29. Gertie Paints Her Masterpiece.
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The Penthouse Suite
Thick raindrops thudded against the panes, blotting out Gertrude Wagner’s view for the third evening in a row.
She brushed her blonde hair away from her forehead and looked up into the sky, hoping for a small clear patch, however narrow in aperture. But there was only a looming slate of grey.
“Shoot,” she said. “Shoot the dang boot.”
Gertie gingerly strolled past the piano and clumsily struck a few keys with her knuckles. The dissonant notes echoed through the wide-open space and faded away as she approached her easel. White cloth was draped over its front. She flipped it over to confront her painting, unfinished and taunting.
It was an old man on a park bench in twilight. In one hand, he gripped a newspaper with fat fingers that also held a cigar. Its end smoldered in amber. The paper’s other end, however, held the real intrigue for Gertie—its corner was folded back, revealing the old man’s inquisitive eye as he gazed toward some place far outside the canvas’s purview.
The scene was inspired by the last city she visited. Just a thing she saw one sunset night from her own park bench.
She’d made a quick sketch with the man’s outline and newspaper, then set to fill in the rest at her next destination. She enjoyed this method of picking out specifics from a variety of locations. Later critics would call this “Gertie’s Collage Period,” but for now, it was just what she liked doing.
Her week at the Palmer had begun productively enough. She’d taken a newspaper from the lobby to fill in details for her painting. It was a ghastly story about a German killer executed by guillotine; it somehow fit the theme. The next day she used her penthouse view of the purple evening sky to fill in the space behind the old man. But there was one element still missing from the scene that she’d seen—a group of fireflies floating above the man’s right shoulder, hovering in their radiant blue-white glow.
On Monday, it started to rain and never let up. Three evenings at the Palmer without those fireflies she wanted to consult.
She glanced down into the courtyard past the tall, drooping canvas tent, weighed down by puddles. It had been installed to protect construction of the hotel’s new dining hall. A man was sitting nearby on a wooden crate, holding a coat over his head to protect him from the downpour.
That’s when she got her bright idea. She’d try to complete the old man’s leering eye.
“Lawrence!” she called.
A short, bald man waddled in from the next room, stood at attention.
“Take me to where the people are,” she told him.
Lawrence wracked his brain for a moment, then mentioned a speakeasy across town. But that wasn’t what she had in mind.
“Not a party,” she clarified. “A place to see people. Normal people.”
“Well, there was a crowd downstairs, and—” Lawrence started, but before he’d finished, Gertie had already run into the bathroom to get fixed up.
An hour later, the penthouse’s private elevator opened on the ground floor. The hallway was filled with people—mostly single men, some couples—waiting to make their way into the lobby to check in. When Gertie and Lawrence turned the corner, they saw that the grand room was an absolute madhouse.
Despite its high ceilings, the lobby felt cramped and cluttered. Sweaty faces huffed in loose order, winding like a snake from the front desk. Couches and chairs and even tables were occupied. Suitcases stacked waist-high turned the floor into a maze. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovered in the air.
Gertie pulled excitedly on Lawrence’s sleeve.
“Perfect,” she whispered.
“If you’re happy, I’m happy,” Lawrence said. “If you don’t need me anymore, I’d like to step outside, ma’am. I don’t do well in enclosed spaces.”
Gertie gave his sleeve another pull, made her giddy, affectionate squeak, and leaned to kiss his cheek. He blushed, then wove through the crowd and out the revolving front door.
Gertie strolled the lobby with her hands clasped behind her back, grinning as she examined the faces. Most were bored, some near rage, all tired.
Her attention landed on a large man with a bald head and cherubic face, halfway to the front. He fanned himself with a train ticket.
“Hello!” she said enthusiastically.
It took him aback.
“Hello?” he responded.
“What is it that you do?” Gertie asked.
“I’m a judge,” he said. “I’m staying here for a case.”
Gertie cocked her head to the side, closed an eye, and looked him over. At this silent examination, the judge gave a confused look, then sucked in his belly and thrust up his chin before spinning left to present what he’d heard was his best angle.
“Oh, honey,” Gertie heard a nasal voice say nearby.
It was from an older woman in a peach-colored coat and flower skirt. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at the display, and the judge suddenly glowed a bright red.
Gertie looked over the judge once more, then rested a gentle hand of consolation on the woman’s forearm. She pursed her lips and squinted like she’d just tasted something sour.
“Not what I’m looking for, darling,” Gertie said.
She continued through the crowd.
Another man, skinny and wrinkled like a prune. He was alone, wearing a hat and holding a small black case at his side. Gertie noticed that he wore a priest’s collar.
“A priest!” she exclaimed.
“I help?” he said in a thick accent, maybe Austrian. “I do what?”
Gertie knew right away he wasn’t right either. His eyes were too round and wide. She needed something more striking, sinister even.
“You looking for someone, miss?” a smooth baritone voice spoke from behind her.
It came from an older man seated next to the lobby’s grandfather clock. His head rested against its mahogany side, his kind eyes watching her with a drowsy curiosity. His sideburns had greyed, but his face was free of wrinkles.
“You don’t seem worried about your place in line,” Gertie said.
“No point worrying,” the man said, tilting his head off the clock. “Fretting won’t make the process go quicker.”
