Crazy for Cornelia (21 page)

It was the first time she had been applauded for anything since her coming-out party at the St. Regis, before she vanished
from that rite of passage and caused a bit of a stink.

But this was a spontaneous and raucous ovation, spiked with cheers and whistles, a symphony of approval. It filled her with
the instant happiness she once felt as a child at Christmastime.

But it was even more. She hadn’t enjoyed a moment when she felt so overwhelmingly welcome since her mother died.

Her hand squeezed Tucker’s. Bathed in the applause, he looked as vainglorious as a cartoon hero, almost shaped like a cone
with his big shoulders tapering all the way down in a sleek black suit to Italian shoes like bedroom slippers.

She let him lead her, slipping through the crowd as easily as an eel sliding through oil. She didn’t have to say much, other
than “Hello” and “It’s good to see you.”

“I’ve known you since you were this high,” a face in a pin-striped suit with thick white hair said, holding his palm at waist
level. She didn’t recognize him.

“You look gorgeous, Cornelia,” said an older woman in a dress shaped like a trumpet.

“Thank you.” She lowered her voice. “Tucker, who are these people?”

“The guy was nobody, the woman was somebody’s wife,” Tucker muttered back.

“Aren’t the photographers horrid?” another woman hissed on her behalf. From her rather feral eyes, she recognized Elsa Innsbruck,
a fashion magazine editor.

“She rounded up the models,” Tucker explained.

Cornelia smiled and said nothing. She thought of the photographer with the resurrected coat, Philip Grace. She didn’t consider
him horrid, just a nuisance. Many so-called respectable people, like Dr. Bushberg, were worse predators but seemed to sneak
in under everyone’s radar.

Tucker gently guided her toward the center of the room where Chester stood. Passing the Christmas tree, she noticed that the
sparkling ornaments were miniature versions of the Kois’ products.

And then the Kois appeared in front of Chester.

She worked hard to smile, repressing her disgust at their monstrous toadish forms. That’s how they looked to her now, knowing
their perfidy. For the first time she noted that Koi
père et fils
shared stout, ungraceful bodies. But also the same clever tailor, who draped them in tuxedos made of a midnight-blue fabric
so fine and exotic it
could have been flown in from another planet. Both had full heads of hair, Senior’s white and Junior’s jet-black.

Han Senior bobbed his head.

“Little Corny, all grown up. Full of spirit.”

“Yes. We always read about you in the papers,” Han Junior said with a tight smile, silky and rude.

Then they were past the Kois and Chester stood before her with his arms held open. His eyes were moist and he gently took
both her hands in his, protectively squeezing her fingers.

“Hi, Daddy,” Cornelia said.

She took him off guard, realizing that she hadn’t called him that in years.

“You look lovely,” he blurted out, obviously shocked.

Chester impetuously slipped one arm over her shoulders and his other up and around Tucker’s, having to stand almost on tiptoe
to reach around Tucker’s neck. Awkward in his impulse, Chester drew them both close to him, hugged her tightly with stiff
muscles, then let them go. His sweet attention lingered with her, even as he turned back to perform his host duties.

She snuck a quick look at the Kois when they thought her back was turned, to catch them with evidence of fraud across their
faces. But old Han merely smiled at some guest in the same half-frozen way she did herself. She stared and Han caught her
furtive look. He lifted his glass to toast her. Mocking her, she supposed. She studied the corona that wrapped around the
head of Han Senior. It was neutral in color, like the airy vapors that drift over asphalt on a blistering-hot day.

Han Junior didn’t notice her spying on him. He talked to a model about Cornelia’s age with biggish hair. Her sleazy dress
exposed cutouts of flesh. She looked awfully obvious for this crowd.

“A sidewalk Cinderella,” Tucker whispered to her. “I hired her to keep an eye on the Kois.”

She focused herself to make out the corona of Han Junior. It was half-formed—faint but already noxious, with a rusty cast.
She could only think of it as a starter corona, taking shape like a twelve-year-old boy’s patchy mustache. She shut her eyes
and shook her head, to rid herself of the image.

