The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  To make matters worse, the driver couldn’t pull up to the sidewalk near the entrance, because so many limousines were in the way. He had to double-park. Sherman and Judy had to thread their way between the limousines…Envy…envy…From the license plates Sherman could tell that these limousines were not hired. They were owned by those whose sleek hides were hauled here in them. A chauffeur, a good one willing to work long hours and late hours, cost $36,000 a year, minimum; garage space, maintenance, insurance, would cost another $14,000 at least; a total of $50,000, none of it deductible. I make a million dollars a year—and yet I can’t afford that!

  He reached the sidewalk. Whuh? Just to the left, in the gloaming, a figure—a photographer—right over there—

  Sheer terror!

  My picture in the paper!

  The other boy, the big one, the brute, sees him and goes to the police!

  The police! The two detectives! The fat one! The one with the lopsided face! McCoy—goes to parties at the Bavardages’, does he! Now they truly smell blood!

  Horrified, he stares at the photographer—

  —and discovers that it’s only a young man walking a dog. He has stopped near the canopy that leads up to the entrance…Not even looking at Sherman…staring at a couple who are nearing the door…an old man in a dark suit and a young woman, a blonde, in a short dress.

  Calm down, for God’s sake! Don’t be crazy! Don’t be paranoid!

  But a smirking, insulting voice says: You got something you wanna get off your chest?

  Now Sherman and Judy were under the canopy, only three or four steps behind the old man and the blonde, heading for the entrance. A doorman in a starched white dickie pushed it open. He wore white cotton gloves. The blonde entered first. The old man, who was not much taller than she was, looked sleepy and somber. His thinning gray hair was combed straight back. He had a big nose and heavy eyelids, like a movie Indian. Wait a minute—I know him…No, he had seen him somewhere…But where?…Bango!…In a picture, of course…It was Baron Hochswald, the German financier.

  This was all Sherman needed, on this night of all nights…After the catastrophes of the past three days, in this perilous low point of his career on Wall Street, to run into this man, whose success was so complete, so permanent, whose wealth was so vast and unassailable—to have to set eyes upon this immovably secure and ancient German—

  Perhaps the baron merely lived in this building…Please, God, don’t let him be going to the same dinner party—

  In that very moment he heard the baron say to the doorman in a heavy European accent: “Bavardage.” The doorman’s white glove gestured toward the rear of the lobby.

  Sherman despaired. He despaired of this evening and of this life. Why hadn’t he gone to Knoxville six months ago? A little Georgian house, a leaf-blowing machine, a badminton net in the backyard for Campbell…But no! He had to tag along behind this walnut-eyed German, heading for the home of some overbearingly vulgar people named Bavardage, a glorified traveling salesman and his wife.

  Sherman said to the doorman, “The Bavardages’, please.” He hit the accented syllable hard, so that no one would think he had paid the slightest attention to the fact that the noble one, Baron Hochswald, had said the same thing. The baron, the blonde, Judy, and Sherman headed for the elevator. The elevator was paneled in old mahogany. It glowed. The grain was showy but rich and mellow. As he entered, Sherman overheard Baron Hochswald saying the name Bavardage to the operator. So Sherman repeated it, as before, “The Bavardages’ ”—lest the baron himself get the impression that he, Sherman, was cognizant of his existence.

  Now all four of them knew they were going to the same dinner party, and they had to make a decision. Did you do the decent, congenial, neighborly, and quite American thing—the sort of thing that would have been done without hesitation on an elevator in a similar building on Beacon Hill or Rittenhouse Square—or in a building in New York, for that matter, if the party were being given by someone of good blood and good bone, such as Rawlie or Pollard (in the present company, Pollard suddenly seemed quite okay, quite a commendable old Knickerbocker)—did you do the good-spirited thing and smile and introduce yourselves to one another…or did you do the vulgar snobbish thing and stand there and pretend you were unaware of your common destination and stare stiffly at the back of the elevator operator’s neck while this mahogany cab rose up its shaft?

