Crazy for Cornelia (46 page)

“Go, Cornee!” Tina French screeched.

“Dr. Powers, thank you,” she said, hugging the museum curator.

“Watch your head,” Dr. Powers yelled as he scuttled out of the tufted velvet bench seat, handing off the controls. She took
the now-familiar stick and throttle in her hands. She examined the simple dashboard with two gauges, one for “Airspeed” and
one that read “Batteries.”

“You’ve got the aircraft, Corny,” Powers told her. “Do you remember everything?”

“Enough,” she said, grabbing the stick as she and Kevin sat at the controls. “Kevin, take the clutch and the throttle. I’ll
do the rest.”

Kevin took the quaint hand controls, the clutch lever and rheostat throttle knob. He pulled his own harness on and helped
tighten hers.

“Ready?” Kevin shouted.

“Full throttle,” she told him.

He turned the throttle knob full ahead. As the electric engine spooled up faster, it twirled the propeller blade into a frenzy.
She tested the foot pedals that controlled the rudder with her wedding slippers.

She kissed his cheek, let out her breath, and toyed with the stick. The airship vibrated on the terrace, as eager to leave
as they were.

“Thank you all for coming, but there’s been a change of heart,” she shouted to the guests crowding the terrace in their path.

She nudged the stick carefully. The round gyroscope on top of the center mast tilted the propeller forward. With a lurch it
thrust them ahead. The small wheels rolled and they began to hurtle down the long, narrow runway of her terrace, scattering
the guests, who shrieked and threw themselves out of their path as they charged the far wall.

“Uh, Corny…”

The brick wall of the terrace raced closer.

“Pop the clutch,” she told him.

He disengaged the clutch lever and the rickety craft hopped up like a rabbit. Then, just as abruptly, it fell back onto the
terrace, plopping down hard on its small tires. They raced faster toward the terrace wall, yawing from left to right. She
could clearly see the bricks, then the mortar between the bricks.

“Pop the clutch again.”

And the ship lifted up a few feet before the wall. She felt glorious wind sting her eyes as the gyrocopter pointed to the
sky and hovered, then felt heavy and shuddered. The lumpy drag held them a few feet off the terrace as though they were being
pulled down by a giant hand. They would smash against the brick wall like two dolls in a matchstick toy.

“Corny…”

“I’ve got it!”

She bit her lip and angled the propeller just right. A rush of air swept underneath them, scooping them up and flinging them
into the sky. They cleared the wall. Then, in a huge gulp of lost altitude, they dipped sharply down toward the street.

“Something’s wrong,” she shouted. “We feel too heavy.”

Kevin looked behind, then under them. “That’s because Tucker’s hanging on down there.”

“I’ll kill you, you little prick,” she heard Tucker scream. “Cornelia, help me.”

She leaned down. Her ex-bridegroom hung on to her airship’s axle by his elbows. She had to laugh at the figure in the wedding
suit, caught in the severe crosswind that whipped past the tall buildings of Fifth Avenue. Tucker’s legs spread wildly in
the smart trousers and his blond hair peeled back from his skull.

“Oh, keep still,” Corny yelled at him. “It’s just a little wind buffet.”

“What do we do with him?” Kevin asked her.

“Well, we certainly don’t want him along with us, do we?”

She whooped with the thrill of the wind in her face and shoved the stick. The little gyrocopter tore almost straight down
into a dive toward the crowd, now fifteen stories below. While Tucker screamed and cursed, she looked back. His shiny black
wingtips were visible wide apart behind the tail.

They plunged toward the doormen in uniform, the police, and a crowd of pedestrians who now pointed and shouted. They were
one hundred feet over their heads… fifty… the crowd below gasped and ducked, making a human wave. She feathered the rudder
pedals with her slippers and jolted the stick.

The airship made a wobbly dip onto its side and started up straight again, hovering twenty feet above the crowd.

She pointed behind them. “Kevin, look.”

The wedding doves had left the terrace and made a V-formation. All twelve doves, the downy little aviators, spread their white
wings and swooped down to meet them.

“The dove man must have thought this was part of the ceremony,” Kevin said.

“Where shall we go after we get rid of Tucker?” she asked.

“How about the Palisades?”

“That sounds wonderful.”

