Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“I have something for you,” she said.

Vincent opened it and found a video camera, a Panasonic. She recognized it as one of the new kind that took DV tapes, but it still had an unexpected weight. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with it.

“When I was younger,” Caroline said, “say maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, I went through a difficult time.”

“What kind of difficult time?” It was the first thing Vincent had said in some hours, maybe all day. The words were sticky in her throat.

“The details aren’t very important. A friend of mine, a photographer, she gave me a camera she no longer needed. She said to me, ‘Just take some pictures, take pictures every day, see if it makes you feel better.’ It seemed like a dumb idea, to be honest, but I tried it, and I did feel better.”

“I don’t think—” Vincent said, but couldn’t finish the sentence. I don’t think a camera will bring my mother back.

“What I’m suggesting,” Caroline said softly, “is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder. I think your brother would laugh at me if I said something like this to him, but maybe you could just try to absorb the idea.”

Vincent was quiet, considering it.

“I was going to buy you a thirty-five-millimeter film camera,” Caroline said with a self-conscious little laugh, “but then I thought, it’s 1994, do kids even take still photos anymore? Surely video’s where it’s at?”

Vincent settled quickly into a form she liked. She recorded segments of exactly five minutes each, like little portraits: five minutes of beach and sky by the pier at Caiette, and then later there were five-minute clips of the quiet street where she lived with her aunt in Vancouver’s endless suburbs, five minutes from the window of the SkyTrain on her way into the city center, five minutes of the fascinating, appalling neighborhood where she lived with Melissa when she was seventeen—not in the film: the way she had to take off running down the street because an addict wanted her camera—and five-minute clips of the dish pit at the Hotel Vancouver that same year, the camera rigged in a plastic bag on a shelf with a timer while Vincent sprayed dishes with hot water and fed them into an industrial machine. Five-minute increments of Caiette again, and then—after she met Jonathan—five minutes of the infinity pool at the Greenwich house, the way it rippled into the lawn, precisely because she hated looking at that vanishing point and was trying to be stronger; five minutes from the window of Jonathan’s private jet the first time she crossed the Atlantic, a few ships far below in the steel-gray water, no visible land. “What are you doing?” Jonathan asked, startling her. He’d been sitting in the back of the plane with Yvette Bertolli, a formidably elegant associate of his who was coming to France with them; she lived in Paris, so Jonathan was giving her a ride as far as Nice, where he had a villa. Vincent, sunk into an enormous armchair by the window, had thought she was momentarily alone.

“Kind of beautiful, don’t you think?” Vincent said.

Jonathan leaned over her to peer down at the distant waves. “You’re shooting video of the ocean?”

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

“Just when you think you know a woman,” he said, and kissed her head.

Jonathan had a shadow. He introduced the topic a few hours after they arrived at the villa in Nice, when they were sitting together on the terrace in the late afternoon. It was only early spring but already warm here, a pleasant breeze coming in from the sea. Vincent was dazed and jet-lagged, trying to cover this with coffee and the eye drops that she’d applied in the bathroom earlier. Yvette, Jonathan’s associate, had discreetly retired to a guest bedroom, so Vincent and Jonathan were alone. The view was of palm trees and then the otherworldly blue of the sea, oddly familiar after all the movies she’d seen set around the Mediterranean, most of which had involved fast cars, gamblers, and/or James Bond. Jonathan was in a contemplative mood. “This will seem an obvious statement,” he said, “but success attracts a certain kind of attention.”

“Positive, or negative?”

“Well, both,” he said, “but I’m thinking of the negative kind.”

“Are you thinking of a particular person?” A door opened behind them, and Anya appeared on the terrace with two coffee cups on a little silver tray. Vincent was startled to see her, because she hadn’t realized Anya was coming to France, although it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen Anya around the house in Greenwich in the last couple of days. “Thank you,” Vincent said to Anya, “I desperately needed that.” Anya nodded. Jonathan took his coffee from the tray without comment, because for him, coffee appearing out of thin air was so commonplace an occurrence that it didn’t merit acknowledgment.

“Yes,” he said. “There is a particular person. A particular obsessive.”

He’d met Ella Kaspersky back in 1999, at, of all places, the Hotel Caiette. They’d had a conversation about Kaspersky’s possibly investing with him, but she’d concluded—without basis, obviously—that the sheer consistency of Jonathan’s returns was indicative of some kind of nefarious fraud scheme. Completely illogical and unfair, delusional even, but what could he do? People jump to their own conclusions.

“I’d think good returns would be an indication that you’re good at your job,” Vincent said.

“Well, exactly. I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but I do know what I’m doing.”

“Clearly,” Vincent said, with a gesture meant to encompass not just the terrace but the villa and its proximity to the Mediterranean, the private jet that had brought them here, the entirety of this remarkable life.

“I’ve done all right,” he said. “Anyway, Kaspersky took her story to the SEC. I’m sorry, it’s rude to throw obscure acronyms around. I mean the Securities and Exchange Commission. They’re the people who look after my industry.” Vincent knew what the SEC was, because she made an effort to follow the financial news, but she only nodded. “They investigated me thoroughly. Naturally they found nothing. There was nothing to find.”

“Did you hear from her again? After the investigation?”

“Not directly. I’ve heard from other people whom she’s spoken to.”

“If she’s spreading false rumors against you,” Vincent said, “can’t you sue her for defamation?”

“The thing you have to understand,” he said, “is that in my business, credibility is everything. I can’t run the risk of it becoming a news story.”

“You’re saying the appearance of scandal would be almost as bad as an actual scandal.”

“Smart girl. But I thought about it later, when all of that insanity with the SEC had passed, and I realized what the problem was. That money she wanted to invest? It was her father’s fortune. He’d died quite recently. So there was just, well, there’s a lot of emotion caught up in money sometimes.” Anya was moving around the periphery of the terrace, discreetly setting out candles for the evening. How much of the conversation was she hearing? Did it matter? Did Anya care? “The letter Ella Kaspersky sent me, it was unhinged,” Jonathan said, “rambling on about her father’s legacy and so on. But to be fair, when I look back on it I realize she was obviously grieving, and grief can make anyone a little irrational in the moment.” The unspeakable subject of Jonathan’s dead wife floated between them, like a ghost; they glanced at one another but didn’t say her name. Jonathan cleared his throat. “Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this is, I just didn’t want you to wonder if you ever came across anything from her online, or if we ever came across her in real life. You never saw her in Caiette, did you?”