The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  —No, no, there was nothing nervous about it. It was quite decisive. And after the war, I came back to America and supported myself for decades as a wedding photographer. For the most part, no one ever knew who the Frenchman was behind the viewfinder.

  * * *

  Martin used the edge of his fork to slice into the perfectly rolled omelet. Claude had never understood the American aversion to keeping a knife in hand during a meal.

  —Your studio was in New Jersey? Where you made the first feature?

  —Perched right above the Hudson, near the town of Fort Lee. A big production stage under a glass roof, like a greenhouse, right up on the Palisades. We used to haul in actors from Manhattan on the ferries and we could shoot melodramas and westerns out on the cliff tops. Did you know the term cliffhanger comes from those early films shot on the Palisades?

  Martin chewed, nodded.

  —I’d heard that. Or read about it.

  —Sabine Montrose or Lillian Gish at the edge of a cliff with a bandit bearing down on her. Then cut, finis, come back next week to pay a quarter to find out whether Sabine lives or dies.

  —What ever happened to her?

  —Who?

  —Sabine Montrose. She never acted again after you made The Electric Hotel together.

  Claude felt his mind slacken and go blank, as if someone had lowered an awning over his thoughts. He rested his hands flat on the tabletop, studied the whites of his knuckles, the sunspots that resembled tiny brown planets.

  —Well, let’s see … Ah, I remember: she ate my entrails like a feral dog and then she vanished into thin air.

  Claude dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, aware of Martin staring at him.

  —Forgive me, it’s been many years since I’ve spoken of her. She wronged me, it’s true, but you might also say that I killed her off.

  —What do you mean?

  —That will take some explaining.

  Claude flagged down Gail for some more coffee and asked if the kitchen had any extra bones they could spare for Susan Berg’s soup broth. Gail topped up their cups and said she’d check.

  —Susan Berg is the woman back at the hotel?

  Claude nodded.

  —I am afraid that if she stops making her treacherous soups and coming down to the lobby to perform her monologue she will simply float away. She was a famous actress once but her voice didn’t make the transition to sound. She whispers a lot because I think she’s always been ashamed of her creaking voice. A director once said that her voice sounded like a burglar creeping down an old wooden staircase, and she never recovered. Poor Susan …

  Martin finished his omelet and retired his fork.

  —The silent era must seem like an eternity ago. Are there directors you still follow? Hitchcock? Didn’t he start out with some silent features? I seem to remember he made a silent in Austria called The Mountain Eagle that was supposed to be set in Kentucky.

  —I must make a confession.

  —Please.

  —I haven’t seen a film since 1920.

  Martin blinked and blew some air between his lips. It reminded Claude of Chip Spalding, the Australian stuntman from the New Jersey studio, a man who walked through his days blowing air between his lips and looking astonished. What had ever happened to Chip? Were there unanswered letters from him somewhere in Claude’s suite?

  —How is that possible?

  —I don’t own a television and I don’t go to the movies.

  —So you’ve never seen a movie with sound?

  Claude gave another Gallic shrug, this time with his whole body, and Martin laughed.

  —What’s so funny?

  —I would call that the biggest shrug in the history of shrugging. It was almost existential in its scope and delivery.

  Claude smiled, moved his plate to the side.

  —I have kept some prints and photographs and equipment from the old days in my hotel suite. Would you like to see them?

  Martin drummed his fingers on the edge of the table, trying to contain a grin.

  —Oh God, that would be incredible. Thank you so much.

  Gail arrived with the bill and a brown paper bag of bones. Martin left some money on the table and they headed out into the street.

  * * *

  Back at the hotel, Claude gave one of the bones to Elsie in the lobby and took the rest up to the ninth floor. Susan Berg appeared in the darkened doorway of 905, her hair now in curlers. She took the bag, kissed Claude on the cheek, and retreated into a cluttered interior hung with bedclothes. In the clanking cage elevator, Claude told Martin that he could remember Susan dancing a tango with Buster Keaton out on the Lido deck.

