The room had the sweet aroma of tobacco smoke and paint fumes and a small red rose that smelled of death. The canvas in the center of the room had nothing but a blue streak of wet paint. Oh! the envied blue streak of paint, the terrifying line of death and hope and all that could ruin the world. His feet were propped up against the desk with a half smoked cigarette resting between his lips and a thin paint brush with blue paint on the tip stuck between his fingers. He stood, dropped the paintbrush on the linoleum floor and stabbed the cigarette into the ash tray. He stood in the doorway grunting menacingly at the sight of the opulent hall.
"Meryl, clean up this place, will you?" Mr. Arthur Bourgeois was speaking. "This hallway is in a disorderly manner, and I can only assume that the study is going to be of awful conditions."
Mr. Arthur Bourgeois wore a red velvet suit and had a black handkerchief folded neatly in his undershirt's pocket.
"Oh, Meryl!" He cried. "It reeks of tobacco in here. You know smoking is prohibited in these hallways. Clean it up and bring me the man who left a burning tobacco in the tray!"
Meryl hurried for the hallway carrying a broom in her hand, rolling her eyes, and slamming the door in Mr. Bourgeois' face.
Mr. Bourgeois made silent eye contact with me, almost suspecting a rather inappropriate gesture from myself. Mr. Bourgeois walked back over to his desk, opened the top drawer, pulled out an unused paintbrush and grabbed a cup of blue paint.
"Mr. Bourgeois, sir, you plan on adding to the blue streak?" I stood in front of the canvas. "But it is not done drying yet."
"I do not need input from some peasant in my house about my painting. A masterpiece is never perfect but far from."
"Sorry, Mr. Bourgeois, I don't quite get you. A masterpiece is so close to perfect isn't it? Then why is it called a masterpiece?"
Mr. Bourgeois snarled and slammed the paint container on the desk, and I sat back in the chair quietly watching Mr. Arthur Bourgeois change his blue streak. He painted in silence never losing focus and stepping back to get a good look. He meticulously added a thin circle in the upper right corner of the canvas and a vague line running perpendicular to the main one. A crash came from the hallway.
"Dammit, Meryl!" Mr. Bourgeois threw the paintbrush on the desk splattering paint on to the mahogany wood. Mr. Bourgeois entered the hallway and shouted a plethora of curses. I tiptoed to the desk and opened the top drawer where he kept all of his paints. White, red, yellow, green with the blue sitting on top. He was a colorful man of something.
"Charles Lloyd," I jumped far away from the desk, "get in here and clean this mess up with Meryl. I have important business to attend to."
I stomped into the hallway and swept up the pieces of the glass vase into the tray for Meryl. Mr. Bourgeois slammed the door and used the lock.
"Meryl!" He screamed. "I thought I told you to clean this burning cigarette up! Get to it!"
"That man," she mumbled, "something else."
Meryl was a woman in her late fifties with red hair mixed with white strands. She had a heavier build and always wore a light blue dress and a black apron wrapped around her waist.
"What did he curse at you?" I asked.
"Oh, Charles, it was not a thing you should be worried for. I hear it time after time and it truly is okay. This place is too big for myself to clean and Mr. Bourgeois is never happy about the look of this place."
'Was the broken vase your doing?"
"I accidentally hit it with the broom when I was sweeping the hallway. It was Mr. Bourgeois' prized vase and I broke it. He threatened to evict me if I did not pick myself up, as well as the vase."
