The Goldfinch

  stool to fix me with a Bela Lugosi stare.

  The bartender was eyeballing me steadily. “This girl you want. What is it that you want with her?”

  “Well, actually, I—”

  “What color hair?”

  “Uh—blonde? Or—actually—” clearly, from his expression, I was about to be thrown out, or worse; my eyes lit on the sawed-off Louisville Slugger behind the bar—“my mistake, forget it—”

  I was out of the bar and well down the street when I heard a shout behind me: “Potter!”

  I froze, as I heard him shout it again. Then, in disbelief, I turned. And while I still stood unable to believe it, people streaming round us on either side, he laughed and barged forward to throw his arms around me.

  “Boris.” Pointed black eyebrows, merry black eyes. He was taller, face hollower, long black coat, same old scar over his eye plus a couple of new ones. “Wow.”

  “And wow, yourself!” He held me out at arm’s length. “Hah! Look at you! Long time, no?”

  “I—” I was too stunned to speak. “What are you doing here?”

  “And, I should ask—” stepping back to give me the once-over, then gesturing down the street as if it belonged to him—“what are you doing? To what do I owe this surprise?”

  “What?”

  “I stopped by your shop the other day!” Throwing the hair out of his face. “To see you!”

  “That was you?”

  “Who else? How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I—” I shook my head in disbelief.

  “You weren’t looking for me?” Drawing back in surprise. “No? This is accident? Ships passing? Amazing! And why this white face on you?”

  “What?”

  “You look terrible!”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Ah,” he said, slinging his arm around my neck. “Potter, Potter! Such dark rings!” tracing a fingertip under one eye. “Nice suit though. And hey—” releasing me, flicking me with thumb and forefinger on the temple—“same glasses on the face? You never got them changed?”

  “I—” All I could do was shake my head.

  “What?” He held out his hands. “You don’t blame me, for being happy to see you?”

  I laughed. I didn’t know where to start. “Why didn’t you leave a number?” I said.

  “So you’re not angry with me? Hate me forever?” Though he wasn’t smiling, he was biting his lower lip in amusement. “You don’t—” he jerked his head at the street—“you don’t want to go fight me or something?”

  “Hi there,” said a lean steely-eyed woman, slim-hipped in black jeans, sliding forward to Boris’s side rather suddenly in a manner that made me think she was his girlfriend or wife.

  “The famous Potter,” she said, extending a long white hand ringed to the knuckles in silver. “Pleasure. I’ve heard all about you.” She was slightly taller than him, with long limp hair and a long, elegant black-clad body like a python. “I’m Myriam.”

  “Myriam? Hi! It’s Theo, really.”

  “I know.” Her hand, in mine, was cold. I noticed a blue pentagram tattooed on the inside of her wrist. “But Potter’s how he speaks of you.”

  “Speaks of me? Oh yeah? What’d he say?” No one had called me Potter in years but her soft voice had brought to mind a forgotten word from those old books, the language of snakes and dark wizards: Parseltongue.

  Boris, who’d had his arm around my shoulder, had unhanded me when she’d approached as if a code had been spoken. A glance was exchanged—the heft of which I recognized instantly from our shoplifting days, when we had been able to say Let’s go or here he comes without uttering a word—and Boris, seeming flustered, ran his hands through his hair and looked at me intently.

  “You’ll be around?” he inquired, walking backward.

  “Around where?”

  “Around the neighborhood.”

  “I can be.”

  “I want to—” he stopped, brow furrowed, and looked over my head at the street—“I want to talk to you. But now—” he looked worried—“Not a good time. An hour maybe?”

  Myriam, glancing at me, said something in Ukrainian. There was a brief exchange. Then Myriam slipped her arm through mine in a curiously intimate manner and started leading me down the street.

  “There.” She pointed. “Go down that way, four-five blocks. There’s a bar, off Second. Old Polack place. He’ll meet you.”

  v.

  ALMOST THREE HOURS LATER I was still sitting in a red vinyl booth in the Polack bar, flashing Christmas lights, annoying mix of punk rock and Christmas polka music honking away on the jukebox, fed up from waiting and wondering if he was going to show or not, if maybe I should just go home. I didn’t even have his information—it had all happened so fast. In the past I’d Googled Boris for the hell of it—never a whisper—but then I’d never envisioned Boris as having any kind of a life that might be traceable online. He might have been anywhere, doing anything: mopping a hospital floor, carrying a gun in some foreign jungle, picking up cigarette butts off the street.

