The Goldfinch

  “She said you two are going to the Glenn Gould?”

  “Well, um, I was dying to go again. Don’t tell her I’ve been,” I said impulsively; and then: “Did you, er—?”

  “No no—” hastily, drawing himself up—“I didn’t.”

  “Well, um—”

  Hobie rubbed his nose. “Well, listen, I’m sure it’s great. I’m dying to see it as well. Not tonight though,” he added quickly. “Some other time.”

  “Oh—” trying hard to sound bummed-out, doing a bad job of it.

  “In any case. Want me to mind the shop for you? In case you want to go upstairs for a wash and a brush-up? You should be leaving here no later than six-thirty if you plan on walking over there, you know.”

  xxvi.

  ON THE WAY OVER, I couldn’t help humming and smiling. And when I turned the corner and spotted her standing out in front of the theater I was so nervous I had to stop and compose myself for a moment before rushing in to greet her, helping her with her bags (she, laden with shopping, babbling about her day), perfect, perfect bliss of standing in line with her, huddling close because it was cold, and then inside, the red carpet and the whole evening ahead of us, clapping her gloved hands together: “oh, do you want some popcorn?” “Sure!” (me springing to the counter) “Popcorn’s great here—” and then, walking into the theater together, me touching her back casually, the velvety back of her coat, perfect brown coat and perfect green hat and perfect, perfect, little red head—“here—aisle? do you like the aisle?” we’d gone to the movies just enough (five times) for me to make careful note of where she liked to sit, plus, I knew it well enough from Hobie after years of inconspicuously questioning him as much as I dared about her tastes, her likes and dislikes, her habits, slipping the questions in casually, one at a time, for almost a decade, does she like this, does she like that; and there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o’clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with given my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places, and more people trickling in even after the film had already started but I didn’t care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine. And the music! Glenn Gould at the piano, wild-haired, ebullient, head thrown back, emissary from the realm of angels, rapt and consumed by the sublime! I kept stealing looks at her, unable to help myself; but it was at least half an hour in before I had the nerve to turn and look at her full-on—profile washed white in the glow from the screen—and realized, to my horror, that she wasn’t enjoying the film. She was bored. No: she was upset.

  I spent the rest of the film miserable, hardly seeing it. Or, rather, I was seeing it but in a wholly different way: not the ecstatic prodigy; not the mystic, the solitary, heroically quitting the concert stage at the height of his fame to retreat into the snows of Canada—but the hypochondriac, the recluse, the isolate. The paranoiac. The pill popper. No: the drug addict. The obsessive: glove-wearing, germ-phobic, bundled year round with scarves, twitching and racked with compulsions. The hunched nocturnal weirdo so unsure how to conduct even the most basic relations with people that (in an interview which I was suddenly finding torturous) he had asked a recording engineer if they couldn’t go to a lawyer and legally be declared brothers—sort of the tragic, late-genius version of Tom Cable and me pressing cut thumbs in the darkened back-yard of his house, or—even more strangely—Boris seizing my hand, bloody at the knuckles where I’d punched him on the playground, and pressing it to his own bloodied mouth.

  xxvii.

  “THAT UPSET YOU,” I said impulsively when we were leaving the theater. “I’m sorry.”

  She glanced up at me as if shocked I’d noticed. We’d come out into a bluish, dream-lit world—the first snow of the season, five inches on the ground.

  “We could have left if you wanted.”

  In answer she only shook her head in a sort of stunned way. Snow whirling down magical, like a pure idea of North, the pure North of the movie.

  “Well, no,” she said reluctantly. “I mean, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it—”

  Floundering up the street. Neither of us had the proper shoes. The crunch of our feet was loud and I listened, attentively, waiting for her to continue and ready to grasp her elbow in a moment if she slipped, but when she turned to look at me all she said was: “Oh, God. We’re never going to get a cab, are we?”

  Mind racing. What about dinner? What to do? Did she want to go home? Fuck! “It’s not that far.”

  “Oh, I know, but—oh, there’s one!” she cried—and my heart plunged until I saw, thankfully, that someone else had grabbed it.

