The Glass Hotel

¹ VINCENT IN THE OCEAN

Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain—

Sweep me up. Words scrawled on a window when I was thirteen years old. I stepped back and let the marker drop from my hand and still I remember the exuberance of that moment, that feeling in my chest like light glinting on crushed glass—

Have I risen to the surface? The cold is annihilating, the cold is all there is—

A strange memory: standing by the shore at Caiette when I was thirteen years old, my brand-new video camera cool and strange in my hands, filming the waves in five-minute intervals, and as I’m filming I hear my own voice whispering, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home,” although where is home if not there?

Where am I? Neither in nor out of the ocean, I can’t feel the cold anymore or actually anything, I am aware of a border but I can’t tell which side I’m on, and it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next—

“Welcome aboard,” the third mate said the first time I ever boarded the Neptune Cumberland. When I looked at him something struck me, and I thought, You—

I am out of time—

I want to see my brother. I can hear him talking to me, and my memories of him are agitating. I concentrate very hard and abruptly I’m standing on a narrow street, in the dark, in the rain, in a foreign city. A man is slumped in a doorway just across from me, and I haven’t seen my brother in a decade but I know that it’s him. Paul looks up and there’s time to notice that he looks terrible, gaunt and undone, he sees me but then the street blinks out—

² I ALWAYS COME TO YOU

At the end of 1999, Paul was studying finance at the University of Toronto, which should have felt like triumph but everything was wrong. When he was younger he’d assumed he’d major in musical composition, but he’d sold his keyboard during a bad period a couple years back and his mother was unwilling to entertain the idea of an impractical degree, for which after several expensive rounds of rehab he couldn’t really blame her, so he’d enrolled in finance classes on the theory that this represented a practical and impressively adultlike forward direction—Look at me, learning about markets and the movements of money!—but the one flaw in this brilliant plan was that he found the topic fatally uninteresting. The century was ending and he had some complaints.

He’d expected that at the very least he’d be able to slip into a decent social scene, but the problem with dropping out of the world is that the world moves on without you, and between the time spent on an all-consuming substance and the time spent working soul-crushing retail jobs while he tried not to think about the substance and the time spent in hospitals and rehab facilities, Paul was twenty-three years old and looked older. In the first few weeks of school he went to parties, but he’d never been good at striking up conversations with strangers, and everyone just seemed so young to him. He did poorly on the midterms, so by late October he was spending all his time either in the library—reading, struggling to take an interest in finance, trying to turn it around—or in his room, while the city grew colder around him. The room was a single, because one of the very few things he and his mother had agreed on was that it would be disastrous if Paul had a roommate and the roommate was into opioids, so he was almost always alone. The room was so small that he was claustrophobic unless he sat directly in front of the window. His interactions with other people were few and superficial. There was a dark cloud of exams on the near horizon, but studying was hopeless. He kept trying to focus on probability theory and discrete-time martingales, but his thoughts kept sliding toward a piano composition that he knew he’d never finish, this very straightforward C-major situation except with little flights of destabilizing minor chords.

In early December he walked out of the library at the same time as Tim, who was in two of his classes and also preferred the last row of the lecture hall. “You doing anything tonight?” Tim asked. It was the first time anyone had asked him anything in a while.

“I was kind of hoping to find some live music somewhere.” Paul hadn’t thought of this before he said it, but it seemed like the right direction for the evening. Tim brightened a little. Their one previous conversation had been about music.

“I wanted to check out this group called Baltica,” Tim said, “but I need to study for finals. You heard of them?”

“Finals? Yeah, I’m about to go down in flames.”

“No. Baltica.” Tim was blinking in a confused way. Paul remembered something he’d noticed before, which was that Tim seemed not to understand humor. It was like talking to an anthropologist from another planet. Paul thought that this should have created some kind of opening for friendship, but he couldn’t imagine how that conversation would begin—I can’t help but notice that you’re as alienated as I am, can we compare notes?—and anyway Tim was already walking away into the dark autumn evening. Paul picked up copies of the alternative weeklies from the newspaper boxes by the cafeteria and walked back to his room, where he put on Beethoven’s Fifth for company and then scanned the listings till he found Baltica, which was scheduled for a late gig at some venue he’d never heard of down at Queen and Spadina. When had he last gone out to hear live music? Paul spiked his hair, unspiked it, changed his mind and spiked it again, tried on three shirts, and left the room before he could make any further changes, disgusted by his indecisiveness. The temperature was dropping, but there was something clarifying about the cold air, and exercise was a therapeutic recommendation that he’d been ignoring, so he decided to walk.

The club was in a basement under a goth clothing store, down a steep flight of stairs. He hung back on the sidewalk for a few minutes when he saw this, worried that perhaps it would turn out to be a goth club—everyone would laugh at his jeans and polo shirt—but the bouncer barely seemed to notice him and the crowd was only about 50 percent vampires. Baltica was a trio: one guy with a bass guitar, another guy working an array of inscrutable electronics attached to a keyboard, and a girl with an electric violin. Whatever they were doing onstage sounded less like music than like some kind of malfunctioning radio, all weird bursts of static and disconnected notes, the kind of scattered ambient electronica that Paul, as a lifelong Beethoven fanatic, absolutely did not get, but the girl was beautiful so he didn’t mind it at all, if he wasn’t enjoying the music he could at least enjoy watching her. The girl leaned into the microphone and sang, “I always come to you,” except there was an echo—the guy with the keyboard had pressed a foot pedal—so it was

—and it was frankly discordant, the voice with the keyboard notes and the bursts of static, but then the girl raised her violin, and this turned out to be the missing element. When she drew her bow the note was like a bridge between islands of static and Paul could hear how it all fit together, the violin and the static and the shadowy underpinning of the bass guitar; it was briefly thrilling, then the girl lowered her violin and the music fell apart into its disparate components, and Paul found himself wondering once again how anyone listened to this stuff.

Later, when the band was drinking at the bar, Paul waited for a moment when the violinist wasn’t talking to anyone and swooped in.

“Excuse me,” he said, “hey, I just wanted to tell you, I love your music.”

“Thanks,” the violinist said. She smiled, but in the guarded manner of extremely beautiful girls who know what’s coming next.

“It was really fantastic,” Paul said to the bass player, in order to confound expectations and keep the girl off balance.

“Thanks, man.” The bass player beamed in a way that made Paul think he was probably stoned.

“I’m Paul, by the way.”

“Theo,” the bass player said. “That’s Charlie and Annika.” Charlie, the keyboardist, nodded and raised his beer, while Annika watched Paul over the rim of her glass.

“Can I ask you guys kind of a weird question?” Paul wanted so badly to see Annika again. “I’m kind of new to the city, and I can’t find a place to go out dancing.”

“Just head down to Richmond Street and turn left,” Charlie said.

“No, I mean, I’ve been to a few places down there, it’s just hard to find anywhere where the music doesn’t suck, and I was wondering if you could maybe recommend…?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Theo downed the last of his beer. “Yeah, try System Sound.”

“But it’s a hellhole on weekends,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, dude, don’t go on the weekends. Tuesday nights are pretty good.”

“Tuesday nights are the best,” Charlie said. “Where are you from?”

“Deepest suburbia,” Paul said. “Tuesday nights at System, okay, thanks, I’ll check it out.” To Annika, he said, “Maybe I’ll see you there sometime,” and turned away fast so as not to see her disinterest, which he felt like a cold wind on his back all the way to the door.

On the Tuesday after exams—three C’s, one C−, academic probation—Paul went down to System Soundbar and danced by himself. He didn’t really like the music, but it was nice to stand in a crowd. The beats were complicated and he wasn’t sure how to dance to them so he just kind of stepped back and forth with a beer in his hand and tried not to think about anything. Wasn’t that the point of clubs? Annihilating your thoughts with alcohol and music? He’d hoped Annika would be here, but he didn’t see her or the other Baltica people in the crowd. He kept looking for them and they kept not being there, until finally he bought a little packet of bright blue pills from a girl with pink hair, because E wasn’t heroin and didn’t count, but there was something wrong with the pills, or something wrong with Paul: he bit one in half and swallowed it, just the half, didn’t feel anything so he swallowed the other half with beer, but then the room swam, he broke out in a sweat, his heart skipped, and just for a second he thought he was going to die. The girl with the pink hair had vanished. Paul found a bench against the wall.

“Hey, man, you okay? You okay?” Someone was kneeling in front of him. Some significant amount of time had passed. The crowd was gone. The lights had come up and the brightness was terrible, the brightness had transformed System into a shabby room with little pools of unidentifiable liquid shining on the dance floor. A dead-eyed older guy with multiple piercings was walking around with a garbage bag, collecting bottles and cups, and after the force of all that music the quiet was a roar, a void. The man kneeling in front of Paul was club management, in the regulation jeans/Radiohead T-shirt/blazer that club management always wore.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Paul said. “I apologize, I think I drank too much.”

“I don’t know what you’re on, man, but it doesn’t suit you,” the management guy said. “We’re closing up, get out of here.” Paul rose unsteadily and left, remembered when he got to the street that he’d left his coat at the coat check, but they’d already locked the door behind him. He felt poisoned. Five empty cabs cruised by before the sixth finally stopped for him. The cabbie was a proselytizing teetotaler who lectured Paul about alcoholism all the way back to campus. Paul wanted desperately to be in bed so he clenched his fists and said nothing until the cab finally pulled up to the curb, when he paid—no tip—and told the cabdriver to stop fucking lecturing him and fuck off back to India.

“I’m from Bangladesh, you racist moron,” the cabdriver said, and left Paul there on the sidewalk, where he knelt carefully and threw up. Afterward he stumbled back to the dorm building, marveling at the scale of the disaster. Against all odds he had clawed his way up into an excellent university, and here it was only December of his first year and it was already over. He was already failing, one semester in. “You must gird yourself against disappointment,” a therapist had told him once, but he couldn’t gird himself against anything, that had always been the problem.

Fast-forward two weeks, past the nonevent of the winter holidays—his mother’s therapist had advised distance from her son, taking time for herself, and giving Paul a chance to be an adult, etc., so she’d gone to Winnipeg to be with her sister for Christmas and hadn’t invited Paul; he spent Christmas Day alone in his room and called his dad for an awkward conversation in which he lied about everything, just like old times—and all the way to December 28, the nadir of that dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, when he dressed up and walked back down to System Soundbar on another Tuesday night, hair slicked back, wearing a button-down shirt that he’d purchased specially. He was wearing the jeans he’d been wearing last time he was here and didn’t remember till he got to the club that the little packet of blue pills was still in a front pocket.

He walked into System and there were the Baltica people, Annika and Charlie and Theo, standing together at the bar. They must have just wrapped up a gig nearby. It was like a sign. Had Annika become more beautiful since he’d seen her last? It seemed possible. His university life was almost over but when he looked at her he could see a new version of reality, another kind of life he might lead. He felt that he was not, objectively speaking, a bad-looking individual. He had some talent in music. Maybe his past made him interesting. There was a version of the world wherein he dated Annika and was in many ways a successful person, even if he wasn’t cut out for school. He could get back into retail, take it more seriously this time and make a decent living.

It’s now or never, Paul thought, and he approached the bar in a blaze of courage.

“Hey,” Theo said. “You. You’re that guy.”

“I took your advice!” Paul said.

“What advice?” Charlie asked.

“System Soundbar on Tuesdays.”

“Oh right,” Charlie said, “yeah, of course.”

“Good to see you, man,” Theo said, and Paul felt a flush of warmth. He smiled at all of them, with particular focus on Annika.

“Hi,” she said, not unkindly, but still with that irritating wariness, like she expected everyone who looked at her to ask her out, although of course that was exactly what Paul was planning to do.

Charlie was saying something to Theo, who leaned down to hear him. (Brief portrait of Charlie Wu: small guy with glasses and a generic office-appropriate haircut, dressed in a white button-down shirt with jeans, standing there with his hands in his pockets, and the light reflecting off his glasses so that Paul couldn’t see his eyes.)

“Listen,” Paul said, to Annika. She looked at him. “I know you don’t know me, but I think you’re really beautiful, and I wondered if you’d let me take you to dinner sometime.”

“No thank you,” she said. Theo’s attention had shifted from Charlie to Paul, and he was watching Paul closely, like he was worried that he might have to intercede, and Paul understood: their evening had been fine until Paul came along. Paul was the problem. Charlie was cleaning his glasses, apparently oblivious, nodding his head to the music as he polished the lens.

Paul forced himself to smile and shrug. “Okay,” he said, “no problem, no hard feelings, just figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

“Never hurts to ask,” Annika agreed.

“You guys into E?” Paul asked.

“It’s not really my thing,” Paul said, because they were all looking at him now, “I mean, no judgment, I’ve just never been that into it, but my sister gave these to me.” He flashed the little packet in the palm of his hand. “I don’t really want to sell them, that’s not my thing either, but I feel like it’d be kind of a waste to flush them down the toilet, so I just wondered.”

Annika smiled. “I think I tried those last week,” she said. “Same exact color.”

“Anyway, they’re yours if you want them,” he said, to this group that like all of the other groups he’d ever encountered in his life was going to reject him, and Annika smiled and took the packet from his hand. “I’ll see you around,” he said, to all of them but especially to her, because sometimes no thank you means not at the present moment but maybe later, although the pills, the pills, the pills—

“Thank you,” she said.

After Paul walked away, Annika took one pill and gave the other two to Charlie, whose heart stopped a half hour later on the dance floor.

It’s easy to dismiss Y2K hysteria in retrospect—who even remembers it?—but the risk of collapse seemed real at the time. At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, the experts said, nuclear power plants might go into meltdown while malfunctioning computers sent flocks of missiles flying over the oceans, the grid collapsing, planes falling from the sky. But for Paul the world had already collapsed, so three days after Charlie Wu’s death he was standing by a pay phone in the arrivals hall at the Vancouver airport, trying to reach his half sister, Vincent. He’d had enough money to flee Toronto, but there wasn’t enough left over for anything else, so his entire plan was to throw himself on the mercy of his aunt Shauna, who in hazy childhood memory had an enormous house with multiple guest bedrooms. Although he hadn’t seen Vincent in five years, since she was thirteen and he was eighteen and Vincent’s mother had just died, and he hadn’t seen Shauna since he was, what, eleven? He was running through all of this while the phone rang endlessly at his aunt’s house. A couple walked by wearing matching T-shirts that said PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999, and only then did he remember that it was actually New Year’s Eve. The last seventy-two hours had had a hallucinatory quality. He hadn’t been sleeping much. His aunt seemed not to have an answering machine. There was a telephone directory on the shelf under the phone, where he found the law firm where she worked.

“Paul,” she said, once he’d cleared the hurdle of her secretary. “What a lovely surprise.” Her tone was gentle and cautious. How much had she heard? He assumed he must have come up in conversation over the years. Paul? Oh, well, he’s in rehab again. Yes, for the sixth time.

“I’m sorry to bother you at work.” Paul felt a prickling behind his eyes. He was extremely, infinitely sorry, for everything. (Try not to think of Charlie Wu on the stretcher at System Soundbar, an arm dangling limp over the side.)

“Oh, it’s no trouble at all. Were you just calling to say hello, or…?”

“I’ve been trying to reach Vincent,” Paul said, “and for some reason she hasn’t been picking up at your home number, so I wondered if she’d maybe gotten her own phone line, or…?”

