Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  I walked straight toward Times Square, past the lurking porn palaces where good, useful men in suits and wedding rings were whacking off in the peep booths, past all the splendid squalor, the religious nuts and racial instigators with sound systems harassing crowds of white tourists, the coal-skinned Nigerians selling counterfeit watches and mass-produced fragments of African culture. Past the Peruvians in traditional black hats and bright homespun colors, just in from the cloud-wreathed mountains, still looking innocent. God knows why they would come to Manhattan. Above Forty-fourth Street hung the gigantic television screen playing some shirtless black guy in a pair of torn-up jeans dancing wildly, his girl’s ass and sinewy back undulating in opposite directions. I think he was on one of the Corporation’s eight music labels. Half of our pop music talent can’t sing a regular studio session, and a few are nothing but lip-sync artists. But they look good. There’re so many and they change so quickly I can’t keep them straight. They score platinum on the first album, a zillion dollars, a house in Bel Air, maybe spin off a TV show for a season, surf the notoriety, and tomorrow no one remembers their names. The Corporation is smart about this, gets the talent on the way up, cuts it loose before the fall. I think the music entertainment division had even quantified the growth-and-decay cycle in American pop music using a formula that could estimate where an artist was along the career curve. Its works, too. The music division earns about $250 million each year. The guy who runs it, Italian from New Jersey by way of Hollywood, knows nothing about music, but is very good at flipping over the talent. Very smart about personalities, knows all the L.A. people. Very ruthless. We were glad now that we didn’t sign Michael Jackson a few years back; the big money years are behind him and the freak years are ahead. Someday they’ll laugh at him like they laugh now at John Travolta. Same with Madonna. Pretty soon she’ll be a pathetic old tart in her forties and when she claws at her crotch it won’t be pretty.

  I stopped at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-third Street, not far from the New York Times building, in front of a crouching six-story wreck of a hotel whose brickwork needed repointing. The Victorian flourishes above the entrance were eroded by acid rain, and judging from the ornate tile floor and Ionic columns, the lobby had once been grand—a place of cool drinks and potted palms and ladies with cigarette holders—but whatever had been the hotel’s charms were dulled now by coat after coat of paint, the last a bilious yellow that hung in flakes from the ceiling like leaves about to fall, and one understood in this small fact part of the great tragic sweep of New York’s history. Luxury is always in decay. Several unattended black children sat playing on the steps inside the doors, flicking lighted matches at each other. The kids were dirty in the way that only poor children are, their clothes filthy, noses running, one of them coughing with unmindful hoarseness. I hate seeing children suffer. It makes me sick. It makes me feel guilty, too, because I’m doing nothing to help them. I’m an asshole. A real bastard. The kids noticed me and stopped the game. Perhaps Maria played with them, I thought, perhaps they knew her.

  “Any of you kids know a little girl named Maria?” I asked breezily. No one answered. They stared up at me in curiosity and fear. White man in a suit, maybe trouble. One little boy thrust three dirty fingers into his mouth and started to suck on them anxiously.

  “I don’t know nobody like that,” a little boy said.

  “No, I think she that one got killed by the police,” another boy volunteered in a high voice, and the children laughed.

  The check-in desk was a reinforced box with a locked door and bulletproof glass with a small slit through which to pass money, keys, or anything else. Inside was a small engraved brass nameplate: MARTIN CLAMMERS, MANAGER. A wizened man shrunken inside a polyester suit sat perched like a monkey on a stool, holding a minute nub of pencil and figuring in the margins of a racing form, while a radio called out one of the early races at Belmont. His hands were unusually big, as if enlarged by the daily handling of cash. I knocked lightly against the glass.

  “What can I do for ya?” He eased off the stool and stepped forward to have a better look at me, perhaps mistaking my suit and tie as that of some city official come to badger him.

  “I’m looking for a woman and child. The woman’s name is Dolores Salcines.”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Are they here?”

  “You like the last guy who came looking for her?”

