by Chris Gilson
She smiled and folded her slender legs to slip into the back seat.
Kevin watched Cornelia and Tucker take off in the cheesy little limousine. The queen of mixed signals, this one. He wondered what condition she’d be in the next time they met.
It wouldn’t do to seethe at Tucker with all they had to do tonight.
Cornelia worked to establish a tone of peace and harmony when they popped out of the limousine at Koi Tower. She stood transfixed by the white dazzle of the snowfall.
“It’s so beautiful,” she breathed.
“It’s beautiful on ski slopes and Christmas cards,” Tucker said. “In Manhattan, it’s just a problem. Everything gets fouled up and takes three times as long.”
What a pill he could be. But she let Tucker take her arm and escort her through the crooked portals of Koi Tower. Her high heels clicked across the marble floor to the special elevator guarded by a big, alert Asian man in a blue blazer with a Lord & Company logo patch on the pocket.
While the elevator lifted them to the forty-second floor in one genteel whoosh, she braced herself to make the best of an evening, full of fake laughter and the empty calories of social chitchat. She could also count on much whispering behind her back.
She positioned her mouth in a half-smile. She could wear this expression almost indefinitely, unlike the full Town & Country jawbreaker smile that bared all your teeth and gums almost from ear to ear and could wear out facial muscles in a matter of minutes.
“I think you should let me do most of the talking,” Tucker said. “These people are vicious.”
“Are they?” She made a little O with her mouth, on purpose this time.
He glanced at her. “And I invited the Kois.”
“Will they come?”
“I’m sure of it. When we make our announcement, don’t be surprised if they’re poker-faced. They’re good at that.”
She paused. “How can you be so sure they’ll show up?”
His smile cracked a little. “I just know these things.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
He said nothing more until the elevator door opened.
The blast of noise and heat from the party was like an open furnace. Tucker kept a restraining grip on her arm, as if the Electric Girl might escape. But tonight she had agreed to be demure and deliver her engagement lines.
The executive offices of Lord & Company occupied this entire floor of Koi Tower. Floor-to-ceiling glass exposed a full 360-degree sweep of Midtown Manhattan, wrapping glitter around the party guests.
Cornelia hadn’t seen the office since she had come to visit her father a year ago. Tonight, the Macho Renaissance of Tucker’s interior design amused her all over again, and she had to giggle.
A postmodern entryway had been designed so it seemed to crumble in front of them, creating a giant hole. The floor at first looked like tarpaper, but on closer inspection turned out to be expensive distressed marble. It looked like someone had poured battery acid over it.
The serpentine video wall that Tucker had installed dominated the center of the entire executive floor. It blinked and beeped more like some consumer electronics show exhibit than the hallowed halls of a once-stuffy investment banking firm.
“There’s the Winking Wall,” she said to annoy him.
The S-shaped granite monolith with holes punched out for television monitors was programmed to scan stock markets across the globe. Tonight, only the Hong Kong and Tokyo exchanges ground out numbers. Other monitors glowed with the TV-Web sites of Lord & Company clients. One screen showed a black-and-white Christmas film, Jimmy Stewart shaking hands with an evil old man, then looking down at his hand as though it had been coated with slime.
She saw a videographer with a ponytail point his camera at party-goers, throwing their manically festive images onto screens of the Winking Wall as well.
She remembered well that last visit to the office, the day the Asian stock markets took a whale-sized dive and sent waves of clammy fear through Lord & Company. Then the granite monolith had looked more like the Wailing Wall, with the fortunes of Lord & Company tied to the Kois. But now the video images blinked almost reverently.
“This floor is definitely a look,” she told Tucker evenly, determined to be nice.
“We have to make our people comfortable.” He shrugged modestly.
“Hmmm.” She didn’t argue, but knew that except for a few top slice-and-dicers, the real employees of Lord & Company worked in cramped cubicles downstairs on the forty-first floor.
