The Goldfinch, Page 29

  another thing about Kotku, she was always getting in scary girl fights, mostly with other white trash girls like herself but occasionally with the real gangsta girls, who were Latina and black.) But who cared what crappy girl Boris liked? Weren’t we still friends? Best friends? Brothers practically?

  Then again: there was not exactly a word for Boris and me. Until Kotku came along, I had never thought too much about it. It was just about drowsy air-conditioned afternoons, lazy and drunk, blinds closed against the glare, empty sugar packets and dried-up orange peels strewn on the carpet, “Dear Prudence” from the White Album (which Boris adored) or else the same mournful old Radiohead over and over:

  For a minute

  I lost myself, I lost myself…

  The glue we sniffed came on with a dark, mechanical roar, like the windy rush of propellers: engines on! We fell back on the bed into darkness, like sky divers tumbling backwards out of a plane, although—that high, that far gone—you had to be careful with the bag over your face or else you were picking dried blobs of glue out of your hair and off the end of your nose when you came to. Exhausted sleep, spine to spine, in dirty sheets that smelled of cigarette ash and dog, Popchik belly-up and snoring, subliminal whispers in the air blowing from the wall vents if you listened hard enough. Whole months passed where the wind never stopped, blown sand rattling against the windows, the surface of the swimming pool wrinkled and sinister-looking. Strong tea in the mornings, stolen chocolate. Boris yanking my hair by the handful and kicking me in the ribs. Wake up, Potter. Rise and shine.

  I told myself I didn’t miss him, but I did. I got stoned alone, watched Adult Access and the Playboy channel, read Grapes of Wrath and The House of the Seven Gables which seemed as if they had to be tied for the most boring book ever written, and for what felt like thousands of hours—time enough to learn Danish or play the guitar if I’d been trying—fooled around in the street with a fucked-up skateboard Boris and I had found in one of the foreclosed houses down the block. I went to swim-team parties with Hadley—no-drinking parties, with parents present—and, on the weekends, attended parents-away parties of kids I barely knew, Xanax bars and Jägermeister shots, riding home on the hissing CAT bus at two a.m. so fucked up that I had to hold the seat in front of me to keep from falling out in the aisle. After school, if I was bored, it was easy enough to go hang out with one of the big lackadaisical stoner crowds who floated around between Del Taco and the kiddie arcades on the Strip.

  But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris—budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages—who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped. Even when he took things without asking, as he all too frequently did—little things were always disappearing, DVDs and school supplies from my locker, more than once I’d caught him going through my pockets for money—his own possessions meant so little to him that somehow it wasn’t stealing; whenever he came into cash himself, he split it with me down the middle and anything that belonged to him, he gave me gladly if I asked for it (and sometimes when I didn’t, as when Mr. Pavlikovsky’s gold lighter, which I’d admired in passing, turned up in the outside pocket of my backpack).

  The funny thing: I’d worried, if anything, that Boris was the one who was a little too affectionate, if affectionate is the right word. The first time he’d turned in bed and draped an arm over my waist, I lay there half-asleep for a moment, not knowing what to do: staring at my old socks on the floor, empty beer bottles, my paperbacked copy of The Red Badge of Courage. At last—embarrassed—I faked a yawn and tried to roll away, but instead he sighed and pulled me closer, with a sleepy, snuggling motion.

  Ssh, Potter, he whispered, into the back of my neck. Is only me.

  It was weird. Was it weird? It was; and it wasn’t. I’d fallen back to sleep shortly after, lulled by his bitter, beery unwashed smell and his breath easy in my ear. I was aware I couldn’t explain it without making it sound like more than it was. On nights when I woke strangled with fear there he was, catching me when I started up terrified from the bed, pulling me back down in the covers beside him, muttering in nonsense Polish, his voice throaty and strange with sleep. We’d drowse off in each other’s arms, listening to music from my iPod (Thelonious Monk, the Velvet Underground, music my mother had liked) and sometimes wake clutching each other like castaways or much younger children.

