Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  She touched the aluminum frame and, through its cold sting, felt the warmth of moments shared with her mother in that sunny glass room of their apartment. She never went in that sunroom anymore. She thought about her visit to the museum just the night before.

  After the horrible plane ride with Tucker, she had come to the museum to energize herself. Oh, had she needed a Tesla fix then. She had obligated herself to attend some dull party at the Plaza, a sort of starchy rave for Young Republicans.

  As she stood by her Tesla helicopter, she yearned with all her being to share the museum with someone whose world was not defined by printed invitations. But would that person ever arrive on the scene?

  Would the Electric Girl always have to work alone?

  For luck, she had touched the aluminum frame. Then she had shut off the spotlight and trudged out to the deserted street, dressed in her black evening dress over her practical Keds, passing the shadowy figures of prostitutes who were the only other women in the warehouse district at night. She hailed a cab to the Plaza, more than unfashionably late for the party where she would join Tucker. He’d probably have a new anecdote about the afternoon dogfight. He would certainly emerge as the hero.

  The fountain in Grand Army Plaza across from the hotel still sprinkled bravely in December. It looked positively refreshing compared to the prickly heat she would feel in the crowd. The moment she joined the black-tie mob in the ballroom, conversation dribbled off, as usual. Really, could anyone stare like the women whose eyes drilled out from those frantically smiling photographs in Town & Country? She smiled thinking of that timber wolf grin, baring all teeth and gums. The full Town & Country jawbreaker.

  Tucker stepped from a clutch of snarky socialites to greet her.

  “Corny, where have you been?”

  “A museum,” she hedged, weary immediately, looking toward a long and tiresome evening.

  “Well,” Tucker said with a smile, “how about a sake martini?”

  And she froze on that moment, because that’s when all the trouble started. The flashbulbs. The cold, wet dress…

  Well. One couldn’t dwell on past mistakes when there was work to do.

  She crossed the cement floor to the curator’s office.

  She thought about Dr. Powers. He looked a bit like a dignified werewolf, with his bushy silver Brillo eyebrows and beard.

  When she had first sought out Dr. Powers and told him what she wanted, he had dismissed her as one of the marginal Tesla groupies who loved to spin government conspiracy theories about what the FBI or CIA or even KGB had done with Tesla’s work. But, slowly and methodically, she had convinced that naturally skeptical man. He had grilled her to her shoes with questions. When she emerged from their first meeting—scheduled for thirty minutes, but lasting three hours—she was so soaked in perspiration she might have been staggering out of a sauna.

  Then, after months of gauging her resolve, checking her out, working with her on a test basis, Dr. Powers had gradually turned from wary werewolf to her best friend, in a sense, and confidant. Finally, he had agreed to give up his Edison Chair of Electricity professorship at M.I.T. and be the museum’s curator for a dollar a year. Such were the passions Nikola Tesla could stir in scientists and debutantes, if not investment bankers.

  Dr. Powers kept his small space orderly and functional, his furniture industrial. If he ever hung his degrees, they would probably cover the entire wall, but he left his office the same distressed red brick as the rest of the warehouse. His only decoration was a large poster of Coney Island at night, dated 1904. The amusement park lit up like a magical city made of light bulbs or fireflies.

  She admired the world in the poster as she planned her next step.

  A friend would be such a delicious luxury now, just someone to listen. Her friendships had lapsed over the years, to put it mildly. She could count only her oldest friends to be a comfort. But should she risk contact with anybody?

  Finally she called her friend Tina French. Tina lived on Sutton Place. She had a sense of humor, if not responsibility, and was given to mood swings. When she felt terribly upset, Tina always shaved her head, which advertised her current feelings quite effectively.

  Cornelia heard a series of high-pitched beeps as Tina’s phone rang. Tina carried a pager around with her, even though she had never worked for a living. Her grandfather had invented the hot-dog spit that turns frankfurters at refreshment counters, so her whole family lived on fat royalty checks. But Tina’s nightlife, connecting with the right people at the right time, was important enough to her to carry a pager.