This floor, Cornelia suspected, was really designed to dazzle visitors with Tucker’s need to buy and then discard things that lit up and beeped. He boasted spending millions each year to install new technoglitz to impress new clients, companies with names like CyberSpend and Firewall Blasters. He spoke of his gift for landing twenty-three-year-old tech-sector geniuses who drank Surge and did interviews for Wired, seeming to make up their own language as they went along.
“You have to understand these guys I do business with,” Tucker whispered, and it jolted her that he could have read her thoughts. “They’re idiot savants, but they’ve got the savant part down as much as the idiot part. And they’ve all got egos like football stars.” Tucker shook his head. “I get dates for these geeks, take them to Knicks games, that kind of stuff.”
So Tucker did understand some people’s needs. In the waves of party guests, she saw several of the boy businessmen he talked about with big-framed glasses and funny bowl haircuts. A whole regiment of pouty, giggling models had been hired to fling themselves into the party throng like confetti.
Tucker had brought new life to the somber, if not quite sober, atmosphere that prevailed at Lord & Company when Granddad and Chester ran the show.
A blond girl, about seventeen, in a tuxedo jacket longer than her skirt and black plastic helmet, careened toward them on Rollerblades. She skidded to a stop half an inch from Tucker’s toe.
“Champagne?” the teenager asked, holding out a server tray of flute glasses. Tucker took one, but she did not.
“Merry Christmas.” Cornelia flicked Tucker’s glass with her fingernail and made it chime.
“Merry Christmas, Corny,” he said.
She noted a U-shaped bar where young men and women as generically good-looking as daytime TV actors poured drinks furiously. Beyond the bar, a magnificent Christmas tree stood in the epicenter of the room. Tiny electrical candles with glass flames lit the bristly, perfect branches of the tree, this Scotch pine almost too perfect to be bred in nature. Out of habit, the Electric Girl followed the tangled cords from the tree lights to their energy source. A heavy-duty orange electrical outlet on the floor bristled with wires, like a porcupine.
Cornelia removed her gloves, and the diamond of her mother’s ring caught the light, reflecting it like a laser show.
As she and Tucker crossed the floor, she felt a giddy rush. Their entrance reverberated, sending ripples. Ice stopped tinkling in glasses. Guests halted in mid-sentence.
The first to clap his hands was Chester Lord, twice.
Then the applause began softly and grew.
She thought the applause was for Tucker, and started clapping. He quickly seized her wrist. And then she looked into the faces of the crowd, lighting on a jowly banker, a hungry socialite, a happy young client whose lip vibrated like a rabbit. It shocked her to her shoes to realize that they were applauding her.
It was the first time she had been applauded for anything since her coming-out party at the St. Regis, before she vanished from that rite of passage and caused a bit of a stink.
But this was a spontaneous and raucous ovation, spiked with cheers and whistles, a symphony of approval. It filled her with the instant happiness she once felt as a child at Christmastime.
But it was even more. She hadn’t enjoyed a moment when she felt so overwhelmingly welcome since her mother died.
Her hand squeezed Tucker’s. Bathed in the applause, he looked as vainglorious as a ca
rtoon hero, almost shaped like a cone with his big shoulders tapering all the way down in a sleek black suit to Italian shoes like bedroom slippers.
She let him lead her, slipping through the crowd as easily as an eel sliding through oil. She didn’t have to say much, other than “Hello” and “It’s good to see you.”
“I’ve known you since you were this high,” a face in a pin-striped suit with thick white hair said, holding his palm at waist level. She didn’t recognize him.
“You look gorgeous, Cornelia,” said an older woman in a dress shaped like a trumpet.
“Thank you.” She lowered her voice. “Tucker, who are these people?”
“The guy was nobody, the woman was somebody’s wife,” Tucker muttered back.
“Aren’t the photographers horrid?” another woman hissed on her behalf. From her rather feral eyes, she recognized Elsa Innsbruck, a fashion magazine editor.
“She rounded up the models,” Tucker explained.
