The Goldfinch

  “Yeah, put it in your pocket,” said Goldie. “Don’t walk around waving it out in your hand like that. Plenty of people on the street would kill you for that much cash.”

  “Plenty of people in this building!” said Jose, overcome with sudden laughter.

  “Ha!” said Goldie, cracking up himself, and then said something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

  “Cuidado,” said Jose—wagging his head in the way he did, mock-serious, but unable to keep from smiling. “That’s why they don’t let Goldie and me work on the same floor,” he said to me. “They got to keep us separated. We have too good a time.”

  xix.

  ONCE DAD AND XANDRA showed up, things started moving fast. At dinner that night (at a touristy restaurant I was surprised my dad had chosen), he took a call at the table from somebody at my mother’s insurance company—which, even all these years later, I wish I’d been able to hear better. But the restaurant was loud and Xandra (between gulps of white wine—maybe he’d quit drinking, but she sure hadn’t) was alternately complaining because she couldn’t smoke and telling me in a sort of unfocused way how she’d learned to practice witchcraft out of a library book when she was in high school, somewhere in Fort Lauderdale. (“Actually, Wicca it’s called. It’s an earth religion.”) With anyone else, I would have asked exactly what it involved, being a witch (spells and sacrifices? deal with the devil?) but before I had a chance she’d moved on, how she’d had the opportunity to go to college and was sorry she hadn’t done it (“I’ll tell you what I was interested in. English history and like that. Henry the Eighth, Mary Queen of Scots”). But she’d ended up not going to college at all because she’d been too obsessed with this guy. “Obsessed,” she hissed, fixing me with her sharp, no-color eyes.

  Why being obsessed with the guy kept Xandra from going to college, I never found out, because my dad got off the phone. He ordered (and it gave me a funny feeling) a bottle of champagne.

  “I can’t drink this whole damn thing,” said Xandra, who was into her second glass of wine. “It’ll give me a headache.”

  “Well, if I can’t have champagne, you might as well have some,” my father said, leaning back in his chair.

  Xandra nodded at me. “Let him have some,” she said. “Waiter, bring another glass.”

  “Sorry,” said the waiter, a hard-edged Italian guy who looked like he was used to dealing with out-of-control tourists. “No alcohol if he’s under eighteen.”

  Xandra started scrabbling in her purse. She was wearing a brown halter dress, and she had blusher, or bronzer, or some brownish powder brushed under her cheekbones in such a strong line that I had an urge to smudge it in with my fingertip.

  “Let’s go outside and have a smoke,” she said to my father. There was a long moment where they exchanged a smirky look that made me cringe. Then Xandra pushed her chair back and—dropping her napkin in the chair—looked around for the waiter. “Oh, good, he’s gone,” she said, reaching for my (mostly) empty water glass and slopping some champagne into it.

  The food had arrived and I’d poured myself another large but surreptitious glass of champagne before they returned. “Yum!” said Xandra, looking glazed and a bit shiny, tugging her short skirt down, edging around and slithering back into her seat without bothering to pull her chair out all the way. She flapped her napkin into her lap and pulled her massive, bright-red plate of manicotti towards her. “Looks awesome!”

  “So does mine,” said my dad, who was picky about his Italian food, and whom I’d often known to complain about overly tomatoey, marinara-drenched pasta dishes exactly like the plate in front of him.

  As they tucked into their food (which was probably fairly cold, judging by how long they’d been gone), they resumed their conversation in mid-stream. “Well, anyway, didn’t work out,” he said, leaning back in his chair and toying rakishly with a cigarette he was unable to light. “That’s how it goes.”

  “I bet you were great.”

  He shrugged. “Even when you’re young,” he said, “it’s a tough game. It’s not just talent. It has a lot to do with looks and luck.”

  “But still,” said Xandra, blotting the corner of her lip with a napkin-wrapped fingertip. “An actor. I can so totally see it.” My dad’s thwarted acting career was one of his favorite subjects and—though she seemed interested enough—something told me that this wasn’t the very first time she had heard about it either.

  “Well, do I wish I’d kept going with it?” My dad contemplated his non-alcoholic beer (or was it three percent? I couldn’t see from where I was sitting). “I have to say yes. It’s one of those lifelong regrets. I would have loved to do something with my gift but I didn’t have the luxury. Life has a funny way of intervening.”

