The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Raphael put his hands on his hips and looked down at the old man with a frustration bordering on anger. Fallow had the impression that had Ruskin so much as fluttered an eyelid, the little maître d’ would have launched into a lecture laced with the bitter-cold courtesy in which the breed couched its insults. The roar was building up again. The diners finally were managing to forget the corpse. But not Raphael. Madame Tacaya was coming. The waiters were now skipping over the corpse mindlessly, as if they did it every night, as if every night there were one corpse or another lying in that spot, until the rhythm of the leap was built into one’s nervous system. But how could the Empress of Indonesia be ushered in over this hulk? Or even be seated in its presence? What was keeping the police?

  Gruesome bloody childish Yanks, thought Fallow. Not one of them, other than the ridiculous Heimlich Maneuverer, had moved a muscle to help this poor old bastard. Finally, a policeman and two crewmen from an emergency squad arrived. The noise dipped once more as everyone inspected the crewmen, one of whom was black and the other Latin, and their equipment, which consisted of a folding stretcher and an oxygen tank. They put an oxygen mask over Ruskin’s mouth. Fallow could tell from the way the crewmen were talking to each other that they were getting no response from Ruskin. They unfolded the stretcher and slipped it under Ruskin’s body and strapped him on.

  When they took the stretcher to the front door, a disturbing problem arose. There was no way they could get the stretcher through the revolving door. Now that the stretcher was no longer folded but was extended with a body on it, it was too long. They began trying to fold back one of the wings of the door, but no one seemed to know how to do it. Raphael kept saying, “Stand it up! Stand it up! Walk it through!” But apparently this was a grave breach of medical procedure, tilting the body vertically, in the case of a heart-attack victim, and the crewmen had their own necks to look after. So they all stood there in the vestibule, before the statue of The Silver Boar, having a discussion.

  Raphael began throwing his hands up in the air and stamping his feet. “Do you think I allow this”—he gestured at Ruskin’s body, paused, then gave up on supplying an appropriate noun—“to remain here in the restaurant, before tout le monde? Please! See for yourself! This is the main entrance! This is a business! People are coming here! Madame Tacaya will be here at any moment!”

  The policeman said, “Okay, take it easy. Is there any other way out?”

  Much discussion. A waiter mentioned the ladies’ room, which had a window onto the street. The policeman and Raphael went back into the dining room to check out that possibility. Soon they returned, and the policeman said, “Okay, I think we can make it.” So now Raphael, his captain, the policeman, the stretcher-bearers, a waiter, Fallow, and the inert hulk of Arthur Ruskin reentered the dining room. They headed along the very same aisle, between the banquette tables and Madame Tacaya’s table, where Ruskin had trod triumphantly barely an hour before. He was still the cynosure of the procession, although he was now laid out cold. The roar in the room dropped off sharply. The diners couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Ruskin’s stricken face and white gut were now being paraded by their very tables…the grim remains of the joys of the flesh. It was as if some plague, which they all thought had been eradicated at last, had sprung back up in their midst, more virulent than ever.

  The procession entered a little door on the far side of the dining room. The door led into a small vestibule, off which were two more doors, to the men’s room and the ladies’ room. The ladies’ room had a small lounge area, and in it was the window to the street. After a considerable struggle, a waiter and the policeman managed to open the window. Raphael produced a set of keys and unlocked the hinged bars that protected the window from the street. A cool sooty draft blew in. It was welcome. The pileup of human beings, the quick and the dead, had made the little room unbearable.

  The policeman and one of the crewmen climbed through the window out onto the sidewalk. The other crewman and the waiter passed one end of the stretcher, the end where Ruskin’s face lay, growing grimmer and grayer by the minute, through the window to the two men outside. The last Fallow saw of the mortal remains of Arthur Ruskin, ferry captain to Mecca for the Arabs, were the soles of his bench-made English shoes disappearing through the window of the ladies’ room of La Boue d’Argent.

