The Bonfire of the Vanities (65 page)

Kramer peered down diligently at the insects. As for Weiss, the loftiness of his sentiments had filled his voice and his face with emotion. He gave Kramer a sincere look and a tired smile, the sort of look that says, “That’s what life is all about, once the petty considerations have been swept away.”

“I never thought about it that way before, Abe,” said Kramer, “but you’re absolutely right.” It seemed like a good moment for the first
Abe
.

“I was worried about this McCoy case at the beginning,” said Weiss. “It looked like Bacon and those people were forcing the issue, and all we were doing was reacting. But that’s okay. It turned out to be a good thing. How
do
we treat some hotshot from Park Avenue? Like anybody else, that’s how! He gets arrested, he gets the cuffs, he gets booked, he gets fingerprinted, he waits in the pens, just like anybody down there on those streets! Now, I think that sends a helluva good signal. It lets those people know we represent
them
and they’re a part a New York City.”

Weiss gazed down upon 161st Street like a shepherd upon his flock. Kramer was glad no one but himself was witnessing this. If more than one witness had been on hand, then cynicism would have reigned. You wouldn’t have been able to think about anything other than the fact that Abe Weiss had an election coming up in five months, and 70 percent of the inhabitants of the Bronx were black and Latin. But since there was, in fact, no other witness, Kramer could get to the heart of the matter, which was that the manic creature before him, Captain Ahab, was right.

“You did a great job yesterday, Larry,” said Weiss, “and I want you to keep pouring it on. Doesn’t it make you
feel good
to use your talents for something that means something? Christ, you know what I make.” That Kramer did. It was $82,000 a year. “A dozen times I coulda taken a fork in the road and gone out and made three times, five times that in private practice. But for what? You only pass this way once, Larry. Whaddaya wanna be remembered for? That you had a fucking mansion in Riverdale or Greenwich or Locust Valley? Or that you
made a difference
? I feel
sorry
for Tommy Killian. He was a good assistant D.A., but Tommy wanted to make some money, and so now he’s out making some money, but how? He’s holding the hands and wiping the noses of a buncha wise guys, psychotics, and dopers. A guy like McCoy makes him look good. He hasn’t seen a guy like that in all the years he’s been outta here. No, I’d rather run the Laboratory of Human Relations. That’s the way I think of it. I’d rather make a difference.”

You did a great job yesterday. And I want you to keep pouring it on
.

“Christ, I wonder what time it is,” said Weiss. “I’m getting hungry.”

Kramer looked at his watch with alacrity. “Almost 12:15.”

“Whyn’t you stick around and have lunch? Judge Tonneto’s coming by, and this guy from the
Times
, Overton Something-or-other—I always forget, they’re all named Overton or Clifton or some fucking name like that—and Bobby Vitello and Lew Weintraub. You know Lew Weintraub? No? Stick around. You’ll learn something.”

“Well, if you’re sure…”

“Of course!” Weiss motioned toward his gigantic conference table, as if to say there’s plenty of room. “Just ordering in some sandwiches.”

He said this as if this happened to be one of those spur-of-the-moment lunches where you order in instead of going out, as if he or any other shepherd from the island fortress dared stroll out amid the flock and have lunch in the civic center of the Bronx.

But Kramer banished all cheap cynicism from his thoughts. Lunch with the likes of Judge Tonneto, Bobby Vitello, Lew Weintraub, the real-estate developer, Overton Whichever Wasp of
The New York Times
, and the district attorney himself!

He was emerging from the anonymous ooze.

Thank God for the Great White Defendant. Thank you, God, for Mr. Sherman McCoy.

With a blink of curiosity, he wondered about McCoy. McCoy wasn’t much older than he was. How did this little icy dip into the real world feel to a Wasp who had had everything just the way he wanted it all his life? But it was only that, a blink.

