The Bonfire of the Vanities (27 page)

“I’m on the streets of the Bronx every day,” said Martin, “and I’ll tell anybody who wants to know.”

“Unh-hunh,” said Reverend Bacon. “We have an organization, All People’s Solidarity. We survey the communities, and the people come to us, and I can tell you that the people are not getting your message. They are getting another message.”

“I been in one a your surveys,” said Martin.

“You been in what?”

“One a your surveys. Up on Gun Hill Road.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It was on the streets of the Bronx,” said Martin.

“Anyway,” said Kramer, looking at Mrs. Lamb, “thank you for your information. And I hope you’ll have some good news about your son. We’ll check out that license number. In the meantime, if you hear about anyone who was with your son the other night, or saw anything, you let us know, okay?”

“Unh-hunh,” she said, striking the same dubious note as she had at the outset. “Thank you.”

Martin was still staring at Reverend Bacon with his Doberman pinscher eyes. So Kramer turned to Goldberg and said, “You have a card you can give Mrs. Lamb, with a telephone number?”

Goldberg fished around in an inside pocket and handed her a card. She took it without looking at it.

Reverend Bacon stood up. “You don’t have to give me your card,” he said to Goldberg. “I know you…see…I’m going to
call
you. I’m going to be
on
your case. I want to see something done. All People’s Solidarity wants to see something done. And something
will
be done…see…So one thing you can count on: you will hear from
me
.”

“Anytime,” said Martin. “Anytime you like.”

His lips were parted ever so slightly, with the suggestion of a smile at the corners. It reminded Kramer of the expression, the Smirking Fang, that boys wore at the beginning of a playground brawl.

Kramer started walking out, saying his goodbyes over his shoulder as he went, hoping that would coax Battling Martin and the Jewish Shamrock out of the room.

On the drive back up to the fortress, Martin said, “Christ, now I know why they send you guys to law school, Kramer. So you can learn how to keep a straight face.” He said it good-naturedly, however.

“Well, hell, Marty,” said Kramer, figuring that, having been a fellow soldier with him in the bullshit skirmish at Reverend Bacon’s, he could go on a nickname basis with the dauntless little Irish Donkey, “the kid’s mother was sitting right there. Besides, maybe the license number will turn up something.”

“You wanna bet on it?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“My ass, it’s a possibility. You get hit by a fucking car, and you go to the hospital and you don’t happen to mention that to them? And then you go home and you don’t happen to mention it to your mother? And the next morning you’re not feeling so hot, so you say, ‘Oh, by the way, I got hit by a car’? Gedoudahere. That poor bastard took a beating, but it wasn’t from anything he wanted to tell anybody about.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that. See if there’s a sheet on him, will you?”

“You know,” said Goldberg, “I feel sorry for those people. They sit there saying the kid don’t have a record, like that’s a real fucking accomplishment. And in the projects, that’s what it is. Just not having a record! That’s something special. I feel sorry for her.”

And a little of the Jew oozes out of the Jewish Shamrock, thought Kramer.

But then Martin took up the refrain. “A woman like that, she shouldn’t even be living in the project, f’r Chrissake. She was all right. She was straight. Now I remember that case when her husband got killed. The guy was a working stiff who had heart. Stood up to some lowlife, and the fucking guy shot him right in the mouth. She works, don’t take welfare, sends the kid to church, keeps him in school—she’s all right. No telling what the kid got himself involved in, but she’s all right. Halfa these people, you know, something happens, and you talk to them, and they spend so much time blaming the fucking world for what happened, you can’t halfway find out what the fuck happened in the first place. But this one, she was straight. Too bad she’s stuck in the fucking project, but you know”—he looked at Kramer when he said this—“there’s a lotta decent people in the projects, people that show up for work.”

Goldberg nodded sagely and said, “You’d never know it now, but that’s what the fucking places were built for, working people. That was the whole idea, low-cost housing for working people. And now you find somebody in’eh who goes to work and tries to do the right thing, it breaks your fucking heart.”

Then it dawned on Kramer. The cops weren’t all that much different from the assistant D.A.s. It was the muck factor. The cops got tired of packing blacks and Latins off to jail all day, too. It was even worse for them, because they had to dive deeper into the muck to do it. The only thing that made it
constructive
was the idea that they were doing it
for
somebody—for
the decent people
. So they opened their eyes, and now they were attuned to all the good people with colored skin…who rose to the top…during all this relentless stirring of the muck…

You couldn’t exactly call it enlightenment, thought Kramer, but it was a fucking start.