  It was getting toward the end of Happy Hour, a few students and artist types trickling in among the pot-bellied old Polish guys and grizzled, fifty-ish punks. I’d just finished my third vodka; they poured them big, it was foolish to order another one; I knew I should get something to eat but I wasn’t hungry and my mood was turning bleaker and darker by the moment. To think that he’d blown me off after so many years was incredibly depressing. If I had to be philosophical, at least I’d been diverted from my dope mission: hadn’t OD’d, wasn’t vomiting in some garbage can, hadn’t been ripped off or run in for trying to buy from an undercover cop—

  “Potter.” There he was, sliding in across from me, slinging the hair from his face in a gesture that brought the past ringing back.

  “I was just about to leave.”

  “Sorry.” Same dirty, charming smile. “Had something to do. Didn’t Myriam explain?”

  “No she didn’t.”

  “Well. Is not like I work in accounting office. Look,” he said, leaning forward, palms on the table, “don’t be mad! Was not expecting to run into you! I came as quick as I could! Ran, practically!” He reached across with cupped hand and slapped me gently on the cheek. “My God! Such a long time it is! Glad to see you! You’re not glad to see me too?”

  He’d grown up to be good-looking. Even at his gawkiest and most pinched he’d always had a likable shrewdness about him, lively eyes and a quick intelligence, but he’d lost that half-starved rawness and everything else had come together the right way. His skin was weather-beaten but his clothes fell well, his features were sharp and nervy, cavalry hero by way of concert pianist; and his tiny gray snaggleteeth—I saw—had been replaced by a standard-issue row of all-American whites.

  He saw me looking, flicked a showy incisor with his thumbnail. “New snaps.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Dentist in Sweden did it,” said Boris, signalling for a waiter. “Cost a fucking fortune. My wife kept after me—Borya, your mouth, disgraceful! I said no way am I doing this, but was the best money I ever spent.”

  “When’d you get married?”

  “Eh?”

  “You could have brought her if you wanted.”

  He looked startled. “What, you mean Myriam? No, no—” reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, punching around on his telephone, “Myriam’s not my wife! This—” he handed me the phone—“ this is my wife. What are you drinking?” he said, before turning to address the waiter in Polish.

  The photo on the iPhone was of a snow-topped chalet and, out in front, a beautiful blonde on skis. At her side, also on skis, were a pair of bundled-up little blond kids of indeterminate sex. It didn’t look so much like a snapshot as an ad for some healthful Swiss product like yogurt or Bircher muesli.

  I looked up at him stunned. He glanced away, with a Russianate gesture of old: yeah, well, it is what it is.

  “Your wife? Seriousl
y?”

  “Yah,” he said, with a lifted eyebrow. “My kids, too. Twins.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes,” he said regretfully. “Born when I was very young—too young. It wasn’t a good time—she wanted to keep them—‘Borya, how could you’—what could I say? To be truthful I don’t know them so well. Actually the little one—he is not in the picture—the little one I have not met at all. I think he is only, what? Six weeks old?”

  “What?” Again I looked at the picture, struggling to reconcile this wholesome Nordic family with Boris. “Are you divorced?”

  “No no no—” the vodka had arrived, icy carafe and two tiny glasses, he was pouring a shot for each of us—“Astrid and the children are mostly in Stockholm. Sometimes she comes to Aspen to the winter, to ski—she was ski champion, qualified for the Olympics when she was nineteen—”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, doing my best not to sound incredulous at this. The kids, as was fairly evident upon closer viewing, looked far too blond and bonny to be even vaguely related to Boris.

  “Yes yes,” said Boris, very earnestly, with a vigorous nod of the head. “She always has to be where there is skiing and—you know me, I hate the fucking snow, ha! Her father very very right-wing—a Nazi basically. I think—no wonder Astrid has depression problems with father like him! What a hateful old shit! But they are very unhappy and miserable people, all of them, these Swedes. One minute laughing and drinking and the next—darkness, not a word. Dzikuj,” he said to the waiter, who had reappeared with a tray of small plates: black bread, potato salad, two kinds of herring, cucumbers in sour cream, stuffed cabbage, and some pickled eggs.

  “I didn’t know they served food here.”

  “They don’t,” said Boris, buttering a slice of black bread and sprinkling it with salt. “But am starving. Asked them to bring something from next door.” He clinked his shot glass with mine. “Sto lat!” he said—his old toast.

  “Sto lat.” The vodka was aromatic and flavored with some bitter herb I couldn’t identify.

  “So,” I said, helping myself to some food. “Myriam?”

  “Eh?”

  I held out open palms in our childhood gesture: please explain.

