The Goldfinch, Page 31

  paper-wrapped dishtowel and wrapped it again with two or three (four? five?) of my dad’s old sports pages, then—impulsively, really getting into it in my own stoned, determined way—wound it around and around with tape until not a shred of newsprint was visible and the entire X-tra large roll of tape was gone. Nobody was going to be opening that package on a whim. Even if with a knife, a good one, not just scissors, it would take a good long time to get into it. At last, when I was done—the bundle looked like some weird science-fiction cocoon—I slipped the mummified painting, pillowcase and all, in my book bag, and put it under the covers by my feet. Irritably, with a groan, Popper shifted over to make room. Tiny as he was, and ridiculous-looking, still he was a fierce barker and territorial about his place next to me; and I knew if anyone opened the bedroom door while I was sleeping—even Xandra or my dad, neither of whom he liked much—he would jump up and raise the alarm.

  What had started as a reassuring thought was once again morphing into thoughts of strangers and break-ins. The air conditioner was so cold I was shaking; and when I closed my eyes I felt myself lifting up out of my body—floating up fast like an escaped balloon—only to startle with a sharp full-body jerk when I opened my eyes. So I kept my eyes shut and tried to remember what I could of the Hart Crane poem, which wasn’t much, although even isolated words like seagull and traffic and tumult and dawn carried something of its airborne distances, its sweeps from high to low; and just as I was nodding off, I fell into sort of an overpowering sense-memory of the narrow, windy, exhaust-smelling park near our old apartment, by the East River, roar of traffic washing abstractly above as the river swirled with fast, confusing currents and sometimes appeared to flow in two different directions.

  xi.

  I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH that night and was so exhausted by the time I got to school and stowed the painting in my locker that I didn’t even notice that Kotku (hanging all over Boris, like nothing had happened) was sporting a fat lip. Only when I heard this tough senior guy Eddie Riso say, “Mack truck?” did I see that somebody had smacked her pretty good in the face. She was going around laughing a bit nervously and telling people that she got hit in the mouth by a car door, but in a sort of embarrassed way that (to me, at least) didn’t ring true.

  “Did you do that?” I said to Boris, when next I saw him alone (or relatively alone) in English class.

  Boris shrugged. “I didn’t want to.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘didn’t want to’?”

  Boris looked shocked. “She made me!”

  “She made you,” I repeated.

  “Look, just because you’re jealous of her—”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t give a shit about you and Kotku—I have things of my own to worry about. You can beat her head in for all I care.”

  “Oh, God, Potter,” said Boris, suddenly sobered. “Did he come back? That guy?”

  “No,” I said, after a brief pause. “Not yet. Well, I mean, fuck it,” I said, when Boris kept on staring at me. “It’s his problem, not mine. He’ll just have to figure something out.”

  “How much is he in for?”

  “No clue.”

  “Can’t you get the money for him?”

  “Me?”

  Boris looked away. I poked him in the arm. “No, what do you mean, Boris? Can’t I get it for him? What are you talking about?” I said, when he didn’t answer.

  “Never mind,” he said quickly, settling back in his chair, and I didn’t have a chance to pursue the conversation because then Spirsetskaya walked into the room, all primed to talk about boring Silas Marner, and that was it.

  xii.

  THAT NIGHT, MY DAD came home early with bags of carry-out from his favorite Chinese, including an extra order of the spicy dumplings I liked—and he was in such a good mood that it was as if I’d dreamed Mr. Silver and the stuff from the night before.

  “So—” I said, and stopped. Xandra, having finished her spring rolls, was rinsing glasses at the sink but there was only so much I felt comfortable saying in front of her.

  He smiled his big Dad smile at me, the smile that sometimes made stewardesses bump him up to first class.

  “So what?” he said, pushing aside his carton of Szechuan shrimp to reach for a fortune cookie.

  “Uh—” Xandra had the water up loud—“Did you get everything straightened out?”

  “What,” he said lightly, “you mean with Bobo Silver?”

  “Bobo?”

  “Listen, I hope you weren’t worried about that. You weren’t, were you?”

  “Well—”

  “Bobo—” he laughed—“they call him ‘The Mensch.’ He’s actually a nice guy—well, you talked to him yourself—we just had some crossed wires, is all.”

  “What does five points mean?”