“She moved out a year ago.” A studied neutrality in his aunt’s voice suggested that the parting hadn’t been amicable.

“A year ago? When she was sixteen?”

“Seventeen,” his aunt said, as if this made all the difference. “She moved in with a friend of hers from Caiette, some girl who’d just moved to the city. It was closer to her job.”

“Do you have her number?”

She did. “If you see her, say hi to her for me,” she said.

“You’re not in touch with her?”

“We parted on strained terms, I’m afraid.”

“I thought she was supposed to be in your care,” he said. “Aren’t you her legal guardian?”

“Paul, she isn’t thirteen anymore. She didn’t like living in my house, she didn’t like going to high school, and if you’d spent more time with her, you’d know that trying to get Vincent to do anything she doesn’t want to do is like arguing with a brick wall. If you’ll excuse me, I have to run to a meeting. Take care.”

Paul stood listening to the dial tone, clutching a boarding pass with Vincent’s phone number scrawled on the back. He’d harbored fantasies of being absorbed into an extra guest bedroom, but the ground was shifting rapidly underfoot. His headphones were dangling around his neck, so he put them on, hands shaking a little; pressed play on the CD in his Discman; and let the Brandenburg Concertos settle him. He only listened to Bach when he was desperate for order. This is the music that will get me to Vincent, he thought, and set out to find a bus to take him downtown. What kind of apartment would Vincent be living in, and with whom? The only friend of hers he remembered was Melissa, and only because she’d been there when Vincent wrote the graffiti that got her suspended from school:

Sweep me up. Words scrawled in acid paste on one of the school’s north windows, the acid marker trembling a little in Vincent’s gloved hand. She was thirteen years old and this was Port Hardy, British Columbia, a town on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island that was somehow less remote than the place where Vincent actually lived. Paul came around the corner of the high school too late to stop her, but in time to see her do it, and now the three of them—Vincent, Paul, Melissa—were silent for a moment, watching thin trails of acid dripping down the glass from several letters. Through the words, the darkened classroom was a mass of shadows, empty rows of desks and chairs. Vincent had been wearing a man’s leather glove that she’d found who knows where. Now she pulled it off and let it drop into the trampled winter grass, where it lay like a dead rat, while Paul stood useless and gaping. Melissa was giggling in a nervous way.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Paul wanted to sound stern, but to his own ears his voice sounded high and uncertain.

“It’s just a phrase I like,” Vincent said. She was staring at the window in a way that made Paul uneasy. On the other side of the school, the bus driver honked his horn.

“We can talk about this on the bus,” Paul said, although they both knew they wouldn’t talk about it at all, because he wasn’t especially convincing as an authority figure.

She didn’t move.

“I should go,” Melissa said.

“Vincent,” Paul said, “if we miss that bus we’re hitchhiking back to Grace Harbour and paying for a water taxi.”

“Whatever,” Vincent said, but she followed her brother to the waiting school bus. Melissa was sitting up front by the driver, ostensibly getting a head start on her homework, but she glanced up furtively as they passed her seat. They rode the bus in silence back to Grace Harbour, where the mail boat waited to take them to Caiette. The boat careered around the peninsula and Paul stared at the massive construction site where the new hotel was going up, at the clouds, at the back of Melissa’s head, at the trees on the shore, anything to avoid looking into the depths of the water, nothing he wanted to think about down there. When he glanced at Vincent he was relieved to see that she wasn’t looking at the water either. She was looking at the darkening sky. On the far side of the peninsula was Caiette, this place that made Port Hardy look like a metropolis in comparison: twenty-one houses pinned between the water and the forest, the total local infrastructure consisting of a road with two dead ends, a small church from the 1850s, a one-room post office, a shuttered one-room elementary school—there hadn’t been enough children here to keep the school open since the mid-eighties—and a single pier. When the boat docked at Caiette they walked up the hill to the house and found Dad and Grandma waiting at the kitchen table. Normally Grandma lived in Victoria and Paul lived in Toronto, but these were not normal times. Vincent’s mother had disappeared two weeks ago. Someone found her canoe drifting empty in the water.

“Melissa’s parents called the school,” Dad said. “The school called me.”

Vincent—give her credit for courage—did not flinch. She took a seat at the table, folded her arms, and waited, while Paul leaned awkwardly against the stove and watched them. Should he come to the table too? As the responsible older brother, etc.? As ever and always, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. In the way Dad and Grandma stared at Vincent, Paul heard everything they were all refraining from mentioning: Vincent’s new blue hair, her plummeting grades and black eyeliner, her staggering loss.

“Why would you write that on the window?” Dad asked.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

“Was it Melissa’s idea?”

“No.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking. They were just some words I liked.” The wind changed direction, and rain rattled against the kitchen window. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it was stupid.”

Dad told Vincent that she’d been suspended for all of next week; it would’ve been a much longer suspension, but the school was making allowances. She accepted this without comment, then rose and went up to her room. They were quiet in the kitchen, Paul and Dad and Grandma, listening to her footsteps on the stairs and her door closing quietly behind her, before Paul joined the other two at the table—the grown-up table, he couldn’t help thinking—and no one pointed out the obvious, which was that he’d ostensibly come back from Toronto to look out for her, which presumably should ideally involve not letting her write indelible graffiti on school windows. But when had he ever been in a position to look out for anyone? Why had he imagined that he could help? No one brought this up either, they just sat quietly listening to rain dripping into a bucket that Dad had placed in a corner of the room, Vincent represented by a ceiling vent that Dad and Grandma seemed not to realize was a conduit into her bedroom.

“Well,” Paul said finally, desperate for a change of scene, “I should probably get started on my homework.”

“How’s that going?” Grandma asked.

“School? Fine,” Paul said, “it’s going fine.” They thought he’d made a noble sacrifice, leaving all his friends behind in Toronto and coming out here to finish high school in order to be there for your sister, but if they’d been paying more attention or were on speaking terms with his mother, they’d have known he wasn’t going to be allowed back to his old school anyway, and also that his mother had kicked him out of the house. But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself. Just because you used your stepmother’s presumed death to start over doesn’t mean that you’re not also doing something good, being there for your sister or whatever. Grandma was giving him a flat stare—could she possibly have spoken to his mother?—but Dad was gearing himself up to say something, a gradual process that involved shifting around in his chair, some throat-clearing, lifting his tea halfway to his mouth and putting it down again, so Paul and Grandma broke off their staring contest and waited for him to speak. Grief had lent him a certain gravitas.

“I have to go back to work soon,” Dad said. “I can’t take her with me to camp.”

“What are you suggesting?” Grandma asked.

“I’m thinking about sending her to live with my sister.”

“You’ve never gotten along with your sister. I swear you and Shauna started arguing when you were two and she was a baby.”

“She drives me crazy sometimes, but she’s a good person.”

“She works a hundred hours a week,” Grandma said. “Wouldn’t it be better for Vincent if you got a job nearby?”

“There are no jobs nearby,” he said. “Nothing I could live on, anyway.”

“What about the new hotel?”

“The new hotel will be a construction site for at least another year, and I don’t know anything about construction. But look, it’s not just…” He went quiet for a moment, staring into his tea. “Financial considerations aside, I’m not sure living here is really the best thing for Vincent. Every time she looks at the water…” He ended the thought there. And Paul thought it went in the good column that he thought of Vincent first when Dad said that, that his first thought wasn’t of the goddamn haunted inlet that he was trying not to look at through the kitchen window, but of the girl listening upstairs at the vent.

“I’m going to go check in on Vincent,” Paul said. He liked the way they looked at him—Look how Paul has matured!—and disliked himself for noticing. At the top of the stairs, his nerve almost failed him, but he did it, he knocked softly on Vincent’s bedroom door and let himself in when he heard no answer. He hadn’t been in this room in a long time and was struck by how shabby it was, embarrassed for noticing and embarrassed for Vincent, although did she notice? Unclear. Her bed was older than she was and had paint chipping off the headboard; opening the top drawer of her dresser required pulling on a length of rope; the curtains had previously been sheets. Maybe none of it bothered her. She was sitting cross-legged by the vent, as predicted.

“Is it okay if I sit here with you?” he asked. She nodded. This could work out, Paul thought. I could be more of a brother to her.

“You shouldn’t be in grade eleven,” she said. “I did the math.” Christ. There was a flash of pain that had to be acknowledged, because his thirteen-year-old half sister had noticed what his own father apparently hadn’t.

“I’m repeating a grade.”

“You failed grade eleven?”

“No, I missed most of it the first time around. I spent some time in rehab last year.”

“For what?”

“I had a drug problem.” He was pleased with himself for being honest about it.

“Do you have a drug problem because your parents split up?” she asked, in tones of genuine curiosity, at which point he wanted desperately to get away from her, so he rose and brushed off his jeans. Her room was dusty.

“I don’t have a drug problem, I had a drug problem. That’s all behind me now.”

“But you smoke pot in your room,” she said.

“Pot isn’t heroin. They’re completely different.”

“Heroin?” Her eyes were very wide.

“Anyway, I’ve got a lot of homework.” I don’t hate Vincent, he told himself, Vincent has never been the problem, I have never hated Vincent, I have only ever hated the idea of Vincent. A kind of mantra that he found it necessary to repeat to himself at intervals, because when Paul was very young and his parents were still married, Dad fell in love with the young hippie poet down the road, who quickly became pregnant with Vincent, and within a month Paul and Paul’s mother had left Caiette, “fleeing that whole sordid soap opera” was how she put it, and Paul spent the rest of his childhood in the Toronto suburbs, shuttling out to British Columbia for summers and every second Christmas, a childhood of flying alone over prairies and mountains with an UNACCOMPANIED MINOR sign around his neck, while Vincent got to live with both of her parents, all the time, until two weeks ago.

He left her there in her bedroom and went back to the room where he’d been sleeping—he’d stayed there as a kid, but it had been repurposed for storage in his absence and didn’t feel like his anymore—and his hands were shaking, he was besieged by unhappiness, he rolled a joint and smoked it carefully out the window, but the wind kept blowing the smoke back inside until finally there was a knock on his door. When Paul opened it, Dad was standing there with a look of unbearable disappointment, and by the end of the week Paul was back in Toronto.

The next time he saw Vincent was on the last day of 1999, when he took a bus downtown from the airport with the Brandenburg Concertos playing on his Discman and found Vincent’s address in the sketchiest neighborhood he’d ever seen, a run-down building across the street from a little park where users stumbled around like extras from a zombie movie. While Paul waited for Vincent to answer the door, he tried not to look at them and not to think of the general preferability of being on heroin, not the squalid business of trying to get more of it and getting sick but the thing itself, the state in which everything in the world was perfectly fine.

Melissa answered the door. “Oh,” she said, “hey! You look exactly the same. Come in.” This was somehow reassuring. He felt marked, as if the details of Charlie Wu’s death were tattooed on his skin. Melissa did not look exactly the same. She’d obviously gone deep into the rave scene. She was wearing blue pants made of fun fur and a rainbow sweatshirt, and her hair, which was dyed bright pink, was in the same kind of pigtails he remembered Vincent wearing when she was five or six. Melissa led him down the stairs and into one of the worst apartments he’d ever walked into, a semifinished basement with water stains on the cinder-block walls. Vincent was making coffee in a tiny kitchenette.

“Hey,” she said, “it’s great to see you.”

“You too.” The last time he’d seen Vincent she’d had blue hair and was writing graffiti on windows, but she seemed to have pulled back from that particular edge. She didn’t seem to be a raver, or if she was, she saved the costumes for the raves. She was wearing jeans and a gray sweater, and her long dark hair was loose around her shoulders. Melissa was talking a little too fast, but hadn’t she always? He remembered her as a nervous kid. He studied Vincent closely for signs of trouble, but she seemed like a reserved, put-together person, someone who’d conducted herself carefully and avoided the land mines. How did she get to be like that, and Paul like this? This question had all the markers of the kind of circular thinking he was supposed to be avoiding—why are you you?—but he couldn’t stop the spiral. You’ve never hated Vincent, just remember that. It isn’t her fault she doesn’t have the same problems as you. They sat around in a living room with dust bunnies the size of mice, Paul and Vincent on a thirty-year-old couch and Melissa on a grimy plastic lawn chair, trying to come up with topics of conversation, but the conversation kept stalling so they kept drinking instant coffee and not quite meeting one another’s eyes.

“Are you hungry?” Vincent asked. “We’re a little low on groceries, but I could make you some toast or a tuna sandwich or something.”

“Nah, I’m good. Thanks.”

“Thank god,” Melissa said. “This is the last four days before payday and rent’s due tomorrow, so it’s probably literally bread or canned tuna.”

“If you need groceries that badly, just dip into your beer money,” Vincent said.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Next paycheck, I’m going to remember to buy lightbulbs,” Vincent said. “I keep forgetting when I have money.” The living room was lit by three mismatched floor lamps, and the one in the far corner was flickering. Vincent rose, switched it off, and returned to the couch. Now the room was halfway dark, shadows crowding in around the periphery.

“Aunt Shauna says hi,” Paul said after a while.

“She’s fine,” Vincent said, answering a question he hadn’t asked, “but probably wasn’t equipped to take in a traumatized thirteen-year-old.”

“She made it sound like you’d dropped out of school.”

“Yeah, high school was tedious.”

“That’s why you left?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “It turns out getting straight A’s isn’t the same thing as being motivated enough to drag yourself to school in the mornings.”

He didn’t know what to say to this. As ever and always, he wasn’t sure what his role was. Was he supposed to counsel her to go back to school? He was in no position to tell anyone to do anything. Charlie Wu’s funeral was today. Charlie Wu was absolutely not standing in the darkest corner of the room, but there was still no need to look in that direction.

“Are you in school?” he asked Melissa.

“I’m going to UBC in the fall.”

“Good for you. That’s a good school.”

Melissa raised her coffee cup. “Here’s to a lifetime of student loan debt,” she said.

“Cheers.” He raised his coffee cup and couldn’t quite meet her eyes. Paul’s mother had paid for his university tuition.

“We have to go out dancing tonight,” Melissa said finally. “I’ve got a couple places in mind.”

“I know people who are holed up in remote cabins with supplies in case civilization collapses,” Vincent said.

“That seems like a lot of trouble to go to,” Paul said.

“Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilization collapses,” Melissa said, “just so that something will happen?”

Later that night they got into Melissa’s beat-up car and drove to a club. Vincent wasn’t legal but the doorman chose not to notice, because when you’re eighteen and beautiful all the doors are open to you, or so it seemed to Paul as he watched her flit through ahead of him. The doorman scrutinized Paul’s ID very carefully and gave him a searching look, which made Paul want to say something snappy, but he decided against it. The new century was a new opportunity, he’d decided. If they survived Y2K, if the world didn’t end, he was going to be a better man. Also if they survived Y2K he hoped never to hear the word Y2K again. At the coat check, Paul saw that Vincent was wearing a sparkly thing that was really only half a shirt, like the front was a normal shirt but the back was missing, just two pieces of string tied in a bow under her naked shoulder blades, making her back seem horribly vulnerable.

“I need a drink,” Melissa said, so Paul accompanied her to the bar, where they ordered beer instead of hard liquor, pacing themselves—responsible adults here—and when he looked back at the dance floor Vincent was already dancing by herself, eyes closed, or maybe she was just looking at the floor, alone in a very fundamental sense: lost in her own little world was the phrase Paul remembered Vincent’s mother using, whenever someone was trying to get her attention while she read a book or stared unreachably into space.