  —It happened a lifetime ago. They sailed across the terra-cotta tile like a couple of Spanish galleons, Claude said, while we all just watched in awe.

  * * *

  They stopped in front of 1013 and Claude moved his cameras to one side to dig for his keys in a coat pocket. When he opened the door, he saw Martin flinch and hold the back of his sleeve up to his nose.

  —Is something the matter?

  —You don’t smell it?

  —What?

  —Vinegar syndrome, Martin said gently, in the old celluloid.

  * * *

  Claude said nothing, but he felt his jaw tighten as he switched on the lights in the living room and kitchenette. The décor hadn’t changed much since the 1930s—gold-and-green-flecked carpet, a tropically themed couch, art deco lampshades, a nest of walnut end tables covered in newspapers. Over the years, Claude had done his best to categorize the reels and press clippings and photographs. He’d organized the canisters into suitcases and metal trunks, arranged the issues of The Moving Picture World in chronological order and stacked them against one wall. The vintage projectors were in a state of disrepair, he admitted, and it was possible that he’d been using an early cinema camera as a plant stand for twenty years.

  —How often do you handle the old reels?

  —They haven’t been touched in decades.

  Martin hummed nervously. Claude folded his arms, bit his lower lip.

  —Do you smoke?

  —Not anymore.

  —Gas or electric stove?

  —The gas stove doesn’t work anymore. I have an electric hotplate.

  —Good. Please don’t ever light a match in here. The nitrates—

  Martin crossed to the suitcases and reached into one to pick up a metal canister.

  —May I?

  Claude nodded. When Martin removed the canister lid, he pointed at the tiny silver shards of nitrate that were flaking along one edge of the reel.

  —See how it’s already flaking and buckling in places?

  Claude said nothing.

  —I have a grad school friend who can duplicate and restore some of these.

  —No, no, I cannot let you take them out of here.

  —For some of the reels, it’s probably too late. They’re lost forever. But some of them can be salvaged in a lab.

  Claude walked over to the window to escape the suffocating air of accusation. The sky above Hollywood was paling away into bands of washed-out blue and tin white. He couldn’t name the emotion that was cutting through him but he felt his throat thicken with it.

  —I don’t think this was a good idea. I’m sorry, Claude said. I am suddenly very tired.

  Martin carefully replaced the canister into the battered-looking suitcase and wiped his hands down his jeans.

  —Perhaps just think about it. I’ll come back next week to see if you’d like to have breakfast again. I have lots of questions I’d like to ask you. I’ll leave a message with the front desk.

  Martin headed for the door and Claude waited at the window until he heard the latch.

  * * *

  That night, and for a week after, Claude smelled nothing but vinegar in his hotel suite—in his bedclothes, in the icebox, on the backs of his hands. The phrase vinegar syndrome kept coming back to him with the euphemistic menace of nineteent
h-century plagues—consumption, scarlet fever, typhus … Did vinegar syndrome affect humans, or just degrade the emulsion along a stretch of celluloid?

  * * *

  He found himself emptying his closet, laying his plaid and mustard-colored suits and dress shirts across his bed. Along the white shirt collars he noticed a jaundiced seam of yellow and it made him think of photographic paper on the verge of exposure. He opened all the windows in the suite, but the noise of the street annoyed him during the day and kept him awake at night. He lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, picturing a chemical fog drifting from room to room, the way his breakfast bananas were spotting in the bromide atmosphere. He saw himself shambling down Hollywood Boulevard in his yellowed shirt collars every morning, Gail wincing at his briny smell when she took his order at the diner. A terrifying thought gripped him: I have been pickling myself for thirty years.

  * * *

  After Martin left a message at the front desk, Claude sat in the lobby in a dry-cleaned suit and a new white dress shirt, a single canister in his hands. Tiny starbursts and cankers of rust surrounded a flaking, foxed label that read The Early Reels. Handing it to Martin, he said that these were the images that launched his career. Will you see what can be saved? Martin carried the canister to the diner and kept touching it with one hand all during breakfast. He asked Claude to take him back to the beginning. Claude stared out through the big windows along Hollywood Boulevard, conjuring Paris of the 1890s.

