Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“We met over drinks too,” Vincent said, “but I was the bartender.”

Mirella smiled. “I’m not surprised. You make an excellent cocktail.”

“Thank you. It was a strange moment in my life. My father had just died.” Mirella’s eyes widened. Having one parent exit the scene was nothing unusual, but losing two was a different situation. “I had to go back to my hometown to deal with his stuff, and there was a job opening at the local hotel, so I decided to stay for a while.”

“What happened to him?”

“A heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” Vincent didn’t like to think of her parents.

“Was this the hotel Jonathan owns? I remember him talking about it.”

“Yes, exactly. I thought living there would be a simpler life, but I knew it was a mistake within a month. My childhood best friend worked there, and then after a few months my brother showed up and started working there too, and, I don’t know, it just started to seem a little claustrophobic, living in the same place with the same people I’d known since I was born.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“He was never really part of my life,” Vincent said. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

“So you went to this place in the middle of nowhere, and left because your brother was there too?”

“No, I…there was a strange incident,” she said. “Okay, so the lobby, it had a glass wall overlooking the water. I was working one night, and there was this guest in the lobby, a man with insomnia, he was just sitting in an armchair reading or working or something, and then he made this sound and jumped out of his chair. So I looked, and someone had just written this awful message on the outside of the glass.”

“What was it?”

“The message? Why don’t you swallow broken glass. ”

“Crazy,” Mirella said.

“I know. And then a minute later, my brother Paul comes in from his dinner break, and it was just so obvious that he’d done it, he was all kind of shifty, couldn’t even meet my eyes—”

“Why would he—?”

“I don’t know. I almost asked him, but then I realized it didn’t matter. There’s just no scenario where writing something like that isn’t horrible, is there?”

“I can’t think of one.” Mirella was quiet for a moment. “It’s a horrible message, but I’m not sure I completely understand why it bothered you that much.”

“The thing with my mother,” Vincent said, “is I know she drowned, but I don’t know why she drowned. She went canoeing all the time. She was a good swimmer.”

“You think it might not have been an accident.”

“I think I’ll never know one way or the other.” They were quiet for a while, and the buzz of the cicadas in the trees at the edge of the property was very loud. “Anyway, it wasn’t just that. I was having one of those moments, where you look at your life and think, Is this really it? I thought there’d be more. ”

“I’m familiar with those moments,” Mirella said. “So you were going to leave anyway, and then Jonathan walked into the bar?”

“No more than two hours later, maybe less. It was five in the morning. I had to do two shots of espresso just to keep my eyes open.”

“Here’s to coffee.” Mirella raised her glass.

“When I say I don’t know where I’d be without it, I mean that literally,” Vincent said.

A lonely man walks into a bar and sees an opportunity. An opportunity walks into a bar and meets a bartender. A lonely bartender looks up from her work and the message on the window makes her want to flee, because the bartender’s mother disappeared while canoeing and she’s told everyone all her life that it was an accident but there is absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and how could anyone who’s aware of this uncertainty—as Paul definitely is—write a suggestion to commit suicide on a window with that water shimmering on the other side, but what’s driving the bartender to despair isn’t actually the graffiti, it’s the fact that when she leaves this place it will only be to go to another bar, and another after that, and another, and another, and anyway that’s the moment when the man, the opportunity, extends his hand.

“Would you believe I actually grew up here?” she asked Jonathan, when in the course of that first conversation he asked where she was from. She’d served him his food and they’d fallen into a surprisingly effortless conversation.

“Here as in Caiette?”

“Well, here and then Vancouver.”

“Great city,” he said. “I keep meaning to spend more time there.”

He slipped her a folded bill as he was leaving—she thanked him without looking at it—and it turned out to be a hundred dollars, folded around a business card on which he’d scrawled a cell phone number. A hundred-dollar bill? Mortifying in retrospect, but she always appreciated the clarity of his intentions. It was always going to be a transactional arrangement. When he beckoned, she would come to him. She would always be well compensated.

Why not you?

That last summer in the kingdom of money, Vincent and Mirella met up in Soho on a subtropical afternoon, where they lingered for a while in Faisal and Mirella’s loft and then went shopping, less out of need than out of boredom. Dark clouds filled the sky. In the late afternoon they wandered down Spring Street with no particular destination in mind, having spent several thousand dollars each on clothing and lingerie, and Vincent was admiring a yellow Lamborghini parked across the street when Mirella said, “I think the rain’s about to start”—and they walked faster, too late, the first thunderclap sounded and the downpour began, Mirella took her hand and they broke into a run. Vincent was laughing—she loved being caught in the rain—and Mirella didn’t like what rain did to her hair, but by the time they reached the corner she was smiling too, she pulled Vincent into an espresso bar and they stood just inside for a moment, pleasantly chilled by the air-conditioning, pushing wet hair away from their eyes and surveying the damage to the shopping bags. Mirella’s bodyguard came in a moment later, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.

“Well,” Mirella said. “Shall we stop for a coffee?”

“Let’s.” Vincent had been on the East Coast of this continent for two and a half years now, but she was still startled by the violence of the summer thunderstorms, the way the sky turned green. They found a minuscule table by the window and sat there with their little coffees, wet shopping bags crowded around their legs. They’d fallen into a companionable silence, and as they watched the downpour, Vincent realized that she felt perfectly at ease, for the first time in recent memory. The truth was that in the kingdom of money, before she’d met Mirella she’d been extremely alone.

“Do you find that shopping is actually incredibly boring?” Vincent felt guilty saying this aloud. It was only possible to say it because Mirella hadn’t come from money either. Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing.

“I know it’s in poor taste to admit it,” Mirella said, “but it’s incredible how quickly the novelty wears off.” There was something about the way she looked up just then, the way the light caught her face, that made Vincent think of a nursery rhyme from childhood, her favorite verse from the Mother Goose book in the elementary school library, read so many times that she had committed it to memory by the time she was five or six: She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the girl of the golden city…