She worked the stick and they whipped into a sharp left over the crowd. They passed over the stone wall separating Central
Park from
Fifth Avenue. A little low, they skimmed over the trees, scraping the ends of the tallest branches.

“Owww,” Tucker yelled below.

She leaned over. “I thought you loved aerobatics.”

Then she executed a nice, smooth banking maneuver toward the Central Park Zoo. Busy New Yorkers with their skates and boomboxes
and baby carriages, and strolling tourists with their Walkmans and tote bags, stopped on the cobblestone path below. They
looked up in shock, pointing at the quietly whomping little helicopter. Then they began to applaud. Who had sponsored this
giddy, impromptu air-show? This soaring deb in her bridal gown with her doorman in uniform. Not to mention the guy in a suit
dangling below.

“Tucker,” Corny yelled down, “you’d better let go when I tell you.”

She peeled off and made a snap turn to approach the zoo. Dipping down to twenty feet, she hovered briefly over a large round
hole built into the ground.

“Goodbye, Tucker,” she yelled.

She lifted the nose sharply and the airship sprang up. They felt so much lighter now. There was a rude shout below. Then a
splash and a round of barking.

“What was that?” Kevin asked her, busy with his rheostat.

“The seal tank. I’m glad they left some water in it.”

She made a lazy, confident bank west, and they climbed to five hundred feet. Beyond Central Park West, across Manhattan and
the sparkling Hudson River, they could see the thin winter sun beginning to set over the cliffs of the Palisades. She pointed
the airship at the rosy haze.

And as they cleared the skyscrapers of Central Park West and soared to one thousand feet, the Tesla Tower replica poked up
from the roof of Corny’s Museum. She stared at the proud steel mushroom, blue light darting around the bulbous top in a spidery
electric ribbon. So what if it didn’t broadcast electricity, and probably never would? It was a tribute, not some crazy experiment.

She looked at Kevin.

“Great corona,” they said together.

Chester Lord stood with his right hand gripping the railing of his terrace, as though afraid to let go.

Roni was at his side now, her arm around his back. Together they watched Cornelia and Kevin become a white speck somewhere
above Central Park West and vanish into the cobalt sky.

“I’d say she looked very happy on her wedding day,” Roni told him.

He nodded dully, and felt something in his left hand. He still clutched the small disk that the gruff, bearded man from the
helicopter had pressed into it.

“Corny recorded this before she planned to leave for South America,”
the man had said.
“I think you ought to see it.”

He looked around for the bearded man, but he was gone now. So he stared at the silvery disk again, shiny and alien as a tiny
UFO.

“Roni, would you come inside with me?”

They found Tucker’s laptop sitting on his desk. Chester approached it gingerly at first, circling the enemy. He picked it
up for the first time. It felt heavier than he expected, the tungsten case solid as a safe door. He tried to open the lid,
but the clasp was locked.

“We’ll fix that,” Roni told him.

She removed a book from Chester’s shelf. It was a musty, leather-bound copy of Margaret Mead’s study,
Coming of Age in Samoa
. She looked at the spine and gave Chester a heavy-lidded, bedroom glance. “I read this once. Very sexy.”

Then she brought the heavy volume crashing down hard on the sweet spot of Tucker’s laptop case, breaking the clasp. It sprung
open like a Jack-in-the-box, sprawled flat on Chester’s desk to reveal the mysteries of its wafer-thin keyboard and silvery
diode screen.

“I could never figure out how to work these things,” Chester admitted.

He tried jabbing at a few keys. Nothing. They were tiny, the letters miniaturized for a younger person’s eyes. Squinting,
he found the button that made a little compartment slide open. He inserted the ultracompact disk that the bearded man had
given him. Then he located another small button and pressed “Play.”

The words faded up hazily on the screen.

To Mr. Philip Grace, Debwatch, The New York Globe
.

He read Cornelia’s words slowly. Then he turned the screen to Roni to show her.

“In January, the New York Tesla Museum will open to the public. I was one of its founders, although nobody knows I helped
to build it. Not even my own father
.

“No history book really does justice to Nikola Tesla. He invented modern electricity, discovered radio and television waves,
X rays, and even the particle beams that will become this century’s lasers. He lit the world’s darkness
.

