To be fair, to be sure to spread the grief, mine was not the only loss. One of the gunman’s bullets had crashed through the store window, ricocheted off a cash register, and, tumbling through the air, destroyed the windpipe of an old black woman inspecting the grocery’s green onions. She survived. Another bullet also passed through the length of the store into a back room, and entered the perfect heart of a thirteen-year-old Korean boy standing on an overturned vegetable crate, instantly killing him.
The New York Times ran a couple of stories on the double homicide because one of the victims was a pregnant, white, professional woman, and what happened to her is what the demographically select population that reads the Times fears most—constantly weighing the opportunity of New York against the notion that the longer you stay, the more likely the odds that the city will call your bluff. The reporter, a guy named Weber, listened dutifully to my grief. The tabloids grabbed the story too, and if you lived in New York then and read the New York Post, you might have paged past a picture of a man in a raincoat clutching a briefcase and gazing down toward something just out of the frame of the photo. The flash of the camera illuminates a jaw frozen tight but not the hollows of his eyes, which remain darkly hidden. PREG WIFE MURDERED IN DRIVE-BY, the headline says. One isn’t sure whether the man is gazing into the grave of his wife or the depth of his own hatred for her killer. I hated everybody then, including myself, for not somehow saving Liz. And I hated the newspapers for converting my torment into a minor entertainment for the masses.
Without a suspect, and with the next horrific crime a few days later (that was the one in which the skull and soupy features of a ballerina were found in a long-steaming cookpot in an apartment in the East Village), public memory quickly forgot Liz’s murder. The carnage in New York is continuous, of course. It was just as well, because the nuts had begun to call, excitedly telling me they were sorry—“Oh, what a tragedy!”—that they knew who did it and would tell me for a certain amount of money, or that Liz was still alive and, misidentified by the hospital bureaucracy, lingered in a coma in an obscure wing of the hospital. One desperate woman sent me a perfumed note asking if I wanted to remarry and included her photograph, which I studied and then returned.
So I moved into Mrs. Cronister’s crumbling, unkempt brown-stone for refuge. The empty house, which of course I legally owned and was still obligated to pay for, offered the haunting comfort that came with knowing Liz had wanted us to live there. All I wanted was to be as tired as possible, too tired to think or feel, or remember. Later, when the police started to hear rumors from the street about the killings, and they developed a suspect, I was denied any chance at seeing Liz’s killer or understanding the motivations of those who took her life with such sporting dispatch. The suspected triggerman was one Roynell Wilkes, a twenty-year-old unremarkable in all ways, including his record of violence and the two gold teeth brightening his mouth. I chose to hate him in the easiest way possible—by imagining him as a ninthgrade drop-out, a bubble-headed jigaboo in an outsized L.A. Raiders jacket who bought the violent rap videos that the Corporation was selling by the millions, a kid without a conscience, a bad customer, a coward in baggy pants and Air Jordans. But it wasn’t nearly so simple as that. Later I learned that as a child Wilkes had been repeatedly beaten by his father to within an inch of his life, causing certain learning disabilities and year upon year of frustration in school. And whereas Liz was not killed on purpose, young Wilkes was. He was found at dawn handcuffed to the steering wheel of that same BMW, parked in front of a Harlem flower shop, two bullets in the back of his closely cropped skull, and ten new, carefully folded hundred-dollar bills stuffed deep into his throat. The Post ran a photo of that too, and one could see that Wilkes had a lightning bolt shaved onto his skull and, incongruously, a face that in the repose of death was soft and even sweet. My heart was not large enough to forgive him, yet I never could be happy that he had died. No, despite myself, his death saddened me—ultimately, I realized, Wilkes was killed by the same thing that killed Liz. They were both killed by the city.
