The Bonfire of the Vanities

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Peter?” Pee-tuh? Thank God, it was an English voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Peter, you’re gurgling. I woke you up, didn’t I. This is Tony.”

  “No, no, no, no, no. I’m—I was, I was in the other room. I’m working at home today.” He realized that his voice had sunk to a furtive baritone.

  “Well, you do a very good imitation of having just woke up.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” Thank God it was Tony. Tony was an Englishman who had come to work on The City Light at the same time he had. They were fellow commandos in this gross country.

  “Of course I believe you. But that puts me in the minority just now. If I were you, I’d come down here as soon as I could.”

  “Ummmmmm. Yes.”

  “The Mouse just came over and asked me where you were. Not out of curiosity, either. He acted extremely pissed.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him you were at the Surrogate’s Court.”

  “Ummmm. Not to pry, but what am I doing there?”

  “Great Christ, Peter, I really did get you out of bed, didn’t I? That Lacey Putney business.”

  “Ummmmmmm. Lacey Putney.” Pain, nausea, and sleep rolled through Fallow’s head like a Hawaiian wave. His head was flat on the carpet. The poisonous yolk sloshed about terribly. “Ummmmmmmmmmm.”

  “Don’t fade out on me, Peter. I’m not joking. I think you should come down here and put in an appearance.”

  “I know, I know I know I know I know. Thanks, Tony. You’re absolutely right.”

  “Are you coming?”

  “Yes.” Even as he said it, he knew what it was going to feel like to try to stand up.

  “And do me a favor.”

  “Anything.”

  “Try to remember that you were at the Surrogate’s Court. The Lacey Putney estate. Not that the Mouse necessarily believed me. But, you know.”

  “Yes. Lacey Putney. Thanks, Tony.”

  Fallow hung up, got up off the floor, staggered into the Venetian blinds, and cut his lip. The slats were the narrow metal ones the Yanks liked. They were like blades. He wiped the blood off his lip with the back of his index finger. He couldn’t hold his head up straight. The mercury yolk ruined his sense of balance. He lurched to the bathroom and entered by the tubercular blue dawn of the fluorescent light in the passageway outside. In the mirror on the medicine cabinet door, in this diseased light, the blood on his lip looked purple. That was all right. He could live with purple blood. But if he turned on the light in the bathroom, he was finished.

  Rows of diode-light computer terminals in putty-gray 2001 sci-fi casings lent the city room of The City Light a gloss of order and modernity. It never survived a second glance. The desks were covered in the usual litter of paper, plastic cups, books, manuals, almanacs, magazines, and sooty ashtrays. The usual shell-backed young men and women sat at the keyboards. A numb dull clattering—thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk thuk—rose from the keyboards, as if an immense mah-jongg tournament was in progress. The reporters, rewrite men, and copy editors were hunched over in the age-old way of journalists. Every few seconds a head would straighten up, as if coming up for air, and yell out something about slugs, headline counts, or story lengths. But not even the excitement of deadline pressure could survive for long. A rear door opened, and a Greek wearing a white uniform came staggering in carrying a prodigious tray full of coffee and soda containers, boxes of doughnuts, cheese Danishes, onion rolls, crullers, every variety of muck and lard known to the takeout food business, and half the room deserted the computer consoles and descended upon him, rooting about the tray like starving weevils.

  Fallow took advantage of this hiatus to make his way across the room toward his cubicle. Out in the middle of the field of computer terminals, he stopped and, with an air of professional scrutiny, picked up a copy of the second edition, which had just been brought upstairs. Below the logo—THE CITY LIGHT—the front page consisted of enormous capital letters running down the right side—

  Scalp

  Grandma,

  Then

  Rob Her

  —and a photograph running down the left. The photograph was a cropped blowup of the sort of smiling lineless portrait that studios produce. It was a picture of a woman named Carolina Pérez, fifty-five years old and not particularly grandmotherly, with a luxuriant head of black hair pulled up behind in the old-fashioned Lady of Spain style.

  Christ God! Scalping her must have been an undertaking! Had he been feeling better, Fallow would have paid a silent tribute to the extraordinary esthétique de l’abattoir that enabled these shameless devils, his employers, his compatriots, his fellow Englishmen, his fellow progeny of Shakespeare and Milton, to come up with things like this day after day. Just think of the fine sense of gutter syntax that inspired them to create a headline that was all verbs and objects, with the subject missing, the better to make you claw your way inside these smeary black pages to find out what children of evil were fiendish enough to complete the sentence! Just think of the maggot’s perseverance that enabled some reporter to invade chez Pérez and extract a picture of Granny that made you feel the bloody act in your fingertips—in your very shoulder joints! Just think of the anticlimax of “scalp Grandma”…“then rob her.” The pointless brilliant anticlimax! Christ, if they’d had more room, they would have added, “then leave all the lights on in her kitchen.”

  At the moment, however, he was too poisonously ill to enjoy it. No, he stood there staring at this latest bit of tabloid genius only to establish the fact, for all to see—and most especially, he hoped, the Dead Mouse himself—that he was on the premises and interested in little else in the world other than the New York City Light.

  Holding the newspaper in his hands and staring at the front page, as if transfixed by the virtuosity of it, he walked the rest of the way across the room and entered his cubicle. It consisted of four-foot-high walls of particleboard in a sickly salmon color, a so-called work station with little high-tech curves at the corners, fencing in a gray metal desk, the ubiquitous computer terminal and keyboard, a plastic desk chair molded in an unpleasant orthopedic fashion and a modular plastic coatrack, which snapped ingeniously onto the modular wall. It was already cracked in the stem. On the rack hung a single drab garment, Peter Fallow’s raincoat, which never left the cubicle.

  Just by the coatrack was a window, and he could see his reflection. Head on, he looked a young and handsome thirty-six rather than fortyish and gone to seed. Head on, his widow’s peak and the longish wavy blond hair that flowed back from it still looked…well, Byronic…rather than a bit lonely on the dome of his skull. Yes, at this head-on angle…it was going to be all right! His long thin nose looked patrician from top to bottom rather than too bulbous in the tip. His big cleft chin did not look overly compromised by the jowls that were forming on either side. His navy blazer, which had been made by Blades eight—no, ten!—years ago was getting a little…shiny…on the lapels…but he could probably raise the nap with one of those wire brushes…He had the beginnings of a belly and was getting too fleshy in the hips and thighs. But this would be no problem now that he was finished with drinking. Never again. He would begin an exercise regimen tonight. Or tomorrow, in any case; he felt too bilious to think about tonight. It wouldn’t be this pathetic American business of jogging, either. It would be something clean, crisp, brisk, strenuous…English. He thought of medicine balls and exercise ladders and leather horses and Indian clubs and pulley weights and parallel bars and stout ropes with leather bindings on the end, and then he realized that these were the apparatus of the gymnasium at Cross Keys, the school he had attended prior to the University of Kent. Dear God…twenty years ago. But he was still only thirty-six, and he was six-foot-two, and he had a perfectly sound physique, fundamentally.

  He pulled in his stomach and drew a deep breath. It made him feel woozy. He picked up the te
lephone 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…