Crazy for Cornelia (12 page)

There had been few moments like that since. With the Chester-Tucker-Bushberg alliance squeezing like a python around her,
the times when she counted on her Tesla fantasies to shut out the world were becoming both longer and more frequent.

Lately, her desire to snap her mind back to the here and now had grown more sluggish, like an insect caught in sticky syrup.
It would be a good idea, she decided, to practice telling people about her work. Tina might be a good start; she could be
trusted, primarily because she wouldn’t care. She checked her Timex with its glowing Indiglo dial.

Tina would, of course, be late to meet her. Forget Eastern Standard Time. Her friend’s internal clock was set to the rhythms
and the revolutions of the club scene.

The taxi deposited her just after eleven, and she moved stealthily through the shadows. The corrugated doors that shut off
the entrances to various businesses were sprayed with angry graffiti. She felt light and free in the meatpacking district,
a frenetic hot spot by night.

She passed the blackened window of Hog Tits, a women’s biker
bar. A chrome cavalry of hogs—custom Harleys—stood outside in a line.

She poked her head in the door. Women with short hair and tattoos played pool. Glancing at the floor, she wondered if the
bar had become gentrified. Instead of sawdust to soak up… well, whatever, she saw the peach-colored pages of the
New York Observer
strewn around. One woman, squat as a fire hydrant, looked up to glare at her. Cornelia gave her a friendly wave and took
off.

Her body revving against the cold that made her nose run, she walked swiftly to Ninth Avenue and into an unmarked club, the
Meat Chest. She walked down a flight of cement stairs and slithered through a gaggle of downtown types clutching drinks, listening
politely to the band. The helium-voiced singer screamed words she only viscerally understood.

“Corny, look at you,” honked Tina French.

Tina’s makeup was so white and powdery it nearly matched her hair. It looked as though she had dunked her face in flour.

She was a reedy young woman, her slender body wrapped in slinky black club couture. Cornelia was delighted to see that her
scalp had not been shaved recently, so she couldn’t have been too depressed lately. Her hair, almost white-blond, had grown
out in a spiky mass. They embraced and Tina held her out by the arms to look at her, giggling.

“I’m on my way to Brazil,” Cornelia told her, then glanced at the other Pack members. Tina had not come alone. Tina never
went anywhere alone. Tonight she’d brought the two Roberts, both also old friends from Gramercy.

“Our carioca Corny,” said Bob Baylor, Robert No. 1, a distant cousin to the Mayflower Madam. Robert was needling her slightly,
for a change. And showing off, too, by using the Brazilian term for natives of Rio.

“Do you still need a plane to fly?” Robert No. 2, Robert Selden, asked her, as though she were crazy. Robert No. 2 had a nasty
streak, and his friends required mental antibodies to tolerate his often sharp words. Robert refused to be called Bob, believing
it trite because it could be spelled either backwards or forwards. Robert also had special
status as the only member of the group who once earned a paycheck, as a writer on the Conan O’Brien show.

“We were just talking about people who tend to be extreme time-sucks.” Robert smiled with signature malice. “So it was funny
you’d show up.”

“Like your time counts,” Tina shot back.

They all stopped to watch a very tall woman with an urchin’s face and arms like sticks pass right through their group and
wink at Tina.

“She’s a model from Iceland, I think,” Tina whispered to Cornelia. “Bob’s been hitting on her all week. But it’s a rather
dry hole so to speak.”

“Is she bisexual?” Bob asked.

“Sure,” Tina said. “If you buy her something she’ll have sex with you.

Tina French and the rest of the Pack, including Cornelia when she decided to join them, carried a certain élan in the Manhattan
club scene, vanishing remnants of the dying breed of Old-Money WASP trust-fund delinquents. Money in Manhattan now was either
made five minutes ago, or came from feeder cultures like Teheran or Los Angeles.

“What have you been doing?” Cornelia asked Tina.

“Well,
La Dolce Vita’s
playing at Angelika this week,” Tina told her after a blank moment. “You have to see it. It’s so explanatory.”

It would definitely explain that outfit, Cornelia thought. She had seen the film in college, a bleak treatise of 1950s vintage
on Italian aristocrats numbed by their money and the absence of value in their lives. Her friends dressed in a style that
could be called retro-Euro to match the film, the two Roberts slouching in skinny continental suits circa 1960 and stringy
ties.

