The Goldfinch, Page 48

  “China—” the bridal consultant traced the plate’s edge with a neutrally manicured finger. “The way I like for my couples to think of fine silver, fine crystal and china—? It’s the end-of-day ritual. It’s wine, fun, family, togetherness. A set of fine china is a great way to put some permanent style and romance in your marriage.”

  “Right,” I said again. But the sentiment had appalled me; and the two Bloody Marys I’d had at Fred’s had not wholly washed the taste of it away.

  Kitsey was looking at the earrings, doubtfully it seemed. “Well look. I will wear them for the wedding. They’re beautiful. And I know they were your mother’s.”

  “I want you to wear what you want.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think.” Playfully, she reached across the table and took my hand. “I think you need to have a nap.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, pressing her palm to my face, remembering how lucky I was.

  ii.

  IT HAD HAPPENED REALLY fast. Within two months of my dinner at the Barbours’, Kitsey and I were seeing each other every day practically—long walks and dinner (sometimes Match 65 or Le Bilboquet, sometimes sandwiches in the kitchen) and talking about old times: about Andy, and rainy Sundays with the Monopoly board (“you two were so mean… it was like Shirley Temple against Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan…”) about the night she’d cried when we made her watch Hellboy instead of Pocahontas, and our excruciating coat-and-tie nights—excruciating for the little boys anyway, sitting stiffly at the Yacht Club, Coca-Colas with lime, and Mr. Barbour looking restlessly around the dining room for Amadeo, his favorite waiter, with whom he insisted on practicing his ridiculous Xavier Cugat Spanish—school friends, parties, always something to talk about, do you remember this, do you remember that, remember when we… not like Carole Lombard’s where it was all booze and bed and not that much to say to each other.

  Not that Kitsey and I weren’t very different people, as well, but that was all right: after all, as Hobie had pointed out sensibly enough, wasn’t marriage supposed to be a union of opposites? Wasn’t I supposed to bring new undertakings to her life and she to mine? And besides (I told myself) wasn’t it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have? For years I’d been wallowing in a hothouse of wasteful sorrow: Pippa Pippa Pippa, exhilaration and despair, it was never-ending, incidents of virtually no significance threw me to the stars or plunged me into speechless depressions, her name on my phone or an e-mail signed “Love” (which was how Pippa signed all her e-mails, to everyone) had me flying for days whereas—if, when phoning Hobie, she didn’t ask to speak to me (and why should she?) I was crushed beyond any reasonable prospect. I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother’s death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren’t there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he’d spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?

  It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap. And somehow I had done it; and there on the other side was Kitsey, looking at me with the amused, gooseberry-gray eyes.

  We had fun together. We got on. It was her first summer in the city, “my whole life, ever”—the house in Maine was closed tight, Uncle Harry and the cousins had gone up to Canada to the Îles de la Madeleine—“and, I’m a bit at loose ends here with Mum, and—oh, please, do something with me. Won’t you please go out to the beach with me this weekend?” So on the weekends we went out to East Hampton, where we stayed in the house of friends of hers who were summering in France; and during the week we met downtown after I got off work, drinking tepid wine in sidewalk cafés, deserted Tribeca evenings with fever-hot sidewalks and hot wind from the subway grates blowing sparks from the end of my cigarette. Movie theaters were always cool, and the King Cole room, and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. Two afternoons a week—hatted, gloved, in Jack Purcells and tidy skirts, sprayed head to toe with medical-grade sunblock (for she, like Andy, was allergic to the sun) she drove out on her own to Shinnecock or Maidstone in her black Mini Cooper which had been specially fitted in the back to hold a set of golf clubs. Unlike Andy she chattered and fluttered, laughed nervously and at her own jokes, with a ghost of her father’s scattered energies but without the disengaged quality, the irony. You could have powdered her and drawn a beauty mark on her face and she might have been a lady-in-waiting at Versailles with her white skin and pink cheeks, her stammering gaiety. She wore tiny linen shift dresses, country and city, accessorized by vintage crocodile bags of Gaga’s, and kept her name and address taped inside the crucifyingly high Christian Louboutins she teetered around in (“Hurty-hurty shoes!”) in case she kicked them off to dance or swim and forgot where she’d left them: silver shoes, embroidered shoes, ribboned and pointy-toed, a thousand dollars a pair. “Meanypants!” she shouted down the stairwell when—three a.m., three sheets to the wind on rum and Coke—I finally staggered down to catch a cab because I had to work the next day.

