The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Fallow.

  “But you know who he is.”

  “Of course,” said Fallow, who had never heard the name in his life.

  “Jesus,” said Ruskin. “I never thought I’d ever become such a great pal of a Kraut, but I love the guy.”

  This thought launched Ruskin on a long soliloquy about the many roads he had traveled in his career and about the many forks in those roads and how America was a wonderful country and who would have ever given a little Jew from Cleveland, Ohio, one chance in a thousand to get where he was today. He began to paint Fallow the view from the top of the mountain, ordering a second sidecar as he did. He painted with vigorous but vague strokes. Fallow was glad they were sitting side by side. It would be difficult for Ruskin to read the boredom on his face. Every now and then he ventured a question. He fished about for information as to where Maria Ruskin might stay when she visited Italy, such as at this moment, but Ruskin was vague about that, too. He was eager to return to the story of his life.

  The first course arrived. Fallow had ordered a vegetable pâté. The pâté was a small pinkish semicircle with stalks of rhubarb arranged around it like rays. It was perched in the upper left-hand quadrant of a large plate. The plate seemed to be glazed with an odd Art Nouveau painting of a Spanish galleon on a reddish sea sailing toward the…sunset…but the setting sun was, in fact, the pâté, with its rhubarb rays, and the Spanish ship was not done in glaze at all but in different colors of sauce. It was a painting in sauce. Ruskin’s plate contained a bed of flat green noodles carefully intertwined to create a basket weave, superimposed upon which was a flock of butterflies fashioned from pairs of mushroom slices, for the wings; pimientos, onion slices, shallots, and capers, for the bodies, eyes, and antennae. Ruskin took no note of the exotic collage before him. He had ordered a bottle of wine and was becoming increasingly expansive about the peaks and valleys of his career. Valleys, yes; oh, he had had to overcome many disappointments. The main thing was to be decisive. Decisive men made great decisions not because they were smarter than other people, necessarily, but because they made more decisions, and by the law of averages some of them would be great. Did Fallow get it? Fallow nodded. Ruskin paused only to stare gloomily at the fuss Raphael and his boys were making over the big round table in front of them. Madame Tacaya is coming. Ruskin seemed to feel upstaged.

  “They all want to come to New York,” he said dismally, without mentioning whom he was talking about, although it was clear enough. “This city is what Paris used to be. No matter what they are in their own country, it starts eating at them, the idea that in New York people might not give a damn who they are. You know what she is, don’t you? She’s an empress, and Tacaya’s the emperor. He calls himself president, but they all do that. They all pay lip service to democracy. You ever notice that? If Genghis Khan was around today, he’d be President Genghis, or president-for-life, like Duvalier used to be. Oh, it’s a great world. There’s ten or twenty million poor devils flinching on their dirt floors every time the empress wiggles a finger, but she can’t sleep nights thinking that the people at La Boue d’Argent in New York might not know who the hell she is.”

  Madame Tacaya’s secret-service man stuck his huge Asian head into the dining room and scanned the house. Ruskin gave him a baleful glance.

  “But even in Paris,” he said, “they didn’t come all the way from the goddamned South Pacific. You ever been to the Middle East?”

  “Mmmm-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-no,” said Fallow, who for half a second thought of faking it.

  “You oughta go. You can’t understand what’s going on in the world unless you go to these places. Jidda, Kuwait, Dubai…You know what they wanna do there? They wanna build glass skyscrapers, to be like New York. The architects tell them they’re crazy. A glass building in a climate like that, they’ll have to run the air conditioning twenty-four hours a day. It’ll cost a fortune. They just shrug. So what? They’re sitting on top of all the fuel in the world.”

  Ruskin chuckled. “I’ll tell you what I mean about making decisions. You remember the Energy Crisis, back in the early 1970s? That was what they called it, the Energy Crisis. That was the best thing that ever happened to me. All of a sudden everybody was talking about the Middle East and the Arabs. One night I was having dinner with Willi Nordhoff, and he gets on the subject of the Muslim religion, Islam, and how every Muslim wants to go to Mecca before he dies. ‘Efry focking Muslim vants to go dere.’ He always threw a lot of fockings in, because he thought that made him sound fluent in English. Well, as soon as he said that, a lightbulb went on over my head. Just like that. Now I was almost sixty years old, and I was absolutely broke. The stock market had gone to hell about then, and that was all I had done for twenty years, buy and sell securities. I had an apartment on Park Avenue, a house on Eaton Square in London, and a farm in Amenia, New York, but I was broke, and I was desperate, and this lightbulb went on over my head.

