The Bonfire of the Vanities (22 page)

He pulled in his stomach and drew a deep breath. It made him feel woozy. He picked up the telephone and put the receiver to his ear. Look busy! That was the main idea. He found the dial tone soothing. He wished he could crawl inside the receiver and float on his back in the dial tone and let the hum of it wash over his nerve endings. How easy it would be to put his head down on the desk and close his eyes and catch forty winks. Perhaps he could get away with it if he put one side of his face down on the desk, with the back of his head to the city room, and kept the telephone over his other ear as if he were talking. No, it would still look strange. Perhaps…

Oh, Christ God. An American named Robert Goldman, one of the reporters, was heading for the cubicle. Goldman had on a necktie with vivid red, yellow, black, and sky-blue diagonal stripes. The Yanks called these bogus regimental ties “rep” ties. The Yanks always wore neckties that leapt out in front of their shirts, as if to announce the awkwardness to follow. Two weeks ago he had borrowed a hundred dollars from Goldman. He had told him he had to repay a gambling debt by nightfall—backgammon—the Bracers’ Club—fast European crowd. The Yanks had very big eyes for stories of Rakes and Aristocrats. Since then, the little shit had already pestered him three times for the money, as if his future on this earth turned on a hundred dollars. The receiver still at his ear, Fallow glanced at the approaching figure, and the blazing tie that heralded him, with contempt. Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.

Fallow began talking into the receiver, as if deep in conversation. He searched his poisoned brain for the sort of one-sided dialogue playwrights have to come up with for telephone scenes.

“What’s that?…You say the surrogate refuses to allow the stenographer to give us a transcript? Well, you tell him…Right, right…Of course…It’s an absolute violation…No, no…Now listen carefully…”

The necktie—and Goldman—were standing right beside him. Peter Fallow kept his eyes down and lifted one hand, as if to say, “Please! This call cannot be interrupted.”

“Hello, Pete,” said Goldman.

Pete!
he said, and not very cheerily, either.
Pete!
The very sound set Fallow’s teeth on edge. This…appalling…Yank…familiarity! And cuteness! The Yanks!—with their Arnies and Buddies and Hanks and
…Petes!
And this lubberly gauche lout with his screaming necktie has the gall to walk into one’s office while one is on the telephone, because he’s a nervous wreck over his pathetic hundred dollars!—and call one
Pete!

Fallow screwed his face into a look of great intensity and began talking a mile a minute.

“So!…You tell the surrogate
and
the stenographer that we want the transcript by noon tomorrow!…Of course!…It’s obvious!…This is something her barrister has cooked up! They’re all thick as thieves over there!”

“It’s ‘judge,’ ” said Goldman tonelessly.

Fallow flicked his eyes up toward the American with a furious black look.

Goldman stared back with a faintly ironic twist to his lips.

“They don’t say ‘stenographer,’ they say ‘court reporter.’ And they don’t say ‘barrister,’ although they’ll know what you mean.”

Fallow closed his eyes and his lips into three tight lines and shook his head and flapped his hand, as if confronted by an intolerable display of impudence.

But when he opened his eyes, Goldman was still there. Goldman looked down at him and put a look of mock excitement on his face and raised both hands and lifted his ten fingers straight up in front of Fallow and then made two fists and popped the ten fingers straight up again and repeated this gesture ten times—and said, “One hundred big ones, Pete,” and walked back out into the city room.

The impudence! The impudence!
Once it was clear the impudent little wet smack wasn’t returning, Fallow put down the receiver and stood up and went over to the coatrack. He had vowed—but Christ God! What he had just been subjected to
was…just…a…bit…much
. Without removing it from the hook, he opened the raincoat and put his head inside it, as if he were inspecting the seams. Then he brought the raincoat around his shoulders so that the upper half of his body disappeared from view. It was the kind of raincoat that has slash pockets with openings on the inside as well as the outside, so that in the rain you can get to your jacket or pants without unbuttoning the coat in front. Beneath his poplin tent, Fallow felt around for the inside opening of the left-hand pocket. From the pocket he withdrew a pint-sized camping canteen.

