Security(16)

“Yeah,” Brian says. “When you’ve got a free minute.”

“This is as close to a free minute as I’m gonna get, Bri. We’re less than a week from the party. I sleep here, when I sleep. Say what you need to say.”

“When you’ve got a free minute,” Brian says again.

“Same old Bri. Wanting all my attention.”

“Oh, pot. Nice to meet you. I’m kettle.”

A loud giggle bubbles over from the dance floor. Justin dips Jules almost to the gleaming wood. Henri is playing classic French croons, concertina piping through an ancient portable stereo.

“They’re pretty great.” Brian nods at Justin who is pulling Jules vertical again.

Tessa turns back to the elevator floor numbers successively lighting: 16 . . . . . . . . . 17. She says, apropos of nothing, “They go to Justin’s parents’ place in Reseda for Christmas Eve. Then they go to Jules’s parents’ place in Ventura for Christmas Day.”

. . . 18 . . .

“What do you do?” Brian asks her.

Tessa works on Christmas. She doesn’t say so. She says, “Any year now,” and presses the “Down” button again. Tessa works on Christmas, even if someone invites her somewhere. If someone invites her somewhere, she tells him to go see his family.

“I watch movies,” Brian says. The pointed roof of the diamond--shaped elevator appears. “On Christmas.”

Delores is in the elevator. Tessa pastes on a smile and says, “I work.”

Camera 17

The Killer steps onto the second floor. He tilts his head and listens, standing inside Delores’s office. The Killer can hear tearing sounds. Delores’s office opens into the employee break room, containing a long table, a kitchenette, and employee lockers. Outside the break room is a hallway, off which is the housekeeping storage area. The secret elevator opens behind cleaning closets on each floor except for the first (the secret elevator opens directly into Franklin’s office on the first floor), second (it opens into Delores’s office), eighteenth (into the south wall of Room 1801, the nondeluxe penthouse), nineteenth (into the kitchen’s walk-in refrigerator), and twentieth (behind my chair). The Killer puts down his paper laundry convenience bag on Delores’s desk. He keeps his knife. The tearing sounds are coming from the housekeeping storage area, where Franklin is unwrapping miniature soaps, wetting them with a liter bottle of water, and glomming them into a large soap clump, which he presumably intends to leave for Delores to find. Franklin is on a ladder, his back to the Killer. The Killer watches Franklin, whose hair sticks up in odd porcupine spikes and whose eyes flash every time he tears through a soap wrapper.

Camera 3

Delores is apologizing to Tessa—this is Delores’s favored greeting to Tessa—before the main elevator’s doors have fully opened. She sees the young man at Tessa’s side and becomes guarded. Tessa introduces Brian. Brian smiles but doesn’t offer Delores his hand. He slouches to appear smaller. His smile doesn’t show his teeth, and he allows Delores a wide perimeter, but holds the elevator door open with his motorcycle boot. Delores scurries around him, as she does all men, like they might bite. Delores hands Tessa her clipboard, while Tessa puts her bandaged palm at the small of Delores’s back and tells Brian to wait for her; this won’t take long. Delores listens to Tessa’s description of what needs to happen in the ballroom tonight. Tomorrow the band will be setting up. This is the last opportunity to clean the bandstand without any instruments or equipment on it. The musicians will make a mess. Tessa will tell Vivica to join Delores. Delores tells Tessa she didn’t see Vivica on the fifteenth floor. Tessa reminds Delores that 1516 is outside the main elevator’s sightlines. Delores allows how that’s true, and she and Tessa split up, Delores walking toward the storage closet. Tessa is returning to the main elevator, and to Brian.

Camera 34

Justin begins dancing with aggressive pelvic movements—in the vernacular, “grinding.” Jules pushes him, gesturing at the three other people in the ballroom, who are ignoring Jules and Justin completely. Justin’s posture becomes conciliatory, apologetic. His hands find Jules’s waist, circle it, drop an inch or two so they skim the tops of her buttocks, and Jules pushes him again. Justin and Jules haven’t made love in more than two months. Jules’s psychiatrist has told Jules to tell Justin about her medications not least because a side effect of SSRIs is a waning sex drive, which a mate may take as personal rejection if he’s unaware his depressed/anxious partner’s neurochemistry is being adjusted. Justin leans to Jules, probably asking—for what seems like the hundredth time—what the hell he’s supposed to do, or what he’s supposed to have done. Jules’s peppy comportment slips for scarcely an instant, before she’s grinning and waving at Brian, who, by the elevator, has been observing this tête-à-tête with curiosity—and maybe a glimmer of sad understanding. Brian waves back, and Jules snuggles to Justin again. Justin joins the farce, calling “Helloooo” to Brian, as if they’re at opposite ends of an abyss.



Franklin thinks his prankster persona endears him to people. Franklin believes he’s had an especially hard life, because he is gay. He majored in theater. He did theater in high school, too, but he also played baseball. He was a star catcher. This makes one want to laugh, but laughter is impossible, given the circumstances. Franklin came out to his parents when he was eighteen, and his parents reacted with nonplussed nonshock, and Franklin—channeling some character in some script—began a soliloquy about how their lack of acceptance shattered his heart, raped his mind, impaled his spirit with daggers the length of his long, hard life. None of this is in Franklin’s personnel file. A more thorough background check became necessary for Franklin, due to his tendency toward pranks. He has established a shaky peace with his parents, who, when interviewed, turned out to be sedately liberal Episcopalians who owned a split--level in Pasadena, thanks to Franklin’s father’s success in advertising and Franklin’s mother’s greater success in selling Mary Kay cosmetics. It makes one thirsty to remember the taste of Franklin’s mother’s raspberry lemonade. It makes one nostalgic for summer, though it’s summer outside.