Kramer had reached that low point in the life of an assistant district attorney in the Bronx when he is assailed by Doubts. Every year forty thousand people, forty thousand incompetents, dimwits, alcoholics, psychopaths, knockabouts, good souls driven to some terrible terminal anger, and people who could only be described as stone evil, were arrested in the Bronx. Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow. Fifty judges, thirty-five law clerks, 245 assistant district attorneys, one D.A.—the thought of which made Kramer twist his lips in a smile, because no doubt Weiss was up there on the sixth floor right now screaming at Channel 4 or 7 or 2 or 5 about the television coverage he didn't get yesterday and wants today—and Christ knew how many criminal lawyers, Legal Aid lawyers, court reporters, court clerks, court officers, correction officers, probation officers, social workers, bail bondsmen, special investigators, case clerks, court psychiatrists—what a vast swarm had to be fed! And every morning the chow came in, the chow and the Doubts.

The sound of the enormous old car door opening and the sight of this little figure getting out were depressing. The judge, Mike Kovitsky, comes to work in a greaser yacht practically ten years old. As a Supreme Court judge, he made $65,100. Kramer knew the figures by heart. He had maybe $45,000 left after taxes. For a sixty-year-old man in the upper reaches of the legal profession, that was pathetic. Downtown ... in the world of Andy Heller . . . they were paying people right out of law school that much to start. And this man whose car goes thwop every time he opens the door is at the top of the hierarchy here in the island fortress. He, Kramer, occupied some uncertain position in the middle. If he played his cards right and managed to ingratiate himself with the Bronx Democratic organization, this— -- thwop!— was the eminence to which he might aspire three decades from now.

As the alarm rang in his head, Kramer grew still more depressed.

Right then and there he made up his mind. He was going to do something— -- something startling, something rash, something desperate, whatever it took. He was going to break out of here. He was going to rise up from this muck. He was going to light up the sky, seize the Life for himself --—

He could see the girl with brown lipstick again, just as surely as if she were standing right next to him in this sad grim place.

As soon as they reached the bus stop, Campbell pulled free. The parents who brought their girls to the Taliaferro bus stop in the morning were a cheery bunch. What a chipper mood they were always in! Sherman began saying his good mornings. Edith Tompkins, John Channing, MacKenzie Reed's mother, Kirby Coleman's nanny, Leonard Schorske, Mrs. Lueger. When he got to Mrs. Lueger—he had never known her first name—he did a double take. She was a thin pale blond woman who never wore makeup. This morning she must have rushed down to the bus stop with her daughter at the last minute. She was wearing a man's blue button-down shirt with the top two buttons unbuttoned. She had on a pair of old blue jeans and some ballet slippers. The jeans were very tight. She had a terrific little body. He had never noticed that before. Really quite terrific! She looked so ... pale and half-awake and vulnerable. You know, what you need is a cup of coffee, Mrs. Lueger. Come on, I'm going over to that coffee shop on Lexington. Oh, that's silly, Mr. McCoy. Come on up to the apartment. I have some coffee already made. He stared at her for a good two seconds longer than he should have, and then . . . pop ... the bus arrived, a big solid Greyhound-size vehicle, and the children bounded up the steps.

Sherman turned away, then looked back at Mrs. Lueger. But she wasn't looking at him. She was walking toward her apartment building. The back seam of her jeans practically clove her in two. There were whitish spots on either side of the seat. They were like highlights for the flesh that welled up underneath. What a marvelous bottom she had! And he had always thought of these women as moms. Who knew what hot little fires burned within these moms?

By now Sherman had walked as far as Lexington Avenue. He always stopped at a candy store near the corner and bought the Times. As he turned the corner, a girl was heading toward him, a tall girl with a lot of blond hair. A large handbag hung from her shoulder by a strap. She was walking rapidly, as if heading for the subway at Seventy-seventh Street. She had on a long sweater that was wide open down the front, revealing a polo shirt with a little embroidered emblem over the left breast. She wore some sort of go-to-hell white pants that were very loose and floppy in the legs but exceptionally tight in the crotch. Exceptionally! There was an astonishing crevice. Sherman stared and then looked at her face. She stared right back. She looked him right in the eye and smiled. She didn't slow down or give him a provocative look. It was a confident, optimistic look that as much as said, "Hi! We're a couple of good-looking animals, aren't we!" So frank! So unabashed! So eagerly immodest!

The investment-banking firm of Pierce & Pierce occupied the fiftieth, fifty-first, fifty-second, fifty-third, and fifty-fourth floors of a glass tower that rose up sixty stories from out of the gloomy groin of Wall Street. The bond trading room, where Sherman worked, was on the fiftieth. Every day he stepped out of an aluminum-walled elevator into what looked like the reception area of one of those new London hotels catering to the Yanks. Near the elevator door was a fake fireplace and an antique mahogany mantelpiece with great bunches of fruit carved on each corner. Out in front of the fake fireplace was a brass fence or fender, as they called it in country homes in the west of England. In the appropriate months a fake fire glowed within, casting flickering lights upon a prodigious pair of brass andirons. The wall surrounding it was covered in more mahogany, rich and reddish, done in linen-fold panels carved so deep, you could feel the expense in the tips of your fingers by just looking at them.

How these sons of the great universities, these legatees of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Frederick Jackson Turner, William Lyons Phelps, Samuel Flagg Bemis, and the other three-name giants of American scholarship— -- how these inheritors of the lux and the veritas now flocked to Wall Street and to the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce! How the stories circulated on every campus! If you weren't making $250,000 a year within five years, then you were either grossly stupid or grossly lazy. That was the word. By age thirty, $500,000 -- —and that sum had the taint of the mediocre. By age forty you were either making a million a year or you were timid and incompetent. Make it now! That motto burned in every heart, like myocarditis. Boys on Wall Street, mere boys, with smooth jawlines and clean arteries, boys still able to blush, were buying three-million-dollar apartments on Park and Fifth. (Why wait?) They were buying thirty-room, four-acre summer places in Southampton, places built in the 1920s and written off in the 1950s as white elephants, places with decaying servants' wings, and they were doing over the servants' wings, too, and even adding on. (Why not? We've got the servants.) They had carnival rides trucked in and installed on the great green lawns for their children's birthday parties, complete with teams of carnival workers to operate them. (A thriving little industry.)

Masters of the Universe! The roar filled Sherman's soul with hope, confidence, esprit de corps, and righteousness. Yes, righteousness! Judy understood none of this, did she? None of it. Oh, he noticed her eyes glazing over when he talked about it. Moving the lever that moves the world was what he was doing— and all she wanted to know was why he never made it home for dinner. When he did make it home for dinner, what did she want to talk about? Her precious interior-decorating business and how she had gotten their apartment into Architectural Digest, which, frankly, to a true Wall Streeter was a fucking embarrassment. Did she commend him for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that made her decorating and her lunches and whatever the hell else she did possible? No, she did not. She took it for granted . . .

[...] 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.

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—.