Tessa never cries. She hardly ever lets herself look exhausted—at least, not in front of people. She frequently looks exhausted when she is alone—or, when she thinks she is alone.
She leans against the elevator’s back wall and lets her neck go slack. Her head bonks against the glass, once. Twice, three times, while the first floor swells around her. In the morning, sunlight makes the glass elevator into a prism as it arrives in the foyer, but not now. Tessa shakes her head at the chandelier, a piece of modern art with white sconces in the shape of a pinecone. It cost seven million dollars. Even if it were lit, it would not prevent the foyer—which boasts east--facing windows every bit as long and impressive as the ballroom’s facing west—from looking like a gargantuan, vaulted tomb in the late afternoon, with its white counters, white sofas, and white marble floors. Tessa’s apartment is a one--bedroom in Anaheim—the good part of Anaheim, but still. Her apartment has indoor--outdoor carpet and a stove on which only three out of four burners work, and her savings account surpassed six figures long ago.
As the main elevator slows still further to settle at its terminus, Tessa’s chin lifts. The elevator dings, and the doors slide open. Shoulders back, she walks to the manager’s office, where the lone person on the first floor sits behind a desk, holding his head in his hands. Destin really let Franklin have it. Franklin leaves his head in his hands, though he must hear Tessa’s boots clacking on the foyer’s Italian marble. She arrives at his office, leans in the doorway—clipboard held parallel to the crease in her black skirt—and waits.
“Don’t tell me he didn’t mean it, Tessie,” Franklin says.
Tessa doesn’t like being called “Tessie”—or anything other than “Tessa”—but she’s never told Franklin that.
“I won’t,” Tessa says. “But I will tell you he barked at everybody in the hotel. Everybody. Including apprentice electricians he’d never met before.”
Franklin raises his head, but keeps a hand over his face. He does this to look silly. It is effective, but not in an endearing way. “He told me I’m not fit to manage a McDonald’s.”
“Aw, Frank,” says Tessa. Her mouth twitches. “Of course you’re not.”
Franklin reclines in his ergonomic office chair. He is short, muscular, hairy, and gay. “Shit on that.” Now he’s grinning. “I could manage the shit out of a McDonald’s.”
Tessa said once that the trick to managing Franklin is to feign amusement at his moods and support his own bouts of insecurity so that his narcissism comes to the fore to galvanize his tenuous sense of self. She didn’t use these exact words. She said, “Tell an asshole he’s an asshole nicely and he’ll fight you.” But she also feels sorry for Franklin. She once said, “He has all the backbone of a jellyfish on a clothesline.” Her expression softens as he reaches to the bottom drawer of his desk and extracts a bottle of scotch and two cut crystal glasses.
“Frank,” she says with a tone.
He pours an inch of scotch. Tessa takes the glass he hands her, but she dumps the liquor in a potted banana tree by the door. Franklin knocks his back.
Tessa says, “Charles thinks he understands people, but he doesn’t. Makes him dangerous.” She sets her glass on Franklin’s desk blotter.
“Dangerous.” Franklin laughs, lightened by Tessa’s confession. “It surprises me you would use the word ‘dangerous.’ ”
Tessa makes a mark on her clipboard. “It’s the right word.”
“How are we doing? For real?”
“We’re in great shape. We’re two days ahead on the ballroom setup, and housekeeping can’t do anything but stock counts until electric’s done on three through twelve—”
“That’s not my fault.”
Tessa’s posture stiffens, so slightly that only a knowing eye would see it. “It’s no one’s fault. Charles didn’t allow for overtime, Pat didn’t notify him the timeline got wonky because of it, nobody told me any of that, so how could I tell you?” She tucks a hair into the twist at the nape of her neck and doesn’t wait for Franklin’s answer. “I have to catch Sid before he leaves. I doubt Charles trekked all the way into the maze, but he might’ve.”
Franklin calls a thank--you. Tessa waves without looking around. Passing the information desk and the check--in counter, she walks to the front entrance and out. She turns around in the reception driveway, looks directly into Camera 3, and says, “You know how Charles is. Don’t take it personally.”
I almost laugh. Tessa holds the camera’s gaze for several seconds, her face firm. She’s imagining my team members on the twentieth floor. She thinks they’re nodding at the monitor and scoffing over hot cups of coffee. Her imaginings are vague, because Tessa’s never been to the twentieth floor.
