The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  Down in the aisle, the auditorium at his back, Claude had the sensation that he was hand-cranking Paris and Normandy into existence, that the bustling pedestrians and the lazing seasiders came into being only through the braiding of silver emulsion with limelight. He couldn’t bring himself to spool Odette’s death, not yet, not here, but he hovered the view from Notre Dame, the gothic spires and mansard rooflines piercing the morning fog, and the beachgoers reading novels in plashes of sunshine or strolling along the shoreline and the cat falling and the naked old hysteric crab-walking down a strip of Persian rug. Each time a new audience saw the omnibus careening toward them, the camera low to the ground, he felt their booming voices in his rib cage.

  * * *

  Sabine suffered three of these outbursts before the intermission. From her side of the wall, she had no way of knowing that each round of hollering came from a new audience for the exhibition, that the vaudeville theater was cycling patrons every thirty minutes. Instead, she imagined the same colossal crowd unhinged at regular intervals. After the second scene in the third act of Hamlet, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out, she had fifteen minutes to gather her senses in her dressing room with Pavel. She removed the sword from her scabbard and laid it across the makeup table, between the bouquets of flowers and the birthday cards from colleagues and fans. She loosened her doublet and lit a cigarette. With her free hand, she dusted some white powder under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose.

  —Every time I look toward the back of the house I see people drifting out, Pavel, as if this were some flea circus with peanut shells and sawdust on the floor.

  —This will pass. Remember to stay natural.

  Through a scrim of smoke, she fixed a cauterizing stare at him in the mirror.

  —Will you go next door and see what in good Christ is happening? And tell the stage manager to stand with the prompt book at the trapdoor.

  —I’ve never seen you forget a line.

  She blew smoke above their heads, waved it away.

  —Every time they look at the wall I feel my mind go blank. Now, let me think for a few minutes before they send me back into that coliseum …

  She watched him compare the time between his twin fob watches before walking out into the hallway. She looked at her gaunt face in the mirror, the way her neck papered above the laced and ribboned collar. Forty was a practical joke, a celestial prank engineered for her mortification.

  * * *

  Back onstage, Sabine favored the apron near the open trapdoor for the rest of the performance. Her fellow actors, Ophelia, Guildenstern, the king and queen and all the rest, had to trail after her downstage, their blocking sabotaged as she stayed within earshot of the prompter. The stage manager, a balding man in rolled shirtsleeves and suspenders, had positioned an enormous boulder made of mastic, papier-mâché, and wire in front of the open trapdoor, to conceal it from the audience, and now he stood with the annotated script, a disembodied head blinking from the floorboards, his baldness glinting under the stage lights. And because the trapdoor led down into the orchestra pit, the transition music, the trumpets and snares and violins, shot up from the crawlspace below the stage as the actors settled into the opening lines of each scene.

  * * *

  By the first scene of act 5, Sabine still hadn’t taken a prompt. Then the final outburst erupted from inside the wall—a woman’s muffled shriek, followed by a communal groan. It was during Ophelia’s burial scene, as Hamlet stood with Horatio in a copse of artificial trees and watched the queen scatter flowers into the grave. Sabine said to Horatio, What, the fair Ophelia? just as the audience shifted in their seats, scowled at the wall of noise, whispered to one another with annoyance. During the queen’s speech and Laertes’s lament for his dead sister, Sabine looked out into the house, saw a flurry of white gloves and watch chains and glinting pearls. The front row had thinned out beyond the lip of the orchestra pit, and it occurred to her that Pavel had never returned from his errand next door. He’d deserted her for whatever was causing so many people to cry out. She stood for a long time in the cardboard trees, their silk leaves rustling in the cross-breeze of a fan in the wings. She stared out into the twilight of the house, waiting for an impulse or a line to galvanize her into action, but she was suddenly sinking and receding, saw herself underground, standing alone under the high ceiling of a limestone cave.

