Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  She stared at me. “You notice that mess outside the building this morning?”

  I stiffened. “Where?”

  “On the south side?”

  I shrugged. “I use the other side.”

  “Of course,” Samantha said.

  “Any more dates with Herr Waldhausen?”

  “Last night we went out for dinner, as a matter of fact.” Samantha arched her eyebrows. She had the inside line on the deal now, I could see; everything went through her or close by. She was smart, too, she knew not to lord this over me.

  “Morrison must be proud of you.”

  “All he wants is the deal. He says just keep Waldhausen talking.”

  “Is he?”

  “Well, he keeps asking me about things.” She hit the save key on her keyboard and turned around. “He wants to know everyone’s responsibilities. He even asked about you.”

  “Me?”

  “He wanted to know where you were after the first day.”

  This surprised me. “You told him?”

  “I told him you were doing some work for the Chairman. He asked me how it was that Morrison expected to do this deal without the Chairman’s approval.”

  “And you said—”

  “I said we thought we could bring him around to see it our way.”

  “Oh, come on, he’s got to see that Morrison wants to force the Chairman out of the airplane. How did Waldhausen react?”

  “He smiled.” Samantha frowned. “I guess I expected him to push the question—you’d think he would, but, on the other hand, if he doesn’t push the issue, doesn’t challenge us, then that signals to us that we have his support. I mean, he’s a smart guy, he knows about the Chairman—”

  “Maybe Waldhausen and his people see the Chairman as an impediment, too, and they know that by dealing only with us, Morrison and everybody, that strengthens our position for us if a fight with the board develops.”

  “Or maybe he’s just hoping we resolve it internally so he doesn’t have to deal with it.”

  “Or maybe he’s got a fucked-up perception of the situation on the thirty-ninth floor.”

  “How could that be?” Samantha said.

  “Morrison told us that he had spelled out the truth of the situation to Waldhausen beforehand, but maybe in fact he misrepresented it, or himself. Made it seem like he was the main guy. That could be done very subtly.”

  “Waldhausen isn’t going to fall for that.”

  “No?”

  “No, I mean we’ve talked a lot, about a lot of things . . . how he perceives American culture, what kids in Germany are like now, his wife,” Samantha noted, examining her nails. “Ulna, Ulna this, Ulna that.”

  The wife’s name on the fax was different—Gretchen, as I remembered. “That was her name?”

  “Yes, about how she neglects him and won’t take care of the house, the whole thing.”

  “Is he the sort of man who has a mistress?”

  “I asked him and he said no, he was too heartbroken over his wife. We talked about a lot of things. He said he was shocked at the homeless problem here. He told me he was in Central Park and saw a man cooking a dead pigeon. What else . . . he’s impressed with Morrison, thinks that he’s just coming into his prime as an executive . . . that sort of thing, we just talked.”

  It was one of the few times I knew something that Samantha did not and I intended to say nothing and thus maintain the advantage. Assuming the fax to his mistress was real, Waldhausen was lying to Samantha, creating fictional scenarios in order to induce her trust. His letter to his wife, with a different name, seemed genuine. As for the mistress, his lie was expectable—why should he tell Samantha about that? He was working Samantha somehow, and she didn’t know it. Why? I couldn’t think of a reason, I could only just stare dumbly, marveling at how pleased Samantha was with herself. I knew what had come next. “Then you seduced him of course.”

  Samantha tilted her blond head and opened her big beautiful mouth. “Of course!”

  “Lucky guy,” I said.

  She crossed her legs. “Other guys have been lucky, no?”

  “Ah, Samantha . . .”

  “Yes?” she teased. “What is it?”

  I sat in her other office chair. “It’s still a little weird for me, even after all this time.”

  “You’re just sentimental,” she said with seriousness. “You’re a sentimental guy, Jack. You have the requisite mean streak in you, but ultimately the other is stronger.” She stared at me, one eye turned in. “I’m sure of this.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She shook her head. “No, definitely.”