  “Hey,” I said. We were near Bedford Street—lights, cafés. “What do you say we try up here?”

  “For a cab?”

  “No, for something to eat.” (Was she hungry? Please God: let her be hungry.) “Or a drink, at least.”

  xxviii.

  SOMEHOW—AS IF BY pre-arrangement of the gods—the half-empty wine bar we’d ducked into, on impulse, was warm and golden and candle-lit and much, much better than any of the restaurants I’d planned for.

  Tiny table. My knee to her knee—was she aware of it? Quite as aware as I was? Bloom of the candle flame on her face, flame glinting metallic in her hair, hair so bright it looked about to catch fire. Everything blazing, everything sweet. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover—because Pippa was exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he’d chosen to be happy with, and in fact that picture was an ideal of happiness in its way, the hike of his shoulders and the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile, that open-ended look like they might just wander off anywhere they wanted together, and—there she was! her! and she was talking about herself, affectionate and old-shoe, asking me about Hobie and the shop and my spirits and what I was reading and what I was listening to, lots and lots of questions but seeming anxious to share her life with me too, her chilly flat expensive to heat, depressing light and damp stale smell, cheap clothes on the high street and so many American chains in London now it’s like a shopping mall, and what meds are you on and what meds am I on (we both had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a malady that in Europe had different initials, it seemed, and got you sent to a hospital for Army vets if you weren’t careful); her tiny garden, which she shared with half a dozen people, and the batty Englishwoman who’d filled it with ailing tortoises she’d smuggled from the south of France (“they all die, of cold and malnutrition—it’s really cruel—she doesn’t feed them properly, crumbled bread, can you imagine, I buy them turtle food at the pet store without telling her”)—and how terribly she wanted a dog, but of course it was hard in London with the quarantine which they had in Switzerland too, how did she always end up living in all these dog-unfriendly places? and wow, I looked better than she’d seen me in years, she’d missed me, missed the hell out of me, what an amazing evening—and we’d been there for hours, laughing over little things but being serious too, very grave, she being both generous and receptive (this was another thing about her; she listened, her attention was dazzling—I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn’t say to anyone else, certainly not Kitsey, who had a brittle way of deflating serious comments by making a joke, or switching to another topic, or interrupting, or sometimes just pretending not to hear), and it was an utter delight to be with her, I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.

  “No no,” she was saying, running a finger around the rim of her win
e glass—the shape of her hands moved me intensely, Welty’s signet on her forefinger, I could stare at her hands the way I could never stare at her face without seeming like a creep. “I loved the movie, actually. And the music—” she laughed, and the laugh, for me, had all the joy of the music behind it. “Knocked the breath out of me. Welty saw him play once, at Carnegie. One of the great nights of his life, he said. It’s just—”

  “Yes?” The smell of her wine. Red-wine stain on her mouth. This was one of the great nights of my life.

  “Well—” she shook her head—“the concert scenes. The look of those rehearsal halls. Because, you know—” rubbing her arms—“it was really, really hard. Practice, practice, practice—six hours a day—my arms would ache from holding the flute up—and, well, I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of it too, that positive-thinking crap that it’s so easy for teachers and physical therapists to dole out—‘oh, you can do it!’ ‘we believe in you!’—and falling for it and working hard and working harder and hating yourself because you’re not working hard enough, thinking it’s your fault you’re not doing better and working even harder and then—well.”

  I was silent. I knew all about this from Hobie, who had spoken of it in great distress and at some length. It seemed that Aunt Margaret had been perfectly correct to send her to the wacko Swiss school with all the doctors and the therapy. Though to all normal standards she’d recovered from the accident completely, still there was a bit of neural damage, just enough to matter on the high end, slight impairment of fine motor skills. It was subtle but it was there. For almost any other vocation or avocation—singer, potter, zookeeper, any doctor apart from a surgeon—it wouldn’t have mattered. But for her it did.

  “And, I don’t know, I listen to a lot of music at home, fall asleep with the iPod every night, but—when’s the last time I went to a concert?” she said sadly.

  Falling asleep with the iPod? Did that mean that she and what’s-his-name weren’t having sex? “And why don’t you go to concerts?” I said, filing away this bit of info for later. “Audiences bother you? Crowds?”

