Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “A clean slate,” Tucker nodded. “I like that. You know, Cornelia and I are getting married on February 14.”

  Dr. Loblitz looked stunned, as though seeing Tucker for the first time.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Dr. Loblitz said. “I could only recommend her release if she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy.”

  “So? I’m convinced.”

  “Mr. Lord is her responsible party. He has to approve my treatment.”

  “I know it’s a burden.” Tucker lifted his laptop onto the table. He opened it up and punched two keys.

  “Mr. Lord isn’t a burden exactly,” Dr. Loblitz said tactfully.

  “No, I mean your student loan,” Tucker told him.

  “What?” Dr. Loblitz’s face reddened.

  Tucker turned his laptop toward the psychiatrist. The screen flashed “LOBLITZ, KENNETH R.” on and off with the number $122,900.00” in blazing red.

  Tucker smiled broadly. “You haven’t made a payment on your student loan for six years.”

  Loblitz wet his large lips. “I bet Chester Lord wouldn’t like whatever you’re suggesting.”

  “All I’m suggesting is that you use your best skills to help Cornelia,” Tucker said solemnly. “I’m just afraid that Chester’s irrational fears are getting in the way. You’re going to cure Cornelia sooner or later anyway. If you do it on my time line to help me, I’m ready to pitch in and help you. Look. Here’s your bank account.”

  Tucker tapped one key and “UNITED BANK OF WESTCHESTER” appeared on the screen with Loblitz’s checking account information in clean lines. The last one read “Balance: $13,560.”

  “And here’s your bank account with Cornelia on shock treatments.” Tucker tapped again and the last line changed to “Balance: $250,560.”

  “Oh my God,” Loblitz said, watching the screen.

  “I’m only asking you to do what you know is right, Ken. If you did choose ECT, how long would the treatments take?”

  “Probably two weeks.” Loblitz’s upper lip began to sweat. “But I can’t guarantee anything. Dr. Burns hates to rush people out of here.”

  “I’ll handle Chester. I watched you, and I know you can handle Burns.”

  Tucker smiled winningly at Dr. Loblitz, who nodded in agreement. Their eyes met again. But their roles had changed dramatically. Now they were brothers-in-arms tackling a mess created by older, obdurate superiors.

  “There’s only one detail.” Tucker reached into his pocket and pulled out an ordinary-looking tie clip. He slipped it onto Dr. Loblitz’s muted tie and smoothed it out. “I want you to wear this to your staff meeting when you talk to Burns.”

  Loblitz looked confused. “What is it?”

  “Just to keep a record, so we’ll know we’re on the same page. If you run into problems with Burns, we’ll listen to the tape and I’ll help you solve them. That’s what I do, Ken, solve problems. Fair enough?”

  Dr. Loblitz’s eyes let his jaw drop watching the screen where $250,560 blinked as though medieval magic occurred there. “I can’t give you any guarantees.”

  “I’m not asking for any.”

  “I just give it my best shot?” Loblitz said. “That’s all?”

  “Hey, you’re the doctor.”

  On the Big Circle, Kevin shuffled in a desultory way with the other sheep from his wing, wearing his Poppin’ Fresh winter coat.

  Cornelia’s group had arrived without her. One of the female patients, a wild-eyed girl with straight hair cut sharply inward at the chin like one long ingrown toenail, whispered to Kevin that Cornelia had two visitors.

  “Her father and a hunk,” she whispered.

  That would be Tucker, Kevin sulked. He kicked up a sparse layer of gray gravel on the Big Circle pathway. He measured his life now in short moments with Cornelia Lord, and the long hours apart. Not seeing her brought a crushing disappointment.

  Soon their exercise period was over and the aides called out, “Vanderbilt II!”

  Kevin hung his head on the winding path back to his wing. They passed the vast stone building where the Sanctuary’s administrative staff worked. Kevin imagined that it looked like a European prison. Maybe the Tower of London looked like that.

  On their route was the parking lot where the senior staff kept their cars.

