The Goldfinch (44 page)

“Glad that’s not me,” said Boris. “Bet they’re freezing their arses off.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I had no eyes for the balloons or the dancers or any of it. To see Herald Square on television made me feel as if I were stranded millions of light-years from Earth and picking up signals from the early days of radio, announcer voices and audience applause from a vanished civilization.

“Idiots. Can’t believe they dress like that. They’ll end up in hospital, those girls.” As fiercely as Boris complained about the heat in Las Vegas, he also had an unshakable belief that anything “cold” made people ill: unheated swimming pools, the air-conditioning at my house, and even ice in drinks.

He rolled over on his back and passed me the bottle. “You and your mother, you went to this parade?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?” said Boris, feeding Popper a potato chip.

“
Nekulturny,
” I said, a word I’d picked up from him. “And too many tourists.”

He lit a cigarette, and offered me one. “Are you sad?”

“A little,” I said, leaning in to light it from his match. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Thanksgiving before; it kept playing and re-playing like a movie I couldn’t stop: my mother padding around barefoot in old jeans with the knees sprung out, opening a bottle of wine, pouring me some ginger ale in a champagne glass, setting out some olives, turning up the stereo, putting on her holiday joke apron, and unwrapping the turkey breast she’d bought us in Chinatown, only to wrinkle her nose and start back at the smell—“Oh God, Theo, this thing’s gone off, open the door for me”—eyewatering ammonia reek, holding it out before her like an undetonated grenade as she ran with it down the fire stairs and out to the
garbage can on the street while I—leaning out from the window—made gleeful retching noises from on high. We’d eaten an austere meal of canned green beans, canned cranberries, and brown rice with toasted almonds: “Our Vegetarian Socialist Thanksgiving,” she’d called it. We’d planned carelessly because she had a project due at work; next year, she promised (both of us tired from laughing; the spoiled turkey had for some reason put us in an hilarious mood), we were renting a car and driving to her friend Jed’s in Vermont, or else making reservations someplace great like Gramercy Tavern. Only that future had not happened; and I was celebrating my alcoholic potato-chip Thanksgiving with Boris in front of the television.

“What are we going to eat, Potter?” said Boris, scratching his stomach.

“What? Are you hungry?”

He waggled his hand sideways:
comme ci, comme ça.
“You?”

“Not especially.” The roof of my mouth was scraped raw from eating so many chips, and the cigarettes had begun to make me feel ill.

Suddenly Boris howled with laughter; he sat up. “Listen,” he said—kicking me, pointing to the television. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“The news man. He just wished happy holiday to his kids. ‘Bastard and Casey.’ ”

“Oh, come on.” Boris was always mis-hearing English words like this, aural malaprops, sometimes amusing but often just irritating.

“ ‘Bastard and Casey!’ That’s hard, eh? Casey, all right, but call his own kid ‘Bastard’ on holiday television?”

“That’s not what he said.”

“Fine, then, you know everything, what did he say?”

“How should I know what the fuck?”

“Then why do you argue with me? Why do you think you always know better? What is the problem with this country? How did so stupid nation get to be so arrogant and rich? Americans… movie stars… TV people… they name their kids like Apple and Blanket and Blue and Bastard and all kind of crazy things.”

“And your point is—?”

“My point is like, democracy is excuse for any fucking thing. Violence… greed… stupidity… anything is ok if Americans do it. Right? Am I right?”

“You really can’t shut up, can you?”

“I know what I heard, ha! Bastard! Tell you what. If I thought my kid was a bastard I would sure the fuck name him something else.”

In the fridge, there were wings and taquitos and cocktail sausages that Xandra had brought home, as well as dumplings from the strip-mall Chinese where my father liked to eat, but by the time we actually got around to eating, the bottle of vodka (Boris’s contribution to Thanksgiving) was already half gone and we were well on our way to being sick. Boris—who sometimes had a serious streak when he was drunk, a Russianate bent for heavy topics and unanswerable questions—was sitting on the marble countertop waving around a fork with a cocktail sausage speared on it and talking a bit wildly about poverty and capitalism and climate change and how fucked up the world was.

