The Goldfinch

  nervewracking lunch at the Harvard Club, leaning back slyly in his chair and running his finger around the rim of his club soda glass.

  “Listen—” It had been a tactical mistake, I realized, to meet him on his own territory, where he knew the waiters, where he did the ordering with pad and pencil, where I could not be magnanimous and suggest that he try this or that.

  “Or that he deliberately took this carved phoenix ornament from a Thomas Affleck, from a—yes yes, I believe it is Affleck, Philadelphia at any rate—and affixed it to the top of this genuinely antique but otherwise undistinguished chest-on-chest of the same period? Are we not speaking of the same piece?”

  “Please, if you’d only let me—” We’d been seated at a table by the window, the sun was in my eyes, I was sweating and uncomfortable—

  “How then can you maintain that the deception was not deliberate? On his part and yours?”

  “Look—” the waiter was hovering, I wanted him to leave—“the mistake was mine. As I’ve said. And I’ve offered to buy the piece back at a premium so I’m not sure what else you want me to do.”

  But despite my cool tone, I had been in a froth of anxiety, anxiety that had not been relieved by the fact that it was twelve days later and Lucius Reeve still had not deposited the money that I’d given him—I’d been checking at the bank right before I ran into Platt.

  What Lucius Reeve wanted I didn’t know. Hobie had been making these cannibalized and heavily altered pieces (“changelings” as he called them) for virtually his whole working life; the storage space at Brooklyn Navy Yard had been crammed full of pieces with tags going back thirty years or more. The first time I’d gone out by myself and really poked around, I’d been thunderstruck to discover what looked like real Hepplewhite, real Sheraton, Ali Baba’s cave spilling with treasure—“Oh Lord, no,” said Hobie, his voice crackly on the cell phone—the facility was like a bunker, no phone reception, I’d gone straight outside to call him, standing on the windy loading dock with one finger in my ear—“believe me, if it was real, I’d have been on the phone to the American Furniture department at Christie’s a long time ago—”

  I had admired Hobie’s changelings for years and had even helped work on some of them, but it was the shock of being fooled by these previously-unseen pieces that (to employ a favored phrase of Hobie’s) filled me with a wild surmise. Every so often there passed through the shop a piece of museum quality too damaged or broken to save; for Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were unfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could (a pair of finials here, a set of finely turned legs there) and then with his gifts as carpenter and joiner to recombine them into beautiful young Frankensteins that were in some cases plainly fanciful but in others such faithful models of the period that they were all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

  Acids, paint, gold size and lampblack, wax and dirt and dust. Old nails rusted with salt water. Nitric acid on new walnut. Drawer runners worn with sandpaper, a few weeks under the sun lamp to age new wood a hundred years. From five destroyed Hepplewhite dining chairs he was capable of fashioning a solid and completely authentic-looking set of eight by taking the originals apart, copying the pieces (using wood salvaged from other damaged furniture of the period) and re-assembling them with half original and half new parts. (“A chair leg—” running a finger down it—“typically, they’re scuffed and dented at the bottom—even if you use old wood, you need to take a chain to the bottom of the new-cut legs if you want them all to match… very very light, I’m not saying whale the hell out of it… very distinctive patterning too, front legs usually a bit more dented than the back, see?”) I had seen him reconfigure original wood from a practically-in-splinters eighteenth-century sideboard into a table that might have been from the hand of Duncan Phyfe himself. (“Will it do?” said Hobie, stepping back anxiously, not appearing to understand the marvel he had wrought.) Or—as with Lucius Reeve’s “Chippendale” chest-on-chest—a plain piece could in his hands become by the addition of ornament salvaged from a grand old ruin of the same period something almost indistinguishable from a masterwork.

