Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Author:Tom Wolfe [Wolfe, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312427573
Publisher: Picador
Published: 1987-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

The Bavardages’ dining room walls had been painted with so many coats of burnt-apricot lacquer, fourteen in all, they had the glassy brilliance of a pond reflecting a campfire at night. The room was a triumph of nocturnal reflections, one of many such victories by Ronald Vine, whose forte was the creation of glitter without the use of mirrors. Mirror Indigestion was now regarded as one of the gross sins of the 1970s. So in the early 1980s, from Park Avenue to Fifth, from Sixty-second Street to Ninety-sixth, there had arisen the hideous cracking sound of acres of hellishly expensive plate-glass mirror being pried off the walls of the great apartments. No, in the Bavardages’ dining room one’s eyes fluttered in a cosmos of glints, twinkles, sparkles, highlights, sheens, shimmering pools, and fiery glows that had been achieved in subtler ways, by using lacquer, glazed tiles in a narrow band just under the ceiling cornices, gilded English Regency furniture, silver candelabra, crystal bowls, School of Tiffany vases, and sculpted silverware that was so heavy the knives weighed on your fingers like saber handles.

The two dozen diners were seated at a pair of round Regency tables. The banquet table, the sort of Sheraton landing field that could seat twenty-four if you inserted all the leaves, had disappeared from the smarter dining rooms. One shouldn’t be so formal, so grand. Two small tables were much better. So what if these two small tables were surrounded and bedecked by a buildup of objets, fabrics, and bibelots so lush it would have made the Sun King blink? Hostesses such as Inez Bavardage prided themselves on their gift for the informal and the intimate.

To underscore the informality of the occasion there had been placed, in the middle of each table, deep within the forest of crystal and silver, a basket woven from hardened vines in a highly rustic Appalachian Handicrafts manner. Wrapped around the vines, on the outside of the basket, was a profusion of wildflowers. In the center of the basket were massed three or four dozen poppies. This faux-naïf centerpiece was the trademark of Huck Thigg, the young florist, who would present the Bavardages with a bill for $3,300 for this one dinner party.

Sherman stared at the plaited vines. They looked like something dropped by Gretel or little Heidi of Switzerland at a feast of Lucullus. He sighed. All…too much. Maria was sitting next to him, on his right, chattering away at the cadaverous Englishman, whatever his name was, who was on her right. Judy was at the other table—but had a clear view of him and Maria. He had to talk to Maria about the interrogation by the two detectives—but how could he do it with Judy looking right at them? He’d do it with an innocuous party grin on his face. That was it! He’d grin through the whole discussion! She’d never know the difference…Or would she?…Arthur Ruskin was at Judy’s table…But thank God, he was four seats away from her…wouldn’t

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