Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “Corny, remember at the bar when I told you I wasn’t good at talking about my feelings?”

  “Through a bit of a mist,” she admitted.

  “Well, I’ve had feelings about you…”

  Uh oh. She heard the Electric Girl’s metallic warning voice.

  “… but I didn’t want to share them with you because I’m not big on losing.”

  “Losing what?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  He almost stammered, which disarmed her. “My hopes about you, I guess.”

  “Tucker, what is it?”

  “Please. Sit down.”

  She perched tensely on the folding chair. He sat on a director’s chair beside her and moved, squeaking on the floor, inches away. One of his knees lightly touched hers.

  “I can only tell you that nothing in my whole life has mattered as much to me as what I’m going to ask you. If you say yes, you’ll make me whole. If you say no, I’ll be missing out on what I’ve always wanted for myself.”

  Leaning in toward her, he looked so earnest and sincere again. So far as she could tell.

  “Maybe you’d better ask me,” she said.

  Tucker tapped a key on his laptop. The big video screen lit up with four words: “WILL YOU MARRY ME?”

  Cornelia felt the bright letters burning up and down on the back of her eyes. Her bewilderment began as a numb feeling in her hair follicles and traveled down her nervous system all the way to her toes. She could think of nothing to say.

  “What do you think?” he finally prodded.

  She tried to overcome her numbness. It made a certain sense that they were sitting in an airplane hangar, given the sudden velocity of Tucker’s proposal. But his words made no sense at all. She needed to organize and try to reflect on them.

  “Um, I like the typeface,” she allowed.

  His forthright expression didn’t change, but a tiny muscle in his forehead twitched.

  “I mean about my proposal.”

  Could she be imagining this? No. She had slammed into an unseen wall of Tucker and been knocked down. That was all. She tried to return to terra firma.

  “You’re allergic to monkfish,” she pointed out.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the most personal thing I know about you, Tucker, even though we’ve been going out to parties together for almost a year. Why do you want to get married all of a sudden?”

  “Not all of a sudden, Corny. I’ve thought this through for a while.” His eyes burned with apparent honesty again. “I guess I just never knew exactly the right time to ask you. Because of who you are,” he added. “You’re smart. You’re beautiful. And you’re a Lord.”

  “And what does that mean? That I’m a Lord?”

  “It means that our lives are intertwined.”

  She thought that over. “Our lives or our fortunes?”

  “Both.” He held up his palms in a gesture of rationality. “Then there’s the noblesse oblige part.”

  “Part of what?”

  “Part of being a Lord,” he intoned silently. “You have a duty.”

  “A duty?”

  He lowered his head and pinched the top of his nose with his fingers, as though her question hurt his sinuses.

  He said finally, “I thought your father would have told you, but I guess he wanted to spare you the worry.”

  “Told me what?”

  “A third party, somebody who we deal with closely, is secretly buying up voting stock in the company. They’re planning a hostile takeover.”

  “Who?”

  “Han Koi.”

  She tried to remember all she had ever known about Han and his son, Han Koi, Jr., whom she had seen socially over the years. At her eighteenth birthday in Southampton, Han Senior had beamed at her and given her a gift. It was so ridiculous, a hot pink boombox, she had found it oddly touching. While Han Koi, Sr., was a gleefully rich merchant, his son reminded her of a not-terribly-nice otter. Sleek and well manicured in Savile Row suits, the younger Han had always seemed mildly contemptuous of her and even her father.

  “What would he gain by taking over our company?” she asked.

  “Prestige,” said Tucker. “Lord & Company is one hundred years old with deep American roots and blue-chip clients.”

  “Tucker”—she remembered—“weren’t you the one who talked Chester into becoming partners with Han Koi?”

  “Yes, I was.” He nodded, slightly sheepish but also irritated. “And at the time it was the right decision. They were big and hungry for a U.S. alliance. Times change. Now Han Koi is still hungry, but what he wants to eat is us. He’s been buying up Lord & Company voting stock. Look.”