She turns, jogs three steps, and then walks again when she sees that two vans still squat at the maze’s entrance. One is dirty and green with “Donaldson Landscaping” stenciled on the side panel. The other is clean and dented, black and blank; it belongs to the electricians. Tessa rounds the vans just as Sid materializes in the maze’s narrow opening. His girth, his bucket of greenery, and his jolly smile at seeing her make Sid look like an oversized garden gnome. Their body language is casual, and their conversation lasts less than four minutes. Toward the end, Sid shakes his head. He points toward the maze and mimes a rich--man walk by sticking his nose in the air. Tessa laughs, smug she was correct that Destin wouldn’t dirty his suit simply to hurl curse words at the man who tends the hedges. She smiles fondly at Sid: here is one fewer person for her to placate. She tells him with fake sternness that she’s off to check his work, and Sid wipes his brow with fake worry. Tessa waves good--bye. She disappears.
She reappears, via Camera 2. She’s checking her watch. It is five fifty--eight p.m. Her body wilts, her feet slow, but her route is much more efficient than Sid’s. Her neck sags to one side, then the other. Tessa unties the twist of her hair and shakes the full weight of it back, unaware how lovely and calm the gesture makes her look, certainly unaware that as she arrives in the maze’s center, Camera 1 motion--activates and shows her trudging toward the fountain, exhausted.
Sid tosses his equipment in the back of the van. He slams the rear doors and gets in the front seat, emerging a second later to pick a brochure out of his windshield wiper. He frowns at it. Destin placed it there before diving into his limousine and racing back to Los Angeles.
“Safety. Luxury. Manderley.”
It’s a slogan that means whatever the prospective guest wants it to mean. The brochure is illustrated with the cliché ocean vistas and eerily clean interiors of any coastal hotel, but it hints at a level of privacy unattainable anywhere else. It promises a movie star sojourn from a bad breakup. It tells the hedge fund manager discretion will be afforded his mistress. It informs the dignitary who has com-mitted terrible atrocities that his transgressions are of no interest here. This is a business that understands business. The background checks for employees are extensive, the hiring process complex. There will be no waiters spiriting bombs upstairs for seventeen American dollars—and especially not cheap bombs—because the hotel pays its employees extremely well.
But Sid is a subcontractor. He makes twelve--fifty an hour, and he has moderate to serious class rage.
Destin knows this. He laughed about it with his driver. His driver is Somali and speaks no English.
Sid throws the brochure over his shoulder. He’s good--humored but not stupid, and he’ll proudly tell someone on first meeting about his quick Irish temper. He slams the van door behind him. The starter grinds. The brochure puffs from the gravel as he blows by it, soaring much higher than one would expect, and flutters down like a serene bird to land on a hedge’s smooth, squared top. The van’s tires squeal down the driveway.
Tessa blinks at the noise. Her brow furrows, but then it relaxes. She’s busy perusing the roses that spit from the hedges like a million arterial bleeds. Cursory inspections here are fine. Sid does excellent work. She’s only ever had to reprimand him once, for defecating into a shrub to save himself a trip inside the hotel.
She sits on the fountain’s wide rim. Her clipboard crushes the flower Sid left her. She’s unzipping her left boot. There’s the click of the zipper down the teeth, to the heel. She winces pulling it off. Then she does her right. She pivots around on her behind to face the fruit and hummingbirds carved in gray granite. She looks at her feet submerging. A plub sound. The black water is warm, oily from a long July day, and she moves her feet in overlapping circles, smiling tiredly at the Venn diagram they create. Or smiling at their motion, as if they existed separately from her. Or at the water, its ridges and scales, the shush they whisper rippling outward from her soft knees. One can be forgiven for wondering—especially one who sees her do this every day at six p.m.—where her mind goes when she watches her feet draw circles underwater, what window to what world lies at the bottom of that dark fountain. She never looks so sad as when she looks almost happy. And it’s very nearly possible, seeing her at peace for the last time, to delude myself that she will remain there, static, safe.
To ignore the Killer in Room 717, rising from the bed.
Or the motorcycle zooming up Manderley’s long driveway, which wraps around either side of the maze like a noose.
