Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  He turned to his sister. “Is that what I am, Helen? Selfish and irresponsible?”

  She said nothing.

  “Okay. I respect what you’re telling me. I just want to say something. Hey, sit down,” he barked when Harold started to get up. “This is for you, too.”

  Harold fell back into the cushion of the Naugahyde sofa, hissing like a tire losing air.

  “Helen, when you were at CCNY having an affair with Harold, you weren’t even eighteen yet and he was married.”

  “That was different,” Helen said.

  “It’s always different when it’s you. Mom and Dad were raising hell. Marne was going to report Harold to the college, screwing around with an underage student. But I said, maybe it’s not ethical, maybe it’s not legal, maybe it’s crazy. But it’s Helen, and she loves the guy, right or wrong. Let’s wait, see what happens.” Kevin took a long pause. “All I need is a shot at it, Helen.”

  Uh-oh. He’d gotten a little carried away. He hoped he didn’t hurt her feelings. But somewhere along the way Helen seemed to have lost her ability to feel either pain or pleasure.

  She set her jawline tight as a vault. “You’d better go.”

  Kevin stood up and walked out of the apartment. He didn’t slam the door behind him, but clicked it shut very politely to make more of a statement.

  He heard Harold through the doorway. “You know, he guilts pretty good, for a guy who isn’t even Jewish.”

  * * *

  He took the subway to the Columbia University library.

  Philip Grace, who had actually attended Columbia for one semester, had kept his campus ID card and given it to Kevin to customize. Using a matte knife, he had inserted his own photograph taken in a booth. Then he changed the dates carefully with a stippling pen. Finally, he put his creation in a plastic laminating machine and became Kevin Doyle, Columbia student.

  The security guard at the Columbia University library entrance barely glanced at the doctored ID when he walked past.

  He started in the room where they kept the psychology stacks. Carting six volumes to a table, Kevin suddenly felt desperately tired. Not just physically, but from a kind of hopelessness. He looked around the table at the Columbia students with piles of books open in front of them, taking notes on pads and laptops. They would go on to be doctors, captains of industry, lawyers.

  It reminded him of all the money and power that would be against him in his struggle. Not just Tucker Fisk, and Chester Lord, but the entire Establishment, whatever that was, down to his own pathetic municipal lifer brother-in-law Harold.

  On Kevin’s side, he had Uncle Eddie’s health plan and a half-baked reporter with a bunch of temporary restraining orders.

  “How can I lose?” he snarled out loud.

  A few people at the library table took unnecessary zeal in shushing him. Kevin opened a fat book called The Diagnostic Manual of Psychiatry familiarly known as the DMP, and a companion book, DMP for Dummies.

  He knew these books from his work at Bellevue. They gave mental health workers a way of classifying the weird things candidates for admission did, like confusing their spouses for empty milk cartons and trying to squeeze them into trash compactors. The categories were coded in the DMP, and an admitting psychologist would check off boxes.

  Kevin plunged through the diagnostic codes for different conditions. He studied 1003.1 with care, “Delusional Disorders, Grandiose.” It came with a list of symptoms like a menu.

  Kevin sampled other books, paying close attention to Treating the Delusional Adult, by Dr. John Blackwell. Philip Grace had given him Blackwell’s name, a Park Avenue psychiatrist with society credentials. If Kevin could fool Blackwell, the doctor would refer him to the Sanctuary and think he was practicing medicine. The problem, as Harold pointed out, was the lie scales on the psychiatric tests.

  The main diagnostic test was called the Maryland Mental Questionnaire, or MMQ. It had trick questions to trap people who were faking mental illness. If he couldn’t get his hands on the MMQ test manual, he’d be snared by the random sneakiness of the lie scale questions.

  When he finished with the psychology section, he moved to history. He studied Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for a time, then returned to the psychology stacks.

  After fifteen hours, the horrible, turgid writing in the textbooks finally got to him. Now he could clearly see how easily he would fail. Doctors could actually read these books and understand them. He’d never beat the doctors at their own game.

