Disquiet, Please! by David Remnick

Author:David Remnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-803-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

ANTHONY LANE

JEWELERS’ CAESAR

One of the first scenes in the British writer Fay Weldon’s new novel takes place amid “the peaches and cream décor” of the Bulgari jewelry store on Sloane Street in London.… Readers may not know that Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, paid Ms. Weldon an undisclosed sum for a prominent place in the book, fittingly entitled The Bulgari Connection. —The Times, September 3, 2001

ANT.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your earrings,

Within whose massy hoops, which feed the sense

That craves their argent light, there doth reside

A pearl beyond all price, except to those

Who have already oped their coffers vast

To that esteemed Bulgari, dearest merchant

I’th’affections of my noble friends,

To whom alone this unsurpassing pair

Is now available online, for nought

But fifteen hundred bucks and fifty cents.

Tush, enough of bargains; may mine eyes

Let fall their jewels on this unlucky stiff.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones,

Unless these men of high estate have shown

The foresight to invest with prudence sound

Their assets, hedg’d more thickly than the glade

Wherein Dian, beloved of the moon,

Did trippingly ensnare the panting hart;

For if my Lords of Morgan and of Stanley,

And thou, fair Dean, whose arm doth yet

Embrace old Witter in its reach, do take

The proffered purse, in mutual assurance

Of thy unbounded funds, why then, we yield

The restless clay of this unhappy frame

Sans weeping, for we know our eldest sons

Will never have to do a stroke of work.

Brutus, whose liquidity I doubt,

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it,

Tho’ not as grievously as those who mouth

Their wither’d answers to the empty air,

And find their cell phone orphan’d of all force,

When they forgot to charge it overnight;

Whereas the lusty Panasonick hath

A battery ingenious devised,

The Superflux T20, that endures

More deeply than the blasted oak, whose limbs,

Like to the babe’s, will ne’er be sundered from

The bosom of the earth. And thus, hands-free,

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest

(For Brutus is an honorable man,

So are they all, all honorable men),

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral:

A heavy task, eas’d only by the ride,

More soft than any steed, that I enjoyed

Upon the sooty couch of my sedan.

Ah! Infiniti, whose very name

Doth footings to eternity vouchsafe,

With ABS as standard as the breath

Of mortals; ah, thy wheels, whose alloy trim

Outlives the jasper of the Afric soil,

Or marble of those columns orgulous

Which yet the uneyed Samson did, in love’s

Despite, reduce to flinted waste! And all

For payments down of half a grand a month.

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