Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “Need another round here.” The Chairman suddenly stood. He looked flushed and took off his coat. His shoulders were naturally squared off; even at his age, he had a certain physical confidence in his carriage. One wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he cut a decent step on the ballroom floor. A few minutes later he made his way back along the aisle, another drink in his hand, meeting the eyes of no one, and sat down. The train rattled on, and in a few minutes I saw that the Chairman had shut his eyes and rolled his head heavily toward the window, where the Maryland countryside rushed past in the twilight—the small towns and heaps of rusted cars and washing machines and deep woods standing mute. The wind of the train turned up the undersides of the new leaves. Rain was beginning to fall. I glimpsed a boy sitting on the hood of his pickup, the kind of boy I would have been if I had stayed with my natural father. His shadowy presence throughout my childhood—I occasionally visited him by bus, never in the company of my mother—reminded me always that a parallel fate followed my days, the fate of another Jack Whitman who, except for being skinnier and with longer hair, looked just like me and lived in a small New York town, smoking pot and working afternoons at one of the gas stations out on the interstate, grease on his KISS T-shirt. Cigarette breath, interested in motorbikes, of little prospect. For when I visited my father, this is what the boys my age seemed to be doing. That is what would have happened to me. At fourteen they already had an edge of bitter toughness in them, and they understood everything about me from the way I talked and the expensive sneakers I wore. I got into a few fights, just a few, and won almost as many as I lost. There is a narrow, hard vein of meanness and expediency in me and this is where it comes from. I knew my fate had been changed forever.

  My mother did not trust fate, however, and did what she could to see that I would not become my father. I would have braces, I’d be instructed how to read the stock pages, I’d be practical. I would have a certain large mole removed from the lobe of my ear when I was about twelve, “because it will matter how people see you,” she explained matter-offactly. Anything to further distance me from my father. Perhaps this was why I still looked for a father, because my real one hardly seemed to fulfill the possibilities. His personality, for instance, seemed to be expressed most clearly through his toenail. That sounds strange, admittedly. But when my father was a boy, the large toenail of his left foot was somehow mangled, in a car door, or crushed by a dropped sledgehammer—I don’t remember the cause. What remained was a shrunken, brown, thickened nail that my father cut each month with wincing exactitude. It looked like a stamp-sized piece of rhinoceros horn and I can remember, growing up, seeing my father stooped over his toe in the bathroom with an expensive stainless-steel Swiss nail clipper—perhaps the only item of luxury he owned. To say that he clipped the nail would be wrong, with its connotations of quick, careless energy, the spring of little shards everywhere. He sculpted and shaved that piece of horn meticulously, accounting for the shape of his shoes and mysterious “tender spots” only he could locate. He didn’t like for me to watch—as if looking at the nail made it hurt—and certainly I was not allowed to touch it, so painful were the compacted nerve endings underneath. The toe had hurt him every day of his life. He had never remarried or even, I think, had sex after my mother left him. It was as if that toe accounted for my father’s hesitant footfalls through a diminished, unhappy life.

  Thus, marrying Liz, I’d believed, made me forever different from my father. He loved Liz as the daughter he had never had. He took me aside on our wedding day to congratulate me for not letting his disastrous marriage to my mother ruin my own feelings. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that, beyond not even remembering his marriage to my mother, it was, instead, her faithful happiness with Harry McCaw that formed my optimistic expectations about the relations between men and women.

  As my father’s only child, it was up to me to keep an eye on him, especially after the church’s conference bishop called me one day to ask how my father’s mental health seemed, to me. They asked him to retire early, for his sermons brought little comfort or inspiration to the members of his church, and the bishop was only able to guarantee a genuinely paltry pension; members of the clergy usually die poor. I would take care of all his money needs of course; this had been understood for at least ten years. Doing so gave me little satisfaction, for it only implied that my father had so mismanaged his finances that now he lived out of his son’s wallet. When Liz was murdered, my father seemed to deflate even further, for now he suspected that he would not have grandchildren, that his branch of the great Whitman name would now disappear, and that, aside from me, no one would ever be around to take care of him. It hardly mattered to me what my father’s selfish motivations for grief were. I barely spoke to him at the funeral. The occasion gave him license to practice his profession again for an afternoon and he hovered about in ministerial fashion, pestering Liz’s and my friends with his condolences. I didn’t hate Mm. I hated what had become of him.

