The Goldfinch, Page 24

  “I wouldn’t steal from some poor working person,” I said, tossing Popper a piece of steak myself. “There are plenty of sleazy people walking around Vegas with wads of cash.”

  “Sleazy?”

  “Dodgy. Dishonest.”

  “Ah.” The pointed dark eyebrow went up. “Fair enough. But if you steal money from sleazy person, like gangster, they are likely to hurt you, nie?”

  “You weren’t scared of getting hurt in Ukraine?”

  He shrugged. “Beaten up, maybe. Not shot.”

  “Shot?”

  “Yes, shot. Don’t look surprised. This cowboy country, who knows? Everyone has guns.”

  “I’m not saying a cop. I’m saying drunk tourists. The place is crawling with them Saturday night.”

  “Ha!” He put the pan down on the floor for the dog to finish off. “Likely you will end up in jail, Potter. Loose morals, slave to the economy. Very bad citizen, you.”

  xiii.

  BY THIS TIME—OCTOBER or so—we were eating together almost every night. Boris, who’d often had three or four beers before dinner, switched over at mealtimes to hot tea. Then, after a post-dinner shot of vodka, a habit I soon picked up from him (“It helps you digest the food,” Boris explained), we lolled around reading, doing homework, and sometimes arguing, and often drank ourselves to sleep in front of the television.

  “Don’t go!” said Boris, one night at his house when I stood up toward the end of The Magnificent Seven—the final gunfight, Yul Brynner rounding up his men. “You’ll miss the best part.”

  “Yeah, but it’s almost eleven.”

  Boris—lying on the floor—raised himself on an elbow. Long-haired, narrow-chested, weedy and thin, he was Yul Brynner’s exact opposite in most respects and yet there was also an odd familial resemblance: they had the same sly, watchful quality, amused and a bit cruel, something Mongol or Tatar in the slant of the eyes.

  “Call Xandra to come collect you,” he said with a yawn. “What time does she get off work?”

  “Xandra? Forget it.”

  Again Boris yawned, eyes heavy-lidded with vodka. “Sleep here, then,” he said, rolling over and scrubbing his face with one hand. “Will they miss you?”

  Were they even coming home? Some nights they didn’t. “Doubtful,” I said.

  “Hush,” said Boris—reaching for his cigarettes, sitting up. “Watch now. Here come the bad guys.”

  “You saw this movie before?”

  “Dubbed into Russian, if you can believe it. But very weak Russian. Sissy. Is sissy the word I want? More like schoolteachers than gunfighters, is what I’m trying to say.”

  xiv.

  THOUGH I’D BEEN MISERABLE with grief at the Barbours’, I now thought longingly of the apartment on Park Avenue as a lost Eden. And though I had access to email on the computer at school, Andy wasn’t much of a writer, and the messages I got in reply were frustratingly impersonal. (Hi, Theo. Hope you enjoyed your summer. Daddy got a new boat [the Absalom]. Mother will not set foot upon it but unfortunately I was compelled. Japanese II is giving me some headaches but everything else is fine.) Mrs. Barbour dutifully answered the paper letters I sent—a line or two on her monogrammed correspondence cards from Dempsey and Carroll—but there was never anything personal. She always asked how are you? and closed with thinking about you, but there was never any we miss you or we wish we could see you.

  I wrote to Pippa, in Texas, though she was too ill to answer—which was just as well, since most of the letters I never sent.

  Dear Pippa,

  How are you? How do you like Texas? I’ve thought about you a lot. Have you been riding that horse you like? Things are great here. I wonder if it’s hot there, since it’s so hot here.

  That was boring; I threw it away, and started again.

  Dear Pippa,

  How are you? I’ve been thinking about you and hoping you are okay. I hope that things are

  going okay

  wonderful for you in Texas. I have to say, I sort of hate it here, but I’ve made some friends and am getting used to it a bit, I guess.

  I wonder if you get homesick? I do. I miss New York a lot. I wish we lived closer together. How is your head now? Better, I hope. I’m sorry that

  “Is that your girlfriend?” said Boris—crunching an apple, reading over my shoulder.

  “Shove off.”

  “What happened to her?” he said and then, when I didn’t reply: “Did you hit her?”

  “What?” I said, only half listening.

  “Her head? That’s why you’re apologizing? You hit her or something?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said—and then, from his earnest, intent expression, realized he was perfectly serious.

  “You think I beat girls up?” I said.

  He shrugged. “She might have deserved it.”

  “Um, we don’t hit women in America.”

  He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. “No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.”

  “Boris, shut up and leave me alone.”

  But he had rattled me with his comment and rather than start a new letter to Pippa, I began one to Hobie.

  Dear Mr. Hobart,

  Hello, how are you? Well, I hope. I have never written to thank you for your kindness during my last weeks in New York. I hope that you and Cosmo are okay, though I know you both miss Pippa. How is she? I hope she’s been able to go back to her music. I hope too

  But I didn’t send that one either. Hence I was delighted when a letter arrived—a long letter, on real paper—from none other than Hobie.