Clothing meant nothing to her, but it mattered deeply to the pack. By next week, the boys could be wearing school ties and
blazers and Tina would be wearing Donna Karan couture and slicked-back brown hair again. The point was, as soon as some arriviste
figured out what to wear to mimic them, fast as lightning her friends changed to some new look. This left wannabes wearing
costumes that fit in two days before, but now made as much fashion sense as showing up in a clown suit.

They all ordered martinis except for Cornelia, who asked for water.

“What’s going on with Tucker? Are you engaged yet?” Bob Baylor wanted to know.

“He wishes,” Tina said in a teenage voice, as though they were still in algebra class at Gramercy.

“We saw your picture in the
Globe
,” Tina said, sounding a little jealous. “What is it about the fountain in front of the Plaza? I threw up in there once.”

“Convenience,” Bob said. “You’re right there.”

“Can we go somewhere and talk for a second?” Cornelia asked Tina.

They wound up standing in a lightly traveled corner of one of the club’s seven rooms, all connected like a kind of funhouse.

“Did you ever wonder what I’ve been busy doing the past year?” Cornelia asked her friend.

Tina opened her mouth, about to say “Sure,” but decided to retreat from that falsity. “I thought you were just shopping. And
you said Chester made you see a psychiatrist.”

“Tina, I helped build a whole museum devoted to Nikola Tesla. On the West Side. I’d like to take you someday.”

Tina almost spit out her drink. “Did you give those people all your money?”

“Of course. I wish I had more to give,” Cornelia said.

“What does your psychiatrist say about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, you have to give them time.” Tina felt on firmer ground discussing psychiatrists.

“No, I mean he really says nothing,” Cornelia explained. “We have silent sessions. The first time I saw him, I told him everything.
That was a year ago. I had nothing more to tell, so I just sit there twice a week.”

“What do you do?” Tina asked.

“In the beginning, I’d wait for him to say something. He’d wait for me. It was a standoff. Then he started doing other things
at his desk, but he’d be sneaky about it. Trying to look like he was writing something about me, when I could see he was paying
his bills.”

“You’ve been doing that for a year?”

“I just do it for Chester. I sit on Dr. Bushberg’s couch and read for an hour, and he just fusses at his desk and talks on
the phone. He doesn’t even bother to pretend anymore.”

“Chester doesn’t pry into what you do? I mean, with your money?”

“No,” Cornelia said, feeling sad about that. “He’s too much of a gentleman. He wouldn’t invade my privacy. And I think he’s
worried about what he’d find out. I’ve been trying to talk to him for years, but Chester loves the concept of status quo.”

The two Roberts interrupted them, still looking fresh and untested despite the martinis and the wild strands of damp blond
hair that slithered over their eyes. Being in their early twenties made all of them impervious. Or at least that’s what they
believed. Cornelia knew that no one, at any age, was safe from harm.

“What are you talking about?” Bob Baylor asked Cornelia.

“Nikola Tesla.”

They stared at her in a dull, dumbfounded way.

“The tennis player?” Bob asked.

“Let’s go to Lizards & Ladies,” Tina said, to change the subject.

Cornelia protested, but they needled and dragged her along and there was little point in resisting.

To carry through their commitment to the
La Dolce Vita
revival, they had found a chromy 1960 Thunderbird convertible and a 1959 Triumph sports car, both sparkling white.

The Pack piled in and put the convertible tops down to head over to 14th Street. Beeping their horns, the cars split up like
two mice to scamper around a tractor-trailer, then screeched to a halt in front of the bar. A tangle of yellow taxis, stretch
limousines, and Town Cars had already stacked up in the dark alleyway. A nondescript storefront flashed a neon sign, “Lizards
& Ladies.”

Inside, the tiny club was packed wall to wall with delicious young model-and-actor flesh. Curiosities from the 1970s dangled
from the ceiling in wicked parody: a Barbie doll wearing black bondage gear hung upside down with her legs forced around G.I.
Joe’s neck, novelty rubber chickens hung from meathooks like bats.

