Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

Marceline said, “Let’s gif it von more go.”

Gamby sighed and looked down. “Well,” he said. “I suppose there is one person I want to reach. It’s just that she’s been gone a long time. And she — BOO!” He slapped the board, and it flew across the terrace with the planchette, and Gamby erupted into boisterous laughter at the same moment that Fannie and Josephine screamed and Viktor fell back into the ivy. Alfie awoke and barked disapprovingly.

Ludo scrambled after the Ouija set. Marlon poured his own drink straight into Gamby’s glass while he was distracted, then fetched himself a refill.

By the time Eddie joined the party, the little girl at last asleep, or at least pretending, there was no appeal to joining the drinkers. He’d never catch up, and they made it look so tiresome. Flushed faces and stupid, shouted conversation. He ought to pack, but his room would be hot. He’d wait till the air had cooled. He leaned against the ivy, next to the White Rabbits, and together they watched Gamby.

Fannie said, “Look at him there, surrounded by beauty. What did he do to deserve any of this?”

Josephine said, “What if we murdered him? What if we threw him on the fire?”

“ Josephine !”

“We could forge letters back to Canada. He’d say how he was joining the artists, how he’d always wanted to be a painter.”

“There’s that little girl!”

“Well, I’m only joking . Eddie, I’m afraid Fannie takes me awfully seriously. And I don’t deserve to be listened to for a single word.”

“She’s all nonsense, it’s true.”

Meanwhile Gamby had grown loud and shrill. “That’s ace !” he shouted.

“He’s going to lick her shoulder,” Armand whispered. “Marceline’s.”

“Do you suppose he’s corked?”

“He’s fried to the hat.”

Eddie watched Zilla, still perched on the wall, watched the way she never fully looked away from Viktor. He’d understood half of it before, but now he realized there was something he’d absolutely missed, something about the way her eyes sunk into themselves: She was bereft, or broken, or grief stricken. She stared at Viktor the way a woman on a boat stares at a man drowning in the ocean.

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?”