The Goldfinch (62 page)
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
—F
RANÇOIS DE
L
A
R
OCHEFOUCAULD
i.
W
HEN
I
WOKE TO
the clatter of garbage trucks, it was as if I’d parachuted into a different universe. My throat hurt. Lying very still under the eiderdown, I breathed the dark air of dried-out potpourri and burnt fireplace wood and—very faint—the evergreen tang of turpentine, resin, and varnish.
For some time I lay there. Popper—who’d been curled by my feet—was nowhere in evidence. I’d slept in my clothes, which were filthy. At last—propelled by a sneezing fit—I sat up, pulled my sweater over my shirt and grappled under the bed to make sure the pillowcase was still there, then trudged on cold floors to the bathroom. My hair had dried in knots too tangled to yank the comb through, and even after I doused it in water and started over, one chunk was so matted I finally gave up and sawed it out, laboriously, with a pair of rusted nail scissors from the drawer.
Christ, I thought, turning from the mirror to sneeze. I hadn’t been around a mirror in a while and I barely recognized myself: bruised jaw, spattering of chin acne, face blotched and swollen from my cold—eyes swollen too, lidded and sleepy, giving me a sort of dumb, shifty, homeschooled look. I looked like some cult-raised kid just rescued by local law enforcement, brought blinking from some basement stocked with firearms and powdered milk.
It was late: nine. Stepping out of my room, I could hear the morning classical program on WNYC, a dream familiarity in the announcer’s voice, Köchel numbers, a drugged calm, the same warm public-radio purr I’d woken up to so many mornings back at Sutton Place. In the kitchen, I found Hobie at the table with a book.
But he wasn’t reading; he was staring across the room. When he saw me he started.
“Well, there you are,” he said as he rose to messily sweep aside a pile of mail and bills so I could sit. He was dressed for the workshop, knee-sprung corduroys and an old peat-brown sweater, ragged and eaten with moth holes, and his receding hairline and new short-cropped hair gave him the ponderous, bald-templed look of the marble senator on the cover of Hadley’s Latin book. “How’s the form?”
“Fine, thanks.” Voice gravelled and croaking.
Down came the brows again and he looked at me hard. “Good heavens!” he said. “You sound like a raven this morning.”
What did that mean? Ablaze with shame, I slid into the chair he scraped out for me and—too embarrassed to meet his eye—stared at his book: cracked leather,
Life and Letters
of Lord Somebody, an old volume that had probably come from one of his estate sales, old Mrs. So-and-So up in Poughkeepsie, broken hip, no children, all very sad.
He was pouring me tea, pushing a plate my way. In an attempt to hide my discomfort I put my head down and plowed into the toast—and nearly choked, since my throat was too raw for me to swallow. Too quickly I reached for the tea, so I sloshed it on the tablecloth and had to scramble to blot it up.
“No—no, it doesn’t matter—here—”
My napkin was sopping wet; I didn’t know what to do with it; in my confusion I dropped it on top of my toast and reached under my glasses to rub my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I blurted.
“Sorry?” He was looking at me as if I’d asked him for directions to a place he wasn’t sure how to get to. “Oh, come now—”
“Please don’t make me go.”
“What’s that? Make you
go?
Go where?” He pulled his half-moon glasses low and looked at me over the tops of them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, in a playful, half-irritated voice. “Tell you where I ought to make you go is straight back to bed. You sound like you’re down with the Black Death.”
But his manner failed to reassure me. Paralyzed with embarrassment, determined not to start crying, I found myself staring hard at the forlorn spot by the stove where once upon a time Cosmo’s basket had stood.
“Ah,” said Hobie, when he saw me looking at the empty corner. “Yes.
There you go. Deaf as a haddock, having three and four seizures a week but still we wanted him to live forever. I blubbed like a baby. If you’d told me Welty was going to go before Cosmo—he spent half his life carrying that dog back and forth to the vet—Look here,” he said in an altered voice, leaning forward and trying to catch my eye when still I sat speechless and miserable. “Come on. I know you’ve been through a lot but there’s no need in the world to fuss about it now. You look very shook—now, now, yes you do,” he said crisply. “Very shook indeed and—bless you!”—flinching a bit—“bad dose of something, for sure. Don’t fret—everything’s all right. Go back to bed, why don’t you, and we’ll hash it out later.”
“I know but—” I turned my head away to stifle a wet, burbling sneeze. “I don’t have any place to go.”
He leaned back in his chair: courteous, careful, something a little dusty about him. “Theo—” tapping at his lower lip—“how old are you?”
“Fifteen. Fifteen and a half.”
“And—” he seemed to be working out how to ask it—“what about your grandfather?”
“Oh,” I said, helplessly, after a pause.
“You’ve spoken to him? He knows that you’ve nowhere to go?”
“Well, shit—” it had just slipped out; Hobie put up a hand to reassure me—“you don’t understand. I mean—I don’t know if he has Alzheimer’s or what, but when they called him he didn’t even ask to speak to me.”
“So—” Hobie leaned his chin heavily in his hand and eyed me like a skeptical schoolteacher—“you didn’t speak to him.”
“No—I mean not personally—this lady was there, helping out—” Xandra’s friend Lisa (solicitous, following me around, voicing gentle but increasingly urgent concerns that “the family” be notified) had retreated to a corner at some point to dial the number I gave her—and got off the phone with such a look that it had elicited, from Xandra, the only laugh of the evening.
“This lady?” said Hobie, in the silence that had fallen, in a voice you might employ with a mental patient.
