The Bonfire of the Vanities (82 page)

“Out of custody.”

“But why would I be
in
custody?”

“Well, as soon as a new bail is set, you’re in custody until you post bond, unless you post it immediately.”

“Wait a minute, Tommy. You don’t mean that if they raise my bail tomorrow morning, they put me in custody immediately, right there, as soon as the bail is set?”

“Well, yeah. But don’t jump to conclusions.”

“You mean they take me right there in the courtroom?”

“Yeah,
if—
but don’t—”

“Take me and put me
where
?”

“Well, the Bronx House of Dentention, probably. But the point is—”

Sherman began shaking his head. He felt as if the lining of his skull were inflamed. “I can’t do that, Tommy.”

“Don’t immediately assume the worst! There’s things we can do.”

Still shaking his head: “There’s no way I can get half a million dollars this afternoon and put it in a bag.”

“I’m not talking”
—tawkin—
“about anything like that, f’r Chrissake. It’s a bail
hear
ing. The judge has to hear the arguments. We got a good argument.”

“Oh sure,” said Sherman. “You said yourself the thing’s a political football.” He hung his head and shook it some more. “Jesus Christ, Tommy, I can’t do it.”

Ray Andriutti was whaling down his pepperoni and his coffee swill, and Jimmy Caughey held half a roast-beef hero up in the air like a baton while he talked to somebody on the telephone about some piece a shit he’d been assigned to. Kramer wasn’t hungry. He kept reading the story in
The City Light
. He was fascinated. Rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month. The revelation didn’t really affect the case much one way or the other. Maria Ruskin wouldn’t come off as quite the sympathetic little lovely who had wowed them in the grand-jury room, but she’d make a good witness all the same. And when she did her “Shuhmun” duet with Roland Auburn, he’d have Sherman McCoy cocked and locked. Rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month. Did he dare call Mr. Hiellig Winter? Why not? He should interview him in any case…see if he can amplify the relationship of Maria Ruskin and Sherman McCoy as it pertains to…to…to rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month.

Sherman walked out of the living room and into the entry gallery and listened to the sound of his shoes on the solemn green marble. Then he turned and listened to himself walking across the marble to the library. In the library there was still one lamp, by a chair, that he hadn’t turned on. So he turned it on. The entire apartment, both floors, was blazing with light and throbbing with stillness. His heart was working away at a good clip. In custody—tomorrow they would put him back
in there
! He wanted to cry out, but there was no one in this vast apartment to cry out to; nor anyone outside it.

He thought of a knife. In the abstract, it was so steely efficient, a long kitchen knife. But then he tried to enact it in his mind. Where would he thrust it in? Could he stand it? What if he made a bloody mess of it? Throw himself out a window. How long before he hit the pavement from this height? Seconds…interminable seconds…in which he would think of what? Of what it would do to Campbell, of how he was taking the coward’s way out. Was he even serious about it? Or was this just superstitious speculation, in which he presumed if he thought of the worst he could bear…the actual
…back in there?
No, he couldn’t bear it.

He picked up the telephone and called the number in Southampton again. No answer; there had been no answer all evening, despite the fact that, according to his mother, Judy and Campbell, Bonita, Miss Lyons, and the dachshund had left the house on East Seventy-third Street for Southampton before noon. Had his mother seen the newspaper article? Yes. Had Judy seen it? Yes. His mother hadn’t even been able to bring herself to comment on it. It was too sordid to discuss. Then how much worse it had been for Judy! She hadn’t gone to Southampton at all! She had decided to disappear, taking Campbell with her…to the Midwest…back to Wisconsin…A flash of memory…the bleak plains punctuated only by silvery aluminum water towers, in the shape of modernistic mushrooms, and clumps of wispy trees…A sigh…Campbell would be better off there than in New York living with the degraded memory of a father who in fact no longer existed…a father cut off from everything that defined a human being, except his name, which was now that of a villainous cartoon that newspapers, television, and slanderers of every sort were free to make sport of as they saw fit…Sinking, sinking, sinking, he gave himself up to ignominy and self-pity…until on about the twelfth ring someone picked up the telephone.

