The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Much appreciative laughter and relief. The old man was mining the lighter vein. He paused again, as if trying to decide whether he should go on or not. His conclusion, evidently, was yes.

  “Why I’ve never written a poem about the States I really don’t know. Well, I take that back. I do know, of course. I have lived in a century in which poets are not supposed to write poems about anything, at least not anything you can put a geographical name to. But the United States deserve an epic poem. At various times in my career I considered writing an epic, but I didn’t do that, either. Poets are also not supposed to write epics any longer, despite the fact that the only poets who have endured and will endure are poets who have written epics. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser—where will Mr. Eliot or Mr. Rimbaud”—pronounced like Mr. Shaflett—“be in their light, even twenty-five years from now? In the shadows, I’m afraid, in the footnotes, deep in the ibid. thickets…along with Aubrey Buffing and a lot of other poets I have thought very highly of from time to time. No, we poets no longer even have the vitality to write epics. We don’t even have the courage to make rhymes, and the American epic should have rhymes, rhyme on top of rhyme in a shameless cascade, rhymes of the sort that Edgar Allan Poe gave us…Yes…Poe, who lived his last years just north of here, I believe, in a part of New York called the Bronx…in a little cottage with lilacs and a cherry tree…and a wife dying of tuberculosis. A drunk he was, of course, perhaps a psychotic—but with the madness of prophetic vision. He wrote a story that tells all we need to know about the moment we live in now…‘The Masque of the Red Death’…A mysterious plague, the Red Death, is ravaging the land. Prince Prospero—Prince Prospero—even the name is perfect—Prince Prospero assembles all the best people in his castle and lays in two years’ provision of food and drink, and shuts the gates against the outside world, against the virulence of all lesser souls, and commences a masked ball that is to last until the plague has burnt itself out beyond the walls. The party is endless and seamless, and it takes place in seven grand salons, and in each the revel becomes more intense than in the one before, and the revelers are drawn on, on, on toward the seventh room, which is appointed entirely in black. One night, in this last room, appears a guest shrouded in the most clever and most hideously beautiful costume this company of luminous masqueraders has ever seen. This guest is dressed as Death, but so convincingly that Prospero is offended and orders him ejected. But none dares touch him, so that the task is left to the Prince himself, and the moment he touches the ghastly shroud, he falls down dead, for the Red Death has entered the house of Prospero…Prospero, my friends…Now, the exquisite part of the story is that somehow the guests have known all along what awaits them in this room, and yet they are drawn irresistibly toward it, because the excitement is so intense and the pleasure is so unbridled and the gowns and the food and the drink and the flesh are so sumptuous—and that is all they have. Families, homes, children, the great chain of being, the eternal tide of chromosomes mean nothing to them any longer. They are bound together, and they whirl about one another, endlessly, particles in a doomed atom—and what else could the Red Death be but some sort of final stimulation, the ne plus ultra? So Poe was kind enough to write the ending for us more than a hundred years ago. Knowing that, who can possibly write all the sunnier passages that should come before? Not I, not I. The sickness—the nausea—the pitiless pain—have ceased with the fever that maddened my brain—with the fever called ‘Living’ that burned in my brain. The fever called ‘Living’—those were among the last words he wrote…No…I cannot be the epic poet you deserve. I am too old and far too tired, too weary of the fever called ‘Living,’ and I value your company too much, your company and the whirl, the whirl, the whirl. Thank you, Leon. Thank you, Inez.”

  And with that the spectral Englishman slowly took his seat.

  The intruder the Bavardages dreaded most, silence, now commanded the room. The diners looked at one another in embarrassment, three kinds of it. They were embarrassed for this old man, who had committed the gaffe of injecting a somber note into an evening at the Bavardages’. They were embarrassed because they felt the need to express their cynical superiority to his solemnity, but they didn’t know how to go about it. Dared they snigger? After all, he was Lord Buffing of the Nobel Short List and their hosts’ house guest. And they were embarrassed because there was always the possibility that the old man had said something profound and they had failed to get it. Sally Rawthrote rolled her eyes and pulled a mock long face and looked about to see if anyone was following her lead. Lord Gutt put a downcast smile on his great fat face and glanced at Bobby Shaflett, who was himself looking at Inez Bavardage for a clue. She offered none. She stared, dumstruck. Judy was smiling an entirely foolish smile, it seemed to Sherman, as if she thought something very pleasant had just been expressed by the distinguished gentleman from Great Britain.

