Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  Why would the V-S team delay? I couldn’t think of a reason. If the merger deal looked bad, they could always call off the talks, but to delay merely wasted everyone’s time and money, unless they had a reason to wait for information or a decision. The rest of the faxes included copies of projected market summaries, which Morrison and the others had provided the V-S people, and correspondence related to routine matters within V-S. There were, however, two intriguing items, the first, a typewritten note from Waldhausen to his wife: Liebe Gretchen, Ich vermisse dich sehr mein Schatz. Wir arbeiten schwer und sonst gibt es nicht viel zu tun. Gib Lotte einen kuß fur mich . . . “Dear Gretchen,” I translated, “Miss you very much, sweetheart. We’re hard at work here, not much to do. Give Lotte a kiss for me. And please have the roofers leave a copy of the bill.” And then second, a handwritten note from Waldhausen: Cornelia, Es ist spät und sicherlich schläfst du also werde ich dich nicht mit einem Anruf wecken . . . This one was more intriguing. “Cornelia, it is late and surely you are sleeping so I will not wake you with a call. It is possible that you will read this letter at breakfast. I am, at the moment, high above the street in New York. A grand hotel. I am lonely. I miss you, and long for our quiet afternoons. I had a dream last night that I was doing squats with the barbell, as I did in university. Doing them naked. Maybe one hundred kg. I could do that then—you have only known me as an older man. And you were beneath me with your mouth open. Every time I came down, Cornelia, your lips were open . . .” And so on. The usual stuff that men can’t say to their fifty-year-old wives. The letter was to Waldhausen’s mistress, no doubt.

  “You got any more work for me?” DiFrancesco said. “Because if you do, give it to me, and if you don’t, I got other things to do. I got this set up now, it’s automatic.”

  “More work?”

  “Sure, other fax numbers, whatever.”

  I thought a moment. Morrison wanted results with the Chairman. I pulled out my electronic date book and started to scroll through all the numbers at the Corporation.

  “This one.” I pointed it out to DiFrancesco. The Chairman’s office fax number. “Hack this one and see what you get.”

  “Okay. Where is it?”

  “It’s in our building, thirty-ninth floor.”

  He looked at me. “You sure?”

  “Yes. You need access to the PBX?”

  “It’s a Northern Telecom,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I noticed it in the lobby.”

  “You need some kind of special access phone number?”

  He thought. “I can do it. I’ll have to go through the—”

  “No, no. I don’t want the explanation.”

  “Okay.”

  “All right, what else . . .” I looked through the numbers. Samantha’s home number, her number on her boat, Beales’s home number, Morrison’s office extension, his office fax, his home numbers in Connecticut and the vacation homes, his private fax number at home. “Can you hack a fax in a private home in Connecticut?” I asked DiFrancesco, being sure not to show him that the home in question was Morrison’s.

  DiFrancesco squeezed his eyes shut. “New England Telephone . . . very hard.”

  “If it’s impossible, then—”

  “No! Yes! I got a friend who specializes in New England Tel.”

  “Sure?”

  “It’ll take a while, but yes.”

  I gathered up the faxes to leave.

  “One more problem,” DiFrancesco said.

  “What?”

  “I’m supposed to write everything up for Shevesky. Report this shit to him.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Just call you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  DiFrancesco looked at me, his eyes watching, understanding. I knew he was surpassingly intelligent. “You wish to control what information reaches your boss, Morrison?”

  I nodded. “Shevesky struck me as your basic fuckwad hustler salesman.”

  A big smile appeared on DiFrancesco’s massive face. “A maggot middleman.”

  “He’ll do anything Morrison tells him to do, right?”

  “Even if he had to bend over.”

  “So our deal will be that you just call me, any hour.” I wrote down my home number. “If Shevesky calls you and says where is my documentation, tell him I said no summaries of the faxes are to be created. Blame it on me. He won’t complain to Morrison, because he’s scared of him, but if he does, I’ll say I ordered no summaries. And one last thing, under no circumstances tell Shevesky these two numbers I just gave you. Okay?”

