Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “Can I see it?” Maria asked.

  “Maria!” Dolores said crossly. “That’s so rude.”

  I slipped the watch from my wrist and handed it to her.

  “Maria, you give that back right now.”

  The girl pouted her lip, handed me the watch, and slinked playfully toward the window again, pressing her stubby fingers against the glass and looking down fearlessly. I wanted to kneel down next to her ear and point out the horses and carriages in Central Park. I wanted to go and buy this little girl new clothes and an ice cream cone and a college education and a million other things. “So high up!” she cried happily. “The cars are little yellow buggies!”

  “Yes. Come on, Maria, we’ve bothered Mr. Whitman too much.” Dolores took the child’s hand. “Thank you,” she repeated. We stood awkwardly, not shaking hands.

  “I’ll walk you out to the elevator.”

  Which I did. Samantha happened by, and she looked with undisguised fascination at Dolores and Maria, then remembered to smile brightly and continued past without saying anything. We reached the reception area.

  “You’ll get that eye looked at?” I asked, wondering if Dolores needed money.

  “We’re fine, Mr. Whitman. You’ve been very nice and we don’t need any more help,” Dolores Salcines said decisively. “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  She entered the elevator then, the palm of her tight hand guiding Maria’s head of curls, and the other touching the brass plate of elevator buttons. I felt a great pressure to say something to her, but no words came. I looked directly into her large dark eyes but she glanced away nervously. “All right, then . . .” I stammered. We gave each other a last polite nod. I tried to reassure myself that Dolores and Maria’s circumstances were going to improve. But reassurances were not forthcoming. The elevator doors closed.

  I returned to my office. Not a bad way to start the day, I thought to myself; high-salaried young executive on the thirty-ninth floor does a kind turn toward a sexy, beat-up Hispanic woman. I would have liked to talk to her longer. But she and her daughter were gone now, and I assumed that we would not communicate further. From the window I looked down at the streets. It was lunchtime. Below me, workers drained by the thousands from the buildings to the sidewalks, specks of color moving in the great stone grid. In a minute Dolores Salcines and her daughter, Maria, would be among the many, hurrying, battling for space and light and air. What happened to them was not my affair, I tried to convince myself, not my responsibility.

  An hour later, we filed into the conference room. On the side table was a large box of doughnuts. I found my usual seat to Morrison’s left, while the others came in, Samantha, the bankers and consultants, a few of Morrison’s finance people, and of course Beales, who had a sort of cold jauntiness that I had always disliked.

  “Afternoon, Jack.” He smiled, the prince of congeniality.

  “Ed.” I gave him a dead nod.

  Beales was all fine features and squinty handsomeness, nearly six feet four, much given to wearing thousand-dollar suits, and I’d hated him from the moment we’d first worked together years back. He had something I didn’t—he had grace. He appeared unconcerned; he seemed always to have time for pleasures and enjoyments. Morrison used Beales for ambassadorial purposes—visits to subsidiaries, investor relations, emceeing annual sales meetings, glad-handing at the professional tennis tournaments the Corporation underwrote, including the U.S. Open, where he handed the big check to the winner in front of the cameras. His voice was deep and pleasing and lent him unearned authority. He was physically always gazing down at me. (I’m a grinder, I never look rested, my face gets pinched and distressed when the acid swirls around down there—I’m a mess.) Beales was paid for his manner, not for his mind, which is the way it often goes. After Liz died, he had come up to me to say how sorry he was, and for a moment I had believed him and then I looked straight into his unblinking eyes and could see he was—that very second—studying me to determine if my grief presented him with some advantage that he should know about. It gets narrower at the top. Looking back now, I see I could have been smarter about Ed Beales.