  A more practical or less scrupulous man would have worked this skill to calculated ends and made a fortune with it (or, in Grisha’s cogent phrase, “fucked it harder than a five-grand prostitute”). But as far as I knew, the thought of selling the changelings for originals or indeed of selling them at all had never crossed Hobie’s mind; and his complete lack of interest in goings-on in the store gave me considerable freedom to set about the business of raising cash and taking care of bills. With a single “Sheraton” sofa and a set of riband-back chairs I’d sold at Israel Sack prices to the trusting young California wife of an investment banker, I’d managed to pay off hundreds of thousands in back taxes on the townhouse. With another dining room set and a “Sheraton” settee—sold to an out-of-town client who ought to have known better, but who was blinkered by Hobie and Welty’s unimpeachable reputations as dealers—I’d gotten the shop out of debt.

  “It’s very convenient,” said Lucius Reeve pleasantly, “that he leaves all the business end of the shop to you? That he has a workshop turning out these frauds but washes his hands of how you dispose of them?”

  “You have my offer. I’m not going to sit here and listen to this.”

  “Why then do you continue to sit?”

  I did not for one instant doubt Hobie’s astonishment if he learned I was selling his changelings for real. For one thing, a lot of his more creative efforts were rife with small inaccuracies, in-jokes almost, and he was not always so fastidious about his materials as someone turning out deliberate forgeries would have been. But I had found it very easy to fool even relatively experienced buyers if I sold about twenty per cent cheaper than the real thing. People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn’t want to see. I knew how to draw people’s attention to the extraordinary points of a piece, the hand-cut veneer, the fine patination, the honorable scars, drawing a finger down an exquisite cyma curve (which Hogarth himself had called “the line of beauty”) in order to lead the eye away from reworked bits in back, where in a strong light they might find the grain didn’t precisely match. I declined to suggest that clients examine the underside of the piece, as Hobie himself—eager to educate, at the price of fatally undermining his own interests—was only too quick to do. But just in case someone did want to have a look, I made sure that the floor around the piece was very, very dirty, and that the pocket light I happened to have on hand was very, very weak. There were a lot of people in New York with a lot of money and plenty of time-pressed decorators who, if you showed them a photo of a similar-looking item in an auction catalogue, were happy to plump for what they saw as a discount, particularly if they were spending someone else’s money. Another trick—calculated to lure a different, more sophisticated customer—was to bury a piece in the back of the store, reverse the vacuum cleaner over it (instant antiquity!) and allow the nosy customer to ferret it out on his or her own—look, under all this dusty junk, a Sheraton settee! With this species of cheat—whom I took great pleasure in rooking—the trick was to play dumb, look bored, stay engrossed in my book, act as if I didn’t know what I had, and let them think they were rooking me: even as their hands were trembling with excitement, even as they tried to appear unhurried while rushing out to the bank for a massive cash withdrawal. If the customer was someone important, or too connected to Hobie, I could always claim the piece wasn’t for sale. A curt “not for sale” was quite often the correct starting position with strangers as well, as it not only made the kind of buyer I was looking for more eager to strike a quick bargain, in cash, but also set the stage for me to abort mid-deal if something went wrong. Hobie wandering upstairs at a bad moment was the main thing that might go wrong. Mrs. DeFrees popping in the shop at a bad moment was another thing that could, and had, gone wrong—I’d had to br
eak off just at the point of closing the sale, much to the annoyance of the movie-director’s wife who got tired of waiting and walked out, never to return. Short of black light or lab analysis, much of Hobie’s fudging wasn’t visible to the naked eye; and though he had a lot of serious collectors coming in, he also had plenty of people who would never know, for instance, that no such thing as a Queen Anne cheval glass was ever made. But even if someone was clever enough to detect an inaccuracy—say a style of carving or a type of wood anachronistic for the maker or period—I had once or twice been bold enough to talk past even this: by claiming the piece was made to order for a special customer and hence, strictly speaking, more valuable than the usual article.

