The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  For years, Sabine had tried to remember that look on her mother’s face, but it had evaded her. She saw plainly, at last, that it was exhaustion and relief, the great burden of human days lifted. Sabine also understood that this was the exact moment her childhood had ended, at the dinner table one school night in October when she was twelve, when her mother patiently ladled out the coq au vin as a woman who was already dead. The dinner wasn’t merely a farewell; it was a liturgy. Sabine had seen it in her eyes forty years ago but hadn’t been able to name it until just now, on the lapping tide of a homeopathic remedy. She remembered wanting to catch her mother’s eyes again, to will her back to the living, but then one of the younger ones chimed in with, I’m very cross with you, maman. You should have told us you were going to kill Samson. We didn’t get to say goodbye.

  * * *

  All this floated about her on the divan, the night her mother walked away from the house after dinner on the pretext of visiting a neighbor, only to drown herself in the river beyond the fields in her best dress. She’d been hiding in plain sight for so long. There was no note, but for months afterward they would find little talismans in their clothes hampers and bookshelves—chestnut leaves pressed into novels, her initials embroidered into a pair of the children’s socks, her wedding ring tied to a ribbon, a breadcrumb trail of tiny goodbyes. Every role began with a wound and a spark, something to fuse the character to the actor’s own shards of memory. What Sabine would carry from that October evening and apply to the widow was the look of teary calm on her mother’s face. There was no guilt or remorse, just a meticulous plot. In her final hours, she wasn’t punishing the living. She was savoring them.

  * * *

  Back in Paris, André Antoine had always insisted that authentic emotion for the actor began with stillness, with what he called expressive motionless. To put herself in the right frame of mind, Sabine spent the next morning paying close attention to everything around her: the lonesome dripping of a faucet, the particular tawdriness of a gray hair in the bathtub drain, the quickening pride of a bird preening on a windowsill. Nothing was too small to elicit her empathy. After a few hours of such attentiveness, she felt herself ready for the next step in her preparations.

  * * *

  As an exercise, she wrote a letter in character to a childhood friend back in France—a woman in Lyon who, over the years, had become accustomed to receiving acerbic, sad, or delusional missives from Phaedra and Ophelia. As the widow, Sabine wrote a short note, then added a postscript at the bottom: I tell no one that it hurts to breathe. When Sabine licked the envelope, the bitter gelatin taste of the gum-flap dropped her headlong into the widow’s mouth and mind. Like Dorothy, the widow in the photoplay had hidden her loveless marriage from the world. Sabine realized the widow must have written countless letters over the years to keep people at bay, lest the loveless secret of her household be widely known. She feared pity more than anything else. Sabine rewrote the letter, this time in a brighter tone but with a subtext of inevitability. The men have finished pruning the maze. The days are growing longer. Everything is as it should be.

  * * *

  Next came the tiny auditions of action. It might be something as simple as washing her hands, or as complex as saying her prayers, but she attempted to trap the widow’s atmosphere, the little weather front she carried around with her as she moved through the world. How does she wake (quickly), eat (voraciously), bathe (slowly, with very hot water), sing (high and trailing), spread jam on a piece of toast (thickly, with too much butter underneath)? The trick, if there was one, was to widen back so she could see all the carriages on the train at the same time.

  * * *

  Finally, she worked on her physical appearance, trying on the costumes and experimenting with makeup. Her nails were cut short, almost down to the cuticle, to prevent the widow from drawing blood when she scratched. She dressed in the black gown, applied some lavender powder to her neck and face, spread some kohl under her eyes, smeared some peppermint oil onto her hands to redden and irritate them, and slipped her gloves into place. Barefoot, her hair pulled up into a chignon, she looked into the mirror in her bedroom. The woman looking back was shockingly pale, hauntingly beautiful, and wholly unrecognizable.

  * * *

  The first night of filming, the production stage shone from the brow of the hill above the Palisades like an illuminated glasshouse. Inside the brightly lit space, Claude watched Sabine emerge from her dressing room through a piece of blue cellophane. He’d been experimenting with various filters for the camera and this one softened her otherworldly menace. He lowered the cellophane and examined her in the brunt of a medical carbon lamp—the contrast of black on powdered white, her hair up off her bare shoulders and the plunge of her neckline, a sapphire winking between her breasts like some Asiatic third eye, a gateway to enlightenment or ruin, depending on who was gazing into it, he thought, as she drifted closer in a cloud of peppermint oil. She walked by, eyes averted, summoning the role. He’d hoped that the rankling desire might dissipate as the film preparations began, as they edged closer to her cinematic death, but in fact it was unrelenting—a malaise that warped his thoughts and left him light-headed.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Pavel was proving a nuisance on the set. In his self-appointed role as acting coach and mentor, he’d posted dozens of Be Natural! signs on the stage walls, out of frame, and in the actors’ dressing rooms. And he had insisted on being part of blocking scenes. When Claude followed Sabine to block out the first scene with Lester Summers, Pavel fell in behind him in his embroidered waistcoat and twin fob watches, peeling an orange. He stood by listening, exploding citrus crescents inside his mouth, while Claude explained the logistics of the widow encountering the stranded traveler on her doorstep in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  Pavel walked over and offered both actors a piece of orange. As they chewed, he spoke to them in low, confiding tones.