  We sat waiting for Morrison, ten tired, irritable people. The chitchat of our earlier meetings had run dry. For months we had lived on Corporation time, in which a week may be an eternity and an epoch may change with a phone call. There were others on the floor, including Campbell, the vice chairman of the executive committee. But he was out of the loop and never coming back. His wife had lung cancer and had been dying for eighteen months. And on the east corridor lay the offices of the executive vice president and general counsel, and the senior vice president and controller—older guys with a certain wincing softness to their step, five or eight years too young to be forcibly retired, too gray and beaten to be considered for further promotion. They understood their future absence; the Corporation is a world in which it is better for young men to look older and for old men to look younger. These men were also out of the picture, even though their stock option plans were in the Corporation’s Series D 12% Convertible Exchangeable Preferred Stock, which is the limited, powerful stock shares. I no longer worried about them. Of the Corporation’s seventeen vice presidents, only three (Beales, Samantha, and I) had offices on the thirty-ninth floor, with the rest on the floors below. The three of us were the comers, the prospects, and if anyone didn’t know that, it was to their own peril. We pushed the deals through, made the hard phone calls that Morrison wanted to avoid. I did not instruct the older men, but I controlled their access to Morrison and I could look them in the eye without fear. This is an important thing, fear—in addition to the formal lines of power, fear courses through the unpredictable web of human relationships. In every organization there is the inner group of those who make the market in fear.

  “Okay, everybody, here we go.” Morrison stumped his way in, holding a briefcase to his side with his bad hand, the one that was missing three fingers. We straightened in our seats, became attentive. Morrison slid into his regular chair. I’d always felt sorry for his war injuries, because he was a proud man, with that thickened thorax and attractive belly armor that men get in their fifties.

  “Sorry we had to start so late, I wanted to wait to be sure the Chairman was gone for the day,” he said. “Jack, you can start smiling. I get worried when you don’t smile. I’m going to smoke a frickin’ cigar even though it bothers some of you guys. Ed, if you want good Cuban cigars, you have to buy them in Switzerland. I was talking to the guy in the cigar store. Castro could go anytime now. Anytime. You guys should read the international news first instead of the sports page. Cuba goes into civil war and we get boat people everywhere, in the pool at the Miami Hilton, in the moat at Disney World, everywhere. Soon as Castro goes I want us ready to move in there. Buy a couple hundred movie theaters, the next day. I mean it. Jesus, we should buy some hotels, too, right on the beach. Tear them down and put up new ones. Jack, you’ll make a note of it? Get somebody to run some numbers?”

  I nodded dutifully.

  “Just let me have my cigar and we’ll do this fast. Everybody get the doughnuts and stuff? I ordered them up. I figured if you guys get doughnuts I get my cigar. Samantha? If it’s okay with you then I know I’m okay.”

  “We’re ready.” She smiled from down the table.

  “Good. I got the call last night from the guy who’s running the deal for them, Otto Waldhausen. Number-two guy. We seem to have a good rapport. He’s all green light. But he also understands the delicacy of the thing.” Morrison set the cigar in his mouth and then took it out. “He says Volkman-Sakura is ready to talk. They know our situation, they know the Chairman is not going to be happy about the idea of a merger, and they know we don’t yet have the board of directors with us. In other words, they know how frickin’ crazy we are.” Morrison lit the cigar. “But Waldhausen also knows that the markets match so well. I said the situation is dynamic, that we’ve got a group of people here committed to this thing. We’ve been working on i
t for months, I told him. I got reports a mile high, I know everything about your company, I know how much money you made last quarter in your pay-per-view rugby matches in Australia, I know how many light bulbs you got in the ladies’ room. Right? He was very impressed. I said we can pitch or we can catch. Better to do it over here, though. Your people speak English and ours don’t speak German, except for Jack, of course, our intellectual. But we need to get going, I said. Also we need some kind of basic understanding on how the deal might be structured so we can convince everybody in the back of the bus. I said quite honestly we have an absentee Chairman, and we try to tell the directors as little as possible. He said he knows we have a passive board. He asked if the power has shifted downward one notch. I said yes. Everything important, everything new, gets done by the people in this room. We have idea people, we have deal people. The whole team. They get that. Waldhausen said he’ll fly over with his people. Lot of talk and handshakes. Maybe tennis. Germans love tennis, even though Boris Becker is finished. Can’t play on clay—Ed could beat him on clay.” Morrison grinned affectionately at Beales and I felt a familiar bitter twist in my gut. “We’ll feel each other out. Broadway shows, whatever. The whole thing is people. Fun and games and good deals. I think we can talk to them, not like the Japanese guys. They got some big Japanese guys in their computer division but we don’t worry about that, that’s internal on their side. I told Waldhausen, quite frankly, we don’t know how to talk to the Japanese guys. We sort of hate them and fear them and we don’t want to talk to them. They get that. So, we’re going to start talking and see how it goes, maybe you guys’ll get to do a dog-and-pony show. Now, they’re probably trying to get a fix on how far along we are with the Chairman and the outside board. They understand everybody in this place doesn’t see it all the same way. They understand that if this thing blows up on the runway we’re gonna be dead men in trees—”

