—If I do it, she said to Claude, we must split the ticket sales for my appearance in the view.
—Madame, I am not authorized to pay film subjects.
—Given the proceedings of last night, madame seems quite formal, don’t you think?
Claude blushed under the glassed-in sky.
—Based on those extravagant newspaper reviews, I think thirty percent is the right number, said Sabine. That’s roughly a three-way split between each brother and me.
She liked the look of the number 30—it began with a woman’s ample buttocks.
—I will have to write to the Lumières and ask them how to proceed.
—Very well, in the meantime, Claude, when you take the view, you must shroud me in orchids and ferns and soap bubbles. I am not making some backroom parlor image.
* * *
They heard a door banging from the other end of the rooftop and turned to see a small army of porters carrying buckets of steaming water over their shoulders. Places, everybody, said Pavel, probably a phrase that came from the theater but one that Claude would use from now on, whenever he was directing a view. Long before there was action! there were places. Claude attached the cinématographe to the tripod, a blank film already loaded and waiting inside the darkness of the chamber. He positioned the camera so that he could take in the backdrop of the city behind the tub. The porters emptied their steaming water and were sent dutifully from the rooftop. Sabine removed her robe and stepped into the tub. She began to soap up the water while Claude arranged ferns and flowers in the foreground. When he looked through the viewfinder he immediately saw a Greek myth of revenge or lust, a bare-breasted Electra bathing above her conquered citadel.
4
The Fiery Splash
Claude never did write to the Lumières about splitting ticket sales with Sabine Montrose. Instead, he bundled along the footage of her bathing on a Midtown rooftop on the steamer to Sydney, Australia. Onboard, belowdecks, and in the kind of barrooms and taverns where only men gathered, it outperformed his other reels. He liked to show it after the careening omnibus and the falling cat but before Odette’s hospital room death, a view now in the regular lineup. Each time he showed it, when he heard the men cheering and groaning with pleasure, he felt his one night with Sabine roaring through him, his blood pounding in his ears.
* * *
He didn’t include the bathtub scene at the Lyceum Theatre on Pitt Street, where he exhibited reels for an audience that included women and children. On the weekends, each performance pulled a crowd of hundreds and they hollered up at the careening omnibus just like their New York counterparts. That sound stayed with him when he came out of the theater, cinématographe and tripod in hand, and walked past the two Edison kinetoscope parlors, both of them small storefronts of half a dozen machines, with viewfinders and twenty-second loops at a shilling a turn. His pockets full of money, he hurried down Pitt Street to the Strand Arcade and passed under the tinted glass roof. The Strand was a commercial conservatory in its own right, a retail cathedral of ironwork and marble columns and carved balustrades, the upper galleries full of hatters and haberdashers and tailors, illuminated below the gas-jet and electric chandeliers that hung from the roof trusses. He had an arrangement with a jeweler on the upper floor to store his ticket sales in the shop safe until the banks opened on Monday morning, but as he climbed the cedar stairs, he thought about the paneled transparent roof, about how a film stage could be built under a ceiling of glass.
* * *
After he’d deposited his takings, he continued down to Circular Quay to take in the gunflint blue of the harbor, to make views among the ferries and tourists. As a city, Sydney was a paradox. Her Paris-inspired town hall held a concert venue with the world’s largest pipe organ, behind an ornate facade carved with lions, and her elite lived in sandstone mansions along the shoreline, and the streets were full of crinoline and top hats and morning suits, but there was also the edge of something darker, a vestige of her convict past. Down at the Rocks, among the gambling houses and weatherboard pubs, there were larrikin gangs known to prey upon outsiders. They wore black bell-bottomed pants and no waistcoats, swaggered along in collarless shirts and neckerchiefs. Claude had been told on several occasions at his hotel to never go walking alone at night, that foreign dandies like him could end up robbed and with their throats slit.
