"Last night I shed a tear," I admitted.
"You think I didn't?"
That was just over twenty-eight years ago, and for most of the first seven I felt as good as I had ever felt before. I couldn't believe how fine I felt and I would come to believe it was gone forever. When I didn't feel fine I went into the city for Teemer once a week for half a day. When I did feel good, I played golf or cards with Emil maybe once a week and kept in touch with him that way. When the diaphragm slipped and Claire found herself pregnant again, we decided against the abortion without even saying so and had our little Michael, I felt so good. It's a way we showed confidence. We named him after my father. Mikey, we called him, and still do when we're kidding around. I felt so vibrant I could have had a hundred more. His Jewish name is Moishe, which was the Jewish name of my father. By then the old man had passed away too, and we could use his name without seeming to wish to put a curse on him while he was still alive. We Jews from the east don't name kids after parents who are still alive. But now I worry about Michael, little Mikey, because apart from money, I don't know what else I'm leaving him in the way of genes and his "natural biological destiny," and the other kids too, and maybe even my grandchildren. Those fucking genes. They're mine and won't listen to me? I can't believe that.
I don't really take to Teemer, but I'm not afraid of him or his diseases anymore, and when Sammy needed a specialist like him for Glenda, I recommended him over the one they already had, and he's the one they stuck with for the little time it took. It's those green apples I'm more afraid of now, all the time, those green apples in my mother's loony theory that green apples were what made people sick. Because more than anything else now, I'm afraid of nausea. I am sick of feeling nauseous.
"That's a good one, Lew," Sammy complimented me, when he was up here the last time.
Then I got the joke.
Sammy wears his hair combed back and parted on the side, and it's silver and thinning too, like I remember his father's. Sammy doesn't have much to do since his wife died, and then later he was forced out of his work at his Time magazine and into retirement, so he comes up here a lot. I don't want him in the hospital up here, but he comes in anyway sometimes, with Claire, and we bullshit until he sees I've had enough. We talk about the good old days in Coney Island, and now they do seem good, about Luna Park and Steeplechase and the big old RKO Tilyou movie theater, and how they've all gone away, disappeared, in d'rerd, as my father and mother used to say, in the earth, underground. He comes up by bus and, when he doesn't sleep over, goes back at night by bus to the bus terminal, that unreal city, he calls it, and then into the modern high-rise apartment he took in a building with everything, including some knockout models and call girls, when he found himself living alone in empty space he no longer wanted. Sammy still doesn't know what to do with himself, and we don't know what to do to help. He doesn't seem interested yet in settling in with someone else, although he talks about wanting to. My oldest daughter has introduced him to some of her unmarried lady friends and so has Glenda's oldest daughter, but nothing happened. They always find each other only "nice" and that's all. Claire's unattached women friends are too old. We decide that without even having to say it. He still likes to get laid now and then, and does, he tries to hint, when I kid about it. Sammy and I can chuckle now when he tells of the times he came in his pants--I never had to--and the first few times he finally got up the nerve to get girls to jerk him off: girls went for him, but he didn't know what to do with them. And the night his pocket was picked in the bus terminal and he found himself with no money and no wallet, not even carfare to get home, and was arrested and locked up in the police station there. I was the person he telephoned. I told off the cop after I vouched for Sammy and demanded the sergeant, I told off the sergeant and asked for the man in charge, and I told off the captain, McMahon, and said I would bring the wrath of the American Legion and National Guard and Pentagon down upon him, and the full force of me, former Sergeant Lewis Rabinowitz of the famed Army First Division, if he didn't show some sense and give him the cab fare to get him home. Sammy still can't get over how good I could be at things like that.
"He was lying down, that Captain McMahon," Sammy swore, "on a bed in a cell in the back of that police station that was furnished like a bedroom, and he looked sick. And the cell next to that one was set up with desks and toys like a little classroom, a kindergarten, but cops with ashtrays were playing cards with each other. There were children's mobiles hanging over them in a prison cell, and one was a mobile of a black-and-white cow jumping over the moon, and they were luminescent, like they reflected light and would shine in the dark," Sammy explained, "like those old radium watches we all used to wear before we found out they were dangerous. There was another man there, named McBride, who was dusting and moving things around, and he's the one who lent me the money to get home. When I mailed him a check to pay him back, he even sent me a thank-you note. How's that one?"
