The Goldfinch (92 page)

“I didn’t steal it.”

Boris chuckled. “No, no. You explained. Preserving it in safety. Big important duty in life. You’re telling me,” he said, leaning forward, “you really haven’t opened it up and looked at it? All these years? What is the matter with you?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said again. “
When
did you take it?” I said when he rolled his eyes away from me. “How?”

“Look, like I said—”

“How do you expect me to believe one word of this?”

Boris rolled his eyes again. He reached in his coat pocket; he punched up a picture on his iPhone. Then he handed it across the table to me.

It was the verso of the painting. You could find a reproduction of the front anywhere. But the back was as distinctive as a fingerprint: rich drips of sealing wax, brown and red; irregular patchwork of European labels (Roman numerals; spidery, quilled signatures), which had the feeling of a steamer trunk, or some international treaty of long ago. The crumbling yellows and browns were layered with an almost organic richness, like dead leaves.

He put the phone back in his pocket. We sat for a long while in silence. Then Boris reached for a cigarette.

“Believe me now?” he said, blowing a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth.

The atoms in my head were spinning apart; the sparkle of the bump had already begun to turn, apprehension and disquiet moving in subtly like dark air before a thunderstorm. For a long, somber moment we looked at each other: high chemical frequency, solitude to solitude, like two Tibetan monks on a mountaintop.

Then I stood without a word and got my coat. Boris jumped up too.

“Wait,” he said, as I shouldered past him. “Potter? Don’t go angry. When I said I would make it up to you? I meant it—

“Potter?” he called again as I stepped through the clattering bead curtain and out on to the street, into the dirty gray light of dawn. Avenue C was empty except for a solitary cab which seemed to be as glad to see me as I was to see it, and darted over to stop for me immediately. Before he could say another word I got in and drove off and left him there, standing in his overcoat by a bank of trash cans.

x.

I
T WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN
the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding my teeth and a heart about to explode. Bureaucratic daylight: pedestrian morning blaring, bright with threat. By quarter of ten I was sitting on the floor of my room at Hobie’s house with my mind reeling like a spun-down top wobbling and veering from side to side. Strewn on the carpet around me were a pair of shopping bags; a
never-used pup tent; a beige percale pillowcase that still smelled like my bedroom in Vegas; a tin full of assorted Roxicodones and morphs I knew I ought to flush; and a snarl of packing tape into which I’d cut, painstakingly, with an X-Acto knife, twenty minutes of delicate work, pulse throbbing in my fingertips, terrified of going in too hard and nicking the painting by mistake, finally getting the side open, peeling the tape off strip by strip by careful strip, with trembling hands: only to find—sandwiched in cardboard and wrapped with newspaper—a scribbled-up Civics workbook (
Democracy, Diversity, and You!
).

Bright multicultural throng. On the cover Asian kids, Latino kids, African American kids, Native American kids, a girl in a Muslim head scarf and a white kid in a wheelchair smiled and held hands before an American flag. Inside, within the book’s cheery dull world of good citizenship, where persons of different ethnicities all participated happily in their communities and inner-city kids stood around their housing project with a watering can, caring for a potted tree with branches illustrating the different branches of government, Boris had drawn daggers with his name on them, roses and hearts surrounding Kotku’s initials, and a set of spying eyes, peeping slyly to one side, above a partially filled out sample test:

Why does man need government?
to impose ideology, punish wrongdoers, and promote equality and brotherhood among peoples

What are some duties of an American citizen?
to vote for Congress, celebrate diversity, and fight the enemies of the state

Hobie, thankfully, was out. The pills I’d swallowed hadn’t worked, and after two hours of twisting and flopping on my bed in a torturous, falling, half-dream state—thoughts flying, exhausted from my heart beating so fast, Boris’s voice still running through my mind—I forced myself to get up, clear the mess strewn round my bedroom, and shower and shave: nicking myself in the process, since my upper lip was almost dentist-chair numb from the nosebleed I’d suffered. Then I made myself a pot of coffee, found a stale scone in the kitchen and forced myself to eat it, and was down in the shop and open for business by noon—just in time to intercept the mail lady in her plastic rain poncho (looking a bit alarmed, standing well back from rheumy-eyed me with my cut lip and my bloody
Kleenex), although as she was handing the mail over to me with latex-gloved hands I realized: what was the point? Reeve could write Hobie all he wanted—phone Interpol—who cared any more.

It was raining. Pedestrians huddled and scurrying. Rain pelting hard at the window, rain beading on the plastic garbage bags at the curb. There at the desk, in my musty armchair, I tried to anchor myself or at least take some kind of comfort in the faded silks and dimness of the shop, its bittersweet gloom like rainy dark classrooms of childhood, but the dopamine slam had dropped me hard and left me with the pre-tremblings of something that felt very like death—a sadness you felt in your stomach first, beating on the inside of the forehead, all the darkness I’d shut out roaring back in.