At some disoriented point, I said: “Boris, shut up. I don’t want to hear this.” He’d gone back to my room for my school copy of
Walden
and was reading aloud a lengthy passage that bolstered some point he was trying to make.

The thrown book—luckily a paperback—clipped me in the cheekbone. “
Ischézni!
Get out!”

“This is my house, you ignorant fuck.”

The cocktail sausage—still impaled on the fork—sailed past my head, missing me narrowly. But we were laughing. By mid-afternoon we were completely wrecked: rolling around on the carpet, tripping each other, laughing and swearing, crawling on hands and knees. A football game was on, and though it was an annoyance to both of us it was too much trouble to find the remote and change the channel. Boris was so hammered he kept trying to talk to me in Russian.

“Speak English or shut up,” I said, trying to catch myself on the banister, and ducking his swing so clumsily I crashed and fell into the coffee table.

“Ty menjá dostál!! Poshël ty!”

“Gobble gobble gobble,” I replied in a whiny girl voice, face down in the carpet. The floor was rocking and bucking like the deck of a ship. “Balalaika pattycake.”

“Fucking
télik,
” said Boris, collapsing on the floor beside me, kicking out ridiculously at the television. “Don’t want to watch this shite.”

“Well I mean, fuck”—rolling over, clutching my stomach—“I don’t
either.” My eyes weren’t tracking right, objects had halos that shimmered out beyond their normal boundaries.

“Let’s watch weathers,” said Boris, wading on his knees across the living room. “Want to see the weathers in New Guinea.”

“You’ll have to find it, I don’t know what channel.”

“Dubai!” exclaimed Boris, collapsing forward on all fours—and then, a mushy flow of Russian in which I caught a swear word or two.

“
Angliyski!
Speak English.”

“Is snowing there?” Shaking my shoulder. “Man says is snowing, crazy man,
ty videsh?
! Snowing in Dubai! A miracle, Potter! Look!”

“That’s
Dublin
you ass. Not Dubai.”

“
Valí otsyúda!
Fuck off!”

Then I must have blacked out (an all-too-typical occurrence when Boris brought a bottle over) because the next I knew, the light was completely different and I was kneeling by the sliding doors with a puddle of puke on the carpet beside me and my forehead pressed to the glass. Boris was fast asleep, face down and snoring happily, one arm dangling off the sofa. Popchik was sleeping too, chin resting contentedly on the back of Boris’s head. I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.

I might have cried, if Boris wasn’t there. Instead, I went in the bathroom and vomited again and then after drinking some water from the tap came back with paper towels and cleaned up the mess I’d made even though my head hurt so much I could barely see. The vomit was an awful orange color from the barbecue chicken wings and hard to get up, it had left a stain, and while I scrubbed at it with dish detergent I tried hard to fasten on comforting thoughts of New York—the Barbours’ apartment with its Chinese porcelains and its friendly doormen, and also the timeless backwater of Hobie’s house, old books and loudly-ticking clocks, old furniture, velvet curtains, everywhere the sediment of the past, quiet rooms where things were calm and made sense. Often at night, when I was overwhelmed with the strangeness of where I was, I lulled myself to sleep by thinking of his workshop, rich smells of beeswax and rosewood shavings,
and then the narrow stairs up to the parlor, where dusty sunbeams shone on oriental carpets.

I’ll call,
I thought. Why not? I was still just drunk enough to think it was a good idea. But the telephone rang and rang. Finally—after two or three tries, and then a bleak half hour or so in front of the television—sick and sweating, my stomach killing me, staring at the Weather Channel, icy road conditions, cold fronts sweeping in over Montana—I decided to call Andy, going into the kitchen so I wouldn’t wake Boris. It was Kitsey who picked up the phone.

