Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

THOUGH I’D BEEN IN Las Vegas almost half a year it was only my fourth or fifth time on the Strip—and Boris (who was content enough in our little orbit between school, shopping plaza, and home) had scarcely been into Vegas proper at all. We stared in amazement at the waterfalls of neon, electricity blazing and pulsing and cascading down in bubbles all around us, Boris’s upturned face glowing red and then gold in the crazy drench of lights.

Inside the Venetian, gondoliers propelled themselves down a real canal, with real, chemical-smelling water, as costumed opera singers sang Stille Nacht and Ave Maria under artificial skies. Boris and I trailed along uneasily, feeling shabby, scuffing our shoes, too stunned to take it all in. My dad had made reservations for us at a fancy, oak-panelled Italian restaurant—the outpost of its more famous sister restaurant in New York. “Order what you like, everyone,” he said, pulling out Xandra’s chair for her. “My treat. Go wild.”

We took him at his word. We ate asparagus flan with shallot vinaigrette; smoked salmon; smoked sable carpaccio; perciatelli with cardoons and black truffles; crispy black bass with saffron and fava beans; barbecued skirt steak; braised short ribs; and panna cotta, pumpkin cake, and fig ice cream for dessert. It was by leaps and fathoms the best meal I’d eaten in months, or maybe ever; and Boris—who’d eaten two orders of the sable all by himself—was ecstatic. “Ah, marvelous, ” he said, for the fifteenth time, practically purring, as the pretty young waitress brought out an extra plate of candies and biscotti with the coffee. “Thank you! Thank you Mr. Potter, Xandra,” he said again. “Is delicious.”

My dad—who hadn’t eaten all that much compared to us (Xandra hadn’t either)—pushed his plate aside. The hair at his temples was damp and his face was so bright and red he was practically glowing. “Thank the little Chinese guy in the Cubs cap who kept betting the bank in the salon this afternoon,” he said. “My God. It was like we couldn’t lose.” In the car, he’d already shown us his windfall: the fat roll of hundreds, wrapped up with a rubber band. “The cards just kept coming and kept coming. Mercury in retrograde and the moon was high! I mean—it was magic. You know, sometimes there’s a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you’re it, you know? You’re the light? There’s this fantastic dealer here, Diego, I love Diego—I mean, it’s crazy, he looks just like Diego Rivera the painter only in a sharp-ass fucking tuxedo. Did I tell you about Diego already? Been out here forty years, ever since the old Flamingo days. Big, stout, grand-looking guy. Mexican, you know. Fast slippery hands and big rings—” he waggled his fingers—“ba-ca-RRRAT! God, I love these old-school Mexicans in the baccarat room, they’re so fucking stylish. Musty old elegant fellows, carry their weight well, you know? Anyway, we were at Diego’s table, me and the little Chinese guy, he was a trip too, horn-rimmed glasses and not a word of English, you know, just ‘San Bin! San Bin!’ drinking this crazy ginseng tea they all drink, tastes like dust but I love the smell, like the smell of luck, and it was incredible, we were on such a run, good God, all these Chinese women lined up behind us, we were hitting every hand—Do you think,” he said to Xandra, “it would be okay if I took them back into the baccarat salon to meet Diego? I’m sure they’d get a huge kick out of Diego. I wonder if he’s still on shift. What do you think?”

“He won’t be there.” Xandra looked good—bright-eyed and sparkly—in a velvet minidress and jewelled sandals, and redder lipstick than she usually wore. “Not now.”

“Sometimes, holidays, he works a double shift.”

“Oh, they don’t want to go back there. It’s a hike. It’ll take half an hour to get there through the casino floor and back.”

“Yeah, but I know he’d like to meet my kids.”

“Yeah, probably so,” Xandra said agreeably, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass. The tiny gold dove on her necklace glistened at the base of her throat. “He’s a nice guy. But Larry, I mean it, I know you don’t take me seriously but if you start getting too chummy with the dealers some day you’re going to go down there and have security on your ass.”

My father laughed. “God!” he said jubilantly, slapping the table, so loudly that I flinched. “If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought Diego really was helping at the table today. I mean, maybe he was. Telepathic baccarat! Get your Soviet researchers working on that, ” he said to Boris. “That’ll straighten out your economic system over there.”

Boris—mildly—cleared his throat and lifted his water glass. “Sorry, may I say something?”

“Is it speechmaking time? Were we meant to prepare toasts?”

“I thank you all for your company. And I wish us all health, and happiness, and that we all shall live until the next Christmas.”

In the surprised silence that followed, a champagne cork popped in the kitchen, a burst of laughter. It was just past midnight: two minutes into Christmas Day. Then my father leaned back in his chair, and laughed. “Merry Christmas!” he roared, producing from his pocket a jewelry box which he slid over to Xandra, and two stacks of twenties (Five hundred dollars! Each!) which he tossed across the table to Boris and me. And though in the clockless, temperature-controlled casino night, words like day and Christmas were fairly meaningless constructs, happiness, amidst the loudly clinked glasses, didn’t seem quite such a doomed or fatal idea.

Chapter 6.

Wind, Sand and Stars

i.

OVER THE NEXT YEAR, I was so preoccupied in trying to block New York and my old life out of my mind that I hardly noticed the time pass. Days ran changelessly in the seasonless glare: hungover mornings on the school bus and our backs raw and pink from falling asleep by the pool, the gasoline reek of vodka and Popper’s constant smell of wet dog and chlorine, Boris teaching me to count, ask directions, offer a drink in Russian, just as patiently as he’d taught me to swear. Yes, please, I’d like that. Thank you, you are very kind. Govorite li vy po angliyskiy? Do you speak English? Ya nemnogo govoryu po-russki. I do speak Russian, a little.

Winter or summer, the days were dazzling; the desert air burned our nostrils and scraped our throats dry. Everything was funny; everything made us laugh. Sometimes, just before sundown, just as the blue of the sky began darkening to violet, we had these wild, electric-lined, Maxfield Parrish clouds rolling out gold and white into the desert like Divine Revelation leading the Mormons west. Govorite medlenno, I said, speak slowly, and Povtorite, pozhaluysta. Repeat, please. But we were so attuned to each other that we didn’t need to talk at all if we didn’t want to; we knew how to tip each other over in hysterics with an arch of the eyebrow or quirk of the mouth. Nights, we ate crosslegged on the floor, leaving greasy fingerprints on our schoolbooks. Our diet had made us malnourished, with soft brown bruises on our arms and legs—vitamin deficiency, said the nurse at school, who gave us each a painful shot in the ass and a colorful jar of children’s chewables. (“My bottom hurts,” said Boris, rubbing his rear end and cursing the metal seats on the school bus.) I was freckled head to toe from all the swimming we did; my hair (longer then than it’s ever been again) got light streaks from the pool chemicals and basically I felt good, though I still had a heaviness in my chest that never went away and my teeth were rotting out in the back from all the candy we ate. Apart from that, I was fine. And so the time passed happily enough; but then—shortly after my fifteenth birthday—Boris met a girl named Kotku; and everything changed.