The Goldfinch (83 page)
But Welty’s ring was physical proof of my whereabouts. Luckily for me, Hobie didn’t like to talk about Welty’s death but every now and then—not often, usually late at night when he’d had a few drinks—he was moved to reminisce. “Can you imagine how I felt—? Isn’t it a miracle that—?” Someday, someone had been bound to make the connection. I’d always known it and yet in my drugged-out fog I’d drifted along ignoring the danger for years. Maybe no one was paying attention. Maybe no one would ever know.
I was sitting on the side of my bed, staring out the window onto Tenth Street—people just getting off work, going out to dinner, shrill bursts of laughter. Fine, misty rain slanted in the white circle of street light just outside my window. Everything felt shaky and harsh. I wanted a pill badly, and I was just about to get up and make myself a drink when—just outside of the light, unusual for the coming-and-going traffic of the street—I noticed a figure standing unaccompanied and motionless in the rain.
After half a minute passed and still he stood there, I switched the lamp off and moved to the window. In an answering gesture the silhouette moved well out of the streetlight; and though his features weren’t plain in the dark I got the idea of him well enough: high hunched shoulders, shortish legs and thick Irish torso. Jeans and hoodie, heavy boots. For a while he stood motionless, a workmanly silhouette out of place on the street at that hour, photo assistants and well-dressed couples, exhilarated college students heading out for dinner dates. Then he turned. He was walking away with a quick impatience; when he stepped forward into the next pool of light I saw him reaching in his pockets, dialing a cell phone, head down, distracted.
I let the curtain fall. I was pretty sure I was seeing things, in fact I saw things all the time, part of living in a modern city, this half-invisible grain of terror, disaster, jumping at car alarms, always expecting something to happen, the smell of smoke, the splash of broken glass. And yet—I wished I were a hundred percent sure it was my imagination.
Everything was dead quiet. The street light through the lace curtains cast spidery distortions on the walls. All the time, I’d known it was a mistake, keeping the painting, and still I’d kept it. No good could come of keeping it. It wasn’t even as if it had done me any good or given me any pleasure. Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning and the middle of the night, autumn, summer, changing with weather and sun. It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.
I got a glass of ice from the kitchen, went to the sideboard and poured myself a vodka, came back to my room and got my iPhone from my jacket pocket and—after reflexively dialing the first three digits of Jerome’s beeper—hung up and dialed the Barbours’ number instead.
Etta answered. “Theo!” she said, sounding pleased, the kitchen television going in the background. “You calling for Katherine?” Only Kitsey’s family and very close friends called her Kitsey; she was Katherine to everyone else.
“Is she there?”
“She’ll be in after dinner. I know she was looking for you to call.”
“Mm—” I couldn’t help feeling pleased. “Will you tell her I phoned then?”
“When are you coming back to see us?”
“Soon, I hope. Is Platt around?”
“No—he’s out too. I’ll be sure to tell him you called. Come back to see us soon, all right?”
I hung up the phone and sat on the side of the bed drinking my vodka. It was reassuring to know that I could call Platt if I needed to—not about the painting, I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him with that, but insofar as dealing with Reeve about the chest. It was ominous that Reeve had said not a word about that.
Yet—what could he do? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed Reeve had overplayed his hand by confronting me so nakedly. What good was it going to do him to come after me for the furniture? What did he have to gain if I was arrested, the painting recovered, whisked
out of his reach forever? If he wanted it, there was nothing for him to do but stand back and allow me to lead him to it. The only thing I had going for me—the
only
thing—was that Reeve didn’t know where it was. He could hire whomever he wanted to tail me, but as long as I kept clear of the storage unit, there was no way he could track it down.
i.
“O
H
, T
HEO
!”
SAID
K
ITSEY
one Friday afternoon shortly before Christmas, plucking up one of my mother’s emerald earrings and holding it to the light. We’d had a long lunch at Fred’s after having spent all morning going around Tiffany’s looking at silver and china patterns. “They’re beautiful! It’s just…” her forehead wrinkled.
“Yes—?” It was three; the restaurant was still chattering and crowded. When she’d gone to make a telephone call I’d pulled the earrings from my pocket and laid them on the tablecloth.
“Well, it’s just—I wonder.” She puckered her eyebrows as if at a pair of shoes she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to buy. “I mean—they’re gorgeous! Thank you! But… will they be quite right? For the actual day?”
“Well, up to you,” I said, reaching for my Bloody Mary and taking a large drink to conceal my surprise and annoyance.
“Because, emeralds.” She held an earring up to her ear, cutting her eyes thoughtfully to the side as she did it. “I adore them! But—” holding it up again to sparkle, in the diffuse luminance of the overheads—“emeralds aren’t really my stone. I think they may just seem a bit hard, you know? With white? And my skin? Eau de Nil! Mum can’t wear green either.”
“Whatever you think.”
“Oh, now you’re annoyed.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes you are! I’ve hurt your feelings!”
“No, I’m just tired.”
“You seem in a really dire mood.”