  “Look, it was just a mix-up. I mean,” he said, “these people are characters. They have their own language, their own ways of doing things. But, hey—” he laughed—“this is great—when I met with him over at Caesars, that’s what Bobo calls his ‘office,’ you know, the pool at Caesars—anyway, when I met with him, you know what he kept saying? ‘That’s a good kid you’ve got there, Larry.’ ‘Real little gentleman.’ I mean, I don’t know what you said to him, but I do actually owe you one.”

  “Huh,” I said in a neutral voice, helping myself to more rice. But inwardly I was almost drunk at the lift in his mood—the same flood of elation I’d felt as a small child when the silences broke, when his footsteps grew light again and you heard him laughing at something, humming at the shaving mirror.

  My dad cracked open his fortune cookie, and laughed. “See here,” he said, balling it up and tossing it over to me. “I wonder who sits around in Chinatown and thinks up these things?”

  Aloud, I read it: “ ‘You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!’ ”

  “Unusual equipment?” said Xandra, coming up behind to put her arms around his neck. “That sounds kind of dirty.”

  “Ah—” my dad turned to kiss her. “A dirty mind. The fountain of youth.”

  “Apparently.”

  xiii.

  “I GAVE you a fat lip that time,” said Boris, who clearly felt guilty about the Kotku business since he’d brought it up out of nowhere in our companionable morning silence on the school bus.

  “Yeah, and I knocked your head against the fucking wall.”

  “I didn’t mean to!”

  “Didn’t mean what?”

  “To hit you in the mouth!”

  “You meant it with her?”

  “In a way, yeah,” he said evasively.

  “In a way.”

  Boris made an exasperated sound. “I told her I was sorry! Everything is fine with us now, no problem! And besides, what business is it of yours?”

  “You brought it up, not me.”

  He looked at me for an odd, off-centered moment, then laughed. “Can I tell you something?”

  “What?”

  He put his head close to mine. “Kotku and me tripped last night,” he said quietly. “Dropped acid together. It was great.”

  “Really? Where did you get it?” E was easy enough to find at our school—Boris and I had taken it at least a dozen times, magical speechless nights where we had walked into the desert half-delirious at the stars—but nobody ever had acid.

  Boris rubbed his nose. “Ah. Well. Her mom knows this scary old guy named Jimmy that works at a gun shop. He hooked us up with five hits—I don’t know why I bought five, I wish I’d bought six. Anyway I still have some. God it was fantastic.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Now that I looked at him more closely, I realized that his pupils were dilated and strange. “Are you still on it?”

  “Maybe a little. I only slept like two hours. Anyway we totally made up. It was like—even the flowers on her mom’s bedspread were friendly. And we were made out of the same stuff as the flowers, and we realized how much we loved each other, and needed each other no matter what, and
how everything hateful that had happened between us was only out of love.”

  “Wow,” I said, in a voice that I guess must have sounded sadder than I’d intended, from the way that Boris brought his eyebrows together and looked at me.

  “Well?” I said, when he kept on staring at me. “What is it?”

  He blinked and shook his head. “No, I can just see it. This mist of sadness, sort of, around your head. It’s like you’re a soldier or something, a person from history, walking on a battlefield maybe with all these deep feelings…”

  “Boris, you’re still completely fried.”

  “Not really,” he said dreamily. “I sort of snap in and out of it. But I still see colored sparks coming off things if I look from the corner of my eye just right.”

  xiv.

  A WEEK OR SO passed, without incident, either with my dad or on the Boris-Kotku front—enough time that I felt safe bringing the pillowcase home. I had noticed, when taking it out of my locker, how unusually bulky (and heavy) it seemed, and when I got it upstairs and out of the pillowcase, I saw why. Clearly I’d been blasted out of my mind when I wrapped and taped it: all those layers of newspaper, wound with a whole extra-large roll of heavy-duty, fiber-reinforced packing tape, had seemed like a prudent caution when I was freaked out and high, but back in my room, in the sober light of afternoon, it looked like it had been bound and wrapped by an insane and/or homeless person—mummified, practically: so much tape on it that it wasn’t even quite square any more; even the corners were round. I got the sharpest kitchen knife I could find and sawed at a corner—cautiously at first, worried that the knife would slip in and damage the painting—and then more energetically. But I’d gotten only partway through a three-inch section and my hands were starting to get tired when I heard Xandra coming in downstairs, and I put it back in the pillowcase and taped it to the back of my headboard again until I knew they were going to be gone for a while.

