His eyes are blue, pale like the glinting shadows in a deep, new snow. He has full bow-shaped lips that purse when he pauses to choose his words, and sandy brown hair, cut short.
His clothes are prep-school unremarkable, except that a Barnes identification card hangs on an orange grosgrain ribbon that peeks like a vest
from under the lapels of his navy blue jacket. Readying himself for a walk across the Barnes arboretum to the stone cottage nearby that he shares with a friend, King throws a red muffler with narrow white stripes around his neck.
"Most people are afraid of color," he says, pausing in the little courtyard outside the former carriage house.
Then he opens the door. Color, as though pent-up and longing for company, bursts through the opening and into the light.
The walls are pink and tangerine and aquamarine, one hue mixing unself- consciously with another, flooding and saturating the senses.
"I want people to think they are walking into a painting every time they enter a room," King says.
The effect is exactly that - of a Matisse painting in which colors are intensified, perspectives flattened or exaggerated, details emphasized for dramatic effect. Improbable combinations of pattern stand out against bold swaths of color.
The kitchen table is made of blue and white ceramic tiles, bordered in bright orange. A string of red Chinese lanterns drapes across a window. Even the wine glasses on their racks are multi-hued, with ruby bowls and golden stems. Behind the table, a pink neon bird glimmers on a shelf.
Here and there, flowers are casually arranged. A delicate sprig of jasmine, studded with pale pink buds and starry white flowers, arches over a fragment of stone in a shallow tray of water on the table. The musky-sweet smell of the flowers mixes with the crisp, smoky odors of embers glowing in a wood stove.
Pepito, a whippet, jumps up excitedly from his basket.
