The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  —In the morning, Helena will make us breakfast. Please stay as long as you like. Cora will likely cross-examine you over crêpes suzette. Leo’s bedroom is made up for you, at the other end of the house.

  * * *

  Claude said good night and carried his equipment out into the hallway. In Leo’s bedroom, he lit a lamp and studied the bookshelves and the framed coin collections, the telescope jutting from one corner. He was careful not to disturb anything. The room smelled of India rubber and ink and stamp glue. He removed his shoes and lay on the bed without removing his jacket or peeling back the covers. He blew out the lamp and stared into the darkness for a while, tried to sleep but stirred into the small blue hours, transfixed by the idea of the first day of a new life, of making his own escape beyond the sunless valley floor.

  * * *

  He carried his shoes and equipment through the darkened house, made two trips, sat out on the slate stoop to tie up his laces, walked down the steep stairs to the courtyard and up the cobblestone street to the Renault. He could not look back at the house for fear he’d woken them, that they’d all be standing in the picture window in their nightgowns with candles. He packed his equipment in the trunk, poured the spare gasoline into the tank, cranked the engine until it sputtered to life. And then he was driving into the floor of the dark valley, down through the Pyrenees in his Paris taxi, the meter running and the occupied light on just for a lark, the oceanic night awash in flint-and-white stars and smelling of slate and juniper and lichen. He drove all the way to the Barcelona docks during daylight, slept in his taxi, bought a ticket on the next steamer to America. For half a century, he would think about the Renault AG1 parked down at the Spanish dockyards, imagining that it had remained untouched all these years, stolen and with its meter still running.

  32

  Return to the River

  Chip Spalding lived at the Tahitian Sunrise Villas, a palm-treed pocket of assisted living wedged between Playa del Rey and LAX. As Martin drove south to pick him up on the day of the screening, Claude stared out the window, cameras strapped across his chest, waiting for the Pacific to glimmer into view. Apart from an occasional taxicab for grocery shopping or a wedding photography gig, Claude had managed to avoid automobiles since before Woodrow Wilson was in office. His mental map of L.A. was a five-mile walking radius that began in the hotel lobby and ended a few blocks east of the 101. As they wended south of Venice, it took him a moment to realize that the snub-nosed leviathans bellying down over the ocean were jetliners, wheels down, metal flanks like burning chrome in the sunshine. He had traveled the world by the time he was twenty, but the idea of packing a suitcase and getting airborne was unthinkable. The jet age, like cinematic sound, was something he could do without.

  * * *

  In his big-heeled boots, Martin was riding the clutch of his Buick. Claude thought of his wartime Renault, of its difficult little gearbox and the way it whinnied up a hillside. Sometimes it stalled out on a Montmartre side street and he’d have to hold the clutch in for a long, winding coast until the engine sputtered over. He asked Martin about the horsepower of the Buick LeSabre and was shocked to hear 250. The buggy he’d driven along the streets of Paris and up into the mountains of Andorra more than forty years ago had had a nine-horsepower engine. They pulled into a parking lot surrounded by tropical motifs—banana trees and buildings with island names and lanais and big-shuttered windows. They signed in at the front desk of the main building and a young nurse named Angela went to find Chip Spalding. Claude watched her pass through two glass doors in her floral-print uniform, down a long corridor that was painted avocado green. She stopped in a sitting area, where the frail and befuddled sat under plaid blankets in front of a television set. Claude could imagine dying alone in his hotel suite, surrounded by vinegared celluloid and jaundiced newsprint, but that flickering nonexistence at the end of the hallway had always terrified him. As he watched Angela begin to push a short wiry man down the corridor in a wheelchair, he felt his breath catch in the back of his throat.

  —Did we know he was a cripple?

  Martin flushed, shook his head.

  —When I called, they said he had to have a nurse with him all day. I figured it was something like that. By the way, they don’t call them cripples anymore. Not since the Depression.

  They both looked down the corridor and saw that Angela’s face was exuberant with laughter as she pushed Chip along. He was wearing a monogrammed, bright orange windbreaker, khaki trousers, a pair of white tennis shoes, his thinning hair raked back into a comb-over.