* * *
On the Sunday afternoon when he met Chip Spalding, the next and final member of his moviemaking family, Claude wondered whether this fifteen-year-old runaway was a surfside cousin to the hoodlums who preyed on tourists down in The Rocks. He was all sinew and lank muscle, fearless and pigeon-chested, a teenage daredevil in a loincloth. Claude had taken the tramline out to Fletcher’s Glen behind Tamarama Beach and walked down to take in the amusements at the Royal Aquarium and Pleasure Grounds. There was a promenade concert, a sea pond stocked with stingrays and sharks, a seal and penguin enclose, a switchback railway that undulated above the sand. A troupe of acrobats twirled from a tethered balloon. Not to be outdone by the aquariums at Manly and Coogee, the proprietors employed a small team of gymnasts and daredevils, and Chip Spalding was one of them. He hand-fed the sharks and set himself on fire before plunging into the Pacific from a tightrope suspended cliff to cliff. Hearing of the fiery stunt, Claude had arranged with the foreman of the pleasure grounds to take his equipment up into the tethered balloon and film it from above.
* * *
Chip Spalding, wearing nothing but his loincloth, lathered up with a gel he made from sheep’s-wool fat and doused himself with kerosene. He was oblivious to Claude hand-cranking the cinématographe from the balloon. Eyes straight out, breath tucked in his gut, he balanced out toward the midpoint of the inlet, some thirty feet above the roiling surf, a wooden pole lit at both ends. The crowd watched from the sand as he slid the burning pole toward his body and made contact. A ruffle of blue-yellow flame kindled up his torso, then curled gently out to his limbs. A few women shrieked from under their wide-brim sunhats down on the sand, while he stood there very still, holding his breath now so that he wouldn’t scorch his throat. Arms outstretched before an arrow-like plunge into the surf below.
* * *
All the way down he heard the sputter of the flames and the awed silence of the onlookers. Then the moment of impact came like a blow to the head, shooting the air from his lungs and bruising his knuckles and fingertips. Everything went dark and cold. He’d once been thrown by his father through a small-town pub window, and that was a holiday compared to this particular descent. Each time he heard himself scream underwater he thought he might black out. When he came up for air, the crowd always chanted his nickname from the beach—Blazer! Blazer! Blazer!—and he wished his mother out west could hear that clapping and cheering. He swam to the shore and ran from the surf, fists in the air like a prizefighter, a wild grin on his face. He died and got reborn every single day.
* * *
In return for this spectacle and for feeding the wobbegong and tiger sharks, Chip earned a few pounds a week plus room and board and an illegal little hut in the scrubby crown land that abutted the pleasure grounds. He didn’t like the bunkroom where the acrobats bedded down because the troupe included some godless gamblers and womanizers who rarely bathed. He washed himself every morning from a spigot he’d drilled into the sandstone wall behind the hut. A pure spring catacombing through the sandstone headland, flowing out into a tiny stream and gulley. It was a source of strength that fortified his stunts, this water, and he liked to picture it flowing in reverse, out to the drought-stricken hinterland, the patch of stony ground his bastard father raised sheep on.
* * *
After bathing, he performed his calisthenics, climbed his tree ropes to stay limber, and read his vellum-paged bible, a birthday present from his mother. Although he’d run away to escape his father and the stricken sheep farm, he kept up the habits of his mother’s household. She was English and cut from finer cloth. He ate his tea when
she did (five sharp), polished his boots on Sunday afternoons, read scriptures every day, and tried to continue his studies in reading and writing. He kept a list of words he heard among the wealthy holidaymakers as they strolled about the pleasure grounds—gallant, incognito, audacious—and looked them up in his travel-sized dictionary. He knew himself to be an audacious person and it pleased him to be in their orbit of fancy words. Sometimes he put the collected words into the letters he wrote to his mother. Every day he renewed the commitment to improve his body and mind. If he had vices, it was possible they included “cleaning his rifle” a little too often, swearing, and a taste for practical jokes. He once put a stingray he’d found washed up on the beach inside a gypsy acrobat’s dressing room because the man had beaten his wife.