He smiled, and when he did, his eyes shone in the light and seemed to pull back into twin points. Sharp, sleek. Just what Gertie was looking for.
“What work do you do?” Gertie asked.
“This and that. Stocks, investments,” he said. “Do you really care about that?”
“Not really,” she smiled.
“Thank god,” he said. “That conversation is always a bore.”
A few more niceties and Gertie told the man he wouldn’t have to wait in line anymore if he went upstairs with her to sit for a painting. He said he’d love to—that, as a matter of fact, he used to dabble as a painter himself. The man stood, favoring his side as they walked through the milling crowd to the penthouse’s private elevator.
As the doors closed, he introduced himself as Graham.
They rolled to a stop, and the cage opened into the private hallway. They walked through the penthouse door into the expansive room, Graham’s heels echoing against the wood.
Gertie explained to Graham what she was looking for, then showed him the painting thus far.
“It’s lovely,” Graham said with admiration.
He walked to the chair and slumped down. Gertie stood behind the easel, lifted her paintbrush of Kolinsky sable, and began trying to translate Graham’s eye onto the canvas.
“You must be new money,” Graham spoke.
“In a way,” Gertie said. “Had a thing go my way years back.”
“Funny how these things just happen,” he said.
Gertie would always have these conversations with her subjects to make the situation less awkward, but at some point, she’d begun learning how to guide their emotions. If there was a certain expression she wanted out of them, she’d find the subject’s trigger point, and try to tweak it in a certain direction. It was like directing an actor, but with the actor unawares.
“Do you come from money?” Gertie asked.
“In a sense,” Graham said, smiling. “Owned land nearby, but lost it all in a bet. Another thing that just happened.”
His eye made another slight twitch—just the gaze she was seeking. This is what she’d press him on.
“What are you thinking about right now?” she asked.
“Fate. I’m considering fate,” Graham said, letting out a giant laugh. “I’m considering how we’re just hurtling through time in whatever direction we are, without any real choice or say in what we do.”
There it was. That perfect tinge in Graham’s eye.
“Tell me more about fate,” she said.
“Think about the concept of choice—it’s an illusion,” Graham began his speech. “Any number of infinite decisions, or cultural and social shifts, all that occurred well before you ended up here, inside the penthouse. Similarly, infinite decisions made by structural forces were determined well before I ended up downstairs in the lobby, my head resting against that clock.”
“But what about my decision to paint you?” Gertie asked. “And your decision to say yes?”
“Ah, but these are merely the expected decisions that come from the happenstance of our own lived experiences,” Graham said. “We exist in a certain place, at a certain time, and we’ve siphoned ideas, opinions, and morals from those around us. As if through osmosis. They fight and wrestle and destroy one another until a decision gets made, but our conscious mind has nothing to do with that process.”
“That sounds bleak,” she said.
“Not to me,” Graham said. “It’s freeing. We’re just a marble dropped from the top of an embankment, without much say in which way we’re headed, just knowing it’s down there somewhere.”
The rest of the conversation went like this. He opined on the state of the universe, and the events, familial or societal or structural, that’d led to this, their single shared moment together in the Palmer Hotel.
As he spoke, there was a gregarious wonder in his eyes. Meanwhile, Gertie nodded and laughed, but kept mostly a frozen smile as she cast her brushstrokes against the canvas.
“Just think—if you hadn’t seen that man on the park bench,” Graham said, “we never would have met.”
“Just think,” she said, mostly dismissively, and stood for one last look at the eye she’d painted. “And I think we’re done. Thank you so much for your time, Graham.”
She extended a hand—and he suddenly lunged and grabbed her wrist.
His nails dug deep into her arm’s flesh.
She felt a shock flush up into her face as she tried to understand this new violence coming from this man’s blissful face, still in awe at the world.
“Now, imagine the events that led me to the decision that I’m going to make,” Graham whispered. “Whether to let you live or die.”
A flash swiped in Gertie’s periphery, and she felt the cool blade of a straight razor on her neck.
“You have no say in this, like the rest of us do during our lives. It’s all chance. But right now, it seems that I have autonomy. It feels that way, to me at least. But is that accurate. Do I really?” Graham asked. “Or am I simply a product of the conditions that led me here? Will they dictate to me that I should cut your throat right now and let you bleed out on the floor?”
He took a fistful of her hair and breathed it in deeply, then pushed her slightly away to take in the view from the bank of penthouse windows. He wistfully looked out at the city landscape.
“We used to have so much fun here,” he said gently. “It used to be so much better. Before they ruined it.”
He removed the blade and Gertie fell to the floor, sucking in air. A light trickle of blood came from her neck. She scurried into the room’s corner in a panic, closed her eyes, then tucked her head protectively into the crooks of her elbows.
Moments later, Graham’s heels echoed in the cavernous space as he exited into the penthouse foyer and slammed the door behind. Gertie heard the ding of the elevator as it was called.
She waited until she heard it descend, then ran to lock the door. She slumped against the wall and sobbed.
Lawrence came back up an hour later to find Gertie staring at her painting, complete now, save for those missing fireflies.
She told him that it was time to go to wherever was next. She decided that she was going to leave the painting behind. It would remain as a gift to the hotel.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).