  They were deep in their own world; for all the attention they were paying to me I might as well have been in Idaho but that was fine with me; I knew this story. My dad, who’d been a drama star in college, had for a brief while earned his living as an actor: voice-overs in commercials, a few minor parts (a murdered playboy, the spoiled son of a mob boss) in television and movies. Then—after he’d married my mother—it had all fizzled out. He had a long list of reasons why he hadn’t broken through, though as I’d often heard him say: if my mother had been a little more successful as a model or worked a little harder at it, there would have been enough money for him to concentrate on acting without worrying about a day job.

  My dad pushed his plate aside. I noticed that he hadn’t eaten very much—often, with my dad, a sign that he was drinking, or about to start.

  “At some point, I just had to cut my losses and get out,” he said, crumpling his napkin and throwing it on the table. I wondered if he had told Xandra about Mickey Rourke, whom he viewed apart from me and my mother as the prime villain in derailing his career.

  Xandra took a big drink of her wine. “Do you ever think about going back to it?”

  “I think about it, sure. But—” he shook his head as if refusing some outrageous request—“no. Essentially the answer is no.”

  The champagne tickled the roof of my mouth—distant, dusty sparkle, bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive.

  “I mean, the second he saw me, I knew he didn’t like me,” my dad was saying to her quietly. So he had told her about Mickey Rourke.

  She tossed her head, drained the rest of her wine. “Guys like that can’t stand competition.”

  “It was all Mickey this, Mickey that, Mickey wants to meet you, but the minute I walked in there I knew it was over.”

  “Obviously the guy’s a freak.”

  “Not then, he wasn’t. Because, tell you the truth, there really was a resemblance back in the day—not just physically, but we had similar acting styles. Or, let’s say, I was classically trained, I had a range, but I could do the same kind of stillness as Mickey, you know, that whispery quiet thing—”

  “Oooh, you just gave me chills. Whispery. Like the way you said that.”

  “Yeah, but Mickey was the star. There wasn’t room enough for two.”

  As I watched them sharing a piece of cheesecake like lovebirds in a commercial, I sank into a ruddy, unfamiliar free-flow of mind, the dining room lights too bright and my face flaming hot from the champagne, thinking in a disordered but heated way about my mother after her parents died and she had to go live with her aunt Bess, in a house by the train tracks with brown wallpaper and plastic covers on the furniture. Aunt Bess—who fried everything in Crisco, and had cut up one of my mother’s dresses with scissors because the psychedelic pattern disturbed her—was a chunky, embittered, Irish-American spinster who had left the Catholic Church for some tiny, insane sect that believed it was wrong to do things like drink tea or take aspirin. Her eyes—in the one photograph I’d seen—were the same startling silver-blue as my mother’s, only pink-rimmed and crazed, in a potato-plain face. My mother had spoken of those eighteen months with Aunt Bess as the saddest of her life—the horses sold, the dogs given away,
long weeping goodbyes by the side of the road, arms around the necks of Clover and Chalkboard and Paintbox and Bruno. Back in the house, Aunt Bess had told my mother she was spoiled, and that people who didn’t fear the Lord always got what they deserved.

  “And the producer, you see—I mean, they all knew how Mickey was, everyone did, he was already starting to get a reputation for being difficult—”

  “She didn’t deserve it,” I said aloud, interrupting their conversation.

  Dad and Xandra stopped talking and looked at me as if I’d turned into a Gila monster.

  “I mean, why would anybody say that?” It wasn’t right that I was speaking aloud, and yet the words were tumbling unbidden out of my mouth as if someone had pushed a button. “She was so great and why was everybody so horrible to her? She never deserved any of the stuff that happened to her.”

  My dad and Xandra exchanged a glance. Then he signalled for the check.

  xx.

  BY THE TIME WE left the restaurant, my face was on fire and there was a bright roar in my ears, and when I got back to the Barbours’ apartment, it wasn’t even terribly late but somehow I tripped over the umbrella stand and made a lot of noise coming in and when Mrs. Barbour and Mr. Barbour saw me, I realized (from their faces, more than the way I felt) that I was drunk.

  Mr. Barbour flicked off the television with the remote control. “Where have you been?” he said, in a firm but good-natured voice.