“Hello?”

“Judy?”

A pause. “I thought it might be you,” said Judy.

“I suppose you saw the story,” Sherman said.

“Yes.”

“Well, look—”

“Unless you want me to hang up right now, don’t even talk about it. Don’t even begin.”

He hesitated. “How is Campbell?”

“She’s doing all right.”

“How much does she know?”

“She understands that there’s trouble. She knows something’s up. I don’t think she knows what. Fortunately, school is over, although it’ll be bad enough out here.”

“Let me explain—”

“Don’t. I don’t want to listen to your explanations. I’m sorry, Sherman, but I don’t feel like having my intelligence insulted. Not any more than it already has been.”

“All right, but I ought to at least tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going back into custody tomorrow. Back into jail.”

Softly: “Why?”

Why?
It doesn’t matter why! I cry out to you—to hold me! But I no longer have the right! So he merely explained to her the problem of the increased bail.

“I see,” she said.

He waited a moment, but that was it. “Judy, I just don’t know if I can do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was horrible the first time, and I was only inside for a few hours in a temporary detention pen. This time it’ll be in the Bronx House of Detention.”

“But only until you post bail.”

“But I don’t know if I can even take a day of it, Judy. After all this publicity, it’ll be full of people…who
have it in for me…
I mean, it’s bad enough even when they don’t know who you are. You can’t imagine what it’s like—” He stopped.
I want to cry out to you!
But he had lost the right.

She picked up the agony in his voice. “I don’t know what to say to you, Sherman. If I could be with you in some way, I would. But you keep cutting the ground out from under me. We’ve had this same conversation before. What do I have left to give you? I just…feel so sorry for you, Sherman. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“Judy?”

“Yes?”

“Tell Campbell I love her very much. Tell her…tell her to think of her father as the person who was here before all this happened. Tell her that all this does something to you and that you can never be the same person again.”

Desperately he wanted Judy to ask him what he meant. At even the most tentative invitation he was ready to pour out everything he felt. But all she said was:

“I’m sure she’ll always love you, no matter what.”

“Judy?”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember when we used to live in the Village, the way I used to go off to work?”

“The way you used to go off to work?”

“When I first started working for Pierce & Pierce? The way I used to give you the raised left fist when I left the apartment, the Black Power salute?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“You remember why?”

“I guess so.”

“It was supposed to say that yes, I was going to work on Wall Street, but my heart and soul would never belong to it. I would use it and rebel and break with it. You remember all that?”

Judy said nothing.

“I know it didn’t work out that way,” he went on, “but I remember what a lovely feeling it was. Don’t you?”

Again silence.

“Well, now I’ve broken with Wall Street. Or Wall Street’s broken with me. I know it’s not the same thing, but in an odd way I feel liberated.” He stopped, hoping to coax a comment.

Finally Judy said, “Sherman?”

“Yes?”

“That’s a memory, Sherman, but it’s not alive.” Her voice broke. “All our memories of that time have been terribly abused. I know you want me to tell you something else, but I’ve been betrayed and I’ve been humiliated. I wish I could be something I was a long time ago and help you, but I can’t.”
Snuffling back tears
.

“It would help if you could forgive me—if you would give me one last chance.”

“You asked me that once before, Sherman. All right, I forgive you. And I’ll ask you again: What does that change?” She was crying softly.

He had no answer, and that was that.

Afterward, he sat in the brilliant blazing stillness of the library. He sank back into the swivel chair at his desk. He was aware of the pressure of the edge of the seat on the underside of his thighs. Ox-blood Moroccan leather; $1,100 just to cover the back and the seat of this one chair. The library door was open. He looked out into the entry gallery. There on the marble floor he could see the extravagantly curved legs of one of the Thomas Hope armchairs. Not a mahogany reproduction but one of the rosewood originals. Rosewood! The childish joy with which Judy had discovered her rosewood originals!