When the kid, their Michael, flipped out with his drugs and disappeared upstate about a year before he hanged himself, I did the same thing on the telephone, although I would have driven right up to Albany if I
had to, but I didn't have to. I called the governor's office, the head of the National Guard, and the headquarters of the state police. It was personal, I knew, but this was Sergeant Rabinowitz, formerly of the famed First Division in Europe, the Big Red 1, and it was a matter of life and death. They found him in a hospital in Binghamton and had him transferred in a government car to a hospital in the city at state expense. Sammy never got over how good I could be at something like that one too.
"I've made jokes that were funnier," I told him this time, when he pointed out the one I'd just made about getting sick of feeling nauseous. "I wasn't trying to be funny."
"And the word is nauseated," he said to me.
"What?" I had no idea what he was talking about.
"The word is nauseated, not nauseous," he explained. "People don't get nauseous. They get nauseated."
I liked it better my way.
"Sammy, don't you be a prick," I told him. "You can get nauseated. I'll get nauseous, if I want to. Just think, Sammy. It wasn't so long ago that I nabbed that kid in the city with the stolen pocketbook. I picked him right up, turned him around in my hands in midair, and slammed him down on the hood of a car just hard enough to let him know I was Lew Rabinowitz. 'Move and I'll break your back,' I warned him, and held him there until the cops came. Who would believe it, looking at me now? Now I feel like I couldn't lift a pound of butter."
My weight is not coming back fast enough, and Teemer and Emil are thinking of trying something new. My appetite isn't back to normal either. Mostly I have none, and I'm beginning to wonder if maybe this time there's something new going on I don't know about yet. Sammy may be ahead of all of us, because he looks worried about me, but he doesn't say. What he does say, with his small smile, is this:
"If you're that weak, Lew, I might be willing to take you on at arm wrestling now."
"I'd still beat you," I came back at him. That made me laugh. "And I'd beat you at boxing too, in case you ever want to try that one with me again."
He laughs too and we eat the rest of our tuna sandwiches. But I know I look thin. My appetite has just not come rushing back like after the other times, and now I seem to be beginning to know--this has not happened to me before--this time I seem to be beginning to know that this time, I may be getting ready to die.
I don't tell Claire.
I say nothing to Sammy.
I'm well into my sixties and we're into the nineties, and this time I'm beginning to feel, like my father felt when he got old, and his brother too, that this time things are beginning to come to an end.
12
Noodles Cook
The ascent to the throne room of the White House by the man with the code name Little Prick was not without its ceremonial falterings and sundry spiteful amusements, as G. Noodles Cook could have documented in detail were it not for a lifelong propensity to be guarded, self-serving, calculating, mendacious, and mercenary--all qualities commending him as a soul singularly qualified for his exalted post as the tenth of nine senior tutors to the man who had eventually become the country's newest President. Yossarian had informed the FBI that his old friend and business colleague G. Noodles Cook was a sneak and a snake and that the administration was not going to find a much better person to fill whatever position he was being considered for. Noodles Cook was a man who could always be trusted to lie.
He got the job.
As far back as seminars in graduate school, where they had met, Noodles had unmasked himself as a person with a tendency to display his gifts only in the presence of a designated mentor, who could note that anything original emerging had originated precociously with him. Noodles, who'd done well at a less-than-elegant preparatory school while Yossarian was away at war, labored on to obtain his doctoral degree and soon found out there was not much for him to do with it but teach.
By that time, Yossarian, who had dropped out of graduate school with just a master's degree, was already in a position to hire Noodles for his group in the public relations agency where he was at work when Noodles wisely decided to give that kind of business a shot. He had good family connections, and the public relations agency seemed to him a good launching pad for something bigger and better.
Coworkers soon smelled out that Noodles never proposed an idea save when Yossarian was close enough to hear and, more frequently, would postpone suggesting anything even to Yossarian until both were in the presence of the client or with a superior official of the company. Too often when they were collaborating on their screenplays and television scripts, Noodles would supply the pregnant line in a way that aroused suspicion that the key to the problem had been lying in his grasp the day before. Telling him to change, Yossarian would tell himself, would be like telling a hunchback to stand up straight. A noodle was a noodle. In his way he was loyal to Yossarian, who did not like him but did not mind him, and they persisted as friends.