“Welcome to command and control,” Beth adds with a smile, clearly recalling the years of cop-talk, mercifully derailing his train of thought.
On the corner desk sits an iMac, ringed with yellow Post-it notes.
“The company paid for it,” Beth continues. “I can do half my work from here now.”
“You’re that good with a computer?”
“They paid for the three-day training, too. I can get around.”
On top of the monitor is something that looks like a small plastic tennis ball with a shiny black dot in the middle. Paris walks over, fiddles with it. He notices that the object is stuck to the top of the monitor with a suction cup.
“Isn’t that neat?” Beth says. “It’s a video camera. We use it for conferencing.”
“Conferencing?”
“Videoconferencing.”
“Sorry,” Paris says. “You know what a Luddite I am.”
Beth joins him at the desk. She hits a few keys, starting a software program called iChat. Then, suddenly, the two of them appear on the monitor screen.
Crazily, Paris feels as if he is walking through Sears, on one of those forays through the electronics department where you stroll by the camcorder display and they let you see how shitty you really look. Except, this was in the privacy of your own, well, wherever you had your computer. Beth’s computer is in her spare bedroom. And thus a million prurient scenarios jog through Jack Paris’s mind. He banishes them. “Wow” is all he can manage.
For a moment, on the screen-a poorly lit shot of the two of them from the waist up-Paris sees his ex-wife as another woman for some peculiar reason, a very attractive stranger standing inches away. He is fascinated by the way the light plays over her breasts, her shoulders, her hair. But he cannot see her face.
And, for some equally peculiar reason, that fact stirs him even more.
“By the way,” Beth says, punching a few keys, killing the image on the screen. “Have you had a chance to get to the safety deposit box?”
Shit, Paris thinks. He was hoping to milk this one for a while. If she hadn’t asked him this time, it would mean another between-visitation liaison. “This week. I promise.”
“I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it,” Beth adds, speaking of her mother’s wedding ring, a mostly sentimental piece of jewelry that was part of the ever-dwindling residue of their marriage. It had sat in a box at Republic Bank at Severance since the divorce.
“This week,” Paris repeats.
“Thanks.” Beth smiles a smile that reaches Paris’s knees, the one that won his heart. She kisses him on the cheek. “I’ll be back by one.”
A little late for an office Christmas party, isn’t it? Paris thinks. But he says nothing about it. “They’ll all be asleep by then, right?”
Beth laughs. “Sure, Jack.”
“How old are your friends, Missy?” They are in the kitchen, making what has to be their fifth pitcher of iced tea. The noise in the living room has abated for a while, save for the occasional barrage of laughter. Somehow, for Paris, as the father of a near-teenager, the silence was worse.
“My age,” Melissa says. “Jennifer’s twelve, Jessica’s eleven, Mindy’s twelve.”
Twelve, Paris thinks, retrieving a not-quite-frozen tray of ice cubes from the freezer. One of them looked at least sixteen. Was this how teenage boys saw his daughter? “They’re all in your class at school?”
“Yep,” Melissa replies.
“Some of them look so… I don’t know…”
“Mature?”
“Yeah. I guess that’s what I mean. Mature.”
“I know,” Melissa says. “Jessica’s getting boobs.”
The word hangs in the air for a moment, immobilizing Jack Paris, freezing all ability to function, to think. Boobs. His daughter said boobs. What the hell was next? Paris attempts speech. “I hadn’t… I mean… I didn’t… y’know-”
“Can we get pizza?” Melissa asks, sparing him. “Mom says the new guy who delivers for Domino’s is really cute. Everybody wants to see him.”
My God, Paris thinks. Cute. Boobs. Guys. One conversation. He feels as if the floor beneath him has suddenly spit out a few nails. He looks at his daughter, at her long mahogany hair, her bright eyes, her still-girlish figure, and wonders how the hell he is going to survive the next ten years of her life.
Luckily, at that moment, somebody’s favorite song comes on the radio in the living room, and Jessica/Jennifer/Mindy turns it up. It is one of the reasons Paris does not hear the phone ring.
The other reason is that the call is coming in on Beth’s second line, the one in the spare bedroom, the one dedicated to the computer’s DSL modem.
As Paris brings the pitcher of iced tea into the living room and looks up the number for Domino’s Pizza, the computer in the bedroom makes a noise, then settles back into a stillness marred only by the occasional skrit-skrit-skrit of the hard drive as it downloads a file: silent, dutiful, discreet.
Start video.
Paris looks at the two words on the computer monitor’s screen, written in bold red letters drop-shadowed in gray. They are centered on a black background and seem to float in space.
He is in the spare bedroom, standing in front of the computer. He knows he is prying, of course, and he hates himself for it. But that doesn’t stop him. Beth is due any minute and still he can’t resist the temptation. Was it the detective in him? Or just the asshole?
Paris votes for the asshole.
Start video.
Next to the words, just to the right, is the mouse cursor-a small white arrow angling inward, to the left. He sits in the office chair, distributes his weight, takes the mouse in hand. After circling Start video a few times, he manages to hover the white arrow over the second c in Click.
He presses the left mouse button.
And although he wasn’t sure what he expected to see when he clicked on the word (perhaps a spreadsheet of some sort, perhaps a database of Beth’s realty clients), what he actually sees confuses the hell out of him.
It is a chair.
A velvet wing chair.
The image is a little fuzzy, fading in and out a bit like bad TV reception. It is also black and white. But for some reason Paris can tell it is not a still photograph he is looking at, but rather a live shot of some sort. A live shot of a chair.
He squints, trying to see if there is an impression on the chair, trying to determine if someone had just recently been sitting there, but the angle is too head-on.
The image reverts back to its Start video screen.
Paris feels safe that he has not violated any trust here, although he knows he doesn’t have the right to start anything in Beth’s life anymore. It wasn’t his business what she had on her computer. What was he expecting to find? Love letters? Beth isn’t the kind of woman who would type a love letter anyway. Beth is the kind of woman who would find just the right stationery, just the right ink, just the right sentiment. In fact, Beth is Standing in the bedroom doorway.
Watching him.
Somehow she had entered the apartment, no doubt checked on Melissa and her friends, and made it all the way up the hallway without making a sound.
What a cop I am, Paris thinks. Ever vigilant.
“I, uh…” Paris manages, rising to his feet. “I was just…”
She has seen him at the computer, of course. Paris looks at the floor, waits for the lecture that will surely include the f-word and end with something about him never being left alone in any dwelling of hers for the rest of everyone’s life.
But that doesn’t happen. Beth greets him instead with a huge, eggnog-sodden smile. And a hug. “Merry Christmas, Jack,” she says.
Paris can smell the booze. He hugs back, instantly aroused at her soft, perfumed nearness. “Merry Christmas. How was the party?”
“Same as always,” Beth says, flopping onto the bed. “But drunker. A little more obnoxious than usual.”
Seeing as she wasn’t going to yell at him, Paris decides to push his luck. Like always. “What is this?” He sits back down at the desk and positions the mouse cursor over the big red Start video. He clicks. After a few turns of the hard drive, the image appears.