Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  I cut off the tape, then erased it. My moves were going wrong, backfiring. Hector didn’t care how many hours he worked, as long as Dolores and Maria came back to him.

  “Jack?” Dolores came up the stairs with a blanket and a bottle of wine and two glasses. “Was there a message?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “You’re coughing, baby,” she said.

  “It’s just . . . the acid.”

  She took my hand and we climbed up to the roof. I drank silently and worried about what would happen the next day at the office. Something was going on. The Chairman had given me no clue after I’d talked and Morrison hadn’t called to see what had happened. And I’d chosen not to call him—if such a thing could be called a choice. Dolores approached me in the darkness.

  “You’re coughing a lot, Jack.”

  “It’s just stress and caffeine and everything.”

  “What happened out there today, can I ask about that? Because I know it wasn’t just a lot of fun. I never saw anybody so nervous.”

  “It’s almost impossible to explain, Dolores. It’s very complicated. I don’t know what the hell’s going on at work. I’m getting pushed around. I could lose my job tomorrow, I think that’s a possibility.”

  “They made you talk so long,” she said sympathetically.

  “Don’t worry about it, you have enough to worry about” There was something accidentally harsh in my voice when I said this, a certain tone of reserve that suggested judgment of Dolores. She looked up in hurt surprise and I believe she saw in my face that I knew I could tell her to leave at any time. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I shouldn’t have snapped. There’s a lot to make me tense now.”

  “I can help that.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, some way.” She smiled and I thought to myself, Fuck you, Hector, this woman is mine.

  “There’re some ways and there’s one way,” I answered.

  “One way, then.”

  “If you’re willing, Dolores, if you’re willing.”

  I slipped off my shoes and pants and underwear and she began then, the one perfect cure for the acid and the tension, and the backs of my knees shook as I lapsed into the bizarre fugue state where it was only my penis that was alive and the rest of me that by contrast was dead while I felt that certain perfect tranquillity, the night wind against my thighs. To have a woman kneeling between my legs, sucking, only then do I not worry about the past or the future. When you are screwing, you worry about the future, you worry about what the woman is going to get out of it, will she be satisfied. But not with the other . . . maybe one of her hands goes underneath the testicles, which is very good. Sweet smoke fills my head, my lips quiver strangely, my penis feels grotesquely, wonderfully thick and heavy—the pleasure seems to actually enlarge it further than its usual tumescence, and I forget the Corporation, I forget the dead and dying, I forget that I myself am merely a putrefying bag of worm-meat set to life by a jolt of electricity. A body electric. I forget my hemorrhoids, my taxes, the fat creeping around my torso, my mother and father. There is only the hard pipe that goes from me to her, her to me, her lips sliding back and forth, her tongue sending pleasure back to me, and I am able to flatter and fool myself that she genuinely enjoys this, that she is sexually aroused by this. She sucks and fondles and soon I am in the great good place in my brain, such that in the penultimate seconds, my knees lifted high, muscles shivering, the last moment, when certainty overtakes expectation, my face changes swiftly from a straining grimace to a younger, eased version of myself, one’s theoretical, unstressed face, at peace for a few seconds. I have never seen this face on myself, but I have felt it.

  FOURTEEN

  . . . These management changes are indeed abrupt, but their effect will be to clarify leadership in this company. We have an excellent, seasoned team now in place, and despite the inevitable coming characterizations in the business media of the Corporation as an enterprise in mortal turmoil, nothing could be further from the truth, as we have many exciting developments awaiting us, some of which may be announced soon. In short, the Corporation is on firm footing, with record gross income in each of the last three years, a rapidly improving balance sheet, and steady profits. When the economy inevitably improves, our profits will brighten even more quickly. I personally will appreciate your continued good faith and industry.

