The Goldfinch, Page 45

  8R, two keys and a combination padlock, 7522, the last four digits of Boris’s home phone in Vegas. The locker creaked with a metallic squeal. There was the shopping bag from Paragon Sporting Goods—tag of the pup tent dangling, King Kanopy, $43.99, just as crisp and new-looking as the day I’d bought it eight years before. And though the texture of the pillowcase peeking out of the bag threw me an ugly short-circuit, like an electric pop in the temple, more than anything I was struck by the smell—for the plastic, pool-liner odor of masking tape had grown overwhelming from being shut up in such a small space, an emotionally evocative odor I hadn’t remembered or thought of in years, a distinct polyvinyl reek that threw me straight back to childhood and my bedroom back in Vegas: chemicals and new carpet, falling asleep and waking up every morning with the painting taped behind my headboard and the same adhesive smell in my nostrils. I had not properly unwrapped it in years; just to get it open would take ten or fifteen minutes with an X-Acto knife but as I stood there overwhelmed (slippage and confusion, almost like the time I’d waked, sleepwalking, in the door of Pippa’s bedroom, I didn’t know what I’d been thinking or what I ought to do) I was transfixed with an urge amounting almost to delirium: for to have it only a handbreadth away again, after so long, was to find myself suddenly on some kind of dangerous, yearning edge I hadn’t even known was there. In the shadows the mummified bundle—what little was visible—had a ragged, poignant, oddly personal look, less like an inanimate object than some poor creature bound and helpless in the dark, unable to cry out and dreaming of rescue. I hadn’t been so close to the painting since I was fifteen years old, and for a moment it was all I could do to keep from snatching it up and tucking it under my arm and walking out with it. But I could feel the security cameras hissing at my back; and—quick spasmodic movement—I dropped my Redbreast Flake tin in the Bloomingdale’s bag and shut the door and turned the key. “Just flush them if you ever really want to kick,” Jerome’s extremely hot girlfriend Mya had advised me, “else your ass is going to be up at that storage unit at two in the morning,” but as I walked out the door, lightheaded and buzzed, the drugs were the last thing on my mind. Just the sight of the bundled painting, lonely and pathetic, had scrambled me top to bottom, as if a satellite signal from the past had burst in and jammed all other transmissions.

  xi.

  THOUGH MY (SOMETIME) DAYS off had kept my dose from escalating too much, the withdrawals got uncomfortable sooner than I’d expected and even with the pills I’d saved to taper I spent the next days feeling pretty low: too sick to eat, unable to stop sneezing. “Just a cold,” I told Hobie. “I’m fine.”

  “Nope, if you’ve got a bad stomach, it’s the flu,” said Hobie, grimly, just back from Bigelow with more Benadryl and Imodium, plus crackers and ginger ale from Jefferson Market. “There’s not a reason on the earth—bless you! If I were you, I’d get myself to the doctor and no fuss about it.”

  “Look, it’s just a bug.” Hobie had an iron constitution; whenever he came down with anything himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.

  “Maybe, but you’ve eaten hardly a bite in days. There’s no point scraping away down here and making yourself miserable.”

  But working took my mind off my discomfort. The chills came in ten minute spasms and then I was sweating. Runny nose, runny eyes, startling electrical twitches. The weather had turned, the shop was full of people, murmur and drift; the trees flowering on the streets outside were white pops of delirium. My hands were steady at the register, for the most part, but inside I was squirming. “Your first rodeo isn’t the bad one,” Mya had told me. “It’s around the third or fourth you’ll start wishing you were dead.” My stomach flopped and seethed like a fish on the hook; aches, jumpy muscles, I couldn’t lie still or get comfortable in bed and nights, after I closed the shop, I sat red-faced and sneezing in a tub that was hot almost beyond endurance, a glass of ginger ale and mostly melted ice pressed to my temple, while Popchik—too stiff and creaky to stand with his paws on the edge of the tub, as he had once liked to do—sat on the bath mat and watched me anxiously.

  None of this was as bad as I’d feared. But what I hadn’t expected to hit even a quarter so hard was what Mya called “the mental stuff,” which was unendurable, a sopping black curtain of horror. Mya, Jerome, my fashion intern—most of my drug friends had been at it longer than I had; and when they sat around high and talking about what it was like to quit (which was apparently the only time they could stand to talk about quitting), everyone had warned me repeatedly that the physical symptoms weren’t the rough part, that even with a baby habit like mine the depression would be like “nothing I’d ever dreamed” and I’d smiled politely as I leaned to the mirror and thought: wanna bet?

