Vincent was quiet, considering it.
“I was going to buy you a thirty-five-millimetre 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 centre, five minutes of the fascinating, appalling neighbourhood 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-grey 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.
Shadows
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 acknowledgement.
“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 rumours 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.)
The Astronaut
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.
Mirella
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 colours 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 favoured 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 int
roduced 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 favourite 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.
The Investor
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.
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