Crazy for Cornelia (6 page)

“I do neon sculpture.”

“Pink flamingos ’n’ shit?”

“My dad thought I ought to do beer signs.” It felt easy talking to Philip, so long as he could sniff the way the reporter’s
questions were headed. “He worked as a brewer for Schaeffer a long time ago.”

“I remember Schaeffer. New York beer,” Philip Grace said.

“Nobody else does,” Kevin told him. “But I got involved making this sculpture of Saint Sebastian instead. You know the martyr
with the arrows in his chest?”

“Long way from Schaeffer to saints.” Grace chewed that over. “Like Hallmark stuff? Little red St. Valentine neon guy, with
pudgy cheeks?”

“Bigger,” Kevin said. “Life-sized.”

Grace looked lost. “You mean neon
art?
Is it good?”

“Well…” The cold numbing his face, Kevin knocked his hands together and took a breath. “I can tell you it’s almost perfect
technically, except the halo’s a little off and I can’t get the neon to shimmer the way I’d like. I got it in a gallery, but
like the owner says, ‘It’s not creative unless it sells.’ So I guess the jury’s still out on how good it is.”

“’Cause I was thinkin’,” Grace went on, and Kevin had to give him credit for plugging away, “maybe we could swing by St.
Patrick’s, ask if they need it for the altar.”

Kevin cackled loudly at the thought of his Sebastian in the Irish saint’s cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Yeah, they’d love it
at St. Pat’s, the priests probably throwing holy water to chase it out.

The two of them had already walked two blocks crosstown, were coming to the light on Park Avenue.

“Whoa.” Philip put his hand in front of Kevin, holding him back.

A bicycle messenger from hell shot in front of them unexpectedly, wearing a black helmet and gloves.

“Thanks,” Kevin said.

The city had hung festive white holiday lights on the spare trees in the center of the avenue, but they wouldn’t start glittering
until after dark. On top of all the coffee, hunger made Kevin feel light-headed. Philip Grace bounced along with him, just
as hungry for information.

“I read your story yesterday,” Kevin said. “What’s your column called?”

Philip slipped his hand into the pocket of his once elegant coat and handed Kevin a glossy business card, fancy white letters
on a black background.

Philip Grace. Debwatch. The New York Daily Globe
.

He saw an office number and a pager. No address.

“I thought it up myself,” Grace said. “A debutante watch. ‘Debutante,’ you look up the word, that’s a girl gets it all handed
to her, parents throw this
comin’ out
party when she’s eighteen. She’s introduced to society, meanin’ the white power structure. The ‘watch’ part, that’s my job.
I keep my nose down, see what all those debs get up to, ’specially if they like to run around, get into trouble.”

Kevin waited. “Why?”

Philip Grace gave him an All-Star glower. “Kevin Doyle, the debutante is the last gasp of the great let-’em-eat-cake, guzzle-champagne-on-the-backs-of-the-poor
American class system. The Golden Goddess of Inequality is what she is. When one of ’em falls off the pedestal, it’s got social
significance.”

Uh-huh, Kevin thought. Just like this reporter, he’d grown up on
the street. Even his baby teeth had been kicked in. Kevin knew exactly what desperation looked and smelled like, and he couldn’t
let Grace think he was getting over on him.

He stopped walking, and Grace stopped in synch with him.

“So, Philip, you bump into a lot of other newspeople on your beat?”

“Not too many.” Philip sounded a little guarded, not so cocky.

“Well,” Kevin pressed, “all due respect, but I was wondering if maybe you started out chasing Madonna and Leo, some real celebrities,
but you couldn’t handle the competition.”

Kevin might as well have thrown a pail of ice water on him, because Philip froze. But, to his credit, he recovered quickly.

“See, I figured you for a man liked to dig in, Kevin Doyle. Yeah, I had my special problems, gainin’ access. Got me three
TROs last year.”

“What?”

“Temporary restraining orders,” Grace said proudly. “The white celebrities start cringin’ when a black man jumps in front
of ’em.”

“And the debutantes don’t?”

Philip laughed. “Damn, you don’t give a guy any room. Let’s just say I learned you gotta create a niche for yourself. Too
many reporters out there. So I stake out my segment, debs worth dishin’, and do my homework. This Cornelia Lord, she’s a disaster
searchin’ for a photographer.”

