Closing Time (56 page)

I'm glad I did. I read it to him in parts when it came to the house and we both laughed about it a lot. Then he'd read it again himself. He took it along into the hospital when he knew he was going in for the last time, and he would read it aloud to the nurses. At night he might have the night nurse read it aloud back to him. The nurses adored him up there, I swear they did, not like those cranky, snobby ones here in New York. He was always asking them about themselves and telling them how good they looked, the married ones with children and the old ones too. He knew how to jolly them along and to say the right things when they had problems. "Mary, tell your husband he'd better watch out, because as soon as I get just a little bit better, you're going to have to start meeting me after work and on your days off too, and he'd better start learning to make dinner for himself. And breakfast too, because some mornings when he wakes up you won't be there." "Agnes, here's what we'll do. Tomorrow, I'll check out. You'll pick me up in your Honda at five, we'll go out for drinks and dinner at the Motel on the Mountain. Bring enough along with you in case you want to stay out all night." "Agnes, don't laugh," I'd say too, because I'd be sitting right there. "He means it. I've seen him work before, and he always gets his way. That's how come I'm with him." It was really a nice, full trip Sam laid out for us in his letter.

"New Zealand, Australia, Singapore…" I praised him. "And with Hawaii, Fiji, Bali, and Tahiti thrown in? Did you really mean all that?"

"Most of it. Not Fiji, Bali, or Tahiti. That was put in for you two." i

"Well, it worked. He got a big kick out of imagining you in those places. 'Poor Sammy,' is what he said to the night nurse, while she was reading it back to him again on that last night. He died at night, you know, and they phoned me in the morning, and those were just about his last words, Sam. 'Just when he needs me most, I have to be laid up in the hospital. Here the poor guy is going off without us on a trip around the world, and he still hasn't learned how to pick up a girl.' "

BOOK ELEVEN

32

Wedding

The four thousand pounds of best-grade caviar were divided by automated machines into portions of one eighth of an ounce for the five hundred and twelve thousand canapes that, with flutes of imported champagne, were on hand for distribution by the twelve hundred waiters to the thirty-five hundred very close friends of Regina and Milo Minderbinder and Olivia and Christopher Maxon, as well as to a handful of acquaintances of the bride and the groom. The excess was premeditated for the attention of the media. Some of the surplus was reserved for the staff. The remainder was transported that same night by refrigerated trucks to the outlying shelters in the suburbs and New Jersey into which the homeless and other denizens of the bus terminal had been rounded up and concentrated temporarily for that day and night. The bedraggled beggars and prostitutes and drug dealers thus dislodged were replaced by trained performers representing them whose impersonations were judged more authentic and tolerable than the originals they were supplanting.

The caviar arrived at the workshops of the Commercial Catering division of Milo Minderbinder Enterprises &Associates in eighty designer-colored canisters of fifty pounds each. These were photographed for publication in vibrant high-style periodicals devoted to good taste and to majestic social occasions of the scope of the Minderbinder-Maxon wedding.

Sharpshooters in black tie from the Commercial Killings division of M & M were positioned discreetly behind draperies in the galleries and arcades on the various balconies of the bus terminal, watching most specially for illegal actions by the sharpshooters from the city police department and from the several federal agencies charged with the safety of the President and First Lady and other government officials.

Accompanying the caviar and champagne were tea sandwiches, chilled shrimp, clams, oysters, crudites with a mild curry dip, and foie gras.

There must be no vulgarity, Olivia Maxon had insisted from the beginning.

In this, her anxiety was allayed by the self-assured young man at the console of the computer model of the wedding to come, now taking place as having already occurred, on the monitors in the Communications Control Center of the PABT building, in which the equipment for the computer model had been installed for display and previewing. He flashed ahead to another of the sixty video screens there.

On that one, after the event that had not yet occurred was over, the socialite master of a media conglomerate was answering questions that had not yet been asked.

"There was nothing vulgar about it," he was asserting, before he even had attended. "I was at the wedding. I thought it was fantastic."

