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Bodies Electric

St. Martin's Press

My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her. I shouldn't have indulged myself — my loneliness, my attraction to her — not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But I'm as weak hearted for love and greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy for the sex — of course that was part of it. If only I'd worked longer at the office that Monday night or gone straight home, if only I hadn't even seen her.

Instead I took a cab uptown to eat at a small Cajun place right on Broadway and had a few drinks with dinner. I watched couples lean toward one another, and when I'd been made lonely by their intimacy, I stepped outside. This was just last April, and that night the city felt lifted on a breeze of pollen, a time when you suddenly see that spring has come again and that you missed it all along, missed the little fenced plots of yellow tulips in front of the better apartment houses and the sharp pale shoulders of women out for lunch at midday. At the subway I paused to look up Broadway for a cab but saw none coming and so I ducked down the stairs. That one choice, right there, made all the difference.

In my seat I opened the Wall Street Journal and settled into a boozy semiconsciousness in which the entrance and exit of passengers, the rush of the train, and the conductor's scratchy announcements blurred together. Hunched over in my charcoal gray suit, I scanned the paper for news of the Corporation's competitors — quarterly profit information, sneaky little deals meant to eat into our market share, who was in, who was out. And then I turned to the stock pages to check on my own portfolio. Money has a certain intellectual fascination if you have enough of it, and I did, more than necessary for a thirty-five-year-old guy living alone in New York City. How much? Everyone wants to know once they find out you work for the Corporation. They get that quick squint in their eyes and inspect your suit, they figure inwardly, He's wired into the big money. They want to know but are afraid to ask. Well, I'll get this point out of the way right now: my compensation at the time was $395,000 a year, which is, of course, a shitload of money, equal to the salaries of about thirty Mexican busboys at the Bull & Bear, a sum that made my father wince when he heard it — a little less than $33,000 a month gross. Getting killed on the taxes, of course. But it was nothing compared to the sums the Chairman and Morrison, our CEO, were pulling in. Millions. Tens of millions. The whole audacious game was rigged for their benefit. Of course, neither man was worth such sums. No one is. We're all replaceable. Just bodies. Isn't that true?

The subway car, grinding through the dark tunnels, was empty enough that everyone on it was seated, and as I stared at the newsprint, something touched the toe of my shoe. It was a red, well-used Crayola crayon that had rolled at an angle across the floor of the car, and sitting opposite me was a dark-haired girl of about four, holding her hand out for it, wiggling her fingers in anticipation. Her legs swung freely above the floor. On the girl's lap was a coloring book. I picked up the crayon, reached across the car, and handed it to her, smiling at her mother in the polite manner of strangers.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the woman whispered in an obligatory, embarrassed way, pulling a ragged coat around her. I noticed her mouth — she knew what she was doing with lipstick. "Thank you."

I nodded and returned to the paper, but like most men, single or otherwise, I don't miss a good-looking woman. I glanced into her face and saw her exhausted eyes quickly look down, avoiding mine. It was then I suffered that first jolt of appetite for her, that gripping in the stomach that is sexual and maybe something else, too. Did I love her immediately? No, of course not. Yes, in that sudden, helpless way, such that I stared. She had the same coloring as the little girl. I couldn't have said what her race was, not exactly, but it wasn't white. Dark hair held up with barrettes. Eyes the color of Coca-Cola. Skin that velvety brown. You could put this woman in an ankle-length black mink, I thought to myself, set her in a polished lobby with a doorman on the Upper East Side, and you'd be convinced she was a Venezuelan or Brazilian heiress with some black or mestizo blood — something different, something to my white-bread taste exotic — trained in the best international boarding schools and underwritten in her glass palace over Park Avenue by a multilingual father reselling oil or computer chips or Eurodollars. And it was equally clear that if the woman had been dressed in a pair of tight jeans and cheap red pumps, she might be a New York-born Puerto Rican whore addicted to self-destruction, carrying a purse filled with rubbers and wrinkled bills and selling herself to all comers at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, a woman who, despite providence's gift of fine bones and large, deep eyes, was forced to live life faster and harder than was ever meant.

But the woman sitting across from me in the subway car belonged to neither such group — she possessed some other story, and I felt that immediate compulsion to study and know the face of a stranger. Was this wrong? Can I at least be forgiven this? Don't we all memorize the faces of strangers? Her cheeks rose sharply and her lips were full. Slightly too much so, suggesting imprudence and passion. On dark women, red lips have a certain lurid appeal. She was a beauty, a tired beauty.