“She’s so spacey,” Melissa said, actually shouted, because the music was quieter by the bar but still not quiet enough to talk.

“She’s always been spacey,” Paul shouted back.

“Well, what happened with her mom, that would mess anyone up,” Melissa shouted, possibly mishearing him. “It was just such a tragic—” Paul didn’t hear the last word, but he didn’t have to. They were quiet for a moment, contemplating Vincent and also the Tragedy of Vincent, which was a separate entity. But Vincent didn’t strike him as a tragic figure, she struck him as someone who had her life more or less together, a composed person with a full-time job busing tables at the Hotel Vancouver, and as such he felt somewhat ill at ease around her.

After two beers he went to join her on the dance floor and she smiled at him. I’m trying, he wanted to tell her, I’m really trying, everything’s gone wrong but the new century’s going to be different. He ingested nothing except beer and danced hard for a while under the influence of nothing—almost nothing, beers don’t count—until he looked up and saw Charlie Wu in the crowd and the night skipped a beat. Paul froze. Of course it wasn’t Charlie, of course it was just some random kid who looked a little like him, a kid with a similar haircut and glasses that reflected the lights, but the vision was so appalling that he couldn’t stay here for even long enough to tell Vincent and Melissa he was going, so he stumbled out onto the street and that was where they found him a half hour later, shivering under a streetlight. Nothing, he told them, he just didn’t really like the music and suddenly needed a little air, did he mention he got claustrophobic in crowds sometimes, also he was really hungry. Twenty minutes later they were staring at menus in a diner where all the other customers were drunk. The lights were so bright that it was possible to be certain that he hadn’t actually seen a ghost. Everyone looks alike in strobe lighting. There are doppelgängers everywhere.

“So why did you come here for New Year’s?” Melissa asked. He’d been a little vague about how long he was staying. “Aren’t the clubs better in Toronto?”

“I’m actually moving here,” Paul said.

Vincent looked up from the menu. “Why?” she asked.

“I just really need a change of scene.”

“Are you in trouble or something?” Melissa asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “maybe a little.”

“Well come on,” Melissa said, “you have to tell us.”

“There was some bad E going around. It seemed like I was maybe going to get blamed for it.”

“Oh wow,” Melissa said. “That’s awful,” and he thought, You have no idea. He couldn’t help but notice how disinterested Vincent seemed. She’d returned to the menu without comment. None of the possibilities here were great: either she didn’t care about Paul at all, or getting in trouble was something that she’d come to expect from him, or she was acquainted with trouble herself. I don’t hate Vincent, he told himself silently, I’ve only ever hated Vincent’s incredible good fortune at being Vincent instead of being me, I only hate that Vincent can drop out of high school and move to a terrible neighborhood and still somehow miraculously be perfectly fine, like the laws of gravity and misfortune don’t apply to her. When they’d finished their burgers, Melissa glanced at her watch, a big plastic digital thing that looked like it should belong to a child.

“Eleven-fourteen,” Melissa said. “We’ve still got forty-four minutes to kill before the end of the world.”

“Forty-six minutes,” Paul said.

“I don’t think it’s gonna end,” said Vincent.

“It’d be exciting if it did,” Melissa said. “All the lights going out, like poof—” She spread her fingers like a magician casting a spell.

“Ugh,” Vincent said. “A city with no lights? Thank you, no.”

“It’d be kind of creepy,” Paul said.

“Dude, you’re kind of creepy,” Melissa said, so he threw a French fry at her and then they all got kicked out. They stood shivering and dehydrated on the street for a few minutes, debating where to go, and then Melissa remembered another club where she thought Vincent probably wouldn’t get carded, another club in another basement, not that far from here—so they set out, got lost twice, eventually found themselves in front of an unmarked door through which the bass pulsed faintly from below. It was somehow still 1999. They descended another set of stairs into another permanent night, and Paul heard the lyrics as the door opened,

—and for a second he couldn’t breathe. The song had been remixed into dance music, Annika’s voice layered over a deep house beat, but he recognized it immediately, he’d have known it anywhere.

“You okay?” Melissa shouted in Paul’s ear.

“Fine!” he shouted back. “I’m good!”

They dispensed with their coats and were absorbed into the dance floor, where the Baltica track was shifting into another song, a song about being blue that was playing on all of the dance floors of 1999, of which only a few minutes remained. Last song of the twentieth century, Paul thought, and he was trying to dance but there was something bothering him, a sense of movement in his peripheral vision, a feeling of being watched. He looked around wildly, but there was only a sea of anonymous faces and none of them were looking at him.

“You sure you’re okay?” Melissa shouted.

The lights began to strobe, and just for a flash Charlie Wu was there in the crowd, hands in his pockets, watching Paul, there and then gone.

“Fine!” Paul shouted. “I’m totally fine!” Because that was actually the only option now, to be fine despite the awful certainty that Charlie Wu was somehow here. Paul closed his eyes for a moment and then forced himself to dance again, pretending desperately. The lights didn’t go out when 1999 changed to 2000, the hours rolling forward until sunrise, when they emerged into the cold street and the new century and piled into Melissa’s beat-up wreck of a car, cold with sweat, Paul in the passenger seat and Vincent curled up in the back like a cat.

“We got through the end of the world,” she said, but when he looked over his shoulder she was sleeping and he wondered if he’d imagined it. Melissa was red-eyed and speedy, driving too fast, talking about her new job selling clothes at Le Château while Paul only half listened, and somewhere on the drive back to their apartment he found himself seized by a strange, manic kind of hope. It was a new century. If he could survive the ghost of Charlie Wu, he could survive anything. It had rained at some point in the night and the sidewalks were gleaming, water reflecting the morning’s first light.

³ THE HOTEL

Why don’t you swallow broken glass. Words scrawled in acid paste on the glass eastern wall of the Hotel Caiette, etched trails of white dripping from several letters.

“Who would write something like that?” The only guest to have seen the vandalism, an insomniac shipping executive who’d checked in the day before, was sitting in one of the leather armchairs with a whiskey that the night manager had brought him. It was a little past two-thirty in the morning.

“Not an adult, presumably,” the night manager said. His name was Walter, and this was the first graffiti he’d seen in his three years on the property. The message had been written on the outside of the glass. Walter had taped a few sheets of paper over the message and was presently moving a potted rhododendron to cover the paper, with the assistance of Larry, the night porter. The bartender on duty, Vincent, was polishing wineglasses while she watched the action from behind the bar at the far end of the lobby. Walter had considered recruiting her to help move the planter, because he could use another set of hands and the night houseman was on a dinner break, but she didn’t strike him as a particularly robust person.

“It’s unnerving, isn’t it?” the guest said.

“I don’t disagree. But I think,” Walter said, with more confidence than he felt, “that this could only have been the work of a bored adolescent.” In truth, he was deeply shaken and was taking refuge in efficiency. He stepped back to consider the rhododendron. The leaves almost but not entirely covered the taped paper. He glanced at Larry, who gave him a this-is-the-best-we-can-do shrug and went outside with a garbage bag and a roll of tape to cover the message from the other side.

“It’s the specificity of it,” the guest said. “Disturbing, isn’t it?”

“I’m so sorry you had to see it, Mr. Prevant.”

“No one should have to see a message like that.” A quaver of distress in Leon Prevant’s voice, which he covered with a quick swallow of whiskey. On the other side of the window, Larry had folded the garbage bag into a neat strip and was taping it over the message.

“I agree completely.” Walter glanced at his watch. Three in the morning, three hours remaining on his shift. Larry had resumed his post by the door. Vincent was still polishing glasses. He went to speak to her, and saw when he did that she had tears in her eyes.

“You okay there?” he asked softly.

“It’s just so awful,” she said, without looking up. “I can’t imagine what kind of person would write something like that.”

“I know,” he said. “But I’m standing by my bored-teenager theory.”

“You believe that?”

“I can convince myself of it,” he said.

Walter went to see if Mr. Prevant needed anything—he didn’t—and then returned to his inspection of the glass wall. Only one more guest was expected that night, a VIP, his flight delayed. Walter lingered by the glass wall for a few minutes, looking out at the reflection of the lobby superimposed on the darkness, before he returned to the desk to write the incident report.

“The property’s in the middle of nowhere,” Walter’s general manager had told him, at their first meeting in Toronto three years ago, “but that’s precisely the point.”

This first meeting was in a coffee shop by the lake, the coffee shop actually built on the pier, boats bobbing nearby. Raphael, the general manager, lived on the property of the Hotel Caiette, along with almost everyone else who worked there, but had come to Toronto to attend a hospitality conference and poach talent from other hotels. The Hotel Caiette had been open since the mid-nineties, but had recently been redone in what Raphael called Grand West Coast Style, which seemed to involve exposed cedar beams and enormous panes of glass. Walter was studying the ad campaign photos that Raphael had slid across the table. The hotel was a glass-and-cedar palace at twilight, lights reflected on water, the shadows of the forest closing in.

“What you said earlier,” Walter said, “about it not being accessible by car?” He felt he must have misunderstood something in the initial presentation.

“I mean exactly that. Access to the hotel is by boat. There are no roads in or out. Are you somewhat familiar with the geography of the region?”

“Somewhat,” Walter lied. He’d never been that far west. His impression of British Columbia was akin to a series of postcards: whales leaping out of blue water, green shorelines, boats.

“Here.” Raphael was shuffling through papers. “Take a look at this map.” The property was represented as a white star in an inlet at the north end of Vancouver Island. The inlet nearly broke the island in half. “It’s wilderness up there,” Raphael said, “but let me tell you a secret about wilderness.”

“Please do.”

“Very few people who go to the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness. Almost no one.” Raphael leaned back in his chair with a little smile, presumably hoping that Walter might ask what he meant, but Walter waited him out. “At least, not the people who stay in five-star hotels,” Raphael said. “Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. The point here”—he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure—“is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.”

“How do you bring in guests and supplies?” Walter was having some difficulty grasping the appeal of the place. It was undeniably beautiful but geographically inconvenient, and he wasn’t sure why your average executive would want to vacation in a cellular dead zone.

“On a speedboat. It’s fifteen minutes from the town of Grace Harbour.”

“I see. Aside from the undeniable natural beauty,” Walter said, trying a different tack, “would you say there’s a distinguishing factor that sets this hotel apart from similar properties?”

“I was hoping you’d ask me that. The answer’s yes. There’s a sense of being outside of time and space.”

“Outside of…?”

“A figure of speech, but it’s not far off.” Raphael loved the hotel, Walter could see that. “The truth of the matter is, there’s a certain demographic that will pay a great deal of money to escape temporarily from the modern world.”

Later, walking home through the autumn night, temporary escape from the world was an idea that Walter couldn’t let go. In those days he was renting a cramped one-bedroom on a street that felt somehow between neighborhoods. It was the most depressing apartment he’d ever seen, which for reasons he refused to articulate was why he’d chosen it. Elsewhere in the city, the ballet dancer to whom Walter had been engaged until two months ago was setting up house with a lawyer.

Walter stopped into the usual grocery store on his way home that evening, and the thought of stopping into this store again tomorrow, and then the day after that, and then the day after that, slow strolls down the frozen-food aisle interspersed with shifts at the hotel where he’d been working for the past decade, a day older every time, the city closing in around him, well, it was unbearable, actually. He placed a package of frozen corn in his basket. What if this was the last time he ever performed this action, here in this particular store? It was an appealing thought.

He’d been with the ballet dancer for twelve years. He hadn’t seen the breakup coming. He’d agreed with his friends that he shouldn’t make any sudden moves. But what he wanted in those days was to disappear, and by the time he reached the checkout counter he realized that he’d made his decision. He accepted the position; arrangements were made; on the appointed day a month later he flew to Vancouver and then caught a connecting flight to Nanaimo on a twenty-four-seat prop plane that barely reached the clouds before descending, spent the night in a hotel, and set off the next day for the Hotel Caiette. He could have saved considerable time by flying into one of the tiny airports further north, but he wanted to see more of Vancouver Island.

It was a cold day in November, clouds low overhead. He drove north in a gray rental car through a series of gray towns with a gray sea intermittently visible on his right, a landscape of dark trees and McDonald’s drive-throughs and big-box stores under a leaden sky. He arrived at last in the town of Port Hardy, streets dim in the rain, where he got lost for a while before he found the place to return the rental car. He called the town’s only taxi service and waited a half hour until an old man arrived in a beat-up station wagon that reeked of cigarette smoke.

“You’re headed to the hotel?” the driver asked when Walter requested a ride to Grace Harbour.

“I am,” Walter said, but found that he didn’t particularly feel like making conversation after all of these hours of traveling in solitude. They drove in silence through the forest until they reached the village of Grace Harbour, such as it was: a few houses here and there along the road and shoreline, fishing boats in the harbor, a general store by the docks, a parking lot with a few old cars. He saw a woman through the window of the general store, but there was no one else around.

Walter’s instructions were to call the hotel for a boat. His cell phone didn’t work up here, as promised, but there was a phone booth by the pier. The hotel promised to send someone within the half hour. Walter hung up and stepped out into cool air. It was getting on toward evening and the world was shifting to monochrome, the water pale and glassy under a darkening sky, shadows accumulating in the forest. He walked out to the end of the pier, luxuriating in the silence. This place was the opposite of Toronto, and wasn’t that what he’d wanted? The opposite of his previous life? Somewhere back in the eastern city, the ballet dancer and the lawyer were at a restaurant, or walking the streets holding hands, or in bed. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Walter waited, listening, and for a while there was only the soft lapping of water against the pier and the occasional cry of a seagull, until in the distance he heard the vibration of an outboard motor. A few minutes later he saw the boat, a white fleck between the dark banks of forest, a toy that grew steadily until it was pulling up alongside the pier, the motor obscenely loud in all that quiet, wake splashing against pylons. The woman at the stern looked to be in her mid-twenties and wore a crisp, vaguely nautical uniform.

“You must be Walter.” She disembarked in a single fluid motion and lashed the boat to the dock. “I’m Melissa from the hotel. May I help with your bags?”

“Thank you,” he said. There was something startling about her, an air of apparition. He was almost happy, he realized, as the boat pulled away from the pier. There was a cold wind on his face, and he knew this was a voyage of no more than fifteen minutes, but he had an absurd sense of embarking on an adventure. They were moving so rapidly, darkness falling. He wanted to ask Melissa about the hotel, how long she’d been here, but the motor was prohibitively loud. When he glanced over his shoulder, the wake was a silver trail leading back to the scattered lights of Grace Harbour.

Melissa piloted them around the peninsula and the hotel was before them, an improbable palace lit up against the darkness of the forest, and for the first time Walter understood what Raphael had meant when he’d talked about an element of surrealism. The building would have been beautiful anywhere, but placed here, it was incongruous, and its incongruity played a part in the enchantment. The lobby was exposed like an aquarium behind a wall of glass, all cedar pillars and slate floors. A double row of lights illuminated the path to the pier, where a doorman—Larry—met them with a trolley. Walter shook Larry’s hand and followed his luggage up the path to the hotel’s grand entrance, to the reception desk, where Raphael stood waiting with a concierge smile. After introductions, dinner, and paperwork, Walter eventually found himself in a suite on the top floor of the staff lodge, whose windows and terrace looked out into trees. He closed the curtains against the darkness and thought about what Raphael had said, about the hotel’s existing outside of time and space. There’s such happiness in a successful escape.