  “So I says to Willi, ‘Willi,’ I says, ‘how many Muslims are there?’ And he says, ‘I dunt know. Dere’s millions, tense of millions, hundruts of millions.’ So I made my decision right then and there. ‘I’m going in the air-charter business. Efry focking Arab who wants to go to Mecca, I’m gonna take him there.’ So I sold the house in London and I sold the farm in Amenia, to raise some cash, and I leased my first airplanes, three worn-out Electras. All my goddamned wife could think of—I’m talking about my former wife—was where were we gonna go in the summer, if we couldn’t go to Amenia and we couldn’t go to London. That was her entire comment on the whole goddamned situation.”

  Ruskin swelled up to his story. He ordered some red wine, a heavy wine that started a delicious fire in Fallow’s stomach. Fallow ordered a dish called veal Boogie Woogie, which turned out to be rectangles of veal, small squares of spiced red apples, and lines of puréed walnuts arranged to look like Piet Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. Ruskin ordered médallions de selle d’agneau Mikado, which was perfectly pink ovals of leg of lamb with tiny leaves of spinach and sticks of braised celery arranged to resemble a Japanese fan. Ruskin managed to down two glasses of the fiery red wine with a rapidity that was startling, given the fact that he did not stop talking.

  It seemed that Ruskin had taken many of the early flights to Mecca himself, posing as a crewman. Arab travel agents had roamed the remotest villages, inveigling the natives to squeeze the price of an airplane ticket out of their pitiful possessions in order to make the magical pilgrimage to Mecca that took a few hours rather than thirty or forty days. Many of them had never laid eyes on an airplane. They arrived at the airports with live lambs, sheep, goats, and chickens. No power on earth could make them part with their animals before boarding the aircraft. They realized the flights were short, but what were they supposed to do for food once they got to Mecca? So the livestock went right into the cabins with their owners, bleating, cackling, urinating, defecating at will. Sheets of plastic were put in the cabins, covering the seats and the floors. So man and beast traveled to Mecca shank to flank, flying nomads on a plastic desert. Some of the passengers immediately set about arranging sticks and brush in the aisles to build fires to prepare dinner. One of the most urgent tasks of the crewmen was discouraging this practice.

  “But what I wanna tell you about is the time we went off the runway at Mecca,” said Ruskin. “It’s nighttime and we come in for a landing, and the pilot lands long and the goddamned ship goes off the runway and we hit the sand with a helluva jolt and the right wing tip digs into the sand and the plane skids around practically 360 degrees before we come to a stop. Well, Jesus Christ, we figure there’s gonna be wholesale panic with all these Arabs and the sheep and the goats and the chickens. We figure it’s gonna be bloody murder. Instead, they’re all talking in normal voices and staring out the window at the wing and the little fire that’s started on the tip. Well, I mean, we’re the ones who are panicked. Then they’re getting up, taking their sweet time about it, and gat
hering up all their bags and sacks and animals and whatnot and just waiting for us to open the doors. They’re so cool—and we’re scared to death! Then it dawns on us. They think it’s normal. Yeah! They think that’s the way you stop an airplane! You stick a wing in the sand and spin around, and that brings the thing to a stop, and you get off! The thing is, they never rode in an airplane before, and so whadda they know from landing an airplane! They think it’s normal! They think that’s the way you do it!”