Cornelia smiled and said nothing. She thought of the photographer with the resurrected coat, Philip Grace. She didn’t consider him horrid, just a nuisance. Many so-called respectable people, like Dr. Bushberg, were worse predators but seemed to sneak in under everyone’s radar.
Tucker gently guided her toward the center of the room where Chester stood. Passing the Christmas tree, she noticed that the sparkling ornaments were miniature versions of the Kois’ products.
And then the Kois appeared in front of Chester.
She worked hard to smile, repressing her disgust at their monstrous toadish forms. That’s how they looked to her now, knowing their perfidy. For the first time she noted that Koi père et fils shared stout, ungraceful bodies. But also the same clever tailor, who draped them in tuxedos made of a midnight-blue fabric so fine and exotic it could have been flown in from another planet. Both had full heads of hair, Senior’s white and Junior’s jet-black.
Han Senior bobbed his head.
“Little Corny, all grown up. Full of spirit.”
“Yes. We always read about you in the papers,” Han Junior said with a tight smile, silky and rude.
Then they were past the Kois and Chester stood before her with his arms held open. His eyes were moist and he gently took both her hands in his, protectively squeezing her fingers.
“Hi, Daddy,” Cornelia said.
She took him off guard, realizing that she hadn’t called him that in years.
“You look lovely,” he blurted out, obviously shocked.
Chester impetuously slipped one arm over her shoulders and his other up and around Tucker’s, having to stand almost on tiptoe to reach around Tucker’s neck. Awkward in his impulse, Chester drew them both close to him, hugged her tightly with stiff muscles, then let them go. His sweet attention lingered with her, even as he turned back to perform his host duties.
She snuck a quick look at the Kois when they thought her back was turned, to catch them with evidence of fraud across their faces. But old Han merely smiled at some guest in the same half-frozen way she did herself. She stared and Han caught her furtive look. He lifted his glass to toast her. Mocking her, she supposed. She studied the corona that wrapped around the head of Han Senior. It was neutral in color, like the airy vapors that drift over asphalt on a blistering-hot day.
Han Junior didn’t notice her spying on him. He talked to a model about Cornelia’s age with biggish hair. Her sleazy dress exposed cutouts of flesh. She looked awfully obvious for this crowd.
“A sidewalk Cinderella,” Tucker whispered to her. “I hired her to keep an eye on the Kois.”
She focused herself to make out the corona of Han Junior. It was half-formed—faint but already noxious, with a rusty cast. She could only think of it as a starter corona, taking shape like a twelve-year-old boy’s patchy mustache. She shut her eyes and shook her head, to rid herself of the image.
She wondered. Tucker had told her that Old Han kept his middle-aged son on a short leash. How did Chester manage to talk to old Han Koi? He was probably dying to lunge for the old pirate’s neck and throttle his turkey wattles.
She made a particular effort to analyze Chester’s corona this evening. It had grown so weak lately as to be almost undetectable. Tonight the haze had brightened, a wisp of hopeful light still trimmed with its old outline of sputtering sadness.
His energy’s almost gone, she heard the Electric Girl whisper. Look at how his corona fades.
She gradually lost her thrill at being a star of the evening. Chester seemed so vulnerable here, surrounded by people of more vitality and less principle. His tenderness touched her in ways recalled from her childhood. She couldn’t throw off his sense of fuzzy weakness.
Now she turned her corona analysis to the enigmatic Tucker. She studied the outline of his hair as he threw his head back and laughed at some guest’s remark. She could still find no trace of a corona. Not even a dewdrop of light around his powerful head.
Tucker. Early that day, he had actually handed her a page of triple-spaced text telling her what to say when she stood in the spotlight and announced their engagement. It was the sort of large-type, simple-minded creation a political handler would give a not-too-bright candidate.
She had torn up his page while he watched, horrified. Then, for good measure, she yelled “Wheeee!” with a crazed look and threw the little pieces up over his head. As the white confetti of his script fell on his hair and shoulders, she told him sharply that she would manage to put together a few words that wouldn’t embarrass him.