She wondered. Tucker had told her that Old Han kept his middle-aged
son on a short leash. How did Chester manage to talk to old Han Koi? He was probably dying to lunge for the old pirate’s
neck and throttle his turkey wattles.

She made a particular effort to analyze Chester’s corona this evening. It had grown so weak lately as to be almost undetectable.
Tonight the haze had brightened, a wisp of hopeful light still trimmed with its old outline of sputtering sadness.

His energy’s almost gone
, she heard the Electric Girl whisper.
Look at how his corona fades.

She gradually lost her thrill at being a star of the evening. Chester seemed so vulnerable here, surrounded by people of more
vitality and less principle. His tenderness touched her in ways recalled from her childhood. She couldn’t throw off his sense
of fuzzy weakness.

Now she turned her corona analysis to the enigmatic Tucker. She studied the outline of his hair as he threw his head back
and laughed at some guest’s remark. She could still find no trace of a corona. Not even a dewdrop of light around his powerful
head.

Tucker. Early that day, he had actually handed her a page of triple-spaced text telling her what to say when she stood in
the spotlight and announced their engagement. It was the sort of large-type, simple-minded creation a political handler would
give a not-too-bright candidate.

She had torn up his page while he watched, horrified. Then, for good measure, she yelled “Wheeee!” with a crazed look and
threw the little pieces up over his head. As the white confetti of his script fell on his hair and shoulders, she told him
sharply that she would manage to put together a few words that wouldn’t embarrass him.

Her mantra for the evening,
no drinking, no Tesla
, thumped like a drum in her head.

She weaved through the throng, chatting with guests. She finished sipping her third mineral water. Applause, or not, social
chatter was still thirsty work.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she whispered to Tucker, in a huddle with other tycoons.

He nodded, seeming comfortable with letting her go off by herself.

Cornelia smiled her way through the crowd and wound up out in
the foyer. Typically, there was a line in front of the women’s bathroom and not the men’s. In her Electric Girl mode, she
might have just slipped in and used the men’s room for efficiency. But tonight she felt her duty to be demure.

Instead of waiting in line, she darted down the spiral staircase to the working floor of Lord & Company to use one of their
bathrooms.

On this floor, the windows were obscured by a lab-rat maze of small cubicles where the scut work of Lord & Company was performed.
Here she imagined a lot of people in short hair and starched shirts plowing through information like pieceworkers in a sweatshop,
wearing splints on their arms to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. The working floor seemed deserted this evening as she walked
toward the bathrooms. She marveled at the sterility of the workstations. The employees’ only revolt over the corporate blandness
seemed to be pinning up Dilbert cartoons and their childrens’ artwork. A few chirps of brittle laughter came from a distance.

She walked through a narrow corridor that separated the cubicles from outer offices with doors. Even the real offices had
glass walls so the occupants could be closely watched.

As she passed a glass wall, she glimpsed something familiar. This office had been turned into a storeroom full of boxes.

They were the same boxes she had seen in the airport hangar.

Behind them, she saw the big video screen that Tucker had used. All the supplies she had seen in the airport hangar seemed
to be here now. She peered in to squint at a sign somebody had scrawled with a Magic Marker, “RETURN TO STORES BEFORE DEC.
30.”

A warning noise rustled in her head, like a sheet of aluminum being shaken.

She made her way down the cubicles until she found life. Two men and a woman in their twenties sat drinking New York State
champagne in plastic cups, and talking office politics. They had deep bags under their eyes and all wore their hair cropped
short. The men had their sleeves rolled up and ties askew.

“Aren’t you Cornelia Lord?” The woman stared at her diamond as though it were the Star of India. “Is that an engagement ring?”

“Not yet,” Cornelia told her. “So how are you?”

“Great. It’s been a killer quarter,” the first young man told her.

She nodded appreciatively. “What’s all that stuff in the empty office? The maps and boxes?”

“Some presentation for a client, all sorts of travel gear,” the woman told her, wagging her head over a fool’s errand. “But
I guess it didn’t work. We have to take it all back to the stores.”

“Yeah,” the second young man spoke up. “I told Tucker we’d return all this stuff to Safari Outfitters for a refund right after
Christmas.”

