The Glass Hotel: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel Page A

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?
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    —
    “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