The Goldfinch

third choice: since for various reasons I felt that a consulate member would be fairly speedy to return my call if I left an after-hours message stating that I was an American citizen wishing to turn myself in for capital murder.

Act of rebellion. Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. Why not beat Fate to the punch? Throw the book on the fire and be done with it? There was no end in sight to the present horror, plenty of external, empirical horror to line up with my own endogenous supply; and, given enough dope (inspecting the bag: less than half left), I would happily have set up a fat line and toppled right over: great-souled darkness, explosion of stars.

But there wasn’t enough to be sure of finishing myself off. I didn’t want to waste what I had on a few hours of oblivion only to wake up again in my cage (or, worse: in a Dutch hospital with no passport). Then again my tolerance was down and I was pretty sure I had enough to do the job if I got good and drunk first and topped it off with my emergency pill.

Bottle of chilled white in the mini-bar. Why not? I drank the rest of my gin and uncorked it, feeling resolute and jubilant—I was hungry, they’d restocked the crackers and cocktail snacks but this was all going to work a lot better on an empty stomach.

The relief was immense. Quiet dismissal. Perfect, perfect joy of throwing it all away. I found a classical station on the radio—Christmas plainchant, somber and liturgical, less melody than a spectral commentary on it—and thought about running myself a bath.

But that could wait. Instead I opened the desk and found a folder of hotel stationery. Gray cathedral stone, minor hexachords. Rex virginum amator. Between fever, and canal water lapping outside, the space around me had fallen quietly into haunted doubleness, a border zone which was both hotel room and the cabin of a gently tossing ship. Life on the high seas. Death by water. Andy, when we were kids, telling me in his eerie Martian-boy voice that he’d heard on the Learning Channel that Mary protected sailors, that one of the protections of the Rosary was that you would never die by drowning. Mary Stella Maris. Mary Star of the Sea.

I thought of Hobie at midnight mass, kneeling in the pew in his black suit. Gilding wears away naturally. On a cabinet door, on the flap of a bureau, there are often a quantity of tiny indentations.

Objects seeking out their rightful owners. They had human qualities. They were shifty or honest or suspicious or fine.

Really remarkable pieces do not appear on the scene from nowhere.

The hotel pen wasn’t great, I wished I had a better one, but the paper was creamy and thick. Four letters. Hobie’s and Mrs. Barbour’s would have to be the longest, as they were the persons who most deserved an explanation and also because they were the only persons who, if I died, would actually care. But I would write to Kitsey as well—to assure her that it wasn’t her fault. Pippa’s letter would be the shortest. I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.

But I wouldn’t say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart. The point was to let her know, briefly, how happy she had made me while leaving out all the more obvious part.

When I shut my eyes, I was struck by clinically sharp flashes of memory that the fever brought bursting up from nowhere, like tracer rounds going off in the jungle, lurid flares of highly detailed and emotionally complex material. Harpstrings of light through the barred windows of our old apartment on Seventh Avenue, scratchy sisal matting and the red waffled texture it left in my hands and knees when I was playing down on the floor. A tangerine party dress of my mother’s with shiny things on the skirt I always wanted to touch. Alameda, our old housekeeper, mashing plantains in a glass bowl. Andy, saluting me before stumbling down the gloomy hall of his parents’ apartment: Aye, Captain.

Medieval voices, austere and otherworldly. The gravity of unadorned song.

I didn’t actually feel upset, that was the thing. Instead it was more like the last and worst of my root canals when the dentist had leaned in under the lamps and said almost done.





December 24

Dear Kitsey,



I’m terribly sorry about this but I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you, and nothing to do with any of your family. Your mother will be receiving a separate letter which will have a bit more information but in the meantime I want to assure you, privately, that my course of action has not been influenced by anything that has happened between us, especially events of late.



Where this stiff voice, and unnaturally stiff handwriting had come from—incongruous with the cloudbursts of memory and hallucination crashing in on me from all sides—I did not know. The wet sleet pelting against the windowpanes had a kind of deep historical weight to it, starvation, armies marching, a never-ending drizzle of sadness.



As you well know, and have pointed out to me yourself, I have numerous problems that began long before I met you, and none of these problems are your fault. If your mother has questions for you about your role in recent events, I should urge you to refer her to Tessa Margolis, or—even better—Em, who will be more than delighted to share her views on my character. Also—completely unrelated matter, but I also urge you not to let Havistock Irving into your apartment again, ever.



Kitsey as a child. Fine hair straggling in her face. Shut up you goofballs. Cut it out or I’ll tell.