  “What’ve you got there?” said my father suspiciously—spotting the New York postmark, snatching the letter from my hand.

  “What?”

  But my dad had already torn the envelope open. He scanned it, quickly, and then lost interest. “Here,” he said, handing it back to me. “Sorry, kiddo. My mistake.”

  The letter itself was beautiful, as a physical artifact: rich paper, careful penmanship, a whisper of quiet rooms and money.

  Dear Theo,

  I’ve wanted to hear how you are and yet I’m glad I haven’t, as I hope this means you are happy and busy. Here, the leaves have turned, Washington Square is sodden and yellow, and it’s getting cold. On Saturday mornings, Cosmo and I mooch around the Village—I pick him up and carry him into the cheese shop—not sure that’s entirely legal but the girls behind the counter save him bits and bobs of cheese. He misses Pippa as much as I do but—like me—still enjoys his meals. Sometimes we eat by the fireplace now that Jack Frost is on us.

  I hope that you’re settling in there a bit and have made some friends. When I talk to Pippa on the telephone she doesn’t seem very happy where she is, though her health is certainly better. I am going to fly down there for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how pleased Margaret will be to have me, but Pippa wants me so I’ll go. If they allow me to carry Cosmo on the plane I might bring him, too.

  I’m enclosing a photo that I thought you might enjoy—of a Chippendale bureau that has just arrived, very bad repair, I was told it was stored in an unheated shed up around Watervliet, New York. Very scarred, very nicked, and the top’s in two pieces—but—look at those swept-back, weight-bearing talons on that ball-and-claw! the feet don’t come out well in the photo, but you can really see the pressure of the claws digging in. It’s a masterpiece, and I only wish it had been better looked after. I don’t know if you can see the remarkable graining on the top—extraordinary.

  As for the shop: I open it a few times a week by appointment, but mostly I keep myself busy below stairs with things sent to me by private clients. Mrs. Skolnik and several people in the neighborhood have asked about you—everything’s much the same here, except Mrs. Cho at the Korean market had a little stroke (

  very

  little, she’s back at work now). Also that coffee shop on Hudson that I liked so much has gone out of business—very sad. I walked by this morning and it looks a
s if they’re turning it into a—well, I don’t know what you’d call it. Some sort of Japanese novelty store.

  I see that as usual I’ve gone on too long and that I’m running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it’s all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there’s anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will.

  xv.

  THAT NIGHT, AT BORIS’S—lying drunk on my half of the batik-draped mattress—I tried to remember what Pippa had looked like. But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. “It was a lot of travelling—ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smelled like popcorn and horse manure. One night we were in San Antonio, and I was having a bit of a melt-down—wanting my own room, you know, my dog, my own bed—and Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess—I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a full moon, it’s like he’s telling me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where you are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.”

  A rustle, next to me. “Potter?” said Boris. “You awake?”

  “Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does the moon look like in Indonesia?”

  “What are you on about?”

  “Or, I don’t know, Russia? Is it just the same as here?”

  He rapped me lightly on the side of the head with his knuckles—a gesture of his that I had come to know, meaning idiot. “Same everywhere,” he said, yawning, propping himself up on his scrawny braceleted wrist. “And why?”

  “Dunno,” I said, and then, after a tense pause: “Do you hear that?”

  A door had slammed. “What’s that?” I said, rolling to face him. We looked at each other, listening. Voices downstairs—laughter, people knocking around, a crash like something had been knocked over.

  “Is that your dad?” I said, sitting up—and then I heard a woman’s voice, drunken and shrill.

  Boris sat up too, bony and sickly-pale in the light through the window. Downstairs, it sounded like they were throwing things and pushing furniture around.

  “What are they saying?” I whispered.

  Boris listened. I could see all the bolts and hollows in his neck. “Bullshit,” he said. “They’re drunk.”

  The two of us sat there, listening—Boris more intently than me.

  “Who’s that with him then?” I said.

  “Some whore.” He listened for a moment, brow furrowed, his profile sharp in the moonlight, and then lay back down. “Two of them.”

  I rolled over, and checked my iPod. It was 3:17 in the morning.

  “Fuck,” groaned Boris, scratching his stomach. “Why don’t they shut up?”

  “I’m thirsty,” I said, after a timid pause.

  He snorted. “Ha! You don’t want to go out there now, trust me.”

  “What are they doing?” I asked. One of the women had just screamed—whether in laughter or fright, I couldn’t tell.

  We lay there, stiff as boards, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ominous crashing and bumping-around.

  “Ukrainian?” I said, after a bit. Though I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I’d been around Boris enough that I was beginning to differentiate the intonations of spoken Ukrainian from Russian.

  “Top marks, Potter.” Then: “Light me a cigarette.”

  We passed it back and forth, in the dark, until another door slammed somewhere and the voices died down. At last, Boris exhaled, a final smoky sigh, and rolled over to stub it out in the overflowing ashtray beside the bed. “Good night,” he whispered.

  “Good night.”

