Page 3 of Drawing Home
“I’m not sure what I’m doing yet,” Penny said.
She was embarrassed to admit that she didn’t have any plans. Why did she feel like such a loser lately? It wasn’t just the usual things, like not having a dad around and living in a house that was small and in the wrong part of town. Her otherness felt deeper, more unshakable, with every passing week.
It was why she felt more comfortable around older people. They didn’t seem to notice anything strange about her. Most were just nice. This was why she had gotten into the habit of hanging around the hotel where her mother worked.
That’s why she was going back there now to show her new book to Mr. Wyatt.
Mr. Wyatt had white hair and always wore a tweed jacket and carried a nephrite walking stick from Fabergé. His usual seat was in the near corner of the bar, his back to the lobby, and he didn’t talk to anyone because he was always bent over a cocktail napkin doodling. It had taken a while before she’d realized some of these napkin drawings were framed in the dining room. The night she’d noticed this, she wanted to ask her mom about it, but the bar had been packed, and if her mother had known she was still there, she would have sent her home. So she asked the old man, “How’d you get them to hang your drawings on the wall?”
“They fished them out of the garbage or retrieved them from a crumpled heap at the end of the evening. I had very little to do with it.”
It took her a few seconds to process this, and then she told him, “I draw too.” It was one of the few things she enjoyed.
“I’m surprised anyone of your generation lets go of the phone long enough to put pencil to paper,” he said.
“I’m not allowed to have a smartphone,” she said. Penny had OCD and anxiety, and the doctor said screens were the worst things for her. This didn’t help her in the friend department.
“You’re not allowed to have a phone but you’re allowed to hang around in hotel bars?” he said.
“I’m just visiting my mother at work,” she told him.
The old man looked across the room at her mother, then back at her. He smiled for the first time. “Emma’s kid. I see the resemblance.” He had to be lying. Her mother was beautiful and she was, well, not.
After that night, Mr. Wyatt asked to see her drawings. He met her in the lobby and they sat on the couch; she drank soda and he had martinis and he taught her about contour and proportion. A month or so later, she realized that Henry’s drawings were hung in other places besides the hotel. His artwork was all around town. Henry was famous.
Now, as she was leaving the bookstore, her phone, her old, crappy, embarrassing flip phone, chirped with a text.
Don’t be mad. You can totally come to the party. I’ll send you the address.
Penny ignored it. She didn’t need Robin’s charity invitation. She had better things to do.
She headed back to the hotel. It took her a minute before she noticed the police cars. Two were parked at an awkward angle right in front of the building. Traffic was being redirected. A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk.
She ducked her head down and tried to slip across the front porch to the hotel entrance.
“Young lady, step aside. You can’t go in there,” an officer said.
Ushered to the sidewalk, Penny wondered if she could sneak around back. And then—
“Some old guy dropped dead at the bar,” a man announced. “Right over his martini.”
“That’s how I want to go,” someone said.
Penny stood very still. Sirens blared nearby, and she covered her ears, her anxiety officially triggered. In the midst of all this, the four o’clock jitney pulled up to the curb, and dozens of passengers disembarked, lugging bags and talking on their phones. Although Penny was desperate to get away, she was trapped by the swarm of summer people in a hurry to have fun.
Chapter Two
Few things in life gave Bea Winstead more pleasure than a crowded room.
As one of New York’s most legendary art patrons, Bea was famous for her intimate gatherings of, oh, a hundred or so people, the kind of people whose deep pockets and eagerness to acquire the next big thing merited an invite. And then there were the guests of honor, the lucky artists who walked into Bea’s Park Avenue apartment wondering how they might pay the next month’s rent on their studios in Greenpoint and ending the evening with six figures in sales. It was this promise of art meeting commerce that had given Bea’s parties the heady air of unpredictability and importance for more than four decades.
But apparently, her power was waning. She scanned the room and noted the no-shows. Had her parties lost their luster? Or was it simply that she could not compete with Memorial Day weekend, when everyone fled to the Hamptons? God, how she loathed the Hamptons.
“Kyle, tell the caterers to keep the drink carts at least five feet from any panels.”
Her assistant was a handsome young man with a thick head of hair, vibrant blue eyes, and the chiseled features of a movie star. When she first saw him doing odd jobs around her building, she assumed that was what he aspired to be, an actor, like her favorite waiter at Aureole, who’d ended up on a sitcom.
“No, ma’am. I’m happy to be a handyman,” he’d said when she asked.
