Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  I felt a jolt of irritation. “So much that—”

  “No, no. You don’t understand, Jack. I never fucked a man who was so rich, so I had to do it just because of that. I got nothing but me, right? And you got so much and I wanted to see what it was like to do it. And also ’cause I felt sorry for you losing your wife like you did.”

  I laughed. “You felt sorry for me and you liked my money. Great.”

  A soft hand flew playfully out of the darkness and slapped me.

  “I want you to have better reasons than that,” I said.

  “You know,” Dolores said, “I’m not looking for love, exactly.”

  “No?”

  “I’m looking for a life. Life after Hector.”

  It seemed Dolores was ready to talk. This was the first time she’d brought up the topic of her husband. “Why is he so jealous?” I asked.

  “Because he loves me, why do you think?”

  “Well, a lot of men wouldn’t be as crazy as him.”

  “A lot of men haven’t had to deal with me.” She laughed, finishing her wine. “He knows what I’ll do. He knows I’ll do it. My tías—that means aunts, they never liked him. I didn’t tell you I had two aunts? My father’s older sisters. They were santera—”

  “That’s sort of a mix of Catholicism and voodoo?”

  “Santeria—it’s the Catholic saints with other names, the old African names,” Dolores explained. “And my aunts would go to the babalawo, the santeria priest, and they went to the botanica every day, maybe to get a little incienso, a little bit of anis, some sal de mar, mostasa, ajonjol, linaja, that kind of stuff, herbs and things, I never could keep them all straight—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “Now you have to tell me about the jar of water.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Dolores protested, giggling too easily.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You had it in that crappy hotel room and you had it in the apartment in Ahmed’s building and now downstairs. It’s not like I haven’t seen it, Dolores.”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  She sighed. “You put it out to collect evil spirits.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Well, no, but . . . it makes me feel better,” Dolores said. “It’s good luck. Too many bad things have happened to me.”

  Of course I had to ask. “What?”

  “Just things.”

  She was quiet, a dark shadow. I heard her breathing. You have no idea who she is, I thought. “Nothing bad’s going to happen,” I finally said.

  A minute passed, the two of us silent in our own thoughts.

  “Anyway,” Dolores went on, “like I was saying, my tías didn’t like Hector. He was too dark. They said I could find a man with lighter skin. They wanted me to have children who were lighter. That’s what you’re supposed to do in the D.R. You get a darker child, that’s un paso atrás, like, a step backwards. And they didn’t like him because he couldn’t speak good Spanish. He just knows a little bit, can’t really speak it. Kitchen Spanish, you know.”

  “He’s Puerto Rican?”

  “Yes.”

  “But born here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I can understand that his Spanish wasn’t that good.”

  “I know, but my tias couldn’t. They said he was too hot, Hector is too hot. Hot is good, but too hot, no good. The nuns in Catholic school always said santeria was no good, that it was stupid, that you got to be ignorant if you believe in it. But most of them didn’t have all these aunts always cooking up some crazy things and looking at their little books and everything. Hector never understood it. Puerto Ricans think Dominicans are all jibaros. Country people. His family never liked me, they think people from the D.R. are no good. Always . . . there’s this word for it, chinchorreando, gossiping, like bedbugs, all crazy and running around. If you’re Puerto Rican you think you’re American, and you think Dominicans are just trash, like they just got here. Hector once tried to pull that shit on me and I told him, ‘You tell me how many cousins you got on welfare and then you joke about my papi.’ If he had ever met my papi he would know. He knew he better not make jokes. My father was a strong man, his calves looked like they had softballs in them or something. He worked in the piano factory. Hector never could pull that shit on me. But there’s another reason, too. See, like I said, I’m a little bit lighter than him, just a little bit. He likes that. I know he always wanted a white woman and he was glad I was lighter than him.”

  “To me you’re very dark.”