  In the next instant Raphael bolted past Fallow, out of the ladies’ room and back into the dining room. Fallow followed. Halfway across the dining room, Fallow was intercepted by the captain who had been in charge of his table. He gave Fallow the sort of solemn smile you give someone in the hour of bereavement. “Monsieur,” he said, still smiling in this sad but kindly way, and he gave Fallow a slip of paper. It looked like a bill.

  “What’s this?”

  “L’addition, monsieur. The check.”

  “The check?”

  “Oui, naturellement. You ordered dinner, monsieur, and it was prepared and served. We are very sorry about your friend’s misfortune…” Then he shrugged and tucked his chin down and pulled a face. (But it has nothing to do with us, and life goes on, and we must make a living all the same.)

  Fallow was shocked by the crassness of the demand. Far more shocking, however, was the thought of having to pay a check in a restaurant like this.

  “If you’re so bloody keen on l’addition,” he said, “I expect you ought to talk it over with Mr. Ruskin.” He brushed by the captain and headed for the door.

  “No, you don’t!” said the captain. It was no longer the oily voice of a restaurant captain. “Raphael!” he yelled, and then he said something in French. In the vestibule, Raphael wheeled about and confronted Fallow. He had a very stern look on his face.

  “Just a moment, monsieur!”

  Fallow was speechless. But at that moment Raphael turned back toward the door and broke into a professional smile. A big glum flat-faced Asian in a business suit came in through the revolving door, his eyes darting this way and that. Behind him appeared a small olive-skinned woman, about fifty, with dark red lips and a huge carapace of black hair and a long red silk mandarin-collared coat with a floor-length red silk gown beneath it. She wore enough jewelry to light up the night.

  “Madame Tacaya!” said Raphael. He held up both hands, as if catching a bouquet.

  The next day the front page of The City Light consisted mainly of four gigantic words, in the biggest type Fallow had ever seen on a newspaper:

  Death

  New York

  Style

  And above that, in smaller letters: society restaurant to tycoon: “KINDLY FINISH DYING BEFORE MADAME TACAYA ARRIVES.”

  And at the bottom of the page: A CITY LIGHT Exclusive by our man at the table: Peter Fallow.

  In addition to the main story, which recounted the evening in lavish detail, down to the waiters skipping busily over the body of Arthur Ruskin, there was a side story that attracted almost as much attention. The headline read:

  Dead Tycoon’s Secret:

  Kosher 747s To Mecca

  By noon the fury of the Muslim world was chattering in over the Reuters wire in the corner of the Mouse’s office. The Mouse smiled and rubbed his hands. The interview with Ruskin had been his idea.

  He hummed to himself with a joy that all the money in the world couldn’t have brought him: “Oh, I am a member of the working press, I am a member of the working press, I am a member of the worrrrrrking press.”

  27. Hero of the Hive

  The demonstrators vanished as rapidly as they had arrived. The death threats ceased. But for how long? Sherman now had to balance the fear of death against the horror of going broke. He compromised. Two days after the demonstration he cut the number of bodyguards down to two, one for the apartment and one for his parents’ house.

  Nevertheless—hemorrhaging money! Two bodyguards on duty around the clock, at twenty-five dollars per hour per man, a total of $1,200 a day—$438,000 per year—bleeding to death!

  Two days after that, he got
up the nerve to keep an engagement Judy had made almost a month before: dinner at the di Duccis’.

  True to her word, Judy had been doing what she could to help him. Equally true to her word, this did not include being affectionate. She was like one asphalt contractor forced into an alliance with another by some sordid turn of fate…Better than nothing perhaps…It was in that spirit that the two of them planned their return to Society.

  Their thinking (McCoy & McCoy Associates’) was that the long story in the Daily News by Killian’s man Flannagan offered a blameless explanation of the McCoy Case. Therefore, why should they hide? Shouldn’t they go through the motions of a normal life, and the more publicly the better?

