When we rolled over she grabbed her hands against my ass, forcing the rhythm. People who have just met rarely screw hard. It takes a shared desire for oblivion, a certain courage on the woman’s part. And if you are a man, you never quite trust yourself not to go too hard at it, not to put a heavy hand on the woman’s collarbone for greater leverage, or thrust your hips at such an angle so that under no circumstances can she shut her legs. It’s what men really want to do. All men know this in their hearts and Dolores let me, urged me, was not afraid. Her bent legs lifted high, the rough bottoms of her feet rasping the back of my legs, and I went after her with the frantic heat that ends with the heart kicking against the lungs.
And we lay there silently afterward. The sweat on my chest cooled and my limbs felt pleasantly heavy. I held Dolores and felt the rise and fall of her ribs.
“I’ve got a ridiculous question,” she said into the darkness. “It’s not romantic, you know, but I was just thinking of it.”
“Sure.”
“What’s that thing—”
“That ‘thing’?” I laughed. “You don’t know what ‘that thing’ is?”
“Not that,” she said playfully. “Let me finish what I was saying, okay?”
“Absolutely.”
“What’s that thing, that little place where they cut out the wall when you’re coming up the stairs? I never saw that before anywhere.”
“You mean where the stairs go to the right and there’s a deep indentation in the wall, like a little curved shelf cut out?”
“Yes.”
“That’s called a ‘coffin-turn,’ ” I said. “When these houses were built, it was back when most people still died at home in a bedroom. Nobody went to the hospital to wait around and die, like now. Then you had a body in a bed. They had to be able to get the coffin down the stairs without breaking the plaster or standing it on its end.”
“You think people died in this house?”
“It’s a hundred and ten years old. So probably.”
Dolores considered this for a moment, then lifted her leg over the side of the bed. “Now I’m scared and have to go check on Maria.” Her voice was anxious. “Okay?”
I watched her naked silhouette move through the dark. Her feet creaked down the stairs. Dolores had displayed a certain eagerness that had little to do with me, I believed; her passion was centered elsewhere, within herself. A few minutes later she returned to the bedroom, murmuring that Maria was still asleep. She stood above me.
“I knew something was wrong,” she whispered with delighted surprise.
I was looking at her form above me. “What?”
“The bed—it’s tilted! The head is higher.” She bent down and looked at the legs. “You have something—telephone books!”
“Under the legs at the head of the bed.”
“Why?”
“I have this problem with my stomach. It helps to keep the bed higher on one end.”
“What do you mean?”
“Acid comes up into my esophagus, the hydrochloric acid in the stomach, and if it comes up through a little sphincter, a little opening, at the base of the esophagus, it burns up the mucous membrane and damages what are called the esophageal cells.”
“That’s why you cough all the time?” she asked. “I was going to maybe say something.”
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt?” she asked kindly.
“It can.”
“Do you throw up?”
“Sometimes, if there’s a lot of acid.”
“Did you see a doctor?” she asked, climbing back into bed.
“A bunch of them.”
“Does sex make it worse?” she teased.
“No.”
“Good.” She put her fingers over my mouth, hard, at the same time laying her other hand on my groin—optimistically, I thought—but she spat generously into her palm and patiently manipulated an erection with a frank brusquesness that had nothing to do with my arousal and everything to do with hers. She rode me hard, harder than was comfortable, with her hands resting on my shoulders, her nails rhythmically clasping into my skin. Then her right hand slipped toward her own groin and quivered against herself, two rigid fingers pressed expertly, moving with electric speed, and she came, contracting backward, her left hand leaving my shoulder for a second and then falling against my face, her palm shoved hard into the curve above my nose and her nails against my forehead. My thoughts flowed sideways back through the day and it occurred to me that Dolores knew nothing of computers and media wars and warp and woof of the capitalistic structure. She was here, a woman in a room fucking a man. Complete in herself. In the grayness her eyes were shut and her bottom lip bitten under the upper one in concentration. The room was large with her smell. When she tired of this position she fell to the sheets and quickly rose on her hands and knees with her rear end high so that I could insinuate myself between her cheeks from behind, slipping it in from underneath, my fingers yanking her hipbones toward me, enjoying the extra tightness of the vagina the man feels when from behind, the gross animal bruteness of it, and one of her hands crawled backward to touch herself again. She moaned and stopped to rest. Sweat dripped from the valley of her back down her ribs.