  Cornelia punched in the museum’s number. Tina would be on her side, whatever the issue. They had been close since second grade, had seen each other when she’d worked long, frustrating days and wanted to blow off steam partying. It was good that she and Tina could always pick up and reactivate their relationship like a solar clock. She didn’t have to tell Tina what she was doing. Tina cared about Cornelia, and she never judged.

  Cornelia now called Air Brasilia. She wrote notes in her neat, squared-off writing, jotting down times and flight numbers for Rio, Sao Paulo, and the quaintly futuristic capital city of Brasilia.

  “Obrigado!” she thanked the airline agent, practicing her Portuguese.

  Line one trilled. “Tina?”

  “Corneee,” Tina screeched. “Where have you been hiding?”

  They agreed to join up below 14th Street, at a nightclub called the Meat Chest.

  “Byee,” she heard, drawn out as though her friend had fallen down a deep hole as she hung up.

  Cornelia clicked onto Dr. Powers’s Mac and went right to the official New York Tesla Museum Web site. She wouldn’t know a soul in South America, and the prospect of such a free-spirited adventure made her scalp tingle. Of course, the Tesla Society would have members in Brazil. She would ask Dr. Powers for help, and query the discussion groups that shared ideas in excited bursts of text over the Internet. She typed in her inquiry three times, in English, Portuguese, and Spanish:

  Tesla researcher traveling to South America needs immediate guidance on possible Tesla visits to your area, including papers/plans/evidence of Tesla Tower.

  She tapped “Send” and settled back in the curator’s chair.

  A few on the fringes would talk about flying saucers that appeared over Rio in the 1950s, supposedly from some secret city where scientists worked on his antigravity theories. Obsessed Tesla groupies thrived in the woolly world of the Internet. But although their messages might wobble at the edge of sanity, responsible members of the Tesla Society’s South American chapters would help her.

  She left Dr. Powers’s office, making clickety-click sounds on the cement floor as she walked to one of the exhibits, striped with blue light from the xenons. This was a life-size mural of the young, kinetic Tesla at the turn of the century, toiling in his laboratory on 33 Fifth Avenue, wearing a black suit. His shoulders danced with bolts of blue flame, running electricity over his body as a parlor trick for friends, among them Mark Twain.

  She walked to their replica of the Tesla aircraft. It always excited her, the memory of that blissful day.

  She had researched Tesla’s original plans. Then she and Dr. Powers contacted a helicopter designer in Connecticut. At first the no-nonsense aeronautics engineer laughed at their plans; because Tesla’s original design was so boxy and top-heavy, it didn’t look as though it could fly at all. But they’d all worked together to come up with the gyrocopter. It ran on an electric engine with four batteries. Sputtering into the wind, flying the noiseless airship over the field, Dr. Powers had let her take the controls. He taught her how to bank the airship, then keep it in a wobbly but level flight. It was the best time she’d had since her mother died.

  There had been few moments like that since. With the Chester-Tucker-Bushberg alliance squeezing like a python around her, the times when she counted on her Tesla fantasies to shut out the world were becoming both longer and more frequent.

  La
tely, her desire to snap her mind back to the here and now had grown more sluggish, like an insect caught in sticky syrup. It would be a good idea, she decided, to practice telling people about her work. Tina might be a good start; she could be trusted, primarily because she wouldn’t care. She checked her Timex with its glowing Indiglo dial.

  Tina would, of course, be late to meet her. Forget Eastern Standard Time. Her friend’s internal clock was set to the rhythms and the revolutions of the club scene.

  The taxi deposited her just after eleven, and she moved stealthily through the shadows. The corrugated doors that shut off the entrances to various businesses were sprayed with angry graffiti. She felt light and free in the meatpacking district, a frenetic hot spot by night.

  She passed the blackened window of Hog Tits, a women’s biker bar. A chrome cavalry of hogs—custom Harleys—stood outside in a line.

