Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  We rose in a continuous glide. Samantha’s soft, almost babyish features obscured the intensity and intelligence of her thought. One might never suspect that she was an expert in corporate law as practiced by the chancery court in Delaware, which is where most large American companies are legally incorporated. We had come up through the ranks together, along with my rival, Ed Beales. When not wearing a formal business suit, Samantha was given to clinging silk dresses, usually a deep blue or green, and except for one detail—or perhaps because of it—she was an unusually striking woman. The defect was her left eye. The fine blue iris turned inward, cross-eyed.

  “I reread your joint operating plan last night,” Samantha said, glancing at her makeup in the brass button panel. “It’s good, so good. I forgot they have four satellites over Africa, over all the big markets. Nigeria is big, a hundred and twenty million people. And Asia! Indonesia, one hundred and ninety-five million! Those population curve estimates are shocking! In twenty years the markets will be huge, Jack.”

  “As far as I see it, Samantha, either we grab this deal or somebody else will, five minutes from now.”

  “I know!” she exclaimed, her eyebrows lifting. “It’s the future! And when did they buy all those movie theaters in southeast China? The Chinese are becoming better capitalists than anybody. And they have the exclusive cellular contract for Poland! Have you had your coffee? I think I had too much this morning. I got up and ran around Central Park twice.”

  “Twelve miles?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t even thinking of anything! I just kept going! They have that rat poison all over the park right now. Of course our famous Chairman is not exactly going to be happy when we tell him what we’re up to,” Samantha went on, her voice harder now, “but there comes a time . . . he suspects, I know it. Only a fool wouldn’t suspect! Now we have to get the poor old guy up to speed, somehow.” She studied me. And with Samantha, that was a strange thing, even though we had an old affection for one another, which I’ll explain at some point. When I’d first met her, the crooked eye was barely out of kilter, even slightly fetching, for she seemed to be concentrating intently on whomever she looked at, but she had gone to an expensive Swiss eye surgeon on the East Side, and instead of perfecting that one wandering blue eye, he botched the job, so that now, when Samantha became agitated or argumentative, the iris wandered closer to the bridge of her nose. Samantha’s successful malpractice suit, which relied on a chorus of expert medical testimony and alleged that the good doctor had enjoyed a glass of wine at lunch two hours before the operation, had reduced the surgeon to ashes and was written up in the law journals. That the eye was permanently unmoored served, strangely enough, to Samantha’s advantage, for in the heat of discussion she suddenly appropriated the qualities of a Picasso portrait done during his Cubist phase—it made people uncomfortable. The juxtaposition of her passionate, airtight arguments with her wandering eyeball disconcerted experienced consultants and weighty attorneys of counsel who suddenly lost the conviction of their opinions. They paused, they worried about which of Samantha’s eyes to look at, they babbled, she interjected, they were lost. Samantha was playing a game of higher stakes; if she could not have two perfectly aligned eyes, then she would have any and everything else.

  When the elevator whispered to a stop at the thirty-ninth floor, Samantha and I bypassed, as usual, the large formal lobby with its teak paneling and glass security walls and took a shortcut through an unmarked door near the elevator. As always, a fresh tray of assorted fruits and pastries lay on the inner reception desk. “Hmmm!” Samantha cried as she snatched a large strawberry and plunged it into her mouth. I followed her high heels and fine legs down the hall, past framed moments of the Corporation’s history. As usual we were the first ones onto the floor. We both worked in smaller vice presidents’ offices on the back corridor that ran along the northern face of the building. The Chairman’s huge northeast corner office suite was flanked by the office belonging to Mrs. Marsh, the only secretary in the entire building who had a window. The offices of the chief executive officer—Morrison—lay at the other end of the corridor on the northwest corner. All of our windows faced toward Central Park nine blocks away, and I often stood at the glass, gazing at the miniature maple and beech trees in the distance, the softball teams, and the figures sitting on the park benches; and in these moments of contemplation I almost always thought of Liz. We had walked and bicycled in the park. Eaten turkey sandwiches. I’d proposed to her there, too. Musing at the window, I’d test myself to see if I remembered her face. Sometimes I didn’t.

