Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  Fricker came in from the next office and we shook hands. He was making about ten times the salary he had been making the last time I’d seen him and it showed in his face.

  “You’ve been in Germany the whole time?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Jack, tomorrow morning we’ll have the formal vote with the whole board,” the Chairman went on. “Just protocol. I’ve talked to all the key people, as you saw yesterday. Then an hour later, the public announcement of the deal.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to get everything you said yesterday out in Bridgehampton down to twenty minutes. It went well but it was way, way too long. Just so the full board can have the whole thing laid out for them. You should go home and think about this, actually. Go home, take off your shoes, and come up with the best twenty minutes you can think of. Time it with a watch, the whole thing.” The Chairman pushed several pieces of paper into a pile. I was about to leave when he called after me. “Also, please do one more thing for me, today before you go home, please get that Freddie Robinson fellow back here. Mrs. Marsh will have his number.” He looked at me. “Some absolute idiot fired him.”

  “Look!” Maria hollered to me when I came home early that day, having reinstated Robinson before leaving the office. “I’m on tiptoes!” She pranced about the living room on her toes, a little pixie in curls and a new dress and shoes.

  “You’re home early,” Dolores said, coming out of the kitchen. They had just returned from Maria’s new playgroup.

  “Good things are happening,” I told her.

  “But you’re home.”

  “It’s the first afternoon I’ve had off in months, actually.”

  “Let’s go do something.”

  “I want to have some fun!” Maria demanded.

  The Chairman’s words had put me in an optimistic mood. “We could go for a drive.”

  “Where?”

  “Brooklyn Heights? Sit out on the promenade and watch the boats?”

  “Maria and I were there last week,” Dolores said.

  “Well, anywhere, a drive for the hell of it, before the rush hour traffic gets bad. Maybe an hour.”

  “I want to go for a drive!” Maria said.

  We walked to the garage and got into my rarely used Ford, with Maria in the back with a bunch of her coloring books. I had no idea where I wanted to go. It would be better to stay off the cratered Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at this time of day. I kept an eye out for kids running into the street after school and nosed the car along Seventh Avenue, past yuppie mothers wheeling babies in Aprica strollers, then cut down to Fourth Avenue and turned left toward the south of Brooklyn.

  “Where’re we going?” Dolores asked. “We’re going to Sunset Park?”

  “We could if you want. I wasn’t planning it.”

  “I want to go!” Maria said.

  She shrugged. “It’s not so great a neighborhood.”

  “But maybe you could show me some of the places you told me about.” I took her hand.

  “Sure,” Dolores said. “But I don’t want to stop and talk to anybody.”

  We headed south for thirty blocks and then we were in her old neighborhood and I looked carefully at the cramped row homes and hulking apartment houses. I remembered the address from Hector’s personnel file; perhaps Dolores’s son was there this very minute. I pictured him as a sturdy, plump six-year-old, with Dolores’s eyes and face. Then I remembered that Hector would still be at work, which meant, I guessed, that the boy was at a friend’s house or in the park or still at school. If Dolores and Hector eventually divorced, it seemed likely that she would get custody of her son, given the fact that judges don’t like to break up siblings. And that might mean the boy would come to live with me. In fact, if Dolores and I were together, then my affluence would be a factor the judge might consider when considering Dolores’s ability to care for the boy. This had never occurred to me before.

  “This is the place I used to buy vegetables,” Dolores said, pointing out the window, “and that, that’s where we used to buy candles and incense. This coming up is our old street.”

  “I’ll turn down it.”

  “Okay, but I don’t want to stop. Maria, don’t wave to anybody.”

  I made a sharp turn and, reading the street numbers, slowed down in front of a crummy walk-up, five stories high, with cracked stonework in the front, and cheap window guards bought in a hardware store in some of the windows, and laundry hung out on the little balconies. I braked to a stop.

  “And this,” I said, a little too abruptly, “is where you used to live?”

  I looked at her expectantly.

  “How did you know about this?” Dolores demanded. “How did you know about this place?” she repeated, a strain of urgency in her voice.

  “That’s not the question, Dolores.”

  “What is the question?” she replied defiantly, and her defensiveness angered me.

  “The question, dammit, is why you didn’t tell me you have a son.”

  She stared at me in shock, and then slumped down in her seat, her eyes filling with tears. She turned her head away from me. I worried that she might grab Maria and jump out of the car, so I eased it down the street, back into traffic for a minute, and then back onto Fourth Avenue, back the way we had come. “Dolores, the company I work for is very, very large,” I finally said. “It has divisions, many divisions. Companies that it owns.”

  “So?” she said from behind her hand.

  “So you already know we own Big Apple Cable, where Hector works during the week. You see, in effect, he and I work for the same gigantic company, except that we are in very different places in it.”

  “I got that.”

  “I’m high enough up that I can get information about all the various parts of the corporation. Including Big Apple.”

  She said nothing.

  “Not too long ago, I requested that I be sent your husband’s employee file.”

  She looked at me, cheeks wet, her face frozen. And then she came at me with her fists.

  “That’s totally wrong!”