  —When I dream of that old life I see it like a strip of burning celluloid. It smokes and curls in the air, but it’s impossible to hold between my fingers.

  2

  The Silver Quickening

  When Claude remembered seeing those first Lumière reels in the basement of a Paris hotel in the winter of 1895, he closed his eyes and smelled the warming nitrates of the celluloid. He recalled the smell of damp wool as the photographic society members brushed snow from their coats, the high sweet chemistry of gelatin on his hands from the hospital darkroom. It struck him that the olfactory world was right there, burned into his memories, while the first glimmer of motion somehow evaded him. Was it a baby eating breakfast or a factory worker astride a bicycle? Was it a street scene or the sight of a woman and four boys plunging into the ocean?

  * * *

  He’d moved to Paris a year earlier, following his older sister as she began treatments for tuberculosis. He’d found a job not far from the consumption institute, working as a photographic apprentice for Albert Londe at La Salpêtrière asylum and hospital. The wards were full of women—hysterics, epileptics, lunatics, the destitute—and his task was to fix images of their behavior. A team of neurologists wanted to uncover patterns and characterize the phases of hysteria and epilepsy or the mounting nervous tics of a compulsive. In the early evenings, when the workday was over, he walked to the consumption ward and sat with Odette and read to her from their father’s botanical letters, about his escapades collecting mushrooms and wild herbs in the woods. As her illness worsened, it was a comfort to picture their father out with the farm dogs and his leather satchel, pulling on his pipe, tramping through the same square mile of northeastern France he’d known all his life.

  * * *

  Claude thought of his widowed father, a fierce patriot, as the Lumière brothers told the gathered members that the invention began with their own father’s grudge against the American inventor Thomas Edison. Auguste Lumière did most of the talking, the older brother and commercial manager of the family factory in Lyon that produced fifteen million photographic plates a year. They stood on a makeshift stage in front of a canvas screen, their invention draped under a cloth down in the aisle between the seats.

  —You see, friends, Auguste said, some years ago our father went to an exhibition where he saw Edison’s crude peepshow device …

  —The Kinetoscope, added Louis Lumière.

  They were both in their thirties, bow-tied in elegant black frockcoats, looking more like wealthy aldermen, it seemed to Claude, than prodigious inventors. He moved his tattered stovepipe hat from his lap to beneath his seat, then he took out a pencil and a leather-bound notebook, the one he used to document his thoughts and photographs at the hospital. He’d been sent to the meeting by Albert Londe to see if there was anything to this new development. Claude wrote down invention = patriotic grudge.

  —Edison’s arcade novelty, Auguste continued, demands that the viewer drop a coin into the slot of a big wooden cabinet and watch through a viewfinder while a tiny motor churns the pictures in front of an electric light bulb. But who wants to hunch over a cabinet all by themselves? Our father heard that Edison wanted to start manufacturing and selling these kinetoscopes in France and he couldn’t abide it … so he comes to my brother and me with a sample of a kinetoscope reel and a proposition. Free the light, he says to us, and you will make Edison’s invention look like a child’s trinket and make yourselves rich in the process.

  Claude wrote I believe you are already rich in his notebook, then he looked up at the younger brother launching onto the balls of his feet, suddenly brimming and boyish.

  —Indeed, we asked ourselves, Louis said, why keep the images cooped up inside a wooden cabinet? What if there was a way to project the views onto a wall? The technical problem, alors, was the movement of the celluloid strip. How to thread at just the right speed, that was the question, and I am happy to report that we solved it as precisely as astronomers using mathematics to locate a new star or planet …

  Louis put his hands into his pockets and looked down at the floor, as if he’d caught himself prattling to dinner guests.