  Inez Bavardage rose up and said, “We’ll have coffee in the other room.” Gradually, without conviction, the hive began to buzz again.

  On the ride back home, the six-block ride, costing $123.25, which is to say, one half of $246.50, with Mayfair Town Car Inc.’s white-haired driver at the wheel, Judy chattered away. She was bubbling over. Sherman hadn’t seen her this animated for more than two weeks, since the night she caught him in flagrante telephone with Maria. Tonight, obviously, she had not detected a thing concerning Maria, didn’t even know the pretty girl sitting next to her husband at dinner had been named Maria. No, she was in great spirits. She was intoxicated, not by alcohol—alcohol was fattening—but by Society.

  With a pretense of amused detachment she burbled about the shrewdness with which Inez had chosen her celebrity all-stars: three titles (Baron Hochswald, Lord Gutt, and Lord Buffing), one ranking politician with a cosmopolitan cachet (Jacques Prudhomme), four giants of arts and letters (Bobby Shaflett, Nunnally Voyd, Boris Korolev, and Lord Buffing), two designers (Ronald Vine and Barbara Cornagglia), three V.I.F.’s—“V.I.F.’s?” asked Sherman—“Very Important Fags,” said Judy, “that’s what everybody calls them” (The only name Sherman caught was that of the Englishman who had sat to her right, St. John Thomas), and three business titans (Hochswald, Rale Brigham, and Arthur Ruskin). Then she went on about Ruskin. The woman on his left, Madame Prudhomme, wouldn’t talk to him, and the woman on his right, Rale Brigham’s wife, wasn’t interested, and so Ruskin had leaned over and started telling Baron Hochswald about his air charter service in the Middle East. “Sherman, have you any idea how that man makes his money? He takes Arabs to Mecca on airplanes—747s!—by the tens of thousands!—and he’s Jewish!”

  It was the first time she had passed on a piece of chitchat to him, in the sunny vein of yore, since he couldn’t remember when. But he was past caring about the life and times of Arthur Ruskin. He could think only of the gaunt and haunted Englishman, Aubrey Buffing.

  And then Judy said, “What on earth do you suppose got into Lord Buffing? The whole thing was so…so mortifying.”

  Mortifying, indeed, thought Sherman. He started to tell her that Buffing was dying of AIDS, but he was long past the joys of gossip also.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  But of course he did. He knew precisely. That mannered, ghostly English voice had been the voice of an oracle. Aubrey Buffing had been speaking straight to him, as if he were a medium dispatched by God Himself. Edgar Allan Poe!—Poe!—the ruin of the dissolute!—in the Bronx—the Bronx! The meaningless whirl, the unbridled flesh, the obliteration of home and hearth!—and, waiting in the last room, the Red Death.

  Eddie had the door open for them by the time they walked from the Mayfair Town Car sedan to the entrance. Judy sang out, “Hello, Eddie!” Sherman barely looked at him and said nothing at all. He felt dizzy. In addition to being consumed by fear, he was drunk. His eyes darted about the lobby…The Street of Dreams…He half expected to see the shroud.

  16. Tawkin Irish

  Martin’s Irish Machismo was so Icy
Kramer couldn’t conceive of him as high-spirited, except possibly while drunk. Even then, he figured, he would be a mean and irritable drunk. But this morning he was in high spirits. His sinister Doberman eyes had become big and bright. He was happy as a child.

  “So we’re standing there in this lobby with these two doormen,” he was saying, “and there’s a buzz, and this button lights up, and Jesus Christ, one a these guys, he’s running out the door like he’s got a wire up his ass, and he’s blowing a whistle and waving his arms for a cab.”