  She poked her head in the door. Women with short hair and tattoos played pool. Glancing at the floor, she wondered if the bar had become gentrified. Instead of sawdust to soak up… well, whatever, she saw the peach-colored pages of the New York Observer strewn around. One woman, squat as a fire hydrant, looked up to glare at her. Cornelia gave her a friendly wave and took off.

  Her body revving against the cold that made her nose run, she walked swiftly to Ninth Avenue and into an unmarked club, the Meat Chest. She walked down a flight of cement stairs and slithered through a gaggle of downtown types clutching drinks, listening politely to the band. The helium-voiced singer screamed words she only viscerally understood.

  “Corny, look at you,” honked Tina French.

  Tina’s makeup was so white and powdery it nearly matched her hair. It looked as though she had dunked her face in flour.

  She was a reedy young woman, her slender body wrapped in slinky black club couture. Cornelia was delighted to see that her scalp had not been shaved recently, so she couldn’t have been too depressed lately. Her hair, almost white-blond, had grown out in a spiky mass. They embraced and Tina held her out by the arms to look at her, giggling.

  “I’m on my way to Brazil,” Cornelia told her, then glanced at the other Pack members. Tina had not come alone. Tina never went anywhere alone. Tonight she’d brought the two Roberts, both also old friends from Gramercy.

  “Our carioca Corny,” said Bob Baylor, Robert No. 1, a distant cousin to the Mayflower Madam. Robert was needling her slightly, for a change. And showing off, too, by using the Brazilian term for natives of Rio.

  “Do you still need a plane to fly?” Robert No. 2, Robert Selden, asked her, as though she were crazy. Robert No. 2 had a nasty streak, and his friends required mental antibodies to tolerate his often sharp words. Robert refused to be called Bob, believing it trite because it could be spelled either backwards or forwards. Robert also had special status as the only member of the group who once earned a paycheck, as a writer on the Conan O’Brien show.

  “We were just talking about people who tend to be extreme time-sucks.” Robert smiled with signature malice. “So it was funny you’d show up.”

  “Like your time counts,” Tina shot back.

  They all stopped to watch a very tall woman with an urchin’s face and arms like sticks pass right through their group and wink at Tina.

  “She’s a model from Iceland, I think,” Tina whispered to Cornelia. “Bob’s been hitting on her all week. But it’s a rather dry hole so to speak.”

  “Is she bisexual?” Bob asked.

  “Sure,” Tina said. “If you buy her something she’ll have sex with you.

  Tina French and the rest of the Pack, including Cornelia when she decided to join them, carried a certain élan in the Manhattan club scene, vanishing remnants of the dying breed of Old-Money WASP trust-fund delinquents. Money in Manhattan now was either made five minutes ago, or came from feeder cultures like Teheran or Los Angeles.

  “What have you been doing?” Cornelia asked Tina.

  “Well, La Dolce Vita’s playing at Angelika this week,” Tina told her after a blank moment. “You have to see it. It’s so explanatory.”

  It would definitely explain that outfit, Cornelia thought. She had seen the film in college, a bleak treatise of 1950s vintage on Italian aristocrats numbed by their money and the absence of value in their lives. Her friends dressed in a style that could be called retro-Euro to match the film, the two Roberts slouching in skinny continental suits circa 1960 and stringy ties.

  Clothing meant nothing to her, but it mattered deeply to the pack. By next week, the boys could be wearing school ties and blazers and Tina would be wearing Donna Karan couture and slicked-back brown hair again. The point was, as soon as some arriviste figured out what to wear to mimic them, fast as lightning her friends changed to some new look. This left wannabes wearing costumes that fit in two days before, but now made as much fashion sense as showing up in a clown suit.

  They all ordered martinis except for Cornelia, who asked for water.

  “What’s going on with Tucker? Are you engaged yet?” Bob Baylor wanted to know.

  “He wishes,” Tina said in a teenage voice, as though they were still in algebra class at Gramercy.

  “We saw your picture in the Globe,” Tina said, sounding a little jealous. “What is it about the fountain in front of the Plaza? I threw up in there once.”

  “Convenience,” Bob said. “You’re right there.”