  The light was coming up in the windows behind her.

  “I saw the graffiti outside the building,” she said.

  I let out a breath. “I thought you might have.”

  “Is it about that woman and little girl I saw up here a couple of weeks ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was very . . . very striking.”

  “She was in bad shape when you saw her.”

  “Yes, but she has a rather remarkable face. Such a strong expression. I think that a man could see that face once and not forget it.”

  I nodded. “That’s exactly what happened, Samantha. I can’t really explain it.”

  “And the little girl, too? That’s part of it?”

  I nodded. “And the little girl, too.”

  Samantha shook her head and looked down. “I was always sorry about what happened to Liz, Jack. You get old enough and all you want is for people to have decent, safe lives.” She looked back up at me. “I always felt terrible about what happened . . . you know that.”

  We were quiet a moment. “I can’t have anybody knowing about this graffiti, Samantha. Not Morrison, not now.”

  “Yes.” She looked at me, her expression soft. “He’d be really pissed. I found the letters this morning, Jack. About five-thirty when I came in.”

  “So you called Fitzpatrick, the building services guy?”

  “I told him to get it cleaned up immediately.”

  “Jesus, thanks.”

  We sat there in her office, a man and a woman, each in suits.

  “Hey, Jack, it’s me, right?”

  I gave her a smile. And we heard noises down the hall, ending the moment.

  “Okay.” I rose to leave Samantha’s office.

  “Okay.”

  I walked to my office, feeling relieved. It had been years since our brief affair. Reagan had still been in the saddle. Neither Samantha nor I confused what had happened for anything other than the satisfaction of mutual curiosity. It was early in my time at the Corporation and Samantha and I were both cutting through the junior-exec levels. My marriage to Liz was fine, too—truly. We were happy. I strayed for no good reason except that the chance was available to me. Samantha and I had been to L.A. on a business trip together, we had talked in the hotel bar. I knew instantly that it would happen. It was a matter of a drink after work a few nights later while Liz worked late, and a cab to Samantha’s apartment, which at the time was still a drab two-bedroom affair on the West Side that she shared with a roommate, a brilliant young Japanese pianist whose bedroom was entirely filled by a Steinway concert grand. The woman slept under the piano each night, as if protected by a massive, three-legged animal with a shiny black coat. (How odd it is that, conceivably, Dolores’s father had worked on that piano.) I think Samantha and I slept together to get it out of the way, in a brotherly-sisterly manner, and to ensure a certain loyalty from each other. Just one night. “We did this now and it was fun but you’re going to stay with Liz and I’m going to keep looking,” Samantha informed me in bed. While she showered I perused her apartment and found a list taped to the refrigerator in the kitchen, entitled “Weekly Goals.” The goals that week: 1) LEARN D-BASE SOFTWARE. 2) STOP BITING FINGER-NAILS FOREVER. Samantha was just twenty-seven, sweeter and more succulent then—her skin impossibly soft, still just a girl’s skin—and in retrospect I think s
he was just starting to understand and experiment with the possible intersections between work and sex. Women do do this, no matter that they rightly decry the practice when a man imposes himself upon a female of lesser position in the office. It would be later that Samantha started to look harder, more polished; it was later, when she began to make the big money, that the months would go by and man after man after man was summoned to her apartment to try to fuck away her loneliness.