  * * *

  Just as she heard a page of the promptbook peel up under the stage manager’s thumb, she burst from the copse toward the grave by the boulder.

  —What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane.

  She heard her voice hollow out the space in front of her, heard it coiling inside the brass bells of the orchestra horns. Not a scream, but a voice pierced and unraveled by grief. The world on the other side of the proscenium went silent and still, the pale, dotted faces turning back to her from the mezzanine and the balcony and she felt their rapt attention in her spine, in the hairs on her neck.

  * * *

  The script and rehearsals called for a skirmish between Laertes and Hamlet, demanded that grief-stricken Hamlet should follow Laertes into the burial pit, but the staging had been uprooted and nothing was in its proper place. Laertes was wringing his hands down on the apron, sweating in the sodium aura of a floodlight, too far from the silk-draped body of his sister over by the boulder. Sabine rushed up to the prompt’s trapdoor, the stage manager a vigilant, blinking prairie dog, and put her boot heel on his bald head and gave it a nudge. When he ducked below for cover, she jumped in after him, down into the cavity under the stage to signify her descent into madness and Ophelia’s burial pit. She couldn’t stand at full height, so she crouched, arms outstretched, and barreled, yelling Hold off thy hand! in the direction of the orchestra pit. As she moved through a rummage of broken theater seats and discarded props, she heard the actor’s boot heels scraping along the floorboards after her, following her movements and voice as if she’d been whisked from a shelf of ice into a swift river below.

  * * *

  She emerged between the woodwinds and the brass section, at the left, tuxedoed elbow of the stunned French horn player. There was a jolt of exhilaration as she drew her sword and climbed over the railing toward her real nemesis, not the brother of her lover and son of the king’s chief councilor, but the bored, dopey Upper East Siders and Iowans and Long Islanders masquerading as her audience.

  * * *

  Lines were dropped, whole actions erased, because here was Hamlet ranting in the aisles, his androgynous voice rubbed hoarse, his sword extended into the space above the raked seats, I loved Ophelia! Sabine wailed. Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her? And from the back acres of the stage came the king’s well-trained, scoffing voice, O, he is mad, Laertes, and the proof was in the walled-back eyes of the theatergoers in the middle rows, who sat under the electricity of Hamlet’s sword and words. After the queen made her entreaty from the stage, This is mere madness, Hamlet fell down in the aisle, prostrate under the tiny cone of illumination on J117, and finished his outpouring. Let Hercules himself do what he may, the cat will mew, and dog will have his day. And it was Horatio who finally moved from the circle of the other actors onstage to come down into the house and retrieve the wrecked Dane. They hobbled back toward the orchestra pit and the stage, Sabine’s arm around Horatio’s neck, the silence unwinding into murmured appreciation and then cascading into applause. From the apron of the stage, she looked down to see Pavel standing in the back of the house, clapping and cheering bravo with the rest of them.

  * * *

  Act 5 unfolded as written and rehearsed. When Sabine uttered Hamlet’s last words, the rest is silence, as she lay dying in Horatio’s arms, she closed her eyes and felt herself slacken into a void of exhaustion. Motionles
s, her breathing a tiny purr in the back of her throat, she heard Horatio and Fortinbras and the ambassador finish out the scene, their voices scudding through the darkness all around her. She had died thousands of times onstage and fallen asleep only once, after a fellow actor forgot to drag her corpse from the stage and she’d lain there poisoned and murdered for an entire act. But she realized she’d drifted off as slain Hamlet when the mechanical curtain winch ground to life and the audience erupted into applause. Horatio, who’d been side-mouthing comments to her all through the evening’s disruptions, nudged her with his shoe and whispered, Wake the hell up, the whole place is on its feet.