  What would really happen was, Cornelia would get beaten by the system, too, just at a much higher level. She would become Mrs. Tucker Fisk. In a couple of years, Kevin would touch his hat to the happy couple every day. Or at least Tucker’s half of the couple would be happy, as they breezed past him in the lobby of 840 Fifth with a nanny pushing a baby carriage. The swift, sure injustice of it all finally whizzed down on his neck and detached his will to go on.

  He left the reference books on the table. In a few minutes, he was falling asleep on the subway home.

  His own slumlord paid Con Ed every month, but the light fixtures had been stolen from the building again.

  He looked at the walls, ripped out by junkies for the copper wires inside. For the first time, rage tore through him as he saw the violated walls. He ran upstairs and slammed his hand against his splintered wooden door. It flew open, unlocked. Somebody had been there.

  He kicked his door frame, tears welling up, and lunged into his apartment. He didn’t care anymore. The crack addicts could throw him against the wall and gun him down like a dog.

  “Come on, you bastards,” he bellowed.

  Nobody answered, but he kicked something small with his foot.

  A black rectangular box sat on his floor with a note underneath it. He stared at it without picking it up. Maybe Tucker Fisk had left a bomb inside his apartment.

  It would probably be an exploding nail bomb. A thousand nails would fly into his body. He would bleed to death from all the holes. He would never see his family or Cornelia again. At least Saint Sebastian would survive, back at the school.

  Then he looked more closely at the writing on the note. It started “Kevin, take this MM…” The rest of the note was obscured by the box.

  Kevin bent over and squeezed the sheet of paper carefully between his two fingers. He gently held the box so it wouldn’t slide. Then he slowly pulled the paper out along the floor until he could read it.

  “Kevin, take this MMQ and use the guidebook. You must return it to me by tomorrow morning.”

  It was signed, “H.” He knew it wasn’t Harold.

  His heart pounded. The Maryland Mental Questionnaire. His heart raced as he leafed through the secret User’s Guidebook, found the L scale for trapping liars. He ran his finger down the top of the long row of cards packed in the black cardboard box, each card asking a question requiring a yes or no. Kevin seized one card at random. The statement read, “In real life, I am a messenger from God.”

  Things were finally starting to look up.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Are you sitting down, Kevin? I’m about to make you flavor of the month,” Jessica Fernandez of the Stinson Gallery told him over the phone.

  He had been waiting for this call all his life.

  Now, in his apartment at ten in the morning, sluggish after staying awake memorizing the MMQ on the brink of his mission, he pictured Jessica in a short black skirt with her slinky legs crossed, her long fingers with blood-red nails playing with the telephone cord. Her eyebrows, those little peaked roofs, would be raised while she spoke to him.

  “Jessica,” he managed, “why now?”

  “The minute I saw the story about you on the front page, getting hit in the head by the limo? I took out my Rolodex and called seventeen clients,” Jessica said. “I told them you were a method artist, that you needed to hurt yourself badly to perfect your neon saint. My client Jack Bremer, he owns that custom plumbing company, Mr. Bidet? He ate it
up, Kevin. He’s going to buy Saint Sebastian.”

  “Jessica, I made Sebastian glow,” he began to tell her.

  “Yes, darling, it’s neon.”

  “I’m using fiber optics now. You have to see it.”

  “Okay, I can see it clearly, Kevin. You had an epiphany, getting hurt in the accident. I’m building on the marketing strategy already. The important thing is, you’ve got to get working, fast. I need more product, much more product, as fast as you can make it.”

  He tried to think of some way to explain to her.

  “Kevin, why aren’t you answering me? You’re up in a bubble right now, but it’s going to burst anytime. I need to build momentum for you. How soon can you make more pieces?”

  “The thing is, I have to go away for a while. Maybe a couple of weeks, a month…”

  “Kevin,” she snapped at him, “you will not be salable in a couple of weeks or even a couple of days. Are you listening to me? I found a buyer now.”

  “But what I have to do, it’s very important to me.”

  “Kevin”—she sounded wary—“did you sign with another gallery?”

