The Goldfinch

  She brushed the hair from her eyes and said nothing.

  “Didn’t think it would matter? Why? You didn’t think I would find out?”

  Angrily she glanced up. “You’re a cold fish, you know that?”

  “Me?” I looked away and laughed. “I’m the one who’s cold?”

  “Oh, right. ‘Wronged party.’ ‘Terribly high principles.’ ”

  “Higher than some, it seems.”

  “You’re thoroughly enjoying this.”

  “Believe me, I’m not.”

  “Oh no? I’d never know it from that smirk.”

  “And what am I supposed to do? Not say anything?”

  “I’ve said I won’t see him any more. Actually I told him I wouldn’t a while back.”

  “But he’s insistent. He loves you. He won’t take no for an answer.”

  To my astonishment, she was blushing. “That’s right.”

  “Poor little Kits.”

  “Don’t be hateful.”

  “Poor baby,” I said again, jeeringly, since I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She was scrabbling in the drawer for the corkscrew, and she turned and regarded me bleakly. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t expect you to understand but it’s rough to be in love with the wrong person.”

  I was silent. Walking in, I’d gone so cold with rage at the sight of her that I’d tried to tell myself that she was powerless to hurt me or—God forbid—make me feel sorry for her. But who knew better the truth of what she was saying than me?

  “Listen,” she said again, putting down the corkscrew. She’d seen her opening and she was taking it: just like on the tennis court, ruthless, watching her opponent’s weak side…

  “Get away from me.”

  Too heated. Wrong tone. This was going the wrong way. I wanted to be cold and in control of things.

  “Theo. Please.” There she was, hand on my sleeve. Nose pinking up, eyes pink with tears: just like poor old Andy with his seasonal allergies, like some ordinary person you might actually feel sorry for. “I’m sorry. Truly. With all my heart. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Oh no?”

  “No. I’ve done you a great disservice.”

  “Disservice. That’s one way of putting it.”

  “And, I mean, I know you don’t like Tom—”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Theo. Does it really matter to you as much as all that? No, you know it doesn’t,” she said quickly. “Not if you have to think about it. Also—” she stopped for a moment before she plunged on—“not to put you on the spot, but I know all about your things and I don’t care.”

  “Things?”

  “Oh, please,” she said wearily. “Hang out with your sleazy friends, take all the drugs you want. I don’t care.”

  In the background, the radiator began to bang and set up a tremendous clatter.

  “Look. We’re right for each other. This marriage is absolutely the right thing for both of us. You know it and I know it. Because—I mean, look, I know. You don’t have to tell me. And, I mean too—things are better for you now since we’ve been seeing each other, aren’t they? You’ve straightened up a lot.”

  “Oh yeah? ‘Straightened up’? What’s that supposed to mean.”

  “Look—” she sighed in exasperation—“no point pretending, Theo. Martina—Em—Tessa Margolis, remember her?”

  “Fuck.” I didn’t think anybody knew about Tessa.

  “Everyone tried to tell me. ‘Stay away from him. He’s darling but he’s a drug addict.’ Tessa told Em she stopped seeing you after she caught you snorting heroin at her kitchen table.”

  “It wasn’t heroin,” I said hotly. They’d been crushed morphine tablets and it had been a terrible idea to snort them, total waste of a pill. “And anyway, Tessa certainly didn’t have any scruples about blow, she used to ask me to get it for her all the time—”

  “Look, that’s different and you know it. Mommy,” she said, talking over me—

  “—Oh yeah? Different?” Raising my voice over hers. “How is it different? How?”

  “—Mommy, I swear—listen to me, Theo—Mommy loves you so much. So much. You saved her life coming along when you did. She talks, she eats, she takes an interest, she walks in the park, she looks forward to seeing you, you can’t imagine how she was before. You’re part of the family,” she said, pressing her advantage. “Truly. Because, I mean, Andy—”

  “Andy?” I laughed mirthlessly. Andy had entertained no illusions whatsoever about his sicko family.

  “Look, Theo, don’t be like this.” She’d recovered now: friendly and reasonable, something of her father in her directness. “It’s the right thing to do. Marrying. We’re a good match. It makes sense for everyone involved, not least us.”

  “Oh yeah? Everyone?”

  “Yes.” Perfectly serene. “Don’t be like that, you know what I mean. Why should we let this spoil things? After all, we’re better people when we’re with each other, aren’t we? Both of us? And—” pale little smile; her mother, there—“we’re a good couple. We like each other. We get along.”

  “Head not heart, then.”

  “If that’s how you want to put it, yes,” she said, looking at me with such plain pity and affection that—quite unexpectedly—I felt my anger drop out from under me: at her cool intelligence, all her own, clear as a silver bell. “Now—” stretching up on tiptoe, to kiss me on the cheek—“let’s both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let’s be happy together and have fun always.”

  xxii.