This time the explosion of the telephone threw his heart into tachycardia, and each contraction forced the blood through his head with such pressure—a stroke!—he was going to have a stroke!—lying here alone in his high-rise American hovel!—a stroke! The panic roused the beast. The beast came straight to the surface and showed its snout.

Fallow opened one eye and saw the telephone lying in a brown Streptolon nest. He was dizzy, and he hadn’t even lifted his head. Great curds of eye trash swam in front of his face. The pounding blood was breaking up the mercury yolk into curds, and the curds were coming out of his eye. The telephone exploded again. He closed his eye. The snout of the beast was right behind his eyelid. That
pedophile
business—

And last night had started off as such an ordinary evening!

Having less than forty dollars to get him through the next three days, he had done the usual. He had called up a Yank. He had called up Gil Archer, the literary agent, who was married to a woman whose name Fallow could never remember. He had suggested that they meet for dinner at Leicester’s, leaving the impression he would be bringing a girl along himself. Archer arrived with his wife, whereas he arrived alone. Naturally, under the circumstances, Archer, ever the bland polite Yank, picked up the bill. Such a quiet evening; such an early evening; such a routine evening for an Englishman in New York, a dull dinner paid for by a Yank; he really was thinking about getting up and going home. And then Caroline Heftshank and this artist friend of hers, an Italian, Filippo Chirazzi, came in, and they stopped by the table and sat down, and Archer asked them if they would like something to drink, and he said why didn’t they get another bottle of wine, and so Archer ordered another bottle of wine, and they drank that, and then they drank another one and another one, and now Leicester’s was packed and roaring with all the usual faces, and Alex Britt-Withers sent over one of his waiters to offer a round of drinks on the house, which made Archer feel socially successful, recognized-by-the-owner sort of thing—the Yanks were very keen on that—and Caroline Heftshank kept hugging her handsome young Italian, Chirazzi, who was posing with his pretty profile up in the air, as if one were to feel privileged just to be breathing the same air as himself. St. John came over from another table to admire young Signor Chirazzi, much to Billy Cortez’s displeasure, and Signor Chirazzi told St. John it was necessary for a painter to paint with “the eyes of a child,” and St. John said that he himself tried to view the world with the eyes of a child, to which Billy Cortez said, “He said child, St. John, not pedophile.” Signor Chirazzi posed some more, with his long neck and Valentino nose rising up from out of a ridiculous electric-blue Punk shirt with a three-quarter-inch collar and a pink glitter necktie, and so Fallow said it was more postmodern for a painter to have the eyes of a pedophile than the eyes of a child, and what did Signor Chirazzi think? Caroline, who was quite drunk, told him not to be stupid, said it quite sharply, and Fallow reared back, meaning only to strike a pose mocking the young painter, but lost his balance and fell on the floor. Much laughter. When he got up, he was dizzy, and he held on to Caroline, just to steady himself, but young Signor Chirazzi took offense, from the depths of his Italian manly honor, and tried to shove Fallow, and both Fallow and Caroline now went down, and Chirazzi tried to jump on Fallow, and St. John, for whatever reason, now jumped on the pretty Italian, and Billy Cortez was screaming, and Fallow struggled up, carrying an enormous weight, and Britt-Withers was over him, yelling, “For God’s sake!” and then a whole bunch of people were on top of him, and they all went crashing out the front door onto the sidewalk on Lexington Avenue—P

The telephone exploded again, and Fallow was terrified at what he might hear if he picked up the receiver. He could remember nothing from the time they all went crashing out onto the sidewalk until this moment. He swung his feet out of the bed, and they were all still roaring and boiling inside his skull, and his whole body felt sore. He crawled across the carpet to the exploding telephone and lay down beside it. The carpet felt dry, metallic, dusty, filthy against his cheek.

“Hello?”

“Aaaayyy, Pete! How wahya!”

It was a cheery voice, a Yank voice, a New York voice, a particularly crude sort of New York voice. Fallow found this Yank voice even more jarring than the
Pete
. Well, at least it wasn’t
The City Light
. Nobody at
The City Light
would be calling him with such a cheery voice.

