The Goldfinch, Page 49

  “Right,” I said, glad he’d been the one to say it. ‘Planting’ was a racket whereby fakes or inferior antiques were placed in private homes—often homes belonging to the elderly—to be sold to vultures clustering at the deathbed: bottom feeders so eager to rip off the old lady in the oxygen tent that they didn’t realize they were being ripped off themselves. “When I tried to give his money back—this was his counter-proposal. We supply the pieces. Fifty-fifty split. He’s been harassing me ever since.”

  Hobie looked blank. “That’s absurd.”

  “Yes—” closing my eyes, pinching my nose—“but he’s very insistent. That’s why I advise you to—”

  “Who’s this woman?”

  “Woman, elderly relative, whatever.”

  “What’s her name?”

  I held the glass to my temple. “Don’t know.”

  “Here? In the city?”

  “I assume so.” I didn’t care for this avenue of inquiry. “Anyway—just throw that thing in the trash. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier but I really didn’t want to worry you. He’s got to get tired of this if we ignore him.”

  Hobie looked at the card, then at me. “I’m keeping this. No,” he said sharply when I tried to interrupt him, “this is more than enough to go to the police with if we have to. I don’t care about the chest—no, no,” he said, raising a hand to hush me, “this won’t do, you’ve tried to set it right and he’s trying to force you into something criminal. How long has this been going on?”

  “Don’t know. Couple months?” I said, when he kept on looking at me.

  “Reeve.” He studied the card with furrowed brow. “I’ll ask Moira.” Moira was Mrs. DeFrees’s first name. “You’ll tell me if he writes again.”

  “Of course.”

  I could not even think what might happen if Mrs. DeFrees happened to know Lucius Reeve, or know of him, but fortunately there had been no further word on that score. It seemed only the rankest luck that the letter to Hobie had been so ambiguous. But the menace behind it was plain. It was stupid to worry that Reeve would follow through on his threat of calling the law, since—I reminded myself of it, again and again—his only chance of obtaining the painting for himself was to leave me at liberty to retrieve it.

  And yet, perversely, this only made me long even more to have the painting close to hand, to look at whenever I wanted. Though I knew it was impossible, still I thought of it. Everywhere I looked, every apartment that Kitsey and I went to see, I saw potential hiding places: high cupboards, fake fireplaces, wide rafters that could only be reached by very tall ladder, floorboards that might easily be prised up. At night I lay staring into the dark, fantasizing about a specially built fireproof cabinet where I could lock it away in safety or—even more absurdly—a secret, climate-controlled Bluebeard closet, combination lock only.

  Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist. Fully conscious of my folly, I’d downloaded pictures of it to my computer and my phone so I could gloat upon the image in private, brushstrokes rendered digitally, a scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels, but the purer the color, the richer the sense of impasto, the more I hungered for the thing itself, the irreplaceable, glorious, light-rinsed object.

  Dust-free environment. Twenty-four-hour security. Though I tried not to think of the Austrian man who had kept the woman locked in a basement for twenty years, unfortunately it was the metaphor that came to mind. What if I died? Got hit by a bus? Might the ungainly package be mistaken for garbage and tossed in the incinerator? Three or four times I’d made anonymous phone calls to the facility to reassure myself of what I already knew from obsessively visiting the website: temperature and humidity guaranteed within acceptable conservatorial range for artworks. Sometimes when I woke up the whole thing seemed like a dream, although soon enough I remembered it wasn’t.

  But it was impossible to even think of going up there with Reeve like a cat waiting for me to scurry across the floor. I had to sit tight. Unfortunately, the rent on the storage unit was due in three months; and what with everything else I saw no point whatsoever in going up to pay it in person. The thing was just to have Grisha or one of the guys go in and pay it for me, in cash, which I was confident they would do no questions asked. But then the second unfortunate thing had happened: because only a few days earlier Grisha had shocked me, thoroughly, by sidling up with a sideways tick of his head when I was alone in the shop and adding up my receipts at the end of the week and saying: “Mazhor, I need a sit-down.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You on lock?”

  “What?” Between Yiddish and gutter Russian, jumbled through a slur of Brooklynese and slang picked up from rap songs, sometimes Grisha’s idioms didn’t make it into any kind of English I could understand.