  —He looks like he’s dressed to be lost at sea. What do they say now? Paraplegic?

  —They just don’t say anything.

  Claude took the pressed handkerchief from the breast pocket of his glen plaid suit and cleaned his bifocals. Chip was still side-mouthing the tail-end of a story as Angela wheeled him into the foyer, something about the Tahitian Villas sock thief and how he didn’t take proper account of a generation of monogrammers.

  — … so the shift nurse lifts Arthur’s polyester pant leg and there’s the incrimination, right on his bloody ankle. Didn’t take Scotland Yard to solve that one.

  Angela laughed and parked Chip in front of his visitors. He squinted up at them, his mouth slightly open, a breath mint on his tongue. Claude bent down to shake Chip’s hand but Chip brought the Frenchman and his cameras into a craning hug.

  —Surprised you’re still in the picture business, Monsieur Ballard. You must be at least a hundred by now.

  —You’re no spring rooster, either. May I film you for a few seconds?

  —Only if you make me look like Errol Flynn.

  Claude straightened, held up the Bell & Howell, spooled a few seconds of Chip with one arm extended for a swordfight.

  —Last time I saw you it was on a hillside full of machinegun fire in Belgium. I sent you some letters after the war and they never got a response. Hal and I assumed you were dead. Resurrected only to die in a flophouse in West Hollywood …

  —What happened to your legs?

  —Claude, admonished Martin.

  —Nerve damage. One too many falls. Not much feeling below the waist. In fact, it’s pretty much dead down there in the nether regions. The nurses try, but it’s like deep space in that particular department.

  Angela gave Chip’s shoulder a playful slap. Claude blinked, unsure of where to look, and introduced Martin.

  —He is the one who has restored the old reels. Despite his cowboy boots, he’s a film historian with a Ph.D.

  —Almost, said Martin. I still have to defend my dissertation.

  —Is it true we’re getting tuxedos for the premiere? asked Chip.

  —The premiere was in 1910, Claude corrected. This is a second release.

  —It’s true, said Martin, thanks to Hal Bender’s son. He’s also donated one of their downtown theaters and paid for a limo.

  Chip nodded, zipped and unzipped some pockets in his windbreaker, removed a roll of antacids, a pair of bent aviator sunglasses, some electrical tape, a pocketknife, before settling on a tin of breath mints. He offered them around and they all took one, trying to find the right words in the minty silence.

  —I haven’t been in a limousine since Alice’s funeral five years ago, said Chip. Maybe this will be a happier occasion. Now I’ll need Angela at my tuxedo fitting to help snug me into the pant legs. She’s certified in that area.

  Chip put his sunglasses on.

  —She’s with us all day and night, said Martin. I was thinking we could get lunch in Venice Beach first. Does that suit everyone?

  Angela said she knew just the place.

  * * *

  After Martin and Angela lifted Chip into the backseat of the Buick they drove down to the beach and found Angela’s favorite restaurant along the boardwalk. It looked to Claude like a shanty made of driftwood and strung with empty wine bottles and fishing nets, though she assured them all that the fish tacos and cheeseburgers were excellent. C
laude sat next to Chip at one end of a picnic table on the patio, the boardwalk in its noonday splendor. They watched buskers singing and playing guitars, bodybuilders with buzz cuts pussyfooting through the sand in their Speedos. A group of surfers came bounding up the beach in their half-peeled wetsuits, laughing and slicking saltwater from their hair, dopey with bronzed youth.

  —You never went back to Australia? Claude asked.

  —A few times. Funerals mostly. After university, one of my sons took a job with IBM in Sydney, if you can believe it. I should go back one day. If all else fails, my ashes will be scattered off the Tamarama cliffs. Strict instructions.

  —Of course you will be cremated. You said one of your sons. How many are there?

  —Alice and me had five kids all up. Three boys, two girls. You never married again?

  —No, no, never.