  SO I SPENT THE night—we ordered in, later, and then went back to bed. But though on some level it was all easy enough pretending everything was the same (because, in some way, hadn’t we both been pretending all along?) on another I felt nearly suffocated by the weight of everything unknown, and unsaid, pressing down between us, and later when she lay curled against me asleep I lay awake and stared out the window feeling completely alone. The silences of the evening (my fault, not Kitsey’s—even in extremis Kitsey was never at a loss for words) and the seemingly unbridgeable distance between us had reminded me very strongly of being sixteen and never having the faintest idea what to say or do around Julie, who though she definitely couldn’t be called a girlfriend was the first woman I’d thought of as such. We’d met outside the liquor store on Hudson when I was standing outside money in hand wanting someone to go in and buy me a bottle of something and there she came billowing around the corner, in batlike, futuristic garb incongruous with her clumping walk and farm-girl looks, her plain-but-pleasing face of a prairie wife of the 1900s. “Hey kid—” hoisting her own wine bottle out of the bag—“here’s your change. No really. Don’t mention it. Are you going to stand out here in the cold and drink that?” She was twenty-seven, nearly twelve years older than me, with a boyfriend just finishing business school in California—and there was never any question that when the boyfriend came back I wasn’t to come by or contact her ever again. We both knew. She hadn’t had to say it. Galloping up the five flights to her studio, on the rare (to me) afternoons I was permitted to come see her, I was always bursting with words and feelings too big to contain but all the things I’d planned to say to her always vanished the instant she opened the door and instead of being able to engage in conversation for even two minutes like a normal person, I would instead hover speechless and desperate three steps behind her, hands plunged in pockets, hating myself, while she walked barefoot around the studio looking hip, talking effortlessly, apologizing for the dirty clothes on the floor and for forgetting to pick up a six-pack of beer—did I want her to run downstairs?—until at some point I would almost literally hurl myself at her mid-sentence and knock her over on the day bed, so violently sometimes my glasses flew off. It had all been so wonderful I’d thought I would die but lying awake afterward I’d been sick with emptiness, her white arm on the coverlet, streetlights coming on, dreading the eight o’clock hour which mea
nt she would have to get up and dress for her job, at a bar in Williamsburg where I wasn’t old enough to stop in and visit her. And I hadn’t even loved Julie. I’d admired her, and obsessed over her, and envied her confidence, and even been a little afraid of her; but I hadn’t really loved her, no more than she’d loved me. I wasn’t so sure I loved Kitsey either (at least not the way I’d once wished I loved her) but still it was surprising just how bad I felt, considering I’d been through the routine before.

  xxiii.

  EVERYTHING WITH KITSEY HAD pushed Boris’s visit temporarily from my mind but—once I went to sleep—it all came back sideways in dreams. Twice I woke and sat bolt-upright: once, from a door swinging open nightmarishly into the storage locker, while kerchiefed women fought over a pile of used clothes outside; then—drifting back asleep, into a different staging of the same dream—storage unit as flimsy curtained space open to the sky, billowing walls of fabric not quite long enough to touch the grass. Beyond was a prospect of green fields and girls in long white dresses: an image fraught (mysteriously) with such death-charged and ritualistic horror that I woke gasping.

  I checked my phone: 4:00 a.m. After a miserable half hour I sat up bare-chested in bed in the dark and—feeling like a crook in a French movie—lit a cigarette and stared out at Lexington Avenue which was practically empty at that hour: cabs just coming on duty, just going off, who knew which. But the dream, which had seemed prophetic, refused to dissipate and hung like a poisonous vapor, my heart still pounding from the airy danger of it, its sense of openness and hazard.

  Deserves to be shot. I’d worried enough about the painting when I believed it to be safely maintained year round (as I’d been assured, by the storage brochure, in brisk professional tones) at a conservatorially acceptable 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 percent humidity. You couldn’t keep something like that just anywhere. It couldn’t take cold or heat or moisture or direct sun. It required a calibrated environment, like the orchids in the flower shop. To imagine it shoved behind a pizza oven was enough to make my idolater’s heart pound with a different, but similar, version of the terror I’d felt when I thought the driver was going to chuck poor Popper off the bus: in the rain, in the middle of nowhere, out by the side of the road.

  After all: just how long had Boris had the picture? Boris? Even Horst, avowed art-lover, hadn’t with that apartment of his struck me as overly particular about conservatorial issues. Disastrous possibilities abounded: Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only seascape he’d ever painted, according to rumor all but ruined from being stored improperly. Vermeer’s masterpiece The Love Letter, cut off its stretchers by a hotel waiter, flaking and creased from being sandwiched under a mattress. Picasso’s Poverty and Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape, water-damaged after being hidden by some numbskull in a public toilet. In my obsessive reading the story that haunted me most was Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, stolen from the oratory of San Lorenzo and slashed from the frame so carelessly that the collector who’d commissioned the theft had burst out crying when he saw it and refused to take it.

