Crazy for Cornelia (22 page)

A blow-dried bartender looked her over. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“Never mind.”
The Electric Girl works alone.

She kicked off her shoes, and used both arms for leverage to climb up on the bartop. Thank goodness the dress was short. She
worked her knees up on the bartop, then stood up straight. Her toes began to move very slightly on the polished surface of
the bar, as though she stood on the bar of Lizards & Ladies, wanting to dance. She made up a little rhythm in her head to
help her decide exactly what to say. People turned and gaped. For the second time that evening, conversation dribbled off.

She pulled out her neatly typed announcement, now moist and crumpled in her hand, and waved it in the air.

“Chester,”
she shouted. “You know Tucker Fisk asked me to marry him.”

Tucker, heading through the crowd toward the bar, with the afterglow of the horrid brown corona still circling his arms, suddenly
stopped. How peculiar. He should be bullying his way through the
crowd to stop her. But he hung back, watching as though he didn’t want to stop her at all. He stood there with almost a challenge
on his face.
We’re all waiting, Corny
.

The Electric Girl struggled to keep her balance as the room veered off in wicked angles.

The videographer had turned his camera on her. It was hooked up to the Winking Wall, and now every screen showed her picture.
The Electric Girl made a fearsome sight, her kinetic hair and eyes burning like glowholes.

“But I think it’s going to get a little crowded on our honeymoon, Chester,” she shouted. “Because I do believe Tucker’s already
in bed with the Kois.”

Chester looked apoplectic as he pushed toward her.

“Get her down,” Tucker called out to the bartender.

Now the guests pointed at her like a bearded lady in a carnival. She looked far off at old Han Koi, who smiled into his cocktail
glass as though laughing off her false charges.

Chester’s face had turned a blotchy raspberry-and-cream. Why had Chester trusted Tucker so? He had given her his mother’s
ring. Chester clung to Tucker the way a fearful sailor lashes himself to a mast in a violent sea.

She closed her eyes, thought about telling Chester exactly how she saw Tucker and Han Koi in their unsavory alliance. She
could imagine his bewildered words, “You saw a
corona?
” Then he would call Dr. Bushberg. This time they might even send her to a place where she would be hopelessly confined.

She jumped down from the bar, grabbed her shoes, and ran.

A man stood in front of her, grasping to stop her. She hopped from foot to foot to confuse him, then sprinted through the
postmodern crumbling foyer to the elevator. She jabbed the elevator button and the door opened for her. Once inside the car,
she jumped up and down to fool the elevator sensors into closing the doors.

Tucker appeared at the door to the car. But the elevator closed in his face and the Electric Girl was alone.

When the doors opened with a chime, the unsmiling Asian security man in the corporate blazer beckoned her with his finger.
His face
looked like an angry fist, as though he took great enjoyment in hurting people and had the skills to do it.

“C’mon,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”

She put her head down and charged the man’s stomach like a bull. His belly had gone soft, and when she rammed it she felt
a squishy movement of organs shifting.

He lost his breath in one long whoosh like the elevator and fell backward onto the floor, landing on his well-padded rump.
He sat looking confused, legs stretched out like a Raggedy Andy.

She ran for the lobby’s side door, which opened to the crosstown street. She turned the bolt lock and pushed the door open.
It flew back with a gust of horizontal snow.

The snowflakes had turned into a blizzard.

She slipped on her shoes with the spiky heels, bent forward, and ran out into the storm, leaving little black holes like deb
tracks in the snow.

S
he made it halfway up the first block, crunching and sliding in the snow, before she realized she had left her coat behind.

Well, it wouldn’t matter much now. Her shoes buckled in the lumpiness of the sidewalk. The snow she had admired a few hours
earlier now threw chips of white against her face, pricking her before they melted.

She felt unsteady from the liquor. Even though the sidewalk was perfectly level, she leaned forward to plow ahead as though
she were fumbling uphill. And she felt horribly cold, wearing only the short velvet dress with a deep décolletage and no back.
The plunging neckline that exposed the hollow of her breasts so glamorously when glamour had been the goal now bared her flesh
cruelly to the elements. Nothing had worked as planned. Tucker had lied. Something loathsome linked him to old Han Koi.

