The car met me at National Airport, and as the driver held my door, I sat down inside expecting to meet the Chairman somewhere in the District of Columbia, but there he was, turning his tanned face toward me.
“Good morning,” came the voice. I’d never been so close to the bright blue eyes, the skin mottled by age. “Have we met?”
“Just briefly,” I answered. The car was moving.
“Mr. Morrison assures me you’re the fellow I need,” he ventured, placing a cigarette in his mouth.
“I’m read up.”
“Good—I’m not. You’re doing the talking. I’ll fill in here and there.” He adjusted a brass knob on the side of the car and our small space was filled by the haunting sounds of a Gregorian chant. “Now then . . .” His gaze drifted out the window. He was done talking. The marble monuments hung against the blue sky as we crossed the Potomac into the District. The Chairman retrieved a book from his briefcase—it was a novel by Trollope, The Way We Live Now—and primly set a pair of bifocals on his nose. A hundred men sung mournfully to us in Latin. The Chairman flipped a page. This was a man who held a fortune of about nine hundred million dollars. I was gone from his mind.
We spent the day driving around the capital, pulling into the reserved lots beneath and behind the government buildings. A staffer was dutifully waiting each time, took us to the particular office. Different issues, short appointments, each an attempt to get the government to rule or act in the interest of the Corporation. I regurgitated the appropriate sections of the file while the Chairman listened and inspected a small Band-Aid on the top of his hand. Skin cancers. There was much respectful nodding. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased with the job I was doing or not, for in the car we said almost nothing to each other. He didn’t appear to want to be jollied up as some bosses do. He took several calls. A few words. Then he would softly put down the phone. He smoked two cigarettes an hour and ignored the briefing papers and reports provided by his office, as well as the day’s newspapers. While he read he pursed and munched his lips, swallowing now and then as if the information on the page was not passing to him through his eyes but being ingested in soupy chunks through an invisible straw. Disappointment spread through me; the Chairman seemed merely a well-dressed Mr. Peepers, not the mysterious titan who had Morrison grinding his teeth down to the gumline. Across from me sat a retired mailman, a polite apple-cheeked codger in a cardigan at the public library perhaps, somebody’s grandfather who liked to go fly-fishing. This was some kind of setup, no? Now I was sure Beales had convinced Morrison to yank me out of the negotiating team. People do this, they plot, they wait years for the right opportunity. Beales figured that with me out of the picture during negotiations with Volkman-Sakura he’d have a chance to build relationships with the Germans that would later prove useful. He knew, of course, that I spoke a little German. I could schmooze the V-S execs in their own language. That bothered him. And why was I in a position to bother him? In 1974, my mother read in the Wall Street Journal that Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and German were the languages of the future. But Spanish was the language of cleaning ladies so far as my mother was concerned. Japanese and Chinese impossible, languages of noodles. That left German. Her firstborn son would learn German. He had a tin ear but a good memory and actually learned the thick-tongued language. It had an unmusical brutality to it that I came to appreciate. In college I even worked my way through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in the original. Now Beales was punishing me for it.
More appointments. At the end of the day, we spoke with the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and my counterpart, his chief of staff. The aide led us down the waxed hallways to one of the paneled hideaway offices in the Russell Senate Office Building. As we waited for the senator to arrive, my eyes wandered over the accoutrements of the office: the framed pens used by past presidents to sign legislation sponsored by the senator; the unbuggable secure phone direct to the White House and Senate majority leader; the leather-bound copies of the Congressional Record; and the legislative clock on the wall, which indicated by way of some sort of special system of lights and buzzers whether the Senate was in recess, about to vote, or in a quorum call.
“The senator needs to be on the floor in twenty minutes,” the aide noted as soon as the senator had shaken hands.
We sat down in four chairs. I knew the routine by now. “As you remember,” I began, “we received final approval last June from BRAZILS AT to establish one of our television satellites over Brazil.”
“Yes.”
“This is fast becoming an important market for American-produced entertainment.”
“Yes.”
