The Bonfire of the Vanities (9 page)

“I’m at a cricket match.” Then less clearly: “What’s the name a this place again?” He was evidently with some other people. “Tottenham Park, Arnie. I’m on a kind of a terrace.”

“Who’s playing?” Parch smiled, as if to show the plastic frog that this wasn’t a serious question.

“Don’t get technical on me, Arnie. A lot of very nice young gentlemen in cable-knit sweaters and white flannel pants, is the best I can tell you.”

Appreciative laughter broke out in the room, and Sherman felt his own lips bending into the somehow obligatory smile. He glanced about the room. Everyone was smiling and chuckling at the brown plastic speaker except for Rawlie, who had his eyes rolled up in the Oh Brother mode.

Then Rawlie leaned over toward Sherman and said, in a noisy whisper: “Look at all these idiots grinning. They think the plastic box has eyes.”

This didn’t strike Sherman as very funny, since he himself had been grinning. He was also afraid that Lopwitz’s loyal aide, Parch, would think he was Rawlie’s confederate in making sport of the maximum leader.

“Well, everybody’s here, Gene,” Parch said to the box, “and so I’m gonna get George to fill you in on where we stand on the auction as of now.”

Parch looked at George Connor and nodded and walked back to his chair, and Connor got up from his and walked over to the Adam cabinet and stared at the brown plastic box and said: “Gene? This is George.”

“Yeah, hi, George,” said the frog. “Go ahead.”

“Here’s the thing, Gene,” said Connor, standing in front of the Adam commode, unable to take his eyes off the plastic box, “it feels pretty good. The old twenties are trading at 8 percent. The traders are telling us they’ll come in on the new ones at 8.05, but we think they’re playing games with us. We think we’re gonna get action right down to 8. So here’s what I figure. We’ll scale in at 8.01, 8.02, 8.03, with the balance at 8.04. I’m ready to go 60 percent of the issue.”

Which, translated, meant: he was proposing to buy $6 billion of the $10 billion in bonds offered in the auction, with the expectation of a profit of two thirty-seconds of a dollar—6¼¢—on every one hundred dollars put up. This was known as “two ticks.”

Sherman couldn’t resist another look at Rawlie. He had a small, unpleasant smile on his face, and his gaze seemed to pass several degrees to the right of the Adam commode, toward the Hoboken docks. Rawlie’s presence was like a glass of ice water in the face. Sherman resented him all over again. He knew what was on his mind. Here was this outrageous arriviste, Lopwitz—Sherman knew Rawlie thought of him that way—trying to play the nob on the terrace of some British cricket club and at the same time conduct a meeting in New York to decide whether Pierce & Pierce was going to stake two billion, four billion, or six billion on a single government bond issue three hours from now. No doubt Lopwitz had his own audience on hand at the cricket club to watch this performance, as his great words bounced off a communications satellite somewhere up in the empyrean and hit Wall Street. Well, it wasn’t hard to find something laughable in it, but Lopwitz was, in truth, a Master of the Universe. Lopwitz was about forty-five years old. Sherman wanted nothing less seven years down the line, when he was forty-five. To be astride the Atlantic…with billions at stake! Rawlie could snigger…and sink into his kneecaps…but to think what Lopwitz now had in his grasp, to think what he made each year, just from Pierce & Pierce, which was at least $25 million, to think of the kind of life he led—and what Sherman thought of first was Lopwitz’s young wife, Snow White. That was what Rawlie called her. Hair as dark as ebony, lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow…She was Lopwitz’s fourth wife, French, a countess, apparently, no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, with an accent like Catherine Deneuve doing a bath-oil commercial. She was something…Sherman had met her at a party at the Petersons’. She had put her hand on his forearm, just to make a point in conversation—but the way she kept the pressure on his arm and stared at him from about eight inches away! She was a young and frisky animal. Lopwitz had taken what he wanted. He had wanted a young and frisky animal with lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow, and that was what he had taken. What had ever happened to the other three Mrs. Eugene Lopwitzes was a question Sherman had never heard brought up. When you had reached Lopwitz’s level, it didn’t even matter.

“Yeah, well, that sounds all right, George,” said the plastic frog. “What about Sherman? Are you there, Sherman?”

“Hi, Gene!” said Sherman, rising from the George II armchair. His own voice sounded very odd to him, now that he was talking to a plastic box, and he didn’t dare even take a quick glance at Rawlie as he walked over to the Adam commode and took his stance and stared, rapt, at the machine on top.

