Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  He pointed. I looked around and noticed something hairy in a Tupperware container; it looked like a small animal had been stuffed in it. “You’re a weird guy, anybody ever tell you that?”

  “Sure.”

  I stepped carefully past the junk on the floor over to his computers and he handed me a couple of papers. On the top was a fax in German from the V-S Bonn headquarters to Waldhausen’s group in the Plaza. I glanced at it quickly—translating enough in my head to see that it had to do with the structure of management of the merged corporations. The second was a fax to the Chairman’s office machine regarding the purchase of the estate in the Bahamas. The cost: thirty-five million dollars. Sounded like a nice place. Hope they have off-street parking. Next was a fax from the Plaza to Bonn regarding the purchase of a new Polish music label. Someone from the V-S group must have been involved in those negotiations. The next fax was from the Chairman’s fax machine, to Bonn. It was addressed to a W. Fricker. This puzzled me. Fricker, the guy who had preceded me as the Chairman’s assistant, was supposedly incapacitated by mysterious headaches and on indefinite sick leave. But here, next, was a memo from the Chairman, typed out by Mrs. Marsh: “We missed you by phone and assume this will await you when you return. We need a fax sent from Bonn to Plaza asking for the proposed executive structure under the new, joint-operating plan,” the memo instructed. “The top ten or fifteen positions on Corporation side. This you will fax back to me immediately.”

  I flipped back through the faxes to the first one that DiFrancesco had given me.

  “These all were sent today?”

  He nodded.

  “You gave these to me in order or out of order?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Bunch of papers is what I had there.”

  I looked at the faxes in frustration.

  “You mean pagination or sequence of receipt?” he said.

  But I was ahead of him. From the small hour printout at the top of the pages I could see that the Chairman’s fax had been sent from New York to Bonn that morning at 11:02 A.M. and the fax from Bonn to the Plaza, which carried out his instructions, had been sent about 1:00 P.M. New York time—early evening in Bonn. This second fax, in German, instructed Waldhausen to ask Morrison for his best guess of the executive structure in the new, merged company. I knew that in this theoretical structure Morrison would elevate himself over the Chairman and place his own people—Beales, Samantha, at least a half dozen others—in key positions. In effect, the Chairman was asking that Volkman-Sakura be provided documentation that Morrison intended to force the Chairman out, as well as a list of Corporation executives loyal to Morrison. A list of traitors provided by the traitors themselves to the Chairman. You had to hand it to him.

  It was Saturday, so the Corporation switchboard was closed. I needed to find Morrison, let him know what was going on. I called information in Westchester and got his home number. While the phone rang I looked out the window. An old Chinese man was taking tomatoes out of a huge packing box and putting them into small two-pound bags.

  Morrison’s wife picked up the phone and I asked for him.

  “I’m afraid he isn’t here,” his wife said easily.

  “Is he at the pool or somewhere I can reach him?”

  “Why no,” she said. “He’s in Manhattan.”

  “Will he be back home soon?”

  “Well, no.”

  “At the office?”

  “No . . . I don’t think so.”

  “Do you know?”

  She paused. Yes, of course she knew. Wives of executives making four million dollars a year always know where their husbands are.

  “He’s in Manhattan, I can say that.”

  “This is important,” I said politely. “This is Jack Whitman, we’ve met a couple of times.”

  “Yes, Jack.”

  “He’s at the Plaza Hotel?”

  “I really can’t tell you. He said no one was supposed to know. I’m sorry.”

  They were meeting at the Plaza and I didn’t even know about it. Bad, very bad. They were definitely cutting me out. But I still had to play it straight—the Chairman certainly wasn’t my champion and so I needed Morrison. Perhaps he would see to it that I would receive an interesting position in the merged corporations. I had to protect him—it was important that the request from Bonn not be answered. I watched the old man select tomatoes and dialed the executive suite at the Plaza where the group was meeting. I reached Beales.

  “Ed, I need to talk to Morrison,” I said.

  “We’re really busy here.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “He’s in the next room with Waldhausen,” Beales answered with purposeful lassitude. “I don’t think it’s a good time to interrupt him.”

  “Samantha, then.”

