* * *
He opened his notebook and flipped through some pages, as if he were about to block out a scene. Then he closed it and looked down at the ground, scanning the blades of grass for portents and omens—marauding ants severing the wings from a dragonfly, say, or a dead finch prostrate under the hedgerows—but all he saw was the perfectly sheared lawn. He thought of all the unreasonable demands he might make, thought of this as a film contract they might sign together, the clause that required her adoration, the manifesto that she place him at the center of everything, but it was like asking a waterfall to change its course, a knife to dull its blade. So instead of asking for her devotion, he settled for the one thing that would ensure a pleasurable descent.
—I would need a wife in all the connubial senses of the word.
She’d never understood why some men pretended sex was an indecipherable index at the back of some enormous tome. It was all they thought about, most of them, and yet each time it came near—a planet blotting out the sun—their minds turned to gelatin and their expressions went blank.
—If you’re worried about amorous congress, then I’m happy to oblige.
He bit his lip, looked up from the book.
—You make it sound like a preference for having the bedroom window open at night.
—Merde, don’t be such an infuriating cold fish. Speaking of the bedroom, you should know that I sleep always on the left side, that some nights I won’t come to bed at all, that Helena brings me breakfast in bed on Sunday mornings, and that I snore in the wintertime when the blankets are piled on. Also, I will need you to bathe after dinner every night, or you will require your own room. Nothing upsets me more than strong odors after a meal.
Claude spoke to an invisible confidant to his left.
—This is not the way I thought it would happen.
—I will have thee; but, by this light, I take thee for pity.
He looked back at her.
—I don’t want your disgusting pity.
—I’m quoting Shakespeare.
She cinched her gloves back to her elbows.
—But, to be truthful, I think you’d gladly take my pity. Because it’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to my undying heroic love. The whole thing couldn’t be simpler. I need a husband, and you need to unload this misery you’ve been carrying half your life.
Now she was the one turning to leave.
—I leave for the sanitarium in a few hours. I hope you’ll come with me to sign the papers as Leo and Cora’s legal father.
* * *
Claude held his hat between his hands and wandered through the maze, head down, zigzagging his way back to the stone bench. As he sat, he couldn’t quite place the emotions that swum through him. He removed his eyeglasses, untied his shoelaces, took off his shoes and socks, rubbed his bare feet across the cool, cropped lawn, tried to make sense of his own rippling thoughts without any clear-sighted distractions. Then something occurred to him and he was suddenly light-limbed and poised. Chip had once told him about the moment before a high burning dive, when the big fist finally unclamped from around his heart and he felt emptied out by the plummet itself, by the inevitability and simplicity of falling. The decision to fall was never made on the tightrope or cliff top, Chip said, but in the middle of the night, when you looked up at the ceiling and saw your own existence as a pinprick in eternity. Now, up on the wire, you were merely following the natural conclusion of whatever you’d fathomed above your head in the nighttime. Claude knew he would say yes, that it was a decision already made for him in a hotel room at the end of the last century, and so it wasn’t indecision that kept him sitting on the stone bench, wrapped in the slack-edged embrace of his myopia, his bare toes caressing the sharp blades of grass. It was certainty. He wanted to linger awhile longer, delay his exit from the maze, imagine for a few more minutes that his life might still be his own.
* * *
They married two days later, in the sanitarium cure cottage where Dorothy lay dying. A Saturday morning in June, a justice of the peace presiding, the superintendent and his wife serving as witnesses. Dorothy observed the proceedings through a scrim of morphine and laudanum, propped up and faintly smiling from her bed, a scarf wrapped around her head. Sabine wore a white silk dress, Claude a seersucker suit with a paisley bow tie and gold cufflinks. When the paperwork was complete, the superintendent took the adoption papers over to Dorothy’s bed for signature, but Claude and Sabine weren’t allowed to come any closer. There were no books by her bedside anymore, just the gramophone with its arm at rest. The doctor propped the documents up at an angle so the widow could sign them without lifting her head. When it was done, she held up one gloved hand to wish them well and Sabine blew her a kiss just as Dorothy closed her eyes.
* * *
As they walked out into the northern sunshine, Sabine took Claude by the arm and led him to the waiting motorcar. Dr. Callow had given them the use of his lake cabin for their twenty-four-hour honeymoon. They needed to be back in New Jersey and ready to shoot by Monday evening. They would collect Leo and Cora from the superintendent’s sister at lunchtime the next day, before taking the train back to New Jersey.
* * *
But for now they had an afternoon and an evening to themselves, a cabin with a lofted bedroom and a dock over the lake. The interior was full of Callow’s bacterial experiments and epidemiology texts, the kitchen crowded with microscopes and porcelain dishes of unidentifiable ooze. It smelled of iodine and vinegar. When they heard the motorcar drive away on the unpaved road, Sabine climbed the ladder to the loft where a narrow pine bed stood under a window. It was stuffy up here, so she opened the window. Claude appeared at the top of the ladder.