“Gene, all my customers are talking 8.05. My gut feeling, though, is that they’re on our side. The market has a good tone. I think we can bid ahead of the customer interest.”

“Okay,” said the voice in the box, “but just make sure you and George stay on top a the trading accounts. I don’t wanna hear about Salomon or anybody horsing around with shorts.”

Sherman found himself marveling at the frog’s wisdom.

Some sort of throttled roar came over the speaker. Everybody stared at it.

Lopwitz’s voice returned. “Somebody just hit the hell outta the ball,” he said. “The ball’s kinda dead, though. Well, you kinda hadda be there.” It wasn’t clear what he meant by that. “Well, look, George. Can you hear me, George?”

Connor hopped to it, rose from his chair, hustled over to the Adam commode.

“I can hear you, Gene.”

“I was just gonna say, if you feel like stepping up to the plate and taking a good whack at it today, go ahead. It sounds okay.”

And that was that.

At forty-five seconds before the auction deadline of 1:00
P.M.
, George Connor, at a telephone in the middle of the bond trading room, read off his final scaled-in bids to a Pierce & Pierce functionary sitting at a telephone at the Federal Building, which was the physical site of the auction. The bids averaged $99.62643 per $100 worth of bonds. Within a few seconds after 1:00
P.M.
, Pierce & Pierce now owned, as planned, $6 billion worth of the twenty-year bond. The bond department had four hours in which to create a favorable market. Vic Scaasi led the charge on the bond trading desk, reselling the bonds mainly to the brokerage houses—by telephone. Sherman and Rawlie led the bond salesmen, reselling the bonds mainly to insurance companies and trust banks—by telephone. By 2:00
P.M.
, the roar in the bond trading room, fueled more by fear than greed, was unearthly. They all shouted and sweated and swore and devoured their electric doughnuts.

By 5:00
P.M.
they had sold 40 percent—$2.4 billion—of the $6 billion at an average price of $99.75062 per $100 worth of bonds, for a profit of not two but four ticks!
Four ticks!
That was a profit of twelve and a half cents per one hundred dollars.
Four ticks!
To the eventual retail buyer of these bonds, whether an individual, a corporation or an institution, this spread was invisible. But
—four ticks!
To Pierce & Pierce it meant a profit of almost $3 million for an afternoon’s work. And it wouldn’t stop there. The market was holding firm and edging up. Within the next week they might easily make an additional $5 to $10 million on the 3.6 billion bonds remaining.
Four ticks!

By five o’clock Sherman was soaring on adrenaline. He was part of the pulverizing might of Pierce & Pierce, Masters of the Universe. The audacity of it all was breathtaking. To risk $6 billion in one afternoon to make
two ticks—
six and a quarter cents per one hundred dollars—and then to make four ticks
—four ticks!—
the audacity!—the audacity! Was there any more exciting power on the face of the earth? Let Lopwitz watch all the cricket matches he wants to! Let him play the plastic frog! Master of the Universe—the audacity!

The audacity of it flowed through Sherman’s limbs and lymph channels and loins. Pierce & Pierce was the power, and he was wired into the power, and the power hummed and surged in his very innards.

Judy…He hadn’t thought of her for hours. What was a single, albeit boneheaded, telephone call…on the stupendous ledger kept by Pierce & Pierce? The fiftieth floor was for people who weren’t afraid to take what they wanted. And, Christ, he didn’t want much, compared to what he, a Master of the Universe, should rightfully have. All he wanted was to be able to kick the gong around when he pleased, to have the simple pleasures due all mighty warriors.

Where did she get off, giving him such a hard time?

If Middle Age wishes the continued support and escort of a Master of the Universe, then she must allow him the precious currency he has earned, which is youth and beauty and juicy jugs and loamy loins—

It made no sense! Somehow, for no explicable reason, Judy had always had his number. She looked down on him—from a wholly fictive elevation; nevertheless, she looked down on him. Still the daughter of Professor Miller, E. (for Egbord!) Ronald Miller of DesPortes University, Terwilliger, Wisconsin, poor stodgy Professor Miller, in his rotting tweeds, whose one claim to fame was a rather mealymouthed attack (Sherman had once plowed through it) on his fellow Wisconsinite, Senator Joseph McCarthy, in the magazine
Aspects
in 1955. Yet, back there in the cocoon of their early days together in the Village, Sherman had validated her claim. He had
enjoyed
telling Judy that while he worked
on
Wall Street, he was not
of
Wall Street and was only
using
Wall Street. He had been
pleased
when she condescended to admire him for the enlightenment that was stirring in his soul. Somehow she was assuring him that his own father, John Campbell McCoy, the Lion of Dunning Sponget, was a rather pedestrian figure, after all, a high-class security guard for other people’s capital. As to why that might be important to him, Sherman didn’t even know how to speculate. His interest in psychoanalytical theory, never lively, had ended one day at Yale when Rawlie Thorpe had referred to it as “a Jewish science” (precisely the attitude that had most troubled and infuriated Freud seventy-five years earlier).

