The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  An hour later, Helena had gone to bed and Pavel slept fitfully on the divan. At one point, a big baritone snore startled him briefly awake and Sabine said, Now that is a magnificent outburst! Claude looked at her blankly and she came to sit in the wingback chair beside him.

  —Are you married, Monsieur Ballard?

  —No, madame.

  —Maybe you’ll find a wife in Australia. You’d be a dapper fellow if you lost that undertaker’s hat and most of your Rhiny accent. How many people in your hometown?

  —A few hundred, farmers and vintners mostly.

  —Just as I feared. No one judges a hayseed like another bumpkin. I mashed the Burgundy grapes before I could walk, toes the color of mulberries.

  Claude nodded, swallowed, drank up.

  —You have lovely blue eyes, she said.

  Claude shrugged, looked away.

  —They remind me of the church domes on Santorini.

  —Madame, you are very kind. But I should let you retire. You must be exhausted.

  —Nonsense, I’ll be up all night. Until the night clerk comes with my newspaper critics at four. Let’s see if they crucify my performance tonight. Do stay. Do you have something else you could show me? Something I’ve never seen before.

  Claude looked into his champagne flute.

  —I hear that Edison wants to film two trains colliding. That would be something to behold.

  He took a long sip, drained his glass, blinked back something she couldn’t quite read. Then she felt it all around her. Only regret or grief doused a room like that.

  —What is it?

  —I took a view of my sister dying of consumption in the Paris hospital where I worked. I showed it to the Lumière brothers when they interviewed me. It’s probably why they gave me the job …

  Sabine watched him in profile, his face turned to the wall.

  —She comes to me in my dreams, singing and baking bread in the sunny kitchen. My mother died when I was young and she cooked for my father and me.

  * * *

  She touched his arm gently. With his face turned away, his jaw faintly trembling, she stole a glance at the metal carrycase that held all those tiny lives. The dying sister is coiled inside there, she thought, her actual final breath. She’d seen two dead bodies in her lifetime. A peasant fieldworker who’d dropped dead one harvest season—wrapped in a blanket and stiff as firewood—and then her mother in a casket, her cheeks rouged and gaunt, a courtesan made up for eternity. A death captured on film was somehow comforting to her—the dark angel brought down to the same plane as flickering toy sailboats and kites in the wind.

  —I lost my mother also. She ended her own life. It’s part of what drew me to the theater, the ache of it.

  Claude grazed his bottom lip with his teeth.

  —I am sorry for that.

  —Perhaps you were honoring your sister’s memory.

  —I told myself I was holding Odette close to my chest. But, the truth is, I fear I have offended God and decency. I have not shown it to anyone since my interview with the Lumières. I’m thinking of destroying it …

  Sabine watched him. He was new to the world, a tightly wound spring waiting to uncoil. He might burn up in Australia, might end up marrying the first pug who lifted her leg. She wanted, somehow, to save him from all that. But in return she also wanted a demonstration of affection and loyalty, the thing she inevitably asked of new lovers and friends.

  —Will you show me her death, Claude? We can watch her passing from this world together.

  She put her hand on his and left it there.

  * * *

  They watched the reel in the silver hush of the lamplight. Afterward, the lamphouse smelled like snuffed quicklime and it reminded Sabine of a burning fuse, of the disappointment that always followed a fireworks display. Partway into the viewing—right when the bird flew from the windowsill—she had decided to sleep with Claude Ballard. As he cranked and jittered his sister’s death back to life, he gave out a fluttery sigh and she sensed the weight he carried. He was trapped and transfixed by everything around him—the grit of a city street, faces at dusk, a bird on a fence paling—and she wanted to offer up a tonic, a way to quell his need to endlessly observe and catalogue. She also wanted to forget herself for a few hours, to lie in that peaceful blue room that always waited, in her mind, at the top of a darkened stairwell.

  * * *

  After he’d extinguished his machine, she took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom while Pavel continued to snore on the divan. She closed the door behind them and lit a lantern by the bedside. Someone had delivered a pineapple wrapped in cellophane as a birthday gift and they both stared at it for a moment as if it were a tribal effigy. The smell of flowers and ripening fruit was overpowering.

  * * *

  From Claude’s perspective, this was not a seduction by the standards of the novels or sonnets he’d read in his Paris garret, or by the measure of the one fumbling escapade he’d had with a nurse at the hospital. That had taken place in a medicine closet and the memory was soaked through with iodine. This was another thing entirely. She stood in front of a bed the size of a swimming pool, floating in a sea of kerosene-light, and slowly untied her robe so that it fell around her ankles. It was an offering, the unveiling of a bronzed explorer in a municipal park. Oceans had been conquered, new continents discovered, and here was the tribute—her long dark hair falling down across her big, puckered breasts and onto her pale stomach.

  * * *

  To ease the tension, Claude made a joke, in French, about which time zone of the bed she would like to occupy and this got him a shushing finger to her lips. Mainly, he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He settled on putting them behind his back, but then he felt them fidgeting nervously.