  “Ah, Myriam! She works for me! Right-hand man, suppose you’d say. Although, I’ll tell you, she’s better than any man you’ll find. What a woman, my God. Not many like her, I’ll tell you. Worth her weight in gold. Here here,” he said, refilling my glass and sliding it back to me. “Za vstrechu!” lifting his own to me. “To our meeting!”

  “Isn’t it my turn to toast?”

  “Yes, it is—” clinking my glass—“but I am hungry and you are waiting too long.”

  “To our meeting, then.”

  “To our meeting! And to fortune! For bringing us together again!”

  As soon as we’d drunk, Boris fell immediately on the food. “And what exactly is it that you do?” I asked him.

  “This, that.” He still ate with the innocent, gobbling hunger of a child. “Many things. Getting by, you know?”

  “And where do you live? Stockholm?” I said, when he didn’t answer.

  He waved an expansive hand. “All over.”

  “Like—?”

  “Oh, you know. Europe, Asia, North and South America…”

  “That covers a lot of territory.”

  “Well,” he said, mouth full of herring, wiping a glob of sour cream off his chin, “am also small business owner, if you understand me rightly.”

  “Sorry?”

  He washed down the herring with a big slug of beer. “You know how it is. My official business so called is housecleaning agency. Workers from Poland, mostly. Nice pun in title of business, too. ‘Polish Cleaning Service.’ Get it?” He bit into a pickled egg. “What’s our motto, can you guess? ‘We clean you out,’ ha!”

  I chose to let that one lie. “So you’ve been in the States this whole time?”

  “Oh no!” He had poured us each a new shot of vodka, was lifting his glass to me. “Travel a lot. I am here maybe six, eight weeks of the year. And the rest of the time—”

  “Russia?” I said, downing my shot, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Not so much. Northern Europe. Sweden, Belgium. Germany sometimes.”

  “I thought you went back.”

  “Eh?”

  “Because—well. I never heard from you.”

  “Ah.” Boris rubbed his nose sheepishly. “It was a messed up time. Remember your house—that last night?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well. I’d never seen so much drugs in my life. Like half an ounce of coka and didn’t sell one stitch of it, not even one quarter gram. Gave a lot away, sure—was very popular at school, ha! Everyone loved me! But most of it—right up my nose. Then—the baggies we found—tablets of all assortments—remember? Those little greens? Some very serious cancer-patient-end-of-life pills—your dad must have been crazy addicted if he was taking that stuff.”

  “Yeah, I wound up with some of those too.”

  “Well then, you know! They don’t even make those good green oxys any more! Now they have the junkie-defeat so you can’t shoot them or snort! But your dad? Like—to go from drinking to that? Better a drunk in the street, any old day. First one I did—passed out before I hit my second line, if Kotku hadn’t been there—” he drew a finger across his throat—“pfft.”

  “Yep,” I said, remembering my own stupid bliss, keeling face-down on my desk upstairs at Hobie’s.

  “Anyway—” Boris downed his vodka in a gulp and poured us both another—“Xandra was selling it. Not that. That was your dad’s. For his own personal. But the other, she was dealing from where she worked. That couple Stewart and Lisa? Those like super straight real-estate looking people? They were bankrolling her.”

  I put down my fork. “How do you know that?”

  “Because she told me! And I guess they got ugly when she came up short, too. Like Mr. Lawyer Face and Miss Daisy Tote Bag all nice and kind at your house… petting her on the head… ‘what can we do’… ‘Poor Xandra…’ ‘we’re so sorry for you’… then their drugs are gone—phew. Different story! I felt really bad when she told me, for what we’d done! Big trouble for her! But, by then—” flicking his nose—“was all up here. Kaput.”

  “Wait—Xandra told you this?”

  “Yes. After you left. When I was living over there with her.”

  “You need to back up a little bit.”

  Boris sighed. “Well, okay. Is long story. But we have not seen each other in long while, right?”

  “You lived with Xandra?”

  “You know—in and out. Four-five months maybe. Before she moved back to Reno. I lost touch with her after that. My dad had gone back to Australia, see, and also Kotku and I were on the rocks—”

  “That must have been really weird.”

  “Well—sort of,” he said restlessly. “See—” leaning back, signalling to the waiter again—“I was in pretty bad shape. I’d been up for days. You know how it is when you crash hard off cocaine—terrible. I was alone and really frightened. You know that sickness in your soul—fast breaths, lots of fear, like Death will reach a hand out and take you? Thin—dirty—scared shivering. Like a little half-dead cat! And Christmas too—everyone away! Called a bunch of people, no one picking up—went by this guy Lee’s where I stayed in the pool house sometime but he was gone, door locked. Walking and walking—staggering almost. Cold and frightened! Nobody home! So I went by to Xandra’s. Kotku was not talking to me by then.”

