The Goldfinch (85 page)

Kitsey was tapping my wrist. “What?”

“
Barneys.
I mean, since we’re here? Maybe we should take a spin round the Homes department? I know Mother won’t love it if we register here but it might be fun to go for something a little less traditional for everyday.”

“No—” reaching for my glass, knocking the rest of it back—“I really need to get downtown, if that’s all right. Supposed to meet a client.”

“Will you be coming uptown tonight?” Kitsey shared an apartment in the East Seventies with two roommates, not far from the office of the arts organization where she worked.

“Not sure. Might have to go to dinner. I’ll get out of it if I can.”

“Cocktails? Please? Or an after-dinner drink, at least? Everyone will be so disappointed if you don’t put in at least a
tiny
appearance. Charles and Bette—”

“I’ll try. Promise. Don’t forget those,” I said, nodding at the earrings, which were still lying on the tablecloth.

“Oh! No! Of course not!” she said guiltily, grabbing them up and throwing them into her bag like a handful of loose change.

iii.

A
S WE WALKED OUTSIDE
together, into the Christmas crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth.

What was wrong with me? I thought, as Kitsey and I crossed Madison Avenue, her pink Prada overcoat bobbing exuberantly in the throng. Why did I hold it against Kitsey that she didn’t seem haunted over Andy and her dad, that she was getting on with her life?

But—clasping Kitsey’s elbow, rewarded by a radiant smile—I felt momentarily relieved again, and distracted from my worries. It had been eight months since I left Reeve in that Tribeca restaurant; no one had yet
contacted me about any of the bad pieces I’d sold though I was fully prepared to admit my mistake if they did: inexperienced, new to the business, here’s your money back sir, accept my apologies. Nights, lying awake, I reassured myself that if things got ugly, at least I hadn’t left much of a trail: I’d tried not to document the sales any more than I’d had to, and on the smaller pieces had offered a discount for cash.

But still. But still. It was only a matter of time. Once one client stepped forward, there would be an avalanche. And it would be bad enough if I wrecked Hobie’s reputation but the moment there were so many claims that I stopped being able to refund people’s money, there would be lawsuits: lawsuits in which Hobie, co-owner of the business, would be named. It would be hard to convince a court he hadn’t known what I was doing, especially on some of the sales I’d made at the Important Americana level—and, if it came down to it, I wasn’t even sure that Hobie would speak up adequately in his own defense if that meant leaving me out to hang alone. Granted: a lot of the people I’d sold to had so much money they didn’t give a shit. But still. But still. When would someone decide to look under the seats of those Hepplewhite dining chairs (for instance) and notice that they weren’t all alike? That the grain was wrong, that the legs didn’t match? Or take a table to be independently evaluated and learn that the veneer was of a type not used, or invented, in the 1770s? Every day, I wondered when and how the first fraud might surface: a letter from a lawyer, a phone call from the American Furniture department at Sotheby’s, a decorator or a collector charging into the store to confront me, Hobie coming downstairs, listen, we’ve got a problem, do you have a minute?

If the marriage-wrecking knowledge of my liabilities surfaced before the wedding, I wasn’t sure what would happen. It was more than I could bear to think of. The wedding might not go off at all. Yet—for Kitsey’s sake, and her mother’s—it seemed even more cruel if it surfaced after, especially since the Barbours were not nearly so well-off as they had been before Mr. Barbour’s death. There were cash flow problems. The money was tied up in trust. Mommy had had to reduce some of the employees to part time hours, and let the rest of them go. And Daddy—as Platt had confided, when attempting to interest me in more antiques from the apartment—had gone a bit bonkers at the end and invested more than fifty percent of the portfolio in VistaBank, a commercial-banking monster, for “sentimental reasons” (Mr. Barbour’s great-great-grandfather had
been president of one of the historic founding banks, in Massachusetts, long since stripped of its name after merging with Vista). Unfortunately VistaBank had ceased paying dividends, and failed, shortly before Mr. Barbour’s death. Hence Mrs. Barbour’s drastically reduced support of the charities with which she had once been so generous; hence Kitsey’s job. And Platt’s editorial position at his tasteful little publishing house, as he’d often reminded me when in his cups, paid less than Mommy in the old days had paid her housekeeper. If things got bad, I was pretty sure Mrs. Barbour would do what she could to help; and Kitsey, as my spouse, would be obligated to help whether she wanted to or not. But it was a dirty trick to play on them, especially since Hobie’s lavish praise had convinced them all (Platt especially, concerned with the family’s dwindling resources) that I was some kind of financial magician sweeping in to his sister’s rescue. “You know how to
make
money,” he’d said, bluntly, when he told me how thrilled they all were Kitsey was marrying me instead of some of the layabouts she’d been known to go around with. “She doesn’t.”

But what worried me most of all was Lucius Reeve. Though I had never heard another peep from him about the chest-on-chest, I had begun in the summer to receive a series of troubling letters: handwritten, unsigned, on blue-bordered correspondence cards printed at the top with his name in copperplate:
L
UCIUS
R
EEVE

It is getting on for three months since I made what, by any standards, is a fair and sensible proposal. How do you conclude my offer is anything but reasonable?

And, later:

A further eight weeks has passed. You can understand my dilemma. The frustration level rises.

And then, three weeks after that, a single line:

Your silence is not acceptable.

I agonized over these letters, though I tried to block them from my mind. Whenever I remembered them—which was often and unpredictably,
mid-meal, fork halfway to my mouth—it was like being slapped awake from a dream. In vain, I tried to remind myself that Reeve’s claims in the restaurant were wildly off-base. To respond to him in any way was foolish. The only thing was to ignore him as if he were an aggressive panhandler on the street.

