Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “I sure hope not,” she told her. “Water, please.”

  “You know we got a tradition here, honey,” Girl-Tex shouted over the din, mock-staring Cornelia down. “If you don’t drink, the bartender does.”

  “Amen,” she told Girl-Tex.

  Girl-Tex filled one glass with water and a shot of straight Baja tequila for herself. She tossed it back. Cornelia took a long swallow of water.

  She felt hemmed in by the crowd. A stale, oppressive cloud formed by cigarette and cigar smoke settled above the bar like an inversion factor. She could feel it pressing trapped air on top of her, hot like a jungle. She drank the water and it cleared her nostrils.

  She inched away from the two Roberts, tugging Tina with her. The boys had locked on to Girl-Tex, out-quipping each other to keep her attention as she built their martinis. Robert Selden stuffed something else in his mouth, probably a fistful of pills he used for mood management that terrified Corny when he took them with liquor. Robert batted away at least one family-and-friends intervention a week.

  Tina looked more alert now. She blossomed after midnight when the crowd gave off a surging, oscillating kind of energy.

  “You never really answered me about Tucker,” Tina said.

  Cornelia thought this over, wishing she could explain to Tina about the coronas. How seeing a sky-blue corona around somebody meant you couldn’t go wrong. And a blackish, ugly corona meant you should run. And how Tucker Fisk exhibited no corona at all.

  “Tucker can keep you off balance,” she allowed. “On the surface, he’s the perfect gentleman. Almost too perfect.”

  Tucker’s ambition always thundered like hoofbeats under his skin. That was easy to spot. If only she could see his corona, so she could know whether or not to trust him.

  “He seems to want to be with you,” Tina said, her eyes wandering.

  “I think I’m just arm candy. But I’m not sure. He’s so close to my father, I can’t really confide in him.”

  “No sex?” Tina asked, wide-eyed.

  “Hardly. I’d rather like to know who I’m having sex with.”

  She had analyzed Tucker’s parents, usually a good clue to character, but found no easy answers. His father, who had been nicknamed Sloopy in college, was a hearty but unsubstantial man. He had been Chester’s roommate at Yale. Tucker’s mother worked as a Wall Street lawyer. She was overly worked-out and always looked so bristling with anger and ambition that she might burst an artery just exchanging social chatter. She had obviously been the one who pushed Tucker. And she had succeeded, because Tucker did get things done. Enough to save her father at Lord & Company.

  “Well, whatever else you say about him, Tucker’s gorgeous,” Tina told her in a dreamy voice, looking across the room.

  “He knows it. I just wish I could decide what he wants from me.”

  “Well, why don’t you ask him?” Tina said. “He’s right there.”

  Cornelia turned and saw Tucker’s head bobbing slowly over all the rest like a golden boat on the waves. Escape was impossible; she was trapped in the jaws of the crowd.

  “Hi,” Tucker said, with a drive-by casualness. “Sake martini?”

  She took the glass gingerly, but didn’t drink. She noticed that he did not say, “Your father is very worried about you.”

  “I came to apologize about taking you dogfighting,” he lobbed out of nowhere. “I thought it would help you get rid of some bad memories, but I guess I really miscalculated.”

  She jerked her glass to her lips and half drained it. His eyes held hers. Their surfaces were like polished stones, impossible to penetrate. But his tone of voice, almost boyish, was a first.

  After a moment she said, “I guess you did.”

  “And maybe I have a little trouble showing emotion, too,” Tucker said. He frowned very seriously now. His voice croaked slightly, like a tree frog lived inside his huge frame.

  “Tucker, what are you telling me?”

  He thought for a moment. “Maybe I’m a little in awe of you. You’re much freer than I am. I think I take myself too seriously sometimes.”

  By the time Tucker brought her a second martini, Cornelia began to understand how Tucker got along with people that he couldn’t fire. He put them in a kind of trance. Like a spider she once read about that anesthetizes its prey. In Tucker’s case, it seemed to be a sweet narcosis of flattery. He also had that boyish quality, such an earnest and apparently real interest in her that he had not revealed so plainly to her before this evening.

  “I’m interested in the things you like to do, where you go every day,” she heard him say over the noisy crowd.

