The Goldfinch, Page 53

  still smelled like my bedroom in Vegas; a tin full of assorted Roxicodones and morphs I knew I ought to flush; and a snarl of packing tape into which I’d cut, painstakingly, with an X-Acto knife, twenty minutes of delicate work, pulse throbbing in my fingertips, terrified of going in too hard and nicking the painting by mistake, finally getting the side open, peeling the tape off strip by strip by careful strip, with trembling hands: only to find—sandwiched in cardboard and wrapped with newspaper—a scribbled-up Civics workbook (Democracy, Diversity, and You!).

  Bright multicultural throng. On the cover Asian kids, Latino kids, African American kids, Native American kids, a girl in a Muslim head scarf and a white kid in a wheelchair smiled and held hands before an American flag. Inside, within the book’s cheery dull world of good citizenship, where persons of different ethnicities all participated happily in their communities and inner-city kids stood around their housing project with a watering can, caring for a potted tree with branches illustrating the different branches of government, Boris had drawn daggers with his name on them, roses and hearts surrounding Kotku’s initials, and a set of spying eyes, peeping slyly to one side, above a partially filled out sample test:

  Why does man need government?

  to impose ideology, punish wrongdoers, and promote equality and brotherhood among peoples

  What are some duties of an American citizen?

  to vote for Congress, celebrate diversity, and fight the enemies of the state

  Hobie, thankfully, was out. The pills I’d swallowed hadn’t worked, and after two hours of twisting and flopping on my bed in a torturous, falling, half-dream state—thoughts flying, exhausted from my heart beating so fast, Boris’s voice still running through my mind—I forced myself to get up, clear the mess strewn round my bedroom, and shower and shave: nicking myself in the process, since my upper lip was almost dentist-chair numb from the nosebleed I’d suffered. Then I made myself a pot of coffee, found a stale scone in the kitchen and forced myself to eat it, and was down in the shop and open for business by noon—just in time to intercept the mail lady in her plastic rain poncho (looking a bit alarmed, standing well back from rheumy-eyed me with my cut lip and my bloody Kleenex), although as she was handing the mail over to me with latex-gloved hands I realized: what was the point? Reeve could write Hobie all he wanted—phone Interpol—who cared any more.

  It was raining. Pedestrians huddled and scurrying. Rain pelting hard at the window, rain beading on the plastic garbage bags at the curb. There at the desk, in my musty armchair, I tried to anchor myself or at least take some kind of comfort in the faded silks and dimness of the shop, its bittersweet gloom like rainy dark classrooms of childhood, but the dopamine slam had dropped me hard and left me with the pre-tremblings of something that felt very like death—a sadness you felt in your stomach first, beating on the inside of the forehead, all the darkness I’d shut out roaring back in.

  Tunnel vision. All those years I’d drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn’t laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.

  What way was there to make it okay? None. In a way Boris had done me a favor by taking the thing—at least, I knew that was how most people would see it; I was off the hook; no one could blame me; the greater part of my problems had been solved at a stroke but while I knew that any sane person would be relieved to have the painting off their hands, yet I’d never felt quite so scorched with despair, self-hatred, shame.

  Warm weary shop. I could not stay still; I stood up and sat down, walked to the window and back again. Everything was sodden with horror. A bisque Pulcinella eyed me with spite. Even the furniture looked sickly and disproportionate. How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person on the basis of my secret uptown? Yet I had. The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.

  xi.

  WHEN HOBIE GOT HOME, around two, he walked in off the street with a jingle of bells like a customer.

  “Well, that was certainly a surprise last night.” He was pink-cheeked from the rain, shrugging off his raincoat and shaking the water off; he was dressed for the auction house, Windsor-knotted tie and one of the beautiful old suits. “Boris!” He’d done well at his auction, I could tell by his mood; though he tended not to go in with strong bids he knew what he wanted and every so often in a slow session, when no one was up against him, he made off with a pile of beauties. “I gather you two made quite a night of it?”

  “Ah.” I was hunched in a corner, sipping tea; my headache was ferocious.

  “Funny to meet him after hearing so much about him. Like meeting a character in a book. I’d always pictured him as the Artful Dodger in Oliver—oh you know—the little boy, the urchin, what’s the actor’s name. Jack something. Ragged coat. Smear of dirt along the cheek.”

  “Believe me, he was dirty enough back then.”

  “Well you know, Dickens doesn’t tell us what happened to the Dodger. Grew up to be a respectable businessman, who knows? And wasn’t Popper out of his mind? I’ve never seen an animal so happy.

  “Oh and yes—” half-turning, busy with his coat; he hadn’t noticed me go still at Popper’s name—“before I forget, Kitsey called.”

  I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. I hadn’t thought of Popper even once.