  But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin. Whatever reason I’d had for storing the painting all those years ago—for keeping it in the first place—for taking it out of the museum even—I now couldn’t remember. Time had blurred it. It was part of a world that didn’t exist—or, rather, it was as if I lived in two worlds, and the storage locker was part of the imaginary world rather than the real one. It was easy to forget about the storage locker, to pretend it wasn’t there; I’d half expected to open it to find the painting gone, although I knew it wouldn’t be, it would still be shut away in the dark and waiting for me forever as long as I left it there, like the body of a person I’d murdered and stuck in a cellar somewhere.

  On the eighth morning I woke sweat-drenched after four hours’ bad sleep, hollowed to the core and as despairing as I’d ever felt in my life, but
steady enough to walk Popchik around the block and come up to the kitchen and eat the convalescent’s breakfast—poached eggs and English muffin—that Hobie pressed on me.

  “And about time too.” He’d finished his own breakfast and was unhurriedly clearing the dishes. “White as a lily—I’d be too, a week of soda crackers and nothing but. A bit of sunshine is what you are in need of, a bit of air. You and the pup should take yourselves out for a good long stroll.”

  “Right.” But I had no intention of going anywhere except straight down to the shop, where it was quiet and dark.

  “I haven’t bothered you, you’ve been so low—” his back-to-business voice, along with the friendly tilt of his head, made me look away uncomfortably and stare into my plate—“but when you were out of commission you had some calls on the home line. ”

  “Oh yeah?” I’d switched my cell phone off and left it in a drawer; I hadn’t even looked at it for fear of finding messages from Jerome.

  “Awfully nice girl—” he consulted the notepad, peering over the top of his glasses—“Daisy Horsley?” (Daisy Horsley was Carole Lombard’s real name.) “Said she was busy with work” (code for Fiancé around, Stay away) “and to text-message her if you wanted to get in touch.”

  “Okay, great, thanks.” Daisy’s big important National Cathedral wedding, if it actually went off, would be happening in June, after which she would be moving to DC with the BF, as she called him.

  “Mrs. Hildesley called too, about the cherrywood high-chest—not the bonnet top, the other. Countered with a good offer—eight thousand—I accepted, hope you don’t mind, that chest isn’t worth three thousand if you ask me. Also—this fellow called twice—a Lucius Reeve?”

  I nearly choked on my coffee—the first I’d been able to stomach in days—but Hobie didn’t seem to notice.

  “Left a number. Said you would know what it was about. Oh—” he sat down, suddenly, drummed the table with his palm—“and one of the Barbour children phoned!”

  “Kitsey?”

  “No—” he took a gulp of his tea—“Platt? Does that sound right?”

  xii.

  THE THOUGHT OF DEALING with Lucius Reeve, unmedicated, was just about enough to send me back to the storage unit. As for the Barbours: I wasn’t all that anxious to speak to Platt either, but to my relief it was Kitsey who answered.

  “We’re going to have a dinner for you,” she said immediately.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Didn’t we tell you? Oh—maybe I should have phoned! Anyway, Mum loved seeing you so much. She wants to know when you’re coming back.”

  “Well—”

  “Do you need an invitation?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “You sound weird.”

  “Sorry, I’ve had the, uh, flu.”

  “Really? Oh my goodness. We’ve all been perfectly fine, I don’t think you can have caught it from us—sorry?” she said to an indistinct voice in the background. “Here… Platt’s trying to take the phone away. Talk to you soon.”

  “Hi, brother,” said Platt when he got on the line.

  “Hi,” I said, rubbing my temple, trying not to think how weird it was for Platt to be calling me brother.

  “I—” Footsteps; a door shutting. “I want to cut right to the chase.”

  “Yes?”

  “Matter of some furniture,” he said cordially. “Any chance you could sell some of it for us?”

  “Sure.” I sat down. “Which pieces is she thinking of selling?”

  “Well,” said Platt, “the thing is, I would really not like to bother Mommy with this, if possible. Not sure she’s up for it, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I mean, she’s just got so much stuff… things up in Maine and out in storage that she’ll never look at again, you know? Not just furniture. Silver, a coin collection… some ceramics that I think are supposed to be a big deal but, I’ll be frank, look like shit. I don’t mean figuratively. I mean like literal clods of cow shit.”