“Right. I mean—” I scrubbed a hand over my face; the colors in the kitchen were too intense; I felt lightheaded, out of control—“I guess Dorothy answered the phone and Lisa said she was like ‘okay, wait,’—not even ‘Oh no!’ or ‘what happened?’ or ‘how terrible!’—just ‘hang on, let me get him,’ and then my granddad came on and Lisa told him about the
wreck and he listened, and then he said well, he was sorry to hear it, but in this sort of
tone,
Lisa said. Not ‘what can I do’ or ‘when is the funeral’ or anything. Just, like, thank you for calling, we appreciate it, bye. I mean—I could have told her,” I added nervously when Hobie didn’t answer. “Because, I mean, they really didn’t like my dad—
really
didn’t like him—Dorothy is his stepmother and they hated each other from Day One but he never got along with Grandpa Decker either—”
“All right, all right. Steady on—”
“—and, I mean, my dad was in some trouble when he was a kid, that might have had something to do with it—he was arrested but I don’t know what for—honestly I don’t know why, but they never wanted anything to do with him for as long as I remember and they never wanted anything to do with me either—”
“Calm down! I’m not trying to—”
“—because, I swear, I hardly ever met them, I really don’t know them at all but there’s no reason for them to hate me—not that my grandpa is such a great guy, he was pretty abusive to my dad actually—”
“Ssh—no carrying on! I’m not trying to put the screws on you, I just want to know—no now, listen,” he said as I tried to talk over him, batting away my words as if he were shooing a fly from the table.
“My mother’s lawyer is here. In the city. Will you come with me to see him? No,” I said in confusion as his eyebrows came together, “not a lawyer lawyer, but that handles money? I talked to him on the phone? Before I left?”
“Okay,” said Pippa—laughing, pink-cheeked from the cold—“what’s wrong with this dog? Has he never seen a car?”
Bright red hair; green wool hat; the shock of seeing her in broad daylight was a dash of cold water. She had a hitch in her walk, probably from the accident but there was a grasshopper lightness to it like the odd, graceful preliminary to a dance step; and she was wrapped in so many layers against the cold that she looked like a colorful little cocoon, with feet.
“He was yowling like a cat,” she said, unwinding one of her many patterned scarves as Popchyk danced at her feet with the end of his leash in his mouth. “Does he always make that weird noise? I mean, a cab would go by and—whoo! in the air! I was flying him like a kite! People were laughing their heads off. Yes—” stooping to speak to the dog, rubbing the top of his head with her knuckles—“you, you need a bath, don’t you? Is he a Maltese?” she said, glancing up.
Furiously I nodded, back of my hand to my mouth, trying to choke back a sneeze.
“I love dogs.” I could hardly hear what she was saying, so dazzled was I by her eyes on mine. “I have a dog book and I memorized every breed there is. If I had a big dog I’d have a Newfoundland like Nana in Peter Pan, and if I had a small dog—well, I change my mind all the time. I like all the little terriers—Jack Russells especially, they’re always so funny and friendly on the street. But I know a wonderful Basenji too. And I met a really great Pekingese the other day. Really really tiny and really intelligent. Only royalty could have them in China. They’re a very ancient breed.”
“Maltese are ancient, too,” I croaked, glad to have an interesting fact to contribute. “They date back to ancient Greece.”
“That’s why you picked a Maltese? Because it was ancient?”
“Um—” Stifling a cough.
She was saying something else—to the dog, not me—but I’d fallen into another fit of sneezing. Quickly, Hobie scrabbled for the closest thing at hand—a table napkin—and passed it over to me.
“All right, enough,” he said. “Back to bed. No, no,” he said as I tried to hand the napkin back to him, “you keep it. Now tell me—” eyeing my wrecked plate, spilled tea and soggy toast—“what can I bring you for breakfast?”
Caught between sneezes, I gave a bright, Russian-accented shrug I’d picked up from Boris:
anything.
“All right then, if you don’t mind it, I’ll make you some oatmeal. Easy on the throat. Don’t you have any socks?”
“Um—” She was busy with the dog, mustard-yellow sweater and hair like an autumn leaf, and her colors were mixed up and confused with the bright colors of the kitchen: striped apples glowing in a yellow bowl, the sharp ding of silver glinting from the coffee can where Hobie kept his paintbrushes.
“Pyjamas?” Hobie was saying. “No? I’ll see what I can find of Welty’s. And when you get out of those things I’ll throw them in the wash. Now, off with you,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder so suddenly I jumped.
“I—”
“You can stay. As long as however you like. And don’t worry, I’ll go with you to see your solicitor, it’ll all be fine.”
ii.
G
ROGGY
,
SHIVERING,
I
MADE
my way down the dark hall and eased between the covers, which were heavy and ice-cold. The room smelled damp, and though there were many interesting things to look at—a pair of terra-cotta griffins, Victorian beadwork pictures, even a crystal ball—the dark brown walls, their deep dry texture like cocoa powder, soaked me through and through with a sense of Hobie’s voice and also of Welty’s, a friendly brown that saturated me to the core and spoke in warm old-fashioned tones, so that drifting in a lurid stream of fever I felt wrapped and reassured by their presence whereas Pippa had cast a shifting, colored nimbus of her own, I was thinking in a mixed-up way about scarlet leaves and bonfire sparks flying up in darkness and also my painting, how it would look against such a rich, dark, light-absorbing ground. Yellow feathers. Flash of crimson. Bright black eyes.
I woke with a jolt—terrified, flailing, back on the bus again with someone lifting the painting from my knapsack—to find Pippa lifting up the sleepy dog, her hair brighter than everything else in the room.
