The Goldfinch Read online

  “Um…” It had not escaped me that a number of the books on Dave’s shelves had titles with the word sex in them: Adolescent Sexuality, Sex and Cognition, Patterns of Sexual Deviance and—my favorite: Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction. “I’m okay, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “No, I’m fine. Things are good.”

  “Oh yeah?” Dave leaned back in his chair, Converse sneaker bobbing. “That’s great.” Then: “Why don’t you bring me up to speed a little bit on what’s been going on?”

  “Oh—” I scratched my eyebrow, looked away—“Spanish is still pretty difficult—I have another make-up test, I’ll probably take that Monday. But I got an A on my Stalingrad paper. So it looks like that’ll bring my B minus in history up to a B.”

  He was quiet so long, looking at me, that I began to feel cornered and started casting around for something else to say. Then: “Anything else?”

  “Well—” I looked at my thumbs.

  “How has your anxiety been?”

  “Not so bad,” I said, thinking how uneasy it made me that I didn’t know a thing about Dave. He was one of those guys who wore a wedding ring that didn’t really look like a wedding ring—or maybe it wasn’t a wedding ring at all and he was just super-proud of his Celtic heritage. If I’d had to guess, I would have said he was newly married, with a baby—he gave off a glazed vibe of exhausted young fatherhood, like he might have to get up and change diapers in the night—but who knew?

  “And your medication? What about the side effects?”

  “Uh—” I scratched my nose—“better I guess.” I hadn’t even been taking my pills, which made me so tired and headachey I’d started spitting them down the plughole of the bathroom sink.

  Dave was quiet for a moment. “So—would it be out of line to say that you’re feeling better generally?”

  “I guess not,” I said, after a silence, staring at the wall hanging behind his head. It looked like a lopsided abacus made of clay beads and knotted rope, and I had spent what felt like a massive portion of my recent life staring at it.

  Dave smiled. “You say that like it’s something to be ashamed of. But feeling better doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten about your mother. Or that you loved her any less.”

  Resenting this supposition, which had never occurred to me, I looked away from him and out the window, at his depressing view of the white brick building across the street.

  “Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?”

  “No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

  “Where did you go just now?” said Dave, attempting to catch my eye.

  “Sorry?”

  “What were you just thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh yeah? Pretty hard to think about absolutely nothing.”

  I shrugged. Aside from Andy, I’d told no one about going down on the bus to Pippa’s house, and the secret colored everything, like the afterglow of a dream: tissue-paper poppies, dim light from a guttering candle, the sticky heat of her hand in mine. But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn’t want to spoil it by talking about it, especially not with him.

  We sat there for another long moment or two. Then Dave leaned forward with a concerned expression and said: “You know, when I ask you where you go during these silences, Theo, I’m not trying to be a jerk or put you on the spot or anything.”

  “Oh, sure! I know,” I said uneasily, picking at the tweed upholstery on the arm of the sofa.

  “I’m here to talk about whatever you want to talk about. Or—” creak of wood as he shifted in his chair—“we don’t have to talk at all! Only I wonder if you have something on your mind.”

  “Well,” I said, after another never-ending pause, resisting the temptation to peek sideways at my watch. “I mean I just”—how many more minutes did we have? Forty?

  “Because I hear, from some of the other adults in your life, that you’ve had a noticeable upswing of late. You’ve been participating in class more,” he said, when I didn’t answer. “Engaging socially. Eating normal meals again.” In the stillness, an ambulance siren floated up faintly from the street. “So I guess I’m wondering if you could help me understand what’s changed.”

  I shrugged, scratched the side of my face. How were you supposed to explain this kind of thing? It seemed stupid to try. Even the memory was starting to seem vague and starry with unreality, like a dream where the details get fainter the harder you try to grasp them. What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn’t tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century painting. Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flower-garlanded hearts. Pippa’s face pale in the dark.

  vi.

  “LISTEN,” I SAID TO Andy several days later, as we were coming out of Starbucks after school, “can you cover for me this afternoon?”

  “Certainly,” said Andy, taking a greedy swallow of his coffee. “How long?”

  “Don’t know.” Depending on how long it took me to change trains at Fourteenth Street, it might take forty-five minutes to get downtown; the bus, on a weekday, would be even longer. “Three hours?”

  He made a face; if his mother was at home, she would ask questions. “What shall I tell her?”

  “Tell her I had to stay late at school or something.”

  “She’ll think you’re in trouble.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want her to phone school to check on you.”

  “Tell her I went to a movie.”

  “Then she’ll ask why I didn’t go too. Why don’t I say you’re at the library.”

  “That’s so lame.”

  “All right, then. Why don’t we tell her that you have a terribly pressing engagement with your parole officer. Or that you stopped in to have a couple of Old Fashioneds at the bar of the Four Seasons.”

  He was imitating his father; the impression was so dead-on, I laughed. “Fabelhaft,” I replied, in Mr. Barbour’s voice. “Very funny.”

  He shrugged. “The main branch is open tonight until seven,” he said, in his own bland and faint-ish voice. “But I don’t have to know which branch you went to, if you forget to tell me.”

  vii.

