Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

On the stage below the projection screen, Paul was in motion, making adjustments to dials, following the projection on his laptop, playing the keyboard at intervals. Vincent sensed movement to her right, and when she looked, the woman had fallen asleep, her head on her chest. Vincent rose and slipped out into the lobby, where the lights and the solid reality of marble and benches made her want to weep with relief, and fled outside into the winter air. She walked over the Manhattan Bridge and all the way up to Grand Central Terminal, trying to steady her thoughts. The idea came to her that she could sue him, but with what proof? He’d been in Caiette every summer and every second Christmas of her childhood. There was no way of proving that he hadn’t filmed the videos himself. And any legal action would be difficult or impossible to hide from Jonathan, for whom she was supposed to be a calm harbor, no drama, no friction. On the train back to Greenwich, she caught sight of her reflection in the window and closed her eyes. She’d started paying her own rent at seventeen. How had she become so dependent on another person? Of course the answer was depressingly obvious: she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier.

In the week that followed, Jonathan worked such long hours that she hardly saw him—small mercy—so she only had to feign lightness for brief periods. She read the news to distract herself, but the news was a litany of economic collapse. She thought of going back to Brooklyn and waiting outside the stage door, but the thought of seeing Paul again was repulsive.

On the following Wednesday, Vincent was awakened by a nightmare for the third time in three nights. She’d been sleeping poorly for longer than that, weeks, but the nightmare was a new and unsettling problem. She was certain that it was the same dream, repeated, but she retained only a vague impression of falling, a sense of catastrophe that persisted in daylight. She stared at the ceiling for a while, Jonathan asleep beside her, before she finally rose and fumbled for her workout clothes—she kept them folded on a chair by the bed—and laced her running shoes in darkness, collected her keys from the hook by the kitchen door. She liked to make a game of leaving the house without turning on any lights. There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen.

In the kingdom of money it was important to be thin, but she would have run anyway. She loved the suburbs at this hour, when there was still some mystery here. It was early December but the weather had been well above freezing all week. She walked quickly down the long driveway that led past Gil and Anya’s cottage—no lights in the windows—to the cul-de-sac, where the equally excessive houses of two neighbors glimmered through the trees, and then broke into a light jog when she reached the first real street, the first street that went somewhere. She liked the stillness of the predawn neighborhood, the secrecy of a street where everyone else was sleeping, their windows unlit. Jonathan wouldn’t have liked her to be out alone in the dark, but these streets had never struck her as dangerous, and she carried mace on her key chain. By the time she returned to the house, it was four o’clock and still dark. She left a note for Jonathan, who wouldn’t wake till five-thirty, then showered and dressed and called a taxi to take her to the five a.m. train.

The others on the train at that hour were mostly financial-industry maniacs, eyes bright in the shine of their little screens, sending and receiving messages from other continents. Vincent had a row of seats to herself. After a while the night gave way to shadows and a murky dawn, the towns shifting from collections of lights to silhouettes of rooftops. How could Paul do it, she found herself thinking, how could he steal from her like that, but she was too tired to maintain the line of thought and drifted into a twilight state that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t consciousness, towns reappearing and blinking out between intervals of trees. She woke with a start as the train pulled into Grand Central.

That was the last morning in the kingdom of money. She ate breakfast in a hotel restaurant near Grand Central. There was an hour in a bookstore, time spent in various shops, an interval of newspapers and coffee in an espresso bar in Chelsea. A strange moment: she stepped out of the espresso bar and into a tour group, a pack of tourists following a leader who held a red umbrella up in the air, and just for a moment, she saw her mother in the crowd. Only a flash, but it was unmistakable—the long brown braid down her back, the red cardigan she’d been wearing when she drowned—and then the crowd shifted and her mother was gone. Vincent stood for a long time on the sidewalk, watching the group walk away. Was she hallucinating? She was alert for signs of madness as she walked uptown through the gray city but saw nothing else that seemed obviously unreal. Central Park was monochromatic, dark trees dripping under a colorless sky.

She was on the steps of the Met when Jonathan called.

“Christmas party tonight,” he said. “You want to come by the office around seven-thirty, and we’ll walk over together?”

“Seven-thirty’s perfect,” Vincent said. “I’m looking forward to it.” She had in fact entirely forgotten about the holiday party. The dress she’d planned to wear was hanging in the bedroom closet in Greenwich, and there was nothing suitable in the pied-à-terre. But the age of money wouldn’t end for a few more hours, so this didn’t constitute an emergency, and she was free to linger for a while with her favorite painting. She had fallen in love with Thomas Eakins’s The Thinker, a massive image of a man in a dark suit, perhaps in his thirties, hands in his pockets, lost in pensive thought. She’d come back to this gallery several times in the past few weeks and stood before this painting, unaccountably moved by it. Her mother would have liked it, she thought.

When she turned to leave, she saw a man she recognized. He’d been looking at the same painting, standing back a little.

“Oskar,” she said. “You work with my husband, don’t you?”

“In the asset management unit.” They shook hands. “Nice to see you again.”

“I don’t mean this as a pickup line,” Vincent said, “but do you come here often?”

“Not as often as I’d like. I took a couple art history classes in college,” he added, as if he had to justify his presence here. They parted ways after a brief volley of small talk—“I hope you’re coming to the party tonight?”—and it might have been unmemorable except that that was the first time she found herself dwelling on the limitations of her arrangement with Jonathan. She enjoyed being with Jonathan, for the most part, she didn’t mind it, but lately she’d found herself thinking that it might be nice to fall in love, or failing that, at least to sleep with someone she was actually attracted to and to whom she owed nothing. She hailed a taxi and traveled to Saks, where she spent some time under dazzling lights and emerged an hour later with a blue velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. There were still so many hours left in the day. Don’t think of Paul, probably in a studio somewhere composing new music to accompany her plundered work. She hailed another taxi and went downtown to the financial district, to linger for a while in a café that she’d always especially liked. She stayed in the Russian Café for two hours, drinking cappuccinos and reading the International Herald Tribune.

By five o’clock she was restless, so she gathered her things and stepped out into the rain. She would find another café, she decided. She’d go up to Midtown and stake out a position near Jonathan’s office, so as to arrive perfectly on time. But halfway down the stairs to Bowling Green station, she was overcome by the certainty that if she went into the subway, she would die. She knew it as clearly as she knew her own name. Vincent turned around and half stumbled, half ran back up the stairs, pushing through a sea of commuters coming the other way, desperate to reach a bench before she fainted. She’d never fainted before but surely this was what it felt like, this terrible lightheadedness, the awareness of being just at the edge of an abyss. I should ask my mother, she thought, and the equally irrational thought that followed was My mother’s waiting for me in the subway.