The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

Jonathan Alkaitis

From The Glass Hotel!!

He was thinking of the last time he’d seen Anna. He’d been playing a concert behind the school with his high school jazz quartet, he remembered. She’d thrown a paper airplane at him through the dark.

Is this the Lola Quartet?

you were in Jazz Orchestra it was possible to earn extra credits by forming your own ensemble under the supervision of the faculty, so four of them had established an outfit they’d called the Lola Quartet after a German film they’d all liked with Lola in the title.

No way! Run Lola Run?!

Daniel arrived at his gate at the last possible moment and as the plane rose out of Salt Lake City he stared down at Utah’s sci-fi landscape, abandoned planet. Unearthly forms of brown and white, high plateaus and long ridges with violet shadows lengthening alongside.

Station Eleven!

But now he woke in the mornings in a soundproofed house as closed as a space station, cool air humming through a vent in the wall.

I love how, now on my third Emily book, I keep feeling that they’re all set in the same, or just slightly different parallel universes... same feelings, same imagery, same beautiful loneliness...

Each one labelled with the address of a house slipping rapidly from its owner’s hands.

Whatsisname the shipping guy from both Station Eleven and Glass Hotel!

“These people don’t always leave forwarding addresses,” Eilo said. “They used to, before the economy tanked, but sometimes now they just disappear.”

In between worlds...

Liam Deval,”

“Lyin’ devil?” “L’ I am devil?”

He’d never wanted to do anything but music and now he didn’t even want to do that.

Fuck yes college music bullshit.

“I’ve been in Utah,” Anna said. “Utah? Why Utah?” “Long story,” Anna said, in a tone that made it clear she didn’t want to tell it.

Well, this is a novel, right? a long story?

“What’s this music we’re listening to?” Morelli asked. “They’re called Baltica,” Anna said. “I think they’re from Canada.” The CD played on the stereo on top of the fridge, quietly so it wouldn’t wake Chloe. Baltica’s sound made her think of snow. A high clear beat with electronic strings in the background sometimes and gentle static, repetitive echoing lyrics if there were any lyrics at all, I always come to you, come to you, come to you in the background while she beat eggs in a bowl with a fork.

Omg, from Glass Hotel!! I always come to you, come to you...

“It sounds like a nice idea,” Anna said. “I used to spend a lot of time with a jazz quartet in high school.” “Did you play?” “No,” she said. “My friends and my sister did.” Were they her friends? She’d slept with two of them and managed to betray both, put the third in danger by showing up at his dorm room, left the state without telling her sister. The pan blurred before her eyes. She blinked hard and flipped the omelette.

Yes she did.

but mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives.

That shipping dude in Glass Hotel again.

“Why don’t we just go to your uncle’s place?” “Because he lives in a small apartment and my friend’s got an entire house to himself.” “What’s your friend’s name?” she asked on the way up the driveway. Daniel was walking ahead of her with the bags. “Paul,” he said. “We worked together when I was here last summer.”

Oh. Fuck.

Your parents know where you are?” “I doubt they’ve noticed I left,” Anna said. “I have parents like that.” “It’s a big club.”

It sure is in this book... Anna, Gavin, Paul...

“Well, we knew Gloria was getting foreclosed—” “But what kind of a real estate agent takes pictures of someone else’s child? Asks her questions? They’ve found us, Sasha, they’ve found us—” “No one’s found us,” Sasha said. “There’s no they.” She was looking at Daniel now. “There’s just a him. One person. Who probably hasn’t left Utah.” Daniel was expressionless. “Who probably has no idea where you are and probably stopped looking years ago. Everything will be fine. Listen, Daniel’s here.” Anna made an indecipherable noise. “Let me talk to him about this.” “What the hell can he do?” Anna asked. “All he’s ever done is—” “He’s a cop,” Sasha said. “Snap out of it. I’ll call you back.” She disconnected and watched the call fade from her cellphone screen. “A stranger showed up and took a picture of Chloe,” she said. Saying the words aloud made the story real, and she began to be afraid. “It might be nothing,” Daniel said, when she told him the story about the real estate agent. “A misunderstanding.”

I don’t get this: for this whole book nobody has communicated to anybody else for shit. And now all of a sudden Anna, Sasha and Daniel are talking about everything? Why aren’t they including Gavin?

“Don’t stop,” Gavin said. So Jack continued, eased back into another long loop of melody. George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Music for a place where it was almost always summer. He knew an arrangement that kept the song looping around and around and he improvised inside it, leaving the melody and wandering away and then coming back to the tune again, and the living is easy, long and slow and meandering, soft and low under the orange tree. Jack always imagined a singer’s voice when he played this song, a woman soothing a child to sleep on a porch in the southern lands that lay north of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, a summer afternoon with the air heavy around them, a breeze through tall grass. He stopped all at once because the daydream and backyard had converged and he was momentarily disoriented, caught between the two. There was a soft wind moving through the grass around him, and the lawn hadn’t been mowed in so long that the grass rippled. Gavin was watching him with that look he always had since he’d come back from New York. Anxious, something desperate about the eyes. “That was beautiful,” Gavin said.

Again, how Mandel flits forth and back between reality and imagination...

The singing doesn’t start till halfway through, and then when it gets to that part about rising up singing, it’s like—” Like a thunderstorm, like disintegration, like a soul rising up, but Jack felt stupid saying these things aloud.

So sad that people feel this way about expressing how music moves them...

“Why would you want to talk to Anna? When has Anna ever done anything good?” Jack wasn’t sure if he’d spoken aloud.

Wow, now that he's said it, that's a great question! I mean, I guess she's a good mother, but... She's had a tough life. But even so, she's made a lot of bad mistakes.

“I’m going to play again,” Jack said. Playing, he had realized, was something that would preclude talking. He wanted to fall back into music and rest for a while. He started playing “Summertime” at half-speed, almost a dirge, slow light all around him, and when he looked up some time later Gavin was gone. He drifted alone in his lawn chair on the grass.

Jack's got the music...

When he allowed his thoughts to wander he imagined an alternative version of events:

Another Mandel stand-by: alternate histories.

“Did something happen to you?” “I took care of something,” Deval said. “I solved a problem.”

Exactly what Paul told Anna after he killed that guy.

and if you’re in a position to help someone, shouldn’t you?

Exactly what Daniel said about Anna!

“Someone came to my mother’s house and took a picture of the kid.” Deval leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and slowly lowered his face into his hands. “Your mother? Gloria Jones, that woman she was staying with a few months back?” “Gloria. Yes.” “A picture. That’s what started this whole thing?” He felt ill. The picture of Chloe was stuck to his fridge with a magnet.

Pieces are starting to come together.

“I owed her,” Deval said. “I lived off her money for years. She funded the first album I recorded with Morelli.”

That's right, a good thing.

address myself to the police officer watching me from behind a high blue countertop, I say the words that change everything: I have information about a murder. I make statements, I name names. I do the technically correct thing, the right thing, the thing a law-abiding citizen does in the presence of a crime.

Goddammit, Gavin! Fucking idiot!

His lips moving with the words of a letter that he would transcribe some days later in Chicago, a letter that he would write but never send: I wanted to find you, dear Chloe, I wanted to help, but in the end the best I could do for you was to leave you in peace. I love you. I’ll never know you. I’ll always wonder who you are.

Oh thank god, he did the right thing.