But that was all part of the past, of his childhood, his childhood on East Seventy-third Street and his childhood in the Village. This was a new era! This was a new Wall Street!—and Judy was…an article left over from his childhood…and yet she lived on and grew older, thinner
…handsome…

Sherman leaned back in his chair and surveyed the bond trading room. The processions of phosphorescent green characters still skidded across the faces of the computer terminals, but the roar had subsided to something more like locker-room laughter. George Connor stood beside Vic Scaasi’s chair with his hands in his pockets, just chatting. Vic arched his back and rolled his shoulders and seemed about to yawn. There was Rawlie, reared back in his chair, talking on the telephone, grinning and running his hand over his bald pate. Victorious warriors after the fray…Masters of the Universe…

And she has the gall to cause him grief over a
telephone call
!

Thumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpathumpa—
the noise of the airliners taking off pounded down so hard, he could feel it. The air was full of jet fumes. The stench cut straight through to his stomach. Cars kept popping up from out of the mouth of a ramp and threading their way through the swarms of people who were roaming about on the roof in the dusk looking for the elevators or their cars or other people’s cars—steal! steal! steal!—and his would be the leading candidate, wouldn’t it? Sherman stood with one hand resting on the door, wondering if he dared leave it here. The car was a black Mercedes two-seat sports roadster that had cost $48,000—or $120,000, according to how you wanted to look at it. In a Master of the Universe tax bracket, with federal, New York State, and New York City taxes to pay, Sherman had to make $120,000 in order to have $48,000 left to spend on a two-seat sports roadster. How would he explain it to Judy if the thing were stolen from up here on the roof of a terminal at Kennedy Airport?

Well—why would he even owe her an explanation? For a solid week he had had dinner at home every night. It must have been the first time he had managed that since he started working for Pierce & Pierce. He had been attentive to Campbell, spending upward of forty-five minutes with her one evening, which was unusual, although he would have been surprised and offended if anybody had ever pointed that out. He had rewired a floor lamp in the library without any undue fuming and sighing. After three days of his model performance, Judy had given up the daybed in the dressing room and come back to the bedroom. True, the Berlin Wall now ran down the center of the bed, and she wouldn’t give him an inch of small talk. But she was always civil to him when Campbell was around. That was the most important thing.

Two hours ago when he had called Judy to say he would be working late, she had taken it in stride. Well—he deserved it! He took one last look at the Mercedes and headed for the international arrivals area.

It was down in the bowels of the building, in what must have been designed as a baggage area originally. Strips of fluorescent lights struggled against the gloominess of the space. People were jammed behind a metal fence, waiting for passengers coming in from abroad to emerge from Customs. Suppose there was someone here who knew him and Judy? He surveyed the crowd. Shorts, sneakers, jeans, football jerseys—Christ, who were these people? One by one the travelers were straggling out of Customs. Sweat suits, T-shirts, windbreakers, tube socks, overalls, warm-up jackets, baseball caps, and tank tops; just in from Rome, Milan, Paris, Brussels, Munich, and London; the world travelers; the cosmopolites; Sherman lifted his Yale chin against the tide.

When Maria finally appeared, she wasn’t hard to spot. In this mob she looked like something from another galaxy. She was wearing a skirt and a big-shouldered jacket of a royal blue that was fashionable in France, a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse, and electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes. The price of the blouse and the shoes alone would have paid for the clothes on the backs of any twenty women on the floor. She walked with a nose-up sprocket-hipped model-girl gait calculated to provoke maximum envy and resentment. People were staring. Beside her marched a porter with an aluminum dolly cart heaped with luggage, a prodigious amount of it, a matched set, cream-colored leather with chocolate leather trim on the edges. Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman. She had only gone to Italy for a week, to find a house on Lake Como for the summer. He couldn’t imagine why she had taken so many bags. (Unconsciously he associated such things with a slack upbringing.) He wondered how he was going to get it all in the Mercedes.

He made his way around the fence and strode toward her. He squared his shoulders.