Last but not least—

(my pen hovering over this line)

last but not least I want to tell you how beautiful you looked at the party and how touched I was that you wore my mother’s earrings. She was crazy about Andy—she would have loved you too, and would have loved for us to be together. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. But I do hope things work out for you. Really.

Best love,

Theo



Sealed; addressed; put aside. They’d have stamps at the front desk.



Dear Hobie,



This is a hard letter to write and I’m sorry to be writing it.



Alternate sweats and frosts. I was seeing green spots. My fever was so high the walls seemed to be shrinking.



This isn’t about the bad pieces I’ve sold. I expect you’ll hear soon enough what it’s about.



Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time.

The effects of time, visible and invisible.



and, I don’t quite know how to say this but I guess what I’m thinking about is this sick puppy my mother and I found on the street in Chinatown. She was lying in a space between two garbage cans. She was a baby pit bull. Smelly, dirty. Skin and bones. Too weak to stand up. People just walking by her. And I got upset and my mother promised me that we’d pick her up if she was still there when we finished eating. And when we got out of the restaurant, there she still was. So we hailed a cab, I carried her in my arms, and when we got her home my mother made her a box in the kitchen and she was so happy and licked our faces and drank a ton of water and ate the dog food we bought her and threw it all right back up.

Well to make a long story short, she died. It wasn’t our fault. We felt like it was. We took her in to the vet, and bought her special food, but she only got sicker and sicker. We were both really fond of her by this time. And my mother took her in again, to a specialist at the Animal Medical Center. And the vet said—this dog has a disease, which I forget the name of, and she had it when you found her, and I know this is not what you want to hear but it is going to be a whole lot kinder if you euthanize her right now



My hand had been flying in reckless jerks and starts across the paper. But at the end of the page while reaching for another, I stopped, appalled. What I’d experienced as weightlessness, a sort of sweeping, last-chance glide, was not at all the eloquent and affecting farewell I’d imagined. The handwriting sloped and slopped all over the place and was not intelligent or coherent or even legible. There had to be some much briefer, and simpler, way to thank Hobie and say what I had to say: namely, that he shouldn’t feel bad, he’d always been good to me and done his best to help me, just as my mother and I had done our best to help this baby pit bull, who—it was actually a pertinent point, only I didn’t want to spin the story out too long—for all her sweet-tempered qualities had been incredibly destructive in the days leading to her death, she’d pretty much destroyed the whole apartment and ripped our sofa to pieces.

Maudlin, self-indulgent, tasteless. My throat felt as if the lining had been scraped out with a razor.

Off comes the upholstery. Look here: we have woodworm. We’ll have to treat it with Cuprinol.

The night I’d overdosed in Hobie’s upstairs bathroom, expecting not to wake up and waking up anyway with my cheek on the trippy old hexagonal floor tile, I’d been amazed at exactly how radiant a pre-war bathroom with plain white fittings could be when you were looking at it from the afterlife.

The beginning of the end? Or the end of the end?

Fabelhaft. Having the best fun ever.

One thing at a time. Aspirins. Cold water from the minibar. The aspirins rasped and stuck in my chest, like swallowing gravel, and I pounded trying to get them down, the booze had made me feel a whole lot sicker, thirsty, confused, fish hooks in my throat, water trickling absurdly down my cheeks, gasping and wheezing, I’d opened the wine as a treat (supposedly) but it was going down like turpentine, burning and razoring around in my stomach, should I run a bath, should I call down for something hot, something simple, broth or tea? No: the thing was simply to finish the wine or maybe just go right ahead and start in on the vodka; somewhere online I’d read that only two per cent of attempted suicides by overdose were successful, which seemed like an absurdly low number although one unfortunately borne out by previous experience. It aint gonna rain no mo’. That was somebody’s suicide note. It was only a farce. Jean Harlow’s husband, who killed himself on their wedding night. George Sanders’s had been the best, an Old Hollywood classic, my father had known it by heart and liked to quote from it. Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. And then, Hart Crane. Pivot and drop, shirt ballooning as he fell. Goodbye everybody! A shouted farewell, jumping off ship.

I no longer considered my body my own. It had ceased to belong to me. My hands, moving, felt separate, floating of their own accord, and when I stood it was like operating a marionette, unfolding myself, rising jerkily on strings.

Hobie had told me that when he was a young man he drank Cutty Sark because it was Hart Crane’s whiskey. Cutty Sark means Short Skirt.

Pale green walls in the piano room, palm trees and pistachio ices.