  Kevin always studied this display of expensive metalwork, marveling at how the designers created little fantasies for the buyers. There were substantial-looking Mercedes 600 and BMW 740 sedans, those slab-sided Autobahn cruisers reeking of power, their taillights notched in like stylish lapels. He wondered what psychiatrists thought, streaking down the parkway in those Teutonic big rigs. He admired the curvier Jaguar sedans from England, lacquered in royal-looking maroons and deep greens, their front grilles a little fussy with serrated chrome. A silvery Porsche 911 looked racy but oddly bulbous, like a potato car made of liquid mercury.

  Walking with his herd around the lot now, he heard the soft throbbing of the big Mercedes limousine before he saw it. The wisp of exhaust from its pipe formed a cloud in the cold. The charcoal gray limousine had been stretched, with even bigger slabs and blackened windows added to the body. Twenty-five feet long with dark windows, it looked like Darth Vader’s car.

  Too late, Kevin saw the driver leaning on the front fender closest to him with his arms folded. He wore a familiar gray flannel chauffeur suit and had taken off his cap, so Kevin recognized him instantly.

  He was Mike, Chester Lord’s driver. And Tucker Fisk’s.

  Their eyes met. Even from fifty feet, Kevin could see Mike squint to figure out who Kevin was. He didn’t have to read lips to see Mike’s beefy mouth, seared like a steak from the cold, form the words, “Son of a bitch.”

  Kevin thought about darting behind another patient, getting lost. But Mike had made him. End of story. Now the driver’s face twisted, wondering why he had just spotted Kevin Doyle, doorman, at the current home-away-from-home of Cornelia Lord.

  Kevin’s brain reeled around, trying to pull together all the facts and impressions he could stuff into the category “Mike the Driver.”

  He knew Mike didn’t always look when he was backing up in the snow. The healed-over gashes in Kevin’s ear and shoulder still hurt in damp weather. Before that night, he had only spoken to Mike maybe four times. Mike spent half his life waiting, but didn’t talk all that much when Kevin had tried to strike up a conversation.

  But from the grunts and gestures and half-smiles he recalled, his instincts made him pretty sure about a few things. Mike was unfailingly loyal to Chester. For whatever reason, he also seemed to get a kick out of Cornelia. And there was that one morsel of hope Kevin could still cling to. Mike had never seemed to like Tucker Fisk. The night Tucker called him to meet in the alley, Mike had wanted to help them carry Cornelia inside. Tucker had told him to shut up and do what he was told.

  He studied Mike’s expression. The driver held his eye with a tight little smile that could be saying either, “You’re mine now, asshole,” or “This I gotta hear.”

  It was too close to call.

  So instead of avoiding him or looking guilty, Kevin smiled back. Then he checked the position of the two aides from Vanderbilt II who were supposed to be herding them. Neither one was watching him. Kevin lowered his head and duck-walked through the herd toward the parking lot. The aides would do a head count when they reached the door, but he had a minute.

  He approached the driver. “How you doing, Mike?”

  “Can’t complain,” Mike said. “You?”

  “Hard to say. You’d better ask my doctors.”

  Mike glanced at the other patients. “That’s what you’re doing here, Kevin? Getting help?”

  “So they say. My union’s got a great health plan.”

  Mike grabbed Kevin’s arm and stuck the beefy face inches from his nose. He could almost feel the bushy brows that stuck out in all directions like quills.

  “Listen, Kevin, I didn’t see you that night. It was a me
ss, snow flying. I was just trying to help. You know that, right?”

  “Sure, Mike.”

  “You here ’cause you got brain damage? I heard the side mirror hit you, sounded like whacking a side of beef with a hammer.”

  Kevin shuddered. “Yeah, that’s what it felt like.”

  “Kevin, answer me honest, okay? Are you going to get a lawyer, sue me for what happened?”

  Kevin paused, as though he were considering it. “You know what I’m thinking, Mike? I’d hate to have anybody know I’m in here. I don’t want their pity.”

  Mike thought that over for what seemed like a week. Then he nodded sagely. “I got you covered. What do you hear about Cornelia?”

  He shrugged. “I never see her. Separate wings, two different worlds.”

