The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  As he looked around the dimly lit space now, he realized the peepshow was officially dead, the parlor a museum. A slug of lead dropped into his stomach when he tried to guess how many months they could remain in business. Even if he could convince his mother to buy a peepshow reel like one of the infamous Leonard-Cushing fight, confined to the viewfinder it was merely a fitful breath before drowning. He knew his mother’s moods and dispositions like his own, the way she’d give her sons Hood’s Sarsaparilla to fortify their blood, make them scrub twice a week with an ammonia-soaked sponge as a safeguard against disease and destitution. Rationing would ensue and roast beef would become a thing of the past because here it was, the other bullet in the revolver. The French brothers and their invention had finished what Chester’s killer had begun—the complete annihilation of the Bender clan. But what if, Hal wondered aloud, he could get his hands on a cinématographe?

  * * *

  When he got into the apartment above the parlor, there was a plate of food on the kitchen table covered with a saucepan lid. Beside it was a note in Flossy’s signature deadpan: Trust the animal spectacle didn’t ruin your appetite. Did she know what he’d witnessed? Then he remembered that he’d told her and his younger brothers that he was meeting an old classmate to go see the menagerie in Central Park. He took off his shoes and ate his dinner in the silence of the kitchen, in the light of a sewing lamp. Up on the wall was a daguerreotype of his father—bearded, blithe, looking out from the puzzle of the afterlife. Hal looked up at his father’s silvered double and said, You should have seen the crowd.

  * * *

  When Sabine woke from her nap, just after midnight, it was to the smell of oranges and lilies. Even with her silk blindfold in place, she could tell the penthouse was choking with flowers and baskets of fruit from well-wishers. She lifted the blindfold, looked at the clock, blinked up at the ceiling. That night’s performance of Hamlet and her birthday, now technically elapsed, came back to her slowly. As a number, 40 seemed unsightly and implausible. She’d thought it might look stately and dignified when she imagined it presiding over her life, but now she saw that the 4 was a wiry man with his arm in a sling, and that the 0 was her own astonished mouth. She sat up in the lamplight and read three of the letters that had been brought in with the assorted packages, fruit baskets, and flowers.

  Dear Sabine Montrose,

  I am collecting the autographs of luminaries in various fields and you will confer a personal favor by enclosing me yours in duplicate, on the accompanying cards, which I shall ever appreciate with feelings of gratitude.

  Yours,

  Muriel Kingsley

  20 High Street, Boston

  Miss:

  I have written a play (enclosed) and can’t get it performed anywhere. What do you suppose is the cause of my failure? The role of the Countess was written with your visage in mind.

  Respectfully,

  Simon Portney

  Sabine Montrose,

  Permit a humble admirer of your genius to express the following lines on the occasion of your Fortieth Birthday.

  Sabine, the years are going

  And your hair is silvery growing;

  Age is the flower of Youth

  Full-blown

  Yielding pain from anguish sown.

  Hurry on through mists of tears

  Toward the spot your laughter clears

  Find amid the young a hiding from that Foe, who day or dark,

  Ever seeks a shining.

  H. C. Cooper

  * * *

  She heard her maid’s insistent knuckles rapping on the door, called out Je dors!, but Helena Favre came in anyway. She stepped briskly across the room and handed Sabine a warm facecloth. She was in her fifties and childless, a pragmatist from Burgundy who sent postcards to her invalid mother from every town and country they visited. Sabine set the letters aside, took the cloth, and pressed it to her face.

  —Pavel says the projectionist is expected any minute.

  Sabine put on her robe and went out into the hotel suite’s living room—another little province of tropical flowers and fruit and plush furniture. Her feet still hurt and the floral intensity of the room made her light-headed. Pavel had changed out of his embroidered waistcoat and now sat in a kaftan and deerskin moccasins, a steaming cup of tea in one hand and Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine open beside him on the velvet sofa. Although Pavel was a Russian émigré who’d spent most of his life in London and Paris, he could, in certain clothes and aspects, put Sabine in mind of a bearded hermit flushed onto the streets of St. Petersburg or Istanbul.