  I reached for the back of the sofa. “Out with Dad and—” But her name had slipped my mind, everything but the X.

  Mrs. Barbour raised her eyebrows at her husband as if to say: what did I tell you?

  “Well, take it on in to bed, pal,” said Mr. Barbour cheerfully, in a voice that managed, in spite of everything, to make me feel a little bit better about life in general. “But try not to wake Andy up.”

  “You don’t feel sick, do you?” Mrs. Barbour said.

  “No,” I said, though I did; and for a large part of the night I lay awake in the upper bunk, miserable and tossing as the room spun around me, and a couple of times starting up in heart-thudding surprise because it seemed that Xandra had walked in the room and was talking to me: the words indistinct, but the rough, stuttery cadence of her voice unmistakable.

  xxi.

  “SO,” SAID MR. BARBOUR at breakfast the next morning, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he pulled out the chair beside me, “festive dinner with old Dad, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.” I had a splitting headache, and the smell of their French toast made my stomach twist. Etta had unobtrusively brought me a cup of coffee from the kitchen with a couple of aspirins on the saucer.

  “Out in Las Vegas, do you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And how does he bring in the bacon?”

  “Sorry?”

  “How does he keep himself busy out there?”

  “Chance,” said Mrs. Barbour, in a neutral voice.

  “Well, I mean… that is to say,” Mr. Barbour said, realizing that the question had perhaps been indelicately phrased, “what line of work is he in?”

  “Um—” I said—and then stopped. What was my dad doing? I hadn’t a clue.

  Mrs. Barbour—who seemed troubled by the turn the conversation had taken—appeared about to say something; but Platt—next to me—spoke up angrily instead. “So who do I have to blow to get a cup of coffee around this place?” he said to his mother, pushing back in his chair with one hand on the table.

  There was a dreadful silence.

  “He has it,” said Platt, nodding at me. “He comes home drunk, and he gets coffee?”

  After another dreadful silence, Mr. Barbour said—in a voice icy enough to put even Mrs. Barbour to shame—“That’s quite enough, Pard.”

  Mrs. Barbour brought her pale eyebrows together. “Chance—”

  “No, you won’t take up for him this time. Go to your room,” he said to Platt. “Now.”

  We all sat staring into our plates, listening to the angry thump of Platt’s footsteps, the deafening slam of his door, and then—a few seconds later—the loud music starting up again. No one said much for the rest of the meal.

  xxii.

  MY DAD—WHO LIKED TO do everything in a hurry, always itching to “get the show on the road” as he liked to say—announced that he planned to get everything wrapped up in New York and the three of us in Las Vegas within a week. And he was true to his word. At eight o’clock that Monday morning, movers showed up at Sutton Place and began to dismantle the apartment and pack it in boxes. A used-book dealer came to look at my mother’s art books, and somebody else came in to look at her furniture—and, almost before I knew it, my home began to vanish before my eyes with sickening speed. Watching the curtains disappear and the pictures taken down and the carpets rolled up and carried away, I was reminded of an animated film I’d once seen where a cartoon character with an eraser rubbed out his desk and his lamp and his chair and his window with a scenic view and the whole of his comfortably appointed office until—at last—the eraser hung suspended in a disturbing sea of white.

  Tormented by what was happening, yet unable to stop it, I hovered around and watched the apartment vanishing piece by piece, like a bee watching its hive being destroyed. On the wall over my mother’s desk (among numerous vacation snaps and old school pictures) hung a black and white photo from her modelling days taken in Central Park. It was a very sharp print, and the tiniest details stood out with almost painful clarity: her freckles, the rough texture of her coat, the chickenpox scar above her left eyebrow. Cheerfully, she looked out into the disarray and confusion of the living room, at my dad throwing out her papers and art supplies and boxing up her books for Goodwill, a scene she probably never dreamed of, or at least I hope she didn’t.

  xxiii.

  MY LAST DAYS WITH the Barbours flew by so fast that I scarcely remember them, apart from a last-minute flurry of laundry and dry cleaning, and several hectic trips to the wine shop on Lex for cardboard boxes. In black marker, I wrote the address of my exotic-sounding new home:

  Theodore Decker c/o Xandra Terrell

  6219 Desert End Road

  Las Vegas, NV

  Glumly, Andy and I stood and contemplated the labeled boxes in his bedroom. “It’s like you’re moving to a different planet,” he said.

