Crazy for Cornelia (40 page)

If ever.

Anyway, she couldn’t save herself now. It was on him to patch together his thin armor and go after her.

Thinking about the “nuptials,” that almost obscene-sounding word, he felt suddenly drained of all energy and hope.

Who was he kidding?

If she stepped into her world again, they could flick a finger and be rid of him forever.

An aide approached him, warily. “You’ve still got a visitor.”

He slumped to the visitors room in his bedroom slippers.

“Jesus, Kevin,” Marne greeted him. “You look like you’ve been chewing the rug. What happened to you?”

“They gave Cornelia shock treatments and released her.”

“Shock?” She blinked. “What kind of shock?”

“Right out of the Middle Ages. They use them to zap somebody’s brain if they’re really disturbed or suicidal. I can’t believe
her father could do that to her.”

Marne involuntarily flexed her biceps under her jacket. “So what are you gonna to do about it?”

“Do about it?” He looked at the wall, as if the secret hung on a light fixture. “Marne, they’re holding me until my health
plan runs out. If I act crazy, they’re happy. If I act normal, they say I’m manipulating them and they drive me crazy all
over again. It’s a beautiful system.

She scowled. “Can they do that? I mean, they got laws in New York State. Look at all the nuts on the street. Maybe I should
call the ACLU for you.”

“The ACLU?” His eyes stung with a hopeless fury. “I need the 101st Airborne. She’s getting married on Valentine’s Day. Oh,
Jesus. What’s the date today?”

“February 7.”

He tried to get control but felt his eyes rolling like pinwheels. “A week. I have to break out of here, get past building
security at 840 Fifth, sneak into the Lords’ apartment, and convince her she ought to take a chance with me. Marne, you’ve
known me since I was two. You really think I’m up to that?”

“What I think,” Marne said after a hard look at him, “is that you rescued that girl once, all on your own. You earned her,
Kevin.”

Vlad’s stupid story about the Doorman Prince had lodged in his brain. Now it crept forward to mock him. He felt that life
had just swallowed him up.

Doorman Prince, my ass
.

Hope had driven him into the hospital. Hope gave you that dumb ambition that spits in the face of reason. But sometimes hope
failed. You get outsmarted, outspent, life comes at you thundering like a bullherd, and you get trampled.

Maybe real wisdom came when you realized it was smarter to give up.

His voice was only a whisper. “Maybe you were right all along. It’s not the end of the world just being a doorman, is it?”

His sister flashed him the defiant glare of the Feeneys, the fighters.

“Being a doorman may be okay for some people,” she told him. “But not for Kevin Doyle.”

T
o the father of the groom!”

“To Sloopy, hear, hear!”

She obediently stood and hoisted her champagne glass. Forty-eight relatives and close friends selected for this intimate dinner
at Binky’s, a jewelbox of a private club, bobbed up like a line of dominoes jerked on a string.

The man from the
New York Times
, the only society reporter permitted into their dinner, ticked off photos of Cornelia as she smiled at Tucker. She widened
her jaw until it showed all her teeth and gums. She lifted her own glass to clink onto his.

Now the whole table stared at Tucker’s father. Sloopy Fisk flapped his fluffy eyebrows in Cornelia’s direction. Amazing that
his friends still called him Sloopy, his nickname from Yale. But not quite as amazing as his marriage to Tucker’s mother.

Perhaps they found each other in a marriage of convenience. Sloopy’s family had the name, but was shabby genteel. Tucker’s
mother, Elise, wore the pants and made the money. She stood as far apart from Sloopy as seating permitted, clutching the stem
of her glass too tightly.

Her new in-laws. Harmless Sloopy and intense Elise. Her future
mother-in-law’s heart pumped so much adrenaline, her fingers almost broke the stemware. But she wasn’t marrying Elise, was
she?

Now it was time for sweet Sloopy’s toast, and she stifled a giggle at his stuffy formality.

Sloopy began luffing at length. “It’s good to finally be in the ‘family way’ with my old college roommate, Chester Lord. We’ve
always been close, but as Chester’s dad used to say, ‘Nothing wrong with inbreeding… works for racehorses, doesn’t it?’”

