Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “Dogfighting?” Chester felt strangled. “My God, what were you thinking of?”

  “It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. It’s just for thrills. More like a roller-coaster ride.”

  Chester glowered at him in disbelief. “She… hates… flying.”

  Tucker’s eyes didn’t even flicker. “I know. But I figured this was a good way to cure her. Look the devil right in the eye. Watch this video we took. Corny started out a little nervous, but once we got into a turn fight, she had a great time. Here… My friend Tony has two old fighter planes he keeps out at Teterboro.”

  Tucker showed Chester a grainy video on his laptop screen. It was taken from a camera mounted in the cockpit of what looked like a restored World War II combat plane. Tucker sat in the pilot’s seat with Cornelia behind him, both tightly strapped in and wearing tan aviator suits and goggles. Chester could see, through the glass canopy of the plane, a crisp blue sky with puffy clouds circling the aircraft.

  “These are T-6 fighter trainers,” Tucker said, “made in the 1940s. They’re in perfect shape, rebuilt engines. The only difference is, Tony had laser machine guns built on to tell when you score a hit on the other plane.”

  Chester fumed. But most of his pique was turned inward. He was the one who had, almost by default, abdicated his responsibility for Cornelia to Tucker. What did he expect? The boy had led a charmed life. He had no reference point for understanding Cornelia’s fragility.

  “Tucker, sometimes I just don’t know. You had no business putting Cornelia at risk.”

  Tucker shrugged. “She wasn’t. We showed the girls how to work their parachutes, just in case. And we gave them radios so we could all talk while Tony and I fought.”

  Now the video showed the yellow plane with Tucker and Cornelia taking off, apparently from a camera mounted on the wing of the other plane.

  “I taxied out and took off with Corny, and we flew in close formation until we got to the airspace they keep clear for Tony.”

  The video revealed the other aircraft off the wing. A voice called, “Fight on,” and the blue airplane peeled off left. Tucker jerked his joystick left and toward him.

  “Tony’s in the blue plane. Now I’m going to get on his tail before he can get on mine.”

  In the computer screen Tucker’s yellow plane rolled over, and Chester started to feel queasy imagining Cornelia’s reaction.

  “We were pulling over five Gs. I heard Cornelia yelling ‘Yeah, yeah’ on the radio. This is us doing yo-yos. We’re climbing to pick up speed. Now I do snap turns around Tony’s plane to stay out of his line of fire. Watch this.”

  Chester’s heart fell as he saw his daughter’s head bouncing around the cockpit of the plane rolling up into the sky, then diving and picking up speed, then rolling over again.

  “I’m about to get on him now,” Tucker said. “He’s trying to get behind me but… here we go, Corny loved this part… yes!”

  Chester saw a cockpit view of the yellow plane zip by into the sky right behind the tail of the blue one. He heard a rat-tat-tat like a video game gun.

  “Nice shooting you, Tony.” That was Tucker’s scratchy voice on the plane’s radio.

  Tucker shut the computer off.

  “We flew to the airport and came back to the city. Corny said she was going home to change, and she met us later at the Plaza. She had a few drinks, then she sort of wandered off and went into the fountain. Think about it, Chester. Whenever Corny’s out of my sight, she gets into trouble.”

  Chester clutched his glass. He pondered their shared legacy at their alma mater, the old Kingsley School in western Connecticut. He and Tucker had shared it a generation apart, but prep school didn’t change much. One could come out prepared to coast through life the way Chester did. Or like Tucker Fisk, who told him he had been a hall monitor able to punish his peers, one could learn early how to wield power without feeling guilty.

  He believed that Tucker’s fearlessness could help Cornelia unravel her own loss. But at times, he wondered if perhaps Tucker’s joyous assault on life was simply insensitivity. Maybe he and his computer shared the same soul, all intelligence with no heart.

  But what choice did he have?

  When he had finally admitted to himself that he could find no purchase at all on his daughter’s behavior, it seemed like he was waking up in a nightmare, his dread of Lord & Company all over again. Could he blame himself for turning to Tucker to help put her right as decisively as he had Lord & Company?

