Closing Time (40 page)

Siegfried had Brünnhilde, now mortal, and the rocky haunt they shared.

Yossarian had his nurse, Melissa MacIntosh, most human also, and a desktop, the carpeted floor, the leather armchair, and the broader windowsill of olden times in his office in the newly renamed M & M Building, formerly the old Time-Life Building, with a pane of glass looking down on the rink of ice on which Sammy and Glenda had gone skating more times than Sammy could remember now, and who subsequently had become man and wife, until death did them part.

Yossarian, nodding as he groped, did indeed agree that the door to the office was not locked, when he knew that it was, and that somebody might indeed walk in on them while they were thus lustfully teamed, when he knew that no one would or could. He was titillated by her apprehension; her tremors, doubts, and indecisions electrified him fiendishly with mounting passion and affection. Melissa was flustered in her ladylike terror of being come upon uncovered in those disarraying exertions of vigorous sexual informalities and, blushing, wished him, for a change, to finish fast; but she laughed when he did and disclosed the ruse as she was checking his baggage for his medicines and preparing to ride with him to the airport before his flight to Kenosha at the start of his journey. Along with basic toilet articles, he wanted Valium for insomnia, Tylenol or Advil for back pain, Maalox for his hiatus hernia. Much to his wonder, there were direct jumbo-jet flights now to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The phone rang as he zipped closed his carry-on bag.

"Gaffney, what do
you
want?"

"Aren't you going to congratulate me?" Gaffney spoke merrily, ignoring Yossarian's evident tone of rancor.

"Have you been listening in again?" asked Yossarian, looking furtively at Melissa.

"To what?" asked Gaffney.

"Why'd you call?"

"You just won't give me credit, will you, John?"

"For what? I got a bill from you finally. You didn't charge much."

"I haven't done much. Besides, I'm grateful for your music. You don't know happy I am to play back the tapes we record. I love the Bruckner symphonies at this darkening time of year, and the
Boris Godunov
."

"Would you like the
Ring
?"

"Mainly the
Siegfried
. I don't hear that one often."

"I'll let you know when I schedule the
Siegfried
," said Yossarian, acidly.

"Yo-Yo, I'll be so obliged. But that's not what I'm talking about."

"
Mr
. Gaffney," said Yossarian, and paused to allow his point to sink in. "What
are
you talking about?"

"We're back to Mr. Gaffney, are we, John?"

"We never passed John, Jerry. What do you want?"

"Praise," answered Gaffney. "Everybody likes to be appreciated when he's done something well. Even Se�or Gaffney."

"Praise for what, Se�or Gaffney?"

Gaffney laughed. Melissa, reposing upon the arm of the leather sofa, was rasping away at her fingernails with an emery board. Yossarian gave her a menacing scowl.

"For my gifts," Gaffney was saying. "I predicted you'd be going to Wisconsin to see Mrs. Tappman. Didn't I say you'd be changing in Chicago, for your trip to Washington to Milo and Wintergreen? You didn't ask me how I knew."

"Am I going to Washington?" Yossarian was amazed.

"You'll be getting Milo's fax. M2 will phone to the airport to remind you. There, that's the fax coming in now, isn't it? I'm on target again."

"You
have
been listening, haven't you, you bastard?'

"To what?"

"And maybe watching too. And why would M2 be phoning me when he's right down the hall?"

"He's back at the PABT building with your son Michael, trying to decide if he's willing to be married there."

"To the Maxon girl?"

"He'll have to say yes. I have another good joke that might amuse you, John."

"I'll miss my plane."

"You've plenty of time. There'll be a delay in departure of almost one hour."

Yossarian burst out with a laugh. "Gaffney, you're finally mistaken," he crowed. "I had my secretary call. It's leaving on schedule."

Gaffney laughed too. "Yo-Yo, you have no secretary, and the airline was lying. It will be late taking off by fifty-five minutes. It was your nurse you had call."

"I have no nurse."

"That warms my heart. Please tell Miss MacIntosh the kidney is working again. She will be happy to hear that."

