Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“No no,” she was saying, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass—the shape of her hands moved me intensely, Welty’s signet on her forefinger, I could stare at her hands the way I could never stare at her face without seeming like a creep. “I loved the movie, actually. And the music—” she laughed, and the laugh, for me, had all the joy of the music behind it. “Knocked the breath out of me. Welty saw him play once, at Carnegie. One of the great nights of his life, he said. It’s just—”

“Yes?” The smell of her wine. Red-wine stain on her mouth. This was one of the great nights of my life.

“Well—” she shook her head—“the concert scenes. The look of those rehearsal halls. Because, you know—” rubbing her arms—“it was really, really hard. Practice, practice, practice—six hours a day—my arms would ache from holding the flute up—and, well, I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of it too, that positive-thinking crap that it’s so easy for teachers and physical therapists to dole out—‘oh, you can do it!’ ‘we believe in you!’—and falling for it and working hard and working harder and hating yourself because you’re not working hard enough, thinking it’s your fault you’re not doing better and working even harder and then—well.”

I was silent. I knew all about this from Hobie, who had spoken of it in great distress and at some length. It seemed that Aunt Margaret had been perfectly correct to send her to the wacko Swiss school with all the doctors and the therapy. Though to all normal standards she’d recovered from the accident completely, still there was a bit of neural damage, just enough to matter on the high end, slight impairment of fine motor skills. It was subtle but it was there. For almost any other vocation or avocation—singer, potter, zookeeper, any doctor apart from a surgeon—it wouldn’t have mattered. But for her it did.

“And, I don’t know, I listen to a lot of music at home, fall asleep with the iPod every night, but—when’s the last time I went to a concert?” she said sadly.

Falling asleep with the iPod? Did that mean that she and what’s-his-name weren’t having sex? “And why don’t you go to concerts?” I said, filing away this bit of info for later. “Audiences bother you? Crowds?”

“Knew you’d understand.”

“Well, I’m sure that this has been suggested to you, because it’s certainly been suggested to me—”

“What?” What was the charm of that sad smile? How could you break it down? “Xanax? Beta-blockers? Hypnosis?”

“All of the above.”

“Well—if it was a panic attack, maybe. But it’s not. Remorse. Grief. Jealousy—that’s the worst of all. I mean—this girl Beta—that’s a stupid name isn’t it, Beta? Really mediocre player, I don’t mean to be snotty but she could hardly keep up with the section when we were kids and she’s in the Cleveland Philharmonic now and it upsets me more than I would admit to just anyone. But they don’t have a drug for any of that, do they?”

“Er—” actually they did, and Jerome, up on Adam Clayton Powell, was doing a booming business in it.

“The acoustics—the audiences—it triggers something—I go home, I hate everyone, I talk to myself, have arguments with myself in different voices, I’m upset for days. And—well, I told you, teaching, I tried it, it wasn’t for me.” Pippa didn’t have to work, thanks to Aunt Margaret’s and Uncle Welty’s money (Everett didn’t work either, thanks to same—the ‘music librarian’ thing, I’d gathered, though presented originally as a striking career choice, was really more along the lines of an unpaid internship, with Pippa footing the bill). “Teenagers—well I won’t even go into the torture of that, watching them head off to conservatory or to Mexico City for the summer to play in the symphony. And the younger kids aren’t serious enough. I’m annoyed with them for being kids. To me—it’s like they’re taking it too lightly—throwing what they have away.”

“Well, teaching’s a shit job. I wouldn’t want to do it either.”

“Yes but—” gulp of wine—“if I can’t play, what else is there? Because I mean—I’m around music, sort of, with Everett, and I keep going to school and keep taking courses—but quite honestly I don’t like London that much, it’s dark and rainy and I don’t have a whole lot of friends there, and in my flat sometimes I can hear someone crying at night, just this terrible broken weeping from next door, and I—I mean, you’ve found something you like to do, and I’m so glad, because sometimes I really wonder what I’m doing with my life.”

“I—” Desperately I tried to think of just the right thing to say. “Come home.”

“Home? You mean here?”

“Of course.”

“What about Everett?”

I had nothing to say to this.

She looked at me critically. “You really don’t like him, do you?”

“Um—” What was the point of lying? “No.”

“Well—if you knew him better, you would. He’s a good guy. Very serene and even-tempered—very stable.”

I had nothing to say to this, either. I was none of these things.

“Also London—I mean I’ve thought about coming back to New York—”

“You have?”

“Of course. I miss Hobie. A lot. He jokes how he could rent me an apartment here for what we spend on the phone—of course he’s living back in the days when long distance to London cost five dollars a minute or whatever. Pretty much every time we speak, he tries to talk me into coming back… well, you know Hobie, he never says it outright, but you know, constant hints, always tells me about jobs opening up, positions at Columbia and stuff—”

“He does?”

“Well—on some level I can’t fathom that I live so far away. Welty was the one who took me to music lessons and to the symphony but Hobie was the one always home, you know, who went upstairs and made me a snack after school and helped me plant marigolds for my science project. Even now—when I have a bad cold? when I can’t remember how to cook artichokes or get candle wax off the tablecloth? who do I call? Him. But—” was it my imagination, was the wine getting her worked up a little bit?—“tell you the truth? Know why I don’t come back more? In London—” was she about to cry? “I wouldn’t tell everybody this, but in London at least I don’t think every second about it. ‘This is the way I walked home the day before.’ ‘This is where Welty and Hobie and I had dinner the next-to-last time.’ At least there I don’t think quite so much: should I turn left here? Should I turn right? My whole destiny hanging on whether I take the F train or the 6. Awful premonitions. Everything petrified. When I come back here I’m thirteen again—and I mean, not in a good way. Everything stopped that day, literally. I even stopped growing. Because, did you know? I never got one inch taller after it happened, not one.”

“You’re a perfect size.”

“Well, it’s fairly common,” she said, ignoring my clumsy compliment. “Injured and traumatized children—they quite often fail to grow to normal height.” She went in and out, unconsciously, of her Dr. Camenzind voice—even though I’d never met Dr. Camenzind I could sense the moments when Dr. Camenzind took over, a kind of cool distancing mechanism. “Resources are diverted. The growth system shuts down. There was one girl at my school—Saudi princess who was kidnapped, when she was twelve? The guys who did it were executed. But—I met her when she was nineteen, nice girl, but tiny, like only four eleven or something, she was so traumatized that she never grew an inch past the day they snatched her.”

“Wow. That underground cell girl? She was at school with you?”