The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  Diving into the pool at night: in summer Vincent dove through the lights of the house, reflected on the surface; in cold weather the pool was heated, so she dove into steam. She stayed underwater for as long as possible, testing her endurance. When she finally surfaced, she liked to pretend that the ring on her finger was real and that everything she saw was hers: the house, the garden, the lawn, the pool in which she treaded water. It was an infinity pool, which created a disorienting impression that the water disappeared into the lawn or the lawn disappeared into the water. She hated looking at that edge.

  Crowds

  Her contract with Jonathan, as she understood it, was that she’d be available whenever he wanted her, in and out of the bedroom, she would be elegant and impeccable at all times—“You bring such grace to the room,” he’d said—and in return for this she had a credit card whose bills she never saw, a life of beautiful homes and travel, in other words the opposite of the life she’d lived before. No one actually uses the phrase trophy wife in conversation, but Jonathan was thirty-four years older than Vincent. She understood what she was.

  There were adjustments to be made. At first, living in Jonathan Alkaitis’s house was like those dreams where you find a door in your kitchen that you never noticed before, and then the door leads into a back hallway that opens up into a never-used au pair’s suite, which opens into an unused nursery, which is down the corridor from the master bedroom suite, which is larger than your entire childhood home, and then later you realize that there’s a way of getting from the bedroom to the kitchen without ever setting foot in either of the two living rooms or the downstairs hall.

  In her hotel days, Vincent had always associated money with privacy—the wealthiest hotel guests have the most space around them, suites instead of rooms, private terraces, access to executive lounges—but in actuality, the deeper you go into the kingdom of money, the more crowded it gets, people around you in your home all the time, which was why Vincent only swam at night. In the daytime there was the house manager, Gil, who lived with his wife, Anya, in a cottage by the driveway; Anya, who was the cook, supervised three young local women who kept the house clean and did laundry and accepted grocery deliveries and such; there was also a chauffeur, who had an apartment over the garage, and a silent groundskeeper, who maintained everything outside of the house. Every time Vincent looked up, someone was nearby, sweeping or dusting or talking on the phone to the plumber or trimming a hedge. It was a lot of people to contend with, but at night the staff retreated into their private lives and Vincent could swim in peace without feeling watched from every window.

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying the pool,” Gil said. “The pool design consultant spent so much time on it, and I swear no one ever used it before you got here.”

  She was in the pool when she first met Jonathan’s daughter, Claire. It was a cool evening in April, steam rising from the water. She’d known Claire was coming over that evening, but she hadn’t expected to surface and find a woman in a suit staring at her through the steam like a goddamned apparition, standing perfectly still with her hands clasped behind her back. Vincent gasped aloud, which in retrospect wasn’t endearing. Claire, who had obviously just come from the office, was a very corporate-looking woman in her late twenties.

  “You must be Vincent.” She picked up the folded towel that Vincent had left on a lawn chair and extended it in a get-out-of-the-pool kind of way, so Vincent felt that she had no choice but to climb the ladder and accept the towel, which was irritating because she’d wanted to swim for longer.

  “You must be Claire.”

  Claire didn’t dignify this with a response. Vincent was wearing a fairly modest one-piece swimsuit but felt extremely naked as she towelled off.

  “Vincent’s an unusual name for a girl,” Claire said with a slight emphasis on girl that struck Vincent as uncalled-for. I’m not that young, Vincent wanted to tell her, because at twenty-four she didn’t feel young at all, but Claire was possibly dangerous and Vincent hoped for peace, so she answered in the mildest tone possible.

  “My parents named me after a poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  Claire’s gaze flickered to the ring on Vincent’s finger. “Well,” she said, “we can’t choose our parents, I suppose. What kind of work do they do?”

  “My parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re dead.”

  Claire’s face softened a little. “I’m sorry to hear that.” They stood staring at one another for a beat or two, then Vincent reached for the bathrobe that she’d left on a deck chair, and Claire said, sounding more resigned than angry now, “Did you know you’re five years younger than me?”

  “We can’t choose our ages either,” Vincent said.

  “Ha.” (Not a laugh, just a spoken word: ha.) “Well, we’re all adults here. Just so you know, I find this situation absurd, but there’s no reason we can’t be cordial with one another.” She turned away and walked back into the house.

  Ghosts

  Vincent’s mother had read a lot of poetry, having formerly been a poet herself. When Edna St. Vincent Millay was nineteen years old, in 1912, she began writing a poem called “Renascence” that Vincent must have read a thousand times in childhood and adolescence. Millay wrote the poem for a competition. The poem didn’t win, but it nonetheless carried an electric charge that transported her from the drudgery of New England poverty to Vassar College, from there into the kind of bohemia that she’d dreamed of all her life: a different kind of poverty, the Greenwich Village–variety, poverty but with late-night poetry readings and dashing friends.