  In my shaky and agitated state, I’d turned almost unconsciously into the park and down the path to the Pond, where Andy and I had sat in our parkas on many winter afternoons in elementary school waiting for my mother to pick us up from the zoo or take us to the movies—rendezvous point, seventeen hundred hours! But at that point, unfortunately, I found myself sitting there more often than not waiting for Jerome, the bike messenger I bought my drugs from. The pills I’d stolen from Xandra all those years before had started me on a bad road: oxys, roxys, morphine and Dilaudid when I could get it, I’d been buying them off the street for years; for the past months, I’d been keeping myself (for the most part) to a one-day-on, one-day-off schedule (although what constituted an “off” day was a dose just small enough to keep from getting sick) but even though it was officially an “off” day I was feeling increasingly grim and the vodkas I’d had with Platt were wearing off and though I knew very well that I didn’t have anything on me still I kept patting myself down, my hands stealing again and again to my overcoat and the pockets of my suit jacket.

  At college I had achieved nothing commendable or remarkable. My years in Vegas had rendered me unfit for any manner of hard work; and when at last I graduated, at twenty-one (it had taken me six years to finish, instead of the expected four), I did so without distinctions of any type. “Quite honestly, I’m not seeing a lot here that’s going to make a master’s program take a chance on you,” my counselor had said. “Particularly since you would be relying so heavily on financial aid.”

  But that was all right; I knew what I wanted to do. My career as a dealer had started at about seventeen when I happened upstairs on one of the rare afternoons Hobie had decided to open the shop. By that time, I had begun to be aware of Hobie’s financial problems; Grisha had spoken only too truly about the dire consequences if Hobie continued to accumulate inventory without selling it. (“Will still be downstairs, painting, carving, the day they come and put evacuation notice on front door.”) But despite the envelopes from the IRS that had begun to accumulate among the Christie’s catalogues and old concert programs on the hall table (Notice of Unpaid Balance, Reminder Notice Balance Due, Second Notice Balance Due) Hobie couldn’t be bothered to keep the store open more than half an hour at a time unless friends happened to stop in; and when it was time for his friends to go, he often shooed out the actual customers and locked up shop. Almost invariably I came home from school to find the “Closed” sign on the door and people peering in at the windows. Worst of all, when he did manage to stay open for a few hours, was his habit of wandering trustfully away to make a cup of tea while leaving the door open and the register untended; though Mike his moving man had had the foresight to lock the silver and jewelry cases, a number of majolica and crystal items had walked away and I myself had come upstairs unexpectedly on the day in question to find a gym-toned, casually dressed mom who looked like she’d just come from a Pilates class slipping a paperweight in her bag.

  “That’s eight hundred and fifty dollars,” I said, and at my voice she froze and looked up in horror. Actually it was only two fifty, but she handed me her credit card without a word and let me ring up the sale—probably the first profitable transaction that had taken place since Welty’s death; for Hobie’s friends (his main customers) were only too aware that they could talk Hobie down to criminal levels on his already too-low prices. Mike, who also helped in the shop on occasion, hiked up the prices indiscriminately and refused to negotiate and in consequence sold very little at all.

  “Well done!” Hobie had said, blinking delightedly in the glare of his work lamp, when I went downstairs and informed him of my big sale (a silver teapot, in my version; I didn’t want to make it seem like I’d outright robbed the woman, and besides I knew he was uninterested in what he called the smalls, which I’d come to realize through my perusal of antiques books formed a huge part of the inventory of the store). “Sharp-eyed little customer. Welty would have taken to you like a baby on the doorstep, ha! Taking an interest in his silver!”

  From then on, I’d made it a habit to sit upstairs with my schoolbooks in the afternoons while Hobie busied himself downstairs. At first it was simply for fun—fun that was sorely missing from my dreary student life, coffees in the lounge and lectures on Walter Benjamin. In the years since Welty’s death, Hobart and Blackwell had evidently acquired a reputation as an easy mark for thieves; and the thrill of pouncing on these well-dressed filchers and pilferers and extorting large sums from them was almost like shoplifting in reverse.

  But I also learned a lesson: a lesson which sifted down to me only by degrees but which was in fact the truest thing at the heart of the business. It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.