  —Sabine Montrose was enough to turn a man off women for life, I reckon. It’s like if you eat bad liver, even one time, then offal is murder all of a sudden. Whatever happened to her?

  —By all accounts, she died an old woman under a blue slate roof in Andorra. Ask Martin. He’s the expert on all of our lives these days.

  Claude looked down at the other end of the table. It was possible Martin was flirting with Angela in his slouching Texan way. She was laughing and rolling her eyes between bites of her fish taco.

  —What’s so funny down there, you two? Chip asked.

  —Claude, I was telling Angela about our candlelight dinner with Susan Berg during the blackout.

  —Ah, Claude said, poor Susan. You might say she is the Genghis Khan of broth.

  Angela was an easy laugh, so this got another generous titter.

  * * *

  Claude and Hal watched a bodybuilder limbering on the sand with hand weights. After a moment, Claude turned his attention to Chip’s scarred hands and wrists, to the half-moon calluses on his knuckles.

  —You and Hal stayed in touch?

  Claude watched the boardwalk float by in Chip’s sunglasses.

  —God yeah, Chip said, pointing with his chin. We used to play handball just over there and sometimes in Santa Monica, every Sunday morning instead of going to church. Hal playing handball as an old man was something to behold, a singlet tucked into nylon shorts like a wrestler, socks pulled up, never yelling or cursing but slapping the tennis ball like some Viking avenging his ancestors. I took bets, like I was his personal bookie, and the newbies never believed he was once a studio head. He looked like a retired mechanic from Thousand Oaks.

  The image made Claude smile, Hal Bender as a hustling old Brooklynite.

  —He got me steady stunt work with the studios over the years, said Chip. Burning falls, helicopter jumps, general combat. One time I rode a saloon piano down a flight of stairs for one of his westerns. He was good to me, Hal was. You remember Alroy Healy, the debt monger from the old neighborhood?

  Claude considered the name, let it hover in the tin-white sky above the boardwalk.

  —The one who took over the theater?

  —Bingo. Also the alleged murderer of Hal’s old man. Well, apparently he was still owed from back in the day, so he shows up on Hal’s back lot one day looking for his arrears. This is twenty years after the fact, mind you, and he looks like an Irish wolfhound from the pound, with a couple of missing teeth and a hobo’s whiskey bottle in a paper bag.

  —What did Hal do?

  Chip took a sip of his iced tea, lifted the bun of his cheeseburger, removed the onions to the side of his plate.

  —You’re thinking revenge, I can see it in your eyes. How do you like the bifocals, by the way? I always feel like I have a concussion when I put mine on.

  —I have grown accustomed to them. What did Hal do?

  The lid back on the bun, Chip took a bite, chewed, washed it down with a swig of iced tea.

  —So he gives Alroy the royal treatment, takes him on a tour of the set we’re filming on, introduces him as a family friend from back east to the director and some stars, makes him feel like perhaps bygones have come into play, but then here’s the surprise move. The haymaker, if you will.

  Another bite of hamburger, some careful navigation around a missing rear molar.

  —He asks Alroy if he’d like to be an extra in that day’s shoot, that he can arrange it with the director. Can’t remember the name of the film now, but I had to do a jump from a balcony into a hotel swimming pool. Hal tells Alroy that he’s going to be in the sequence and all he has to do is smoke a cigar while lounging on a pool float. I have to do a practice run anyway, so Hal asks me and the director if I can do it with the Irishman in the pool, whether I can jump as close to the bastard as possible, without actually killing him. So I jump from the balcony, fifty feet up, and land within a foot of Alroy Healy blowing smoke into the air. He goes under like a torpedoed battleship, gasping for air, thrashing and yelling all the way back to Red Hook. Eventually I drag him sputtering to the side of the pool and tell him that he’s a murdering son of a whore that’s not owed a fucking cent, that if he ever sets his pockmarked arse back on the premises then security will break his goddamn legs, and failing that I would be happy to oblige. He leaves the lot soaked and holding his shoes. I’ll never forget it.

  Martin and Angela had stopped talking and were looking down at the other end of the table. Claude realized he was still holding a fish taco two inches from his mouth.

