Salon
Six o’clock
A room lit for whoever is coming
Nothing on it has a color of its own. Champagne, burnished metal, and mercury glass take the lamp, the window, and whatever is lit outside it, and hand all of it back — the room turns up small and curved inside every ornament. It is full through the middle. The collar is antiqued mirror, so the light arrives twice: once down through the branches and once up off the floor.
Six o’clock, before anyone has knocked. There are glasses out on a tray, the oven is on, and there is nowhere yet for the coats. Someone comes in, stops in the doorway for a second, and then the evening carries on and nobody mentions it again. It is the first thing anyone sees when they come through your door.
The tree is a Balsam Hill Fraser Fir. It’s artificial — which is why it looks like this on the twenty-eighth of December, and why there is never anything to sweep. The ornaments are Balsam Hill Signature in champagne, with burnished metal and mercury glass. It stands in an antiqued mirrored collar, with a gold mirror star at the top.