  DiFrancesco smiled. “You live in a nasty world, Mr. Whitman.”

  I nodded. “Gets nastier every day, too.”

  Back in my office, I was wondering how my windows got so dirty on the outside when Helen buzzed me and said a Hector Salcines was on the phone.

  “Tell him I’m in a meeting.”

  “He called three times while you were out.”

  I gripped the edge of my desk. “In a meeting,” I told her.

  “Okay.”

  “And, Helen,” I asked, “how do you generally answer the phone?”

  “ ‘Mr. Whitman’s office.’ ”

  “That’s what I thought. How did this Hector Salcines ask for me the first time?”

  “He asked for Jack.”

  “And Jack Whitman subsequently?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, if he calls again, say that I’m not available.”

  “You want to avoid him?”

  “I don’t even want to be on the same planet with him.”

  Perhaps Hector Salcines had decided over the weekend to contact me. He now knew that the man who had arranged to house his wife and child was named Jack Whitman, thanks to Ahmed. And he had my work number. I could also assume that Hector knew I was at the Corporation, because if he had called Helen once while she was out, the call would have bounced out to the receptionist, who greeted callers with the Corporation’s name. He did not know where I lived, of course, and thus not where Dolores and Maria were. If he was given to research, he would dial directory assistance in all five boroughs and even the suburbs and call every J. or John Whitman listed. But that wouldn’t succeed; since Liz’s death, I’d had an unlisted phone number. And I counted that as a lucky thing, since I didn’t need any more difficulty from Hector Salcines. It was troubling enough that he knew where I worked.

  That night, home late after Maria had gone to bed, I found Dolores sitting on the living room rug with the photo albums of Liz and me. We used to take a lot of pictures—meals out with friends, vacations, whatever. Jack Whitman with a thirty-two-inch waist and weaker glasses. The photographs revealed that I was not going to age well, the flesh falling from my face just like my father’s. I hung up my coat. “Long time ago,” I said, pointing at the stack of photo albums.

  “I like them,” Dolores said quietly, turning a page. “You were so young. Both of you. She was good-looking.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was very rich?”

  “No, not at all—she grew up working summers in a lobster pound.”

  I told Dolores how Liz had learned the restaurant business from her father, a widower with a face of ruddy disapproval who ran a string of lobster houses on the Massachusetts and Maine coasts that went belly-up not long after he died of a massive coronary while pushing a lawn mower. In retrospect, I think his doctor had told him many years before that his heart was not good and, when he was turned down for life insurance, he began to pull money out of the restaurant business, perhaps even cheating his partners, so that he could pay for Liz to go to Harvard. He was a lousy father, too authoritarian with his wife and daughter, but after his wife’s death, Liz was all he ever cared about. He left her all that he still owned, which wasn’t much: the proceeds from the sale of his house and a refrigerator full of beer. Her grief was tremendous and she clung to me in those months. But her father had trained her well, and soon after that Liz w
as hired to manage a large midtown restaurant that catered mostly to the business trade, and she loved getting there early, making sure the daily orders had arrived, that the floors had been vacuumed overnight, that the fresh bread was in, that the laundry service had delivered the napkins and tablecloths. It’s notoriously difficult to prosper in the restaurant business in New York City but Liz had thrown herself into it with the same reckless confidence that had taken her up to 168th Street after dark on the evening of her death.

  “I knew she worked hard,” Dolores said. “You can sort of see it in her face.” She had been sitting with the photo albums awhile, studying each of the photos, ingesting my past, my marriage to Liz. “I looked at all of them,” she added, a little playfully.

  “All of them? Oh—there were a couple . . .”

  “Mm-hmm.” She pulled one out of its sleeve. “This the one you’re thinking about?”

