The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  A moment later there came a torrential animal roar, followed by a man’s full-throated scream. Sabine, still standing at the mirror, felt something electrical pass through her scalp and into the roots of her hair. She was unable to turn away from the scene captured in the full-length mirror—the animal trainer with the steak in his hand, only the limp hand was now attached to a wrist that happened to be secured inside the tiger’s serrated mouth. A delicate strand of the animal’s saliva threaded along its blackened gum line. Even she was surprised that she didn’t scream or faint. She just kept looking into the mirror, where the tiger looked nonchalantly at a distant spot on the wall and the trainer’s eyes met Sabine’s apologetically.

  —She did this once before …

  The man panted, turned white, bit his bottom lip—did anyone on set even know his name?

  — … but eventually she got bored and let it go. Right now, there’s more pressure than actual puncturing. I startled you, that’s all, isn’t it, Bella?

  Sabine could see the whites of his eyes in the mirror.

  —You’re going to be all right, she said. I promise.

  She turned away to yell down the stairwell.

  —Is anyone coming to take care of this? Anyone?

  * * *

  She watched as the tiger in the mirror shook its enormous head loose, side to side, as if slicking water off its jowls, and the man’s drooping hand waved theatrically at the floor, as if beckoning down a mineshaft. When she saw a bright slash of blood against the pale, hairy wrist and against the black, shining gum line she gave herself permission to faint if she needed to. But she didn’t faint, something she would regret later on account of her vivid, carnivorous dreams. She didn’t want to startle the animal further, so she stood perfectly still at the mirror.

  * * *

  Then came the sound of Chip Spalding bounding up the stairs. He was saying easy now, easy girl, as he came closer. Bella lifted her head, reared up, this time causing a parabola of the trainer’s blood to arc out into the room. Chip lowered himself slowly beside the trainer—Sabine saw it as a genuflection, a graceful sinner kneeling in church—reached for the man’s holstered revolver, and fired two shots into the brindled fur of Bella’s neck.

  * * *

  With the camera still clicking away, a cloud of blood burst open under the sodium arc lights, covering the animal trainer’s face and Chip’s arms and chest. It even spattered the train of Sabine’s long gown. She turned at last from the mirror to see the tiger drop with such force that it took the trainer to the floor with it. Then Chip Spalding was prying open Bella’s jaws, and Claude appeared, ripping off his shirt and tightening a tourniquet above the trainer’s mangled wrist and hand. The lights suddenly went out, and in the darkness, with the carbon arcs ticking and cooling, they all heard the animal trainer calling for Bella like a lost lover. Somebody at last said his name. It was Rex Lander.

  * * *

  Production was halted while the custodial crew bleached the blood out of the attic and while Hal Bender sourced another tiger. Both Nash Sully and Claude suggested that the tiger could be cut from the photoplay, that the affected scenes could be easily rewritten, but Hal wouldn’t hear of it. He thought of Edison’s electrocution of a Coney Island elephant, of two trains colliding, of the need to keep up with the hunger for spectacle.

  * * *

  He had a lead from a circus in Florida, where a Bengal tiger was nearing retirement age, if only he could negotiate a fair price and delivery. In the meantime, Hal decided, it would be a thoughtful gesture to have Bella’s body hauled off to a Fort Lee taxidermist. He could imagine the resurrected cat presiding over the lobby of the Bender Bijoux with its glaucous eyes and a plaque below, with the untold story of animal trainer bravery in moving pictures. But the taxidermist was unable to patch and fortify an animal of this size and damage, and eventually Hal settled for the mounted head. He took it with him to visit Rex Lander in the hospital.

  * * *

  The animal trainer lay back in his bed, his left arm amputated below the elbow and resting on a pillow, wrapped in bandages. He was an old amusement park bachelor, so the room contained only a handful of get-well cards and notes, mostly from the film crew. Sabine had sent a bonsai in a ceramic pot and it stood on the windowsill. Hal rested the tiger head on a side table, as if he’d brought in a basket of flowers or fruit, and looked over at the desolation sweeping across Rex Lander’s face. Rex refused to look over at the head on the table but his eyes began to brim with tears. Oh God, he said, turning away, please get it out of here.