  * * *

  But that relentless flint-gray regard had not been honed in solitude but during dinnertime debate and philosophical argument. It was the cold unwavering scrutiny of a man who seldom apologized and had never been in love. And his inability to lie was another trait that never failed to surprise her. In response to a simple question like How was my performance tonight? Pavel’s answer was uncompromising, flat-toned, a little distracted, as if he’d just asked someone to hand him a bowl of almonds—You were pinched in the throat and overblown in your gestures. Forget the Comédie-Française, with its wooden mechanics and ostrich-feather hats. We are aiming at something truthful beyond all that. Then he would look about the room, or return to his book, not noticing the utter devastation roiling through Sabine’s chest and face.

  * * *

  Helena busied herself organizing the twenty-six trunks that had come across the Atlantic on the steamer, each one labeled in French—chapeaux, robes, bijoux. Pavel drew his legs under his kaftan, sipped his tea.

  —Did the little sleep replenish you?

  Sabine’s English wasn’t perfect either, but she wished he could retain the word nap. In the middle of his eloquent monologues she often came upon a blunder, a little rodent in his garden of criticism.

  —I slept wonderfully. When is the Frenchman who killed my Hamlet arriving?

  —Any minute.

  Pavel looked around the room, blew across the rim of his cup, studied the arabesque of the carpet and the drapes.

  —How terrible was it tonight? Sabine asked.

  Pavel leaned his head to one side, squinted as if listening to difficult, exotic music.

  —I invent nothing. You are the one slaying the demons out there in front of humanity every night. Who am I to ever judge what you do?

  —It hasn’t stopped you in the past.

  —I study people’s minds and hearts, the little stories of daily life. I’m no expert.

  —Get on with it. And please take account of the insanity that came from the vaudeville house next door.

  —Disruptions can be wrecking balls, or they can be mental mosquitoes. But we are concerned with the smoke of human emotion wafting up from those boards without a single lie. That is the criteria.

  He examined the fingernails on one hand while Sabine looked out the windows toward Fifth Avenue. Her fortieth birthday had vanished and it occurred to her that one day she would be an old woman living alone in Brittany, scalding and nagging herself in a cottage by the sea. She saw it as plainly as her own hands, the long white days of solitude.

  —And on this front, how did I fare?

  —Until the magnificent outburst of you jumping into Ophelia’s burial pit, it was a series of formulas and chess moves by a beautiful expert.

  She folded her arms, felt her earlobes flush.

  —Has a woman ever consented to sleep with you? It’s impossible to imagine a seduction with you in the starring role.

  Pavel smiled into his teacup.

  —As it happens, I’m not much interested in that variety of flesh. Carnality zaps a man’s vital energies. Oh, but your graveyard scene, when you climbed over the railing of the orchestra pit, you should have seen the look on the faces of Gramercy Park matrons! It made me want to bring back Aristotle from the dead. It made me want to write sonnets. So honest and exhilarating, your own anger and grief tearing at
your throat. It was Hamlet beating at the walls of his own paralysis. I have the chicken skin just thinking of it.

  —Goose bumps.

  —All languages are bastards. I let my speech fornicate with whatever happens by. How did you feel out there?

  She ran a hand along the plush of her chair, closed her eyes, steadied her voice. For a moment, she could feel Shakespeare’s iambs throbbing in her throat like five lingering heartbeats.

  —Full of rage and anguish. As if my life had ended.

  —The secret, said Pavel, was forgetting.

  She opened her eyes, looked at him.

  —Your riddles have always bored me.

  —You forgot to enunciate and project. You forgot that hundreds of people had paid to see you pretending to be a grief-stricken prince. You forgot that you are famous, entitled, spoiled, divorced, and middle-aged. You also forgot that you’re a woman. It was a marvelous thing to behold.

