Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“We could do a lot worse,” Leon said. They were sitting at a picnic bench by the RV, looking at a view of distant mountains turning violet in the sunset, and he felt at that moment that all was well with the world.

“We move through this world so lightly,” said Marie, misquoting one of Leon’s favorite songs, and for a warm moment he thought she meant it in a general sense, all of humanity, all these individual lives passing over the surface of the world with little trace, but then he understood that she meant the two of them specifically, Leon and Marie, and he couldn’t blame his chill on the encroaching night. In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumbrance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.

They sat watching the sunset fading out behind the mountains, they stayed out well after dark until the sky blazed with stars, but they had to go in eventually and so they rose stiffly and returned to the warmth of the RV, performed the various tasks of getting ready for bed, kissed one another good night. Marie turned out the light and was asleep within minutes. Leon lay awake in the dark.

“Most memorable job?” Simone hears herself say at a cocktail party in Atlanta, where she lives with her husband and three children and works for a company that sells clothes on the Internet. “Oh, that one’s easy.” She’s in a circle of colleagues, holding court. “Any of you remember Jonathan Alkaitis? That Ponzi scheme, way back in 2008?”

“No,” her assistant says. Her name is Keisha. She was three years old when Alkaitis went to prison.

“ That Jonathan Alkaitis?” An older colleague. “He stole my grandpa’s retirement savings.”

“Oh my god, that’s terrible,” Keisha says. “What did he do?”

“My grandpa? Spent the last decade of his life in my mother’s guest bedroom. You never met a more embittered man. Simone, you had some connection with Alkaitis?”

“I was his last secretary before he went to prison.”

“You weren’t. ”

“Oh my god, ” Keisha says, looking at her boss in the way administrative assistants do when it’s just dawned on them that the boss was once an administrative assistant.

“I’d just moved to New York,” Simone said, “so I was approximately twelve years old, and the city had a kind of sparkle to it. I got a job pretty quickly, at this financial place in Midtown, receptionist duties with some light secretarial work. Three weeks in, I’m just about ready to die of boredom, and then one day I walk into a meeting with a tray of coffee—”

“You had to get coffee?” Keisha has to get coffee twice a day.

“That wasn’t even the most boring thing I had to do,” Simone says, choosing to ignore Keisha’s tone. “Anyway, Alkaitis is having a meeting with his staff, and he calls for coffee, so I bring it in on a tray. When I walk into the room, there’s just this very fraught atmosphere. Like everyone was scared. I don’t know that I can really explain it, it was like…help me out here, Keisha, you’re the poetry major.”

“An atmosphere of dread?”

“Thank you, yes, exactly. An atmosphere of dread, like someone had just said something awful or something. I’m just leaving with the tray, and as I’m closing the door, I hear Alkaitis say, ‘Look, we all know what we do here.’”

“Wow. This was just before he was arrested?”

“Literally the day before. Then he comes to me an hour later and asks me to go buy paper shredders.” She’s honed the story over the years, made it sharper and more entertaining, and now, as always, she has to carefully suppress the vision of Claire in the back of the black SUV that carried her home the next night. What became of Claire? She doesn’t want to know.

“Which were you, though?” Keisha asks, toward the end of the story. “His secretary, or his receptionist?”

“Bit of both,” Simone says. “More the latter. Does it matter?”

“Well, probably only from a word-derivation sense,” Keisha says with the hesitance of people who know no one else is nearly as interested in the topic as they are, and the conversation moves on, Simone forgets to ask what she means, but she looks it up later in the quiet of her bedroom, her husband sleeping beside her. She was never Alkaitis’s secretary, she realizes now, when she looks up the word. A secretary is a keeper of secrets.

By then, when Simone is in her mid-forties, the rest of us have served our sentences—four years, eight years, ten years—and have been released from prison, although Oskar was released and then sent back in for a different crime. We’re released in different years and from different facilities. We emerge into an altered world in various states of disarray, clutching our belongings in our hands. Harvey is the first, because in light of his invaluable assistance to the prosecution he was sentenced to time served—four years of shuttling between the orderly hell of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan and the opulent offices of the court-appointed asset trustee uptown, four years of acting as a tour guide to the Ponzi by day and lying alone in his cell at night and on weekends—and after the sentencing he obtains permission from his probation officer to leave the state and move to New Jersey, where his sister owns an ice-cream shop. He serves ice cream near the beach and lives in her basement.

Ron avoids conviction but not divorce. He lives with his parents in Rochester, in upstate New York, and has a job taking tickets at a movie theater.

Oskar and Joelle are dropped off at bus depots, in different years and in different states: Joelle travels from Florida to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she sits for a long time in the Greyhound waiting room, watching mothers with their children, until finally her sister arrives, late as always, chattering about traffic and weather and the spare room where Joelle’s welcome to stay until she gets back on her feet, whatever that means; Oskar stands for a while in front of an information board at the Indianapolis bus station and eventually boards a bus bound for Lexington, the destination chosen because the bus is leaving soon and he can afford the ticket. He drifts off to sleep and wakes in the mountains under cloudy skies, pine trees rising into mist on steep hillsides, and the sheer beauty of the world brings tears to his eyes. This is a landscape that he holds on to when he’s arrested on drug charges a year later, handcuffed on the sidewalk at two a.m. and shoved into the squad car, where he closes his eyes on the way to the station and takes himself back to this moment on the bus on the way to Kentucky, a vision of steep slopes, pine trees, mist.

Enrico has two small daughters and a wife who thinks his name is José. It isn’t an especially happy marriage, but they have a nice house by the beach. The rest of us are united by our obsession with Enrico. In our imaginations he has become a heroic figure, leading a life of verve and mystery beyond the southern border. But in his actual life he watches his daughters and his wife chasing one another on the beach in the twilight, and thinks about how they will fare if—not if, when, surely when—he is finally apprehended and taken away. He can’t escape the dread. Once he was proud of himself for evading his fate, but more and more lately he feels it moving toward him, his fate approaching from a long way off. He is always waiting for a slow car with dark windows, a tap on the shoulder, a knock on the door.