  She was the one who had asked me to marry. On our way to a party. Chanel No. 19, baby blue dress. We’d stepped out on Park Avenue—both a little looped from cocktails upstairs—and the street lights had snapped on the moment we stepped out the door and we’d stopped dead and looked at each other: did we do that? The moment was so funny we both began laughing hysterically—it was like the light was pouring off us, like we could power up Park Avenue. And when Kitsey seized my hand and said: “You know what I think we should do, Theo?” I knew exactly what she was going to say.

  “Should we?”

  “Yes, please! Don’t you think? I think it would make Mum so happy.”

  We hadn’t even firmed up the date. It kept getting changed, due to the availability of the church, the availability of certain indispensable members of the party, someone else’s cup race or due date or whatever. Hence, how the wedding seemed to be gearing up into quite such a big deal—guest list of many hundreds, cost of many thousands, costumed and choreographed like a Broadway show—how this wedding seemed to be spiraling into quite such a production I wasn’t quite sure. Sometimes, I knew, the mother of the bride got blamed for out-of-control weddings but in this case anyway you couldn’t pin the rap on Mrs. Barbour, who could scarcely be prised from her room and the embroidery basket, who never took phone calls and never accepted invitations and never even went to the hairdresser any more, she who had once had her hair done every other day without fail, a standing eleven a.m. appointment before lunching out.

  “Won’t Mum be pleased?” Kitsey had whispered, jabbing me in the rib with her sharp little elbow as we were hurrying back to Mrs. Barbour’s room. And the memory of Mrs. Barbour’s joy at the news (you tell her, Kitsey had said, she’ll be extra happy if she hears it from you) was a moment I played and replayed and never tired of: her startled eyes, then delight blooming unguarded on her cool, tired face. One hand held to me and the other to Kitsey, but that beautiful smile—I would never forget it—had been all for me.

  Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp,
confusing, wrong—but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. The clarity was exhilarating; it was as if I’d removed a pair of smudged-up glasses that fuzzed everything I saw. All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating whock of tennis balls. And all I could think was Kitsey, Kitsey, Kitsey!

  And four months had passed, and it was December, brisk mornings and a chime of Christmas in the air; and Kitsey and I were engaged to be married and how lucky was I? but though it was all too perfect, hearts and flowers, the end of a musical comedy, I felt sick. For unknown reasons, the gust of energy that had swept me up and fizzed me around all summer had dropped me hard, mid-October, into a drizzle of sadness that stretched endlessly in every direction: with a very few exceptions (Kitsey, Hobie, Mrs. Barbour) I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, all human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill in the wilderness, there was not a squeak of light anywhere I looked, the antidepressants I’d been dutifully swallowing for eight weeks hadn’t helped a bit, nor had the ones before that (but then, I’d tried them all; apparently I was among the twenty percent of unfortunates who didn’t get the daisy fields and the butterflies but the Severe Headaches and the Suicidal Thoughts); and though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.

  Just why I felt so lost I didn’t know. I wasn’t over Pippa and I knew it, might never be over her, and that was just something I was going to have to live with, the sadness of loving someone I couldn’t have; but I also knew my more immediate difficulty was in rising to (what I found, anyway) an uncomfortably escalating social pace. No longer did Kitsey and I enjoy so many of our restorative evenings à deux, the two of us holding hands on the same side of a dark restaurant booth. Instead, almost every night it was dinner parties and busy restaurant tables with her friends, strenuous occasions where (jumpy, un-opiated, wracked to the last synapse), it was hard for me to make the proper show of social ardor, particularly when I was tired after work—and then too the wedding preparations, an avalanche of trivia in which I was expected to interest myself as enthusiastically as she, bright tissue-paper flurries of brochures and merchandise. For her, it amounted to a full-time job: visiting stationers and florists, researching caterers and vendors, amassing fabric swatches and boxes of petit-four and cake samples, fretting and repeatedly asking me to help her choose between virtually identical shades of ivory and lavender on a color chart, co-ordinating a series of “girly-girl” sleepovers with her bridesmaids and a “boys’ weekend” for me (organized by Platt?? at least I could count on staying drunk)—and then the honeymoon plans, stacks of glossy booklets (Fiji or Nantucket? Mykonos or Capri?) “Fantastic,” I kept saying, in my affable new talking-to-Kitsey voice, “it all looks great,” although given her family and its history with water, it did seem odd that she wasn’t interested in Vienna or Paris or Prague or any destination, actually, that wasn’t a literal island in the middle of the freaking ocean.

