Yossarian went crosstown by taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the monthly meeting of ACACAMMA, arriving in time for the reading of an anonymous proposal for the creation of a deconstruction fund to reduce the museum from the farcical dimensions to which it had now grown preposterously. He heard the motion ruled out of order, seeing Olivia Maxon turn to fix her glowing black eyes upon him severely while he was turning to gaze with a suppressed smile at Frances Beach, who raised her eyebrows with admiring inquiry at Patrick Beach, who was looking down at his fingernails and paying no attention to Christopher Maxon, who, all jowls and chortles beside him, rolled an imaginary cigar between his fingers, wet its imaginary tip, relished the imagined fragrance he inhaled, inserted the imaginary cigar into a mouth that was real, and puffed himself deeply into a soporific delirium.
ACACAMMA, the select Adjunct Committee for the Advancement of Cultural Activities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was an exclusive body of which only thirty or forty of the seventy or eighty members had come that day to deal with the same thorny question: if and how to increase revenues from the utilization of the premises for social events like weddings, bridal showers, bridge classes, fashion shows, and birthday parties, or whether to discontinue those incongruous ceremonies altogether as crass.
The potent need as always was for money.
Introduced and tabled for more comprehensive discussion at future meetings were such topics as the art of fund-raising, the art of the deal, the artistry of publicity, the art of social climbing, the art of fashion designing, the art of the costume, the art of catering, and the art of conducting without dissension and bringing to a close on time a meeting lasting two hours that was pleasant, uneventful, unsurprising, and unnecessary.
What dissonance appeared was managed neatly.
A final anonymous proposal that all anonymous proposals no longer be given even perfunctory consideration was referred to the executive committee for consideration.
At the bar of the hotel nearby to which Yossarian escaped afterward with Patrick and Frances Beach, Frances began a gin and tonic and Patrick Beach looked bored.
“Of course I’m bored,” he informed his wife with ill-tempered pride. “By now I hate the paintings as much as I hate hearing them talked about. Oh, Frances”—his sigh was the whimsical plea of a martyr—“why must you keep putting us both into settings like that one ?”
“Have we anything better to do?” Frances Beach said sweetly to her husband. “It gets us invited to so many other things that are even worse, doesn’t it? And it helps keep our name in the newspapers, so that people know who we are.”
“It’s so we know who we are.”
“I think that’s divine.”
“I have promised to kill her if she uses that word.”
“Let’s get to the point,” said Frances seriously.
“He could not possibly have meant it.”
“Yes, he could. Did you mean it, John, when you suggested a wedding in that bus terminal?”
“Of course,” lied Yossarian.
“And you think it could be done? A big one?”
“I have no doubt,” he lied again.
“Olivia Maxon.” Frances made a wry face. “She’s giving a wedding for a stepniece or someone and wants fresh ideas for an original venue. That word is her own. The museum isn’t good enough since those two Jews had their reception there and those two other Jews were named trustees. Those words are also hers. Poor Olivia just isn’t able to remember when talking to me that I might be Jewish.”
“Why don’t you remind her?” Yossarian said.
“I don’t want her to know.”
All three chuckled.
“You certainly wanted me to know,” chided Patrick affectionately. “And everyone in my family.”
“I was poor then,” said Frances, “and an angry actress who thrived on dramatic conflict. Now that I’m married to a man of wealth, I’m loyal to his class.”
“With a gift for stilted repartee,” said Patrick. “Frances and I are happiest together when I’m away sailing.”
“What I never could trust about high comedy,” Yossarian mused, “is that people say funny things and the others don’t laugh. They don’t even know they are part of a comedy.”
“Like us,” said Patrick.
“Let’s get back to our agenda,” ruled Frances. “I’d like to see that wedding at your bus terminal, for Olivia’s sake. For mine, I’d like it to be the disaster of the century.”
“I might help with the venue,” said Yossarian. “I don’t guarantee the disaster.”
“Olivia will pitch in. She’s sure she can attract our newest President. Christopher gives plenty since he received a suspended sentence and escaped community service.”
“That’s a good start.”
“The mayor would come.”
“That would help too.”
“And the cardinal will insist.”
“We’re holding all the cards,” said Yossarian. “I’ll start casing the joint if you really want me to.”
“Who do you know there?” Frances was eager to learn.
“McMahon and McBride, the cop and a supervisor. McBride was a detective at the police station there—”
“They have a police station there?” Patrick exclaimed.
“That should be novel,” Frances remarked. “We’ve got our protection on hand.”
