Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “The girl must have been something,” Kevin allowed, “for a guy to go work in the fur business.”

  He let Vlad leave on his break and found himself wondering what a girl like Cornelia Lord had to tell her psychiatrist. Maybe she had herself talked into believing she had real psychiatric problems, like the patients he’d worked with at Bellevue. Sometimes they mistook their wives for fire hydrants, or told Kevin they heard the Captain and Tennille singing through their fillings. It was pretty sad.

  But if Cornelia Lord really did have problems, he was pretty sure the psychiatrist who went upstairs wouldn’t help much.

  Dr. Bushberg came out of Cornelia’s bedroom, frowning, and closed the door.

  When O’Connell escorted him into Chester’s den, Bushberg folded himself into the chair and pulled out a meerschaum pipe. They sat in silence while Bushberg fiddled with his pipe paraphernalia.

  If the doctor had to spend this much time collecting his thoughts so profoundly, Chester worried, Cornelia’s case must be severe. Or he could just be procrastinating, the same way Chester always had. He felt the now-familiar shame creeping up. This would probably be the moment where the psychiatrist would tell him it was all his fault, that he hadn’t been there for her.

  “Let’s get to the point,” Chester rasped. “What’s Cornelia’s problem?”

  “Well,” Bushberg hemmed, “I wouldn’t like to rush into a diagnosis…”

  “Rush? You’ve been seeing her for a year. What do you talk about?”

  “I can’t discuss what she tells me.” He gave Chester a too-easy smile. “Professional ethics.”

  “I’ve paid you to treat her and I want an evaluation of her condition.”

  Bushberg reluctantly pulled out and flipped through an old note book. “Cornelia is obsessed with an inventor named Nikola Tesla who’s been dead for over fifty years,” Bushberg said. “Something about an injustice to the man going back to the turn of the century.”

  “I know about Tesla.” Chester waved his palm helplessly. “What does that have to do with going out dancing in bars, ending up drunk in fountains?”

  Bushberg consulted his notes. “She may believe that her body contains more electrical impulses than the average person. Possibly she’s self-medicating to calm herself down.”

  “Does she?” Chester asked seriously.

  “Does she what?”

  “Have more electricity?”

  “No, we all have roughly the same amount,” Bushberg said. “But she could be interpreting her anxiety as extra energy.”

  This was going nowhere, Chester thought. “When you started her therapy, I thought the medication you gave her was supposed to control her moods.”

  “It might,” Bushberg said, “if she took her medication. But she doesn’t. That’s also fairly common.”

  Chester had a bad feeling. “When you talk about my daughter, it’s as though you’re speaking of someone you knew briefly, a long time ago.”

  Bushberg sucked so hard on his pipe, his cheekbones threatened to collapse. Then he banged it loudly on the ashtray.

  “Professional detachment.” Bushberg spoke each word carefully. “She can’t become too dependent on me.”

  “I don’t see that as a danger.” Chester shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve tried to talk to her myself…”

  He paused and Bushberg leaned forward, sounding pleased at this change of topic. Chester didn’t like the look of Bushberg, but reassured himself that the man practiced on Park Avenue and billed Chester $6,000 each month for his daughter’s sessions. He must know something. Perhaps all psychiatrists, Chester theorized, developed slippery personalities to slide in and out of their patients’ lives without picking up any of their demons, like burrs that stuck to your pants along a country trail. Perhaps he should try confiding in the man himself. He certainly paid him enough.

  “I’ve tried to talk with her several times,” Chester said, “and it’s as though we just miss.”

  “Oh, no. That wouldn’t be wise, trying to talk to her yourself.” Bushberg shook his head very somberly now, Sphinx-like. “I’ve given her an injection of antidepressants and tranquilizers. She should be under control for twenty-four hours and, if necessary, I’ll come back tomorrow and give her another shot.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” Chester felt the back of his neck heating up.

  “I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of short-term residential therapy. I can recommend a private facility where she would get one-on-one attention.”

  “A mental hospital?” A snake pit.