  —When Rosalind sees Harold Spruce arrive at the hotel for the first time, perhaps you are thinking, Sabine, it is merely a suggestion, about a time when you stole something as an enfant terrible in Burgundy. What could it be? No, no, don’t tell me, just think on it. Gently, always from within. There is never an excuse for a big monkey face. Now, Mr. Summers, you want to consume her, eat her up like a piece of pound cake. Perhaps you are thinking of a great meal you have eaten, or of a woman you have devoured.

  Lester Summers was short and thin and Sabine wondered whether he was capable of devouring a short stack of pancakes let alone a woman. Lester shrugged, his makeup clotting in the heat and glare.

  —Lust is not a difficult thing to show on a man’s face, Lester said. Now, if you don’t mind, let’s just run it.

  * * *

  Lester sighed and looked over at Chip Spalding, who was standing by with the animal trainer and the caged tiger. There was going to be a sequence with the animal and they’d been preparing for hours. After a week practicing stunt handoffs and maneuvers together, they had developed enough of a rapport that Chip felt comfortable offering up his studied impression of Pavel for Lester—shoulders up, chest and belly out, pacing, one hand stroking his chin while squinting into the middle distances. Lester and the lighting crew broke into laughter. Pavel still had his back turned but Sabine looked over just in time to see the final flourishes of the impression. Sabine blew Chip a stagey kiss and wagged her finger at him and then everyone was laughing at him, his eyes down, hands dropped to his sides, blushing in the medical lamplight.

  * * *

  Claude reasserted himself between the actors with his clipboard. Nash Sully leafed through the photoplay, dressed in a pair of breeches; his job was to call out underlined stage directions, read title cards on set, and make last-minute changes to the script before the camera rolled. The dialogue cards would be added during editing. Pavel moved to the periphery with his half-eaten orange, sensing but not fully understanding his ridicule.

&
nbsp; —Remember, Claude said, the main camera swings down in a continuous shot from the level of the attic, after the tiger has trekked through the hotel. So, we will see Rosalind over Harold’s shoulder. Let’s try it with Sabine opening the door. Lighting crew, let’s hot it up a notch. If we get it right, then we’ll run the strip.

  * * *

  Sabine lifted the hem of her gown and took her mark behind the hotel’s front door. She could see her reflection in the narrow glass panel set into the entranceway. She’d instructed the hair-and-makeup girl to make her face shockingly pale and luminous. I want to look fantomatique and ravissant, understand, an oracle of the night, she’d told the girl. And she’d argued with Claude and the costume designer about the cut of her dress. When they refused to take the neckline lower, she brought them a sketch of Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII of France, standing in a courtly scene with her breasts exposed above a square neckline. Regard, Sabine had said, that this saintly buxom depiction is from the fifteenth century. And Charles the First of England also sent his wife around with her nichons exposed and puckered. Both Charleses understood the power of a woman’s buste, that it is part of her empire. Now, just a few more inches of hillside, if you please. They conceded, and now, looking into the glass panel, she suspected she was too old for the unscrolled parchment of her upper breasts to appear flattering. Merde, she thought, I want to vanish.

  * * *

  The arc lights came up hot against her face, buzzing and sulfuric. She looked at Lester through the glass panel—dressed in a dinner jacket that looked as if it had been dragged through mud and brambles, his bow tie unraveled. The suggestion was that he’d clambered his way onto the estate, through the woods toward the hotel, after his motorcar had broken down on the highway. Sabine couldn’t put her finger on why she disliked Lester Summers. He was too beautiful for a man, that was one thing, with delicate hands and a black pencil mustache the same thickness as his eyebrows. Then there was the matter of his height, a stature that brought to mind quips about Shetland ponies and stepladders. A clause of his contract was rumored to govern the distance of the camera so that he would never appear standing at full height beside another actor.

  * * *

  There was a long kiss coming up later that night—twenty seconds, right before the attic bedroom seduction scene (cutaway to moonlit, diaphanous curtains)—and she was already planning her strategy. She would accept his amorous intentions as an offering from the edge of her bed (she’d have to sit to avoid revealing his height), but mentally, she would think of the great kisses of her lifetime, of Louis Pasteur’s nephew with his supple mouth and his impeccable breath, of her ex-husband, a methodical, lingual kisser, even of Claude Ballard, who tasted like a loaf of bread and kissed as if his life depended on it. At least 50 percent of a kiss was aromatic and she worried that Lester would smell like sour cherries and talcum powder.

  —Quiet on the set, please! Claude yelled. Places, everybody! Actors, when you’re ready.

  Sabine closed her eyes and the word ravenous dropped into her mind.

  —The doorbell rings … a hotel guest in the middle of the night! called Nash Sully.