  THE DOOR OPENED QUICKER than I’d expected, while I was staring down the street and thinking of something else. This time, he was clean-shaven, smelling of soap, with his long gray hair neatly combed back and tucked behind his ears; and he was just as impressively dressed as Mr. Blackwell had been when I’d seen him.

  His eyebrows came u
p; clearly he was surprised to see me. “Hello!”

  “Have I come at a bad time?” I said, eyeing the snowy cuff of his shirt, which was embroidered with a tiny cypher in Chinese red, block letters so small and stylized they were nearly invisible.

  “Not at all. As a matter of fact I was hoping you’d stop by.” He was wearing a red tie with a pale yellow figure; black oxford brogues; a beautifully tailored navy suit. “Come in! Please.”

  “Are you going somewhere?” I said, regarding him timidly. The suit made him seem a different person, less melancholy and distracted, more capable—unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled aspect of an elegant but mistreated polar bear.

  “Well—yes. But not now. Quite frankly, we’re in a bit of a tip. But no matter.”

  What did that mean? I followed him inside—through the forest of the workshop, table legs and unsprung chairs—and up through the gloomy parlor into the kitchen, where Cosmo the terrier was pacing fretfully back and forth and whimpering, his toenails clicking on the slate. When we came in, he took a few steps backwards and glared up at us aggressively.

  “Why’s he in here?” I asked, kneeling to stroke his head, and then pulling my hand back when he shied away.

  “Hmn?” said Hobie. He seemed preoccupied.

  “Cosmo. Doesn’t he like to be with her?”

  “Oh. Her aunt. She doesn’t want him in there.” He was filling the teakettle at the sink; and—I noticed—the kettle shook in his hands as he did it.

  “Aunt?”

  “Yes,” he said, putting the kettle on to boil, then stooping to scratch the dog’s chin. “Poor little toad, you don’t know what to make of it, do you? Margaret’s got very strong opinions on the subject of dogs in the sickroom. No doubt she’s right. And here you are,” he said, glancing over his shoulder with an odd bright look. “Washing up on the strand again. Pippa’s been talking of you ever since you were here.”

  “Really?” I said, delighted.

  “ ‘Where’s that boy.’ ‘There was a boy here.’ She told me yesterday that you were coming back and presto,” he said, with a warm and young-sounding laugh, “here you are.” He stood, knees creaking, and wiped the back of his wrist against his knobbly white brow. “If you wait a bit, you can go in and see her.”

  “How is she doing?”

  “Much better,” he said, crisply, without looking at me. “Lots of goings-on. Her aunt is taking her to Texas.”

  “Texas?” I said, after a stunned pause.

  “Afraid so.”

  “When?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “No!”

  He grimaced—a twinge that vanished the moment I saw it. “Yes, I’ve been packing her up to go,” he said, in a cheerful voice that did not match the flash of unhappiness that he’d let slip. “People have been in and out. Friends from school—in fact, this is the first quiet moment we’ve had in a while. It’s been quite a busy week.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “Well—not for a while, actually. Margaret’s taking her down there to live.”

  “Forever?”

  “Oh no! Not forever,” he said, in a voice that made me realize that forever was exactly what he meant. “It’s not as if anyone’s leaving the planet,” he added, when he saw my face. “Certainly I’ll be going down to see her. And certainly she’ll be back for visits.”

  “But—” I felt like the ceiling had collapsed on top of me. “I thought she lived here. With you.”

  “Well, she did. Until now. Although I’m sure she’ll be much better off down there,” he added, without conviction. “It’s a big change for us all, but in the long run I’m sure it’s all for the best.”

  I could tell he didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. “But why can’t she stay here?”

  He sighed. “Margaret is Welty’s half sister,” he said. “His other half sister. Pippa’s nearest relative. Blood, in any case, which I am not. She thinks that Pippa will be better off in Texas, now that she’s well enough to move.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live in Texas,” I said, taken aback. “It’s too hot.”

  “I don’t think the doctors are as good there either,” said Hobie, dusting his hands off. “Although Margaret and I disagree about that.”

  He sat down, and looked at me. “Your glasses,” he said. “I like them.”

  “Thanks.” I didn’t want to talk about my new eyeglasses, an unwelcome development, although they did actually help me to see better. Mrs. Barbour had picked out the frames for me at E. B. Meyrowitz after I’d failed an eye test with the school nurse. They were round tortoiseshell, a little too grown-up and expensive-looking, and adults had been going a little too far out of their way to assure me how great they looked.

  “How are things uptown?” said Hobie. “You can’t imagine the stir your visit has caused. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of coming uptown to see you myself. The only reason I didn’t was that I hated to leave Pippa since she’s going away so soon. This has all happened very fast, you see. The business with Margaret. She’s like their father, old Mr. Blackwell—she gets something in her head and off she goes, it’s done.”

  “Is he going to Texas too? Cosmo?”

  “Oh no—he’ll be fine here. He’s lived here in this house since he was twelve weeks old.”

  “Won’t he be unhappy?”