  “More or less.”

  “No I’m serious. That address. It’s like from some mining colony on Jupiter. I wonder what your school will be like.”

  “God knows.”

  “I mean—it might be one of those places you read about. With gangs. Metal detectors.” Andy had been so mistreated at our (supposedly) enlightened and progressive school that public school, in his view, was on a par with the prison system. “What will you do?”

  “Shave my head, I guess. Get a tattoo.” I liked that he didn’t try to be upbeat or cheerful about the move, unlike Mrs. Swanson or Dave (who was clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to negotiate any more with my grandparents). Nobody else at Park Avenue said much about my departure, though I knew from the strained expression Mrs. Barbour got when the subject of my father and his “friend” came up that I wasn’t totally imagining things. And besides, it wasn’t that the future with Dad and Xandra seemed bad or frightening so much as incomprehensible, a blot of black ink on the horizon.

  xxiv.

  “WELL, A CHANGE OF scenery may be good for you,” said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. “Even if the scene isn’t what you’d choose.” We were having dinner in the dining room for a change, sitting together at the far end of the table, long enough to seat twelve, silver ewers and ornaments stretching off into opulent darkness. Yet somehow it still felt like the last night in our old apartment on Seventh Avenue, my mother and father and I sitting atop cardboard boxes to eat our Chinese take-out dinner.

  I said nothing. I was miserable; and my determination to suffer in secret had made me uncommunicative. All during the anxiety of the previous week,
as the apartment was being stripped and my mother’s things were folded and boxed and carted off to be sold, I’d yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie’s house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled beeswax.

  “I mean, your mother—” He paused delicately. “It’ll be a fresh start.”

  I studied my plate. He’d made lamb curry, with a lemon-colored sauce that tasted more French than Indian.

  “You’re not afraid, are you?”

  I glanced up. “Afraid of what?”

  “Of going to live with him.”

  I thought about it, gazing off into the shadows behind his head. “No,” I said, “not really.” For whatever reason, since his return my dad seemed looser, more relaxed. I couldn’t attribute it to the fact that he’d stopped drinking, since normally when my dad was on the wagon he grew silent and visibly swollen with misery, so prone to snap that I took good care to stay an arm’s reach away.

  “Have you told anyone else what you told me?”

  “About—?”

  In embarrassment, I put my head down and took a bite of the curry. It was actually pretty good once you got used to the fact it wasn’t curry.

  “I don’t think he’s drinking any more,” I said, in the silence that followed. “If that’s what you mean? He seems better. So…” Awkwardly, I trailed away. “Yeah.”

  “How do you like his girlfriend?”

  I had to think about that one too. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  Hobie was amiably silent, reaching for his wine glass without taking his eyes off me.

  “Like, I don’t really know her? She’s okay, I guess. I can’t understand what he likes about her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well—” I didn’t know where to begin. My dad could be charming to ‘the ladies’ as he called them, opening doors for them, lightly touching their wrists to make a point; I’d seen women fall apart over him, a spectacle I watched coldly, wondering how anyone could be taken in by such a transparent act. It was like watching small children being fooled by a cheesy magic show. “I don’t know. I guess I thought she’d be better looking or something.”

  “Pretty doesn’t matter if she’s nice,” said Hobie.

  “Yeah, but she’s not all that nice.”

  “Oh.” Then: “Do they seem happy together?”

  “I don’t know. Well—yes,” I admitted. “Like, he doesn’t seem constantly so mad all the time?” Then, feeling the weight of Hobie’s un-asked question pressing in on me: “Also, he came to get me. I mean, he didn’t have to. They could have stayed gone if they didn’t want me.”

  Nothing more was said on the subject, and we finished the dinner talking of other things. But as I was leaving, as we were walking down the photograph-lined hallway—past Pippa’s room, with a night light burning, and Cosmo sleeping on the foot of her bed—he said, as he was opening the front door for me: “Theo.”

  “Yes?”

  “You have my address, and my telephone.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well then.” He seemed almost as uncomfortable as I was. “I hope you have a good trip. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too,” I said. We looked at each other.

  “Well.”

  “Well. Good night, then.”

  He pushed open the door, and I walked out of the house—for the last time, as I thought. But though I had no idea I’d ever be seeing him again, about this I