The Goldfinch (101 page)

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.

“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.

O
N 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.

“T
HAT 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.

S
OMEHOW—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 wine 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.