“And convenient too,” said Yossarian. “They can fingerprint the guests as we all arrive. McBride should know if it can be done. We’ve all gotten pretty close since my son Michael was arrested there.”
“For what?” Patrick demanded.
“For coming out of the subway and stepping back in when he realized he had mistaken the stop he wanted. They shackled him to a wall.”
“Good God!” Patrick reacted with a look of wrath. “That must have been horrifying.”
“It almost killed both of us,” Yossarian said, with a nervous, depressed laugh. “Come there with me, Patrick. I’ll be going to look at something new. You’ll see more of what modern life is really like. It’s not all just the museum.”
“I’d rather be sailing.”
Patrick Beach, four years older than both, had been born rich and intelligent and was early made indolent by the perception of his own intrinsic uselessness. In Britain, he had remarked to Yossarian, or in Italy or one of the few remaining republican societies with a truly aristocratic tradition, he might have sought to distinguish himself academically as a scholar in some field. But here, where intellectual endeavors generally were rated menial, he was sentenced from birth to be a dilettante or a career diplomat, which he felt was almost always the same thing. After three quick superficial marriages to three superficial women, he had finally settled permanently on Frances Rosenbaum, whose stage name was Frances Rolphe, and who understood easily his recurring attraction for solitude and study. “I inherited my money,” he was fond of repeating with overdone amiability to new acquaintances to whom he felt obliged to be civil. “I did not have to work hard to be here with you.”
He was not disturbed that many did not like him. But that patrician face of his could freeze and his fine lips quiver in powerless frustration with people too obtuse to discern the insult in his condescension, or too brutal to care.
“Olivia Maxon,” said Frances in summation, “will agree to anything I want her to, provided I let her think the initiative was hers.”
“And Christopher Maxon is always agreeable,” Patrick guaranteed, “as long as you give him something to agree with. I have lunch with him frequently when I feel like eating alone.”
When he felt like eating with someone, he thought often of Yossarian, who was content to chat disparagingly with him about almost everything current and to reminisce about their respective experiences in World War II, Yossarian as a decorated bombardier on an island near Italy, Patrick with the Office of War Information in Washington. Patrick was still always respectfully enchanted to be talking to a man he liked who knew how to read a newspaper as skeptically as he did and had been wounded in combat once and stabbed in the side by a native prostitute, and who had defied his immediate superiors and compelled them at the last to send him home.
Frances went on with good cheer. “Olivia will be delighted to know you’re assisting. She’s curious about you, John,” she volunteered archly. “Here you’ve been separated now a whole year, and you’re still not attached to another woman. I wonder about that too. You say you’re afraid of living alone.”
“I’m more afraid of living with someone. I just know the next one too will like movies and television news! And I’m not sure I can ever fall in love again,” he observed, pining. “I’m afraid those miracles may be past.”
“And how do you think a woman my age feels?”
“But what would you say,” Yossarian teased, “if I said I was in love now with a nurse named Melissa MacIntosh?”
Frances welcomed this game. “I would remind you that at our age, love seldom makes it through the second weekend.”
“And I’m also attracted to a shapely Australian blonde who shares her apartment, a friend named Angela Moorecock.”
“I might fall in love with that one myself,” ventured Patrick. “That’s really her name? Moorecock?”
“Moore.”
“I thought you said Moorecock.”
“I said Moore, Peter.”
“He did say Moorecock,” said Frances, reproachfully. “And I would also accuse you of ruthlessly exploiting innocent young working girls for degenerate sexual purposes.”
“She isn’t innocent and she isn’t so young.”
“Then you might as well take up with one of our widows or divorcées. They can be manipulated but never exploited. They have lawyers and financial advisers who won’t allow them to be misused by anyone but themselves.”
Patrick made a face. “John, how did she talk before she went on the stage?”
“Like I do now. Some people would say you were lucky, Patrick, to be married to a woman who speaks always in epigrams.”
“And gets us talking that way too.”
“I find that divine.”
“Oh, shit, darling,” said Patrick.
“That’s an obscenity, my sweet, that John would never use with both of us.”
“He speaks dirty to me.”
“To me too. But never to both of us.”
He glanced with surprise at Yossarian. “Is that true?”
“You can bet your sweet ass,” said Yossarian, laughing.
“You’ll find out what you can? About our wedding at the bus terminal?”
“I’m on my way.”
There were no cabs outside the hotel. Down the block was the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, a redoubtable mortuary catering to many of the city’s perished notables. Two men out front, one in the sober attire of an employee, the other plebeian in appearance with a knapsack and a hiking pole, were rasping at each other in muted disagreement, but neither gave him a look as he lifted an arm and caught his taxi there.