  * * *

  Helena announced that the projectionist was waiting out in the hallway. Sabine told her to let him in, and through the open doorway she glimpsed her disruptor and saboteur, top hat in hand, standing out there with a room service cart loaded with equipment. Helena showed him in and he wheeled in a tripod, a metal carrycase, an electric lamphouse, a big wooden box with a fixed lens, and a hand crank. He was tall, skinny, bespectacled. He moved lightly and precisely on his feet. Hands by his side, he nodded into a deferential bow.

  —Claude Ballard, at your service, madame.

  —And what service is that? Ruining my tragedy?

  Claude looked down at his hat, then at his shoes.

  —My apologies. Monsieur Rachenko told me what happened. I can speak with the booking agent and perhaps secure a different time slot. I wasn’t quite expecting the uproar.

  —Five of them, if I’m not mistaken, said Sabine. Cinq tumultes!

  —Thank you for coming, said Pavel, getting up from the couch.

  * * *

  The two men shook hands and exchanged pleasantries in French. Sabine listened and made a perimeter check around Claude Ballard’s accent and upbringing. He said he was from a small town outside of Belfort, that his mother was Austrian and his father was French. He had a handsome, patrician face behind those wire-rimmed eyeglasses, blue eyes that were bright and quick. In the debit column was a pair of frayed shoelaces on his brandy-colored brogues and hands that were far too big for his wrists. She wondered why God had placed a potato farmer’s hands onto the body of a figure skater. She enjoyed watching him as he made furtive glances at Pavel’s kaftan and the suety yard of leg above his moccasins.

  —Alsace, it seems to me, is not quite German and not fully French, said Sabine. Perhaps you should all form your own country up there and leave the rest of us alone.

  —I am happy to report that Belfort has never been annexed by the Germans.

  —That’s something, I suppose.

  —And I’ve lived in Paris since the age of eighteen. I moved to the city to become a man of science.

  —And what science is that? Pavel asked.

  —Motion of the human figure, sir. I worked as a hospital photographer at La Salpêtrière before joining the Lumière brothers. I’ll be taking my exhibition to Australia next, if you can believe it. Lumière concession agents are going out to the ends of the earth. Russia, Egypt, Mexico, Japan …

  —I played Camille and Tosca in Australia some years back, before all the trouble with the unions and the radicals, said Sabine. Wonderful people … though none of them spoke even a smidgeon of French … We had to give them booklets in translation and keep the house lights up so they could follow along.

  —Isn’t there some kind of economic trouble down there in the colonies? asked Pavel. A depression, a drought?

  —That might be, said Claude. But I’m told that Sydney already has two Edison kinetoscope parlors that sell more tickets than all of London.

  —So you’re also being sent there to slay the competition, said Pavel.

  —I suppose so.

  * * *

  While Pavel and Claude talked, Sabine found herself remembering her Sydney lover, Adrien Loir, nephew to Louis Pasteur. He’d been sent to solve the country’s rabbit plague and holed up with his test tubes and microscopes on an island in Sydney Harbour, in a little cottage where Sabine spent her nights after her theater performances. Even the words chicken cholera could sound appealing when they left Adrien Loir’s sensual mouth. That epic mustache camouflaged the fullest lips and the most beautiful teeth she’d ever seen on a man. Sabine interrupted Pavel’s monologue about the importance of a workingman seeing his own life and emotions on the stage.

  —Now that you’ve come all this way, Monsieur Ballard, perhaps you’ll show us?

  —Of course. May I borrow a bedsheet as a makeshift screen?

  * * *

  Sabine disliked the inconsistency of hotel bed linens, so she always traveled with her own. She asked Helena to dig through one of the trunks. Claude took the white sheet, unfolded it, and hung it between two picture frames on the wall. Sabine thought she noticed him leaning in slightly, as if to smell the cotton. Helena liked to roll up sprigs of dried lavender in the steamer trunks so that Sabine’s bedding and clothes smelled like the fields of Provence. Claude set up his cart in the middle of the room, behind the divan where Sabine and Pavel now sat. He illuminated the lamphouse and a chemical whiff sharpened the air. He opened the front of the wooden box, cabling the light through an aperture.