  Now, through the office wall, I heard Samantha listening to voice-mail messages on her speaker phone.

  “Samantha,” I called out my door, “how many dates do you have lined up this week?”

  “Not enough!” she called back.

  “Let’s have lunch.”

  “Can’t, sorry. I’m booked.”

  “A young prospect?”

  “Yes,” she called. “Untested as yet.”

  After a string of the usual affairs, Samantha now scorned the attentions of professional men in their forties, who attempted to replace waning sexual ability with the vigors of wealth—new cars, ski lodges, exotic travel. She had decided, I think, that her career would not allow for marriage and children. But there could be compensations. Samantha now favored the long arms and wide backs of the twenty-year-olds who rowed on Columbia University’s heavyweight crew, even watching home regattas from her own inboard forty-foot powerboat. Every year or two she would pick out a new young man and seduce him with a hungry forthrightness that younger women didn’t yet possess. The junior or senior in question was inevitably from a small town in Ohio or Connecticut and would be shyly present at Samantha’s annual Christmas party. “My friend,” Samantha would casually introduce him. Mike or Tom or Larry was clearly flattered by Samantha’s expensive attentions—a dozen shirts from Bloomingdale’s, gold cuff links, whatever—and probably saw in her lust a challenge largely athletic. No doubt, too, the young stalwart was reassured by Samantha’s declaration that he was not to feel committed to her in any way. She liberally abused the Corporation’s car service account to bring her boys down from Morningside Heights to the East Side. She came to work with the cold clarity of a woman who has successfully commodified sex for maximum pleasure and minimum bother. When it came time to discard her young man, she was irritable until he was replaced. We all knew these things about Samantha Pipes, and it scared us a little. She understood that to be to her advantage.

  That day, just before noon, Helen Botstein, my executive assistant, came in to my office, shut my door, and sat down in the chair across my desk. “Security had some people asking for you downstairs in the lobby,” she said.

  I was involved with several reports in preparation for the meeting that afternoon. “People?” I asked. “Don’t we always have people around here? Some pretty pathetic characters, too.”

  Helen managed a smile. “I didn’t want to bother you so I went down. It’s a woman,” she said. “And her child.”

  “A woman and a child? What do they—” It came to me, then, just who Helen meant.

  “She says she knows you.”

  I remembered the woman’s face.

  “She says you gave her your card. Jack, the woman has a terribly bruised eye. I brought them upstairs and got the little girl some milk,” Helen explained. “She’s just beautiful, like her mother.”

  “Right outside the door?”

  “Yes,” Helen whispered.

  “The woman probably is dressed in pretty dirty—”

  Helen nodded her head fiercely, almost in tears. She wanted children almost as much as she wanted to breathe and had been trying to get pregnant for three years, and now was taking fertility drugs. “The little girl has this head of curls.”

  “Yes.”

  “Send them in?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  Helen got up and quietly opened the door.

&
nbsp; The woman entered slowly, with the same proud composure I had seen on the subway, stepping across the Persian rug in badly scuffed heels, holding her daughter’s hand firmly and not looking back. Helen left and closed the door. The woman was wrapped in the soiled coat I’d seen before. Same marvelous lips, same body. But what I noticed with sudden alarm was the bruise around her left eye—it was puffy and tender, a shiny asymmetrical swelling; in the fifteen hours or so since I’d seen her the evening before, someone had really whacked that eye. The little girl shook free of her mother’s hand and rushed to my office window, where she pressed her tiny hands against the glass and looked down at the yellow taxis moving on the street below. Her mother stood in the middle of the room with her arms at her side, ignoring her daughter for the moment, and stared at me. She did not move close enough to shake hands and appeared worried that she had made a great mistake.

  “Please,” I said. “Sit.”