Yet New York City is full of beautiful women, thousands upon thousands of them, and most are understandably wary of the sudden attentions of strange men. So I looked away. I am polite, after all, not the type to make an aggressive compliment. I don't have the glib confidence. And I've never insulted a woman, said the things men say aloud. Of course I think those brutal thoughts. Men are full of brutal thoughts.

I peered blindly at the Journal, but after a minute or two looked up a second time, wondering how such a magnificent woman was so obviously riding the edge of homelessness. The women one meets in the Corporation and at its social rituals possess a certain high gloss, with small fortunes spent on clothing and jewelry. Quite charming with a wineglass in their hands, they are able to tinkle polite laughter, and underneath their sleek dresses they wear silk panties the color of jade. They are very smart about the guests on "Nightline" and up-to-date on their mammograms, and so on. At times such women had interested me, other times not. They and I had been through it.

Now, I saw that the child continued to color in her book, choosing each crayon carefully, after happy consultation with her mother. The girl was clean, with brushed hair; if she had no older sister she was dressed in what I suspected was clothing given out by a church or bought in a secondhand shop. Her mother was dressed no better, or even a bit worse, but it was hard to tell, as she remained wrapped within her old coat, which was large for her and spotted. I took the woman to be in her late twenties, and among the last things I noticed was a narrow gold wedding ring on her left hand.

That the woman was married struck me as a great waste, for it appeared she lived nearly hand to mouth; perhaps her husband was unemployed, perhaps he was a drug addict, perhaps he was any of the kinds of men upon whom so many women desperately depend. I knew, of course, that beauty was neither qualification nor guarantee for the receipt of love and happiness, but it pained me that the woman was obviously uncared for, even as she lifted her daughter into her lap and lightly kissed the child's head. I sort of suddenly loved the little girl as well. (I was drunk, I was sentimental, I was nostalgic for something that had been taken from me. Those of us who have known horror never forget it — one is forever changed.) The woman held her daughter with both arms and gently rocked her. She didn't know I watched. Her face tipped forward in fatigue and, by habit, I supposed, she kissed the small dark head again. I wondered if she lived in the outer neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the final destination of our train, where the rents are lower, as are the social classes. And her apparently married condition didn't disappoint me, for I had already made the usual half-conscious assumptions about her race and background and education — married or not, she wasn't the kind of woman I ever got involved with.

Still, I watched them (of course, I tell myself now, of course you watched them like you had not watched anyone in a long time, you watched the mother in your horny bastard's mind as she lowered herself down upon you, the lips red and huge and her eyes wet smoke). Sitting beneath advertisements for cockroach poison and AIDS hotlines, mother and child appeared to live only for each other, and I saw that the daughter desired to please her mother as much as her mother sought to shield her from the harshness of the subway. She held her daughter tightly, as if drawing strength from the wriggling young body in her arms.

"I can draw," the girl declared as she scribbled energetically over a page of the coloring book.

"Yes, you can," the mother whispered into the small ear next to her lips. It was then that a rhythmic hollering could be heard through the door at the far end of the car, coming from an advancing black woman of about sixty, who was dressed immaculately in white. "I am here in the name of the Lord!" she announced in a ruined voice that admitted no fear of the opinion of her listeners. She had a squat muscularity to her carriage and gripped a small Bible in one hand. "You must ask sal-va-tion of the Lord! He does not love the sin, but He loves the sinnah!" She spat these words at the riders, most of whom had already bent their heads back into their papers and books. "... I'm not here to talk about no nice stuff! I'm here to talk about the lies and corruption of the body of Christ. About the crack and the drinkin' and the killin'! And the greed for the golden calf! And infidelity! About all you men who say you been out with the boys when you been out with the girls —"

"Some womens want some that good stuff, too!" came a man's voice toward the other end of the car, followed by sniggering and smiles all around.

"That's right!" the gospelizing woman answered. "Sure they do! They want that because they think it going to make them happy. But the body is a weak vessel, it will rot and putrefah! The man's penis, it putrefah! And the vagina, it putrefah! And the hand what got the golden calf in it! And all the rest of the body! Anybody here gone to live forever?" She looked around accusingly. "Anybody here three hundred year old? The body is nothin' but rotting meat! while the soul — the soul is divine. Anybody one hundred and two! I didn't think so! Anybody here not a sinner?" The woman looked around menacingly, her teeth bared. "I didn't think so! And the soul will putrefah without salvation! And those of you who sin and sin again, shall be snatched into eternal fire!" The woman swiveled on her thick hips, blasting one end of the car and then the other. "The Lord is watchin' ..."

