Closing Time

I've picked safe countries and neutral airlines. But I'll probably be hijacked by terrorists anyway, Esther jokes, and then shot to death because of my American passport and Jewish origin. Esther probably would marry me if I could bring myself to ask, but only if she could safeguard all her widow's assets. She's officious and opinionated. We would not get along.

Yossarian is better off than I am because he still has big decisions to make. Or so says Winkler, who was there in the hospital room reporting on his business agreement with Milo Minderbinder for his new state-of-the-art shoe-I still laugh when I remember those days as kids when Winkler was starting up his new state-of-the-art breakfast-sandwiches-for-home-delivery business and I was writing the copy, headlined SLEEP LATE SUNDAY MORNING! for his advertising leaflets-when the flashy blonde woman came bursting into the hospital room with the news for Yossarian that had to be a shocker. Approaching age seventy, he was faced with the daunting prospect of becoming a father again, or not, and marrying a third time, or not.

"Holy shit," were the words Winkler remembered emerging from him.

The woman thus fertilized was the dark-haired nurse. It was obvious to everyone they'd been close for some time. If ever she was going to have a child, she wanted it to be his. And if she didn't have this one now, they both might soon be too old.

"Doesn't she realize," exhorted Yossarian, "that when he asks me to run out for a pass, I'll be eighty-four years old?"

"She doesn't care about that."

"She'll want me to marry her?"

"Of course. I do too."

"Listen-you too, Winkler!-not a word about this," commanded Yossarian. "I don't want anyone else to know."

"Who would I tell?" asked Winkler, and immediately told me. "I know what I would do," he offered, with the pompous demeanor he likes to affect as a businessman.

"What would you do?" I asked.

"I don't know what I would do," he answered, and we both laughed again.

Finding Yossarian there in the hospital and seeing all that he's up to, with that enthusiastic blonde for a friend and that pregnant nurse who wants him to marry her, with Patrick Beach and his wife there, and with something secret going on between Beach and that blonde, as well as between Yossarian and the woman married to Patrick Beach, and with McBride with his fiancee dropping in regularly too, and their talk about the bus terminal and the crazy wedding scheduled there, and with those two tons of caviar on order-all that and more leave me with the sheepish remorse that I've missed out on much, and that now that I no longer have it, mere happiness was not enough.

31 Claire

When it reached his stomach again, he decided to give up and let himself pass away. There was nothing he could think of anymore that was worse than the nausea. He could take losing his hair, he said, trying to raise a laugh, but he wasn't sure anymore about the other. There was so much around him now he was sick of. He was nauseous from the cancer, he was nauseous from the cure, and then there was something new they called lymphoma. He just didn't want to fight it anymore. He'd had pain of every kind. He said the nausea beat them all. I'd had the feeling right off there was something different about him this time. As soon as we were home, he started in with the arithmetic. He wouldn't let up.

"Which is more-eight percent or ten percent?"

"Of what?" I answered him bade. "Ten percent. What did you expect me to say?"

"Yeah? Then which weighs more-a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?"

"I'm not an idiot, you know. You don't have to start all over from the begi

"Which is worth more-a pound of copper or a pound of newspapers?"

We both smiled at that memory.

"I know the answer to that one too now."

"Yeah, big-tits? Let's see and make sure. How many three-cent stamps in a dozen?"

"Lew!"

"Okay, then, which is more-ten percent of eighty dollars or eight percent of a hundred dollars?"

"Let me get you something to eat."

"This time they're the same. Can't you see that?"

"Lew, leave me alone. The next thing you'll want to hear is seven times eight. It's fifty-six, Lew, right?"

"That's wonderful. Is seven times eight more than six times nine? Come on, baby. Try. How do they measure?"

"For Christ sakes, Lew, ask me things I know! Should your omelet be ru

He wasn't hungry. But the smell of cheese always brought him a smile. He might not eat much, but his face sure turned bright, and it was a way to get him to let up. It was like he thought that if I couldn't remember those multiplication tables of his, I wouldn't be able to hold on to a pe

"I think he's getting ready to die, Mom," my daughter Linda told me when I said I couldn't stand it anymore, and our Michael was right there with her and agreed. "That's why there's all that accounting now, and all that stuff about banking."

I had missed that part of it, and I'd always been able to read him like a book. Oh, no, I told them, Lew would never stop fighting. But he did, and he didn't deny it.

"You want to know what Linda thinks?" I said to him, fishing. "She says she thinks you've made up your mind to get ready to die. I told her she's crazy. People just don't decide like that, not normal people, and not you. You'd be the last person for something like that."