  I watched his face for a clue as to who he meant. He had leaky eyes. “No,” I answered.

  “You here to pay her bill?” He examined me expectantly.

  “No. I’m only a visitor.”

  “She’s gotta pay her bill today or it’s out.”

  I nodded my comprehension.

  “I mean, fellah, if you’re a friend of hers, you better help her pay up. This ain’t no welfare hotel,” the old man said, turning down the radio. “I been in business a long time—a long time—and it’s because I keep the level of the clientele up. Can’t have the ones who won’t pay.” He found a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “I ain’t nasty about it, I’m just telling you in case you think you might be helping this Salcines woman out.”

  “You rent by the week?”

  “If they look okay, it’s one-sixty-two. That’s twenty-three dollars and fourteen cents a night, cheap as you can get.”

  “She owes for a week?”

  “Yep. And if she doesn’t pay, she’s out tonight.”

  I handed him a credit card. “Put it on this. Mind telling me which room?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t let anyone up.”

  “You afraid I’ll burn the place down?”

  “I can’t go letting people up and down.”

  “Can you make an exception?” I said, signing the receipt.

  He handed my card back and stared dutifully at his racing form; he had all his bets figured. “No, sir, I can’t.”

  “Can you make an exception for fifty dollars cash?”

  “Yes, sir, I think I can.”

  I handed him the money—a couple of more bets. He pulled out a clipboard and ran his knobby fingers down a long list of names and then across the sheet to find the room number.

  “She know you’re coming?”

  “No,” I answered. “Not really.”

  Mr. Clammers dialed a number on a telephone, waited a moment, mumbled something into the handset, listened, and then looked at me.

  “She wants to know what you want.”

  “Tell her I came to visit for just a few minutes.”

  This he did, looking back furtively with increasing distrust, so it seemed.

  “She says it wasn’t her fault she was fired.”

  “Okay. I know that.”

  The hotel manager hung up the phone. “Four-sixty-six.”

  A shaky wooden banister led me up four flights to a long, windowless hall, along which ran corroded sprinkler pipes on the ceiling and a stained strip of magenta carpeting on the floor pocked by gum stains. The hallway smelled of insecticide and stale cigarette smoke. It occurred to me that Dolores’s husband might be with her and Maria in the room, in which case—in which case, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do. The doors were solid and wooden, some with many holes from previous lock fixtures and each with a neatly painted gold number. I followed these numbers, passing a garbage can stuffed with whiskey and wine bottles. Except for some faint weeping behind one of the doors, the dark hallway was as quiet as a tomb. The hotel was, if not quite the bottom, then one of its lower rungs, where lives ended in anonymous silence, the sort of place where a few days pass before the bodies are discovered.

  I heard a door open behind me. “Are you new around here?” came a strangely high voice.

  I turned back to see a gaunt, elongated figure in a robe and stockings, hair a jolting orange tint, and face a lurid mask of makeup. It was a man. A lacy black bra pushed the meager dough of his chest into the semblance of breasts. His torso was shaved of all body hair.

 
; “I asked if you’re new, honey.” He pulled his robe back to reveal, above his gartered stockings, a shaved groin and a penis pierced by half a dozen small gold rings. I looked at his face. His tongue, skewered by a closed safety pin, lolled wetly on his bottom lip.

  I shook my head. “You got the wrong kind of guy.”

  “Are you sure?” he purred. “Taster’s choice.”

  I didn’t know what this meant but it didn’t sound good. “No chance,” I told him.

  “Then have a very nice day.” He smiled and shut the door.

  There was a pay phone farther down the hall. I stopped and checked the phone number I’d called earlier—it was the same. A few doors on, I came to Dolores’s room and stopped. Inside a radio played salsa, the song lush and passionate and full of soaring trumpet blasts. I knocked. The radio quieted.

  “It’s unlocked.”

  I pushed the door open. Dolores sat in a ratty armchair, dressed in a torn-off Knicks T-shirt, her hair tied up above her head in a dark mess of curls, arms folded in front of her. Her eye was less swollen, but the bruise had darkened and drained like running mascara beneath her skin.

