Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

Lucas’s funeral was a small, private affair near his family’s house in Greenburgh. She didn’t hear he’d died until at least a month after it happened. It seemed to her later that she might not even have remembered him, just another fallen sparrow in a chaotic and rapidly receding decade, except that forty years later—forty years of no money, of no sales, of embarrassing phone calls where she had to ask her sister, Monica, for rent money, forty years of temp jobs in interchangeable offices and selling jewelry at fairs for her friend Diego’s silver import business, forty years in the desert—there was a retrospective exhibition of downtown artists from the fifties, Olivia among them, and in its wake there was a sudden—and vanishingly brief—resurgence of interest in her work, during which her painting Lucas with Shadows sold at auction for two hundred thousand dollars, which was more money than she’d ever imagined possessing at one time.

“You should invest it,” Monica said. They were sitting in the backyard of Olivia’s new rental house in Monticello on a summer afternoon. Not the famous Monticello in Virginia, the Monticello in upstate New York with the boarded-up main street, the giant Walmart, the army/navy/marine recruitment offices, the stores that sold prosthetic limbs, the racetrack. Olivia had rented a little house on the outskirts. The house had previously been part of a bungalow colony. It was tiny and needed a new roof, but it was a pleasure to leave the city and come here. The backyard felt tropical in the August heat, greenery exploding in the humidity, and that particular afternoon with Monica, she’d been drifting on the edge of sleep. Her blood sugar problems wouldn’t be diagnosed for another year, but she’d noticed the correlation between eating carbohydrates and difficulty staying awake an hour or two later. She’d started doing it on purpose for the pleasure of drowsing on a chaise longue in the late afternoons. On this occasion, though, she took a long draft of strong iced tea, trying to bring herself back with caffeine and ice, because Monica had told her a few years ago that she felt Olivia wasn’t a good listener and that being unlistened-to made Monica feel small. Olivia remembered this only after the bagel, and felt bad for purposefully making herself sleepy.

“How does one go about…how does a person invest?” Money was mysterious to Olivia, but Monica had been a lawyer before she retired and had a much better grasp of the logistics of daily life.

“Well, there are different ways of going about it,” Monica said, “but I recently invested some money with a guy my friend Gary met at his club.”

Olivia wouldn’t have described herself as an overly superstitious person, but she’d always believed in messages from the universe, and she liked to pay attention to patterns and signs. Surely it meant something that the man with whom Monica had invested her savings was Lucas’s brother.

“You won’t remember me,” she said to Jonathan when she called him, and immediately wished she’d said something different. The trouble with that line was that it had worked when she was young because when she was young she was beautiful, also fierce in a calculated manner that she’d believed to be attractive, which had lent a certain irony to the suggestion that anyone could have possibly forgotten her— Oh, you know, just another gorgeous magnetic fresh young talent with gallery representation —but lately she’d found that the line sometimes elicited a tactful silence, and she’d realized that often people did not, in fact, remember her. (Idea for a ghost story: a woman gets old and falls out of time and realizes that she’s become invisible.)

“We met at the gallery with Lucas,” he said softly. “The night it snowed.”

The night it snowed, Olivia thought, and to her amazement, her eyes filled with tears. She hadn’t cried when Lucas died. She’d felt a little sad about it, obviously, she wasn’t a monster, it’s just that she was perpetually distracted and they’d hardly known one another. But all these decades later, the pity of it overcame her: in a version of New York so different that it might as well have been a foreign city, she’d stepped out of the cold night and into the brilliance of the gallery, which memory had transformed from a den of petty jealousies and grubby desperation into a palace of art and light, sheer brilliance in every sense of the word, walls vibrating with color, artists vibrating with genius and youth, where Lucas—so young, so talented, so doomed—and little Jonathan—who must have been, what, twelve?—awaited her arrival.

“You have a remarkable memory,” she said.

“Well, you were memorable. You were the beautiful woman who didn’t like my brother’s paintings.”

“I wish I hadn’t said so. I should’ve been kinder.” And then, on impulse, although she’d only meant to ask for a few minutes of his time over the phone: “Would you like to meet up for lunch sometime? I’ve come into some money, and I could use a little investment advice.”

“I would be delighted,” he said.

They saw one another a few times over the years that followed. She’d stop by his office sometimes, or they’d meet up for lunch. She looked forward to these lunches immensely; he was a warm, interested person, a good conversationalist, and he always picked up the check. He liked talking about Lucas and wanted to hear everything she remembered about his mysterious life in New York. “My brother was a decade older than me,” he said. “I loved him, but when you’re a kid, a decade is like the space between galaxies. I never felt that I knew him very well.”

“Do you know,” she said, “my sister and I are only three years apart, and I’ve never felt I knew her very well either.”

“It’s always possible to fail to know the people closest to us. But I’m fairly confident you knew my brother better than I did.”

“That’s a sad thought,” Olivia said. “I hope he had people in his life who really knew him.”

“Me too. But you knew him well enough to paint him.”

“We posed for each other, it’s true.”

“He painted you, then? I wondered about that.”

“He did.” In languid memory, she sat naked on his yellow sofa in the heat of a July afternoon. “Do you know, I’ve no idea what became of his painting of me?”

He smiled. “Really?”

“Really. He completed his painting of me in a single afternoon and sold it at some group art show a couple months later. It was pretty small, maybe a foot square, so he wouldn’t have sold it for much. I don’t know who bought it.”

“That means you can imagine it anywhere you want,” he said. “Anyone you can think of, it could be hanging in their house.”

“My favorite Hollywood actor,” she said, enjoying this idea.

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, thank you, Jonathan, I’ll enjoy the vision of that painting on display in Angelina Jolie’s living room.”

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I bought your painting of Lucas,” he said.

She had been eating salad; she put the fork down carefully, afraid she might drop it. “You did?”

“Just last month. I tracked down the guy who bought it at auction, and he was willing to sell. It was a little painful at first,” he said, “seeing how unhealthy he looked, those bruises on his arms. But I spent some time with the painting, and I realized that I love it. You captured something about him that accords with my memories. It’s hanging in my Manhattan apartment.”

“I’m glad you have it,” Olivia said. She wouldn’t have imagined that she’d be so moved.