The telephone rang.
She was calling back!
He picked up the receiver at once.

“Hello?”

“Ayyyyy, Sherman.” His heart sank again. It was Killian. “I want you to come on back down here. Got something to show you.”

“You’re still at your office?”

“Quigley’s here, too. We got something to show you.”

“What is it?”

“Just as soon not talk about it”
—tawkaboudit—
“on the telephone. I want you to come on down here.”

“All right…I’ll leave right now.”

He wasn’t sure he could have remained in the apartment another minute, in any case.

At the old building on Reade Street, the night watchman, who appeared to be Cypriot or Armenian, was listening to a country-music station on a huge portable radio. Sherman had to stop and write down his name and the time on a ledger. In a thick accent the watchman kept joining in the chorus of the song:

Which came out:

Sherman took the elevator up, walked through the dingy stillness of the corridor, and came to the door with the incised plastic sign that read
DERSHKIN, BELLAVITA, FISHBEIN & SCHLOSSEL
. For an instant he thought of his father. The door was locked. He rapped on it, and after five or ten seconds Ed Quigley opened it.

“Ayyyyy! Come on in!” said Quigley. His dour face was all lit up.
Beaming
is the word. All of a sudden he was Sherman’s warmest pal. Half a chuckle bubbled out of him as he led Sherman toward Killian’s office.

Killian was standing inside with the smile of the cat that ate the canary. On his desk was a large tape machine that was obviously from the higher and more sophisticated reaches of the Audio-Visual Kingdom.

“Ayyyyyyyyyy!” said Killian. “Have a seat. Get a good grip on yourself. Wait’ll you hear this.”

Sherman sat down beside the desk. “What is it?”

“You tell me,” said Killian. Quigley stood next to Killian, looking at the machine and fidgeting like a schoolboy onstage to receive a prize. “I don’t want to get your hopes up too high over this thing,” said Killian, “because there’s a couple very serious problems with it, but you’ll find it interesting.”

He pushed something on the machine, and a stream of low static began. Then a man’s voice:

“I knew it. I knew it at the time. We should have reported it immediately.” For the first second or so he didn’t recognize it. then it sank in.
My own voice!
It continued: “I can’t believe I’m—I can’t believe we’re in this situation.”

A woman’s voice: “Well, it’s too late now, Sherman.”
Shuhmun
. “That’s spilt milk.”

The entire scene—the fear, the tension, the very atmosphere of it—flooded through Sherman’s nervous system…In her hideaway the evening the first article about Henry Lamb appeared in
The City Light…
HONOR STUDENT’S MOM: COPS SIT ON HIT’N’RUN
…He could see the headline itself on top of the oak pedestal table…

His voice: “Just…tell what actually happened.”

Her voice: “That’ll sound
wonderful
. Two boys stopped us and tried to rob us, but you threw a tire at one of them, and I drove outta there like a…a
…hot
-rodder, but I didn’t know I hit anybody.”

“Well, that’s exactly what happened, Maria.”

“And who’s gonna believe it?…”

Sherman looked at Killian. Killian had a tight little smile on his face. He raised his right hand as if to caution Sherman to keep listening and not speak yet. Quigley kept his eyes fixed on the magical machine. His lips were pursed to hold back the broad grin he felt he was due.

Soon the Giant arrived. “
You
live here?”

His own voice: “I said we don’t have time for this.” He sounded terribly snooty and precious. All over again he felt the humiliation of that moment, the dreadful feeling that he was about to be forced into a masculine duel, very likely physical, that he could not possibly win.

“
You
don’t live here, and
she
don’t live here. What you doing here?”

The snooty fellow: “That’s not your concern! Now, be a good fellow and leave!”

“
You
don’t belong here. Okay? We got a real problem.”

Then Maria’s voice…the squabbling…a tremendous crack, as the chair breaks and the Giant hits the floor…his ignominious retreat…Maria’s whoops of laughter…