* * *
When Claude descended from the balloon and hiked up the glen that Sunday afternoon, Chip was inspecting his body for new burns and scrapes from the tightrope fall. His freckled arms, legs, and chest were hairless and there were crescents and discs from old burns, patches of marbled skin, dark runs on the backs of his forearms and shins. A childhood spent lighting bonfires and falling off barbed-wire fences, barns, and horses had been written into his body. A map of boyhood rebellion. He washed the ash and grease out of his hair and eyebrows, rubbed down his legs and arms with a soapy washcloth. The wool fat compound never really washed off; it just crusted over and had to be scraped off with a twig. He liked to smear the scrapings on the bark of the trees, each one like a notch on a leather belt.
* * *
He saw the French projectionist walking up through the scrub—bespectacled eyes on the ground, hands butterflying behind his back, a beachside scholar running his mind. This bloke was different from the foreigners in the bunkhouse; his hands were big plates of bone china and he smelled of lemons. A few nights ago, Monsieur Ballard had been invited by the pleasure grounds to put on his light show in one of the canvas sideshow tents. Chip had sat on the ground because all the chairs were full, and he’d been close enough to smell the Frenchman’s aroma, to watch his hand turn the crank. Because Paris and New York were as unfathomable to Chip Spalding as distant planets, he got a lump in his throat when he saw the shaky little pictures of northern cities, especially the one with the tall, big-bosomed actress bathing herself like an empress above the city.
* * *
Chip could hardly talk when the nude scene was over and his cheeks were searing in the dark as he walked barefoot back through the glen, his crotch throbbing and burning. He had to lean up against a silky oak to relieve himself of that particular burden and then go inside the hut to read scriptures by candlelight and apologize to God for besmirching his own sanctity. He’d made a commitment to clean his rifle only once a month and now he’d fallen short. Plus she was old enough to be his mother. Deep down, though, he knew he’d do it again if he ever saw that woman sudsing herself in a bathtub under the noonday sun, her hair pulled to the nape of her neck.
* * *
Claude stopped ten feet short.
—I hope I’m not intruding.
The Frenchman, it seemed to Chip, was made of manners and tweed. Chip was naked except for an old bath towel around his waist, still taking inventory of his scars and welts. He looked up, shrugged. The foreigner’s shoulders were bent forward, an invisible weight around his neck.
—Doesn’t matter to me.
Claude came closer and briefly had the sensation of approaching a wild animal in a clearing.
—As soon as I develop the film I’ll show you your work. It was quite wonderful, especially from a height.
—I never seen it, obviously, but they tell me the fiery splash makes certain ladies faint. The fat ones mostly, on account of the heat and sun. They stand out there like sausages bursting from their casings.
Claude laughed and looked across the glen toward the beach. Then he asked the question that had been troubling him for hours: Why do you do it?
* * *
Chip made a show of studying his scars. When people asked him why, he shrugged and pretended he’d never thought about it. How could he explain that to live inside the slicked skin of a new stunt—a fall, a burn, a backward somersault off a cliff—was to lance your own fate like a wasp to a corkboard? The knot of fear began as a swollen fist around his heart and then it opened out, right before the leap, his limbs electrified and unbreakable. Each time he felt washed clean, exalted in the vellum words of his mother’s old bible. Did you hear that ruckus on the beach, he wanted to ask the Frenchman, the way they worship me like some blue-headed Hindu god? Matronly women sometimes brought him flowers; young girls with organdy bows in their hair offered him ice cream cones or money, their fathers nudging them forward. Back home, on the hectares of dust and cane grass that passed for a sheep station, he was invisible at the bottom of a big brood of twelve kids. The runt of the hardscrabble Catholic clan. The older siblings had all left, fled to the coasts, and unless his father was on a bender and marking him for a hiding, he was free to go skiving off school and live out among the scrub and ghost gums, tethering ropes between the trees and setting fires down in the stony riverbed. On the night he’d run away, he burned down the clanking old windmill just to make sure they’d all notice he was gone. The rusting blades shanking through the night had always given him nightmares anyway.