  In consequence, I’d started going through the store, removing some tags (so the customer would have to come to me for the price) and changing others—not all, but some. The trick, as I discovered through trial and error, was to keep at least a quarter of the prices low and jack up the rest, sometimes by as much as four and five hundred percent. Years of abnormally low prices had built up a base of devoted customers; leaving a quarter of the prices low kept them devoted, and ensured that people hunting for a bargain could still find one, if they looked. Leaving a quarter of the prices low also meant that, by some perverse alchemy, the marked-up prices seemed legitimate in comparison: for whatever reason, some people were more apt to put out fifteen hundred bucks for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling (correctly, but cheaply) for a few hundred.

  That was how it had started; that was how Hobart and Blackwell, after languishing for years, had begun under my beady auspices to turn a profit. But it wasn’t just about money. I liked the game of it. Unlike Hobie—who assumed, incorrectly, that anyone who walked into his store was as fascinated by furniture as he was, who was extremely matter-of-fact in pointing out the flaws and virtues of a piece—I had discovered I possessed the opposite knack: of obfuscation and mystery, the ability to talk about inferior articles in ways that made people want them. When selling a piece, talking it up (as opposed to sitting back and permitting the unwary to wander into my trap) it was a game to size up a customer and figure out the image they wanted to project—not so much the people they were (know-it-all decorator? New Jersey housewife? self-conscious gay man?) as the people they wanted to be. Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set. The trick was to address yourself to the projection, the fantasy self—the connoisseur, the discerning bon vivant—as opposed to the insecure person actually standing in front of you. It was better if you hung back a bit and weren’t too direct. I soon learned how to dress (on the edge between conservative and flash) and how to deal with sophisticated and unsophisticated customers, with differing calibrations of courtesy and indolence: presuming knowledge in both, quick to flatter, quick to lose interest or step away at exactl
y the right moment.

  And yet, with this Lucius Reeve, I had screwed up badly. What he wanted I didn’t know. In fact he was so relentless in sidestepping my apologies and directing his anger full-bore on Hobie that I was starting to think that I had stumbled into some preexisting grudge or hatred. I didn’t want to tip my hand with Hobie by bringing up Reeve’s name, though who could bear such a fierce grudge against Hobie, most well-intentioned and unworldly of persons? My Internet research had turned up nothing on Lucius Reeve apart from a few innocuous mentions in the society pages, not even a Harvard or Harvard Club affiliation, nothing but a respectable Fifth Avenue address. He had no family that I could tell, no job or visible means of support. It had been stupid of me to write him a check—greediness on my part; I’d been thinking about establishing a lineage for the piece, though at this point even an envelope of cash placed under a napkin and slid across the table was no assurance he was going to let the matter drop.

  I was standing with my fists in the pockets of my overcoat, glasses fogged from the spring damp, staring unhappily into the muddy waters of the Pond: a few sad brown ducks, plastic bags washing in the reeds. Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors—in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever—but my mother’s bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given by its anonymous donor a more mysterious and welcoming message: EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY. It had been Her Bench since before I was born; in her early days in the city, she had sat there with her library book on her afternoons off, going without lunch when she needed the price of a museum pass at MoMA or a movie ticket at the Paris Theatre. Further along, past the Pond, where the path turned empty and dark, was the unkempt and desolate patch of ground where Andy and I had scattered her ashes. It was Andy who had talked me into sneaking over and scattering them in defiance of the city rule, scattering them moreover in that particular spot: well, I mean, it’s where she used to meet us.

  Yeah, but rat poison, look, these signs.

  Go on. You can do it now. No one’s coming.

  She loved the sea lions, too. We always had to walk over and look at them.

  Yeah but you definitely don’t want to dump her over there, it smells like fish. Besides it creeps me out having that jar or whatever in my room.

  vi.

  “MY GOD,” SAID HOBIE when he got a good look at me under the lights. “You’re white as a sheet. You’re not coming down with something?”

  “Um—” He was just going out, coat over his arm; behind him stood Mr. and Mrs. Vogel, buttoned-up and smiling poisonously. My relations with the Vogels (or “the Vultures,” as Grisha called them) had cooled, significantly, since I’d taken over the shop; mindful of the many, many pieces they’d in my view as good as stolen from Hobie, I now tacked on a premium to anything I even vaguely suspected they were interested in; and though Mrs. Vogel—no fool—had taken to telephoning Hobie directly, I usually managed to thwart her by (among other means) claiming to Hobie that I’d already sold the piece in question and forgotten to tag it.