And her father would never listen to his crazy daughter if she tried to warn him.

Her ankles twisted sideways until she was running on the side of each flimsy shoe. She would like to stop and take the shoes
off, knock off the heels and go on with flats. But she knew that if she stopped moving ahead, she would lose her balance and
fall. Maybe to freeze
and die here, to end up an Old Electric Woman who once had a mission in life but was now cast out to drift away on an ice
floe. She plunged on. Through the sleet, she could make out Fifth Avenue and the distant shape of the Plaza Hotel. A right
on Fifth Avenue, six long blocks, and she’d be home.

But where exactly
was
home, now that Tucker seemed to have snuck in and gained control over her life?

Chester looked angrier than Tucker had ever seen him, stumbling out in the snow and snapping his arm away from Mike the driver,
who tried to steady him.

“I hope you have a plan B,” Chester growled at Tucker between his teeth.

You just saw Plan B
, Tucker felt like saying.

Tucker thrust his hands into his jacket pockets against the cold. It took truckloads of self-control to bear the awesome weight
of managing Chester’s company, Chester’s indecision, Chester’s regrets, and now Chester’s daughter. He used that discipline
to force his mind into hyper-diplomacy before responding.

“Chester, we can’t both leave the party. Go back and I’ll find her.”

“Damn the party,” Chester yelled at him. “I’m going to find Cornelia.”

Chester climbed into the back seat of his Panda limousine and slammed the tinny door. “Drive up Madison,” he told Mike. “Come
back down Fifth from 67th to see if she’s headed home.”

Tucker watched the car crunch away in the slush, fishtailing. As usual, Chester blamed him for Corny’s behavior. It made him
feel, just for a second, hot indignation even with the cold and sleet against his face. To Chester, it would look as though
he had fumbled the ball, and Cornelia had sent him sprawling in the mud.

Funny, he thought, how he could get his pride hurt even when he was the one who had just passed the forty-yard line with the
ball.

All Cornelia had done was make the game more interesting. Now Chester would be forced to send her away for treatment. Confinement.
Isolation. Treatment by a psychiatric staff. Tucker knew only one thing about doctors, they loved money. But with the insurance
companies putting the screws to them, a lot of doctors weren’t raking
it off the table the way they used to. He knew that he could find a psychiatrist he could persuade to see things his way,
once he found out who the players were.

Tucker blocked a stooped-over businessman slogging toward him, throwing the older man off balance and propping him up just
before he fell.

“Did a blond girl with no coat go by you?” Tucker shouted into his face.

“I remember her.” The man’s teeth chattered. “I think she called me a ‘fucker.’”

No, that would be me, Tucker thought, releasing the man to slide on the ice. There weren’t any cabs and she didn’t have much
of a head start. So he plunged ahead, jogging into the blizzard. By the end of the block, he could make out a shape some distance
ahead, frail and unsteady. She would be going home. She had no money, no other place to go.

But this time it would be a short stay. He would get Chester to pack her off in a matter of days.

Who could argue against that now?

Roni Dubrov wore a uniform for her job, and it made her look like an old English chimney sweep from Oliver Twist’s time.

She always dressed in a long black wool coat with peaked lapels, her long, curly black hair spilling over the shoulders. In
her black top hat, her height exceeded six and a half feet and awed the tourists on Fifth Avenue. Now her hat and the shoulders
of her jacket were dusted in a coat of white, piling up steadily even as the wet snow evaporated.

Roni worked seventy hours a week as a horse-carriage driver. She squired tourists through Central Park in one of the few hansom
cabs that offered the cover of a landau roof. Her carriage had been constructed back in 1903 when craftsmanship mattered.
White lacquer and red-leather seats made it the showiest of the numerous carriages that usually lined Grand Army Plaza, where
Fifth Avenue met Central Park South and haughty old buildings like the Bergdorf Goodman store and the Sherry Netherland Hotel
still reigned.

Most impressive of all, the famous Plaza Hotel looked as grand to Roni as a European palace. Tourists dressed in baseball
caps and running
shoes flocked to get a look at this great hotel they’d all seen in movies. And the most romantic tourists took horse-drawn
carriage rides through the park.

