The Goldfinch (100 page)

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.

S
INCE
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.

A
LL 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?