So my vengeance was expired, though not my grief, and I withdrew deep into myself, burrowing into the work at the Corporation, churning the paper and phone calls and meetings with the fervor of one who must never think too much. Friends suggested I see a “grief therapist” for a few months, that I date or travel. Instead, after the funeral, I returned to work. I could not do anything but work. My propensity to remember was obliterated under the stamping machine of work. Bush came into the White House, the great golden decade crashed and burned, yet the Corporation thrived. The country fell into a shuddering recession and the United States Air Force incinerated thousands of Iraqi soldiers. The Corporation sent five thousand VCR cassettes of our movies to the troops. They watched them in the tents. It was my idea. We were heavily leveraged but we kept making money. The Corporation—America’s largest media and entertainment company—is very, very good at making money. In my department on the twentieth floor I became known for my odd, emotionless ambition. In a perverse sort of way, my luck turned upon Liz’s murder; her death freed me to become my own worst efficient self. Morrison, second in command in the Corporation, the man everyone feared, started paying attention when my subdivision turned a $49 million profit as a result of my marketing plan. Morrison had lost half a leg and most of a hand as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam; having survived, he had the confidence of five men. Combat had shown him that we are all merely walking bags of meat, and once a man has decided that, all manner of brilliant scheming becomes possible. Morrison also had a mean, opportunistic streak—I knew that, even then—and he figured that my loss created his advantage. I had possibilities. He brusquely promoted me up to the thirty-ninth floor, where the air-conditioning was cooler and the toilet paper softer, and where twenty-five people ran the whole damn operation, managed the forty-six thousand employees of the Corporation. My new title was one of those meaningless strings of words that begin with “vice president for.” The special assignments came, then the access, the dinner parties, the raises, the stock options. I didn’t screw up, I quit worrying about the mortgage payments each month. I started having my shirts picked up by the laundry and delivered back. It happened over just a few years. My name did not appear in the annual report, with the color photographs of the Chairman and Morrison and four or five other key executives in stiff poses. But I rode in the cars and saw all the budgets and went to the small meetings. Morrison didn’t like me much as a man, but he saw my usefulness to him. That is what bosses look for, even at my level—usefulness.
I was thinking about the woman on the train as I stepped inside the parlor floor of my house, recalling her full lips and dark eyes, when Morrison found me again. His voice boomed from my answering machine: “Got the call from Bonn this evening, Jack. Don’t know what took them so long. They’re ready to start negotiating. They have problems, of course—the succession thing, and the stock numbers look pretty far apart, but now we’re going to—” He went on about a meeting the next day. We were speeding up now. Acceleration and deceleration are two of the skills of a CEO. A few months earlier, Morrison had secretly gathered his loyal people in and told them that he was proposing a merger between the Corporation and Volkman-Sakura, the world’s other immense communications corporation, itself the product of the 1991 buy-out by the German media conglomerate of the Japanese electronics manufacturer. The Chairman did not know of the deal, Morrison had said, but that was only one of the difficulties we would face. Legally, a merger would be extremely complicated but possible. The lawyers would find a way to skirt the FCC limitations on foreign ownership of American media. Various shareholders would be shocked and would immediately file suit, but he was counting on the arbitrageurs to buy up the big blocks of stock in a desire to diversify their holdings into deutschemarks, a currency at the time far stronger than the American dollar. The administration in Washington would be sympathetic. Certain assurances had been made, certain friendships maintained. Those
of us in Morrison’s team would work out a proposal to integrate the two companies’ markets and products. A huge task. The deal was far bigger than Matsushita’s $6.1 billion acquisition of MCA in 1990. We were shocked and then excited, and began to dream about how we were all going to make our careers on this. Our plan was unknown outside the thirty-ninth floor. “Deutsche Bank okayed the financing, in theory, so as long as our share price stays with three points of the thirty-day moving average,” Morrison went on. “So that’s good.” He paused. “And one more thing, Jack, why don’t you and I have a little private talk in my office after lunch? A small item. Real fast. See you tomorrow.”