  “Knew you’d understand.”

  “Well, I’m sure that this has been suggested to you, because it’s certainly been suggested to me—”

  “What?” What was the charm of that sad smile? How could you break it down? “Xanax? Beta-blockers? Hypnosis?”

  “All of the above.”

  “Well—if it was a panic attack, maybe. But it’s not. Remorse. Grief. Jealousy—that’s the worst of all. I mean—this girl Beta—that’s a stupid name isn’t it, Beta? Really mediocre player, I don’t mean to be snotty but she could hardly keep up with the section when we were kids and she’s in the Cleveland Philharmonic now and it upsets me more than I would admit to just anyone. But they don’t have a drug for any of that, do they?”

  “Er—” actually they did, and Jerome, up on Adam Clayton Powell, was doing a booming business in it.

  “The acoustics—the audiences—it triggers something—I go home, I hate everyone, I talk to myself, have arguments with myself in different voices, I’m upset for days. And—well, I told you, teaching, I tried it, it wasn’t for me.” Pippa didn’t have to work, thanks to Aunt Margaret’s and Uncle Welty’s money (Everett didn’t work either, thanks to same—the ‘music librarian’ thing, I’d gathered, though presented originally as a striking career choice, was really more along the lines of an unpaid internship, with Pippa footing the bill). “Teenagers—well I won’t even go into the torture of that, watching them head off to conservatory or to Mexico City for the summer to play in the symphony. And the younger kids aren’t serious enough. I’m annoyed with them for being kids. To me—it’s like they’re taking it too lightly—throwing what they have away.”

  “Well, teaching’s a shit job. I wouldn’t want to do it either.”

  “Yes but—” gulp of wine—“if I can’t play, what else is there? Because I mean—I’m around music, sort of, with Everett, and I keep going to school and keep taking courses—but quite honestly I don’t like London that much, it’s dark and rainy and I don’t have a whole lot of friends there, and in my flat sometimes I can hear someone crying at night, just this terrible broken weeping from next door, and I—I mean, you’ve found something you like to do, and I’m so glad, because sometimes I really wonder what I’m doing with my life.”

  “I—” Desperately I tried to think of just the right thing to say. “Come home.”

  “Home? You mean here?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about Everett?”

  I had nothing to say to this.

  She looked at me critically. “You really don’t like him, do you?”

  “Um—” What was the point of lying? “No.”

  “Well—if you knew him better, you would. He’s a good guy. Very serene and even-tempered—very stable.”

  I had nothing to say to this, either. I was none of these things.

  “Also London—I mean I’ve thought about coming back to New York—”

  “You have?”

  “Of course. I miss Hobie. A lot. He jokes how he could rent me an apartment here for what we spend on the phone—of course he’s living back in the days when long distance to London cost five dollars a minute or whatever. Pretty much every time we speak, he tries to talk me into coming back… well, you know Hobie, he never says it outright, but you know, constant hints, always tells me about jobs opening up, positions at Columbia and stuff—”

  “He does?”

  “Well—on some level I can’t fathom that I live so far away. Welty was the one who took me to music lessons and to the symphony but Hobie was the one always home, you know, who went upstairs and made me a snack after school and helped me plant marigolds for my science project. Even now—when I have a bad cold? when I can’t remember how to cook artichokes or get candle wax off the tablecloth? who do I call? Him. But—” was it my imagination, was the wine getting her worked up a little bit?—“tell you the truth? Know why I don’t come back more? In London—” was she about to cry? “I wouldn’t tell everybody this, but in London at least I don’t think every second about it. ‘This is the way I walked home the day before.’ ‘This is where Welty and Hobie and I had dinner the next-to-last time.’ At least there I don’t think quite so much: should I turn left here? Should I turn right? My whole destiny hanging on whether I take the F train or the 6. Awful premonitions. Everything petrified. When I come back here I’m thirteen again—and I mean, not in a good way. Everything stopped that day, literally. I even stopped growing. Because, did you know? I never got one inch taller after it happened, not one.”

  “You’re a perfect size.”