“Please Kitsey, I’m tired.” We’d been expending heroic effort searching for an apartment, a frustrating process which we’d borne in mostly good
humor although the bare spaces and empty rooms haunted with other people’s abandoned lives kicked up (for me) a lot of ugly echoes from childhood, moving boxes and kitchen smells and shadowed bedrooms with the life gone out of them all but more than this, pulsing throughout, a sort of ominous mechanical hum audible (apparently) only to me, heavily-breathing apprehensions which the voices of the brokers, ringing cheerfully against the polished surfaces as they walked around switching on the lights and pointing out the stainless-steel appliances, did little to dispel.
And why was this? Not every apartment we saw had been vacated for reasons of tragedy, as I somehow believed. The fact that I smelled divorce, bankruptcy, illness and death in almost every space we viewed was clearly delusional—and, besides, how could the troubles of these previous tenants, real or imagined, harm Kitsey or me?
“Don’t lose heart,” said Hobie (who, like me, was overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations left by time). “Look on it as a job. Sorting through a box of fiddly bits. You’ll turn up just the one as long as you grit your teeth and keep looking.”
And he was right. I’d been a good sport throughout, as had she, powering through from open house to open house of gloomy pre-wars haunted by the ghosts of lonely old Jewish ladies, and icy glass monstrosities I knew I could never live in without feeling I had sniper rifles trained on me from across the street. No one expected apartment hunting to be fun.
In contrast, the prospect of walking over with Kitsey to set up our wedding registry at Tiffany’s had seemed a pleasing diversion. Meeting with the Registry Consultant, pointing at what we liked and then wafting out hand-in-hand for a Christmas lunch? Instead—quite unexpectedly—I’d been knocked reeling by the stress of navigating one of the most crowded stores in Manhattan on a Friday close to Christmas: elevators packed, stairwells packed, flowing with shoals of tourists, holiday shoppers jostling five and six deep at the display cases to buy watches and scarves and handbags and carriage clocks and etiquette books and all kinds of extraneous merchandise in Signature Robin’s Egg Blue. We’d slogged round the fifth floor for hours, trailed by a bridal consultant who was working so hard to provide Flawless Service and assist us in making our choices with confidence that I couldn’t help but feel a bit stalked (“A china pattern should say to both of you, ‘this is who we are, as a couple’… it’s an important statement of your style”) while Kitsey flitted from setting
to setting: the gold band! no, the blue! wait… which was the first one? is the octagonal too much? and the consultant chimed in with her helpful exegesis: urban geometrics… romantic florals… timeless elegance… flamboyant flash… and even though I’d kept saying sure, that one’s fine, that one too, I’d be happy with either, your decision Kits, the consultant kept showing us more and more settings, clearly hoping to wheedle some firmer show of preference from me, gently explaining to me the fine points of each, the vermeil here, the hand-painted borders there, until I had been forced to bite my tongue to keep from saying what I really thought: that despite the craftsmanship it made absolutely zero difference whether Kitsey chose the x pattern or the y pattern since as far as I was concerned it was basically all the same: new, charmless, dead-in-hand, not to mention the expense: eight hundred dollars for a made-yesterday plate? One plate? There were beautiful eighteenth-century sets to be had for a fraction of the price of this cold, bright, newly-minted stuff.
“But you can’t like all of it
exactly
the same! And yes, absolutely, I keep coming back to the Deco,” Kitsey said to our patiently-hovering saleswoman, “but as much as I love it, it may not be quite right for us,” and then, to me: “What are your thoughts?”
“Whatever you want. Any of them. Really,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets and looking away when still she stood blinking respectfully at me.
“You are looking very fidgety. I wish you’d tell me what you like.”
“Yes, but—” I’d unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.
“Chinois? Or Birds of the Nile? Do say, Theo, I know you must prefer one of the two.”
“You can’t go wrong with either. Both are fun and fancy. And this one is simple, for everyday,” said the consultant helpfully,
simple
obviously being in her mind a key word in dealing with overwhelmed and cranky grooms. “Really really simple and neutral.” It seemed to be registry protocol that the groom should be allowed to select the casual china (I guess for all those Super Bowl parties I would be hosting with the guys, ha ha) while the “formal ware” should be left to the experts: the ladies.
“It’s fine,” I said, more curtly than I’d meant to, when I realized they
were waiting for me to say something. Plain, white, modern earthenware wasn’t something I could work up a lot of enthusiasm for, particularly when it went for four hundred dollars a plate. It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they’d purchased through their decorators for the price of good Queen Anne—but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not be re-sold at even half what they’d bought it for.
“China—” the bridal consultant traced the plate’s edge with a neutrally manicured finger. “The way I like for my couples to think of fine silver, fine crystal and china—? It’s the end-of-day ritual. It’s wine, fun, family, togetherness. A set of fine china is a great way to put some permanent style and romance in your marriage.”
“Right,” I said again. But the sentiment had appalled me; and the two Bloody Marys I’d had at Fred’s had not wholly washed the taste of it away.
Kitsey was looking at the earrings, doubtfully it seemed. “Well look. I
will
wear them for the wedding. They’re beautiful. And I know they were your mother’s.”
“I want you to wear what you want.”
“I’ll tell you what
I
think.” Playfully, she reached across the table and took my hand. “I think you need to have a nap.”
“Absolutely,” I said, pressing her palm to my face, remembering how lucky I was.
ii.