Everyone knows the name of the Corporation. Everyone watches the movies that the film entertainment division pumps out—forty a year, now—the big movies, with the names we all know, at any one time playing on approximately nine thousand first-run movie theater screens nationally. And everyone reads the stuff that comes out of the magazine division—news, sports, money; and watches the cable television division’s stations; and buys the publishing division’s cookbooks, self-help books, celebrity biographies, novels, and even the cartoon coloring books such as the one held by the little girl on the train; and purchases the compact discs and cassettes created in the fiefdoms of the music entertainment division. The Corporation is the world’s largest distributor of TV programming, licensing over eighteen thousand hours of shows in more than one hundred countries and in fifteen languages. The levers are pulled and the great trembling colossus of popular culture walks. The only question is whether the product will move, whether it will play, whether the people will buy. The average person doesn’t care where it comes from, wants only the product—the news, the music, the comedies, the game shows, the soaps, the movies, the grotesquely spotless theme parks (the Corporation owns sixteen now), the fanzines, the best-sellers, the spinoffs, the next hit of information, the buzz of the buzz. The Corporation is even quietly getting into late-night infomercial programming and 900-number companies. The Corporation is sewn into all of us, it has informed who we are and how we see the world. Even now, as you breathe, it grows bigger, buying subsidiaries—anything under $100 million not even worthy of a blink—independent music companies, megaplex movie theaters in Russia, strange new computer research outfits in small offices in California, Brazilian television studios, hot new comic book publishers, fledgling film production companies. It grows like a fat woman gorging recklessly on chocolates while others shrink back in horrified amazement at her appetite. If she were to fall, the earth would shudder; only by her great weight does she remain on her feet. This is the big American media-entertainment corporation, many times larger than Disney and Paramount and all the others, the one whose stock is considered a blue-chip growth equity into the next century and is thus owned by the Japanese and German banks, by all the universities and other institutions with huge endowments—my undergraduate alma mater, Columbia University, and by Harvard, the Ford Foundation, all the giant pension fund operations—the California Public Employees, New York State, the Texas Teachers Union—the huge equity mutual funds, by all of them. I’ll give you the Corporation’s numbers: 1992 annual revenues, $32.6 billion; annual profits, before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, $4.6 billion. Ranked by market value, the fifty-sixth largest publicly traded company in the world. Way up high on the thirty-ninth floor, I lived in its heart.
The woman with the memorable lips and her lovely, innocent child had looked at me and seen nothing except some guy with a thinning hairline in a good suit who stank of booze and loneliness. This seemed the only reasonable conclusion. She had waited for the subway car to move away, then smiled at her daughter, smiling the funny man and his funny business card out of her child’s worried face. They had walked toward the exit stairway, the card left in the trash. A minute later the woman had forgotten the entire affair. Forget it, I thought, you’ll never see her again. I brushed my teeth and took my nizatidine pills, three hundred milligrams. My kind of acid is serious, requires medication. It’s not an ulcer, which is down low in the stomach, it’s high in the throat—erosive gastroesophageal reflux disease is the term. You get to be an expert about just how it works, whether it’s just ticking quietly in your chest, little matchheads flaring brightly for a second, or the real lava jetting up through the sphincter at the top of the stomach into the esophagus, making you cough a quick, useless cough every fifteen seconds. Vomiting is occasional. You take the pills every night but that doesn’t do it completely, so you lay down a cup of DiGel or Maalox like a buffer. Chalky goop, Maalox. Either that or Mylanta. I used them all. I’ve swallowed barrels of the shit. And eaten the tablets—Turns, Rolaids, half a dozen at a pop minimum. But the acid always comes back—it burns, it sticks in the throat.