  Still, I’d never felt so sure of the future; and when I reminded myself of the right-ness of my course, as I often had occasion to do, my thoughts went not only to Kitsey but also Mrs. Barbour, whose happiness made me feel reassured and nourished in channels of my heart which had stood scraped dry for years. Our news had visibly brightened and straightened her; she’d begun stirring about the apartment, she’d pinked up with just the tiniest bit of lipstick, and even her most commonplace interactions with me were colored with a steady, stable, peaceful light that enlarged the space around us and beamed calmly into all my darkest corners.

  “I never thought I’d be quite so happy ever again,” she’d confided quietly, one night at dinner, when Kitsey had jumped up very suddenly and run out to get the telephone as she was apt to do, and it was just the two of us at the card table in her room, poking awkwardly at our asparagus spears and our salmon steaks. “Because—you were always so good to Andy—bolstering him, improving his confidence. He was absolutely his best self with you, always. And—I’m so glad you’re going to be an official part of the family, that we’re going to make it legal now, because—oh, I suppose I shouldn’t say this, I hope you don’t mind if I speak from the heart for a moment, but I always did think of you as one of my very own, did you know that? Even when you were a little boy.”

  This remark so shocked and touched me that I reacted clumsily—stammering in discomposure—so that she took pity and turned the conversation into another channel. Yet every time I remembered it I was suffused with a glow of warmth. An equally gratifying (if ignoble) memory was Pippa’s slight, shocked pause when I’d broken the news to her on the phone. Over and over again I had played that pause in my mind, relishing it, her stunned silence: “Oh?” And then, recovering: “Oh, Theo, how wonderful! I can’t wait to meet her!”

  “Oh, she’s amazing,” I’d said venomously. “I’ve been in love with her ever since we were kids.”

  Which—in all sorts of ways I was still coming to realize—was absolutely true. The interplay of past and present was wildly erotic: I drew endless delight from the memory of nine-year-old Kitsey’s contempt for geeky thirteen-year-old me (rolling her eyes, pouting when she had to sit by me at dinner). And I relished even more the undisguised shock of people who’d known us as children: You? and Kitsey Barbour? Really? Her? I loved the fun and wickedness of it, the sheer improbability: slipping into her room after her mother was asleep—same room she’d kept shut against me when we were kids, same pink toile wallpaper, unchanged since the days of Andy, hand-lettered signs, KEEP OUT, DO NOT DISTURB—me backing her in, Kitsey locking the door behind us, putting her finger to my mouth, tracing it across my lips, that first, delicious tumble to her bed, Mommy’s sleeping, ssh!

  Every day, I had multiple occasions to remind myself how lucky I was. Kitsey was never tired; Kitsey was never unhappy. She was appealing, enthusiastic, affectionate. She was beautiful, with a luminous, sugar-white quality that turned heads on the street. I admired how gregarious she was, how engaged with the world, how amusing and spontaneous—“little feather-head!” as Hobie called her, with a great deal of tenderness—what a breath of fresh air she was! Everyone loved her. And for all her infectious lightness of heart, I knew it was an extremely petty cavil that Kitsey never seemed very moved by anything. Even dear old Carole Lombard had got teary-eyed about ex-boyfriends and abused pets on the news and the closing of certain old-school bars in Chicago, where she was from. But nothing ever seemed to strike Kitsey as particularly urgent or emotional or even surprising. In this, she resembled her mother and brother—and yet Mrs. Barbour’s restraint, and Andy’s, were somehow very different from Kitsey’s way of making a flippant or trivializing comment whenever anyone brought up something serious. (“No fun,” I’d heard her say with a half-whimsical sigh, wrinkling her nose, when people inquired about her mother.) Then too—I felt morbid and sick even thinking it—I kept watching for some evidence of sorrow about Andy and her dad, and it was starting to disturb me that I hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t their deaths affected her at all? Weren’t we supposed to at least talk about it at some point? On one level, I admired her bravery: chin up, carrying on in the face of tragedy or whatever. Maybe she was just really really guarded, really locked-down, putting up a masterly front. But those sparkling blue shallows—so enticing at first glance—had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to s
wim.