  I looked at the photo and froze—it was one I’d taken of Liz in her third month. As her pregnancy progressed, her breasts had swelled. She was baffled and slightly embarrassed by their new size. I celebrated this sudden gift, telling her I intended to get all the time I could sucking and fondling her breasts before the next generation took over. By this point in the conversation—we had it often in the months that she was pregnant, for I enjoyed the topic—my hands had spidered their way up around each nipple and she playfully slapped at my fingers, saying her breasts were too big and complaining her bras no longer fit. But, I answered, when would I ever again have an opportunity to appreciate such magnificent breasts? High, full, fertile, and heavy? She didn’t understand, I would moan good-naturedly, she suddenly had amazing tits. “Like the bows of whaling ships! Like erotic sculptures in India!” I exclaimed. “Attention must be paid now, for someday in the far future I will be a broken-down old man with rotting nuts and a useless hose between my legs and you will be a hag with leathery fallen dugs!” “That’s a horrible thing to say to your pregnant wife,” Liz responded, pleased nonetheless. “A man,” I said solemnly, “needs to bank some memories against the onslaught of time.” Could I take a picture of her from the waist up—so as to remember? My wife, lusty in bed but modest in most other respects, agreed, and so one Saturday morning she knelt on the sheets with the morning light coming through the windows while I fussed with a thirty-five-millimeter camera. She was sleepy and silly and had just brushed her hair. Her breasts stood pale and firm, lifted into the light, faint deltas of veins newly visible, the aureole of each breast larger and darker since she’d become pregnant. In the picture, Liz is looking at me beneath amused brows, a smile curled on her lips, with one hand modestly lifted to her shoulder—her hand is beautiful in the sun, too—as if about to cover herself. Her wedding ring glints ever so barely in the light.

  A picture of happiness. Yet I could not look at the photo without thinking of the last actual conversation I had with Liz, a conversation that, coincidentally, had do with breasts belonging to another woman. It’s not a pleasant incident. It doesn’t reflect well upon me. I’ve already set forth the basic, unhappy details of Liz’s murder, but there is one last aspect of her death that still needs to be told. On the evening of her death, only a few hours before it, Liz and I talked by phone; Liz was due to visit her friend Susie at the hospital. I wasn’t happy with this; as far as I was concerned, Susie was a whining tart who lived off her trust fund and for years had talked about how she wanted children and meanwhile slept indiscriminately with married men—lunchtime rendezvous in a hotel, no demands. She had helped to wreck at least two marriages. Susie’s bout with breast cancer elicited only grudging sympathy from me. “You’re too tired to go all the way uptown,” I told Liz. “Really, why not do it on the weekend? Susie’s not going anywhere.”

  “I want to go tonight because Susie has just had the surgery,” Liz said. “You could meet me at the hospital and we’d just hop on the subway home.”

  “I’ve got this work.”

  “You always have work,” she answered, the effort of patience audible in her voice. “You have decades of work ahead of you, Jack. This is a friend of ours who has cancer.”

  “I know. But this is stuff I have to get done. If it’s good, there’s a chance this guy Morrison will see it.”

  “It’s very important to me that you go see Susie,” Liz insisted. “She’s miserable. She’s got tubes in her and is very, very depressed. They took off both her breasts, her mother said. She doesn’t have anybody except her parents. What’s-his-name, the jerk she’s been sleeping with, won’t come to see her.”

  “Can’t do it,” I told my wife. “Okay?”

  “You’re really being a shit about this,” Liz answered. “A prime-A, jumbo-sized shit.”

  “I have to do this work, Liz.”

  “You haven’t visited Susie once.”

  “Sorry.”

  Liz sighed. “I’ll be home around nine-thirty.”

  “Okay,” I said, thinking her anger was spent.

  “And, Jack?”

  “Yes?” I answered my wife, hoping she had softened.

  “Fuck you.”