  “Men?” Samantha complained mockingly. “What about me?”

  Morrison relit his cigar, sucking hard against the wet end. “Samantha, I got a feeling you’re gonna be okay. Don’t ask me why. If I told you, you’d sue me for sexual harassment and then I couldn’t promote you, right? You’d sue me and I’d be forced to live in a railroad shack the rest of my life. Catch some trout.” Morrison’s eyebrows shot up in thought. “Sounds good, actually. Now, anyway, they’ll be very interested in why our Chairman hasn’t shaken a couple of their hands. I’ll be working on that angle. They’ll want to know who the players are. Waldhausen says he understands it could get messy over here.”

  “Who would head up the new merged corporation?” Beales asked. “Have you talked about that?”

  “Maybe their guy, maybe not,” Morrison said vaguely. “Me, you, anyone. Madonna. I don’t know. A lot could happen.” Of course Morrison assumed he was in the line of succession at the Corporation. No overt successor was being groomed and the Chairman planned on ruling the Corporation until he dropped. Morrison was well liked by the Corporation’s board of directors but that guaranteed nothing; despite their passivity, they retained absolute legal power at the Corporation, and anybody, even a number-two guy, can be forced out tomorrow if his smell goes bad. Several of the directors had been chief executive officers of Fortune 100 companies that had been gutted in the frenzy of junk-bond buy-outs in the eighties; they hated unsecured debt; they hated raiders and management coups; and even more, they might well hate the idea that a German-Japanese company might mingle management with the Corporation. So the trick for us was to convince them that the deal was good for the Corporation and the stockholders. This might be nearly impossible, for the directors were extremely loyal to the Chairman. They still believed, at this late date, that he had the magic. He was one of the thirty-odd men who sat in the pantheon of corporate gods. His tanned face was seen at all the black-tie galas, with his most recent wife in tow, a correctly attractive woman twenty-five years his junior, not much older than his children by his first marriage, a woman with slim ankles who, it was rumored, received estrogen shots to keep her face soft. The Chairman had, of course, once been a fine, prescient businessman. Prior to 1985, he had given final approval on nine of the twenty-one highest-grossing Hollywood films of all time. He had initiated the start-up of the Corporation’s three most profitable magazines. And in the dinosaur days of cable TV, the Chairman had taken on the networks by starting a cable network from scratch. Now, the Corporation’s cable television division offered subscribers eighteen different national channels—news, sports, movies, children’s programming, business news, science, Spanish-language programming, you name it—and owned distributorships in most of the country’s large markets. The Corporation’s total share of all television audiences was a remarkable 19 percent. Gross profits from this division alone were now over $600 million a year. The Chairman was the sole, iron-fisted architect of this stranglehold, and in the years of its construction he had ruthlessly fired anyone who did not share his vision. He had been brutal and he had been right.