Kevin thought about the spoiled rich girl’s eyes in the photograph. She’d been searching for something, but definitely not
a camera. “You’re saying, she’s asking for it?”

“Don’t matter. The public’s got a right to know. You seen Corny yet? Man, that’s a one-woman show. How ‘bout I buy you somethin’
to eat, we can talk about her.”

Kevin felt the emptiness of his stomach and his wallet. But the only thing worse than hunger he could think of, even worse
than being a servant, was being for sale.

“No thanks.” He put his hands in the cold, frayed pockets of his leather jacket and flashed Philip a grin so he’d know this
wasn’t personal. “Just so we’re clear, I gotta issue you my personal TRO on any resident where I work, okay?”

Grace started to speak, then stuck his hand out so Kevin had to shake it again, one businesslike pump.

“Well, I’ll see you ‘round the building, Kevin Doyle.” Grace smirked. “Both gotta fight for our art, right?”

He strolled off, whistling.

Kevin looked at Philip Grace’s card and wondered if he’d just done something stupid, passing up a fistful of cash. Then he
tore it up and scattered the pieces in the wind.

He walked to Third Avenue, listening to his stomach gurgling. He had one dollar and some change in his pocket. Coffee or a
subway token, but not both. He stopped at a coffee shop no wider than a bowling lane; a dirty blue neon sign announced, “The
Waldorf-Estonia Luncheonette.” Thanks to his neon teacher, he recognized the stylish letters as an example of the 1930s German
Bauhaus school of signage.

The coffee shop looked generically shabby. Booths were jammed close together around the same chipped Formica tables as his
building’s staff room. Somebody had just swabbed the floor. He gagged from the smell of ammonia.

Regular working people hunched over the counter, sipping coffee and scarfing down Danish. The booths belonged to plumbers
and other trade aristocrats who made their own hours and took time to order eggs and pancakes. He took a booth toward the
back, then once again checked his pockets for spare change.

Kevin’s eyes went glassy as he read the menu, four pages long, single spaced. The smaller and seedier the luncheonette, the
more items they had on the menu. Where did they keep all this stuff?

“You want to order?”

A young waitress with a whiny voice stood over him, a mustard stain on her white sleeve, rolled up to reveal bleached hair
on her arms with tiny black roots like an ant farm. She held her pencil stub to her pad as if Kevin were putting her life
on hold. He asked for a small pitcher of hot water with a teabag on the side.

When the waitress left his water and complimentary soda crackers, he looked around to see if anybody was watching. Then he
took the clogged-up bottle of Heinz ketchup and tapped on the “57” etched in the glass; the ketchup spurted like lava into
the cup of boiling water.
Kevin stirred his instant tomato soup. It scalded his tongue, then filled his throat and chest, and finally dulled the aching
in his stomach.

He snuck three cups of his homemade soup and six packages of crackers, watching to make sure the waitress didn’t catch him.
But she was busy snapping orders in shorthand through a window in the kitchen.

Kevin checked the time on the watch his father had lent him, an old promotional one that said on the rotting band,
Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one
. He would really need to buy a more dignified watch for the job. But he already owed Uncle Eddie $2,000 for getting him the
job. “The vig,” Eddie had called it. Kevin snorted. That was Eddie Feeney deluxe, trying to sound like a loan shark to scare
him. At least he wouldn’t have to pay Eddie until Christmas Day, after he got his tips.

His eyes closed. He thought about the fact that he couldn’t totally explain to himself, let alone Philip Grace, about the
neon saint.

Because that’s what Mom wanted
.

On his eleventh birthday, she balanced
Art of the Renaissance
on her lap and pointed to the color reproductions of paintings like
The Adoration of the Magi
. Kevin stared at the halos, which popped out at him like golden saucers.

“The saints,” his mother breathed. “Look at the coolers.”

The colors
. His mother loved an artist whom he thought she called Jotto, like the New York lottery. She pointed out all the paintings
Jotto created, the frescoes inside churches with names like
The Ascension
with Jesus Christ taking off like a 747.