  “No.”

  “I want you to meet me for lunch today. I’ll bring a contract. Schrappnel at noon.”

  “Thanks, Jessica.”

  The abrupt disconnect buzz came. Definitely Jessica Fernandez. Not a dream. He suddenly collapsed onto his knees, clutching the phone to his chest.

  But why now?

  For months, he had rehearsed how he would handle the glorious news of a sale if and when this call ever came. The truth was, he would have just yelped and done a wild goat dance of victory. But now all that had changed. His new mission directly conflicted with the glossy world of Jessica Fernandez, actually shrunk it down from the galactic importance it once held.

  He could still have lunch. He deserved just a taste of the sweet fruit, to sun himself for maybe an hour in the new Art Life that would end as suddenly as it had begun.

  Calling his sister at the fire station where she worked in the rump of Brooklyn, he could practically hear the water from Dead Horse Bay lap at the station door while she came to the phone.

  “Marne, I need a favor, bad. It involves wearing something you might put on to go to church and meeting me on Park Avenue. You can’t tell anyone.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you. I just need to know if you’re in.”

  “I dunno. Is it about that debutante?”

  “Maybe.” Silence. “Marne?”

  “This better be good, Kevin.”

  Crossing over the threshold of Schrappnel gave Kevin bumps on his arms.

  The heavy-duty art, film, and music people ate here in TriBeCa, the epicenter of Art Life, the volume of their chatter careening off the hard surfaces. Languid models looking for jobs served their food with adoration. He had read that a syndicate of dentists from Long Island owned the place, and they hired the metal sculptor Xavier Schrapp to decorate it and used his name to give it tone. Schrapp was one of Jessica’s clients. She had pushed him to an oeuvre of tortured metalwork she called “Schrappnel.” Brand names were key to Jessica’s artist-marketing strategy.

  For the restaurant, Schrapp had chosen a theme of danger. It forced Kevin to be careful squeezing to his table, to avoid being pierced by the sharp metal projectiles sticking up and out from the floor and walls. He’d bet that Schrapp executed the design in one day by setting off dynamite in some Bronx auto graveyard and dumping the result in the restaurant, then playing the artiste by forbidding the owners to move a single jagged piece.

  Meeting Jessica Fernandez, here at the Valhalla for New York artists, to talk about the sale of his work. He wished his mother could see him now, being led by a stunning sylph with a permapout to a corner table. Jessica looked even slinkier than he imagined, a little black dress over her golden brown exuberant body, the sulking red lips.

  He wished, brushing by a metal spike, that Cornelia could see him, too. But should she see Jessica? Would Corny get jealous over him? He wondered if Cornelia even had a jealous bone in her body. Somehow, she seemed beyond that. He had to add that question to others he had formed about her since she had followed his corona to his apartment.

  Jessica stood up and gave him both sides of her face to kiss. A waiter hustled over with a champagne bucket and made a fuss of pouring them two flute glasses with perfectly equal crests of fizz. The man performed with his own topspin, like a wannabe actor. He held the bottle in such a way that Kevin could read “Krug” on the label before it got crunched back in the ice bucket.

  “To those baby-blue eyes and all the green they’ll make us,” Jessica toasted him, wrinkling her nose at the ugly black stitches in his ear.

  Kevin drank the champagne and felt the merry bubbles tickling his nostrils. After a moment, they struck his brain.

  “Your hair doesn’t match your eyes,” she said. “Are you really Irish?”

  “Black Irish,” Kevin said.

  “I’m Cuban, you know.” She smiled at him like Salome contemplating John the Baptist. “What I was thinking, I have a house in East Hampton with a studio. We can get it fixed up for you and you can turn out, say, one piece a week.”

  “One piece of what?”

  She seemed flustered for a moment, leaving an imprint of her red lips on the champagne glass. “You know, what you’re doing. More neon saints.”

  “Jessica, I don’t want to do any more saints. Somebody showed me how to work with freestanding fiber optics. I’m ready to move on.”

  Jessica Fernandez looked as stung and betrayed as though he’d stabbed her with his bread knife.