“How nice,” she said. “Do you happen to remember a picture of an old man?” she asked. “A South American?”

“He wasn’t South American.” The young woman rolled her eyes. “I pulled it off the Web myself. I had two hours to find a shot
of a guy who looked like a Brazilian over eighty years old. I downloaded it from a Seniors Without Partners site.”

The Electric Girl’s head rattled again, more vehemently.
I told you so
, she heard the metallic voice in her head say.

“So who was this presentation for?”

“I dunno,” the first young man sighed. “We’re kind of low on the food chain down here. Tucker Fisk’s team ran the thing. We
just did what we were told.”

The Electric Girl felt a distinct snap somewhere in her head. The clean-cut trio in front of her looked suddenly terrified.

“Ms. Lord, are you okay? Can we get you some water?”

“Maybe just a sip of that champagne,” she told them. She grabbed an unopened bottle off the desk and popped the cork expertly.
It shot into the cubicle ricocheting off a wall as the young executives ducked. She took a long, sloppy drink, the lusty fizz
tickling her throat and running down her chin.

She collected her thoughts as she drank, trying to sort out what to do next. She didn’t stop until the bottle was almost empty.

In the downstairs bathroom mirror, when she finally got to it, she noticed that her hair stood on end, frizzing. Her eyes
flashed now, Cornelia’s soft gray taken over by the Electric Girl’s fuses.

When the Electric Girl marched back up the spiral staircase to the executive floor, the party guests made way for her. This
time, she saw no admiration.

She approached the center of the party where Tucker stood very close to the Kois. Chester was a few feet behind them talking
with a group, playing host.

“Chester…” Tucker warned. Slowly, Chester slipped into confusion, then alarm.

“Corny,” Tucker stepped toward her with a look of abused innocence. “What’s the trouble?”

She searched Chester’s face for a strong word, an act of protection. But Chester looked too weak to defend her.

She squinted at the Kois with one eye the way a drunk person drives, because she could clearly see the formation of something
she had never seen before. It was a slimy corona that actually moved. It writhed like a spitting swamp creature, slithering
a few feet to encircle Tucker’s right arm. The ugly current wrapped around Tucker’s own like a fuzzy brown snake.

She struggled backward now, losing her balance, trying to connect with her father’s eyes.

“Chester,” she yelled, but her voice felt so tight and strangled it came out as a puny squeak. She remembered nights when
she would scream for her father and he wouldn’t hear her. She wiggled free from Tucker as he reached for her arm. Her father
approached now, brow lowered, foggy and uncertain again.

“Daddy!” she wailed out loud.

Then Tucker plowed toward her, pushing his way in front of her father. She swerved away from him, maneuvering through the
sea of dumbstruck faces. He followed her.

“Cornelia, maybe you should freshen up a little,” he called to her in a reasonable voice.

“It’s bad enough you lie to me,” she yelled over her shoulder. “But taking advantage of Chester? You ungrateful shit.”

Tucker shoved through the crowd and grabbed her waist from behind with both his arms. She slipped around in his grasp to face
him.

“Hey, c’mon.” Tucker actually smiled at her. “What seems to be the trouble?”

She looked for her father, but Tucker held both her arms in check, his big frame blotting out the crowd. The buzzing of the
party guests sounded like a dentist’s drill.

“I went downstairs and found South America.”

“What?”

“You said you’d keep your team working. Why are you returning all the supplies?”

His eyes didn’t even flicker. Tucker was an All-Star deceiver. “That stuff from the airport? That was just a demonstration.”

“A demonstration?”

“Sure,” he spoke earnestly. “We’ll get brand-new equipment before we go. I was just dramatizing things for you. I wanted to
show you what you’d be missing.”

“I believe what I was missing,” she said, “was how close you are to the Kois. You made them Lord & Company’s partners. You
got them here tonight and I saw a… connection between you I’d never noticed before.”

“You think I’m helping old Han Koi?” He stared at her with eyes as impenetrable as mirrored contact lenses. “That’s just crazy.”

She summoned the full force of her energy. With a great tug of her wrists, the Electric Girl broke away from Tucker’s grip
and shoved through guests until she reached the U-shaped bar.