The Bonfire of the Vanities (4 page)

“Have you told him you have your own apartment here?”

“Of course not. I told you, I don’t lie to him, but I don’t tell him every little thing.”

“Is this a little thing?”

“It’s not as big a thing as
you
think it is. It’s a pain in the neck. The landlord’s got himself in an uproar again.”

Maria stood up and went to the table and picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to Sherman and returned to the edge of the bed. It was a letter from the law firm of Golan, Shander, Morgan, and Greenbaum to Ms. Germaine Boll concerning her status as the tenant of a rent-controlled apartment owned by Winter Real Properties, Inc. Sherman couldn’t concentrate on it. He didn’t want to think about it. It was getting late. Maria kept going off on tangents. It was
getting late
.

“I don’t know, Maria. This is something Germaine has to respond to.”

“Sherman?”

She was smiling with her lips parted. She stood up.

“Sherman, come here.”

He took a couple of steps toward her, but he resisted going very close. The look on her face said she had very close in mind.

“You think you’re in trouble with your wife, and all you’ve done is make a phone call.”

“Hah. I don’t think I’m in trouble, I know I’m in trouble.”

“Well, if you’re already in trouble, and you haven’t even done anything, then you might as well do something, since it’s all the same difference.”

Then she touched him.

King Priapus, he who had been scared to death, now rose up from the dead.

Sprawled on the bed, Sherman caught a glimpse of the dachshund. The beast had gotten up off the rug and had walked over to the bed and was looking up at them and switching his tail.

Christ!
Was there by any chance some way a dog could indicate…Was there anything dogs did that showed they had seen…Judy knew about animals. She clucked and fussed over Marshall’s every mood, until it was revolting. Was there something dachshunds did after observing…But then his nervous system began to dissolve, and he no longer cared.

His Majesty, the most ancient king, Priapus, Master of the Universe, had no conscience.

Sherman let himself into the apartment and made a point of amplifying the usual cozy sounds.

“Attaboy, Marshall, okay, okay.”

He took off his riding mac with a lot of rustling of the rubberized material and clinking of the buckles and a few
whews
.

No sign of Judy.

The dining room, the living room, and a small library led off the marble entry gallery. Each had its familiar glints and glows of carved wood, cut glass, ecru silk shades, glazed lacquer, and the rest of the breathtakingly expensive touches of his wife, the aspiring decorator. Then he noticed. The big leather wing chair that usually faced the doorway in the library was turned around. He could just see the top of Judy’s head, from behind. There was a lamp beside the chair. She appeared to be reading a book.

He went to the doorway.

“Well! We’re back!”

No response.

“You were right. I got soaking wet, and Marshall wasn’t happy.”

She didn’t look around. There was just her voice, coming from out of the wing chair:

“Sherman, if you want to talk to someone named Maria, why do you call me instead?”

Sherman took a step inside the room.

“What do you mean? If I want to talk to
who
?”

The voice: “Oh, for God’s sake. Please don’t bother lying.”

“Lying—about
what
?”

Then Judy stuck her head around one side of the wing chair. The look she gave him!

With a sinking heart Sherman walked over to the chair. Within her corona of soft brown hair his wife’s face was pure agony.

“What are you
talking
about, Judy?”

She was so upset she couldn’t get the words out at first. “I wish you could see the cheap look on your face.”

“I don’t know what you’re
talking
about!”

The shrillness in his voice made her laugh.

“All right, Sherman, you’re going to stand there and tell me you didn’t call here and ask to speak to someone named Maria?”

“To
who
?”

“Some little hooker, if I had to guess, named Maria.”

“Judy, I swear to God, I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve been out walking Marshall! I don’t even
know
anybody named Maria! Somebody called here asking for somebody named Maria?”

“Uhhh!” It was a short, unbelieving groan. She stood up and looked at him square in the eyes. “You
stand
there! You think I don’t know your voice on the phone?”

“Maybe you do, but you haven’t heard it tonight. I swear to God.”

“You’re lying!” She gave him a hideous smile. “And you’re a rotten liar. And you’re a rotten person. You think you’re so swell, and you’re so cheap. You’re lying, aren’t you?”

