But as we continued going off weekends, I began leaving spare clothes in her apartment, and when we had a late night, it was easier to sleep over, and when I slept over, it soon became easier and then easy to sleep with her. She had her clothes in mine, and a cosmetic bag too, with a diaphragm inside. No one in her family seemed to find my being there novel. Only Michael was occasionally curious and might murmur something cryptic, or droll, but Michael could turn spontaneously curious about almost anything and not sustain that curiosity long. Sometimes Michael could lose interest in what he was saying even as he was saying it and change subject in midsentence. The rest of them thought it was his special way of teasing. He pretended it was, but I took him seriously and began to feel it was something more.
The household collaborated to simplify our trysts: soon the living room too was privileged space when the hour was late and we had closed the door. And it was just as well, for if we were both still animated by drink, we might start in there with a casual embrace and then finish there too, and it was anybody's guess where our clothing might fly. And in the beginning, and for a good many years afterward, there was rarely a night we were alone together, even those that were late, or hardly a morning or afternoon on a trip away, that we did not make love at least once, even during menstrual periods. We slowed down later and skipped chances, too often because she might turn miserably depressed and brood with the worries and troubles we had with Michael. By then we'd written Richard out of our lives as useless. She would talk solemnly and weep quietly in my arms until we kissed to console each other, and even then, when she'd feel I had gotten hard, we would make love with a different spirit, in a way that was solicitous and tender. I would delay long enough to gauge her responses and then yield myself into release, and she might or might not have hers, but she would be pleased I was contented, and grateful I had helped divert her again somewhat from the oppressive weight of our problems with Michael, as much mine now as hers, it is still my conviction that I have not in my lifetime met a person less selfish, more kindhearted, and less self-centered than she was, or less demanding or troubling, and I cannot even conceive of a woman who would have been better for me as a wife and a friend than she had been. And that was true for all the years we were married, even through Michael's flip-outs and eventual, inevitable suicide, right up until the time she began feeling sick too often in her stomach and intestines and the doctors, after tests, agreed she had cancer of the ovary, and only then was the honeymoon over.
And those were the best, and I mean best, years of my life, with not one minute of regret. It was better than the war. Yossarian would know what I meant by that.
She died in thirty days, as Teemer determined she would, fading weakly away into illness, with little acute pain, as he had all but guaranteed, and I still felt indebted when I met him again in the hospital taking care of Lew and learned with bemusement that he had put himself into the psychiatric ward there for help with the relentless stress of the idiosyncratic "theology of biology" he was formulating, which was proving too difficult for him to cope with unaided. He continued working daytimes, but slept there evenings, alone. His wife could reside there with him, but she preferred not to.
Teemer, intent, industrious, melancholic, was older too and, as Yossarian described him, a disabled casualty in his war against cancer. His was now a view of the world that decoded living cancer cells and expiring societies as representations of the same condition. He saw cancers everywhere. What he saw in a cell he saw enlarged in the organism, and what went on in the human he found re-created in groups. He shouldered a bewildering conviction, a conviction, he maintained, as healthy and vigorous in growth as a typical malignancy of the kind in which he specialized: the conviction that all the baleful excesses he spied multiplying unstoppably everywhere were as normal and inevitable to our way of life as the replications of malignant cells he knew of in animal life and vegetation.
Dennis Teemer could look at civilization, he liked to joke in pessimistic paradox, and see the world as just a microcosm of a cell.
"There are two more things about these cancer cells you might like to know. They live forever in the laboratory. And they lack self-control."
"Hmmmmm," said Yossarian. "Tell me, Teemer, does a cancer cell live as long as a healthy cell?"
"A cancer cell is a healthy cell," was the reply that came back and displeased us all, "if strength, growth, mobility, and expansion are the standards."
"Does it live as long as a normal cell?"
"A cancer cell is normal," was the frustrating answer, "for what it is. Biologically, why would you expect it to behave any differently? They can live forever-"
"Forever?"
"In the laboratory, unlike our others. They multiply irresistibly. Doesn't that sound healthy? They migrate and colonize and expand. Biologically, in the world of living things, why would you expect there would not be cells more aggressive than the rest?"
"Hmmmmm."
"And biology always does what it has to do. It doesn't know why and it doesn't care. It doesn't have choices. But unlike us, it doesn't seek reasons."
"Those are very large thoughts you are working with," I said to him, ambiguously.
"I wish he would stop," said his wife.
"It's my pleasure," said Teemer, with what passed for a smile. "Radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy are my work. But it's not the work that depresses me. It's the depression that depresses me."
"I wish he'd come home," said Mrs. Teemer.
He was honored to be taken seriously by his medical colleagues in psychiatry: they thought he was crazy but found that irrelevant.
Meeting Yossarian again brought back a flood of treasured war memories, even of gruesome events that were perilous and revolting, like those of wounded Snowden dying of cold and Yossarian throwing up numbly into his own lap. And of me blacking out dizzily each time I recovered and saw something else taking place I could not force myself to watch: Yossarian folding flesh back into a wound on the thigh, cutting bandages, retching, using the pearly cloth of Snowden's parachute as a blanket to warm him, and then as a shroud. There was that ditching with Orr, and the missing carbon dioxide cylinders for the ice cream sodas from Milo that the officers could have every day and we enlisted men got only on Sundays. At the investigation, it turned out logistically that there could be life vests or sodas, not both. They voted for sodas, because there were more of us to enjoy sodas than would ever need life jackets. I had that crash-landing with Hungry Joe. They gave him a medal for bringing the plane back and wrecking it needlessly. And there was a medal to Yossarian for going around over the bridge at Ferrara a second time, with McWatt at the controls caroling: "Oh, well, what the hell." Yossarian, seeing the crosshairs drifting and knowing he would miss, had not wasted his bombs. We were the only planes left with a chance at the target, and now all the antiaircraft fire would be aimed just at us.
"I guess we have to go back in again, don't we?" I heard McWatt on the intercom, when the bridge was undamaged.
"I guess we do," Yossarian answered.
"Do we?" said McWatt.
"Yeah."
"Oh, well," sang McWatt, "what the hell"
And back we went and hit the bridge, and saw Kraft, our copilot in the States, get killed in the plane alongside. And then Kid Sampson too, of course, cut apart at the beach by McWatt in a plane while capering on the raft anchored in the water. And "Oh, well, what the hell," McWatt had caroled to the control tower, before banking around lazily to fly himself into a mountain. And, of course, always Howie Snowden, cold and bleeding just a few feet away, crying out suddenly as he bled: "It's starting to hurt me!"
And then I saw he was in pain. Until then I didn't know there could be pain. And I saw death. And from that mission on, I prayed to God at the start of every one, although I did not believe in God and had no faith in prayer.