  “I hope not. Well—quite honestly—he’ll miss her. Cosmo and I get on fairly well, though he’s been in a terrible slump since Welty died. He was Welty’s dog really, he’s only taken up with Pippa quite recently. These little terriers like Welty always had aren’t always so crazy about children, you understand—Cosmo’s mother Chessie was a holy terror.”

  “But why does Pippa have to move down there?”

  “Well,” he said, rubbing his eye, “it’s really the only thing that makes sense. Margaret is the technical nearest of kin. Though Margaret and Welty scarcely spoke while Welty was alive—not in recent years, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well—” I could tell he didn’t want to explain it. “It’s all very complicated. Margaret was quite against Pippa’s mother, you see.”

  Just as he said this, a tall, sharp-nosed, capable-looking woman walked into the room, the age of a young-ish grandmother, with a thin, patrician-harpy face and iron-rust hair going gray. Her suit and shoes reminded me of Mrs. Barbour, only they were a color that Mrs. Barbour would never have worn: lime green.

  She looked at me; she looked at Hobie. “What is this?” she said coldly.

  Hobie exhaled audibly; he looked exasperated. “Never mind, Margaret. This is the boy who was with Welty when he died.”

  She peered over her half-glasses at me—and then laughed sharply, a high self-conscious laugh.

  “But hello,” she said—all charm all of a sudden, holding out to me her thin red hands covered with diamonds. “I’m Margaret Blackwell Pierce. Welty’s sister. Half sister,” she corrected herself, with a glance over my shoulder at Hobie, when she saw my eyebrows go down. “Welty and I had the same father, you see. My mother was Susie Delafield.”

  She said the name as if it ought to mean something. I looked at Hobie to see what he thought about it. She saw me doing it, and glanced at him sharply before she returned her attention—all sparkle—to me.

  “And what an adorable little boy you are,” she said to me. Her long nose was slightly pink at the end. “I’m awfully glad to meet you. James and Pippa have been telling me all about your visit—the most extraordinary thing. We’ve all been abuzz about it. Also—” she clasped my hand—“I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for returning my grandfather’s ring to me. It means an awful lot to me.”

  Her ring? Again, in confusion, I looked at Hobie.

  “It would have meant a lot to my father, as well.” There was a deliberate, practiced quality to her friendliness (“buckets of charm,” as Mr. Barbour would have said); and yet her coppery tang of resem
blance to Mr. Blackwell, and Pippa, drew me in despite myself. “You know how it was lost before, don’t you?”

  The kettle whistled. “Would you like some tea, Margaret?” said Hobie.

  “Yes please,” she replied briskly. “Lemon and honey. A tiny bit of scotch in it.” To me, in a more friendly voice, she said: “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid we have some grown-up business to attend to. We’re to meet with the lawyer shortly. As soon as Pippa’s nurse arrives.”

  Hobie cleared his throat. “I don’t see any harm if—”

  “May I go in and see her?” I said, too impatient for him to finish the sentence.

  “Of course,” said Hobie quickly, before Aunt Margaret could intervene—turning expertly away to evade her annoyed expression. “You remember the way, don’t you? Just through there.”

  viii.

  THE FIRST THING SHE said to me was: “Will you please turn off the light?” She was propped in bed with the earbuds to her iPod in, looking blinded and disoriented in the light from the overhead bulb.

  I switched it off. The room was emptier, cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. A thin spring rain was hitting at the windowpanes; outside, in the dark courtyard, the foamy white blossoms of a flowering pear were pale against wet brick.

  “Hello,” she said, folding her hands a little tighter on the coverlet.

  “Hi,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound quite so awkward.

  “I knew it was you! I heard you talking in the kitchen.”

  “Oh, yeah? How’d you know it was me?”

  “I’m a musician! I have very sharp ears.”

  Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dim, I saw that she seemed less frail than she had on my previous visit. Her hair had grown back in a bit and the staples were out, though the puckered line of the wound was still visible.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  She smiled. “Sleepy.” The sleep was in her voice, rough and sweet at the edges. “Do you mind sharing?”

  “Sharing what?”

  She turned her head to the side and removed one of the earbuds, and handed it to me. “Listen.”

  I sat down by her on the bed, and put it in my ear: aethereal harmonies, impersonal, piercing, like a radio signal from Paradise.

  We looked at each other. “What is it?” I said.

  “Umm—” she looked at the iPod—“Palestrina.”

  “Oh.” But I didn’t care what it was. The only reason I was even hearing it was because of the rainy light, the white tree at the window, the thunder, her.

  The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. “You don’t have to talk,” she said. “If you don’t feel like it.” Her eyelids were heavy and her voice was drowsy and like a secret. “People always want to talk but I like being quiet.”

  “Have you been crying?” I said, looking at her a bit more closely.

  “No. Well—a little.”

  We sat there, not saying anything, and it didn’t feel clumsy or weird.

  “I have to leave,” she said presently. “Did you know?”

  “I know. He told me.”

  “It’s awful. I don’t want to go.” She smelled like salt, and medicine, and something else, like the chamomile tea my mother bought at Grace’s, grassy and sweet.

  “She seems nice,” I said, cautiously. “I guess.”

  “I guess,” she echoed gloomily, trailing a fingertip along the border of the coverlet. “She said something about a swimming pool. And horses.”