  She hung up. That was the last thing Liz ever said to me. Fuck you. She’d said it before and would have said it again, a flash of anger typical of a normal marriage. We had traversed many such moments, a few needing talk and negotiation, most forgotten quickly by both of us. As I have said, we had a good marriage. But my slight, for which I had been unable to apologize, was to weigh on me, fill my mouth with bitterness and self-loathing. It wasn’t just that my last words to Liz were less than affectionate, but also that had I acted with greater charity, had I only decided to go uptown and meet her, then perhaps it might all have been different. And, probably, we would have taken a cab home, because I did not like to see her struggle heavily down and up the subway steps. That the chain of causation of Liz’s death had passed through my hands, so to speak, became the source of unutterable grief for me. The fact that Susie had recovered completely, been fitted for new, larger, unnaturally pert breasts, compliments of her trust officer, and then continued to chase married men, even having the gall to smile wetly at me once or twice, confirmed the senselessness of Liz’s death. I’d spent many evenings sitting at home thinking If I had only . . ., promising myself that if ever I somehow found a wife again that I would be different, that never again would I make the same selfish mistake.

  I put Liz’s photo back in Dolores’s soft dark hand.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  It was hard to say. I didn’t talk to anyone about this anymore. “See, this was when my wife was pregnant.”

  “She was pregnant?” Dolores reacted with alert attention, her dark eyes seeking mine. “What happened to the baby?”

  “Liz was pregnant when she was killed. The baby was eight months—”

  “Could they save—”

  “No. It would have been a girl. A little baby girl.”

  “You lost a baby, too?” Dolores’s voice trailed off and she turned her head toward the slight breeze that moved through the open window. I stood there, wrapped again in the grief of it. And Dolores too seemed to suffer a confusion of emotions. Several streets over we heard a momentary passing of sirens. I wished then that I could go to Dolores. I wished I could beg her to let me put my head in her lap and shut my eyes. With her cool hand on my forehead in the manner of kindness. It had been years since a woman’s hand had been on my forehead. Dolores stared up at me, her face soft in thought. She hung now in the balance, we both knew, between the life that was behind her and, quite possibly, something vastly different. But then the moment seemed to have passed. I was tired from the day and saddened by seeing Liz’s picture and so I started up the stairs.

  “Your wife—” Dolores called after me. “She’s happy in these pictures. She looks like you took care of her.”

  “I did,” I said pointedly. “I took very good care of her.”

 
; Late that night, maybe 1:00 A.M., I found myself restlessly riding the gray edge of consciousness. Outside my bedroom window came the rush of the gloom and the rustle of the twisted old pear trees luminous with papery white blossoms, each no bigger than Maria’s fingernails. Information was moving globally. You could almost feel it, invisible pulses and bytes streaming through the air, silent cells of light pulsing across continents. You can sense the global picture changing, the computer manufacturers and consumer electronics firms—AT&T, Matsushita, Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Apple—all converging on the technologies, pushing at the Corporation. Underneath his bluster, Morrison knew this, knew that if the Corporation was to survive, the Chairman would not be the man to lead the charge. I lay in the dark tasting the residual chalkiness in my mouth from the acid medication and wondering if the next day’s meeting with the Chairman would be any good.

  Then I heard what had woken me, a foot on the stairs in the darkness. The old brass hinges of the door creaked. I rolled over and there was Dolores next to the bed, naked, her belly at my eyes, her heavy breasts above me, with their sad, mortal beauty. Her dark tangle of pubic hair had a forthright fullness. She bent down and held my face tight in both hands. I could tell she’d been drinking wine in the kitchen and she peered at me with great seriousness—I think she wanted to be sure it was going to be honest between us—and then pulled the covers away and got in the bed. My head was hot with sleep and my breath foul. I hesitated, but she did not. My head cleared quickly. That certain urgent energy was suddenly available. Don’t say anything to her yet. I wondered if she felt obliged to do this. It had been a long time, and I wanted to go slowly, to have it come back to me. But Dolores pressed quickly, straddling me, pushing hard against my chest. It all came rushing back after a long lapse, the wet slipping in and out, the tension and breathing, the sweet rank odor of Dolores filling the room.