By the end of his first year in Caiette, Walter realized that he was happier here than he’d ever been anywhere, but in the hours following the graffiti, the forest outside seemed newly dark, the shadows dense and freighted with menace. Who stepped out of the forest to write the message on the window? The message was written backward on the glass, Walter wrote on the incident report, which suggests it was meant to be viewed from the lobby.

“I appreciate the clarity of the report,” Raphael said when Walter came to his office the following afternoon. Raphael had lived twenty years in English Canada but retained a strong Quebec City accent. “Some of your colleagues, I ask for a report and they hand in a dog’s breakfast of typos and wild speculations.”

“Thank you.” Walter valued this job more than he’d ever valued anything and was always vastly relieved when Raphael praised his performance. “The graffiti’s unsettling, isn’t it?”

“I agree. Just this side of threat.”

“Is there anything on the surveillance footage?”

“Nothing very useful. I can show you if you’d like.” Raphael swiveled the monitor toward Walter and pressed play on a black-and-white video clip. Security footage of the front terrace at night, cast in the spooky luminescence of the camera’s night-vision mode: A figure appears from the shadows at the edge of the terrace, wearing dark pants and an oversized sweatshirt with a hood. His head is down—or is it a woman? Impossible to tell—and there’s something in the gloved hand: the acid marker that defaces the glass. The ghost steps gracefully up onto a bench, scrawls the message, and melts back into the shadows, never looking up, the entire vision transpiring in less than ten seconds.

“It’s like he practiced it,” Walter said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just, he writes it so quickly. And he’s writing backward. Or she. I can’t tell.”

Raphael nodded. “Is there anything else you can tell me about last night,” he said, “that might not have appeared in the report?”

“What do you mean?”

“Anything at all out of the ordinary in the lobby. Any strange details. Something you maybe thought not relevant.”

Walter hesitated.

“Tell me.”

“Well, I don’t like to rat on my colleagues,” Walter said, “but it seemed to me that the night houseman was behaving strangely.”

The night houseman, Paul, was Vincent’s brother—no, Vincent had said he was her half brother, but Walter was unclear on which parent they had in common—and he’d been at the hotel for three months. He’d been living in Vancouver for five or six years but he’d grown up in Toronto, he told Walter, which should have created a bond but didn’t, in part because he and Paul were from different Torontos. They tried to compare favorite Toronto restaurants and nightclubs, but Walter had never heard of System Soundbar, whereas Paul had never heard of Zelda’s. Paul’s Toronto was younger, more anarchic, a Toronto that danced to the beat of music that Walter neither liked nor understood, a Toronto that wore peculiar fashions and did drugs that Walter had never heard of. (“Well, but you know why the raver kids wear soothers around their necks,” Paul said, “it’s not just bad fashion sense, it’s because K makes you grind your teeth,” and Walter nodded knowledgeably without having the slightest idea of what “K” was.) Paul never smiled. He did his job well enough but had a way of drifting off into little reveries while cleaning the lobby at night, staring at nothing while he mopped the floor or polished tabletops. It was sometimes necessary to say his name two or three times, but any sharpness in tone in the second or third repetition would trigger a reproachful, wounded expression. Walter found him to be an irritating and somewhat depressing presence.

On the night of the graffiti, Paul returned from his dinner break at three-thirty a.m. He came in through the side door, and Walter looked up in time to see the way Paul’s gaze fell immediately to the awkwardly placed philodendron and then to Leon Prevant, the shipping executive, who by then was on his second whiskey and reading a two-day-old copy of the Vancouver Sun.

“Something happen to the window?” Paul asked as he passed the desk. To Walter’s ear, there was something faux-casual about his tone.

“I’m afraid so,” Walter said. “Some extremely nasty graffiti.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “Did Mr. Alkaitis see it?”

“Who?”

“You know.” Paul nodded toward Leon Prevant.

“That isn’t Alkaitis.” Walter was watching Paul closely. He was flushed and looked even more miserable than usual.

“I thought it was.”

“Alkaitis’s flight was delayed. You didn’t see anyone lurking around outside, did you?”

“Lurking around?”

“Anything suspicious. This just happened in the last hour.”

“Oh. No.” Paul wasn’t looking at him anymore—another irritating trait; why did he always look away when Walter was talking?—and was staring at Leon, who was staring at the window. “I’m going to go see if Vincent needs the kegs changed,” he said.

“What was unusual?” Raphael asked.

“Inquiring about guests like that. How would he even know who was checking in that night?”

“It’s not the worst thing for a houseman to take a look at the guest list, familiarize himself with the lay of the land. Just playing devil’s advocate.”

“Okay, sure, I’ll give you that. But then, the way he looked straight to that point on the glass when he walked in, straight at the potted plant. I just don’t think the philodendron was that obvious,” Walter said.

“It is obviously out of place, to my eye.”

“But is it the first thing you look at? Especially at night? You walk into the lobby from the side door, at night, you look past the double row of pillars, past the armchairs and the side tables, halfway down the glass wall…”

“He does clean the lobby,” Raphael said. “He’d know better than anyone where the potted plants go.”

“I’m not accusing him of anything, to be clear. It’s just something I noticed.”

“I understand. I’ll speak with him. Was there anything else?”

“Nothing. The rest of the shift was completely normal.”

The rest of the shift:

By four a.m., Leon Prevant was beginning to yawn. Paul was somewhere back in the heart of the house, mopping floors in the staff corridors. Walter had finished his report and gone through his checklist. He was gazing out into the lobby, trying not to think too much about the graffiti. (What does Why don’t you swallow broken glass signify, if not I hope you die?) Larry was standing by the door with his eyes half-open. Walter wanted to wander over and talk to him, but he knew Larry used the quiet hours to meditate, and that when his eyes were half-open, that meant he was counting breaths. Walter considered going to talk to Vincent, but it wouldn’t look right for the night manager to linger by the bar while a guest was present, so he settled for a leisurely inspection of the lobby. He straightened a framed photograph by the fireplace, ran a fingertip over the bookshelves to check for dust, adjusted the leaves of the philodendron so that they better covered the paper taped to the glass. He stepped out for a moment into the cool night air, listening for a boat that he knew was not yet en route.

At four-thirty Leon Prevant rose and drifted toward the elevator, yawning. Twenty minutes later, Jonathan Alkaitis arrived. Walter heard the boat long before it came into view, as always, the motor violently loud in the stillness of night, and then the lights on the stern swung over the water as the boat rounded the peninsula. Larry set off for the pier with a luggage trolley. Vincent put away the newspaper she’d been reading, adjusted her hair, reapplied lipstick, and took two quick shots of espresso. Walter put on his warmest professional smile as Jonathan Alkaitis walked in behind his luggage.

In later years Walter was interviewed three or four times about Jonathan Alkaitis, but the journalists always left disappointed. As a hotel manager, he told them, he lived and died by his discretion, but in truth there wasn’t much to tell. Alkaitis was interesting only in retrospect. He’d come to the Hotel Caiette with his wife, now deceased. He and his wife had fallen in love with the place, so when it’d come up for sale he’d bought the property, which he leased to the hotel’s management company. He lived in New York City and came to the hotel three or four times a year. He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him. He was generically well dressed, tanned in the manner of people who spend time in tropical settings in the wintertime, reasonably but not spectacularly fit, unremarkable in every way. Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.

The best suite had been set aside for him, as always. He was absurdly jet-lagged, he told Walter, and also quite hungry. Could an early breakfast be arranged? (Of course. For Alkaitis, anything could be arranged.) It was still dark outside, but day broke in the kitchen long before sunrise. The morning shift would be arriving by now.

“I’ll just take a seat at the bar,” Alkaitis said, and within minutes was deep in conversation with Vincent, who was, it seemed to Walter, at her brightest and most engaging, although he couldn’t quite make out what they were talking about.

Leon Prevant left the lobby at four-thirty a.m., climbed the stairs to his room, and crept into the bed, where his wife was sleeping. Marie didn’t wake up. He’d purposefully drunk one whiskey too many with the thought that this might make it possible to fall asleep, but it was as if the graffiti had opened a crack in the night, through which all his fears flooded in. If pressed he might have admitted to Marie that he was worried about money, but worried wasn’t strong enough. Leon was afraid.

A colleague had told him this place was extraordinary, so he’d booked an extremely expensive room as an anniversary surprise for his wife. His colleague was right, he’d decided immediately. There were fishing and kayaking expeditions, guided hikes into wilderness, live music in the lobby, spectacular food, a wooded path that opened into a forest glade with an outdoor bar and lanterns hung from trees, a heated pool overlooking the tranquil waters of the sound.

“It’s heavenly,” Marie said on their first night.

“I’m inclined to agree.”

He’d sprung for a room with a hot tub on the terrace, and that first night they were out there for at least an hour, sipping champagne with a cool breeze in their faces, the sun setting over the water in a postcard kind of way. He kissed her and tried to convince himself to relax. But relaxation was difficult, because a week after he’d booked this extravagant room and told his wife about it, he’d begun to hear rumors of a pending merger.

Leon had survived two mergers and a reorganization, but when he heard the first whispers of this latest restructuring, he was struck by a certainty so strong that it felt like true knowledge: he was going to lose his job. He was fifty-eight years old. He was senior enough to be expensive, and close enough to retirement to be let go without weighing too heavily on anyone’s conscience. There was no part of his job that couldn’t be performed by younger executives who made less money than he did. Since hearing of the merger he’d lived whole hours without thinking about it, but the nights were harder than the days. He and Marie had just bought a house in South Florida, which they planned to rent out until he retired, with the idea of eventually fleeing New York winters and New York taxes. This seemed to him to be a new beginning, but they’d spent more money on the house than they’d meant to, he had never been very good at saving, and he was aware that he had much less in his retirement accounts than he should. It was six-thirty in the morning before he fell into a fitful sleep.

When Walter returned to the lobby the following evening, Leon Prevant was eating dinner at the bar with Jonathan Alkaitis. They’d met a little earlier, in what seemed at the time like a coincidental manner and seemed later like a trap. Leon had been at the bar, eating a salmon burger, alone because Marie was lying down upstairs with a headache. Alkaitis, who was drinking a pint of Guinness two stools down, struck up a conversation with the bartender and then expanded the conversation to include Leon. They were talking about Caiette, which, as it happened, Jonathan Alkaitis knew something about. “I actually own this property,” he said to Leon, almost apologetically. “It’s hard to get to, but that’s what I like about it.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Leon said. He was always looking for conversations, and it was a pleasure to think about something—anything!—other than financial insolvency and unemployment for a moment. “Do you own other hotels?”

“Just the one. I mostly work in finance.” Alkaitis had a couple of businesses in New York, he said, both of which involved investing other people’s money in the stock market for them. He wasn’t really taking on new clients these days, but he did on occasion make an exception.

The thing about Alkaitis, a woman from Philadelphia wrote some years later, in a victim impact statement that she read aloud at Alkaitis’s sentencing hearing, is he made you feel like you were joining a secret club. There was truth in this, Leon had to admit, when he read the transcript, but the other part of the equation was the man himself. What Alkaitis had was presence. He had a voice made for late-night radio, warm and reassuring. He radiated calm. He was a man utterly without bluster, confident but not arrogant, quick to smile at jokes. A steady, low-key, intelligent person, much more interested in listening than in talking about himself. He had that trick—and it was a trick, Leon realized later—of appearing utterly indifferent to what anyone thought of him, and in so doing provoking the opposite anxiety in other people: What does Alkaitis think of me? Later, in the years that he spent replaying this particular evening, Leon remembered a certain desire to impress him.

“This is slightly embarrassing,” Alkaitis said that night, when they’d left the bar and retired to a quieter corner of the lobby to discuss investments, “but you said you’re in shipping, and I realized as you said it that I’ve only the dimmest idea of what that actually means.”

Leon smiled. “You’re not alone in that. It’s a largely invisible industry, but nearly everything you’ve ever bought traveled over the water.”

“My made-in-China headphones, and whatnot.”

“Sure, yes, there’s an obvious one, but I really mean almost everything. Everything on and around us. Your socks. Our shoes. My aftershave. This glass in my hand. I could keep going, but I’ll spare you.”

“I’m embarrassed to admit that I never thought about it,” Jonathan said.

“No one does. You go to the store, you buy a banana, you don’t think about the men who piloted the banana through the Panama Canal. Why would you?” Easy now, he told himself. He was aware of a weakness for rhapsodizing on his industry at excessive length. “I have colleagues who resent the general public’s ignorance of the industry, but I think the fact that you don’t have to think about it proves that the whole system works.”

“The banana arrives on schedule.” Jonathan sipped his drink. “You must develop a kind of sixth sense. Here you are in the world, surrounded by all these objects that arrived by ship. You ever find it distracting, thinking about all those shipping routes, all those points of origin?”

“You’re only the second person I’ve ever met who guessed that,” Leon said.

The other was a psychic, a college friend of Marie’s who’d come into Toronto from Santa Fe, back when Leon was still based in Toronto, and the three of them had had dinner downtown at Saint Tropez, Marie’s favorite restaurant in their Toronto years. The psychic—Clarissa, he remembered now—was friendly and warm. He liked her immediately. He had an impression that psychics must very often be exploited by their friends and passing acquaintances, an impression not dispelled by Marie’s reminiscences about all the times she’d asked Clarissa for free advice, so over the course of the evening Leon went elaborately out of his way to avoid asking her anything, until finally, over dessert, curiosity overtook him: Was it ever deafening, he asked her, being in a crowded room? Was it like being in a room filled with radios tuned to overlapping frequencies, a clamor of voices broadcasting the mundane or horrifying details of dozens of lives? Clarissa smiled. “It’s like this,” she said, gesturing at the room around them, “it’s like being in a crowded restaurant. You can tune in to the conversation at the next table, or you can let that become background noise. Like the way you see shipping,” she said, and this remained in memory as one of the most delightful conversations Leon had ever had, because he’d never talked with anyone about the way he could tune in and out of shipping, like turning a dial on a radio. When he glanced across the table at Marie, for example: he could see the woman he loved, or he could shift frequencies and see the dress made in the U.K., the shoes made in China, the Italian leather handbag, or shift even further and see the Neptune-Avramidis shipping routes lit up on the map: the dress via Westbound Trans-Atlantic Route 3, the shoes via either the Trans-Pacific Eastbound 7 or the Shanghai–Los Angeles Eastbound Express, etc. Or further still, into the kind of language he’d never speak aloud, not even to Marie: there are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much.

When Walter walked within earshot of Leon Prevant and Jonathan Alkaitis, some time later, the conversation had shifted from Leon’s work to Alkaitis’s, from shipping to investment strategies. Walter understood none of it. Finance wasn’t his world. He didn’t speak the language. Someone on the day shift had covered the graffiti on the glass with reflective tape, an odd silvery streak of mirror on the darkened window. Two American actors were eating dinner at the bar.

“He left his first wife for her,” Larry said, nodding at them.

“Oh?” said Walter, who could not possibly have cared less. Twenty years of working in high-end hotels had cured him of any interest in celebrity. “I wanted to ask you,” he said, “just between the two of us, does the new guy seem a little off to you?”

Larry glanced theatrically over his shoulder and around the lobby, but Paul was elsewhere, mopping the corridor behind Reception in the heart of the house.