  “Late-ish—ten. Told her you’d run into Boris, you’d come by, you’d gone out, hope that was all right.”

  “Sure,” I said, after an effortful pause, struggling to collect my thoughts which were galloping in several very bad directions at once.

  “What must I remind you.” Hobie put his finger to his lips. “I was given a charge. Let me think.

  “I can’t remember,” he said after a small start, shaking his head. “You’ll have to phone her. Dinner tonight, I know, at someone’s house. Dinner at eight! That I remember. But I can’t remember where.”

  “The Longstreets,” I said, my heart plunging.

  “That sounds right. Anyhow, Boris! Great fun—great charmer—how long’s he in town for? How long’s he here for?” he repeated amiably when I didn’t answer—he couldn’t see my face, staring out horrified into the street. “We should have him over for dinner, don’t you think? Why don’t you ask him to give us a couple of nights when he’s free? That is, if you like,” he said, when I didn’t reply. “Up to you. Let me know.”

  xii.

  ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER—exhausted, eyes streaming with pain from my headache—I was still frantically wondering how to get Popper back while simultaneously inventing, and rejecting, explanations for his absence. I left him tied in front of a store? Someone had snatched him? An obvious lie: quite apart from the fact that it was pouring rain, Popper was so old and cranky on the leash I could hardly drag him down to the fire hydrant. Groomer? Popper’s groomer, a needy-seeming old lady named Cecelia who worked out of her apartment, always had him back by three. Vet? Quite apart from the fact that Popper wasn’t sick (and why wouldn’t I have mentioned it if he was?) Popper went to the same vet that Hobie had known since the days of Welty and Chessie. Dr. McDermott’s office was right down the street. Why would I have taken him anywhere else?

  I groaned, got up, walked to the window. Again and again I ran against the same dead end, Hobie walking in befuddled, as he was bound to do in an hour or two, looking around the store: “Where’s Popper? Have you seen him?” And that was it: infinite
loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. “Where’s Popper?” No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment.

  The ragged sheets of rain had slowed to a drizzle, shining sidewalks and water dripping from the awnings, and everyone on the street seemed to have seized the moment to throw on a raincoat and dash out to the corner with the dog: dogs everywhere I looked, galumphing sheepdog, black standard poodle, terrier mutts, retriever mutts, an elderly French bulldog and a self-satisfied pair of dachshunds with their chins in the air, prissing in tandem across the street. In agitation I went back to my chair, sat down, picked up the Christie’s house sale catalogue and began to leaf through it in a rattled way: horrible modernist watercolors, two thousand dollars for an ugly Victorian bronze of two buffalos fighting, absurd.

  What was I going to tell Hobie? Popper was old and deaf, and sometimes he fell asleep in out-of-the-way places where he didn’t hear right away when we called, but soon enough it would be time for his dinner and I would hear Hobie walking around upstairs, looking for him behind the sofa and in Pippa’s bedroom and all his usual places. “Popsky? Here, boy! Dinnertime!” Could I feign ignorance? Pretend to search the house too? scratch my head in puzzlement? Mysterious disappearance? Bermuda Triangle? I’d returned, with sinking heart, to the groomer idea when the shop bell jingled.

  “I started to keep him.”

  Popper—damp, but otherwise looking none the worse for his adventure—stiffened his legs rather formally as Boris set him down on the floor and then paddled over to me, holding his head up so that I might scratch him under the chin.

  “He did not miss you one bit,” said Boris. “We had a very nice day together.”

  “What’d you do?” I said, after a long silence, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Sleeped, mostly. Gyuri dropped us off—” he scrubbed his darkened eyes, and yawned—“and we had a very nice nap together, the two of us. You know—how he used to curl up? Like a fur hat on my head?” Popper had never liked to sleep with his chin on my head like that—only with Boris. “Then—we woke up, and I had a shower and I took him for a walk—not far, he did not want to go far—and I made some phone calls and we ate a bacon sandwich and drove back in. Look, I am sorry!” he said impulsively when I didn’t answer, running his hand through his rumpled hair. “Really. And I am going to make it right again, and good, I will.”

  The silence between us was crushing.

  “Did you have fun last night anyway? I had fun. Big night out! Not feeling so hot this morning, though. Please say something,” he blurted when I didn’t reply. “I have been feeling very very bad about this all day.”

  Popper had snuffled across the room to his water dish. Peacefully, he began to drink. For a long time there was no sound except his monotonous lapping and slurping.