  “The old guy at the desk said I could come up.”

  “What do you want?” Her face was hard.

  I looked for a place to sit. The room was insufferably hot and cramped, with enough space for a chair, a small basin, and the bed. A radiator hissed in the corner despite the warm April day. The wastebasket was full of take-out cartons and the room smelled of beans and garlic.

  “Careful,” Dolores said sharply, pointing.

  Maria lay at the top of the bed, nearly hidden under a blanket. She was asleep and wheezed as she breathed.

  “Is she sick?”

  “She has chills,” Dolores said. “A little fever.”

  “Sounds sort of congested.”

  “She’s okay. She just needs to sleep.” Dolores watched the slow rise and fall of her daughter’s back. “This place is so noisy, she can’t sleep. Quiet all day, loud at night.”

  “It’s hot as hell in here.”

  “The heat is on. Won’t go off.” She looked at me suspiciously. “So, why’re you here?”

  We were strangers, of course. “I called Mrs. Triscott and she said she’d fired you.”

  “Yes?” Dolores said testily. “So?”

  “She said you were too tired to work.”

  “Well, I’m tired, but I was also thinking about Maria. I had to leave her here and I didn’t like doing that. Listen, I appreciate you checking on me but—” Dolores flashed her dark eyes at me. “But I don’t need your help.”

  The radiator hissed erratically. I nodded my agreement. “Your eye looks better.”

  “I kept ice on it a long time. Plus I’m a fast healer,” she added sarcastically.

  “Where’s your husband?

  “Who the hell are you to ask?”

  “You wear a wedding ring, Dolores. Where is the guy? Why isn’t he around?”

  “These are pretty personal questions, you know?”

  True. I was out of my mind. I didn’t know the woman, she didn’t know me. But there I was, looking into the dark smoothness of her face. And her daughter lay sprawled on the bed asleep.

  “I’m not asking you who you’re married to, and what’s her name, and is she pretty, right?” Dolores asked angrily. She crossed her legs. “I mean, where’s your wife?”

  “That’s a long story, actually.”

  “Oh, right.” She laughed in disgust, and her reaction, so sudden and clean, was a lovely thing. It meant she was strong. There was something about the way she was so certain of herself that I admired. She knew herself, she liked herself. Liz had been like this. Strong women are the most attractive women. “It’s always a long story,” Dolores went on. “You come here and then tell me it’s—”

  “I was married,” I interrupted. “My wife was killed. A guy drove by the corner where she was standing and shot at some other guys and she was in the way.”

  “Oh Jesus, I’m sorry,” Dolores said quickly, eyes wide. “I mean, I had no idea. I just said that because—”

  She didn’t finish her sentence. She leaned over and rubbed Maria’s back.

  “I understand why you said it,” I answered. “You don’t know why I’m here and I don’t really know why either.”

  Dolores considered this. “I just think you should know that I’m not free, I mean, I’m still, like, involved.”

  I said nothing, instead wondering what sleep and better food and new clothes might do for Dolores. She stood up to check Maria’s forehead. Her T-shirt, lifted by her breasts, ended at the navel and I glimpsed her stomach and imagined running my thumb down the curve of her waist. The smoothness of the skin. It would be interesting to see my white hand against the dark flesh of her belly, or thigh, or anywhere. Or my penis in her mouth. I thought that, too. These things come into my head.

  Now Dolores bent over and adjusted her daughter’s pajama top. “It’s all screwed up between me and my husband, okay? And he’s incredibly jealous—” She glanced up at me, expecting a reaction. “I’m trying to keep away from him, you understand?” She looked at her watch. “He wants me back home. Also he knows I’m here in this place. I got to get another place to sleep tonight—”

  “How does he know?”

  “I got too many girlfriends in my old neighborhood who, like, feel sorry for him. I got to move me and Maria.”

  “Is he the one who hit you?”