  Now the rain slashed against the train’s windows. The slack skin of the Chairman’s neck fell over his shirt collar as he dozed. I considered calling Morrison from one of the phones at the end of the car but thought better of it, in case the Chairman woke and guessed who I’d called. The two men had danced in a hateful, silent embrace for years. The Chairman was an aging seventy-one and Morrison a fit and steaming fifty-three. The Chairman needed Morrison’s energy and market savvy to push into new ventures, while Morrison needed the Chairman to get the board’s approval for new projects. The Chairman had stacked the outside membership of the board with old friends and had shrewdly blocked the election of any of the representatives from the big pension funds who were now fighting their way into the boardroom and causing hell for company managements by demanding that they remember the stockholders before themselves. If the Chairman went down in a bloody fight, Wall Street would know that the Corporation was in flux and the share price might begin to tank. The man had stayed on top a long time—there had been Morrisons of one type or another all along the way, the statistical whiz kids, the generals, the world-class salesmen, the palace Rasputins. He’d used them, brought them along, sucked out their talents and energy, then scrapped them when they became powerful enough that there was talk of succession. Back in the late seventies, he had forced a majority of the board to resign after they had secretly courted another executive who inconveniently dropped dead of a heart attack before being hired. He had made and then broken half a dozen Morrisons. And if Morrison lost this battle, then the thirty-ninth floor would be gutted, me included.

  Sitting there, I studied the Chairman, as men do their corporate fathers. All faces, especially those of old men, have a sort of grotesque quality. The Chairman’s eyeballs rolled demonlike beneath their lids. Capillaries ran like crazed red wires under the skin of his nostrils, under the age-slackened cheeks. His mouth hung open slightly. Tobacco stains were etched into the cracked enamel of his teeth. I felt a strange affection for him.

  Later, after the train shot through the slums of North Philadelphia, the Chairman lifted his eyelids into a boozy consciousness. “Finished, hmm? Right?” He waited for me to answer and I didn’t. “Those who are liquid and can move their assets out will be all right . . . the smart money is in Hong Kong for the next two years . . . but the rest of them . . . ahhm . . .” He gazed out the rain-streaked windows into the nickel light of New Jersey’s industrial parks. “So many . . . who’ll never have, or even know what happened . . . why are the blacks such a tortured people? I’ve asked myself that for thirty years . . . why, societally, do we hate them so much? So much anxiety . . . it’s—hmm . . . I myself have grandchildren . . . it’s going to be much worse than anyone ever imagined.” He swiveled his head and stared at me. I saw the years in the skin around his eyes. “The government is dead, you realize that—all those men we spoke to today? They’re floating belly up in the river, not to be trusted . . . these people, ahhmmm—excuse me, happens when I drink . . . the forces
are too big, why the British pound used to be the currency of the trading nations. Aahem.” Odd shards of light drifted over the sagging folds of his cheeks. “People said the pound would reign supreme for five hundred years. It lasted fifty. Then the dollar. No one thinks about the Chinese, what they could do . . .”

  He lapsed back into silence and the minutes passed. Finally the train slid underground into Manhattan and we exited. The escalator from the platform was broken, so the crowd trudged in group exhaustion up the paralyzed steps, flowing with unconscious precision around a stinking woman in her fifties with several scabs on her cheek who lay across the concrete, her mismatched skirts lifted in gruesome display. “This is America now,” the Chairman muttered. I slowed my pace for him. We found his personal car waiting for us outside the station, and once inside its dark softness the Chairman picked up the remote and flicked on the screen. He scrolled through an alphabetized list of companies to the Corporation to check the day’s closing price. It was up three points, from 107 a share, a sizable jiggle. Anyone holding a thousand shares of the Corporation’s stock, say, would go to bed tonight three thousand dollars richer than he had woken up, having done nothing. Perhaps somebody out there was buying in anticipation of the Volkman-Sakura deal. Or perhaps one of the big institutional investors had merely decided it was a good time to make a play on the Corporation’s stock. The Chairman, however, seemed uninterested and he switched off the screen and leaned forward to give the driver a few words.

  “Be right there, sir,” the man replied with an efficient nod, and the big car turned uptown on one of the avenues and gathered speed, caught in a bright river of taxis, blowing past Korean groceries, past a pet shop window full of puppies pawing frantically at the glass and office workers straggling home late and a long line of moviegoers standing under the bright lights of a marquee—“That one’s ours,” the Chairman murmured, pointing at the movie being featured—and we pulled to a stop at a private club and got out, the Chairman leaving his coat behind. The chauffeur would pull up the street, lock the doors, and doze.

  “Lackley is giving a party,” the Chairman said, referring to our man at Citibank, to which the Corporation owed eight hundred million dollars. “Certain rituals have to be observed.”