  Mike gave a hard, sincere nod. “She’s a good kid. Saved my job. Chester was about to fire me. She made him promise to keep me on.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin nodded. “Sounds like her.”

  “A good kid,” Mike said again, shaking his jowls for emphasis so they waggled like saddlebags. “It pisses me off, the stuff I hear Tucker Fisk saying about her…”

  Mike’s eyes, already moist from the cold air, grew more watery as he looked away.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “To me?” Mike snorted incredulously. “Nothing. Tucker Fisk thinks I’m the part of the steering wheel that says ‘yes sir.’ He forgets I’m there when he’s on the phone.”

  “We’re invisible to guys like Tucker, Mike,” Kevin pointed out. Then he waited as long as he could. “So what did he say about Cornelia?”

  “Calls her flaky… impetuous, that’s the word he likes to use. The only time he ever looked happy talking about her, he was yakking on his cell phone to the Chinese guy. Said he’d only deliver Cornelia if he could be thirty by thirty.”

  “Thirty by thirty? It doesn’t sound like a fun size to be, Mike.”

  The driver shrugged. “All I know is he was grinning like a real shithead when he said it.”

  Kevin had been mulling something over, looking at the driver who thought Corny was a good kid and felt guilty about Kevin. “I got the letter from Cornelia Lord at my building. No stamp. Somebody had to bring it there. You know anything about that?”

  Mike looked at the snow, the little smile spreading across his big jaw again.

  Then suddenly Kevin felt big cold hands like bear paws on both his shoulders. He didn’t have to turn around to know that Luke, the better-natured of the aides on his wing, had been the one to nail him. That was lucky. Luke was a big man with a gentle way about him. He had grown up in the Bronx and studied at City College. Now he gave Kevin a look of mock concern, deep cracks in his forehead.

  “Hey, Sebastian, man, you gonna miss the Punic Wars, you don’t start haulin’ ass back to your wing.” Luke turned to Mike. “Saint Sebastian bothering you, sir?”

  Mike looked vacant. “Nah. This guy don’t bother me at all.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  In Vanderbilt II, Kevin dressed for his first social in a spiffy WASP ensemble from the Sanctuary Boutique.

  He slipped on a green wool blazer over a pink cotton shirt with button-down collar and a Sanctuary tie. This would be the closest he’d ever come to an old-school tie. Looking just right mattered. This would be his first actual date with Cornelia, where they had made plans to meet in a social setting.

  Sweaty palms deluxe.

  He felt the mix of anticipation and dread he recalled from his first real date at fourteen, dressed up to take a girl from the neighborhood to a party. He’d gone to Marne for advice. His sister was strikingly pretty at thirteen and already fielding guys.

  “Put your tongue back in your mouth,” Marne had told him. “Stop looking at the girl and find the person.”

  Good advice, but he always found the wrong person. He also realized, from the oily street-corner Romeos and neighborhood psychos who showed up to take Marne on dates, she wasn’t doing much better. Nobody really knew anything when it came to dating.

  In high school, blinded by his heat-seeking Cyclops, he’d ignored Marne and jumped into heart-pumping infatuations with any girl who encouraged him. Other guys could do that and move on. He couldn’t. He wasn’t raised by his mother and two sisters to hurt girls’ feelings. So he spent his high school years in a luckless pattern of spending three days in every new relationship and six months trying to break up. Twice he thought about changing schools.

  After he’d gone out in the world and discovered neon, he only wanted women who had a BoHo way of looking at things. They tended to look and act spooky, which he wrote off to having an artist’s way of viewing the world, an artist’s eye, and not being appreciated. But most of them turned out to actually be spooky. None of them had an artist’s eye, but they did have probation officers or jealous boyfriends on Rikers Island who carved homemade tattoos on their arms and sometimes their foreheads.

  The more he worked on his neon at NYIAT, the more his art took out of him. It was like having a bitchy girlfriend who was never satisfied. Then Cornelia Lord came along.

