My Last Duchess - Writing game 2

My Last Duchess - Writing game 2

The Last One

“Hey you,” he said as he first waved a hand from his pale temple, before he gave me a limp and evasive handshake. “So you’ve come to see the goods.” He was nothing like I had imagined. An air of cold detachment hung around him and a whiff of it was enough to send me a few steps backwards. Polite exchanges followed, but he held himself in a seemingly uncomfortable position with his back in extension, as if he was a piece of elastic stretched as far as the properties of the material would allow. “She’s in here,” he said with a voice bereft of intonations. He quickly turned his back to me, and walked a few steps in the dimly lit entrance hall, before stopping again. As he stooped to pick an ornate silver key up from the top of a large chest, his baggy black hipsters dipped even lower from his hips and the name “Calvin Klein” in pink squirmed back at me. He turned again, smiled in an inquisitive way and said, “so you collect paintings? Or should I say portraits?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned his back again and walked over to another door, stuck the key in and turned it twice before he flung the door open. He slammed his right hand against the inside wall and hit the light switch with military precision – turning yet again this time to gesture for me to follow.

It was as if a candyfloss had stuck its tongue out and licked me in the eyes; the room was completely pink; floor, ceiling, walls; well beyond the dreams of a five-year old girl. An enormous chandelier draped itself from the ceiling, glinting dangerously as if a thousand knives had been drawn all at once. The echo of our steps as we walked in seemed to bounce right back at us from the mirror that covered the entire wall to our left – the narcissistic trance of the reflection and its anomaly glued me to the pink floor. In the reflections of the mirror, a curtain of pink velvet was draped from ceiling to floor concealing the opposite wall. “You’re the first one”, he said with a little quiver in his voice.

“Let’s do it,” he said, this time with some more excitement in his voice. He walked over to the curtain, pulled it to the right in one long sweeping motion. He quickly tied the rope around the curtain and carefully released the tassel in a cascade leaving only the curtain strangled. “I see her beauty,” he said, “though it wasn’t for me.”

I was struck down by the intensity of the complex portrait – vivid colours, changing for each face, but the same face replicated nine times. The silk screens softened the harder photographic outlines, but it was the colours that gave the portraits their different moods. The negative photographic images further to the right seemed to wash out her contours – erasing her slowly and constantly, imprinting her absence and presence at the same time. The mirror opposite exaggerated the volume of faces, only our presence splintering the effect.

“It’s a durable image, don’t you think?” He spoke in a barely audible voice now, “Lasting more than 15 minutes. Of course there are reproductions everywhere. As I see it, they made her omnipresent and distorted her true image - made her false as water. They killed her, she didn’t. But she was true, and still is, at least here with me.”

He turned and for the first time looked me straight in the eyes. “Will you keep it – or just sell it on?” The detached voice now back in place. "Either way, I guess you’ld like to know her name, since she was the last of the big ones. Her name was Marilyn.”