Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “Not if you’re my friend.”

  She looked hurt and checked my expression for humor but there was none there. “Then I won’t ask,” she concluded testily.

  “Look,” I said in a softer voice, “Morrison is chewing on me pretty good to induce a mystical revelation within the Chairman’s head,” I told her. “I spent that day in Washington with him and all he did was get drunk on the train and babble strangely to me at the end of the night.”

  “You get a chance to tell him that Morrison is planning his forced retirement?” she asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “You need to get past Mrs. Marsh,” she said appraisingly.

  “I was afraid you’d say that.” Only one road led into the Chairman’s schedule and it ran past Mrs. Marsh, his heavy-hipped secretary of twenty-five years. Powerful, well-known men often are, contrary to their public image, almost pathologically dependent people. In the case of the Chairman, it was Mrs. Marsh who ran his life. No one could recall what her first name was. She directed her own two secretaries, whom she chose for their efficiency and plainness (so as not to distract the Chairman). They handled much of the Chairman’s Corporation business, while she alone handled his personal affairs. Mrs. Marsh loved the Chairman with great unconditional secretarial love, never expressed, of course—a love in which his foibles and weaknesses were forgiven—and in this she was set apart from his wife and children as well as everyone else, except perhaps his dead mother. I had heard that Mrs. Marsh alone had access to the account out of which he paid for his mistresses (and probably his exertions at the club where he’d taken me) and that he had delegated all decisions as to what sums they should receive to Mrs. Marsh. It was known that a showgirl who had once seduced the Chairman thirty years prior was now living in near poverty and received a monthly stipend from the Chairman’s personal foundation, in violation of the federal law governing not-for-profit organizations. Mrs. Marsh’s loyalty was immovable and her quiet manner masked a ruthless code of protection of the Chairman.

  “Anyway,” said Samantha. “Morrison wouldn’t have told you to do this unless he thought you would succeed.”

  “I was pissed as hell when he told me. That whole joint operating plan is mine.”

  “I know.”

  “Beales suggested this to Morrison,” I ventured after seeing that the door was shut. “He wants me out of the negotiating group. I am out of the group.”

  “I think you’re a little paranoid about that, Jack,” Samantha disagreed. “Really. Morrison just tried to figure out what was the best way to use people. He knows you like a good fight and that you can talk off the top of your head to people. I think he figures you’ll get into a discussion of the whole idea with the Chairman, start bringing him around. He has to do it that way because he himself doesn’t get along with the Chairman and because the board is so tricky. He can’t go through the board—they might smell what’s going on and protect the Chairman.”

  “Beales—”

  “Don’t worry about everybody’s motivations, Jack,” she replied. “Just do what Morrison says and get the results. That’s my advice. C’mon. You need to see Mrs. Marsh.”

  So I trailed down the long hallway to the northeast corner of the floor, where the Chairman’s offices were. It was said that when the building was designed in 1974 he had chosen this corner because he could look out his windows and see his six thirty-foot-high Chinese magnolias on his penthouse garden fifteen blocks away. What was I doing back then? Following Mike Schmidt’s home run statistics and contemplating growing a beard. Mrs. Marsh was in her office.

  “Got a minute?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Whitman.” She was one of those women who, having grown stout, had translated her fat into authority. Her fleshy neck and thick ankles and a daily uniform of white blouse and plaid calf-length skirt all bespoke order, manners, and many years in Catholic school. Her only indulgence was a bowl of candies on her desk; she sucked on them constantly with prim fervor.

  “You may know that I’ve been assigned to work with the Chairman on some matters, and I was wondering if I might schedule a meeting with—”

  She was already shaking her head.

  “He and I discussed this,” she said. “You’re to be available when he needs you. He hasn’t instructed me to set up a meeting.”

  “We have to discuss a couple of things we’ve been at work on together.”

  Mrs. Marsh inspected the polish of her nails with insulting concentration. “Generally I know everything that he is working on,” she said. She conferred with the lawyers and bankers for him, wrote and signed out his checks with her exact replica of his signature, and in some matters, it was rumored, possessed power-of-attorney for him. I had little doubt that had the Chairman suddenly met his demise, that she would have been called upon to be the executor of his estate.