  And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet—fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream. We never spoke of it; it wasn’t quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about. And yet, more than once, I had wondered if I should step up my nerve and say something: draw some kind of line, make things clear, just to make absolutely sure he didn’t have the wrong idea. But the moment had never come. Now there was no point in speaking up and being awkward about the whole thing, though I scarcely took comfort in the fact.

  I hated how much I missed him. There was a lot of drinking going on at my house, on Xandra’s end anyway, a lot of slammed doors (“Well, if it wasn’t me, it had to be you,” I heard her yelling); and without Boris there (they were both more constrained with Boris in the house) it was harder. Part of the problem was that Xandra’s hours at the bar had changed—schedules at her work had been moved; she was under a lot of stress, people she’d worked with were gone, or on different shifts; on Wednesdays and Mondays when I got up for school, I often found her just in from work, sitting alone in front of her favorite morning show too wired to sleep and swigging Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle.

  “Big old exhausted me,” she said, with an attempt at a smile, when she saw me on the stairs.

  “You should go for a swim. That’ll make you sleepy.”

  “No thanks, I think I’ll just hang out here with my Pepto. What a product. This is definitely some bubble-gum flavored awesomeness.”

  As for my dad: he was spending a lot more time at home—hanging out with me, which I enjoyed, though his mood swings wore me out. It was football season; he had a bounce in his step. After checking his BlackBerry he high-fived me and danced around the living room: “Am I a genius or what? What?” He consulted spread breakdowns, matchup reports, and—occasionally—a paperbacked book called Scorpio: Your Sports Year in Forecast. “Always looking for an edge,” he said, when I found him running down the tables and punching out numbers on the calculator like he was figuring out his income tax. “You only have to hit fifty-three, fifty-four percent to grind out a good living on this stuff—see, baccarat is strictly for entertainment, there’s no skill to it, I set myself limits and never go over, but you can really make money at the sports book if you’re disciplined about it. You have to approach it like an investor. Not like a fan, not even like a gambler because the secret is, the better team usu
ally wins the game and the linemaker is good at setting the number. Your linemaker has got limitations, though, as to public opinion. What he’s predicting is not who’s going to win but who the general public thinks is going to win. So that margin, between sentimental favorite and actual fact—fuck, see that receiver in the end zone, another big one for Pittsburgh right there, we need them to score now like we need a hole in the head—anyway, like I was saying, if I really sit down and do my homework as opposed to Joe Beefburger who picks his team by looking five minutes at the sports page? Who’s got the advantage? See, I’m not one of these saps that gets all starry-eyed about the Giants rain or shine—shit, your mother could have told you that. Scorpio is about control—that’s me. I’m competitive. Want to win at any price. That’s where my acting came from, back when I acted. Sun in Scorpio, Leo rising. All in my chart. Now you’re a Cancer, hermit crab, all secretive and up in your shell, completely different MO. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just how it is. Anyway, whatever, I always take my lead from my defensive-offensive lines, but all the same it never hurts to pay attention to these transits and solar-arc progressions on game day—”

  “Did Xandra get you interested in all this?”

  “Xandra? Half the sports book in Vegas has an astrologer on speed dial. Anyway, like I was saying, all other things equal, do the planets make a difference? Yes. I would definitely have to say yes. It’s like, is a player having a good day, is he having a bad day, is he out of sorts, whatever. Honestly it helps to have that edge when you’re getting a little, how do I put it, ha ha, stretched, although—” he showed me the fat wad of what looked like hundreds, wrapped with a rubber band—“this has been a really amazing year for me. Fifty-three percent, a thousand plays a year. That’s the magic spot.”

