Security(47)

If Tessa had absolutely needed anything, I’d have given it. I wouldn’t have paused to ask myself what I was sacrificing, what was being lost. But Tessa didn’t need anything from me. Not a damn thing. She was helping launch Destin Management Group to a height that dwarfed Donofrio Properties, spat on it from the troposphere of success, and she was doing it the fair way, by being simply better, by working harder. Destin Management Group built an office complex for an animation company in Palo Alto, and while construction raged like a competitive sport, walls and plumbing and electric and the highest--tech technology in meeting rooms resembling a sketch from The Jetsons, Tessa was called away from a problem with the unisex bathrooms to the coffee bar, where the animation company’s CEO was livid over the design of the cups and saucers. So Tessa took four hours to call the coffee bar manager, get the number of the distributor through whom he’d ordered the dishes, call that number, and climb the levels of speakers’ importance until she was joking good--naturedly with the CEO of that company. She talked him into marshaling his designers together and creating for the office complex an exclusive set of cups and saucers. When the animation company’s office complex was toured by a journalist, he ordered a coffee at the coffee bar, and used a paragraph of precious space regaling his readers with the fascinating, tilted, off--kilter design of the dishes from which he sipped his soy chai latte. Tessa’s job was to make an infinity of infinitesimal decisions like that, and to make the right decision, every day, all day. And the head of security watched her do this, from banks of monitors in close little rooms. He would take coffee breaks and bring her coffee, to which she said thank you, but then she would sip, set down the cup, and forget about it. He would see the cup from a monitor. It was torture. But it was also bliss, because she didn’t have a boyfriend, no husband, not even a father, and so it stood to reason that she was profoundly alone, as the man who watched her was alone, and that made it stand to reason that Tessa—given enough time and attention, enough focused prodding—would come to love the man who watched her. She had come from nothing, as he had. She’d come from a larger nothing than he had, and the sense of this, followed by the confirmation of it when he read her personnel file, was arguably what made him love her with such abrupt completeness. She lived in a humble apartment, but he owned a house in Malibu. She had made good her escape, but dared not enjoy it yet. He could teach her. He could save her.

“You love riding,” she says again. She winces. “How many motor-cycles do you have?”

Brian winces, too, and says, “Eight.”

They laugh. They hold each other in the middle of the bed. A shape under the comforter. Tessa’s leg, rising around his waist, and the shape of Brian’s arm, stroking that tear--jerking home country of high on her thigh, to her buttock, to her hip and the lowest part of her back.

“Keep one,” Tessa says. Her laugh muffles as Brian kisses her hard on the mouth.

He says, “Two. I never ride one of them. It’s Mitch’s.”

“Two.” Tessa kisses him. She does it like she’s serious about progressing beyond a kiss. Though that is a guess. That is not based on experience. Experience would suggest that sex was utilitarian for Tessa. Boring, really, most of the time.

“You love working.” Brian pins Tessa under him to say it, pins her hands by her head. “Keep your job, but scale it back.” He says it roughly. He’s holding her wrists rather roughly. “Take a vacation. Take a big vacation, soon, so we can go somewhere and try and kill each other with sex.”

Tessa says, “’Kay,” and rolls him over, under her, but he rolls them again, to the edge of the bed, where they teeter, giggling. He sounds like a girl; he practically is. He has the ass of a twelve--year--old girl, and he was the one Tessa thought of when she contemplated the dead morning hours, happening upon a cold cup of coffee she’d abandoned in another building project in another part of coastal California. Brian was why she looked sad when she brought the cup to her lips, needing the jolt to stay awake, needing to stay awake to make more decisions, put out more fires, do more work, more, more work. It was Brian she didn’t want to go to sleep and dream about, so she’d take the cup to the nearest microwave and nuke it, drink it, make sour faces at it. She didn’t have a boyfriend, husband, not even a goddamn father, but she had a soul mate, somewhere, missing her, needing her. Those two elements—missing and needing—multiplied together and then taken to the power of the years they’d been apart, resulted in a string of digits that stacked to dwarf the love of a man who thought Tessa would come to need him because she no doubt wanted to forget her humble beginnings, when the truth was that Tessa wanted to remember them. She wants to revel in them; she wants to return to her beginning, and be brand--new. She sounds brand--new, like a child. Happy. Brian’s tickling her.

The Thinker leaves the east window. The monitor for the twentieth floor shows him sitting at the slop of his playing cards, gathering them together again, sighing and dealing his fifty--first game of solitaire. There is a salty, wet drop on the security counter, under the inert skull resting there, sideways. There is no way for the skull to lick the teardrop without alerting the Thinker to the body’s continued functioning (though the body has urinated and moved its bowels in the chair with wheels, by now, but bladder and bowels let go in death, and so the smell blends with the three other bodies that are actually dead).