  “I need only a short appointment,” I finally said.

  “He tells me who his appointments will be.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” I went on, “but I need just a little time next week. Just fifteen minutes to go over—”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask him about it first,” she said, her eyes on mine. “You see, his schedule is unclear.”

  “But he’ll be back in the office on Monday?”

  “It’s not clear.”

  “Not back Monday? How about Tuesday?”

  “He might be,” she said. “But generally his schedule is a private matter. I will note that you would like an appointment and if it is appropriate—”

  Her idiotic formality was a pure power play.

  “I won’t take this polite bullshit,” I told her. “You’re a gatekeeper, Mrs. Marsh, and no more. I want to know on Monday morning by ten o’clock when I can see him. Mr. Morrison has requested—no, he has directed, he has ordered me to talk with the Chairman about certain matters and I insist upon my right to do that.”

  Mrs. Marsh inhaled in surprise, but she had been around a long time, dealing with all manner of assholes and furiosos.

  “I cannot tolerate such rudeness in this office—”

  “I cannot tolerate such unwillingness by a secretary to accommodate a vice president of this company!” Then I quieted my voice and drew close enough to her desk that it made her uncomfortable. “You would be well advised, on your boss’s behalf, Mrs. Marsh, to make sure that people have a chance to talk with him.”

  At the end of the day, Freddie Robinson, the ancient black man who shined shoes in the building, wheeled his cart into my office. “I’m late,” he said.

  I sat, furious and tense, in my office chair, waiting for the phone to bring me more bad news. Robinson silently pushed a bench under my right shoe. He had been shining shoes at the Corporation for over fifty years, enduring any number of changes in management. Although he technically was not an employee of the Corporation, he had his own tiled alcove off the thirty-eighth floor men’s room where he kept his supplies. He shined only the men’s shoes, but repaired women’s shoes, too, each day beginning on a different floor. In this way he worked through the whole headquarters in about a week, popping his head into any office with impunity, saying, “Shine?” He was a holdover from the old days and yet no one, frankly, seemed embarrassed that an aged black man stooped at his feet to buff away the grime and mud and dogshit of the streets. The older men treated Robinson with greater warmth, as if he were a pet, while the younger men, who may actually have felt guiltier by his presence, accorded him a cold aloofness. Was I the only one who felt embarrassed? No doubt my shame indicated my own patronizing attitudes. Robinson didn’t appear to mind; it was the old days he pined for, and sometimes he would shake his head and say, “Back in Mr. L.’s time . . .” and by that he meant the illustrious founder of the Corporation, dead decades before.

  “What do you hear around the offices?” I asked Robinson as he dabbed shine onto my shoe.

  “Ahh ha.” He shook his head. “You know I don’t understand all the
mumbo-jumbo you all speak.”

  “You know I know that you know.”

  He looked up at me and winked. “I know you smarter than most the rest, I know that.”

  It was a marvel Robinson kept going, mile after mile of carpeted hallway, into and out of the elevators all day long. He was a wiry stick of a man, dressed each day in suspenders and a white shirt. One could always see the pattern of curled white hairs on his head as he worked. Sometimes in the spring or summer he would have a small portable radio with him on his cart and a plug in one ear, listening to the Mets at Shea Stadium. A lifetime of stooping had resulted in an arthritic back and there were days we didn’t see him and later we would find his back had hurt too much for him to work. And all other times I could catch the wintergreen smell of analgesic balm. He buffed and whipped his rags over my shoe with mechanical intensity, perhaps for four minutes, and then tapped the outside of the heel with two bony fingers to signal the left foot—and said, “That’s it, boss,” as if there was no indignity in him saying this, even to twenty-one-year-old assistants right out of college.

  “So you hear about any big things happening?” I asked again.

  “Well, sure. That’s easy. I been here a long time, Mr. Whitman, a long time. Just gimme a minute on it.”