  “Kevin, no!” Scolding a dog. “You will not do any little artsy-fartsy departures on me. You will only do art that people will buy.”

  “It’s not creative unless it sells?” He sighed. The attractive qualities he once saw in Jessica Fernandez were falling away now, like shedding skin. Well, he only came to bask in the moment. He might as well have his fun with it.

  “I guess I could do Saint Catherine next, spread-eagled and spinning on a wheel in the fire. Make the piece move with light, use red and yellow, some kind of burnt-flesh tones.”

  “Like crème brûlée,” she agreed. “Brilliant.”

  “Then maybe Joan of Arc. Whites and blues. I can make her feet dance in the flames. I can do a whole series, call it Rhythm of the Saints.”

  “Astonishing. You’re a genius, darling. How long does it take you to make these saints?”

  “Sebastian only took two years.”

  Jessica’s smile dropped below the horizon and her face lost its creamy luster. “We’re going to have to speed the process up. Can’t you do something smaller? Maybe something we can merchandise in volume?”

  He thought it over.

  “I guess I could start with a Saint Sebastian pencil holder.”

  Her eyes sparkled again, and he realized that Jessica had also begun turning them on him in a new, heavy-lidded way.

  Her eyelids reminded him of a reptile’s the way they closed from both top and bottom. Her hand casually dropped below the table to touch his leg. Just you and me together on this rock, sunning ourselves, and don’t let the fact that I’m all coiled up and ready to strike bother you.

  Unless he struck first. “Jessica, have you ever been in love?”

  “What are you asking me?” Her eyes smoldered.

  Kevin stood up. “All I can tell you is, I fell in love with somebody. She went away and it’s like losing a leg or something. It changes your priorities about life. No more saints. I’m sorry. Maybe some other time.”

  She looked so damaged. “Did I offend you, Kevin?”

  He took a last sip and saw in the flute glass his career circling the drain.

  “Thanks for the champagne. I really have to go.”

  “Kevin, just remember,” she recovered, calling loudly after him as he worked his way through the tables and sharp points. “You have until five o’clock to change yo
ur mind and call me. Or you can stick that mall art up your ass, darling.”

  The lunch crowd turned around to watch him. He was only punctured by one of Schrapp’s twisted fenders before he made it out the door.

  His breath made a circle that appeared and went away on the window of the Hyperkinesis Gallery on Greene Street.

  He stared inside at a metal-and-light sculpture in the window with a red “Sold” tag on it. The red tag seemed almost larger than the sculpture, the way he concentrated on it. He thought about “cognitive dissonance,” a concept he had run across in his four-day crash course in psychology. It said that once you make a decision, all of the negatives about it pop up like demons in your brain. The psychologists said you should ignore it.

  But looking at the red “Sold” tag in front of him, Kevin thought that maybe cognitive dissonance was a bullshit concept. People made decisions that ruin their lives every day. Like Romeo killing himself, believing Juliet was already dead. Or Kevin pissing off Jessica Fernandez when she was ready to ignite his Art Life.

  He wondered. He had begun walking toward his apartment at some point, in what felt like a low-level coma. Was it possible to create a Twilight Zone kind of reverse ending, to turn the clock back by just one hour? That’s all he would need. Jessica would show up at the restaurant feeling good about him again. He would just drop down on his knees and ask for the train schedule to East Hampton. He glanced down. Unconsciously, his feet had actually started moving a little faster.

  No.

  He slowed down again. Cornelia had changed him. Before Corny, he just crept around the idea of love, too timid to really go after it. Like golfers on television who walk around the hole fifty times measuring and pointing with their clubs because they don’t really want to take the shot. Cornelia was a catalyst for good things. But, at the moment, she happened to be Tucker Fisk’s catalyst.

  His plan was so insane that maybe he really did belong in a psychiatric hospital. He could probably just tell the Sanctuary doctors what his plan was, and they would look at one another and open their doors to him. Any struggling artist who blew off Jessica Fernandez was a certifiable lunatic.