“I’m
not
lying. I swear to God, I took Marshall for a walk, and I come back in here, and
wham—
I mean, I hardly know what to say, because I truly don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re asking me to prove a negative proposition.”

“
Negative proposition
.” Disgust dripped from the fancy phrase. “You were gone long enough. Did you go kiss her good night and tuck her in, too?”

“Judy—”

“Did you?”

Sherman rolled his head away from her blazing gaze and turned his palms upward and sighed.

“Listen, Judy, you’re totally…totally…utterly wrong. I swear to God.”

She stared at him. All at once there were tears in her eyes. “Oh, you swear to God. Oh, Sherman.” Now she was beginning to snuffle back the tears. “I’m not gonna—I’m going upstairs. There’s the telephone. Why don’t you call her from here?” She was forcing the words out through her tears. “I don’t care. I really don’t care.”

Then she walked out of the room. He could hear her shoes clicking across the marble toward the staircase.

Sherman went over to the desk and sat down in his Hepplewhite swivel chair. He slumped back. His eyes lit on the frieze that ran around the ceiling of the little room. It was carved of Indian redwood, in high relief, in the form of figures hurrying along a city sidewalk. Judy had had it done in Hong Kong for an astonishing amount
…of my money
. Then he leaned forward.
Goddamn her
. Desperately he tried to relight the fires of righteous indignation. His parents had been right, hadn’t they? He deserved better. She was two years older than he was, and his mother had said such things
could
matter—which, the way she said it, meant it
would
matter, and had he listened? Ohhhhh no. His father, supposedly referring to Cowles Wilton, who had a short messy marriage to some obscure little Jewish girl, had said, “Isn’t it just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl from a good family?” And had he listened? Ohhhhhh no. And all these years, Judy, as the daughter of a Midwestern history professor—a
Midwestern history professor!—
had acted as if she was an intellectual aristocrat—but she hadn’t minded using his money and his family to get in with this new social crowd of hers and start her decorating business and smear their names and their apartment across the pages of these vulgar publications, W and
Architectural Digest
and the rest of them, had she? Ohhhhhhhhh no, not for a minute! And what was he left with? A forty-year-old bolting off to her Sports Training classes—

—and all at once, he sees her as he first saw her that night fourteen years ago in the Village at Hal Thorndike’s apartment with the chocolate-brown walls and the huge table covered with obelisks and the crowd that went considerably beyond bohemian, if he understood bohemian—and the girl with the light brown hair and the fine, fine features and the wild short skimpy dress that revealed so much of her perfect little body. And all at once he
feels
the ineffable way they closed themselves up in the perfect cocoon, in his little apartment on Charles Street and her little apartment on West Nineteenth, immune to all that his parents and Buckley and St. Paul’s and Yale had ever imposed on him—and he
remembers
how he told her—in
practically these words!—
that their love would transcend
…everything—

—and now she, forty years old, starved and Sports Trained to near-perfection, goes crying off to bed.

He slumped back in the swivel chair once more. Like many a man before him, he was no match, at last, for a woman’s tears. He hung his noble chin over his collarbone. He folded.

Absentmindedly he pressed a button on the desktop. The tambour door of a
faux
-Sheraton cabinet rolled back, revealing the screen of a television set. Another of his dear weeping decorator’s touches. He opened the desk drawer and took out the remote-control gadget and clicked the set to life. The news. The Mayor of New York. A stage. An angry crowd of black people. Harlem. A lot of thrashing about. A riot. The Mayor takes cover. Shouts…chaos…a real rhubarb. Absolutely pointless. To Sherman it had no more meaning than a gust of wind. He couldn’t concentrate on it. He clicked it off.

She was right. The Master of the Universe was cheap, and he was rotten, and he was a liar.

The next morning, to Lawrence Kramer, she appears, from out of a feeble gray dawn, the girl with brown lipstick. She stands right beside him. He can’t make out her face, but he knows she’s the girl with brown lipstick. He can’t make out any of the words, either, the words that tumble like tiny pearls from between those lips with brown lipstick, and yet he knows what she’s saying.
Stay with me, Larry. Lie down with me, Larry
. He wants to! He wants to! He wants nothing more in this world! Then why doesn’t he? What holds him back from pressing his lips upon those lips with brown lipstick? His wife, that’s what. His wife, his wife, his wife, his wife, his wife—

He woke up to the pitch and roll of his wife crawling down to the foot of the bed. What a flabby, clumsy spectacle…The problem was that the bed, a queen-size resting on a plywood platform, was nearly the width of the room. So you had to crawl down or otherwise traverse the length of the mattress to reach the floor.

