The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  As soon as the laughter had receded, Sherman said to Bobby Shaflett, “Did you know that Assinore’s contract, and his ermine coat, for all I know, is owned by a syndicate of businessmen in Ohio, mostly from Cleveland and Columbus?”

  The Golden Hillbilly looked at him as if he were a panhandler. “Hmmmmmmmm,” he said. It was the hmmmmmmmm that says, “I understand, but I couldn’t care less,” whereupon he turned back to the other three and said, “So I asked him if he’d sign my menu. You know, they give you this menu?—and—”

  That was all for Sherman McCoy. He pulled the revolver of Resentment back out of his waistband. He wheeled away from the cluster and turned his back on them. Not one of them noticed. The hive raged in his head.

  Now what would he do? All at once he was alone in this noisy hive with no place to roost. Alone! He became acutely aware that the entire party was now composed of these bouquets and that not to be in one of them was to be an abject, incompetent social failure. He looked this way and that. Who was that, right there? A tall, handsome, smug-looking man…admiring faces looking up at his…Ah!…It registered…an author…His name was Nunnally Voyd…a novelist…he’d seen him on a television talk show…snide, acerbic…Look at the way those fools doted on him…Didn’t dare try that bouquet…Would be a repeat of the Golden Hillbilly, no doubt…Over there, someone he knew…No! Another famous face…the ballet dancer…Boris Korolev…Another circle of adoring faces…glistening with rapture…The idiots! Human specks! What is this business of groveling before dancers, novelists, and gigantic fairy opera singers? They’re nothing but court jesters, nothing but light entertainment for…the Masters of the Universe, those who push the levers that move the world…and yet these idiots worship them as if they were pipelines to the godhead…They didn’t even want to know who he was…and wouldn’t even be capable of understanding, even if they had…

  He found himself standing by another cluster…Well, at least no one famous in this one, no smirking court jester…A fat, reddish man was talking, in a heavy British accent: “He was lying in the road, you see, with a broken leg…” The delicate skinny boy! Henry Lamb! He was talking about the story in the newspaper! But wait a minute—a broken leg—“…and he kept saying, ‘How very boring, how very boring.’ ” No, he was talking about some Englishman. Nothing to do with me…The others in the cluster were laughing…a woman, about fifty, with pink powder all over her face…How grotesque…Wait!…He knew that face. The sculptor’s daughter, now a stage designer. He couldn’t remember her name…But then he did…Barbara Cornagglia…He moved on…Alone!…Despite all, despite the fact that they were circling—the police!—he felt the pressure of social failure…What could he do to make it appear as if he meant to be by himself, as if he were moving through the hive alone by choice? The hive buzzed and buzzed.

  Near the doorway through which Judy and Inez Bavardage had disappeared was an antique console bearing a pair of miniature Chinese easels. Upon each easel was a burgundy velvet disk the size of a pie, and in slits in the velvet, little pockets, were stuck name cards. They were models of the seating arrangement for dinner, so that each guest would know who his dinner partners were going to be. It struck Sherman, the leonine Yale man, as another piece of vulgarity. Nevertheless, he looked. It was a way of appearing occupied, as if he were alone for no other reason than to study the seating arrangement.

  There were evidently two tables. Presently he saw a card with Mr. McCoy on it. He would be sitting next to, let’s see, a Mrs. Rawthrote, whoever she might be, and a Mrs. Ruskin. Ruskin! His heart bolted. It couldn’t be—not Maria!

  But of course it could be. This was precisely the sort of event to which she and her rich but somewhat shadowy husband would be invited. He downed the rest of his gin-and-tonic and hurried through the doorway into the other room. Maria! Had to talk to her!—but also had to keep Judy away from her! Don’t need that on top of everything else!

  He was now in the apartment’s living room, or salon, since it was obviously meant for entertaining. It was enormous, but it appeared to be…stuffed…with sofas, cushions, fat chairs, and hassocks, all of them braided, tasseled, banded, bordered and…stuffed…Even the walls; the walls were covered in some sort of padded fabric with stripes of red, purple, and rose. The windows overlooking Fifth Avenue were curtained in deep folds of the same material, which was pulled back to reveal its rose lining and a trim of striped rope braid. There was not so much as a hint of the twentieth century in the decor, not even in the lighting. A few table lamps with rosy shades provided all the light, so that the terrain of this gloriously stuffed little planet was thrown into deep shadows and mellow highlights.