  “Really, Theo—” hand to heart—“I feel terrible. My feelings—my shame—I have no words for,” he said, more gravely, when still I did not answer. “And yes, I’ll admit it, part of me asks myself, ‘why did you wreck everything, Boris, why did you open your big mouth.’ But how could I lie and sneak? You’ll give me that, at least?” he said, rubbing his hands, agitatedly. “I am not cowardly. I told you. I admitted it. I didn’t want you to worry, not knowing what was going on. And I am going to make it up to you, somehow, I promise.”

  “Why—” Hobie was busy downstairs with the vacuum but I lowered my voice all the same, the same angry whisper when Xandra was downstairs and we didn’t want her to hear us quarreling—“why—”

  “Why what?”

  “Why the hell did you take it?”

  Boris blinked, a bit self-righteously. “Because you have Jewish Mafiya coming to your house, is why!”

  “No, that’s not why.”

  Boris sighed. “Well, is partly why—a little. Was it safe at your house? No! And not at school either. Got my old school book, wrapped it in newspaper and taped it same fatness—”

  “I asked why did you take it.”

  “What can I say. I am thief.”

  Popper was still noisily slurping up the water. With exasperation I wondered if Boris had thought to put a bowl down for him in their so-nice day out.

  “And—” lightly he shrugged—“I wanted it. Yes. Who would not?”

  “Wanted it why? For money?” I said, when he didn’t answer.

  Boris made a face. “Of course not. Can’t sell something like that. Although—must admit—one time I was in trouble, four-five years ago, I almost sold it outright, low low price, giveaway almost, just to be rid of it. Glad I did not. I was in a jam and I needed cash. But—” sniffing hard, wiping his nose—“trying to sell piece like that is the quickest way to get caught. You know that yourself. As negotiable instrument—different story! They hold it as collateral—they front you the goods. You sell the goods, whatever, return with the capital, give them their cut, picture is returned to you, game over. Understand?”

  I said nothing, began to leaf through the Christie’s catalogue again, which was still lying open on my desk.

  “You know what they say.” His voice both sad and cajoling. “ ‘Chance makes the thief.’ Who knows that better than you? I went in your locker looking for lunch money and I thought: what? Hello? What’s this? It was easy to slip it out and hide it. And then I took my old workbook to Kotku’s shop class, same size, same thickness—same tape and everything! Kotku helped me do it. I didn’t tell her why I was doing it though. You couldn’t really tell Kotku things like that.”

  “I still can’t believe you stole it.”

  “Look. Am not going to make excuses. I took it. But—” he smiled winningly—“am I dishonest? Did I lie about it?”

  “Yes,” I said, after a disbelieving pause. “Yes, you did lie about it.”

  “You never asked me straight out! If you did, I would have told you!”

  “Boris, that’s bullshit. You lied.”

  “Well, am not lying now,” said Boris, looking around resignedly. “I thought you would have found out by now! Years ago! I thought that you knew it was me!”

  I wandered away, to the stairs, trailed by Popchik; Hobie had shut the vacuum cleaner off, leaving a glaring silence, and I didn’t want him to hear us.

  “I am not too clear—” Boris blew his nose sloppily, inspected the contents of the Kleenex, winced—“but am fairly sure it is in Europe somewhere.” He wadded the Kleenex and stuffed it in his pocket. “Genoa, outside chance. But my best guess is Belgium or Germany. Holland, maybe. They will be able to negotiate with it better because people are more impressed with it over there.”

  “That doesn’t really narrow it down a lot.”

  “Well, listen! Be glad it is not in South America! Because then, I guarantee, no chance you would see it again.”

  “I thought you said it was gone.”

  “I am not saying anything except I think I may be able to learn where it is. May. That is very different from knowing how to get it back. I have not dealt with these people before at all.”

  “What people?”

  Boris, uneasily, remained silent, casting his eyes about on the floor: iron bulldog figurines, stacked books, many little carpets.

  “He doesn’t pee on the antiquities?” he inquired, nodding at Popchik. “All this nice furniture?”

  “Nope.”

  “He used to go all the time in your house. Your whole carpet downstairs smelled like pee. I think maybe because Xandra was not so good about taking him out before we got there.”

  “What people?”

  “Huh?”

  “What people have you not dealt with.”

  “It’s complicated. I will explain to you if you want,” he added hastily, “only I think we are both tired and now is not the time. But I am going to make a few calls and tell you what I find, right? And when I do, I will come back and tell you, promise. By the way—�
� tapping his upper lip with his finger.

  “What?” I said, startled.

  “Spot there. Under your nose.”

  “I cut myself shaving.”

  “Oh.” Standing there, he looked uncertain, as if he were on the verge of rushing in with some much more heated apology or outburst, but the silence that hung between us had a decidedly conclusive air, and he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well.”

  “Well.”

  “See you later, then.”