“Who is it?” said Fallow. His own voice was an animal in a hole.

“Jeezus, Pete,
you
sound terrific. Any pulse? Hey. This is Al Vogel.”

The news made him close his eyes again. Vogel was one of those typical Yank celebrities who, to an Englishman reading about them in London, seemed so colorful, irrepressible, and morally admirable. In person, in New York, they always turned out the same way. They were Yanks; which is to say, crude bores. Vogel was well known in England as an American lawyer whose specialty was unpopular political causes. He defended radicals and pacifists, much the way Charles Garry, William Kunstler, and Mark Lane had. Unpopular, of course, merely meant unpopular with ordinary people. Vogel’s defendants were certainly popular enough with the press and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Europe, where anyone defended by Albert Vogel grew wings, a halo, a toga, and a torch. Few of these latter-day saints had any money, however, and Fallow often wondered how Vogel made a living, especially since the 1980s had not been kind to him. In the 1980s not even the press and intellectuals had any patience for the sort of irascible, seething, foul-humored, misery-loving, popped-vein clientele he specialized in. Lately Fallow had been running into the great defender at the most extraordinary parties. Vogel would go to the opening of a parking lot (and Fallow would say hello to him there).

“Oh, hi-i-i-i,” said Fallow in what ended up as a moan.

“I called your office first, Pete, and they said they hadn’t seen you.”

Not good, thought Fallow. He wondered when, if, why, where he had given Vogel his home telephone number.

“You still there, Pete?”

“Ummmmmmmm.” Fallow had his eyes closed. He had no sense of up or down. “It’s all right. I’m working at home today.”

“I’ve got something I want to talk to you about, Pete. I think there’s a hell of a story in it.”

“Ummmm.”

“Yeah, only I’d just as soon not go into it over the telephone. I tell you what. Whyn’t you come have lunch with me. I’ll meet you at the Regent’s Park at one o’clock.”

“Ummmm. I don’t know, Al. The Regent’s Park. Where is that?”

“On Central Park South, near the New York Athletic Club.”

“Ummmmm.”

Fallow was torn between two profound instincts. On the one hand, the thought of getting off the floor, of shifting the mercury yolk for a second time, for no other reason than to listen to an American bore and has-been for an hour or two…On the other hand, a free meal at a restaurant. The pterodactyl and the brontosaurus were locked in mortal combat on the cliff over the Lost Continent.

The free meal won, as it had so often in the past.

“All right, Al, I’ll see you at one o’clock. Where is this place again?”

“On Central Park South, Pete, right near the New York A.C. It’s a nice place. You can look at the park. You can look at a statue of José Martí on a horse.”

Fallow said goodbye and struggled to his feet, and the yolk was yawing this way and that way, and he stubbed his toe on the metal frame of the bed. The pain was terrific, but it focused his central nervous system. He took a shower in the dark. The plastic shower curtain was suffocating. When he closed his eyes he had the feeling he was keeling over. From time to time he had to hold on to the shower head.

The Regent’s Park was the sort of New York restaurant favored by married men having affairs with young women. It was grand, glossy, and solemn, with a great deal of marble inside and out, a colossal stiff neck whose
hauteur
appealed mainly to people staying at the nearby Ritz-Carlton, Park Lane, St. Moritz, and Plaza Hotels. In the history of New York no conversation had ever begun with: “I was having lunch at the Regent’s Park the other day and…”

True to his word, Albert Vogel had secured a table beside the great window. This was not a hard ticket at the Regent’s Park. Nevertheless, there it was, the park, in its springtime glory. And there was the statue of José Martí, which Vogel had also promised. Martí’s horse was rearing up, and the great Cuban revolutionary was leaning perilously to the right in his saddle. Fallow averted his eyes. An unsteady park statue was too much to contend with.

Vogel was in his usual hearty mood. Fallow watched his lips move without hearing a word. The blood drained from Fallow’s face, and then his chest and arms. His hide turned cold. Then a million little scalding hot minnows tried to escape from his arteries and reach the surface. Perspiration broke out on his forehead. He wondered if he was dying. This was the way heart attacks began. He had read that. He wondered if Vogel knew about coronary resuscitation. Vogel looked like someone’s grandmother. His hair was white, not a gray-white, but a silky pure white. He was short and pudgy. In his palmy days he had been pudgy, too, but he had looked “scrappy,” as the Yanks liked to say. Now his skin was pinkish and delicate. His hands were tiny and had ropy old veins leading up to the knuckles. A cheery old woman.