The Bororo Indians, a primitive tribe who live along the Vermelho River in the Amazon jungles of Brazil, believe that there is no such thing as a private self. The Bororos regard the mind as an open cavity, like a cave or a tunnel or an arcade, if you will, in which the entire village dwells and the jungle grows. In 1969 José M. R. Delgado, the eminent Spanish brain physiologist, pronounced the Bororos correct. For nearly three millennia, Western philosophers had viewed the self as something unique, something encased inside each person’s skull, so to speak. This inner self had to deal with and learn from the outside world, of course, and it might prove incompetent in doing so. Nevertheless, at the core of one’s self there was presumed to be something irreducible and inviolate. Not so, said Delgado. “Each person is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment.” The important word was
transitory
, and he was talking not about years but about hours. He cited experiments in which healthy college students lying on beds in well-lit but soundproofed chambers, wearing gloves to reduce the sense of touch and translucent goggles to block out specific sights, began to hallucinate
within hours
. Without the entire village, the whole jungle, occupying the cavity, they had no minds left.

He cited no investigations of the opposite case, however. He did not discuss what happens when one’s self—or what one takes to be one’s self—is not a mere cavity open to the outside world but has suddenly become an amusement park to which everybody,
todo el mundo, tout le monde
, comes scampering, skipping, and screaming, nerves a-tingle, loins aflame, ready for anything, all you’ve got, laughs, tears, moans, giddy thrills, gasps, horrors, whatever, the gorier the merrier. Which is to say, he told us nothing of the mind of a person at the center of a scandal in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

At first, in the weeks following the incident in the Bronx, Sherman McCoy had regarded the press as an enemy that was stalking him
out there
. He feared each day’s newspapers and news broadcasts the way a man would fear the weapons of any impersonal and unseen enemy, the way he would fear falling bombs or incoming shells. Even yesterday, outside the Central Booking facility, in the rain and the filth, when he saw the whites of their eyes and the yellow of their teeth and they reviled and taunted and baited him, when they did everything short of trampling and spitting upon him, they were still the enemy
out there
. They had closed in for the kill, and they hurt him and humiliated him, but they could not reach his inviolable self, Sherman McCoy, inside the brass crucible of his mind.

They closed in for the kill. And then they killed him.

He couldn’t remember whether he had died while he was still standing in line outside, before the door to Central Booking opened, or while he was in the pens. But by the time he left the building and Killian held his impromptu press conference on the steps, he had died and been reborn. In his new incarnation, the press was no longer an enemy and it was no longer
out there
. The press was now a condition, like lupus erythematosus or Wegener’s granulomatosis. His entire central nervous system was now wired into the vast, incalculable circuit of radio and television and newspapers, and his body surged and burned and hummed with the energy of the press and the prurience of those it reached, which was everyone, from the closest neighbor to the most bored and distant outlander titillated for the moment by his disgrace. By the thousands, no, the millions, they now came scampering into the cavity of what he had presumed to be his self, Sherman McCoy. He could no more keep them from entering his very own hide than he could keep the air out of his lungs. (Or, better said, he could keep them out only in the same manner that he could deny air to his lungs once and for all. That solution occurred to him more than once during that long day, but he fought against morbidity, he did, he did, he did, he who had already died once.)

