Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  Time passed under the sun. Most of the children seemed to have run off down the hill and, left alone, I found one of those absurd pool chairs made out of Styrofoam and aluminum that floats even as you sit in it. Fortified by a cold beer that fit in the arm of the chair, I fell into a stuporous half slumber, rocked by the light lapping of the pool, the sun searing pleasurably through my closed eyelids. It had been years since I had enjoyed such an afternoon, and almost two decades since I had enjoyed a summer of such afternoons. What is it about the pleasure of burning beneath the sun? My mother and Harry McCaw had joined the tennis club and the summer I was fifteen I’d spent a lot of time there, working on my serve, aware somehow that it was my last summer of freedom, cultivating a precancerous tan and pursuing the legendary Betsy Jones, the daughter of the club’s owner, only fifteen and already notorious for her sassiness, drinking, and remarkable two-handed backhand . . . those were vanished, memorable weeks. It was rumored then that Betsy was dating a University of Pennsylvania sophomore (which turned out to be true, since she eventually married and divorced him), but I was sleek and energetic and at ease in my tight little tank swimsuit, which I tied with a little string halfway between my navel and crotch, and after a summer of insipid teenaged flirtation, we did the great deed late one night at the club in a five-foot-deep wooden closet, atop hundreds of folded linen table-cloths. She knew what she was doing, and I didn’t, and the actual act probably lasted less than three feverish minutes, with no ultimate satisfaction for Betsy Jones, but afterward I believed myself to be transported to a new level of manhood, as if, say, I had just been drafted into professional football. I remember saying good night to her sometime after 2:00 A.M. and then streaking on my bicycle in crazed jubilance through the dark streets toward home, my sockless toes gripping the clammy insides of my tennis shoes as I pedaled with my hands off the bike’s handles, raising my fists over my head in a mad celebration of victory. I remembered this more than the actual act of sex. I never saw Betsy again. She was shipped off to a new boarding school and we lost touch.

  A shadow moved above me in the sun. I heard my name. Mr. Warren appeared at the side of the pool, looking hot in his tweed jacket. He was holding a towel.

  “If you have a minute, Mr. Whitman?”

  I knew by his polite expression that I was being summoned, that the afternoon had a purpose after all.

  “Do I have time to get dressed?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Whitman.”

  “I’d really like to just go back to the pool house and throw a shirt on, at least.”

  “I’m sorry. He would like you this very moment.”

  I climbed out of the pool, irritated with this silliness, my swimsuit dripping, and looked around for Dolores and Maria.

  “They’re with the other children.” Mr. Warren handed me a towel, implying that there was no time to find Dolores and tell her I’d left the pool. For a butler, the guy was tough. I followed him in my tender bare feet along a path of bricks set in a herringbone pattern that wound under ornamental cherry trees toward the main house.

  “I’m still wet,” I said, pointing to the parquet floor as we stepped from the bright sun through a sliding glass door.

  “That’s all right, Jack,” came a voice from inside the room. “We know you’re a slippery fish.” The Chairman. My eyes adjusted to a dark, air-conditioned room of paneling and Oriental rugs as Mr. Warren stayed outside and pulled shut the glass door behind me. He was seated in an easy chair and swept his hand toward four older men, all showered and dressed in casual clothes. “Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet Jack Whitman, one of our most promising young people.”

  The far-off older men who’d been playing tennis were now showered and seated in padded armchairs. They nodded hello dutifully, sipping their drinks. They looked familiar. They were familiar. I tried to arrange the towel casually around my neck and look as if I knew just what was going on. Water ran in quick droplets down my legs, puddling at my feet. I was virtually naked, my thinning hair frizzled up by the sun and water, white stomach popping out over my waistband. There is something disconcerting about standing in wet trunks inside a house, in front of five older men, available for their inspection, representing my generation, and not a prime specimen, not at all. I was no longer the young man who had given Betsy Jones a pop in the tablecloth closet. I looked like a guy dragged out of a swimming pool and forced to stand and deliver. You had to hand it to the Chairman; he knew how to terrify a man. I had a wet jockstrap on and it chafed and bound my testicles. My knees began to shake and I felt the slime of perspiration in the heat of my armpits.

