The Hundred-Year House (34 page)

Marlon and Armand leaned on the makeshift bar, and Ludo soft-shoed around the terrace, but Viktor sat now, Indian style, an empty glass by one knee. He was looking out, either at Zilla or the fire. Maybe to him they were the same thing.

In one breath Eddie fished his Waterman from his trouser pocket and grabbed Viktor’s hand. Viktor didn’t seem to notice at all. He wrote across the veins, in dark blue:
She loves you.
He stepped in front of Samantha, in front of Gamby, in front of Marceline, who was talking about Hollywood ghostwriters and the confessional craze. He grabbed Zilla’s hand—she at least looked at him, startled—and wrote:
He loves you
.

He capped the pen. It was a service someone had to perform,
he felt. A translation service, in a way. What
was
all this, but a modern tower of Babel? Here was someone speaking nothing but dance, and someone else speaking paint, and someone speaking poetry, and someone speaking music. And what were they trying to express, but the inexpressible? If there existed words, regular words, to say what they were aiming at, then why would they even need to do what they did? Why were they all living here, knocking so ineffectively at the doors of the palace? The ink was insufficient as anything else, but perhaps it was a start. If he’d been a sculptor, he’d have sculpted it for them: Look! There! Love.

Someone had appeared at the edge of the terrace: a small girl in a white nightgown. No one but Marceline noticed at all, until Eddie sprang across the bricks and knelt in front of her and said, “Let’s have one more story, shall we?” And he vanished with the girl, around the corner of the house. Gamby, his eyes closed in laughter, hadn’t even seen.

The sun was lower in the sky. It hovered over the trees a long time, casting long shadows toward the house.

Fannie: “If we could only slow down time, we could accomplish an infinite amount of work before this place gets the wrecking ball.”

Armand: “I’ll move very slowly when I’m near you. And you’ll believe it’s come true.”

Josephine: “You have such an honest energy, Armand. You live very close to the skin.”

And off Armand bounded, to pour more gin in Gamby’s cup.

Zilla and Viktor both squinted at the backs of their hands like confused palm readers.

Marceline, a laugh like an oboe: “Vell, can you belief, ve all thought the talkies vould mean more vork for
theater
actors. But instead they vant to pay youngsters something like seventy-fife a veek. And gif them leads! And star them!”

Zilla tried to focus on the same conversation: “But,” she said, “
here
is a place—here we’re so different from a place like Hollywood. They’ve built a city, an industry. And here we are in our studios. You understand it, don’t you, Mr. Devohr? What it is we do here, and why it matters. A man like you, a man has everything he wants, autos and servants and land—what does he do next? He buys art!”

“I do!” Gamby said. His words were garbled. “I buy art! I’ll buy it from you! You can paint me a picture of Marcelot. Of Marceline. Of—ha!—of Miss Horn.”

Eddie returned. Things felt like they’d fallen apart—the Ouija long abandoned, even Marceline and Zilla’s flirting strangely mechanical and overdone now. Samantha had turned to stone. He wished he could think of something to help. The magic words to save this place that he himself wanted nothing more to do with.

But Armand was staring at him, Armand was smiling at him, Armand was not looking away.

Any instinct on Eddie’s part to hide had been wiped away by the catastrophe of Viktor and Zilla. Did he want to end up like them, made sick by what he wouldn’t acknowledge? And so he stared back at Armand.

Ludo wove around them like a leprechaun. The music from the solarium was “Let’s Fall in Love.” Ludo pulled Zilla off the terrace wall with both hands, pulled her into a little waltz that didn’t match the music at all.

He whispered: “Where is your camera? Don’t you, somewhere, have a camera?”

“Marlon’s got a Leica.”

The August air, thick enough to climb.

Alfie, asleep again.

Eddie looked right at Armand. And—the bravest thing he’d done in his life—he slowly, slowly, stuck out his tongue to display
the nickel he’d kept in his mouth since the afternoon, removing it only for dinner. Then he flipped it back in and closed his lips.

Armand did not look away. For the next five minutes, he did not look away.

Gin fractured the time. An encounter halfway down the lawn, Fannie tripping—how had they gotten there?—and one back on the terrace, surely later. Marlon would try to recall, the next morning. He’d had his smoking jacket, and then he hadn’t. Eddie had been near, and then he’d been quite far away, and then there was a bathroom floor. And then there was the fire, still burning, though someone else was in charge. The sun was low but still hot, and Viktor was crying. Why was Viktor crying? What was wrong with the man?