  —Would you like me to help you out of your clothes, Monsieur Ballard?

  He shook his head. She watched him kneel down to untie his shoelaces with the precision of a surgeon removing sutures. He stood, removed his coat and trousers, unbuttoned his shirt, and folded everything neatly onto an armchair. He stood in his black, darned socks and his flannel drawers and eyeglasses.

  —Come over to the bed.

  When he got there she took his big knuckles and kissed them one by one, then the palms and the slender wrists. She lifted her face to his.

  —Êtes-vous prêt? she whispered. You will leave your spectacles on?

  He nodded but couldn’t speak. No one had ever looked at him like that.

  * * *

  What followed was a meticulous blocking out of his sensual performance. She peeled back the fragrant bedclothes and took him by the hand, as if helping him aboard a yacht. Flattening her stomach against the mattress, she said, Kiss my neck, then my shoulders and down to the small of my back. Claude complied, moving his lips down her body. There were two dimples in the small of her back—two inverted commas spanning an invisible quote—and he lingered there, drunk on the smell of her, on the headiness of jasmine and musk. She said, Now kiss the arches of my feet.

  * * *

  In his anatomical speculations Claude had never considered feet to be implicated in lovemaking, but here he was grazing his lips against her silvery pale instep while she murmured into her pillow. When she turned over he retraced his steps, working back toward her head, getting a whispered bon or oui as he passed the russet, malty inlet of her groin, kissing each rib on his ascent.

  * * *

  He thought this tender choreography might continue for some time, but then she told him to tie her wrists to the bedframe with a silk blindfold. When he hesitated, she asked him again, then she accused him of being an Alsatian milksop in a tone that was softened by a whisper. Don’t make me do it myself, she said. He took the blindfold and cinched both her hands to the wooden headboard. She smiled up at him from the pillow. Merde, she said, you still have your chaussettes and drawers on. He removed his undergarments and tossed them theatrically over the cellophane-wrapped pine
apple by the bed. They both laughed and he fell into a grinning kiss.

  * * *

  The actual lovemaking was a series of cryptic clues and concealed pleasures. A sensual treasure hunt. She asked for something, then changed her mind. He made adjustments and calibrations, awaited further instruction.

  * * *

  For most of the proceedings he felt his own desire as if it were tethered to a wire, a bright red balloon floating in his peripheral vision, but eventually he burst through. It was toward the end, as their breathing quickened. Her stage directions had stalled out into silence. He looked to his right and noticed the scene in the smoky lens of the mirror above the bureau, saw his own body move with the steady rhythm of a bellows blowing air at the base of a fire. It brought back the early experiments at the photographic society in Paris, the wiring of a bird’s feet to a camera-gun, the mounting tension and uplift before a surge of exasperated flight. His own face looking back in the mirror—open-mouthed, flushed, euphoric—was a wild, strange thing to him. A beguiled stranger he’d never met, held in place by an infinite loop. Then his eyes locked on Sabine’s in the mirror and he could see that she was pleased with her staging, with her hair fanning across the pillow, with the way her ankles locked about his calves so that her long white feet formed a perfect V. And it was the act of looking back at the filmstrip juddering above the bureau that sent her into a final boisterous delirium. She bit his shoulder, then whispered into the mirror—nous voilà, catching her breath, here we are.

  * * *

  When it was over she lit candles and brushed out her hair at the edge of the bed. He curled behind her, kissing her hips and rubbing the small of her back. When she lay back in the lavendered sheets, they talked until she grew sleepy. About the trapdoor of the past, about the loss of a mother at an early age.

  —I spent my adolescence seeking attention and adoration, performing skits and plays for anyone who would watch, she said.

  —I missed the singing, after she died. My father has a farmer’s curiosity for the world, but the truth is he prefers fish and fungus to people. My mother liked to cook for people and hear their stories. I remember her always throwing open the windows in the summertime …

  She closed her eyes and he suddenly felt self-conscious, as if he were prattling.

  —How would you like to be filmed tomorrow?

  —Pardon?

  —Mr. Rachenko asked me if I would make a view of you tomorrow. Something that would capture the world’s attention and lift the veil of mystery on the real Sabine Montrose.

  —Did he now? Well, let me sleep on it. Perhaps the answer will come to me in my dreams.

  * * *

  Within minutes she had fallen asleep with her blindfold on. Claude lay awake for hours, staring into the whorl of darkness just below the ceiling, his eyeglasses folded by the bed, his life a baffling and beautiful mystery. If there was an anchor point, some place to go back to and say here was the beginning of his ruin, it was here, in that hotel room, a hazy twilight floating between him and the molded ceiling. He felt weightless, invisible, out of time. Something enormous had been roused in him and he thought Sabine Montrose was the cause of it.