  Tucker tapped a flurry of buttons and Cornelia saw the columns of corporate names and stock lots marching down the big video screen.

  “That’s the voting stock that’s not owned by you or Chester,” Tucker explained grimly. “The Kois are using dummy corporations to buy it. They already own 20 percent.”

  She stared at the screen, like a traffic accident.

  “Tucker, they’re wasting their money. I own 25 percent of the voting stock. Between us, Chester and I own 51 percent, and that I believe is called a majority because nobody can outvote us. Isn’t that true?”

  “Technically. But the Kois have been… encouraged to think they could pull off a takeover anyway.”

  “My father encouraged them?”

  “Of course not. Chester’s a proud man. He’s not going to lose the company it took your family a century to build.”

  She felt like screaming. Trying to pull information out of Tucker was like trying to pull something up from the earth’s core. She grabbed his wrist and startled him.

  “Then how could the Kois get enough voting stock, Tucker?”

  Tucker held his breath and blew it out. His square face seemed to collapse, as though he had tried to keep something awful from her that now hovered over her head.

  “Corny, I don’t like to think how many times I’ve taken you off bartops, pulled you out of fountains, with some sleazy photographer around.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures. So?”

  “So it’s not weird the Kois think you’re the weak link.”

  An awful feeling roiled in the pit of her stomach. To think she had acted so badly that business pirates would crank up the Jolly Roger and use her to try to steal her family’s company. But how could they if she didn’t help them?

  “For God’s sake, Tucker, I’m not selling my father out.”

  “I know that, you know that, and Chester knows that,” Tucker told her solemnly. “But if the Kois decide to go public with a takeover attempt, they may not have to win you over for Lord & Company to lose.”

  She squeezed her fists together. “What do you mean?”

  “Lord & Company lives by its reputation.” Tucker averted his eyes. “The Kois can use all the news stories about you to make Chester look weak. You can figure out their spin yourself: ‘He can’t even control his own daughter, how can he run Lord & Company?’”

  Yes. She could see that. The social vultures had already made up their minds about her. It didn’t take much to imagine the same thing happening with the business vultures who hovered over Wall Street.

  She sighed miserably. “And that’s why you’re asking me to marry you now. You want to circle the wagons.”

  He smiled approvingly, a teacher with a bright pupil. “We’d beat the Kois to the media. A big wedding. News stories like, ‘Deb’s Crazy Days Are Over’… or whatever. But the point is, they’d see us as a united family. They’d have to pull back.”

  “Why can’t you just issue a press release?”

  “Corny.” Tucker shook his handsome head. “Talk is cheap. Look, I know I’ve been wrapped up with Lord & Company. It’s taken a lot out of me, your father…” He waved his hand and let it go. “So what do you think?”

  “I think this is a dream,” she said. And not a good one. She shivered, from the c
old inside the hangar and the enormity of what she had to decide.

  Tucker Fisk?

  She tried to turn him into a personal ad in the back of New York magazine. It could read, “Mogul, 28, full of himself, seeks boss’s daughter/heiress for self-interest.” Or she might be taking a simplistic view of him, exactly what she hated about others who judged her behavior. To be fair about it, the ad could just as easily have said, “Mogul, 28, with intelligence, ambition, and firm grasp on reality seeks flightier partner for fun and profit.” At this moment he appeared humbled, as much as someone like Tucker could be, by what seemed a very real desire to marry her. And there was the trip to South America.

  His gift of the Tesla adventure could just be Tucker’s version of a young man who hides an engagement ring in a Dunkin’ Donut to give his girlfriend, to let her squeal with surprise if she doesn’t chip her tooth. In fact, his gesture could be viewed as even more touching. Totally un-Tucker-like. He had done considerable homework about something that mattered to her. Could the Tucker she’d known, that enigma in an Armani suit, turn so easily into this bashful puppy?

  Hard to tell. But the Koi takeover attempt, that looked real as acid rain.