  Grisha snorted noisily. “I don’t think you understanding me right, champ. I am asking is everything square with you. With the laws.”

  “Hang on,” I said—I was in the middle of a column of figures—and then looked up from the calculator: “Wait, what are you talking about?”

  “You my brother, not condemning or judging. I just need to know, all right?”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Peoples are hanging around the shop, keeping an eye on. You know anything about it?”

  “Who?” I glanced out the window. “What? When was this?”

  “I wanted to ask you. Scared to drive out to Borough Park to meet with my cousin Genka for some business he got going—afraid of getting these guys on me.”

  “On you?” I sat down.

  Grisha shrugged. “Four, five times now. Yesterday, getting out of my truck, I saw one of them hanging around out front again, but he slipped across the street. Jeans—older—very casual dressed. Genka, he don’t know nothing about it but he’s freaked, like I say we got some stuff going, he told me to ask you what you knew about it. Never talks, just stands and waits. I am wondering if it is some of your business with the Shvatzah,” he said discreetly.

  “Nope.” The Shvatzah was Jerome; I hadn’t seen him in months.

  “Well then. I hate to break it to you but I think is maybe poh-lices smelling around. Mike—he has noticed too. He thought it was because of his child supports. But the guy just hangs around and does nothing.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Who knows? But one month, at least. Mike says longer.”

  “Next time, when you see him, will you point him out to me?”

  “He might be private investigator.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because in some ways he looks more like ex-cop. Mike thinks this—Irish, they know from cops, Mike said he looked older, like poh-lice retired from the force maybe?”

  “Right,” I said, thinking of the heavyset guy I’d seen out my window. I’d spotted him four or five times subsequently, or someone who looked like him, lingering out front during business hours—always when I was with Hobie or a customer, inconvenient to confront him—although he was so innocuous-looking, hoodie and construction-worker boots, I could hardly be sure. Once—it had scared me, badly—I’d seen a guy who looked like him lingering out in front of the Barbours’ building but when I got a better look I’d been sure I was wrong.

  “He’s been around for a while. But this—” Grisha paused—“normally I would not say anything, maybe is nothing, but yesterday…”

  “Well, what? Go on,” I said, when he massaged his neck and looked guiltily to the side.

  “Another guy. Different. I’d seen him hanging about the shop before. Outside. But yesterday he came in the shop to ask for you by your name. And I did not like the looks of him at all.”

  I sat back abruptly in my chair. I’d been wondering when Reeve would take it in his head to drop by in person.

  “I did not talk to him. I was out—” nodding—“so. Loading the truck. But I saw him go in. Kind of guy you notice. Nice dressed, but not like
a client. You were at lunch and Mike was in the shop by himself—guy comes in, asks, Theodore Decker? Well, you’re not in, Mike says so. ‘Where is he.’ Lot a lot a questions about you, like do you work here, do you live here, how long, where you are, all sorts.”

  “Where was Hobie?”

  “He didn’t want Hobie. He wanted you. Then—” he drew a line on the desk top with his finger—“out he comes. Walks around the shop. Looks here, looks there. Looks all around. This—I see from where I am, across the street. It looks strange. And—Mike did not mention this visit to you because he said maybe is nothing, maybe something personal, ‘better keep out of it,’ but I saw him too and thought you should know. Because, hey, game recognize game, you get me?”

  “What’d he look like?” I asked, and then—when Grisha did not reply—“Older fellow? Heavy? White hair?”

  Grisha made an exasperated sound. “No no no.” Shaking his head with resolute firmness. “This was nobody’s grandpappy.”

  “What’d he look like, then?”

  “He looked like a guy you would not want to get into a fight with, is what he looked like.”

  In the silence that followed, Grisha lit a Kool and offered me one. “So what should I do, Mazhor?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Do me and Genka need to worry?”

  “I don’t think so. Right,” I said, hitting a little awkwardly the triumphant palm that he held up for me to slap, “okay, but will you do me a favor? Will you come and get me if you see either of them again?”

  “Sure thing.” He paused, looking at me critically. “You sure me and Genka don’t need to worry?”

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re doing, do I?”

  Grisha flipped a dirty handkerchief from his pocket and scrubbed his purpled nose with it. “I don’t like this answer from you.”