  Dolores shut her eyes and tipped back her head, expelling a breath. Her throat was smooth. Then she lowered her chin and opened her dark eyes. “You know, except for where you work, I don’t know who you are or what you want, though I got a pretty good idea of what that might be. Maybe it’s good I got myself fired from your big company where a computer keeps track of how many keystrokes you type each hour—did you know that? It tells you when you can take a break and how many minutes you got to go to the bathroom. And Mrs. Biscuit—”

  “Mrs. Triscott.”

  “Yeah, well, she treats everybody like they’re stupid, right? She made one of the other girls, this very sweet Chinese girl, cry in front of everybody, yelling at her about how to spell ‘fiduciary extrapolations.’ ” Dolores went to the closet and pulled out the coat she had been wearing the night I first saw her on the subway. “I want you to get out of here.”

  I stood to leave. “From all I can see, you’re at the end of the line, Dolores.”

  She pulled the coat tight around her in spite of the radiator’s oppressive heat. “Oh?”

  “The guy downstairs was hoping I’d pay your rent.”

  She shut her eyes and exhaled in frustration. “All right, yeah, I don’t have any money. You were very nice and gave me your card. Then I came to your office and you got me a job. Then I got fired. I feel pretty stupid about that, you know? What am I supposed to do, ask you for another job?”

  “I’d try to help you get it,” I said. “It’s a big company. I’m sure there are other—”

  “Look,” Dolores interrupted, “you seem like a really nice guy. A dumb, nice guy, you know? My life right now is very fucked up. I appreciate the trouble you’ve gone to. But I’m in a situation, okay?” Dolores’s dark eyes burned at me, warning me, it seemed, to leave for my own good.

  “If I can find a safe place for you and Maria to stay, would you take it, to stay for free for a while?”

  She smiled ever so slightly at my brazen willingness to press her; it was not quite an expression of pity but something more elusive.

  “Not where I live,” I went on, “but another place, here in Manhattan. Totally free, for a week or two.”

  Dolores glanced at Maria. I realized that every question ran through Maria. “I’ll have to think about it. Actually, no thanks.”

  “Why?”

  “Just no thanks, all right? Jesus.”

  “All right.”

  She stared at me indecisively, not yet ready to close the topic. “You
’re just looking for an easy fuck.”

  I should have let it go, right then. But I couldn’t. Dolores and I were already locked into something. She was challenging me, seeing how serious I was about helping her.

  “Yes or no, Dolores,” I said. “A place to stay, free. Safe. I could check on it and give you a call here at five o’clock. At that pay phone down the hall. Keep your radio down and you can hear it. I paid your bill here, incidentally. Take it or leave it. If you leave it, fine. Have a nice life. And good luck dealing with the shelters. You’ll be in one huge room with five or six hundred other people. Half will be mentally ill or violent or fucked-up. They’ll steal every last thing you have and they’ll have every kind of infectious disease you can imagine—AIDS, TB, hepatitis, everything—and you’re going to be worrying about Maria every second. I mean that. I don’t like to think of Maria in a place like that. I really meant that, too, much as you think I’m some kind of crazy asshole. So have a nice life, Dolores. I hope it gets better.”

  She anxiously looked at Maria and then, strangely, she stared at a small glass jar set in the middle of the dresser. It was half-full of water. Dolores examined the jar, as if expecting to see something inside it. Then she turned back to me. “You’re not some weirdo?” She cocked her head, her expression doubting, fearful, wanting to trust. “You’re not some sick guy who’s gonna hurt me and my daughter?”

  “Do I look like that?” I asked, my hands open—a salesman’s trick, incidentally.

  “You look like a nice guy.” She frowned. “That’s what I don’t get.”

  “I am a nice guy, dammit,” I protested. “I’m a nice boring guy with a good job. I wear a suit, I go to work, I pay my bills, I’m a nice guy, okay? My father’s a retired minister, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Those are the worst kind.” She smiled. “With the fathers like that.”

  I knew we were past the hard part now.

  “You’re worried about us, really?” she asked.