The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “Germaine pays only $331 a month, and I pay her $750. It’s rent-controlled. They’d love to get her out of here.”

  “It doesn’t strike you as odd that they’d decide to barge in here—right now?”

  “Right now?”

  “Well, maybe I’m crazy, but today—after this thing is in the paper?”

  “In the paper?” Then it dawned on her what he was saying, and she broke into a smile. “Sherman, you are crazy. You’re paranoid. You know that?”

  “Maybe I am. It just seems like a very odd coincidence.”

  “Who do you think sent him in here, if the landlord didn’t? The police?”

  “Well…” Realizing it did sound rather paranoid, he smiled faintly.

  “The police are gonna send a colossal great Hasidic piece-a-blubber moron lunatic to spy on you?”

  Sherman hung his mighty Yale chin down over his collarbone. “You’re right.”

  Maria walked over and lifted his chin with her forefinger and looked into his eyes and smiled the most loving smile he had ever seen.

  “Sherman.” Shuhmun. “The entire world isn’t standing still thinking about you. The entire world isn’t out to get you. Only I am.”

  She took his face in both hands and kissed him. They ended up on the bed, but this time it took some doing on his part. It wasn’t the same when you were scared half to death.

  12. The Last of the Great Smokers

  After a fitful sleep, Sherman reached Pierce & Pierce at eight o’clock. He was exhausted, and the day hadn’t begun. The bond trading room had a hallucinatory quality. The appalling glare on the harbor side…the writhing silhouettes…the radium-green numbers skidding across the faces of an infinite number of terminals…the young Masters of the Universe, so utterly unknowing, bawling at the electric doughnuts:

  “I’ll pay two!”

  “Yeah, but what about the when-issued?”

  “Down two ticks!”

  “Bullshit! You can’t turn off a fuse!”

  Even Rawlie, poor dispirited Rawlie, was on his feet, his telephone at his ear, his lips moving a mile a minute, drumming his desktop with a pencil. Young Arguello, lord of the pampas, was rocked back in his chair with his thighs akimbo, the telephone at his ear, his moiré suspenders blazing away, and a big grin on his young gigolo face. He had scored a smashing coup yesterday in Japan with the Treasuries. The whole trading room was talking about it. Grinning grinning grinning grinning, the greaseball lounged in triumph.

  Sherman had a craving to go to the Yale Club and take a steam bath and lie down on one of those leather-top tables and get a good hot hammering massage and go to sleep.

  On his desk was a message, marked urgent, to call Bernard Levy in Paris.

  Four computer terminals away, Felix was working on the right shoe of a gangling, obnoxious young whiz named Ahlstrom, just two years out of Wharton. Ahlstrom was on the telephone. Gobble, gobble, gobble, eh, Mr. Ahlstrom? Felix—The City Light. It would be on the stands by now. He wanted to see it, and he dreaded seeing it.

  Scarcely even aware what he was doing, Sherman put the telephone to his ear and dialed the Trader T number in Paris. He leaned over the desk and supported himself with both elbows. As soon as Felix was through with the hot young Ahlstrom, he would call him over. Some part of his mind was listening when the French doughnut, Bernard Levy, said:

  “Sherman, after we spoke yesterday, I talked it over with New York, and everyone agrees you’re right. There’s no point waiting.”

  Thank God.

  “But,” Bernard continued, “we can’t go ninety-six.”

  “Can’t go ninety-six?”

  He was hearing portentous words…and yet he couldn’t concentrate…The morning newspapers, the Times, the Post, the News, which he had read in the taxi on the way downtown, contained rehashes of the City Light story, plus more statements from this black man, Reverend Bacon. Ferocious denunciations of the hospital where the boy still lay in a coma. For a moment Sherman had taken heart. They were blaming it all on the hospital! Then he realized this was wishful thinking. They would blame…She was driving. If they closed in, finally, if all else failed, she was driving. It was her. He clung to that.

  “No, ninety-six is no longer on the table,” said Bernard. “But we’re ready at ninety-three.”

  “Ninety-three!”

  Sherman sat up straight. This could not be true. Certainly in the next moment Bernard would tell him he’d made a slip. He’d say ninety-five at the worst. Sherman had paid ninety-four. Six hundred million bonds at ninety-four! At ninety-three Pierce & Pierce would lose six million dollars.

