Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

Summer faded into autumn, then the quiet and the dark of the winter months, the rainstorms more frequent, the hotel half-empty, the staff quarters growing quiet with the departure of the seasonal workers. Walter slept through the days and arrived at his shift in the early evenings—the pleasure of long nights in the silent lobby, Larry by the door, Khalil at the bar, storms descending and rising throughout the night—and sometimes joined his colleagues for a meal that was dinner for the night shift and breakfast for the day people, shared a few drinks sometimes with the kitchen staff, listened to jazz alone in his apartment, went for walks in and out of Caiette, ordered books in the mail that he read when he woke in the late afternoons.

On a stormy night in spring, Ella Kaspersky checked in. She was a regular at the hotel, a businesswoman from Chicago who liked to come here to escape “all the noise,” as she put it, a guest who was mostly notable because Jonathan Alkaitis had made it clear that he didn’t want to see her. Walter had no idea why Alkaitis was avoiding Kaspersky and frankly didn’t want to know, but when she arrived he did his customary check to make sure Alkaitis hadn’t made a last-minute booking. Alkaitis hadn’t visited the hotel in some time, he realized, longer than his usual interval between visits. When the lobby was quiet at two a.m., he ran a Google search on Alkaitis and found images from a recent charity fund-raiser, Alkaitis beaming in a tuxedo with a younger woman on his arm. She looked very familiar.

Walter enlarged the photo. The woman was Vincent. A glossier version, with an expensive haircut and professional-grade makeup, but it was unmistakably her. She was wearing a metallic gown that must have cost about what she’d made in a month as a bartender here. The caption read Jonathan Alkaitis with his wife, Vincent.

Walter looked up from the screen, into the silent lobby. Nothing in his life had changed in the year since Vincent’s departure, but this was by his own design and his own desire. Khalil, now the full-time night bartender, was chatting with a couple who’d just arrived. Larry stood by the door with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes half-closed. Walter abandoned his post and walked out into the April night. He hoped Vincent was happy in that foreign country, in whatever strange new life she’d found for herself. He tried to imagine what it might be like to step into Jonathan Alkaitis’s life—the money, the houses, the private jet—but it was all incomprehensible to him. The night was clear and cold, moonless but the blaze of stars was overwhelming. Walter wouldn’t have imagined, in his previous life in downtown Toronto, that he’d fall in love with a place where the stars were so bright that he could see his shadow on a night with no moon. He wanted nothing that he didn’t already have.

But when he turned back to the hotel he was blindsided by the memory of the words written on the window a year ago, Why don’t you swallow broken glass, the whole unsettling mystery of it. The forest was a mass of undifferentiated shadow. He folded his arms against the chill and returned to the warmth and light of the lobby.

Sanity depends on order. Within a month of leaving the Hotel Caiette and arriving in Jonathan Alkaitis’s absurdly enormous house in the Connecticut suburbs, Vincent had established a routine from which she seldom wavered. She rose at five a.m., a half hour earlier than Jonathan, and went jogging. By the time she returned to his house, he’d left for Manhattan. She was showered and dressed for the day by eight a.m., by which point Jonathan’s driver was available to take her to the train station—he repeatedly offered to drive her to the city, but she preferred the movement of trains to gridlocked traffic—and when she emerged into Grand Central Terminal she liked to linger for a while on her way across the main concourse, taking in the constellations of stars on the green ceiling, the Tiffany clock above the information booth, the crowds. She always had breakfast at a diner near the station, then made her way south toward lower Manhattan and a particular café where she liked to drink espresso and read newspapers, after which she went shopping or got her hair done or walked the streets with her video camera or some combination thereof, and if there was time she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while before she made her way back to Grand Central and a northbound train, in time to be home and dressed in something beautiful by six p.m., which was the earliest Jonathan would conceivably arrive home from the office.

She spent the evening with Jonathan but always found a half hour to go swimming at some point before bed. In the kingdom of money, as she thought of it, there were enormous swaths of time to fill, and she had intimations of danger in letting herself drift, in allowing a day to pass without a schedule or a plan.

“People clamor to move into Manhattan,” Jonathan said when she asked why they couldn’t just live in his pied-à-terre on Columbus Circle, where they stayed sometimes when they had theater tickets, “but I like being a little outside of it all.” He’d grown up in the suburbs, and had always loved the tranquility and the space.

“I see your point,” Vincent said, but the city drew her in, the city was the antidote to the riotous green of her childhood memories. She wanted concrete and clean lines and sharp angles, sky visible only between towers, hard light.

“Anyway, you wouldn’t be happy living in Manhattan,” Jonathan said. “Think of how much you’d miss the pool.”

Would she miss the pool? She reflected on the question as she swam. Her relationship with the pool was adversarial. Vincent swam every night to strengthen her will because she was desperately afraid of drowning.

Diving into the pool at night: in summer Vincent dove through the lights of the house, reflected on the surface; in cold weather the pool was heated, so she dove into steam. She stayed underwater for as long as possible, testing her endurance. When she finally surfaced, she liked to pretend that the ring on her finger was real and that everything she saw was hers: the house, the garden, the lawn, the pool in which she treaded water. It was an infinity pool, which created a disorienting impression that the water disappeared into the lawn or the lawn disappeared into the water. She hated looking at that edge.

Her contract with Jonathan, as she understood it, was that she’d be available whenever he wanted her, in and out of the bedroom, she would be elegant and impeccable at all times—“You bring such grace to the room,” he’d said—and in return for this she had a credit card whose bills she never saw, a life of beautiful homes and travel, in other words the opposite of the life she’d lived before. No one actually uses the phrase trophy wife in conversation, but Jonathan was thirty-four years older than Vincent. She understood what she was.

There were adjustments to be made. At first, living in Jonathan Alkaitis’s house was like those dreams where you find a door in your kitchen that you never noticed before, and then the door leads into a back hallway that opens up into a never-used au pair’s suite, which opens into an unused nursery, which is down the corridor from the master bedroom suite, which is larger than your entire childhood home, and then later you realize that there’s a way of getting from the bedroom to the kitchen without ever setting foot in either of the two living rooms or the downstairs hall.