The Bonfire of the Vanities (36 page)

She continued to smile warmly at him, like a mother who has let a child in on a great truth. He wondered if she really knew what she was talking about or whether she was just indulging in a little sentimental reverse snobbery.

“So what are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m saying I think you ought to trust my instincts.”

Just then there was a knock on the door.

“Who’s that?” said Sherman, going on red alert.

“Don’t worry,” said Maria. “It’s Germaine. I told her you’d be here.” She got up to go to the door.

“You didn’t tell her what happened…”

“Of course not.”

She opened the door. But it wasn’t Germaine. It was a gigantic man in an outlandish black outfit. He came walking in as if he owned the place, took a quick look around the room, at Sherman, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and then at Maria.

“You Germaine Boll”—he was gasping for breath, apparently because he had just walked up the stairs—“or Bowl?”

Maria was speechless. So was Sherman. The giant was young, white, with a big crinkly black beard, a huge apoplectic-red face glistening with perspiration, a black homburg with an absolutely flat brim, a too-small black homburg perched way up on his huge head like a toy, a rumpled white shirt buttoned at the throat, but no tie, and a shiny black double-breasted suit with the right side of the jacket overlapping the left, the way a woman’s jacket is usually made. A Hasidic Jew. Sherman had often seen Hasidic Jews in the Diamond District, which was on Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, but he had never seen one so enormous. He was probably six feet five, well over 250 pounds, grossly fat but powerfully built, bulging out of his liverish skin like a length of bratwurst. He took off his homburg. His hair was pasted down on his skull with perspiration. He hit the side of his great head with the heel of his hand, as if he were tamping it back into shape. Then he put his hat back on his head. It was perched up so high, it looked as if it might fall off at any moment. Perspiration rolled down the giant’s forehead.

“Germaine Boll? Bowl? Bull?”

“No, I’m not,” said Maria. She had recovered. She was testy, already on the attack. “She’s not here. What do you want?”

“You live here?” For such a big man, he had an oddly high-pitched voice.

“Miss Boll isn’t here now,” said Maria, ignoring the question.

“You live here or she live here?”

“Look, we’re kinda busy.” Exaggerated patience. “Why don’t you try later?” Challengingly: “How’d you get in this building?”

The giant reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and pulled out an enormous ring of keys. There appeared to be scores of them. He ran a great fat forefinger around the ruff of keys and stopped at one of them and delicately lifted it with his forefinger and thumb.

“With this. Winter Real Estate.” Wid dis. Wint-tuh Reelastate. He had a slightly Yiddish accent.

“Well, you’ll have to come back later and talk to Miss Boll.”

The giant didn’t budge. He looked around the apartment again. “You don’t live here?”

“Now, listen—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. We gonna paint in here.” With that the giant stretched both his arms out, like wings, as if he were about to do a swan dive, and walked over to a wall and faced it. Then he pressed his left hand against the wall and sidled over and lifted his left hand and pressed his right hand down on that spot and shuffled over to his left until he was spread out in the swan-dive position again.

Maria looked at Sherman. He knew he was going to have to do something, but he couldn’t imagine what. He walked over to the giant. In as frosty and commanding a tone as he could create, just as the Lion of Dunning Sponget would have done it, he said: “Just a minute. What are you doing?”

“Measuring,” said the giant, still doing his swan-dive shuffle around the wall. “Got to paint in here.”

“Well, I’m very sorry, but we don’t have time for that now. You’ll have to make your arrangements some other time.”

The enormous young man turned around slowly and put his hands on his hips. He took a deep breath, so that he looked puffed up to about five hundred pounds. On his face was the look of someone forced to deal with a pest. Sherman had the sinking feeling that this monster was used to such confrontations and, in fact, relished them. But the male battle was now on.

“You live here?” asked the giant.

“I said we don’t have time for this,” said Sherman, trying to maintain the Lion’s tone of cool command. “Now, be a good fellow and leave and come back and do your painting some other time.”