  He looked straight at Bernie Fitzgibbon as he told this tale. The four of them, Martin, Fitzgibbon, Goldberg, and himself, were in Fitzgibbon’s office. Fitzgibbon, as befitted a Homicide Bureau chief in the District Attorney’s Office, was a slender athletic Irishman of the Black Irish stripe with a square jaw, thick black hair, dark eyes, and what Kramer called a Locker Room Grin. A Locker Room Grin was quick but never ingratiating. Fitzgibbon no doubt smiled readily at Martin’s story and its boorish details because Martin was a particular type of tough little Harp, and Fitzgibbon understood and valued the breed.

  There were two Irishmen in the room, Martin and Fitzgibbon, and two Jews, Goldberg and himself, but to all intents and purposes there were four Irishmen. I’m still Jewish, thought Kramer, but not in this room. All the cops turned Irish, the Jewish cops, like Goldberg, but also the Italian cops, the Latin cops, and the black cops. The black cops even; nobody understood the police commissioners, who were usually black, because their skin hid the fact that they had turned Irish. The same was true of assistant district attorneys in the Homicide Bureau. You were supposed to turn Irish. The Irish were disappearing from New York, so far as the general population was concerned. In politics, the Irish, who twenty years ago still ran the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and much of Manhattan, were down to one seedy little district over on the West Side of Manhattan, over where all the unused piers rusted in the Hudson River. Every Irish policeman Kramer met, including Martin, lived out on Long Island or some place like Dobbs Ferry and commuted to the city. Bernie Fitzgibbon and Jimmy Caughey were dinosaurs. Everybody moving up in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office was Jewish or Italian. And yet the Irish stamp was on the Police Department and on the Homicide Bureau of the D.A.’s Office, and it would probably be there forever. Irish machismo—that was the dour madness that gripped them all. They called themselves Harps and Donkeys, the Irish did. Donkeys! They used the word themselves, in pride but also as an admission. They understood the word. Irish bravery was not the bravery of the lion but the bravery of the donkey. As a cop, or as an assistant district attorney in Homicide, no matter what kind of stupid fix you got yourself into, you never backed off. You held your ground. That was what was scary about even the smallest and most insignificant of the breed. Once they took a position, they were ready to fight. To deal with them you had to be willing to fight also, and not that many people on this poor globe were willing to fight. The other side of it was loyalty. When one of them got in a jam, the others never broke ranks. Well, that wasn’t completely true, but the game had to be pretty far gone before the Irish started looking out for Number One. The cops were like that, and assistant D.A.s in Homicide were supposed to be like that. Loyalty was loyalty, and Irish loyalty was a monolith, indivisible. The code of the Donkey! And every Jew, every Italian, every black, every Puerto Rican, internalized that code and became a stone Donkey himself. The Irish liked to entertain one another with Irish war stories, so that when Donkey Fitzgibbon and Donkey Goldberg listened to Donkey Martin, all they lacked was booze so they could complete the picture by getting drunk and sentimental or drunk and in a brutal rage. No, thought Kramer, they don’t need alcohol. They’re high on what tough, undeluded motherfuckers they are.

  “I asked one a the doormen about it,” said Martin. “I mean, we had lotsa time. This fucking McCoy makes us wait down in the lobby for fifteen minutes. Anyway, on every floor, beside the elevator, they got two buttons. One is for the elevator, and the other is for cabs. You push the button, and this little shitball runs out in the street blowing his whistle and waving his arms. So anyway, we finally get in the elevator, and it dawns on me I don’t know what floor the fucking guy lives on. So I stick my head out the door, and I says to the doorman, ‘What button do I push?’ And he says, ‘We’ll send you up there.’ We’ll send you up there. You can push all the buttons you want inside the elevator and it don’t mean shit. One a the doormen has to push the button on his panel out by the door. Even if you live in the fucking place and you want to go visit somebody else, you can’t just get on the elevator and push somebody else’s floor. Not that the place strikes me as the kinda place where they just drop by to shoot the shit. Anyway, this guy McCoy’s on the tenth floor. The door opens, and you step out into this little room. It don’t open up on a hall, it opens up on this little room, and there’s only one door. On that floor the elevator is just for his fucking apartment.”

  “You’ve lived a sheltered life, Marty,” said Bernie Fitzgibbon.

