator to such atrocious squalor as he saw mounting up all around him now into an eminent domain of decay. Not even-he had added in his cynicism more than once to Frances Beach, his lady friend from far back-at the sexless fund-raising luncheons and black-tie evening events he attended more times than he wanted to as the only presentable official of M & M Enterprises & Associates, an eligible male and a person who could chat with some fluency about something other than business matters to well-informed others who imagined egoistically that they were affecting world events by talking about them.

It was nobody's fault, of course.

"My God, what's that?" cried Frances Beach, as the two rode back in her rented limousine with her rented chauffeur from still another tepid tea-and-wine party for those trustees and friends of the trustees of the New York Public Library who were still in town and had concluded, after long bouts with indecision, that they did want to go there.

"The bus terminal," said Yossarian.

"It's awful, isn't it? What the devil is it for?"

"Buses. What the devil did you think it was for? You know, Frances," Yossarian taunted kindly, "you might consider sponsoring your next fashion show in there, or one of your glittering charity balls. I know McBride."

"What are you talking about? Who's McBride?"

"An ex-cop who works there now. Why not a wedding," he went on, "a really big one? That would really make the news. You've had them-"

"
I
haven't."

"-in the museum and the opera house. The terminal's more picturesque."

"A society wedding in that terminal?" she rejoined with a smirk. "You must be mad. I know you're joking, so let me think. Olivia and Christopher Maxon may be looking for a new place soon. Look at those people!" She sat up suddenly. "Are they men or women? And those others-why must they do those things out there in the street? Why can't they wait till they're home?"

"Many don't have homes, Frances dear," said Yossarian, smiling benignly at her. "And the lines for the toilets at the bus terminal are long. Reservations must be made for the peak hours. No one can be seated without them. The lavatories in the restaurants and hotels, say the signs, are for patrons only. Have you ever noticed, Frances, that men who take leaks in the street usually take very long ones?"

No, she had not noticed, she informed him frostily. "You sound so bitter these days. You used to be funnier."

Years back, before either had married, they had luxuriated together in what would today be termed an affair, although neither then would have conceived of applying a title so decorous to the things they were doing with each other so ardently and incessantly, with never a pledge or serious care of a future together. Then, in little time, he had turned away from his promising work as a beginner in arbitrage and investment banking for a second crack at teaching before going back to the advertising agency and then into public relations and freelance writing, succeeding, in time, as a jack-of-all-trades except any encompassing a product that could be seen, touched, utilized, or consumed, a product that occupied space and for which there was need. While she, with curiosity, drive, and some inborn talent, started finding herself attractive to theatrical producers and other gentlemen she thought might prove useful to her in stage, screen, and television.

"And you," he reminded her now, "used to be much more sympathetic. You've forgotten your past."

"You too."

"And radical."

"So were you. And now you're so negative," she remarked without much feeling. "And always sarcastic, aren't you? No wonder people are not always comfortable with you. You make ligit of everything, and they're never satisfied you really agree with tiem. And you're always flirting."

"I am not!"

"Yes, you are," Frances Beach insisted, without even turning her head to add conviction to her argument. "With just about everyone but me. You know who flirts and who doesn't. Patrick and Christopher don't. You do. You always did."

"It's the way that I joke."

"Some of the women imagine you have a mistress."

"Mistress?" Yossarian turned that word into a snorting guffaw. "Only one would be one too many."

Frances Beach laughed too and her suggestion of strain vanished. They were both past sixty-five. He had known her when her name was Franny. She remembered when they called him Yo-Yo. They had not toyed with each other since, not even between marriages, neither one of them ever possessed by a need to test the accommodations made by the other.

"There seem to be more and more of these people everywhere," she murmured mildly, with a despair she made clear would be easily controlled, "doing everything imaginable right out in public. Patrick was mugged just in front of our house, and there are whores on our corners day and night, unsightly ones in unattractive outfits, like those at that building."