Olivia Maxon, her fears for the moment assuaged by this reassuring demonstration of what was projected as inevitable to occur, squeezed Yossarian's arm in a gesture of restored confidence and began fishing for another cigarette while extinguishing the butt of the one she'd been smoking. Olivia Maxon, a smallish, dark woman, wrinkled, smiling, and fashionably emaciated, had been anything but joyous at the unforeseen withdrawal from active cooperation by Frances Beach because of the serious stroke suffered by her husband, and by the need to rely more extensively than she wanted to on John Yossarian, with whom she had never felt altogether secure. Frances stayed much at home with Patrick, forbidding casual visitors.

The equipment in the command bubble in the South Wing of the terminal, between the main and second floors, was the property of the Gaffney Real Estate Agency, and the breezy young computer expert elucidating now for only Yossarian, Gaffney, and Olivia Maxon was an employee of Gaffney's. He had introduced himself as Warren Hacker. Gaffney's burgundy tie was in a Windsor knot. The shoulders of his worsted jacket today were tailored square.

Christopher Maxon was absent, having been told by his wife he could be no use there. Milo, bored by this replay of the event taking place in the future, had wandered outside to the surrounding balcony. Anything but at ease so near transvestites at the railing above looking with shining iniquity on the figures below, of which he understood he was one, he had coasted down the escalator to the main level below, to wait and go with Yossarian on the tour of the terminal that now was authorized for all of them and which some in his family thought he should make. With the income from his plane now assured, he had skyscrapers in mind. He liked his M & M Building and wanted more. He was perplexed as well by a nagging enigma: upstairs on a screen, he'd been disoriented to observe himself at the wedding in white tie and tails delivering a short speech he had not yet seen, and then dancing with that dark-haired woman Olivia Maxon, whom he'd only just met, when he still did not know how to dance. He was not sure where he was in time.

Before drifting down, he had taken Yossarian outside for a word in private. "What is the fucking problem," he had wondered absently, "with the fucking caviar?"

"It's not the money," Yossarian informed him. "It's the fucking fish. But now they think they've caught enough."

"Thank God," said Olivia, hearing that news again.

In the social archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were precedents with guidelines and milestones to be emulated and exceeded. The Minderbinder-Maxon affair would surpass them all. Even in a recession, the country was awash in money. Even amid poverty, there was room for much waste.

Although it was spring, the florist in charge had installed eighty Christmas trees in the five banquet halls and had surrounded them with thousands of pots of white narcissus. There were two sections with dance floors and bandstands on the main and second floors of the South Wing, and one on the main floor of the North Wing. From midafternoon on, spotlights illuminated the entrance:; on Eighth Avenue and Ninth Avenue and the lesser, more secluded doorways along the side streets. The effect inside through the smoked plate-glass windows of the major outside wall for two whole city blocks was of lots of sunlight on stained glass. Rolling buses seen through the panes were acclaimed as a clever approximation of the real world. Lauded equivalently as an impression of reality was the occasional wafting scent of diesel fumes filtering in through the natural clouds of perfumes from the women and emitted by fragrances infused into the central ventilating system. All of the subcaterers, florists, and other workers contracting with M & M Commercial Catering, Inc. were required to sign confidentiality agreements with the Commercial Killings division of M & M E & A, and the secrecy of these confidentiality agreements was publicized widely.

The bottom floor of the North Wing, which was separated from the South Wing by a city street that the bride with her procession would have to cross, was converted into a chapel and select banquet area. Effecting this renovation had required the removal of massive staircases leading to the floor below, together with an information booth and the enormous activated sculpture of moving colored balls that normally occupied much of the floor space. The staircases, information booth, and work of sculpture were put on exhibition under a temporary canopy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the place where the Great Hall of the museum normally stood, and these attracted respectable attendance and decent reviews from art critics. The Great Hall of the museum had itself been transferred into the bus terminal, on loan for the occasion for a consideration of ten million dollars. Uprooting the staircases and sculpture from the North Wing made room for pews and rows of walnut benches, and, of more moment, for the installation there in the bus terminal of the Temple of Dendur from the same Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, through the peaceful application of much persuasive pressure and a fee of another ten million dollars, was also lent out temporarily by the museum for the evening. It was in the North Wing of PABT that those now watching in the Communications Control Center would soon observe the wedding ceremony enacted. There was space left as well in that area for a small head table for the principal participants in the ceremony and their two guests from the White House, and for six round tables, each with seats for ten people who were most closely connected with the proceedings and with those eminences at the oblong table in front of the columns of the Temple. The altar inside the Temple of Dendur was banked with flowers and blowing candelabra.