  “I guess my question would be, why would you want to sell it.”

  “Well, there’s no need to sell it,” he said hastily. “But the thing is, she gets so tenacious about some of this old nonsense.”

  I rubbed my eye. “Platt—”

  “I mean, it’s just sitting there. All this junk. Much of which is mine, the coins and some old guns and things, because Gaga left them to me. I mean—” crisply—“I’ll be frank with you. I have another guy I’ve been dealing with, but honestly I’d rather work with you. You know us, you know Mommy, and I know you’ll give me a fair price.”

  “Right,” I said uncertainly. There followed an expectant, endless-seeming pause—as if we were reading from a script and he was waiting with confidence for me to deliver the rest of my line—and I was wondering how to put him off when my eye fell on Lucius Reeve’s name and number dashed out in Hobie’s open, expressive hand.

  “Well, um, it’s very complicated,” I said. “I mean, I would have to see the things in person before I could really say anything. Right, right—” he was trying to put in something about photos—“but photographs aren’t good enough. Also I don’t deal with coins, or the kind of ceramics you’re talking about either. With coins especially, you really need to go to a dealer who does nothing but. But in the meantime,” I said—he was still trying to talk over me—“if it’s a question of raising a few thousand bucks? I think I can help you out.”

  That shut him up all right. “Yes?”

  I reached under my glasses to pinch the bridge of my nose. “Here’s the thing. I’m trying to establish a provenance on a piece—it’s a real nightmare, guy won’t leave me alone, I’ve tried to buy the piece back from him, he seems intent on raising a stink. For what reason I don’t know. Anyway it would help me out, I think, if I could produce a bill of sale proving I’d bought this piece from another collector.”

  “Well, Mommy thinks you hung the moon,” he said sourly. “I’m sure she’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Well, the thing is—” Hobie was downstairs with the router going, but I lowered my voice just the same—“we’re speaking in complete confidence, of course?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t actually see any reason to involve your mother at all. I can write out a bill of sale, and back-date it. But if the guy has any questions, and he may, what I’d like to do is refer him to you—give him your number, eldest son, mother recently bereaved, blah blah blah—”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “His name is Lucius Reeve. Ever heard of him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well—just so you know, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he knows your mother, or has met her at some point.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. Mommy hardly sees anyone these days.” A pause; I could hear him lighting a cigarette. “So—this guy phones.”

  I described the chest-on-chest. “Happy to email a photo. The distinctive feature is the phoenix carving on the top. All you need to tell him, if he calls, is that the piece was up at your place in Maine until your mother sold it to me a couple of years back. She will have bought it from a dealer out of business you see, some old guy who passed away a few years back, can’t remember the name, darn, you’ll have to check. Though if he presses—” it was astonishing, I’d learned, how a few tea stains and a few minutes of crisping in the oven, at low temperatures, could further age the blank receipts in the 1960s receipt book I’d bought at the flea market—“it’ll be easy enough for me to provide that bill of sale for you too.”

  “I got it.”

  “Right. Anyway—” I was groping around for a cigarette which I didn’t have—“if you take care of things on your end—you know, if you commit to backing me up if the guy does call—I’ll give you ten percent on the price of the piece.”

  “Which is how much?”

  “Seven thousand dollars.”

  Platt laughed—an oddly happy an
d carefree-sounding laugh. “Daddy always did say that all you antiques fellows were crooked.”

  xiii.

  I HUNG UP THE phone, feeling goofy with relief. Mrs. Barbour had her share of second and third rate antiques, but she also owned so many important pieces that it disturbed me to think of Platt selling things out from under her with no clue what he was doing. As for being “over a barrel”—if anyone gave off the aroma of being embroiled in some sort of ongoing and ill-defined trouble, it was Platt. Though I had not thought of his expulsion in years, the circumstances had been so diligently hushed up that it seemed likely he’d done something fairly serious, something that in less controlled circumstances might have involved the police: which in a weird way reassured me, in terms of trusting him to collect his cash and keep his mouth shut. Besides—it gladdened my heart to think of it—if anyone alive could high-hand or intimidate Lucius Reeve it was Platt: a world-class snob and bully in his own right.