“We can’t talk,” she said in a rush when she realized it was me. “We’re late. We’re on the way out to dinner.”

“Where?” I said, blinking. My head still hurt so much I could hardly stand up.

“With the Van Nesses over on Fifth. Friends of Mum’s.”

In the background, I heard indistinct wails from Toddy, Platt roaring: “Get
off
me!”

“Can I say hi to Andy?” I said, staring fixedly at the kitchen floor.

“No, really, we’re—Mum, I’m coming!” I heard her yell. To me, she said, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“You too,” I said, “tell everybody I said hi,” but she’d already hung up.

xxi.

M
Y APPREHENSIONS ABOUT
B
ORIS’S
father had been eased somewhat since he’d taken my hands and thanked me for looking after Boris. Though Mr. Pavlikovsky (“Mister!” cackled Boris) was a scary-looking guy, all right, I’d come to think he wasn’t quite as awful as he’d seemed. Twice the week after Thanksgiving, we came in after school to find him in the kitchen—mumbled pleasantries, nothing more, as he sat at the table throwing back vodka and blotting his damp forehead with a paper napkin, his fairish hair darkened with some sort of oily hair cream, listening to loud Russian news on his beat-up radio. But then one night we were downstairs with Popper (who I’d walked over from my house) and watching an old Peter Lorre movie called
The Beast with Five Fingers
when the front door slammed, hard.

Boris slapped his forehead. “Fuck.” Before I realized what he was
doing he’d shoved Popper in my arms, seized me by the collar of the shirt, hauled me up, and pushed me in the back.

“What—?”

He flung out a hand—
just go.
“Dog,” he hissed. “My dad will kill him. Hurry.”

I ran through the kitchen, and—as quietly as I could—slipped out the back door. It was very dark outside. For once in his life, Popper didn’t make a sound. I put him down, knowing he would stick close, and circled around to the living room windows, which were uncurtained.

His dad was walking with a cane, something I hadn’t seen. Leaning on it heavily, he limped into the bright room like a character in a stage play. Boris stood, arms crossed over his scrawny chest, hugging himself.

He and his father were arguing—or, rather, his father was talking to him angrily. Boris stared at the floor. His hair hung in his face, so all I could see of him was the tip of his nose.

Abruptly, tossing his head, Boris said something sharp and turned to leave. Then—so viciously I almost didn’t have time to register it—Boris’s dad snapped out like a snake with the cane and whacked Boris across the back of the shoulders and knocked him to the ground. Before he could get up—he was on his hands and knees—Mr. Pavlikovsky kicked him down, then caught him by the back of the shirt and pulled him, stumbling, to his feet. Ranting and screaming in Russian, he slapped him across the face with his red, beringed hand, backwards and forwards. Then—throwing him staggering out into the middle of the room—he brought up the hooked end of the cane and cracked him square across the face.

Half in shock, I backed away from the window, so disoriented that I tripped and fell over a sack of garbage. Popper—alarmed at the noise—was running back and forth and crying in a high, keening tone. Just as I was clambering up again—panic-stricken, in a crash of cans and beer bottles—the door flew open and a square of yellow light spilled on the concrete. As quickly as I could I scrambled to my feet, snatched up Popper, and ran.

But it was only Boris. He caught up with me, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down the street.

“Jesus,” I said—lagging a little, trying to look back. “What was that?”

Behind us, the front door of Boris’s house flew open. Mr. Pavlikovsky
stood silhouetted in the light from the doorway and bracing himself with one hand, shaking his fist and shouting in Russian.

Boris pulled me along. “Come
on.
” Down the dark street we ran, shoes slapping the asphalt, until at last his father’s voice died away.

“Fuck,” I said, slowing to a walk as we rounded the corner. My heart was pounding and my head swam; Popper was whining and struggling to get down, and I set him on the asphalt to dash in circles around us. “What happened?”