The Hundred-Year House (31 page)

Someone has heard that Marceline Horn once lived in sin with Ronald Coleman. Only it’s not a sin in Hollywood, is it? They have different gods out there.

Someone heard she spent two thousand dollars on a Chinese rug. We are disinclined to believe this.

ZILLA IN THE ATTIC

Up here, she could concentrate. It wasn’t so much that she had heard Viktor’s feet through the Longhouse wall, and his humming, and occasionally the phonograph, but that she could
feel
him there, and it made her cold and it made her blood vibrate and every day she shrank. Every noise might have been his door closing, or opening, or him tapping on her window, or a woman—one of his dancing girls, or that waifish poet who left last Tuesday—coming to see him, to untuck his shirt, to lead him to the bed in the corner. So Zilla asked Samantha for the attic key, and Samantha gave it without comment, though she knew, they all knew, who wouldn’t have known? And so for the fourth day now she was working on a piece of linen that she’d tacked right to the floor, for lack of properly lit wall space. And also for the difference it made. To stand
above
it, to feel she was peering straight through the linen and into the rest of the house, Fannie’s bedroom below, and what was below that? The dining room. It was a hundred degrees up here, but still she was freezing from the inside out.

She wasn’t sure what this painting wanted to be. She’d tried for petallate, frilled, wet, but ultimately she found she couldn’t, in her state, create something verdant and expectant. She found five fallen oak leaves outside, early jumpers, stuck together with rain, not brown so much as opally pink, blushing at their early demise. And this was what she wanted to express now: a stack of soft, lovely suicides.

She’d had a letter that morning from Lemuel, holed up in Madison, “drowning in silver baths and sulphite,” trying to finish the prints for his show. He wanted her home. He wanted her to keep him safe from nightmares. He said he might go up in an airplane with Kneller, which she knew was meant as a threat, as he believed all planes crashed, and believed that he, in particular, was due a fiery death. If she could, she’d stay here forever. She’d be like Ludo, minus the marooning via political unrest. She’d beg Samantha to let her stay, and then stay longer, and stay longer, until she’d become a part of the furniture. Her room, like Ludo’s, would be permanently blocked off on Samantha’s color-coded chart. Except that Lemuel would die, he truly would. He’d stop eating, like Violet Devohr.

The leaves were working out nicely. There was something new, a depth she could normally achieve only with many layers of oil, but that somehow came through now with just the thinnest washes. Now that she was this far from him, she was painting, in a sense, for Viktor. Though she’d never admit it aloud. And if he visited her studio along with everyone else at the end of her stay, why would he assume this particular pile of oak leaves had to do with him?

When she’d walked, travel-weary, into the library three weeks ago and seen him there, sitting as always, cigar and drink, legs halfway across the rug, she’d been shaken to the core, but only in the most familiar of ways. This time, she’d have been more surprised if he’d
not
been there. This was the third stay for both, and the third time their visits had coincided. He didn’t need to tell her he hadn’t arranged it this way: The blanching of his face was enough. It wasn’t Samantha’s doing, either—Samantha, who, in ’27, asked them in all earnestness if they’d overlapped before. Zilla had come to feel the house itself was responsible, a magnetic field drawing them both back at regular intervals.

In March of ’25, right after her first solo show, she’d come here
to recover, to try to make something she didn’t loathe as much as the work she’d just stared at till she wished for blindness. When she first saw him, Viktor was arriving late to dinner. His walk from the train had half frozen him, and he hadn’t shaved in days. His hair—she’d thought it was the ice freezing it out like that in all directions. He sat next to her and said very little. She asked him for the salt without even looking at him—an elderly playwright was holding forth on hermaphrodites—and Viktor took her hand and uncoiled her fingers, tilted the shaker so the salt poured slowly into her palm. She turned, and he locked up her eyes in some kind of cage with his own, so that she couldn’t turn away. Everyone began laughing and thought it a great joke, but really something far stranger was going on, something to do with her spinal column and her entire future. Her hand grew heavy. The salt began to spill over the edges and between her fingers. It was a long time—a minute? five minutes?—till he gave the container a last shake and set it down, and there she sat, dopey, buried under a mountain of a million small things. She pinched a few grains off the top for her casserole, and sat there eating the rest of her meal with her hand still outstretched, still laden. She said nothing at all, and this became a source of tremendous amusement for the rest of the table. They tried to remember which Roman goddess it was she resembled, and whether there might have been, once, a salt-bearing oracle. For the rest of that stay, the whole group called her The Oracle. She resumed talking the next morning, and found she had become such an object of fascination to the other artists that they all wanted to hear whatever she said. They wanted to ask The Oracle their futures. “How burnt shall dinner be?” “When will my poems ever be done?” “Which painting will sell?”

