Security by Gina Wohlsdorf
“That feast was laid before us always, and yet we ate so little.”
—DAPHNE DU MAURIER
CAMERA 1
The maze is twenty--five hundred yards square. Destin Management Group planted hedges before they even began construction on the hotel, since plants can’t be paid to hurry like contractors can. The hedges are twelve feet tall, lush, rounded smooth as sanded wood, and currently a dark black green. This is because the hotel is straight and monolithic, a stark white block on a flat stretch of Santa Barbara beach, the kind of building that inspires arguments about whether its simplistic appearance is a great leap forward in design, or whether a child with a crayon and a napkin could have drawn it while waiting for a five--dollar grilled cheese. It’s visible from the Pacific Coast Highway but only just. The driveway is quite long so as to accommodate the hedge maze, which is the size of half a football field, and it is darkening, now, in the hotel’s shadow.
In the maze’s center, the dark red roses are immaculate, thanks to four hours of grooming and possibly because Sid, a freckled and obese landscape technician, is singing “O Danny Boy” in his surprisingly gentle tenor. He told the landscape architect that romantic serenades are the secret to growing flawless red roses; fragile flowers need to know they’re loved. He also told the landscape architect he hated the hotel and would take the contract on the condition he never had to go inside. “It looks like a goddamn tooth. Like a tooth somebody yanked out and stuck on the beach.” He pointed at the hotel and spat in its direction, unaware anyone was listening. “Like it’d bite you when you weren’t watching close.”
Manderley Resort does look somewhat like a tooth. Kinder meta-phors like “jewel” and “main sail” are more prominent in the marketing materials. Ads in every medium have ensured that Manderley is the talk of its demographic. Every third billboard in Los Angeles splashes a quote from Travel magazine about how tasteful, how opulent, and how special Manderley will be once it opens in August. It is now mid--July. More tasteful and more opulent invitations arrived at the households of L.A.’s elite yesterday. It’s going to be the Party of the Year. It says so on the invitation. Charles Destin—owner of Destin Management Group, owner of Manderley Resort—does not know how to throw a party that is anything but the Party of the Year.
Destin’s father was a diplomat who died in a hotel in Sierra Leone because a waiter agreed to take a contraband tray to Lamont Destin’s room. The waiter agreed to do this for seventeen American dollars. The tray had a bomb glued underneath it—a cheap bomb, composed of household products. Charles Destin was notified of his father’s death after a lacrosse match. He was ten years old. He won the lacrosse match, and he always includes this detail when the subject of his father’s death meanders into conversation. He also always mentions that the bomb was cheap, and the spray--tanned skin around his capped teeth tightens when he says this, as though to be incinerated by an expensive bomb is somehow less offensive.
In the maze, Sid’s wrist beeps, signaling the end of his workday. He croons his final verse to the dry, rose--heavy air—“For you will bend”—snipping deep into a hedge so that a perfect bloom’s absence isn’t blight on the foliage. He slides his large clippers through a fat loop in his tool belt and takes a smaller pair from a thin loop, trimming the thorns from the rose’s twelve--inch stem. Sid goes to the fountain at the center of the maze. Immense, made of stone, themed on fruit and hummingbirds, it sits dank and murky, its wide rim holding the detritus of Sid’s labor: excised leaf clots and thorny branches overflowing a black bucket, and plastic sandwich bags bunched in a rusted silver lunch pail. Sid tweezes the rose between thumb and forefinger, setting it on the fountain’s rim with exaggerated care. Using a schmaltzy pianissimo for the final strains of his ballad, he picks up the bucket, shuts his lunch pail and locks it, and departs from the maze’s center, taking the first right turn in his favored route, which is effective but not remotely efficient.
On the nineteenth floor, Tessa is boarding the elevator. Its soft ding carries to the ballroom’s ceiling, thirty feet above her, and bounces off the mural there: a sunset sky in muted pinks and oranges, playing host to a dozen subtle, and subtly modern, cherubim. Their fleshy faces all stare down instead of up. The ballroom’s enormous west--facing windows trap the earliest phases of an actual sunset. Bars of light and shadow crosshatch tables set with china finer than bone. White napkins are folded in the shapes of swans, magnolias, seashells. Only a few are folded in the shape of napkins. A clutch of red roses serves as each table’s centerpiece, and if a guest asks, staff is to confirm that the roses are from Manderley’s garden, though they’re not. Tessa placed a standing order with a florist last week to deliver fifty dozen every Monday.
She holds the elevator’s glass doors open with her left boot and takes a final look at the southeast corner of the ballroom, where Jules is holding the base of a twenty--foot ladder. Jules’s husband and catering partner, Justin, is finishing the pyramid of a thousand champagne flutes they began at seven this morning. At the Party of the Year, Charles Destin intends to climb this ladder and pour a bottle of champagne, the fizz of which will overflow the glass at the apex, to the four glasses under it, and so on, into a thousand glasses. A thin plastic hose worms up through the pyramid. The hose runs to a storage room, where four large tanks of champagne will finish the work that Destin’s pouring will start. Destin compared the illusion of the single bottle of Cristal filling a thousand glasses to the miracle of Jesus and his disciples feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish. When Destin made this comparison, Tessa rolled her eyes so hard, one of her contact lenses fell out.