She heard echoes of polite laughter.

A flickering candle caught her attention inside the glass of the candelabra in front of her. Like a firefly, casting little
stars and shadows, shapes like…
that face in uniform
.

A uniformed officer of some kind, with his ear bleeding.

Her father had just explained
that face
the day before. It was a man who used to work at her building. He had done something and been fired. When did he work there?
she wondered. Surely when she was a child. She couldn’t recall his name, but he saved her from a terrible accident. It was
a trauma, Chester told her, like her mother dying.

Oops. All the guests stood up around the table, looking at her.

She shifted her attention back to her well-wishers. Sloopy had finished his part. Now they all waited for her.

She smiled apologetically. “Thank you,” she said, lifting her glass. “I have a toast, too. To my fiancé, who I’m sure you’ve
all read about in
New York
magazine as the city’s number one bachelor. What more could I add, except that we’ll be putting an end to that foolishness
soon enough.”

Relieved laughter bubbled from the table.

Kevin whaled against the old Beautyrest put up against the wall of the Seclusion Room.

Dust particles flew as he skinned his knuckles red. He raged, screeching and muttering, yowling and cursing. He no longer
cared how he sounded. It didn’t matter, anyway.

Loblitz had downgraded him even further, a unit so hellish they didn’t even call it a wing—South One, an apt name for this
lowest level of pit, for patients with random bursts of aggression and bad table manners. There were so many problem patients,
the South One Seclusion
Room often became as overbooked as an HMO’s waiting room. Kevin often had to share it with other patients.

He tensed for trouble from one of the real psychos when the door clicked and slammed open with a squish against the rubber.
Then he relaxed.

“Hey, Richard,” he said.

The aides wrestled his pudgy old pal in, pink-wrapped in a cold sheet, and dropped him onto the floor mattress. The aeronautical
engineer rolled his eyes up so high Kevin could only see the whites like two cueballs.

He felt sorry for Richard, but at least it wasn’t his turn in the freezing sheets.

Then the door opened again and Loblitz’s curly head popped in.

“Cold-pack Doyle, too,” he ordered.

They sat shivering together.

Kevin tried concentrating on a plan. He had heard about prisoners of war who survived by building houses in their heads, down
to the last nail. He was constructing his plan. But now Richard was interrupting, blowing big holes in his plan so it kept
collapsing. Richard was whining in one of his high-pitched monologues that lasted hours, sometimes days. He recited aircraft
specs in a voice so incredibly high-pitched and singsong there was no way to keep it from intruding on his thoughts.

“Richard,” he finally asked him, “what are they punishing you for?”

“My doctor had me taken upstairs,” Richard told him, teeth chattering. “I went for it.”

Richard had a rare but very real mental disorder Kevin had heard about at Bellevue. Richard was an obsessive personality who,
if he went above the first floor, would look at a window and feel the compulsion to fly. Now Richard had been cruelly denied
both the thrill of flight and his plastic green bottle to throw up in the air. He needed more than ever to recite the specs
of every aircraft ever built, to bring order back to his world.

“If you had a plane in the Wright Brothers’ day, Kevin,” he babbled in the high-pitched whine, “it was probably a Curtiss…”

Kevin sighed and gave up on constructing his plan. Instead he
tried to imagine puffy clouds and Richard’s old planes. The tiny germ of an idea started, but Richard’s voice chased it away.

He fell fitfully asleep. He dreamed of a cobalt sky and a flock of white doves soaring into the sun. He woke sharply and saw
only the white room.

Richard lay next to him, snoring.

Cornelia waited for Tucker in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel.

She read her daily checklist for the third time. She had forgotten to do a bridal registry at Bendel’s, Tina’s suggestion.
But she did remember that she and her parents had always brunched in this lovely, archaic room when she was a child.

This would be her last chance to really talk with Tucker before the wedding. And she did have some questions.

Now Tucker threaded through the room toward her, beaming, clearly the star of his world. His presence excited one tableful
of businesspeople who smiled and nodded as he passed. With his shiny blond hair combed back and his crisp white shirt and
wine-colored tie, he seemed practically anointed for power.