  Kitsey’s phone, I’d noticed, was missing from its usual place: the charger dock on the windowsill where she always grabbed for it first thing in the morning. Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night to see the backlight glowing blue in the dark on her side of the bed, under the covers, from her secret nest of sheets. ‘Oh, just checking the time,’ she said, if I tumbled over drowsily to ask what she was doing. I imagined it switched off and buried deep in the alligator bag with Kitsey’s usual mess of lip gloss and business cards and perfume samples and cash floating loose, crumpled twenties falling out every time she reached for her hairbrush. There, in that fragrant jumble, Cable would be calling repeatedly in the night, leaving multiple texts and voice mails for her to find when she woke in the morning.

  What did they talk about? What did they say to each other? Oddly enough: it was easy to imagine their interaction. Bright chatter, a sense of sly connivance. Cable calling her silly names in bed and tickling her until she shrieked.

  Grinding out my cigarette. No form, no sense, no meaning. Kitsey disliked it when I smoked in her bedroom but when she found the cigarette butt smashed out in the Limoges box on her dresser I doubted she was going to have anything to say about it. To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.

  xxiv.

  SINCE I COULDN’T GET back to sleep I left without waking Kitsey, in the icy black hour before sun-up, shivering as I dressed in the dark; one of the roommates had come in and was running a shower and the last thing I wanted was to bump into either of them on the way out.

  By the time I got off the F train, the sky was turning pale. Dragging home in the bitter cold—depressed, dead tired, letting myself in at the side door, trudging up to my room, smudged-up glasses, reeking of smoke and sex and curry and Kitsey’s Chanel No. 19, stopping to greet Popchik, who had bundled down the hall and was looping-the-loop with unusual excitement at my feet, pulling my rolled necktie out of my pocket so I could hang it on the rack on the back of the door—my blood almost froze when I heard a voice from the kitchen: “Theo? Is that you?”

  Red head, poking around the corner. It was her, coffee cup in hand.

  “Sorry, did I scare you? I didn’t mean to.” I stood transfixed, dumbfounded, as she put out her arms to me with sort of a happy crooning noise, Popchik whining and capering in excitement at our feet. She was still wearing the things she’d slept in, candy striped pyjama bottoms and a long sleeved T-shirt with an old sweater of Hobie’s over it, and she still smelled like tossed bedsheets and bed: oh God, I thought, closing my eyes and pressing my face into her shoulder with a rush of happiness and fear, swift draft from Heaven, oh God.

  “Lovely to see you!” There she was. Her hair—her eyes. Her. Bitten-down nails like Boris’s and a pout to her lower lip like a child who’d sucked her thumb too much, red tousled head like a dahlia. “How are you? I’ve missed you!”

  “I—” All my resolutions gone in a second. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was flying to Montreal!” Harsh laugh of a much younger girl, a hoarse playground laugh. “Stopping over to see my friend Sam for a few days and then going to meet Everett in California.” (Sam? I thought.) “Anyway my plane got re-routed—” she took a gulp of her coffee, wordlessly offered the cup to me, want some? no? another gulp—“and I was stuck at Newark, and I thought, why not, I’ll take the rain check and come into the city and see you guys.”

  “Huh. That’s great.” You guys. I was included in that, too.

  “Thought it might be fun to pop in, since I won’t be here for Christmas. Also since your party’s tomorrow. Married! Congratulations!” She had her fingertips on my arm and when she stretched up on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek I felt her kiss go all through me. “When do I get to meet her? Hobie says she’s a dreamboat. Are you excited?”

  “I—” I was so stunned I put my hand to the place where her lips had been, where I still felt the press of them glowing, and then when I realized how it must look took it rapidly away. “Yes. Thanks.”

  “It’s good to see you. You’re looking well.”

  She didn’t appear to notice how dumbstruck, how dizzy, how completely gobsmacked I was at the sight of her. Or maybe she
did notice and didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

  “Where’s Hobie?” I said. I wasn’t asking because I cared, but because it was a little too good to be true to be alone in the house with her, and a little frightening too.

  “Oh—” she rolled her eyes—“he insisted on going to the bakery. I told him not to bother but you know how he is. He likes to get me those blueberry biscuits that Mama and Welty used to buy me when I was little. Can’t believe they even make them any more—they don’t have them every day, he says. Sure you don’t want some coffee?” moving to the stove, just the trace of a limp in her walk.

  It was extraordinary—I could hardly hear a word she was saying. It was always like this when I was in the room with her, she overrode everything: her skin, her eyes, her rusty voice, flame-colored hair and a tilt to her head that sometimes gave her a look like she was humming to herself; and the light in the kitchen was all mixed up with the light of her presence, with color and freshness and beauty.