  “The point is she raised herself into a new life by sheer force of will,” Vincent’s mother had said, and Vincent wondered even at the time—she would have been about eleven—what that statement might suggest about how happy Vincent’s mother was about the way her own life had gone, this woman who’d imagined writing poetry in the wilderness but somehow found herself sunk in the mundane difficulties of raising a child and running a household in the wilderness instead. There’s the idea of wilderness, and then there’s the unglamorous labour of it, the never-ending grind of securing firewood; bringing in groceries over absurd distances; tending the vegetable garden and maintaining the fences that keep the deer from eating all the vegetables; repairing the generator; remembering to get gas for the generator; composting; running out of water in the summertime; never having enough money because job opportunities in the wilderness are limited; managing the seething resentment of your only child, who doesn’t understand your love of the wilderness and asks every week why you can’t just live in a normal place that isn’t wilderness; etc.

  What Vincent’s mother probably wouldn’t have imagined: a life—an arrangement—in which Vincent wore a wedding ring but was not actually married. “I want you close,” Jonathan said, at the beginning, “but I just don’t want to get married again.” His wife, Suzanne, had died only three years earlier. They never said her name. But while he didn’t want to marry Vincent, he did feel that wedding rings created an impression of stability. “In my line of work,” he said, “managing other people’s money, steadiness is everything. If I take you out to dinner with clients, it’s better for you to be a beautiful young wife than a beautiful young girlfriend.”

  “Does Claire know we’re not married?” Vincent asked the night Claire appeared by the pool. By the time Vincent had come in and showered, Claire had already left. She found Jonathan alone in the south living room with a glass of red wine and the Financial Times.

  “Only two people in the world know that,” he said. “You and me. Come here.” Vincent came to stand before him in the lamplight. He ran his fingertips down the length of her arm, and then turned her around and slowly unzipped her dress.

  But what kind of man lies to his daughter about being married? There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if
she’d stepped temporarily outside of herself.

  Accomplices

  They had cocktails at a bar in Midtown with a couple who’d invested millions in Jonathan’s fund, Marc and Louise from Colorado. At that point Vincent had only been in the kingdom of money for three weeks, and the strangeness of her new life was acute.

  “This is Vincent,” Jonathan said, his hand on her lower back.

  “It’s so lovely to meet you,” Vincent said. Marc and Louise were in their forties or fifties, and after a few more months with Alkaitis she would come to recognize them as typical of a particular western subspecies of moneyed people: as wealthy as their counterparts in other regions, but prematurely weathered by their skiing obsession.

  “It’s so great to meet you,” they said, and Louise caught sight of Vincent and Jonathan’s rings in the round of handshakes. “Oh my goodness, Jonathan,” she said, “are congratulations in order?”

  “Thank you,” he said, in such a convincing tone of bashful happiness that for a disorienting moment Vincent entertained the wild thought that they were somehow actually married.

  “Well, cheers,” Marc said, and raised his glass. “Congratulations to the both of you. Wonderful news, just wonderful.”

  “Can I ask . . . ?” Louise said. “Big wedding, small . . . ?”

  “If we’d made any to-do about it at all,” Jonathan said, “you’d have been the first names on the guest list.”

  “Would you believe,” Vincent said, “that we actually got married at city hall?”

  “Good lord,” Marc said, and Louise said, “I like your style. Donna’s getting married—that’s our daughter—and my god, the logistics, the complications, all the drama, the headache of it, I’m tempted to suggest they follow your lead and elope.”

  “There’s a certain efficiency to elopement,” Jonathan said. “Weddings are such elaborate affairs. We just didn’t want all the hoopla.”

  “I had to convince him to take the day off work,” Vincent said. “He wanted to just go down there on his lunch break.” They were laughing, and Jonathan put his arm around her. She could tell he appreciated the improvisation.

  “Was there a honeymoon?” Marc asked.

  “I’m taking her to Nice next week, and then on to Dubai for the weekend,” Jonathan said.

  “Ah, right,” Marc said, “I remember you telling me that you love it there. Vincent, have you been?”

  “To Dubai? No, not yet. I can’t wait.” And so on and so forth. She didn’t want to be a liar but his expectations were clear. As a former bartender, she was accustomed to performing. The lies were troublingly easy. On the night when Jonathan had walked into the bar at the Hotel Caiette, someone had written terrible graffiti on the window, and she was standing there polishing glasses, counting the minutes till the end of her shift, wondering why she’d ever thought it was a good idea to come back here, trying to imagine the rest of her life and getting nowhere because of course she could leave and go work in another bar, and then another bar after that, and another, and another, but leaving Caiette wouldn’t change the underlying equation. The problems of Vincent’s life were the same from one year to the next: she knew she was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life, also a difference between knowing that a college degree might change your life and a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans, especially since she’d worked alongside enough bartenders with college degrees to know that a college degree might not change anything at all, etc., etc., and she was spiralling through that familiar territory, sick of her thoughts and sick of herself, when Jonathan walked into the bar. In the way he spoke to her, his obvious wealth and his obvious interest, she saw an opening into a vastly easier life, or at least a different life, a chance to live in a foreign country, a life of something other than bartending in a place other than here, and the opportunity was irresistible.

