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.
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.
“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