Jotto, he discovered, was really a fourteenth-century Italian painter named Giotto. And Giotto painted stories that had a
kind of moral, if not always physical, beauty. One of Giotto’s paintings of Francis of Assisi made Kevin see why the saint
was a big deal to the Irish, because Giotto zeroed in on the saint’s character. Francis grew up a spoiled young rich man’s
son who got sick and learned to be humble, then gave all his possessions back to his father and spent his life in poverty.
He made his whole life an offering.

But his mom’s favorite saint was St. Sebastian. The young Roman had served as an officer in the Praetorian Guard, protecting
the Emperor Diocletian. Then Sebastian, that arrogant Roman prick, somehow
got what his mom called a “spark of the divine.” He became a true believer, a persecuted Christian, along with the poor people
and the lepers. Diocletian liked Sebastian, so he ordered him to renounce his faith. When Sebastian refused, Diocletian threw
an imperial-sized fit and ordered Sebastian shot by archers in his command, dishonorably fragged by his own men.

In
Art of the Renaissance
, Kevin’s mother reverently pointed out Giotto’s little-known
Lost Saint Sebastian
, stolen and then recovered from a Swiss bank vault. She told him it was the first painting she had ever seen. She had found
it in the National Museum in Dublin, a
culchie
country girl with skinned knees trembling in front of the triptych of Sebastian with his chest full of arrows. She said it
changed her life.

Just thinking about it made Kevin’s chest hurt. Those sharp arrows probably made a hell of a thump even going into a tree.
He wondered how they must have felt tearing through muscle and pumping arteries.

Kevin was jolted out of his reverie by the waitress speedwalking past him.

“Can I have another hot water, please?”

She ignored him and went to another table to take an order.

Kevin closed his eyes again for just a second. He saw Saint Sebastian hanging. The archers started to bang their bows on the
ground. His eyes opened and his waitress was banging silverware on the table in front of him. He smiled at her.

“You were snoring like a pig in a trough,” she said, like she’d caught him walking out the door with the cash register. “You
see a sign outside, Eat ‘n’ Sleep?”

“No,” he said. “I was just drifting.”

“No more crackers, you cheap shit,” she yelled, making people turn and stare. “Go outside. The cold’s free.”

“The cold’s free in here.” Kevin sighed, and got up to pay at the counter. He couldn’t work up much hostility for the waitress.
The tips must suck at the Waldorf-Estonia Luncheonette, and at least one of the customers looked like he belonged back in
the psych ward at Bellevue.

A middle-aged man with a red face, who had missed about half
his thick whiskers shaving, sat at the counter wearing a seedy old business suit. Nobody sat near him, because every few
seconds he would suddenly jerk back on his spinning seat and wave with both hands, like a spring-loaded toy.

Kevin had seen plenty of people do that at Bellevue, wrestling with invisible demons or maybe thinking they were doing a breaststroke
across the East River. He looked away.

On his way out the door, he snuck a curious look back and stopped. A fly landed on the man’s food. Kevin watched the man jerk
his body back and do his breaststroke again to chase the fly away. But the fly zipped right back a few seconds later, insanely
persistent like all insects, and landed on the man’s greasy hash browns.

Kevin stared, wondering how he could turn his observation into art. Someday, after he fixed Sebastian’s halo, maybe he could
create a neon sculpture about somebody like that. Somebody who looks from a distance like he’s acting crazy. Then, after you
get closer, you see he has a good reason.

I
gnoring the screaming wind on Lexington Avenue, Kevin looked for a phone booth that wasn’t being used or vandalized.

His mom could play the Irish martyr sometimes. She could have asked his dad to carry the turkey up the stairs for her. Or
waited for Kevin. Why hadn’t he gotten there early enough to help her?

He couldn’t crawl any lower than being responsible, even in a small way, for his mother’s death. Or maybe he could. No matter
how rotten things got, they could always be downgraded an extra notch. He felt a vague panic that he could still fail at neon
sculpture and die his own Art Death. Then, for the rest of his life, he’d be a doorman.

At the corner of Lexington and 52nd, he found a pay phone that worked and punched in the number of the Stinson Gallery in
SoHo. This was the sixteenth call he’d made to the owner, Jessica Fernandez. He hoped that this time she’d be there, since
she’d never call him back.

“Stinson. Jessica Fernandez speaking.”

“Jessica? Kevin Doyle. How are you?”

“Kevin, darling.” She sounded pleased. “Come right over. I have something I’d like to speak to you about.”