  Sundays were what he called major-ticket days. When I got up, I found him downstairs in a crackle of strewn newspapers, zinging around bright and restless like it was Christmas morning, opening and shutting cabinets, talking to the sports ticker on his BlackBerry and crunching on corn chips straight from the bag. If I came down and watched with him for even a little while when the big games were on sometimes he’d give me what he called “a piece—” twenty bucks, fifty, if he won. “To get you interested,” he explained, leaning forward on the sofa, rubbing his hands anxiously. “See—what we need is for the Colts to get wiped off the map during this first half of the game. Devastated. And with the Cowboys and the Niners we need the score to go over thirty in the second half—yes!” he shouted, jumping up exhilarated with raised fist. “Fumble! Redskins got the ball. We’re in business!”

  But it was confusing, because it was the Cowboys who had fumbled. I’d thought the Cowboys were supposed to win by at least fifteen. His mid-game switches in loyalty were too abrupt for me to follow and I often embarrassed myself by cheering for the wrong team; yet as we surged randomly between games, between spreads, I enjoyed his delirium and the daylong binge of greasy food, accepted the twenties and fifties he tossed at me as if they’d fallen from the sky. Other times—cresting and then tanking on some hoarse wave of enthusiasm—a vague unease took hold of him which as far as I could tell had nothing very much to do with how his games were going and he paced back and forth for no reason I could discern, hands folded atop his head, staring at the set with the air of a man unhinged by business failure: talking to the coaches, the players, asking what the hell was wrong with them, what the hell was happening. Sometimes he followed me into the kitchen, with an oddly supplicant demeanor. “I’m getting killed in there,” he said, humorously, leaning on the counter, his bearing comical, something in his hunched posture suggesting a bank robber doubled over from a gunshot wound.

  Lines x. Lines y. Yards run, cover the spread. On game day, until five o’clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom—autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day—but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn’t shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east.

  The panic that overtook me then was hard to explain. Those game days broke up with a swiftness, a sense of losing blood almost, that reminded me of watching the apartment in New York being boxed up and carted away: groundlessness and flux, nothing to hang on to. Upstairs, with the door of my room shut, I turned all the lights on, smoked weed if I had it, listened to music on my portable speakers—previously unlistened-to music like Shostakovich, and Erik Satie, that I’d put on my iPod for my mother and then never got around to taking off—and I looked at library books: art books, mostly, because they reminded me of her.

  The Masterworks of Dutch Painting. Delft: The Golden Age. Drawings by Rembrandt, His Anonymous Pupils and Followers. From looking on the computer at school, I’d seen that there was a book about Carel Fabritius (a tiny book, only a hundred pages) but they didn’t have it at the school library and our computer time at school was so closely monitored that I was too paranoid to do any research on line—especially after a thoughtlessly clicked link (Het Puttertje, The Goldfinch, 1654) had taken me to a scarily official-looking site called Missing Art Database that required me to sign in with my name and address. I’d been so freaked out at the unexpected sight of the words Interpol and Missing that I’d panicked and shut down the computer entirely, something we weren’t supposed to do. “What have you just done?” demanded Mr. Ostrow the librarian before I was able to get it back up again. He reached over my shoulder and began typing in the password.

  “I—” In spite of myself, I was relieved that I hadn’t been looking at porn once he began surfing back through the history. I’d meant to buy myself a cheap laptop with the five hundred bucks my dad had given me for Christmas, but somehow that money had gotten away from me—Missing Art, I told myself; no reason to panic over that word missing, destroyed art was missing art, wasn’t it? Even though I hadn’t put down a name, it worried me that I’d tried to check out the database from my school’s IP address. For all I knew, the investigators who’d been to see me had kept track, and knew that I was in Vegas; the connection, though small, was real.

  The painting was hidden, quite cleverly as I thought, in a clean cotton pillowcase duct-taped to the back of my headboard. I’d learned, from Hobie, how carefully old things had to be handled (sometimes he used white cotton gloves for particularly delicate objects) and I never touched it with my bare hands, only by the edges. I never took it out except when Dad and Xandra weren’t there and I knew they wouldn’t be back for a while—though even when I couldn’t see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.

