Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “A hooker.”

  “Right, she was screaming at me and she pulled out this little knife and I started to run. I was so stupid to go walking there and I figured it out, that was the whole neighborhood, but I didn’t know that, I never was there before, right? So I ran back to the hotel and went upstairs and I thought, oh shit, look at my eye, it was so stupid to do what I did. I didn’t want to wake up Maria and I kept ice on it. I didn’t know what to do. I kept looking at your little card. I put it on the table and I looked at it and I looked at it. I said to myself, ‘Take the chance.’ So I did. I guess I did the right thing . . . I want to live. This is the only life I got, Jack. I’m still young enough, right? A lot has happened but I’m still young enough. I can still have more children. You’re a good man, you’re steady and clean and I really believe you love Maria. You’ve known her only a little while but I believe you love her. I was watching you. I think maybe we could try it . . . if you can take me, Jack, I’ll give you everything I got. I mean, I’ll be good for you, I’ll be good to you. And you’ll have Maria. Both of us.”

  Dolores looked up at me with great fragile hope in her face and I thought to myself, God has given you a gift, so don’t be an asshole, don’t be an idiot. I pulled Dolores tightly in my arms.

  “You got it,” I whispered to her, squeezing my eyes shut and feeling a certain long-lost relief, a return to myself, a return to hope for the future. I was caught up in it, for, you see, I came from a broken family—I cannot remember ever having been in the same room with both my mother and father, and as the Chairman had told me earlier that same day, I have always wanted a whole family. I have always wanted that with terrifying longing, like I wanted breath.

  When I opened my eyes, there was Maria looking at us, holding her plastic pail and shovel, not knowing what to do. I knelt down and scooped her up and held the both of them tightly in my arms, kissing Dolores and Maria back and forth, one and then the other, pressing my lips against them with reverence for their existence in the universe, and in this quiet dance, all the promises that can be made between human beings were made . . .

  The great German philosopher Schopenhauer wrote the following, which I read as a college student and have remembered ever since: In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. These words make me think of Maria. Someday she will realize that she did not imagine the torments of adulthood. But I would add to Schopenhauer’s statement. I would say that even as adults, studying the world, working the odds as well as we can, acting with the best part of hope and charity, we yet do not know what torments await us. We do not know. I was happily spinning beneath the sky with a beautiful woman and child, unmindful that I was in good health, unmindful that I was making $395,000 a year. Enough money, as I have said, to make my father wince. But I did not know what torments awaited me and, more to the point—to insert the rigid steel needle of truth into the soft marrow of happiness—I did not know how I would torment others. It is our crimes against others that burn most perfectly in our souls year after year. In one moment a young girl is scooped from the ground by a thirty-five-year-old man who has grown to love her as the daughter he was denied. Years from now, when Maria, grown up, is explaining her life to some young fellow, she will recall me aloud. I hope that he loves Maria with what little sense as young men may have. And while Maria tells about what later followed that moment of hope, as she recalls what happened—as she half remembers it, having been there when it occurred and having had it explained to her through the years or having imagined it, she will remember the wealthy man named Jack Whitman, whose house she lived in with her mother. Maria, eighteen years old or twenty or twenty-four, will have thought about what happened many thousands of times. Perhaps she will understand it in a way no one else could. But as she tells her story to the young man, bowing her head, then lifting her lovely dark eyes to his, her voice, now that of a young woman, will be calm. The time of tears will have long since passed. If she loves the young man and wants him to know her heart, then she will need to explain the strange set of circumstances—she will need to explain me, however briefly. She will recall me from the dim vault of memory in order that she may find love, and when she does this, when the apparition of memory she calls Jack Whitman appears, it will be with a certain unsolvable torment.

