—Vous êtes macabre, Claude said.
—Et vous.
—You don’t look a day over three hundred.
—I’ve always wanted to be an oracle, an old hag from Delphi. Tonight I intend to dispense ambiguous alarms about people’s futures.
—And what is my ambiguous alarm?
—Yours is not so ambiguous.
She tightened a tattered shawl around her shoulders.
—You have been cursed to love the wrong woman.
* * *
She stepped down from the porch, goblet in hand, her hair spilling against her shoulders. Claude could see that she had streaked her hair with talcum powder to whiten it. He watched her as she moved down the path, that old feeling mangling through his chest and thoughts. Did she mean she was the wrong woman to love or Lavinia? His ankle chains jangled as he stepped off the porch and followed a few feet behind. He was determined not to provoke her, so he sidled up beside her and extended his elbow.
—Chip mixed up the stunt blood for me. I’m an escaped murderer.
—Did you finally bludgeon that glorified barmaid from Hoboken in her sleep?
She pronounced Hoboken as O-bock-aine. He swallowed, refused to be baited.
—She’s actually visiting her mother in Connecticut. I look like this because I murdered a man in cold blood for his pocket watch.
Sabine liked this answer and took his arm. Even in the envelope of a brisk fall night, she still smelled like Provence, like lemons and sun-bleached limestone.
—I’ve got a surprise for you. A spectacle, he said.
—Are there any left to be had?
—A few. I’m working on a new idea for a film I’d like you to star in. It will be an hour long.
—Who would sit in darkness for an hour?
* * *
They came along the pathway and onto the grassy flats adjacent to the Palisades. The airship—secured perpendicular to the cliff—swayed a little in the pockets of turbulence above the Hudson. It hovered thirty feet or so from the edge, a framed canvas screen below. Except for the undercarriage and the faint silhouette of the aeronaut and his anonymous passenger, wearing a top hat, it looked as if the filmstrip were projecting directly into a rent of darkening sky above the river.
* * *
Claude had instructed Chip to run a starter reel he’d spliced of Sabine in various roles, a montage of her as pioneer wife, kidnapped countess, empress in a long flowing robe. She stopped when she saw these enormous projected images, then continued walking slowly. An organ had been set up at the edge of the cliffs, played by Hal’s brother Angus, and it fog-horned through the riverine night, into the canyon of falling dark between the studio and Manhattan.
—Bordel de merde! I look gargantuan and impossibly old up there. My mouth is the size of a cave. And, what, we are playing a funeral march to accompany my mortification?
* * *
Claude felt a bite of anger but said nothing. He would kill her off in his film so convincingly that everyone in America would assume she’d really perished, that she’d finally snubbed them all for the vanity of her own private afterlife. And it would be his masterpiece, his rallying cry to Edison, Selig, and D. W. Griffith.
* * *
He led her down into the gathering crowd, Fort Lee residents and their children dressed as witches and monsters and lions. A few of them recognized Sabine and they gave her a round of applause. She blew them a kiss and waved. The animal trainer had brought out the bear and the tiger into separate enclosures just for the occasion. A few young wolves and warlocks stood throwing pieces of jerky and bread out toward the animals.
* * *
Down at the cliffs, Chip manned the projector dressed as a racehorse jockey, his pet wallaby leashed and lying on its haunches at his feet. Earlier, Claude had set up a private viewing area on the stunt stage, the mattress and scaffolding that lay suspended six feet below the edge. They climbed down the wooden ladder—Claude slowly, one chained foot at a time, Sabine with her goblet and staff still in hand—and settled against a makeshift divan of pillows and sheepskin. A bottle of champagne stood propped inside a bucket of ice, two flutes nearby.
* * *
Claude knew that he had staged a seduction scene, but he wasn’t sure if it was strictly a seduction of Sabine or whether he was trying to seduce himself, that part of his mind that could conjure the dark narrative coil of a melodrama. He imagined the widow, heard her fitful breathing as she looked out a frosted window of the hotel. He imagined an overgrown yew maze in the foreground and knew that she liked to stare into it from above, trying to fathom its design. But he couldn’t make out her expression in the windowpane—it was a blank sheet of glass.
* * *
Sabine settled back against the plush cushions, nursing her goblet of spiced wine. When she was done with her drink, she let Claude pour her some champagne and they watched the last of her montage in silence, a dozen disguises and characters. Claude looked off at the opalescent city against the other shoreline, the Hudson breathing and lapping far below, and felt momentarily suspended in time, floating high above the intricate workings of his own life. He thought: Something new is going to happen.
—Does my insurance cover this particular location? Sabine asked.
She sipped her champagne. Claude smiled but said nothing. The film opened with the raising of a curtain on a title card:
In each of us, two natures are at war.
But in our own hands lies the power to choose—what we want most to be, we are.
The organ music above their heads became a fugue.
—Have you read the book? I think the quote is Stevenson, Claude whispered.
Sabine shook her head and brought her finger to her lips to shush him.