  Robinson reached into his ancient wooden cart for a rag. He seemed to have a second sense as to when not to enter an office, and no one could ever recall when he had ever entered inappropriately. He had been at the Corporation so long that he simply knew the rhythms and patterns of activity in a way that accorded him a sense of where and when to go. The other side of it, too, was that no one minded where or when he entered an office, mostly, like the janitor who emptied wastebaskets near the end of the day. Men continued to have conversations on the phone while he came around their desk, set up a footstool on which the foot was set, and went to work. They’d dig a few dollars out of their wallets, lay the money on the desk for Robinson to retrieve, and keep talking, perhaps taking notes with a pen as they listened, barely noticing that their shoes had been cleaned and Robinson was gone.

  “So,” I reminded him, “any big things going on?”

  “Sure,” he said in his throaty old voice.

  “How do you know?”

  “ ’Cause they order up a whole mess of that caviar for the dining room. Bill, my friend who runs the kitchen, he tells me. And them guys in the parking garage rope off that section just inside the ramp for the big cars, I seen they doing that again. But there always one sure sign.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, feeling his fingers on my foot.

  “Everybody”—and here he looked left and right theatrically, as if they were all secretly listening to him—“everybody says, ‘Robinson, what do you hear around the offices?’ ” He laughed the velvety laugh of the aged, bemused at the furious anxieties of the young. “ ‘What’s going on, Robinson?’ ‘What do you hear up on thirty-nine?’ ‘What are they saying down on sixteen?’ ”

  “You got me again.”

  “Naw. You remarried yet?”

  “Well, I might have a little problem.”

  “What’s that?” he asked with amusement.

  He was the only trustworthy soul in the Corporation. “She’s in my house but her husband’s looking for her.”

  “Yessir, that is bad. I been there once . . .” Robinson looked up and into his past, a gentle smile playing on his face. “ . . . somethin’ like thirty-five years ago, I had that. She wasn’t going to five with her husband no more so she came to live with me. Had a little boy, too.”

  “This one has a little girl.”

  “When they got the kids, that makes it worse,” Robinson said.

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “You go to church and pray he a nice, friendly fellow.” He tapped my foot. “That’s it, boss.”

  I handed him his money. The price was three dollars, but he got four for his trouble, which meant, I’d once figured, that, shining perhaps four pairs of shoes an hour five hours a day could bring him a decent living, especially considering he was an uneducated black man in his seventies.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Whitman.” Robinson smiled. We liked each other. Or at least I liked him. He might have just been faking it for the money. He wheeled his cart toward the door.

  “Wait. I’ve got one more question.”

  Robinson stopped to turn back at me, his face a soft leathery smile. “Hmm?”

  “You shine the Chairman’s shoes?”

  “Yessir, twice a week.”

  “You doing it next week?”

  “Monday morning, eight o’clock.”

  “That a regular time?”

  “Reg’lar as rain.”

  “But maybe he’ll be out of the office on Monday.”

  “No, I checked the appointment with Miz Marsh, see. Today I did that.”

  There, a piece of information I could use.

  “You ever hear any of them talk about me, Robinson?”

  “You know I don’t hear nothing,” he answered casually as he shuffled out of the office. “Old man like me lucky he hear the alarm clock.”