  Sabine opened the door and did her best not to squint into the carbonized moonlight. Even though the camera was going to look over Lester’s shoulder at her, his face was alive with emotion. He let his eyes come up to her face slowly, taking her in by degrees, from the black hem of her dress to the hollow expression floating behind her eyes. Coming out of a mental fog, he said:

  —I’ve broken down and somehow found my way here. Do you have a room for the night?

  —The tiger appears in the doorway, from behind the widow’s dress, Nash Sully called.

  The tiger was, in fact, licking herself docilely in a cage over in the corner with Chip and the animal trainer. But Lester gave such a look of fright that Sabine was convinced for a moment that she could feel the animal bristling against her gown.

  —We have a room. Would you like to come in?

  She brought one hand up to her sapphire necklace to deliver her line, then she left her hand covering part of her chest, conscious, she now realized, of making contact with her own body. Rosalind may have been burning brightly but she was also blanching away, vanishing before everyone’s eyes. The widow stood aside and the traveler came through the door.

  —Perfect, actors, Claude said. Take a few minutes while we ready the camera.

  * * *

  Sabine and Lester had their hair and makeup checked and then they went outside to cool off. Lester lit a cigarette and blew smoke extravagantly up at the starlight.

  —Was that all right? he asked, craning skyward.

  Was it his studied self-doubt that annoyed her so?

  —Yes, wonderful.

  She could feel the night air against her exposed shoulders. Because Lester was due on another film later that summer, they were shooting all his courtship, conquest, and peril scenes first, and that was another source of irritation. Like the child actors—who weren’t due for another six weeks—the film was dovetailing around his schedule. She held her hand out for his cigarette and he gladly handed it over. She took a long, deep pull and exhaled slowly. From the look on his face she could tell that he thought this was another stage of intimacy, the old dame of the continental theater sharing a smoke with the younger star, the breaking of bread, so to speak, but she was trying to taste the residue of his mouth against the cigarette paper, in anticipation of the upcoming kiss. Slightly fermented, she decided. Apple cider left too long on a sunny porch. They finished the cigarette in silence, handing it back and forth, the lights of Manhattan white and phosphorous across the river. Shall we go in? she said at last.

  * * *

  It came time to release the tiger and let it saunter through the cutaway hotel. The suspended camera would swoon—that was Nash Sully’s word for it in the photoplay—from the widow in the attic, track the descending tiger, and finally arrive over Harold’s shoulder on the doorstep, all in a single seamless, floating shot. In order to film it, the camera and director were positioned on a platform that could be raised or lowered by a series of pulleys and weights, two crewmembers giving it ballast at the other end of a fulcrum.

  * * *

  As Sabine climbed up to the attic to take her position, she found herself imagining Dorothy’s house in Albany—the bed where she slept with her railway tycoon husband, his false teeth faintly effervescing in a nearby glass of water. The clocks ticking, the paintings gassing off their antique varnish, the dining room where they’d eaten so many cheerless meals and put on a brave front for the children. Stories of the railroad, perhaps, or seashore escapades in Maine, anything to keep the loveless hound from crossing the threshold and ripping out their throats. Many people lived a lie, Sabine thought, but not many people have died from it. Consumptives are the world’s great liars, she decided, and it burns them alive.

  * * *

  After they’d rehearsed the descent a few times—Chip standing in for the tiger—Claude told everyone to be quiet on the set and the camera began to roll. Lester Summers stood below at his mark on the imitation stone steps while Sabine brushed her hair out in front of the full-length mirror in the attic. The animal trainer—in a flannel shirt, a revolver holstered at his side—unleashed and unmuzzled the Siberian tiger at the top of the stairs. Unseen by the camera, the trainer tried to coax the tiger down the stairs with a piece of sirloin attached to a long length of rope. Claude, craning into the viewfinder from the raised platform, told the two crewmembers holding the counterweight to lower him a few feet. From his vantage point, he saw the tiger’s enormous head in profile, protruding from around the edge of a wall.

  —Camera gliding right, called Claude. Now looking for the tiger on the stairs …

  * * *

  The trainer began to call out the tiger’s name—Bella, come, Bella—but she wouldn’t budge. Claude decided to keep the camera rolling while the animal deliberated.

  —Actors, keep
acting, camera still rolling. Do we need a bigger piece of meat? A carcass, perhaps?

  The animal trainer was clearly embarrassed. He poked his head around the corner of the wall and shielded his eyes against the glare of the arc lamps.

  —We’ve practiced it a dozen times. She’ll come ’round. Sorry, Mr. Ballard.

  He muttered a few things to himself and disappeared behind the wall again.

  * * *

  A moment later there came a torrential animal roar, followed by a man’s full-throated scream. Sabine, still standing at the mirror, felt something electrical pass through her scalp and into the roots of her hair. She was unable to turn away from the scene captured in the full-length mirror—the animal trainer with the steak in his hand, only the limp hand was now attached to a wrist that happened to be secured inside the tiger’s serrated mouth. A delicate strand of the animal’s saliva threaded along its blackened gum line. Even she was surprised that she didn’t scream or faint. She just kept looking into the mirror, where the tiger looked nonchalantly at a distant spot on the wall and the trainer’s eyes met Sabine’s apologetically.