  Boris had promised me that we would do two of the leftover hits of acid as soon as his mind got back to usual, which was how he put it; he still felt a bit spaced-out, he confided, saw moving patterns in the fake wood-grain of his desk at school, and the first few times he’d smoked weed he’d started out-and-out tripping again.

  “That sounds kind of intense,” I said.

  “No, it’s cool. I can make it stop when I want to. I think we should take it at the playground,” he added. “On Thanksgiving holiday maybe.” The abandoned playground was where we’d gone to take E every time but the first, when Xandra came beating on my bedroom door asking us to help her fix the washing machine, which of course we weren’t able to do, but forty-five minutes of standing around with her in the laundry room during the best part of the roll had been a tremendous bringdown.

  “Is it going to be a lot stronger than E?”

  “No—well, yes, but is wonderful, trust me. I kept wanting Kotku and me to be outside in the air except was too much that close to the highway, lights, cars—maybe this weekend?”

  So that was something to look forward to. But just as I was starting to feel good and even hopeful about things again—ESPN hadn’t been on for a week, which was definitely some kind of record—I found my father waiting for me when I got home from school.

  “I need to talk to you, Theo,” he said, the moment I walked in. “Do you have a minute?”

  I paused. “Well, okay, sure.” The living room looked almost as if it had been burgled—papers scattered everywhere, even the cushions on the sofa slightly out of place.

  He stopped pacing—he was moving a bit stiffly, as if his knee hurt him. “Come over here,” he said, in a friendly voice. “Sit down.”

  I sat. My dad exhaled; he sat down across from me and ran a hand through his hair.

  “The lawyer,” he said, leaning forward with his clasped hands between his knees and meeting my eye frankly.

  I waited.

  “Your mom’s lawyer. I mean—I know this is short notice, but I really need you to get on the phone with him for me.”

  It was windy; outside, blown sand rattled against the glass doors and the patio awning flapped with a sound like a flag snapping. “What?” I said, after a cautious pause. She’d spoken of seeing a lawyer after he left—about a divorce, I figured—but what had come of it, I didn’t know.

  “Well—” My dad took a deep breath; he looked at the ceiling. “Here’s the thing. I guess you’ve noticed I haven’t been betting my sports anymore, right? Well,” he said, “I want to quit. While I’m ahead, so to speak. It’s not—” he paused, and seemed to think—“I mean, quite honestly, I’ve gotten pretty good at this stuff by doing my homework and being disciplined about it. I crunch my numbers. I don’t bet impulsively. And, I mean, like I say, I’ve been doing pretty good. I’ve socked away a lot of money these past months. It’s just—”

  “Right,” I said uncertainly, in the silence that followed, wondering what he was getting at.

  “I mean, why tempt fate? Because—” hand on heart—“I am an alcoholic. I’m the first to admit that. I can’t drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand’s not enough. Giving up booze was the best thing I ever did. And I mean, with gambling, even with my addictive tendencies and all, it’s always been kind of different, sure I’ve had some scrapes but I’ve never been like some of these guys that, I don’t know, that get so far in that they embezzle money and wreck the family business or whatever. But—” he laughed—“if you don’t want a haircut sooner or later, better stop hanging out at the barber shop right?”

  “So?” I said cautiously, after waiting for him to continue.

  “So—whew.” My dad ran both hands through his hair; he looked boyish, dazed, incredulous. “Here’s the thing. I’m really wanting to make some big changes right now. Because I have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this great business. Buddy of mine has a restaurant. And, I mean, I think it’s going to be a really great thing for all of us—once in a lifetime thing, actually. You know? Xandra’s having such a hard time at work right now with her boss being such a shit and, I don’t know, I just think this is going to be a lot more sane.”

  My dad? A restaurant? “Wow—that’s great,” I said. “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” My dad nodded. “It’s really great. The thing is, though, to open a place like this—”

  “What kind of restaurant?”

  My dad yawned, wiped red eyes. “Oh, you know—just simple American food. Steaks and hamburgers and stuff. Just really simple and well prepared. The thing is, though, for my buddy to get the place open and pay his restaurant taxes—”

  “Restaurant taxes?”

  “Oh God, yes, you wouldn’t believe the kind of fees they’ve got out here. You’ve got to pay your restaurant taxes, your liquor-license taxes, liability insurance—it’s a huge cash outlay to get a place like this up and running.”

  “Well.” I could see where he was going with this. “If you need the money in my savings account—”

  My dad looked startled. “What?”

  “You know. That account you started for me. If you need the money, that’s fine.”