  “Well, be careful, whatever. Just in case.”

  “Mazhor, I should say the same of you.”

  iv.

  I HAD LIED TO Kitsey; I didn’t have a thing to do. Outside Barneys, we kissed goodbye on the corner of Fifth before she walked back to Tiffany to look at the crystal—we hadn’t even made it to the crystal—and I went to catch the 6. But instead of joining the stream of shoppers pouring down the stairs to the station I felt so empty and distracted, so lost and tired and unwell, I stopped instead to look in at the dirty window of the Subway Inn, straight across from the loading dock at Bloomingdale’s, a time warp straight out of The Lost Weekend and unchanged since my father’s drinking days. Outside: film-noir neon. Inside: same grimy red walls, sticky tables, broken floor tiles, strong Clorox smell, and a concave bartender with a rag over his shoulder pouring a drink for a bloodshot solitary at the bar. I remembered my mom and me losing my dad at Bloomingdale’s once, and how—mysteriously to me, at the time—she’d known to leave the store and walk straight across the street and find him here, throwing back four-dollar shots with a wheezy old Teamster and a bandanna-wearing senior who looked homeless. I’d stood waiting inside the doorway, overpowered by the waft of stale beer and fascinated by the warm secretive dark of the place, the Twilight Zone glow of the jukebox and the Buck Hunter arcade game blinking away in the depths—“Ah, the smell of old men and desperation,” my mother had said wryly, wrinkling her nose as she exited the bar with her shopping bags and caught me by the hand.

  A shot of Johnnie Walker Black, for my dad. Two shots maybe. Why not? The dark recesses of the bar looked warm, comradely, that sentimental boozy aura that made you forget for a moment who you were and how you’d ended up there. But at the last moment, starting in the doorway so the bartender glanced over at me, I turned away and kept walking.

  Lexington Avenue. Wettish wind. The afternoon was haunted and dank. I walked right by the stop on Fifty-First Street, and the Forty-Second stop, and still I kept going to clear my head. Ash-white apartment blocks. Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange feeling of being already dead, of moving in a vaster sidewalk grayness than the street or even the city could encompass, my soul disconnected from my body and drifting among other souls in a mist somewhere between past and present, Walk Don’t Walk, individual pedestrians floating up strangely isolated and lonely before my eyes, blank faces plugged into earbuds and staring straight ahead, lips moving silently, and the city noise dampened and deafened, under crushing, granite-colored skies that muffled the noise from the street, garbage and newsprint, concrete and drizzle, a dirty winter grayness weighing like stone.

  I’d thought, having successfully escaped the bar, I might see a movie—that maybe the solitude of a movie theater would set me aright, some near-empty afternoon showing of a film ending its popular run. But when, lightheaded and sniffling with cold, I got to the theater on Second and Thirty-Second, the French cop film I wanted to see had already started and so had the mistaken-identity thriller. All that remained were a host of holiday movies and intolerable romantic comedies: posters of bedraggled brides, battling bridesmaids, a dismayed dad in a Santa hat with two howling babies in his arms.

  The cabs were starting to go off duty. High above the street, in the dark afternoon, lights burned in lonely offices and apartment towers. Turning away, I continued to drift downtown, with no very clear idea where I was going or why, and as I walked I had the oddly appealing sensation that I was undoing myself, unwinding myself thread by thread, rags and tatters falling away from me in the very act of crossing Thirty-Second Street and flowing along amongst the rush-hour pedestrians and rolling along from the next moment to the next.

  At the next theater, ten or twelve blocks down, it was the same story: the CIA film had started, as had the well-reviewed biopic of a 1940s leading lady; the French cop movie didn’t start for another hour and a half; and unless I wanted the psychopath film or the searing family drama, which I didn’t, it was more brides and bachelor parties and Santa hats and Pixar.