  “A very pleasant facility,” Bushberg said. “Almost a resort really. I’m thinking of the Sanctuary up in Westchester.”

  “A resort?” Chester snapped. “A resort gives seaweed wraps and massages. A resort lets its guests leave. That’s out of the question. And Cornelia doesn’t belong in a mental hospital. Why can’t we, well, give her bed rest and you can cure her here at home?”

  “Oh, no, no.” Bushberg shook his head vigorously. “That wouldn’t be at all practical.”

  “Why not?”

  Bushberg answered in a crushing wave of jargon that Chester went down trying to understand.

  “… Bipolar One Disorder… Episodic Alcohol Dependence…”

  It all sounded like such gobbledygook. People of Bushberg’s ilk only plowed into this level of jargon to fool lay people. Why did he suspect the psychiatrist wanted to wash his hands of Cornelia? Because he had tried but couldn’t help her. Her condition had even worsened. He felt his anger build. Bushberg was probably struggling to avoid a malpractice suit, all this weaseling. Then he felt a sudden panic. Maybe Bushberg thought Cornelia could harm herself, but the groveling fool couldn’t admit it to him.

  “Are you telling me that Cornelia is at risk of hurting herself?” he asked coldly. “Yes or no?”

  “Perhaps. I wouldn’t rule that out,” Bushberg said, unable to stop equivocating. “It needn’t be deliberate. She could hurt herself purely by accident.”

  Chester felt the weight of decision closing tightly in his chest. He felt frightened for Cornelia.

  “Why this sudden escalation?” Chester demanded. “You didn’t think she was a danger to herself a week ago.”

  Bushberg seemed to jerk at that, gripping the arms of his chair. “It’s very difficult for a family member to accept how suddenly the onset of a deeper problem can occur. Do you want me to phone the Sanctuary? There’s a waiting list, but we can overcome that.”

  “No. You may not.”

  Bushberg’s mouth remained open for a second. “Well, how do you want to proceed then?”

  “Cornelia stays here.” Chester tapped his desktop firmly with his forefinger. Genetic code was taking over for him, as it had for the Lord men all the way back to when Chester I could make even the mighty pucker by tapping the blotter of his desk in just this way.

  “She needs to be heavily medicated then,” Bushberg squirmed. “And she has to be closely supervised.”

  “Then we’ll hire nurses for her around the clock.” Chester stood up and O’Connell’s craggy face arrived at the doorway.

  Bushberg swallowed as he rose. “Of course, we’ll handle it as you like, but I want to go on record that this wouldn’t be my preferred treatment.”

  “Your preference is duly noted,” Chester dipped his words in frost. “Cornelia stays here until further notice.”

  Chester waited for Bushberg to be gone. Then he spent ten minutes on the phone with his own doctor, whom he had known since they were classmates at prep school. “Tom, this Bushberg, are you sure he knows what he’s doing?”

  “He’s a top man. Former head of the New York Psychiatric Association.” His friend’s deep baritone was a soothing balm. “Though I understand that he’s gone through a wrung-out divorce with some financial pressure.”

  Chester frowned. “Would that affect his judgment of Cornelia’s condition?”

  “Only if he’s suddenly doubling up on her sessio
ns.”

  “All right.” Chester hung up.

  He would have to trust Bushberg against his better instincts. What did he know about psychiatrists?

  He only knew that he would not make hasty decisions about his daughter, no matter what any of them said.

  From the lobby, Kevin heard the bing of the elevator and saw Cornelia Lord’s psychiatrist eject himself, a projectile of tics and hasty movements. He held the front door open for him, tipping his cap forward so he could eyeball the doctor without being noticed.

  At Bellevue, Kevin had liked working with the shrinks. They didn’t seem especially crazy, as a group, the way people joked about them. They worked hard. Some of them, especially the women, had as much guts as his sister Marne.

  One doctor from Pakistan, so tiny her arms were like chicken bones, had actually walked into a utility closet to seek out a pumped-up, 250-pound male patient bellowing threats in the dark. Calmly, she talked him back onto the ward.