  “She’s not here yet.”

  “Let me talk to Morrison.”

  “If it’s important you can talk to me.”

  I supposed I had to.

  “Listen,” I said. “You guys are working out the structure of the new executive group today, right?”

  “Well,” Beales said vaguely, “we’re working on things, various aspects of the deal, you know.”

  “Don’t fuck around with me, Ed. I know Bonn has faxed you a request for a management structure.”

  “We’re going to send it to them in a few minutes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t fax it to them. It’s going directly to the Chairman, via Germany.”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting something here,” DiFrancesco said, looking at his screen. “Incoming fax to the Plaza machine.”

  “Hang on,” I told Beales. I set down the phone and went over to the screen. “This fax is coming into the V-S machine at the Plaza?”

  “Yes, here . . .” DiFrancesco said. “It’s coming . . .”

  I looked at the screen. It was unreadable.

  “Wait a minute,” DiFrancesco protested. “I can fix this.”

  “Jack,” Beales said in my ear when I picked up the phone. “What do you want? I got to go back to the other room.”

  “You guys got a fax machine there?” I asked him.

  “Do we?”

  “I mean one that’s different from the V-S machine.”

  “No, why?”

  I wasn’t sure. I was confused and trying to keep everything straight.

  “Hey, hey,” DiFrancesco said, “I got this readable now.”

  I glanced at the document on the screen. A request to Waldhausen’s people for an immediate answer to the previous fax. Why the hurry? It occurred to me that someone somewhere was trying to time a sequence of events.

  “I’m going to have to hang up,” Beales said.

  “Wait,” I told him. “Who has the fax with all the new management structure on it?”

  “They got a couple of secretaries here,” Beales said in exasperation. “One of them, I suppose.”

  “Can you alter a fax as it goes through your machine?” I asked DiFrancesco across the room.

  “That’s a fascinating question—”

  “Yes or no. Could you do it now?” I insisted.

  “No. I mean it probably could be done, but I’m going to have to think about it.”

  “Ed,” I returned to the phone. “Don’t have that fax sent.”

  “Why, for Christ sakes?”

  “Because—”

  “Hold on.” Beales covered the phone. Then he came back. “They tell me they just got another request by fax for the document, Jack. I can see the girl, the secretary, across the room—we worked all this out here, we agreed on it and it’s been typed up. In fact I just looked it over—”

  “Don’t fax it!”

  “You’re just pissed because your name won’t be on it,” he blurted.

  So. They were cutting me out completely.

  “Okay,” I said calmly. “Listen to me. I’m being straight with you. Get
your name off the document—”

  “What?”

  “Get everyone’s name off that—”

  “You’re out of your mind. How’d you find out about this stuff?”

  “Let me talk to Samantha,” I said.

  “I told you she’s not here yet. Why do you want to talk to her?”

  Below me, the old man was putting bad tomatoes under good ones, hiding them. That was the secret, I realized. I could fuck over Beales nicely. “Listen to me, Ed. Get your name off that management structure and make sure that Samantha’s is on it. I’ll say it again, Ed. You’re going to wish you did what I’m telling you. Get your name off the document, and make sure Samantha—your colleague whom you so much admire—make sure her name is on it, okay?”

  “You’re out of your fucking head,” Beales whispered harshly into the phone at me. “You’re out of the loop, pal. We got it all figured out on this end. Hey”—he called across the room—“give me that, yes—that one, I need to make an adjustment, very fast . . . here, yes, thank you, just . . . just this page, I need a pen, get me a pen . . .” His voice returned to the phone directly. “We don’t need you anymore, Jack. I’ve been listening to your arguing and bullshit for too many years. I can say this because it’s all wrapped up here, Morrison has signed off on it, I guess he was going to tell you on Monday, but—”

  “Fuck you, Ed.” I hung up.

  DiFrancesco looked at me.

  “He wouldn’t do what you told him to do?”

  “No.”

  “Is that bad?”

  I glanced out the window. The old man spat on his hand and polished up one of the top tomatoes in a bag. Shiny and nice, with the rotten ones underneath. My life was one stupid game after another. “You should be getting something on your machine very soon,” I said finally.

