Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“We were just talking about you,” Olivia said when Vincent returned to the deck with a fresh round that she’d mixed inside.

“I hope you made up some interesting rumors, at least,” Vincent said.

“We didn’t have to,” Jonathan said. “You’re an interesting person.” He accepted his drink from Vincent with a little nod and passed the other glass to Olivia.

“You remind me so much of myself at your age,” Olivia said with an obvious air of bestowing a compliment.

“Oh,” Vincent said. “I’m flattered.” She glanced at Jonathan, who was suppressing a smile. Olivia sipped her drink and gazed out at the ocean.

“This is delicious,” Olivia said. “Thank you.”

“I’m so glad you like it.” Vincent was charmed by Olivia, as she knew Jonathan was, but something about Olivia made Vincent a little sad. Olivia’s dress was too formal, her lipstick was too bright, her hair was freshly trimmed, she was slightly too attentive in the way she looked at Jonathan, and the combined effect was overeager. You’re showing your hand, Vincent wanted to tell her, you can’t let anyone see how hard you’re trying, but of course there was no way to give advice to a woman two or three times her age.

“Do you ever go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music?” Olivia asked after a while. “My sister was just telling me the other day about a show she’d seen there, and it occurred to me, I haven’t gone in years.”

“You know I try not to cross that river if I can help it,” Jonathan said.

“Snob,” Olivia said.

“Guilty as charged. Although, I was just thinking about Brooklyn the other day. I was looking at a real estate listing, this loft a friend of mine was thinking about buying, and I’m looking at all this luxury, some four-thousand-square-foot place in this gorgeous neighborhood by the Manhattan Bridge, and I’m thinking, Whatever this place is now, it has nothing to do with the Brooklyn I used to know. Seemed like a different city.”

“And then there’s BAM,” Olivia said. “My sister Monica was telling me about this show she’d seen, and I realized, when was the last time I’ve been? Two thousand four? Two thousand five?”

“We should all go together,” said Vincent, without much intention, but a month later, back on land, at home with a head cold on a hazy October afternoon, she found herself wondering if she should propose some sort of unexpected evening activity to Jonathan for the weekend, perhaps surprise him with theater tickets or something, and her thoughts drifted back to the conversation. She looked up the Brooklyn Academy of Music online, and found her brother.

It seemed that Paul, against all odds, had attained some success as a composer and performer. In early December he had a three-night series of performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The program was called Distant Northern Land: Soundtracks for Experimental Film. She hadn’t seen him in three years, since the last shift they’d worked together at the Hotel Caiette. In the image on the BAM website, he looked possessed: he was on a stage surrounded by equipment that she didn’t understand, keyboards and inscrutable boxes with dials and knobs, hands blurred with motion, and above him, projected on a screen, was a picture that she thought she recognized as the shoreline of Caiette, a rocky beach with dark evergreens under a cloudy sky.

In Distant Northern Land, the emerging composer Paul James Smith presents a series of mysterious home videos, each with a running time of exactly five minutes, all filmed by the composer during his childhood in rural western Canada, presented here as part of an arresting composition that blurs the lines between musical genres and interrogates our preconceived notions of home movies, of wilderness, of—

Vincent closed her eyes. She’d never been very careful with her videos. She’d made them and recorded over them, or made them and then left them in boxes in her childhood room. How often had Paul visited their father without her, in the years after she left Caiette? Often enough, she supposed. There was nothing stopping him from plundering her belongings. She found herself sitting outside by the pool, staring at the water, although she didn’t specifically remember leaving the house.

On a late-summer afternoon in distant childhood, she and her mother had accompanied Paul as far as the Port Hardy airport, where he boarded a propeller plane to Vancouver to catch a connecting flight to Toronto. Vincent would have been ten or so. Paul had been awful all day, laughing at her whenever she said anything, then at the airport he turned away from them with a cursory wave and got into the security line without looking back, and afterward, on the way home with her mother, Vincent was quiet and a little sad.

“The thing with Paul,” her mother said, while they were waiting for the water taxi on the pier at Grace Harbour, “is he’s always seemed to think that you owe him something.” Vincent remembered looking up at her mother, startled by the idea. “You don’t,” her mother said. “Nothing that happened to him is your fault.”

In 2008, by the pool, Vincent heard footsteps and looked up. Anya was approaching with a blanket. “I thought you might need this,” Anya said. “It’s cold out here.”