"What kidney?"

"Oh, Yossarian, shame. You don't always listen when she telephones. The kidney of the Belgian patient. And as long as you're going to Washington, why don't you invite Melissa-"

"Melissa, Mr. Gaffney?"

"Miss MacIntosh, Mr. Yossarian. But why don't you invite her to join you there? I bet she'll say she'd really love to go. She's probably never been. She can go to the National Gallery when you're busy with Milo and Noodles Cook, and to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution."

Yossarian covered the telephone. "Melissa, I'm going to stop in Washington on the way back. How about taking time off to meet me there?"

"I'd really love to go," Melissa replied. "I've never been. I can go to the National Gallery when you're busy, and to that aeronautical museum of the Smithsonian Institution."

"What did she say?" asked Jerry Gaffney.

Yossarian replied respectfully. "I think you know what she said. You really are a man of mystery, aren't you? I haven't figured you out yet."

"I've answered your questions."

"I must think of new ones. When can we meet?"

"Don't you remember? In Chicago, when your connecting flight is delayed."

"It will be delayed?"

"For more than an hour. By unpredictable blizzards in Iowa and Kansas."

"You predict them already?"

"I hear things and see things, John. It's how I earn my living. May I try out my joke now?"

"I'll bet you do. And you have been listening, haven't you? Maybe watching too."

"Listening to what?"

"You think I'm simpleminded, Gaffney? Would you like to hear
my
joke? Jerry, go fuck yourself."

"That's not a bad one, Yo-Yo," said Gaffney, sociably, "although I've heard it before."

The opera
Siegfried
brought to mind, Yossarian was recalling in the pearl-gray limousine, that the
heldentenor
in that one, after a mere touch to his lips of the blood of the slain dragon, illustriously began to understand the language of birds. They told him to take the gold, kill the dwarf, and dash to the mountain through the circle of fire to find Brunnhilde lying there in charmed sleep, this message in bird notes to a youth who had never laid eyes on a woman before and needed more than one look at the buxom Brunnhilde to make the startling discovery that
this was not a man
!

Siegfried had his birds, but Yossarian had his Gaffney, who could report, when Yossarian phoned him from the car, that the chaplain was passing tritium in his flatulence.

Nurse Melissa MacIntosh had not heard of an intestinal condition like that one before but promised to ask a number of gastroenterologists she was friendly with.

Yossarian was not certain he wanted her to.

He was wounded and abashed by the question that leaped to mind, and too shamed to voice it: to ask if she'd dated these doctors and slept with them too, even with only four or five. It told him again, to his inconceivable delectation, that he indeed thought himself in love. Such pangs of jealousy for him were extremely few. Even far back in his torrid affair with Frances Beach, though almost monogamous himself, he had indifferently assumed that she, in the vernacular of the age, was at that time also "boffing" others who were potentially supportive of her aspirations as actress. Now he reveled like an epicure in the euphoria of impressions of love that were again rejuvenating him. He was not embarrassed or afraid, except that Michael or the other children might find out, while it was still in the outlandish character of a rapture.

In the car she held his hand, pressed his thigh, ran fingers through the curls at the back of his head.

Whereas Siegfried from the start was in the evil hands of a wicked dwarf greedy for dragon's gold and drooling to liquidate him as soon as he had collared it.

Melissa was preferable.

She and her roommate, Angela Moore, or Moorecock, as he now called her, disapproved righteously of married men in quest of secret girlfriends, except for the married men who had quested specifically for
them
, and Yossarian was glad his newest divorce was final. He thought best not to divulge to her that, even with ravishing women, the seduction over, there was only the infatuation and sex, and that often in men of his years, caprice and fetishism were more arousing than Spanish fly. He was already scheming to take the last shuttle plane back with her from Washington and in the semidarkness of the interior attempt, while she sat near the window, to succeed in removing her underpants in the fifty or so minutes they had. Unless, of course, she wore jeans.