  Lying about being married troubled her conscience, but not enough to make her want to flee. I’m paying a price for this life, she told herself, but the price is reasonable.

  Variations

  Jonathan never talked about Suzanne, his real wife, but the past wasn’t entirely off the table. Sometimes in a certain mood he liked to hear stories about Vincent’s life. She doled them out carefully: “When I was thirteen,” she told him once, lying in the bed on a Sunday morning, “I dyed my hair blue and got suspended from school for writing graffiti on a window.”

  “Really. What did you write?”

  “Would you believe I wrote a philosopher’s last words? I came across them in a book somewhere and loved them.”

  “Precocious, but morbid,” he said. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Sweep me up. It has a certain beauty, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe if you’re a temperamental thirteen-year-old girl,” he said, so she threw a pillow at him. She didn’t tell him that her mother had died two weeks earlier, or that her brother had been lurking around and saw her do it, or that she had a brother. It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.

  Also, it wasn’t morbidity, she found herself thinking on the train into the city the following afternoon. It was almost the opposite. She’d never had a clear vision of what she wanted her life to look like, she had always been directionless, but she did know that she wanted to be swept up, to be plucked from the crowd, and then when it happened, when Jonathan extended a hand and she took it, when she went in the space of a week from the mildew-plagued staff quarters of the Hotel Caiette to an enormous house in a foreign country, she was surprised by how disorienting it was, and then surprised by her surprise. She got off the train at Grand Central and let herself be absorbed into the flow of pedestrian traffic down Lexington Avenue. How have I come to this foreign planet, so far from home? But it wasn’t just the place, it wasn’t even mostly the place, it was mostly the money that made it foreign and strange. She wandered over to Fifth Avenue with no particular destination in mind, and walked until a pair of buttery yellow leather gloves in a window caught her eye. Everything in the shop was gorgeous, but the yellow gloves shone with a special light. She tried them on and bought them without looking at the price tag, because in the age of money her credit card was a magical, weightless thing.

  She left the boutique with the gloves in her handbag and found her thoughts drifting a little as she walked. Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she’d quit working at the Hotel Caiette and returned to her old job at the Hotel Vancouver before Jonathan arrived, for example, or where he decided to get room service that morning instead of sitting at the bar and ordering breakfast, or where he did sit at the bar and order breakfast but he didn’t like Vincent; an alternate reality where she still lived in the staff quarters of the Hotel Caiette, serving drinks to wealthy tourists all night, years passing. None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.

  She’d read newspapers all her life, because she felt that she was desperately undereducated and wanted to be an informed and knowledgeable person, but in the age of money she would often read a news story and find herself uneasily distracted by its opposite: Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed. A variation of reality where North Korea hadn’t fired test missiles, where the terrorist bombings in London hadn’t happened, where the Israeli prime minister hadn’t suffered a stroke. Or spin it back further: a version of history where the Korean peninsula was never divided, where the USSR had never invaded A
fghanistan and al-Qaeda had never been founded, where Ariel Sharon died in combat as a young man. She could only play this game for so long before she was overcome by a kind of vertigo and had to make herself stop.

  Shield

  One of the first things she bought was an expensive video camera, a Canon HV10. She’d been shooting video since she was thirteen, a few days after her mother disappeared, when her grandmother Caroline arrived from Victoria to help out. That first night of her grandmother’s visit, when Vincent was sitting at the table after dinner—drinking tea, which was a habit she’d picked up from her mother, and staring down the hill at the water because surely any minute now her mother would walk up the steps to the house—her grandmother brought a box to the table.

  “I have something for you,” she said.

  Vincent opened it and found a video camera, a Panasonic. She recognized it as one of the new kind that took DV tapes, but it still had an unexpected weight. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with it.

  “When I was younger,” Caroline said, “say maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, I went through a difficult time.”

  “What kind of difficult time?” It was the first thing Vincent had said in some hours, maybe all day. The words were sticky in her throat.

  “The details aren’t very important. A friend of mine, a photographer, she gave me a camera she no longer needed. She said to me, ‘Just take some pictures, take pictures every day, see if it makes you feel better.’ It seemed like a dumb idea, to be honest, but I tried it, and I did feel better.”

  “I don’t think—” Vincent said, but couldn’t finish the sentence. I don’t think a camera will bring my mother back.

  “What I’m suggesting,” Caroline said softly, “is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder. I think your brother would laugh at me if I said something like this to him, but maybe you could just try to absorb the idea.”