Now she was standing on the floor and bending over a chair to pick up her bathrobe. The way her flannel nightgown came down over her hips, she looked a mile wide. He immediately regretted thinking any such thought. He tingled with sentiment. My Rhoda! After all, she had given birth just three weeks ago. He was looking at the loins that had brought forth his first child. A son! She didn’t have her old shape back yet. He had to allow for that.

Still, that didn’t make the view any better.

He watched her wiggle into the bathrobe. She turned toward the doorway. A light came from the living room. No doubt the baby nurse, who was from England, Miss Efficiency, was already up and waxing efficient. In the light he could see his wife’s pale, puffy, undecorated face in profile.

Only twenty-nine, and already she looked just like her mother.

She was the same person all over again! She
was
her mother! No two ways about it! It was only a matter of time! She had the same reddish hair, the same freckles, the same chubby peasant nose and cheeks, even the beginning of her mother’s double chin. A
yenta
in embryo! Little Gretel of the
shtetl!
Young and yitzy on the Upper West Side!

He narrowed his eyelids to slits so that she wouldn’t know he was awake. Then she left the room. He could hear her saying something to the baby nurse and to the baby. She had a way of saying “Jo-shu-a” in baby cadence. That was a name he was already beginning to regret. If you wanted a Jewish name, what was wrong with Daniel or David or Jonathan? He pulled the covers back up over his shoulders. He would return to the sublime narcosis of sleep for another five or ten minutes. He would return to the girl with brown lipstick. He closed his eyes…It was no use. He couldn’t get her back. All he could think of was what the rush to the subway would be like if he didn’t get up now.

So he got up. He walked down the mattress. It was like trying to walk along the bottom of a rowboat, but he didn’t want to crawl. So flabby and clumsy…He was wearing a T-shirt and B.V.D. shorts. He became aware that he had that common affliction of young men, a morning erection. He went to the chair and put on his old plaid bathrobe. Both he and his wife had started wearing bathrobes since the English baby nurse had come into their lives. One of the apartment’s many tragic flaws was that there was no way of getting from the bedroom to the bathroom without going through the living room, where the nurse slept on the convertible couch and the baby resided in a crib beneath a music-box mobile hung with tiny stuffed clowns. He could hear it now. The music box played the tune “Send in the Clowns.” It played it over and over again. Plink plink plinkplink, plink plink plinkplink, plink
PLINK
plinkplink.

He looked down. The bathrobe did not do the trick. It looked as if there was a tent pole underneath it. But if he bent over, like this, it wasn’t noticeable. So he could walk through the living room and let the baby nurse see the tent pole, or he could walk through hunched over as if he had a back spasm. So he just stood where he was, in the gloom.

The gloom
was right. The presence of the baby nurse had made him and Rhoda acutely aware of what a dump they lived in. This entire apartment, known as a 3½-room in New York real-estate parlance, had been created out of what had once been a pleasant but by no means huge bedroom on the third floor of a town house, with three windows overlooking the street. The so-called room he now stood in was really nothing more than a slot that had been created by inserting a plasterboard wall. The slot had one of the windows. What was left of the original room was now called a living room, and it had the other two windows. Back by the door to the hallway were two more slots, one for a kitchen two people couldn’t pass each other in, and the other for a bathroom. Neither had a window. The place was like one of those little ant colonies you can buy, but it cost them $888 a month, rent stabilized. If it hadn’t been for the rent-stabilization law, it would have cost probably $1,500, which would be out of the question. And they had been happy to find it! My God, there were college graduates his age, thirty-two, all over New York who were dying to find an apartment like this, a 3½, with a view, in a town house, with high ceilings, rent stabilized, in the West Seventies! Truly pathetic, wasn’t it? They could barely afford it when they were both working and their combined salaries had been $56,000 a year, $41,000 after deductions. The plan had been that Rhoda’s mother would give them the money as a sort of baby present to hire a baby nurse for four weeks, while Rhoda got back on her feet and went back to work. In the meantime, they would find an
au pair
girl to live in and look after the baby in return for room and board. Rhoda’s mother had come through with her part of the plan, but it was already obvious that this
au pair
girl who was willing to sleep on a convertible couch in the living room in an ant colony on the West Side did not exist. Rhoda would not be able to go back to work. They were going to have to get by on his $25,000-after-taxes, and the yearly rent here in this dump, even with the help of rent stabilization, was $10,656.