  I caught her with my right arm, held her. “Yes. Yes, it was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it but I did. In that file was the usual stuff but also in it was the information that you and Hector have a son, Dolores. I know about your son, Dolores. I can tell you the day he was born.”

  Sometime, in another life, I will learn about the physiology of the veins in the head, and then I will understand how it was that three of them pulsed suddenly in Dolores’s forehead at that moment, even as her lips quivered and she stared at me with great wet angry eyes. But I was angry too.

  “Your son, Dolores, your son,” I pressed. “Where is he?”

  Dolores was silent on the way back, curled away from me in the car seat, staring dully out the window. When we returned to Park Slope, I pulled the car over and suggested we sit out in the garden, where Maria could play by herself in a new sandbox I’d bought her. Dolores nodded her head tearfully and we marched back to the yard, where Dolores found her wallet in a bag, and slipped out a small color photgraph. She contemplated it. Then without bothering to meet my eyes, she handed it to me.

  It was a picture of the three of them, Dolores, Hector, and little Hector, taken when the boy was about two, I guessed. And that would be four and a half years prior. The intervening time had aged her noticeably. In the photo, Dolores seemed to be almost a different person, with that sort of bright healthy juiciness only young women possess. Her eyes were happy and her smile more animated than I’d ever seen it. And Hector himself seemed more robust, more confident than when I’d seen him, his dark hair shiny as glass, one hand on his wife’s shoulder as she sat in the photographer’s studio chair, the other casual by his side. And in Dolores’s lap was little Hector, a small dark-eyed prince of a boy, obviously cleaned and scrubbed down to his nails for the photo session, looking stiff in his collar shirt and cute little fake tie, and staring
into the camera with the unknowing, open-eyed wonder of a child, his little lips fat and red. I remembered Maria’s age and did a little rough figuring. “Were you pregnant when this was taken?”

  Dolores looked startled for a moment, then said, sadly, “Yes.” Like about three months.”

  I handed the photo back to Dolores and she slipped it back into her wallet. “I want you to understand two things. It was an accident, but it wasn’t an accident. I mean, it happened because of Hector and me. It—” She looked at me. “I want to explain it to you so that you will see why it is so hard for Hector, for us. We’re caught by it, you know? We can’t forget it.”

  There is something self-evidently false about focusing on particular instants of a life, as opposed to the confluence of patterns that causes events to transpire, but one must find a beginning somewhere when talking about the past. So, too, with Dolores. She recalled for me the moment she knew she was pregnant with little Hector, a tickling twinge in her breasts not long after her period was late. She returned home from the doctor’s office—a cheap clinic full of Indian doctors with thick accents who couldn’t get work elsewhere, she said dismissively—with a sense of dread, because her own mother had died as a result of childbirth and because she didn’t know if Hector would be happy about the news, or if he would believe or admit the child was his. “We weren’t even married,” Dolores said, “and he hadn’t said anything. He did get me a little ring but that didn’t mean anything. So I got home and waited for him to come off work. And he got home and was tired and I took a breath and said I got to tell you something and then I just said it all at once and—this was so surprising, he was very happy and started to kiss my stomach. He said he loved the baby and we would get married real fast. So we did, which I already told you about, and we had a big wedding, like I said already—did I say how much it cost? I think it was something like five thousand dollars and I really didn’t want to spend it, but Hector, he said he was going to make us rich, he was going to go into business and not to worry. He always wanted to be rich, throw money out the window to people. So he spent all of his savings and some of the money he got from the army for his hand—oh, he was in the army for about two weeks and got stabbed in the hand and so they used to send him money for it. And I think he borrowed the rest. He looked good in his tux. Everybody looked good.”

  After the wedding, which was attended by the melancholy pair of aging aunts, both with swollen ankles and propped up and strapped in wheelchairs, neither of whom trusted Hector’s glib boasts, the young couple shot by limousine to Atlantic City. “It had this little wall that went up between the driver and the people in the seats, and the driver told us he would be shutting it and that he would open it again when we got to Atlantic City.”

  “So you screwed in the seat of the limo as it was driving.”

  “Of course!” She smiled.

  Then came the months of pregnancy and birth, which was difficult, Dolores said, not only because the Indian doctor whom she didn’t trust used forceps but because it was her first labor and the little boy’s head was swollen and conical from the pressure to get through her pelvis. He turned yellow with jaundice, as is common with newborns, and was kept under special lights at the hospital for four days while his liver began to work on its own. The baby had to have a tiny blindfold fitted snugly over his eyes, or else the intense lights could damage them. “The nurses were not any good. They had too many babies to look after, so I stayed up, like, three days in a row to be sure that the blindfold didn’t fall off. Hector had to work the whole time. Of course the baby, he pulled the blindfold off all the time, he hated being on his back under the lights, but I just sat there and pulled it back on.”

