The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  —Tout va bien? he asked.

  —What an odd question.

  —Is it?

  —Nothing is all right.

  He leaned against the railing, looked at the runnels of hazy light above the city.

  —When I see you in the viewfinder, you’re a different person now.

  —How so?

  —You’ve become so still. It’s like you’re evaporating before our eyes.

  —Like absinthe on a tongue?

  He laughed.

  —Is it contrived?

  —No, it’s very good for the role, but I barely recognize you.

  Pavel arrived with Sabine’s cocktail and handed it to her. Chip Spalding came over with a drink for Claude.

  —Here’s to the comet, said Chip, raising his glass of ginger ale.

  Chip never drank, on account of his father’s whiskeyed ruin. They all raised their glasses. Sabine took a sip of her absinthe cocktail and turned back to Claude.

  —I think Rimbaud was wrong. It’s more like drinking a tiny cloud.

  * * *

  At that moment a bright flash came from the other side of the deck, and for an instant Sabine thought it was the comet. But Hal Bender had organized a photographer to take some early publicity shots—the cast relaxing on a yacht moored in the Hudson—that he would circulate for the picture’s release. Hal and Sabine, standoffish with each other since their confrontation in the stone cottage, looked at each other across the deck. Claude had persuaded Hal to stay on the sidelines, to let him handle the tinderbox of Sabine’s emotions, but now Hal raised a glass to Sabine and it was unclear how she would respond. Flanked by Lester Summers and Nash Sully, Hal kept his glass in the air for an unnaturally long time. The longer he kept it there, the more attention it attracted. Even Lester’s steward, deckhand, and captain shifted nervously in their white uniforms as they waited for the continental slight. Eventually, Sabine raised her absinthe frappé, though it was clear she was pointing it more toward the heavens than at Hal Bender. Claude heard somebody sigh with relief and realized it was his own nervous exhalation. He went to fetch his box camera and set it up on the foredeck.

  * * *

  At about ten-thirty the earth moved into the comet’s icy tail, about thirteen million miles from its fiery head. This was the widely reported figure in the newspapers and everyone seemed to remember it, from newsboys to clergymen, because it emphasized the sheer and particular distance from calamity. Despite the intermittent clouds, New Yorkers came out of doors to see the auroral lights in the northeastern sky. People thronged onto hotel rooftops, along Broadway and Riverside Drive, packed into ferryboats and lined along the river bridges. The New York Times reported that “a million or so sky-gazers here were taking a lively interest in the heavens,” and they all wanted to glimpse the edge of something cosmic. What would the comet do to the magnetic pole, to telegraph wires and atmospheric pressure, to the family pet?

  * * *

  On the Lower East Side, Italian children, clad in white, walked out of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral holding candles and chanting the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. People gawked and prayed in Central Park, marooned on blankets with bottles of wine and opera glasses. The hotels ran express elevators to their rooftops and upper floors, sponsored comet dinners and dances. On the rooftop of the Gotham, a night camp was set up, complete with wigwams and teepees and ticket-buying tourists. In the sun parlor of the Waldorf-Astoria, a telescope stood mounted in the center, under the electric torches, surrounded by six tables of women playing bridge, a consortium of the disinterested.

  * * *

  From Lester’s yacht, they saw intermittent flashes over Manhattan, a spray of white light trailed by tiny arcs of fire. Claude caught much of it on film. The scintillations came in waves and lasted until two-thirty in the morning. They continued to drink and eat all through the eruptions of the night sky, occasionally pausing to applaud or comment on something particularly spectacular.

  * * *

  Standing silently on the foredeck with Pavel, Sabine felt unmoored from the proceedings. The planet spun, the comet pinwheeled, and Pavel had drunk too much champagne. He stood wobbling, grinning oafishly up at the cosmos. Under that fanning arc of light, she felt outside of herself, thought of Dorothy Harlow and her fixation that the comet was personal, that her own falsehoods had somehow caused orbits and gravities to alter their natural courses. The human mind was capable of placing its own hurt and muddle at the center of the universe. If you weren’t properly tied to the living, then you were convinced that the planets were orbiting the sun of your own discontent. She leaned into her glass and felt the absinthe dissolving under her nose. She took a sip and looked at a still-craning Pavel. Something in her life needed to change.

  —I am sinking into oblivion, she said.

  He nodded, oblivious, humming up at the stars.

  * * *

  The festivities petered out just before dawn. Actors lay slumped in deckchairs, slurring stories of a profession in decline, tales of botched lines and booing audiences, of the consummate thespian friend who’d become an embittered hack. Chip, Hal, Claude, and Lester played poker in the cabin, dinner jackets off, shirtsleeves rolled up. Sabine asked to be taken back to the studio grounds and Pavel went with her in the motorcar. Mercifully he was quiet and drifted off on the ride up the Palisades road, snoring himself awake as the motorcar rattled over the cattle grate at the studio’s main entrance.