  By the time I made it to the theater at Seventeenth Street I didn’t stop at the box office at all but kept walking. Somehow, mysteriously, in the process of crossing Union Square, swept along in a dark eddy that had hit me from nowhere, I’d arrived at the decision to call Jerome. There was a mystic joy in the idea, a saintly mortification. Would he even have pharms on such short notice, would I have to buy regular old street dope? I didn’t care. I hadn’t done drugs in months but for whatever reason, an evening nodding and unconscious in my bedroom at Hobie’s had begun to seem like a perfectly reasonable response to the holiday lights, the holiday crowds, the incessant Christmas bells with their morbid funeral note, Kitsey’s candy-pink notebook from Kate’s Paperie with tabs reading MY BRIDESMAIDS MY GUESTS MY SEATING MY FLOWERS MY VENDORS MY CHECKLIST MY CATERING.

  Stepping back quickly—the light had changed, I’d almost walked in front of a car—I reeled and nearly slipped. There was no point dwelling on my unreasoning horror of a large public wedding—enclosed spaces, claustrophobia, sudden movements, phobic triggers everywhere, for some reason the subway didn’t bother me so much it had more to do with crowded buildings, always expecting something to happen, the puff of smoke, the fast-running man at the crowd’s margin, I couldn’t even bear being in a movie theater if there were more than ten or fifteen people in it, I would turn around with my fully paid ticket and walk right out. And yet somehow this massive, jam-packed church ceremony was springing up around me like a flash mob. I would swallow a few Xanax and sweat my way through it.

  Then too: I hoped that the escalating social roar which I’d been riding like a boat in a hurricane would slow, post-wedding, since all I really wanted was to get back to the halcyon days of summer when I’d had Kitsey all to myself: dinners alone, watching movies in bed. The constant invitations and gatherings were wearing me down: brightly-shifting whirlwinds of her friends, crowded evenings and hectic weekends that I weathered with my eyes squeezed shut and clutching on for dear
life: Linsey? no, Lolly? sorry… and this is—? Frieda? Hi, Frieda, and… Trev? Trav? nice to see you! Politely I stood around their antique farm tables, drinking myself into a stupor as they chatted about their country houses, their co-op boards, their school districts, their gym routines—that’s right, seamless transition from breast feeding although we’ve had some big changes in the nap schedule lately, our oldest just starting pre-K and the fall color in Connecticut is stunning, oh yes, of course, we all have our annual trip with the girls but you know these boys’ trips we do twice a year, out to Vail, down to the Caribbean, last year we went fly-fishing in Scotland and we hit some really outstanding golf courses—but oh, that’s right, Theo, you don’t golf, you don’t ski, you don’t sail, do you.

  “Sorry, afraid not.” The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job. And—all these pregnant women? “Oh, Theo! Isn’t he adorable!” Kitsey unexpectedly thrusting a friend’s newborn at me—me in all sincere horror leaping back as if from a lighted match.

  “Oh, sometimes it takes us guys a while,” said Race Goldfarb complacently, observing my discomfort, raising his voice above the infants wailing and tumbling in a nanny-supervised area of the living room. “But let me tell you, Theo, when you hold that little one of your own in your arms for the first time—?” (patting his wife’s pregnant tummy)—“your heart just breaks a little. Because when I first saw little Blaine?” (sticky-faced, staggering around unattractively at his feet) “and gazed into those big blue eyes? Those beautiful baby blues? I was transformed. I was in love. It was like: hey, little buddy! you are here to teach me everything! And I’m telling you, at that first smile I just melted into goo like we all do, didn’t I, Lauren?”

  “Right,” I said politely, going into the kitchen and pouring myself a huge vodka. My dad too had been wildly squeamish around pregnant women (had in fact been fired from a job for one too many ill-advised remarks; those breeder cracks hadn’t gone over too well at the office) and, far from the conventional “melting into goo” wisdom, he’d never been able to stand kids or babies either, much less the whole doting-parent scene, dumbly-smiling women feeling up their own bellies and guys with infants bound to their chests, would go outside to smoke or else skulk darkly at the margins looking like a drug pusher whenever he was forced to attend any sort of school event or kiddie party. Apparently I’d inherited it from him and, who knew, maybe Grandpa Decker as well, this violent procreative disgust buzzing loudly in my bloodstream; it felt inborn, wired-in, genetic.

  Nodding the night away. The dark-throated bliss of it. No thanks, Hobie, already ate, think I’ll just head up to bed with my book. The things these people talked about, even the men? Just thinking about that night at the Goldfarbs’ made me want to be so wrecked I couldn’t walk straight.