“Now,” she breathed loudly in the room. “Now you’re going. To like this.” She rolled her head forward so that it was supporting her weight and slipped both her hands underneath herself in frank service of my pleasure, one hand cupping me from underneath, playing and stroking me, the thumb and forefinger of the other hand forming a second ring of tightness, slipping back and forth in countersyncopation to my thrusts.
“Jesus,” I exclaimed.
“Do it,” she answered.
And I did.
Afterward, we lay there for some minutes, listening to the wind and the cars speeding up the streets. Dolores murmured something about being with Maria when she woke up. She lifted the covers and disappeared into the darkened doorway. She did not bend down to kiss me and she did not return that night.
“Why do you wear a tie?” Maria inquired of me the next morning while I was dressing. In the shower I’d felt that sweet ache in my groin from the night before. But already, stupidly, obsessively, I was worrying about the meeting that day with the Chairman. Morrison would be looking at me with a grimace pasted on his face, as if he were about to be forced to do something distasteful, and I sensed that he was making reassurances to the V-S people. We were moving inexorably toward the moment when some public announcement of the negotiations would have to be made, in accordance with federal securities law. If I didn’t get the Chairman onto the field, Morrison would make a brutal move to the board of directors. Where that put me was anyone’s guess.
“Why?” Maria repeated, pointing to my necktie.
“Because I’m going to work and it’s the rule,” I told her.
“Why?” Maria said, holding my electric shaver.
“Why do they have the rule? Because that way everybody looks ready to work. It’s a silly rule, actually.”
“How come you have it then?”
“Because adults like to make up rules.”
“We’re going to the playground today, see all the kids.”
“In the park?”
I walked downstairs with Maria leading me.
“Maria, would you get the newspaper for me?”
“Yes!” She stomped down the stairs to the garden floor that led to the door under the stoop.
Dolores and I had not yet spoken to one another and I wondered how she might act after the previous night. In my experience, you look at the woman the next morning and you know instantly whether the previous night was a mistake or a gift. Dolores stood in the kitchen, making breakfast, her hair pulled back. I noticed the wine bottle in the trash. She was wearing one of my flannel gardening shirts.
“Good morning.”
“Have a good appetite?” She smiled.
“Absolutely.”
“Good.” She spooned some h
ot cereal into a bowl. “There’s more when you want it.”
“More?”
“If you want more,” she said with a certain smile, “you’ll get more, you know what I’m saying?”
That morning, just as I stood from my desk to go see the Chairman, Helen opened my door and handed me a colored sheet of paper. “There’s a man downstairs who sent this up, the man who called yesterday.” She stared at me, without sympathy. “The note is on the other side.” It was a flier from a men’s clothing shop a few blocks away and on the reverse, written in carefully legible block letters, were these words:
DEAR JACK WHITMAN,
I WAS TOLD BY YOUR FREIND AT THE BILDING DOWN TOWN THAT YOU KNOW WHERE MY WIFE AND BABY-GIRL IS LIVING. PLEASE ANSWER MY CALL, SIR, PLEASE. MY HOME NUMBER IS 718-555-4640 AND YOU CAN LEEVE A MESAGE ON THE MACHINE. OR YOU CAN COME DOWNSTAIRS AND MEET ME HERE, I WILL BE HERE TO 12 NOON.
SINCERELY, HECTOR SALCINES
He was down in the Corporation’s lobby, pressing his claim. He’d probably taken a day off from work. But Dolores had left him. What did I owe him, what did he deserve? Not once had she mentioned going back to him, and it was she who had come to my bed. I slipped the note into my desk and decided to do nothing. I would like to believe this was a reasonable thing to do.