“This one uses the new nickel-hydrogen-battery technology which prolongs the life of the satellite. It has smaller and lighter batteries,” I said, sounding like I was reading a brochure. The senator’s man looked at me; we both knew I didn’t know a damn thing about satellites. “We wanted to test transmission patterns over a specified footprint in Brazil, and we went to considerable planning to launch a satellite into geostationary orbit just due north of Brasilia. I don’t need to mention that this is extremely expensive technology.” The satellite was a big shiny bug with fragile solar-panel wings that faced the sun. It cost, said a memo in the file, $289 million to build and launch to its altitude of 22,300 miles above earth. This sum was paid by smiling investors who in 1986 bought the Corporation’s bonds during the capitalization phase of the satellite project. Most communications companies don’t own their own satellites, instead buying time from the satellite companies themselves. But it’s often better to be the landlord than the tenant, so we’d bought a few for ourselves. The time was coming when only so many satellites will fill up the sky. The price to transmit will go up and our competitors will have to pay that, while the Corporation will have its own capacity.
“Now then,” I went on, “the Brazilian Air Force complained almost immediately that the Corporation’s satellite signal interfered with their communications. But our antenna pattern was authorized. See, every satellite is built with a customized transmitting capacity based on its orbital position and the transmission footprint on the ground that is desired. When we refused to adjust the position of the satellite, their air force jammed its signals.”
“All this seems very familiar,” said the senator’s man.
“I appreciate that, but I’m just running through the key points of our situation.” We smiled poisonously at each other. I glanced at the senator. His face was slack, dreaming of something: Sunday church sermons, blowjobs, his lost boyhood—anything but this. “The jamming affected what is known as the downlink frequency. Let me explain that. To avoid signal interference, satellite transponders translate uplink frequencies into different downlink frequencies, and the change in the downlink frequency caused the satellite to stop directing the Corporation’s test commun—”
“Was it true?” the senator asked, his mind running thirty seconds behind the conversation. “The satellite signal interfered?”
Yes. The satellite’s actual transmission footprint was 30 percent larger than was authorized, in order to cover a greater possible market, according to the file. But this had never been admitted, even to the Corporation’s ten full-time lobbyists, who had communicated “concern” about the satellite problem to various representatives of the administration, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the FCC, and the State Department.
“No,” I said. “Their information is wrong. We’re within fifteen miles of the transmission boundaries that we agreed on.”
“What is true, then?”
We believed that BRAZILSAT, the Brazilian satellite agency, had reversed itself, I said. Perhaps an investor down there had bought off one of the BRAZILSAT officials.
“Surely, if the Brazilians do not want one of your satellites over their capital city, they do not have to have it,” the senator’s man said, folding his arms in obvious patience.
“This represe
nts a very large market for us,” I told him. “We want access to this market. One hundred and sixty million people. And we could have bought that satellite from someone else . . .” I didn’t need to add that the satellite had been assembled in the senator’s own state. Big defense contractor, big PAC money. “And we’ll be putting bids out on two new satellites in the next year.”
The Chairman and senator listened with abstracted looks.
“We need something done in the next few weeks,” I continued. “It would be very advantageous if—”
“No, no, it’s premature to promise anything,” the senator’s man said. “I mean, the channels take time, you have to call people, see what their position is—” He hummed on about drafting a cable to the American embassy in Brasilia to inquire on an informal basis—protecting his boss from commitment while implying that action would be taken. I did not like him. He was the type who gets his hair cut every other Monday: a spittle-licking drone, a loyal flack, an ambitious, coffee-sipping brain-for-hire. The national political edifice is choked with men and women like this. “. . . or, if there were more time,” the senator’s man continued, “we might consider making an inquiry to—”
“We don’t need an inquiry,” the Chairman interrupted politely, leaning forward as if to catch some elusive note with his ear. “We need pressure.”
The room was quiet. Then the senator and the Chairman looked at each other and nodded, each understanding the proper proportions of talk, power, and insinuation. They stood up and shook each other’s liver-spotted hands.
“Give me a call if you’re up on the island this summer.” The Chairman winked amiably to the senator. “We’ll get a round in.”
In the hallway on the way out, the Chairman turned to me. “You were too contentious. These things are done subtly.”
“I should have been more careful.”
“You have a certain fervor to make a point,” he observed.
“I suppose I do.”
He looked at me calmly. “Is this why you were assigned to me?”
I considered my answer.
“Did you want to be assigned to me?” the Chairman asked before I could answer.
“No,” I said. “I did not.”
I expected that he might say something then, yet we walked on toward the car with no further talk. But I did glance at his face. The Chairman stared ahead, but caught in the crow’s feet around his eyes was the unmistakable wrinkle of amusement.