  THE CHAIRMAN’S MEMORANDUM LAY CENTERED ON EVERY desk the very next morning, over his signature and the typed names of the board of directors, specifying who on the thirty-ninth floor had “resigned to pursue other interests”: Morrison, of course, Beales, and about ten other of Morrison’s pilot fish. Only minutes earlier, I’d walked out of the bright light of the morning into the Corporation’s lobby and seen an odd look flung onto the face of Frankie the guard. He’d noted my arrival. People pick up on things. Information is instantaneous. Regimes are never more than an idea. When the elevator opened to the floor, I’d found the hallways empty, the secretaries sitting in quiet anxiousness at their desks, some whispering into the phone. Now, with the announcement before me, I went on reading. The bankers had been replaced, fired, cut out, bought off—the professional equivalent of being shot in the back of the head and dumped in the East River. The bean counters in internal accounting, gray men with worn soles and tired faces who had never done a deal, had been spared. A couple of Morrison protégés in lesser division positions had been sent packing. Bodies floating down the river, one by one, faceup, facedown. The Chairman had burned Morrison and his people out of the Corporation. Some of the firings were gratuitous—good people, smart people. Fricker, the Chairman’s assistant who everybody assumed had left because of his headaches, had been elevated to senior vice president for international relations, a new position. A new fellow from Disney would be joining us. I read through the announcement carefully a second time. Samantha was not on the list of dead. I’d saved her.

  Helen stood in my doorway. “So, you saw.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Marsh says you should go over to the Chairman’s office in about an hour.”

  “What happened to Beales?” I inquired.

  “He cleaned out his office at six-thirty, they told me.”

  “Morrison?” I asked.

  “All I know is that the Chairman had three compensation lawyers and some secretaries working all day here yesterday printing out severance agreements.”

  “Yesterday, a Sunday?” The Chairman was way ahead of me, of everybody.

  “Three lawyers,” Helen said. “All day long. He was on the phone all day with them here.”

  “He couldn’t have been on the phone the whole time,” I said, “because I was in a meeting with him for a couple of hours in the afternoon.”

  She shrugged. “I heard they started working at five o’clock in the morning, so maybe they were done by then.”

  “I see.”

  Helen stood there.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It didn’t have to be like that. Mr. Morrison worked here something like twenty years—”

  “Twenty-five,” I corrected. “He came to the Corporation right after his last tour in Vietnam.”

  “Elaine Comber was extremely upset when she came in this morning and saw the announcement. Extremely upset.”

  Morrison’s secretary.

  “It was going to be him or the Chairman,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t think it was fair,” Helen went on. “I know no one’s asking me, but I think it’s pretty lousy.”

  “Then you don’t understand the mistakes Morrison made.”

  “What?”

  “Morrison thought the Chairman could no longer exercise power. He thought the Chairman wasn’t watching, that he was an old man who he could just blow past.”

  “So you’ve changed your allegiance?”

  “Jesus, it’s a matter of survival, Helen. Morrison was cutting me out of the picture. That’s what I kept talking about. He was streamlining his
management team. He had to if he was going to merge his group with the Volkman-Sakura people. He knew Beales and I could never work together, that things were only getting worse.”

  Helen shifted her weight to another foot. I was telling it to myself as much as to her. “He carefully got all my best work out of me and then chose to keep Beales in the group. I wasn’t crazy to think the wind had shifted. He assigned me to the Chairman because it was a way of doing three things—loosening the Chairman up on the merger question—weakening him, placating Beales, and then, when the Chairman was forced out by the board, I would be disposed of along with him, since I would then be associated with him. It was a very smart management move but it didn’t work.”

  “I still don’t think it’s fair,” Helen protested. “Mr. Morrison worked so long here . . .”

  “Well, what do you think he got for his suffering?” I said, irritated now. “Fifty million?”

  “Nobody was allowed to say.”

  Helen heard something and looked toward the hallway behind her. Samantha was at the door in a blue suit with white blouse, holding her thin leather briefcase. I wondered if she understood all that happened over the last few days.

  “Good morning!” she said brighdy to both of us. “Helen, I need a minute here with Jack.”

  Helen left dutifully and Samantha shut the door. She walked toward me across the room.

  “When do women learn to walk like that?” I said.