The Chairman was at his desk, a steaming silver teapot at his elbow. “Now just talk, dammit,” he said to me when I came in. “Just say what you need to say.”
It was a good twenty steps from his office door to his desk. I pulled up a chair. “I’ve started to, a couple of times, and you dodge me,” I said.
“Why, do you think?”
“Do you want a candid answer?”
“Yes,” he said, not blinking his blue eyes.
“Fine.” It wasn’t going to be nice. “I believe you’re resisting my desire to open discussions with you because you refuse to accommodate reality. Chances are you’re afraid of death. That’s okay—you follow in a fine tradition. You feel that the death of the Corporation as you know it, as you built it, metaphorically presages your own.”
There it was, laid out in front of us both—the imaginary pale corpse of the Chairman, suspended in the air—a wrinkled bag of skin and bones and hair, the eyes sunken and closed, the hollowed mouth gaping upward in a leer of death. The red rims of the Chairman’s eyes watered angrily.
“Get out,” he said.
I didn’t move from the chair, not a twitch. “Why not listen to what I have to say?”
He swirled his spoon around his teacup without answering, so I kept talking, kept running in the air: “Look, you, above all, should be able to see that the Corporation is ever changing. We cannot help but to try to manage that change. It’s coming down to four or five big companies, big global companies and a couple of dozen very aggressive, very smart smaller ones. If we don’t grow, we shrink.”
“Very good. You have just updated me to 1978.”
“In theoretical terms only. Now the technology is upon us.”
“So I’m told. Everyone tells me this. Everybody in this damn company sings the technology anthem, the whole idea of synergy among products doesn’t work.”
“It doesn’t work yet.” I could feel his resistance. “The Corporation and V-S can have huge markets around the globe if the whole thing is put together right. Huge. Think of it. We can put the squeeze on Disney and Paramount. They’re expanding very quickly, and we have to front them aggressively in some of these markets. Also the regional telephone companies are coming on very strong, now that they can transmit television signals through their phone wires. With a merger with V-S, we protect ourselves. Bertelsmann, Sony, none of them will be able to link so many pieces of the machine. We do have competition from Phillips, Toshiba, and MCA. But we can beat them. It’s so clear.”
“What’s clear,” the Chairman said, sipping his tea, “is that you and all the other crystal-ball wizards on this floor are suffering from another pitiful fad. Another windbag theology, whatever the headline writer wants to call it. I’ve seen a lot of theories over the years, Jack. We were all going to be riding around in jet-powered cars by the year 1980. Honestly. I’m seventy-one years old. Life . . . life has its own limitations—there are human truths that supersede all technological advances. You may be too young to see that. You can’t jam together two things that were never meant for one another. Someone loses, someone gets the bum end. Believe me, I understand where you are coming from, I was like that once, I had grand schemes when I was young—”
“All the other media mergers so far have been within the same countries or between giant industrials and smaller properties,” I continued. “V-S has so much of what we want. They have telephone systems in developing countries, cable systems all over Europe, a satellite system, access to the Japanese research into the new chips and the new plasma display screens—”
“New screens,” the Chairman complained. “Why is this all I ever hear about? Who needs them? We’re a movie and magazine and cable television and recording company. We do this well enough. We had an absolute net profit of eight hundred and ninety-two million dollars last year, right? We have smart people working on all the things you’ve mentioned, right? Why do we have to shake hands with a bunch of Germans and Japanese?” He shook his head in disgust and seemed to have reached a conclusion. His look told me he thought we were done.
“All right,” I told him. “Just listen to what I have to say. Listen to it like you have never listened to anything in your life, because what I am going to describe is going to happen with or without you, here in the Corporation, or elsewhere, and it will happen everywhere.”
The Chairman was silent. I looked straight into his pale blue eyes. Set within the folds of his dry, too-tan skin, they remained bright, not at all frightened by me, not frightened by my invocation of his death, keen to rule as much of the world as he could, to play chess with me, the young court jester appointed as a temporary amusement. Maybe that’s all I was, a court jester dressed in a business suit.
