Anniversaries and office doors.

[Mark Kohut]

>From a recent McSweeney's bit o' wit entitled *New Erotica for Feminists*
there is this LOL-joke:
He calls me into his office and closes the door… to promote me. He promotes
me again and again. I am wild with ecstasy.

https://twitter.com/levistahl/status/1079539275925016576

This comes from late in the book and is an unreadable (to some) picture of
a page of *Anniversaries.  *
Johnson soars here in every sentence and it begins with a remark on offices
and their doors."The only place where one can be alone
in NYC". Remember it is 1967-68.

Earlier in the novel there is a situation where the protagonist, Gisene,
gets a promotion. Told in the words of
her co-workers we hear of "how long she was in the boss's office".....There
is not an overt
hint of sexual innuendo or harassment in *Anniversaries* so far, and Gisene
is a moralist able to be outraged. (She walks away form a rental when she
needs it
when the landlord jokes about keeping the colored away")---which is why we
have to notice this, I suggest, yet.......
ah, wonderful suggestive ambiguity.


Joseph Heller's second, and to some, greater novel than *Catch-22* is
*Something
Happened. *There's this:   "Closed doors give me the willies" [I think this
is the line. Close anyway. Not looking anything up]. It repeats this trope
by the protagonist who
works in NYC. with riffs and reflections on why such anxiety and a killer
payoff. Heller worked in advertising around such doors while Johnson was
noticing them, too. Artists, yes.

By the way, the protagonist of *SH* is Bob Slocum, which can't help making
you think of T. Slothrop, right? Heller worked on this novel for more than
a decade, pubbed in 1974, and as we think we've learned in a
little comparative publishing re* Catch-22* and *V*, it seems pretty clear
that TRP got to read some of *Catch-22, *at least, before it was published
because of Candida Donadio, their shared agent. So, some of *Something
Happened* read too? Just speculatin'.