  Kitsey was tapping my wrist. “What?”

  “Barneys. I mean, since we’re here? Maybe we should take a spin round the Homes department? I know Mother won’t love it if we register here but it might be fun to go for something a little less traditional for everyday.”

  “No—” reaching for my glass, knocking the rest of it back—“I really need to get downtown, if that’s all right. Supposed to meet a client.”

  “Will you be coming uptown tonight?” Kitsey shared an apartment in the East Seventies with two roommates, not far from the office of the arts organization where she worked.

  “Not sure. Might have to go to dinner. I’ll get out of it if I can.”

  “Cocktails? Please? Or an after-dinner drink, at least? Everyone will be so disappointed if you don’t put in at least a tiny appearance. Charles and Bette—”

  “I’ll try. Promise. Don’t forget those,” I said, nodding at the earrings, which were still lying on the tablecloth.

  “Oh! No! Of course not!” she said guiltily, grabbing them up and throwing them into her bag like a handful of loose change.

  iii.

  AS WE WALKED OUTSIDE together, into the Christmas crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth.

  What was wrong with me? I thought, as Kitsey and I crossed Madison Avenue, her pink Prada overcoat bobbing exuberantly in the throng. Why did I hold it against Kitsey that she didn’t seem haunted over Andy and her dad, that she was getting on with her life?

  But—clasping Kitsey’s elbow, rewarded by a radiant smile—I felt momentarily relieved again, and distracted from my worries. It had been eight months since I left Reeve in that Tribeca restaurant; no one had yet contacted me about any of the bad pieces I’d sold though I was fully prepared to admit my mistake if they did: inexperienced, new to the business, here’s your money back sir, accept my apologies. Nights, lying awake, I reassured myself that if things got ugly, at least I hadn’t left much of a trail: I’d tried not to document the sales any more than I’d had to, and on the smaller pieces had offered a discount for cash.

  But still. But still. It was only a matter of time. Once one client stepped forward, there would be an avalanche. And it would be bad enough if I wrecked Hobie’s reputation but the moment there were so many claims that I stopped being able to refund people’s money, there would be lawsuits: lawsuits in which Hobie, co-owner of the business, would be named. It would be hard to convince a court he hadn’t known what I was doing, especially on some of the sales I’d made at the Important Americana level—and, if it came down to it, I wasn’t even sure that Hobie would speak up adequately in his own defense if that meant leaving me out to hang alone. Granted: a lot of the people I’d sold to had so much money they didn’t give a shit. But still. But still. When would someone decide to look under the seats of those Hepplewhite dining chairs (for instance) and notice that they weren’t all alike? That the grain was wrong, that the legs didn’t match? Or take a table to be independently evaluated and learn that the veneer was of a type not used, or invented, in the 1770s? Every day, I wondered when and how the first fraud might surface: a letter from a lawyer, a phone call from the American Furniture department at Sotheby’s, a decorator or a collector charging into the store to confront me, Hobie coming downstairs, listen, we’ve got a problem, do you have a minute?