  “Because you spent your whole life with white girls!” Dolores laughed. “I saw that picture of your wife and you know what I thought? I said to myself that was Hector’s dream woman, right there, he never had a white woman with the blue eyes and all. I think actually he wanted one with real blond hair too, California-girl hair. He told me before we got married that it was something he wanted and never had, I mean, he had some light-skinned girls who were sort of Puerto Rican—Italian, right? You get a lot of that down in Bay Ridge. But no blondes, you know, real blondes. I told him that if he ever looked at some girl that got real blond hair I was going to make him regret it. He wanted to ask me some things but I think he didn’t want to know the answers. He was always afraid I wanted black guys. Maybe I did. I used to say give me Lawrence Taylor, please”

  “The guy who plays linebacker for the Giants?”

  “Oh, please.” She laughed, tipping her head back, the city lights bright on the curved surfaces of her eyes. “Me and my girlfriends used to talk about how big he was and everything. Just to, like, be under him. Like maybe he would just kill you. But anyway, I never told Hector all the things like that because he was just going to get pissed. You see, Hector is a romantic. You are, too. You’re kind of romantic about me and Maria ’cause we’re different, right?” Dolores looked at me to be sure I was listening. “But I don’t have some big problem with this stuff, okay? My papi told me, he said Dominicans, they been free something like five hundred years, mixing everybody around. I don’t have some kind of problem with this.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean I been with white guys, whatever. It’s inside is what counts.”

  “Yes.” Dolores didn’t want to talk any more about our racial difference. But she was clearly in the mood to talk. “So, are your aunts still alive?” I said.

  “No. The second one died about three years ago. She was in a nursing home . . . it was sad, she came here with my papi after my mother died.”

  We sat in silence.

  “It’s late,” Dolores said. “You want to go to bed now?”

  Her voice was husky and full of want and I realized that just mentioning her mother and father and dead aunts, about whom I knew nothing, had made Dolores feel vulnerable and sad. Her people were gone.

  “Hey,” I said softly. “Dolores.”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me.”

  “What?” she said, almost in tears.

  “Tell me who you are. Everything.”

  She put her head down. “Jack, if I do that then I don’t know what it means, you know? I don’t know why I’m telling it to you. There’s so much . . .”

  I took her lovely smooth face in my hand and turned it toward me and the light from the city caught the wetness of her eyes and she stared into my face, lost in the sudden compressed awareness of the unpredictability of life. I sensed that she had suffered a great loss, and I tried to convey tenderly that there was nothing she could not tell me, that I would listen to her for however long it took, and that I desired above all for her to release herself to me. “Tell me, Dolores,” I said again.

  We sat there on the roof, facing the night, and Dolores began to speak. She was born, she said, in 1965 in Santo Domingo. That year the government was overthrown, the schools were closed, and U.S. troops came ashore. That was all that had ever been told her by her two aunts, the sisters of her fa
ther, all years older than he. Her mother was a large woman with great breasts and a mouth men liked. Yet sensible, too. A robust daughter of a fisherman, Dolores’s mother, Paloma Martinez, had carried Dolores seemingly without effort. A midwife delivered her, so Dolores learned, a woman who had come hastily from another delivery and who hadn’t had time to scrub her hands properly. Midwives typically sweep their fingers back and forth within the vaginal opening of a woman about to deliver, in order to stretch the flesh and allow the baby through without the woman tearing. But she ended up making a small cut anyway, for Dolores was a big newborn, with a large head like her father’s, and as soon as the flesh was opened, a route of infection was created. Dolores’s mother was sick with septic infection within four days of the delivery and her milk never came in. The aunts consulted the local babalawo, who advised that Dolores be nursed by her mother’s sister, who had a year-old son. Dolores’s mother died of septicemia when Dolores was two weeks old. Her father was heartbroken and vowed to raise his daughter in a country that had a future, where healthy twenty-year-old women did not die because God was looking elsewhere. Where there were doctors, not old women who did not read newspapers and forget to wash their hands. Santo Domingo was hot and wretched and reminded him of his wife, whom he had seen waste away from the robustness of pregnancy to a spectral, shrunken presence attended by her sisters, who chanted prayers and burned incense in her room as she slipped toward death. The only thing he would miss would be his amateur baseball team, for which he played catcher. He was by trade a jeweler, a man who wore a crisp white shirt each day and read the newspapers. His friends told him not to go. But his two older sisters urged him to make the trip. He would support them and they would care for Dolores. One sister had never married and the other had lost a husband and never had children. Yet when he came north in 1965, taking a bus from Miami with his infant daughter and two sisters to New York, it was soon clear that he was going to be unable to work as a jeweler. For the first time in his life, Roberto Martinez understood that he was a black man, at least in the eyes of America. The jeweler’s trade was still dominated by Jews; to set up his own shop he needed at least a couple of thousand dollars, which was out of the question. Every dollar—the old, thin dollars of the poor—was counted and folded, recounted and saved for necessities. The local banks at that time were run by the Irish who had settled Sunset Park around the turn of the century, and few were willing to lend to the population that was driving the Irish out, even from St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church on Fourth Avenue, an immense, magnificent structure, built with the dollars of Irish widows and the pennies of Irish cops, and now—so went the reaction to Dolores’s father’s request for a business loan—now the fuggin spicks, from P.R. or whatever goddamned country, were arriving by the fuggin planeload. Dolores’s father knew he had to look for a job, any job, and he was lucky to have a strong back, built as he was with great stocky width through the shoulders. For a time he worked at the immense Brooklyn Army Terminal at Fifty-ninth Street and Second Avenue, where the army was shipping munitions and tanks to Europe during the Cold War fortification of West Germany. The job paid reasonably well, but he had three other mouths to feed. He saved every dime, Dolores said, becoming a man so frugal that he would set a can of beans over the pilot light of the gas stove each morning. Heating slowly, the beans would be ready by evening.