Gamby stumbling down the lawn, grabbing at Marceline’s chest. She was nimble. She held him by the elbow. Laughing and laughing.

Zilla had Marlon’s camera.

“Everyone together! Quick, before the last of the sun—”

Fannie, trying. Josephine pulling at her arm. “Mr. De—Mr. Devohr. Your mother, and her death. Don’t you think—don’t you think, though, she’d have wanted all this? All this art?”

“Vell, the tap dancers are doing splendidly now of course. Who could haf guessed?”

“Eddie, what’s wrong with him? Can you get Viktor some water?”

Samantha nodding to Armand.
Yes, go ahead, do it, whatever it is.

“Miss Horn will join us, yes! And Miss Silverman as well! But—”

Armand’s clothes off, Gamby’s off, Zilla’s off too. Marceline backing toward the house. The sun beginning to set.

“It’s the way the natives fish!”

“Here, get your head up! Don’t drown.”

And the two of them, Armand and Gamby, out of the water. Who had kept the fire going? Laughing and laughing, and no one could stop laughing.

Armand, grabbing: “Look, I caught a fish!” Moving the other’s plump hand: “Look, you caught one too!”

Laughter and the click of the Leica and the low red sun, and the light of the fire. No one could stop laughing.

It was dark so fast, and they couldn’t remember how.

Viktor, somewhere out in the dark. No one could find him. They could hear him, but they couldn’t find him.

In the humid night, some of them stumbled together, and some stumbled farther apart.

ZILLA IN THE DARKROOM, GAMBY IN THE DARK

First she points it at the back of the big house and clicks through the rest of the film. Thirteen photos of abandoned windows, lit orange by the setting sun. Up there, the room where she slept on her first visit, before there were beds in the Longhouse. The yellow room at the other end, where Viktor once stayed. The solarium studio, Fannie and Josephine’s sculptures shining like living things. The dining room, where she’s fallen in some sort of love with every artist and composer and writer who’s ever sat across from her.

The sun is gone as she gropes her way down the path to the darkroom cabin. She’s been developing Lemuel’s prints for years, doing half his work, really, and even in this unfamiliar space it takes her little time to sort things out. All the chemistry she needs is here: a jackpot of not quite empty bottles left by departing photographers. Tanks and reels. An ancient ruby light, with a funny little door. But no photographic paper. No matter, if the negative is clear and convincing. She takes her time lining things up left to right on the counter. Developer, stop bath, fixer. She makes sure the sink works.

(At this same moment, back on the lawn: Gamby, somehow both drunker and more sober, lunges at Fannie. He says, “Hey, wait, where’s your camera? Wait!” “Good gracious, it wasn’t my camera,” Fannie says.)

She turns off the electric lamp and feels her way back to the
counter. It’s a relief not to see her hands anymore, the upside-down script:
He loves you
. Well, yes. Eddie didn’t know what he was doing, writing on them like that. He imagined he was pointing out something they didn’t both already know.

(It has started to rain again, to pour. Marlon wakes up on the terrace and wonders why he’s in a pool, why he’s underwater, how he can breathe underwater. He goes back to sleep. Gamby is looking for Armand. He’s shouting.)

Her hands are shaking so that she can’t get the film hooked onto the reel. She has no idea if the light was enough. She has no idea if the shutter clicked at the right moment. If everything’s a blur. At last she gets it engaged, begins reeling. One long strip of gray. The images hidden under that gray, waiting. Backward through time. This first half will be empty house. Somewhere in the middle here will be Gamby and Armand, the four shots she managed. The last bit should be Marlon’s shots—yesterday, and the day before, and the day before. She finishes, and traps the whole thing in the aluminum canister, and hopes, as she pours, that the bottle of developer is correctly labeled, that it isn’t someone’s old supply of bathtub gin. It smells right at least. She closes the canister and turns the lamp back on. She sits on the counter to agitate. She goes by her watch to time the moving meditation—the front of her wrist, the back of her wrist—and the periods of rest.

(Eddie and Armand, behind the composer’s shed, in the rain. The coin has been replaced by Armand’s tongue. Eddie Parfitt, despite his considerable success, his poetry collections, his awards—Eddie Parfitt is twenty-one years old. He has lived a thousand years in those twenty-one. But he has never been in love.)