  * * *

  Slightly dumbfounded, Hal reached into his pocket and produced an envelope of cash. With his eyes down on the floor, he placed the money on the table. This feeling was familiar to him—the sudden humiliation of missing the mark. For years, out at the curbstone on Flatbush or Fulton, he’d read strangers as plainly as a book while he coaxed them into the novelty parlor, but he’d routinely misread his own flesh and blood, or friends who needed his kindness. He remembered bringing a girl at school an extravagant present after her father had died of pneumonia, as if the lacquered wooden box of ivory dominoes might offer distraction from her grief. Did he get this trait from Chester? He could remember him delivering tone-deaf gifts to Flossy after disappearing for three days at a time—snow globes, tulip bulbs, secondhand watches from the pawnshop. He picked up the head and walked back out into the corridor.

  * * *

  Within a week, a new tiger arrived at the studio from Florida and it cost Hal more than he cared to admit. Although he’d tried to negotiate a lease for Sumi—a four-hundred-pound male Bengal tiger—the circus sensed an opportunity to offload the twelve-year-old cat. To sweeten the deal, they threw in his trainer at a discounted daily rate. The cast and the crew came down to the loading dock to watch Sumi’s arrival. It took eight men to lift his covered metal cage from the bed of the lorry.

  * * *

  Compared to the ageing Rex Lander, who dressed like a cowhand and was routinely unshaven, the new trainer appeared from the cabin of the lorry dressed as an international delegate for animal trainers, a professional brotherhood, he told them all, that was widely misunderstood. He wore a khaki safari suit, a waxed mustache, a holstered pearl-handled pistol. He carried a whip, a chair, and an embossed business card: Cyril Beck—Wild Cat Specialist.

  * * *

  As soon as Cyril removed the cover from the cage, Hal realized he’d paid a fortune for a tiger that nobody wanted—the big sleeping cat had a scarred, kinked tail and a patch of mange on its haunches. Sumi opened one eye, then the other, as Cyril entered the cage with the chair raised dramatically in front of him.

  —Careful he doesn’t drool on you, said Hal.

  Cyril shot him a stare as he kneeled down to muzzle Sumi’s enormous, drooping mouth. He attached a length of rope around the tiger’s neck and led him out into the open.

  * * *

  Claude stood with Hal and Sabine.

  —We’ll shoot the old cat in profile, mostly at night. No one will know he looks half-dead, said Claude.

  —Old or not, we’re not taking any chances. The actors won’t go anywhere near this thing, said Hal.

  He gestured to Chip Spalding, who’d been waiting off to one side and who came forward doubled as the widow—the long black gown, a dark wig, his neck and face powdered to whiten his freckles, even a smear of kohl under each eye. The crew whistled and groaned with pleasure while Chip sashayed along in his gown. Sabine folded her arms and took him in.

  —He walks better in heels than I do.

  —All those years of balancing on the high wire, said Claude.

  * * *

  Chip took the length of rope from Cyril and began to lead the tiger down the grassy slope, toward the cliffs, before turning and bringing Sumi back to the trainer.

  —Can you paint stripes over the mange? We’re back filming tomorrow.

  —It’s not mange, Mr. Bender, but a mild skin irritation. Felin
e eczema, in fact.

  Hal shrugged and turned for the main house. A deflated Cyril took the rope from Chip and led Sumi back toward the cage.

  —Wait please, Mr. Beck.

  It was Sabine stepping forward. She stood between the tiger and Chip, her costumed doppelganger. She’d spent the morning horse riding at a nearby farm and was still wearing jodhpurs and a linen chemisette.

  —May I?

  The animal trainer bristled, still offended by the insult Hal had levied at his cat, then melted under her gaze.

  —He likes his ears rubbed.

  He took Sabine’s hand and rested it on top of Sumi’s muzzled head. She began to stroke the crown of his head, between the leather straps of his muzzle, working her fingers into the spaces behind each ear. They all watched as Sumi squinted up at Sabine.

