Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“At the hotel? I don’t really remember many of the other guests, to be honest. I was only there for six or seven months.”

“Till I swept you off your feet,” he said, and kissed her. His lips were cold and tasted unpleasantly of stale coffee, but Vincent smiled at him anyway.

“I think envy’s understandable,” she said. “Not everyone succeeds.”

(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. Later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion. )

She met Jonathan’s employees that summer, at his annual Fourth of July party, which lasted until the small hours of the morning and involved a fleet of chartered buses. There was an army of caterers and a swing band dressed in white on the lawn. The guests were all employees of Jonathan’s. There were a little over a hundred employees, five in the asset management group and the rest in the brokerage company.

“Are the asset management people a little standoffish?” Vincent asked. The asset management team was standing in a tight little group at the party’s edge. One of them, Oskar, was trying to juggle plastic cups while the others watched. “No, wait,” Oskar was saying, “I swear I used to know how to do this…”

“They’ve always been a little insular,” Jonathan said. “They work on a different floor.”

When everyone was gone, the lawn seemed enormous, a twilight landscape of round tables with flickering candles on wine-stained tablecloths, plastic cups glimmering in the trampled grass. “You’re so poised,” Jonathan said. They were sitting by the pool with their feet in the water, while the caterers blew out candles and folded tables and packed dirty glasses into crates. That’s my job, Vincent didn’t say in return. Calling it a job seemed uncharitable, because she really did like him. It wasn’t the romance of the century, but it didn’t have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone’s company, she’d been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don’t mind sleeping with them, isn’t that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like friendship? She spent more time thinking about this than she would have liked, which suggested that it was an unresolved question, but she felt certain that she could go on this way for a long time, years probably. The Fourth of July was a feverish night at the peak of a heat wave.

“Well, thank you. I try.” Sweat ran down her back.

“You try without appearing to try, though,” he said. “You’ve no idea what a rare quality that is.”

She was watching the shimmer of lights on the surface of the pool. When she looked up, one of the caterers was watching her, a young woman who was straightening deck chairs. Vincent looked away quickly. She had studied the habits of the monied with diligence. She copied their modes of dress and speech, and cultivated an air of carelessness. But she was ill at ease around the household staff and the caterers, because she feared that if anyone from her home planet were to look at her too closely, they’d see through her disguise.

In their first winter together, they flew south to a party at a private club in Miami Beach. Jonathan seemed to belong to an extraordinary number of clubs. “It’s an expensive hobby,” he told Vincent, “but I’ve always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down.” (Yet another clue that Vincent felt she should have picked up: Why exactly did he want time to slow down? Was there something in that statement besides a general awareness of mortality, some other inevitability that he felt was rushing toward him?) “Some of the clubs have other pleasures,” he said, “golf courses and tennis courts and whatnot, but there’s a certain pleasure in just drinking coffee or wine in a private lounge. Time moves differently in these places.”

The Winter Formal in Miami Beach was a deadly evening of tuxedos and iridescent gowns. The women were mostly much older than Vincent. The men would have looked alike even if they weren’t all dressed like penguins—the curious sameness of expensively maintained people with similar habits—and most of them had always been in this world, it was obvious, they had lived their whole lives above a safety net and were therefore of a different species from Vincent. She moved through the room in a silver gown, smiling and telling people that she was delighted to meet them, laughing convincingly at weak jokes, listening intently to dull anecdotes with the same smile she’d used on good tippers back in her bartending days. Jonathan had known most of the Miami Beach people for a decade or more. Many of the other women had been friends with Jonathan’s wife, Suzanne, and they had children Vincent’s age and older. Several of them had had unfortunate cosmetic procedures—puffed-out faces, immobile foreheads, swollen rubbery lips—that made her eyes widen involuntarily when they were introduced. Vincent stayed by Jonathan’s side until he excused himself for a discreet conversation with a potential investor, at which point she went to the bar, where a tall woman in a blindingly fuchsia dress was ordering a gin and tonic. Vincent had noticed her earlier, as one of the very few women in the room who seemed to be about Vincent’s age. They received their drinks from parallel bartenders at the same moment and nearly collided as they left the bar.

“Oh no,” Vincent said. “I didn’t spill any wine on your dress, did I?”

“Not a drop,” the woman said. “I’m Mirella.”

“I’m Vincent. Hi.”

“I was just heading out to the terrace, if you’d like to join me?”

They went out to the terrace, which had Italian pretensions. There were a few women out here of their age and younger, but they all seemed to know one another and were either deep in conversation or deep in their phones. Vincent liked that she could see the ocean from here, same blue as the Mediterranean.

“Have you ever been to a more tedious party?” Vincent was normally more cautious, but Mirella had an air of boredom that set her at ease.

“Yes. The same party last year.”

A man in a dark suit had followed them out. He stood some distance away, scanning the terrace.

“Is he with you?” Vincent asked.

“Always,” Mirella said, and Vincent realized that the man was hired protection. Mirella lived at a high altitude.

“Is it oppressive? Having someone follow you around all the time?”

They were leaning on the balustrade, contemplating the terrace. The other women looked like a flock of tropical birds. It was Vincent’s first time in Florida, and she’d noticed that people wore much brighter colors here than in New York or Connecticut.

“Funny you should ask,” Mirella said. “I was just thinking about this earlier. I realized something slightly disturbing.”

“Tell me.”

“Sometimes I don’t even see him anymore. I don’t want to think of myself as a person to whom other people are invisible, but there it is.”

“Has it been…” Vincent didn’t know how to ask the question, but she was curious about how long it took for a person to become invisible. She was still aware of Jonathan Alkaitis’s household staff at all times, and there was something appalling and also seductive in the idea of no longer being able to see them. “Has he been with you a long time?”