Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“You seem a little distracted today.”

“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.”