  FIFTEEN

  DAWN ON THE DAY I WAS TO GET RICH. A CLEAR MAY morning that promised heat and leafy shade. I woke early and lay next to Dolores in the sheets with my arms behind my head letting the time pass in slow luxury. Each minute carried me inexorably toward the 9:00 A.M. meeting with the board of directors, which would be followed by the 10:00 A.M. press conference, in which the plan with Volkman-Sakura would be announced. I’d be seated next to the Chairman, close enough to follow the second hand on his watch. Beales would be sitting at his kitchen table, a man with nothing to do that day. Ha. I slipped the sheet from Dolores’s shoulders to examine the clean curve of vertebrae that ran from the fine hairs in the nape of her neck between her shoulder blades down to the ripe cleft of her rear. She stirred and now I’ve asked Jack Whitman—some of you have met him already—to lay out the specifics here. Jack? I dragged my fingers across Dolores’s creamy dark skin and then insinuated myself into her dreams while whispering the numbers and arguments into the air above the bed. Perhaps the best place to begin is with a declaration, gentlemen, and that declaration would be that we are at a juncture where we either make our fate for ourselves or have it made for us by our competitors. It is time for a bold stroke. We live now in an era when gigantic segments of the world’s populations are newly able to demand and pay for the products we create. At the same moment, important new technologies are expanding what it is that we call entertainment . . . I pushed into Dolores. I’d talk for the specified twenty minutes, being sure to keep my hand movements slow and forceful and let my eyes linger on each face, the new generation explaining the future to the old. And I’d end with a brisk yet obedient nod toward the Chairman. Thanks, Jack, that gets us going in the right direction. Now then, we may indeed see that the opportunities, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia, are impressive . . . Dolores woke sufficiently to understand what I was doing. We said nothing, not a breath, and this continued the perfection of it. I would sit back down next to the Chairman with a sober expression that masked my elation. How different it was all going to be. Jack, the Chairman would say to me in a couple of weeks, the board’s compensation committee has decided that your new role with us merits a different approach to your salary . . . And now, be-cause greed is convertible to lust, a few fine, hardworking minutes followed, my breath hot in Dolores’s ear, each exhalation florid with pornographies, the first sweet sweat of the day coming as we worked under a bright rug of sunlight, with Jack Whitman, senior vice president for corporate planning and development, fucking and thrusting his way into the certain future of a seven-figure salary and stock options in the Series D 12% Convertible Exchangeable Preferred, Dolores’s dark hair fallen over her eyes and cheek, the corner of the white pillowcase caught tightly in her teeth. She, like I, was dreaming of something, but I do not know what.

  Afterward we heard Maria talking to her dolls in the next room, telling them in a sweet fluting voice that it was time for them to wake up and have breakfast. “Do you want eggs? Do you want cereal? Do you want bananas?” The latch of the bedroom door clicked and Maria came in, wearing only her tiny pink nightshirt and underwear. She carried five or six stuffed animals and dropped them onto the bedcovers.

  “Oh, good morning!”

  “Hi, sweetie,” I said.

  “Hi, sweetie to you!” she answered.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m cooking breakfast,” Maria announced.

  “Good,” Dolores said. “Then I don’t have to do it.”

  “No, I’m
shaving!” Maria padded into the bathroom and came back to the bed with my electric battery-charged razor. “I’m shaving Jack,” she said, holding the black instrument in front of me, her dark eyes wide awake. “I’m going to do it.”

  I presented one whiskery cheek. “Okay, but move the razor slowly.”

  Maria switched on the razor and held it with two tiny hands and then dragged it across my skin.

  “It works!”

  Dolores pulled on a robe and cinched it around her waist before heading toward the bathroom. “Maria, put some clothes on when you’re done shaving Jack.” She looked at me. “You’re getting pretty good service this morning.”

  “I’m appreciative,” I responded as the razor whined close to my ear. “I appreciate everything.”

  “Mmmn,” Dolores responded, raising her chin.

  Later, after breakfast, we sat out in the garden. I’d showered and dressed for work in my best, dark, summer-weight suit, lingering before the mirror, looking into my eyes to see if I was different yet. Gentlemen, perhaps the best place to begin is with the declaration that we are at a juncture where we either make our fate for ourselves or have it made for us . . . It was just after 8:00 A.M. The subway took thirty-five minutes minimum, and with rush hour congestion it could take ten more. Gentlemen, we either . . . The trip from the lobby to my office took two minutes. The first meeting was at nine. So I had a few minutes before I had to leave make our fate . . .