  Could he form a total mind meld with Cornelia and take up Nikola Tesla as his cause, both united in amperes? Maybe. Could he honestly help her search for an electrical tower South of the Border? The truth, no. The problem was, he had studied just enough electricity to know how it worked. A utility like Con Ed fed electricity to people through wires. What Tesla was trying to do, build a tower to broadcast electricity to everybody through the airwaves, that was a story only Vlad the Self-Impaler could get behind.

  Despite what he had told Marne, Corny’s ideas didn’t always add up.

  He picked up the book about Nikola Tesla he had checked out of the Sanctuary library and glanced through the pictures of Tesla’s inventions. Some of Tesla’s ideas belonged in cloud-cuckoo-land, funky Victorian helicopters like Corny had in her museum and Star Trek particle beam machines. Why Cornelia Lord chose to pledge her soul to this man was the puzzle of the decade.

  Then he turned to a page of his Tesla book and stared. It was a copy of an old letter. He read it twice, then read it again. This musty historical document, he believed, was Cornelia Lord’s personal fly.

  He closed his eyes. You have to trust me sometime, she had told him, then kissed him. He still tingled thinking about it. She had sacrificed her own freedom to keep him safe when she vanished of her own free will into the police car. He owed her a leap of faith. If she wanted to believe in Tesla, maybe he shouldn’t discourage her. He just had to make sure he knew why.

  Knowing her, really knowing her, would be his gift to Cornelia.

  On Astor II, Cornelia dressed in one of the black cocktail dresses O’Connell had packed for her.

  Since her hands were a little shaky from the meds, and from the jitters of her first date with Kevin, she let an aide apply makeup. She brushed her own hair. Then she slipped on her shoes. Not high heels. They were illegal here. No doubt because she needed steady footing so she wouldn’t keel over from the meds that kept her body unstable, as though she balanced herself on a long spring that swayed back and forth. She settled on flat espadrilles.

  She felt completely Cornelia tonight, just as she had tried to be the evening of her father’s office party. But there was a huge difference. Now she didn’t need to talk herself into anything. With Kevin, she never had to fake calm. She was calm.

  And now he had done the impossible, breaking into this dungeon of psychiatry to rescue her.

  They were protected here. As long as they were both discreet, they would be able to explore what they had, within certain limitations. And maybe that part was good, too. The constraints made them free, in a funny way, like school uniforms.

  With thorny issues of sex and status on hold for the time being, they would be only Cornelia and Kevin.

  The Electric Girl might want to work alone, but Cornelia had grown so tired of that lonely vigil. The risk was that Kevin might get to know her too well. The longer
her father knew her, the less contact he had with her. If your own father didn’t want to be with you, who did? Tina French and other trust fund delinquents. And for his own murky reasons, Tucker Fisk.

  Kevin came from another world where, even though he was too kind to say so, a Cornelia Lord was distrusted. She felt the sting of his wariness, sensed he was afraid.

  She bit her lip. Her own fear nagged, like being nibbled to death by ducks. One day, when she became the girl in Penthouse A again, would he still follow her like she had followed his corona?

  Evening socials are planned by our staff to provide social interaction in the comfort of a chaperoned setting.

  Kevin had read that in his Sanctuary brochure.

  He stood in the club room for evening socials, the Abraham Maslow Room. In this fine, old mahogany-paneled hall with vaulted ceilings and wire-gated glass, patients abided by a strict Dress and Conduct Code. Men needed jackets and ties, with the added stress of matching socks. Women were supposed to wear party dresses and flat shoes, but no sneakers.

  And no physical contact.

  Kevin looked around the room, admiring the patients who’d given it the old college try. Male patients who ran naked and snarling through his wing now held chairs for female patients. It didn’t seem that different from the outside, where guys left alone tended to act like crazed apes and only pulled themselves together to meet girls.

  This would be his first upper-class party. He expected plenty of slack, because some of the guests who stared into space or snapped their fingers continuously probably didn’t have a heavy social calendar on the outside.

  Cornelia waited alone on a couch. He followed her stare dreamily out the bay window with only a thin mask of wire. It had begun to snow, trapping the white flakes in outdoor spotlights. Holiday lights twinkled on all the tree branches. It reminded him of probably the most bucolic place he had ever seen at Christmas, the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park.