The Goldfinch (68 page)

“You’re missing out, Theo,” said Susanna my counselor (first names only: all pals), “extracurricular activities are what anchor our students in an urban campus. Our younger students especially. It can be easy to get lost.”

“Well—” She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn’t socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger (even one spindly twelve year old rumored to have an IQ of 260) their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I’d forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; they freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless. For all I had in common with any of them, I might as well have tried to go down and hang out with the eight year olds at PS 41.

“I see you’re taking French. The French Club meets once a week, in a French restaurant on University Place. And on Tuesdays they go up to the
Alliance Française and watch French-language movies. That seems like something you might enjoy.”

“Maybe.” The head of the French department, an elderly Algerian, had already approached me (shockingly—at his large firm hand on my shoulder, I’d jumped like I was being mugged) and told me without preamble that he was teaching a seminar that I might like to sit in on, the roots of modern terrorism starting with the FLN and the Guerre d’Algérie—I hated how all the teachers in the program seemed to know who I was, addressing me with apparent foreknowledge of “the tragedy,” as my cinema teacher, Mrs. Lebowitz (“Call me Ruthie”) had termed it. She too—Mrs. Lebowitz—had been after me to join the Cinema club after reading an essay I’d written about
The Bicycle Thief;
she’d suggested as well that I might also enjoy the Philosophy Club, which entailed weekly discussion of what she called The Big Questions. “Um, maybe,” I said politely.

“Well, from your essay, it seems as if you are drawn to what I’ll call for lack of a better term, the metaphysical territory. Such as why do good people suffer,” she said, when I continued to look at her blankly. “And is fate random. What your essay deals with is really not so much the cinematic aspect of De Sica as the fundamental chaos and uncertainty of the world we live in.”

“I don’t know,” I said, in the uneasy pause that fell. Was my essay really about these things? I hadn’t even liked
The Bicycle Thief
(or
Kes,
or
La Mouette,
or
Lacombe Lucien,
or any of the other extremely depressing foreign films we had watched in Mrs. Lebowitz’s class).

Mrs. Lebowitz looked at me so long I felt uncomfortable. Then she adjusted her bright red eyeglasses and said: “Well, most of what we do in European Cinema is pretty heavy. Which is why I’m thinking maybe you’d like to sit in on one of my seminars for film majors. ‘Screwball Comedies of the Thirties’ or maybe even ‘Silent Cinema.’ We do
Dr. Caligari
but also a lot of Buster Keaton, a lot of Charlie Chaplin—chaos, you know, but in a non-threatening framework. Life-affirming stuff.”

“Maybe,” I said. But I had no intention of burdening myself with even one scrap of extra work, no matter how life-affirming in nature. For—from almost the moment I’d gotten in the door—the deceptive burst of energy by which I had clawed my way into the Early College program had collapsed. Its lavish offerings left me unmoved; I had no desire to exert myself one bit more than I absolutely had to. All I wanted was to scrape by.

Consequently, the enthusiastic welcome of my teachers soon began to wane into resignation and a sort of vague, impersonal regret. I was not seeking out challenges, developing my skills, expanding my horizons, utilizing the many resources available to me. I was not, as Susanna had delicately put it, adjusting to the program. In fact—increasingly as the term wore on, as my teachers slowly distanced themselves and a more resentful note began to surface (“the academic opportunities offered do not seem to spur Theodore to greater efforts, on any front”) I grew more and more suspicious that the only reason I’d been allowed into the program at all was because of “the tragedy.” Someone had flagged my application in the admissions office, passed it to an administrator, my God, this poor kid, victim of terrorism, blah blah blah, school has a responsibility, how many places do we have left, do you think we can fit him in? Almost certainly I had ruined the life of some deserving brainiac out in the Bronx—some poor clarinet-playing loser in the projects who was still getting beaten up for his algebra homework, who was going to end up punching tickets in a tollbooth instead of teaching fluid mechanics at Cal Tech because I’d taken his or her rightful place.

Clearly a mistake had been made. “Theodore participates very little in class and appears to have no desire to expend any more attention on his studies than absolutely necessary,” wrote my French professor, in a scathing midterm report that—in the absence of any closely supervising adult—no one saw but me. “It is to be hoped that his failures will drive him to prove himself so that he may profit from his situation in the second half of the term.”

But I had no desire to profit from my situation, even less to prove myself. Like an amnesiac I roamed the streets and (instead of doing my homework, or attending my language lab, or joining any of the clubs to which I had been invited) rode the subway out to purgatorial end-of-the-line neighborhoods where I wandered alone among bodegas and hair-weave emporiums. But soon I lost interest even in my newfound mobility—hundreds of miles of track, riding just for the hell of it—and instead, like a stone sinking soundlessly into deep water, lost myself in idlework down in Hobie’s basement, a welcoming drowsiness beneath the sidewalk where I was insulated from the city blare and all the airborne bristle of office towers and skyscrapers, where I was happy to polish table-tops and listen to classical music on WNYC for hours on end.

After all: what did I care about
passé composé
or the works of Turgenev? Was it wrong, wanting to sleep late with the covers over my head and wander around a peaceful house with old seashells in drawers and wicker baskets of folded upholstery fabric stored under the parlor secretary, sunset falling in drastic coral spokes through the fanlight over the front door? Before long, between school and workshop, I had slipped into a sort of forgetful doze, a skewed, dreamlike version of my former life where I walked familiar streets yet lived in unfamiliar circumstances, among different faces; and though often walking to school I thought of my old, lost life with my mother—Canal Street Station, lighted bins of flowers at the Korean market, anything could trigger it—it was as if a black curtain had come down on my life in Vegas.

