The Goldfinch (126 page)

Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care
about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Because—isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to
Tosca
to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur
in
the world, but not
of
the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

Though my engagement isn’t off, not officially anyway, I’ve been given to understand—gracefully, in the lighter-than-air manner of the Barbours—that no one is holding me to anything. Which is perfect. Nothing’s been said and nothing
is
said. When I’m invited for dinner (as I
am, often, when I’m in town) it’s all very pleasant and light, voluble even, intimate and subtle while not at all personal; I’m treated like a family member (almost), welcome to turn up when I want; I’ve been able to coax Mrs. Barbour out of the apartment a bit, we’ve had some pleasant afternoons out, lunch at the Pierre and an auction or two; and Toddy, without being impolitic in the least, has even managed to let casually and almost accidentally drop the name of a very good doctor, with no suggestion whatever that I might possibly need such a thing.

[As for Pippa: though she took the Oz book, she left the necklace, along with a letter I opened so eagerly I literally ripped through the envelope and tore it in half. The gist—once I got on my knees and fit the pieces together—was this: she’d loved seeing me, our time in the city had meant a lot to her, who in the world could have picked such a beautiful necklace for her? it was perfect, more than perfect, only she couldn’t accept it, it was much too much, she was sorry, and—maybe she was speaking out of turn, and if so she hoped I forgave her, but I shouldn’t think she didn’t love me back, because she did, she did. (You do? I thought, bewildered.) Only it was complicated, she wasn’t thinking only of herself but me too, since we’d both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike—too much. And because we’d both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn’t, and couldn’t, understand, wasn’t it a bit… precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn’t doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn’t it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn’t that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. (Dumb of me not to have seen it earlier, after all the injuries, the crushed leg, the multiple surgeries; adorable drag in the voice, adorable drag in the step, the arm-hugging and the pallor, the scarves and sweaters and multiple layers of clothes, slow drowsy smile: she herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop I’d chased for all those years.)

But, as the reader of this will have ascertained (if there ever is a reader)
the idea of being Dragged Down holds no terror for me. Not that I care to drag anyone else down with me, but—can’t
I
change? Can’t
I
be the strong one? Why not?]

[You can have either of those girls you want, said Boris, sitting on the sofa with me in his loft in Antwerp, cracking pistachios between his rear molars as we were watching Kill Bill.

No I can’t.

And why can’t you? I’d pick Snowflake myself. But if you want the other, why not?

Because she has a boyfriend?

So? said Boris.

Who lives with her?

So?

And here’s what I’m thinking too: So? What if I go to London? So?

And this is either a completely disastrous question or the most sensible one I’ve ever asked in all my life.]

I’ve written all this, oddly, with the idea that Pippa will see it someday—which of course she won’t. No one will, for obvious reasons. I haven’t written it from memory: that blank notebook my English teacher gave me all those years ago was the first of a series, and the start of an erratic if lifelong habit from age thirteen on, beginning with a series of formal yet curiously intimate letters to my mother: long, obsessive, homesick letters which have the tone of being written to a mother alive and anxiously waiting for news of me, letters describing where I was “staying” (never living) and the people I was “staying with,” letters detailing exhaustively what I ate and drank and wore and watched on television, what books I read, what games I played, what movies I saw, things the Barbours did and said and things Dad and Xandra did and said—these epistles (dated and signed, in a careful hand, ready to be torn out of the notebook and mailed) alternating with miserable bursts of I Hate Everyone and I Wish I was Dead, months grinding by with a disjointed scribble or two, B’s house, haven’t been to school in three days and it’s Friday already, my life in haiku, I am in a state of semi-zombie, God we got so trashed last night like I whited out sort of, we played a game called Liar’s Dice and ate cornflakes and breath mints for dinner.

And yet even after I got to New York, I kept writing. “Why the hell is it so much colder here than I remember, and why does this stupid fucking
desk lamp make me so sad?” I described suffocating dinner parties; I recorded conversations and wrote down my dreams; I took many careful notes of what Hobie taught me below stairs in the shop.

eighteenth century mahogany easier to match than walnut—eye fooled by the darker wood

When artificially done—too evenly executed!