“Maybe a little depressed, is all,” Larry said. “Not the most sparkling personality I’ve ever come across.”

“Did he ask you about arriving guests last night?”

“How’d you know? Yeah, asked me when Jonathan Alkaitis was arriving.”

“And you told him…?”

“Well, you know my eyesight’s not great, and I’d only just come on shift. So I told him I wasn’t completely sure, but I thought the guy drinking whiskey in the lobby was Alkaitis. Didn’t realize my mistake till later. Why?” Larry was a reasonably discreet man, but on the other hand, the staff lived together in the same building in the woods and gossip was a kind of black-market currency.

“No reason.”

“Come on.”

“I’ll tell you later.” Walter still didn’t understand the motive, as he walked back toward Reception, but there was no doubt in his mind that Paul had committed the act. He glanced around the lobby, but no one seemed to require his attention at that moment, so he slipped through the staff door behind the reception desk. Paul was cleaning the dark window at the end of the hall.

“Paul.”

The night houseman stopped what he was doing, and in his expression, Walter knew that he’d been correct in his suspicions. Paul had a hunted look.

“Where’d you get the acid marker?” Walter asked. “Is that something you can just buy at a hardware store, or did you have to make it yourself?”

“What are you talking about?” But Paul was a terrible liar. His voice had gone up half an octave.

“Why did you want Jonathan Alkaitis to see that disgusting message?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“This place means something to me,” Walter said. “Seeing it defaced like that…” It was the like that that bothered him the most, the utter vileness of the message on the glass, but he didn’t know how to explain this to Paul without opening a door into his personal life, and the thought of revealing anything remotely personal to this shiftless little creep was untenable. He couldn’t finish the sentence. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to give you an opportunity,” he said. “Pack up your things and leave on the first boat, and we don’t have to get the police involved.”

“I’m sorry.” Paul’s voice was a whisper. “I just—”

“You just thought you’d deface a hotel window, for the sake of delivering the most vicious, the most deranged—” Walter was sweating. “Why did you even do it?” But Paul had the furtive look of a boy searching for a plausible story, and Walter couldn’t stand to listen to another lie that night. “Look, just go,” he said. “I don’t care why you did it. I don’t want to look at you anymore. Put the cleaning supplies away, go back to your room, pack your bags, and tell Melissa that you want a ride to Grace Harbour as quickly as possible. If you’re still here at nine a.m., I’ll go to Raphael.”

“You don’t understand,” Paul said. “I’ve got all this debt—”

“If you needed the job that badly,” Walter said, “you probably shouldn’t have defaced the window.”

“You can’t even swallow broken glass.”

“What?”

“I mean it’s actually physically impossible.”

“Seriously? That’s your defense?”

Paul flushed and looked away.

“Did you ever think of your sister in all of this?” Walter asked. “She got you the job interview here, didn’t she?”

“Vincent had nothing to do with this.”

“Are you going to leave? I’m in a generous mood and I don’t want to embarrass your sister, so I’m giving you a clean exit here, but if you’d prefer a criminal record, then by all means…”

“No, I’ll go.” Paul looked down at the cleaning supplies in his hands, as if unsure how they’d landed there. “I’m sorry.”

“You should go pack before I change my mind.”

“Thank you,” Paul said.

But the horror of it. Why don’t you swallow broken glass. Why don’t you die. Why don’t you cast everyone who loves you into perdition. He was thinking about his friend Rob again, forever sixteen, thinking about Rob’s mother’s face at the funeral. Walter sleepwalked through the rest of his shift and stayed up late to meet with Raphael in the morning. As he passed through the lobby at eight a.m., up past his bedtime and desperate for sleep, he caught sight of Paul down at the end of the pier, loading his duffel bags into the boat.

“Good morning,” Raphael said when Walter looked into his office. He was bright-eyed and freshly shaved. He and Walter lived in the same building, but in opposite time zones.

“I just saw Paul getting on the boat with his worldly belongings,” Walter said.

Raphael sighed. “I don’t know what happened. He came in here this morning with an incoherent story about how much he misses Vancouver, when the kid practically begged me for a change of scenery three months back.”

“He gave no reason?”

“None. We’ll start interviewing again. Anything else?” Raphael asked, and Walter, his defenses weakened by exhaustion, understood for the first time that Raphael didn’t like him very much. The realization landed with a sad little thud.

“No,” he said, “thank you. I’ll leave you to it.” On the walk back to the staff lodge, he found himself wishing that he’d been less angry when he’d spoken with Paul. All these hours later, he was beginning to wonder if he’d missed the point: when Paul said he had debts, did he mean that he needed the job at the hotel, or was he saying that someone had paid him to write the message on the glass? Because none of it actually made sense. It seemed obvious that Paul’s message was directed at Alkaitis, but what could Alkaitis possibly mean to him?

Leon Prevant and his wife departed that morning, followed two days later by Jonathan Alkaitis. When Walter came in for his shift on the night of Alkaitis’s departure, Khalil was working the bar, although it wasn’t his usual night: Vincent, he said, had taken a sudden vacation. A day later she called Raphael from Vancouver and told him she’d decided not to come back to the hotel, so someone from Housekeeping boxed up her belongings and put them in storage at the back of the laundry room.

The panel of glass was replaced at enormous expense, and the graffiti receded into memory. Spring passed into summer and then the beautiful chaos of the high season, the lobby crowded every night and a temperamental jazz quartet causing drama in the staff lodge when they weren’t delighting the guests, the quartet alternating with a pianist whose marijuana habit was tolerated because he could seemingly play any song ever written, the hotel fully booked and the staff almost doubled, Melissa piloting the boat back and forth to Grace Harbour all day and late into the evening.

Summer faded into autumn, then the quiet and the dark of the winter months, the rainstorms more frequent, the hotel half-empty, the staff quarters growing quiet with the departure of the seasonal workers. Walter slept through the days and arrived at his shift in the early evenings—the pleasure of long nights in the silent lobby, Larry by the door, Khalil at the bar, storms descending and rising throughout the night—and sometimes joined his colleagues for a meal that was dinner for the night shift and breakfast for the day people, shared a few drinks sometimes with the kitchen staff, listened to jazz alone in his apartment, went for walks in and out of Caiette, ordered books in the mail that he read when he woke in the late afternoons.

On a stormy night in spring, Ella Kaspersky checked in. She was a regular at the hotel, a businesswoman from Chicago who liked to come here to escape “all the noise,” as she put it, a guest who was mostly notable because Jonathan Alkaitis had made it clear that he didn’t want to see her. Walter had no idea why Alkaitis was avoiding Kaspersky and frankly didn’t want to know, but when she arrived he did his customary check to make sure Alkaitis hadn’t made a last-minute booking. Alkaitis hadn’t visited the hotel in some time, he realized, longer than his usual interval between visits. When the lobby was quiet at two a.m., he ran a Google search on Alkaitis and found images from a recent charity fund-raiser, Alkaitis beaming in a tuxedo with a younger woman on his arm. She looked very familiar.

Walter enlarged the photo. The woman was Vincent. A glossier version, with an expensive haircut and professional-grade makeup, but it was unmistakably her. She was wearing a metallic gown that must have cost about what she’d made in a month as a bartender here. The caption read Jonathan Alkaitis with his wife, Vincent.

Walter looked up from the screen, into the silent lobby. Nothing in his life had changed in the year since Vincent’s departure, but this was by his own design and his own desire. Khalil, now the full-time night bartender, was chatting with a couple who’d just arrived. Larry stood by the door with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes half-closed. Walter abandoned his post and walked out into the April night. He hoped Vincent was happy in that foreign country, in whatever strange new life she’d found for herself. He tried to imagine what it might be like to step into Jonathan Alkaitis’s life—the money, the houses, the private jet—but it was all incomprehensible to him. The night was clear and cold, moonless but the blaze of stars was overwhelming. Walter wouldn’t have imagined, in his previous life in downtown Toronto, that he’d fall in love with a place where the stars were so bright that he could see his shadow on a night with no moon. He wanted nothing that he didn’t already have.

But when he turned back to the hotel he was blindsided by the memory of the words written on the window a year ago, Why don’t you swallow broken glass, the whole unsettling mystery of it. The forest was a mass of undifferentiated shadow. He folded his arms against the chill and returned to the warmth and light of the lobby.

⁴ A FAIRY TALE

Sanity depends on order. Within a month of leaving the Hotel Caiette and arriving in Jonathan Alkaitis’s absurdly enormous house in the Connecticut suburbs, Vincent had established a routine from which she seldom wavered. She rose at five a.m., a half hour earlier than Jonathan, and went jogging. By the time she returned to his house, he’d left for Manhattan. She was showered and dressed for the day by eight a.m., by which point Jonathan’s driver was available to take her to the train station—he repeatedly offered to drive her to the city, but she preferred the movement of trains to gridlocked traffic—and when she emerged into Grand Central Terminal she liked to linger for a while on her way across the main concourse, taking in the constellations of stars on the green ceiling, the Tiffany clock above the information booth, the crowds. She always had breakfast at a diner near the station, then made her way south toward lower Manhattan and a particular café where she liked to drink espresso and read newspapers, after which she went shopping or got her hair done or walked the streets with her video camera or some combination thereof, and if there was time she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while before she made her way back to Grand Central and a northbound train, in time to be home and dressed in something beautiful by six p.m., which was the earliest Jonathan would conceivably arrive home from the office.

She spent the evening with Jonathan but always found a half hour to go swimming at some point before bed. In the kingdom of money, as she thought of it, there were enormous swaths of time to fill, and she had intimations of danger in letting herself drift, in allowing a day to pass without a schedule or a plan.

“People clamor to move into Manhattan,” Jonathan said when she asked why they couldn’t just live in his pied-à-terre on Columbus Circle, where they stayed sometimes when they had theater tickets, “but I like being a little outside of it all.” He’d grown up in the suburbs, and had always loved the tranquility and the space.

“I see your point,” Vincent said, but the city drew her in, the city was the antidote to the riotous green of her childhood memories. She wanted concrete and clean lines and sharp angles, sky visible only between towers, hard light.

“Anyway, you wouldn’t be happy living in Manhattan,” Jonathan said. “Think of how much you’d miss the pool.”

Would she miss the pool? She reflected on the question as she swam. Her relationship with the pool was adversarial. Vincent swam every night to strengthen her will because she was desperately afraid of drowning.

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.

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 toweled 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.

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 labor 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.

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 spiraling 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.

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 Afghanistan 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.

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.”

Vincent was quiet, considering it.

“I was going to buy you a thirty-five-millimeter film camera,” Caroline said with a self-conscious little laugh, “but then I thought, it’s 1994, do kids even take still photos anymore? Surely video’s where it’s at?”

Vincent settled quickly into a form she liked. She recorded segments of exactly five minutes each, like little portraits: five minutes of beach and sky by the pier at Caiette, and then later there were five-minute clips of the quiet street where she lived with her aunt in Vancouver’s endless suburbs, five minutes from the window of the SkyTrain on her way into the city center, five minutes of the fascinating, appalling neighborhood where she lived with Melissa when she was seventeen—not in the film: the way she had to take off running down the street because an addict wanted her camera—and five-minute clips of the dish pit at the Hotel Vancouver that same year, the camera rigged in a plastic bag on a shelf with a timer while Vincent sprayed dishes with hot water and fed them into an industrial machine. Five-minute increments of Caiette again, and then—after she met Jonathan—five minutes of the infinity pool at the Greenwich house, the way it rippled into the lawn, precisely because she hated looking at that vanishing point and was trying to be stronger; five minutes from the window of Jonathan’s private jet the first time she crossed the Atlantic, a few ships far below in the steel-gray water, no visible land. “What are you doing?” Jonathan asked, startling her. He’d been sitting in the back of the plane with Yvette Bertolli, a formidably elegant associate of his who was coming to France with them; she lived in Paris, so Jonathan was giving her a ride as far as Nice, where he had a villa. Vincent, sunk into an enormous armchair by the window, had thought she was momentarily alone.

“Kind of beautiful, don’t you think?” Vincent said.

Jonathan leaned over her to peer down at the distant waves. “You’re shooting video of the ocean?”

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

“Just when you think you know a woman,” he said, and kissed her head.

Jonathan had a shadow. He introduced the topic a few hours after they arrived at the villa in Nice, when they were sitting together on the terrace in the late afternoon. It was only early spring but already warm here, a pleasant breeze coming in from the sea. Vincent was dazed and jet-lagged, trying to cover this with coffee and the eye drops that she’d applied in the bathroom earlier. Yvette, Jonathan’s associate, had discreetly retired to a guest bedroom, so Vincent and Jonathan were alone. The view was of palm trees and then the otherworldly blue of the sea, oddly familiar after all the movies she’d seen set around the Mediterranean, most of which had involved fast cars, gamblers, and/or James Bond. Jonathan was in a contemplative mood. “This will seem an obvious statement,” he said, “but success attracts a certain kind of attention.”

“Positive, or negative?”

“Well, both,” he said, “but I’m thinking of the negative kind.”

“Are you thinking of a particular person?” A door opened behind them, and Anya appeared on the terrace with two coffee cups on a little silver tray. Vincent was startled to see her, because she hadn’t realized Anya was coming to France, although it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen Anya around the house in Greenwich in the last couple of days. “Thank you,” Vincent said to Anya, “I desperately needed that.” Anya nodded. Jonathan took his coffee from the tray without comment, because for him, coffee appearing out of thin air was so commonplace an occurrence that it didn’t merit acknowledgment.

“Yes,” he said. “There is a particular person. A particular obsessive.”

He’d met Ella Kaspersky back in 1999, at, of all places, the Hotel Caiette. They’d had a conversation about Kaspersky’s possibly investing with him, but she’d concluded—without basis, obviously—that the sheer consistency of Jonathan’s returns was indicative of some kind of nefarious fraud scheme. Completely illogical and unfair, delusional even, but what could he do? People jump to their own conclusions.

“I’d think good returns would be an indication that you’re good at your job,” Vincent said.

“Well, exactly. I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but I do know what I’m doing.”

“Clearly,” Vincent said, with a gesture meant to encompass not just the terrace but the villa and its proximity to the Mediterranean, the private jet that had brought them here, the entirety of this remarkable life.

“I’ve done all right,” he said. “Anyway, Kaspersky took her story to the SEC. I’m sorry, it’s rude to throw obscure acronyms around. I mean the Securities and Exchange Commission. They’re the people who look after my industry.” Vincent knew what the SEC was, because she made an effort to follow the financial news, but she only nodded. “They investigated me thoroughly. Naturally they found nothing. There was nothing to find.”

“Did you hear from her again? After the investigation?”

“Not directly. I’ve heard from other people whom she’s spoken to.”

“If she’s spreading false rumors against you,” Vincent said, “can’t you sue her for defamation?”

“The thing you have to understand,” he said, “is that in my business, credibility is everything. I can’t run the risk of it becoming a news story.”

“You’re saying the appearance of scandal would be almost as bad as an actual scandal.”