  If the marriage-wrecking knowledge of my liabilities surfaced before the wedding, I wasn’t sure what would happen. It was more than I could bear to think of. The wedding might not go off at all. Yet—for Kitsey’s sake, and her mother’s—it seemed even more cruel if it surfaced after, especially since the Barbours were not nearly so well-off as they had been before Mr. Barbour’s death. There were cash flow problems. The money was tied up in trust. Mommy had had to reduce some of the employees to part time hours, and let the rest of them go. And Daddy—as Platt had confided, when attempting to interest me in more antiques from the apartment—had gone a bit bonkers at the end and invested more than fifty percent of the portfolio in VistaBank, a commercial-banking monster, for “sentimental reasons” (Mr. Barbour’s great-great-grandfather had been president of one of the historic founding banks, in Massachusetts, long since stripped of its name after merging with Vista). Unfortunately VistaBank had ceased paying dividends, and failed, shortly before Mr. Barbour’s death. Hence Mrs. Barbour’s drastically reduced support of the charities with which she had once been so generous; hence Kitsey’s job. And Platt’s editorial position at his tasteful little publishing house, as he’d often reminded me when in his cups, paid less than Mommy in the old days had paid her housekeeper. If things got bad, I was pretty sure Mrs. Barbour would do what she could to help; and Kitsey, as my spouse, would be obligated to help whether she wanted to or not. But it was a dirty trick to play on them, especially since Hobie’s lavish praise had convinced them all (Platt especially, concerned with the family’s dwindling resources) that I was some kind of financial magician sweeping in to his sister’s rescue. “You know how to make money,” he’d said, bluntly, when he told me how thrilled they all were Kitsey was marrying me instead of some of the layabouts she’d been known to go around with. “She doesn’t.”

  But what worried me most of all was Lucius Reeve. Though I had never heard another peep from him about the chest-on-chest, I had begun in the summer to receive a series of troubling letters: handwritten, unsigned, on blue-bordered correspondence cards printed at the top with his name in copperplate: LUCIUS REEVE

  It is getting on for three months since I made what, by any standards, is a fair and sensible proposal. How do you conclude my offer is anything but reasonable?

  And, later:

  A further eight weeks has passed. You can understand my dilemma. The frustration level rises.

  And then, three weeks after that, a single line:

  Your silence is not acceptable.

  I agonized over these letters, though I tried to block them from my mind. Whenever I remembered them—which was often and unpredictably, mid-meal, fork halfway to my mouth—it was like being slapped awake from a dream. In vain, I tried to remind myself that Reeve’s claims in the restaurant were wildly off-base. To respond to him in any way was foolish. The only thing was to ignore him as if he were an aggressive panhandler on the street.

  But then two disturbing things had happened in rapid succession. I had come upstairs to ask Hobie if he wanted to go out for lunch—“Sure, hang on,” he said; he was going through his mail at the sideboard, glasses perched on the tip of his nose. “Hmn,” he said, flipping an envelope over to look at the front. He opened it and looked at the card—holding it out at arm’s length to peer at it over the top of his glasses, then bringing it in closer.

  “Look at this,” he said. He handed me the card. “What’s this about?”

  The card, in Reeve’s all-too-familiar writing, was only two sentences: no heading, no signature.

  At what point is this delay unreasonable? Can we not move forward on what I have proposed to your young partner, since there is no benefit to either of you in continuing this stalemate?

  “Oh, God,” I said, putting the card down on the table and looking away. “For Pete’s sake.”

  “What?”

  “It’s him. With the chest-on-chest.”

  “Oh, him,” said Hobie. He adjusted his glasses, regarded me quietly. “Did he ever cash that check?”

  I ran a hand through my hair. “No.”

  “What’s this proposal? What’s he talking about?”

  “Look—” I went to the sink to get a glass of water, an old trick of my father’s when he needed a moment to compose himself—“I haven’t wanted to bother you but this guy’s been a huge nuisance. I’ve started throwing away the letters without opening them. If you get another one, I suggest you toss it in the trash.”

  “What
does he want?”

  “Well—” the faucet was noisy; I ran my glass; “well.” I turned, wiped my hand across my forehead. “It’s really nuts. I’ve written him a check for the piece, as I said. For more than he paid.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Ah—” I took a swallow of my water—“unfortunately he has something else in mind. He thinks, ah, he thinks we’re running an assembly line down here, and he’s trying to cut himself in on it. See, instead of cashing my check? he’s got some elderly woman lined up, nurses twenty-four hours a day, and what he wants is for us to use her apartment to, uh—”

  Hobie’s eyebrows went up. “Plant?”