  Sherman cut an exploratory glance at Hochswald and the blonde. Her dress was a black sheath that ended several inches above her knees and hugged her luscious thighs and the lubricious declivity of her lower abdomen and rose up to a ruff at the top that resembled flower petals. Christ, she was sexy! Her creamy white shoulders and the tops of her breasts swelled up as if she was dying to shed the sheath and run naked through the begonias…Her blond hair was swept back to reveal a pair of enormous ruby earrings…No more than twenty-five years old…A tasty morsel! A panting animal!…The old bastard had taken what he wanted, hadn’t he!…Hochswald wore a black serge suit, a white shirt with a spread collar, and a black silk necktie with a large, almost rakish knot…all of it fashioned just so…Sherman was glad Judy had pressured him into wearing the navy suit and navy tie…Nevertheless, the baron’s ensemble seemed terribly smart by comparison.

  Now he caught the old German flicking his eyes up and down Judy and himself. Their glances engaged for the briefest of instants. Then both stared once more at the piping on the back of the collar of the elevator operator.

  So they ascended, an elevator operator and four social mutes, toward some upper floor. The answer was: You did the vulgar snobbish thing.

  The elevator stopped, and the four mutes walked out into the Bavardages’ elevator vestibule. It was lit by clusters of tiny silk lampshades on either side of a mirror with a gilded frame. There was an open doorway…a rich and rosy glow…the sound of a hive of excited voices…

  They went through the doorway, into the apartment’s entry gallery. Such voices! Such delight! Such laughter! Sherman faced catastrophe in his career, catastrophe in his marriage—and the police were circling—and yet the hive—the hive!—the hive!—the sonic waves of the hive made his very innards vibrate. Faces full of grinning, glistening, boiling teeth! How fabulous and fortunate we are, we few, to be in these upper rooms together with our radiant and incarnadine glows!

  The entry gallery was smaller than Sherman’s, but whereas his (decorated by his wife, the interior designer) was grand and solemn, this one was dazzling, effervescent. The walls were covered in a brilliant Chinese-red silk, and the silk was framed by narrow gilded moldings, and the moldings were framed by a broad burnt-umber upholsterer’s webbing, and the webbing was framed by more gilded moldings, and the light of a row of brass sconces made the gilt gleam, and the glow of the gilt and the Chinese-red silk made all the grinning faces and lustrous gowns yet more glorious.

  He surveyed the crowd and immediately sensed a pattern…presque vu! presque vu! almost seen!…and yet he couldn’t have put it into words. That would have been beyond him. All the men and women in this hall were arranged in clusters, conversational bouquets, so to speak. There were no solitary figures, no strays. All faces were white. (Black faces might show up, occasionally, at fashionable charity dinners but not in fashionable private homes.) There were no men under thirty-five and precious few under forty. The women came in two varieties. First, there were women in their late thirties and in their forties and older (women “of a certain age”), all of them skin and bones (starved to near perfection). To compensate for the concupiscence missing from their juiceless ribs and atrophied backsides, they turned to the dress designers. This season no puffs, flounces, pleats, ruffles, bibs, bows, battings, scallops, laces, darts, or shirrs on the bias were too extreme. They were the social X-rays, to use the phrase that had bubbled up into Sherman’s own brain. Second, there were the so-called Lemon Tarts. These were women in their twenties or early thirties, mostly blondes (the Lemon in the Tarts), who were the second, third
, and fourth wives or live-in girlfriends of men over forty or fifty or sixty (or seventy), the sort of women men refer to, quite without thinking, as girls. This season the Tart was able to flaunt the natural advantages of youth by showing her legs from well above the knee and emphasizing her round bottom (something no X-ray had). What was entirely missing from chez Bavardage was that manner of women who is neither very young nor very old, who has laid in a lining of subcutaneous fat, who glows with plumpness and a rosy face that speaks, without a word, of home and hearth and hot food ready at six and stories read aloud at night and conversations while seated on the edge of the bed, just before the Sandman comes. In short, no one ever invited…Mother.

  Sherman’s attention was drawn to a bouquet of ecstatic boiling faces in the immediate foreground. Two men and an impeccably emaciated woman were grinning upon a huge young man with pale blond hair and a cowlick at the top of his forehead…Met him somewhere…but who is he?…Bango!…Another face from the press…The Golden Hillbilly, the Towheaded Tenor…That was what they called him…His name was Bobby Shaflett. He was the new featured tenor of the Metropolitan Opera, a grossly fat creature who had somehow emerged from the upland hollows of the Appalachians. You could hardly read a magazine or a newspaper without seeing his picture. As Sherman watched, the young man’s mouth opened wide. Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw, he broke out into a huge barnyard laugh, and the grinning faces around him became even more radiant, more transported, than before.