She had just driven two young couples, Plaza Hotel guests, for three hours from Central Park to Gramercy Park and back again.
But then they got caught in the blizzard, and she had barely managed to bring them back to the Plaza through the slush and
wind-driven snow. She neatened up the cab, getting ready to take her horse, Peggy, back to the stable. The only people left
on the sidewalks were the ragtag homeless. She called them “scarecrows” because they wore tattered clothes and scared the
hell out of the tourists, yelling in their faces demanding money.

Other hansom drivers went home when it snowed. Roni stayed on. At home, she had served as an officer with the Israeli army.
She could abide discomfort. If she held her position in the snow, she could always expect some crazy couple to want to ride
through the park cuddled together under the heavy wool blanket she kept in back. That’s why Roni bought the hansom with the
roof. She was maximizing her utilization of the cab, exactly as she’d learned studying management for a year at Technion University
in Jerusalem.

Peggy wore blinders, because Roni believed that Peggy thought more like a car than a horse. With the blinders on, he would
stay in one lane, stop for red lights, and stay exactly one car length behind other vehicles, as though he had studied the
New York Motor Vehicle Code. True, Peggy revealed a mean streak now and then, and nipped Roni. But they got along. She gave
him the name Peggy after a song by Little Peggy March called “I Will Follow Him,” a private joke to cheer her up when she
first moved to New York.

It was perhaps the loneliest city on earth for a single woman. With all the beautiful, successful women and so many gay men,
it left a girl with few prospects.

“Home, Peggy,” Roni ordered from her high driver’s seat. The chestnut horse jerked gratefully and started from the curb, heading
west toward his stable.

Then she saw a single, pitiful scarecrow staggering against the blizzard on Fifth Avenue. The shape of the stumbling creature
got her attention. Usually when she tried to help scarecrows, they just
screamed at her to go away. But this one looked different. She peered through the snow to see a young girl trying to run
on the sides of her shoes, her legs buckling. She wore a short dress. And she had no coat. Oh, well.

“Cluck, cluck,” she repeated. “Home, Peggy.”

Then she saw the girl collapse on the sidewalk. She could die there. Roni heaved a brooding sigh because it would take time
and make Peggy difficult. But during the holiday season especially, it wouldn’t kill her to help.

“Peggy, whoa,” she ordered.

Westward bound by habit, the horse turned toward her in disbelief.

“Whoa!” Roni told him sharply.

Peggy stopped with an irate snort. Roni stepped down from her driver’s seat into the snow, and took long strides in her stovepipe
pants. In the gutter of Fifth Avenue at 59th Street, the scarecrow was trying to pick herself up.

“Are you all right?” Roni shouted.

The scarecrow lifted her head, and Roni saw a frightened young woman who didn’t belong on the street. The girl’s delicate
features and skin, now raw, looked well cared for.

“Upsy daisy,” Roni said, scooping the girl up. Her ruined dress probably cost what Roni made in four months. “Where do you
live?”

“I can’t go home.” The girl’s light blue lips quivered. “They’ll put me away.”

With good reason, Roni thought. But maybe things weren’t as they appeared. Perhaps her husband beat her and she was running
away from him. The girl looked desperate enough.

“Do you want me to call the police?” she asked.

“Oh, no. Look, I’m sorry,” the girl’s white teeth clattered. Then she began crying, her skin slowly turning from red to a
more disturbing blue.

“Listen to me,” Roni barked in her army officer’s voice, pitched sharp enough to startle arrogant young Israeli men. “I will
drive you home and we’ll see what’s what. Where do you live?”

“Eight-forty Fifth, at 65th Street.”

Roni knew the building, a very rich person’s building. More than
just rich. A classy building. A lost slip of a girl who lived in a magnificent building. Then she saw the diamond ring as
big as a crab apple reflecting from a streetlight. She thought of other people who could find this girl, rob her of the gem
without any shame at all, and leave her to freeze on the street.

She used her lean muscles to heft the girl, and carried her across the street. Lifting her into the back seat of her carriage,
she bundled her up in the heavy plaid lap robe.