Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers! It's the Third World down there! Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans, Colombians, Hon-durans, Koreans, Chinese, Thais, Vietnamese, Ecuadorians, Panamanians, Filipinos, Albanians, Senegalese, and Afro-Americans! Go visit the frontiers, you gutless wonders! Morningside Heights, St. Nicholas Park, Washington Heights, Fort Tryon—por qui pagar mas! The Bronx—the Bronx is finished for you! Riverdale is just a little freeport up there! Pelham Parkway—keep the corridor open to Westchester! Brooklyn—your Brooklyn is no more! Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope—little Hong Kongs, that's all! And Queens! Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Hollis, Jamaica, Ozone Park—whose is it? Do you know? And where does that leave Ridgewood, Bayside, and Forest Hills? Have you ever thought about that! And Staten Island! Do you Saturday do-it-yourselfers really think you're snug in your little rug? You don't think the future knows how to cross a bridge? And you, you Wasp charity-bailers sitting on your mounds of inherited money up in your co-ops with the twelve-foot ceilings and the two wings, one for you and one for the help, do you really think you're impregnable? And you German-Jewish financiers who have finally made it into the same buildings, the better to insulate yourselves from the shtetl herdes, do you really think you're insulated from the Third World!

You poor fatties! You marshmallows! Hens! Cows! You wait'll you have a Reverend Bacon for a mayor, and a City Council and a Board of Estimate with a bunch of Reverend Bacons from one end of the chamber to the other! You'll get to know them then, all right! They'll come see you! They'll come see you at 60 Wall and Number One Chase Manhattan Plaza! They'll sit on your desks and drum their fingers! They'll dust out your safe-deposit boxes for you, free of charge— --

Completely crazy, these things roaring through his head! Absolutely paranoid! Nobody's going to elect Bacon to anything. Nobody's going to march downtown. He knows that. But he feels so alone! Abandoned! Misunderstood! Me! You wait'll you don't have me any longer! See how you like it then! And you let me stand here alone at this lectern with a goddamned asbestos ceiling coming down on my head --

At that very moment, in the very sort of Park Avenue co-op apartment that so obsessed the Mayor . . . twelve-foot ceilings . . . two wings, one for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who own the place and one for the help . . . Sherman McCoy was kneeling in his front hall trying to put a leash on a dachshund. The floor was a deep green marble, and it went on and on. It led to a five-foot-wide walnut staircase that swept up in a sumptuous curve to the floor above. It was the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world. But Sherman burned only with the urge to get out of this fabulous spread of his for thirty minutes.

So here he was, down on both knees, struggling with a dog. The dachshund, he figured, was his exit visa.

Looking at Sherman McCoy, hunched over like that and dressed the way he was, in his checked shirt, khaki pants, and leather boating moccasins, you would have never guessed what an imposing figure he usually cut. Still young . . . thirty-eight years old ... tall . . . almost six-one . . . terrific posture . . . terrific to the point of imperious ... as imperious as his daddy, the Lion of Dunning Sponget ... a full head of sandy-brown hair ... a long nose ... a prominent chin ... He was proud of his chin. The McCoy chin; the Lion had it, too. It was a manly chin, a big round chin such as Yale men used to have in those drawings by Gibson and Leyendecker, an aristocratic chin, if you want to know what Sherman thought. He was a Yale man himself.

Three rings, and a woman's voice: "Hello?"

But it was not Maria's voice. He figured it must be her friend Germaine, the one she sublet the apartment from. So he said: "May I speak to Maria, please?"

The woman said: "Sherman? Is that you?"

Christ! It's Judy! He's dialed his own apartment! He's aghast -- —paralyzed!

"Sherman?"

He hangs up. Oh Jesus. What can he do? He'll bluff it out. When she asks him, he'll say he doesn't know what she's talking about. After all, he said only five or six words. How can she be sure?

But it was no use. She'd be sure, all right. Besides, he was no good at bluffing. She'd see right through him. Still, what else could he do?

In blithe moments, when King Priapus reigned, with no crises in his domain, Sherman made this climb up to Maria's with a romantic relish. How bohemian! How . . . real this place was! How absolutely right for these moments when the Master of the Universe stripped away the long-faced proprieties of Park Avenue and Wall Street and let his rogue hormones out for a romp! Maria's one room, with its closet for a kitchen and another closet for a bathroom, this so-called apartment of hers, fourth floor rear, which she sublet from her friend Germaine— -- well, it was perfect. Germaine was something else again. Sherman had met her twice. She was built like a fire hydrant. She had a ferocious hedge of hair on her upper lip, practically a mustache. Sherman was convinced she was a lesbian. But so what? It was all real! Squalid! New York! A rush of fire in the loins!

But tonight Priapus did not rule. Tonight the grimness of the old brownstone weighed on the Master of the Universe.