  —My brother is being far too modest and cosmique, said Auguste. During one of his bouts of insomnia, he has suffered nervous complaints and headaches his whole life, you see; regardless, one night he stumbled downstairs and took apart our mother’s sewing machine and began to copy the mechanism that pulls the hem of a garment under the grip of the churning needle. She was not very happy, I can assure you, but the claw mechanism Louis designed was our great huzzah! In a way, gentlemen, you could say that we learned how to stitch light together … heavens, now I am the one being cosmique …

  An older society member in the front row, an optician from the Latin Quarter with a monocle, folded his arms and bellowed up at the stage.

  —Perhaps, esteemed brothers, now that you’ve stitched so many words together, we can see the damn thing work?

  Auguste smiled weakly and bent into a continental bow. He gestured for Louis to take his place down in the aisle with the covered contraption.

  —The public exhibition will be after Christmas, said Auguste, so we’d appreciate your discretion until then. Behold, gentlemen, the cinématographe: a working camera, projector, and printer. A photographic trinity, if you will. Amusez-vous bien!

  * * *

  Claude expected Louis to remove the cloth with a stage magician’s flourish, but the younger brother delicately lifted each corner and revealed the machine by degrees. Claude cleaned his spectacles with a silk cloth and put them back on. He was sitting on the end of a row, and as the gaslight sconces were dimmed he leaned into the aisle to study the device. It resembled a wooden sawhorse with a ten-inch box camera mounted on one end and a metallic lamphouse on the other. There was a hand-powered crank on one side of the camera and a narrow strip of silver-black film coiled onto a spool above. Louis Lumière opened a hatch on the lamphouse and lit the limelight, then he began to steadily turn the hand crank, the air sharpening with quicklime and emulsion. Claude would remember his eyes smarting and a swallow, a moment of suspension before everything changed.

  * * *

  A space opened out behind the stage, a catacomb of dappling motion and light. Dozens of workers came silently bustling through the wall of the hotel basement, surging between the enormous metal doors of a factory at the end of a day, a man astride a wobbling bicycle, women in hats and sturdy shoes with aprons and baskets, a brown dog circling and tail-wagging in the foreground.
They were all suspended in midair, slightly jittered and staccato in their motions, accelerating toward evening, as if under the unwinding tension of a spring, toward dinners and children, toward taverns and lovers. Claude felt their humanity in his chest, the headlong plunge toward home, even as he thought of a million drops of mercury teeming on the surface of a daguerreotype, a chemical rain that somehow atomized and animated these figures to life.

  * * *

  When a horse-drawn carriage barreled out of the factory’s darkened, gaping mouth, the optician in the front row gave a start, threw up his hands, and dropped his monocle as the horse veered toward him. Another member, a funeral photographer not much older than Claude, stood up and began to ghost toward the screen, a sleepwalker roused by otherworldly music. He drifted down the aisle, right by Louis Lumière, and suddenly his monstrous shadow crossed into the projector’s arc and was pinned against the wall, blotting out the factory scene to a volley of French insults and expletives. The first matinee heckle, Claude would think in years to come. The forty-six-second reel came to an end and Louis began to thread another, looping the strip of shining celluloid between a series of spools.

  * * *

  Later, Claude would forget the exact sequence of the views. A prankster with a garden hose; a congress of photographers arriving by boat in Lyon with their equipment; a baby being held up to the rim of an enormous glass bowl filled with goldfish, a grinning, white-frocked monster wobbling above her watery domain. There was a reel, perhaps the final one, consisting of a woman and four boys, probably her boisterous, wiry sons, running out along a wooden plank in their bathing suits and jumping into the gunmetal sea. Each of the ten reels was less than a minute long, just long enough to peer into the crevice of a human life, but they would all run together in his mind, a confluence that came bursting over him like shards of recovered memory. And although the order of the images remained hazy, he would never forget the revelation that fell through him as he sat in the half light, the sound and smell of Louis hand-cranking the shimmerings of existence in front of the limelight.