He unscrewed the top, put the opening to his lips, and took two long gulps of vodka and waited for the jolt in his stomach. It hit and then bounced up through his body and his head like a heat wave. He screwed the top back on and slipped the canteen back in the pocket and emerged from the raincoat. His face was on fire. There were tears in his eyes. He took a wary look toward the city room, and—

Oh shit.

—the Dead Mouse was looking straight at him. Fallow didn’t dare so much as blink, much less smile. He wanted to provoke no response in the Mouse whatsoever. He turned away as if he hadn’t seen him. Was vodka truly odorless? He devoutly hoped so. He sat down at the desk and picked up the telephone again and moved his lips. The dial tone hummed, but he was too nervous to surrender himself to it. Had the Mouse seen him under the raincoat? And if he had, would he guess anything? Oh, how different that little nip had been from those glorious toasts of six months ago! Oh, what glorious prospects he had pissed away! He could see the scene…the dinner at the Mouse’s grotesque flat on Park Avenue…the pompous, overformal invitation cards with the raised script:
Sir Gerald Steiner and Lady Steiner request the pleasure of your company at dinner in honour of Mr. Peter Fallow
(
dinner
and
Mr. Peter Fallow
written in by hand)…the ludicrous museum of Bourbon Louis furniture and threadbare Aubusson rugs the Dead Mouse and Lady Mouse had put together on Park Avenue. Nevertheless, what a heady evening that had been! Everyone at the table had been English. There were only three or four Americans in the upper echelons of
The City Light
anyway, and none was invited. There were dinners like this all over the East Side of Manhattan every night, he had soon discovered, lavish parties that were all English or all French or all Italian or all European; no Americans, in any case. One had the sense of a very rich and very suave secret legion that had insinuated itself into the cooperative apartment houses of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, from there to pounce at will upon the Yanks’ fat fowl, to devour at leisure the last plump white meat on the bones of capitalism.

In England, Fallow had always thought of Gerald Steiner as “that Jew Steiner,” but on this night all base snobberies had vanished. They were comrades-in-arms in the secret legion, in the service of Great Britain’s wounded chauvinism. Steiner had told the table what a genius Fallow was. Steiner had been swept off his feet by a series on country life among the rich that Fallow had done for the
Dispatch
. It had been full of names and titles and helicopters and perplexing perversions (“that thing with the cup”) and costly diseases, and all of it was so artfully contrived as to be fireproof in terms of libel. It had been Fallow’s greatest triumph as a journalist (his only one, in point of fact), and Steiner couldn’t imagine how he had pulled it off. Fallow knew exactly how, but he managed to hide the memory of it with the embroideries of vanity. Every spicy morsel in the series came from a girl he was seeing at that time, a resentful little girl named Jeannie Brokenborough, a rare-book dealer’s daughter who ran with the Country Set as the social runt in the stable. When little Miss Brokenborough moved on, Fallow’s daily magic vanished with her.

Steiner’s invitation to New York had arrived just in time, although Fallow did not see it that way. Like every writer before him who has ever scored a triumph, even on the level of the London
Dispatch
, Fallow was willing to give no credit to luck. Would he have any trouble repeating his triumph in a city he knew nothing about, in a country he looked upon as a stupendous joke? Well…why should he? His genius had only begun to flower. This was only journalism, after all, a cup of tea on the way to his eventual triumph as a novelist. Fallow’s father, Ambrose Fallow, was a novelist, a decidedly minor novelist, it had turned out. His father and his mother were from East Anglia and had been the sort of highly educated young people of good blood and good bone who after the Second World War had been susceptible to the notion that literary sensitivity could make one an aristocrat. The notion of being aristocratic was never far from their minds, nor from Fallow’s. Fallow had tried to make up for his lack of money by being a wit and a rake. These aristocratic accomplishments had gained him nothing more than an insecure place in the tail of the comet of the smart crowd in London.

Now, as part of the Steiner brigade in New York, Fallow was also going to make his fortune in the fat white-meat New World.