“You
live
here?”

“In point of fact, I
don’t
live here, but I’m a guest here, and I don’t—”

“
You
don’t live here and
she
don’t live here. What you doing here?”

“That’s not your concern!” said Sherman, unable to control his anger but feeling more helpless by the second. He pointed toward the door. “Now, be a good fellow and leave!”

“You don’t belong here. Okay? We got a real problem.”
We gottuh reel problem
. “We gottuh wrong people living in this building. This a rent-control building, and the people, they turn around”
—tuhn arount—
“and they rent the apartments to other people for a thousand, two thousand dollars a month. The rent in this apartment here, it’s only $331 a month. See? Germaine Boll—but we never see huh here. How much you pay huh?”

Such insolence! The male battle! What could he do? In most situations Sherman felt like a big man, physically. Next to this outlandish creature…He couldn’t possibly touch him. He couldn’t intimidate him. The Lion’s cool commands had no effect. And beneath it all the very foundations were rotten. He was at a complete moral disadvantage. He
didn’t
belong here—and he had everything in the world to hide. And what if this incredible monster was not actually from the Winter Real Estate Company? Suppose—

Fortunately Maria intervened. “It so happens Miss Boll’s gonna be here very shortly. In the meantime—”

“Okay! Good! I wait fuh huh.”

The giant began walking across the room like a rocking druid. He stopped at the oak pedestal table, and with glorious casualness, he lowered his tremendous heft into one of the bentwood chairs.

“All right!” said Maria. “That’s about enough!”

The giant’s response to that was to fold his arms and close his eyes and lean back, as if to settle in for the duration. In that instant Sherman realized he would truly have to do something, no matter what, or else be stripped of all manhood. The male battle! He started to step forward.

Craaaacccckkkk!
All at once the monster was on the floor, on his back, and the stiff brim of his homburg was cartwheeling crazily along the rug. One leg of the chair was cracked almost in two, near the seat, with the light wood underneath the exterior stain showing. The chair had collapsed under his weight.

Maria was screaming. “Now look what you’ve done, you peckerwood! You brood sow! You tub a lard!”

With much huffing and puffing, the giant righted himself and began hoisting himself to his feet. His insolent pose was shattered. He was red in the face, and the perspiration was pouring down again. He leaned over to pick up his hat and almost lost his balance.

Maria continued on the attack. She pointed at the remains of the chair. “I hope you realize you’re gonna have to
pay
for that!”

“Whaddaya whaddaya,” said the giant. “It don’t belong to you!” But he was retreating. Maria’s reproaches and his own embarrassment were too much for him.

“That’s gonna cost you five hundred dollars and a—and a lawsuit!” said Maria. “That’s breaking and entering and entering and breaking!”

The giant paused by the door and glowered, but it was all too much for him. He went rocking out the door in great disarray.

As soon as she heard him clumping down the stairs, Maria closed the door and locked it. She turned around and looked at Sherman and gave a great whoop of laughter.

“Did…you…see…him…on…the…floor!” She was laughing so hard, she could scarcely get the words out.

Sherman stared at her. It was true—she was right. They were different animals. Maria had the stomach for…for whatever was happening to them. She fought—with relish! Life was a fight on the line she was talking about—and so what? He
wanted
to laugh. He wanted to share her animal joy in the ludicrous scene they had just witnessed. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even manage a smile. He felt as if the very insulation of his position in the world was unraveling. These…unbelievable people…could now walk into his life.

“Craaaaassssssh!” said Maria, weeping with laughter. “Oh God, I wish I had a videotape a that!” Then she caught the look on Sherman’s face. “What’s the matter?”

“What do you think that was all about?”

“What do you mean, ‘all about’?”

“What do you think he was doing here?”

“The
land
lord sent him. You remember that letter I showed you.”

“But isn’t it kind of odd that—”

“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.

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 Printout
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:

Sherman’s heart jumped inside his chest.

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?