  * * *

  During the final curtain call, after Sabine gestured magnanimously down into the orchestra pit and toward her director in the front row, she flung an arm out toward the redbrick wall, at the unnamed saboteur of her play, and the theatergoers laughed en masse and directed their clapping at the vaudeville side of the divide. The curtain came down and Sabine moved toward her dressing room without speaking or making eye contact with the ensemble. Pavel waited in a lounge chair with his notebook and fob watches.

  —I thought you’d abandoned me, she said.

  —I stayed a little while to see what all the fuss was about.

  —And?

  —The Lumière brothers have sent a concession agent to show the Americans their new invention.

  —Don’t they sell chemicals in Lyon or someplace?

  —Photographic plates, actually. They’re calling it the cinématographe …

  She pulled off her buckskin boots, rubbed the soles of her stockinged feet.

  —I hurt my goddamn ankle on that stunt below the stage … And what does it do, this invention, burn a hole into the brainbox of any idiot who sees it?

  —It turns life into moving pictures.

  She winced into the mirror.

  —Theater turns life into moving pictures, into flesh-and-blood persons moving on a stage in front of a breathing audience. Imagine it. And, what, all that screaming was for this magic lantern show? You should talk to the booking manager. It was horrific, an outrage.

  Pavel nodded, crossed his legs.

  —As a student of naturalism, I thought you would want to see this. So I took the liberty of inviting the projectionist to come to the hotel suite later tonight for a private exhibition.

  —I’d rather have my legs removed.

  —He said that he and the Lumière brothers were enormous fans of your work and it would be a great honor. A patriotic privilege, I believe is the phrase he used. Besides, I have an idea you might like.

  —Tell me.

  —After you see the show.

  —Very well, but I must take a nap first. I’m a wreck.

  Pavel stood and gave her a nod.

  —I will tell him to come a little after midnight.

  Sabine heard Pavel close the door behind him and she turned her attention back to her swollen feet.

  * * *

  Hal Bender emerged from the vaudeville theater in a trance and a funk. He’d paid to sit through six or seven screenings, he couldn’t remember which, and was now walking along Broadway in the general direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything seemed crude, slow, and hard-edged compared to that silver-skinned river of light. He intended to walk all the way back to Fulton Street, that much was clear to him, slouching along with his hands in his pockets, the night folded out in the middle. Flossy Bender was always at him for wearing his shoes down at the heel, duck-footed she called him, a trait he got from his dead father, Chester Bender. But now Hal appreciated his splayed-foot inheritance because all he wanted to do was think and walk slow, to amble along on his crooked heels.

  * * *

  From the bridge, he watched the East River blink red and blue with navigation lights. Somewhere down there were the remains of Chester’s ketch, a bloated, waterlogged affair that was taken out on weekends and on summer weeknights. Eel fishing with the Germans from Staten Island, clamming with giant metal tongs, all three brothers dragging down the stern. Shortly before his father was shot for his gambling debts, the boat had been set on fire by a disgruntled creditor and sent to the bottom of the river. In Hal’s mind, Chester Bender was down there with his sunken sailboat, standing in the mud and murk with the eels, whistling bubbles up to the surface.

  * * *

  Chester had always been an inveterate whistler, and Hal missed that puckering as much as anything else. When he made it back to the Brooklyn side of the bridge, he took a detour down Columbia Heights and formulated his father’s brassy signature tune with his mouth as he passed the site where they’d found his body. Dr. Shepard’s Turkish Baths for Malaise was the spot where Chester, who’d trained as a daguerreotypist and spent too much time with mercury vapors, took his nervous complaints for a medicinal soak. He’d come down off the front stoop, Hal remembered, hair slicked, cheeks flushed, replenished and light, puckering into the sunlight, daydreaming about one of his moneymaking schemes, perhaps, the portrait-studio-cum-barbershop, the floating bandstand, while he smoked and melodized down the street. He returned to the apartment above the novelty parlor with a new amplitude in his joints and limbs and mind, floated through the apartment smelling of camphor or birch leaves—venik, he said it was called—the younger boys hanging off him, slipping their hands into his trouser pockets for coins or mints, pausing his whistle to kiss his wife on the lips on the way down the hallway to dinner, and then he’d come to Hal, his eldest, and they’d shake hands like two diplomats signing a treaty. What’s the word, Harold Bender, he’d ask, all good among your chiefdoms?