  Taking it out, handling it, looking at it, was nothing to be done lightly. Even in the act of reaching for it there was a sense of expansion, a waft and a lifting; and at some strange point, when I’d looked at it long enough, eyes dry from the refrigerated desert air, all space appeared to vanish between me and it so that when I looked up it was the painting and not me that was real.

  1622–1654. Son of a schoolteacher. Fewer than a dozen works accurately attributed to him. According to van Bleyswijck, the city historian of Delft, Fabritius was in his studio painting the sexton of Delft’s Oude Kerk when, at half past ten in the morning, the explosion of the powder magazine took place. The body of the painter Fabritius had been pulled from the wreckage of his studio by neighboring burghers, “with great sorrow,” the books said, “and no little effort.” What held me fast in these brief library-book accounts was the element of cha
nce: random disasters, mine and his, converging on the same unseen point, the big bang as my father called it, not with any kind of sarcasm or dismissiveness but instead a respectful acknowledgment for the powers of fortune that governed his own life. You could study the connections for years and never work it out—it was all about things coming together, things falling apart, time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

  Upstairs, the tap water from the bathroom sink was too chlorinated to drink. Nights, a dry wind blew trash and beer cans down the street. Moisture and humidity, Hobie had told me, were the worst things in the world for antiques; on the tall-case clock he’d been repairing when I left, he’d showed me how the wood had been rotted out underneath from the damp (“someone sluicing stone floors with a bucket, you see how soft this wood is, how worn away?”)

  Time warp: a way of seeing things twice, or more than twice. Just as my dad’s rituals, his betting systems, all his oracles and magic were predicated on a field awareness of unseen patterns, so too the explosion in Delft was part of a complex of events that ricocheted into the present. The multiple outcomes could make you dizzy. “The money’s not important,” said my dad. “All money represents is the energy of the thing, you know? It’s how you track it. The flow of chance.” Steadily the goldfinch gazed at me, with shiny, changeless eyes. The wooden panel was tiny, “only slightly larger than an A-4 sheet of paper” as one of my art books had pointed out, although all that dates-and-dimensions stuff, the dead textbook info, was as irrelevant in its way as the sports-page stats when the Packers were up by two in the fourth quarter and a thin icy snow had begun to fall on the field. The painting, the magic and aliveness of it, was like that odd airy moment of the snow falling, greenish light and flakes whirling in the cameras, where you no longer cared about the game, who won or lost, but just wanted to drink in that speechless windswept moment. When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

  v.

  THE GOOD THING: I was pleased at how nice my dad was being. He’d been taking me out to dinners—nice dinners, at white-tablecloth restaurants, just the two of us—at least once a week. Sometimes he invited Boris to come, invitations Boris always jumped to accept—the lure of a good meal was powerful enough to override even the gravitational tug of Kotku—but strangely, I found myself enjoying it more when it was just my dad and me.

  “You know,” he said, at one of these dinners when we were lingering late over dessert—talking about school, about all sorts of things (this new, involved dad! where had he come from?)—“you know, I really have enjoyed getting to know you since you’ve been out here, Theo.”

  “Well, uh, yeah, me too,” I said, embarrassed but also meaning it.

  “I mean—” my dad ran a hand through his hair—“thanks for giving me a second chance, kiddo. Because I made a huge mistake. I never should have let my relationship with your mother get in the way of my relationship with you. No, no,” he said, raising his hand, “I’m not blaming anything on your mom, I’m way past that. It’s just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close—” he laughed, sadly—“there wasn’t much room for three.”

  “Well—” My mother and I tiptoeing around the apartment, whispering, trying to avoid him. Secrets, laughter. “I mean, I just—”

  “No, no, I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m the dad, I’m the one who should have known better. It’s just that it got to be a kind of vicious circle if you know what I mean. Me feeling alienated, bummed-out, drinking a lot. And I never should have let that happen. I missed, like, some really important years in your life. I’m the one that has to live with that.”