  “I have some CDs I’ve burned for you!” Turning to look at me over her shoulder. “Wish I’d thought to bring them. Didn’t know I’d be stopping though. I’ll be sure and pop them in the mail when I get back home.”

  “And I have some CDs for you.” There was a whole stack of them in my room, things I’d bought because they reminded me of her, so many I’d felt funny sending them. “And books.” And jewelry, I neglected to say. And scarves and posters and perfume and records on vinyl and a Make-Your-Own-Kite kit and a toy pagoda. An eighteenth-century topaz necklace. A first edition of Ozma of Oz. Buying the things had been mostly a way of thinking of her, of being with her. Some of it I’d given to Kitsey but still there was no way I could come out of my room with the gigantic pile of stuff I’d actually bought for her over the years because it would look completely insane.

  “Books? Oh, that’s great. I finished my book on the plane, I need something else. We can swap.”

  “Sure.” Bare feet. Blush-pink ears. The pearl white skin at the scoop neck of her T-shirt.

  “Rings of Saturn. Everett said he thought you might like it. He says hi, by the way.”

  “Oh right, hi.” I hated this pretense of hers, that Everett and I were friends. “I’m, er—”

  “What?”

  “Actually—” My hands were shaking and I wasn’t even hung over. I could only hope she didn’t see. “Actually I’m just going to duck in my room for a second, all right?”

  She looked startled, touched her fingertips to her forehead: silly me. “Oh, right, sorry! I’ll just be in here.”

  I didn’t start to breathe again until I was in my room with the door shut. My suit was okay, for yesterday’s, but my hair was dirty and I needed a shower. Should I shave? Change my shirt? Or would she notice? Would it look weird that I’d run in and tried to clean up for her? Could I get in the bathroom and brush my teeth without her noticing? But then suddenly I had a rush of counter-panic that I was sitting in my room with the door closed, wasting valuable moments with her.

  I got up again and opened the door. “Hey,” I yelled down the hall.

  Her head appeared again. “Hey.”

  “Want to go to the movies with me tonight?”

  Slight beat of surprise. “Well sure. What?”

  “Documentary about Glenn Gould. Been dying to see it.” In fact I’d already seen it, and had sat in the theater the whole time pretending she was with me: imagining her reaction at various parts, imagining the amazing conversation we would have about it after.

  “Sounds fantastic. What time?”

  “Sevenish. I’ll check.”

  xxv.

  ALL DAY, I WAS practically out-of-body with excitement at the thought of the evening ahead. Downstairs, in the store (where I was too busy with Christmas customers to devote undivided attention to my plans), I thought about what I would wear (something casual, not a suit, nothing too studied) and where I would take her to dinner—nothing too fancy, nothing that would put her on guard or seem self-conscious on my part but really special all the same, special and charming and quiet enough for us to talk and not too terribly far from Film Forum—besides which, she’d been out of the city for a while, she’d probably enjoy going someplace new (“Oh, this little place? yeah, it’s great, glad you like it, a real find”) but apart from all the above (and quiet was the main thing, more than food or location, I didn’t want to be anyplace where we were going to have to yell) it was going to have to be someplace I could get us in at short notice—and then too, there was the vegetarian issue. Someplace adorable. Not too expensive to raise alarms. It couldn’t look as if I was going to too much trouble; it had to seem thoughtless, unplanned. How the hell could she be living with this goofball Everett? With his bad clothes and his rabbit teeth and his always-startled eyes? Who looked as if his idea of a hot time was brown rice and seaweed from the counter at the back of the health food store?

  And so the day crawled; and then it was six, and Hobie was home from his day out with Pippa, and he was poking his head in the store.

  “So!” he said, after a pause, in a cheerful but cautious tone that reminded me (ominously) of the tone my mother had taken with my dad when she came home and found him buzzing about on the verge of an upswing. Hobie knew how I felt about Pippa—I’d never told him, never breathed a word of it, but he knew; and even if he hadn’t, it would have been perfectly visible to him (or any stranger walking in off the street) that I practically had sparks flying out of my head. “How’s everything?”

  “Great! How was your day?”

  “Oh wonderful!” with relief. “I was able to get us in at Union Square for lunch, we sat at the bar, wish you’d been with us. Then we went up to Moira’s, and the three of us walked over to the Asia Society, and now she’s out doing a bit of Christmas shopping. She says you, ah, you’re meeting her later tonight?” Casual, but with the unease of a parent wondering if an erratic teenager is really going to be okay taking the car out. “Film Forum?”

  “Right,” I said nervously. I didn’t want him to know I was taking her to the Glenn Gould movie since he knew I’d already seen it.