  Chester took a gulp of his martini, at sea once again.

  He often suspected that Cornelia dated Tucker just to make Chester happy, so he could feel more comfortable with whatever she did with her time. Nothing seemed to spark between his daughter and his protégé. At least not so far as she was concerned. She might be the only young woman in New York City who did not consider Tucker Fisk the catch of the decade. And her coolness to the boy caused him to wonder whether it was simply her impaired judgment, or whether she saw something in Tucker that Chester did not.

  Or maybe she just felt jealous.

  He held this thought, rolling around in it like an epiphany. She might harbor feelings of jealousy about the close relationship between Tucker and Chester. It wasn’t the bond of father and son by any means, but it could possibly, he supposed, seem that way to her.

  “Chester,” Tucker interrupted his musings as he drained his martini.

  O’Connell instantly appeared at the door. “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Um, would you like a drink?” Chester asked Tucker.

  “No thanks.”

  The corners of Chester’s mouth drooped slightly.

  “Actually, a martini sounds good,” Tucker corrected himself.

  “Right,” Chester said. “O’Connell, please get us a pitcher. Then you can go home.”

  The men talked Ivy League football while O’Connell poured the drinks.

  When they were certain the butler was gone, Chester leaned toward Tucker. “I’ve grounded Cornelia in her room with a bodyguard.”

  Tucker Fisk nodded his approval as he sat back in his chair.

  Tucker felt a spurt of adrenaline under his solid crust of calm. He enjoyed a certain thrill in doing battle even sitting in a club chair. And, in a matter of seconds, he would mount the assault of his career.

  Tucker watched Chester frown at him in the ponderous way of the semidrunk. He tried not to wince at the gin fumes his mentor blew his way. Unfortunately, that had been his idea. Chester once preferred vodka martinis to camouflage his drinking. But Tucker convinced him that he should switch to gin, so people who did business with Lord & Company would realize that Chester was just drunk and not stupid.

  But tonight, Tucker was grateful to see Chester good and loaded. Here goes, he thought, keeping his goal in sight and beginning his long run.

  “We have another problem that involves Cornelia,” Tucker said. “It’s about her stock in the company. You and Cornelia own just enough of the Lord & Company voting stock to keep control.”

  “What’s the problem in that?” Chester snapped. “I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me.”

  What else is new, Tucker thought to himself as he punched some keys on his laptop. A column of names and numbers appeared on the screen and scrolled down malevolently.

  “Look at this,” Tucker said. He turned the screen toward Chester for a view of this march of money. “I just got ahold of it today through our people on Wall Street. Han Koi is buying voting stock in Lord & Company for a takeover play. These are all dummy corporations that Koi Industries is using to buy a little here, a little there, you’d barely notice. Look at this company name, Yellow Apparel of China, Inc. They’ve bought up 18 percent of the outstanding stock already. Obviously they’re planning a hostile takeover.”

  Tucker waited. He could imagine exactly what Chester was thinking, watching the pieces bitten off his family business. The screen mocked Chester Lord and all the Lords before him. He would now be stewing
mightily over the treachery of the two-faced Han Koi, who had broken bread at Chester’s home.

  Chester had never really trusted his partner-of-convenience, old Han Koi. They weren’t exactly separated at birth. Han Koi and Chester were both rich, but that was the only glue. Koi was a player in the real world, a self-made merchant who built an electronics conglomerate from a repair shop in Hong Kong. The old man’s face could look like a serpent’s head, tongue darting out and disappearing. Just talking with him repelled Chester, who had fought Tucker bitterly over the co-venture with Koi Industries. Chester wasn’t a racist. He was barely a snob. But he didn’t understand what a player had to do to make wheelbarrows full of money in the bloody new world of business warfare. And now his mentor would be feeling slimed by the chain-smoking Han and his useless son, Han Koi, Jr.

