Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Still, I’d never felt so sure of the future; and when I reminded myself of the right-ness of my course, as I often had occasion to do, my thoughts went not only to Kitsey but also Mrs. Barbour, whose happiness made me feel reassured and nourished in channels of my heart which had stood scraped dry for years. Our news had visibly brightened and straightened her; she’d begun stirring about the apartment, she’d pinked up with just the tiniest bit of lipstick, and even her most commonplace interactions with me were colored with a steady, stable, peaceful light that enlarged the space around us and beamed calmly into all my darkest corners.

“I never thought I’d be quite so happy ever again,” she’d confided quietly, one night at dinner, when Kitsey had jumped up very suddenly and run out to get the telephone as she was apt to do, and it was just the two of us at the card table in her room, poking awkwardly at our asparagus spears and our salmon steaks. “Because—you were always so good to Andy—bolstering him, improving his confidence. He was absolutely his best self with you, always. And—I’m so glad you’re going to be an official part of the family, that we’re going to make it legal now, because—oh, I suppose I shouldn’t say this, I hope you don’t mind if I speak from the heart for a moment, but I always did think of you as one of my very own, did you know that? Even when you were a little boy.”

This remark so shocked and touched me that I reacted clumsily—stammering in discomposure—so that she took pity and turned the conversation into another channel. Yet every time I remembered it I was suffused with a glow of warmth. An equally gratifying (if ignoble) memory was Pippa’s slight, shocked pause when I’d broken the news to her on the phone. Over and over again I had played that pause in my mind, relishing it, her stunned silence: “Oh?” And then, recovering: “Oh, Theo, how wonderful! I can’t wait to meet her!”

“Oh, she’s amazing, ” I’d said venomously. “I’ve been in love with her ever since we were kids.”

Which—in all sorts of ways I was still coming to realize—was absolutely true. The interplay of past and present was wildly erotic: I drew endless delight from the memory of nine-year-old Kitsey’s contempt for geeky thirteen-year-old me (rolling her eyes, pouting when she had to sit by me at dinner). And I relished even more the undisguised shock of people who’d known us as children: You? and Kitsey Barbour? Really? Her? I loved the fun and wickedness of it, the sheer improbability: slipping into her room after her mother was asleep—same room she’d kept shut against me when we were kids, same pink toile wallpaper, unchanged since the days of Andy, hand-lettered signs, KEEP OUT, DO NOT DISTURB—me backing her in, Kitsey locking the door behind us, putting her finger to my mouth, tracing it across my lips, that first, delicious tumble to her bed, Mommy’s sleeping, ssh!

Every day, I had multiple occasions to remind myself how lucky I was. Kitsey was never tired; Kitsey was never unhappy. She was appealing, enthusiastic, affectionate. She was beautiful, with a luminous, sugar-white quality that turned heads on the street. I admired how gregarious she was, how engaged with the world, how amusing and spontaneous—“little feather-head!” as Hobie called her, with a great deal of tenderness—what a breath of fresh air she was! Everyone loved her. And for all her infectious lightness of heart, I knew it was an extremely petty cavil that Kitsey never seemed very moved by anything. Even dear old Carole Lombard had got teary-eyed about ex-boyfriends and abused pets on the news and the closing of certain old-school bars in Chicago, where she was from. But nothing ever seemed to strike Kitsey as particularly urgent or emotional or even surprising. In this, she resembled her mother and brother—and yet Mrs. Barbour’s restraint, and Andy’s, were somehow very different from Kitsey’s way of making a flippant or trivializing comment whenever anyone brought up something serious. (“No fun,” I’d heard her say with a half-whimsical sigh, wrinkling her nose, when people inquired about her mother.) Then too—I felt morbid and sick even thinking it—I kept watching for some evidence of sorrow about Andy and her dad, and it was starting to disturb me that I hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t their deaths affected her at all? Weren’t we supposed to at least talk about it at some point? On one level, I admired her bravery: chin up, carrying on in the face of tragedy or whatever. Maybe she was just really really guarded, really locked-down, putting up a masterly front. But those sparkling blue shallows—so enticing at first glance—had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.

Kitsey was tapping my wrist. “What?”

“ Barneys. I mean, since we’re here? Maybe we should take a spin round the Homes department? I know Mother won’t love it if we register here but it might be fun to go for something a little less traditional for everyday.”

“No—” reaching for my glass, knocking the rest of it back—“I really need to get downtown, if that’s all right. Supposed to meet a client.”

“Will you be coming uptown tonight?” Kitsey shared an apartment in the East Seventies with two roommates, not far from the office of the arts organization where she worked.

“Not sure. Might have to go to dinner. I’ll get out of it if I can.”

“Cocktails? Please? Or an after-dinner drink, at least? Everyone will be so disappointed if you don’t put in at least a tiny appearance. Charles and Bette—”

“I’ll try. Promise. Don’t forget those,” I said, nodding at the earrings, which were still lying on the tablecloth.

“Oh! No! Of course not!” she said guiltily, grabbing them up and throwing them into her bag like a handful of loose change.

iii.

AS WE WALKED OUTSIDE together, into the Christmas crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth.

What was wrong with me? I thought, as Kitsey and I crossed Madison Avenue, her pink Prada overcoat bobbing exuberantly in the throng. Why did I hold it against Kitsey that she didn’t seem haunted over Andy and her dad, that she was getting on with her life?

But—clasping Kitsey’s elbow, rewarded by a radiant smile—I felt momentarily relieved again, and distracted from my worries. It had been eight months since I left Reeve in that Tribeca restaurant; no one had yet contacted me about any of the bad pieces I’d sold though I was fully prepared to admit my mistake if they did: inexperienced, new to the business, here’s your money back sir, accept my apologies. Nights, lying awake, I reassured myself that if things got ugly, at least I hadn’t left much of a trail: I’d tried not to document the sales any more than I’d had to, and on the smaller pieces had offered a discount for cash.

But still. But still. It was only a matter of time. Once one client stepped forward, there would be an avalanche. And it would be bad enough if I wrecked Hobie’s reputation but the moment there were so many claims that I stopped being able to refund people’s money, there would be lawsuits: lawsuits in which Hobie, co-owner of the business, would be named. It would be hard to convince a court he hadn’t known what I was doing, especially on some of the sales I’d made at the Important Americana level—and, if it came down to it, I wasn’t even sure that Hobie would speak up adequately in his own defense if that meant leaving me out to hang alone. Granted: a lot of the people I’d sold to had so much money they didn’t give a shit. But still. But still. When would someone decide to look under the seats of those Hepplewhite dining chairs (for instance) and notice that they weren’t all alike? That the grain was wrong, that the legs didn’t match? Or take a table to be independently evaluated and learn that the veneer was of a type not used, or invented, in the 1770s? Every day, I wondered when and how the first fraud might surface: a letter from a lawyer, a phone call from the American Furniture department at Sotheby’s, a decorator or a collector charging into the store to confront me, Hobie coming downstairs, listen, we’ve got a problem, do you have a minute?