  Samantha ignored the joke and came around my desk, stopping next to me. I could smell her perfume but never could tell the cheap stuff from the expensive. Samantha bent down and put a soft hand on my left cheek and pressed her lips against my right cheek sweetly. A caring, lingering kiss. She looked at me, her blue eyes wet.

  “Thank you, Jack,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  An hour later, after I had brushed my hair and straightened my tie in the men’s bathroom, I stood in Mrs. Marsh’s office, waiting to find out what was to happen to me.

  “He’ll be just a minute or two,” Mrs. Marsh said, her plump cheeks lifting into a flawless smile of politeness. “May I get you a cup of coffee, tea?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.” Now we were old friends.

  And then I went in. The Chairman stood up from his desk, his fingertips resting lightly on the wood. He’d picked up a little sun over the weekend.

  “A new epoch,” I said.

  His old lined face smiled—slowly, generously. And with that smile, I knew I was all right. I was a player, in for the new haul. He was the father, I was one of the sons. He took my hand and shook it, holding both hands.

  “Yes, a new epoch,” he repeated. “And with a new epoch comes new people. Please, sit.” He nodded toward a chair. “Good. Now then, we need to talk. We’ll be talking quite a bit, you and I, as well as with the others. First you and I will talk. We need to start from scratch. I’ll try to explain the basis for our working relationship, as I see it.” The Chairman looked at me and gave a little chuckle. “I figured you out on Sunday, Jack, I finally figured you out. I’d been trying, incidentally. I’d been thinking about it, based on our time together. You and I took the train up from Washington and went to my little retreat and we had a couple of arguments, and I still couldn’t figure you out. But I figured it out yesterday, Jack. I pride myself on being able to figure people out, I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’m interested in personality, in character. They say character is destiny. I generally agree with that.”

  “So what did you discover?”

  “I was talking on the phone, Jack, in my study out in the house on Long Island. I have in my study a brass telescope that was once . . . that belonged to a Nantucket sea captain, one of my ancestors. It’s about two and a half feet long, and it’s mounted on a swivel base so you don’t have to hold it. Very steady. I was talking to someone on the phone—one, of the lawyers working here that day, actually—and I had in front of me a list of people here. Some were in the left-hand column and some were in the right-hand column. I was crossing out, moving people back and forth.” The Chairman waited for a moment, to let the brutality of this statement pass. “And some were in neither column, Jack. I was writing down the names of people that I and the board were going to fire and the names of people we should keep.” He looked at me with a certain cold clarity. “I couldn’t decide about you. Your name was not on either list. I am being utterly honest about this. Things were moving very quickly at that point. We—the board members and I—had been meeting since the night before. We were all drunk on coffee, if you know what I mean. It had occurred to me that you should address the board, that you should inject your enthusiasm, and frankly, I had invited you out to my place for that very possibility, just in case, you see, in case I felt like having you talk to them. You were going to be a card I could play if necessary.” The Chairman checked my expression to see whether this offended me. “I knew it wouldn’t matter if you were prepared or not. You would be all right, I had that faith in you. But I didn’t know whether you belonged to Morrison or you belonged to me. You understand what I mean by that?”

  I nodded easily. The Chairman’s face had a certain kindness in it now, a certain wisdom.