  * * *

  The driver dropped her at the stone cottage and took Pavel to the actors’ bunkhouse, where he was forced to sleep alongside the extras, with the nameless hotel guests, the widow’s gardener, the aeronaut, with people the camera only ever saw in profile and at a distance. It was good to develop humility, she told Pavel, to elevate those in your orbit, and so she packed him off to the bunkhouse whenever she could. Inside the cottage, in the dawning light, she went to the table in the kitchen and began to write the letter she’d been thinking about for hours.

  May 19, 1910

  The Palisades, New Jersey

  Chère Madame,

  Tonight the comet lifted the train of her dress and left us in her fiery wake. Not an hour ago I was standing on a yacht owned by an over-billed actor and staring up through a diaphanous curtain of milky stars. It reminded me of everything transient and pulsing. I recall your idea that the comet was a harbinger of something terrible, perhaps your own death, but I am writing to say it has awoken me from a rather long and dull sleep.

  I see you sleeping toward The End in your recliner, propped up by all those pillows, swaddled in a horse blanket, and it makes me want to cry. I want to provide you with some tangible comfort, madame. For your consideration, I would like to extend the offer of adopting your son and daughter as my own. I realize this will come as a shock, especially from an unmarried, divorced actress in her fifties. It seems to me, however, that what your children need most is the loving attention of someone who can guide and protect them, who can not only tend to their material needs but also their spiritual necessities. Fame has given me many things, some of them unwelcome, but it has also provided a kind of shelter. A stone fortress. More and more, I want to spend my days immersed in the simpler pleasures de la vie.

  You should know that I intend to marry, and this will expand my suitability for the task at hand. It will provide Leo and Cora with a loving father—a well mannered, caring, talented, and devoted man I have known for fifteen years. In the end, love chooses us, I think, and we have to embrace its imperfections and frailties. If we don’t we end up alone on a desolate coastline. But because you confided in me, Dorothy, I will tell you that I don’t know that I have ever loved anything or anyone with my whole heart. Your children, I swear to you, will be the formidable exception to this terrible average.

  I know your prognosis is dwindling and in a few hours I will place a call to Dr. Callow, will dispatch this letter by private courier so that it arrives by nightfall. I will come to you with a fuller propo
sal before the week is out.

  Votre amie dévouée,

  Sabine Montrose

  14

  The Proposal

  Sabine invited Claude to take a walk with her in the yew maze later that morning, after the comet party, as the city across the river slept off the hangover of its continued existence. The world had not ended, she thought, but her old life had vanished. She suspected that love was not a garden maze, but rather a series of ramparts, an avant-garde theater production that left its actors stranded on elevated, raked platforms. Nonetheless, she would propose marriage in the hedgerows to suggest they might find their way to the enigmatic heart of a great labyrinth together.

  * * *

  She stood at the leafy entrance and watched him walking toward her. He carried his notebook and hand lens, perhaps assuming they’d talk about that evening’s shoot. He was forever jotting down production ideas, using arrows and boxes to block out or storyboard a scene, panning the space in front of him with his peephole glass. It occurred to Sabine that she mostly saw Claude with one eye closed and the other eye magnified. Didn’t the one cancel out the other?

  * * *

  She’d chosen a practical outfit for the occasion—calf-length boots, a pale blue shirtwaist with a gored skirt—and she hoped her attire would send the right intrepid signal. This marriage would be an expedition into the unknown. She gestured for him to follow her into the maze.

  * * *

  The hedges were full of nesting thrushes, birds flitting in and out of the tightly packed under-branches. Sabine led them into several dead-end passageways, and each time she silently retraced her steps to choose another route. Claude flipped through his notebook.

  —I have a map the head gardener made for me.

  —That would be cheating.

  * * *

  Eventually they found the stone bench at the center. It was the peaceful, geometric hub of the labyrinth, the hedges planed to perfection, the morning sun raking in from an angle, the air rife with turf and juniper. Sabine told him to sit on the bench, but remained standing, her gloved hands clasped in front of her. Her hands—scorched with peppermint oil, concealed from view—connected her more than anything else to the widow. She felt Dorothy’s hands scalding inside her own.

  —I have made an offer to adopt Dorothy Harlow’s children.

  Claude removed his hat and looked down into its felt bowl, as if a reply were taped inside.

  —I see.

  He squinted up at the sun, looked back down into his hat, and finally over at her.

  —I stopped trying to guess your inclinations a long time ago, Sabine. When did this come to you?

  —Truthfully, from the moment I met her. It was like I’d been wandering through an empty house all these years, trying to find a room with a lamp on, something to give me purpose. When you filmed us together with the children, you saw it, I think. Or the camera did.

  —I remember seeing something I hadn’t seen on your face before.

  —What was it?

  —Devotion.

  The birds flitted and wheeled in the hedged understories. A maze within a maze.

  —The theater and the films aren’t enough?

  She shrugged.

  —When I’m onstage, or in front of the camera, I feel invigorated, then I go back to my dressing room and look in the mirror. Or I see my reflection in the kitchen window of the cottage. There’s a woman looking back at me who is so terribly bored and lonely, who is vain and terrified of getting old.

  —And what do you know about being a mother?

  His voice took on a ragged edge.