  “Mr. Reeve?” I said courteously when he picked up the phone.

  “Lucius, please.”

  “Well then, Lucius.” His voice had made me go cold with anger; but knowing I had Platt in my corner made me more cocky than I had reason to be. “Returning your call. What’s on your mind?”

  “Probably not what you think,” came the swift reply.

  “No?” I said, easily enough, though his tone took me aback. “Well then. Fill me in.”

  “I think you’d probably rather I do that in person.”

  “Fine. How about downtown,” I said quickly, “since you were good enough to take me to your club last time?”

  xiv.

  THE RESTAURANT I CHOSE was in Tribeca—far enough downtown that I didn’t have to worry too much about running into Hobie or any of his friends, and with a young enough crowd (I hoped) to throw Reeve off-balance. Noise, lights, conversation, relentless press of bodies: with my fresh, un-blunted senses the smells were overwhelming, wine and garlic and perfume and sweat, sizzling platters of lemongrass chicken hurried out of the kitchen, and the turquoise banquettes, the bright orange dress of the girl next to me, were like industrial chemicals squirted directly into my eyes. My stomach boiled with nerves, and I was chewing an antacid from the roll in my pocket when I looked up and saw the beautiful tattooed giraffe of a hostess—blank and indolent—pointing Lucius Reeve indifferently to my table.

  “Well, hello,” I said, not standing to greet him. “How nice to see you.”

  He was casting his glance round in distaste. “Do we really have to sit here?”

  “Why not?” I said blandly. I’d deliberately chosen a table in the middle of traffic—not so loud we had to shout, but loud enough to be off-putting; moreover, had left him the chair that would put the sun in his eyes.

  “This is completely ridiculous.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. If you’re not happy here…” I nodded at the self-absorbed young giraffe, back at her post and swaying absently.

  Conceding the point—the restaurant was packed—he sat down. Though he was tight and elegant in his speech and gestures, and his suit was modishly cut for a man his age, his demeanor made me think of a puffer fish—or, alternately, a cartoon strongman or Mountie blown up by a bicycle pump: cleft chin, doughball nose, tense slit of a mouth, all bunched tight in the center of a face which glowed a plump, inflamed, blood-pressure pink.

  After the food arrived—Asian fusion, with lots of crispy flying buttresses of wonton and frizzled scallion, from his expression not much to his liking—I waited for him to work around to whatever he wanted to tell me. The carbon of the fake bill of sale, which I’d written out on a blank page in one of Welty’s old receipt books and backdated five years, was in my breast pocket, but I didn’t intend to produce it until I had to.

  He had asked for a fork; from his slightly alarming plate of “scorpion prawn” he pulled out several architectural filaments of vegetable matter and laid them to the side. Then he looked at me. His small sharp eyes were bright blue in his ham-pink face. “I know about the museum,” he said.

  “Know what?” I said, after a waver of surprise.

  “Oh, please. You know very well what I’m talking about.”

  I felt a jab of fear at the base of my spine, though I took care to keep my eyes on my plate: white rice and stir-fried vegetables, the blandest thing on the menu. “Well, if you don’t mind. I’d rather not talk about it. It’s a painful subject.”

  “Yes, I can imagine.”

  He said this in such a taunting and provocative tone I glanced up sharply. “My mother died, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes, she did.” Long pause. “Welton Blackwell did too.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, I mean. Written about in the papers, for heaven’s sake. Matter of public record. But—” he darted the tip of his tongue across his upper lip—“here’s what I wonder. Why did James Hobart go about repeating that tale to everyone in town? You turning up on his doorstep with his partner’s ring? Because if he’d just kept his mouth shut, no one would have ever made the connection.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “You know very well what I mean. You have something that I want. That a lot of people want, actually.”

  I stopped eating, chopsticks halfway to my mouth. My immediate, unthinking impulse was to get up and walk out of the restaurant but almost as quickly I realized how stupid that would be.

  Reeve leaned back in his chair. “You’re not saying anything.”

  “That’s because you’re not making any sense,” I rejoined sharply, putting down the chopsticks, and for a flash—something in the quickness of the gesture—my thoughts went to my father. How would he handle this?

  “You seem very perturbed. I wonder why.”

  “I guess I don’t see what this has to do with the chest-on-chest. Because I was under the impression that was why we were here.”