But then two disturbing things had happened in rapid succession. I had come upstairs to ask Hobie if he wanted to go out for lunch—“Sure, hang on,” he said; he was going through his mail at the sideboard, glasses perched on the tip of his nose. “Hmn,” he said, flipping an envelope over to look at the front. He opened it and looked at the card—holding it out at arm’s length to peer at it over the top of his glasses, then bringing it in closer.

“Look at this,” he said. He handed me the card. “What’s this about?”

The card, in Reeve’s all-too-familiar writing, was only two sentences: no heading, no signature.

At what point is this delay unreasonable? Can we not move forward on what I have proposed to your young partner, since there is no benefit to either of you in continuing this stalemate?

“Oh, God,” I said, putting the card down on the table and looking away. “For Pete’s sake.”

“What?”

“It’s him. With the chest-on-chest.”

“Oh, him,” said Hobie. He adjusted his glasses, regarded me quietly. “Did he ever cash that check?”

I ran a hand through my hair. “No.”

“What’s this proposal? What’s he talking about?”

“Look—” I went to the sink to get a glass of water, an old trick of my father’s when he needed a moment to compose himself—“I haven’t wanted to bother you but this guy’s been a huge nuisance. I’ve started throwing away the letters without opening them. If you get another one, I suggest you toss it in the trash.”

“What does he want?”

“Well—” the faucet was noisy; I ran my glass; “well.” I turned, wiped my hand across my forehead. “It’s really nuts. I’ve written him a check for the piece, as I said. For more than he paid.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Ah—” I took a swallow of my water—“unfortunately he has something else in mind. He thinks, ah, he thinks we’re running an assembly line down here, and he’s trying to cut himself in on it. See, instead of cashing my check? he’s got some elderly woman lined up, nurses twenty-four hours a day, and what he wants is for us to use her apartment to, uh—”

Hobie’s eyebrows went up. “Plant?”

“Right,” I said, glad he’d been the one to say it. ‘Planting’ was a racket whereby fakes or inferior antiques were placed in private homes—often homes belonging to the elderly—to be sold to vultures clustering at the deathbed: bottom feeders so eager to rip off the old lady in the oxygen tent that they didn’t realize they were being ripped off themselves. “When I tried to give his money back—this was his counter-proposal. We supply the pieces. Fifty-fifty split. He’s been harassing me ever since.”

Hobie looked blank. “That’s absurd.”

“Yes—” closing my eyes, pinching my nose—“but he’s very insistent. That’s why I advise you to—”

“Who’s this woman?”

“Woman, elderly relative, whatever.”

“What’s her name?”

I held the glass to my temple. “Don’t know.”

“Here? In the city?”

“I assume so.” I didn’t care for this avenue of inquiry. “Anyway—just throw that thing in the trash. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier but I really didn’t want to worry you. He’s got to get tired of this if we ignore him.”

Hobie looked at the card, then at me. “I’m keeping this. No,” he said sharply when I tried to interrupt him, “this is more than enough to go to the police with if we have to. I don’t care about the chest—no, no,” he said, raising a hand to hush me, “this won’t do, you’ve tried to set it right and he’s trying to force you into something criminal. How long has this been going on?”

“Don’t know. Couple months?” I said, when he kept on looking at me.

“Reeve.” He studied the card with furrowed brow. “I’ll ask Moira.” Moira was Mrs. DeFrees’s first name. “You’ll tell me if he writes again.”

“Of course.”

I could not even think what might happen if Mrs. DeFrees happened to know Lucius Reeve, or know of him, but fortunately there had been no
further word on that score. It seemed only the rankest luck that the letter to Hobie had been so ambiguous. But the menace behind it was plain. It was stupid to worry that Reeve would follow through on his threat of calling the law, since—I reminded myself of it, again and again—his only chance of obtaining the painting for himself was to leave me at liberty to retrieve it.

And yet, perversely, this only made me long even more to have the painting close to hand, to look at whenever I wanted. Though I knew it was impossible, still I thought of it. Everywhere I looked, every apartment that Kitsey and I went to see, I saw potential hiding places: high cupboards, fake fireplaces, wide rafters that could only be reached by very tall ladder, floorboards that might easily be prised up. At night I lay staring into the dark, fantasizing about a specially built fireproof cabinet where I could lock it away in safety or—even more absurdly—a secret, climate-controlled Bluebeard closet, combination lock only.

Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist. Fully conscious of my folly, I’d downloaded pictures of it to my computer and my phone so I could gloat upon the image in private, brushstrokes rendered digitally, a scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels, but the purer the color, the richer the sense of impasto, the more I hungered for the thing itself, the irreplaceable, glorious, light-rinsed object.

Dust-free environment. Twenty-four-hour security. Though I tried not to think of the Austrian man who had kept the woman locked in a basement for twenty years, unfortunately it was the metaphor that came to mind. What if I died? Got hit by a bus? Might the ungainly package be mistaken for garbage and tossed in the incinerator? Three or four times I’d made anonymous phone calls to the facility to reassure myself of what I already knew from obsessively visiting the website: temperature and humidity guaranteed within acceptable conservatorial range for artworks. Sometimes when I woke up the whole thing seemed like a dream, although soon enough I remembered it wasn’t.

But it was impossible to even think of going up there with Reeve like a cat waiting for me to scurry across the floor. I had to sit tight. Unfortunately, the rent on the storage unit was due in three months; and what with everything else I saw no point whatsoever in going up to pay it in person. The thing was just to have Grisha or one of the guys go in and pay
it for me, in cash, which I was confident they would do no questions asked. But then the second unfortunate thing had happened: because only a few days earlier Grisha had shocked me, thoroughly, by sidling up with a sideways tick of his head when I was alone in the shop and adding up my receipts at the end of the week and saying: “
Mazhor,
I need a sit-down.”