The Goldfinch (125 page)

“Well—I’m just an old copyist talking myself. You know what Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.’ Still with real greatness, there’s a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn’t matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It’s the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock. And these copies—” leaning forward with hands folded on the table—“these artists’ copies he grew up with were lost when the house in Cairo burned, and to tell you the truth they were lost to him earlier, when he was crippled and they sent him back to America, but—well, he was a person like us, he got attached to objects, they had personalities and souls to him, and though he lost almost everything else from that life, he never lost those paintings because the originals were still out in the world. Made several trips to see them—matter of fact, we took the train all the way to Baltimore to see the original of his Manet when it was exhibited here, years ago, back when Pippa’s mother was still living. Quite a journey for Welty. But he knew he’d never make it back to the Musée d’Orsay. And the day he and Pippa went up to the Dutch exhibition? What picture do you think he was taking her specially to see?”

The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy—smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit—was also the old man who’d clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.

Hobie cleared his throat. “Ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“How’d you store it?”

“In a pillowcase.”

“Cotton?”

“Well—is percale cotton?”

“No padding? Nothing to protect it?”

“Just paper and tape. Yep,” I said, when his eyes blurred with alarm.

“You should have used glassine and bubble wrap!”

“I know that now.”

“Sorry.” Wincing; putting a hand to his temple. “Still trying to get my
head around it. You flew with that painting in checked baggage on Continental Airlines?”

“Like I said. I was thirteen.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me? You could have done,” he said, when I shook my head.

“Oh, sure,” I said, a little too quickly, though I was remembering the isolation and terror of that time: my constant fear of Social Services; the soap-heavy smell of my un-lockable bedroom, the drastic chill of the stone-gray reception area where I waited to see Mr. Bracegirdle, my fear of being sent away.

“I’d have figured out something. Although, when you tipped up here homeless like you did… well, I hope you don’t mind my saying so but even your own lawyer—well, you know it as well as I do, the situation made him nervous, he was pretty anxious to get you out of here and then on my end, as well, several very old friends said, ‘James, this is absolutely too much for you…’ well you can understand why they’d think it,” he added hastily, when he saw the look on my face.

“Oh, sure, of course.” The Vogels, the Grossmans, the Mildebergers, while always polite, had always managed to silently convey (to me, anyway) their Hobie-has-quite-enough-to-deal-with philosophy.

“On some level it was mad. I know how it looked. And yet—well—it seemed a plain message, how Welty had sent you here, and then there you were, like a little insect, coming back and coming back—” He thought a moment, brow furrowed, a deeper version of his perpetual worried expression—“I’ll tell you what I’m trying a bit clumsily to say, after my mother died I’d walk and walk, that awful dragging summer. Walk all the way from Albany to Troy sometimes. Standing under awnings of hardware stores in the rain. Anything to keep from going home to that house without her in it. Floating around like a ghost. I’d stay in the library until they kicked me out and then get on the Watervliet bus and ride and then wander some more. I was a big kid, twelve years old and tall as a man, people thought I was a tramp, housewives chased me with brooms from their doorsteps. But that’s how I ended up at Mrs. De Peyster’s—she opened the door when I was sitting on her porch and said: You must be thirsty, would you like to come in? Portraits, miniatures, daguerreotypes, old Aunt This, old Uncle Thus and So. That spiral staircase coming down. And there I was—in my lifeboat. I’d found it. You had to pinch
yourself in that house sometimes to remind yourself it wasn’t 1909. Some of the most beautiful American Classical pieces I’ve ever seen to this day, and, my God, that Tiffany glass—this was in the days before Tiffany was so special, people didn’t care for it, it wasn’t the thing, probably it was already commanding big prices in the city but back then you could find it in upstate junk shops for next to nothing. Soon enough I started prowling those junk shops myself. But this—this had all come down in her family. Every piece had a story. And she was delighted to show you just where to stand, at what hour, to catch each piece in the best light. In the late afternoon, when the sun wheeled round the room—” he splayed his fingers,
pop, pop!
—“they’d fire up one by one like firecrackers on a string.”

From my chair I had a clear view of Hobie’s Noah’s Ark: paired elephants, zebras, carven beasts marching two by two, clear down to tiny hen and rooster and the bunnies and mice bringing up the rear. And the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon: rain streaming down the skylights, the homely file of creatures lined on the kitchen counter waiting to be saved. Noah: the great conservator, the great caretaker.

