Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

There was a mom-and-pop drugstore across the street. Once my breathing had settled I walked over—feeling clammy and isolated in the mild-hearted spring breeze—and bought a Pepsi from the cold case and walked away without taking my change and went back to the leaf shade of the park, the soot-dusted bench. Pigeons aloft and beating. Traffic roaring past to the tunnel, other boroughs, other cities, malls and parkways, vast impersonal streams of interstate commerce. There was a great, seductive loneliness in the hum, a summons almost, like the call of the sea, and for the first time I understood the impulse that had driven my dad to cash out his bank account, pick up his shirts from the cleaners, gas up the car, and leave town without a word. Sunbaked highways, twirled dials on the radio, grain silos and exhaust fumes, vast tracts of land unrolling like a secret vice.

Inevitably my thoughts went to Jerome. He lived way up on Adam Clayton Powell, a few blocks from the last stop on the 3 line, but there was a bar called Brother J’s where we sometimes met on 110th: a workingman’s dive with Bill Withers on the jukebox and a sticky floor, career alcoholics slumped over their third bourbon at two p.m. But Jerome did not sell pharmaceuticals in increments of less than a thousand dollars and though I knew he would be perfectly glad to let me have a few bags of smack it seemed like a lot less trouble if I just went ahead and took a cab straight down to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Old lady with a Chihuahua; little kids squabbling over a Popsicle. Up above Canal streamed a remote delirium of sirens, a formal offstage note that clashed with the ringing in my ears: something of mechanical warfare about it, sustained drone of incoming missiles.

With my hands pressed over my ears (which didn’t help the tinnitus at all—if anything, amplified it) I sat very still and tried to think. My childish machinations about the chest-on-chest now struck me as ridiculous—I would simply have to go to Hobie and admit what I’d done: not much fun, pretty shitty in fact, but better if he heard it from me. How he would react I couldn’t imagine; antiques were all I knew, I’d have a hard time getting another job in sales but I was just handy enough to find a place in a workshop if I had to, gilding frames or cutting bobbins; restorations didn’t pay well but so few people knew how to repair antiques to any kind of decent standard that someone was sure to take me on. As for the article: I was confused by what I’d read, almost as if I’d walked in on the middle of the wrong movie. On one level it was clear enough: some enterprising crook had faked my goldfinch (in terms of size and technique, not all that difficult a piece to fake) and the phony was floating around somewhere being fronted as collateral in drug deals and mis-identified by various clueless drug lords and federal agents. But no matter how fanciful or off-base the story, how lacking in relevance to the painting or me, the connection Reeve had made was real. Who knew how many people Hobie had told about me showing up at his house? or how many people those people had told? But so far no one, not even Hobie, had made the connection that Welty’s ring put me in the gallery with the painting. This was the crux of the biscuit, as my father would have said. This was the story that would get me put in jail. The French art thief who’d panicked, who’d burned a lot of the paintings he’d stolen (Cranach, Watteau, Corot) had gotten only twenty-six months in prison. But that was France, only shortly after 9/11; and, under the new rubric of federal anti-terrorism laws, the museum thefts carried an additional, more serious charge of “looting of cultural artifacts.” Penalties had grown much stiffer, in America particularly. And my personal life didn’t stand a lot of scrutiny. Even if I was lucky I would be looking at five to ten years.

Which—if I was honest—I deserved. How had I ever thought I could keep it hidden? I’d meant to deal with the painting for years, get it back where it belonged, and yet somehow I had kept on and on finding reasons not to. To think of it wrapped and sealed uptown made me feel self-erased, blanked-out, as if burying it away had only increased its power and given it a more vital and terrible form. Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.

xvi.

“HOBIE,” I SAID, “I’M in a jam.”

He glanced up from the Japaned chest he was retouching: roosters and cranes, golden pagodas on black. “Can I help?” He was outlining a crane’s wing with water-based acrylic—very different from the shellac-based original, but the first rule of restorations, as he’d taught me early on, was that you never did what you couldn’t reverse.

“Actually, the thing is. I’ve sort of gotten you in a jam. Inadvertently.”

“Well—” the line of his brush did not waver—“if you told Barbara Guibbory we’d help with that home she’s decorating in Rhinebeck, you’re on your own. ‘Colors of the Chakras.’ I never heard of such a thing.”

“No—” I tried to think of something funny or easy to say—Mrs. Guibbory, aptly nicknamed “Trippy,” was usually a wellspring of comedy—but my mind had gone completely blank. “Afraid not.”

Hobie straightened up, stuck the paintbrush behind one ear, blotted his forehead with a wildly patterned handkerchief, psychedelic purple like an African violet had thrown up on it, something he’d found probably in a crazy old lady’s effects at one of his sales upstate. “What’s going on, then?” he said reasonably, reaching for one of the saucers he mixed his paint in. Now that I was in my twenties, the generational formality between us had vanished, so that we were collegial in a way it was difficult to imagine being with my dad had he lived—me always on edge, trying to figure out how fucked-up he was and what my percentage point was of trying to get any kind of straight answer.

“I—” I reached to make sure that the chair behind me wasn’t sticky before I sat. “Hobie, I’ve made a stupid mistake. No, a really stupid one,” I said, at his good-natured, dismissive gesture.

“Well—” he was dripping raw umber into the saucer with an eyedropper—“I don’t know about stupid, but I can tell you it wholly ruined my day last week to see that drill bit coming through Mrs. Wasserman’s tabletop. That was a good William and Mary table. I know she won’t see where I’ve patched the hole but believe me it was a bad moment.”

His half-attentive manner made it worse. Quickly, with a sort of sick, dreamlike glide, I rushed headlong into the matter of Lucius Reeve and the chest-on-chest, leaving out Platt and the back-dated receipt in my breast pocket. Once I got started it was like I couldn’t stop, like the only thing to do was keep talking and talking like some highway killer droning on under a light bulb at a rural police station. At some point Hobie stopped working, stuck the paintbrush behind his ear; he listened steadily, with a sort of heavy-browed, Arctic, ptarmigan-settling-into-itself look that I knew well. Then he plucked the sable brush from behind his ear and dabbled it in some water before he wiped it on a piece of flannel.

“Theo,” he said, putting up a hand, closing his eyes—I’d stalled, going on and on about the uncashed check, dead end, bad position—“Stop. I get the picture.”

“I’m so sorry.” I was babbling. “I should never have done it. Never. But it’s a real nightmare. He’s pissed off and vindictive and he seems to have it in for us for some reason—you know, some other reason, something apart from this.”