“Smart girl. But I thought about it later, when all of that insanity with the SEC had passed, and I realized what the problem was. That money she wanted to invest? It was her father’s fortune. He’d died quite recently. So there was just, well, there’s a lot of emotion caught up in money sometimes.” Anya was moving around the periphery of the terrace, discreetly setting out candles for the evening. How much of the conversation was she hearing? Did it matter? Did Anya care? “The letter Ella Kaspersky sent me, it was unhinged,” Jonathan said, “rambling on about her father’s legacy and so on. But to be fair, when I look back on it I realize she was obviously grieving, and grief can make anyone a little irrational in the moment.” The unspeakable subject of Jonathan’s dead wife floated between them, like a ghost; they glanced at one another but didn’t say her name. Jonathan cleared his throat. “Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this is, I just didn’t want you to wonder if you ever came across anything from her online, or if we ever came across her in real life. You never saw her in Caiette, did you?”

“At the hotel? I don’t really remember many of the other guests, to be honest. I was only there for six or seven months.”

“Till I swept you off your feet,” he said, and kissed her. His lips were cold and tasted unpleasantly of stale coffee, but Vincent smiled at him anyway.

“I think envy’s understandable,” she said. “Not everyone succeeds.”

(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. Later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion.)

She met Jonathan’s employees that summer, at his annual Fourth of July party, which lasted until the small hours of the morning and involved a fleet of chartered buses. There was an army of caterers and a swing band dressed in white on the lawn. The guests were all employees of Jonathan’s. There were a little over a hundred employees, five in the asset management group and the rest in the brokerage company.

“Are the asset management people a little standoffish?” Vincent asked. The asset management team was standing in a tight little group at the party’s edge. One of them, Oskar, was trying to juggle plastic cups while the others watched. “No, wait,” Oskar was saying, “I swear I used to know how to do this…”

“They’ve always been a little insular,” Jonathan said. “They work on a different floor.”

When everyone was gone, the lawn seemed enormous, a twilight landscape of round tables with flickering candles on wine-stained tablecloths, plastic cups glimmering in the trampled grass. “You’re so poised,” Jonathan said. They were sitting by the pool with their feet in the water, while the caterers blew out candles and folded tables and packed dirty glasses into crates. That’s my job, Vincent didn’t say in return. Calling it a job seemed uncharitable, because she really did like him. It wasn’t the romance of the century, but it didn’t have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone’s company, she’d been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don’t mind sleeping with them, isn’t that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like friendship? She spent more time thinking about this than she would have liked, which suggested that it was an unresolved question, but she felt certain that she could go on this way for a long time, years probably. The Fourth of July was a feverish night at the peak of a heat wave.

“Well, thank you. I try.” Sweat ran down her back.

“You try without appearing to try, though,” he said. “You’ve no idea what a rare quality that is.”

She was watching the shimmer of lights on the surface of the pool. When she looked up, one of the caterers was watching her, a young woman who was straightening deck chairs. Vincent looked away quickly. She had studied the habits of the monied with diligence. She copied their modes of dress and speech, and cultivated an air of carelessness. But she was ill at ease around the household staff and the caterers, because she feared that if anyone from her home planet were to look at her too closely, they’d see through her disguise.

In their first winter together, they flew south to a party at a private club in Miami Beach. Jonathan seemed to belong to an extraordinary number of clubs. “It’s an expensive hobby,” he told Vincent, “but I’ve always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down.” (Yet another clue that Vincent felt she should have picked up: Why exactly did he want time to slow down? Was there something in that statement besides a general awareness of mortality, some other inevitability that he felt was rushing toward him?) “Some of the clubs have other pleasures,” he said, “golf courses and tennis courts and whatnot, but there’s a certain pleasure in just drinking coffee or wine in a private lounge. Time moves differently in these places.”

The Winter Formal in Miami Beach was a deadly evening of tuxedos and iridescent gowns. The women were mostly much older than Vincent. The men would have looked alike even if they weren’t all dressed like penguins—the curious sameness of expensively maintained people with similar habits—and most of them had always been in this world, it was obvious, they had lived their whole lives above a safety net and were therefore of a different species from Vincent. She moved through the room in a silver gown, smiling and telling people that she was delighted to meet them, laughing convincingly at weak jokes, listening intently to dull anecdotes with the same smile she’d used on good tippers back in her bartending days. Jonathan had known most of the Miami Beach people for a decade or more. Many of the other women had been friends with Jonathan’s wife, Suzanne, and they had children Vincent’s age and older. Several of them had had unfortunate cosmetic procedures—puffed-out faces, immobile foreheads, swollen rubbery lips—that made her eyes widen involuntarily when they were introduced. Vincent stayed by Jonathan’s side until he excused himself for a discreet conversation with a potential investor, at which point she went to the bar, where a tall woman in a blindingly fuchsia dress was ordering a gin and tonic. Vincent had noticed her earlier, as one of the very few women in the room who seemed to be about Vincent’s age. They received their drinks from parallel bartenders at the same moment and nearly collided as they left the bar.

“Oh no,” Vincent said. “I didn’t spill any wine on your dress, did I?”

“Not a drop,” the woman said. “I’m Mirella.”

“I’m Vincent. Hi.”

“I was just heading out to the terrace, if you’d like to join me?”

They went out to the terrace, which had Italian pretensions. There were a few women out here of their age and younger, but they all seemed to know one another and were either deep in conversation or deep in their phones. Vincent liked that she could see the ocean from here, same blue as the Mediterranean.

“Have you ever been to a more tedious party?” Vincent was normally more cautious, but Mirella had an air of boredom that set her at ease.

“Yes. The same party last year.”

A man in a dark suit had followed them out. He stood some distance away, scanning the terrace.

“Is he with you?” Vincent asked.

“Always,” Mirella said, and Vincent realized that the man was hired protection. Mirella lived at a high altitude.

“Is it oppressive? Having someone follow you around all the time?”

They were leaning on the balustrade, contemplating the terrace. The other women looked like a flock of tropical birds. It was Vincent’s first time in Florida, and she’d noticed that people wore much brighter colors here than in New York or Connecticut.

“Funny you should ask,” Mirella said. “I was just thinking about this earlier. I realized something slightly disturbing.”

“Tell me.”

“Sometimes I don’t even see him anymore. I don’t want to think of myself as a person to whom other people are invisible, but there it is.”

“Has it been…” Vincent didn’t know how to ask the question, but she was curious about how long it took for a person to become invisible. She was still aware of Jonathan Alkaitis’s household staff at all times, and there was something appalling and also seductive in the idea of no longer being able to see them. “Has he been with you a long time?”

“Six years,” Mirella said. “Not him personally. Different men in the same position. It was only strange for the first few months.” She was looking at Vincent’s left hand. “Who’s your husband?”

“I don’t know if you’d know him, he’s not at this club very often. His name’s Jonathan Alkaitis.”

Mirella smiled. “I know Jonathan,” she said. “My boyfriend invests with him.”

Mirella was always followed by a bodyguard because her boyfriend, Faisal, was a Saudi prince. A cousin’s girlfriend had been kidnapped for ransom a decade earlier, and the episode had left him a little paranoid.

“Is he going to be king someday?” Vincent asked Mirella when they met up in Manhattan the week after the party. Mirella and Faisal lived most of the year in a loft in Soho.

Mirella smiled. “Not a chance,” she said. “There are something like six thousand Saudi princes.”

“How many princesses?”

“No one really counts the princesses.”

They met for dinner sometimes after that, Faisal and Mirella and Jonathan and Vincent. Faisal was a supremely elegant man in his forties who favored bespoke suits and white shirts with the top two buttons undone, never a tie. He didn’t work. He and Mirella had settled in New York City because he felt free here, he said. Not that he disliked Riyadh, where he was from, just that it was frankly kind of nice to live in a place that doesn’t also contain hordes of your relatives. He felt he had a little more breathing room on this side of the world. That being said, he found New York winters difficult, so he’d once spent an entire February learning to play golf at the club in Miami Beach, which was where he’d met Jonathan.

Faisal had always been a disappointment in his family. He was the son who only wanted to go to jazz clubs and spend evenings at the opera and read obscure literary journals in French and English, the one who’d put half the world between himself and his family and showed no interest in marriage, let alone grandchildren. But then he invested with Alkaitis and introduced Alkaitis to several family members, whose investments performed so spectacularly that Faisal’s status as the family’s black sheep was at least partially reversed, and it was obvious that this mattered immensely to him.

Mirella and Faisal had lived in London for a couple of years, then briefly in Singapore, before they’d settled in New York. “My life wasn’t really different in those places,” Mirella said when Vincent asked. This was a month or two after they’d met. Vincent had taken Mirella to her favorite gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vincent had no formal education in art, but she was moved by portraits, especially portraits whose subjects looked quite ordinary, like people you might see in the subway except in outmoded clothes.

“I don’t think of those as similar cities,” Vincent said.

“They’re not, but my life was the same. It was just a change in background scenery.” She glanced at Vincent. “You didn’t come from money, did you?”

“No.”

“Me neither. You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

One of the things that Vincent tried not to think about too much: a difference between Mirella and Vincent was that Mirella was in this country of money with a man whom she truly loved. You could see it in the way she looked at Faisal, the way she brightened when he came into a room.

If money is a country, there were other citizens whom Vincent liked much less. She and Jonathan had dinner with Lenny Xavier, a music producer from Los Angeles. Jonathan was quiet and distracted on the way to the restaurant. “He’s my most important investor,” he said quietly as they walked in, and then he caught sight of Lenny and Lenny’s wife at the far end of the room and broke into a grin. Lenny wore an expensive-looking suit with sneakers and had hair that was messy on purpose. His wife, Tiffany, was very beautiful but didn’t have much to say.

“We met at an audition, actually,” she said when Vincent attempted small talk, and said almost nothing further to her. She’d been a singer but now she wasn’t singing. Toward the end of the evening, Jonathan somehow drew Tiffany into conversation, and Lenny, who had had too much to drink, turned to Vincent and launched into a monologue about a girl he’d worked with years ago, another girl who’d also wanted to be a singer.

“The problem is,” he told her, “some people just can’t recognize opportunity.”

“That’s very true,” Vincent said, but his statement made her uneasy. She enjoyed Jonathan’s company, but it was undeniable that when he’d walked into the bar of the Hotel Caiette, she’d recognized an opportunity.

“She had real potential. Real potential. But an inability to recognize opportunity? That right there is a fatal flaw.”

“Where is she now?” Vincent asked. Lenny had been talking about the girl in the past tense, which Vincent found mildly alarming.

“Annika? Who gives a fuck. I haven’t seen her since 2000, maybe 2001.” Lenny poured himself another glass of red. “You really want to know? She went back to Canada to play weird electronica with her friends.”

(“The problem is, though,” Tiffany was saying to Jonathan, across the table, “when you buy jewelry online, it’s really hard to tell how chunky it is.”)

“You don’t work with her at all anymore?”

“No, because she’s a fucking idiot. Okay, so this girl, Annika, when I met her she was young. Really shockingly beautiful, okay? Just shockingly beautiful. Not a ton of talent, but enough. Great body. Her voice was just okay, but you know what? We can work with that. She writes poetry, so her lyrics are good. She plays the violin, which is a fucking useless instrument for pop music, but whatever, at least she’s got a musical background. So we start working with her, we’re moving toward an album, making plans for how to package her, how to roll her out. Like I said, she’s beautiful, and tell you what, she’s got this edge to her, this kind of rare quality, like she’s really sexy but it’s not obvious, right? Like it’s not in your face, there’s something a little mysterious about it.”

“Mysterious?”

“Kind of remote, but not ice-queen remote, more like, I don’t know, intelligent remote, which can be attractive in certain girls.” His eyes dropped briefly to Vincent’s chest. “So anyway, we’re pretty far along, we’re hiring a backup band and looking for a choreographer, and then she comes to us and she’s like, ‘I want out.’ We’re like, ‘I’m sorry, what?’ We’re pretty shocked, me and my partners. We’ve got her on this program, right? We’re paying for vocal lessons, guitar lessons, songwriters, a personal trainer. Any musician, any recording artist would kill for an opportunity like what she’s got here. We point that out and she’s like, yeah, she gets it, she appreciates the effort, but we’re violating her artistic integrity.” Lenny paused to sip his wine. “Hilarious, right?”

Vincent smiled, unsure of what exactly she was supposed to find hilarious. (“Oh, that? That’s topaz, I think,” Tiffany was saying to Jonathan. “With little diamonds around it.”)

“We’re like, your what? Your integrity? You are twenty-one years old. You don’t get to have integrity. I mean, okay, look, maybe she had integrity, you know, personally, like as a human being, but artistic integrity? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. She’s a little girl.”

“So what happened?”

“Like I said, she went back to Canada. I Googled her the other day, and you know what she’s doing? Touring Canada in a fucking van, playing in tiny clubs and music festivals in towns you’ve never heard of. You see what I mean? Couldn’t recognize an opportunity. Whereas me, when I met your husband? When I figured out how his fund worked? That right there was an opportunity, and I seized it.”

“Lenny,” Jonathan said, cutting Tiffany off midsentence, “let’s not bore our lovely wives with investment talk.”

“All I’m saying is, my investment performed better than I could’ve imagined.” Lenny raised his glass. “Anyway. Annika. It’s all good, because you know what? I can predict the future.” He smiled and tapped his forehead with one finger. “She’ll come back to me.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Vincent said. What was strange was that she was certain Jonathan was listening very intently to her conversation with Lenny, even though he was gazing at Tiffany and nodding at what Tiffany was saying. It seemed to her that there was something that Jonathan didn’t want Lenny to reveal.

“Any year now, any day now, I’ll hear from her again, I’d bet money on it.”

“No question.” If only the evening would end. Vincent’s face was getting tired.

“She’ll be all, like, hey, remember me, we were going to do something together, and I’ll be like, yeah, we were going to do something together, you and me, past tense. That was five years ago, six years ago, now you’re not twenty-one anymore.”

“Tell me about the place you’re from,” Mirella said toward the end. The age of money lasted a little under three years. During the final summer, six months before the end, Faisal went home to Riyadh to spend a few weeks with his father, who’d just received a cancer diagnosis, and during that period Mirella fell into the habit of taking a car up to Greenwich almost every afternoon. Vincent and Mirella spent languid hours swimming or lying in the shade by the pool, stunned by heat, Mirella’s bodyguard reading the paper or staring at his phone on a lawn chair out of earshot.

“I grew up on a road with two dead ends,” Vincent said. “That pretty much sums it up.”

“Put down that camera, will you? You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m not filming you, I’m just filming those trees over there.”

“Yeah, but they’re boring trees. They’re not doing anything.”

“Fair point,” Vincent said, and smiled and put the camera away, although it pained her to stop filming at the three-minute-twenty-seven-second mark. She was aware that the necessity of filming in precise five-minute intervals probably constituted an undiagnosed case of OCD, but this had never really struck her as a serious problem.

“How can a road have two dead ends?”

“If it’s accessible only by boat or floatplane. Picture a row of houses on an inlet. Forest all around, water, nothing else.”

“You had a boat?”

“Some people had their own boats. We didn’t. I used to catch the mail boat to get to school in the mornings, then a bus would meet us by the pier on the other side and drive us to the nearest town. There was no television there till I was thirteen.”

“What do you mean, no television?” Mirella was looking at her as if she’d just announced she was from Mars.

“I mean, there was no signal.”

“So if you switched on the TV, what would happen?”

“Well, you’d just get static,” Vincent said.

“On every channel?”

(A memory: thirteen years old, suspended from school for the graffiti incident, sitting by the kitchen window with a book, then looking up and seeing Dad walking up the hill from the water taxi with an unwieldy box in his arms, grinning. “Look what my mom bought for us,” he said. “I got a call to come pick it up from the electronics store in Port Hardy.” Grandma Caroline had departed that morning to return to her own life for a few days, but it appeared she’d left a parting gift.