One million, one hundred and twenty-two thousand champagne tulips had been procured as door prizes and souvenirs. A massive variety of fabulous hanging chandeliers from different epochs was installed throughout all five banquet sections, and these were wrapped in curly willow branches. Wisps of raffia were added to the willow branches, and there were tiny twinkling lights in all of the leaves and in the boughs of all eighty Christmas trees. Ravishing tapestries for tablecloths, masses of staggered candles, antique cages full of live birds, and rare books and silver plate from different periods were in abundance everywhere. Thickets of summer asters in the twenty-two hundred Malaysian pots flanking all of the entrances into the principal terminal halls helped turn half the South Wing of the main floor of PABT into a miniature Versailles, with thousands of flickering lights in the terra-cotta pots simulating millions of candles. In one hundred and four vitrines along the sides of all banquet areas were living actors in poses and activities re-creating the hustlers, whores, drug dealers, child runaways, panhandlers, drug addicts, and other derelicts who regularly inhabited the terminal. Shops still surviving profitably in the terminal were paid to remain open all night, enhancing the novelty of the surroundings and setting, and many of the guests enjoyed spending time in the intervals buying things. Sixty-one sets of attractive female identical twins, all that could be found in the world for that work, posed as mermaids in the fifty or so artificial pools and fountains created, and thirty-eight pairs of male identical twins performed as heralds and banner wavers and offered humorous responses to questions.

Port Authority Patron Aides in red jackets were on duty everywhere to assist with instructions and directions. The AirTransCenter of the terminal was held open to transport to the city's three major airports those guests rushing directly from the lavish Minderbinder-Maxon affair to lavish parties in Morocco and Venice, music festivals in Salzburg or Bayreuth, and the Chelsea Flower Show or Wimbledon tennis matches in England.

Sophisticated managerial headhunters had ensured through intensive interview procedures that only well-bred models and thespians from good families, with degrees from good colleges, were hired for the parts of the male and female whores and other penurious, degenerate inhabitants of the premises who normally made their residences and livelihoods there, and they threw themselves into these roles with a wholesome waggery and an endearing enthusiasm for good, clean sport that won the hearts of all in the several audiences. Toward party's end, as those observing on the video screens could see, these mingled with the guests in their costumes and feigned vocations, and this was another innovation contributing much to the general hilarity.

Other actors and actresses and male and female models outfitted to resemble figures in famous paintings and motion pictures strolled through the several galleries, striking the characteristic poses of the characters they were aping. There were a number of Marilyn Monroes, a couple of Marlon Brandos playing Stanley Kowalski, a Humphrey Bogart here and there, a pair of dying Dantons, and at least two Mona Lisas, whom everyone recognized. Waiters wore flowing white blouses and embroidered tunics of different periods. The Off-Track Betting parlor and Arby's restaurant on the second floor and the Lindy's Restaurant and Bar below were reconstructed to resemble seventeenth-century Flemish eating-drinking houses, with bric-a-brac and artifacts of that time filling the taverns appropriately. In one of these tableaux, smoking a cigarette rather than a pipe and scrutinizing everything shrewdly, was a lean man with milky skin, pink eyes, and copper hair. He wore Bavarian lederhosen and had a hiking staff and green rucksack, and Yossarian, who was vaguely sure he had seen him somewhere else, could not tell whether he was there at work or as an outfitted element in the decor. There were several Rembrandt self-portrait look-alikes and one Jane Avril. There were no Jesus Christs.