Read Online The Glass Hotel: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel - Free Book Online Page B

that young, Vincent wanted to tell her, because at twenty-four she didn’t feel young at all, but Claire was possibly dangerous and Vincent hoped for peace, so she answered in the mildest tone possible.
    “My parents named me after a poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
    Claire’s gaze flickered to the ring on Vincent’s finger. “Well,” she said, “we can’t choose our parents, I suppose. What kind of work do they do?”
    “My parents?”
    “Yes.”
    “They’re dead.”
    Claire’s face softened a little. “I’m sorry to hear that.” They stood staring at one another for a beat or two, then Vincent reached for the bathrobe that she’d left on a deck chair, and Claire said, sounding more resigned than angry now, “Did you know you’re five years younger than me?”
    “We can’t choose our ages either,” Vincent said.
    “Ha.” (Not a laugh, just a spoken word: ha. ) “Well, we’re all adults here. Just so you know, I find this situation absurd, but there’s no reason we can’t be cordial with one another.” She turned away and walked back into the house.
    Ghosts
    Vincent’s mother had read a lot of poetry, having formerly been a poet herself. When Edna St. Vincent Millay was nineteen years old, in 1912, she began writing a poem called “Renascence” that Vincent must have read a thousand times in childhood and adolescence. Millay wrote the poem for a competition. The poem didn’t win, but it nonetheless carried an electric charge that transported her from the drudgery of New England poverty to Vassar College, from there into the kind of bohemia that she’d dreamed of all her life: a different kind of poverty, the Greenwich Village–variety, poverty but with late-night poetry readings and dashing friends.
    “The point is she raised herself into a new life by sheer force of will,” Vincent’s mother had said, and Vincent wondered even at the time—she would have been about eleven—what that statement might suggest about how happy Vincent’s mother was about the way her own life had gone, this woman who’d imagined writing poetry in the wilderness but somehow found herself sunk in the mundane difficulties of raising a child and running a household in the wilderness instead. There’s the idea of wilderness, and then there’s the unglamorous 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