No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (14 page)

The Over & East fleets, ground and air, had been
put at the disposal of Stephen Caldwell, a big-time New Jersey
contractor and, at the time Wood was speaking of, brother-in-law of
the governor. Caldwell's use of the fleets coincided with campaign
season.

Over & East also used Caldwell as their prime
contractor in New Jersey. Several of the jobs, also coincidental with
campaign season, were, according to Wood, overpriced to the tune of
300-400 percent, an estimated $5 million in over-spending. Money that
was intended, Wood said, to find its way to political figures
throughout the state.

The results indicated that it had. Various
municipalities, as well as the state, did Over & East some
substantial favors. Zoning variances. Roads built and rail service
improved when they led to O&E facilities. Jersey had a
tax-abatement program designed to lure new industry. It was applied
twice in favor of Over & East when they simply took over and
reorganized existing companies. Exemptions were granted in dumping
and clean-air ordinances.

It was a tale I read with mounting excitement. Hot
sniff. Prison-sentence and vote-the-bastards-out-of-office stuff,
even in New Jersey where four of the five mayoral candidates in the
last Newark primary were under indictment even as they ran.

Mel confirmed my immediate reaction over the squall
of breakfast children. It was indeed, he agreed, hot stuff. So hot,
Mel said, that Caldwell had already done time for it. As had several
executives of the Over & East subsidiary, John's River Chemical
and Refining, Inc.

Charles Goreman, speaking through his attorney, Edgar
Wood, had expressed deep shock and dismay. Everyone in a position of
authority at John's River had been dismissed or transferred. A
special letter of apology and explanation was sent to every
stockholder. At the next meeting the stockholders voted a special
memo of appreciation to Charles Goreman for responding so responsibly
and promptly to the mess.

"What a load of crap," I said. "He
sold you a bill of goods."

"We only had him for three weeks, dammit,"
Mel said. "Wood was at the center. He knew it all. He was
spilling it, slowly, sure, but he was spilling it. We just lost him
too soon."

"Brodsky, you know what occurs to me. What
occurs to me is that Charles Goreman is a very smart man. Slick,
tricky, sails close to the wind. And that is all. Edgar Wood was a
very angry person who made a lot of threats, which were promises he
couldn't keep. That happens when people get upset. For instance,
there are people who have said they were going to blow me away, and
here I am. And then, it occurs to me, a couple of dumbshit
half-amateur car thieves got caught in the act, and they hopped Edgar
Wood a little too hard. That all occurs to me."
 

13
A BODY OF
WATER

I WENT FROM
Brodsky, to
National, to LaGuardia, to a pay phone and, when she said 'come
over," to Christina Wood's apartment.

"So far," I had to tell her, "there is
nothing."

"I want you to, I need you to go on looking.
Please."

"Of course I will, if you want me .... I want to
go back over some things about your father. Now, you told me you
weren't here at the trial. Were you here when he was arrested?"

"Can we take a walk? Or go out for a cup of
coffee?"

We headed west. I got her to laugh by telling her
about Mel Brodsky, acid king of the SEC. Crossing Sixth Avenue, she
took my arm. The casual intersection of limbs seemed to curl through
my whole body.

"Were you here when your father was arrested?"
I asked again.

"Yes, yes, I was," she said like an
admission of something.

"What did he say? How did he react?"

"He said, said it was nothing, nothing serious.
He said they couldn't prove anything and it would be over very
quickly. "

"Is that all he said?" She let go of my
arm. It left a void. Its absence filled me with desire.

"That's all he said to me and my . . . mother."

"Go on. You heard him say something to someone
else."

"On the phone. I heard him on the phone. He was
talking to one of his attorneys, I think. He was cursing a lot. Every
other word was 'fucking,' and I'll try to remember what he said, but
I'll leave that out."

"Sure, I can visualize it." It would have
sounded like a great deal of the transcript.

"He said it was a personal and vindictive thing.
That the other partners resented him because he was an upstart, he
wasn't part of their little club. If, if it had been anyone else, he
said--and that was the first time I realized he was guilty, that
Daddy was a thief—they would have kept it very quiet and certainly
they would have had the bare minimum of courtesy to come and talk to
him first."

"Did you ever talk to him about it?"

She moved away from me. Then, after a long pause,
moved back and answered, "I tried."

"
What happened?"

" 'My dear daughter,' " she mimicked him,
angry about it, " 'you don't have to concern yourself with this
matter. It's just smoke, and where there is smoke there is not always
fire,' and I knew that there was. But I didn't . . . he didn't let me
talk to him."

"You called Charles Goreman 'Uncle Charlie'. You
were close to him? He was close to the family?"

"At my sweet sixteen," and it was clearly a
memory she was fond of, "Charlie gave me a fur coat. He was very
sweet. He said, 'Now dat you are a grown-up woman you must have a
grown-up woman's coat.' It was Russian sable. I was quite careful not
to find out how much it cost. That way I could say to my girl
friends, 'Of course I don't know how much it cost, it was a gift from
a man.' "

"Your father seemed to have resented Goreman a
lot, at least at the end. Did that have anything to do with it?"

"What?"

"Things like giving you a fur coat."

"No," she said nervously.

"Did he always resent Goreman?"

"In a way, thinking back, I guess he did,"
she said thoughtfully. "Daddy was very status conscious. There
were clubs that invited Charlie in that wouldn't even speak to my
father. Charlie spoke to presidents and kings. He made deals with
entire countries and with the heads of companies that were bigger
than some of those countries. And if Daddy got to speak to those
people at all, they spoke to him like a . . .flunky. No, not that,
but like a functionary."