  “Have you eaten?” Hobie, in his gentle woolly-mindedness and unwisdom, remained completely unaware that the Vogels and I no longer held each other in anything but the very highest regard. “We’re just running down the street for dinner. Come with us, why don’t you.”

  “No thanks,” I said, conscious of Mrs. Vogel’s gaze boring into me, cold fraudulent smile, eyes like agate chips in her smooth, aging-milkmaid face. As a rule I took pleasure in stepping up and smiling back in her teeth—but in the stern hall lights I felt clammy and used-up, demoted somehow. “I think, um, I’ll eat in tonight, thanks.”

  “Not feeling well?” said Mr. Vogel blandly—balding midwesterner in rimless glasses, prim in his reefer coat, tough luck to you if he was the banker and you were late with the mortgage. “What a shame.”

  “Lovely to see you,” Mrs. Vogel said, stepping forward and putting her plump hand on my sleeve. “Did you enjoy Pippa’s visit? I wish I’d got to see her but she was so busy with the boyfriend. What did you think of him—what was his name—?” turning back to Hobie. “Elliot?”

  “Everett,” said Hobie neutrally. “Nice boy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, turning to shoulder my coat off. The appearance of Pippa fresh off the plane from London with this “Everett” had been one of the uglier shocks of my life. Counting the days, the hours, shaky from sleeplessness and excitement, unable to stop myself looking at my watch every five minutes, leaping at the doorbell and literally running to throw open the door—and there she stood, hand-in-hand with this shoddy Englishman?

  “And what does he do? A musician too?”

  “Music librarian actually,” said Hobie. “Don’t know what that entails nowadays with computers and all.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Theo knows all about it,” said Mrs. Vogel.

  “No, not really.”

  “Cybrarian?” said Mr. Vogel, with an uncharacteristically loud and merry chuckle. Addressing me: “Is it true what they say, that young people today can make it through school without once setting foot in a library?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” A music librarian! It had taken every ounce of possession I had to keep my face empty (guts crumbling, end of everything) to accept his moist English hand, Hullo, Everett, you must be Theo, heard so much about you, blah blah blah, while I stood frozen in the doorway like a bayoneted Yank staring at the stranger who’d run me through to death. He was a slight, wide-eyed bounce of a guy, innocent, bland, infuriatingly cheerful, dressed in jeans and hoodie like a teenager; and his quick, apologetic smile when we were alone in the living room had sent me blank with rage.

  Every moment of their visit had been torture. Somehow I’d stumbled through it. Though I’d tried to stay away from them as much as I could (as skilled a dissembler as I was, I could barely be civil to him; everything about him, his pinkish skin, his nervous laugh, the hair sprouting out the cuffs of his shirt sleeves, made me want to jump on him and knock his horsey English teeth out; and wouldn’t that be a surprise, I thought grimly, glaring at him across the table, if old antique-dealing Specs hauled off and busted his eggs for him?) still, as hard as I’d tried, I hadn’t been able to stay away from Pippa, I’d hovered obtrusively and hated myself for it, so painfully excited had I been by her nearness: her bare feet at breakfast, bare legs, her voice. Unexpected glimpse of her white armpits when she pulled her sweater over her head. The agony of her hand on my sleeve. “Hi, lovey. Hi, darling.” Coming up behind me, cupping my eyes with her hands: surprise! She wanted to know everything about me, everything I was doing. Wedging in beside me on the Queen Anne loveseat so that our legs touched: oh God. What was I reading? Could she look at my iPod? Where did I get that fantastic wristwatch? Whenever she smiled at me Heaven blew in. And yet every time I devised some pretext to get her on her own, here he came, thump thump thump, sheepish grin, arm around her shoulder, wrecking everything. Conversation in the next room, a burst of laughter: were the two of them talking about me? Putting his hands on her waist! Calling her “Pips!” The only even vaguely tolerable or amusing moment of his visit was when Popchik—territorial in his old age—had jumped up unprovoked and bitten him on the thumb—“oh, God!” Hobie rushing for the alcohol, Pippa fretting, Everett trying to be cool but visibly put out: sure, dogs are great! I love them! we just never had them because my mom’s allergic. He was the “poor relation” (his phrase) of an old schoolmate of hers; American mother, numerous siblings, father who taught some incomprehensible mathematical/philosophical something-or-other at Cambridge; like her, he was a vegetarian “verging on vegan;” to my dismay, it had emerged that the two of them were sharing a flat (!)—he had of course slept in her room during the visit; and for five nights, the whole time he was there, I’d lain awake bilious with fury and sorrow, ears attuned to every rustle of bedclothes, every sigh and whisper from next door.

