Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“Welcome aboard,” Mendoza said.

“Yes, welcome,” said Bell. They shook her hand, and the port security guy got back in his car and drove off. Mendoza led the way and Bell followed with her suitcase, although she could easily have managed it herself.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Mendoza said. He kept up a running monologue all the way up the stairs. He’d specifically requested an assistant cook with experience in more than one restaurant, he said, because he’d been at sea for too long and frankly could use some new menu ideas. He hoped Vincent didn’t mind starting tonight. (She didn’t.) He was glad she was Canadian because several of his favorite colleagues over the years had been Canadian too. She let him talk, because all she wanted was to absorb this place, the deck high above the port, and she kept thinking, I’m here, I’m actually here, while Mendoza led the way into the accommodations house and down a narrow industrial corridor that reminded her of the interiors of the ferries that run from Vancouver to Vancouver Island.

“Take a little time to unpack,” Mendoza said, “and I’ll come back for you in a couple hours.” Bell, who hadn’t said anything since offering to take the suitcase, set it inside the threshold of the room with surprising gentleness and smiled as he closed the door.

The room was more or less what Vincent had expected, small and blandly utilitarian, all imitation-wood cabinetry and white walls. There was a narrow bed, a closet, a desk, a sofa, everything either built into a wall or bolted to the floor. She had her own small bathroom. There was a window, but she kept the curtain closed, because she wanted the ocean to be the first thing she saw through it. From outside there was a constant clanging and grinding and creaking, cranes lowering containers into the holds and stacking them high on the lashing bridges. She unpacked her possessions—clothes, a few books, her camera—and found as she did so that she was thinking of Bell. She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.

She zipped up the empty suitcase, stowed it in the closet, and turned to the stack of sheets and blankets and the well-used pillow on the bed. She made the bed and then sat on it for a while, acclimatizing herself to the room. It was impossible not to think in that moment of the master bedroom suite in Jonathan’s house in Greenwich, the wasteful acres of carpeting and empty space. Luxury is a weakness.

It had taken so much to come here, all the training and studying and certifications and hassle, and when Mendoza came to collect her, when she was shown the galley where she’d spend her working life, it seemed improbable that she was actually here, on board, that she’d successfully left land, and it was all she could do to refrain from grinning like an idiot while he kept up a running monologue about his meal plans—French fries with almost every meal as a matter of policy, say four dinners out of five, because the guys liked them and potatoes were cheap so it helped keep the budget under control; rice biryani twice a week for the same reason—and the first shift was such a blur of information and French fries that she didn’t realize the ship had left Newark until later that night, after the cleanup, when she stumbled grimy and exhausted out onto the deck, a constellation of tiny burns stinging on her forearms from the deep-fat fryer, and found that the air had changed, the humidity broken by a cool breeze that carried no scent of land. They were traveling south toward Charleston, the East Coast of the United States marked by a string of lights on the starboard horizon. She walked to the other side of the ship to look out at the Atlantic, its darkness broken only by the far lights of a distant ship and by airplanes beginning their descents into the eastern cities, and her thought at that moment was that she never wanted to live on land again.

“Why did you want to go to sea?” Geoffrey Bell asked her, the first time they talked. She’d been at sea for a week by then, give or take. The ship had just left the Bahamas and had begun the long Atlantic crossing, toward Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Geoffrey had come to the galley at the end of her shift and had asked if she might like to go for a walk with him. He’d taken her to his favorite place on the ship, a corner of the deck on C level that he liked because it was out of sight of the security cameras, “which I realize sounds sinister,” he said, “now that I’m actually saying it aloud, but the trouble with being on a ship is the lack of privacy, don’t you find?”

“I don’t disagree,” Vincent said. “Is that a barbecue?” There was a strange tubular contraption with four legs chained to a railing.

“Oh, it is,” he said, “but I haven’t seen it used in years.” Onboard barbecues were dismal, he explained. Picture twenty men standing around on a steel deck, trying to make conversation in the wind while they eat hot dogs and chicken, a wall of containers rising up behind them. No, he’s not explaining it right. Not twenty men, twenty coworkers , twenty colleagues who’ve been stuck at sea together for months and are fairly sick of one another’s company, and not a single solitary beer for lubrication, because of the no-alcohol rule. Still, he liked this deck, he said.

Vincent liked it too. It was quiet, except for the ever-present hum of the engines. She leaned over the railing to look down at the ocean.

“It’s a pleasure to be out of sight of land,” she said. The horizons were uninterrupted on all sides.

“I notice you didn’t answer my question.”

“Right, you asked why I went to sea.”

“It’s not my best conversational opener,” he said. “Maybe even kind of overly obvious, since here we are, standing on a ship. But one has to start somewhere.”

“It’s a strange story,” Vincent said.

“Thank god. I haven’t heard a decent story in months.”

“Well,” Vincent said. “I was with a man for a while. It ended in a complicated way.”

“I see,” he said. “I don’t mean to pry, if it’s something you’d prefer not to talk about.”

She could see that he perceived the outlines of a story, lurking under the surface like an iceberg, and two possibilities opened before her, two variations: she could tell him that she’d been affiliated with a criminal and risk his contempt, or she could be one of those exhaustingly mysterious people whom no one wants to talk to because they can’t open their mouths without hinting at dark secrets that they can’t quite bring themselves to reveal. “No, it’s fine. Actually, it wasn’t quite…I didn’t leave land because of what he did, specifically,” she said. “I left land because I kept running into the wrong people.”

“That’s the trouble with land,” Geoffrey said. “It’s got too many people on it.”

At first, it seemed there would be a way to withstand the collapse of the kingdom of money, to remain in the city that she loved and find a new life there. The morning after Jonathan’s last holiday party, she’d woken alone and shivering in the pied-à-terre in Manhattan. The duvet had slipped to the floor. She rose, showered, made some coffee, and spent a few minutes looking out at the view of Central Park. She knew by then that Jonathan was going to be arrested, and knew this was the last time she’d admire this view. Jonathan had left a beautiful little duffel bag in the pied-à-terre, creamy white with brown leather accents. Her side of the closet held two gowns, which she thought might have some resale value, and there were also five thousand dollars in cash and some jewelry in the safe. She put the cash and the jewelry in the bag and in her jacket, rolled the dresses carefully into the duffel bag along with a couple changes of clothes.