  But now the Chairman needed to be deposed, we all believed, in order that the Corporation expand and prosper. Tremendous new multimedia technologies were coming, driven by advances in microchip technology, making the usual entertainments pale in comparison. Eastern Europe was like the Wild West, huge, open for the taking, though Germany had the lead. Our international expansion was substantial but as yet consisted only of a patchwork of alliances and marketing deals. We wanted a bigger presence—“Napoleonic,” Morrison had prescribed. “We must seek transformative victories.” We had the chance to implant our products into cultures and populations wholly unfamiliar with them—people without checking accounts or credit cards. It was, as everyone knew, an unstable global market. With that great click into the twenty-first century, we believed the Corporation would have found its future. The inhabitants of what used to be the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc constituted a population larger than that of Europe, Japan, or the United States. The new entertainment market easily reached the hundreds of billions of dollars. Black market and pirated products were giving way to established Western-style market controls. Southeastern China was opening up, too. And South America was becoming more stable politically; those markets were opening. The Corporation could be there and everywhere, ready with the product. So could our traditional competition—Disney, Bertelsmann, Paramount—as well as the new players who had the size, cash, and expertise to mix computers, consumer electronics, and communications—AT&T, Sony, Matsushita, Microsoft. It was a chaos of creative destruction. Whatever outfit triumphed would become one of the most important companies in the twenty-first century.

  “They’ll be arriving at the Plaza Hotel early next week,” Morrison continued. “The first meeting will be the day or two after that. When we have a stock valuation and a market organization proposal worked out, we can go to the Chairman and the directors with it, get them all gassed up on the idea—”

  And so on. We went on talking. The details turned on figures and formulas and the interpretation of great sums of money, that week’s stock market climate, the Corporation’s debt levels and projected profits, the direction that interest rates were moving and the Federal Reserve Board’s behavior and what the volatile Japanese stock market might do in the short term and at least twenty other factors. I glanced from time to time at Ed Beales, whose expression indicated he was up in the box seats and not on the field. When he met my gaze his handsome eyes crinkled, as if he knew the joke and I didn’t.

  My meeting with Morrison was pushed to 5:00 P.M., and at the appointed time I waited in the western corridor outside his office. The hall was lined with oil paintings of the founder, now dead twenty years (who missed a chance to buy CBS on the cheap in 1957 and Paramount Pictures in 1964), former chairmen of the Corporation, and the handful of the venerable magazine editors and publishers who had made the Corporation what it was. Those same men, lucky or brilliant or natural salesmen, were now irrelevant. The big profits were no longer in the printed word. Our t
op five rap music videos yielded greater net profits than our famous eighty-one-year-old news magazine, but that’s the slope of the culture now. The Corporation was one hundred times larger than it had been in 1950, twenty-five times larger than in 1970. Our overseas sales accounted for 40 percent of gross revenues, which wasn’t surprising, given that America’s largest export is pop culture and the Corporation its greatest exporter. The Chairman’s portrait was also among those that Morrison passed each day, a large, purposefully virile painting full of bright blues and whites and yellows, showing the Chairman many years prior at the age of about fifty-five.

  “You can’t learn anything from dead men, Jack,” Morrison announced, limping down the hall. “They don’t even know they’re dead, for starters. Trust me on that.” He walked past me, yanked off his overcoat, and I followed him into his office, where a gaudy de Kooning brightened the shiny cherry-wood walls. Mrs. Comber, his secretary, came in and poured tea for us.

  “I’m supposed to go hear the vice president talk tonight.” He absentmindedly examined his spoon. “Want to go?”

  I tended to drink too much at these things.

  “There’s a dinner beforehand. We need somebody to go. It’s the vice president of the United States, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ve seen him talk. I’m not crazy about it.”

  “Neither am I.” Morrison smiled. “The jokes are bad and I never understand what the appetizer is. It’s sitting on my plate and it could be a clam or a cucumber or the nuts of a pig, for all I know.” Morrison’s good hand, large and meaty from overuse, flipped through some papers. “But it’d look good to have somebody there. We paid something like five grand for a plate and said we would be there.”