  “Not fucking sheltered enough, if you ask me,” said Martin. “We ring the bell, and a maid in a uniform opens the door. She’s Puerto Rican or South American or something. This hall you walk into, there’s all this marble and wood paneling and one a those big staircases that goes up like this, like something in a fucking movie. So we cool our heels on the marble floor for a while, until the guy figures he’s made us wait the proper length a time, and then he comes down the stairs, very slowly, with his fucking chin—I swear to Christ—with his fucking chin up in the air. You catch that, Davey?”

  “Yeah,” said Goldberg. He snorted with amusement.

  “What’s he look like?” asked Fitzgibbon.

  “He’s tall, got the gray suit, got this chin up in the air—your Wall Street asshole. Not a bad-looking guy. About forty.”

  “How did he react to you guys being there?”

  “He was pretty cool about the whole thing at first,” said Martin. “He invited us into this library, I guess it was. It wasn’t very big, but you shoulda seen this fucking shit up around the ceiling.” He waved his hand in a sweeping motion. “There’s all these fucking people, carved outta wood, like crowds a people on the sidewalk, and these shops and shit in the background. You never seen anything like it. So we’re sitting there, and I’m telling him how this is a routine check of cars of this make with this license plate and so on, and he’s saying yeah, he heard something about the case on television and yeah, he has a Mercedes with a license number that begins with R, and it sure is a fucking coincidence, all right—and I mean, I figure, well, this is just another jerk-off name on this fucking jerk-off list they handed us. I mean, if you wanna figure out the least likely character you can think of who would be driving up fucking Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx at night, this is the guy. I mean, I’m practically apologizing to the guy for wasting his fucking time. And then I ask him if we can take a look at it, and he says, ‘When?’ And I says, ‘Now,’ and that was all it took. I mean, if he said, ‘It’s in the shop’ or ‘My wife’s got it’ or any goddamned thing, I don’t know if I’da even come back to check it out, it all looked so fucking unlikely. But he gets this look on his face, and his lips start trembling, and he starts talking this double-talk about how he don’t know…and what’s the routine…but it’s mainly the look on his face. I looked at Davey, and he looked at me, and we both saw the same goddamned thing. Ain’t that the truth, Davey?”

  “Yeah. Suddenly the bitch comes out in him. You could see it coming out.”

  “I seen people like this before,” said Martin. “He don’t like this shit at all. He’s not a bad guy. Looks a little stuck-up, but he’s probably a nice enough guy. He’s got a wife and a kid. He’s got this fucking apartment. He ain’t got the heart for this shit. He ain’t got the heart for being on the wrong side a the law. I don’t care who you are, sometime in your life you’re gonna be on the wrong side a the law, and some people got the heart for it and some don’t.”

&nbs
p; “He don’t have the heart for you sitting on his fucking desk,” said Goldberg, laughing.

  “His desk?” said Fitzgibbon.

  “Oh yeah,” said Martin, chuckling at the recollection. “Well, the thing is, I see the guy starting to come apart, and I say to myself, ‘Well, shit, I ain’t read him his fucking rights yet, so I better do that.’ So I’m trying to be real casual about it, and I’m telling him how much we appreciate his cooperation and all, but he don’t have to say anything if he don’t want to, and he’s entitled to a lawyer, and so forth, and now I’m thinking ahead. How’m I gonna say, ‘If you can’t afford an attorney, the state will provide you with one free a charge,’ and make that sound casual, when the fucking carvings on the wall cost more than a fucking 18b lawyer makes in a year. So I figure I’ll throw in the old ‘move over’ maneuver for good measure, and I stand right over him—he’s sitting down at this big desk—and I look at him like, ‘You’re not gonna do a chickenshit thing like keeping your mouth shut, just because I’m reading you your rights, are you?’ ”

  “It was worse than that,” said Goldberg. “Marty starts sitting on the edge of the guy’s fucking desk!”

  “What did he do?” asked Fitzgibbon.

  “Nothing at first,” said Martin. “He knows something’s up. There ain’t no way you can just say, ‘By the way,’ and read somebody his rights like you’re just passing the time. But he’s confused. I can see his eyes getting bigger and bigger. He’s double-talking like a sonofabitch. Then he gets up, and he says he wants to talk to a lawyer. The funny thing is, here he starts coming apart when we ask him about the car, and then we go by and see the car, and it’s clean. There’s not a mark on it.”