We weren’t taking the shuttle back to New York. Corporate lore had it that years prior, on a business flight, Morrison and the Chairman had been sitting in the regular-class compartment of the airplane when the wing engine outside the Chairman’s window had fallen off. Just like that. The Chairman, looking out the window, had seen it happen, Morrison had reported, and watched as the giant shiny turbojet dropped away, tearing a strip of metal skin from the wing, leaving only the ruined engine mount below the wing. The Chairman looked at his watch, coolly marked the time, turned to Morrison, and said, “If it’s more than thirty seconds before the captain informs us, I’m never flying again.”
That nameless captain had taken, in fact, four minutes to announce the emergency landing, and so now the Chairman’s car took us to the Metroliner, through a mysterious side entrance in the back of Union Station, bypassing all the other passengers standing behind the glass doors, right onto the platform. It occurred to me that of course Amtrak had built secret entrances for use with presidents, heads of state, the big players. We were seated by the time the others began to board.
“Why not the helicopter?” I asked. “You use that sometimes.”
“Don’t like them at night,” the Chairman explained with a wince on his face. “A bad bet. Look what happened to Senator Heinz and all those fellows who worked for Trump.” We settled in the half-empty club car and the Chairman lit a cigarette and poured himself two miniature bottles of scotch, neat. He’d been waiting for this all day and his face sagged in contentment after the first swallow. Around us sat others, mostly men in suits, some drinking and laughing with their fellow workers, others talking quietly into their telephones and a few gazing into laptop computers. In each group I could pick out the dominant one immediately. Usually he was the oldest, of course, and often one of the younger men was watching with a special deep attention. It’s something that can happen between men. So many of us are silently desperate for fathers, even as we pass into middle age. Often we find them at work.
“Can we really get those Brazilian colonels to stop messing around with our damn satellite?” the Chairman asked. Then he shrugged before I could answer. It didn’t matter. Others would grind out solutions to the Corporation’s problems—me, Beales, Samantha, the lobbyists, the corporate relations office, somebody on down the line. All the Chairman had needed to do was to mention a round of golf to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This was essentially now his job.
“So, Jack, tell me about yourself,” the Chairman said, loosening his tie and looking out the window. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“Well,” I began, flattered by the question, “you may know my title is vice president for—”
“No! Please no. Tell me something interesting, for Christ’s sake,” the Chairman said with an agreeably dismissive wave. “Tell me why a fine fellow like you hasn’t re-married.”
I turned to face him. “You know about—?”
He nodded. “Of course.”
“You know about Liz, what happened?”
“Yes. I was told the next day.”
“The next day?” I said incredulously.
“I still know a few things about what’s happening in my company.” He smiled suggestively. “Now, as I was saying, tell me why a fine fellow like you hasn’t remarried.”
“I haven’t found the right woman.”
“Then you must have dalliances,” he concluded. “A fine old word, ‘dalliances.’ A girl, a hotel room, a cigarette at the window, room service afterwards.”
I wandered what Dolores was doing that very moment. Perhaps putting Maria to bed. Perhaps anything. “I’ve got too much work these days,” I answered warily.
“Ah, that won’t do!” the Chairman exclaimed. “Life is short. Sometime I’ll give you my theory of dalliances.” He chuckled. “Sometime. Anyway, I’m not getting much out of you. Tell me about your father. Men like to talk about their fathers.”
“It’s not a happy topic.”
He held up his glass and swished the liquid around in the light. “Few topics are, I think.”
The drink had put him in an amiable mood now and he wanted to be entertained. Diverted. So I described to him my father, who for more than twenty-five years had lived in the same small, run-down clapboard house in upstate New York, a miserable, overly introspective man. It was not that he purposefully drew attention to his loneliness and isolation, but it nonetheless hung on him like an oversized jacket. At twenty, the neat part of his hair had fooled my mother into thinking that here was a man with a future. That’s how she told it. When I was four years old, she asked my father for a divorce.
“Did she remarry?” the Chairman asked.
“Instantly.”