  —This is one of the most popular Lumière views, with scenes from Paris.

  * * *

  In a few moments they were watching schoolchildren setting toy boats afloat on a pond and picnickers reading novels in the sun. Helena came and stood beside the divan, cooing with homesick delight. The sky was pewter, the shadows inky and amorphous. The quality of the shimmering light reminded Sabine of waking as a child, of coming back dreamily to a world hemorrhaging daylight. In her attic bedroom she had learned the art of sleeping away an afternoon and waking at dusk, a habit that infuriated her father. When the sun got low enough, the twilight spangled shapes from the garden up against her ceiling—linden branches and slantwise fence palings shifting with each passing second. She recognized the same suspension on the bedsheet—the teeming world shining and magnified by some trick of light. She thought: Twilight makes everything fathomless.

  —What else do you have? asked Pavel.

  —I have some scenes from the Lumière factory and Auguste having breakfast with his wife and baby.

  —Even with the dazzling presentation, there’s a limit to what can be made interesting, said Pavel. You and the Lumières need to be thinking about the real power of this invention.

  —I would agree with you, said Claude. How about a falling cat?

  —Oh, I must see that! said Helena, clapping.

  * * *

  Pavel and Sabine indulged the maid and let Claude thread the plummeting feline into the wooden box. They watched it three times, once at slow speed, while Claude gave an impromptu lecture on the mechanics of the cinématographe, about how it doubled as a camera and a projector. He opened up the front of the box and showed them the rotating disk that parsed and shuttered the outbound images. When he threaded and projected the omnibus reel, only Helena gave a start.

  —That was what made all those people scream through the wall? asked Sabine.

  —You have to remember it was in the dark on a big screen, said Claude.

  Sabine yawned, feeling a little bored, looked at the clock and realized she was two hours into her forty-first year and no one had sung to her or raised a toast. She asked Helena to have some champagne on ice sent up.

  * * *

  When the champagne arrived, they sang Bon anniversaire, insisted that the whole year Sabine be gentle and light, which was an impossibility, she told them. Then they toasted various portions of her life and career. There was the final escape from the Burgundy countryside, her birth into the theater, the ex-h
usband who tried to steal her away from the stage on a Mediterranean island. Sabine braided her memories in French and English. Gently drunk, Claude told stories about foraging for mushrooms and truffles in the northern woods, about how his father had filled every book and bible in their house with pressed flowers. Sabine watched him over her champagne flute. He was twenty, perhaps, and not yet fully formed. Earnest, a touch morose, something devout in his gaze, either faith or conviction. She’d always had a leaning toward young men of science, she realized, because she wanted to free them from that pious, burdened look in their eyes.

  * * *

  Claude told them about his arrival in Paris, about the hospital where he photographed the deranged and the hobbled in the name of physiology. Pavel’s accent took a Slavic turn when he drank champagne, and Sabine listened to his metaphors coarsen. The mind is a bear, he said, and cannot be tamed by documenting an old woman’s hysterical gait with photographs. No, the mind winters and sleeps in the insane, but emerges from the cave famished and ready for spring … He raised a glass to the bear minds of the world. Sabine overheard Helena, who was unpacking trunks on the periphery of the room, murmur to herself, Surprise, the Russian charlatan is drunk again. The maid had been with her for twenty years, since Sabine’s first successes in the theater, and she regarded Pavel as a stray mutt that Sabine had let in off the street. Only the mongrel had been given the place of honor by the hearth. Sabine took in the room while the conversation moved on without her. Steamer trunks and flowers and bottles of Brut Réserve—these were the props of her carefully managed life.