Only sometimes, in unguarded moments, it struck through in such mutinous bursts that I stopped mid-step on the sidewalk, amazed. Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place. Maybe it was just I’d sobered up a bit, no longer the chronic waste and splendor of those blazing adolescent drunks, our own little warrior tribe of two rampaging in the desert; maybe this was just how it was when you got older, although it was impossible to imagine Boris (in Warsaw, Karmeywallag, New Guinea, wherever) living a sedate prelude-to-adulthood life such as the one I’d fallen into. Andy and I—even Tom Cable and I—had always talked obsessively about what we were going to be when we grew up, but with Boris, the future had never appeared to enter his head any further than his next meal. I could not envision him preparing in any way to earn a living or to be a productive member of society. And yet to be with Boris was to know that life was full of great, ridiculous possibilities—far bigger than anything they taught in school. I’d long ago given up trying to text him or call; messages to Kotku’s phone went unanswered, his home number in Vegas had been disconnected. I could not imagine—given his wide sphere of movement—that I would ever see him again. And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old Polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

And—sometimes, unexpectedly, with a sharpness that was almost pain—I remembered my father. Chinatown made me think of him in its
flash and seediness, its slippery unreadable moods: mirrors and fishtanks, shop windows with plastic flowers and pots of lucky bamboo. Sometimes when I walked down to Canal Street for Hobie, to buy rottenstone and Venice turpentine at Pearl Paint, I ended up drifting over to Mulberry Street to a restaurant my dad had liked, not far from the E train, eight stairs down to a basement with stained Formica tables where I bought crispy scallion pancakes, spicy pork, dishes I had to point at because the menu was in Chinese. The first time I’d shown up at Hobie’s laden with greasy paper bags his blank expression had stopped me cold, and I stood in the middle of the floor like a sleepwalker awakened mid-dream wondering what exactly I’d been thinking—not of Hobie, certainly; he wasn’t the person who craved Chinese food all hours of the day and night.

“Oh, I
do
like it,” said Hobie hastily, “only I never think of it.” And we ate downstairs in the shop straight from the cartons, Hobie seated atop a stool in his black work apron and sleeves rolled to the elbow, the chopsticks oddly small-looking in his large fingers.

iii.

T
HE INFORMAL NATURE OF
my stay at Hobie’s worried me too. Though Hobie himself, in his foggy beneficence, didn’t appear to mind me at his house, Mr. Bracegirdle clearly viewed it as a temporary arrangement and both he and my counselor at school had taken great pains to explain that though the dormitories at my college were reserved for older students, something could be worked out in my case. But whenever the topic of living arrangements came up, I fell silent and stared at my shoes. The residence halls were crowded, fly-specked, with a graffiti-scrawled cage lift that clanked like a prison elevator: walls papered with band flyers, floors sticky with spilled beer, zombified mob of blanket-wrapped hulks drowsing on the sofas in the TV room and wasted-looking guys with facial hair—grown men in my view, big scary guys in their twenties—throwing empty forty-ounce cans at each other in the hall. “Well, you’re still a bit young,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, when—cornered—I expressed my reservations, although the true reason for my reservations was something I couldn’t discuss: how—given my circumstances—could I possibly live with a roommate? What about security? Sprinkler systems?
Theft?
The school is not responsible for the personal property of students,
said the handbook I’d been given.
We recommend that students take out a dorm insurance policy on any valuable objects that may be accompanying them to school.

In a trance of anxiety, I threw myself into the task of being indispensable to Hobie: running errands, cleaning brushes, helping him inventory his restorations and sort through fittings and old pieces of cabinet wood. While he carved splats and turned new chair legs to match old, I melted beeswax and resin on the hot plate for furniture polish: 16 parts beeswax, 4 parts resin, 1 part Venice turpentine, a fragrant butterscotch gloss that was thick like candy and satisfying to stir in the pan. Soon he was teaching me how to lay down the red on white ground for gilding: always a little of the gold rubbed down at the point where the hand would naturally touch, then a little dark wash with lampblack rubbed in interstices and backing. (“Patination is always one of the biggest problems in a piece. With new wood, if you’re going for an effect of age, a gilded patina is always easiest to fudge.”) And if, post-lampblack, the gilt was still too bright and raw-looking, he taught me to scar it with a pinpoint—light, irregular scratches of different depth—and then to ding it lightly with a ring of old keys before reversing the vacuum cleaner over it to dull it down. “Heavily restored pieces—where there are no worn bits or honorable scars, you have to hand out a few ancients and honorables yourself. The trick of it,” he explained, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist, “is never to be too nice about it.” By
nice
he meant ‘regular.’ Anything too evenly worn was a dead giveaway; real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut. “What ages wood? Anything you like. Heat and cold, fireplace soot, too many cats—or that,” he said, stepping back as I ran my finger along the rough, muddied top of a mahogany chest. “What do you suppose wrecked that surface?”

“Gosh—” I squatted on my heels to where the finish—black and sticky, like the burnt-on crust of some Easy-Bake Oven item you didn’t want to eat—feathered out to a clear, rich shine.