—This is obviously the place where the good doctor comes to get away from his wife and to dream of tubercular sputum.
He laughed at this and looked down at his feet.
—Don’t be nervous, she said. I will take care of everything, just like the first time.
* * *
She closed the white gauzy curtains and casually began to undress. Compared to the last time Claude had seen her naked—more than fifteen years ago—this occurred without flourish. If that first occasion was the unveiling of a bronzed monument in a park, this reminded him of someone removing a wrinkled frock from a clothes hanger. He looked at the creases in her thighs and across her stomach from her undergarments, the tiny dimples in her buttocks. He had agreed, in principle, to be pragmatic about the arrangements of their new life. She needed a husband and he needed to put this old burden to rest. You either throw the bottle of poison over the cliff top or you drink the whole thing down—he’d said something to that effect after the maze, when he’d gone to the cottage to tell her he was coming upstate. He’d never actually said yes until the I do of the ceremony. He’d said I’ll come with you, that was all. Seeing her naked now at the foot of the knotted-pine bedframe, her gray-black hair down and unbrushed, her hands at her sides, palms out, allowed him to imagine for a fleeting second that he could still possess her body and mind.
* * *
He stood very still.
—Do you still like to have your wrists tied to the bedposts?
—Who can remember, it’s been so long.
He removed his shoes and socks, folded his trousers neatly and laid them across a wicker chair. He took off his jacket and shirt and tie, folded them carefully. He straightened his eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose.
—Are you at the doctor’s office or on your honeymoon?
He gave her a look. She blew him a kiss.
—Come sit on the edge of the bed.
* * *
He walked over naked, aware of the alpine breeze blowing against his privates as he passed the window. When he was sitting on the edge of the bed she took his hand and traced his fingers down her throat and breasts, down her stomach and between her legs. Then she had hold of his wrist, pressing the heel of his palm into her. Her eyes were open but blinkin
g slowly the whole time. After a few moments she straddled him, sank down onto him with a small sigh, whispered voici, simple and satisfied, as if she’d just cleared a drain or cranked an automobile into submission, and began to rock back and forth.
* * *
He felt the air go out of him and for a minute or two he was oddly detached and thinking about the attic bedroom scenes on set, the widow’s empty gaze as Sabine kissed him now for a small eternity, her head motionless, just the way she’d kissed Lester Summers under all those sodium lamps. Was she seducing him in character? But then she asked him to pull her hair before slipping her cool tongue between his lips. He heard himself groan into her open mouth as he took a handful up near the nape of her neck and then his mind went blank and clear.
* * *
A pantomime of love—this was the dispiriting thought that settled over him as she curled beside him after it was over. He reiterated that his condition for accepting her proposal was that they never live like brother and sister, that she perform all of the normal wifely duties. To which she answered:
—We will make love when I choose and I won’t leave you languishing, but don’t imagine I will ever cook or clean for you. And I have never darned a sock in my life. I also have a condition.
—What is that?
—That you don’t smother me like some rescued spaniel. This might be an expedition into the unknown, but certain rules will still apply.
He resisted the impulse to stroke the back of her head as she lay beside him.
—Where will they go to school? he asked.
—I was thinking we would hire a tutor.
—There is a school in Fort Lee.
—We’ll see. For now, it’s summer and school is en vacances.
—Hal says that we will have an easy time at immigration with adopted American citizens.
—I don’t want to become American.
—But our children are American.
—For now, she said, closing her eyes.
* * *
The superintendent’s wife had sent along a wicker basket of supplies—wine, coffee, milk, hardboiled eggs, sandwiches, and a frosted cake. At dusk, they sat out on the wooden dock, their feet dangling in the lake, and ate their first meal together as a married couple. There were no wineglasses, so they drank from the tin mugs they found in the kitchen.
—This wine tastes like it might contain a cure for consumption, he said, drinking it down.
They toasted their marriage, the adopted children, the film. A loon swam into view, haunting the lake and marshes with its phantom call.
—It sounds like a wolf calling, he said.
—Or a dying baby.
She drank her wine, splashing her feet back and forth.
—How does it end?
He paused, considered the possibilities of what she meant, placed them in decreasing order of magnitude: the world, life, their marriage, the film.
—I still have not seen the final pages of the photoplay. Why are you keeping them from me?
—We’re still working on the stunts and effects, to see if they are possible. We require a permit from the New Jersey fire warden, for one thing, and those are not easy to come by. Especially when Edison has every government official in the state in his back pocket.
—Surely something horrible happens to me, otherwise you wouldn’t be so coy.
—An angry mob descends on the estate.
—Audiences will like that. What happens to her?
—There are two possible endings. In one the mob burns the estate to the ground and they pursue her out to the cliffs. She jumps rather than face what they will do to her.
—And the other version?
—She tries to escape in the airship but they set it on fire as it begins to float away. Lester Summers dangles from the ladder with a torch in his hands. She burns horribly and we see her fall in flames into the river far below. We see her sink down into the sludge, her face distorted and blackened … I’ve worked out a way to film from behind an aquarium tank, making it look as if it’s all happening underwater.