  “Tucker,” she had to practically shout in his ear, “you’re the most information-crazed individual I’ve ever known. If you really wanted to know, you could have asked me.”

  “I’m asking now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him in the rather stiff, formal way that suggested she might have had too much to drink. “But I really don’t think I want to get into that at the moment.”

  Tucker ordered her a third martini. After that she caught only loose fragments of Tucker’s conversation more than the actual points he made, although his body language told her that he was working very hard to make points.

  She spoke haltingly, struggling to connect things. After three drinks, her allergy to alcohol was seeping in. Her brain was becoming a fuzzball. Each thought drifted through wisps of cotton candy in fragments, at one-quarter time.

  “Don’t you think Chester cares about you?” he yelled.

  “Yes, but my father seems to think I’m a train wreck.”

  She noted that he didn’t say, “Oh, no.” But he did say, “Is that what you think?”

  “I do sometimes,” she told him, the alcohol roaring through her brain now, loosening things a notch.

  “What I’m saying, Corny”—Tucker made a face as sincere as one without a corona around it could look—“is if you feel that way, I’d like you to be my train wreck.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to gain a strategic perspective on this conversation that had suddenly become so full. A poor idea. The room swirled.

  When she opened them, Girl-Tex, a blurry form in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, appeared, standing up on the bar. Guy-Tex jumped up after her.

  “C’mon, Corny,” Girl-Tex yelled for her. Cornelia headed gratefully for the bar. Girl-Tex held out her hand, got a strong grip on her forearm, and pulled her up.

  The jukebox blasted “Radar Love.” Girl-Tex started to dance a fierce two-step, her blue and yellow cowboy boots banging clunk-clunk-clunk on the bar. Guy-Tex started clunk-clunk-clunking with her own cowboy boots. Cornelia began to tap along, feeling the drums.

  Below her, she could hear the two Roberts. They chanted, “Corny! Cor-ny!”

  She felt just right, stomping on the bar, charged and juiced, even though the crowd had begun to blur. Girl-Tex had wonderful electricity. She could almost see blue sparks kicking up from the cowgirl’s boot heels.

  The jukebox changed to “I Walk the Line.” More women jumped up onto the bar now. A redhead ripped off her top, exposing a lacy black Wonderbra.

  The music went on. She saw Tucker push his way through the crowd. He hopped onto the bar in one smooth move like he never stopped playing on the football field at Yale.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. I thought maybe you’d like to go now.” He smiled.

  “Not yet, thank you,” she said.

  But now she was the one to miscalculate. Just as he began to wrap his beautiful black and gray suit jacket around her, the room circled diagonally. She felt herself falling backward.

  Then the Electric Girl passed out.

  “Good evening, 840 Fifth.” Kevin took the call on the black phone box that hung by the front door.

  “This is Tucker Fisk. I need you right now at the rear service entrance.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Kevin said and hung up.

  Vladimir had manage
d to doze off for most of their shift, perched on the padded seat that pulled down like an ironing board from the wall. Vladimir’s jowls quivered as he snored, and his gray cap slipped over his forehead. The lobby’s stifling heat, set to quickly warm the owners coming in out of the cold, sucked up all of Kevin’s oxygen.

  He shook Vlad the Self-Impaler before he could fall and hurt himself. “I’ve got to go in the back. I got a call.”

  Kevin walked briskly to the back door. Could the caller be a hoax? Philip Grace pulling a fast one? He didn’t think so. Tucker Fisk had a good-sized ego, expecting Kevin to know who he was. He only knew because he’d studied Andrew’s chart.

  Kevin opened the back door, a double-thick metal slab with three locks. He saw Chester Lord’s funny-looking stretch limousine idling with its side door open. And Cornelia Lord’s boyfriend standing by the open door in a dark suit, his jacket flapping in the cold wind. His white shirt cuffs almost shone in the dark.

  “What took you so long?” Tucker greeted him, his breath streaming in front of him. “Give me a hand.”

  “With what?”

