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The Gypsy
Madonna - excerpt
It all began on a snowy January
day. January is bleak in New York. The trees are
bare, the festivities over, the Christmas tree
lights taken down for another year. The wind that
races down the streets is edged with ice. I walked
briskly with my hands in my coat pockets. Head
down, eyes to the ground, lost in thought: nothing
particular, just the business of the day. I tried
not to think of my mother. I am an avoider. If
something gives me pain I don’t think about
it. If I don’t think about it, it isn’t
happening. If I can’t see it, it isn’t
there, right? My mother had been dead a week.
The funeral was over. Only the journalists pestered
like flies, determined to find out why an uncatalogued,
unknown Titian of such importance had only now
come to light. Didn’t they understand that
I knew as little as they did? If they were grappling
in the dark, I was floundering
in space.
I reached my office. A redbrick building in the
West Village with an antique shop on the ground
floor. Zebedee Hapstein, the eccentric clockmaker,
toiled against a discordant orchestra of ticking
in his workshop next door. I fumbled in my pocket
for the key. My fingers were numb. I had forgotten
to wear gloves. For a moment I looked at my reflection
in the glass. The haunted face of a man old beyond
his years stared grimly back at me. I shook off
my grief and walked inside, brushing the snow
from my shoulders. Stanley wasn’t in yet,
nor was Esther who answered the shop telephone
and cleaned the place. With leaden feet I climbed
the stairs. The building was dim and smelled of
old wood and furniture polish. I opened the door
to my office and stepped inside. There, sitting
quietly on a chair, was a tramp.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Angrily, I demanded
to know what he was doing there and how he had
got in. The window was closed and the front door
had been locked. For an instant I was afraid.
Then he turned to me, his mouth curling into a
half smile. I was at once struck by the extraordinary
color of his eyes that shone out from his cracked
and bearded face, like aquamarine
set in rock. I had a sudden sense of déjà
vu but it was gone as quickly as it had come.
he wore a felt hat and sat hunched in a heavy
coat. I noticed his shoes were dirty and scuffed
with a hole wearing through at one toe. He looked
me up and down appraisingly and I felt my fury
mount at his impertinence...
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