  She saw a sad, bedraggled image of her father. Sitting at home in his study with disheveled copies of the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s strewn over the floor. Rummaging through snipped articles about the Kois’ brutal takeover of Lord & Company, still in a bathrobe and unshaven at cocktail hour, then walking out on the terrace and gazing down over the edge of the balcony.

  Enough. This had all been her fault. Not only hadn’t she tried harder to reach her father, but she had publicly become a crazed media Ophelia.

  “Tucker, why didn’t my father just ask for my help?”

  He shrugged. “He didn’t want to make you feel guilty.”

  She wiped absently at her eyes with the sleeve of her black sweater. “Okay. I’ll cancel my flight.”

  “I knew you’d say yes.”

  Tucker moved toward her and she reflexively pushed him away.

  “But why do we have to get married? Can’t we just get engaged? We’ll look like we’re going to get married and convince old Han Koi.”

  He seemed crestfallen. “Do you hate me, Corny?” His brow crunched up and the overbite of his large front teeth gnawed at his lower lip while he waited for her answer.

  “Of course I don’t hate you.”

  “There’s a concept called ‘propinquity.’” He seemed proud to have pulled that out of a long-forgotten prep school education, although he mispronounced the word. “If you spend enough time with a person and you don’t hate him, you start to like him.”

  “I think the concept you’re referring to is called ‘arranged marriage.’”

  He smirked. “Don’t knock it, it’s kept a lot of families together. Look at the Medicis.”

  “We’re not Italian, and I’m not going to carry on traditions that were dead before I was born. Tucker, you don’t have a…”

  “A what?” He waited patiently.

  “You don’t have a corona,” she blurted out.

  That befuddled him. “You smoke cigars?”

  She felt boxed in, tiny as she was in this vast space almost the size of the Tesla Museum.

  What if she just agreed to the engagement? She could always change her mind, after she helped Chester and he no longer felt threatened over losing his business. And he would be so grateful to her, surely this could be the beginning of a thaw in the awful, icy tundra between them.

  “Corny,” Tucker said. “The way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You can do what you say you’re going to do with my help. Or you can stay locked up in a bedroom at home, sneak out at night, and waste your life. I’ve got information, the equipment, and the resources and we can stay on top of the situation with the Kois while we’re gone. You decide. Either way, I’m keeping all the gear for South America right here in this hangar.”

  She searched the emptiness around his head again.

  An image of Kevin Doyle, and his glorious, sky-blue corona, suddenly popped into her head. She realized that an image of the real Kevin Doyle, not her dreamy fantasy of Tesla, had crept in as her standard for judging the corona of others.

  No, she couldn’t marry Tucker.

  She didn’t even know him. And she didn’t trust him, at least not yet. But if she pretended to agree, at least she could buy time. She would be on her best behavior, and make the Kois believe that the Lords stood together indivisible.

  “Tucker, do you swear this is all true?”

  “I swear on my mother’s life.”

  She flinched. Could anyone possibly lie about that?

  “How long will it take to beat the Kois?”

  “Hard to say,” he said. “They’ll keep buying up shares. When we announce our engagement, that should make them think hard about it. If we get married on Valentine’s Day, right before the company’s board meeting in Palm Beach, that ought to lock them out for good.”

  “All right,” she told Tucker. “I accept.”

  She let him give her a hug of beefy but rather soft muscles in fine-suit fabric and noted an ion or two of cologne.

  “I knew you’d make the right decision, Corny.”

  Relieved, she thought. That’s how Tucker sounded. Not charged up emotionally or even sexually. But definitely relieved. His hand went into his jacket pocket and a dazzling starburst appeared in her face. It almost blinded her.

  Tucker held out her mother’s diamond engagement ring. She stared at the sparkling stone in its antique setting, remembered turning her mother’s finger to study all the facets of the glorious kaleidoscope of a ring.

  “My father gave you that?” How he must trust Tucker, she thought with another sudden wave of melancholy. “I want to talk to Chester about this.”

  “Sure.” He stiffened slightly. “But if you’re only doing this for him, don’t let him know, okay? Your father’s kind of fragile now. I don’t think he could handle that on top of everything else.”

