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.”
Poolside
“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