  “Can we go somewhere and talk for a second?” Cornelia asked Tina.

  They wound up standing in a lightly traveled corner of one of the club’s seven rooms, all connected like a kind of funhouse.

  “Did you ever wonder what I’ve been busy doing the past year?” Cornelia asked her friend.

  Tina opened her mouth, about to say “Sure,” but decided to retreat from that falsity. “I thought you were just shopping. And you said Chester made you see a psychiatrist.”

  “Tina, I helped build a whole museum devoted to Nikola Tesla. On the West Side. I’d like to take you someday.”

  Tina almost spit out her drink. “Did you give those people all your money?”

  “Of course. I wish I had more to give,” Cornelia said.

  “What does your psychiatrist say about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you have to give them time.” Tina felt on firmer ground discussing psychiatrists.

  “No, I mean he really says nothing,” Cornelia explained. “We have silent sessions. The first time I saw him, I told him everything. That was a year ago. I had nothing more to tell, so I just sit there twice a week.”

  “What do you do?” Tina asked.

  “In the beginning, I’d wait for him to say something. He’d wait for me. It was a standoff. Then he started doing other things at his desk, but he’d be sneaky about it. Trying to look like he was writing something about me, when I could see he was paying his bills.”

  “You’ve been doing that for a year?”

  “I just do it for Chester. I sit on Dr. Bushberg’s couch and read for an hour, and he just fusses at his desk and talks on the phone. He doesn’t even bother to pretend anymore.”

  “Chester doesn’t pry into what you do? I mean, with your money?”

  “No,” Cornelia said, feeling sad about that. “He’s too much of a gentleman. He wouldn’t invade my privacy. And I think he’s worried about what he’d find out. I’ve been trying to talk to him for years, but Chester loves the concept of status quo.”

  The two Roberts interrupted them, still looking fresh and untested despite the martinis and the wild strands of damp blond hair that slithered over their eyes. Being in their early twenties made all of them impervious. Or at least that’s what they believed. Cornelia knew that no one, at any age, was safe from harm.

  “What are you talking about?” Bob Baylor asked Cornelia.

  “Nikola Tesla.”

  They stared at her in a dull, dumbfounded way.

  “The tennis player?” Bob asked.

  “Let’s go to Lizards & Ladies,” T
ina said, to change the subject.

  Cornelia protested, but they needled and dragged her along and there was little point in resisting.

  To carry through their commitment to the La Dolce Vita revival, they had found a chromy 1960 Thunderbird convertible and a 1959 Triumph sports car, both sparkling white.

  The Pack piled in and put the convertible tops down to head over to 14th Street. Beeping their horns, the cars split up like two mice to scamper around a tractor-trailer, then screeched to a halt in front of the bar. A tangle of yellow taxis, stretch limousines, and Town Cars had already stacked up in the dark alleyway. A nondescript storefront flashed a neon sign, “Lizards & Ladies.”

  Inside, the tiny club was packed wall to wall with delicious young model-and-actor flesh. Curiosities from the 1970s dangled from the ceiling in wicked parody: a Barbie doll wearing black bondage gear hung upside down with her legs forced around G.I. Joe’s neck, novelty rubber chickens hung from meathooks like bats.

  Behind the bar, a mountain of bras had been slung in a pile against the mirror, women’s panties and men’s boxer shorts peeking out. They got there because women danced on the bar, if they were drunk or exhibitionistic enough, and shed their bras. Sometimes that was just a starting point. Ever since Mayor Guiliani shut down the topless bars in Manhattan and made the city a little too wholesome and corn-fed, it became a thing that club types did for fun.

  The Pack’s entrance sparked an instant buzz. The crowd made way, as much as they could in the crunch, so Cornelia’s gaggle of friends could shove through. They ordered drinks from the rangy, gorgeous bartender, Girl-Tex. Guy-Tex, the other bartender, was much stockier, had eyebrows like caterpillars and a shaved head. Both women came from Texas.

  “Hey, Corny,” she said, “long time. We gonna dance tonight?”