  It made him wonder how, with indigent patients at Bellevue getting great shrinks like that, a rich girl like Cornelia wound up with this jittery piece of work named Bushberg. He stank of deceit, reminding him of losers from his neighborhood who committed to the shylocks for loans they couldn’t pay back, then hopped around like fleas trying to avoid them.

  Kevin drifted back to listening to Vlad.

  “It is very important when you go to a steak house,” Vlad explained one of his revenge schemes, “that you always say you are sending the steak back to the kitchen because it is too well done. Then they have to throw it away.”

  Kevin said, “Come on, you’re just wasting food.”

  Vlad shrugged. “Capitalist food.”

  Chapter Eight

  At eight in the evening, Cornelia called upon all of her energy just to rise out of her chair and climb into bed. She felt as though each of her limbs weighed three hundred pounds, and no possible effort seemed worth the trouble.

  The previous evening was simply a black hole punched in her brain. Now her tongue felt as large and prickly dry as a cactus plant, her eyes were shrouded in mist, and she could barely find her limbs. All thanks to Dr. Bushberg’s psychotropic drugs. It was her father’s genteel way of keeping her manacled at home. Dr. Bushberg’s medical headlock saddened more than angered her. Classic Chester, trying to keep an unsteady lid on the surface, while his own fear and panic kicked up underneath.

  After Bushberg gave her the shot with the hint of a smile and left, her father had pulled a chair close to her bed.

  “Dr. Bushberg told me something that disturbed me today,” he began, sounding contrite.

  She’d raised her head, struggling to keep her eyelids open to listen, but then the full weight of the drugs slammed against her as if she’d just walked into the side of a bus, and she had fallen asleep.

  Why did they always just miss? It wasn’t merely that Chester’s judgment seemed to fail him, because her own sense of timing had not been infallible. Going out to meet Tina had not been a sound move, she admitted to herself. She felt needy and drank way too much when Tucker showed up and that undid her plans. Temporarily.

  The Electric Girl must work faster.

  On the other hand, she could not forget the surprising interlude with Tucker. Although she could only play back their words in fragments, and remember the two of them huddled together at the bar of Lizards & Ladies as the murkiest of images, she knew that Tucker had begun to open a curtain on himself.

  Thinking clearly was difficult. She could review only one item at a time. Since what she needed to focus on was escape, she painstakingly checked items off her mental list.

  Flight? Done. Air Brasilia, tomorrow evening.

  Money? Done. She would use only cash and her American Express Platinum card. The bills went to her own accountant, not her father’s.

  Research? Done. The museum had all the sources she needed. Now she only had to download replies to her e-mail inquiries.

  Everything seemed in order. Still, little things could trip her up. Big things, too.

  Like the nurse Dr. Bushberg had hired for her named Lucy Banks, R.N. That brown mountain of a woman in a pristine white outfit filled the butterfly chair so that none of the fabric could be seen slung over the metal frame. It was close to her bed on the red side of the room where the soft goods were, rather than the black side of the room where she kept hard goods like her metal dresser. Nurse Lucy seemed in a drowsy stupor. Her fleshy arms and legs that jiggled when she walked had settled down. Her eyes had grown deeply entranced by a Jackie Collins paperback with an iridescent cover. In about twenty minutes, Nurse Lucy would get up and give the Electric Girl another injection that would keep her pinned down to her bed. Oh, yes, that formerly tame weasel Dr. Bushberg had finally revealed his meanness. Fortunately, the Electric Girl kept some options open.

  “Lucy,” she said, working to lift her tongue and open her lips.

  Her words echoed in her head as though she were trying to yell up from a deep well. Nurse Lucy looked up from her book, slowly. As a rule, Lucy didn’t move very fast.

  “What’s that, honey?” Nurse Lucy said. Cornelia thought she had lovely eyes, like portholes looking onto a calm sea.

  “It’s really hard for me to get up. Could you please go into my closet and get me my heavy white bathrobe? I’m kind of chilly.”

  She had made a point of asking Lucy to do a lot of things over the course of the afternoon and early evening. One of them, going to the kitchen for her, had given the stealthy Electric Girl the opportunity to disable a closet door handle.

