Read The Little Death for Free Online Page B

prevent it. I poured myself a drink from the bottle of
brandy I’d found in the kitchen. When a hype came to me, it wasn’t for medical
advice or psychological counseling, but simply to stay out of jail. If I did
that much for one of them, got him into a hospital or a drug program, then I
considered myself successful. As to why someone became addicted or how he rid
himself of the habit, those things remained mysteries to me. The only thing I
was pretty sure about was that when dealing with an addict, the fact of
addiction was more important than the drug. Thinking about Hugh I wished, for
his sake, that I knew more.
    I
wandered aimlessly across the big, bare room. The house had the dank, decaying
smell of so many Victorian houses, as if the walls were stuffed with wet
newspaper. Hugh’s house, only a couple of blocks from Castro, was in a
neighborhood undergoing renovation; many of the neighboring houses looked
freshly painted or were in the process of reconstruction or were for sale. His
house was untouched by this activity. Strips of paint peeled from the banister
of the stairs leading up to the porch. Inside, the rooms were painted white,
badly, in some spots barely covering the last application of gaudy wallpaper.
The wooden floors were scarred and dirty. From the kitchen, the refrigerator
shrieked and buzzed, then subsided to a low whine. It wasn’t the house of an
heir.
    Yet
there were incongruous, aristocratic touches. There were dazzlingly white
sheets on his bed and freshly laundered towels piled in the bathroom. The few
pieces of furniture scattered around the house were of obvious quality. The
brandy I was drinking was Courvoisier VSOP, and the glass from which I drank it
appeared to be crystal.
    I
found myself at the bookshelves which held a couple of dozen books. Many of
them were worn-out paperbacks, Tolkien, Herman Hesse, a volume of Ginsberg —
the library of a college sophomore of the sixties. I opened the Ginsberg.
Written on the flyleaf were Hugh’s name, the year 1971, and the words New
Haven. Inspecting the second shelf, I saw the books were poetry, mostly, and by
people I’d never heard of. The spine of one volume was cracked and when I
opened it a sheaf of pages fell out, fluttering to the floor. I knelt down to
pick them up and saw, on the bottom shelf, a framed photograph laid face down.
I picked it up with the pages, put the book back together and turned the
picture over.
    It
was the portrait of a woman, a lady, I thought. She may have been as young as
fifty. It was hard to tell from the black and white photo whether her hair was
white or an ashy shade of blond. Light and darkness had been tactfully deployed
on the plain background behind her. The obvious effect was timelessness and
the apparent reason was the woman’s age. Still, there was an elegance in her
angular, handsome face quite apart from
    the
photographer’s craft, and a kind of luster in the brightness of her hair and
eyes. I thought she must have once been beautiful.
    “My
mother,” a voice commented behind me. I nearly dropped the picture in surprise
and turned to find Hugh standing at the edge of the room, just outside the
light. He stepped forward, white-faced, his eyes exhausted. “Sorry. I didn’t
mean to come up on you like that.” He held out his hand for the photo and I
gave it to him. He studied it a moment then returned it. I laid it back on the
bookshelf.
    “Nice
picture,” I said. “Looks professional.”
    “The
official portrait,” he said, with a trace of contempt in his voice. “It appears
on all the dust jackets.”
    “She
writes?”
    He
nodded, seating himself on a corner of the couch, drawing a thick sweater
across his bare chest. I noticed for the first time, watching him, that the
room was cold. “What has she written?”
    “Poetry,
mostly.”
    “I
didn’t notice any of her books on your shelves.”
    “I
don’t have any.”
    “You’re
not close to her?”
    “I
haven’t seen her in