  —Do they purr? Sabine asked.

  —No, the roaring cats don’t purr, but look, he squints when he’s happy. Amounts to the same thing.

  Sabine looked at Cyril, seeking his permission. Then she took one hand and moved it down to the side of the animal’s neck and left it there, to the place where Bella had been opened out to the world.

  * * *

  Sabine was different in the viewfinder. Claude had noticed it from the first night. Over the years she’d developed a number of trademark motifs and gestures—her reflective eyes coming up from the floor, her chin resting on her fingertips, a sigh that worked its way into her shoulders—but now everything had been pared back. Her arms barely left her sides and her face was expressionless until an emotion transfigured it. They used separate cameras for close-ups of the actors’ faces, since the master shot couldn’t vary its focal length to adequately take in the eyes and the mouth, and Claude was shocked to see the uncut celluloid from the close cameras. In the instant before a flash of anguish or lust or rage, Sabine’s face was perfectly still. He pictured her floating on her back in a tranquil lake, staring up at the transit of clouds. The French word détente came to mind—a loosening and attentive quiet.

  * * *

  Even her voice had changed. It came from the pit of her stomach and the back of her throat instead of through her nose, not projected so much as unraveled. None of these sounds could be captured on film, and yet they vastly improved the scene and the performances of everyone around her. Some lines surged and came back, broke off, and others were barely audible, uncoiling as strands of thin silver wire. Occasionally there came a rising, locomotive wail that hit him in the chest behind the main camera. It reminded him of the patients he’d filmed and documented at the hospital in Paris, the way a second, paradoxical self could be carried in the human chest and larynx, a hysteric’s childlike voice or a neurotic’s steady baritone.

  * * *

  The kissing scene in the makeshift attic bedroom with Lester, Sumi watching from a darkened corner of the room, unfolded less like a seduction and more like an act of animal magnetism. The mesmerized Lester came into the bedroom holding his shoes, perhaps to quiet his passage through the hotel, and the widow—who was drinking an absinthe cocktail—gestured offhandedly to the bed. He complied, sat on the edge of the mattress, gently placed his shoes on the floor beside his stocking feet.

  * * *

  They had all agreed that Sabine wouldn’t stand over Lester, that she would sit beside him for the kiss, but once the camera started to roll she stayed standing, removed her earrings, and put them gently into his hands for safekeeping. Then she lifted his chin with one gloved hand, brought the absinthe cocktail to his lips, wiped his lips with her cottoned thumb after he’d taken a sip. Then she brought her face to his, still with the glass in hand. Lester, the diamond earrings winking in his open palms, kept his eyes open for most of the twenty-second kiss. Meanwhile, the widow’s eyes were serenely closed, as if she were drawing a fortifying breath directly from Harold Spruce’s mouth.

  * * *

  Asleep inside a kiss was the thought that came to Claude from behind the viewfinder. But he was surprised by the power of it. In real life, a kiss that long would have been accentuated by a sensual hand, by the tilt of a head, but this was oddly sedate and stylized. Lester’s face, when it reappeared, was stricken. When the widow peeled back the covers on one side of the bed—this was close to the agreed-upon cut point—there was a look of total annihilation and defeat washing over him. He reclined very slowly and tenderly, an injured man lowering himself into a scalding bathtub. As soon as Lester’s head touched the pillow, Claude yelled cut! and Lester sprang to his feet, dusting off the sleeves of his dinner jacket.

  —That’s not what we agreed on when we blocked this out.

  He turned to Claude, then back to Sabine.

  —Can we retake that one? At the very least, I’d like this poor sod to be standing on his own two feet before she puts her hooks into him.

  * * *

  Ignoring him, Sabine walked over to Pavel, who was standing in one corner of the attic with the photoplay. Claude heard them have a low-set exchange, then Pavel announced to the room:

  —Sabine feels confident that the scene is appropriate for the circumstances.

  —Let’s keep improvisation to a minimum, said Claude. But the camera liked what it saw. Actors, take a short break.