  “I . . . uh, yes, it’s dialing in now . . . looks like an outgoing fax from the Plaza Hotel machine to . . . that same number in Bonn,” DiFrancesco said, staring at his screen. “Cover sheet says six pages . . . I’m getting it.”

  A minute later he had the document captured on his screen. I scrolled through it, not bothering to translate the German. I knew what I was looking for. On the fourth page I found a schematic diagram of the new management structure, all boxes and lines of power and new titles. The whole group from the Corporation at the Plaza was on there, with one position or another. About a dozen. Yet one name had been hastily scratched out. Just a thick black line through the neat little box. I scanned all the other names—there was Morrison as “Co-chairman,” with V-S’s chairman, there was Ed Beales as “Executive Vice President for International Market Planning and Development,” the position that by rights would be mine. My name wasn’t there, and neither was Samantha’s—hers, I realized, was the one that had been hastily scratched out. As I’d hoped, Beales had assumed that I was lying to him. If I’d been telling him to remove his name from the document, then, in his logic, his name should remain on the document. And telling him to keep Samantha’s name on the document had elicited the opposite action—he had quickly blacked it out, assuming that doing so would confer to him some advantage over her.

  “You get what you want there?” DiFrancesco asked.

  “I might have,” I told him. “Don’t know yet.”

  A few minutes later, that same fourth page was sent from Bonn to the fax machine in the Chairman’s office, with a cover note by Fricker. As I expected. It was sent to the attention of Mrs. Marsh, and, no doubt, it was that very mo ment curling out of the machine into her soft, plump hand.

  THIRTEEN

  HER LIPS LOOKED GREAT. SHE LEANED IN CLOSE TO THE mirror and puckered them and rolled the shiny tube of lipstick just so, along the border of each lip. Then she ran her pink tongue across her teeth, touched up her eye makeup, lifted the lashes one last time with the black tip of the mascara applicator. Her face was coy in the mirror, pouting, flirting. She knew she looked terrific. Her hair, washed and rinsed with conditioner and brushed to a high luster, was pulled up above her neck with some sort of mother-of-pearl clasp she’d picked up in the Village, and she had a new pair of hundred-dollar sunglasses perched sportily on top. It was a summery, fun look. From the bed, I watched the preparations step by step. The nails on her fingers and toes were a cherry red, her legs were shaved and creamed, her underarms smooth and spritzed with antiperspirant, and her new sundress, a flowery, three-hundred-dollar cotton print charged on my American Express card at Bloomingdale’s, was cut low and made to be worn without a bra for the few women who could pull it off, and just high enough on the back of the thighs that one knew instantly that the bitch be game, as they say in Brooklyn, that here was a woman who was ready for a good time, that here was Dolores preparing for our trip to the Chairman’s place.

  “Do I look cheap?” Dolores spun in front of the mirror suddenly worried.

  “You look pretty expensive, actually.”

  Dolores didn’t like the joke. “Jack . . .”

  “You look fine,” I assured her. “It’s a weekend thing. People are supposed to be dressed casually. You look sexy and casual and great.”

  “Good. That’s just what I want.” Dolores turned back to the mirror. “I got a new bathing suit and one for Maria.”

  “Can I see yours?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Is it a bikini or one-piece?” I asked, packing some towels and a swimsuit for myself.

  “Oh, you’ll have to wait,” she teased.

  “Sounds sort of scandalous.”

  “Might be, you never know.”

  I nodded. “Good.”

  “Will it be warm enough to swim?”

  “It’s supposed to be pretty warm today, but the pool will be heated if necessary.”

  “He must have a lot of money.”

  I laughed.

  “Does he?” Dolores asked earnestly. “I mean, a heated pool is a lot of money.”

  “We’ll get out there and you can tell me if you think he’s rich,” I said. “You can give me your opinion on it.”