“Thank you,” Vincent said.

Anya frowned. “Are you crying?”

It was difficult to uphold her contract with Jonathan in the two months that followed, difficult to maintain an air of lightness, but he seemed not to notice. In the last months of 2008, he was working all the time. He was always at the office, or in the study with his door closed. She heard his voice on the phone when she walked by in the hallway but could never quite make out the words. When he was with her, he seemed tired and distracted.

In early December she boarded a series of trains that brought her eventually to the steps of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She’d worried about how to explain a Thursday night absence to Jonathan, but he’d texted to say he was working late and spending the night in the pied-à-terre. She arrived early and lingered outside for a while as a cross-section of affluent Brooklyn assembled on the sidewalk in their uniforms: flat-heeled boots and complicated arrangements of scarves for the women, beards and unflatteringly tight jeans on the men. It was a pleasure to watch them meet one another and pair off, streaming past her in twos and threes and fours, latecomers hurrying around the corner in a fluster of apologies and complaints about the subway. At last Vincent allowed herself to be pulled into the theater with the last of the crowd, found her seat in the front row, and set about the usual preshow business of blowing her nose, unwrapping a cough drop just in case, turning off her phone, anything to not think about what she was about to see.

“Do you know the artist?” the woman beside her whispered. She looked to be in her eighties, white hair arranged into spikes. She was elegantly dressed, but she looked ill; she was emaciated and her hands trembled.

“No.” Vincent felt that this was technically true. She’d known her brother, past tense. The lights were dimming around them.

“I was here last night too,” the woman said. “I just think he’s brilliant.”

“Oh,” Vincent said. “I’m looking forward to seeing him, then.”

“Do you know the artist?” the woman asked again, after a moment, and Vincent felt a stab of pity.

“Yes,” Vincent said. Applause rose around them, and when she looked up, her brother was walking out onto the stage. Paul was thinner and noticeably older, and she couldn’t tell if his black suit and thin dark tie were meant to be ironic. He looked like an undertaker. He nodded to the audience, smiled at the applause with what seemed to Vincent to be genuine pleasure, and took his place behind a keyboard, then the stage lights dimmed too, until he was barely illuminated. The screen above his head lit up, a field of white with a black title, “Melissa in the Water,” and then the white resolved into a shoreline. Vincent recognized the beach by the pier at Caiette, grainy and oversaturated, the water and sky too blue, the islands in the inlet an unnatural green. Paul’s music sounded at first like white noise, a radio caught between stations. He played a sequence of notes on a keyboard, the notes emerging a few seconds later as cello music, to which he added a quietly meandering piano, moving between the keyboard and a laptop perched on a stand, pressing buttons and tapping pedals to create loops and distortions, a one-man band. The static had taken on a pulsating quality, a steady beat. Onstage, the screen burst into life as a group of children dashed across the frame. Vincent could see from their faces that they were shouting and laughing, but the film had no sound. She remembered this video. This was the first summer without her mother. She’d been living in Vancouver for ten or eleven months—long hours alone in her aunt’s basement with the television, long commutes by bus to school—but she’d come home to visit Dad for the summer. She’d stood on the beach filming the swimmers, a.k.a. the entire underage population of Caiette circa 1995: a little girl whose name she’d forgotten—Amy? Anna?—who stopped at the water’s edge, giggling but afraid to go in; the twins, Carl and Gary, a little older, splashing around in a corner of the frame; Vincent’s friend Melissa, who would have been fourteen but was small for her age and looked closer to twelve. Melissa’s pale hair and the yellow swimsuit and the graininess and oversaturation of the film lent her an air of radiance. She was doing somersaults in the water, laughing when she surfaced. In three years she would move to Vancouver to go to the University of British Columbia and live with Vincent in that ghastly basement apartment on the Downtown Eastside; she would go dancing with Vincent and Paul on the last night of the twentieth century; at nineteen she would develop a drug problem, drop out of school, return to Caiette to live with her parents while she pulled herself together; a year after that she would be hired as a chauffeur and gardening assistant at the Hotel Caiette; but in the video all of this was in the unimaginable future and she was just a kid twisting around in the water like a fish. The music had a shifting, unstable quality that Vincent found unpleasant, like a soundtrack for one of those nightmares where you try to run but your feet won’t move, and now there were voices in the static, overlapping.