But she was caught up, meanwhile, in watching Viktor. His clothes were always too small or too large, or both. His eyes bugged out, so dark a brown that you couldn’t tell iris from pupil.
She’d thought him tremendously ungraceful for a dancer at first, until she understood his problem: He was meant to move in empty and infinite space, not to interact with chairs and lamps and soup spoons. Still, every muscle engaged in whatever he did. No movement was isolated to just the hand, or just the leg. Each action had behind it the force and eloquence of his entire body.

The next night there had been a storm, one of those violent Midwestern ordeals she was still unaccustomed to. They’d been gathered in the library after dinner, and midway through the first round of drinks Zilla had confessed how terrified she was of the thunder, of the lightning hitting her in bed as she slept. Viktor had rested his cigar in the ashtray, and left the room. They’d laughed about where he’d gone—he felt a dance coming on!—but twenty minutes later he was back, soaked like a shipwrecked sailor, teeth clacking, hair improbably still erect. He extended his palm, a wet, black acorn in the middle. He said, “For your windowsill. To protect you.” It was a tradition having to do with Thor, he explained, being god of both the oak trees and the lightning. The whole crowd had laughed again, but this time with—she thought she heard it—an edge of wonder and knowing and general romantic envy. This man must be in love with this woman.
But we haven’t yet spoken!
she wanted to say. Later they would speak. They’d spend hours on the terrace, always with others, laughing about failure and rent parties and a thousand other things.

She hadn’t thought of it till now, but this must be why she’d chosen oak leaves to paint. Of course. How dense, not to realize.

A knocking below.

“Yes!” she called. “Yes, yes, yes.”

And here, hurrying up, were Samantha and Ludo, and trailing behind was Armand, the illustrator, the sweet golden one with the odd teeth.

Samantha’s eyes were bright and wet. “We’ll need to hide
Ludo up here. Tonight at dinner, and after. You know Gamby thinks he’s gone. I swore.”

“You no mind?” Ludo said. “I leave alone your paint.” He appraised the room.

Zilla took Samantha’s wrist and led her gently to the rolling stool. “Sit down,” she said. “Breathe great slow breaths.”

She found chairs for the men and a crate for herself, and they sat by an open dormer, where an electric fan fought a losing battle with the heat.

Samantha said, “I’ll offer Gamby the extra bed in the director’s house, but I’m sure he’ll stay at the hotel. Either way, Ludo should be safe to sleep in his room. I mean, just at night. I don’t imagine Gamby will stay more than a day or two. Unless he kicks us out and stays
forever
.”

“He won’t,” Ludo said.

“He will. He actually will.”

Ludo was a frenetic little man. It had been two years since he and Zilla had made love (
love
, ha!) in the composer’s cottage, since Viktor had hit him in the mouth with a dinner plate the next day—also, not coincidentally, the last day Viktor had spoken directly to her—and she could remember nothing at all about the feel of Ludo’s body, his smell, his tongue. He looked at her with equal vacancy.

Samantha said, “This morning I wrote to the board. Some are my friends, but most aren’t. I don’t know how much sympathy we have.”

Armand, quiet till now, let out a loud breath, a dragon puffing contemplative steam. “What would he take from New York? The Broadway, or the Twentieth Century? Well, no, it doesn’t matter. They both get to the city in the morning. Let’s say he’s there now, he’ll have to switch to the local, maybe he’ll have lunch first. We have a few hours.”

“To do what?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

Ludo said, “I quote you Ovid, but I don’t know in the English: Fortune is not helping those who pray but those who act.”