  “Thank you.” I could smell the woman’s perfume—something cheap, yet floral and pleasing. Despite her attire and even her battered eye, she was immensely attractive. Disheveled, yes, without clean clothes and with the barest amount of makeup—only a touch of lipstick perhaps, a cherry red that set off the dark coloring of her eyes and hair, but vigorous, a firm body beneath the stained coat. She perched on the edge of the chair and clutched her purse. It seemed only right that she speak first, since she had sought me out.

  “Your—uh, Miss Botstein said I could come in and talk. You gave me your card.”

  Her voice had the usual inflection of a native New Yorker, but there was also something softly musical about it, as if she’d grown up hearing others speak quite differently. I knew it wasn’t the clippity Haitian vowels one hears in taxis or a harsh Puerto Rican accent; it was something else. “Absolutely,” I answered. “I meant what I said on the subway.”

  She took a deep breath. “My name’s Dolores Salcines, Mr. Whitman. And this is Maria. When you gave me your card I didn’t really think—I mean, I don’t usually talk to men on the subway, but I just decided to call and see if you really worked here, because, I mean”—she paused—“I recognized the name of the company, so I thought I’d come see you.” She smiled with polite guardedness, and I wondered if doing so made the bruise hurt. “I know somebody who installs the wires for the cable company.”

  “Big Apple Cable, you mean?” I asked.

  She nodded. “You own that, right?”

  “The Corporation does, yes.” It was the local New York City cable franchise held in large part by our cable television division, constituting a minute fraction of the Corporation’s empire. The white vans with the Big Apple logo on the side were everywhere in the five boroughs, driven by men in striped uniforms.

  “Well, I heard of the company, so I kind of thought—I was pretty sure . . .” Dolores Salcines looked nervously at me. “I guess I figured that because I don’t have any clothes, any decent clothes, and I know I look like some kind of homeless person. The guards downstairs looked at me pretty bad, but I guess they let me go, on account of I had your card to show them.” She glanced at her daughter, whose head was still pressed against the glass. “You don’t rnind if she just stands there?”

  “Not at all.” I watched her dark fingers clutch one another. “Not a bit. How old is she?”

  “She’ll be four in two months.”

  “What a beautiful child.”

  “She won’t mess anything up.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “Dolores,” I began, unable to avoid saying it, “somebody has hit—”

  “I know.” She quickly nodded in shame, her fingers flying up to touch her eye. “Please, don’t ask me about it—it’s not important right now. It’s really not your problem, Mr. Whitman, believe me, I know that. I see you’re busy, I can see that from where they put your office up here—I mean, are people like me even allowed up here?”

  “Generally? No.”

  She was quiet a moment, unsure of how to proceed. “I thought, you know, maybe you really could help me. I’m not going to give you a whole long story, Mr. Whitman. I need money, I need work. You could’ve seen that last night, I guess.”

  “You looked like you needed help,” I agreed. “But before we talk about a job, first can I order you a little something to eat, coffee?”

  “No, I’m fine—” Yet she glanced toward Maria, who’d discovered a glossy stack of the Corporation’s magazines on a low, lacquered Chinese table chosen for my office by the Corporation’s “furnishings consultant” and was paging through them, looking at the advertisements for diamonds and wristwatches and ninety-thousand-dollar cars. I buzzed Helen and explained we needed sandwiches and coffee and juice—anything she could have the food service send immediately.

  “I’m not here for charity,” Dolores told me when I put the phone down, pulling her coat tight around her. “I know I look terrible, but this isn’t my normal situation, I don’t usually look so bad . . . I just need a job.”

  “And you’re living here in Manhattan?”

  She gave a vague nod, meanwhile unconsciously twisting the wedding ring on her finger. “They stole my suitcase and money at the place where I’m staying—it’s a hotel, sort of, a place to stay. I looked at apartments but they’re so expensive.”