  “Surely you didn’t say ninety-three!”

  “Ninety-three, Sherman. We think it’s a very fair price. In any event, that’s the offer.”

  “Christ almighty…I’ve got to think for a second. Listen, I’ll call you back. Will you be there?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right. I’ll call you right back.”

  He hung up and rubbed his eyes. Christ! There must be a way to pull this out. He had let himself get rattled with Bernard yesterday. Fatal! Bernard had detected panic in his voice and had pulled back. Get yourself together! Regroup! Think this thing out! There’s no way you can let it collapse after all this! Call him back and be yourself, best producer of Pierce & Pierce!—Master of the…He lost heart. The more he urged himself on, the more nervous he became. He looked at his watch. He looked at Felix. Felix was just rising from the shoe of the hot child, Ahlstrom. He waved him over. He took his money clip out of his pants pocket, sat down, put it between his knees to hide it, withdrew a five-dollar bill and slipped it into an interoffice envelope, then stood up as Felix walked over.

  “Felix, there’s five dollars in there. Go downstairs and get me a City Light, will you? The change is yours.”

  Felix looked at him and then gave him a funny smile and said, “Yeah, okay, but you know, last time they keep me waiting down there at the stand, and the elevator don’t come, and I lose a lotta time. It’s fifty floors down there. Cost me a lotta time.” He didn’t budge.

  It was outrageous! He was claiming that five dollars to go fetch a thirty-five-cent newspaper was cutting into his profit margin as a shoeshine man! He had the nerve to gouge him—ahhhhhhhh…that was it. Some kind of street radar told him that if he was hiding the newspaper in an envelope, then it was contraband. It was smuggling. It was desperation, and desperate people pay money.

  Scarcely able to contain his fury Sherman dug into his pocket and came up with another five dollars and thrust it at the black man, who took it, gave him a fastidiously bored look, and went off with the envelope.

  He dialed Paris again.

  “Bernard?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sherman. I’m still working on it. Give me another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  A pause. “All right.”

  Sherman hung up and looked toward the great rear window. The silhouettes bobbed and jerked about in insane patterns. If he was willing to come up to ninety-five…In no time the black man was back. He handed him the envelope without a word or a fathomable expression.

  The envelope was fat with the tabloid. It was as if there were something alive in there. He put it under his desk, where it gnashed and thrashed about.

  If he threw part of his own profit into it…He began jotting down the figures on a piece of paper. The sight of them—meaningless! Attached to nothing! He could hear himself breathing. He picked up the envelope and headed for the men’s room.

  Inside the cubicle, the pants of his two-thousand-dollar Savile Row suit gracing the bare toilet seat, his New & Lingwood cap-toed shoes pulled back up against the china toilet bowl, Sherman opened up the envelope and withdrew the newspaper. Every crackle of the paper accused him. The front page…CHINATOWN GHOST VOTER SCANDAL…of no earthly interest…He opened it up…Page 2…Page 3…a picture of a Chinese restaurant owner…It was at the bottom of the page:

  Secret Printo
ut

  In Bronx Hit’N’Run

  Above the headline, in smaller white letters upon a black bar: New Bombshell in Lamb Case. Below the headline, on another black bar, it said: A CITY LIGHT Exclusive. The story was by the same Peter Fallow:

  Declaring “I’m fed up with the foot-dragging,” a source within the Division of Motor Vehicles yesterday provided The City Light with a computer printout narrowing down to 124 the number of vehicles that might have been involved in last week’s hit-and-run maiming of Bronx honor student Henry Lamb.

  The source, who has worked with police on similar cases in the past, said: “They can check out 124 vehicles in a few days. But first they have to want to commit the manpower. When the victim is from the projects, they don’t always want to.”

  Lamb, who lives with his widowed mother in the Edgar Allan Poe Towers, a Bronx housing project, lies in an apparently irreversible coma. Before losing consciousness, he was able to give his mother the first letter—R—and five possibilities for the second letter—E, F, B, R, P—of the license plate of the luxurious Mercedes-Benz that ran him down on Bruckner Boulevard and sped off.

  Police and the Bronx District Attorney’s Office have objected that almost 500 Mercedes-Benzes registered in New York State have plates beginning with those letters, too many to justify a vehicle-by-vehicle check in a case where the only known witness, Lamb himself, may never regain consciousness.

