Free The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe Page B

First Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street. He felt buoyant. Just why, he couldn’t have explained. The discovery of the lovely little Mrs. Lueger…yes, but in fact he always left the bus stop in a good mood. The Best School, the Best Girls, the Best Families, the Best Section of the capital of the Western world in the late twentieth century—but the only part that stuck in his mind was the sensation of Campbell’s little hand holding his. That was why he felt so good. The touch of her trusting, utterly dependent little hand was life itself!
    Then his spirits sank. He was walking along at a good clip, his eyes idly panning the façades of the brownstone houses. On this gray morning they looked old and depressing. Shapeless polyethylene bags of trash, in shades of Dogshit Brown and Turd Green, were deposited in front of them, out by the curbs. The bags had a slimy-looking surface. How could people live this way? Just two blocks away was Maria’s apartment…Ralston Thorpe’s was around here somewhere…Sherman and Rawlie had gone to Buckley, St. Paul’s, and Yale together, and now they both worked at Pierce & Pierce. Rawlie had moved from a sixteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue to the top two floors of a brownstone somewhere along here after his divorce. Very depressing. Sherman had taken a nice big step toward a divorce last night, hadn’t he? Not only had Judy caught him, in flagrante telephone , as it were, but then he, abject creature of lust that he was, had gone ahead and gotten laid—right! nothing more than that! —laid!— and not returned home for forty-five minutes…What would it do to Campbell if he and Judy ever broke up? He couldn’t imagine his life after such a thing. Weekend visitation rights with his own daughter? What was that phrase they used? “Quality time”? So tawdry, so tawdry…Campbell’s soul hardening, month by month, into a brittle little shell…
    By the time he had gone half a block, he hated himself. He felt like turning around and heading back to the apartment and begging forgiveness and swearing never again . He felt like it, but he knew he wouldn’t do it. That would make him late getting to the office, which was much frowned upon at Pierce & Pierce. No one ever said anything openly, but you were supposed to get there early and start making money…and master the universe. A surge of adrenaline—the Giscard! He was closing in on the biggest deal of his life, the Giscard, the gold-backed bond—Master of the Universe!—then he sank again. Judy had slept on the daybed in the dressing room of their bedroom suite. She was still asleep, or pretending to be, when he got up. Well, thank God for that. He hadn’t relished another round with her this morning, especially with Campbell or Bonita listening in. Bonita was one of those South American servants with perfectly pleasant but nonetheless formal demeanors. To display temper or anguish in front of her would be a gaffe. No wonder marriages used to hold up better. Sherman’s parents and their friends had all had plenty of servants, and the servants had worked long hours and lived in. If you were unwilling to argue in front of the servants, then there wasn’t much opportunity to argue at all.
    So in the best McCoy manner, just as his father would have done it—except that he couldn’t imagine his father ever being in such a jam—Sherman had kept up appearances. He had breakfast in the kitchen with Campbell, while Bonita got her through breakfast and ready for school. Bonita had a portable television set in the kitchen, and she kept turning toward it to watch the news report of the riot in Harlem. It was hot stuff, but Sherman hadn’t paid attention to it. It had all seemed so remote…the sort of thing that happened out there…among those people…He had been busy trying to pump out charm and cheeriness so that Bonita and Campbell wouldn’t sense the poisonous atmosphere that enveloped the household.
    By now Sherman had walked