Well, at least these morbid considerations had restored his bathrobe to a decent shape. So he emerged from the bedroom.

“Good morning, Glenda,” he said.

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Kramer,” said the baby nurse.

Very cool and British, this voice of hers. Kramer was convinced he really couldn’t care less about British accents or the Brits themselves. In fact, they intimidated him, the Brits and their accents. In the baby nurse’s
oh
, a mere
oh
, he detected a whiff of
Finally getting up, are you?

A plump, fiftyish woman, she was already efficiently turned out in her white uniform. Her hair was pulled back into a perfect bun. She had already closed up the convertible couch and put the cushions back in place, so that it had resumed its daytime mode as a dingy yellow, synthetic-linen-covered piece of parlor furniture. She sat on the edge of the thing, her back perfectly straight, drinking a cup of tea. The baby was lying on his back in his crib, perfectly content. Perfectly was the woman’s middle name. They had found her through the Gough Agency, which an article in the Home section of the
Times
had listed as one of the best and most fashionable. So they were paying the fashionable price of $525 a week for an English baby nurse. From time to time she mentioned other places where she had worked. Always it was Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Sutton Place…Well, too bad! Now you’re getting an eyeful of a jack-legged walk-up on the West Side! They called her Glenda. She called them Mr. Kramer and Mrs. Kramer, instead of Larry and Rhoda. Everything was upside down. Glenda was the very picture of gentility, having tea, while Mr. Kramer, lord of the ant colony, came tramping through to the bathroom barefooted, bare-legged, tousle-headed, wearing a tattered old plaid bathrobe. Over in the corner, under an extremely dusty
Dracaena fragrans
plant, the TV set was on. A commercial flared to an end, and some smiling heads began talking on the
Today
show. But the sound was not on. She wouldn’t be so imperfect as to have the TV blaring. What on earth was she really thinking, this British arbiter sitting in judgment (on an appalling fold-out sofa) upon the squalor of
chez
Kramer?

As for the mistress of the household, Mrs. Kramer, she was just emerging from the bathroom, still in her bathrobe and slippers.

“Larry,” she said, “look at my fuh-head. I think theh’s something theh, like a rash. I sawr it in the mirror.”

Still foggy, Kramer tried to look at her fuh-head.

“It’s nothing, Rhoda. It’s like the beginning of a pimple.”

That was another thing. Since the baby nurse had arrived, Kramer had also become acutely aware of the way his wife talked. He had never noticed it before, or hardly. She was a graduate of New York University. For the past four years she had been an editor at Waverly Place Books. She was an intellectual, or at least she seemed to be reading a lot of the poetry of John Ashbery and Gary Snyder when he first met her, and she had a lot to say about South Africa and Nicaragua. Nevertheless, a forehead was a fuh-head, and
there
had no r at the end, but
saw
did.

That was like her mother, too.

Rhoda padded on by, and Kramer entered the bathroom slot. The bathroom was pure Tenement Life. There was laundry hanging all along the shower curtain rod. There was more laundry on a line that ran diagonally across the room, a baby’s zip-up suit, two baby bibs, some bikini panties, several pairs of panty hose, and God knew what else, none of it the baby nurse’s, of course. Kramer had to duck down to get to the toilet. A wet pair of panty hose slithered over his ear. It was revolting. There was a wet towel on the toilet seat. He looked around for some place to hang it. There was no place. He threw it on the floor.