  But The City Light’s DMV source said: “Sure, there are 500 possibilities, but only 124 that are likely. Bruckner Boulevard, where this young man was run down, is not exactly a tourist attraction. It stands to reason that the vehicle belongs to someone in New York City or Westchester. If you go on that assumption—and I’ve seen the cops do it in other cases—that narrows it down to 124.”

  The revelation prompted new demands by a black leader, Rev. Reginald Bacon, for a full-scale investigation of the incident.

  “If the police and the District Attorney won’t do it, we’ll do it ourselves,” he said. “The power structure lets this brilliant young man’s life be destroyed and then just yawns. But we’re not going to stand for that. We’ve got the printout now, and we’ll track down those cars ourselves if we have to.”

  Sherman’s heart jumped inside his chest.

  Lamb’s South Bronx neighborhood was described as “up in arms” and “seething with fury” over the handling of his injuries and the alleged reluctance of authorities to move on the case.

  A spokesman for the Health and Hospital Administration said an “internal investigation” was under way. Police and the office of Bronx District Attorney Abe Weiss said their investigations were “continuing.” They refused comment on the narrowing down of the number of vehicles, but a DMV spokesman, Ruth Berkowitz, referring to the material obtained by The City Light, said: “The unauthorized release of ownership data in a sensitive case such as this is a serious and very irresponsible breach of departmental policy.”

  That was it. Sherman sat on the toilet seat staring at the block of type. Closing the noose! But the police weren’t paying any attention to it…Yes, but suppose this…this Bacon…and a bunch of seething black people, up in arms, started checking the cars themselves…He tried to picture it…Too gross for his imagination…He looked up at the gray-beige door of the toilet cubicle…The air hinge of the door to the men’s room was opening. Then a door opened just a couple of cubicles away. Slowly Sherman closed the newspaper and folded it over and slipped it back inside the interoffice envelope. Ever so slowly he rose from the toilet seat; ever so quietly he opened the cubicle door; ever so stealthily he stole across the men’s-room floor, while his heart raced on ahead.

  Once more in the bond trading room, he picked up the telephone. Must call Bernard. Must call Maria. He tried to put a businesslike expression on his face. Personal calls from the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce were much frowned upon. He dialed her apartment on Fifth. A woman with a Spanish accent answered. Mrs. Ruskin not at home. He called the hideaway, dialing the numbers with great deliberation. No answer. He rocked back in his chair. His eyes focused in the distance…the glare, the flailing silhouettes, the roar…

  The sound of someone’s fingers snapping over his head…He looked up. It was Rawlie, snapping his fingers.

  “Wake up. Thinking’s not allowed around here.”

  “I was just…” He didn’t bother to finish, because Rawlie had already passed by.

  He hunched over his desk and looked at the radium-green numbers trucking across the screens.

  Just like that he decided to go see Freddy Button.

  What would he tell Muriel, the sales assistant? He would tell her he was going to see Mel Troutman at Polsek & Fragner about the Medicart Fleet issue…That was what he would tell her…and the notion sickened him. One of the Lion’s maxims was “A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you’re weak.”

  He couldn’t remember Freddy Button’s telephone number. It had been that long since he had called him. He looked it up in his address book.

  “This is Sherman McCoy. I’d like to speak to Mr. Button.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McCoy, he’s with a client. Can he call you back?”

  Sherman paused. “Tell him it’s urgent.”

  The secretary paused. “Hold on.”

  Sherman was hunched over his desk. He looked down at his feet…the envelope with the newspaper…No! Suppose she called in to Freddy over an intercom, and another lawyer, someone who knew his father, heard her say it…“Sherman McCoy, urgent”…

  “Excuse me! Wait a second! Never mind—are you there?” He was yelling into the telephone. She was gone.

  He stared down at the envelope. He scribbled some figures on a piece of paper, so as to look busy and businesslike. The next thing he heard was the ever-suave, ever-nasal voice of Freddy Button.

  “Sherman. How are you? What’s up?”

  On the way out, Sherman told his lie to Muriel and felt cheap, sordid, and weak.

  Like a lot of other old-line, well-fixed Protestant families in Manhattan, the McCoys had always made sure that only other Protestants ministered to their private affairs and their bodies. By now, this took some doing. Protestant dentists and accountants were rare creatures, and Protestant doctors weren’t easy to find.

