Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“One Cosmopolitan, one Midnight in Saigon.” Vincent set the drinks on the bar.

“Thanks so much,” Mirella said, and Vincent heard the glasses clink as she turned away. She emptied the tip jar on the counter.

“Little early to count out, isn’t it?” Ned was looking at her curiously. There was no one at the bar now except Mirella and her friend, deep in conversation.

“Ned, I’m sorry about this, but you’re going to have to close up on your own tonight.” Vincent divided the tip money into two piles and pocketed one of them.

“What’s going on? Are you sick?”

“No, I’m walking off the job. I apologize.”

“Vincent, you can’t just—”

“I can, though,” Vincent said, and left him there. She was much more ruthless after Alkaitis than before. She exited via the kitchen door. Mirella didn’t look at her as she left. She wouldn’t have imagined that Mirella could be so cold, but what were they if not actors? You didn’t come from money, Mirella had said to Vincent once, in a different, unimaginable life. If they were plausible in the age of money because they could disguise their origins, why should it be surprising that Mirella was capable of pretending they’d never met? Pretending was their area of mutual expertise.

That night she walked down to lower Manhattan, to the Russian Café, a place she’d frequented during her years with Alkaitis, although if anyone recognized her from that time, they never let on. Her favorite manager was working that night, a woman in her thirties named Ilieva who spoke with a slight Russian accent and had once let slip that she’d acquired her green card in exchange for testimony in a criminal case.

“You have no coat?” Ilieva asked when she came to Vincent’s table. “You’ll freeze to death.”

“I just quit my job,” Vincent said. “I forgot my coat in the break room.”

“You just walked off the job?”

“I did.”

“Glass of red on the house?”

“Thank you,” Vincent said, although the wine here was terrible. The point of this place wasn’t the wine, the point was the atmosphere. Here in the warmth and dim lighting, with scents of coffee and cheesecake in the air, Nina Simone on the sound system, the gripped feeling in her chest was beginning to subside. This place was the one constant between the kingdom of money and her current life.

“So,” Ilieva said when she came back with the wine, “what next? Another bartending job?”

“No, I have my second job, in the other place,” Vincent said. “I’m going to try to get more hours.”

“It’s a kitchen job, isn’t it? What, you want to be a chef, open your own restaurant?”

“No,” Vincent said. “I think I’d like to go to sea.”

Vincent’s mother went to sea in her early twenties. Vincent had always pressed her for stories from when she was young, because while the contours of Vincent’s father’s life were fairly straightforward—an undramatic childhood in the Seattle suburbs, a brief stint studying philosophy before he dropped out and found work as a tree planter—Vincent’s mother’s past held a certain mystery. Vincent’s mother had survived a miserable childhood in a small town in the Prairies—there were aunts, an uncle, and even a set of grandparents whom Vincent had been given to understand she would never meet—and gone east when she was seventeen, to Nova Scotia, where she worked as a waitress and wrote poetry, then at nineteen she got a job as a steward on a Canadian Coast Guard vessel that maintained navigational aids in the shipping lanes. She loved it and hated it in equal measure. She saw the northern lights and sailed past icebergs, but also she was always cold and thought she might actually die of claustrophobia, so she quit after two rotations and drove across the country with a new boyfriend. She was a restless person. Within a year the boyfriend was going to medical school in Vancouver and Vincent’s mother was living precariously in Caiette, writing poetry that was sometimes accepted for publication in obscure literary journals, commuting back and forth on the mail boat and hitchhiking into Port Hardy for a job cleaning houses, until she fell in love with a married man down the road—Vincent’s father—and got pregnant with Vincent. She was still only twenty-three years old.

Vincent’s mother would not talk about her family. “They’re not nice people,” she’d say. “They’re not worth talking about, sweetie, so please don’t ask.” But of the stories she was willing to tell, what Vincent most wanted to hear about was the time on the coast guard vessel, and she pressed her mother for those stories so many times that they began to seem like Vincent’s own memories: she’d never been to that coast but held mental images of the northern lights shifting over a winter sky, the silent towers of icebergs in a dark gray sea. And then after her mother was gone, Vincent started trying to place her mother in the picture—her mother gazing at the iceberg, her mother’s face tilted toward the aurora borealis—but who was her mother at twenty, at twenty-one? It’s so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. In memory her mother was stranded forever at thirty-six, the age she’d been when she came into thirteen-year-old Vincent’s bedroom, kissed her on the top of the head—Vincent barely looked up from her book—and said, “I’m just taking the canoe out for a bit, sweetie, I’ll see you later”—before she descended the stairs for the last time.

The day after she saw Mirella, Vincent took the train back into the city and then boarded a southbound subway and rode it to its terminal point, to stand for a while on a white-sand beach at the edge of the city, filming the waves. A cold gray day, but the cold was bracing. A containership was passing on the far horizon. She was thinking of her mother, and then, watching the ship, she found herself thinking of one of her last nights at the Hotel Caiette, a day or two after she first met Jonathan. He’d been eating dinner at the bar that night, and she’d been talking to him, when another guest arrived, a man staying in the hotel with his wife. She couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered a detail of the conversation: “I’m in shipping,” he’d said to Jonathan when the subject of work came up, and this was memorable because he was someone who clearly loved his job, she could see that immediately, the way he lit up when the topic was introduced. Years later, standing by the ocean on a cold spring day, she lowered her camera to watch the passing ship. How difficult would it be to get a job at sea?

“Thailand,” Geoffrey Bell repeated, aboard the Neptune Cumberland in the fall of 2013. “Why are you going to Thailand when your leave comes up?”

“Because I’ve never been,” Vincent said.

“Seems like a solid reason. It’s just that most people use their shore leave to go home.”

“Where would that be, though? I don’t mean this in any kind of tragic sense,” Vincent said, “but I don’t feel that I really have a home on land at this point.”

“Don’t tell me you think of the Neptune Cumberland as home,” Geoffrey said. “You’ve been at sea for, what, two months?”

“Three.”

Three months of rising in her cabin for a middle-of-the-night shower before breakfast prep, long hours of cooking in a windowless room that moved in rough weather, walks on the deck in rain and in sunlight, sleeping with Geoffrey, overtime hours, three months of hard labor and dreamless sleep while the ship moved on a sixty-eight-day cycle from Newark down to Baltimore and Charleston, from Charleston over to Freeport in the Bahamas, from Freeport to Port Elizabeth in South Africa, up to Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Bremerhaven in Germany, then back across the Atlantic to Newark again. Most of the men on board—she was the only woman—worked for six months straight and then took three months off, and she’d decided to do the same.