  I nearly asked then about her husband, but didn’t, for each personal question seemed only an affront to her powerlessness. I assumed that she had little education and wondered about the unskilled and semiskilled jobs in the building. All the janitorial and kitchen jobs were contracted out to service companies. “Dolores, what kind of qualifications do you have?”

  “I graduated Catholic school in Brooklyn,” she said. “I wanted to be a nurse but things got messed up. I haven’t worked much the last few years, I was taking care of Maria.” Her hand drifted toward her bruise but she pulled it back into her lap. “I’m looking for a night job so I can work while Maria is asleep.”

  “You don’t have anyone to take care of her, then.”

  “No.”

  “Can you type? Because if you can, that changes everything.”

  “Yes,” said Dolores, with some hope in her voice. “At least I used to be able to type.”

  “Good.” I looked through the Corporation directory and phoned Mrs. Triscott, a battle-ax whose meanness was her only marketable commodity; she used it to drive the sixty pressured souls of the word processing department. I’d been down there once in my early days. It was a huge, low-ceilinged room on the fifth floor, a brightly lit dungeon of cubicles of women clacking away at computer screens. The department operated every minute of the year, processing truck-loads of memoranda, reports, sales kits, handbooks, whatever. Yes, Mrs. Triscott told me in gruff disgust, people kept quitting and there were a couple of openings.

  “I have a friend here who I think would do a good job.”

  “What programs?”

  I covered the phone. “Know any word processing programs?”

  Dolores shook her head. “I never did a computer before . . .”

  She was unskilled for office work.

  “But I can learn,” she said fiercely, perhaps seeing my reaction. “I can learn anything.”

  I returned to the phone. “Mrs. Triscott, she knows WordStar, Xywrite, WordPerfect, a couple others less well.”

  “Words?” Mrs. Triscott requested grumpily.

  “Words?” I repeated.

  “Per minute.”

  I asked Dolores this.

  “Maybe . . . thirty? It’s been so long.”

  “One-oh-five a minute,” I told Mrs. Triscott.

  “She’ll go through personnel,” she answered skeptically. “They actually hire.”

  Helen arrived with a plate of sandwiches brought down from the executive dining room on the fortieth floor. She smiled nervously, her eyes watering, and while Dolores and Maria helped themselves, I called the personnel office and leaned on a young assistant manager who sounded new. I wanted, I said, for him to give Dolo
res Salcines, the applicant, all due consideration for the next word processing job that came open and to take into her account my strong support for a job in the company.

  “We have certain procedures,” he squeaked, apparently not recognizing my name. “First, it’s mandatory, really, that we do a work history. That way we can match the skill level of the applicant with the—”

  “I’m requesting that you hire her.”

  “Wait a sec,” he said with less certainty in his voice, “you can’t just call up—”

  “Yes,” I interrupted, “I can.”

  “And what floor might you be on?” he asked bluntly.

  I told him. Each floor of the Corporation is identified by a certain degree of fear. The thirty-ninth floor is the most terrifying. It is seen as the floor of giants. The personnel manager began babbling promises and accommodations, a certain hysteria now in his voice.

  “Eight-thirty tomorrow, floor five, room five-forty-two,” I told Dolores after I hung up. “You begin work at nine.”

  Her eyes widened. “Just like that?”

  “It’s not great but it pays enough to live on, maybe eighteen or nineteen thousand, and I assume it has some kind of decent health insurance. Maybe after a few months a secretarial position could come open and you would have polished up your skills and—”

  “It’s fine, Mr. Whitman,” Dolores responded, gathering her things as if to stay a minute longer jeopardized her new job. “I really, really appreciate this, I don’t know why you did this for someone you don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I shrugged, but I let my eyes linger on hers, and so even in those first minutes after Dolores and I had met, perhaps we both knew that things were more complicated than they appeared. Dolores hovered for a moment in the middle of my office, appearing to indulge a desire to pass her gaze around it one last time. Maria wandered over to me and inspected my watch, which Liz had given me.