They drank through a silence.
—I see. Either I leap to my death or I burn alive and drown.
—Chip will double you in either case. He’ll wear your dress and a wig. You won’t even need to be on set the day we shoot the final sequence.
—Why not have the widow and the children float away to safety in the airship, across the river?
—Audiences will want her punished.
—You mean you will.
The lake lapped, the loon called.
—And what happens to the children?
—The widow manages to hide her children in the maze before the mob arrives. There is a passageway for them to escape into the woods.
She took another sip from her tin mug.
—I’ve been thinking … I would like Leo and Cora to play the children. If they’re willing, of course.
—How do you mean?
—In the film. We don’t need to bring in child actors from Manhattan. In Paris, André Antoine used real street urchins and vagrants for his tavern scenes and they were electrifying.
Claude looked over at her.
—They’re about to lose their mother.
She stared into the lake as if her own childhood floated there.
—It’s different for children. After my mother killed herself I began to memorize Baudelaire and recited poems because I wanted to be noticed for the first time. I missed her terribly, but I needed to be fully in the world. A child doesn’t know what to do with grief. They carry it around like so much sand in their pockets … Besides, this way the poor darlings can stay right by our sides on the set.
She drained her mug and looked off at the darkening lake.
—You should choose the ending that burns me alive and sinks me to the bottom of the river. We should kill the beautiful monster off without mercy.
She handed him the empty mug, got to her feet, and walked back toward the cabin with her shoes in one hand.
15
The Mansion of Happiness
Claude did not expect happiness. But here it was, so compact and knowable it felt like a varnished birdhouse between his two big hands. The way they crammed into the stone cottage that summer, fell into a regimen of picnics and walks and parlor games. They summered like tourists at a lakeside resort. Sabine staged their mornings and afternoons, filled the rooms and hours with gramophone concerts, éclairs and lemonade, beach towels, puppets, tarot cards, Parcheesi. A board game was perennially laid out, mid-game, across one end of the kitchen table. Claude thought back to his own mother playing an old board game called the Mansion of Happiness, a spiral track of virtues and vices before the player ascended into heaven. Sabbath breakers, he remembered, were sent to the whipping post. Christian morality had been important to his mother and he could feel her disapproval from the afterlife. What would she make of his film, his marriage?
* * *
The children shared a room with bunk beds and a window facing the woods, one side crammed with books and insects in jars, the other with paints and sketchpads. Cora was almost eleven, Leo nine. In the boy, Claude saw himself at that age—a fringe of brown hair that was forever in his eyes, a magnifying glass winking from a shirt pocket, shoelaces untied, a runner and a knee-scraper, a cataloguer of the natural world. Just like Leo, he’d also been a hoarder of stamps and bugs, a marauder of puzzles and riddles, and this had given his days two different pulses: long hours of quiet punctuated by bursts of scrambling energy. It was why his mother had nicknamed him the housecat by the time he was six. Cora, on the other hand, was a green-eyed painter and sketcher, a rescuer of nestlings and a singer with a high, clear voice. She was comfortable with adults, met their eyes steadily or spoke out against their imprecisions with an air of righteousness. Other children, sometimes her brother, were blots on her mental landscape and had to be ignored with unwavering devotion.
* * *
Both o
f them were serious-minded and inquisitive about household and worldly arrangements. They had, after all, been shuttled between a tycoon’s mansion, a spinster’s house near a railway station, and a film star’s summer cottage, so they wanted to know when breakfast and dinner were served, how many people lived in the main house, whether Sabine and Claude had met in Paris, whether other children were expected—by birth or adoption—and if it was all right to open their bedroom window at night.
* * *
Other questions, over breakfast and lunch: Do the French believe in God? (Cora), Is Helena a widow or an old maid? (Leo). Sabine always answered them as directly as possible, but she also began posting a daily schedule in the kitchen each morning, like a call sheet, to give their new lives some ballast. A typical day read:
8:00 a.m. breakfast
9:00 a.m. walking along the cliffs
10:00 a.m. motorcar ride to the shore, swimming
12:00 noon picnic lunch
1:00 p.m. quiet time/dormir/reading
2:00 p.m. games or city excursion
5:00 p.m. dinner
6:00 p.m. report to set
After Helena served them all dinner in the cottage, Sabine read aloud in the parlor, Conan Doyle for Leo and Little Women for Cora, one before the other, with all the accents and dramatic gestures she could summon. Sometimes Claude hung a bedsheet on the mantel and projected an actuality for the children. From their spread blanket in the parlor, they stared up at their French counterparts at the seaside, a boy setting his toy boat before a wave and the salt-lipped girl running along the beach. Claude was careful not to show them his sister’s death or other scenes that might frighten them. After a viewing, they interrogated him about the workings of the camera and projector, about how light could pierce the celluloid and the darkness.
The Electric Hotel: A Novel Page 21