Her mantra for the evening, no drinking, no Tesla, thumped like a drum in her head.
She weaved through the throng, chatting with guests. She finished sipping her third mineral water. Applause, or not, social chatter was still thirsty work.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she whispered to Tucker, in a huddle with other tycoons.
He nodded, seeming comfortable with letting her go off by herself.
Cornelia smiled her way through the crowd and wound up out in the foyer. Typically, there was a line in front of the women’s bathroom and not the men’s. In her Electric Girl mode, she might have just slipped in and used the men’s room for efficiency. But tonight she felt her duty to be demure.
Instead of waiting in line, she darted down the spiral staircase to the working floor of Lord & Company to use one of their bathrooms.
On this floor, the windows were obscured by a lab-rat maze of small cubicles where the scut work of Lord & Company was performed. Here she imagined a lot of people in short hair and starched shirts plowing through information like pieceworkers in a sweatshop, wearing splints on their arms to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. The working floor seemed deserted this evening as she walked toward the bathrooms. She marveled at the sterility of the workstations. The employees’ only revolt over the corporate blandness seemed to be pinning up Dilbert cartoons and their childrens’ artwork. A few chirps of brittle laughter came from a distance.
She walked through a narrow corridor that separated the cubicles from outer offices with doors. Even the real offices had glass walls so the occupants could be closely watched.
As she passed a glass wall, she glimpsed something familiar. This office had been turned into a storeroom full of boxes.
They were the same boxes she had seen in the airport hangar.
Behind them, she saw the big video screen that Tucker had used. All the supplies she had seen in the airport hangar seemed to be here now. She peered in to squint at a sign somebody had scrawled with a Magic Marker, “RETURN TO STORES BEFORE DEC. 30.”
A warning noise rustled in her head, like a sheet of aluminum being shaken.
She made her way down the cubicles until she found life. Two men and a woman in their twenties sat drinking New York State champagne in plastic cups, and talking office politics. They had deep bags under their eyes and all wore their hair cropped short. The men had their sleeves rolled up and ties askew.
“Aren’t you Cornelia Lord?” The woman stared at he
r diamond as though it were the Star of India. “Is that an engagement ring?”
“Not yet,” Cornelia told her. “So how are you?”
“Great. It’s been a killer quarter,” the first young man told her.
She nodded appreciatively. “What’s all that stuff in the empty office? The maps and boxes?”
“Some presentation for a client, all sorts of travel gear,” the woman told her, wagging her head over a fool’s errand. “But I guess it didn’t work. We have to take it all back to the stores.”
“Yeah,” the second young man spoke up. “I told Tucker we’d return all this stuff to Safari Outfitters for a refund right after Christmas.”
“How nice,” she said. “Do you happen to remember a picture of an old man?” she asked. “A South American?”
“He wasn’t South American.” The young woman rolled her eyes. “I pulled it off the Web myself. I had two hours to find a shot of a guy who looked like a Brazilian over eighty years old. I downloaded it from a Seniors Without Partners site.”
The Electric Girl’s head rattled again, more vehemently. I told you so, she heard the metallic voice in her head say.
“So who was this presentation for?”
“I dunno,” the first young man sighed. “We’re kind of low on the food chain down here. Tucker Fisk’s team ran the thing. We just did what we were told.”
The Electric Girl felt a distinct snap somewhere in her head. The clean-cut trio in front of her looked suddenly terrified.
“Ms. Lord, are you okay? Can we get you some water?”
“Maybe just a sip of that champagne,” she told them. She grabbed an unopened bottle off the desk and popped the cork expertly. It shot into the cubicle ricocheting off a wall as the young executives ducked. She took a long, sloppy drink, the lusty fizz tickling her throat and running down her chin.
She collected her thoughts as she drank, trying to sort out what to do next. She didn’t stop until the bottle was almost empty.
In the downstairs bathroom mirror, when she finally got to it, she noticed that her hair stood on end, frizzing. Her eyes flashed now, Cornelia’s soft gray taken over by the Electric Girl’s fuses.