  EIGHT

  IF YOU GOT A JOB, YOU DRIVE AWAY, PROCLAIMED THE SIGN at the Brooklyn car lot where Hector Salcines worked weekends. It was Sunday morning and I stood under an umbrella in a heavy spring drizzle in jeans and a T-shirt, rather pleased with my own cleverness. Calling from my office, it had taken me only about twenty minutes with the Yellow Pages and a street map of Brooklyn to find the place. I’d picked out half a dozen used-car places within a reasonable distance of the Sunset Park neighborhood Dolores had lived in and then called each, asking for Hector Salcines. Simple. The man answering the phone at the fourth place said Hector worked weekends—something I kin hep youse with, guy? No, I’m looking for Hector, I told him, you see he showed me a car. Then youse come roun Sunday mornin’. The lot was located on a triangular, otherwise useless piece of property way down on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street behind a twelve-foot-high chain link fence. The cars, many of them with cheap new paint jobs, were parked in tight rows with prices painted in big white numbers on the windshields, some with a short message: $300 TAKE HER TO CONEY ISLAND. $1,250 CHECK IT OUT. $1,800 SHE WANTS A NICE CAR. $3,650 JERSEY SHORE THIS SUMMER. Strings of faded red, white, and blue flags flew high above the lot and intersected at the sales office, which was nothing more than an old steel-sided trailer set up on cement blocks. I stood at the curb, coughing tightly from the acid, worrying now that I was about to do something monumentally stupid.

  Three days had gone by since Dolores and Maria had moved in. Dolores continued to get up before me, making me eggs each morning. I was even a little tired of them, but said nothing for fear of discouraging her. Dolores, for her part, had been going to bed early in the evenings, taking care of Maria and doing little else, regaining her strength, I figured. Already, her face seemed less drawn by fatigue. There was greater energy in her expression and voice. I’d given her a hundred dollars to buy the things she said she needed—clothes for Maria, whatever. “Spend it,” I told Dolores.

  And after a moment or two of protest she did. After only a few days, the two of them were starting to take liberties, which I liked—Maria exploring the house wantonly, pulling open my underwear drawer, pawing through the kitchen cabinets, taking the scissors to old issues of the Wall Street Journal and slicing them into long crooked ribbons. Dolores had fixed up their bedroom a bit, put a spray of daffodils from the back garden in a vase in the dining room. Their kitchen was spotless now and the refrigerator half-full. Dolores cooked me something she called tostones, which was mashed-up plantains, fried and served with garlic. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. I hadn’t yet asked about the jar of water, which Dolores had put in my living room on a side table near the window. And each evening on the way home I picked up something for Maria—books, watercolors, a “Sesame Street” puppet, all kinds of stuff.

  But in those first days, despite the ple
asant nature of these interactions, Dolores and I talked very little, and the silence between us did not get easier. I was sure she was thinking of her husband, in some way, thinking of what he was doing, or what she was going to do next, now that she was away from him. Hector was the unseen player, the man who had killed two dogs to get to Dolores and Maria. I wanted to see what kind of man he was. Call it market research, I told myself. And I could do this safely, I figured, because even though Hector knew my name, he didn’t know my face or my home phone number.

  That morning I’d told Dolores I was going out. And when I’d said good-bye to Maria, I found her perched on my bed watching morning cartoons on one of the cable stations telecast by Big Apple Cable. All Corporation executives in the New York region received complimentary service. It was strange enough that Maria’s father installed the wiring that transmitted the very show—if not in my house then elsewhere in the city. But that was just the start of it and I’d lingered for a minute, watching Maria and marveling at the weird tangle of ironies. The cartoons appeared on a children’s cable station that was 10 percent-owned by the Corporation. We’d received that portion of ownership—worth about twenty-three million dollars as I recall—simply in exchange for providing to the cable station five years of use of some of the Corporation’s extensive celluloid cartoon library, much of which was created in the 1950s. I had done the deal four years ago. It was a small deal but one that had a certain elegance I was proud of. The majority owners of the children’s station were pleased with the agreement, since it gave them, in addition to programming footage, the Corporation’s prestige and name recognition. But the Corporation had the real advantage. In exchange for a truckload of old cartoons, we received annual profit dividends of about three million dollars, not to mention the steady appreciation of the stock, which could serve as collateral for bank financing of other Corporation projects. There was also another advantage: the cable station’s repetitive broadcast of the old cartoon properties amounted to free advertising for our feature-length cartoon movies that used the same characters (each of which we rereleased every three or four years, garnering twenty or thirty million in profit each time), as well as for the licensed spin-off products—toys and clothes and stuffed animals, sleeping bags and kiddie watches, you name it. Little Maria Salcines, sitting on my bed watching television, was consuming my work.