  “Naturally, Han Koi used a Sun Tzu kind of attack. Very diagonal,” Tucker said to goad him gently.

  “Turn that off,” Chester told Tucker angrily. “What do we do now?”

  “Defense, pure and simple.” Tucker had rehearsed this part carefully. It was the first few yards that were most important for a player to get his footing and build momentum. “If they make a run on the company, we’ve got to block them.”

  “Exactly,” Chester said, his knuckles white, squeezing his glass. “I never trusted Han Koi. Duplicitous as hell, what he’s trying to do. But it won’t come to anything. I hold twenty-six percent of the voting stock and Cornelia holds twenty-five percent. That’s a fifty-one percent majority between us.”

  Tucker licked his lips but said nothing while Chester searched his face.

  “Oh, no. Cornelia would never…” Chester began.

  Tucker measured his next words. The Cornelia problem involved a swamp of emotions, both Chester’s and Cornelia’s. But he made it his business to know what Chester Lord thought before Chester did.

  “Not deliberately,” Tucker spoke carefully. “But do you know where she goes all day?”

  “Well, no…”

  “Neither do I,” Tucker said, which was true. Nor did he care if it was Saks or Bendel’s. “Do you know why she’s suddenly going on this trip to South America?”

  “Something to do with Nikola Tesla,” Chester answered with his eyes on his martini glass.

  “But why would that come up now, Chester? Has she ever just taken off for another continent before?”

  “Uh…” Chester shifted in his chair, making the leather squeak.

  “I’m pointing out that there’s a lot about her that we don’t know for sure.”

  Chester’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “What we do know is that old Han Koi has taken the trouble to count Cornelia’s voting stock, too. And we can expect him to play dirty.”

  “How could old Han…” Chester fumbled.

  “Corny turns twenty-one on February 14. She’ll be able to do anything she wants with her voting stock.”

  “She wouldn’t pledge it to Han Koi,” Chester scoffed.

  “Of course not. But in her… condition, she could be manipulated.”

  He would let Chester use his imagination for a moment.

  “What do you mean?” A waste of time. Chester needed scenarios, faces.

  “Well…” Tucker leaned in toward Chester, resting his arms on his knees. He had never felt more sincere in laying out a possibility. “Let’s use a worst-case scenario. Han might get with some fortune hunter who could win Corny’s confidence.”

  Tucker watched Chester fidget. Soon, Tucker knew, Chester would realize that he’d have to make a decision. He also knew it would be the most passive, least active solution. Chester possessed plenty of buried anger, but no guts. That’s why he could always be led to the right decision. With Cornelia involved, it would just be a tougher game.

  “The way I see it, you have two choices,” Tucker said confidently, as though they could whip through this together with the wind at their backs. “You could hope for the best. Trust Corny to do the right thing.”

  He watched Chester take a swallow from his martini glass. Be afraid, Tucker thought. Be very afraid.

  “Option two,” Tucker said evenly. “We can be practical. Cornelia and I start talking seriously about marriage.”

  Chester frowned deeply. His gaze slipped to the framed picture on his desk of himself and Elizabeth on their honeymoon. Tucker noted that he didn’t recoil or spit out his drink.

  “What does that have to do with Cornelia’s voting stock?” Chester finally asked.

  “You need to make sure you keep it in the family. You know I’ve been attracted to Cornelia for a long time. These”—he waved his hand in dismissal—“brownouts of hers are manageable. If the psychiatrist can’t deal with them, I can.”

  Tucker tried to read Chester’s thoughts, but couldn’t see clearly. This was a rainy, muddy field today. He would just grip the ball and slog through the next few yards on instinct.

  “I was hoping that by this spring”—Tucker ran fifty yards—“I would ask you for Cornelia’s hand in marriage.”

  Chester jerked involuntarily, spilling his martini on his toe. He didn’t even notice.

  Tucker waited.

  “I just can’t see that,” Chester finally stammered, the grooves in his forehead making defensive trenches.

  “Only because of her behavior,” Tucker weaved expertly. “We’ll work through it. The important thing now is to set a date.”