  “Sure, baby,” Lucy said, but didn’t move before she finished the sentence she was reading.

  Then Cornelia saw Nurse Lucy jettison herself out of her chair with startling vigor for such a big woman. Uh-oh. She hadn’t suspected that Lucy’s time in the chair was a recharging of her booster-rocket. Now the woman blazed across the room at the very moment she needed her to be deliberate and plodding.

  But it was now or never.

  She waited for the nurse to go a little farther into the depths of her closet. She had purposely hung the white robe as far back as possible, a fifteen-foot trek from the closet door.

  As soon as Nurse Lucy had disappeared from her sight, Cornelia summoned all the energy inside her. She raised herself stiffly from the bed. Even her nightgown seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. When she hit the floor, she felt as though she were seeping through the carpet toward the earth’s core. She lumbered in long strides for the closet, a race through water, her body more like a barge than a sleek submarine.

  She put her arms straight out in front of her like Frankenstein to achieve forward momentum, huffing so hard she was sure Nurse Lucy could hear her.

  Inside the closet, she saw Nurse Lucy’s head turning, sensing her, then turned her bulk around to head back toward the closet door.

  But the Electric Girl thumped ahead, holding her course. She reached the door first by one hundredth of a second. She felt for the doorknob and pulled. It shut almost all the way.

  Almost.

  She felt a devastating jerk that nearly yanked her onto the floor, and saw, through the crack of the door, Nurse Lucy’s grim face. They each pulled like titans to gain an inch of space between the door and its frame. The door wobbled between them.

  She willed her body to create more electricity, to ignite the reserve of adrenaline that she might still squeeze past the drugs. The door was only inches away from closing, but the torque from the Nurse-Lucy-pull was fantastic, as powerful as the yank from a big-wheeled tractor. She felt herself losing ground.

  Then for an instant, Nurse Lucy faltered.

  The Electric Girl whooped, grunted hard, and threw herself backward, pulling the door shut. Nurse Lucy yanked her fingers back so they wouldn’t get caught.

  A click.

  The door locked. Nurse Lucy pounded hard on the inside of the door and called out, but nobody would hear her or investigate until early the following morning. The Ele
ctric Girl had already said her dull good night to Chester. O’Connell had gone home. She shuffled over to close and lock the door to her bedroom for good measure.

  The Thorazine Shuffle.

  She had researched the Physicians’ Desk Reference carefully a year before when Bushberg began prescribing medicine. She knew that Thorazine, used to calm agitated mental patients, was the main ingredient in the cocktail Bushberg gave her. She slowly spun around as best she could, in a victory dance.

  She had left a box lunch she’d assembled from the kitchen, a turkey sandwich, a bunch of grapes, and a bottle of Pellegrino inside the closet so Nurse Lucy wouldn’t starve. Although that would probably take quite a bit longer than one night, given the woman’s carbohydrate reserves. She wished she could toss the Jackie Collins book into the closet, but that would tempt fate.

  She felt around her red bedspread to pull out a duffel bag, efficiently prepacked for a trip to the jungle. It weighed a lot with her hiking boots inside. She dug out her travel outfit, soft black workout clothes, and slowly slipped them on. Then she took a black jacket with thick lining from under the chaise longue and managed to pull the sleeves on with great effort. She didn’t bother with her hair or makeup. This was no beauty contest. She pulled a black watch cap over her hair.

  She unlocked the bedroom door, looked both ways, and slunk slowly down the upstairs corridor. Chester would probably be in his study. She tiptoed down the staircase and shuffled ahead.

  When she approached the door of her father’s sanctum, she carefully lowered herself down on the floor, stretched out, and used her compact mirror at floor level to get a worm’s-eye view. She saw Chester at his desk staring into space, a half-full brandy snifter in front of him.

  Her poor dad. Cornelia felt a cold ping at the base of her spine. She worried about him. His energy had fallen so drastically over the past six months that she feared for his health. It would help him so much to give her his attention now, since they were as far apart as hostile countries.