  But would le monde—and, more specifically, the very social di Duccis—see it that way? With the di Duccis they at least had a fighting chance. Silvio di Ducci, who had lived in New York since he was twenty-one, was the son of an Italian brake shoe manufacturer. His wife, Kate, had been born and reared in San Marino, California; he was her third wealthy husband. Judy was the decorator who had done their apartment. She now took the precaution of ringing up and offering to back out of the dinner party. “Don’t you dare!” said Kate di Ducci. “I’m counting on your coming!” This gave Judy a terrific lift. Sherman could read it in her face. It did nothing for him, however. His depression and skepticism were too profound for a polite boost from the likes of Kate di Ducci. All he could manage to say to Judy was, “We’ll see, won’t we.”

  The bodyguard at the apartment, Occhioni, drove the Mercury station wagon over to his parents’ house, picked up Judy, returned to Park Avenue, and picked up Sherman. They headed for the di Duccis’ on Fifth Avenue. Sherman pulled the revolver of his Resentment out of his waistband and braced for the worst. The di Duccis and the Bavardages ran with precisely the same crowd (the same vulgar non-Knickerbocker crowd). At the Bavardages’ they had frozen him out even when his respectability was intact. With their combination of rudeness, crudeness, cleverness, and chic, what would they inflict upon him now? He told himself that he was long past caring whether they approved of him or not. His intention—their intention (McCoy & McCoy’s)—was to show the world that, being without sin, they could proceed with their lives. His great fear was of the sort of outcome that would prove them wrong: namely, an ugly scene.

  The di Duccis’ entry gallery had none of the dazzle of the Bavardages’. Instead of Ronald Vine’s clever combinations of materials, of silk and hemp and gilt wood and upholsterer’s webbing, the di Duccis’ betrayed Judy’s weakness for the solemn and grand: marble, fluted pilasters, huge classical cornices. Yet it was every bit as much from another century (the eighteenth), and it was filled with the same clusters of social X-rays, Lemon Tarts, and men with dark neckties; the same grins, the same laughter, the same 300-watt eyes, the same sublime burble and ecstatic rat-tat-tat-tat chatter. In short, the hive. The hive!—the hive!—the familiar buzz closed in about Sherman, but it no longer resonated in his bones. He listened to it, wondering if his tainted presence would stop the hive’s very hum in mid-sentence, mid-grin, mid-guffaw.

  An emaciated woman emerged from the clusters and came toward them, smiling…Emaciated but absolutely beautiful…He had never seen a more beautiful face…Her pale golden hair was swept back. She had a high forehead and a face as white and smooth as china, and yet with large, lively eyes and a mouth with a sensual—no, more than that—a provocative smile. Very provocative! When she grasped his forearm, he felt a tingle in his loins.

  “Judy! Sherman!”

  Judy embraced the woman. In all sincerity she said, “Oh, Kate, you’re so kind. You’re so wonderful.” Kate di Ducci hooked her arm inside Sherman’s and drew him toward her, so that the three of them formed a sandwich, Kate di Ducci between the two McCoys.

  “You’re more than kind,” said Sherman. “You’re brave.” All at once he realized he was using the sort of intimate baritone he used when he wanted to get the old game going.

  “Don’t be silly!” said Kate di Ducci. “If you hadn’t come, both of you, I’d have been very, very cross! Come over here, I want you to meet some people.”

  Sherman noticed with trepidation that she was leading them toward a conversational bouquet dominated by the tall patrician figure of Nunnally Voyd, the novelist who had been at the Bavardages’. An X-ray and two men with navy suits, white shirts, and navy ties were beaming great social grins at the great author. Kate di Ducci made the introductions, then led Judy out of the entry gallery, into the grand salon.

  Sherman held his breath, ready for an affront or, at best, ostracism. Instead, all four kept smiling mightily.

  “Well, Mr. McCoy,” said Nunnally Voyd with a mid-Atlantic accent, “I must tell you, I’ve thought about you more than once over the past few days. Welcome to the legion of the damned…now that you’ve been properly devoured by the fruit flies.”

  “The fruit flies?”