  The hive buzzed with the sheer ecstasy of being in this mellow rosy stuffed orbit. Hack hack hack hack hack hack, the horse laugh of Inez Bavardage rose somewhere. So many bouquets of people…grinning faces…boiling teeth…A butler appeared and asked him if he wanted a drink. He ordered another gin-and-tonic. He stood there. His eyes jumped around the deep stuffed shadows.

  Maria.

  She was standing by one of the two corner windows. Bare shoulders…a red sheath…She caught his eye and smiled. Just that, a smile. He answered with the smallest smile imaginable. Where was Judy?

  In Maria’s cluster was a woman he didn’t recognize, a man he didn’t recognize, and a bald-headed man he knew from somewhere, another of the…famous faces this zoo specialized in…a writer of some sort, a Brit…He couldn’t think of his name. Completely bald; not a hair on his long thin head; gaunt; a skull.

  Sherman panned the room, desperately searching for Judy. Well, what difference would it make if Judy did meet someone in this room named Maria? It wasn’t that unusual a name. But would Maria be discreet? She was no genius, and she had a mischievous streak—and he was supposed to sit next to her!

  He could feel his heart kicking up in his chest. Christ! Was it possible that Inez Bavardage knew about the two of them and put them together on purpose? Wait a minute! That’s very paranoid! She’d never risk having an ugly scene. Still—

  Judy.

  There she was, standing over near the fireplace, laughing so hard her new party laugh—wants to be an Inez Bavardage—laughing so hard her hair was bouncing. She was making a new sound, hock hock hock hock hock hock hock. Not yet Inez Bavardage’s hack hack hack hack, just an intermediary hock hock hock hock. She was listening to a barrel-chested old man with receding gray hair and no neck. The third member of the bouquet, a woman, elegant, slim, and fortyish, was not nearly so amused. She stood like a marble angel. Sherman made his way through the hive, past the knees of some people sitting down on a huge round Oriental hassock, toward the fireplace. He had to push his way through a dense flotilla of puffed gowns and boiling faces…

  Judy’s face was a mask of mirth. She was so enthralled by the conversation of the barrel-chested man she didn’t notice Sherman at first. Then she saw him. Startled! But of course!—it was a sign of social failure for one spouse to be reduced to joining another in a conversational cluster. But so what! Keep her away from Maria! That was the main thing. Judy didn’t look at him. Once again she beamed her grinning rapture at the old man.

  “—so last week,” he was saying, “my wife comes back from Italy and informs me we have a summer place on ‘Como.’ ‘Como,’ she says. It’s this Lake Como. So all right! We’ll have a summer place on ‘Como.’ It’s better than Hammamet. That was two summers ago.” He had a rough voice, a brushed-up New York street voice. He was holding a glass of soda water and looking back and forth, from Judy to the marble angel, as he told his story, getting vast effusions of approval from Judy and the occasional wriggle of the upper lip when he looked directly into the angel’s face. A wriggle; it could have been the beginning of a polite smile. “At least I know where ‘Como’ is. I never hearda Hammamet. My wife’s gone gaga about Italy. Italian paintings, Italian clothes, and now ‘Como.’ ”

  Judy went off into another automatic-weapon burst of laughter, Hock hock ho
ck hock hock hock, as if the way the old man pronounced “Como,” in mockery of his wife’s love of things Italian, was the funniest thing in the world—Maria. It came over him, just like that. It was Maria he was talking about. This old man was her husband, Arthur Ruskin. Had he mentioned her by name yet, or had he been talking only about “my wife”?

  The other woman, marble angel, just stood there. The old man suddenly reached toward her left ear and took her earring between his thumb and forefinger. Appalled, the woman stiffened. She would have jerked her head away, but her ear was now between the thumb and forefinger of this ancient and appalling ursine creature.

  “Very nice,” said Arthur Ruskin, still holding on to the earring. “Nadina D., right?” Nadina Dulocci was a highly mentionable jewelry designer.

  “I believe so!” said the woman in a timorous, European voice. Hurriedly she brought her hands to her ears and unfastened both earrings and handed them to him, most emphatically, as if to say, “There, take them. But be so kind as not to rip my ears off my head.”