  Eventually the baby was well enough to go home, said Dolores, and the three of them settled into the life of young parents—the life I’d missed by three bullets. Dolores read as much as she could about being a good mother, for she didn’t trust her aunts, and, besides, she wanted to raise her son as an American, not half and half as she had been raised, Dominican Spanish at home, New York street Spanish outside, too little English, her half-literate aunts burning scents in her room at night sometimes and mixing smelly potions on the stove and pouring them into glass jars, praying in Spanish for their dead father, who had been buried in the sandy soil of Santo Domingo thirty years prior. No, none of that for her, thank you. Her child was born in December of 1985, and Dolores’s aunts and father, living the first thirty years of their lives in Santo Domingo, had been born, in a sense, in the previous century. So she took Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous book out of the Sunset Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, and plowed through it, all five hundred-odd pages of it, with a dictionary next to her to use when necessary. Their little boy was slender, more like his father, with skinny shoulders and chest. His lashes were long and the corners of his eyes were perpetually wet. As her firstborn, she indulged him, letting him sleep with her in bed with her in the mornings after Hector had gone to work. On good days she pushed him in a stroller up to Sunset Park to meet with the other young women with children, sitting on benches and talking about all the important matters of life: children, husbands, mothers, money. The park was perfectly situated upon one of the highest hills of Brooklyn and afforded a magnificent, distant view of the blue-gray skyline of Manhattan and the white world of power and influence wholly impregnable to the aspirations of a mujer such as Dolores Salcines. But no matter. Hector was bringing in just enough money, and having a son filled her. Her boy—her boy!—grew, he took his first chubby bowlegged steps, he cooed, he began to speak. He kicked off his shoes and threw his food on the floor and didn’t want to go to bed. He suffered from diaper rash and ear infections and sudden fevers and strange blotches on his skin that came and went. He told his dad to “be the funny horse!” and rode around on his back. He learned to count to ten and to sing “The Farmer in the Dell” and ride a tricycle. Dolores wished that her father had lived long enough to see his grandson. If she could have anything, it would be that.

  And then she was pregnant again, happily so—though it was no surprise, because after little Hector’s birth, sex with Hector had gotten better. Somehow having had a baby had been the final loss of corporeal innocence; the blood and the pain and frank animalness of it had changed her. She became aroused more quickly and came so easily now, without trying. She’d heard other young mothers talk about this. And now that she was pregnant again, this time she knew enough to get her rest and take her vitamins. It was a good pregnancy, even chasing after her little boy. Hector was tense, worrying about the money. They argued sometimes. When she was almost due, he said he would find a better job, maybe check out the company that was doing all the cable-TV installations in the neighborhood. He knew one of the guys who did the wire work. The company, Hector had been told, would probably be hiring sometime in the next six months. But Dolores was not thinking about these things; she was feeling her body reach its ultimate weight, her breath short, her ankles swollen. The baby was going to be big. Her water broke on a Sunday and the delivery was quick and uneventful. Hector coached her as best he could during the labor, and when the baby was out and clearly a healthy girl, he cut the umbilicus with the surgical scissors the nurse handed him. Now we have a son and a daughter, he said to Dolores, his eyes bright.

  “We were always so happy then,” Dolores remembered. “Hector, he believed in everything, he believed he could make a better life for us, you know? And I told you what happened to his flooring store before Maria was born, the way they stole everything? I mean, we were happy, we were very happy about our kids, but . . . I don’t know. Things started to happen. Hector finally got the cable job after Maria was born, but it wasn’t so great and so he had to start selling cars. He wasn’t around enough. I used to get angry and sometimes he would just go out at night. He was trying to make enough money. Maybe he was getting tired of it, you know? Things started to happen . . . it’s hard to explain. We kind of fought. But things happened you would never
expect. This isn’t about my son yet. First I have to tell you about what happened on the train.”

  They were on the R train headed south toward Sunset Park one Saturday afternoon in July, Dolores explained, and Hector had a copy of the Daily News pulled up to his nose. They’d seen a movie, picked up some groceries. Little Hector and Maria were with a baby-sitter Dolores watched her husband page through the sports section. He was a smart man but a slow reader and this sometimes irritated her. She read everything quickly, and always held great pride in this ability. Hector was also illiterate in Spanish. But she knew he loved to read about the Yankees, he was always talking about how ballplayers worked only a couple of hours a day for millions. She waited for him to glance up and see her. The subway pulled into the Union Street station. Something was different outside the windows of the train and immediately the riders picked up on it, as they do; then it was clear—there was yelling outside the train. Perhaps a gang—that was always the danger—and who knew where they were on the platform? Hector put his paper down and his eyes met Dolores’s. The train stopped and the doors opened, without the conductor’s usual announcement. They could leave the train or stay. They heard more shouts. And then suddenly cops started running into the car, ten, maybe fifteen, huge men in blue, their chests thickened by bulletproof vests, the black leather belts heavy with nightsticks and flashlights, bullets and citation pads, and of course guns—working their way down the car, looking at everyone in it, skipping past Dolores and the other women and the few white guys, concentrating on anybody who was black or Hispanic and young—Hector, no doubt, felt the sudden, chill fear of the innocent. When the cops came to him—they seemed to believe they had spotted him—one of them said, “He’s got a red shirt. Let’s see how tall he is.”