  Then a friend told him that the Steinway & Sons piano factory up in Long Island City liked to hire men who had built boats, because they understood the mysteries of wood. Grains and knots. Glues and bracing. All the two of them needed to do, the friend said, was show up and claim to have built boats in the harbor of Santo Domingo. Who would know they hadn’t? The men drove to the factory and Maria’s father was hired as soon as the manager saw the width of his back. The other man was dismissed. It was a long commute for Dolores’s father but steady work that paid enough. In 1966 America had more children than ever, and schools and families were buying pianos. For the first few months there, Roberto Martinez worked in the rim-bending operation, a low dark cavelike room, with a crew of other powerfully built young men who, standing in tandem, bent and set the long layered and glued sections of hardrock maple onto a press. When the wood was set and dried it became the case of the piano and moved through the immense factory, gradually being finished. When she was older, her father walked with Dolores through the factory after hours, showing her every step of the manufacture of a piano, shuffling through sawdust and wood scraps. Each piano had thirteen thousand parts, he said. As a jeweler, he understood fine work, and thought that he could do it. When he mentioned his former trade, one of the managers—a Ukrainian immigrant himself and enlightened then as to assigning jobs by talent rather than race—found Roberto Martinez a new job sitting at a bench in the “action department,” assembling the delicate trip hammers made of wood and green felt that struck the piano’s strings within the instrument.

  It was also possible that Roberto Martinez was promoted simply because of his quiet, selfless dignity. Dolores remembered that he slept each night in the kitchen on a sagging cot behind a screen. The aunts needed to be close to the bathroom at night and the only other room where one could sleep was Dolores’s. Next to her father’s bed was a small dresser table he had found discarded behind an apartment building and its one small drawer became the only private space Roberto Martinez had. But Dolores knew what was in it: his set of jeweler’s tools, his own father’s watch, which did not work, a modest box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that held a few pieces of his wife’s jewelry, and a manila envelope with his diploma from high school, his jeweler’s certificate, and the yellowed wedding notice in a Dominican newspaper. He kept a piece of muslin over these items. On the top of the table was a cross and a framed black-and-white photo of his wife.

  Roberto Martinez’s grief over his wife was a pure and holy thing, but he slipped away some evenings and occasionally brought a girlfriend home for dinner. He had a life that was private from his daughter and sisters, and whether he had ever wanted to marry again was something Dolores never knew. Her aunts were a formidable pair and they bluntly inspected whomever their younger brother brought home. A wife would mean a larger apartment and the diminishment of their authority. Eventually Roberto Martinez ceased bringing his occasional girlfriends home. He seemed content to sit at night and ask Dolores to bring the newspaper or the department store catalog to him. They would page through it, looking at the jewelry ads. He would point to a photo of a diamond ring and say, “Now, here, mi corazon, is a diamond solitaire. See the way the light goes up and down these edges? When you finish school,” he told her, “I will make you a ring.” This she remembered vividly.