* * *
A woman stands by an open French window in the drawing room of a London townhouse. Agnes, daughter of Sir Danvers, is waiting for her fiancé, Dr. Henry Jekyll. The father sits playing chess with his lawyer nearby. Their conversation, spanning half a dozen title cards, details Jekyll’s recent erratic behavior, then the story of a strange man brutally assaulting a woman out in the street.
* * *
A few moments later, the camera cuts to the young doctor arriving at the open window. But he stops a few feet short, seized by an idea.
—I am possessed of a fiend, wearing at times another shape, vile, monstrous, hideous beyond belief. I must break things off with Agnes. To save her poor soul.
He backs away from the window and quickens across the square. But both Agnes and Danvers see him leave.
—An important case, no doubt.
—There he goes now, through the trees. Look, Papa. The moon is coming up … it is beautiful.
The screen blanches with moonlight. A few moments later, the fiancé appears again, this time bent and haggard, stopping to drink from the fountain in the square. He wipes his mouth with the back of a sleeve and looks up at the window, at the camera, at Danvers and Agnes at the window.
* * *
The cliffside audience—monsters and ghouls at the precipice—murmured as they watched him lope toward the open window.
—Leave the room, Agnes. Do as I bid you, child.
The doctor, now transformed into Mr. Hyde, walks closer, something erratic in his hands and shoulders and breathing. He cranes up into the halo of a gaslight. Claude could see the whites of his eyes, the grinding set of his jaws. It was the same actor playing Jekyll, but his face and body had been completely altered.
—Call Agnes back, I say. I saw her face through the window, and I like it.
—My daughter’s name! Why, what’s that to you?
Hyde reaches through the window, places his gnarled hands against the aristocrat’s throat, and forces him to the ground. Claude looked over at Sabine, her flute of champagne halfway to her mouth, her face unblinking. He watched her swallow, hoping she was terrified.
* * *
Just as Hyde strangled the life out of Danvers, a
series of piercing notes erupted from the organ and Jimmy Thorpe, the aeronaut, lit a lantern in the gondola of the airship and threw his anonymous passenger over the side. The figure dangled from a long rope, his neck wrenched and limp inside a noose. His top hat fell, end over end, curling down toward the Hudson far below. Women and children and goblins screamed from the edge of New Jersey until they saw, in the slumping of the figure, in his misshapen trouser legs stuffed with cotton and rags, that this was a Halloween hoax. Jimmy had executed the stunt exactly as Chip had instructed, following Angus’s organ cue. Claude watched Sabine’s face wash with relief, a single adrenal tear in one of her eyes, then she smacked his bloodied shoulder, called him an imbecile, and folded her arms.
* * *
There was a long pause on the cliff top, then a volley of energetic cheering and applause to clear out the lingering terror. The aeronaut waved to the crowd and turned off his lantern, but left the lynched dummy dangling below.
* * *
A few minutes later, during a scene with Hyde in a lodging house, Claude finally understood how Sabine as the widow had to appear in the film. Hyde has just come in from the street and sits at a table with a candle burning before him. He looks up at his own distorted shadow on the wall.
—I thought someone followed me in from the street, but it is merely this—this that I love. My own self is my sanctuary.
Hyde’s face changes. His eyes soften, his mouth becomes supple and imploring.
* * *
Claude thought: This that I love is a thing he carries through the glinting rooms and days of the living, his own secret self-infatuation. Claude suddenly saw the widow’s face at the window of the hotel as she looked down into the puzzle of the yew maze. Her reflection, he realized, was not bleak and pallid, but radiant, her face burning and somehow purified by the tubercular fevers. He remembered seeing that look in his own sister before her death—her face smooth and pale as soapstone, her eyes green and flinty and shining, her lips full and blood-red. Had she been seducing death in her final days, or was she courting that other eternal self at the windowpane? Her dark and eternal this that I love.
* * *
The men who checked into the electric hotel—he saw it now—fell under her spell, because a kind of hypnotism was at work. Lights went out when she entered a room, suitcases unpacked themselves, and each night one of these stupefied guests climbed the stairs to her attic bedroom. And she was somehow sustained by these seductions, drawing down sustenance like so much DC current. Eventually, when the traveling salesmen and merchants didn’t check out of the hotel, the townspeople would descend on the property, convinced that the widow was a witch, a whore, a murderess, or all three. They wanted to burn her alive. But the truth was, Claude realized, she’d been burning alive for some time, in love with her own apparition in the windowpane.
* * *
Selig’s film was winding down, Hyde disappearing behind the facade of Jekyll after the monster takes a dose of the poisonous tonic. The devil, the rogue traveler, retreated again into the shadows. A curtain came down at the end of the reel and they heard the audience above begin to disperse, some of them walking down toward the bonfire.
* * *
Claude looked over at Sabine, who was now wrapped in a blanket.
—Did you like it?
She nodded.
—But it made me very cold.