“I think you’re a real reporter at heart, Mr. Grace, even though asking me to ‘back up’ into the Plaza fountain the other
night was rather paparazzo. Since I’ll be away and you’ll be seeking a new subject, I wanted to invite you to visit the museum
and possibly encourage others to do the same
.

“On a more personal note, I am not some wild debutante
.

“I probably earned a reputation for being flaky. But I learned from watching my father that a person must take their responsibilities
seriously, even when it becomes quite lonely. And my duty was to the museum
.

“So I have dedicated my part of the Tesla Museum to my parents, Elizabeth and Chester Lord IV. There’s a small plaque near
the Tesla helicopter
.

“I hope it brings some brightness to my father’s life, which I’m afraid you and I have made rather glum lately just doing
our jobs as Reporter and Electric Girl
.

“Regards from Rio, Cornelia Lord.”

Chester felt a rush in his chest. But it wasn’t the dreaded old anvil rising up this time. This was a feeling so unfamiliar
in its absence of burden or remorse, so kaleidoscopic in its sweep of pleasure and possibility, he actually laughed out loud,
ferociously, for the first time in a decade.

Roni stared in amazement. “Chester?”

He settled down just enough to tap the laptop screen proudly with his forefinger. “Roni, this is my daughter.”

M
any people contributed their ideas to this first novel. I would especially like to thank:

My literary agent and friend, Robert Tabian, the real hero of this book, and those literary lions of song and story, Howie
Sanders and Richard Green at UTA.

Discerning publishers Larry Kirshbaum and Jamie Raab at Warner Books. My unsung co-author through three revisions, Executive
Editor Rick Horgan at Warner Books, as well as Executive Managing Editor Harvey-Jane Kowal, Creative Director Jackie Meyer,
Deputy Director of Publicity Jennifer Romanello, Associate Editor Jody Handley, and copyeditor Fred Chase.

Lithe gourmet Lynn Harris at New Line Cinema, screenwriter Robert Kamen, and producers Mark Johnson, Elizabeth Cantillon,
and Tiffany Daniel.

Stephen Fischer, for his guidance at the very beginning.

Sandi Gellis-Cole, wickedly accurate with her creative prodding and Glock nine, for her Boot Camp in fiction writing.

My earliest ally and muse Mandy McDevitt, who turned my handwritten swamp creature into a manuscript. Her
belissima
typing is, as advertised, A-1.

For their creative and professional support, those wild romantics
Christopher Gilsons I and III; my singularly gifted assistant Debie Klein, with special thanks to Cynthia and Kacie; the
world’s best-loved in-laws, Greta and Louis Zuckerman; the inimitable Caron K; Beryl Echlin; Gene Powers; George Pammer; Sue
Barton; Joyce and Chuck Beber; Lieutenant Dan Hollar; James Degus; Avanti de Mille; Allen and Cheri Jacobi; Bob Gordon; Richard
and Dina Nicolella; Peter Rodriguez; Stenya Lipinska; Kerry and Susan Sakolsky; Carol Taite; Evan Blair; Cindy Roesel; Noel
Frankel; Tom Lopez; JoAnn Lederman; Mike and Martha Gilson; Jim and Rhonda Schoolfield; Elaine Terris; Peggy, Arnie, and Sande
Harris; John and Barbara Kushner; Rick and Jennifer Schmidt; Kevin Smith; Dan Starer of Research for Writers, New York; Spencer
and Calvin.

And, of course, Nikola Tesla for inventing the future.

I’m lucky to have all of you, but I’m especially lucky to be in love. To my wife, Carolyn, the truly talented half of our
couple, thank you for being my heart, my life, my dance of light.

CRAZY FOR
CORNELIA

“GREAT FUN… wayward and winsome… a truly good read.”

—F
AY
W
ELDON, AUTHOR OF
B
IG
G
IRLS
D
ON’T
C
RY

“
CRAZY FOR CORNELIA
is a lot like the city itself: irresistibly smart and energetic, soaring with creativity, extremely funny and yet kindly
sentimental, and populated with wonderful characters. CHRIS GILSON IS A FRESH VOICE.”

—L
AURA
V
AN
W
ORMER, AUTHOR OF
E
XPOSÉ
AND
A
NY
G
IVEN
M
OMENT