  “Jack, let me introduce you,” began the Chairman with a casual wave of his arm. “This is Peter Velkner—”

  I nodded. Yes, I recognized everyone now. Velkner had been a board member of the Corporation since 1986. Founding chairman, now retired, of Velkner Aerospace in California. A technology genius. Key computer inventions back in the 1960s. Understood manufacturing processes. Completely uninterested in the New York social scene. Spoke Japanese fluently. Raised hybrid coniferous trees as a hobby. I nodded hello but did not shake hands.

  “Ralph Ueberoth—”

  Board member of the Corporation since 1990. Current vice chairman of New York Trust National Bank. By training an economist. Had been one of the governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in the first Reagan administration. From what I knew of him, a doubter by nature, a lemon-sucker.

  “Harry Doerman—”

  Of course. Board member of the Corporation since 1979. Current chairman of Global Airlines; former vice chairman of Merck, the drug manufacturer; former vice president of IBM. A happy guy, a deal maker. Could sell anything to anybody, sunglasses to corpses, anything.

  “And Earl Watson.”

  Board member of the Corporation since 1983. Founder of the Watson Corp., which ran a chain of sixty-eight newspapers nationwide. Very smart about American culture, a patron of the arts. Somewhere I’d read that as boys he and the Chairman had taken violin lessons together sixty years back, during the Depression. These were the senior members of the board, the inner sanctum.

  “Jack, as you probably know, the board has a number of committees. One of them, as you know, is called the governance and nominating committee, which has a standing subcommittee for miscellaneous purposes. You may not know about this”—the Chairman conducted himself as if he and I were mere acquaintances, his tone ever so subtly patronizing—“but the subcommittee is empowered under one of our bylaws, one of our obscure bylaws, to bypass other members of the board and convene itself as it sees fit and wherever it deems sufficient. This is the only subcommittee that can meet officially and not notify all the other board members. I tell you that”—and here he paused to look straight into my eyes—“to be sure you realize that despite the agreeably informal appearance of our meeting, that this is a formal meeting.” At these words, Mrs. Marsh appeared, in her frumpy dress and stockings, carrying a notebook and pen. But her hair looked blasted from behind—I realized that she had just come in on the helicopter and no doubt she had yesterday’s faxes to the Chairman from Germany with her. She sat down in the back of the room. “. . . with complete recorded minutes of the meeting, binding power of vote, and so on.”

  The Chairman let his blue eyes settle on mine to be sure I understood. He looked alert, jazzed up. “Now, to get to the matter at hand. Jack has been making the case to me for a merger with Volkman-Sakura. As everyone here knows, with perhaps the exception of Jack, over the last six months I have had informal discussions with their representatives. We’ve been quiet about this, very quiet. I’ve decided, based in part upon Jack’s excellent arguments, that a straight stock-for-stock swap, plus a V-S capitalization plan, makes excellent sense. Jack here has all the details, all the rationale.”

  He turned to me and I shivered with recognition at his cleverness, his mastery of me, of Morrison, of all of them. “I would like you to make the case for the deal to the committee, Jack, if you
would.”

  “I am pleased to do that”—I smiled in terror—“but perhaps there are others in the executive group who should also have the opportunity to—”

  “We appreciate your loyalty to Mr. Morrison and the others,” Watson, one of the committee members, interrupted, “but we wish to hear you.”

  “Yes,” the Chairman answered, “you need not worry about Morrison and the others. Their roles are clearly understood by this committee . . .”

  Their roles are clearly understood by this committee. I stood in the midst of a countercoup. The Chairman was presenting the joint venture plan as his own idea to the board.

