She had turned on the television set and was listening to the news!
There was no war, no national election, no race riot, no big fire, storm, earthquake, or airplane crash-there was no news, and she was listening to it on television.
But then, while dressing, he caught the savory aromas of eggs scrambling and bacon frying and bread warming into slices of toast. The year he'd lived alone had been the loneliest in his life, and he was living alone still.
But then he saw her putting ketchup on her eggs and had to look at something else. He looked at the television screen.
"Melissa dear," he found himself preparing her two weeks later. He had his arm atop a shoulder again and absently was stroking her neck with his finger. "Let me tell you now what is going to happen. It will have nothing to do with you. These are changes I know will occur with a man like me, even with a woman he cares about very much: a man who likes to be alone much of the time, thinks and daydreams a lot, doesn't really enjoy the give-and-take of companionship of anyone all that much, falls silent much of the time and broods and is indifferent to everything someone else might be talking about, and will not be affected much by anything the woman does, as long as she doesn't talk to him about it and annoy him. It has happened before, it happens to me always."
She was nodding intently at each point, either in agreement or in worldly perception.
"I'm exactly the same way," she began in earnest response, with eyes sparkling and lips shining. "I can't stand people who talk a lot, or speak to me when I'm trying to read, even a newspaper, or call me on the telephone when they've nothing to say, or tell me things I already know, or repeat themselves and interrupt."
"Excuse me," interrupted Yossarian, as she seemed equipped to say more. He killed some time in the bathroom. "I really think," he said, upon returning, "I'm too old, and you're really too young."
"You're not too old."
"I'm older than I look."
"So am I. I've seen your age on the hospital charts."
Oh, shit, he thought. "I have to tell you also that I won't have children and will never have a dog, and I won't buy a vacation house in East Hampton or anywhere else."
Off the entrance to his apartment in each direction was a good-sized bedroom with a bathroom and space for a personal television set, and perhaps they could start that way and meet for meals. But there again was the television, turned back on, and voices were at work to which she was not listening. She never could tell when there might come something interesting. Although television was the one vice in a woman he could not abide, he believed that with this woman it was worth a try.
"No, I won't tell you her name," said Yossarian to Frances Beach, after the next, tumultuous meeting of ACACAMMA, at which Patrick Beach had spoken out dynamically to second the anonymous proposal by Yossarian that the Metropolitan Museum of Art settle financial problems by getting rid of the artwork and selling the building and real estate there on Fifth Avenue to a developer. "It's not a woman you know."
"Is it the friend of the succulent Australian woman you keep talking about, the one named Moore?"
"Moorecock."
"What?"
"Her name is Moorecock, Patrick, not Moore."
Patrick squinted in puzzlement. "I could swear you'd corrected me and said it was Moore."
"He did, Patrick. Pay no attention to him now. Is it that nurse you mentioned? I'd be saddened to think you sank so low as to marry one of my friends."
"Who's talking about marriage?" protested Yossarian.
"You are." Frances laughed. "You're like that elephant who always forgets."
Was he really going to have to marry again?
No one had to remind a doubtful Yossarian of a few of the blessings of living alone. He would riot have to listen to someone else talking on the telephone. On his new CD player with automatic changer, he could put a complete Lohengrin, Boris Godunov, or Die Meistersinger, or four whole symphonies by Bruckner, and play them all through in an elysian milieu of music without hearing someone feminine intruding to say, "What music is that?" or "Do you really like that?" or "Isn't that kind of heavy for the morning?" or "Will you please make it lower? I'm trying to watch the television news," or "I'm talking to my sister on the telephone." He could read a newspaper without having someone pick up the section he wanted next.
He could stand another marriage, he imagined, but did not have time for another divorce.
23 Kenosha
Such portentous food for equivocal thought weighed heavily on Yossarian's mind as he flew west on his journey for his rendezvous with the chaplain's wife, the sole purpose of which visit now was commiseration and a mutual confession of ignominious defeat. Her face fell with a disappointment she was not able to suppress when she picked him out at the airport.
They each had hoped for somebody younger.
The hero Siegfried, he afterward remembered, had cruised into action like a galley slave, rowing Brünnhilde's horse in a boat, and was soon tete-a-tete with another woman, to whom he was swiftly affianced.
Yossarian had his first-class seat on a jet and no such demented daydream in mind.
Siegfried had to climb a mountain and walk through fire to claim the woman Brünnhilde.
Yossarian had Melissa fly to Washington.
Looking back when it was over and he was thinking of a parody for The New Yorker magazine, he considered he had fared pretty well in comparison with the Wagnerian hero.
Half a million dollars richer, he was on the horns of a dilemma but alive to deal with it.
Siegfried was dead at the end; Brünnhilde was dead, even the horse was dead; Valhalla had collapsed, the gods were gone with it; and the composer was elated while his voluptuous music subsided in triumph like a delicate dream, for such is the calculating nature of art and the artist.
Whereas Tossarian could look forward to getting laid again soon. He had his doctor's okay. All his life he had loved women, and in much of that life he had been in love with more than one.
The small port city of Kenosha on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, just twenty-five miles south of the much larger small city of Milwaukee, now had a jet airport and was experiencing an upturn in economic activity that the town fathers were at a loss to explain. Local social engineers were attributing the middling boom, perhaps waggishly, to benign climate. Several small new businesses of somewhat technical nature had opened and an agency of the federal government had established laboratories rumored to be CIA fronts in an abandoned factory that had long lain idle.
In the lounge in New York, Yossarian had taken note of the other travelers in first class, all men younger than himself and in very good spirits. Only scientists were so happy in their vocations these days. They held pencils at the ready as they talked, and what they talked about most-he was startled to hear-was tritium and deuterium, of which he now knew a little, and lithium deuteride, which, he learned when he asked, was a compound of lithium and heavy water and, more significantly, was the explosive substance of preference in the best hydrogen devices.
"Does everyone know all this?" He was amazed they talked so openly.
Oh, sure. He could find it all written in The Nuclear Almanac and Hogerton's The Atomic Energy Handbook, both perhaps on sale in the paperback rack.
Boarding, he'd recognized in business class several prostitutes and two call girls from the sex clubs in his high-rise building and as streetwalking attractions near the cocktail lounges and cash machines just outside. The call girls were fellow tenants. In economy class he spotted small clumps of the homeless who had somehow acquired the airplane fare to leave the mean streets of New York to be homeless in Wisconsin. They had washed themselves up for the pilgrimage, probably in the lavatories of the PABT building, where posters Michael had once designed still warned Sternly that smoking, loitering, bathing, shaving, laundering, fucking, and sucking were all forbidden in the washbasins and toilet stalls, that alcohol could be harmful to pregnant women, and that anal intercourse could lead to HIV and hepatitis infections. Michael's posters had won art prizes. Their carry-on luggage consisted of shopping carts and paper bags. Yossarian was sure he saw sitting far back the large black woman with the gnarled melanoma moles he had come upon swabbing herself clean in only a sleeveless pink chemise on the emergency staircase the one time he had gone there with McBride. He looked for but did not find the addled woman with one leg who, as a matter of common practice, was raped by one derelict man or another perhaps three or four times daily, or the pasty blonde woman he also remembered from the stairwell who was sewing a seam in a white blouse listlessly.