It started within minutes after he and Killian managed to disengage themselves from the mob of demonstrators and reporters and photographers and camera crews and get into the car-service sedan Killian had hired. The driver was listening to an Easy Listening station on the car radio, but in no time the every-half-hour news broadcast came on, and right away Sherman heard his name, his name and all the key words that he would hear and see over and over for the rest of the day: Wall Street, socialite, hit-and-run, Bronx honor student, unidentified female companion, and he could see the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror staring into the open cavity known as Sherman McCoy. By the time they reached Killian’s office, the midday edition of
The City Light
was already there, and his contorted face was staring back at him from the front page, and everyone in New York was free to walk right in through those horrified eyes of his. Late in the afternoon, when he went home to Park Avenue, he had to run a gauntlet of reporters and television camera crews to get into his own apartment building. They called him “Sherman,” as merrily and contemptuously and imperiously as they pleased, and Eddie, the doorman, looked into his eyes and stuck his head way down into the cavity. To make matters worse, he had to ride up on the elevator with the Morrisseys, who lived in the penthouse apartment. They said nothing. They just poked their long noses inside the cavity and sniffed and sniffed at his shame, until their faces stiffened from the stench. He had counted on his unlisted telephone number as a retreat, but the press had already solved that, by the time he got home, and Bonita, kind Bonita, who took only a quick peek inside the cavity, had to screen the calls. Every imaginable news organization called, and there were a few calls for Judy. And for himself? Who would be so deficient in dignity, so immune to embarrassment, as to make a personal telephone call to this great howling public arcade, this shell of shame and funk, which was Sherman McCoy himself? Only his mother and father and Rawlie Thorpe. Well, at least Rawlie had that much in him. Judy—roaming the apartment shocked and distant. Campbell—bewildered but not in tears; not yet. He hadn’t thought he would be able to face the television screen, and yet he turned it on. The vilification poured forth from every channel. Prominent Wall Street investment banker, top echelon at Pierce & Pierce, socialite, prep school, Yale, spoiled son of the former general partner of Dunning Sponget & Leach, the Wall Street law firm, in his $60,000 Mercedes sports roadster (now an extra $10,000), with a foxy brunette who was not his wife and not anything like his wife and who makes his wife look dowdy by comparison, runs over an exemplary son of the deserving poor, a young honor student who grew up in the housing projects, and flees in his fancy car without so much as a moment’s pity, let alone help, for his victim, who now lies near death. The eerie thing was—and it felt eerie as he had sat there looking at the television set—was that he was not shocked and angered by these gross distortions and manifest untruths. Instead, he was
shamed
. By nightfall they had been repeated so often, on the vast circuit to which his very hide now seemed wired, that they had taken on the weight of truth, in that millions had now
seen
this Sherman McCoy, this Sherman McCoy on the screen, and they knew him to be the man who had committed the heartless act. They were here now, in vast mobs, clucking and fuming and probably contemplating worse than that, inside the public arcade that he had once thought to be the private self of Sherman McCoy. Everyone, every living soul who gazed upon him, with the possible exception of Maria, if she ever gazed upon him again, would know him as this person on the front of two million, three million, four million newspapers and on the screen of God knew how many million television sets. The energy of their accusations, borne over the vast circuit of the press, which was wired into his central nervous system, hummed and burned through his hide and made his adrenaline pump. His pulse was constantly fast, and yet he was no longer in a state of panic. A sad, sad torpor had set in. He could concentrate on…nothing, not even long enough to feel sad about it. He thought of what this must be doing to Campbell and to Judy, and yet he no longer felt the terrible pangs he felt before…before he died. This alarmed him. He looked at his daughter and tried to feel the pangs, but it was an intellectual exercise. It was all so sad and heavy, heavy, heavy.

The one thing he truly felt was fear. It was the fear of going
back in there
.

Last night, exhausted, he went to bed and thought he would be unable to sleep. In fact, he fell asleep almost at once and had a dream. It was dusk. He was on a bus going up First Avenue. This was odd, because he had not taken a bus in New York for at least ten years. Before he knew it, the bus was up around 110th Street, and it was dark. He had missed his stop, although he couldn’t remember what his stop was supposed to be. He was now in a black neighborhood. In fact, it should have been a Latin neighborhood, namely, Spanish Harlem, but it was a black neighborhood. He got off the bus, fearing that if he stayed on, things would only get worse. In doorways, on stoops, on the sidewalks he could see figures in the gloom, but they hadn’t seen him yet. He hurried along the streets in the shadows, trying to make his way west. Good sense would have told him to head straight back down First Avenue, but it seemed terribly important to head west. Now he realized the figures were circling. They said nothing, they didn’t even come terribly close…for the time being. They had all the time in the world. He hurried through the darkness, seeking out the shadows, and gradually the figures closed in; gradually for they had all the time in the world. He woke up in a dreadful panic, perspiring, his heart leaping out of his chest. He had been asleep for less than two hours.