  Unconcerned, Ruskin took them in his hairy paws and inspected them further. “Nadina D., all right. Very nice. Where’d you get ’em?”

  “They were a gift.” Cold as marble. He returned them to her, and she quickly put them in her purse.

  “Very nice, very nice. My wife—”

  Suppose he said “Maria”! Sherman broke in. “Judy!” To the others: “Excuse me.” To Judy: “I was wondering—”

  Judy instantly transformed her startled expression into one of radiance. No wife in all of history had ever been more charmed to see her husband arrive at a conversational bouquet.

  “Sherman! Have you met Madame Prudhomme?”

  Sherman extended his Yale chin and put on an expression of the most proper Knickerbocker charm to greet the shaken Frenchwoman. “Howja do?”

  “And Arthur Ruskin,” said Judy. Sherman shook the hairy mitt firmly.

  Arthur Ruskin was not a young seventy-one. He had big ears with thick rinds and wire hairs sprouting out. There were curdled wattles under his big jaws. He stood erectly, rocking back on his heels, which brought out his chest and his ponderous gut. His heft was properly swathed in a navy suit, white shirt, and navy tie.

  “Forgive me,” said Sherman. To Judy, with a charming smile: “Come over here a moment.” To Ruskin and the Frenchwoman he flashed a smile of apology and moved off a few feet, Judy in tow. Madame Prudhomme’s face fell. She had looked to his arrival in the bouquet as a salvation from Ruskin.

  Judy, with a fireproof smile still on her face: “What is it?”

  Sherman, a smiling mask of Yale Chin charm: “I want you to…uh…to come meet Baron Hochswald.”

  “Who?”

  “Baron Hochswald. You know, the German—one of the Hochwalds.”

  Judy, the smile still locked on: “But why?”

  “We rode up in the elevator with him.”

  This obviously made no sense to Judy at all. Urgently: “Well, where is he?” Urgently, because it was bad enough to be caught in a large conversational cluster with your husband. To form a minimal cluster with him, just the two of you—

  Sherman, looking around: “Well, he was here just a minute ago.”

  Judy, the smile gone: “Sherman, what on earth are you doing? What are you talking about, ‘Baron Hochswald’?”

  Just then the butler arrived with Sherman’s gin-and-tonic. He took a big swallow and looked around some more. He felt dizzy. Everywhere…social X-rays in puffed dresses shimmering in the burnt-apricot glow of the little table lamps…

  “Well—you two! What are you trying to cook up!” Hack hack hack hack hack hack hack. Inez Bavardage took them both by their arms. For a moment, before she could get her fireproof grin back onto her face, Judy looked stricken. Not only had she ended up in a minimal cluster with her husband, but New York’s reigning hostess, this month’s ring-mistress of the century, had spotted them and felt compelled to make this ambulance run to save them from social ignominy.

  “Sherman was—”

  “I was looking for you! I want you to meet Ronald Vine. He’s doing over the Vice President’s house, in Washington.”

  Inez Bavardage towed them through the hive of grins and gowns and inserted them in a bouquet dominated by a tall, slender, handsome, youngish man, the aforesaid Ronald Vine. Mr. Vine was saying, “…jabots, jabots, jabots. I’m afraid the Vice President’s wife has discovered jabots.” A weary roll of the eyes. The others in the bouquet, two women and a bald man, laughed and laughed. Judy could barely summon up even a smile…Crushed…Had to be rescued from social death by the hostess…

  Such sad irony! Sherman hated himself. He hated himself for all the catastrophes she didn’t yet know about.

  The Bavardages’ dining room walls had been painted with so many coats of burnt-apricot lacquer, fourteen in all, they had the glassy brilliance of a pond reflecting a campfire at night. The room was a triumph of nocturnal reflections, one of many such victories by Ronald Vine, whose forte was the creation of glitter without the use of mirrors. Mirror Indigestion was now regarded as one of the gross sins of the 1970s. So in the early 1980s, from Park Avenue to Fifth, from Sixty-second Street to Ninety-sixth, there had arisen the hideous cracking sound of acres of hellishly expensive plate-glass mirror being pried off the walls of the great apartments. No, in the Bavardages’ dining room one’s eyes fluttered in a cosmos of glints, twinkles, sparkles, highlights, sheens, shimmering pools, and fiery glows that had been achieved in subtler ways, by using lacquer, glazed tiles in a narrow band just under the ceiling cornices, gilded English Regency furniture, silver candelabra, crystal bowls, School of Tiffany vases, and sculpted silverware that was so heavy the knives weighed on your fingers like saber handles.