  “Um—” I felt so bad I didn’t know what to say.

  “Not trying to put you on the spot, pal. Just saying I’m glad that we’re friends now.”

  “Well yeah,” I said, staring into my scraped-clean crème brûlée plate, “me too.”

  “And, I mean—I want to make it up to you. See, I’m doing so well on the sports book this year—” my dad took a sip of his coffee—“I want to open you a savings account. You know, just put a little something aside. Because, you know, I really didn’t do right by you as far as your mom, you know, and all those months that I was gone.”

  “Dad,” I said, disconcerted. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Oh, but I want to! You have a Social Security number, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I’ve already got ten thousand set aside. That’s a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I’ll open an account in your name, okay?”

  vi.

  APART FROM SCHOOL, I’D hardly seen Boris, except for a Saturday afternoon trip when my dad had taken us in to the Carnegie Deli at the Mirage for sable and bialys. But then, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, he came thumping upstairs when I wasn’t expecting him and said: “Your dad has been having a bad run, did you know that?”

  I put down Silas Marner, which we were reading for school. “What?”

  “Well, he’s been playing at two hundred dollar tables—two hundred dollars a pop,” he said. “You can lose a thousand in five minutes, easy.”

  “A thousand dollars is nothing for him,” I said; and then, when Boris did not reply: “How much did he say he lost?”

  “Didn’t say,” said Boris. “But a lot.”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t just bullshitting you?”

  Boris laughed. “Could be,” he said, sitting on the bed and leaning back on his elbows. “You don’t know anything about it?”

  “Well—” As far as I knew, my father had cleaned up when the Bills had won the week before. “I don’t see how he can be doing too bad. He’s been taking me to Bouchon and places like that.”

  “Yes, but maybe is good reason for that,” said Boris sagely.

  “Reason? What reason?”

  Boris seemed about to say something, then changed his mind.

  “Well, who knows,” he said, lighting a cigarette and taking a sharp drag. “Your dad—he’s part Russian.”

  “Right,” I said, reaching for the cigarette myself. I’d often heard Boris and my father, in their arm-waving “intellectual talks,” discussing the many celebrated gamblers in Russian history: Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, other names I didn’t know.

  “Well—very Russian, you know, to complain how bad things are all the time! Even if life is great—keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.” He was wearing a discarded dress shirt of my father’s, washed nearly transparent and so big that it billowed on him like some item of Arab or Hindu costume. “Only, your dad, sometimes is hard to tell between joking and serious.” Then, watching me carefully: “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He knows we talk. That’s why he told me. He wouldn’t tell me if he didn’t want you to know.”

  “Yeah.” I was fairly sure this wasn’t the case. My dad was the kind of guy who in the right mood would happily discuss his personal life with his boss’s wife or some other inappropriate person.

  “He’d tell you himself,” said Boris, “if he thought you wanted to know.”

  “Look. Like you said—” My dad had a taste for masochism, the overblown gesture; on our Sundays together, he loved to exaggerate his misfortunes, groaning and staggering, complaining loudly of being ‘wiped out’ or ‘destroyed’ after a lost game even as he’d won half a dozen others and was totting up the profits on the calculator. “Sometimes he lays it on a bit th
ick.”

  “Well, yes, is true,” said Boris sensibly. He took the cigarette back, inhaled, and then, companionably, passed it to me. “You can have the rest.”

  “No, thanks.”

  There was a bit of a silence, during which we could hear the television crowd roar of my dad’s football game. Then Boris leaned back on his elbows again and said: “What is there to eat downstairs?”

  “Not a motherfucking thing.”

  “There was leftover Chinese, I thought.”

  “Not any more. Somebody ate it.”

  “Shit. Maybe I’ll go to Kotku’s, her mom has frozen pizzas. You want to come?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. “Suit yourself, yo,” he said, in his “gangsta” voice (discernible from his regular voice only by