  And maybe if I’d left then, things would have been different. The jets approaching LaGuardia roared overhead every forty seconds or so while I squatted down and showed Maria how to plant cucumbers, thumbing a hole in the ground, dropping in the slender white seeds and patting down the earth. Dolores sat in one of my faded beach chairs, mending a small cotton shirt of Maria’s, the sun lighting her dark hair. She looked up at me. “What’re you so excited about?” she asked.

  “You.”

  “Come on.”

  “I am,” I told her. “I’m excited about you because I think you’re pretty great, in all respects, not just the usual ones, if you know what I mean, which you do—and I’m excited about Maria, who doesn’t want me to give her kisses ever—”

  “Never, ever, ever!” Maria cried happily as she smacked her hand on the dirt.

  “—and I’m excited because we’re planting cucumbers here and they’re going to grow all summer and we’re going to watch them as they stick out their little orange flowers and Maria is going to water them every night with the hose, and that’s fun, you know, and I’m excited because I have an incredibly important meeting in exactly . . . fifty-six minutes. I’ve got to leave now.”

  “All you do is go to these meetings all the time,” Dolores complained in good humor as she looked at her sewing. “When are you going to get rich?”

  I helped Maria dig in the warm earth. “Maybe soon.”

  Dolores lifted her eyes. I brushed some dirt from the knees of my pants and we looked at one another.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “There’s a chance, a good chance.”

  “Worms!” Maria shrieked. “Look!”

  A long wet night crawler contracted and wriggled in the dirt. “The ground is full of them, honey.”

  “Why?”

  “They make everything that is rotting and dead into good earth,” I said, thinking of my father. He loved worms—they did God’s work.

  “Okay,” I told them as I glanced at my watch. “I’ve got to go. See you tonight. Good-bye, Maria.”

  “Bye!” she called.

  During those minutes, we had not heard Hector break the beveled panel of glass in the outer parlor door in the front of the house, for it could not have been a terribly loud noise, especially since he probably wrapped his hand in his shirt before he broke the glass with his fist. The glass, more than one hundred years old, shattered like a thin sheet of ice, and Hector reached inside and unlocked the door. The two closed inner doors, which also concealed the sound of the breaking glass, had been left unlocked by me when I went to the front door for the newspapers. Later it was apparent that Hector had moved stealthily about the house. I think he heard us in the garden through the open windows on the parlor floor and decided to take his advantage and hurried up the stairs, looking into the bedrooms. He bounded up the next flight of stairs too, where my office was. There was a lot to see in all of those rooms, much that revealed the new life of his wife and

  daughter, and he could have been in the house as long as ten or fifteen minutes; I think now that what he saw influenced his mood and worked in some strange way against his rage. Depressed him, made him frantic. I had just given Dolores a quick, domestic peck on the cheek when Hector appeared at the door to the garden, panting and sweating in a heavy black coat. He was unshaven and excitable and plunged out into the sunlight of the garden.

  “Finally!” he breathed loudly, taking in the sight of Maria and me. “I finally found you.”

  Dolores rose to her feet and held out her hand for Maria.

  Hector took a couple of steps forward and looked at his wife and daughter, examined them. “This is pretty fuckin’ good, Dolores, you and Maria in new clothes. I can tell you that right now. Pretty new clothes. Shoes and everything—what’s that?” He pointed at the bracelet on Dolores’s wrist. “I knew you was good, but I didn’t know you was this good.” Then he waved his hand behind him. “You know what I’m talkin’ about, Dolores? I said I knew you was good but not like this. House full of computers and toys and antiques and shit.” Hector’s voice became bitterly sarcastic. “Not even you knew you was that good.”

  Dolores’s face remained calm but she glanced at the pockets of her husband’s coat, watching his hands.

  “So it looks like a happy little scene here, everybody all dressed up so nice. Hey—” he said to me, “going to buy a car now? You’re pretty slick, Whitman. Checkin’ me out like that. Yeah, I figured that out. Then trying to keep my wife and kid from talking to me.” He looked back at his wife. “Dolores, you know I been tryin’ to talk to you for weeks? Did this guy tell you that? About the messages I been leavin’ on some machine, long messages? Did he tell you he came to the car lot to check me out? We rode around in a car together. Did he tell you that?” Hector drilled the question at her, jabbing and cutting the air with his hands. “Did he tell you how I been trying to find you, how I been sending him letters and callin’ and everything?”