  “Sure.” But when he walked out the door, and I stood at the window and watched him duck the drips from the awning and saunter away—his gait loosening and lightening as soon as he thought he was out of my view—I felt there was a pretty good chance it was the last I’d see of him.

  xiii.

  GIVEN HOW I FELT, which was near death basically, suffering from an ugly migrainous headache and engulfed with such misery I could barely see, there was little point keeping the shop open. So though the sun had come out and people were appearing on the street, I turned around the “Closed” sign and—with Popper trundling anxiously behind me—I dragged myself upstairs, half-sick with the pain hammering behind my eyes, to pass out for a few hours before dinner.

  Kitsey and I were to meet at her mother’s apartment at 7:45 before heading over to the Longstreets’, but I arrived a little early—partly because I wanted to see her on her own for a few minutes before we went to dinner; partly because I had something for Mrs. Barbour—a rare-ish exhibition catalogue I’d found for her in one of Hobie’s estate lots, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt.

  “No, no,” said Etta when I went to the kitchen to ask her to knock on the door for me, “she’s up and about. I took her some tea not fifteen minutes ago.”

  What “up and about” meant, for Mrs. Barbour, was pyjamas and puppy-chewed slippers with what looked like an old opera coat thrown over. “Oh, Theo!” she said, her face opening with a touching, unguarded plainness that made me think of Andy on the rare occasions when he was actually pleased about something—such as his Nagler 22mm telescopic eyepiece arriving in the mail or his happy discovery of the LARP (Live Action Role Play) porn site, featuring busty sword-wielding lasses getting it on with knights and wizards and so forth. “What a dear, dear duck you are!”

  “You don’t have it, I hope?”

  “No—” leafing through it delightedly—“how perfect of you! You’ll never, ever believe it but I saw this show in Boston when I was in college.”

  “That must have been some show,” I said, settling back into an armchair. I was feeling much happier than, an hour previous, I would have thought possible. Sick over the painting, sick with headache, despairing at the thought of dinner with the Longstreets, wondering how the hell I was going to make it through an evening of hot crab dip and Forrest delivering his views on the economy when all I basically wanted to do was blow my brains out, I’d tried to call Kitsey, with the intention of begging her to plead illness with me so we could skive off and spend the evening at her apartment, in bed. But—as often happened, infuriatingly, on Kitsey’s days out—my calls had gone unreturned, my texts and emails unanswered, my messages clicking straight through to voice mail—“I need to get a new phone,” she’d said fretfully, when I’d complained of these all-too-frequent communication blackouts, “there’s something wrong with it”—and though I’d asked her several times to walk in off the street with me to the Apple store and get a new one, she always had an excuse: lines too long, had to be somewhere, wasn’t in the mood, hungry, thirsty, needed to pee, couldn’t we do it another time?

  Sitting on the side of my bed with eyes closed, annoyed at not being able to reach her (as I never seemed to be able to do, when I really needed to), I’d thought of calling Forrest and telling him I was ill. But as bad as I felt I still wanted to see her, even if it was only across the table at dinner with people I didn’t like. Hence—to force myself out of bed, uptown, and through the most deathly part of the evening—I’d swallowed what had been, for me, in the old days, a mild dose of opiates. But though it hadn’t knocked my headache out it had put me in a surprisingly good mood. I hadn’t felt so well in months.

  “You and Kitsey are dining out tonight?” said Mrs. Barbour, who was still happily leafing through the catalogue I’d brought. “Forrest Longstreet?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was in your class with Andy, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes he was.”

  “He wasn’t one of those boys who was so awful?”

  “Well—” Euphoria had made me generous. “Not really.” Forrest, oafish and slow on the draw (“Sir, are trees considered plants?”) had never been intelligent enough to persecute Andy and me in any kind of focused or resourceful way. “But, yes, you’re right, he was part of that whole group, you know, Temple and Tharp and Cavanaugh and Scheffernan.”

  “Yes. Temple. I certainly remember him. And the Cable boy.”

  “What?” I said, mildly surprised.

  “He’s certainly turned out badly,” she said without looking up from the catalogue. “Living on credit… can’t hold a job and also some trouble with the law, I hear. Wrote some bad checks, apparently his mother had a hard time keeping the people from pressing charges. And Win Temple,” she said, looking up, before I could explain that Cable hadn’t really been a part of that aggressive-jock crowd. “He was the one who knocked Andy’s head against the wall in the showers.”

  “Yes, that was him.” What I mainly remembered about the showers was not so much Andy getting concussed on the tile as Scheffernan and Cavanaugh wrestling me down and trying to shove a stick of deodorant up my ass.

  Mrs. Barbour—wrapped delicately in her coat, shawl over her lap as if riding in a sleigh to a Christmas party—was still leafing through her book. “Do you know what that Temple boy said?”