A television! A tower had gone up a few months earlier in Grace Harbour, just up the inlet, which meant that for the first time in history there was a signal in Caiette, and Mom would never have allowed this but it wasn’t up to her anymore, because she’d been gone for three weeks. Dad and Vincent flicked through variations of static to find a room, where two women with American accents were talking, one with long brown hair and glasses, the other with a cloud of platinum hair and tighter clothing.

“WKRP in Cincinnati,” Dad said. “I used to watch this in the eighties.”

One of the women said something funny, which made Dad laugh for the first time in three weeks. Where was Cincinnati? On television the city had a soft gleam, like the blond actress’s hair. Later, Vincent pulled the atlas down from a high shelf and found it, a point in the middle of the closest country to the south. She looked up the page for southwestern British Columbia, but of course Caiette was too small to appear on the map.)

Mirella had a story about a duplex in a housing development of identical duplexes, exurban Cleveland, cornfields on one side and an expressway on the other. Her mother worked two jobs and her father was in prison. Mirella and her sister were home alone for hours every day, watching television; they walked home from the school bus stop and locked the door behind them, and then they weren’t allowed to go outside again. They warmed up Hot Pockets for dinner and sometimes did their homework, sometimes didn’t. “It actually wasn’t that bad,” she said. “I got lucky. Nothing terrible happened to me. It was just boring. You grew up with both your parents?”

“My mother drowned when I was thirteen.” Vincent appreciated the way Mirella just nodded at this. Perhaps from now on she would only be friends with people who were missing at least one parent. “My dad was a tree planter, so he’d be up at these remote camps for weeks at a time during the school year, so I went to live with my aunt in Vancouver.”

The conversation shifted away from points of origin, which was fine with Vincent. Everything about Caiette was either impossible to describe or too difficult to talk about, and everything after Caiette was either boring or embarrassing. Mirella was talking about how she and Faisal had met. Mirella had tried to be a model, but she hadn’t made it very far. The problem, as her agent had explained it, was that Mirella was beautiful but it was an ordinary kind of beauty. There was nothing unusual about Mirella’s face, except for its prettiness, and that was a moment in modeling when it wasn’t enough to be beautiful, the agent said. One also had to be strange. The successful models of that moment had unusually wide-spaced eyes, or faces that were actually quite plain but had an indefinably striking quality, or ears that stuck out like jug handles. When she met Faisal, Mirella was trying to be an actor because the modeling wasn’t working out, but acting wasn’t going well either. She had some talent, but not enough to rise above the sea of other moderately talented beautiful young women. The night she met Faisal she was at a party in an expensive dress that she’d borrowed from her roommate, hours after a call with her agent’s assistant—her agent wasn’t taking her calls anymore—wherein the assistant, who’d once wanted to be an actor too, had gently broken the news that Mirella had been passed over for yet another role. Rejection is exhausting. Mirella was standing by the window, looking out at a view of downtown Los Angeles, and she realized that she was getting too tired for this life. She was thinking that maybe she should finally go to school, study something that would lead to a good job, but her sister had done that and now her sister was struggling under the weight of student loans, and Mirella wasn’t sure the debt was worth it. She was standing there trying to imagine what might come next, and then Faisal appeared beside her, beautifully dressed and holding two glasses of wine, and she thought, Why not you?

“We met over drinks too,” Vincent said, “but I was the bartender.”

Mirella smiled. “I’m not surprised. You make an excellent cocktail.”

“Thank you. It was a strange moment in my life. My father had just died.” Mirella’s eyes widened. Having one parent exit the scene was nothing unusual, but losing two was a different situation. “I had to go back to my hometown to deal with his stuff, and there was a job opening at the local hotel, so I decided to stay for a while.”

“What happened to him?”

“A heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” Vincent didn’t like to think of her parents.

“Was this the hotel Jonathan owns? I remember him talking about it.”

“Yes, exactly. I thought living there would be a simpler life, but I knew it was a mistake within a month. My childhood best friend worked there, and then after a few months my brother showed up and started working there too, and, I don’t know, it just started to seem a little claustrophobic, living in the same place with the same people I’d known since I was born.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“He was never really part of my life,” Vincent said. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

“So you went to this place in the middle of nowhere, and left because your brother was there too?”

“No, I…there was a strange incident,” she said. “Okay, so the lobby, it had a glass wall overlooking the water. I was working one night, and there was this guest in the lobby, a man with insomnia, he was just sitting in an armchair reading or working or something, and then he made this sound and jumped out of his chair. So I looked, and someone had just written this awful message on the outside of the glass.”

“What was it?”

“The message? Why don’t you swallow broken glass.”

“Crazy,” Mirella said.

“I know. And then a minute later, my brother Paul comes in from his dinner break, and it was just so obvious that he’d done it, he was all kind of shifty, couldn’t even meet my eyes—”

“Why would he—?”

“I don’t know. I almost asked him, but then I realized it didn’t matter. There’s just no scenario where writing something like that isn’t horrible, is there?”

“I can’t think of one.” Mirella was quiet for a moment. “It’s a horrible message, but I’m not sure I completely understand why it bothered you that much.”

“The thing with my mother,” Vincent said, “is I know she drowned, but I don’t know why she drowned. She went canoeing all the time. She was a good swimmer.”

“You think it might not have been an accident.”

“I think I’ll never know one way or the other.” They were quiet for a while, and the buzz of the cicadas in the trees at the edge of the property was very loud. “Anyway, it wasn’t just that. I was having one of those moments, where you look at your life and think, Is this really it? I thought there’d be more.”

“I’m familiar with those moments,” Mirella said. “So you were going to leave anyway, and then Jonathan walked into the bar?”

“No more than two hours later, maybe less. It was five in the morning. I had to do two shots of espresso just to keep my eyes open.”

“Here’s to coffee.” Mirella raised her glass.

“When I say I don’t know where I’d be without it, I mean that literally,” Vincent said.

A lonely man walks into a bar and sees an opportunity. An opportunity walks into a bar and meets a bartender. A lonely bartender looks up from her work and the message on the window makes her want to flee, because the bartender’s mother disappeared while canoeing and she’s told everyone all her life that it was an accident but there is absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and how could anyone who’s aware of this uncertainty—as Paul definitely is—write a suggestion to commit suicide on a window with that water shimmering on the other side, but what’s driving the bartender to despair isn’t actually the graffiti, it’s the fact that when she leaves this place it will only be to go to another bar, and another after that, and another, and another, and anyway that’s the moment when the man, the opportunity, extends his hand.

“Would you believe I actually grew up here?” she asked Jonathan, when in the course of that first conversation he asked where she was from. She’d served him his food and they’d fallen into a surprisingly effortless conversation.

“Here as in Caiette?”

“Well, here and then Vancouver.”

“Great city,” he said. “I keep meaning to spend more time there.”

He slipped her a folded bill as he was leaving—she thanked him without looking at it—and it turned out to be a hundred dollars, folded around a business card on which he’d scrawled a cell phone number. A hundred-dollar bill? Mortifying in retrospect, but she always appreciated the clarity of his intentions. It was always going to be a transactional arrangement. When he beckoned, she would come to him. She would always be well compensated.

Why not you?

That last summer in the kingdom of money, Vincent and Mirella met up in Soho on a subtropical afternoon, where they lingered for a while in Faisal and Mirella’s loft and then went shopping, less out of need than out of boredom. Dark clouds filled the sky. In the late afternoon they wandered down Spring Street with no particular destination in mind, having spent several thousand dollars each on clothing and lingerie, and Vincent was admiring a yellow Lamborghini parked across the street when Mirella said, “I think the rain’s about to start”—and they walked faster, too late, the first thunderclap sounded and the downpour began, Mirella took her hand and they broke into a run. Vincent was laughing—she loved being caught in the rain—and Mirella didn’t like what rain did to her hair, but by the time they reached the corner she was smiling too, she pulled Vincent into an espresso bar and they stood just inside for a moment, pleasantly chilled by the air-conditioning, pushing wet hair away from their eyes and surveying the damage to the shopping bags. Mirella’s bodyguard came in a moment later, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.

“Well,” Mirella said. “Shall we stop for a coffee?”

“Let’s.” Vincent had been on the East Coast of this continent for two and a half years now, but she was still startled by the violence of the summer thunderstorms, the way the sky turned green. They found a minuscule table by the window and sat there with their little coffees, wet shopping bags crowded around their legs. They’d fallen into a companionable silence, and as they watched the downpour, Vincent realized that she felt perfectly at ease, for the first time in recent memory. The truth was that in the kingdom of money, before she’d met Mirella she’d been extremely alone.

“Do you find that shopping is actually incredibly boring?” Vincent felt guilty saying this aloud. It was only possible to say it because Mirella hadn’t come from money either. Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing.

“I know it’s in poor taste to admit it,” Mirella said, “but it’s incredible how quickly the novelty wears off.” There was something about the way she looked up just then, the way the light caught her face, that made Vincent think of a nursery rhyme from childhood, her favorite verse from the Mother Goose book in the elementary school library, read so many times that she had committed it to memory by the time she was five or six: She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the girl of the golden city…

“At first it felt like some kind of compensation,” Vincent said. “You remember the times when you had to choose between rent and groceries, and it’s like, ‘Now I can afford this dress, so balance has been restored in the world,’ but after a while…”

“After a while you find you’ve acquired enough dresses,” Mirella said. “If Faisal knew the extent of my shopping habit, he’d probably stage an intervention.”

Although of course the clothing wasn’t the point, Vincent thought later, on the train back to Greenwich. It wasn’t the stuff that kept her in this strange new life, in the kingdom of money; it wasn’t the clothing and objects and handbags and shoes. It wasn’t the beautiful home, the travel; it wasn’t Jonathan’s company, although she did genuinely like him; it wasn’t even inertia. What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

When she arrived home, Jonathan was waiting in the living room. He’d been working but closed his laptop when she came in. “You poor thing,” he said. “I wondered about you, out there in the deluge.” She was shivering a little, her clothes damp in the chill of the air-conditioning. There was a cashmere blanket on the back of the sofa, just within his reach. He put his laptop on the coffee table and held the blanket open to receive her. “Come here,” he said. “Let’s get you warm.”

⁵ OLIVIA

On a dark afternoon in August, a painter was standing under an awning in Soho when Vincent and Mirella passed by. Across the street, a yellow Lamborghini shone in the haze of the afternoon. The car had such presence that it was almost alive, all but vibrating with possibility, like something from the future. Olivia had come to this street because behind the Lamborghini was a doorway that she’d passed through once in the late fifties, when Jonathan Alkaitis’s brother was looking for models. In the summer of 2008, Olivia stood across the street under a red awning because it was obviously about to rain, eating a chocolate chip cookie even though the sugar would send her to sleep later—on a bench, in the subway, in a movie theater, wherever she might happen to land—and allowed herself to sink into memory. In 1958 she walked briskly up to the door in her new trench coat, which she was convinced made her look like the star of her favorite French movie because it’s possible to convince oneself of such things at twenty-four. When a voice crackled incoherently out of the buzzer she said, “It’s me,” which she’d found always worked at every building no matter which buzzer she pressed, and climbed four flights of stairs to Lucas’s studio.

Lucas Alkaitis was on the run from the suburbs just like everyone else, on the run from mediocrity and Brylcreem and gray flannel suits, and Olivia had met enough fake painters by then to recognize when she was in the presence of the real thing. In 1958, Lucas was working on a series of nudes: women and men, mostly women, all sitting on a sofa the color of the Lamborghini that would park outside his door a half century later. The sofa was much dirtier in real life than in the paintings.

The paintings were ravishing. But Lucas himself, to Olivia’s amusement and disappointment, was every cliché in combination: the too-long, artfully tousled hair; the white undershirt, streaked with paint; the work boots, which he’d also allowed to become streaked with paint, presumably to advertise his painterliness to the opposite sex. He looked her over and ran his hand through his hair in a way that made her think he’d practiced the motion in the mirror.

“Help you?” he asked.

“I hear you’re looking for a model.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” A slow, lazy smile as he appraised her. This was a profoundly self-satisfied man. “I can’t pay very much.”

“Actually, I have a proposition on that front.”

“Oh?”

What Olivia sometimes wondered—even in the present, on the other side of the split screen in 2008, where she was still standing under the awning, had moved on to a second chocolate chip cookie, and could already feel herself coming unmoored, her blood sugar rising in a way that always made her think of a doomed hot-air balloon, an unsteady giddy motion before a precipitous fall—is if it might be possible to send out a memo to the entire population of persons below the age of thirty, no, forty, men and women alike, a memo to the effect that it is not in fact necessary to raise an eyebrow every time the word proposition is uttered in conversation. “I would appreciate it,” she muttered aloud, in 2008, “if everyone would stop.”

On the other side of the gauze, in 1958, she waited for Lucas’s eyebrow to lower before she said, “Not that kind of proposition, for Christ’s sake. Payment in kind.”

He looked confused.

“My name’s Olivia Collins.” She watched as the name registered. She’d had some success, nothing earth-shattering but enough that a certain subset of the painting population south of 14th Street knew her name. She had gallery representation, which was more than most of these floppy-haired puppy dogs could say. “I’m a painter,” she said, unnecessarily, “and I’m looking for models.”

“Okay, yeah, so you’re saying…”

“You paint me, I paint you,” she said. “I’m working on a new portrait series.”

Lucas crossed the room to a cluttered windowsill, extracted a box of cigarettes from between two paint cans that had been repurposed as vases for dying daisies, tapped the cigarette box, removed one, lit it, inhaled, exhaled while holding Olivia’s gaze, all of the stalling motions that smokers perform when they’re not sure what to say and have seen too many movies. If another memo could possibly be sent out, this one specific to smokers: You cannot be both an unwashed bohemian and Cary Grant. Your elegant cigarette moves are hopelessly undermined by your undershirt and your dirty hair. The combination is not particularly interesting.

“Intriguing proposition,” he said, “but I don’t pose.”

“Well, it takes a certain boldness,” Olivia said with a shrug. In 1958, her values included a determination that no one should ever be able to tell whether she cared about any given thing or not. “Not everyone can do it.” She could see that this stung, as intended. “Well, if you change your mind.” She scrawled her phone number on a scrap of paper, left it on his worktable, nodded goodbye, and turned away. “Your work’s good, by the way,” she said from the door, as a parting shot.

In 2008, a pair of girls were approaching. Shoppers, weighted down, somewhere in their twenties, both pretty in an expensive way, a genre of girl whom fifty years ago Olivia would have both painted and seduced. They were talking about nothing, a conversation about jeans they wanted to buy, but one of them looked away and Olivia saw that she was gazing across the street at the yellow Lamborghini, brilliant in the dull pre-storm light.

“I see it too,” Olivia murmured, but so quietly that neither looked her way as they passed. Perhaps she didn’t say it aloud. The sky exploded in a thunderclap and they ran away into the rain.

When Lucas came to her, she wasn’t alone. She’d been painting her friend Renata for days, from various angles. The problem was Renata’s eyes, which were worried and doelike when Renata looked at her head-on but coolly confident when she was looking away. The effect was of two different people. Which to show?

