Roberta Heilprinn is cool and manipulative, acting not spontaneously but out of some planned strategy to exert her control over others. Even Esther, George notes, like her friend and counterpart, Roberta, manipulates others with her deceptive innocence. It is Amy Van Leer who symbolizes the tragic waste and corruption of this decadent age, her broken and fragmented speech and consequent inability to communicate except by frenzied, half-articulated phrases personifying a corruption and impending decay almost as old as civilization itself: “her life seemed to go back through aeons of iniquity, through centuries of vice and dissipation … [like] the dread Medusa … some ageless creature, some enchantress of Circean cunning whose life was older than the ages and whose heart was old as Hell.” Wolfe leaves no doubt that the serpent has wholly claimed this wastelandish flapper.

He worked tirelessly on the chapter entitled “Mr. Hirsch Was Wounded Sorrowfully,” creating several variants until he was satisfied with his cutting counterpoint depicting the tired lust and bored ennui of the partygoers. The social chatter of the rich whose indiscriminate lust for wealth and power creates the misery of the poor rings with “political correctness.” Only Mr. Robert Ahrens is depicted as a genuine human being. He does not engage in empty conversation and refuses to be baited by Lily Mandell when she asks him about the writer Beddoes. Ahrens’s knowledge is real, not a contrived pastiche like that of Lawrence Hirsch. Amidst the glitter and meaningless chatter, he moves quietly, not engaging in conversation but actually browsing through books in Esther’s library, in contrast to Piggy Logan, who pulls volumes from the shelves and hurls them to the floor.

Young and old, man and woman, they were an ark of lost humanity drifting, doomed, toward some eventual disaster:

Well, here they were then, three dozen of the highest and the best, with shimmer of silk, and ripple of laughter, with the tumultuous babel of fine voices, with tinkle of ice in shell-thin glasses, and with silvern clatter, in thronging webs of beauty, wit and loveliness—as much passion, joy, and hope, and fear, as much triumph and defeat, as much anguish and despair and victory, as much sin, viciousness, cruelty and pride, as much base intrigue and ignoble striving, as much unnoble aspiration as flesh and blood can know, or as a room can hold—enough, God knows, to people hell, inhabit heaven, or fill out the universe—were all here, now, miraculously composed, in magic interweft—at Jack’s.

As Piggy Logan prepares his wire circus, his admiring claque of socialites rudely enters the Jacks’ apartment. Amy, offended by their slight of her beloved Esther, utters her only complete sentences of the evening: “Six little vaginas standing in a row and not a grain of difference between them. Chapin’s School last year. Harvard and their first—this! All these little Junior League bitches.” Piggy Logan’s circus is a grotesque parody of art. His “celebrated sword swallowing act” is a brutal display of ignorance, obscene in its banality. Indeed, the guests themselves seem to be little more than hollow dummies: the young society girl speaking through motionless lips; Krock, the depraved sculptor, making crudely aggressive sexual advances; and even Esther herself forcing George and her closest friend upon each other and enticing them to engage in sexual promiscuity. Finally, the depravity of the partygoers becomes too much for George to endure. He understands that if he remains in this jaded world of illusion and glitter, he too will be destroyed.

After the party, the noises of the great city once again enter the Jacks’ apartment; the cause is the outbreak of a fire in the building. Almost immediately the intimate little group remaining with Esther undergoes some frenzy when it hears the sirens and smells smoke, but eventually everyone joins the “ghostly” procession and leaves the building. The honeycomb of the apartment building takes on an atmosphere of unreality as the dim lights and thick, acrid smoke cast a haze over this world. Wolfe makes this frightening ordeal of escape a kind of hell. From this strange world, a “tide of refugees … marched steadily” out of the building. It seems as if, the old order destroyed as in Frederick’s dream, all humanity comes together in “an extraordinary and bizarre conglomeration—a parade of such fantastic quality as had never been witnessed in the world before.” The lover is moved by this “enormous honeycomb of life,” young and old, rich and poor, speaking together a babel of languages representative of all the languages of mankind. Indeed, the apartment building itself seems a little world representative of the larger world of the city, “with a whole universe of flesh, and blood, a world incarnate with all the ecstasy, anguish, hatred, joy, and vexed intrigue that life could know.” Only a great writer or painter like Shakespeare or Brueghel (or Wolfe perhaps) can present the enormity of such a spectacle. George realizes that this great event unraveling before him, this symphonic sweep of brotherhood and humanity, seems to take on the majesty of a vision, and he notes as well a sense of prophetic doom. For this mass of humanity gathered before him seems like victims of some great shipwreck, like the Titanic, “all the huge honeycomb of life … assembled now, at this last hour of peril, in a living fellowship—the whole family of earth, and all its classes, at length united on these slanting decks.” Man is indeed united in the vast honeycomb of life, and every action is ineluctably interwoven.

Eventually the fire is brought under control and the crowd is dispersed, but there is a sense of foreboding within the small group taking refuge in a little drugstore nearby. These “lords and masters of the earth” have for a moment relinquished the illusion of control to which they have become accustomed. They are like “shipwrecked voyagers … caught up and borne onwards, as unwitting of the power that ruled them as blind flies fastened to the revolutions of a wheel.” Like Hemingway’s ants upon a burning log, Wolfe’s inhabitants are little more than insects blinded to the larger world beyond their small realities and propelled from life to death by forces greater than their own.

The various cells in which concurrent action is taking place are exposed for us to see. For example, in the vast hive of the tunnels beneath the apartment building decisions are being made that will affect the lives of 500 train passengers traveling outward to their individual destinies, and some design begins to formulate itself: “lights changed and flashed … poignant as remembered grief, burned there upon the checkerboard of the eternal dark.” As the men in the train tunnel work to restore “order,” firemen free the bodies of two trapped elevator operators whose deaths will be noted by a hardened reporter in the few lines he files with his newspaper.

Faced with a common danger, these Park Avenue apartment dwellers and their high-society guests had mingled with maids, butlers, cooks, and other workers and had briefly felt a common bond of humanity. With the all-clear signal, the privileged class returns to the building with the assorted retainers. The old order is quickly reestablished. Nothing has really changed; the sense of brotherhood, indeed, the prophetic hope for the future, has vanished like smoke from the extinguished fire, as the old “ordered formality” and “cold restraint” once more prevail.