  “Well, it’s fairly common,” she said, ignoring my clumsy compliment. “Injured and traumatized children—they quite often fail to grow to normal height.” She went in and out, unconsciously, of her Dr. Camenzind voice—even though I’d never met Dr. Camenzind I could sense the moments when Dr. Camenzind took over, a kind of cool distancing mechanism. “Resources are diverted. The growth system shuts down. There was one girl at my school—Saudi princess who was kidnapped, when she was twelve? The guys who did it were executed. But—I met her when she was nineteen, nice girl, but tiny, like only four eleven or something, she was so traumatized that she never grew an inch past the day they snatched her.”

  “Wow. That underground cell girl? She was at school with you?”

  “Mont-Haefeli was weird. You had girls who’d been shot at while fleeing the presidential palace, and then you had girls who got sent there because their parents wanted them to lose weight or train for the Winter Olympics.”

  She accepted my hand in hers, without saying anything—all bundled up, she hadn’t let them take her coat. Long sleeves in summer—always swathed in half a dozen scarves, like some sort of cocooned insect wrapped in layers—protective padding for a girl who’d been broken and stitched and bolted back together again. How could I have been so blind? No wonder the film had u
pset her: Glenn Gould huddled year-round in heavy overcoats, pill bottles piling up, concert stage abandoned, snow growing deeper round him by the year.

  “Because—I mean, I’ve heard you talk about it, I know you’re as obsessed as I am. But I go over and over it too.” The waitress had inconspicuously poured her more wine, refilled it to the top without Pippa even asking or seeming to notice: dear waitress, I thought, God bless you, I’m leaving you a tip to knock your socks off. “If only I’d signed up to audition on Tuesday, or Thursday. If only I’d let Welty take me to the museum when he wanted… he’d been trying to get me up to that show for weeks, he was determined that I see it before it came down.… But I always had something better to do. More important to go to the movies with my friend Lee Ann, whatever. Who, incidentally, vanished into thin air after my accident—never saw her again after that afternoon at the stupid Pixar film. All these tiny signs that I ignored, or didn’t fully recognize—everything could have been different if only I’d been paying attention—like, Welty was trying so hard to get me to go earlier, he must have asked a dozen times, it was like he had a sense of it himself, something bad going to happen, it was my fault we were even there that day—”

  “At least you hadn’t been expelled from school.”

  “Were you expelled?”

  “Suspended. Bad enough.”

  “It’s weird to think—if it had never happened. If we hadn’t both been there that day. We might not know each other. What do you think you would be doing now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, a bit startled. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “Yeah, but you must have an idea.”

  “I wasn’t like you. I didn’t have a talent.”

  “What’d you do for fun?”

  “Nothing that interesting. The usual. Computer games, sci-fi stuff. When people asked me what I wanted to be, I’d usually be a smart ass and say I wanted to be a blade runner or something like that.”

  “God, I’m so haunted by that movie. I think about Tyrell’s niece a lot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That scene where’s she’s looking at the pictures on the piano. When she’s trying to figure out whether her memories belong to her or Tyrell’s niece. I go back through the past too, only looking for signs, you know? Things I should have picked up on, but missed?”

  “Listen, you’re right, I think like that too, but, omens, signs, partial knowledge, there’s no logical way you could…” why couldn’t I ever get a sentence to come out right around her? “… can I just say how cuckoo it sounds? Especially when someone else says it? To blame yourself for not predicting the future?”

  “Well—maybe, but Dr. Camenzind says we all do it. Accidents, catastrophes—something like seventy-five per cent of disaster victims are convinced there were warning signs they brushed off or didn’t pick up on correctly, and with children under eighteen, the percentage is even higher. But that doesn’t mean the signs weren’t there, does it?”

  “I don’t think it’s like that. In hindsight—sure. But I think maybe it’s more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake—the point where you would have had a different outcome.”