“Pete,” said Vogel, “what’ll you have to drink?”

“Not a thing,” said Fallow, rather overemphatically. Then to the waiter: “Could I have some water.”

“I want a margarita on the rocks,” said Vogel. “Sure you won’t change your mind, Pete?”

Fallow shook his head. That was a mistake. A poisonous hammering began inside his skull.

“Just one to turn the motor over?”

“No, no.”

Vogel put his elbows on the table and leaned forward and began scanning the room, and then his eyes fastened on a table slightly behind him. At the table were a man in a gray business suit and a girl in her late teens with long, straight, very showy blond hair.

“You see that girl?” said Vogel. “I could swear that girl was on this committee, whatever they call it, at the University of Michigan.”

“What committee?”

“This student group. They run the lecture program. I gave a lecture at the University of Michigan two nights ago.”

So what? thought Fallow. Vogel looked over his shoulder again.

“No, it’s not her. But, Christ, it sure looks like her. These goddamned girls at these colleges—you wanna know why people go out on the lecture circuit in this country?”

No, thought Fallow.

“Okay, for the money. But not counting that. You wanna know why?”

The Yanks constantly repeated introductory questions.

“These goddamned girls.” Vogel shook his head and stared off distractedly for a moment, as if stunned by the very thought. “I swear to God, Pete, you have to hold yourself back. Otherwise, you’d feel so fucking guilty. These girls—today—well, when I was growing up, the big deal was that when you went to college, you could drink when you felt like it. Okay? These girls, they go to college so they can get laid when they feel like it. And who do they want? This is the part that’s really pathetic. Do they want nice-looking healthy boys their own age? No. You wanna know who? They want…Authority…Power…Fame…Prestige…They wanna get laid by the teachers! The teachers go crazy at these places now. You know, when the Movement was going strong, one of the things we tried to do on the campuses was to break down that wall of formality between the faculty and the students, because it was nothing but an instrument of control. But now, Jesus Christ, I wonder. I guess they all want to get laid by their fathers, if you believe Freud, which I don’t. You know, this is one thing the women’s movement has made no headway with. When a woman reaches forty, her problems are just as big now as they ever were—and a guy like me has never had it so good. I’m not so old, but, f’r Chrissake, I’ve got gray hair—”

White, thought Fallow, like an old woman’s.

“—and it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever. A little touch of celebrity and they fall over. They just
fall over
. I’m not bragging, because it’s so pathetic. And these goddamned girls, each one is more of a knockout than the last one. I’d like to give them a lecture on
that
subject, but they probably wouldn’t know what I was talking about. They have no frame of reference, about anything. The lecture I gave the night before last was on student commitment in the 1980s.”

“I was dying to know,” said Fallow in the back of his throat, without moving his lips.

“Pardon?”

The Yanks said
pardon?
instead of
what?

“Nothing.”

“I told them what it was like on the campuses fifteen years ago.” His face clouded over. “But I don’t know…fifteen years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred years ago…they have no frame of reference. It’s all so remote to them. Ten years ago
…five
years ago…Five years ago was before Walkman earphones. They can’t imagine that.”

Fallow stopped listening. There was no way Vogel could be deflected from his course. He was irony-proof. Fallow glanced at the girl with the long yellow hair. Thrashing through the restaurant. Caroline Heftshank and the frightened look on her face. Had he done something just before they all went crashing out the door? Whatever—she deserved it—but what was it? Vogel’s lips were moving. He was going through his entire lecture. Fallow’s eyelids dropped shut. The beast broke the surface and thrashed about and eyed him. He eyed him straight down his filthy snout. Now the beast had him. He couldn’t move.

“…Managua?” asked Vogel.

“What?”

“You ever been there?” asked Vogel.

Fallow shook his head. The yawing motion made him nauseous.

“You oughta go. Every journalist oughta go. It’s about the size of…oh, I don’t know, East Hampton. If it’s that big. Would you like to go there? It would be easy enough to set it up for you.”