Behind the bar, a mountain of bras had been slung in a pile
against the mirror, women’s panties and men’s boxer shorts peeking out. They got there because women danced on the bar, if
they were drunk or exhibitionistic enough, and shed their bras. Sometimes that was just a starting point. Ever since Mayor
Guiliani shut down the topless bars in Manhattan and made the city a little
too
wholesome and corn-fed, it became a thing that club types did for fun.

The Pack’s entrance sparked an instant buzz. The crowd made way, as much as they could in the crunch, so Cornelia’s gaggle
of friends could shove through. They ordered drinks from the rangy, gorgeous bartender, Girl-Tex. Guy-Tex, the other bartender,
was much stockier, had eyebrows like caterpillars and a shaved head. Both women came from Texas.

“Hey, Corny,” she said, “long time. We gonna dance tonight?”

“I sure hope not,” she told her. “Water, please.”

“You know we got a tradition here, honey,” Girl-Tex shouted over the din, mock-staring Cornelia down. “If you don’t drink,
the bartender does.”

“Amen,” she told Girl-Tex.

Girl-Tex filled one glass with water and a shot of straight Baja tequila for herself. She tossed it back. Cornelia took a
long swallow of water.

She felt hemmed in by the crowd. A stale, oppressive cloud formed by cigarette and cigar smoke settled above the bar like
an inversion factor. She could feel it pressing trapped air on top of her, hot like a jungle. She drank the water and it cleared
her nostrils.

She inched away from the two Roberts, tugging Tina with her. The boys had locked on to Girl-Tex, out-quipping each other to
keep her attention as she built their martinis. Robert Selden stuffed something else in his mouth, probably a fistful of pills
he used for mood management that terrified Corny when he took them with liquor. Robert batted away at least one family-and-friends
intervention a week.

Tina looked more alert now. She blossomed after midnight when the crowd gave off a surging, oscillating kind of energy.

“You never really answered me about Tucker,” Tina said.

Cornelia thought this over, wishing she could explain to Tina about the coronas. How seeing a sky-blue corona around somebody
meant you couldn’t go wrong. And a blackish, ugly corona meant you should run. And how Tucker Fisk exhibited no corona at
all.

“Tucker can keep you off balance,” she allowed. “On the surface, he’s the perfect gentleman. Almost too perfect.”

Tucker’s ambition always thundered like hoofbeats under his skin. That was easy to spot. If only she could see his corona,
so she could know whether or not to trust him.

“He seems to want to be with you,” Tina said, her eyes wandering.

“I think I’m just arm candy. But I’m not sure. He’s so close to my father, I can’t really confide in him.”

“No sex?” Tina asked, wide-eyed.

“Hardly. I’d rather like to know who I’m having sex with.”

She had analyzed Tucker’s parents, usually a good clue to character, but found no easy answers. His father, who had been nicknamed
Sloopy in college, was a hearty but unsubstantial man. He had been Chester’s roommate at Yale. Tucker’s mother worked as a
Wall Street lawyer. She was overly worked-out and always looked so bristling with anger and ambition that she might burst
an artery just exchanging social chatter. She had obviously been the one who pushed Tucker. And she had succeeded, because
Tucker did get things done. Enough to save her father at Lord & Company.

“Well, whatever else you say about him, Tucker’s gorgeous,” Tina told her in a dreamy voice, looking across the room.

“He knows it. I just wish I could decide what he wants from me.”

“Well, why don’t you ask him?” Tina said. “He’s right there.”

Cornelia turned and saw Tucker’s head bobbing slowly over all the rest like a golden boat on the waves. Escape was impossible;
she was trapped in the jaws of the crowd.

“Hi,” Tucker said, with a drive-by casualness. “Sake martini?”

She took the glass gingerly, but didn’t drink. She noticed that he did not say, “Your father is very worried about you.”

“I came to apologize about taking you dogfighting,” he lobbed out of nowhere. “I thought it would help you get rid of some
bad memories, but I guess I really miscalculated.”

She jerked her glass to her lips and half drained it. His eyes held
hers. Their surfaces were like polished stones, impossible to penetrate. But his tone of voice, almost boyish, was a first.

After a moment she said, “I guess you did.”

“And maybe I have a little trouble showing emotion, too,” Tucker said. He frowned very seriously now. His voice croaked slightly,
like a tree frog lived inside his huge frame.

“Tucker, what are you telling me?”