  Maria, washed and brushed too, was outfitted in a cute little red sundress and sandals. She and Dolores went on getting ready and I wandered downstairs. There had been no new information since the previous afternoon when I had been at DiFrancesco’s office, and as of that morning Di-Francesco hadn’t intercepted any more faxes. I assumed that Morrison, Samantha, and the others had continued their negotiations with Waldhausen and the other V-S people at the Plaza Hotel. I was tempted to call Morrison at home or Samantha but didn’t see the use. Morrison’s wife would have told him I’d called, even if Beales hadn’t. And Morrison knew I was going out to the Chairman’s Long Island home, but in his scheme for the management of the new merged Corporation, it didn’t matter where I was. If anything that Morrison considered important was to happen out there, he would have primed me, told me to report back to him. But he clearly didn’t care what I was doing now. I was extraneous, I was old news.

  So, in a mood of discouragement, I accompanied Dolores and Maria out to Long Island on the Long Island Railroad, picking up the train at Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and after a two-and-a-half-hour trip, we were met at the Southampton station by an elderly man in a tweed coat standing in a slant of sun on the platform. “Out for the day to see us?” he smiled, by way of introduction, taking the bag of swimsuits and towels Dolores had brought. “My name is Mr. Warren.” He led us to a boxy new station wagon with LITTLE MARSH FARM painted discreetly on the driver’s door. We followed the Montauk Highway east for a few minutes toward Bridge-hampton, so forcibly neat, and then down a winding road. Each side was lined with impenetrable hedges twelve feet high, with an occasional flicker of a gabled roofline or an elaborate brick chimney rising from behind. This was serious money, not Jack Whitman run-down-brownstone money. Dolores and Maria lolled in the backseat of the station wagon, the sun flickering across their faces, the wind pushing their hair back and toying with the hem of Maria’s sundress. I suddenly realized
I was happy. So fuck Morrison, I thought, life has its compensations.

  Then I turned back to Mr. Warren. “Is there a special gathering out here today?”

  “No, not especially. There’s usually people for tennis and swimming here on the weekends.” He was slowing down and checked his rearview mirror. “Friends, you know.”

  Dolores pressed her face into the open window. “I smell the ocean.”

  Mr. Warren smiled. “Yes, we’re very close to the water now.”

  We proceeded up an unmarked private road, and continued for five minutes past marshes and fields of wild rose and through a stand of virgin oaks and poplars, each a good two hundred feet high, and then through a rolling field of grass, where pruned, hundred-year-old copper beeches gracefully lined either side of the road. The station wagon dipped and rose and several Japanese luxury sedans flew past us going the opposite direction, with a friendly wave from Mr. Warren out the window. As the road leveled out we saw the brick chimneys first, and then beneath them rose the shingled Georgian mansion about the size of the New York Public Library. Behind it was the hundred-mile haze of the Atlantic.

  “Oh my God,” Dolores whispered.

  The Chairman was not available to greet us, said Mr. Warren amiably, but he had asked to see that we were comfortable. We were led around the house and directed to a large pool, where perhaps a dozen young children and adults played—no one I recognized as Corporation people, which was a relief. The grounds were extensive, and across an expanse of lawn sat a sleek black helicopter. Farther off came the sounds of tennis balls being hit on several courts and I could just make out a few older men in tennis togs, their sagging chests distorting their whites. But they remained at a distance. Inside the pool house was a table of finger sandwiches, salad, fruits, juices, beer, and so on. Dolores and Maria disappeared with their suits into the women’s cabana. They emerged a few minutes later, Maria first in her cute pink suit with a frilly skirt, and then Dolores. She had chosen a striped bikini that lifted her breasts up nicely, and as she led Maria over to the pool, I watched the other guests adjust to Dolores’s sexuality. She and Maria were the only dark-skinned people at the pool, but no one seemed particularly interested in this fact; they looked rich and that was enough. Maria quickly made friends with another little girl and the two of them splashed happily in the shallow end. Dolores swam tentatively and it occurred to me that she’d never had much chance to swim, growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The three of us played in the water for a while. I noticed the helicopter leaving and arriving. At one point in the next hour I saw Mr. Warren at the house, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand as he looked toward the pool, perhaps looking for me. Then he disappeared. Dolores and Maria and their new friends drifted away from the pool to play a game of croquet. I swam a few nervous laps, wondering if I would see the Chairman at all that afternoon.