  He fell asleep almost immediately—I could tell from his breathing—but I lay awake a lot longer, with a scratchy throat, feeling light-headed and sick from the cigarette. How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? Boris—oblivious—snored beside me. At last, towards dawn, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my mother: sitting across from me on the 6 train, swaying slightly, her face calm in the flickering artificial lights.

  What are you doing here? she said. Go home! Right now! I’ll meet you at the apartment. Only the voice wasn’t quite right; and when I looked more closely I saw it wasn’t her at all, only someone pretending to be her. And with a gasp and a start, I woke up.

  xvi.

  BORIS’S FATHER WAS A mysterious figure. As Boris explained it: he was often on site in the middle of nowhere, at his mine, where he stayed with his crew for weeks at a time. “Doesn’t wash,” said Boris austerely. “Stays filthy drunk.” The beaten-up short wave radio in the kitchen belonged to him (“From Brezhnev era,” said Boris; “he won’t throw it away”), and so were the Russian-language newspapers and USA Todays I sometimes found around. One day I’d walked into one of the bathrooms at Boris’s house (which were fairly grim—no shower curtain or toilet seat, upstairs or down, and black stuff growing in the tub) and got a bad start from one of his dad’s suits, soaking wet and smelly, dangling like a dead thing from the shower rod: scratchy, misshapen, of lumpy brown wool the color of dug roots, it dripped horribly on the floor like some moist-breathing golem from the old country or maybe a garment dredged up in a police net.

  “What?” said Boris, when I emerged.

  “Your dad washes his own suits?” I said. “In the sink in there?”

  Boris—leaning against the frame of the door, gnawing the side of his thumb nail—shrugged evasively.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, and then, when he kept on looking at me: “What? They don’t have dry cleaning in Russia?”

  “He has plenty of jewelry and posh,” growled Boris around the side of his thumb. “Rolex watch, Ferragamo shoes. He can clean his suit however he wants.”

  “Right,” I said, and changed the subject. Several weeks passed with no thought of Boris’s dad at all. But then came the day when Boris slid in late to Honors English with a wine colored bruise under his eye.

  “Ah, got it in the face with a football,” he said in a cheery voice when Mrs. Spear (‘Spirsetskaya,’ as he called her) asked him, suspiciously, what had happened.

  This, I knew, was a lie. Glancing over at him, across the aisle, I wondered throughout our listless class discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson how he’d managed to black his eye after I’d left him the previous night to go home and walk Popper—Xandra left him tied up outside so much that I was starting to feel responsible for him.

  “What’d you do?” I said when I caught up with him after class.

  “Eh?”

  “How’d you get that?”

  He winked. “Oh, come on,” he said, bumping his shoulder against mine.

  “What? Were you drunk?”

  “My dad came home,” he said, and then, when I didn’t answer: “What else, Potter? What did you think?”

  “Jesus, why?”

  He shrugged. “Glad you’d gone,” he said, rubbing his good eye. “Couldn’t believe when he showed up. Was sleeping on the couch downstairs. At first I thought it was you.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ah,” said Boris, sighing extravagantly; he’d been smoking on the way to school, I could smell it on his breath. “He saw the beer bottles on the floor.”

  “He hit you because you were drinking?”

  “Because he was fucking plastered, is why. He was drunk as a log—I don’t think he knew it was me he was hitting. This morning—he saw my face, he cried and was sorry. Anyway, he won’t be back for a while.”

&nbs
p; “Why not?”

  “He’s got a lot going on out there, he said. Won’t be back for three weeks. The mine is close to one of those places where they have the state-run brothels, you know?”

  “They aren’t state-run,” I said—and then found myself wondering if they were.

  “Well, you know what I mean. One good thing though—he left me moneys.”

  “How much?”

  “Four thousand.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, no—” he slapped his forehead—“thinking in roubles, sorry! About two hundred dollars, but still. Should have asked for more but I didn’t have the nerve.”

  We’d reached the juncture of the hallway where I had to turn for algebra and Boris had to turn for American Government: the bane of his existence. It was a required course—easy even by the desultory standards of our school—but trying to get Boris to understand about the Bill of Rights, and the enumerated versus implied powers of the U.S. Congress, reminded me of the time I’d tried to explain to Mrs. Barbour what an Internet server was.

  “Well, see you after class,” said Boris. “Explain again, before I go, what’s the difference between Federal Bank and Federal Reserve?”

  “Did you tell anybody?”

  “Tell what?”

  “You know.”

  “What, you want to report me?” said Boris, laughing.

  “Not you. Him.”

  “And why? Why is that a good idea? Tell me. So I can get deported?”

  “Right,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause.

  “So—we should eat out tonight!” said Boris. “In a restaurant! Maybe the Mexican.” Boris, after initial suspicion and complaint, had grown to like Mexican food—unknown in Russia, he said, not bad when you got used to it, though if it was too spicy he wouldn’t touch it. “We can take the bus.”

  “The Chinese is closer. And the food is better.”

  “Yah, but—remember?”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” I said. The last time we’d eaten there we’d slipped out