  The thought threw Ruskin into a great phlegmy laugh, deep in his throat, and then the laugh turned into a coughing spasm, and his face became very red. He pushed himself back from the table with his hands until he seemed to be pressed back against the banquette, and he said, “Unnnh! Hmmmm! Hmmmmm, hmmmmm, hmmmm,” as if he were reflecting in an amused way on the scene he had just described. His head fell forward, as if he were deep in thought about it all. Then his head fell sideways, and a snoring sound came from his mouth, and he leaned his shoulder against Fallow’s. For an instant, Fallow thought the old man had fallen asleep. Fallow turned, in order to look into Ruskin’s face, and when he did, Ruskin’s body fell toward him. Startled, Fallow twisted about in his seat, and Ruskin’s head ended up on his lap. The old man’s face was no longer red. Now it was a ghastly gray. The mouth was slightly open. The breath was coming out in rapid little heaves. Without thinking, Fallow tried to sit him back up on the banquette. It was like trying to lift a sack of fertilizer. As he grappled and tugged, Fallow could see the two women and two men at the next table, along the banquette, staring with the contemptuous curiosity of people watching something distasteful. No one lifted a finger, of course. Fallow now had Ruskin propped up against the banquette and was looking around the room for help. Raphael, a waiter, two captains, and a busboy were fussing with the big round table that awaited Madame Tacaya and her party.

  Fallow called out, “Excuse me!” Nobody heard him. He was conscious of how silly it sounded, this British Excuse me, when what he meant was Help! So he said, “Waiter!” He said it as belligerently as he could. One of the captains by Madame Tacaya’s table looked up and frowned, then walked over.

  With one arm Fallow kept Ruskin upright. With the other hand he gestured toward his face. Ruskin’s mouth was half open, and his eyes were half closed.

  “Mr. Ruskin’s suffered some sort of—I don’t know what!” Fallow said to the captain.

  The captain looked at Ruskin the way he might have looked at a pigeon that had unaccountably walked into the restaurant and taken the best seat in the house. He turned around and fetched Raphael, and Raphael peered at Ruskin.

  “What happened?” he asked Fallow.

  “He’s suffered some sort of attack!” said Fallow. “Is there anyone here who’s a doctor?”

  Raphael scanned the room. But you could tell he wasn’t looking for anyone in particular. He was trying to calculate what would happen if he tried to quiet the room and appeal for medical assistance. He looked at his watch and swore under his breath.

  “For God’s sake, get a doctor!” said Fallow. “Call the police!” He gestured with both his hands, and when he took the one hand off Ruskin, the old man pitched face forward into his plate, into the selle d’agneau Mikado. The woman at the next table went, “Aaaaooooooh!” Almost a yelp it was, and she lifted her napkin to her face. The space between the two tables was no more than six inches, and somehow Ruskin’s arm had become wedged in.

  Raphael barked at the captain and the two waiters at Madame Tacaya’s table. The waiters began pulling the table away from the banquette. Ruskin’s weight was on the table, however, and his body began to slide forward. Fallow grabbed him around the waist to try to keep him from hitting the floor. But Ruskin’s massive body was a dead weight. His face was slipping off the plate. Fallow couldn’t hold him back. The old man slid off the table and took a header onto the carpet underneath. Now he was lying on the floor on his side, with his legs jackknifed. The waiters pulled the table out farther, until it blocked the aisle between the tables at the banquette and Madame Tacaya’s table. Raphael was yelling to everybody at once. Fallow knew some French, but he couldn’t make out a word Raphael was saying. Two waiters carrying trays full of food stood there looking down and then at Raphael. It was a traffic jam. Taking charge, Raphael squatted down and tried to pick Ruskin up by the shoulders. He couldn’t budge him. Fallow stood up. Ruskin’s body prevented him from getting out from behind the table. One look at Ruskin’s face and it was obvious he was a goner. His face was an ashy gray, smeared with a French sauce and pieces of spinach and celery. The flesh around his nose and mouth was turning blue. His still-open eyes were like two pieces of milk glass. People were craning this way and that, but the joint was still roaring with conversation. Raphael kept looking toward the door.

  “For God’s sake,” said Fallow, “call a doctor.”

  Raphael gave him a furious look and then a dismissing wave of the hand. Fallow was startled. Then he was angry. He didn’t want to be stuck with this dying old man, either, but now he had been insulted by this arrogant little maître d’. So now he was Ruskin’s ally. He knelt down on the floor, straddling Ruskin’s legs. He loosened Ruskin’s necktie and tore open his shirt, popping off the top button. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped the trousers and tried to pull Ruskin’s shirt away from his body, but it was wrapped around it tightly, apparently from the way he had fallen.

  “What’s wrong with him? ’S’e choking? ’S’e choking? Lemme g’im the Heimlich maneuver!”

  Fallow looked up. A big florid man, a great Percheron Yank, was standing over him. He was apparently another diner.

