They could not talk long without quarreling. After I was on the scene, it grew easier for both to allow me to speak to each on behalf of the other. Her mother came east to help in the large, rent-controlled apartment on West End Avenue with the many large rooms, and she was able to go back to work with good income in the advertising-merchandising department of Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, and that was where I met her. She sat facing a low partition, and I would lean on it and gossip when neither of us had anything important to get done. She was smarter than the man she worked for and more responsible and particular, but that never made a difference for a woman back then at that company-no female could be an editor or a writer in any of the publications or the head of any department. Without me she would not have been able to manage expenses and possibly would have had to retreat from the city with her mother and three children. Naomi and Ruth would not have had time or money to go through college. There would have been no funds for the private schools in Manhattan or, later, despite the excellent Time Incorporated medical plan, the expensive personal psychotherapy for Michael, which in the end did no good.
I do miss her, as Yossarian observed in our talks in the hospital, and make no attempt to hide it.
I miss her very much, and the few women I spend time with now-my widowed friend with some money and a good vacation home in Florida, two others I know from work who were never successful in resolving their own domestic lives, none of us young anymore-know I will continue to miss her, and that now I am pretty much only marking time. I enjoy myself a lot, playing bridge, taking adult education courses and subscribing to concerts at Lincoln Center and the YMHA, making short trips, seeing old friends when they come to town, doing my direct-mail consulting work for cancer relief. But I am only marking time. Unlike Yossarian, I expect nothing much new and good to happen to me again, and I enjoy myself less since Lew finally, as Claire chose to phrase it, "let himself" pass away. His family is strong and there was no weeping at the funeral services, except by an older brother of his and a sister. But I cried some tears myself back home after Claire gave me her account of his final few days and told me his last words, which were about me and my trip around the world.
I find myself looking forward to the trip I've started planning, to see sights everywhere of course, but mainly to see people I know in Australia, Singapore, and England, and in California too, where I still have Marvin and his wife, a nephew with a family, and some other acquaintances left from the days in Coney Island. I will begin, it's been decided, with short stops in Atlanta and Houston, to visit Naomi and Ruth, with their husbands and my grandchildren. The two girls have long since come to think of me as their natural father. Richard raised no objection to my adopting them legally. From the start I found myself dealing with them psychologically as my biological children, and I've felt no regrets about not siring my own. But we are no closer than that. As in most families I see, we find only desultory entertainment in each other's company and are soon all of us mutually on edge. Richard never showed jealousy because we grew close so quickly, and he eased himself away from all pretense of family life as soon as he decently could. In just a couple of years he had some new wives of his own and with the last one a child.
I am also looking forward to finding out more about that grotesque wedding in the bus terminal, the Wedding of the Close of the Century, as Yossarian and others now name it, to which, while I snorted humorously, he said I would be invited.
"I was robbed once in that bus terminal," I told him.
"My son was arrested there."
"I was too," I told him.
"For being robbed?"
"For raising a fuss, a hysterical fuss, when I saw the police doing nothing."
"He was put in a wall chain."
"So was I," I informed him, "and I still don't think I'll ever want to go there again."
"Not even for a wedding? A wedding like this one? With four thousand pounds of the best beluga caviar on order?"
I won't want to go. There are some compromises left I just don't want to make. Although Esther, the widowed lady I see most often, "would die" to attend, just to be on the scene and gape at others.
By the time I met Glenda, her loose days were behind her. I occasionally felt at least a little bit cheated because I had not been there in her bohemian heyday to enjoy her sexually then too, as more others had done than she wished comfortably to recall, and enjoy her roommates and other female friends too. The thought of the freedom with which those four had lived continued to titillate, and torment, me. I'd had my own good promiscuous years too, with girls from student days at New York University and Greenwich Village and then from the company, and with others I'd met through people in the company, and even on a lark or two each semester while I was teaching at my college in Pennsylvania for two years. Nevertheless, for a little while about the time of our marriage, I could still find myself temperamental, privately jealous and petulant, over her entire erotic past, and resentful of all the males, the youths, that high school football player, and then of all the men who had played their fornicating roles as partners with her. I hated especially the ones I imagined who could bring her always and simply to dizzying climaxes. Virile performances did not seem to matter to her. They mattered to me, and among those rogues of whom I had some knowledge, or was otherwise motivated to invent, I had to put her husband Richard. I saw him in these demeaning dramas as a conquering cavalier and irresistible adversary, and this was true even after I'd grown to discount him as a bothersome, vain man, shallow and empty-headed, always brimming with energetic plans of narrow ambition, and one whom Glenda also now considered only boring and exasperating. That she had harbored a long passion for the likes of him was a shameful recollection almost too distressing for either one of us to bear.
I still don't know how a guy with melanoma was able to keep working and get raises and new girlfriends and even a couple of wives. But Richard did. Lew could have told me, I'd always thought; but I did not want Lew to guess what I had come to understand about myself, that I had never fully grown up, not even with Glenda, when it came to that matter of a man's way with a woman.
Richard's first new girlfriend that we laid eyes on was the nurse in the office of his oncologist. She was perky and knew everything about his physical state; yet she was soon sleeping with him anyway and answering the phone in his apartment as though the place were her own. His next was her closest friend, to whom she gave him up in good spirit, who also knew about his malignancies but married him anyway. While that marriage was breaking up, there were girls in succession and concurrently, and then came the willowy, intelligent woman from good family he married next, a successful lawyer with a large firm in Los Angeles, to which city he packed himself up and migrated, into an even better job than the one he resigned from, to set up house with her there and move farther away from any familial claims upon him here. And these were only the ones he went to extremes to make sure we learned about, the attractive ones he had call for him in our apartment when he showed up on his visitation rights while he still chose to exercise them, or to haggle once more over money for maintenance or the problems with Michael, which grew more marked as he grew older. Richard had already gone west before we heard that horrifying word schizophrenia ventured and learned from the Time library and research files what a borderline case was then presumed to be. Glenda disdained my awe of Richard.