Ice-coated windows. Unheated rooms of Hobie’s childhood.

The Old Masters, they were never wrong.

What did I think, what did I feel?

It hurt to breathe. The packet of heroin was in the night table on the other side of the bed. But though my dad, with his unflagging love for show-biz hell, would have adored the whole set up—dope, dirty ashtray, booze and all—I couldn’t quite bear the thought of being found sprawled out in my complimentary hotel robe like a has-been lounge singer. The thing to do was clean up, shower and shave and put on my suit so I didn’t look too seedy when they found me and only then, at the last, after the night chambermaids were off duty, take the Do Not Disturb sign off the door: better if they found me first thing, I didn’t want them to find me from the smell.

It felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I’d been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetlamp out in front of Film Forum and how I’d stood on the corner to savor it—the joy of watching her watch for me. Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.

Suit from the closet. Shirts all dirty. Why hadn’t I thought to send one out? My shoes were waterlogged and wrecked which added a final sorry note to the picture—but no (pausing muddled in the middle of the room), was I going to lay myself out fully dressed, shoes and all, like a corpse on a slab? I’d broken out in a cold sweat, shivers and chills again, the whole routine. I needed to sit down. Maybe I was going to have to re-think the whole presentation. Tear up the letters. Make it look like an accident. Much nicer if it looked like I was on my way to some mysterious dress-up party, just having a bump on the way out—sitting on the edge of the bed, little too much, black sparklers and fizz-pops, keeling over deliciously. Whoops.

White wings of tumult. Running jump into the infinite.

Then—at a blare of trumpets—I started. The liturgical chant had given way to a burst of inappropriately festive orchestration. Melodic, brassy. A wave of frustration boiled up in me. Nutcracker Suite. All wrong. All wrong. A full-blooded Seasonal Extravaganza wasn’t at all the note to go out on, dashing orchestral number, March of the Something Something, and all at once my stomach heaved, violent pitch right into my throat, it felt like I’d swallowed a quart of lemon juice and the next thing I knew almost before I could lurch for the wastebasket it was all coming up in a clear acid gush, wave after wave after yellowy wave.

After it was over, I sat on the carpet with my forehead resting on the sharp metal edge of the can and the kiddie-ballet music sparkling along irritatingly in the background: not even drunk, that was the hell of it, just sick. In the hallway I could hear a gaggle of Americans, couples, laughing, saying their loud goodbyes as they parted for their respective rooms: old college friends, jobs in the financial sector, five-plus years of corporate law and Fiona entering first grade in the fall, all’s well in Oaklandia, well goodnight then, God we love you guys, a life I might have had myself except I didn’t want it. That was the last thing I remember thinking before I made it swaying to my feet and switched the annoying music off and—stomach roiling—threw myself face down on the bed like throwing myself off a bridge, every lamp in the room still blazing as I sank away from the light, blackness closing over my head.





iv.



WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she’d been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall. Sometimes I spotted her in a crowd, or in a taxicab pulling away, and these glimpses of her I treasured despite the fact that I was never able to catch up with her. Always, ultimately, she eluded me: I’d always just missed her call, or misplaced her phone number; or run up breathless and gasping to the place where she was supposed to be, only to find her gone. In adult life these chronic near misses pulsed with a messier and much more painful anxiety: I would be stricken with panic to learn, or remember, or be told by some implausible party that she was living across town in some terrible slum apartment where for reasons inexplicable I had not gone to see her or contacted her in years. Usually I was frantically trying to hail a cab or make my way to her when I woke up. These insistent scenarios had a repetitive and borderline-brutal quality that reminded me of the wound-up Wall Street husband of one of Hobie’s clients who, when he got in a certain mood, liked to tell the same three stories of his Vietnam war experience over and over with the same mechanical wording and gestures: same rat-a-tat of gunfire, same chopping hand, always in the exact same spot. Everyone’s face got very still over the after-dinner drinks when he spieled off into his routine, which we’d all seen a million times and which (like my own ruthless loop of searching for my mother, night after night, year after year, dream after dream) was rigid and invariable. He was always going to stumble and fall over the same tree root; he would never make it to his friend Gage in time, just as I would never manage to find my mother.