  “Oh yeah.” My dad was silent for a moment. “Thanks. I really appreciate that, pal. But actually—” he had stood up, and was walking around—“the thing is, I actually see a really smart way we can do this. Just a short term solution, in order to get the place up and running, you know. We’ll make it back in a few weeks—I mean, a place like this, the location and all, it’s like having a license to print money. It’s just the initial expense. This town is crazy with the taxes and the fees and so forth. I mean—” he laughed, half-apologetically, “you know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t an emergency—”

  “Sorry?” I said, after a confused pause.

  “I mean, like I was saying, I really need you to make this call for me. Here’s the number.” He had it all written out for me on a sheet of paper—a 212 number, I noticed. “You need to telephone this guy and speak to him yourself. His name is
Bracegirdle.”

  I looked at the paper, and then at my dad. “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to understand. All you have to do is say what I tell you.”

  “What does it have to do with me?”

  “Look, just do it. Tell him who you are, need to have a word, business matter, blah blah blah—”

  “But—” Who was this person? “What do you want me to say?”

  My father took a long breath; he was taking care to control his expression, something he was fairly good at.

  “He’s a lawyer,” he said, on an out breath. “Your mother’s lawyer. He needs to make arrangements to wire this amount of money—” my eyes popped at the sum he was pointing to, $65,000—“into this account” (dragging his finger to the string of numbers beneath it). “Tell him I’ve decided to send you to a private school. He’ll need your name and Social Security number. That’s it.”

  “Private school?” I said, after a disoriented pause.

  “Well, you see, it’s for tax reasons.”

  “I don’t want to go to private school.”

  “Wait—wait—just hear me out. As long as these funds are used for your benefit, in the official sense, we’ve got no problem. And the restaurant is for all our benefit, see. Maybe, in the end, yours most of all. And I mean, I could make the call myself, it’s just that if we angle this the right way we’d be saving like thirty thousand dollars that would go to the government otherwise. Hell, I will send you to a private school if you want. Boarding school. I could send you to Andover with all that extra money. I just don’t want half of it to end up with the IRS, know what I’m saying? Also—I mean, the way this thing is set up, by the time you end up going to college, it’s going to end up costing you money, because with that amount of money in there it means you won’t be eligible for a scholarship. The college financial aid people are going to look right at that account and put you in a different income bracket and take 75 percent of it the first year, poof. This way, at least, you’ll get the full use of it, you see? Right now. When it could actually do some good.”

  “But—”

  “But—” falsetto voice, lolled tongue, goofy stare. “Oh, come on, Theo,” he said, in his normal voice, when I kept on looking at him. “Swear to God, I don’t have time for this. I need you to make this call ASAP, before the offices close back East. If you need to sign something, tell him to FedEx the papers. Or fax them. We just need to get this done as soon as possible, okay?”

  “But why do I need to do it?”

  My dad sighed; he rolled his eyes. “Look, don’t give me that, Theo,” he said. “I know you know the score because I’ve seen you checking the mail—yes,” he said over my objections, “yes you do, every day you’re out at that mailbox like a fucking shot.”

  I was so baffled by this that I didn’t even know how to reply. “But—” I glanced down at the paper and the figure leaped out again: $65,000.

  Without warning, my dad snapped out and whacked me across the face, so hard and fast that for a second I didn’t know what had happened. Then almost before I could blink he hit me again with his fist, cartoon wham, bright crack like a camera flash, this time with his fist. As I wobbled—my knees had gone loose, everything white—he caught me by the throat with a sharp upward thrust and forced me up on tiptoe so I was gasping for breath.

  “Look here.” He was shouting in my face—his nose two inches from mine—but Popper was jumping and barking like crazy and the ringing in my ears had climbed to such a pitch it was like he was screaming at me though radio fuzz. “You’re going to call this guy—” rattling the paper in my face—“and say what I fucking tell you. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be because I will make you do this, Theo, no lie, I will break your arm, I will beat the everloving shit out of you if you don’t get on the phone right now. Okay? Okay?” he repeated in the dizzy, ear-buzzing silence. His cigarette breath was sour in my face. He let go my throat; he stepped back. “Do you hear me? Say something.”

  I swiped an arm over my face. Tears were streaming down my cheeks but they were automatic, like tap water, no emotion attached to them.

  My dad squeezed his eyes shut, then re-opened them; he shook his head. “Look,” he said, in a crisp voice, still breathing hard. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t