  She noticed that Tucker’s face had quickly rearranged itself from the dark, somber hollows of concern to its usual bright and fleshy confidence. “We can announce our engagement at the Lord & Company Christmas party. A lot of people are going to be very happy about this.”

  “I know,” she thought out loud. “I just hope I’ll be one of them.”

  Chapter Eleven

  This time, she was a painting of physical beauty. He wondered if she still had underneath what he’d seen before, that moral beauty that Giotto painted.

  Kevin watched her walk off the elevator all dazzle and fluid motion, her amazing legs scissoring in high heels with a vital purpose—snip, snip, snip, right toward him. Her straw-colored hair now seemed to flame like a torch, and her clinging dress threw off kinetic energy that hit him from forty feet away. She still wore black, but this time a velvet party dress wrapped artfully to reveal the moves of her body. Her matching velvet coat wouldn’t keep a kitten warm. It was the kind of winter outfit that said, “I have a limousine and don’t have to worry about getting cold and wet.”

  She had Tucker Fisk’s arm.

  Tucker smiled, showing her off. See my butterfly? Isn’t she beautiful?

  Kevin forced the same smile he hoisted up for any other resident. Then he held the door for them.

  As soon as she saw Kevin, her eyes fixed at the top of his head. A violet constellation twinkled in her eyes where he had once seen a dingy haze. No more meds. But she looked bittersweet somehow, which made him wonder. When she glided past him, he also saw changes in the hair-and-makeup department. Her hair looked cut by an expert, one strand at a time, and diamond earrings shaped like lightning bolts flashed at her ears. Cosmetics covered a few freckles he had seen across her nose, making her more woman than girl. And her skin tone had blossomed somehow, even under the blush she wore, to a healthy peach-glow.

  She looked like, although he hated to use the word, class.

  T
ucker propelled her out the door, his hair slicked straight back for the evening. Then he stopped suddenly and Cornelia with him. Tucker took a long look at Kevin, finally recognizing him behind the uniform.

  “The other night,” Tucker asked him, “how do you suppose that photographer knew to hide out in the alley?”

  Kevin felt calm even while his sphincter tightened, ready—maybe even eager—to face off with Cornelia Lord’s boyfriend. Then he saw, in slashes of red across Cornelia Lord’s cheeks and the tips of her ears, her shame over Tucker’s accusation. In that perturbed face, Kevin recognized the escapee he’d helped. The perfect deb with her diamond earrings could push his bitch-buttons. The escapee underneath was a lost soul.

  To notch back his anger at Tucker Fisk, he looked blankly at a spot over his nose.

  “I don’t know,” Kevin said. “I suppose he thought he was doing his job.”

  “Well,” Tucker flung another spiked glove, “I wonder if you were doing yours.”

  Now Kevin couldn’t help but look Tucker in the eye.

  “Tucker!” Cornelia spoke sharply.

  Kevin saw Cornelia’s gray eyes fill with tiny points of anger.

  “If he can’t take the heat…” Tucker shrugged and left it hanging in the air, grinning at him.

  “It’s not the heat,” Kevin said. “It’s the humility.”

  He picked a large black umbrella out of the stand and held it up so the sharp tip passed not too far from Tucker’s nose. Casually, he held the door open.

  “After you,” Kevin told Cornelia evenly.

  The wind almost knocked them down with the winter’s first snowfall, a heavy one. Tucker led her out the door and Kevin popped the big umbrella open to protect them while he walked behind. The flakes pelted him, dripping down his forehead, as he walked what was only a few yards but seemed like a football field from the front door of 840 Fifth Avenue to the back door of their waiting limousine.

  “So,” Kevin said, with no particular emotion, “you both have a nice evening.”

  “Thank you, Kevin.” She gave him a guilty smile. More than that. Maybe a conspiratorial smile.

  “You look hot—uh, nice, Ms. Lord,” Mike their chauffeur blurted as he held the car door for her.