Unlike Angela, she herself never verbally tendered evidence of the versatile range of amatory experiences her roommate and best friend had bawdily claimed for them both. Her vocabulary tended toward the pristine. But she seemed a stranger to nothing and evinced no need for guidance or definitions. In fact, she knew a trick or two he had not imagined. And she so stubbornly resisted conversing about her sexual history that he soon left off searching for it.

"Who is Boris Godunov?" she asked in the car.

"The opera I was listening to the other night when you came in from work and then had me turn it off because you wanted to hear the fucking television news."

"When you get back," she next wanted to know, "can we listen to the
Ring
together?"

Here again, he considered, they both enjoyed another large advantage over the Wagnerian prototypes.

For good Brünnhilde had savored little delight once Siegfried set out on his mission of heroic deeds and had experienced only betrayal, misery, and jealous fury after he returned to seize and deliver her to another man. It did not once cross her mind while conspiring in his death that he might have been slipped a potion that caused him to forget who she was.

Whereas Yossarian was making Melissa happy.

This was a thing he had not been able to do for long with any other woman. He was hearing bird notes too.

Melissa found him expert and benevolent when he concluded she could indeed give up her staff job and have more money and time as a private-duty nurse,
if
-and it was a big
if
-she was willing to forgo her paid vacations and an eventual pension. But for her future security she
must
make up her mind that she
must
soon marry a man, handsome or not, even a boor, a dolt, forget charm, who
did
have a pension plan and
would
have a retirement income to bequeath when he died. Melissa listened blissfully, as though he were caressing and celebrating her.

"Do you have a pension plan?"

"Forget about me. It must be someone else."

She thought his brain immense.

A simple discharged promise made shortly after they'd met in the hospital affecting outdated silver fillings in two upper teeth meant more than he would have guessed; they were exposed when she laughed; and he'd pledged to have them replaced by porcelain crowns if she kept her eyes out for oversights and he came out of the hospital alive. And this, when done, went farther with her than all the long-stemmed red roses and lingerie from Saks Fifth Avenue, Victoria's Secret, and Frederick's of Hollywood, and suffused her with an exhilarated gratitude he had never witnessed before. Not even Frances Beach, who had so much from Patrick, knew how to feel grateful.

John Yossarian lay awake some nights in a tremulous agitation that this woman with whom he was entertaining himself might already be somewhat in love with him. He was not that positive he wanted what he wished for.

Since the shock in the shower, the course of this true love had run so smoothly as to beguile him into a presumption of the notional, fictitious, and surreal. On the memorable evening following his talk with Michael, in the movie house down from the lobby level of his apartment building, she showed no surprise when he put a hand on her shoulder to fondle her neck awhile, then another on the inside of her knee to see what good he could do for himself there.
He
was the one surprised when her resistance this time was perfunctory. With the coming of spring she wore no panty hose. Her jacket lay folded in her lap for tasteful concealment. When he moved upward to arrive at the silken touch of the panties and the feel of the lacework of curls underneath, he had come as far as he had aspired to and was content to stop. But she then said:

"We don't have to do that here." She spoke with the solemnity of a surgeon rendering a verdict that was inevitable. "We can go upstairs to your apartment."

He found he preferred to see the rest of the movie. "It's okay here. We can just keep watching."

She glanced about at others. "I'm not comfortable here. I'll feel better upstairs."

They never did find out how that movie ended.

"You can't do it like that," she said in his apartment, when they had been there a very little while. "Don't you put something on?"

"I've had a vasectomy. Don't you take the pill?"

"I've had my tubes tied. But what about AIDS?"

"You can see my certificate of blood work. I have it framed on the wall."

"Don't you want to see mine?"

"I'll take; my chances." He put a hand on her mouth. "For God sakes, Melissa, please stop talking so much."

She bent up her legs and he pressed himself down between them, and after that they both knew what to do.

Counting back late the next morning, when he had to believe they finally were through, he found himself convinced he had never in his life been more virile and prodigious, or more desirous, amorous, considerate, and romantic.