The train slowed as it neared the Forty-second Street stop and I turned my attention back to the mother and daughter across the aisle. The mother put away the crayons with the care of someone who knows to the penny what they cost and then stood up. The coloring book, I saw, featured cartoon figures known to all children and licensed by the animated entertainment subdivision of the film division of the Corporation. The mother pulled her coat around her shoulders, still talking in a low voice to her daughter, while down the car the old woman raved: "... children around the world bin killed ever-day and nobody care except the Lord! You! And your She pointed a fat gloved finger at several commuters reading their papers or staring out the windows at the dark tunnel blurring past. "You be standin' by while the little children of God are being killed by sin and wickedness!"

"Shut yo mouth, old woman!" came the same heckling voice again, this time angry and fast.

"If your momma had shut her legs when you was being born," the woman responded, "then you would have died, sinner!" She resumed her transit toward my end of the car, muttering damnation and putrefaction under her breath. She passed the young woman and her daughter without incident; perhaps they did not appear as sinners in her eyes. But before heading out the door to the next car, she let her manic, accusatory attention rest on me. Her eyes boiled with crazed dark righteousness — You 'specially wicked and don't you think I don't know it they seemed to shoot, and I felt an odd fear, staring into the bright black face furrowed in judgment.

The train cleared the subway tunnel and slowed past the many waiting people on the platform. The woman gathered her daughter's hand and I felt a sudden, inexplicable anxiety that I was never going to see them again. I jumped up. "Excuse me," I blurted. "I noticed —" The subway car lurched and I did a broken dance step. "I noticed that you might need something —"

"Yes?" the woman answered in a clear, self-possessed voice. "What do you think I need?"

"Well — a job, maybe?" I stayed several feet away, in order that she not smell the drink on my breath. The woman's eyes moved over me appraisingly, as if despite my suit and overcoat and fine leather shoes, I might be yet another urban madman, pressing specious friendship upon her. Other than that, I was merely some white guy going soft in the belly. "I thought maybe you might need work," I stumbled on, "and I wondered if I could be of help. I work for a large company ..." I fished into my wallet and found an embossed business card, with the famous logo of the Corporation most prominent. "Here." By now, people were staring at me with the guarded, what-now interest New Yorkers reserve for beggars, con men, and incompetent subway musicians. Meanwhile the brakes of the train screamed and the conductor's voice, dismantled by static into a proto-human chatter, blasted over the intercom: Forty-second Street change here for the number one local, number nine, Rand N trains, step lively when exiting the train, watch your step let them off please, let them off.

"Here, take it." I leaned forward as the subway car doors opened and pressed the crisp, heavy-stock card into the woman's hand, careful that our fingers not touch. "I'm not a nut, you understand? Not crazy. Call me if you need a job."

The woman and her daughter stepped off the train. The doors jolted shut and I felt strangely exhausted. The other riders stared at me. The woman turned back, safe now on the other side of the glass — still beautiful in the harsh fluorescent light of the platform — and glanced down at the card in her hand. Her daughter waited for her mother's reaction. Then the woman looked up at me, lifting her chin, her pressed-lipped expression admitting nothing.

Brooklyn is, still, a great and romantic place. I lived in the Victorian brownstone neighborhood of Park Slope, not far from Grand Army Plaza, the entrance to Prospect Park. An immense arch honoring the thousands of Union men who died in the Civil War stands in the plaza, and is decorated with generals and soldiers and freed slaves massed in the heat of struggle. At the top of the arch thunders a giant bronze monument of winged Victory driving her chariot of horses. The figures have tarnished to a bright, marbleized blue, and their frenzied, death-rapturous eyes have blind dominion over the plaza, where black nannies clucking in various Caribbean dialects wheel an army of white babies into the park each day. The neighborhood attracts upper-middle-class families and abounds with Montessori schools, video stores, automatic banking machines, real estate offices, good bookshops, cafés, and bakeries selling croissants and expensive coffee. On weekends, beneath the old maples and oaks that canopy the streets, children can be found scribbling in colored chalks on the massive slabs of slate that front the grand nineteenth-century buildings while their mothers or fathers sit out on the stoops with a fat Sunday Times. I lived there because of the quiet atmosphere, because the train that ran past my office in Manhattan deposited me only a few blocks away, and because it had once seemed an ideal place in the city to have a family.

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Excerpted from Bodies Electric by Colin Harrison. Copyright © 1993 Colin Harrison. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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