1. bookcase will show wear on bottom rails where dusted and touched, but not on top
   
2. on items that lock, look for dents and scratches below the keyhole, where wood will have been struck by opening the lock with a key on a bunch
   

Interspersed throughout this, and notes of auction results from Important Americana sales (“Lot 77 Fed. part ebz. girandôle cvx mirror $7500”) and—increasingly—sinister charts and tables which I somehow thought would be incomprehensible to a person picking up the notebook but in fact are perfectly clear:

… pervading this daily record, and raising it above itself, is the secret visible only to me: blooming in the darkness and never once mentioned by name.

Because: if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it’s there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it’s not. Dream and magic, magic and delirium. The Unified Field Theory. A secret about a secret.

[That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter
saw
him—he wasn’t painting that bird from his mind, you know? That’s a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw
him mixed up with dozen other birds all the same kind, I could pick him out, no problem.]

And he’s right. So could I. And if I could go back in time I’d clip the chain in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted.

Only it’s more complicated than that. Who knows why Fabritius painted the goldfinch at all? A tiny, stand-alone masterpiece, unique of all its kind? He was young, celebrated. He had important patrons (although unfortunately almost none of the work he did for them survives). You’d imagine him like the young Rembrandt, flooded with grandiose commissions, his studios resplendent with jewels and battle axes, goblets and furs, leopard skins and costume armor, all the power and sadness of earthly things. Why this subject? A lonely pet bird? Which was in no way characteristic of his age or time, where animals featured mainly dead, in sumptuous trophy pieces, limp hares and fish and fowl, heaped high and bound for table? Why does it seem so significant to me that the wall is plain—no tapestry or hunting horns, no stage decoration—and that he took such care to inscribe his name and the year with such prominence, since he can hardly have known (or did he?) that 1654, the year he made the painting, would also be the year of his death? There’s a shiver of premonition about it somehow, as if perhaps he had an intimation that this tiny mysterious piece would be one of the very few works to outlive him. The anomaly of it haunts me on every level. Why not something more typical? Why not a seascape, a landscape, a history painting, a commissioned portrait of some important person, a low-life scene of drinkers in a tavern, a bunch of tulips for heaven’s sake, rather than this lonely little captive? Chained to his perch? Who knows what Fabritius was trying to tell us by his choice of tiny subject? His presentation of tiny subject? And if what they say is true—if every great painting is really a self-portrait—what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself? A painter thought so surpassingly great by the greatest painters of his day, who died so young, so long ago, and about whom we know almost nothing? About himself as a painter: he’s saying plenty. His lines speak on their own. Sinewy wings; scratched pinfeather. The speed of his brush is visible, the sureness of his hand, paint dashed thick. And yet there are also half-transparent passages rendered so lovingly alongside the bold, pastose strokes that there’s tenderness in the
contrast, and even humor; the underlayer of paint is visible beneath the hairs of his brush; he wants us to feel the downy breast-fluff, the softness and texture of it, the brittleness of the little claw curled about the brass perch.

But what does the painting say about Fabritius himself? Nothing about religious or romantic or familial devotion; nothing about civic awe or career ambition or respect for wealth and power. There’s only a tiny heartbeat and solitude, bright sunny wall and a sense of no escape. Time that doesn’t move, time that couldn’t be called time. And trapped in the heart of light: the little prisoner, unflinching. I think of something I read about Sargent: how, in portraiture, Sargent always looked for the animal in the sitter (a tendency that, once I knew to look for it, I saw everywhere in his work: in the long foxy noses and pointed ears of Sargent’s heiresses, in his rabbit-toothed intellectuals and leonine captains of industry, his plump owl-faced children). And, in this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another.

But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.

And yes—scholars might care about the innovative brushwork and use of light, the historical influence and the unique significance in Dutch art. But not me. As my mother said all those years ago, my mother who loved the painting only from seeing it in a book she borrowed from the Comanche County Library as a child: the significance doesn’t matter. The historical significance deadens it. Across those unbridgeable distances—between bird and painter, painting and viewer—I hear only too well what’s being said to me, a
psst
from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it’s really very personal and specific. It’s there in the light-rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are—hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible—and then, at a distance, the miracle, or the joke as Horst called it, although really it’s both, the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone. It’s the place
where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.