Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“So what happened?”

“Like I said, she went back to Canada. I Googled her the other day, and you know what she’s doing? Touring Canada in a fucking van, playing in tiny clubs and music festivals in towns you’ve never heard of. You see what I mean? Couldn’t recognize an opportunity. Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it.”

“Lenny,” Jonathan said, cutting Tiffany off midsentence, “let’s not bore our lovely wives with investment talk.”

“All I’m saying is, my investment performed better than I could’ve imagined.” Lenny raised his glass. “Anyway. Annika. It’s all good, because you know what? I can predict the future.” He smiled and tapped his forehead with one finger. “She’ll come back to me.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Vincent said. What was strange was that she was certain Jonathan was listening very intently to her conversation with Lenny, even though he was gazing at Tiffany and nodding at what Tiffany was saying. It seemed to her that there was something that Jonathan didn’t want Lenny to reveal.

“Any year now, any day now, I’ll hear from her again, I’d bet money on it.”

“No question.” If only the evening would end. Vincent’s face was getting tired.

“She’ll be all, like, hey, remember me, we were going to do something together, and I’ll be like, yeah, we were going to do something together, you and me, past tense. That was five years ago, six years ago, now you’re not twenty-one anymore.”

“Tell me about the place you’re from,” Mirella said toward the end. The age of money lasted a little under three years. During the final summer, six months before the end, Faisal went home to Riyadh to spend a few weeks with his father, who’d just received a cancer diagnosis, and during that period Mirella fell into the habit of taking a car up to Greenwich almost every afternoon. Vincent and Mirella spent languid hours swimming or lying in the shade by the pool, stunned by heat, Mirella’s bodyguard reading the paper or staring at his phone on a lawn chair out of earshot.

“I grew up on a road with two dead ends,” Vincent said. “That pretty much sums it up.”

“Put down that camera, will you? You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m not filming you, I’m just filming those trees over there.”

“Yeah, but they’re boring trees. They’re not doing anything.”

“Fair point,” Vincent said, and smiled and put the camera away, although it pained her to stop filming at the three-minute-twenty-seven-second mark. She was aware that the necessity of filming in precise five-minute intervals probably constituted an undiagnosed case of OCD, but this had never really struck her as a serious problem.

“How can a road have two dead ends?”

“If it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. Picture a row of houses on an inlet. Forest all around, water, nothing else.”

“You had a boat?”

“Some people had their own boats. We didn’t. I used to catch the mail boat to get to school in the mornings, then a bus would meet us by the pier on the other side and drive us to the nearest town. There was no television there till I was thirteen.”

“What do you mean, no television?” Mirella was looking at her as if she’d just announced she was from Mars.

“I mean, there was no signal.”

“So if you switched on the TV, what would happen?”

“Well, you’d just get static,” Vincent said.

“On every channel?”

(A memory: thirteen years old, suspended from school for the graffiti incident, sitting by the kitchen window with a book, then looking up and seeing Dad walking up the hill from the water taxi with an unwieldy box in his arms, grinning. “Look what my mom bought for us,” he said. “I got a call to come pick it up from the electronics store in Port Hardy.” Grandma Caroline had departed that morning to return to her own life for a few days, but it appeared she’d left a parting gift.

A television! A tower had gone up a few months earlier in Grace Harbour, just up the inlet, which meant that for the first time in history there was a signal in Caiette, and Mom would never have allowed this but it wasn’t up to her anymore, because she’d been gone for three weeks. Dad and Vincent flicked through variations of static to find a room, where two women with American accents were talking, one with long brown hair and glasses, the other with a cloud of platinum hair and tighter clothing.

“ WKRP in Cincinnati, ” Dad said. “I used to watch this in the eighties.”

One of the women said something funny, which made Dad laugh for the first time in three weeks. Where was Cincinnati? On television the city had a soft gleam, like the blond actress’s hair. Later, Vincent pulled the atlas down from a high shelf and found it, a point in the middle of the closest country to the south. She looked up the page for southwestern British Columbia, but of course Caiette was too small to appear on the map.)

Mirella had a story about a duplex in a housing development of identical duplexes, exurban Cleveland, cornfields on one side and an expressway on the other. Her mother worked two jobs and her father was in prison. Mirella and her sister were home alone for hours every day, watching television; they walked home from the school bus stop and locked the door behind them, and then they weren’t allowed to go outside again. They warmed up Hot Pockets for dinner and sometimes did their homework, sometimes didn’t. “It actually wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I got lucky. Nothing terrible happened to me. It was just boring. You grew up with both your parents?”

“My mother drowned when I was thirteen.” Vincent appreciated the way Mirella just nodded at this. Perhaps from now on she would only be friends with people who were missing at least one parent. “My dad was a tree planter, so he’d be up at these remote camps for weeks at a time during the school year, so I went to live with my aunt in Vancouver.”

The conversation shifted away from points of origin, which was fine with Vincent. Everything about Caiette was either impossible to describe or too difficult to talk about, and everything after Caiette was either boring or embarrassing. Mirella was talking about how she and Faisal had met. Mirella had tried to be a model, but she hadn’t made it very far. The problem, as her agent had explained it, was that Mirella was beautiful but it was an ordinary kind of beauty. There was nothing unusual about Mirella’s face, except for its prettiness, and that was a moment in modeling when it wasn’t enough to be beautiful, the agent said. One also had to be strange. The successful models of that moment had unusually wide-spaced eyes, or faces that were actually quite plain but had an indefinably striking quality, or ears that stuck out like jug handles. When she met Faisal, Mirella was trying to be an actor because the modeling wasn’t working out, but acting wasn’t going well either. She had some talent, but not enough to rise above the sea of other moderately talented beautiful young women. The night she met Faisal she was at a party in an expensive dress that she’d borrowed from her roommate, hours after a call with her agent’s assistant—her agent wasn’t taking her calls anymore—wherein the assistant, who’d once wanted to be an actor too, had gently broken the news that Mirella had been passed over for yet another role. Rejection is exhausting. Mirella was standing by the window, looking out at a view of downtown Los Angeles, and she realized that she was getting too tired for this life. She was thinking that maybe she should finally go to school, study something that would lead to a good job, but her sister had done that and now her sister was struggling under the weight of student loans, and Mirella wasn’t sure the debt was worth it. She was standing there trying to imagine what might come next, and then Faisal appeared beside her, beautifully dressed and holding two glasses of wine, and she thought, Why not you?