  * * *

  When Claude woke, it was to sunlight streaming in through the windows along Fifth Avenue. Sabine lay on her back, her hair draped across the pillows, the silk blindfold across her eyes, a stack of newspapers across her chest. Somehow she’d been up and reading the theater reviews without him noticing. He lifted the sheet and took in her nakedness—she was pale-breasted and leggy, her hips as curved as the bouts of a viola. Her hands were folded across her stomach, fingers laced. Claude breathed in the underworld of the bedclothes, hoping to catch something of the actual event. He wanted it to smell earthy and coital, a little olfactory proof of his exploits, but it smelled sedate and freshly laundered. Looking around the room, he tallied the moments from the night before and reached for his eyeglasses.

  * * *

  The Russian appeared in the doorway in his embroidered waistcoat drinking a small tumbler of grape juice, a fob watch dangling between his fingers. He refused to look directly over at the bed, but stared off at the brightening windows.

  —All right, my sleepyheads, everything is prepared. Is the light optimal at present, Monsieur Ballard, for the making of a view? We are almost upon eleven o’clock. I want Sabine to look very natural, you understand.

  Sabine removed her blindfold and propped her head onto one hand, causing the newspapers to fall off the side of the bed. She flinched at the light from the windows and held out one hand to block it. Claude could see the rise of her breasts against the hem of the bedsheet.

  —The solar conditions look promising, said Claude.

  —Pavey, what are you talking about? asked Sabine.

  —All you need is your robe. Congratulations on your reviews, by the way. The critics love to build you shrines out of newspaper. Now hurry along! I’ll meet you out in the hallway.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Pavel was leading them up a darkened stairwell at the far end of the penthouse floor. Sabine was in her robe, hair unbrushed, an afghan wrapped around her shoulders. Claude carried his equipment, the cinématographe in one hand, a tripod over one shoulder. When they reached the top of the stairs, Pavel held open a metal door and they came out onto the hotel’s rooftop. An expanse of flagstone opened out toward a conservatory at one end, a tiny chapel of iron and glass winking in the sunshine. Behind it, the city teemed with water towers and smokestacks and custodian perches. Seeing the city from this vantage point, Claude realized that New York kept her crown jewels, her terraced rooftop gardens and statuary, right next to her broom closets, her generators, her winches and coal shovels. The Paris skyline—the mansard roofs and gargoyled nooks and spires, the zinced dormers—was much more sedate.

  * * *

  As they walked toward the conservatory, they saw a profusion of plants blooming and greening behind the windowpanes and transparent turrets.

  —What is it? asked Sabine, tightening the afghan about her shoulders. Pavel sipped his grape juice, pleased with himself.

  —Don’t you love it? A glasshouse modeled on the Crystal Palace in London. The hotel wanted an all-weather tearoom up here but they couldn’t get the permits. The doorman told me that a botanist from Columbia University has adopted it.

  —Are we to make the view up here? asked Claude.

  —In there, said Pavel, gesturing to the open conservatory doors.

  * * *

  Stepping inside, Claude had the sensation of entering a cloister of glass and humid gasses, the cerulean blue of the sky and the woody, green smells somehow magnified. He could smell peat and pollen and something damp and lingering, a fungal afternote. There were bromeliads, ferns, and palms pushing against the walls, orchids hanging and cantilevering from the high ledges, outcroppings of passionflowers and hibiscuses. A tiny bog garden lay encircled by Venus flytraps. It was very warm inside and he could see rivulets of condensation running down the glass ceiling. A room that had its own air and weather, tiny zephyrs whistling above their heads between open glass panels. In the center of the conservatory, an enormous cast-iron and porcelain bathtub had been placed under a canopy of maidenhair and staghorn ferns. Pavel stood in front of the tub, very pleased with himself, as if he’d made all this by hand during the night.

  —It took six porters and an unspeakable gratuity to get this tub up here, Pavel said. They are on their way up with buckets of hot water.

  —I don’t understand, said Sabine.

  —There is nothing more natural or compelling than a beautiful woman bathing. And what better way to capitalize on your debut in a moving picture. As Monsieur Ballard travels the world, he will also be publicizing your theatrical appearances … We will capture you with all due modesty, of course.

  * * *

  When Pavel had suggested a promotional reel of Sabine Montrose backstage at the Union Square vaudeville house, Claude had p
ictured Sabine walking through Manhattan dressed as the prince of Denmark, a troupe of grocers and shopgirls in her wake. He imagined the camera perched high, looking down at her from above. But now he saw this cinematic coup plainly: a famous French actress bathing in a rooftop glasshouse. It was beautiful and theatrical and natural, and he couldn’t reconcile the conceit with this Russian who carried two fob watches and leisured in a kaftan. He thought of the letter he would write to the Lumière brothers describing the new addition: I have made a view of one of the world’s great talents, a household theatrical name. Attendance at screenings is up 60%.

  * * *

  They both watched Sabine standing at the porcelain lip, staring down into the tub as if it were a mineshaft or a well. Along the ledge was a crystal bowl of bath salts and another of lavender soap flakes.

  —Sabine Montrose stripped bare, down to flesh and blood, she said. Seen like never before …