  Sherman lifted his Yale chin, squared his shoulders, straightened his back, raised himself to his full height, and assumed the Presence, the presence of an older, finer New York, the New York of his father, the Lion of Dunning Sponget.

  A butler materialized and asked Judy and Sherman what they wanted to drink. Judy asked for “sparkling water.” (To say “Perrier” or any other brand name had become too trite.) Sherman had intended to drink nothing. He had intended to be aloof from everything about these people, these Bavardages, starting with their liquor. But the hive had closed in, and the cowlicked towhead of the Golden Hillbilly boomed away.

  “A gin-and-tonic,” said Sherman McCoy from the eminence of his chin.

  A blazing bony little woman popped out from amid all the clusters in the entry gallery and came toward them. She was an X-ray with a teased blond pageboy bob and many tiny grinning teeth. Her emaciated body was inserted into a black-and-red dress with ferocious puffed shoulders, a very narrow waist, and a long skirt. Her face was wide and round—but without an ounce of flesh on it. Her neck was much more drawn than Judy’s. Her clavicle stuck out so far Sherman had the feeling he could reach out and pick up the two big bones. He could see lamplight through her rib cage.

  “Dear Judy!”

  “Inez!” said Judy, and the two of them kissed or, rather, swung their cheeks past one another, first on this side, then on that side, in a European fashion that Sherman, now the son of that staunch Knickerbocker, that Old Family patriarch, that Low Church Episcopal scourge of the fleshpots, John Campbell McCoy, found pretentious and vulgar.

  “Inez! I don’t think you’ve met Sherman!” She forced her voice into an exclamation, in order to be heard above the hive, “Sherman, this is Inez Bavardage!”

  “Howja do,” said the Lion’s scion.

  “I certainly feel like I know you!” said the woman, looking him squarely in the eye and flashing her tiny teeth and thrusting her hand toward him. Overwhelmed, he took it. “You should hear Gene Lopwitz go on about you!” Lopwitz! When? Sherman found himself clutching at this rope of hope. (Perhaps he had built up so many points in the past, the Giscard debacle would not finish him!) “And I know your father, too. Scared to death of him!” With this the woman gripped Sherman’s forearm and fastened her eyes onto his and broke into an extraordinary laugh, a hacking laugh, not hah hah hah but hack hack hack hack hack hack hack hack hack, a laugh of such heartiness and paroxysmal rapture that Sherman found himself grinning foolishly and saying:

  “You don’t say!”

  “Yes!” Hack hack hack hack hack hack hack. “I never told you this, Judy!” She reached out and hooked one arm inside Judy’s and the other inside Sherman’s and pulled the two of them toward her, as if they were the two dearest chums she had ever had. “There was this dreadful man named Derderian who was suing Leon. Kept trying to attach things. Pure harassment. So one weekend we were out on Santa Catalina Island at Angie Civelli’s.” She dropped the name of the famous comedian without so much as a syncopation. “And we’re having dinner, and Leon starts talking about all the trouble he’s having with this man Derderian, and Angie says—believe me, he was absolutely serious—he says, ‘You want me to take care of it?’ ” With this, Inez Bavardage pushed her nose to one side with her forefinger to indicate the Bent-Nose Crowd. “Well, I mean I’d heard about Angie and The Boys, but I didn’t believe it—but he was serious!” Hack hack hack hack hack hack hack hack. She pulled Sherman yet closer and put her eyes right in his face. “When Leon got back to New York, he went to see your father, and he told him what Angie had said, and then he said to your father, ‘Maybe that’s the simplest way to take care of it.’ I’ll never forget what your father said. He said, ‘No, Mr. Bavardage, you let me take care of it. It won’t be simple, it won’t be fast, and it’ll cost you a lot of money. But my bill you can pay. The other—no one is rich enough to pay them. They’ll keep collecting until the day you die.’ ”

  Inez Bavardage remained close to Sherman’s face and gave him a look of bottomless profundity. He felt obliged to say something.

  “Well…which did your husband do?”

  “What your father said, of course. When he spoke—people jumped!” A hack-hack-hack-hacking peeeealllll of laughter.

  “And what about the bill?” asked Judy, as if delighted to be in on this story about Sherman’s incomparable father.