  Tucker grabbed his arm and pointed him inside the limousine. Sprawled on the gray velvet of the small back seat, the party-girl Cornelia Lord wasn’t moving. He put his face near hers and felt a small breath on his cheek. She was alive, anyway. But the smell of an unfamiliar alcohol, kind of sweet, oozed out of her pores like toxic gas. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. Her blond hair flopped over her forehead. Kevin noticed that. Even though she was drunk and passed out, her tiny, perfect features still made her look like a model, except with a rich person’s extra-creamy skin and a very young face shaped almost like a heart. A dewy line had formed over her lips, and her fine cheekbones had a pink stripe from the cold. The Girl Who’ll Always Have Everything.

  “Hey,” Kevin said, shaking her gently. “You’re home now.”

  She opened her eyes and fixed them on Kevin’s cap.

  “Great corona,” he thought she said.

  Then her eyes fell shut and she began snoring lightly, her face looking haunted. Kevin’s pulse fluttered.

  “What are you doing in there?” Tucker said, annoyed. “Get her legs.”

  Kevin grabbed her slender ankles while Tucker took her arms. Carrying her toward the door, Kevin thought he heard a sound behind the garbage Dumpster.

  A silent explosion rocked the night in front of him, a pop-pop-pop of white flashes. Kevin held tightly on to her ankles.

  “Thanks, folks,” he heard Philip Grace say. The tabloid terrorist whipped from behind the Dumpster on a beat-up old Vespa motor scooter. He wore his mirrored glasses in the night, and a long white scarf with fringe at the end flapped from his neck. Grace gunned the gas and made the scooter whine like a Mixmaster.

  “You cocksucker,” Tucker yelled at him. “If you print that, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  “You’re just sayin’ that ‘cause I’m black,” Grace shouted, cackling. Then he laughed again, pulled a little wheelie, and blew past them, shooting foul-smelling exhaust in their faces.

  Tucker cursed under his breath while he and Kevin brought the girl inside, limp as a cadaver. Kevin suggested they take the service elevator, so they wouldn’t meet anybody, and Tucker grunted.

  Carrying the girl, Kevin watched Tucker study the floor lights changing over the door as they rode, so he wouldn’t have to speak to the doorman. Kevin pretended to look at the lights, too, but discreetly glanced at the girl’s face. The blond hair hung back, exposing small ears that stuck out a little.

  “You never saw us tonight,” Tucker said when the elevator door opened. He took his softly breathing prize from Kevin and strode off with her bouncing in his arms, a doll stuffed with sawdust.

  On his way down in the clunky service elevator, Kevin thought about the woman’s eyes. They’d opened for only a second, but weren’t dull and wasted party-girl eyes at all. They had latched instantly on to something she found just over, or kind of around, his head.

  Kevin felt his heart whomping, like he’d been through an ordeal. He didn’t know exactly what to make of Cornelia Lord here in the flesh. If he looked at her without knowing anything about her life, he’d be pretty knocked out. When she opened her eyes, she looked as though she had what his mother called “a spark of the divine” inside her, a soft glow. But this was a girl who only lit up in real life by getting loaded, then passing out so people like Kevin and even her asshole boyfriend had to clean up after her. He couldn’t deny that she was practically a Giotto to look at. But she had the character of a virus.

  He just wondered, walking back to the lobby, what she meant by “corona.”

  To him, a corona was the electrical arc he made working on his neon. But Cornelia Lord didn’t look like anybody who’d know what an electrical arc was.

  Part Two

  Electric Girl Blue

  Chapter Seven

  Everyone knows the story of the Russian prince,” Vlad the Self-Impaler began in his big, round storytelling voice.

  Kevin stifled his yawn inside a tight smile.

  At 8:00 A.M., Kevin had begun the second half of his double-header shift with Vlad.

  Kevin pulled the worst shifts because he was new. Vlad got them because the building manager hated him. Vlad proudly displayed his laziness like a badge. Management couldn’t fire him because of the union, but they didn’t have to give him the choice shifts.

  But as much as he hated carrying out bags and sorting mail, the Russian loved to talk. He worked to make each trivial event of his life into an epic told with pauses, arched eyelids, and dramatic gestures. Vlad never gave up his die-hard communism. He thought that anybody who ran any kind of business in New York, even a hot dog vendor, was a fang-toothed capitalist.

  If the dry cleaner lost a button off Vlad’s uniform, the Self-Impaler would spin a morality tale about his confrontation. But Vlad couldn’t tell a story in real time. With all his dramatic flourishes, they always ran into overtime, longer than the event itself.