  “Man, you had some kind of serious balls. I wouldn’t have gone back there for a million dollars.”

  “I know, it took some onions, but was so lonely and ill. Mouth all gittering. Like—where you want to lie still and to look at a clock and count your heartbeats? except no place to lie still? and you don’t have a clock? Almost in tears! Didn’t know what to do! Didn’t even know was she still there. But lights were on—only lights on the street
—came around by the glass door and there she was, in her same Dolphins shirt, in the kitchen making margaritas.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “Ha! Wouldn’t let me in, at first! Stood in the door and yelled a long while—cursed me, called me every name! But then I started crying. And when I asked could I stay with her?”—he shrugged—“she said yes.”

  “What?” I said, reaching for the shot he’d poured me. “You mean like stay stay—?”

  “I was scared! She let me sleep in her room! With TV turned to Christmas movies!”

  “Hmn.” I could see he wanted me to press for details, only from his gleeful expression I was not so sure I believed him about the sleeping-in-her-room business, either. “Well, glad that worked out for you, I guess. She say anything about me?”

  “Well, yes a little.” He chortled. “A lot actually! Because, I mean, don’t be mad, but I blamed some things on you.”

  “Glad I could help.”

  “Yes, of course!” He clinked my glass jubilantly. “Many thanks! You’d do the same, I wouldn’t mind. Honest, though, poor Xandra, I think she was glad to see me. To see anyone. I mean—” throwing his shot back—“it was crazy… those bad friends… she was all alone out there. Drinking a lot, afraid to go to work. Something could have happened to her, easy—no neighbors, really creepy. Because Bobo Silver—well, Bobo was actually not so bad guy. ‘The Mensch’? They don’t call him that for nothing! Xandra was scared to death of him but he didn’t go after her for your dad’s debt, not serious anyway. Not at all. And your dad was in for a lot. Probably he realized she was broke—your dad had fucked her over good and proper, too. Might as well be decent about it. Can’t get blood out of a turnip. But those other people, those friends of hers so called, were mean like bankers. You know? ‘You owe me,’ really hard, fucking connected, scary. Worse than him! Not so big sum even, but she was still way short and they were being nasty, all—” (mocking head tilt, aggressive finger point) “ ‘fuck you, we’re not going to wait, you better figure something out,’ like that. Anyway—good I went back when I did because then I was able to help.”

  “Help how?”

  “By giving her back the moneys I took.”

  “You’d kept it?”

  “Well, no,” he said reasonably. “Had spent it. But—had something else going, see. Because right after the coke ran out? I had taken the money to Jimmy at the gun shop and bought more. See, I was buying it for me and Amber—just the two of us. Very very beautiful girl, very innocent and special. Very young too, like only fourteen! But just that one night at MGM Grand, we had got so close, just sitting on the bathroom floor all night up at KT’s dad’s suite and talking. Didn’t even kiss! Talk talk talk! I all but wept from it. Really opened up our hearts to each other. And—” hand to his breastbone—“I felt so sad when the day came, like why did it have to be over? Because we could have sat there talking forever to each other! and been so perfect and happy! That’s how close we got to each other, see, in just that one night. Anyway—this is why I went to Jimmy. He had really shitty coke—not half so good as Stewart and Lisa’s. But everyone knew, see—everyone had heard about that weekend at MGM Grand, me with all that blow. So people came to me. Like—dozen people my first day back at school. Throwing their moneys at me. ‘Will you get me some… will you get me some… will you get some for my bro… I have ADD, I need it for my homework.…’ Pretty soon was selling to senior football players and half the basketball team. Lots of girls too… friends of Amber and KT’s… Jordan’s friends too… college students at UNLV! Lost money on the first few batches I sold—didn’t know what to ask, sold fat for low price, wanted everyone to like me, yah yah yah. But once I figured it out—I was rich! Jimmy gave me huge discount, he was making lots of green off it too. I was doing him big favor, see, selling drugs to kids too scared to buy them—scared of people like Jimmy who sold them. KT… Jordan… those girls had a lot of money! Always happy to front me. Coke is not like E—I sold that too, but it was up and down, whole bunch then none for days, for coka I had a lot of regulars and they called two and three times a week. I mean, just KT—”

  “Wow.” Even after so many years, her name struck a chord.

  “Yes! To KT!” We raised our glasses and drank.

  “What a beauty!” Boris slammed his glass down. “I used to get dizzy around her. Just to breathe her same air.”

  “Did you sleep with her?”