After urinating, he moved twelve or fourteen inches to the sink and took off his bathrobe and his T-shirt and draped them over the toilet seat. Kramer liked to survey his face and his build in the mornings. What with his wide, flat features, his blunt nose, his big neck, nobody ever took him for Jewish at first. He might be Greek, Slavic, Italian, even Irish—in any event, something tough. He wasn’t happy that he was balding on top, but in a way that made him look tough, too. He was balding the way a lot of professional football players were balding. And his build…But this morning he lost heart. Those powerful deltoids, those massive sloping trapezii, those tightly bunched pectorals, those curving slabs of meat, his biceps—they looked deflated. He was fucking
atrophying
! He hadn’t been able to work out since the baby and the baby nurse arrived. He kept his weights in a carton behind the tub that held the dracaena plant, and he worked out between the plant and the couch—and there was no way in the world he could work out, could grunt and groan and strain and ventilate and take appreciative looks at himself in the mirror in front of the English baby nurse…or the mythical
au pair
girl of the future, for that matter…Let’s face it! It’s time to give up those childish dreams! You’re an American workadaddy now! Nothing more.

When he left the bathroom, he found Rhoda sitting on the couch next to the English baby nurse, and both of them had their eyes pinned on the TV set, and the sound was up. It was the news segment of the
Today
show.

Rhoda looked up and said excitedly: “Look at this, Larry! It’s the Mayor! There was a riot in Harlem last night. Someone threw a bottle at him!”

Kramer only barely noticed that she said
meh-uh
for
mayor
and
boh-uhl
for
bottle
. Astonishing things were happening on the screen. A stage—a melee—heaving bodies—and then a huge hand filled the screen and blotted out everything for an instant. More screams and grimaces and thrashing about, and then pure vertigo. To Kramer and Rhoda and the baby nurse it was as if the rioters were breaking through the screen and jumping onto the floor right beside little Joshua’s crib. And this was the
Today
show, not the local news. This was what America was having for breakfast this morning, a snootful of the people of Harlem rising up in their righteous wrath and driving the white Mayor off the stage in a public hall. There goes the back of his head right there, burrowing for cover. Once he was the Mayor of New York City. Now he is the Mayor of White New York.

When it was over, the three of them looked at one another, and Glenda, the English baby nurse, spoke up, with considerable agitation.

“Well, I think that’s perfectly disgusting. The colored don’t know how good they’ve got it in this country, I can tell you that much. In Britain there’s not so much as a colored in a police uniform, much less an important public official, the way they have here. Why, there was an article just the other day. There’s more than two hundred coloreds who are mayors in this country. And they want to bash the Mayor of New York about. Some people don’t know how well off they are, if you ask me.”

She shook her head angrily.

Kramer and his wife looked at each other. He could tell she was thinking the same thing he was.

Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste. So they were the superiors of their English baby nurse, after all. What a fucking relief.

The rain had just about stopped when Kramer started walking to the subway. He was wearing an old raincoat over his usual gray suit, button-down shirt, and necktie. He had on a pair of Nike running shoes, white with stripes on the sides. He carried his brown leather dress shoes in a shopping bag, one of those slippery white plastic bags you get at the A&P.

The subway stop where he could catch the D train to the Bronx was at Eighty-first Street and Central Park West. He liked to walk across to Central Park West on Seventy-seventh Street and then walk up to Eighty-first, because that took him past the Museum of Natural History. It was a beautiful block, the most beautiful block on the West Side, to Kramer’s way of thinking, like a street scene in Paris; not that he had ever been to Paris. Seventy-seventh Street was very wide at that point. On one side was the museum, a marvelous Romanesque Revival creation in an old reddish stone. It was set back in a little park with trees. Even on a cloudy day like this the young spring leaves seemed to glow.
Verdant
was the word that crossed his mind. On this side of the street, where he was walking, was a cliff of elegant apartment houses overlooking the museum. There were doormen. He got glimpses of marbled halls. And then he thought of the girl with brown lipstick…He could see her very clearly now, much more clearly than in the dream. He clenched his fist. Damn it! He was going to do it!
He was going to call her
. He was going to make that telephone call. He’d have to wait until the end of the trial, of course. But he was going to do it. He was tired of watching
other people
lead… The Life. The girl with brown lipstick!—the two of them, looking into each other’s eyes across a table in one of those restaurants with blond wood and exposed brick and hanging plants and brass and etched glass and menus with crayfish Natchez and veal and plantains mesquite and cornbread with cayenne pepper!