  Sabine wrapped herself in a silk robe and went outside to smoke a cigarette. Lester sat on the edge of the bed to put his shoes back on, still fuming. When Pavel edged past the camera, Claude reached out to touch his elbow.

  —Can she still speak for herself?

  Pavel offered up an oblique smile.

  —She asked if I could relay her thinking. She’s feeling fragile.

  —Should I be worried?

  —On the contrary, it works to your advantage. We’re seeing her drift and detach.

  Claude looked at him blankly and Pavel chuckled.

  —They’re all existentialists and nonconformists, these tubercular rascals …

  Claude watched the baffling Russian head for the darkened stairwell.

  13

  The Comet

  In the days leading up to the comet, Sabine didn’t think the world was ending, but she suspected her spirit had been poisoned. She smelled it in the sulfurous aura of the arc lamps, sensed it in her dreams of the tiger prowling along the cliff tops, saw it in the meals that Helena dutifully delivered on a tray to the cottage. Lapin à la cocotte—one of her childhood favorites—arrived in a clay pot like some Aztec sacrifice, bones separating from glistening flesh, smelling of scorched marrow and bitter thyme. She took the rabbit meat off the bone and fed it to a dog that belonged to the master carpenter, eating only the potatoes and carrots that remained in the pot.

  * * *

  She tried to pinpoint when this raking unease had first begun, but it was impossible to locate its source. It had been there long before Thérèse Raquin and Dorothy Harlow and the tiger, had perhaps always been there. She saw it now darkening the edges of all her memories—the early theater triumphs, her Greek island honeymoon, her barefoot days in the vineyards as a girl. She saw something new and unsettling in all these images, a shadow blotting out faces in an old photograph. Her discontent, her toska, had always been there.

  * * *

  The planet, or at least New York, would swim into the gassy tail of Halley’s Comet on the night of May 18, 1910. If she had her way, she would have spent the evening in the bathtub with a glass of wine and her galley of Colette’s The Vagabond, a gift from a Parisian publisher friend. Instead, Hal and Claude had given everyone the night off and Lester Summers was throwing a comet party on his yacht, still moored down in Edgewater. She suspected that Lester was trying to rekindle his reputation as a bon vivant, instead of the short, pouting figure they had all come to know.

  * * *

  The entire cast and crew were invited, the studio providing a driver and omnibus for transport. Dressed in a cochineal-red evening gown, she drove down with Pavel, Hal, Chip, and Claude in the studio’s Oldsmobile, staring off at the river while the others ex
changed production notes. Claude intended to film the comet’s passage and held on to a wooden box camera. Down at the Palisades Amusement Park, they were offering dirigible rides over the city for comet enthusiasts who didn’t believe tonight was the Apocalypse, or for those who wanted to embrace it.

  * * *

  The yacht was festooned with lights and red-white-and-blue bunting, decorated as if the comet’s passing were more patriotic than cosmic. They walked up the gangplank, and Lester, dressed in a white dinner jacket, waited at the top to greet them. He shook hands with the men and kissed Sabine on both cheeks. It’s kind of you to come, cheri, he said, smelling of pomade and gin. The deck was set up with recliners and wickerwork chairs, with tables of hors d’oeuvres and champagne. Lester was also apparently mixing cocktails, because soon he made a show of standing behind a rattan bar and hurling a metal shaker back and forth above his head. He offered his guests a choice of gin fizz, absinthe frappé, or sazerac. Sabine stood by the railing and sent Pavel to get her an absinthe frappé, giving Claude an opening to come stand by her.

  —Do you know what Rimbaud said about drinking absinthe?

  She didn’t answer, but she turned from the railing to face Claude.

  —He said the sensation is akin to the darkest forest melting into an open meadow.

  —It tickles my nose and tongue, that’s about all.

  They’d barely spoken outside of the glasshouse since the incident with the tiger. While Claude filmed her on set, he often thought about the kiss in the cottage the day after her return, imagined that she’d been caught off guard by her own tenderness toward him.