“And—” he’d gotten up to make some coffee—“I suppose it’s ignoble to spend your life caring so much for
objects
—”

“Who says?”

“Well—” turning from the stove—“it’s not as if we’re running a hospital for sick children down here, let’s put it that way. Where’s the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I’ve seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean—mending old things, preserving them, looking after them—on some level there’s no rational grounds for it—”

“There’s no ‘rational grounds’ for anything I care about.”

“Well, no, nor me either,” he said reasonably. “But”—peering nearsightedly into the coffee jar, spooning ground coffee into the pot—“well, sorry to maunder on, but from here, from where I’m standing, it looks like a bit of a fix, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

He laughed. “What’s to say? Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But—” crossing back to the table to sit again “—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway.
Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.
” Fingertip gliding over the faded-out photo—the conservator’s touch, a touch-without-touching, a communion wafer’s space between the surface and his forefinger. “An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.
Yours, yours. I was painted for you.
And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling…” passing a hand over his forehead.… “but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”

“You sound like my dad.”

“Well—let’s put it another way. Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”

“Now you
really
sound like my dad.”

“Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

viii.

A
ND YES.
I
SUPPOSE
it can. Or—to quote another paradoxical gem of my dad’s: sometimes you have to lose to win.

Because it’s almost a year later now and I’ve been travelling almost the whole time, eleven months spent largely in airport lounges and hotel rooms and other walk-through places, Stow for Taxi, Take-off, and Landing, plastic trays and stale air through the shark-gill cabin vents—and even though it’s not quite Thanksgiving the lights are up already and they’re starting to play easy-listening Christmas standards like Vince Guaraldi’s “Tannenbaum” and Coltrane’s “Greensleeves” at the airport Starbucks; and among the many, many things I’ve had time to think about (such as what’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?) I’ve been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

And it’s been good for me, my time alone on the road. A year is how long it’s taken me to quietly wander round on my own and re-purchase the frauds still out, a delicate proceeding which I’ve found is best conducted in person: three or four trips a month, New Jersey and Oyster Bay and Providence and New Canaan, and—further afield—Miami, Houston, Dallas, Charlottesville, Atlanta, where at the invitation of my lovely client Mindy, the wife of an auto-parts magnate named Earl, I spent three fairly congenial days in the guest house of a spanking new coral-stone château featuring its own billiard parlour, “gentleman’s pub” (with authentic, imported, English-born barkeep), and indoor shooting range with custom track mounted target system. Some of my dot-com and hedge fund clients have second homes in exotic places, exotic to me anyway, Antigua and Mexico and the Bahamas, Monte Carlo and Juan-les-Pins and Sintra, interesting local wines and cocktails on terraced gardens with palm trees and agaves and white umbrellas whipping out by the pool like sails. And in between, I’ve been in a kind of bardo state, flying around in a gray roar, climbing with drop-spattered windows to laddered sunlight, descending to rainclouds and rain and escalators down and down to a tumble of faces in baggage claim, eerie kind of afterlife, the space between earth and
not-earth, world and not-world, highly polished floors and glass-roof cathedral echoes and the whole anonymous concourse glow, a mass identity I don’t want to be a part of and indeed am not a part of, except it’s almost as if I’ve died, I feel different, I
am
different, and there’s a certain benumbed pleasure in moving in and out of the group mind, napping in molded plastic chairs and wandering the gleaming aisles of Duty Free and of course everyone perfectly nice when you touch down, indoor tennis courts and private beaches and—after the obligatory tour, all very nice, admiring the Bonnard, the Vuillard, light lunch out by the pool—a hefty check and a taxi ride back to the hotel again a good deal poorer.

It’s a big shift. I don’t know quite how to explain it. Between wanting and not wanting, caring and not caring.

Of course it’s a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. Coded messages in the in-flight magazines. Energy Shield. Uncompromising Care. Electricity, colors, radiance. Everything is a signpost pointing to something else. And, lying on my bed in some frigid biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel how even my sadness can make me happy, how wall to wall carpet and fake Biedermeier furniture and a softly murmuring French announcer on Canal Plus can all somehow seem so necessary and right.

I’d just as soon forget, but I can’t. It’s kind of the hum of a tuning fork. It’s just there. It’s here with me all the time.

White noise, impersonal roar. Deadening incandescence of the boarding terminals. But even these soul-free, sealed-off places are drenched with meaning, spangled and thundering with it. Sky Mall. Portable stereo systems. Mirrored isles of Drambuie and Tanqueray and Chanel No. 5. I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers—hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark—and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.