  “What we would like from you, Jack, is, first, the overall argument for the plan. You’ve talked to me about the penetration and addition of new markets, the ability to pass through various cultural curtains through V-S’s own distribution system, and so on. Then I would like you to specify the financial maneuvers that would actually effect the venture, starting with the shell holding corporation, the valuation of their stock against ours, any bridge loan requirements, what our Eurodollar situation is like now, and then, if you have any breath left”—he gave a soft, staged little laugh—“then lay out for us the effect on each division, which operations would have to be spun off and sold, what the conflicts with federal regulations are, the market for these superfluous operations, and who, possibly, would buy them—”

  And so on. In short, to summarize all the work of all the others, the useful stuff, the important figures and strategies, certain words and concepts worth millions of dollars. He knew from the satellite meetings in Washington that I had a very good memory, was a quick study. The committee members didn’t care who had come up with the numbers and valuations and reports; once out of my mouth, the information was theirs, forever. Mrs. Marsh sat poised to take it all down in shorthand, her half-frame glasses on the bridge of her nose. As he finished I quietly cleared my throat—I’d be talking for an hour, perhaps more . . .

  There are moments when we betray other people. Morrison had manipulated me into a position where I could do that to him, even while propounding his vision of the Corporation. He had purposefully taken me out of the negotiating group—what did I owe him now? If I did not cooperate with the Chairman, then I signaled my allegiance to Morrison, and hence advertised his betrayal of the Chairman. Either way I turned, Morrison was screwed, as far as I could see. He couldn’t protect me now. And I was expendable to the Chairman as soon as I talked. My only chance was to do a good job. I was on my own, singing for the angels.

  The Chairman asked solicitously, “I think you have a lot to tell us, Jack. Perhaps you would like to sit?”

  More than anything, I wanted to shoot my hand into my trunks and unbind my balls from the clammy jockstrap.

  “No,” I answered quietly, to him and then to the four men sitting in front of me, “I’ll stand.”

  It went somewhat better than I expected. I got into it, paced around a bit as I talked, answered the questions and objections that were raised by each man. We backtracked a few times; they weren’t familiar with some of the latest market information. The Chairman stood to the back, listening. He picked up a tiny Chinese jade horse from a side table and inspected it absentmindedly, nodding to himself from time to time as he heard certain of my points and responses. I ceased hearing my own voice nervously and just talked to the people in the room. They were smart; they could see that the presentation depended on analysis, not a bunch of gee-whiz charts and slide shows. And then, they had asked their last questions.

  Outside, the shadows of the trees had fallen like giant fingers across the pool. Were we done? The Chairman gave a sharp little nod to me and said, “Thanks, Jack—you’ve given us a great deal to think about. Or maybe I should say now we’re going to think about a great deal.” He gave a quick concluding wink and the meeting was over. Someone put a drink in my hand and each of the committee members came up and shook my hand in that dry-skinned, casual way of older men, getting close and just sort of slipping a cool, not-too-tight palm in there, as if a bill is being passed between the two of you. I belonged to them now, they had me.

  The Chairman quietly told me he’d see me in the office the next day, and that was the cue that screamed I was to disappear. Mr. Warren miraculously appeared again and guided me down a hallway toward another door. The warmth had returned to his manner. I passed a formal dining room where a magnificent table was set for five, warm silver bowls resting on buffet carts. Mr. Warren led me to a comfortable den, where Dolores and Maria were sitting on a sofa, dressed now, watching television. I could see that they’d had a nice day; they’d been taken care of, fed, entertained. After I changed into my clothes, Mr. Warren escorted us across the lawn to the helicopter. Dolores took my hand and squeezed it. We stepped up into the cabin, which was large enough to seat six people.

  “Thank you for coming to see us this day,” Mr. Warren said. Then he pointed to a cabinet behind us. “There should be a rather nice warm dinner behind you, there, with just enough time to eat.”

  He shut the cabin door and within a minute the helicopter lifted up.

  “Where are we going?” Dolores asked over the loud vibration of the helicopter.

  “Probably the heliport on the East Side,” I told her. “It’ll be forty-five minutes, is my guess.”