  Dolores looked at me with confusion. “No,” she said quiedy.

  “I was tryin’ to do that ’cause I still love you, Dolores, and I know you still love me. We’re still together, baby, I can feel it. Just that your problem is you never understood love. You never really got it, you know?” he tapped his head. “You don’t appreciate loyalty. I get kicked around by about a dozen cops and so then what do you do? Couple a months later you go out and fuck some of them, probably same cops beat me up. I mean, a man’s wife goes and fucks a bunch of cops and firemen after she sees him get beat up. Is that fucked up or what? I’m talking about loyalty. And you left the window open and the baby fell out and got killed. And—”

  He saw Dolores look quickly toward me.

  “Oh, she didn’t tell you that part, I guess,” Hector spat bitterly. “That one little thing that made all the difference, right? Okay? How she left the window open because she had too much to drink even though she knew it was dangerous? Did she talk about how the social work lady from Family Services come around asking what happened? How there coulda been a hearing down at Family Services? How I forgave her for it? I forgave her everything. She killed my son and I forgave her for that!”

  His voice slid into a great angry lament and Dolores seemed alarmed by this change—she recognized something in it. “I loved you that time I first seen you, Dolores,” Hector went on. “Jesus Christ, I told you that. I made my promises, you know? Them vows in front of your aunts? Spent all my money on the honeymoon? We had it good in them times, we had everything we wanted. I always been
loyal to you, Dolores, never fucked around. Maybe I pretended I was messin’ with some them girls at the bar down on Forty-eighth Street, make you a little pissed off, but I never did nothin’. I’m tellin’ you I never stuck my fuckin’ cock in no other woman because I loved you. I fucked a lot of girls before I married you, Dolores, and I liked doin’ it and then I stopped because I loved you like you never understood. A guy don’t always want to admit that, Dolores. Nothin’, Dolores, I never did nothin’ because I’m tellin’ myself that this ain’t nearly good as what I got back home. You was the fuckin’ best. I told some the guys that, too.” He waited for Dolores’s acknowledgment. It didn’t come. “And I kept bustin’ my hump, right? I’m a proud man, Dolores, I got my pride but I rather have you. I worked my ass off for you and the kids and then I come home one day and you’re gone and then you move in with some guy, some fuckin’ rich white guy who probably can’t fuck no good—”

  “He does just fine, Hector, so you can shut up.” Dolores stared hatefully at him, her lips pressed together. The two of them seemed to have forgotten my presence.

  I realized that there was more to come, and I worriedly checked my watch. There was no way now that I could make it exactly on time to the board meeting; already I was running five minutes late. But I couldn’t leave with Hector in my backyard. He might hurt Dolores or Maria, he might burn the place down, he might take them away from me. “Hey,” I said to him, “let’s just get a few things straight here—”

  “You!” Hector hollered. “You ain’t part of this, you ain’t not even here, you got that? I’m not even gonna bother myself with you in this deal.” He turned toward Dolores, his eyes softer. “Dolores, please, baby, I been tryin’ to find you for weeks, you know that? I’m sorry I hadda kill a couple of dogs. It wasn’t their fault. It’s just that I ain’t got nothin’, Dolores. I don’t have myself no more, you know? I been workin’ so long and I ain’t got nothin’. Nobody is buying cars at the lot. All we got out there is a lot of shit that is no good, stuff that’s eight, ten years old. But that’s okay because I got this promotion. I said that on the tape, too. You hear that? They made me a supervisor, Dolores, I get something like fifty-two hundred bucks more comin’ in. Good money. Got a whole training manual and everything. So I figured maybe we could take a little vacation, maybe go down to the beach, Dolores. Maria loves the ocean, remember that time we went out to Coney Island? Atlantic City or something, just stay in one of them motels that ain’t so expensive.” Hector looked at his wife, hoping she would say something. He wanted desperately to disgorge his grief and I could imagine him sitting in confession, minute after minute as Dolores had said, talking too loudly to the priest.