  “It was sensational! It was astonishing, that bill!” Hack hack hack hack hack. Vesuvius, Krakatoa, and Mauna Loa erupted with laughter, and Sherman felt himself swept up in the explosion, in spite of himself. It was irresistible—Gene Lopwitz loves you!—your incomparable father!—your aristocratic lineage!—what euphoria you arouse in my bony breast!

  He knew it was irrational, but he felt warm, aglow, high, in Seventh Heaven. He eased the revolver of his Resentment back into his waistband and told his Snobbery to go lie down by the hearth. Really a very charming woman! Who would have thought it, after all the things one hears about the Bavardages! A social X-ray, to be sure, but one can’t very well hold that against her! Really very warm—and quite amusing!

  Like most men, Sherman was innocent of the routine salutatory techniques of the fashionable hostesses. For at least forty-five seconds every guest was the closest, dearest, jolliest, most wittily conspiratorial friend a girl ever had. Every male guest she touched on the arm (any other part of the body presented problems) and applied a little heartfelt pressure. Every guest, male or female, she looked at with a radar lock upon the eyes, as if captivated (by the brilliance, the wit, the beauty, and the incomparable memories).

  The butler returned with the drinks for Judy and Sherman, Sherman took a long deep draught of the gin-and-tonic, and the gin hit bottom, and the sweet juniper rose, and he relaxed and let the happy buzz of the hive surge into his head.

  Hack hack hack hack hack hack hack went Inez Bavardage.

  Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw went Bobby Shaflett.

  Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah went Judy.

  Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh went Sherman.

  The hive buzzed and buzzed.

  In no time Inez Bavardage had steered him and Judy over to the bouquet where the Golden Hillbilly held forth. Nods, hellos, handshakes, under the aegis of Sherman’s new best friend, Inez. Before he quite realized what had happened, Inez had steered Judy out of the entry gallery, into some inner salon, and Sherman was left with the celebrated Appalachian fat boy, two men, and an X-ray. He looked at each of them, starting with Shaflett. Non
e returned his gaze. The two men and the woman stared, rapt, at the huge pale head of the tenor as he recounted a story of something that had happened on an airplane:

  “—so I’m settin’up’eh waitin’ fuh Barb’ra—she’s supposed to be ridin’ back to New York with me?” He had a way of ending a declarative sentence with a question that reminded Sherman of Maria…Maria…and the huge Hasidic Jew! The great blond ball of fat before him was like that huge sow from the real-estate company—if that was where he was from. A cold tremor…They were out there circling, circling…“And I’m in my seat—I got the one by the window? And from back’eh, here come ’is unbelievable, outrageous black man.” The way he hit the un and the out and fluttered his hands in the air made Sherman wonder if this hillbilly giant was, in fact, a homosexual. “He’s wearin’ this’eh ermine overcoat?—down to here?—and ’is’eh matchin’ ermine fedora?—and he’s got more rings’n Barb’ra’s got, and he’s got three retainers with ’im?—right outta Shaft?”

  The giant bubbled on, and the two men and the woman kept their eyes on his huge round face and their grins fixed; and the giant, for his part, looked only at them, never at Sherman. As the seconds rolled by, he grew increasingly aware that all four of them were acting as if he didn’t exist. A giant fairy with a hillbilly accent, thought Sherman, and they were hanging on his every word. Sherman took three deep gulps of his gin-and-tonic.

  The story seemed to revolve about the fact that the regal black man, who had sat down next to Shaflett on the airplane, was the cruiser-weight champion of the world, Sam (Assassin Sam) Assinore. Shaflett found the term “cruiser weight” vastly amusing—haw haw haw haw haw haw haw—and the two men went into excited screams of laughter. Sherman labeled them homosexual, too. Assassin Sam hadn’t known who Shaflett was, and Shaflett hadn’t known who Assassin Sam was. The point of the entire story seemed to be that the only two people in the first-class section of the airliner who hadn’t known who both these celebrities were…were Shaflett and Assinore themselves! Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw—hee hee hee hee hee hee hee—and—aha!—a conversational nugget about Assassin Sam Assinore popped into Sherman’s brain. Oscar Suder—Oscar Suder!—he winced at the memory but pressed on—Oscar Suder was part of a syndicate of Midwestern investors who backed Assinore and controlled his finances. A nugget! A conversational nugget! A means of entry into this party cluster!