* * *
Chip grinned and said, Who the hell knows why I do it? as he backed into his lean-to. Claude stood in the doorway, peering into the darkness. There was a small cot, a hurricane lantern, a desk made from a packing crate with a bible on top. And then there was what appeared to be a tiny shrine, a ledge brimming with flowers and foreign postcards, sea glass and cockles. A leather-clad seaweed album lay on a chair, open to an emerald-haired specimen.
—They tell me you’re from out in the country? Claude asked.
—Out west.
—What is it like?
Chip picked through a small pile of neatly folded clothes and put on a pair of trousers under his towel.
—Hot and dry. The flies get bad in the summer. Bush flies the size of currawongs.
—Currawongs?
Chip let the silence and confusion gather, buttoned his pants. He wasn’t put on the earth to explain Australia’s flora and fauna to every foreigner who happened upon its shores. He shrugged, inspected one hairless, spackled arm, slung it through a singlet.
—It’s a bird. A fucking savage. Excuse the French.
—But it’s not French.
They both laughed. Then Claude understood that he was not going to be invited in, so he collected his thoughts in the darkening glen.
—As an agent for the Lumière brothers, I wish to retain an assistant, someone who might help make moving pictures. I have come to see if you might consider it. It would mean traveling around Australia and then back to America, possibly to Europe. You would also be in some of the films, with your daredevil work.
Chip looked him dead in the eyes.
—America’s far. What’s it pay?
—Handsomely.
—How handsomely?
—As prettily as Sabine Montrose bathing in the reel the other night.
Claude saw the boy blush as he tried to smooth out the wrinkles of a cotton shirt.
—What about me job here?
—If we can agree on a price, I will speak with the owners and see if they will let you leave. You might be gone a year or more. I am also willing to pay them. A finder’s fee, let’s call it.
—Nope, they didn’t find me. I found them. Rode a neighbor’s gelding for three weeks and slept in chook houses.
As he buttoned up his shirt, Chip tried to think of a number that would shock the Frenchman.
—Five pounds a week, plus meals, including afternoon tea all the seven days. Each stunt is extra, depending on its peculiar hazards.
—That seems fair.
—That means I could have asked for more.
Claude shrugged amiably.
—Who’l
l feed the sharks when I’m gone?
—Perhaps one of the Hungarian acrobats.
—I reckon the tiger sharks might get a taste for gypsy blood.
He ran a bone-handled comb through his hair, something he’d bought with his own money. Fire and falling fed and clothed him and now they were going to bear him across oceans. He wished his husk of an old man could know that he’d become a shining colossus.
—Consider us under contract if the owners agree to let me quit.
He liked the official way that sounded. Claude moved off the doorframe and extended his hand to the boy. When they shook, Claude felt the callused skin on Chip’s palm and fingertips. It made him embarrassed of his own big fleshy hand at the end of his tweed sleeve.
5
The Bender Bijoux
Everyone agreed that Hal Bender had brought something beautiful to the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street, even if they didn’t know what to call it. Something between a glorified storefront, a vaudeville theater, and a novelty parlor. The facade was stucco and rusticated imitation stone, but the flourishes—sculpted garlands and goddesses—were molded plaster, painted to a high gloss. From a distance, it looked like a curbside basilica, something hand-chiseled by neighborhood sinners and aspirants, but inside there were eight rows of red-plush opera chairs and the velvet drapes were tied back with golden, tasseled ropes. There was a Kimball pump organ, a mounted screen of white silk, and a stage where vaudeville acts could perform between reels.
The Electric Hotel Page 8