by
Tom Wolfe
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The end of the trading day was like the end of a battle. After five o'clock the Masters of the Universe took care of all the things people in other businesses spent the entire day doing. They figured out the "net net," which is to say, the actual profit and loss for the day's work. They reviewed the markets, reviewed strategies, discussed personnel problems, researched new issues, and did all the reading of the financial press that was forbidden during the daily battle. They told war stories and beat their breasts and yodeled, if they deserved it. The one thing you never did was simply go home to the wife'n'kiddies.
How should he look? Should he put his jacket and tie back on? He had on a white shirt, the pants of a gray nailhead worsted suit and a pair of black cap-toed shoes. With the tie and the jacket on, he would look terribly Wall Street, terribly conservative. They might resent that. He hurried into the other bedroom, which had become his dressing room, and took a tweed jacket with a plaid design from the closet and slipped it on. Time rolling by, rolling by. Much more casual, relaxed; a man in his own home, completely relaxed. But the soft tweed jacket didn't go with the hard-finished pants. Besides ... a sport jacket . . . a sport... a young rip who takes wild rides in a sports roadster ... He took off the tweed jacket and threw it on the daybed and hurried back to the master bedroom. His jacket and tie were strewn across a stuffed chair. He put on the tie and pulled it up into a tight knot. Time rolling by, rolling by. He put on the jacket and buttoned it. He lifted his chin and squared his shoulders. Wall Street. He went into the bathroom and brushed his hair back. He lifted his chin again. Be strong. A Master of the Universe.
Had to kill some time to make it plausible that he went to Freddy Button's building and dropped off a note and came back. He walked over to Madison Avenue ... the Whitney Museum ... the Carlyle Hotel . . . Three men came out of the door that led to the Cafe Carlyle. They were about his age. They were talking and laughing, with their heads thrown back, blissfully boiled ... All three carried attache cases, and two of them wore dark suits, white shirts, and pale yellow ties with small print patterns. These pale yellow ties had become the insignia of the worker bees of the business world . . . What the hell did they have to laugh and crow about, other than the alcoholic buzz in their brains, the poor deluded
He was experiencing the resentment of those who discover that, despite their own grave condition, the world goes on about its business, heartless, without even so much as a long face.
But there was a yet more compelling reason for the hired car and driver. It would be perfectly okay for the two of them to arrive for dinner at a Good Building (the going term) on Fifth Avenue by taxi, and it would cost less than three dollars. But what would they do after the party? How could they walk out of the Bavardages' building and have all the world, tout le monde, see them standing out in the street, the McCoys, that game couple, their hands up in the air, bravely, desperately, pathetically trying to hail a taxi? The doormen would be no help, because they would be tied up ushering tout le monde to their limousines. So he had hired this car and this driver, this white-haired driver, who would drive them six blocks, wait three and a half or four hours, then drive them six blocks and depart. Including a 15 percent tip and the sales tax, the cost would be $197.20 or $246.50, depending on whether they were charged for four or five hours in all.
Hemorrhaging money! Did he even have a job left! Churning fear . . . Lopwitz . . . Surely, Lopwitz wouldn't sack him . . . because of three miserable days . . . and $6 million, you ninny! . . . Must start cutting back . . . tomorrow . . . Tonight, of course, it was imperative to have a car and driver.
To make matters worse, the driver couldn't pull up to the sidewalk near the entrance, because so many limousines were in the way. He had to double-park. Sherman and Judy had to thread their way between the limousines . . . Envy . . . envy . . . From the license plates Sherman could tell that these limousines were not hired. They were owned by those whose sleek hides were hauled here in them. A chauffeur, a good one willing to work long hours and late hours, cost $36,000 a year, minimum; garage space, maintenance, insurance, would cost another $14,000 at least; a total of $50,000, none of it deductible. I make a million dollars a year -- and yet I can't afford that!
Sherman despaired. He despaired of this evening and of this life. Why hadn't he gone to Knoxville six months ago? A little Georgian house, a leaf-blowing machine, a badminton net in the back yard for Campbell . . . But no! He had to tag along behind this walnut-eyed German, heading for the home of some overbearingly vulgar people named Bavardage, a glorified traveling salesman and his wife.