People wondered why Steiner, who had no background in journalism, had come to the United States and undertaken the extremely costly business of setting up a tabloid newspaper. The smart explanation was that
The City Light
had been created as the weapon of attack or reprisal for Steiner’s much more important financial investments in the United States, where he was already known as “the Dread Brit.” But Fallow knew it was the other way around. The “serious” investments existed at the service of
The City Light
. Steiner had been reared, schooled, drilled, and handed a fortune by Old Steiner, a loud and pompous self-made financier who wanted to turn his son into a proper British peer, not just a rich Jewish boy. Steiner
fils
had become the well-mannered, well-educated, well-dressed, proper mouse his father required. He had never found the courage to rebel. Now, late in life, he had discovered the world of the tabloids. His daily dive into the mud—
SCALP GRANDMA, THEN ROB HER
—brought him inexpressible joy.
Uhuru!
Free at last! Every day he rolled up his sleeves and plunged into the life of the city room. Some days he wrote headlines himself. It was possible that he had written
SCALP GRANDMA
, although that had the inimitable touch of his managing editor, a Liverpool prole named Brian Highridge. Despite the many victories of his career, however, he had never been a social success. This was largely due to his personality, but anti-Jewish sentiment was not dead, either, and he could not discount it altogether. In any case, he looked with genuine relish upon the prospect of Peter Fallow building a nice toasty bonfire under all the nobs who looked down on him. And so he waited…

And waited. At first, Fallow’s expense account, which was far larger than any other
City Light
writer’s (not counting the rare foreign assignment), caused no concern. After all, to penetrate the high life one had to live it, to some extent. The staggering lunch bills, dinner bills, and bar bills were followed by amusing reports of the swath Mr. Peter Fallow was cutting as a jolly Brit giant in fashionable low dives. After a while they were not amusing anymore. No great coup in the chronicling of the high life was forthcoming from this particular soldier of fortune. More than once, Fallow had turned in stories only to find them reduced to unsigned column items the following day. Steiner had called him in for several progress reports. These chats had become chillier and chillier. His pride wounded, Fallow had begun entertaining his colleagues by referring to Steiner, the renowned “Dread Brit,” as the Dead Mouse. Everyone seemed to enjoy this enormously. After all, Steiner
did
have a long pointed nose like a mouse and no chin and a crumpled little mouth and large ears and tiny hands and feet and eyes in which the light seemed to have gone out and a tired little voice. Recently, however, Steiner had become downright cold and abrupt, and Fallow began to wonder if in fact he somehow had learned of the Dead Mouse crack.

He looked up…there was Steiner, six feet away in the doorway to the cubicle, looking straight at him, one hand resting on a modular wall.

“Nice of you to pay us a visit, Fallow.”

Fallow!
It was the most contemptuous sort of school-proctor stuff! Fallow was speechless.

“Well,” said Steiner, “what do you have for me?”

Fallow opened his mouth. He ransacked his poisoned brain in search of the facile conversation for which he was renowned and came up gasping and sputtering.

“Well!—you’ll remember—the Lacey Putney estate—I mentioned that—if I’m not mistaken—they’ve tried to give us a very hard time at the Surrogate’s Court, the—the—” Damn! Was it stenographers or something about reporters? What had Goldman said? “Well!—I hardly—but I’ve really got the whole thing now! It’s just a matter of—I can tell you—this is really going to break open…”

Steiner didn’t even wait for him to finish.

“I sincerely hope so, Fallow,” he said quite ominously. “I sincerely hope so.”

Then he left and plunged back into his beloved tabloid city room.

Fallow sank down into his chair. He managed to wait almost a full minute before he got up and disappeared into his raincoat.

Albert Teskowitz was not what Kramer or any other prosecutor would call a threat when it came to swaying a jury with the magic of his summations. Emotional crescendos were beyond him, and even what rhetorical momentum he could manage was quickly undercut by his appearance. His posture was so bad that every woman on a jury, or every good mother, in any case, was aching to cry out, “Hold your shoulders back!” As for his delivery, it wasn’t that he didn’t prepare his summations, it was that he obviously prepared them on a yellow legal pad, which lay on top of the defense table.