  —What’s to know? You feed them and love them, no? You educate them and read them stories, help them make their way into the world. Helena will always be with me, of course. That woman adores children. And she is very devoted to me.

  —So the children will be raised by two women …

  It sounded resigned, almost philosophical.

  —As it happens, I intend to add a husband to the equation. Not for me, so much as for les enfants. It will make everything simpler for the legal arrangements.

  * * *

  Claude rubbed the back of his neck and put his hat back on. He’d built himself a funeral pyre out of his longing and it had been burning for more than a decade. Why had he so diligently been adding his own bones to the fire like kindling all these years? He stood up from the stone bench, an unbroken line of dread and anger connecting him to the ground. He felt light-headed and thirsty. His feet were numb. He didn’t know where to look.

  —I need to make some preparations on the set. I assume you’ll be shooting your scenes tonight?

  —I must leave for a day or two, but I will be back with the children.

  Claude closed his eyes briefly, folded into the immense, jagged pressure in his chest.

  —We’re running out of money. Every delay is costing us a fortune.

  —It cannot be helped. Dorothy is on her deathbed and the papers must be signed.

  Claude felt he might scream, or faint, so he turned to leave, but he was suddenly faced with four competing hedgerow passages. He hesitated before beginning down one of them.

  * * *

  Sabine followed after him but his pace quickened. He veered into a side passage and fell into a loping trot. She chased after him, lifting her skirt, calling him imbécile and connard as she ran. Claude had always been light on his feet and she couldn’t keep up, but then he took a wrong turn and she followed him into a dead end. He refused to turn around. He just kept stamping his feet in front of the yew wall. She came closer, still out of breath.

  —Crétin … please stop running … it’s you I want to marry.

  She pushed a big breath out to level her voice.

  —If you would take an old lioness like me, knowing that she cannot be tamed.

  * * *

  It struck her how unceremonious and undignified all this was, running and panting through a maze of hedgerows. She thought of Chekhov’s one-act farce, The Marriage Proposal, and how everything unravels from a single misunderstanding. Working up to his proposal, the smitten neighbor says to Natalie,… my property, as you know, adjoins your own. If you will be so good as to remember, my meadows touch your birch woods. It sounded like erotic poetry, like a euphemism for the melding of bodies and minds, but in fact Natalie hears only the beginning of a property dispute. She replies, But are they yours? Sabine reminded herself that the play does, in fact, end with a yes. Because Claude still hadn’t turned around, she added, Veux-tu m’épouser? She watched his neck and shoulders loosen, his fingers uncurl at his sides. Later, she would tell him that she took the straightening fingers as her yes. When he turned around his face was pale, his mouth slightly open.

  —You look like a thirsty cat wandering through a summer garden, she said.

  —I don’t understand anything you’re saying.

  —I’m asking if you would marry me and help raise Leo and Cora.

  * * *

  As a reprieve from the mangled feeling behind his rib cage he looked into the sight lines behind her head. The aperture of his mind had always been controlled by his eyes, so he let his gaze go out into the blued distances. He was thirty-three years old and nothing about his life made sense to him. A boy from an Alsatian village who’d moved to Paris to become a photographer’s apprentice, a man who’d traveled halfway across the planet to make moving images and who now lived above the cliffs of New Jersey, who spent every waking moment thinking about his epic film, the strip that had begun in his mind as the cinematic death of the woman he’d loved hopelessly for fifteen years and who was now proposing marriage in front of him. He suddenly felt the resistance he’d been plying through, the dead weight of his languishing stupor. He saw the surface of his life as a great Arctic sea choked with pack ice.

  —You look unwell. Do you need medicine?

  He shook his head, came at the idea from a hazy depth.

  —A proposal of marriage?

&
nbsp; —I may faint from exasperation, she said.

  He swallowed, gathered his thoughts in a straight line. There could be no deception or ambiguity.

  —But you ask it as if we’re sitting at different ends of the table and you need me to pass the butter. As if you just need a little butter on your bread …

  —For God’s sake, I just chased you through a labyrinth. Do you also need a violinist?

  He was holding his hat again. The forlorn Alsatian undertaker, she thought, is still there. He had a bruised look in his eyes as they found his own feet.

  —You’ve never loved me, Sabine, we both know that.

  —Perhaps not the way you’ve gorged yourself on it. I’ve never loved anyone or anything like that. But you are dear to me and I admire you more than anyone else I can think of.

  He looked at her, finally, paced a few steps.

  —What you’re offering is a marriage of convenience, two friends raising a widow’s children together.

  She noticed the way his fingertips worried the felt rim of his hat. His nails were bitten to the quick.

  —It’s unorthodox, I know. Then again, you’re never going to marry that woman from Hoboken and we both know it. That ship has sailed. And now here comes a new ocean liner.

  —Not exactly new.

  She preened her gloves.

  —They name ships after women and lots of them lie at the bottom of the ocean, he said.

  —The ocean is a dangerous place. It’s not for everybody.

  —Who else is on the list? If I say no, who is next? Pavel?

  —There is no one else, Claude. The truth is, I’ve lost all interest in men. I will do it alone if I have to and if the widow allows it.