  * * *

  And Hal would tell him of his exploits out at the Coney Island handball courts, back before he’d left school to take over the novelty parlor. Smelling of hot oil and minerals, Chester would listen and marvel and chuckle in all the right places. Slapping old tennis balls against the dilapidated wooden jetties with his friends turned into competitive matches against the Italians and the Irish. For the year before Chester’s death, Hal was the reigning champion in single-wall handball, trouncing the older, shirtless boys with stubble and massive wingspans. Chester sometimes trekked out there to cheer him on and take bets from the sidelines with a coffee can. But those stories about his summer afternoon triumphs and the coffee cans full of his winnings already felt like another lifetime. Two years ago, in the wake of his father’s murder, he’d left his childhood behind.

  * * *

  And he’d been running the novelty parlor as if it were a small shipping empire ever since, determined to turn a profit as a way of getting even with a stone-hearted universe. He tallied receipts, plotted revenue curves on graphing paper, mailed viewing surveys to his neighbors, negotiated better terms with creditors. If they entered a Sunday afternoon slump, when the post-church crowd were flushed from their porches and doorways after a pot-roast lunch, he walked out onto Flatbush or Fulton in his derby hat and necktie to drum up a fresh round of peepers, rocking on his heels like a clapboard evangelist, a nickel to change your day, see real life like never before with Edison’s latest marvel. He greeted customers and prospects by name and knew how to read strangers in the street from a distance of fifty feet. If he saw a lonely punter shambling toward him, eyes averted, hands in pockets, he stopped barking like a sideshow carnie and simply held out the sandwich board sign he’d painted by hand: A happy man has no use for fun. For everyone else, there’s Edison’s kinetoscope!

  * * *

  While Hal tended the front of the house and the daily ledger, his mother supervised the novelty parlor itself. She kept out the rabble-rousers, walked the aisles between phonographs and kinetoscopes with a ready quip or admonishment. Because Flossy Bender had lost her husband to drink and vice, she conducted the business with an even, virtuous hand. Management reserved the right to deny entry or turn off a peepshow midstream if some lunatic from Red Hook or Young Dublin started yelling down into the peephole. On moral grounds, she didn’t exhibit boxing matches or fe
male contortionists. She preferred scenes that were wholesome or patriotic, or suggested purification—brass band parades, a family flying a kite from a hillside, surfers on the Atlantic, a tenement rat-catcher plying his trade.

  * * *

  Ticket sales were down, though, and the slump hung over the Benders all that summer. Hal called it their kinetoscopic revenue gap and drew charts that demonstrated the effect of showing a single boxing match at a nickel a round. Flossy said she had no appetite for blood sport and complained that he was already becoming an authority on everything under the sun, just like his buried old man. She sometimes speculated that Chester Bender had been shot with his mouth open, mid-opinion, holding forth at the Turkish bathhouse like a country parson.

  * * *

  By the time Hal reached the parlor, he was sweating and also appalled at the thought of turning on the kinetoscopes and phonographs in the morning. At the end of a row of phonographs, their stethoscope earphones neatly folded across the top, Flossy had posted a sign that read Dancing in the Aisles Strictly Prohibited. At the other end, in an alcove devoted to kinetoscopes, a daguerreotype portrait of a young Thomas Edison hung above the franchise certificate on the wall, a look of distracted genius and scarlet fever in his eyes. Occasionally, Hal heard his mother offer up a kind of commercial prayer to the patron saint of nickel entertainments—Let it rain on Saturday so people are driven indoors to distraction and can’t be bothered schlepping out to Coney Island.