“Right now, as I talk, there are probably only a thousand people in America who understand what is going to happen. In 1981 there were four million personal computers in America. By 1991, that number was eighty-five million. By the year 2001, there will be one hundred forty million. It’s part of the culture. Even the working-class poor now buy computers for their children. Why shouldn’t they? The price keeps dropping. At the same time, free broadcast television viewership is dying, as you know. It will be forty-five percent of its historic high in the year 2000. Now then, the personal computer, as a metaphor, as a conceit, is finished. The phase is through, like electric typewriters. The movement is to interactive, portable, specialized. It will be a few years before Congress figures out who uses what wires—the cable companies, the telephone companies, whoever. Like I said, the FCC is going to allow the regional phone companies to transmit television on fiber optic. It will take at least ten years to completely rewire the country with fiber optic. But that’s just the conduit. We will have products that can move through any conduit—cable, fiber optic, radio, television, direct-broadcast satellite, whatever. Why the hell do you think you were in Washington a few weeks ago? To set up a fucking game of golf with a senator? No. Because this company, whether you give a damn or not, is moving into the future. That satellite is important. We’re well positioned there. The telephone utilities are slowly being deregulated anyway, so we could start buying them if we wanted. There will be different modes and types of boxes. No one knows what the complete menu will be. Multiple avenues of transmission. It will shift. Some will do well and then be replaced by others. Some will be outflanked by industry standards, like Beta tape was by VHS—”
“You’re preaching the same old religion,” the Chairman said wearily. “I don’t think—”
“The point, dammit, is that what is possible is going to change. People will catch information or entertainment in new ways and they will be able to use it in new ways. We’re positioned well
for all of those technologies, domestically. Our 1992 gross revenues from TV shows and movies is going to come out around two billion. The cash flow is consistent, our debt is basically in hand, and the analysts love us—at least this week. The time is good to do a deal. And Volkman-Sakura wants to push back Phillips in Europe and Toshiba in Japan; they have incentives. V-S is well positioned in Europe and Japan. They may get the fiber optic contract for Russia. Think about that,” I told him. “Think about the market that is opening up there. Their communications system is hopelessly out of date. They’ll have to scrap the whole thing and buy a couple of hundred million miles of fiber optic wiring from Owens-Corning. They’ll do it, too, once they get the economy stabilized. And what are they going to want? They’re going to want what we make, our pop culture. And they’re not just going to have VCRs, they’re going to have the same magic boxes we do. The magnitude of this change is enormous. The whole world eventually interacting with massive global computer systems of entertainment. The cost-effectiveness ratios are doubling every year. Intel has a chip that is eighty percent faster than the P-Five they brought out last year and thirty percent cheaper. They announced that last week. With this kind of advance—”
“Religion . . . nothing but religion.” The Chairman flipped through his papers listlessly. “We’ve been farting around all these years with optical discs and magazines on TV and all kinds of other Frankenstein monsters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars of R and D—”
“No, no, wait,” I said. “There have been some huge and costly mistakes. But the right product will come along. I mean, in about eighteen months, two years, I’ll be able to hang an HDTV screen on my wall, like a poster, maybe an inch thick, except it will be as big as a doorway. Then I’ll slip a disk in and I’ll have Madonna dancing and singing her new single in front of me. It will make MTV look like an old celluloid movie, and the sound will be better than any current CD player on the market. But you have to realize it will be better than all the multimedia stuff now on the market. Those are just very fancy video games. Once the technology is in sync with the product, you’ll be able to walk up to the screen and look in Madonna’s eyes and be able to see the tiny red veins! Then when she opens her mouth you’ll be able to see back into her throat. You’ll be able to talk to her and she’ll talk to you! She’ll call you by name and she’ll take her clothes off if you ask her to. It will be better than anything we have now, better in a sense than reality because you can stop it and make it start or back up or in the case of Madonna, you can fiddle with a switch and watch her rotate until she’s facing away from you and still singing.”
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