  And yet—waving goodbye to Hobie and the Vogels, have a great time! then turning grimly awa
y—what could I have expected? It had enraged me, cut me to the bone, the careful, kindly tone she had taken with me around this “Everett”—“no,” I said politely, when she asked me whether I was seeing someone, “not really,” although (I was proud of it in a lucid, gloomy way) I was in fact sleeping with two different girls, neither of whom knew about the other. One of them had a boyfriend in another town and the other had a fiancé whom she was tired of, whose calls she screened when we were in bed together. Both of them were pretty and the girl with the cuckolded fiancé was downright beautiful—a baby Carole Lombard—but neither of them was real for me; they were only stand-ins for her.

  I was irritated at how I felt. To sit around “heartbroken” (the first word, unfortunately, that came to mind) was foolish, it was maudlin and contemptible and weak—oh boo hoo, she’s in London, she’s with someone else, go pick up some wine and fuck Carole Lombard, get over it. But the thought of her gave me such continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock: what time was it in London? always adding and subtracting, totting up the time difference, compulsively checking the London weather on my phone, 53 degrees Fahrenheit, 10:12 p.m. and light precipitation, standing on the corner of Greenwich and Seventh Avenue by boarded-up St. Vincent’s heading downtown to meet my dealer, and what about Pippa, where was she? in the back of a taxicab, out at dinner, drinking with people I didn’t know, asleep in a bed I’d never seen? I desperately wanted to see photos of her flat, in order to add some much-needed detail to my fantasies, but was too embarrassed to ask. With a pang I thought of her bedsheets, what they must be like, a dark dorm-room color as I imagined them, tumbled, unwashed, a student’s dark nest, her freckled cheek pale against a maroon or purple pillowcase, English rain tapping against her window. Her photographs, lining the hall outside my bedroom—many different Pippas, at many different ages—were a daily torment, always unexpected, always new; but though I tried to keep my eyes away always it seemed I was glancing up by mistake and there she was, laughing at somebody else’s joke or smiling at someone who wasn’t me, always a fresh pain, a blow straight to the heart.

  And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn’t see her as I did—if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her—that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if she knew just how beautiful I found her. But this had never happened. Angrily, I concentrated on her flaws, willfully studying the photographs that caught her at awkward ages and less flattering angles—long nose, thin cheeks, her eyes (despite their heartbreaking color) naked-looking with their pale lashes—Huck-Finn plain. Yet all these aspects were—to me—so tender and particular they moved me to despair. With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

  For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination, from the antique valentines and embroidered Chinese coats she collected to her tiny scented bottles from Neal’s Yard Remedies; there had always been something bright and magical about her unknown faraway life: Vaud Suisse, 23 rue de Tombouctou, Blenheim Crescent W11 2EE, furnished rooms in countries I had never seen. Clearly this Everett (“poor as a churchmouse”—his phrase) was living off her money, Uncle Welty’s money rather, old Europe preying off young America, to use a phrase I’d employed in my Henry James paper in my last semester of school.

  Could I write him a check to make him leave her alone? Alone in the shop, in the slow cool afternoons, the thought had crossed my mind: fifty thousand if you walk out tonight, a hundred if you never see her again. Money was a concern with him, clearly; during his visit he’d always been digging anxiously in his pockets,