Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

She brought her coffee to the bathroom, where she reached for the lacquered box where she kept her makeup here, and then stopped. In all of her time with Jonathan, she had never failed to put on makeup. She thought her face looked strange without it, but now, on this particular morning, with her pretend husband either on the verge of arrest or in police custody, there was some appeal in the thought of not looking like herself. Vincent studied her face in the mirror while she drank her coffee. She saw that at some point in the near past she had slipped over a border, into the era of her life where when she was tired she looked not just tired but slightly older. She was almost twenty-eight years old.

She found a pair of nail scissors in a drawer and began methodically cutting off her hair. Her head felt immediately lighter, and a little cold. A half hour later, when she left the building for the last time, the concierge in the lobby did a double take before his smile snapped into place. She got her hair recut at the first salon she passed—“Did your kid cut your hair while you were sleeping?” the stylist asked, concerned—and then stopped into a drugstore, where she bought a pair of minimum-strength reading glasses, although her eyes were fine. Vincent examined herself in a drugstore mirror. In glasses, without makeup, her hair cut short, she thought she looked like a very different person.

Within a week she’d found a place to live in a satellite town a few stops up the Hudson Line from Grand Central, an au pair’s suite that was really just a room above a garage, with a bathroom carved out of one corner and a kitchenette in another. She slept on a mattress on the floor and had a dresser that she’d purchased from Goodwill for $40, a card table that her landlord had given her, and a single chair that she’d found on the street on garbage day. It was enough. Within three weeks of Jonathan’s arrest, she’d found a job bartending in Chelsea. The hours weren’t enough, so she was also a kitchen trainee at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. She preferred the kitchen, because bartending is a performance. The public streams through your workplace and watches your every move. Every time she looked up and saw a new face at the bar, there was a moment of terror when she thought it was going to be an investor.

She saw Mirella again, just once, a year and a half later. In the spring of 2010, Vincent was tending bar in Chelsea when Mirella came in with a group of people, six or seven of them. Mirella’s hair was teased into a magnificent Afro. Her lipstick was fire-engine red. She was dressed in one of those outfits that look casual at first glance but are in fact comprised entirely of coded signals—the sweatshirt that cost $700, the jeans whose rips were carefully executed by artisans in Detroit, the scuffed boots that retailed for a thousand dollars, etc. She looked spectacular.

“Regulars,” Ned said, following the direction of Vincent’s gaze. He was her best friend at work, a mild sort of person who was pursuing an MFA in poetry that he didn’t want to talk about. They were both working the bar that night, although the place wasn’t crowded enough to justify both of them.

“Really? I’ve never seen them here.” The hostess was leading Mirella’s group to a booth in the back corner.

“Only because you never work Thursdays.”

A man in a shiny blue blazer had his arm draped over Mirella’s shoulders. Vincent’s desire to be seen by her was matched only by her desire to hide. She had tried to call Mirella three times: once the day after Jonathan was arrested, then twice when she learned that Faisal had died. All three calls went to voicemail.

“You okay?” Ned asked.

“Not at all,” Vincent said. “You mind if I take five?”

“No, go ahead.”

Vincent slipped out through the kitchen door and walked down the block a little. Cherry blossoms had appeared almost overnight on the trees across the street, and the flowers looked like an explosion, like fireworks suspended in the dark. The cigarette couldn’t last forever, and when she came back in, Mirella and one of her friends had left the group at the table and moved to the bar. Whatever Mirella had to say, whatever accusations and condemnations she’d been rehearsing these past two years, she could say them now, and Vincent could tell her that words couldn’t express how sorry she was, and that if she’d known—if she’d even suspected—then of course she would have said something, she would have told Mirella immediately, she would have called the FBI herself. I didn’t know, Vincent wanted to tell her, I didn’t know anything, but I am so sorry. Then they could go their separate ways with nominally lighter burdens, or something like that.

“Hello,” Mirella said, smiling politely at Vincent, “do you have any bar snacks?”

“Oh, that’s the best idea ever,” her friend said. She was about Vincent and Mirella’s age, at some indeterminate point in her thirties, with aggressively bleached hair cut in a squared-off bob like a 1920s flapper.

“Bar snacks,” Vincent repeated. “Um, yes, mixed nuts or pretzels?”

“Mixed nuts!” the flapper said. “God yes, that’s exactly what I need. This martini’s super-sweet.”

“Actually,” Mirella said, holding Vincent’s gaze, “could we possibly have both?”

“Of course. Mixed nuts and pretzels, coming right up.” This was a dream, wasn’t it?

“I haven’t had mixed nuts in like a million years,” the flapper said to Mirella.

“I’d say you’ve been missing out,” Mirella said.

Vincent felt strangely outside of herself. She observed her hands as she poured mixed nuts and pretzels into little steel bowls. I dreamed you came into my bar and didn’t know me. She set the bowls gently on the bar before her former best friend, who said thanks without looking at Vincent and returned to her conversation. “The thing with New York,” Mirella’s friend was saying as Vincent turned away, “is everybody leaves. I really thought I’d be the exception.”

“Everyone thinks they’re the exception.”

“You’re probably right. It’s just, my friends started taking off ten years ago, going to Atlanta or Minneapolis or wherever, and I guess I thought I’d be the one to stay and make a go of it.”

“But it’s a better job in Milwaukee, isn’t it?”

“I could afford a huge apartment there,” the flapper said. “Probably actually a whole house. I don’t know, it just seems like such a cliché, living in New York City for your twenties and then leaving.”

“Yeah, but people do that for a reason,” Mirella said. “Don’t you ever get the impression that it’s easier to live pretty much everywhere else?” Look at me, Vincent thought, notice me, say my name, but Mirella ignored Vincent as completely as if she were a stranger.

“Hey, excuse me,” Mirella said.

Vincent took off her glasses before she turned to face her.

“Mirella,” she said.

“Could I get another martini?” As though she hadn’t heard her name.

“Of course. What’s that you were drinking, Mirella, a Sunday Morning?”

“No, just a plain old Cosmo.”

“I thought you didn’t like Cosmos,” Vincent said.

“Oh, I’ll take another Midnight in Saigon, please,” the flapper said.

“Coming right up,” Vincent said. Was it possible that she was actually unrecognizable to someone who’d once been her dearest friend? A more likely possibility was that this was Mirella’s revenge, pretending not to know Vincent, or perhaps she was playing the same game Vincent was, living in disguise, except that Mirella’s disguise was more comprehensive and included pointedly not recognizing anyone from her previous life, or alternatively, possibly Vincent was losing her mind and maybe none of her memories were real.