  —Sorry all, got a bit carried away, Chip said.

  —Did Alroy ever come back? Claude asked.

  —Never. And the best part was that we captured it all on film, just for the dailies. Hal kept that little outtake in his own collection, like it was a snuff film to prove the past had finally been put to rest.

  * * *

  No, no, Claude thought, the past never stops banging at the doors of the present. We pack it into tattered suitcases, lock it into rusting metal trunks beneath our beds, press it between yellowed pages of newsprint, but it hangs over us at night like a poisonous cloud, seeps into our shirt collars and bedclothes. They ate for a few moments, listening to Angela tell stories of Chip’s antics at the nursing home, the way he commandeered the television remote if a movie came on that featured one of his stunts. Sometimes he yelled admonishments or cheered at the TV during an action sequence. Martin looked at his watch and asked if everyone was ready for their formalwear fitting. Chip pointed at Angela’s daisy-print uniform.

  —Do the scrubs come in black?

  —Don’t worry, Mr. Spalding, I packed along a dress and heels for your special occasion.

  * * *

  At the downtown formalwear store, Claude and Chip chose white dinner jackets and black cummerbunds, with a white carnation in the lapel. Martin wore a bolo tie with silver tips and a Navajo turquoise slide, and Angela changed into a sapphire evening gown, something she confessed she hadn’t worn since her sister’s wedding. When the limousine picked them up at the designated spot, they took a leisurely route toward the theater, moving through downtown and past Elysian Park and the new Dodger Stadium.

  * * *

  As they drew closer to the venue, Claude saw immediately that the Fulton Theatre on Broadway was Hal Bender’s love letter to the Bender Bijoux. It had a bull-nosed nickel ticket booth stenciled in gold and a stucco facade full of carved gods and griffins. Martin had warned them on the car ride not to expect red carpet and a crowd, but there were twenty or so people gathered in the foyer, spilling out onto the curbstone in their eveningwear. As the chauffeur and Angela navigated Chip back into his wheelchair, a round of applause started up and Chip grinned as they wheeled him inside. Claude captured their entrance into the cheering foyer with his Bell & Howell.

  * * *

  Claude took a flute of champagne from a waiter with a tray and began to walk around the lobby, camera in hand. This seemed to delay the deluge of introductions that awaited, mostly to Martin’s university colleagues. Here was Hal Bender’s ode to Flossy’s Brooklyn cake emporium—a glass cabinet stocked
with cigars and cigarettes and matchbooks—and here were the red velvet drapes with the gold ropes. Then, in one corner, Hal had erected a shrine—the single plush opera chair from the Queens apartment, 1A, a gramophone on a table, then a Model B cinématographe on a tripod beside it. The crowning touch was the ossified head of Bella, the Siberian tiger, hanging on the wall, her mouth slightly open, her eyes yellow and glazed. The Bell & Howell was still filming in Claude’s hand, but he loosened his grip and let it fall to his waist. Chip’s voice came from somewhere down there.

  —Did you know he kept the head under his bed in that fleabag apartment we all shared?

  —I never knew. I remember the chair, that’s it.

  —For years he kept the tiger head in his studio office out here, said it came in handy during contract negotiations, then he moved it when they took over the theater and renovated it. It was a good-luck charm for him, if you can believe it, a talisman to ward off the evils of the past.

  Claude pictured the Queens apartment above a greengrocer. He’d been so distracted by Sabine’s flight and the studio’s ruin that he wouldn’t have noticed a tiger’s head on the dinner table.

  * * *

  Martin appeared smiling in his tuxedo.

  —Are you two going to stand over here by yourselves all night? Some people want to talk to you before the film starts.

  —Show us the way, Chip said, maneuvering himself into a turn.

  Martin led them over to three people standing with cocktails in hand. The older man and woman were in their sixties and scholarly in their attentions, perhaps film historians from the university, both of them nodding seriously at the fast talker with the cigarette, a producer of some kind with studio war stories and tales of celebrity excess.