But that night, finally, I did find her. Or more accurately: she found me. It felt like a one off, although maybe some other night, some other dream, she’ll come to me like that again—maybe when I’m dying, though it seems almost too much to wish for. Certainly I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty’s death, Andy’s death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, because—writing this now, I’m close to tears—I think how poor Andy told me, with terror on his face, that my mother was the only person he’d known, and liked, who’d ever died. So—maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far side of the water, maybe my mother was the very one who knelt down by his side to greet him on the foreign shore. Maybe it’s stupid to even articulate such hopes. But, then again, maybe it’s more stupid not to.

Either way—one-off or not—it was a gift; and if she had only one visit, if that’s all they allowed her, she saved it for when it mattered. Because all of a sudden, there she was. I was standing in front of a mirror and looking at the room reflected behind me, which was an interior much like Hobie’s shop, or, rather, a more spacious and eternal-seeming version of the shop, cello-brown walls and an open window which was like an entry point into some much larger, unimaginable theater of sunlight. The space behind me in the frame was not so much a space in the conventional sense as a perfectly composed harmony, a wider, more real-seeming reality with a deep silence around it, beyond sound and speech; where all was stillness and clarity, and at the same time, as in a backward-run movie, you could also imagine spilled milk leaping back into the pitcher, a jumping cat flying backward to land silently upon a table, a waystation where time didn’t exist or, more accurately, existed all at once in every direction, all histories and movements occurring simultaneously.

And when I looked away for a second and then looked back, I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn’t allowed to turn around—it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were—but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn’t alive, not exactly, she wasn’t dead either because she wasn’t yet born, and yet never not born—as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions, the before-Christmas smile of someone with a secret too wonderful to let slip, just yet: well, you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you? But just as she was about to speak—drawing an affectionate exasperated breath I knew very well, the sound of which I can hear even now—I woke up.





v.



WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, it was morning. All the lamps in the room were still blazing and I was under the covers with no memory of how I’d gotten under them. Everything was still bathed and saturated with her presence—higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in optics that had produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people felt after visions of saints—not that my mother was a saint, only that her appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame leaping up in a dark room.

Still half sleeping, I drifted in the bedclothes, buoyed by the sweetness of the dream washing quietly about me. Even the ambient morning sounds in the hallway had taken on the atmosphere and color of her presence; for if I listened hard, in my half-dreaming state, it seemed that I could hear the specific light, cheerful sound of her footsteps mixed up with the clank of the room service trays up and down the hall and the rattle of elevator cables, the opening and closing of elevator doors: a very urban sound, a sound I associated with Sutton Place, and her.

Then, suddenly, bursting into the last wisps of bioluminescence still trailing from the dream, the bells of the nearby church broke out in such violent clangor that I bolted upright in a panic, fumbling for my glasses. I had forgotten what day it was: Christmas.

Unsteadily, I got up and went to the window. Bells, bells. The streets were white and deserted. Frost glittered on tiled rooftops; outside, on the Herengracht, snow danced and flew. A flock of black birds was cawing and swooping over the canal, the sky was hectic with them, great sideways sweeps and undulations as a single, intelligent body, eddying to and fro, and their movement seemed to pass into me on almost a cellular level, white sky and whirling snow and the fierce gusting wind of poets.

First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.

I took a shower, shaved and dressed. Then, quietly, I cleared up and packed my things. Somehow I would have to get Gyuri’s ring and watch back to him, assuming he was still alive, which I was increasingly doubtful he was: the watch alone was a fortune—a BMW 7 series, a down payment on a condo. I would FedEx them to Hobie for safekeeping and leave his name for Gyuri at the front desk, just in case.

Frosted panes, snow ghosting the cobblestones, deep and speechless, no traffic on the streets, centuries superimposed, 1940s by way of 1640s.

It was important not to think too deeply. The important thing was to ride the energy of the dream that had followed me into waking. Since I didn’t speak Dutch, I would go to the American consulate and have the consulate phone the Dutch police. Spoiling some consulate member’s Christmas, the festive family meal. But I didn’t trust myself to wait. Possibly a good idea to go down and look at the State Department’s website and apprise myself of my rights as an American citizen—certainly there were many worse places in the world to be in jail than the Netherlands and maybe if I was up front about everything I knew (Horst and Sascha, Martin and Frits, Frankfurt and Amsterdam) they could run the painting down.

But who knew how it would play. I was certain of nothing except that evasive action was over. Whatever happened, I would not be like my father, dodging and scheming up until the very moment of flipping the car and crashing in flames; I would stand forward and take what was coming to me; and, to that point, I went straight to the bathroom and flushed the glassine stamp down the toilet.

And that was that: fast as Martin, and just as irrevocable. What was it my dad liked to say? Face the music. Not something he’d ever done.