We were at West Street, where the West Side Highway
was until it fell down, six lanes of overanxious traffic. The sign
said "Don't Walk," but there was a fragment of green left
on the light. We looked at each other, grasped hands and ran for it.

Laughing and gasping, we beat the bestial charge of
the cars and trucks and walked out onto the Morton Street pier. Gay
couples passed us hand in hand and with arms around each other.
Single men sat, gazing at the wide, wide river, dreaming dreams of
sailors. A queen drifted past, looked me over, gazed at Christina
with disdain and sniffed. We were the last heterosexuals.

"You don't have to do this out of guilt," I
told her.

"
Is that what you think?"

"I have no real way of knowing. I'm just telling
you that you don't have to. "

"Do you want to drop it? Is that what you're
saying? Are you saying you want to give it up?"

"No. I just have to let you know the real status
of things. It 's your money, and you have to know how it's being
spent."

"I don't care about the money, there's plenty,"
she said carelessly. "And if it turns out that he was killed by
a car thief, as everyone thinks, I will accept that. I just want to
know for sure. As long as it is proved and I know. "

"I will do all I can," I promised.

We were at the end of the pier. The sun was riding
down from its apex and clouds were coming up from the west to meet
it. As they began to touch, color tinged the smog over New Jersey and
it promised a lavish sunset.

"I don't know anything about you," she
said. "You look like there's a woman in your life."

"Yes. Yeah, there is. " I looked at the
river and away from her. I did not want to see the way that she had
been looking at me change when she had the facts.

"Tell me about it."

I turned toward her. Our eyes met, hers sea-green and
looking up at me, and yes, it was all there. The poem in my head, the
tension in her room, the look that I had seen the very first time and
consigned to delusion—they were not projections of desire. They
were manifestations of desire. It was all of whatever there is, and
both of us knew it.

I stared into her eyes. My hand reached up and
touched her cheek.

Passion lies sleeping like a dog in a kennel. Then
there are fences, collars and leashes, so that even when the bitch
wakes up she won't have her freedom. Later on, after the
investigation, the accusations, the recriminations, still, no one
knows who left the gate unlocked.

My voice was thin and hoarse when I spoke. "Does
it matter?"

"I don't think so."

She turned her head so her lips nestled into my palm.
They were moist, they were open and they kissed me. There was a sound
unheard, a cry, and I lifted her mouth to mine. We came to each other
so that every queen on the pier envied the royalty of our lust and
the purity of my erection. We walked back to her apartment, to her
bed, kissing on corners in full oblivion, gazing moonstruck, our
bodies liquid and poured together, for all the honest world to see.

The door closed behind us. Breasts and buttocks,
shoulders and thighs, eyes, thighs, penises, ankles, loins and linger
joints are all day long such ordinary things, like fried eggs, shoes
and doors. Then a moment comes when the days are torn off and the
weight of a woman's breast, the fatness of the moon in autumn, the
laugh of a fool, are as fresh and awe-inspiring as the moment you
realized the bullet missed. I wanted to recite poems. Once poets were
dangerous men. Leading to war and insurrection, opening the seraglios
of forbidden beds and unmentionable desire, taunting and arousing
whatever gods their times had. Now the poets, it seems, are declawed
and defanged, as good as gone. But we still have rock 'n' roll.

The way was open. We both made sounds as I entered.
We both reached down, deep into hunger, and yielded. We began the
beginning of the end. It was a warm and liquid place, full of
rhythms, we began to forget that it's only rock 'n' roll, and there
was a ballad, ancient and tender, somewhere above the pounding
Afro-percussion.

Fuck cannot be that good. Fuck can't be so full of
wonder. When it's not bits and pieces of physiology, when your
fingertips are as urgent as a cock, hands as clinging as a cunt, and
your eyes seek each other as violently as your hips, then what is it?
The word love floats in, but that just can't be. When the first group
of orgasms ebbed, I lifted the upper part of my body from hers and
looked down into her eyes. We were wet and sweet with sweat; stray
hairs clung to her moist forehead and I brushed them away.

"Can you stay the night?" she asked.

"Yes, " I said. I had not called ahead to
say home will be the sailor, and this one night could be lost in the
slipstream of the shuttle.

Wordless, when the second group of orgasms ebbed, we
clung to each other, still wordless. You can fuck on the first date,
but you can't say "I love you," and each time I ambled
through the catalog in my mind for a phrase, that was pretty much it.
If glances were words, if touches were words, the style of giving and
taking were words, and they are, then they pretty well covered it.

The clouds that had been forming in the west did not
come in. The night was clear, and we stood at the window with a
bright moon watching us. Close, light kisses hovered around the edge
of sex. She slid to her knees looking at my body as if she thought it
was the kind of miracle that I knew hers to be.

When I was young and first loving women, there was
one moment that thrilled me above all. It was not a physical moment.
Not when I would first touch the lips of a vulva and find them wet,
or a clitoris and find it erectile responsive, or the ritual of
making bodies naked for each other. It came earlier, fully dressed,
most often with a close-held kiss. The moment of yielding. The moment
when resistance was gone, the tension melted, and I would actually
feel the girl's whole body become soft, her body letting her be mine.
The moment when all her struggling "no" turned to "yes,"
to yielding.

It is a moment that has disappeared from my adult
sexual experience. Possibly because times have changed and sex is no
longer a contest of the male "yea" and female "nay."

Yielding has been replaced by mutual agreement, by
the consent between consenting adults, brittle and pallid.

Christina touched that adolescent place where sexual
feeling is formed. The fantasyland inside met the reality before me
as she found a way to give me that gift of her yielding. All of me
pulsed with the heat of the blood that swelled me hard. The tools of
sex are part of the body; sex itself is rooted in desire, and desire
is a swelling of the mind.