  “Yes, but that’s almost as bad, isn’t it? To see the mistake, the place where you went wrong, and not be able to go back and fix it? My audition—” large gulp of wine—“pre-college orchestra at Juilliard, my solfège teacher had told me I might get second chair but if I played really well, I might have a shot at first. And I guess it was a big deal, sort of. But Welty—” yes, definitely, tears, eyes shining in the firelight—“I knew I was wrong nagging him to come uptown with me, there was no reason for him to come—Welty spoiled me rotten even when my mother was alive but after she died he spoiled me more, and it was a big day for me, sure, but was it as important as I made it seem? No. Because,” she was crying now, a little, “I didn’t even want to go to the museum, I wanted him to come uptown with me because I knew he’d take me out to lunch before the audition, anywhere I wanted—he should have stayed home that day, he had other stuff to do, they didn’t even let family sit in, he would have had to wait down the hall—”

  “He knew what he was doing.”

  She glanced up at me as if I’d said exactly the wrong thing; only I knew it was exactly the right thing if I could voice it correctly.

  “The whole time we were together, he was talking about you. And—”

  “And what?”

  “Nothing!” I closed my eyes, overwhelmed with the wine, with her, with the impossibility of explaining it. “It’s just—his last moments on earth, you know? And the space between my life, and his, was very, very thin. There wasn’t any space. It was like something opened up between us. Like a huge flash of what was real—what mattered. No me, no him. We were the same person. Same thoughts—we didn’t have to talk. It was just a few minutes but it might have been years, we might as well still be there. And, um, I know this sounds weird—” in fact, it was a completely lunatic analogy, crackpot, insane, but I didn’t know any other way to work around to what I wanted to say—“but you know Barbara Guibbory, who does those seminars up in Rhinebeck, those past-life-regression things? Reincarnation and karmic ties and all that? Souls who have been together for a lot of lifetimes? I know, I know,” I said, at her startled (and slightly alarmed) look—“every time I see Barbara she tells me I need to chant Um or Rum or whatever to heal, like, the blocked chakras—‘deficient muladhara’—I’m not kidding you, that was her diagnosis of me, ‘unrooted…’ ‘constriction of the heart…’ ‘fragmented energy field…’ I was just standing there having a cocktail and minding my own business and here she comes drifting up telling me all these foods I need to eat to ground myself…” I was losing her, I could see it—“sorry, I’m wandering off topic a little, it’s just, well, we’ve had this discussion, all that stuff irritates the hell out of me. Hobie was standing there too drinking a big old Scotch and he said ‘What about me, Barbara? Should I eat some root vegetables? Stand on my head?’ and she just patted him on the arm and said ‘oh, no worries, James, you ARE an Advanced Being.’ ”

  That got a laugh out of her.

  “But Welty—he was one too. An Advanced Being. Like—not joking. Serious. Out of the ballpark. Those stories that Barbara tells—guru What’s-His-Name putting his hand on her head in Burma and in that one minute she was infused with knowledge and became a different person—”

  “Well, I mean, Everett—of course he never met Krishnamurti but—”

  “Right, right.” Everett—why this annoyed quite me so much, I didn’t know—had attended some sort of guru-based boarding school in the south of England where the classes had names like Care For the Earth and Thinking of Others. “But I mean—it’s like Welty’s energy, or force field—God that sounds so corny but I don’t know what else you’d call it—it’s been with me from that hour on. I was there for him and he was there for me. It’s sort of permanent.” I had never quite vocalized this before, to anyone, although it was something I felt very deeply. “Like—I think about him, he’s present, his personality is with me. I mean—pretty much the second I came to stay with Hobie, I was up there in the shop—it reeled me in—just this instinctive thing, I can’t explain it. Because—was I interested in antiques? No. Why would I be? And yet there I was. Going through his inventory. Reading his notes in the margins of auction catalogues. His world, his things. Everything up there—it drew me like a flame. Not that I was even looking for it—more that it was looking for me. And I mean, before I was eighteen, no one taught me, it was like I knew already, I was up there on my own and doing Welty’s job. Like—” I crossed my legs, restlessly—“did you ever think how weird, that he sent me to your house? Chance—maybe. But it didn’t seem like chance to me. It was like he saw who I was, and he was sending me exactly where I needed to be, to who I needed to be with. So yeah—” coming to myself a bit; I was ta
lking a little too