Only the dachshund was happy. He was hauling his belly up the stairs at a merry clip. It was warm and dry in here, and familiar.

"Well, if you're already in trouble, and you haven't even done anything, then you might as well do something, since it's all the same difference."

Then she touched him.

King Priapus, he who had been scared to death, now rose up from the dead.

Sprawled on the bed, Sherman caught a glimpse of the dachshund. The beast had gotten up off the rug and had walked over to the bed and was looking up at them and switching his tail.

Christ! Was there by any chance some way a dog could indicate . . . Was there anything dogs did that showed they had seen . . . Judy knew about animals. She clucked and fussed over Marshall's every mood, until it was revolting. Was there something dachshunds did after observing . . . But then his nervous system began to dissolve, and he no longer cared.

His Majesty, the most ancient king, Priapus, Master of the Universe, had no conscience.

Sherman went over to the desk and sat down in his Hepple-white swivel chair. He slumped back. His eyes lit on the frieze that ran around the ceiling of the little room. It was carved of Indian redwood, in high relief, in the form of figures hurrying along a city sidewalk. Judy had had it done in Hong Kong for an astonishing amount . . . of my money. Then he leaned forward. Goddamn her. Desperately he tried to relight the fires of righteous indignation. His parents had been right, hadn't they? He deserved better. She was two years older than he was, and his mother had said such things could matter -- —which, the way she said it, meant it would matter, and had he listened? Ohhhhh no. His father, supposedly referring to Cowles Wilton, who had a short messy marriage to some obscure little Jewish girl, had said, "Isn't it just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl from a good family?" And had he listened? Ohhhhhh no. And all these years, Judy, as the daughter of a Midwestern history professor -- —a Midwestern history professor!— -- had acted as if she was an intellectual aristocrat—but she hadn't minded using his money and his family to get in with this new social crowd of hers and start her decorating business and smear their names and their apartment across the pages of these vulgar publications, W and Architectural Digest and the rest of them, had she? Ohhhhhhhhh no, not for a minute! And what was he left with? A forty-year-old bolting off to her Sports Training classes—— --
-- and all at once, he sees her as he first saw her that night fourteen years ago in the Village at Hal Thorndike's apartment with the chocolate-brown walls and the huge table covered with obelisks and the crowd that went considerably beyond bohemian, if he understood bohemian -- —and the girl with the light brown hair and the fine, fine features and the wild short skimpy dress that revealed so much of her perfect little body. And all at once he feels the ineffable way they closed themselves up in the perfect cocoon, in his little apartment on Charles Street and her little apartment on West Nineteenth, immune to all that his parents and Buckley and St. Paul's and Yale had ever imposed on him—and he remembers how he told her—in practically these words!—that their love would transcend . . . everything—— -- and now she, forty years old, starved and Sports Trained to near-perfection, goes crying off to bed.

He slumped back in the swivel chair once more. Like many a man before him, he was no match, at last, for a woman's tears. He hung his noble chin over his collarbone. He folded.

The gloom was right. The presence of the baby nurse had made him and Rhoda acutely aware of what a dump they lived in. This entire apartment, known as a 3 1/2-room in New York real-estate parlance, had been created out of what had once been a pleasant but by no means huge bedroom on the third floor of a town house, with three windows overlooking the street. The so-called room he now stood in was really nothing more than a slot that had been created by inserting a plasterboard wall. The slot had one of the windows. What was left of the original room was now called a living room, and it had the other two windows. Back by the door to the hallway were two more slots, one for a kitchen two people couldn't pass each other in, and the other for a bathroom. Neither had a window. The place was like one of those little ant colonies you can buy, but it cost them $888 a month, rent-stabilized. If it hadn't been for the rent-stabilization law, it would have cost probably $1,500, which would be out of the question. And they had been happy to find it! My God, there were college graduates his age, thirty-two, all over New York who were dying to find an apartment like this, a 3 1/2, with a view, in a town house, with high ceilings, rent-stabilized, in the West Seventies! Truly pathetic, wasn't it? They could barely afford it when they were both working and their combined salaries had been $56,000 a year, $41,000 after deductions. The plan had been that Rhoda's mother would give them the money as a sort of baby present to hire a baby nurse for four weeks, while Rhoda got back on her feet and went back to work. In the meantime, they would find an au pair girl to live in and look after the baby in return for room and board. Rhoda's mother had come through with her part of the plan, but it was already obvious that this au pair girl who was willing to sleep on a convertible couch in the living room in an ant colony on the West Side did not exist. Rhoda would not be able to go back to work. They were going to have to get by on his $25,OOO-after-taxes, and the yearly rent here in this dump, even with the help of rent stabilization, was $10,656.