  When Roberto Martinez was no longer interested in looking at jewelry catalogs Dolores understood he was losing his sight. He went to a succession of Brooklyn eye doctors. After a year in which he made increasingly more mistakes at the workbench, he was transferred to the Steinway delivery crew as a foreman, for which eyesight was less important than judgment, patience, and on occasion a strong back, which he still possessed. He oversaw the loading of the pianos into the black Mercedes vans and the unloading into schools, music stores, and private homes. The company salesmen had a habit of saying that if an assembled piano would fit within a room, any room, then the company could get the piano into it. Any room. That made selling pianos easier and delivering them more difficult. It was during the summer of 1972, Dolores told me, when her father was a week short of his fortieth birthday and when she was seven that the Juilliard School took delivery of fifteen new nine-foot concert grand pianos with ebony finish. They were delivered two to a truck, and a train of eight Steinway vans rolled into Manhattan’s West Side. The temperature had reached past the nineties that day, touching one hundred, and, so Dolores was to learn from her aunts, her father stood for hours out on the hot pavement, giving directions to the drivers and movers, co-ordinating the arrival of freight elevators, and listening, no doubt, to the heaving and creaking of the
mammoth instruments, each of which cost twenty-three thousand dollars, as they were delicately lifted onto the wooden dollies. With customary dedication, he took it quite seriously.

  And so there was a certain sad glory in Roberto Martinez’s last day, for he completed the delivery of a third of a million dollars’ worth of pianos, his biggest delivery ever. He took the subway home instead of returning with the empty trucks to Long Island City for his car, and the subway that evening was notoriously hot. Dolores remembered the blank, drained look on her father’s face as he came in the front door of the apartment in Sunset Park and moved unsteadily into the kitchen for some water. She was only seven, but old enough to see that he was not himself—there were deep rings of sweat under his neck and armpits, and instead of getting to the refrigerator, her father sat heavily down on one of the kitchen chairs, bought from the local furniture store on lay-away, and said to her in a quiet, confused voice, his last words, “Dolores, mi corazon, donde estd tu mami?” Where is your mother? And at that his heart ruptured and he collapsed to the linoleum.

  “After Papi died,” Dolores explained to me, “we didn’t have any money and we had to move. We lived on Tia Lucinda’s welfare and her dead husband’s pension from the D.R. army.” It was, indisputably, a poor living—in a peeling apartment that faced Brooklyn’s Eighth Avenue in which the windows rattled at night and the roaches ran up through the floorboards from the bodega restaurant downstairs. But her aunt Lucinda was kind, if a little slow, and Dolores had a bit more freedom than other girls. Her father’s meager fourteen-thousand-dollar insurance policy was to be spent on the cost of parochial school.

  In a few years, Dolores said, she was a dark-haired little girl in a St. Anthony’s uniform, the white blouse and green tie and the plaid skirt and matching green knee socks. Her aunts considered returning to Santo Domingo but that would mean Dolores would not be an American. They had become increasingly dependent on santeria for their version of reality and sometimes Dolores came home after school to see that the apartment was full of burning candles, her aunts chanting quiet prayers in Spanish before an altar. They went to mass nearly every day, and, in retrospect, she saw they were simply two uneducated Dominican women in their fifties who had expected that their robust younger brother would take care of them until their deaths; now they were terrified by the fluid complexity of American culture. They knew they were losing Dolores to this new place. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, she was getting older, looking more like a young woman. There was a strength in her expression, almost a ferocity, and this they knew had come from Dolores’s mother. Dolores finished the ninth grade. They did not like the way she dressed, or what was shown on television, or the way the boys acted. They especially did not like the young man who called her every evening. She was only fourteen, tall for her age, but that did not mean she was ready for Micky O’Shea, a hulking Irish boy who worked in a garage down on Fourth Avenue.