  “I think he’s had a heart attack,” said Fallow.

  “ ‘S’what it looks like when they’re choking!” said the man. “Good God, g’im the Heimlich maneuver!”

  Raphael had his hands up, trying to steer the man away. The man brushed him aside and knelt down beside Ruskin.

  “The Heimlich maneuver, damn it!” he said to Fallow. “Heimlich maneuver!” It sounded like a military command. He put his hands under Ruskin’s arms and managed to lift him to a sitting position, whereupon he slipped his arms around Ruskin’s chest, from behind. He squeezed Ruskin’s body, then lost his balance, and both he and Ruskin keeled over onto the floor. It looked as if they were wrestling. Fallow was still on his knees. The Heimlich Maneuverer stood up, holding his nose, which was bleeding, and staggered away. His struggling had succeeded mainly in pulling Ruskin’s shirt and undershirt loose from his body, so that now a large expanse of the old man’s ponderous gut was exposed to the view of one and all.

  Fallow started to stand up, when he felt a heavy pressure on his shoulder. It was the woman on the banquette trying to squeeze past. He looked up at her face. It was a picture of frozen panic. She was shoving Fallow as if she were trying to catch the last train out of Barcelona. She accidentally stepped on Ruskin’s arm. She looked down. “Aaaaaaoooh!” Another yelp. She took two steps beyond. Then she looked up at the ceiling. She began turning slowly. There was a blur of action in front of Fallow’s eyes. It was Raphael. He lunged toward Madame Tacaya’s table, grabbed a chair, and slipped it under the woman at the precise moment she fainted and collapsed. All at once she was sitting down, comatose, with one arm hanging over the back of the chair.

  Fallow stood up and stepped over Ruskin’s body and stood between Ruskin and the table that awaited Madame Tacaya. Ruskin’s body was stretched out across the aisle, like some enormous beached white whale. Raphael stood two feet away, talking to the Asian bodyguard with the cord in his ear. Both looked toward the door. Fallow could hear them saying Madame Tacaya Madame Tacaya Madame Tacaya.

  The little bastard! “What are you going to do?” Fallow demanded.

  “Monsieur,” said Raphael angrily, “we have call the police. The ambulance will arrive. There is nothing more I can do. There is nothing more you can do.”

  He gestured to a waiter, who stepped over the body, carrying a huge tray, and
began serving a table a few feet away. Fallow looked at the faces at the tables all around. They stared at the appalling spectacle, but they did nothing. A large old man was lying on the floor in very bad condition. Perhaps he was dying. Certainly any of them who managed to get a look at his face could tell that much. At first they had been curious. Is he going to die right in front of us? At first there had been the titillation of Someone Else’s Disaster. But now the drama was dragging on too long. The conversational roar had died down. The old man looked repulsive, with his pants unzipped and his big gross bare belly bulging out. He had become a problem of protocol. If an old man was dying on the carpet a few feet from your table, what was the proper thing to do? Offer your services? But there was already a traffic jam there in the aisle between the rows of tables. Clear the area and give him air and come back later to complete the meal? But how would empty tables help the man? Stop eating until the drama had played itself out and the old man was out of sight? But the orders were in, and the food had begun to arrive, and there was no sign of any halt—and this meal was costing about $150 per person, once you added in the cost of the wine, and it was no mean trick getting a seat in a restaurant like this in the first place. Avert your eyes? Well, perhaps that was the only solution. So they averted their eyes and returned to their picturesque dishes…but there was something damned depressing about it all, because it was hard for your eyes not to wander every few seconds to see if, f’r Chrissake, they hadn’t moved the stricken hulk. A man dying! O mortality! Probably a heart attack, too! That deep fear lodged in the bosom of practically every man in the room. The old arteries were clogging up micromillimeter by micromillimeter, day by day, month by month, from all the succulent meats and sauces and fluffy breads and wines and soufflés and coffee…And was that the way it would look? Would you be lying on the floor in some public place with a blue circle around your mouth and cloudy eyes that were half open and a hundred percent dead? It was a damned unappetizing spectacle. It made you queasy. It prevented you from relishing these expensive morsels arranged in such pretty pictures on your plate. So curiosity had turned to discomfort, which now turned to resentment—an emotion that had been picked up by the restaurateurs and doubled and then doubled again.