How It All Goes Down
On a hazy autumn morning, a slightly disheveled man in his mid-forties steps out of his room at the Hotel Gloriana, and takes the elevator down to the lobby. No, this isn't The Hangover, it's Tommy Wilhelm's "day of reckoning" (5.40). Today, Wilhelm will learn if a desperate financial gamble has saved his life, or ruined it completely.
In the first half of the novel, Wilhelm slowly makes his way to the hotel dining hall, where he regularly meets his father, Dr. Adler, for breakfast. Along the way, he stops and chats with Rubin, "the man at the newsstand" (1.4), and picks up his mail at the front desk. When he finally enters the dining hall to meet his father, he finds another neighbor sitting at their usual table: an elderly gentleman called Mr. Perls.
The three sit together, and Dr. Adler and Wilhelm tell Mr. Perls a little bit about Wilhelm's life. When Mr. Perls leaves, Dr. Adler tries to make small talk with his son, but Wilhelm soon turns the conversation back to his financial troubles and woes. When he eventually comes right out and asks his father for help, Dr. Adler refuses. Wilhelm storms out of the dining hall. Thanks for nothing, Dad.
Back in the hotel lobby, Wilhelm runs into Dr. Tamkin: another resident of the Hotel Gloriana, and the man to whom Wilhelm recently gave a power of attorney over the last of his savings. Tamkin claims to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist or something (nobody seems quite sure), and he also claims to be a wizard of the stocks and commodities markets. Wilhelm has let Tamkin invest his last seven hundred dollars in lard, and he's desperate for things to work out.
Much more leisurely than Wilhelm would like, the two men slowly make their way to the brokerage office (but only after Tamkin eats some breakfast first). In the brokerage office, Tamkin reveals to Wilhelm that he's made some changes to their investments, and things are looking up. Relived, Wilhelm tries to convince Tamkin to get out while the getting's good, but Tamkin refuses.
At lunchtime, the two men wander out to a nearby cafeteria. Wilhelm picks at his food anxiously while Tamkin eats a big meal, and he soon hurries Tamkin back to the brokerage office. When they reach the door, one of the other regulars, Mr. Rappaport, is waiting. Mr. Rappaport insists that Wilhelm escort him to a nearby cigar store, and since the old man is elderly and frail, Wilhelm agrees—grudgingly.
By the time Wilhelm returns to the brokerage office, his and Tamkin's purchases have dropped so low that Wilhelm can see he's been wiped out completely. He searches for Tamkin frantically, but the man is nowhere to be found.
Wilhelm rushes back to the Hotel Gloriana to find Tamkin, but the doctor isn't in his room. Wilhelm tries to locate his father instead, and soon finds him in the baths downstairs. When Wilhelm begs his father for help, Dr. Adler refuses, and shouts at him angrily.
As Wilhelm gets ready to leave the hotel, he gets a message from his wife, Margaret, asking him to call her. He does, and she demands to know why his last support check was postdated. The two argue, and when Margaret finally hangs up on Wilhelm, he tries to rip the phone from the wall. You show that phone, Wilhelm.
Wilhelm hurries out into the street, and thinks he sees Tamkin in a crowd of funeral-goers down the road. He rushes towards him, but gets caught up in the crowd, and is herded into the funeral parlor with everyone else. There, Wilhelm winds up in the line of mourners waiting to pay their respects, and when he finally arrives at the coffin, he breaks down in tears. Soon, Wilhelm is sobbing uncontrollably as the rest of the crowd looks on. He sure did seize the day, all right.