Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

MY LAST DAYS WITH the Barbours flew by so fast that I scarcely remember them, apart from a last-minute flurry of laundry and dry cleaning, and several hectic trips to the wine shop on Lex for cardboard boxes. In black marker, I wrote the address of my exotic-sounding new home:

Theodore Decker c/o Xandra Terrell

6219 Desert End Road

Las Vegas, NV

Glumly, Andy and I stood and contemplated the labeled boxes in his bedroom. “It’s like you’re moving to a different planet,” he said.

“More or less.”

“No I’m serious. That address. It’s like from some mining colony on Jupiter. I wonder what your school will be like.”

“God knows.”

“I mean—it might be one of those places you read about. With gangs. Metal detectors.” Andy had been so mistreated at our (supposedly) enlightened and progressive school that public school, in his view, was on a par with the prison system. “What will you do?”

“Shave my head, I guess. Get a tattoo.” I liked that he didn’t try to be upbeat or cheerful about the move, unlike Mrs. Swanson or Dave (who was clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to negotiate any more with my grandparents). Nobody else at Park Avenue said much about my departure, though I knew from the strained expression Mrs. Barbour got when the subject of my father and his “friend” came up that I wasn’t totally imagining things. And besides, it wasn’t that the future with Dad and Xandra seemed bad or frightening so much as incomprehensible, a blot of black ink on the horizon.

xxiv.

“WELL, A CHANGE OF scenery may be good for you,” said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. “Even if the scene isn’t what you’d choose.” We were having dinner in the dining room for a change, sitting together at the far end of the table, long enough to seat twelve, silver ewers and ornaments stretching off into opulent darkness. Yet somehow it still felt like the last night in our old apartment on Seventh Avenue, my mother and father and I sitting atop cardboard boxes to eat our Chinese take-out dinner.

I said nothing. I was miserable; and my determination to suffer in secret had made me uncommunicative. All during the anxiety of the previous week, as the apartment was being stripped and my mother’s things were folded and boxed and carted off to be sold, I’d yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie’s house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled beeswax.

“I mean, your mother—” He paused delicately. “It’ll be a fresh start.”

I studied my plate. He’d made lamb curry, with a lemon-colored sauce that tasted more French than Indian.

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

I glanced up. “Afraid of what?”

“Of going to live with him.”

I thought about it, gazing off into the shadows behind his head. “No,” I said, “not really.” For whatever reason, since his return my dad seemed looser, more relaxed. I couldn’t attribute it to the fact that he’d stopped drinking, since normally when my dad was on the wagon he grew silent and visibly swollen with misery, so prone to snap that I took good care to stay an arm’s reach away.

“Have you told anyone else what you told me?”

“About—?”

In embarrassment, I put my head down and took a bite of the curry. It was actually pretty good once you got used to the fact it wasn’t curry.

“I don’t think he’s drinking any more,” I said, in the silence that followed. “If that’s what you mean? He seems better. So…” Awkwardly, I trailed away. “Yeah.”

“How do you like his girlfriend?”

I had to think about that one too. “I don’t know,” I admitted.

Hobie was amiably silent, reaching for his wine glass without taking his eyes off me.

“Like, I don’t really know her? She’s okay, I guess. I can’t understand what he likes about her.”

“Why not?”

“Well—” I didn’t know where to begin. My dad could be charming to ‘the ladies’ as he called them, opening doors for them, lightly touching their wrists to make a point; I’d seen women fall apart over him, a spectacle I watched coldly, wondering how anyone could be taken in by such a transparent act. It was like watching small children being fooled by a cheesy magic show. “I don’t know. I guess I thought she’d be better looking or something.”

“Pretty doesn’t matter if she’s nice,” said Hobie.

“Yeah, but she’s not all that nice.”

“Oh.” Then: “Do they seem happy together?”

“I don’t know. Well—yes,” I admitted. “Like, he doesn’t seem constantly so mad all the time?” Then, feeling the weight of Hobie’s un-asked question pressing in on me: “Also, he came to get me. I mean, he didn’t have to. They could have stayed gone if they didn’t want me.”

Nothing more was said on the subject, and we finished the dinner talking of other things. But as I was leaving, as we were walking down the photograph-lined hallway—past Pippa’s room, with a night light burning, and Cosmo sleeping on the foot of her bed—he said, as he was opening the front door for me: “Theo.”

“Yes?”

“You have my address, and my telephone.”

“Sure.”

“Well then.” He seemed almost as uncomfortable as I was. “I hope you have a good trip. Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” I said. We looked at each other.

“Well.”

“Well. Good night, then.”

He pushed open the door, and I walked out of the house—for the last time, as I thought. But though I had no idea I’d ever be seeing him again, about this I was wrong.

II.

When we are strongest—who draws back?

Most merry—who falls down laughing?

When we are very bad,—what can they do to us?

—ARTHUR RIMBAUD

Chapter 5.

Badr al-Dine

i.

THOUGH I HAD DECIDED to leave the suitcase in the package room of my old building, where I felt sure Jose and Goldie would look after it, I grew more and more nervous as the date approached until, at the last minute, I determined to go back for what now seems a fairly dumb reason: in my haste to get the painting out of the apartment, I’d thrown a lot of random things in the bag with it, including most of my summer clothes. So the day before my dad was supposed to pick me up at the Barbours’, I hurried back over to Fifty-Seventh Street with the idea of unzipping the suitcase and taking a couple of the better shirts off the top.

Jose wasn’t there, but a new, thick-shouldered guy (Marco V, according to his nametag) stepped in front of me and cut me off with a blocky, obstinate stance less like a doorman’s than a security guard’s. “Sorry, can I help you?” he said.

I explained about the suitcase. But after perusing the log—running a heavy forefinger down the column of dates—he didn’t seem inclined to go in and get it off the shelf for me. “An’ you left this here why?” he said doubtfully, scratching his nose.

“Jose said I could.”

“You got a receipt?”

“No,” I said, after a confused pause.

“Well, I can’t help you. We got no record. Besides, we don’t store packages for non-tenants.”

I’d lived in the building long enough to know that this wasn’t true, but I wasn’t about to argue the point. “Look,” I said, “I used to live here. I know Goldie and Carlos and everybody. I mean—come on,” I said, after a frigid, ill-defined pause, during which I felt his attention drifting. “If you take me back there, I can show you which one.”