“Hello, babe,” he said.

“
Babe?
” said Maria. She added a smile, as if she weren’t really annoyed, but obviously she was. It was true that he had never called her babe before. He had wanted to sound confident but casual, like a Master of the Universe meeting his girlfriend in an airport.

He took her arm and fell in step with her and decided to try again. “How was the flight?”

“It was great,” said Maria, “if you don’t mind being bowed by some Brit for six hours.” It was a couple of beats before Sherman realized she was saying
bored
. She gazed into the distance, as if reflecting upon her ordeal.

Up on the roof, the Mercedes had survived the thieving multitudes. The skycap couldn’t get much of the luggage into the car’s sporty little trunk. He had to stack half of it up on the back seat, which wasn’t much more than an upholstered ledge. Terrific, thought Sherman. If I have to stop short, I’ll get hit in the base of the skull by matched flying cream-colored vanity cases with chocolate-brown trim.

By the time they got out of the airport and went onto the Van Wyck Expressway toward Manhattan, only the last low dull glow of daylight was visible behind the buildings and the trees of South Ozone Park. It was that hour of dusk when the streetlights and headlights come on but make little difference. A stream of red taillights rolled on ahead of them. Over on the side of the expressway, just past Rockaway Boulevard, he saw an enormous two-door sedan, the sort of car they used to make in the 1970s, up against a stone retaining wall. A man…spread-eagled on the highway!…No, as they drew closer, he could see it wasn’t a man at all. It was the hood of the car. The entire hood had been pulled off and was lying on the pavement. The wheels, seats, and steering wheel were gone…This huge derelict machine was now part of the landscape…Sherman, Maria, the luggage, and the Mercedes rolled on.

He tried once more. “Well, how was Milan? What’s going on at Lake Como?”

“Sherman, who’s Christopher Marlowe?” Shuhmun, who’s Christuphuh Muhlowe?

Christopher Marlowe?
“I don’t know. Do I know him?”

“The one I’m talking about was a writer.”

“You don’t mean the playwright?”

“I guess so. Who was he?” Maria continued to look straight ahead. She sounded as if her last friend had died.

“Christopher Marlowe…He was a British playwright, about the time of Shakespeare, I think. Maybe a little before Shakespeare. Why?”

“Which was when?” She couldn’t have sounded more miserable.

“Let’s see. I don’t know…The sixteenth century—15-something. Why?”

“What did he write?”

“God…beats me. Listen, I thought I was doing well just to remember who he was. Why?”

“Yes, but you do know who he was.”

“Barely. Why?”

“What about Dr. Faustus?”

“Dr. Faustus?”

“Did he write something about Dr. Faustus?”

“Mmmmmmrnm.” A tiny flash of memory; but it slipped away. “Could be. Dr. Faustus
…The Jew of Malta!
He wrote a play called
The Jew of Malta
. I’m pretty sure of that.
The Jew of Malta
. I don’t even know how I remember
The Jew of Malta
. I’m sure I never read it.”

“But you do know who he was. That’s one of the things you’re supposed to know, isn’t it?”

And there she had put her finger on it. The only thing that had truly stuck in Sherman’s mind about Christopher Marlowe, after nine years at Buckley, four years at St. Paul’s, and four years at Yale, was that you were, in fact, supposed to know who Christopher Marlowe was. But he wasn’t about to say that.

Instead, he asked: “Who’s supposed to?”

“Anybody,” Maria mumbled. “Me.”

It was getting darker. The Mercedes’s spiffy dials and gauges were now lit up like a fighter plane’s. They were nearing the Atlantic Avenue overpass. There was another abandoned car by the side of the road. The wheels were gone, the hood was up, and two figures, one holding a flashlight, were jackknifed over the engine well.

Maria continued to look straight ahead as they merged with the traffic on Grand Central Parkway. A galaxy of streaming headlights and taillights filled their field of vision, as if the energy of the city were now transformed into millions of globes of light orbiting in the darkness. Here, inside the Mercedes, with the windows rolled up, the entire stupendous show came gliding by without a sound.

“You know something, Sherman?” You know somethun, Shuhmun? “I hate the Brits. I
hate
‘um.”

“You hate Christopher Marlowe?”

“Thank you, smartie,” said Maria. “You sound just like the sonofabitch I sat next to.”

Now she was looking at Sherman and smiling. It was the kind of smile you bring up bravely through great pain. Her eyes looked as if they might be about to spring tears.

“Which sonofabitch?” he said.