“Didn’t Ovid get exiled?”

Armand said, “Stay here.” He vanished down the stairs, and they all stared after him, bemused, and then in seconds he came running back. He put something on the windowsill: a little monkey, carved from green jade. Loopy arms, a manic grin. “It’s the Lord of Mischief,” he said. “A relic of my dissolute years in the Orient. He’ll be our totem.”

Samantha stared at the thing. “I thought you’d be coming back with an idea.”

“Well, no.”

Zilla rubbed Samantha’s neck. She said, “We could either seduce him or kidnap him. I believe these are our options.”

Armand: “We’ll charm him.”

Samantha: “It won’t work. And what then?”

“Then, anything and everything. Desperation.”

VIKTOR IN HIS STUDIO: THE WINTER’S TALE

It is a dance to be done to a wall.

On the stage, it will be a dance to a statue, to the frozen Hermione. Leontes will dance his grief, his longing, for the wife he betrayed and killed, and then—then!—the statue steps down, Hermione lives, and there is to be the most exquisite
pas de deux
, all the more wrenching for their sixteen-year separation, for the age of the dancers. If only he can create the thing. But for now, in the Longhouse, he lives inside Leontes’ dance of despair, the score spread around him on the floor like icebergs. His feet bare. The music is in his head, and he dances to the western wall. Zilla is through that wall (Armand Cox is through the other) and there are times when he knows she’s standing not two feet away, facing him, brush in her left hand, a brush in her teeth, painting on her thin cloth. If there were no wall, if there were no cloth, she’d be painting the same air he is dancing in.

In sixteen years, he will not need a statue to remember her body, her face.

He dances as far as the dance is written.

He presses his hips to the wall.

FRIDAY, 1:00

Armand and Ludo, hunting down the other artists, giving them their roles.

—

Josephine at the window, to Fannie: “It’s one of the last good places in the world, isn’t it? One of the last.”

—

Viktor, walking Marlon around to sober him up. Marlon: “Have you seen those photos of Zilla? The ones her husband took? And exhibited in public! They’re—let me tell you. Let me
tell
you.” Viktor: “Yes. I’ve seen them.”

—

Zilla and Samantha in the kitchen of the director’s house, giggling like children, tearing at the thin plaster of the wall around the small black hole, until chunks come away in their hands and the opening is two feet square between the counter and the icebox.

“There, see? That cross beam back there,” Samantha says.

They reach carefully into the hole with the bottles they’ve brought from the library, and line them up along the exposed beam: gin, bourbon, rye, scotch, vermouth, all new and full from the bootlegger’s drop.

Zilla: “That’s the ugliest speakeasy I’ve ever seen.”

“It’ll do.”

They nail the square board over the hole, as gently as they can, so the bottles won’t fall.

—

Outside, sunshine and wind.

ARMAND AND EDDIE IN THE FLOWERED BEDROOM

He found Eddie under the desk, tucked in a ball, writing in a small black notebook. Armand understood instantly, and wanted to tell him so: that it sometimes felt better like this, tucked into something solid, hidden from the world. Instead, when Eddie scooted halfway out, what he said was, “You look like a turtle.”

Eddie laughed and nodded, but he didn’t come any farther, so Armand sat Indian style on the floor.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Armand said.

“I’m glad you did. I didn’t like what I was writing.”

Eddie was so controlled, so careful. His eyes, though—the way they pulsed around the room and then back to your face—it was as if they were taking in everything with such tremendous force, such thirst. A good chance
this
was the reason for his quiet. There was so much pouring in that nothing could come out.

Armand told him his role for the evening, and said nothing would go into effect till Samantha gave the word. “We might yet be wrong,” he said. “He might be paying a purely social visit. To absorb some culture, you know. Perhaps he wants to learn to paint. Ha.” Eddie didn’t say anything. “It’s not a full plan, I know, but it’s something. God, I’d love to draw you under there. The lines are fantastic. It’s just the desk and your head and your knees.”

Eddie blushed. Everyone blushed when you said you wanted to draw them. It was perhaps the most flattering thing in the world.
Not the suggestion that you were beautiful so much as the implicit revelation:
I see you. I really see you.