  I have never been capable of bitterness toward women I have slept with—the relationship may have ended in flames, but I remember each woman—or girl, as the case may be—with a certain wistfulness at the perishability of intimacy, at the younger, more innocent version of the both of us. Even my functional congress with Miss Najibullah, the paid courtesan at the Chairman’s club, would eventually be painted over with cheap nostalgia. I think this is a character flaw in myself and I think that Samantha saw it and knew that she could sleep with me and thereby inoculate herself against the possibility that we might be vicious competitors at some future moment at the Corporation. But I didn’t realize this at the time. I remember coming home the night after we’d done it—a matter of a fifteen-block walk at the time—and taking a shower. Liz returned home late and undressed next to the bed, still smelling of the restaurant, the smoke and spilled beer and squeezed lemon rinds and half-eaten swordfish fillets, and as she flung her clothes to the floor in exhaustion before falling into bed I thought that life had a certain weird richness to it that I could lie down twice in one night with two different women. What I’d done was wrong, for I’d promised Liz I would never do it and there was no reason to break her trust, but it was utterly delicious. I knew that I would never get caught and I never did, unless of course you take into account the fact that Liz was killed before I gathered the courage to confess to her, which I always meant to do, considered it each day, in fact. When you are denied the chance to confess, you are also denied the chance to be forgiven. In that respect I was caught, caught terribly.

  I spent the morning worrying that everyone in the building knew that Jack Whitman, a vice president on the thirty-ninth floor, had been the subject of a graffiti attack. I chewed antacids. It didn’t get any better when Beales stopped by my office. His big, handsome frame filled the doorway. “Let’s eat lunch today,” he said. “To talk.”

  “Talk?” I wondered if he had heard about the graffiti.

  His face was set. “You and I need to talk.”

  Perhaps he was right. We agreed on one o’clock at an expensive Indian place draped in great bolts of maroon fabrics such that you felt you were caught in chambers of a giant heart. I got there first and was shown a seat in the back, which was more private. Keeping my eyes on the tablecloth, I listened to the two men at the table next to me.

  “When they call, don’t say, ‘I decline to comment,’ ” said the first.

  “They love that—it can be construed as guilt.”

  “Yes. Exactly. So instead, what you say is, ‘I can’t help you with your story.’ That’s very good. It can’t be quoted and yet it is not a formal refusal to comment and it validates the reporter’s role. Says you understand he’s got a job to do. It’s very subtle, but it works.”

  “ ‘I can’t help you with your story . . .’ ” the other man mused.

  “Yes, that’s what you say when they call.”

  On my other side sat a heavyset man dressed in the pseudo-relaxed literary manner, his hair pulled back in a ponytail. I supposed that he was a magazine or book editor. He was talking to the famous South American poet who made his reputation singing the torments of the Brazilian slums (and who now, I’d read, spent most of his time in San Francisco, Paris, and New York). While the waiters obediently scraped crumbs from the table into brass trays, the two men delighted in berating the administration’s vicious indifference to the lowest classes. In but a few minutes, they had analyzed America’s foreign policy toward Latin America, the current direction of the United States Supreme Court, the cultural wretchedness of the suburbs, and the succulencies of the salad vegetables now in vogue. It occurred to me that Dolores had probably never eaten in a place like this.

  Beales came in, shouldering rudely past the Indian bus-boys, enjoying his greater size. He was in a hurry and he would be in a hurry until he got to his grave. He saw me, but then he noticed someone from CBS whom he knew and paused to chat, standing to be seen standing. Despite all his tennis, he was thickening around the middle. Years back, when we were trying as hard as possible to be friends, he used to insist that after work we slip into this little place on Broadway between Fifty-second and Fifty-third. It was a topless bar, with a stage. You went down a narrow, grimy flight of stairs. An immense black man in a suit and tie showed you to a chair next to the stage and asked what you wanted to drink. The colored lights swirled, the mirror balls spun. Meanwhile the girls dancing onstage already had their g-string in your face, the little garters with tiny cloth roses, the leather, whatever. Some were bored or faking, but a few looked like they meant it. They were very good, this being midtown Manhattan. The drinks cost too much, the complementary buffet loaded with the worst cheesy slop. But we were married guys and it was a cheap thrill. There was a very firm Texan girl, who looked no older than eighteen, her hair a silky curtain that played around her body, which was slender as a snake’s. When she spun hard around the brass pole, you could hear the screws groan in the wood. She did nothing for me and so I wondered with detachment if she knew, really, what she was doing with her mouth as she danced. But Beales, whose wife was a heavy-hipped blonde who had birthed three babies, each over nine pounds, was fascinated by this young girl, her compact smoothness. She looked tight. He must have put a dozen bills in her garter that first time. After he was made a vice president, he started going to the club by himself and coming back to the office late after lunch. Then, without telling his wife, he bought a tiny studio apartment a block south of Central Park—ten feet by eighteen feet, no bigger than a large rug—eighty thousand bucks, a sum low enough that his wife wouldn’t notice a change in the family’s living standard from the outgo of monthly mortgage payments. It would have been a great investment but Beales didn’t rent it out. He took the bar dancer there maybe twice a week at lunchtime, and occasionally before getting on the commuter train home to kids and dinner. The evil pleasure of a quick pop. This kind of thing is common; the pressure pushes men into new, harder versions of themselves.