“Okay, I’ve got an idea for a ghost story,” Renata said. This was a game they played sometimes, when Renata was posing and starting to get bored, because they’d both loved ghost stories since childhood. “A guy gets hit by a car and dies, and then after that the intersection’s haunted, but the ghost isn’t the guy who gets hit by the car, the ghost is the car.”

Olivia stepped back for a moment, considering the eye problem. “So it’s a story about a ghost car?”

“The driver feels so guilty about the accident that his guilt manifests as a ghostly car.”

“I like it.”

It was cold in the studio that day and Olivia was mostly working on Renata’s face and shoulders, so Renata was wearing a bathrobe that she hadn’t bothered to close. Olivia heard her friend and neighbor Diego’s voice in the hall, his quick knock and entry, and turned in time to see Lucas catch sight of Renata’s breasts and do a double take that he tried to cover with a coughing fit.

“Fumes getting to you?”

“Those’ll go straight to your head,” Renata said, in that languid voice that always made her sound stoned, which often she was, but on this particular occasion she wasn’t.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Olivia said to Lucas, which in those days was one of her signature lines. (A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.) “We’ll be done in a few minutes.”

Lucas stood by the door, awkward. She sensed his taking in the work. In anticipation of his arrival, Olivia had propped seven of her best recent portraits around the room. She’d been experimenting with surrealist backgrounds: the subject painted with eighteenth-century fealty to realism—or as close as she could get to eighteenth-century fealty to realism; she was aware at all times of the limits of her technical skills—but backgrounds dissolving into a fever dream of red, of purple, of blue, interiors breaking apart into formlessness, landscapes where the light was all wrong. In her most recent completed painting, Diego was sitting on a red chair, relaxed, his arm draped over the back, but the chair lost form at its extremities and dissolved into the wall, and a red pool had formed under one of the chair’s feet, as if the paint were running off.

“That chair bleeding?” Lucas asked, indicating the Diego painting with his chin.

“Take off your robe?” Olivia said to Renata, who rolled her eyes but didn’t object. Her naked flesh had the desired effect of shutting up Lucas. He forgot about the bleeding chair. (Something that troubled her even years later, decades later, all the way to 2008: Was the bleeding chair even a good idea? Were any of her artistic ideas ever actually any good? Her self-doubt had been one of the few constants in her life over the past half century.) “If you want to hang out,” Olivia said to Lucas, “we’ll be done in a half hour.”

“Twenty minutes,” Renata said. “I have to pick up my kid.” When she left, Lucas took her place on the chair. He hadn’t spoken since the bleeding-chair comment.

“You’re overdressed for the occasion,” Olivia said, but it came out softer than she intended, not at all sharp. Perhaps she could be a gentler person, she thought. Her shell was so hard in those days. “Can you take off your shirt?”

Lucas shrugged and took off his denim jacket and undershirt. He was skinny and unpleasantly pale, a strictly indoor creature. He watched her as she began. She was thinking about his work, the clean lines and restraint in his portraiture. He was ridiculous in some ways, but beneath all that he was a serious person, she understood that, he was a serious person who worked very hard. She painted rapidly, not at all in her usual style, swift short strokes. She’d hoped that if she skimmed the surface of the portrait she might be able to see him better, that something might become apparent that she could use as a starting point for a deeper, more serious work, and something did: when she stepped back to look at the canvas she saw the shadows on his face, the look she’d seen before on others, the awkward way he held his arms.

“Turn your left arm toward me,” she said, demonstrating.

He smiled and didn’t move. But she caught a glimpse as he reached for his shirt, and added it later: she painted over his left arm so that in the final version his palm was open, shadows streaked on his inner elbow, bruised veins.

At the opening five months later, he cornered her by the door. “I could kill you,” he said pleasantly, smiling so that anyone looking would think he was complimenting her work. Two or three people who weren’t out of earshot moved closer, curious. “I don’t mean this in the screwball-comedy sense, by the way, as in ‘They just got off on the wrong foot and now they’re going to fall in love.’ I mean that given the chance I could actually literally kill you.”

“Live by the sword, die by the sword.” Olivia raised her drink.

“You think you’re so cute. All those canned fucking lines. It’s not even accurate,” he said, a whine entering his voice, “you’re a fucking liar,” but in ten months he would OD behind a restaurant on Delancey Street. She went to a show of his just before the end, a group exhibition in a warehouse in Chelsea. It was an underwhelming evening. The night was freezing and the room was too cold, everyone shivering with their cups of cheap wine. A few people recognized Olivia and she saw their jealousy under their smiles, which made her feel small and hollow and like she just wanted to go home. This was the thing about her life in those years: some nights it was beautiful but some nights there was such pain, throbbing just under the surface of the evening for no discernible reason, and on nights like that she understood why Lucas and Renata did what they did, the dulling trick with the needle. She found Lucas in a far corner with three of his paintings. He’d been working on a new series without people in it, just empty streets. General streets, not specific streets. She suspected they belonged to no particular city.

“I like these,” Olivia said, as a peace offering. Lucas was with a kid, a boy wearing sneakers and jeans with an untucked shirt. This was what she remembered of her first sight of Jonathan Alkaitis, years later: that his untucked shirt was somehow poignant. The kid had suburbia written all over him but had untucked the shirt in order to look looser, more downtown, because he wasn’t quite fourteen years old and was desperate to fit in, but the shirt was deeply creased around the waist where it had been tucked into his pants before he left the house.

“Thanks so much,” Lucas said flatly.

“Who’s your little friend?”

“My brother. Jonathan, meet Olivia. Olivia, Jonathan.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Jonathan Alkaitis said. He was wide-eyed, out of his element. “Do you not like my brother’s paintings?”

“I just said I liked them.”

“You’re a terrible actor, though,” Lucas said. “Even the kid can tell you don’t like them.”

Olivia did not, in fact, particularly like Lucas’s new paintings. They were derivative of Edward Hopper and could only have been more obvious in theme if he’d maybe painted the word LONELINESS across them in red.

“You’re right,” Olivia said to Jonathan. “I don’t particularly like your brother’s paintings.”

Jonathan frowned. “Then why did you say you liked them?”

“Just trying to be polite,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me.” She didn’t understand what Lucas was striving for but she could see where he was going, his face more shadowed than it had been, that awful pallor, and she didn’t see the profit in engaging with him seriously. (This was how she thought in her twenties: I didn’t see the profit. She was ashamed of this later.) Death was already in him. Anyone could see that he was halfway out the door. She remembered later that she’d felt sorry for his brother, who was going to be an only child soon.

Lucas’s funeral was a small, private affair near his family’s house in Greenburgh. She didn’t hear he’d died until at least a month after it happened. It seemed to her later that she might not even have remembered him, just another fallen sparrow in a chaotic and rapidly receding decade, except that forty years later—forty years of no money, of no sales, of embarrassing phone calls where she had to ask her sister, Monica, for rent money, forty years of temp jobs in interchangeable offices and selling jewelry at fairs for her friend Diego’s silver import business, forty years in the desert—there was a retrospective exhibition of downtown artists from the fifties, Olivia among them, and in its wake there was a sudden—and vanishingly brief—resurgence of interest in her work, during which her painting Lucas with Shadows sold at auction for two hundred thousand dollars, which was more money than she’d ever imagined possessing at one time.

“You should invest it,” Monica said. They were sitting in the backyard of Olivia’s new rental house in Monticello on a summer afternoon. Not the famous Monticello in Virginia, the Monticello in upstate New York with the boarded-up main street, the giant Walmart, the army/navy/marine recruitment offices, the stores that sold prosthetic limbs, the racetrack. Olivia had rented a little house on the outskirts. The house had previously been part of a bungalow colony. It was tiny and needed a new roof, but it was a pleasure to leave the city and come here. The backyard felt tropical in the August heat, greenery exploding in the humidity, and that particular afternoon with Monica, she’d been drifting on the edge of sleep. Her blood sugar problems wouldn’t be diagnosed for another year, but she’d noticed the correlation between eating carbohydrates and difficulty staying awake an hour or two later. She’d started doing it on purpose for the pleasure of drowsing on a chaise longue in the late afternoons. On this occasion, though, she took a long draft of strong iced tea, trying to bring herself back with caffeine and ice, because Monica had told her a few years ago that she felt Olivia wasn’t a good listener and that being unlistened-to made Monica feel small. Olivia remembered this only after the bagel, and felt bad for purposefully making herself sleepy.

“How does one go about…how does a person invest?” Money was mysterious to Olivia, but Monica had been a lawyer before she retired and had a much better grasp of the logistics of daily life.

“Well, there are different ways of going about it,” Monica said, “but I recently invested some money with a guy my friend Gary met at his club.”

Olivia wouldn’t have described herself as an overly superstitious person, but she’d always believed in messages from the universe, and she liked to pay attention to patterns and signs. Surely it meant something that the man with whom Monica had invested her savings was Lucas’s brother.

“You won’t remember me,” she said to Jonathan when she called him, and immediately wished she’d said something different. The trouble with that line was that it had worked when she was young because when she was young she was beautiful, also fierce in a calculated manner that she’d believed to be attractive, which had lent a certain irony to the suggestion that anyone could have possibly forgotten her—Oh, you know, just another gorgeous magnetic fresh young talent with gallery representation—but lately she’d found that the line sometimes elicited a tactful silence, and she’d realized that often people did not, in fact, remember her. (Idea for a ghost story: a woman gets old and falls out of time and realizes that she’s become invisible.)

“We met at the gallery with Lucas,” he said softly. “The night it snowed.”

The night it snowed, Olivia thought, and to her amazement, her eyes filled with tears. She hadn’t cried when Lucas died. She’d felt a little sad about it, obviously, she wasn’t a monster, it’s just that she was perpetually distracted and they’d hardly known one another. But all these decades later, the pity of it overcame her: in a version of New York so different that it might as well have been a foreign city, she’d stepped out of the cold night and into the brilliance of the gallery, which memory had transformed from a den of petty jealousies and grubby desperation into a palace of art and light, sheer brilliance in every sense of the word, walls vibrating with color, artists vibrating with genius and youth, where Lucas—so young, so talented, so doomed—and little Jonathan—who must have been, what, twelve?—awaited her arrival.

“You have a remarkable memory,” she said.

“Well, you were memorable. You were the beautiful woman who didn’t like my brother’s paintings.”

“I wish I hadn’t said so. I should’ve been kinder.” And then, on impulse, although she’d only meant to ask for a few minutes of his time over the phone: “Would you like to meet up for lunch sometime? I’ve come into some money, and I could use a little investment advice.”

“I would be delighted,” he said.

They saw one another a few times over the years that followed. She’d stop by his office sometimes, or they’d meet up for lunch. She looked forward to these lunches immensely; he was a warm, interested person, a good conversationalist, and he always picked up the check. He liked talking about Lucas and wanted to hear everything she remembered about his mysterious life in New York. “My brother was a decade older than me,” he said. “I loved him, but when you’re a kid, a decade is like the space between galaxies. I never felt that I knew him very well.”

“Do you know,” she said, “my sister and I are only three years apart, and I’ve never felt I knew her very well either.”

“It’s always possible to fail to know the people closest to us. But I’m fairly confident you knew my brother better than I did.”

“That’s a sad thought,” Olivia said. “I hope he had people in his life who really knew him.”

“Me too. But you knew him well enough to paint him.”

“We posed for each other, it’s true.”

“He painted you, then? I wondered about that.”

“He did.” In languid memory, she sat naked on his yellow sofa in the heat of a July afternoon. “Do you know, I’ve no idea what became of his painting of me?”

He smiled. “Really?”

“Really. He completed his painting of me in a single afternoon and sold it at some group art show a couple months later. It was pretty small, maybe a foot square, so he wouldn’t have sold it for much. I don’t know who bought it.”

“That means you can imagine it anywhere you want,” he said. “Anyone you can think of, it could be hanging in their house.”

“My favorite Hollywood actor,” she said, enjoying this idea.

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, thank you, Jonathan, I’ll enjoy the vision of that painting on display in Angelina Jolie’s living room.”

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I bought your painting of Lucas,” he said.

She had been eating salad; she put the fork down carefully, afraid she might drop it. “You did?”

“Just last month. I tracked down the guy who bought it at auction, and he was willing to sell. It was a little painful at first,” he said, “seeing how unhealthy he looked, those bruises on his arms. But I spent some time with the painting, and I realized that I love it. You captured something about him that accords with my memories. It’s hanging in my Manhattan apartment.”

“I’m glad you have it,” Olivia said. She wouldn’t have imagined that she’d be so moved.

Sometime in 2003, he arrived at lunch without a wedding ring. He’d been married to Suzanne for a long time, decades, but Olivia had never met her. Although, when had she last seen him? Over a year had passed since their last lunch, she realized.

“You’re not wearing a ring,” she said.

“Oh. Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. “I decided it was finally time to take it off.” There was something in his tone, in the way he looked at his ringless hand, and she understood that Suzanne was dead.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Thank you.” A small, pained smile, and he turned his attention to the menu. “Forgive me, but it’s still difficult to talk about. Have you tried the halibut at this place?”

Three months before Jonathan Alkaitis was arrested, he invited her along on a trip on his yacht. This was September of 2008. They were sailing from New York to Charleston. It was her first time meeting Jonathan’s second wife, Vincent, who turned out to be an elegant and friendly person with a talent for mixing cocktails.

“She’s delightful,” Olivia said to Jonathan, when they were alone on deck after dinner. Vincent had gone in to make drinks. The sunset was fading.

“Isn’t she? I’m very happy.”

“Where did you find her?”

“A hotel bar in British Columbia,” he said. “She was the bartender.”

“I suppose that explains why she’s so good at mixed drinks.”

“I think she’d be good at anything she set out to do.”

Olivia wasn’t sure what to say to this, so she only nodded, and for a moment they just listened to the waves and the engines. They were passing alongside a quiet part of North Carolina, only a few scattered lights on the shore.

“What a fortunate thing,” Olivia said finally, “being good at everything.” She herself had only ever been good at one thing, and possibly not even that. Few sales had followed Lucas with Shadows. No one seemed interested in any of the work she’d done after the fifties, and the truth was that she hadn’t painted in a long time. Painting was something that had grabbed hold of her for a while, decades, but now it had let go and she had no further interest in it, or it had no further interest in her. All things end, she’d told herself, there was always going to be a last painting, but if she wasn’t a painter, what was she? It was a troubling question.

“I walked into the bar and saw her,” Alkaitis said, “and I thought, She’s very pretty.”

“She’s gorgeous.”

“Then I found I enjoyed talking with her, and I thought, Why not? You know, if you don’t have to be alone, then maybe you shouldn’t be.”

Olivia, who was almost always alone, couldn’t think of anything to say to this.

“It’s interesting,” he said, “she’s got a very particular kind of gift.”

“What’s that?”

“She sees what a given situation requires, and she adapts herself accordingly.”

“So she’s an actress?” The conversation was beginning to make Olivia a little uneasy. It seemed to her that Jonathan was describing a woman who’d dissolved into his life and become what he wanted. A disappearing act, essentially.

“Not acting, exactly. More like a kind of pragmatism, driven by willpower. She decided to be a certain kind of person, and she achieved it.”

“Interesting,” Olivia said, to be polite, although she couldn’t actually think of anything less interesting than a chameleon. Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person. Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you’re a serious person, she’d long ago decided, or you’re not. A difficulty of her current life was that she was no longer sure which category she fell into. Vincent was returning now with another round of cocktails. The lights of the Carolinas slipped past on the shore.