CAMERA 2/3, 4, 4/12, 3
The electricians have arrived in the foyer. They took the stairs. Their voices were indecipherable in the stairwell, but here, in the spacious foyer’s excellent acoustics, each is distinct. They’re making fun of the apprentice who lost his walkie--talkie. “Vin, buddy, you gonna lose your dick next—”; “Nah, Vin’s girl got it in a jar on the—”; “Yeah! Ha! Woo! She’s—”; “Important. Expensive, too,” says the lead electrician, who has a hand on Vin’s slouching back. “I know every kid had a walkie--talkie, but they were cheap kids’ toys, and these are part of the trade, Vin. Okay?”
Tessa’s head snaps up from the fountain. She looks terrified. Her breath stops; it’s Pavlovian. She grabs her clipboard and tries to calm herself—some internal conversation, counterargument to a nightmare. The motorcycle engine gives a final grunt and is silent. Tessa’s chest collapses in. Rises--collapses. The sound of her panicked respiration is enough to make an invested observer panic, too, but she grabs her left hand with her right and digs her thumbnail into her palm. Pain pulls her eyes wide open, and her breathing normalizes. She laughs, not happily, dismissing her fear of a revving motorcycle like a judge would a case with no evidence. She’s brutal about putting her boots back on and yanking the front pieces of her hair into a low knot.
A young man in a motorcycle jacket eases down his kickstand with bizarre physical grace. He levers himself off the bike the same way. His clothing and transportation bespeak an idolization of Steve McQueen, but he’s tall, slight. He looks up at Manderley, and he pales. The hotel can have that effect at twilight. Its flat white fa?ade with several hundred panes of clear glass is intimidating—the tired simile of empty windows as eyes. He touches his motorcycle’s handlebars, as if for comfort. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and begins to pace. Occasionally he puts a rough hand through his short, dark hair.
The young man in the motorcycle jacket becomes the central point for two approaching parties: Tessa, from the hedge maze, her boot heels punching divots in the soil and the electricians, from the foyer, whose cacophony is dying down at Vin’s lack of reaction to their mockery. The electricians’ exit from the foyer doors and Tessa’s exit from the maze are nearly simultaneous. Nearly, but not quite. The electricians are first.
Vin says, “Whoa!” He’s staring at the motorcycle parked by their van.
“Dude!” says another apprentice.
The young man turns to them. Tessa sees him in profile, and she drops her clipboard. It clatters against a low marble plaque recommending that any guests who fear tight spaces should forgo the hedge maze. Attached to the plaque is a cube of Plexiglas; it is designed to hold maps of the maze, which Tessa hopes will obviate guest complaints that the path is too difficult. The young man turns back to Tessa. He’s looking at her like she’s a mirage.
“Domini?” says Pat, who’s looking at the young man like he’s a mirage.
Seconds later, the young man in the motorcycle jacket has vanished, surrounded by the five electricians. Their gruff handshakes and slaps to the young man’s back give Tessa, who remains standing stiff as an ax handle, a chance to pick up her clipboard and compose her features, which briefly slide into an arrangement completely foreign to her face: skin crimped and pinking, mouth pressed thin, eyes wet. She swallows, her throat convulsing several times, like whatever she’s feeling is something she must digest. It appears to work. She walks toward the huddle of men with the hard fa?ade she wears on mornings when she has important meetings on her schedule.
The electricians are behaving like girls at a dance who want to be looked at, listened to: “Damn, that jump at Saratoga—”; “Watched it the night my kid was born. Wife kept telling me to turn off the—”; “Haven’t seen you. Heard you’re mostly promoting—”
“Brian?” Tessa says. She makes a check mark on her clipboard. This action is an excuse to study the hedge maze, and not the young man in the motorcycle jacket, whose name, one supposes, must be Brian.
“Listen,” says Pat to Brian, fumbling in the pockets of his drywall--specked jeans, “I know you must get this all the time, but—” He shoves a pen and perhaps a receipt into Brian’s hand. “For my son. He’s a fan. I mean, I am, too, but he’d flip shit if I came home with—”
“Sure,” Brian says, and more pens and odd scraps of paper appear by his hands. “What’s your son’s name?” He grins at Tessa. It’s not a creepy or smarmy grin. It’s boyish. Kind.