He surveyed the crowd and immediately sensed a pattern . . . presque vu! presque vu! almost seen! . . . and yet he couldn't have put it into words. That would have been beyond him. All the men and women in this hall were arranged in clusters, conversational bouquets, so to speak. There were no solitary figures, no strays. All faces were white. (Black faces might show up, occasionally, at fashionable charity dinners but not in fashionable private homes.) There were no men under thirty-five and precious few under forty. The women came in two varieties. First, there were women in their late thirties and in their forties and older (women "of a certain age"), all of them skin and bones (starved to near perfection). To compensate for the concupiscence missing from their juiceless ribs and atrophied backsides, they turned to the dress designers. This season no puffs, flounces, pleats, ruffles, bibs, bows, battings, scallops, laces, darts, or shirrs on the bias were too extreme. They were the social X rays, to use the phrase that had bubbled up into Sherman's own brain. Second, there were the so-called Lemon Tarts. These were women in their twenties or early thirties, mostly blondes (the Lemon in the Tarts), who were the second, third, and fourth wives or live-in girlfriends of men over forty or fifty or sixty (or seventy), the sort of women men refer to, quite without thinking, as girls. This season the Tart was able to flaunt the natural advantages of youth by showing her legs from well above the knee and emphasizing her round bottom (something no X ray had). What was entirely missing from chez Bavardage was that manner of woman who is neither very young nor very old, who has laid in a lining of subcutaneous fat, who glows with plumpness and a rosy face that speaks, without a word, of home and hearth and hot food ready at six and stories read aloud at night and conversations while seated on the edge of the bed, just before the Sandman comes. In short, no one ever invited . . . Mother.
ugh he's so cruel
He was stranded again. To his right, Maria was still deep in conversation with Lord Buffing. He was facing social death once more. He was a man sitting utterly solo at a dinner table. The hive buzzed all around him. Everyone else was in a state of social bliss. Only he was stranded. Only he was a wallflower with no conversational mate, a social light of no wattage whatsoever in the Bavardage Celebrity Zoo . . . My life is coming apart!and yet through everything else in his overloaded central nervous system burned the shamethe shame!of social incompetence.
He stared at Huck Thigg's hardened vines in the center of the table, as if a student of floral arrangements. Then he put a smirk on his face, as if confidently amused. He took a deep gulp of wine and looked across to the other table, as if he had caught the eye of someone there ... He smiled ... He murmured soundlessly toward vacant spots on the wall. He drank some more wine and studied the hardened vines some more. He counted the vertebrae in Mrs. Rawthrote's backbone. He was happy when one of the waiters, one of the varones from the country, materialized and refilled his glass of wine.
lmao this is so neil it's amazing i didn't read this before
The dessert was apricot souffle, prepared individually, for each diner, in a stout little crock of the Normandy sort, with borders au rustaud painted by hand near the rim. Rich desserts were back in fashion this season. The sort of dessert that showed you were conscious of calories and cholesterol, all the berries and melon balls with dollops of sherbet, had become just a bit Middle America. On top of that, to be able to serve twenty-four individual souffles was a tour de force. It required quite a kitchen and a staff and a half.
"To tell you the truth," said Sherman, "this really surprises me. MariaMaria's not the cautious type. She's an adventuress. She's a gambler. This little Southern girl, from nowhere, who makes it to 962 Fifth Avenue ... I don't know . . . And this may sound naive, but I think she genuinely . . . feels something for me. I think she loves me."
"I bet she loves 962 Fifth, too," said Killian. "Maybe she figures it's time to stop gambling."
Vogel had managed to find a waiter and order some beer. He also asked for some chopsticks. The Huan Li was so frankly commercial and unconcerned about authenticity, they set the tables with ordinary hotel silverware. How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements . . . How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles. While chasing some sort of slippery little dumpling around a bowl, Vogel said to Fallow, "Well, Pete, tell the truth. Didn't I tell you? Didn't I tell you this was gonna be a great story?"