  Protestant lawyers were still plentiful, however, at least on Wall Street, and Sherman had become a client of Freddy Button the same way he had joined the Knickerbocker Greys, the kiddie cadet corps, as a boy. His father had arranged it. When Sherman was a senior at Yale, the Lion thought it was time he made out a will, as an orderly and prudent part of growing up. So he passed him along to Freddy, who was then a young and newly made partner at Dunning Sponget. Sherman had never had to worry about whether Freddy was a good lawyer or not. He had gone to him to be tidy: for wills, redrafted when he married Judy and when Campbell was born, for contracts when he bought the apartment on Park Avenue and the house in Southampton. The purchase of the apartment had made Sherman think twice. Freddy knew he had borrowed $1.8 million to buy it, and that was more than he wanted his father (technically Freddy’s partner) to know. Freddy had kept his counsel. But in an obscene business like this, with the newspapers screaming, was there some reason why—some procedure—some practice of the firm—something that would cause the matter to be circulated to other partners—to the aging Lion himself?

  Dunning Sponget & Leach occupied four floors of a skyscraper on Wall Street, three blocks from Pierce & Pierce. When it was built, it had been the very latest in the 1920s Moderne style, but now it had the grimy gloom that was typical of Wall Street. The Dunning Sponget offices resembled Pierce & Pierce’s. In both cases modern interiors had been caked with eighteenth-century English paneling and stocked with eighteenth-century English furniture. This was lost on Sherman, however. To him everything about Dunning Sponget was as venerable as his father.

  To his relief, the receptionist didn’t recognize him or his name. Of course, by now the Lion was
nothing more than one of the wrinkled old partners who infested the corridors for a few hours each day. Sherman had just taken a seat in an armchair when Freddy Button’s secretary, Miss Zilitsky, appeared. She was one of those women who look fiftyish and loyal. She led him down a silent hall.

  Freddy, tall, lank, elegant, charming, smoking away, stood waiting for him at the door of his office.

  “Hel-lo, Sherman!” A plume of cigarette smoke, a magnificent smile, a warm handshake, a charming display of pleasure at the very sight of Sherman McCoy. “My goodness, my goodness, how are you? Have a seat. How about some coffee? Miss Zilitsky!”

  “No, thanks. Not for me.”

  “How’s Judy?”

  “Fine.”

  “And Campbell?” He always remembered Campbell’s name, which Sherman appreciated, even in his present state.

  “Oh, she’s thriving.”

  “She’s at Taliaferro now, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. How did you know that? Did my father mention it?”

  “No, my daughter Sally. She graduated from Taliaferro two years ago. Absolutely loved it. Keeps up with everything. She’s at Brown now.”

  “How does she like Brown?” Jesus Christ, why am I even bothering to ask? But he knew why. Freddy’s thick, fast, meaningless current of charm swept you up. Helpless, you said the usual.

  It was a mistake. Freddy was immediately off on an anecdote about Brown and coed dorms. Sherman didn’t bother listening. To make a point, Freddy flipped his long hands upward in a languid, effeminate gesture. He was always talking about families, his family, your family, other people’s families, and he was a homosexual. No doubt about it. Freddy was about fifty years old, six feet four or more, slender, awkwardly put together but elegantly dressed in the English “drape” style. His limp blond hair, now dulled by a rising tide of gray, was slicked back in the 1930s fashion. Languidly he settled into his chair, across the desk from Sherman, talking as he did so, and smoking. He took a deep draft of the cigarette and let the smoke curl out of his mouth and drained it up into his nostrils in two thick columns. This was once known as French inhaling and was so known to Freddy Button, the last of the Great Smokers. He blew smoke rings. He French-inhaled and blew large smoke rings and then blew speedy little smoke rings through the large ones. From time to time he held his cigarette not between his first two fingers but between his thumb and forefinger, upright, like a candle. Why was it that homosexuals smoked so much? Perhaps because they were self-destructive. But the word self-destructive was the outer limit of Sherman’s familiarity with psychoanalytical thought, and so his eyes began to drift. Freddy’s office was done, the way Judy talked about doing apartments. It looked like something from one of those abominable magazines…burgundy velvet, oxblood leather, burled wood, brass and silver bibelots…All at once Freddy and his charm and his taste were supremely annoying.