“On the plane. This Brit.” Synonymous with worm. “He started talking to me. I was looking at the catalogue from the Reiner Fetting show I saw in Milano”—it annoyed Sherman that she used the Italian, Milano, instead of the English, Milan, especially since he had never heard of Reiner Fetting—“and he starts talking about Reiner Fetting. He had one a those gold Rolexes, those huge things? It’s a wonder you can lift your arm?” She had the Southern Girl habit of turning declarative sentences into questions.

“You think he was making a play?”

Maria smiled, this time with pleasure. “Of course he was!”

The smile brought Sherman great relief. The spell was broken. Just why, he didn’t know. He didn’t realize that there were women who thought about sexual attractiveness the way he thought about the bond market. He only knew that the spell had been broken and that the weight had been lifted. It didn’t really matter what she chattered on about now. And she did chatter on. She headed deep into the indignity she had suffered.

“He couldn’t wait to tell me he was a movie producer. He was making a movie based on this play,
Doctor Faustus
, by Christopher Marlowe, or just Marlowe, I think that was all he said, just Marlowe, and I don’t even know why I said anything, but I thought somebody named Marlowe wrote for the movies. Actually, what I think I was thinking about was, there was this movie with a
character
named Marlowe. Robert Mitchum was in it.”

“That’s right. It was a Raymond Chandler story.”

Maria looked at him with utter blankness. He dropped Raymond Chandler. “So what did you say to him?”

“I said, ‘Oh, Christopher Marlowe. Didn’t he write a movie?’ And you know what this…bastard…says to me? He says, ‘I shouldn’t think so. He died in 1593.’
I shouldn’t think so
.”

Her eyes were blazing with the recollection. Sherman waited a moment. “That’s it?”

“That’s
it
? I wanted to strangle him. It was…hum
il
iating.
I shouldn’t think so
. I couldn’t
believe
the…snottiness.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing. I turned red. I couldn’t say a word.”

“And that’s what accounts for this mood of yours?”

“Sherman, tell me the honest truth. If you don’t know who Christopher Marlowe is, does that make you stupid?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Maria. I can’t believe that’s what put you in such a mood.”

“What mood?”

“This black cloud you landed in.”

“You didn’t answer me, Sherman. Does that make you stupid?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I could barely think of who he was, and I probably had him in a course or something.”

“Well, that’s just the point. At least you had him in a course. I didn’t have him in any course. That’s what makes me feel so—you don’t even understand what I’m talking about, do you?”

“I sure don’t.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

By now they were passing La Guardia Airport, which was lit up by hundreds of sodium vapor lights. It didn’t look like a great gateway to the sky. It looked like a factory. Sherman swung to the outside and hit the accelerator and sent the Mercedes barreling under the Thirty-first Street overpass and up the ramp onto the Triborough Bridge. The cloud had passed. He was feeling pleased with himself once again. He had jollied her out of it.

Now he had to slow down. All four lanes were heavy with traffic. As the Mercedes ascended the bridge’s great arc, he could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight. Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being
where things are happening—
and he was among the victors! He lived on Park Avenue, the street of dreams! He worked on Wall Street, fifty floors up, for the legendary Pierce & Pierce, overlooking the world! He was at the wheel of a $48,000 roadster with one of the most beautiful women in New York—no Comp. Lit. scholar, perhaps, but gorgeous—beside him! A frisky young animal! He was of that breed whose natural destiny it was…to have what they wanted!

He took one hand off the wheel and made a grand gesture toward the mighty island.

“There it is, babe!”

“We’re back to babe again?”

“I just feel like calling you babe, babe. New York City. There it is.”

“Do you really think I’m the babe type?”

“You’re as babe as they come, Maria. Where do you want to have dinner? It’s all yours. New York City.”

“Sherman! Aren’t you supposed to turn there?”

He looked to the right. It was true. He was two lanes to the left of the lanes that led to the off-ramp to Manhattan, and there was no way he could cut across. By now this lane—the next lane—the next lane—every lane—was a train of cars and trucks, bumper to bumper, inching toward a toll plaza a hundred yards ahead. Above the plaza was a huge green sign, lit up by yellow lamps, saying
BRONX UPSTATE N.Y. NEW ENGLAND
.

“Sherman, I’m sure that’s the turnoff to Manhattan.”

“You’re right, sweetheart, but there’s no way I can get over there now.”

“Where does this go?”

“The Bronx.”

The trains of vehicles inched forward in a cloud of carbon and sulphur particles toward the toll gates.