That April night, so far away now, I set the alarm for 4:00 A.M. and went to bed as I always went to bed, knowing that the morning would be an agonizing rise from the grave of sleep, the tide of the day pulling at me from my bed. The smoking, clamorous earth would grind forward on its axis, and after a shower I’d again stand naked at my dresser bureau, staring into the mess of my underwear drawer, the bottom of which was littered with coins and unused condoms and tickets from my Chinese laundry, trying to find a matching pair of socks, thinking about what needed to be accomplished that day—get numbers on a joint-venture deal to build fifty multiscreen complexes in Japan, plan a schmooze lunch with the South American syndicators of the Corporation’s films, whatever momentarily important task it was—pulling one blue sock out and comparing it with another, tired of working and shopping and laundry and solitude. What a stupid life. As children, we never imagine the tedium and suffering of adulthood, the grinding grimness of it all. The cups of coffee. The way years disappear. I worried that I might be slowly becoming my neighbor, Bob somebody, a twice-divorced hospital-supply salesman in his early forties who quietly squired various long-single women in and out of his house next door. These women had the grimace of suppressed expectation on their faces—Perhaps! Perhaps he is the one!—but inevitably, the next week, the next month, Bob was with someone else. He had a stooped, hangdog look about him, yet sported a thin mustache and walked with an oily swagger. On weekend mornings when I sat in the garden, I sometimes caught an accidental glimpse of Bob through his kitchen window as he stood in his black bikini briefs making coffee. He looked ridiculous in the tight underpants, twenty years past his prime, his fleshy ass dimpled and low and sad, a cigarillo hanging from his lips; he reminded me that men who don’t marry successfully, ever, are often doomed to a slow, obvious wasting.
I did not want to be one of those men. Many of the couples Liz and I had known together now had children, and I was shocked by the frank physical love that they had for their kids and which was returned—two-year-old boys squirming against their mothers’ thighs, tiny girls lustily digging their teeth into their fathers’ chests. I missed this, the arc of a natural life that had been robbed from me. Every day that I did not find a woman and make a family was a day lived in deepening loneliness. I think that if we can imagine ourselves dying alone, without benefit of loved ones around us, that it sets life into a certain perspective; the implications of a solitary, unloved death run backward through time, backward to the moment of that death’s imagining. All around me at the Corporation were very smart men and women who were going to die alone. Some knew it, but most did not.
I lay in the dark, staring at the liquid shadows on the ceiling. Only now do I understand that things were already in motion. Only now do I see that I should have heard the odd rattle in Morrison’s voice when he mentioned a “small item.” He was lying fearlessly and I should have heard it. And what I should not have done, ever, even as lonely as I was, was to be so recklessly charitable as I’d been on the subway that evening, casually offering my business card to a beautiful, unknown woman.
TWO
DAWN ARRIVES UNWANTED, SNATCHES YOU FORWARD. I waited at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street the next m
orning, sun brightening the meager designer trees of Rockefeller Center. Across the street, the Corporation’s uniformed maintenance crew had rousted the homeless off the sheltered benches in the building plaza and was steam-blasting away the piss and garbage deposited there the night before. The men moved slowly, hourly wage workers in no hurry. I crossed with the light. Inside the lobby, another man pushed a polishing machine slowly across the gleaming marble floor, as pink as an expanse of frozen salmon mousse. I passed the computerized building directories and nodded to Frankie, the sleepy old night guard ending his shift, and he slipped off his stool and summoned the reserved elevator, which stopped only at floors thirty-eight through forty-one. When I got on, the bell chimed softly and the doors slid toward one another.
“Hold it!” commanded a woman’s voice. “I’m here!” A hand chopped through the two-inch slit between the elevator doors—five red fingernails on five long fingers and the cuff of a business suit. The doors reopened automatically and there stood the tall blond presence of Samantha Pipes.
“Good morning, Jack!” Samantha gave me her usual moist smile, which suggested great pleasure but promised only misery, and entered the elevator in a gust of perfume and makeup and coffee breath. “Oh, they’re going to fight us on everything! All the market overlap! About the stock price, and the management succession, just all of it, don’t you think? But we have to do it! And they do, too!” she cried happily. “It’s the most logical thing!” She turned and savagely jabbed the door button. “I hate waiting for everybody! We’ll ride up together.”
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