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Morphine Lollipop
A WILDERNESS OF GILT, gleaming in the slant from the dust-furred windows:
gilded cupids, gilded commodes and torchieres, and — undercutting the oldwood smell — the reek of turpentine, oil paint, and varnish. I followed him
through the workshop along a path swept in the sawdust, past pegboard and
tools, dismembered chairs and claw-foot tables sprawled with their legs in
the air. Though a big man he was graceful, “a floater,” my mother would
have called him, something effortless and gliding in the way he carried
himself. With my eyes on the heels of his slippered feet, I followed him up
some narrow stairs and into a dim room, richly carpeted, where black urns
stood on pedestals and tasseled draperies were drawn against the sun.
At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the
massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the
air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment
when Mrs. Barbour took me back to Sutton Place to get some things I
needed. It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself
when someone had died.
All at once I wished I hadn’t come. But the man — Hobie — seemed to
sense my misgiving, because he turned quite suddenly. Though he wasn’t a
young man he still had something of a boy’s face; his eyes, a childish blue,
were clear and startled.
“What’s the matter?” he said, and then: “Are you all right?”
His concern embarrassed me…