Mercedes offers Corrine a drink. Mercedes heads for the bar while Corrine pour herself a cup of coffee. It was always like that, even when they were sorority sisters back at USC: Corrine was always the serious one, Mercedes loved to party.

Their conversation begins with the obligatory gossip about Byron Palisades and his strange new actress/girlfriend. No one can believe Byron got himself so twisted up over a woman, and he's not speaking to anyone.

Corrine changes the subject, starts asking Mercedes about some drummer in one of Bill's bands, F Hole. Mercedes knows Jackie is pregnant by her guitarist, the former gigolo, she made sure Monica got that story. Corrine is the editor of Livin' Large, and like Monica uses her connection to Mercedes to get inside information on bands. If Corrine knows enough to ask if it is true that F Hole's drummer also has a pregnant girlfriend, then she already knows more than Mercedes, who cannot be bothered about drummers. Not wanting to come up short, Mercedes makes up some juicy gossip about the band & their loose relations. Who cares if it's true or not, if it sells CDs?

Once she's given Corrine enough to get a good story from, Mercedes changes the subject, bragging about how great her life is going. When they were in college together, the two friends had shared their aspirations for the future with each other. Now both women are essentially living their own dreams: Mercedes has her art gallery, her Beverly Hills estate, her wealthy, powerful husband, and Corrine is the editor of a major lifestyle magazine, she has real power & influence, she's independent and lives a life of glamour & luxury. Both women got exactly what they wanted out of life, but Mercedes always feels like Corrine fancies herself superior to her sorority sister, and she makes up for it by bragging whenever they meet. She would like to gloat about her new magazine, it is coming along quite nicely now, but Mercedes knows it won't impress Corrine, with her world famous magazine. So after she's prattled about the success of her recent charity event (Corrine was there, so Mercedes can't say much more, really) she isn't left with much. So she starts in about the house in Tahoe, they really paid very little for the property and real estate prices have soared. Of course they had no idea when they bought it that it would eventually be worth so much, but she speaks of it as though they had done it on purpose, a clever investment.

Something lights up in Corrine's eyes: she's interested in the house. "I want a place away from the city, a place to get away," she says. Mercedes dredges up her memories of the property: they haven't been there in some time, but she gathers up enough to make a pitch for it, describing the hardwood walls & floors, the deck right out on the lake, serene & gorgeous nature, all in loving detail. Mercedes actually detested the place, now that she brings it to mind: too woodsy. They installed a very expensive system of security cameras in that house, she remembers suddenly as she's waxing nostalgiac about the view of the lake from the loft office: they wanted to keep an eye Portia's sitter while they were out. Such a waste of money, and so dreadfully boring watching the tapes of their daughter being cooked for & catered to. By the end of the conversation, Mercedes is promising to drive up to Tahoe & show Corrine the house this Saturday.

Wanting to get out of the office, Mercedes suggests a little shopping to wind down the afternoon. She wants to distract her mind from the persistent fantasies of Justin & Eleanor that fill every vacant moment. Corrine is a bad companion for this: who knows what she's thinking as she peruses the perfumes? She doesn't say much of anything at all, and Mercedes is left with her erotic reveries. In Mercedes' imaginings, Justin is a brutal & powerful lover: how does her little assistant handle him? she wonders. Mercedes has never seen him fully naked, he won't let her look at him or touch him...if she could get her security camera system from the Tahoe house & somehow arrange to have Justin & Eleanor somewhere where she could tape them making love, she would at least be able to satisfy her curiosity, if not her desires.....but where? how? Not the office, surely....

Over the next few days, Mercedes stews in frustration, knowing she has the perfect equipment to surreptitiously spy on the young lovers, but nowhere to put it where she could catch them in the act. And she regrets agreeing to show the house to Corrine this Saturday: Bill has flatly refused to come along, claiming he needs to stay in the city & work on a big recording deal he's trying to finesse, and Mercedes doesn't look forward to a weekend alone in the woods. By Thursday, Mercedes has come up with the perfect plan to solve both her problems: she'll send Eleanor to Tahoe for the weekend, tell her to bring her boyfriend along & enjoy the house, and to show it to Corrine on Saturday. They had cameras in every room of the house, on the deck and also several with a view of the pier & the lakeshore. In a weekend alone together in a house in the woods like that, a young couple would be bound to make love several times, and there is nowhere on the property they could do that out of view of her cameras. She summons Eleanor into her office on Thursday morning to tell her.

She explains that she & Bill meant to show the house to Corrine on Saturday, but something came up in the family & she can't go, and wants to send Eleanor in her place. Mercedes wants to make sure she gets what she wants out of this scheme, so she gives Eleanor Friday off to drive up to the house a day early. "To air out the house," she says.

And she makes a point of stressing that Eleanor should bring her boyfriend along. Once she has the tapes, Justin won't be able to claim any more that he 'doesn't do that'. And when she threatens to expose him to Eleanor for what he is, he'll have to do what she wants.

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