Free The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow by Quinn Sinclair Page B

asleep, she stepped softly into the room and went to his worktable.
    The Jumbo pad was where he always kept it.
    She lay down on the couch in the third bedroom and stretched out, reaching behind her to turn on the floor lamp. It wasn't there. She looked through every page, but nowhere could she find the drawing of the woman whose blank face was disfigured by the nose of a pig.
    She checked again, pressing each sheet between her fingers to make sure no two were stuck together.
    It was gone, torn out—but by whom? Sam always kept his pads intact, storing them under his bed when one was finished and he was ready to start on a fresh one.
    Once again she riffled through the pages. Maybe this was a new pad, a different one. But no, this was the same one. She saw the moving van, the portrait of Val, the taxi cab going over the bridge, the pendant that hung from the slim chain encircling her own neck.
    ***
    She turned off the light and replaced the pad on Sam's worktable, then went back to bed. She lay listening in the darkness—his breathing, the blood pumping in her ears, a car that now and then moved more noisily than most as it made its way along Lexington or Park.
    She was willing to understand that she did not like this quiet anymore. Eight floors above the street, in a neighborhood that was predominantly residential, behind the thicker walls that came with a pre-war building, it all made for a strangled silence louder than the sirens that had screamed all night back on Thirty-third.
    What the hell was happening to them, anyway? With their fancy new jobs and their fancy new co-op, their son miraculously enrolled in a snooty little prep school—why was it that she'd never felt more unhappy in her entire married life? She felt so alienated from Hal it terrified her—if it weren't for Sam, she realized, she could walk away from her marriage without a backward glance. The awful truth of it was enough to make her sob.
    When had everything started to fall apart? Had they just gone through too many changes too quickly? Was it the move? Was that the dreadful, terrible mistake that had signaled an end to all their domestic contentment? Or was it that goddamned school? It seemed to mean too much to Hal—during the times they'd discussed their "St. Martin's boy," she'd had to fight a feeling that Hal seemed to place a life-and-death importance on Sam's being there, as if all the insecurities and self-doubts he felt about his own background would rise up and annihilate him if Sam were for some reason deprived entree to the magic sphere St. Martin's represented to him. It was unhealthy, really, the passionate significance Hal attached to it.
    When she stopped to think about it, Peggy had to admit to herself that there was something deeply unnerving about all the events of the past several months. How odd it was, really, that she and Hal should have both received such fantastic promotions, after so many years, within weeks of each other. And she knew there were people at the store who couldn't really believe the Coopers had been accepted into this building, a building whose board normally demanded that applicants be able to pay for the apartment in cash and still show assets in excess of the purchase price. The Coopers would have been lucky to make it into a low-rent building on the Upper West Side—that they'd gotten into this building was almost inexplicable.
    And finally, there was the matter of St. Martin's. Peggy had absolutely no doubt that had Sam applied through normal channels, he'd have stood as good a chance as the next guy of getting in. He was terrifically bright and engaging, and even the toniest prep schools were not the exclusive province of the "upper crust" anymore. The public school system was so rotten that by now the middle class had invaded the private schools in droves.
    But Peggy was too well versed in the admissions procedures—God knows she'd heard enough about it from her frantic friends last year—not to