The subway stop where he could catch the D train to the Bronx was at Eighty-first Street and Central Park West. He liked to walk across to Central Park West on Seventy-seventh Street and then walk up to Eighty-first, because that took him past the Museum of Natural History. It was a beautiful block, the most beautiful block on the West Side, to Kramer's way of thinking, like a street scene in Paris; not that he had ever been to Paris. Seventy-seventh Street was very wide at that point. On one side was the museum, a marvelous Romanesque Revival creation in an old reddish stone. It was set back in a little park with trees. Even on a cloudy day like this the young spring leaves seemed to glow. Verdant was the word that crossed his mind. On this side of the street, where he was walking, was a cliff of elegant apartment houses overlooking the museum. There were doormen. He got glimpses of marbled halls. And then he thought of the girl with brown lipstick ... He could see her very clearly now, much more clearly than in the dream. He clenched his fist. Damn it! He was going to do it! He was going to call her. He was going to make that telephone call. He'd have to wait until the end of the trial, of course. But he was going to do it. He was tired of watching other people lead . . . The Life. The girl with brown lipstick!— -- the two of them, looking into each other's eyes across a table in one of those restaurants with blond wood and exposed brick and hanging plants and brass and etched glass and menus with crayfish Natchez and veal and plantains mesquite and cornbread with cayenne pepper!

And this young man was . . . Andy Heller! No doubt about it whatsoever. He had been in Kramer's class at Columbia Law School—and how superior Kramer had felt when Andy, chubby bright little Andy, had done the usual thing, namely, gone to work Downtown, for Angstrom & Molner. Andy and hundreds like him would spend the next five or ten years humped over their desks checking commas, document citations, and block phrases to zip up and fortify the greed of mortgage brokers, health-and-beauty-aid manufacturers, merger-and-acquisition arbitragers, and re-insurance discounters—while he, Kramer, would embrace life and wade up to his hips into the lives of the miserable and the damned and stand up on his feet in the courtrooms and fight, mano a mano, before the bar of justice.

And that was the way it had, in fact, turned out. Why, then, did Kramer now hold back? Why didn't he march right up and sing out, "Hi, Andy"? He was no more than twenty feet from his old classmate. Instead, he stopped and turned his head toward the front of the building and put his hand to his face, as if he had something in his eye. He was damned if he felt like having Andy Heller— -- while his doorman held his car door open for him and his driver waited for the signal to depart— -- he was damned if he felt like having Andy Heller look him in the face and say, "Larry Kramer, how you doing!" and then, "What you doing?" And he would have to say, "Well, I'm an assistant district attorney up in the Bronx." He wouldn't even have to add, "Making $36,600 a year." That was common knowledge. All the while, Andy Heller would be scanning his dirty raincoat, his old gray suit, which was too short in the pants, his Nike sneakers, his A&P shopping bag . . . Fuck that . . . Kramer stood there with his head turned, faking a piece of grit in his eye, until he heard the door of the Audi shut. It sounded like a safe closing. He turned around just in time to catch a nice fluffy little cloud of German-luxury-auto fumes in his face as Andy Heller departed for his office. Kramer didn't even want to think about what the goddamned place probably looked like.

Despite everything, the courthouse stirred his soul. Its four great facades were absolute jubilations of sculpture and bas-relief. There were groups of classical figures at every corner. Agriculture, Commerce, Industry, Religion, and the Arts, Justice, Government, Law and Order, and the Rights of Man— noble Romans wearing togas in the Bronx! Such a golden dream of an Apollonian future!

Today, if one of those lovely classical lads ever came down from up there, he wouldn't survive long enough to make it to 162nd Street to get a Choc-o-pop or a blue Shark. They'd whack him out just to get his toga. It was no joke, this precinct, the 44th. On the 158th Street side the courthouse overlooked Franz Sigel Park, which from a sixth-floor window was a beautiful swath of English-style landscaping, a romance of trees, bushes, grass, and rock outcroppings that stretched down the south side of the hill. Practically nobody but him knew the name of Franz Sigel Park anymore, however, because nobody with half a brain in his head would ever go far enough into the park to reach the plaque that bore the name. Just last week some poor devil was stabbed to death at 10:00 a.m. on one of the concrete benches that had been placed in the park in 1971 in the campaign to "provide urban amenities to revitalize Franz Sigel Park and reclaim it for the community." The bench was ten feet inside the park. Somebody killed the man for his portable radio, one of the big ones known in the District Attorney's Office as Bronx attache cases. Nobody from the District Attorney's Office went out into the park on a sunny day in May to have lunch, not even somebody who could bench-press two hundred pounds, the way he could. Not even a court officer, who had a uniform and legally carried a .38, ever did such a thing. They stayed inside the building, this island fortress of the Power, of the white people, like himself, this Gibraltar in the poor sad Sargasso Sea of the Bronx.