Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“Oh, of course I wouldn’t stay here forever, ” Walter said, in order to be reassuring, but that wouldn’t be the worst thing, he thought on the walk back to the staff lodge. Caiette was the first place he’d ever truly loved. There was nowhere else he wanted to go. Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.

A decade later, in Edinburgh, Paul accepted a glass of wine from the bartender and turned to slide back into the crowd, and there she was before him.

“You,” he said, because he couldn’t remember her name.

“Hello, Paul.” She was exactly as he remembered—a small, well-put-together person with a very precise haircut, dressed this evening in an elegant suit, wearing a necklace that seemed to involve a mosquito trapped in a walnut-sized piece of amber—but who was she? He was jet-lagged and slightly drunk, also so bad at remembering faces and names at the best of times that lately he’d started to wonder if it was maybe some kind of thing, either borderline sociopathy— Am I so self-absorbed that I can’t see other people? —or some mild variant of facial blindness, that neurological situation wherein you won’t recognize your wife if she gets a haircut, not that he had a wife. He ran through all of this while the mystery woman waited patiently, whiskey in hand.

“Not to rush you,” she said finally, “but I was about to head up to the terrace for a cigarette. Perhaps you’d like to join me while you think about it?”

She had an American accent, but that brought him no closer to placing her. The party had drawn a cross-section of the Edinburgh Festival, and a fair percentage of the guests had American accents. He mumbled something ineloquent and followed her through the crowd, but her identity didn’t come to him until they’d been alone on the terrace for a moment and she’d lit her cigarette.

“Ella,” Paul said. “Ella Kaspersky. I’m so sorry. I’m a little jet-lagged…”

She shrugged. “You see a person out of context…” She left the thought unfinished. “And it’s been a long time.”

“Thirteen years?”

“Yes.”

It was cold on the terrace and he wanted to go back in. No, not back in, back to his hotel. The cold wasn’t really the problem. Practically speaking, flying economy from Toronto to Edinburgh meant that he’d been awake for two days, which fell into that increasingly vast category of things that were doable when he was eighteen but less so as he slid into middle age. Seeing Ella Kaspersky only made him feel worse. Something of this must have shown in his face, because Ella seemed to soften, just a little, and she lightly touched his arm.

“I’ve wanted to apologize to you for thirteen years,” she said. “I was angry in Caiette, and I’d been drinking too much, and I let both those things get the better of me. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.”

“I could’ve said no.”

“You should’ve said no. But I should never have asked you in the first place.”

“Well,” he said, “you were right about Alkaitis, at least.” He’d never been particularly interested in the news, but he had read a book about the Ponzi that came out a few years later, looking for news of his sister. In the book, Vincent was a marginal figure, her quotes confined to excerpts from a deposition transcript. It was obvious that the writer hadn’t managed to secure an interview with her, although there was a great deal of speculation about the material opulence of her life with Alkaitis.

“Yes. I was right.”

“Did you know he lived with my sister?” He was smoking a cigarette, although he couldn’t quite remember Kaspersky’s having given it to him. Lately time had been stuttering a little.

“Are you serious?”

“She was the bartender at the Hotel Caiette,” he said. “A man walks into a bar, one thing leads to another…”

“Extraordinary. I saw pictures of him with a young woman, but I never made the connection back to the hotel.”

“Do you remember a pretty bartender with long dark hair?”

She frowned. “Maybe. No. No, if I’m being honest, I don’t remember her at all. What became of her afterward?”

“We’re not in touch,” Paul said. For Paul, Vincent existed in a kind of suspended animation. On the first night of his run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, back in 2008, he walked out onto the stage and saw her. She was in the front row, at the far end; his eyes fell on her and his heart sped up. He got through the opening somehow, and when he glanced up again, no more than ten minutes later, she was gone, an open seat yawning in the shadows. That night he procrastinated for two hours before he left the theater, but she wasn’t waiting for him outside the stage door. She wasn’t there the next night, or the next; he expected to see her every night when he exited the theater, and she was never there, but he imagined the confrontation so many times that it began to seem like something that might actually have happened. Look, all those years you lived in Vancouver, you left the videos boxed up in your childhood bedroom, he’d tell her. Obviously you weren’t going to do anything with them. You didn’t even notice they were gone. And you thought that meant you could take them? she would ask. At least I did something with them, he’d tell her, and after days of imagining this conversation he almost began to long for it. It turned out that never having that conversation with Vincent meant that he was somehow condemned to always have that conversation with Vincent. It had been exactly a decade since the performances at BAM and he was still talking to her, the imagined Vincent who never materialized outside the stage door. Do you mean to tell me, she’d ask, that you’ve built a whole career on my videos? Not a whole career, Vincent, but composing soundtracks for your videos led to collaborations with video artists, live performances at art fairs in Basel and Miami, the residency at BAM, my fellowship, my teaching position, all of the success that I’ve found in this life. Does that justify it? she’d ask. I don’t know, Vincent, I’ve never known what’s reasonable and what isn’t. But for whatever it’s worth, after the BAM performances I never did another public performance with your tapes. Do you think that redeems you? No, I know it doesn’t. I know that I’m a thief.

“Still with me?” Ella said, and he realized that he may have been staring into space for a while.

“Sorry, yes. I’m a bit wrecked from traveling all night.”

“Parties are a bit much under those conditions,” Ella said. “Let’s get out of here, and I’ll buy you a drink somewhere.” Ten minutes later they were at a pub around the corner, an old-time kind of place with a bright red door and a forest’s worth of wood paneling inside.

“So,” Ella said, when they’d slid into a booth. “Forgive me, but you look terrible.”

“I’ve been awake for two days.”

“That’ll do it, I suppose.” But she was giving him a certain kind of look. He had trouble with names and faces but didn’t have trouble recognizing the question she was refraining from asking. It was a look he’d been seeing more and more of lately.

“How did you end up at that party?” he asked, to distract her. He was acutely aware of the little plastic bag in the inside pocket of his jacket.