Tunnel vision. All those years I’d drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn’t laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.

What way was there to make it okay? None. In a way Boris had done me a favor by taking the thing—at least, I knew that was how most people would see it; I was off the hook; no one could blame me; the greater part of my problems had been solved at a stroke but while I knew that any sane person would be relieved to have the painting off their hands, yet I’d never felt quite so scorched with despair, self-hatred, shame.

Warm weary shop. I could not stay still; I stood up and sat down, walked to the window and back again. Everything was sodden with horror. A bisque Pulcinella eyed me with spite. Even the furniture looked sickly and disproportionate. How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person on the basis of my secret uptown? Yet I had. The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.

xi.

W
HEN
H
OBIE GOT HOME
, around two, he walked in off the street with a jingle of bells like a customer.

“Well, that was certainly a surprise last night.” He was pink-cheeked from the rain, shrugging off his raincoat and shaking the water off; he was dressed for the auction house, Windsor-knotted tie and one of the beautiful old suits. “Boris!” He’d done well at his auction, I could tell by his mood; though he tended not to go in with strong bids he knew what he wanted and every so often in a slow session, when no one was up against him, he made off with a pile of beauties. “I gather you two made quite a night of it?”

“Ah.” I was hunched in a corner, sipping tea; my headache was ferocious.

“Funny to meet him after hearing so much about him. Like meeting a character in a book. I’d always pictured him as the Artful Dodger in
Oliver
—oh you know—the little boy, the urchin, what’s the actor’s name. Jack something. Ragged coat. Smear of dirt along the cheek.”

“Believe me, he was dirty enough back then.”

“Well you know, Dickens doesn’t tell us what happened to the Dodger. Grew up to be a respectable businessman, who knows? And wasn’t Popper out of his mind? I’ve never seen an animal so happy.

“Oh and yes—” half-turning, busy with his coat; he hadn’t noticed me go still at Popper’s name—“before I forget, Kitsey called.”

I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. I hadn’t thought of Popper even once.

“Late-ish—ten. Told her you’d run into Boris, you’d come by, you’d gone out, hope that was all right.”

“Sure,” I said, after an effortful pause, struggling to collect my thoughts which were galloping in several very bad directions at once.

“
What
must I remind you.” Hobie put his finger to his lips. “I was given a charge. Let me think.

“I can’t remember,” he said after a small start, shaking his head. “You’ll have to phone her. Dinner tonight, I know, at someone’s house. Dinner at eight! That I remember. But I can’t remember where.”

“The Longstreets,” I said, my heart plunging.

“That sounds right. Anyhow, Boris! Great fun—great charmer—how long’s he in town for? How long’s he here for?” he repeated amiably when I didn’t answer—he couldn’t see my face, staring out horrified into
the street. “We should have him over for dinner, don’t you think? Why don’t you ask him to give us a couple of nights when he’s free? That is, if you like,” he said, when I didn’t reply. “Up to you. Let me know.”

xii.

A
BOUT TWO HOURS LATER
—exhausted, eyes streaming with pain from my headache—I was still frantically wondering how to get Popper back while simultaneously inventing, and rejecting, explanations for his absence. I left him tied in front of a store? Someone had snatched him? An obvious lie: quite apart from the fact that it was pouring rain, Popper was so old and cranky on the leash I could hardly drag him down to the fire hydrant. Groomer? Popper’s groomer, a needy-seeming old lady named Cecelia who worked out of her apartment, always had him back by three. Vet? Quite apart from the fact that Popper wasn’t sick (and why wouldn’t I have mentioned it if he was?) Popper went to the same vet that Hobie had known since the days of Welty and Chessie. Dr. McDermott’s office was right down the street. Why would I have taken him anywhere else?

I groaned, got up, walked to the window. Again and again I ran against the same dead end, Hobie walking in befuddled, as he was bound to do in an hour or two, looking around the store: “Where’s Popper? Have you seen him?” And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. “Where’s Popper?” No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment.

The ragged sheets of rain had slowed to a drizzle, shining sidewalks and water dripping from the awnings, and everyone on the street seemed to have seized the moment to throw on a raincoat and dash out to the corner with the dog: dogs everywhere I looked, galumphing sheepdog, black standard poodle, terrier mutts, retriever mutts, an elderly French bulldog and a self-satisfied pair of dachshunds with their chins in the air, prissing in tandem across the street. In agitation I went back to my chair, sat down, picked up the Christie’s house sale catalogue and began to leaf through it in a rattled way: horrible modernist watercolors, two thousand dollars for an ugly Victorian bronze of two buffalos fighting, absurd.