  The two dozen diners were seated at a pair of round Regency tables. The banquet table, the sort of Sheraton landing field that could seat twenty-four if you inserted all the leaves, had disappeared from the smarter dining rooms. One shouldn’t be so formal, so grand. Two small tables were much better. So what if these two small tables were surrounded and bedecked by a buildup of objets, fabrics, and bibelots so lush it would have made the Sun King blink? Hostesses such as Inez Bavardage prided themselves on their gift for the informal and the intimate.

  To underscore the informality of the occasion there had been placed, in the middle of each table, deep within the forest of crystal and silver, a basket woven from hardened vines in a highly rustic Appalachian Handicrafts manner. Wrapped around the vines, on the outside of the basket, was a profusion of wildflowers. In the center of the basket were massed three or four dozen poppies. This faux-naïf centerpiece was the trademark of Huck Thigg, the young florist, who would present the Bavardages with a bill for $3,300 for this one dinner party.

  Sherman stared at the plaited vines. They looked like something dropped by Gretel or little Heidi of Switzerland at a feast of Lucullus. He sighed. All…too much. Maria was sitting next to him, on his right, chattering away at the cadaverous Englishman, whatever his name was, who was on her right. Judy was at the other table—but had a clear view of him and Maria. He had to talk to Maria about the interrogation by the two detectives—but how could he do it with Judy looking right at them? He’d do it with an innocuous party grin on his face. That was it! He’d grin through the whole discussion! She’d never know the difference…Or would she?…Arthur Ruskin was at Judy’s table…But thank God, he was four seats away from her…wouldn’t be chatting with her…Judy was sitting between Baron Hochswald and some rather pompous-looking youngish man…Inez Bavardage was two seats away from Judy, and Bobby Shaflett was on Inez’s right. Judy was grinning an enormous social grin at the pompous man…Hock hock hock hock hock hock hock hock hock hock! Clear above the buzz of the hive he could hear her laughing her new laugh…Inez was talking to Bobby Shaflett but also to the grinning social X-ray seated to the Golden Hillbilly’s right and to Nunnally Voyd, who was to the right of the X-ray. Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw, sa
ng the Towheaded Tenor…Hack hack hack hack hack hack, sang Inez Bavardage…Hock hock hock hock hock hock hock hock hock, bawled his own wife…

  Leon Bavardage sat four chairs to Sherman’s right, beyond Maria, the cadaverous Englishman, and the woman with the pink powder on her face, Barbara Cornagglia. In contrast to Inez Bavardage, Leon had all the animation of a raindrop. He had a placid, passive, lineless face, wavy blondish hair, which was receding, a long delicate nose, and very pale, almost livid skin. Instead of a 300-watt social grin, he had a shy, demure smile, which he was just now bestowing upon Miss Cornagglia.

  Belatedly it occurred to Sherman that he should be talking to the woman on his left. Rawthrote, Mrs. Rawthrote; who in the name of God was she? What could he say to her? He turned to his left—and she was waiting. She was staring straight at him, her laser eyes no more than eighteen inches from his face. A real X-ray with a huge mane of blond hair and a look of such intensity he thought at first that she must know something…He opened his mouth…he smiled…he ransacked his brain for something to say…he did the best he could…He said to her, “Would you do me a great favor? What is the name of the gentleman to my right, the thin gentleman? His face is so familiar, but I can’t think of his name for the life of me.”

  Mrs. Rawthrote leaned still closer, until their faces were barely eight inches apart. She was so close she seemed to have three eyes. “Aubrey Buffing,” she said. Her eyes kept burning into his.

  “Aubrey Buffing,” said Sherman lamely. It was really a question.

  “The poet,” said Mrs. Rawthrote. “He’s on the short list for the Nobel Prize. His father was the Duke of Bray.” Her tone said, “How on earth could you not know that?”