A Little Death

A short story

It was rich of him to suggest I was spoiled, but then everything of him was rich. So what if he was right? I shuffled my feet against the soft brushed cork of my house shoe. A few weeks after he presented them to me over the breakfast table I had seen them on the feet of a mannequin in the window of Bergdorf Goodman’s. Inside the store, still blasting its hot air despite the positively springlike day outside, I hunted them down in men’s fashion. They cost more than a few months’ rent on my parents house, which I already knew before I looked for them. Knowing wasn’t the point, of course. I knew, he knew. My parents probably didn’t know. But I wanted to see. That’s rich of you, I said, and he lifted his hand in the air in one quick, violent motion, spinning his fork up with it. By the time it clattered down onto the china, flinging egg across the green marble table top and dripping hollandaise sauce onto the jute rug, he was already standing. 

I could hear the click-clack of his little heels stomping up towards the library as I walked the breakfast room with my coffee. Good god, it was ugly. But God had nothing to do with it; this room was Andy’s own creation, his french fancy, and even his decorator couldn’t be held accountable. The walls had been clad with panels of white garden trellis, adorned with white lacquered mirrors and fussy country cottage lamps. The architecture of the room itself, like the whole house, was stunning; a little townhouse, designed and built by McKim, Mead, and White the same year they finished Penn Station, barely twenty feet wide but with seven and a half floors, slotted between two foreign cultural institutes. I ran my fingers across the Victorian sideboard, the only tolerable piece of furniture in the room, and sipped from the pretty Puiforcat porcelain coffee cup, rimmed with oak leaves. I was wearing only a pair of old Nike basketball shorts, and the house shoes. I faked a yawn, lifting my arms high above my head to expose my armpits. I left the coffee cup, without the saucer, atop the Poussin book left open on the coffee table at The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, watching a drip run down from its rim to the soft, acid free archival paper, and bloom across his ripped abs. I knew in his anger Andy would be upstairs in his library, watching me through the security console on his laptop, his hands tucked down the front of his slacks. Studiously avoiding eye contact with the little camera secreted next to the porcelain plates hanging between the sash windows, I slumped across the long, white sofa. I slipped off my house shoes and rubbed bare my feet against the cushion. He would be furiously pleased all day, so after I’d let him finish, I took a shower and went home.