  “I’m scared,” Maria said.

  “Don’t be, sweetie.”

  She settled down and pressed her nose to the curved window and watched the Long Island shoreline on our left as we flew west back toward Manhattan, into the last minutes of the sun. I was exhausted by the afternoon; the careful orchestration of events, with Jack Whitman as unwitting pawn, scared me. What would happen when I arrived in the office the next day? Did I belong to Morrison or to the Chairman? Where was the advantage? I closed my eyes. And then I felt warm lips on my forehead and opened my eyes. Dolores sat before me, dark eyes fixed on me. I saw that the afternoon had profoundly changed her understanding of me; she gazed at me intently, with new hunger.

  We landed on a huge yellow X at the heliport. A car awaited us and not seventy-five minutes after taking off we were at my front door.

  “Are you tired, Jack?” Dolores asked as we stepped inside.

  I flipped on the hall light. “Stressed out. I should have brought some of my acid medication along with me.”

  “You didn’t know what they wanted from you.”

  “I should have guessed, Dolores, I really should have.”

  She was unpacking the swimsuits and towels. “Well, I had a very, very nice day.”

  I managed a smile. “Good.”

  “They made you talk that whole time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you put Maria to bed? Maybe it will calm you down.”

  So I did, impressed with Dolores’s little piece of wisdom. Maria and I went upstairs hand in hand to her new room, which I’d started to fix up with a toy box and a little bed and a table for the coloring books. Maria was tired from the sun and water and I helped her into her pajamas.

  “Read me The Cat in the Hat,” she said.

  “You’re very sleepy, sweetie.”

  “Read it to me.”

  “Get up in my lap, then.”

  I read the first few pages in a low voice about how the little girl and little boy were inside on a rainy day with nothing fun to do when the Cat in the Hat appears. Maria’s eyes became glassy. Her lids closed slowly and she went limp in my arms, her head upon my left breast, so close that my exhalation made her dark curls tremble. Her lips were fat and slackened, eyeballs gently moving beneath her lids. I might never know her—our lives might fly apart or she might nurse me on my deathbed—but in those seconds I loved her. What I held in my arms was as perfect a thing as could be made by nature, a child still years from the great neuroses and miseries of adulthood, the creeping hatreds and fears. Maria stirred, her lips smacking quietly. One arm found my hand and gathered it in. Did Hector suspect that another
man held his child with fatherly desire?

  After I put Maria into her bed and covered her, I checked the answering machine in my office. Two messages: “Uh, hello, this is Mike DiFrancesco . . . I got a little bit of a problem with NYNEX, when I was changing your unlisted number, I messed it up: the number is now 555-4043 but it’s listed, not unlisted. The address is still unlisted and I can’t figure that out, except maybe the NYNEX file got duplicated somehow in the system, and you’re considered a new listing. They’ve been changing their protocols, so I hope this doesn’t create some kind of problem—”

  I fast-forwarded to the second message: “Dolores, listen I know you’re there, I know you’re listening . . .” Hector’s voice, rattling out of the little box. I turned the volume down until the message was barely audible. “. . . I got this phone number from the phone company just now, some kinda new number, Whitman’s been fucking around with the number or something. Listen, if you’re there, you gotta be, I been figuring some things out here,’bout where you are now, and I think I got it and so maybe we’ll be talkin’ real soon, Dolores, and that’s good because I just want you to know that I got promoted. A new job, lotta more work. They just said, ‘You, you’re promoted.’ I been fuckin’ sweating up there more than three years and they finally give me a break. Now I’m one of the field bosses—field supervisors. I know you always wanted me to make more money, Dolores. They got me starting training tomorrow. All kinds of procedures and rules and shit. There’s paperwork, and stuff on a computer, too. I told them I was gonna do a good job. It’s more money, Dolores, I got more money for us and you can come back. Bring Maria back. I got fifty-two hundred more bucks coming in now, real money. Think I’ll still, you know, put in those shifts at the car lot, for extra, right? I gotta work longer but—”