  Kevin imagined that Russians valued storytelling because for so many years they lacked traditional American pastimes, like cable TV or showers. He managed to get through Vlad’s stories because he liked to watch the Russian contort his rubbery face into different villains, the evil newsstand owners or reckless shoe repairman, who he claimed had shrunk his black brogues one size smaller.

  His story of the Russian prince should be good for half a shift.

  A cab pulled up outside discharging a tall, worried-looking man with a gangly body and long legs who seemed to half-fall out of it. When he reached the door, Kevin opened it to see that the man had shaved badly and dressed too fast in a tweed suit and tan raincoat. Kevin suspected he still had pajamas on under the suit.

  “Good morning,” Kevin asked without enthusiasm. “Can I help you?”

  Vlad squinted at the man and interrupted. “Ah! Dr. Bushberg. Go up, please, they are expecting you.”

  “Thanks,” the man mumbled and stepped quickly toward the elevator.

  “That is Dr. Bushberg,” Vlad stage-whispered, “headhunter to Cornelia Lord.”

  “If he doesn’t carry a spear, he’s a headshrinker,” Kevin corrected him.

  “Yes. Mr. Lord left word permitting Dr. Bushberg to visit. He pretends the doctor comes to treat Miss Lord for the flu. But the young Russian prince. The prince was a peasant boy, handsome and cunning. He worked like me at the Leningradska Hotel.” Vlad’s eyes misted. “It was better for workers there. For each doorman’s shift we had eight men, only four KGB.”

  “Sure,” Kevin told him. “Eight guys doing one job, plenty of nap time.”

  Vlad nodded in agreement. “A guest asked us to do something, we would tell them, ‘This is impossible,’ and they went away. We had no capitalist anxieties then.” He pointed upstairs. “No need for head-shrinkers.”

  “Except to give lobotomies to the dissidents.” Kevin liked to pull Vlad’s chain.

  Vladimir wagged his head. “CN
N propaganda. The Americans have always sneered at us. ‘Russians can’t build computers any smaller than a barn.’ But workers had dignity. It was the bankers and the Mafia who ruined our country.”

  “Well, I see why you came to New York City, to get away from people like that,” Kevin said.

  Vlad nodded. “So the young Russian prince came to New York City. He found work as doorman in a building on Gramercy Park, where all the residents have keys to the park. Very cozy. He was not afraid to use his charms on a young girl who lived in the building, a rich businessman’s daughter. At night they met in the park. Soon, a romance.” Vlad made a knocking motion with his hand. “The prince went to her father’s door. He stood proud and declared his love for the daughter.”

  “And?” Kevin asked. He could feel his timing a little off, because he wasn’t concentrating on the Russian prince. Instead, he thought about this Dr. Bushberg who’d gone upstairs, comparing this Park Avenue specimen to the psychiatrists he’d seen working at Bellevue.

  “But the father”—Vlad made a show of rage—“the father slammed the door in the young man’s face, told him he would have him fired. Or killed. He was a rich man in the fur business. He shouted he would never have a doorman for a son-in-law.”

  “So which was it, fired or killed?” Kevin asked.

  Vlad snorted. “The prince would not bow and scrape to the rich father. He brought the girl to the top of the Empire State Building, got down on his knees and asked her to be his wife.”

  “He saw that movie.” Kevin couldn’t remember the name, a tear-jerker.

  “What movie? He told the girl, ‘Say yes or I jump now and kill myself.’”

  Kevin raised his eyebrows. “He would’ve gone through with that?”

  “Oh yes. It is very poetic, a martyr for love.”

  Poetic? Must be a Russian thing. He tried to imagine falling for somebody, then telling her you’re a suicidal maniac. Where he grew up, that wouldn’t make you any kind of a catch.

  “I’d take the elevator down, either way,” Kevin said.

  “Ah, but she said yes. They eloped to Atlantic City, New Jersey.” Vlad had a silvery thrill in his voice, like he believed his own story. “To keep his daughter near, the father forgave them. He gave the prince a job in the fur business and for a wedding present bought them an apartment in the same building. This story is true. My cousin who worked on Gramercy Park knew the Russian prince.”