  “What do you mean?” Chester remained too perplexed to put his glass down. He held it in midair.

  “If Cornelia and I got married on her birthday, Valentine’s Day, she and I would own her Lord & Company voting stock in common. I would need her consent to sell it.” He paused. “And she would need mine.”

  Tucker let Chester get used to that idea for a few seconds.

  “I believe that I can give Cornelia what she needs. Stability. Patience. And continuity for the future. She’s an only child, Chester.” Tucker leaned forward slightly to deliver his money line. “We have the next generation to consider.”

  Tucker expected Chester to mist over, thinking about bouncing grandchildren on his knee. Instead, his lips tangled up as though he had started to speak but changed his mind about what he was going to say.

  Tucker waited. Hel-lo. “Chester, are you with me?”

  “Oh, yes,” Chester stammered. “I see the financial angle, certainly. Very smart. It’s just… I would feel better if Cornelia had mentioned a deeper relationship with you, Tucker. I feel like you’re my own son… in many ways. I’d just like to see Cornelia more excited about you.

  Tucker worked to keep his eyes from narrowing. “Chester, let me ask you something, man to man.”

  “All right.” Chester’s voice sounded high and strangled.

  “Does Cornelia always confide her feelings to you? Who her friends are, that type of thing?”

  “Well…”

  “You see, Cornelia is a very private person. She has trouble expressing her feelings. I believe she’s very spiritual.”

  “Spiritual?”

  “I think so. She deals more in unspoken communication. Mind-to-mind kinds of things.”

  Chester seemed to drift. Tucker hoped he hadn’t sounded too New Age. He needed to keep Chester grounded. “She and I are closer than you might think, but her problem won’t let her commit.”

  Tucker went for the close aggressively. That’s how a player always scored, knowing that only one of them, he or Chester, would come out of this room the winner. He needed that knife-edged focus now to hack through Chester’s endless waffling.

  “Chester, just let me speak to her about my intentions. I have a plan and it’s a good one.”

  “You do?” Now Tucker caught a small point of hope in Chester’s foggy eyes.

  “Definitely.” He smiled with total confidence. “Have I ever let you down?”

  While Sergeant DiBlasi kept her under watch, Cornelia thought again about her last date with Tucker. Definitely what bad sex must fee
l like.

  Tucker Fisk had to be the most peculiar young mogul in all of Manhattan. So skilled at making people do what he wanted, but so dense with her. He had promised her an adventure with a hint of such surprise and fun. Then he had taken her to an airport and jerked that musty old World War II plane through the skies in an obtuse attempt to impress her. She was flung around inside the cockpit, banging her head on the glass, feeling nauseated from all the twists and turns, her chest crushed by the force of gravity as he flipped the plane around like a matchstick.

  What was he thinking?

  The only way she could make it through the wrenching hour without throwing up was to clench her teeth and fantasize about Tesla. In fact, it ended up one of her most creative fantasies. So satisfying, Tucker could have taken a few more turns. She had completely forgotten that he was sitting in front of her in the airplane and she no longer felt sick.

  Time to pick it up again, she decided, to recharge her batteries while she waited for exactly the right moment. Cornelia closed her eyes and garnered her energy, dreaming up her robust Electric Girl.

  The dense South American jungle, a spiky dark net, enveloped her.

  Her legs propelled her through the snarl of trees with giant fronds. Electrolytes tickled her nose, cleaning the air after a rainstorm. A roaring sound grew louder.

  Beyond the last tangle of vines, she caught the bright orange ball of the sun. She broke out of the jungle to stand on a patch of cliff over Iguazú Falls. The falls rolled before her like a silvery mirror cascading into foam and mist. Maybe Tesla had been here. Why not? It was a breathtaking enough spot for a genius.

  The Electric Girl slipped off her backpack, rummaged through it for a tiny model of the Tesla Tower. Then she took a breath and threw the toggle switch that produced bright threads of blue light across its miniature mushroom top.