She tried to organize her thoughts. They were so hollowed out somehow, like craters of the moon.

“Hi,” he greeted her. “Rough morning. Am I late?”

“Only an hour.”

Over these past few weeks, she had definitely learned Tucker’s sense of priorities. Her handsome young man smoothed out his
tie, a silky Armani, and swept his hair back with his hand to strike a leonine pose.

Tucker Fisk, King of Beasts.

But much of his story needed to be repeated to her. She could recall so little of their time together. She remembered the
feeling of high pressure, being jostled around in a small plane. Then some incident by a fountain where he appeared to look
after her. They seemed to have shared some rough moments, which of course could glue a couple together. What seemed to elude
her in her recollections were the giddy, carefree times that they must also have shared to be so in love that they were now
heading for the altar.

“Tucker, what exactly did we do when we dated? I hate having to ask, but I can’t help it.”

He shrugged and patted her hand once. Whether it was from tenderness or a hint of impatience, she couldn’t tell.

“We saw friends, went to parties.”

The nice waiter appeared. He had already brought her five cups of coffee while she waited, and joked with her so she wouldn’t
feel so alone.

“We’ll both have kippers and eggs with coffee,” Tucker told him.

“Tucker, don’t I hate kippers?”

“Oh. What do you want?”

“Just the coffee. And maybe a mimosa would be nice.”

The waiter started to move away.

“Waiter,” Tucker called loudly. The man returned without flinching. “No champagne in her mimosa.”

She glanced out the window toward Central Park. The morning had been bright and cloudless. Now a thundercloud drooped north
of the park. She watched it darken and saw light flash through it.

A lightning storm—rare for February. It made her tense. No, severely troubled. She sensed a vague memory through her body,
stirring her nerve endings.

In the distance, a white bolt crackled out of the thick cloud. She jumped in her seat.

“What’s the matter?” Tucker asked her.

“I don’t know.”

The lightning had startled her with what she recognized as traces of forgotten feelings, important ones. They slid across
her face like fingernails on a blackboard, sharp, intrusive.

“Then what’s bothering you?” Tucker asked.

“An electrical storm.”

A single line of worry appeared on his forehead.

“No,” he told her firmly. “It’s just a storm.”

C
ornelia lay in the half-world between sleep and waking.

She slept for so long, a crust of sandpaper had formed between her eyelids. She opened one eye and looked around her.

The pillows and bedsheets sandwiched her among layers of lavender silk and pink chenille.

She opened the other eye. The room looked almost exactly as it had when she was a child. She was sure she recognized the hand-painted
bed table. It was a pastoral scene of maidens in togas frolicking in a yellow field, their faces like peaches over ample arms
and legs. All that exquisite brushwork, just to decorate a drawer that contained her hairbrush and Excedrin.

A piece of Lalique crystal on the table had also been shaped into a maiden—maybe the White Rock girl bending over and pushing
her hair back. Simple maidens cavorted everywhere in this girl’s room, dewy virgins, milkmaids. Like the young girl in the
poem “Maud Muller.”

What was the phrase about Maud?

For of all sad words of tongue or pen

The saddest are these: It might have been!

Why did she remember this room as having been simpler once?

She had the nagging sense that it had been quite stark. Yes. And she was certain that a fish tank once occupied the space
where a huffy Louis XVI armoire now stood.

She slipped out of her bed and walked nude to her closet, threw open the door, revealing a rarefied fashion warehouse full
of dresses and sportswear and suits. Hanging in the center was the giant plastic Baggie that held her wedding gown.

She took down her extravagant dress and held it up to her neck, studying herself from all angles in her three-way mirror.

She swayed her torso left and right, the elegant wedding dress flowing with her. Perhaps one hundred yards of silk, tulle,
and taffeta, gathered and draped, puffed into a fantasy, crowned with a few dozen yards of lace to be swept back over her
head and shoulders. Her blond hair folded itself neatly around her head now, snipped into a debutante’s understated haircut.

She hung up the dress. She would adhere strictly to schedule. Madame timed this day as precisely as boiling an egg.