Page 4 of Drawing Home
Bea appreciated that kind of focus. Dedication to work was important, whatever that work might be. It was a sign of good character. And so, when she needed help with a particularly complicated art installation in her apartment, she’d asked him. That same week, her assistant quit. She thought,Why not hire someone practical, for a change?Enough with these dreamy art hangers-on with no discernible skills. She offered the young handyman a job with a salary he couldn’t turn down.
Bea took a final look at the canvases Kyle had mounted on the wall for the evening’s event, paintings of gigantic flowers, amoebas, and birds. The artist, Bronx native Frank Cuban, was twenty-six years old. Bea was hosting this show of his work tonight as a favor for an old friend, Joyce Carrier-Jones, an artist she’d known back in the heyday of the Tenth Street galleries. Now Joyce was the dean of admissions at Franklin, the city’s top fine-arts high school. Cuban was a former student. In art, as in life, it was all about who you knew.
The artist’s show included one panel in acrylic, graphite, wood, and nail polish. Another was an oil pastel on paper with Sharpie and spray paint. Amusing, yes. Groundbreaking, no. Bea missed the days when there were one or two big art movements in any given decade. She missed the sense of discovering a true star.
But the key to longevity was not to look back. Looking back was fatal to the spirit.
Joyce Carrier-Jones walked over and handed Bea a glass of wine. Joyce had a loud manner of dressing, bright caftans and large ceramic jewelry. Her dyed-black hair had a dramatic silver streak in front and she wore oversize square-framed glasses.
“Cheers,” Joyce said. “To the rise of another new talent. You know, Bea, I really admire your career. I might want to move into managing artists like you used to do. Never too late, right?”
Bea barely heard her. She held up her wineglass, incredulous. It was stemless! Did any standards exist these days?
“This is unacceptable,” she said.
“Do you see a crack?” Joyce said.
“It’s not what I see, it’s what I don’t see—a stem! You cannot serve white wine in a stemless glass.” Her free hand fluttered impatiently up to the large pearls around her neck.
“Oh, Bea, it’s fine. You have to get with the times. These are very popular right now.”
“A stem is for function, not decoration. It is to keep the chilled wine from being heated by hands.”
She charged back into her foyer in a huff, thinking for the thousandth time that the greatest indignity of aging was not watching your body degrade but watching the world around you fall apart.
Bea had been raised in a place where etiquette was second only to religion—Newport, Rhode Island. She was born just a few years after the Great Hurricane of 1938, a night when roads had been washed away along with people’s lives. But her parents’ story about that infamous evening said everything about the town: When the deadly storm hit, their neighbor Grace Graham Wilson Vanderbilt was preparing for a formal dinner, and she continued her preparations even as a large portion of her porch was swept away by the winds. Roads became rivers, and the invited guests had to decide whether to risk their lives or risk offending Grace Graham Wilson Vanderbilt. Twenty-seven of the thirty invited dinner guests arrived.
She would have her assistant deal with the wineglasses.
“Kyle, I need to talk to you,” she said, snapping her fingers and waving him over.
“I need to talk to you too,” he said. “There’s something you should see.”
Kyle handed her his phone, a news alert on the home screen:Henry Wyatt, pioneer of the minimalist art movement, dead at 83.
The room blurred around her. The party, the paintings, the wineglasses—all receded, replaced by images of another crowded room decades earlier. A young man with tapered fingers and paint under his nails. She closed her eyes, seeing a railroad apartment filled with canvas after canvas stacked against the walls. The memories rushed at her, vivid and breathtaking. She saw herself as if it were yesterday, sitting with Henry on a bench in Washington Square Park, broke and uncertain but with their entire lives ahead of them.
Bea reached for Kyle’s arm to steady herself. “Get everyone out of this apartment. Pack my bag and pull the car around to the front.”
“Now?”
“Now!”
“Where are you going?”
“Weare going to the Hamptons.”
In addition to everything else she had to do, Emma suddenly had another major task: maintaining a sense of normalcy.
While she had long heard rumors that The American Hotel was haunted, she had never known anyone to actually drop dead there. That it would happen on her watch was unfortunate. That it would happen to someone she knew and liked, even more so. But there was no time to think about Henry Wyatt when the bar was overflowing and the wait list for a table was in the double digits.
The Henry Wyatt business was being handled by her boss. The owner of the hotel, Jack Blake, had spent a long time huddled in the back office with the police chief and he was now busy keeping out the press. Emma told herself to pretend it was just a typical Friday night and focus on keeping the guests satisfied.
The head bartender, Chris Vincenzi, signaled for her.
Emma had a special affection for the bartenders at the hotel. She knew it was partly because her own father had been one himself. He had died when she was very young, so the hotel bar felt like a link to him. But on a practical level, she appreciated the bartenders because they made her job easier.
The bar was the heart and soul of the establishment. When cocktails were flowing and the conversation reached a fever pitch, when the assembled crowd was that perfect mix of local and transient, moneyed and blue collar, young and old, all was right with the world. Even the most persnickety hotel guest couldn’t help but fall under the spell. When she’d applied for a job at the hotel, she’d dreamed of working behind the bar. But Jack Blake had never, in the history of his establishment, hired a female bartender. Sexist? Maybe. The guys at the bar called it tradition. She wondered if her father would have agreed with them.