  Once inside the marble foyer, he shed his sleepy fatigue and came back to life, crinkling sex-amused eyes at the hostess, a striking woman of about sixty who, it was said, had slept with John F. Kennedy. The Chairman barged agreeably inside, handshakes and smiles all around. The women wore brilliant stones and the men expensive shoes, but the money was quieter than it had been five years prior. As always, people were drinking hard, against the direction of time. I missed Liz. If she had been there she would have slipped her hand into mine, Liz a woman who spent teenage summers handling live lobsters at her father’s restaurant, and whispered, Jack, let’s get out of here before it gets desperate, and we would have gone to thank the host. And then gossiped in the taxi on the way home, with my hand in her crotch under her coat. I got a glass at the bar and by the time I had turned around, the Chairman was already sitting within a circle of guests on a sixty-thousand-dollar Empire sofa, the scrolled arms thick as tree trunks and cushions soft as the puff of crab something being served on silver trays. I composed my face into the proper degree of geniality and had the usual conversations. The women were beautiful and strangely uninteresting, and I slipped away to find a phone, hoping that Dolores might have called and left a message. I dialed my own number and punched in the playback code, and heard nothing, wanting to hear Dolores’s voice, wanting—I wanted to fuck her. I guess that’s true.

  When a polite hour had passed, the Chairman signaled me that he was ready to leave, and after we retreated to the limousine, he instructed the driver so quickly and casually that I understood he had referred to an address the chauffeur knew well. Five minutes later we pulled to a stop in front of an apartment building in the East Eighties and got out.

  “Ever been here?” he asked, plunging ahead of me.

  “No.”

  “You recognize the address, though.”

  I looked up at the number on the striped awning.

  “No.”

  “You really don’t know about this place?”

  “No.”

  He seemed pleased by this. “Well, you better let an old man show you a thing or two.”

  Inside, the doorman nodded at the Chairman and we ascended to the tenth floor, and when the elevator doors opened, we emerged to a small, rather plain foyer. We waited in front of a closed door.

  “It’s usually a minute or two,” the Chairman said.

  “Before what?” I said anxiously.

  He looked at me. Don’t say stupid things, I thought. “Before they let us in.”

  “How do they know we’re here? The guy downstairs call up?”

  His eyes were amused. “They know.”

  At that moment the door opened and we were met by an attractive redheaded woman in a silk robe. She ushered us into a small lounge, which by the quality and taste of the decor might very well have been the waiting room of one of the suites of private banking offices on Park Avenue. An antique English mantel clock was striking eleven. The Chairman swayed ever so slightly, boozy on his feet, and I could see from his face that he was impatiently eager. He lit a cigarette, not bothering to worry about an ashtray.

  “I like your tie tonight,” the woman said with a British accent. They smiled at each other and then she punched several digits on the phone, whispered into it, listened, and then said to us, “Would you like Miss Najibullah or Miss Choonhavan to join you tonight?”

  “Miss Choonhavan.”

  “And the gentleman, sir?”

  “I would surmise that Miss Najibullah would be a very fine addition to his evening.”

  “Does he have any . . . requests?”

  The Chairman turned to me. “Any proclivities you want indulged, Jack?”

  I was still figuring it out. “No,” I said, to be safe.

  “On your account?” the woman asked.

  “Absolutely, he’s my guest.”

  “He is a new guest?”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll follow the usual procedures, of course.” She smiled warmly at me, then turned to the Chairman. “The usual envelope in the room?”

  “Aaaah, yes,” the Chairman said. “And I switched to rum about an hour ago, so you better have that in there, too.”

  The woman disappeared. I understood now.

  “Everyone new is tested,” the Chairman explained. “And the girls are tested every single week. But they’re fine.”

  His attitude irritated me. I doubted that he knew anyone who’d died of AIDS; it was an abstraction to him. But not to me. I’d lost half a dozen college classmates. And people with AIDS were everywhere in the subways, begging. “How can I be sure?” I asked. “I mean, prostitutes are notoriously—”

  “You can be sure.”

  “How?”

  “Because,” he answered with a rich man’s pride, “this is probably the most expensive whorehouse in America.”

  We were led to a carpeted locker room that had about thirty cubicles, each double wide and semiprivate like the ones professional athletes have in their locker rooms. Each had a small brass plate engraved with initials and contained, in addition to a personal assortment of colognes and toiletries and combs and brushes, a laundered terry cloth robe and several towels, all maroon. A leather easy chair fronted each cubicle. Several of the lockers had business suits neatly hanging in them. An attendant in a white coat appeared. The Chairman gave me a reassuring nod. The attendant guided me to a small office, where he asked me to roll up my left shirtsleeve. He swabbed the crease at my elbow joint with alcohol and expertly took a small blood sample and had me sign a small release form.