  As I approached Astor Place—African drum players, drunks arguing, clouds of incense from a street vendor—I felt my spirits lifting. My tolerance was sure to be way down: a cheering thought. Only one or two pills a week, to get me through the very worst of the socializing, and only when I really really needed them. In lieu of the pharms I’d been drinking too much and that really wasn’t working for me; with opiates I was relaxed, I was tolerant, I was up for anything, I could stand pleasantly for hours in unbearable situations listening to any old tiresome or ridiculous bullshit without wanting to go outside and shoot myself in the head.

  But I hadn’t phoned Jerome in a long time, and when I ducked in the doorway of a skate shop to make the call, it went straight to voice mail—a mechanical message that didn’t sound like his. Has he changed his number? I thought, starting to worry after the second try. People like Jerome—it had happened with Jack, before him—could drop off the map pretty suddenly even if you were in regular contact.

  Not knowing what to do, I started walking down St. Mark’s toward Tompkins Square. All Day All Night. You Must Be Twenty One To Enter. Downtown, away from the high-rise press, the wind cut more bitterly and yet the sky was more open too, it was easier to breathe. Muscle guys walking paired pit bulls, inked-up Bettie Page girls in wiggle dresses, stumblebums with drag-hemmed pants and Jack O’Lantern teeth and taped-up shoes. Outside the shops, racks of sunglasses and skull bracelets and multicolored transvestite wigs. There was a needle exchange somewhere, maybe more than one but I wasn’t sure where; Wall Street guys bought off the street all the time if you believed what people said but I wasn’t wise enough to know where to go or who to approach, and besides who was going to sell to me, a stranger with horn rimmed glasses and an uptown haircut, dressed for picking out wedding china with Kitsey?

  Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood—as I did—the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.

  Jerome—I stopped on the sidewalk outside a cheap sushi bar to get my bearings—Jerome had told me about a bar, red awning, around St. Mark’s, Avenue A maybe? He was always coming from there, or stopping off on his way to me. The bartender dealt from behind the counter to patrons who didn’t mind paying double for not having to buy on the street. Jerome was always making deliveries to her. Her name—I remembered it, even—Katrina! But every other storefront in the neighborhood seemed to be a bar.

  I walked up A and down First; ducked into the first bar I saw with an even vaguely red awning—liverish tan, but it might have been red once—and asked: “Does Katrina work here?”

  “Nope,” said the scorched redhead at the bar, not even looking at me as she pulled her pint.

  Shopping cart ladies asleep with their heads on bundles. Shop window of glitter Madonnas and Day of the Dead figures. Gray flocks of pigeons beating soundlessly.

  “You know you thinking about it, you know you thinking about it,” said a low voice in my ear—

  I turned to find a ripe, heavyset, broadly smiling black man with a gold tooth in front, who pressed a card into my hand: TATTOOS BODY ART PIERCING.

  I laughed—him too, a rich full-body laugh, both of us sharing in the joke—and slipped the card in my pocket and walked on. But a moment later I was sorry I hadn’t asked him where to find what I wanted. Even if he wouldn’t tell me, he’d looked like he would know.

  Body Piercing. Acupressure Footrub. We Buy Gold We Buy Silver. Many pallid kids, and then, further down—all on her own—a wan dreadlocked girl with a filthy puppy and a cardboard sign so worn I couldn’t read it. I was reaching guiltily into my pockets for some money—the money clip Kitsey had given me was too tight, I was having a hard time getting the bills out, as I fumbled I was aware of everyone looking at me and then—“hey!” I cried, stepping back, as the dog snarled and lunged, snapping and catching the hem of my pants leg in its needlelike teeth.

  Everyone was laughing—the kids, a street vendor, a cook in a hair net sitting on a stoop talking on a cell phone. Wrenching my pants leg loose—more laughter—I turned away and, to recover from my consternation, ducked into the next bar I saw—black awning with some red on it—and said to the bartender: “Does Katrina work here?”

  He stopped drying his glass. “Katrina?”

  “I’m a friend of Jerome’s.”

  “Katrina? Not Katya, you mean?” The guys at the bar—Eastern Europeans—had gone silent.

  “Maybe, uh—?”

  “What’s her last name?”

  “Um—” One leather-jacket guy had lowered his chin and turned full on his