  “I didn’t know what resentments you might have. They could be substantial. It was clear to me from the start that Morrison was trying to get you out of his group. But he knew that you would be loyal to him, even if he was using you. He’s a smart fellow—I should know, I brought him along. I could see that first day that you didn’t want to be with me, Jack. You had been listening to Morrison too long, you had a certain idea of me. That’s all right. That perception of me has persisted the last five years or so. Fine. I’ve been used to that perception. It has been useful. People tend to work harder if they think that there’s a chance that the leadership will change. They’re jockeying for position. I know this makes for greater anxiety in the office. But it is useful. Morrison has been busy making a name for himself for ten years with this very thing in mind. And you too. You wouldn’t have been working so hard this last year on a joint merger plan if you didn’t think it might personally benefit you. So I was perceived as being out of touch, not around. Fine. I was in touch with the key guys on the board on a weekly basis. So, now then, where was I? I’m sitting there at the window wondering if you, this very bright thirty-five-year-old vice president who has been hollering at me the last couple of weeks, are with me or not. I had the telescope and I watched you come down the hill around the house to the pool. I didn’t even know you were going to be there, I just happened to look through the telescope. You had that very attractive woman friend of yours with you. And her little girl. I watched the three of you. I wondered why you were with her—she’s really not your type, at least on the face of it. Not the typical wife of an executive—that’s not a judgment, incidentally, just an observation. Of course, she’s attractive. But that’s not so unusual. I just watched the three of you, wondering what was going on. You were on the edge of the pool, you had your hand on the little girl’s head. I think that you were putting some sort of sun lotion on her forehead. Maybe the sun was hot enough to burn. I’m a father, I remember doing this with my own daughter perhaps forty years ago, when I was about your age. I found this touching, Jack. This is not your little girl but here you are, caring for her like a father. I could see that you felt that way about her. Then I remembered what you told me about your father and mother, and the terrible thing that had happened to your wife.”

  The Chairman shook his old head in sadness at what I had suffered. And in this was more redemption than anything my father had ever said to me.

  “And then it clicked for me. It all made sense. You’re wounded. You want to be part of something, Jack. That is who you are—you want to be part of a family, a body of people, a corporation, whatever. You have been made lonely by circumstance and you want to be part of something. You need people, Jack, more than most. You want somebody to love, people to love. I believe you want this more than you want
power, Jack. You have this need, not a weakness, exactly, but a need. You will innovate as necessary. My guess is that this is why you have this woman and child in your life, somehow they give this to you, perhaps they comfort you. I very much hope that things work out for you with her. That she has a child by another man makes it more complicated, I suspect.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I would bet that each of you has something of a past.”

  I thought, of course, of Dolores’s son, wondering when she and I would talk about him. I realized that we needed to deal with the question. “You have any advice on that?”

  “Yes.” The Chairman nodded. “As a matter of fact I do. Be honest. Clean it up. Get it over with. Then things can move forward. You need a family, Jack. One at home and one at work. This is why you went along with Morrison’s scheming. You are clearly a brilliant young man when it comes to planning and detail, one of the more brilliant I have come across in the last twenty years, but I would expect Morrison to have found people like that. Yes. But that isn’t why I want you to stay on this team, Jack. I want you to stay on this team because I want people working with me who want people. I saw you with the little girl and the woman and I knew that so long as I made you feel that you were part of something here, that you had a family here too, that you would be loyal to me and would work on the Corporation’s behalf. And that is why you are here in my office today.”

  I sat motionless, feeling very young.

  “Now then, yesterday went nicely,” the Chairman said, rising from his desk to adjust the window blind behind him. “And today is going to be a mess. I have already made statements to the Times and the Journal and CBS News. And that fellow from CNN. It’s going to look like there was a struggle for power and the old lion won. And that’s what it was. The reporters will figure it out. I’m not so sure I care. But the corporate relations people are running around trying to make this look as good as possible and they tell me we’ve got to get the good news out fast. I agree with that, the board agrees with that. It might be better to wait a few weeks, but there are other considerations. The stock price, for one. So tomorrow, we’ll announce the V-S deal. One story will obliterate the other. The focus becomes on the future. The firings are seen less as a bloodletting than as a reorientation, a recreation of a new company. So we’ll announce the merger negotiations almost exactly as Morrison and his people worked it out. It’s a very fine agreement, and the people at Volkman-Sakura are pleased. When Mr. Morrison initiated communications with Mr. Waldhausen several months ago, Mr. Waldhausen called me. I was surprised but I was not shocked at Mr. Morrison’s boldness. Apparently he thought he could sway the board at the right time. Waldhausen and I devised an idea to let it go forward. He understood my position. I’ve been meeting with the board privately since then. This is how it played out.” The door opened. “Oh—you know Wally Fricker.”