The stop bath, the fixer, the water. The water, at least, she can trust.

(Viktor, back in the house alone. Picking up the book Zilla
left in the library—Keats’s letters—opening it to the middle: He smells it.)

She feels that Eddie broke something tonight. By writing it out, so starkly, so stupidly, on their hands.

(They are starting without her. Ludo walks Gamby in, drenched and confused, face like a mole forced above ground, and sits him in the solarium among Fannie and Josephine’s sculptures.)

At last, she can allow herself to look at the negatives, to see the damage. She finds scissors first, a good sharp pair hanging from a nail. She opens the canister and slowly unspools the reel. The first frames, of the house, she snips off. A blurry shot of the two men, so unclear that they might as well be monkeys. The next one, yes, as she hoped: everything clearly visible, everything anatomical and precise. Gamby’s face, as clear as a mug shot. And Armand’s as well, and his body, and the sinews of his legs. The head of his penis, fat and soft.

(Samantha says, “You’re a businessman, Mr. Devohr.”)

She cuts the good shot loose and hangs it to dry. Then she spools back through the shots Marlon’s been taking all week. A close-up of a daylily, meant to be artistic. Samantha on her balcony. The giant oak, the two houses, Armand smoking a cigarette. Eddie, smiling uncomfortably on the terrace. Fannie and Josephine walking by the fountain, but obviously posed. Perhaps because she’s already in an agitated state, perhaps because of the awkward subjects, Zilla finds these photographs all unduly chilling. What should be so troublesome about two women walking the path? Only she can’t shake the feeling that the photographs have existed all along, have been waiting in their canister for a thousand years, and that the people in them have lived their whole lives just to end up in these exact positions, just to hit their marks like dancers. Certainly this is what happened to Gamby, every moment of his life leading him right into this photograph,
this trap. They got him to stand just so. They got him entwined with Armand. And he became the picture.

(Eddie’s been summoned to the solarium as a bodyguard. All five and a half feet of him, arms like—well, like a poet’s. Armand hiding in the library, for his safety. Eddie slips his coin back in his mouth, where it now belongs. Samantha, in a molten voice Eddie didn’t know she had in her: “Mr. Devohr, Armand Cox is a known homosexual.”)

Zilla realizes something, and it takes her a minute to wrap herself around the idea. She’s always thought of Laurelfield as a magnet, drawing her back again and again. But that’s just it: A magnet pulls you toward the
future
. Objects are normally products of their pasts, their composition and inertia. But near a magnet, they are moved by where they’ll be in the next instant. And this,
this
, is the core of the strange vertigo she feels near Laurelfield. This is a place where people aren’t so much haunted by their pasts as they are unknowingly hurtled toward specific and inexorable destinations. And perhaps it feels like haunting. But it’s a pull, not a push. She doubts she can express it to anyone else, and she doubts she ought to.

(Gamby, no more blood in his face, sunken back in the chair, surrounded: “What in the hell do you people want?” Samantha still sitting, but she might as well be flying above him, Athena in the sky: “We want twenty-five years.”)

Zilla hangs Marlon’s shots next to the shots of Gamby. He’ll be delighted that someone’s done all the work for him.

(Grace, tossing in bed, turning the pillow to the cool side. Dreaming of Rapunzel and fish.)

But a moment later Zilla’s sinking, and she realizes what’s wrong, what it is. A lot of time has passed, and she’s done her job, and Viktor hasn’t followed her here. After Eddie wrote those words, there was a window of maybe half an hour when Viktor might have staggered through the dark, knocked on the door,
called her name. But he hasn’t, and the night air has hardened to impenetrable glass.

(Gamby’s head between his knees. He says, “Twenty-five?” And he sits up to sign the paper they’ve made.)

Zilla and Viktor might pine for the rest of their lives, but that is
all
they will do. They will harden and soften into their old age, and she will paint him a hundred pictures and he will make her a hundred dances, but there will be no words, and there will be no coming together of bodies.

(It’s not till Fannie has escorted Gamby back to the director’s house that the solarium erupts in jubilation. Armand bursts in and says, “We changed fate! Do you realize what we did? It’s—what is it? The victory of art over greed! It is! We reached in and we changed fate!” But Eddie says, “Did we?” Because this whole evening he’s felt himself sucked into a whirlpool of inevitability. “Are you sure?”)