  “The press. I’m amused by all the soul-searching these…insects do. ‘Are we too aggressive, too cold-blooded, too heartless?’—as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger. I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty. That’s what I call praise by faint damnation. They’ve got the wrong animal. In fact, they’re fruit flies. Once they get the scent, they hover, they swarm. If you swing your hand at them, they don’t bite it, they dart for cover, and as soon as your head is turned, they’re back again. They’re fruit flies. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Despite the fact that this grand literatus was using his predicament as a pedestal upon which to place this entomological conceit, this set piece that came out a bit shopworn in the delivery, Sherman was grateful. In some way Voyd was, indeed, a brother, a fellow legionnaire. He seemed to recall—he had never paid much attention to literary gossip—that Voyd had been stigmatized as homosexual or bisexual. There had been some sort of highly publicized squabble…How very unjust! How dare these…insects pester this man who, while perhaps a bit affected, had such largeness of spirit, such sensitivity to the human condition? What if he was…gay? The very word gay popped into Sherman’s head spontaneously. (Yes, it is true. A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.)

  Emboldened by his new brother, Sherman told of how the horse-faced woman had shoved a microphone in his face as he and Campbell left the apartment building and how he had swung his arm, purely to get the device out of his face—and the woman was now suing him! She was crying, pouting, whimpering—and filing a civil suit for $500,000!

  Everyone in the bouquet, even Voyd himself, was looking directly at him, absorbed, beaming a social grin.

  “Sherman! Sherman! Goddamn!” A booming voice…He looked around…A huge young man coming toward him…Bobby Shaflett…He had broken off from another bouquet and was coming toward him with a big barnyard grin on his face. He held out his hand, and Sherman shook it, and the Golden Hillbilly sang out, “You sure have been making the feathers fly since the last time I saw you! You sure as hell have, godalmighty dog!”

  Sherman didn’t know what to say. As it turned out, he didn’t have to say a thing.

  “I got arrested in Montreal last year,” said the Towheaded Tenor with evident satisfaction. “You probably saw something about that.”

  “Well, no…I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No—why on earth—what were you arrested for?”

  “PEEING ON A TREE!” Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw! “They don’t cotton to it when you pee on their trees at midnight in Montreal, leastways not right outside the hotel!” Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw!

  Sherman stared at his beaming face with consternation.

  “They threw me in jail! Indecent exposure! PEEING ON A TREE!” Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw! He calmed down a bit. “You know,” he said, “I never was in jail before. What’d you think a jail?”

  “Not much,” said Sherman.

  “I know what you mean,” said Shaflett, “but it wudd’n so a
wful. I’d heard all this stuff about what the other prisoners do to you in jail?” He enunciated this as if it were a question. Sherman nodded. “You wanna know what they did to me?”

  “What?”

  “They gave me apples!”

  “Apples?”

  “Sure did. The first meal I got in’eh, it was so bad I couldn’t eat it—and I like to eat! All’s I could eat was this apple that came with it. So you know what? The word got out that all’s I’d eat was the apple, and they all sent me their apples, all the other prisoners. They passed ’em along, hand over hand, through the bars, till they got to me. By the time I got outta there, there was just my head stickin’ out of a pile of apples!” Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw!

  Encouraged by this favorable gloss put upon jail time, Sherman told of the Puerto Rican in the holding pen who had seen the television crews filming him in handcuffs and wanted to know what he had been arrested for. He told of how his answer, “Reckless endangerment,” had obviously disappointed the man and how, therefore, he told the next questioner, “Manslaughter.” (The black youth with the shaved head…He felt a twinge of the original terror…This he did not mention.) Eagerly they stared at him, the entire bouquet—his bouquet—the renowned Bobby Shaflett and the renowned Nunnally Voyd, as well as the other three social souls. Their expressions were so rapt, so deliriously expectant! Sherman felt an irresistible urge to improve upon his war story. So he invented a third cellmate. And when this cellmate asked him what he was in for, he said, “Second-degree murder.”