  Beales came to the table.

  “Okay,” he said after we’d ordered, “why do I want to talk? Because all of us, you, me, everybody, are knocking our balls together trying to come up with a deal with V-S and Waldhausen, and we’re actually getting pretty close—”

  “How close?”

  “Basically it’s down to management questions. All the marketing stuff is worked out. But that’s not what I want to talk about, Jack.” He paused to see if I was ready to switch topics. “I think you and I should just call some kind of truce. When we fight in front of Morrison, it doesn’t help either one of us. I know you and I are not exactly in love with one another, but you’re acting really pissed—”

  “Yeah,” I jumped in. “I am acting pissed, because you got Morrison to cut me out of the negotiating team and start farting around with the Chairman.”

  Beales’s eyebrows arched. “I didn’t do that.”

  “The fuck you didn’t.”

  He opened his hands in the air. “Morrison must have dreamed it up.”

  “No, I don’t think he did,” I replied. “I really don’t think that. He had me working on the merger plan from the very first moment. He had me in there as one of the guys that knew everything. It’s actually stupid for him to have done this.”

  Beales sat back in his chair. “I agree.”

  “You agree?”

  “Yes, I agree, it was stupid. I didn’t understand it at the time.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  Beales shook his head. “No.”


  “You saw it as to your advantage, of course.”

  “True.”

  He was forty, too old to take chances. He had worked hard for almost fifteen years, finding and laboring in the dense seams of power in the Corporation, just as we all had. He was older mentally than he should be. He loved the non-reality of air-conditioning, knew he was safe in airconditioning, one of those men who wanted the future locked up and put in a Merrill Lynch Cash Management Account. His shins were rubbed smooth of hair by the elastic in his expensive socks that his wife bought him three times a year from Saks. He hated that, because it made him know he was going to die.

  “So,” I went on, “you might as well have been the one to suggest it to Morrison.”

  He didn’t say anything. Our soup came.

  “You realize that I know none of the V-S guys?” I continued. “That Samantha has been busy with Waldhausen and you and Morrison and the bankers and everyone have had a fucking party together using my work? You realize that, don’t you?” My voice was getting louder and people at the other tables glanced over.

  “Yes,” Beales finally said, smoothing his yellow tie.

  “And I suppose you guys are going to work it through the board, leaving the Chairman on some side road holding a suitcase, or dinking around in his rose garden in the Hamp-tons. And that was the idea all along.”

  “Look, Jack, do I mind that Morrison’s got you on a fishing expedition? No. I’ll be honest about that. But you’ve got to believe I didn’t put the idea in his head.” He was moving his big tanned hands around in emphasis. “Somebody else, and who, I don’t know. Maybe the consultants, I don’t know. And I’m saying why don’t you and I just avoid hammering each other right now? It’s not worth it for either one of us.”

  He was protecting himself. “You’re full of shit,” I told him.

  Beales shrugged, sipped his soup, and then put the spoon down.

  “You know what?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I thought I could just reason this out with you but I can’t.” Beales looked around the restaurant, stood up, and fished into his pocket for a couple of bills. He flipped them dismissively onto the table. “I’d rather get a turkey sandwich at a deli.”