Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

I felt strange taking the money, for all sorts of reasons. Even in my shock, something about the story felt dodgy (what kind of store would deliver a computer that wasn’t paid for?). Later, I wondered: did I look that destitute, that the doormen had taken up a collection for me? I still don’t know where the money came from; and I wish I had asked more questions, but I was so stunned by everything that had happened that day (and more than anything by the sudden appearance of my dad, and Xandra) that if Goldie had confronted me and tried to give me a piece of old chewing gum he’d scraped off the floor I would have held out my hand and taken it just as obediently.

“None of my business, you know,” Jose said, looking over my head as he said it, “but if I was you, I wouldn’t tell anybody about that money. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, put it in your pocket,” said Goldie. “Don’t walk around waving it out in your hand like that. Plenty of people on the street would kill you for that much cash.”

“Plenty of people in this building!” said Jose, overcome with sudden laughter.

“Ha!” said Goldie, cracking up himself, and then said something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

“ Cuidado, ” said Jose—wagging his head in the way he did, mock-serious, but unable to keep from smiling. “That’s why they don’t let Goldie and me work on the same floor,” he said to me. “They got to keep us separated. We have too good a time.”

xix.

ONCE DAD AND XANDRA showed up, things started moving fast. At dinner that night (at a touristy restaurant I was surprised my dad had chosen), he took a call at the table from somebody at my mother’s insurance company—which, even all these years later, I wish I’d been able to hear better. But the restaurant was loud and Xandra (between gulps of white wine—maybe he’d quit drinking, but she sure hadn’t) was alternately complaining because she couldn’t smoke and telling me in a sort of unfocused way how she’d learned to practice witchcraft out of a library book when she was in high school, somewhere in Fort Lauderdale. (“Actually, Wicca it’s called. It’s an earth religion.”) With anyone else, I would have asked exactly what it involved, being a witch (spells and sacrifices? deal with the devil?) but before I had a chance she’d moved on, how she’d had the opportunity to go to college and was sorry she hadn’t done it (“I’ll tell you what I was interested in. English history and like that. Henry the Eighth, Mary Queen of Scots”). But she’d ended up not going to college at all because she’d been too obsessed with this guy. “ Obsessed, ” she hissed, fixing me with her sharp, no-color eyes.

Why being obsessed with the guy kept Xandra from going to college, I never found out, because my dad got off the phone. He ordered (and it gave me a funny feeling) a bottle of champagne.

“I can’t drink this whole damn thing,” said Xandra, who was into her second glass of wine. “It’ll give me a headache.”

“Well, if I can’t have champagne, you might as well have some,” my father said, leaning back in his chair.

Xandra nodded at me. “Let him have some,” she said. “Waiter, bring another glass.”

“Sorry,” said the waiter, a hard-edged Italian guy who looked like he was used to dealing with out-of-control tourists. “No alcohol if he’s under eighteen.”

Xandra started scrabbling in her purse. She was wearing a brown halter dress, and she had blusher, or bronzer, or some brownish powder brushed under her cheekbones in such a strong line that I had an urge to smudge it in with my fingertip.

“Let’s go outside and have a smoke,” she said to my father. There was a long moment where they exchanged a smirky look that made me cringe. Then Xandra pushed her chair back and—dropping her napkin in the chair—looked around for the waiter. “Oh, good, he’s gone,” she said, reaching for my (mostly) empty water glass and slopping some champagne into it.

The food had arrived and I’d poured myself another large but surreptitious glass of champagne before they returned. “Yum!” said Xandra, looking glazed and a bit shiny, tugging her short skirt down, edging around and slithering back into her seat without bothering to pull her chair out all the way. She flapped her napkin into her lap and pulled her massive, bright-red plate of manicotti towards her. “Looks awesome!”

“So does mine,” said my dad, who was picky about his Italian food, and whom I’d often known to complain about overly tomatoey, marinara-drenched pasta dishes exactly like the plate in front of him.

As they tucked into their food (which was probably fairly cold, judging by how long they’d been gone), they resumed their conversation in mid-stream. “Well, anyway, didn’t work out,” he said, leaning back in his chair and toying rakishly with a cigarette he was unable to light. “That’s how it goes.”

“I bet you were great.”

He shrugged. “Even when you’re young,” he said, “it’s a tough game. It’s not just talent. It has a lot to do with looks and luck.”

“But still,” said Xandra, blotting the corner of her lip with a napkin-wrapped fingertip. “An actor. I can so totally see it.” My dad’s thwarted acting career was one of his favorite subjects and—though she seemed interested enough—something told me that this wasn’t the very first time she had heard about it either.

“Well, do I wish I’d kept going with it?” My dad contemplated his non-alcoholic beer (or was it three percent? I couldn’t see from where I was sitting). “I have to say yes. It’s one of those lifelong regrets. I would have loved to do something with my gift but I didn’t have the luxury. Life has a funny way of intervening.”

They were deep in their own world; for all the attention they were paying to me I might as well have been in Idaho but that was fine with me; I knew this story. My dad, who’d been a drama star in college, had for a brief while earned his living as an actor: voice-overs in commercials, a few minor parts (a murdered playboy, the spoiled son of a mob boss) in television and movies. Then—after he’d married my mother—it had all fizzled out. He had a long list of reasons why he hadn’t broken through, though as I’d often heard him say: if my mother had been a little more successful as a model or worked a little harder at it, there would have been enough money for him to concentrate on acting without worrying about a day job.

My dad pushed his plate aside. I noticed that he hadn’t eaten very much—often, with my dad, a sign that he was drinking, or about to start.

“At some point, I just had to cut my losses and get out,” he said, crumpling his napkin and throwing it on the table. I wondered if he had told Xandra about Mickey Rourke, whom he viewed apart from me and my mother as the prime villain in derailing his career.

Xandra took a big drink of her wine. “Do you ever think about going back to it?”

“I think about it, sure. But—” he shook his head as if refusing some outrageous request—“no. Essentially the answer is no.”

The champagne tickled the roof of my mouth—distant, dusty sparkle, bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive.

“I mean, the second he saw me, I knew he didn’t like me,” my dad was saying to her quietly. So he had told her about Mickey Rourke.

She tossed her head, drained the rest of her wine. “Guys like that can’t stand competition.”

“It was all Mickey this, Mickey that, Mickey wants to meet you, but the minute I walked in there I knew it was over.”