My mother, I told him, had been young enough to replant her life, and took me along with her to the ample house of the man she was having her affair with, her new husband, Harry McCaw, a big-bellied fellow who loved me fully and without reservation. My father, a seminary student at the time, consented to the divorce on one condition: that his son’s last name remain the same. “My father, Charles Whitman, is a direct descendant of an uncle of Walt Whitman,” I said. “He named me after the first known Whitman in America, John Whitman, who lived from 1602 to 1692 and came over from England in 1640 on a ship called the True Love!” The great bearded poet was, of course, a homosexual and left no progeny—or at least none who carried the Whitman name. And that name is all my father ever possessed that might suggest greatness. And it was all he could give me.
When I was about seven he showed me his shelf where he kept copies of editions of Leaves of Grass, the major biographies, and the fat Portable Whitman. Later he read to me the poet’s moving description of the ancient Whitman family graveyard in Long Island (“This is where you come from, Jack,” my father told me, “and you must never forget this, ever.”) and Walt Whitman’s accounts of nursing Union soldiers injured in the Civil War. Later still, my father insisted I read the long poems. Only then did I understand why my father had demanded that I retain the name of my ancestors: although Walt Whitman was, in my opinion, a better reporter than he was a poet, he had a great and true heart and my father understood this. Walt Whitman understood the yearning and vitality of the unknown masses. My mother wanted out and the satisfaction of my father’s pride was a small price to pay for her deliverance. So I remained a Whitman. It’s just a name, of course, and means little, except perhaps, if you want to get fancy about it, that I am implicated by blood in something inextricably American.
“How marvelous,” the Chairman said. “Remarkable, really.”
“What?”
“That a long-descended relative of Walt Whitman would come to be an executive in America’s largest media-entertainment company. It’s too perfectly ironic.”
“My father said something like that too. He said, and I quote, that it ‘confirmed the death of the venerable republic.’ ”
“Well, don’t be too angry with him,” the Chairman responded. “As you get older you see these things, you see how history made the present, the way things twist into the future. After age fifty, you feel time moving all the time, across your hands, so to speak.”
I didn’t answer.
“So your mother knew your father would fail,” the Chairman mused, returning to my background.
“Yes.”
“Despite the glory of his name.”
“Despite that, yes.” I fell silent. My mother saved the two of us, I know, from a narrowing, ever-sadder existence with my father, who subsequently eked out a living as a minister of a small Methodist church upstate where rhetorical delivery on Sundays was not as important as endless patience to listen to the miseries of the church members during the rest of the week. Harry McCaw was by contrast a man without misery of any sort, and if that meant that his character had never been tempered by self-doubt, then that did not bother my mother, who had listened to too many of my father’s anguished soliloquies. My earliest memory of Harry is when he rubbed an inflated balloon on his sweater and miraculously stuck it to the ceiling. Big-bellied, big-dicked Harry made my mother laugh, earned good money in his insurance office at Seventeenth and Market in downtown Philadelphia, and sent me and my younger half brother and half sister to good Quaker private schools. I easily accepted Harry’s largess—the piano lessons, the big backyard where we played catch in the spring when he came home from work, the many months of summer camp in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, the news articles neatly scissored from the New York Times and placed upon my bedside table for me to read if I wanted, the new school clothes each fall, picked out at John Wanamaker’s department store in downtown Philadelphia by my mother, the annual pair of soccer cleats that I cherished, the ten-speed bicycle on my thirteenth birthday, the school band trip to Europe, the braces, the kindly but firm lecture to please not get a girl pregnant and never to drive with anyone who was drunk, the first arranged summer jobs, the tuition to Columbia, all of it. I have no complaints: it was a reasonably happy childhood, better than most, better than Liz’s. Or Dolores’s, for that matter. My mother would always comment she had made “the deal of a lifetime.” Her luck continued, even to this day. Harry possessed the amiable shrewdness useful to an insurance man, and he had foreseen that the Reagan era could be very good to him, and for five years he tossed every nickel he could find into the stock market, finally pulling out a gigantic wad in August of 1987, and sticking it back in the following November to make another wad, then out a year later, and again back in November 1991—thus one of the few men in America who timed the Reagan-Bush bull market perfectly. Just as the real estate market topped in 1988, he and my mother sold the big house on the Main Line and made the American elephant graveyard migration—to a Florida retirement community that faced the Gulf of Mexico. They were unthinkingly content, wealthy enough to live within a compound patrolled by a force of private police where golf and the lack of rain were the urgent topics of conversation. My mother had never liked Liz that much—she felt Liz had “married up,” and hadn’t been properly grateful. I rarely called my mother now.
Bodies Electric Page 9
