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.
It was wonderful, he whistled through his teeth while washing up after the last time, then switched in a syncopated, swinging beat to the foreplay and orgasmic love music from Tristan. It was more marvelous than anything in all his libidinous experience, and he knew in his heart that never, never, not once, would he ever want to have to go through anything like all that again! He preliumed she understood that there would be a rather sheer falling off: he might not, in fact, find the wish, the will, the actual desire, and the elemental physical resources ever to want to make love to her again, or to any other woman!
He recalled Mark Twain in one of his better writings employing the simile of the candlestick and the candleholder to emphasize that between men and women sexually it was not close to an equivalent competition. The candleholder was always there.
And then he heard her on the telephone.
"And that one made it five!" she was confiding exuberantly to Angela, her face flushed with prosperity. "No," she continued, after an impatient pause to listen. "But my knees sure hurt."
He himself would have fixed the tally subjectively at five and three eighths, but he felt a bit better about the near future to hear that her bones were aching also.
"He knows so much about everything," she went on. "He knows about interest rates, and books, and operas. Ange, I've never been happier."
That one gave him pause, for he was not sure he wanted again the accountability of a woman who had never been happier. But the fillip to his vanity sure felt good.
And then came the shock in the shower. When he turned it off he heard men murmuring in wily discussion outside the closed bathroom door. He heard a woman in the obvious cadence of assent. It was some kind of setup. He knotted the bath towel around his waist and moved out to confront whatever danger awaited. It was worse than he could have foreseen.