* * *
She leaned toward him and he wrapped the sheepskin around her shoulders. They looked out from their perch at the airship. Jimmy Thorpe released the steel cables and began to motor back toward the aerodrome where he stored the Strobel. His lantern picked through the fog above the river. Up above, they heard Chip call, A very nice exhibition, Jimmy! Top-notch! The aeronaut shrugged, the words lost in the night air, and waved as he drifted by.
* * *
Claude watched the airship buoy through the darkness for a moment.
—When we advertise this film, we will use the airship to display your image high above the streets of Manhattan. We might even use it in the film itself.
—Ah, I see, like a floating advertisement for baking soda or hemorrhoid cream. Put your arm around me, je gèle.
Claude complied.
—Did it frighten you, the film?
Sabine blew into her hands.
—Give me your knee. I need to have something warm between my hands.
He cocked his left knee and angled it toward her. She placed her hands on his kneecap, fingers laced.
—What is the idea for the picture?
—There is a widow overcome by consumption …
—It sounds morbid already. I will need more champagne.
—You have to promise not to interrupt. Vous promettez?
She nodded, held out her flute. Claude poured the last of the champagne into her glass and settled back against the cushions.
—The widow runs a hotel out in the country and lives there with her two children. To modernize and attract paying guests, she electrifies the hotel. But she continues to die. Only she gets more beautiful the closer she gets to death. Every day, as she is dying, she stands at the window staring down into a yew maze.
—What is a yew? A sheep? Un mouton?
—You promised. A kind of tree. Traveling salesmen and merchants check in to the hotel, but they fall under her spell and never leave. Eventually, they’re found stupefied and shuffling endlessly through the garden maze. Or some of them are found dead in their rooms.
—What happens to the children?
—They wander through the hotel and the grounds, as if lost.
—Did she kill the husband? Poison him?
—No, I don’t think so.
A silence.
—What else?
* * *
He continued to improvise the script while they both stared north, up into the dark gaping mouth of the Hudson Valley. He knew exactly which aspects to emphasize to draw her in—the widow’s mounting beauty, her seductive powers, the silk dresses she wears to the dinner table, a ghost who’s drifted in from a glittering spectral ballroom. He told her everything in elaborate detail except for the film’s ending. He didn’t know exactly how her terrible death would unfold, but he wanted to keep it from her as long as possible. When he was done he waited, braced himself for her cynicism.
—I am too old to have small children. No one would believe that.
—It will be part of your supernatural powers. We would begin filming in the spring.
—Could she be foreign, French, like me?
—Perhaps.
—What are you calling it?
—The Electric Hotel. We would release it next Halloween.
She thought for a moment, looking off into the distance. He felt the hand pressure on his knee tighten.
—You should set the picture as if it were taking place right here above the river. We’re always pretending New Jersey is somewhere else.
—Agreed.
She peered into the space in front of her, letting it all take shape.
—Yes, your film needs a beautiful monster, a shockingly pale woman in a black silk gown.
—I was thinking white.
—No, no, black will bring out the lavender powder on her cheeks.
—I’m so pleased you like the idea.
He put his hand on top of hers, the one gripping his knee. She left her hand there for a moment, then removed it and looked into her empty champagne glass.
—I don’t know why you’ve loved me like this all these years. It’s pure but also monstrous.
Claude stared down at the river. Hal Bender’s dead father had a boat lying at the bottom of the Hudson, and Claude imagined it there in an underwater cemetery, a riverscape of mud and sunken scows and bloated keg barrels. Life is nothing but flotsam, he thought, floating all around us while we slowly drown.
—The poison that Dr. Jekyll carries in his pocket … This is loving you. I take a sip and there you are again, ready to put a knife t
hrough my shoulder blades.
She lifted her hands in front of her, opened her fingers wide.
—Look, there is no knife in my hands. There never has been …
—I’m going to ask Hal to spend fifty thousand dollars on this film. It will be unlike anything else that’s ever been made. Will you do it?
Sabine, still with nettles in her hair, examined her champagne flute and gave it a sudden toss. They heard a tiny, far-off shattering of glass against the cliff face. She smiled faintly but didn’t look at him.
—We used to smash our glasses before opening night at the Théâtre Libre. It’s a gesture of good luck for a new beginning. It signals the death of the past. Of course I will do it.
Claude tossed his own glass off the cliff and they listened for the far-off shattering.
9
The Feature
“THE ELECTRIC HOTEL”
A DARK MELODRAMA
PHOTOPLAY
Principals:
The Widow, Rosalind Bernaud--Madame Sabine Montrose
The Besotted Hotel Guest--Lester Summers
Director--Claude Ballard
Producer--Hal Bender
Master of Stunts--Chip Spalding
ACT I
1. EXTERIOR HOTEL (NIGHT)
The camera is stationary as the fade comes in. The Palisades in moonlight, the dark river below. A gothic hotel, hunkered and foreboding, looms above a ruined garden. A single light shines from a circular attic window: a portal into another world.
In the foreground, something prowls: a menacing silhouette. The beast slinks up the stairs and onto the porch, lying across the entranceway. In the pall, we see its piercing eyes. A tiger. Blink, then it’s gone.
The Electric Hotel Page 13