Crazy for Cornelia (35 page)

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 mess, 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.”

I
n 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.

Over the sound system, a scratchy old record played on a turntable. His mother and father had actually danced to the same
record album,
South Pacific
, about twenty years ago. It had brought out his parents’ sappy, romantic side that, in hindsight, was pretty nice.

He maneuvered in front of Cornelia and she slowly turned, first looking up to the top of his hair.

“Is it just me, or is this a good song?” he asked her.

“It’s called ‘Bali Ha’i.’ Someone’s idea of paradise.” She smiled
and patted the seat for him to sit down. “You’re not looking much like Saint Sebastian tonight.”

“I’d strip down to my loincloth, but I’m afraid they’d take me off socials.”

“It’s a fine line,” she agreed slowly.

His anger kicked up at how heavily they had medicated her.

“Now tell me from the beginning,” folded hands in her lap, “how did you ever get in here?”

“I did my homework, used a couple of connections.”

No physical contact
, Dr. Lester said. He kept physically apart from her but left his pinkie close, a half-inch away from hers.

“Corny,” he said, “I have to ask you something before I get too comfortable. Do you really love Tucker?”

Her mouth turned down. “It’s messy.”

“Does he love you?”

“He’s undoubtedly in love with the prospect of marrying Cornelia Lord. You have to know my family.” She stopped and Kevin
waited for her. “When my mother died, Chester fell apart. Worse than I did. He was running Lord & Company very badly.”

“So he hired Tucker?”

“My father hates confrontation. Tucker loves it. He fired all the troublemakers and terrorized the rest. Tucker saved Lord
& Company once, and now it’s in trouble again. A business partner of my father’s named Koi is plotting a hostile takeover.
Tucker told me my father needs my help. I own shares of voting stock. He wants to make sure we keep it all in the family.”