Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

I told myself I didn’t miss him, but I did. I got stoned alone, watched Adult Access and the Playboy channel, read Grapes of Wrath and The House of the Seven Gables which seemed as if they had to be tied for the most boring book ever written, and for what felt like thousands of hours—time enough to learn Danish or play the guitar if I’d been trying—fooled around in the street with a fucked-up skateboard Boris and I had found in one of the foreclosed houses down the block. I went to swim-team parties with Hadley—no-drinking parties, with parents present—and, on the weekends, attended parents-away parties of kids I barely knew, Xanax bars and Jägermeister shots, riding home on the hissing CAT bus at two a.m. so fucked up that I had to hold the seat in front of me to keep from falling out in the aisle. After school, if I was bored, it was easy enough to go hang out with one of the big lackadaisical stoner crowds who floated around between Del Taco and the kiddie arcades on the Strip.

But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris—budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages—who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped. Even when he took things without asking, as he all too frequently did—little things were always disappearing, DVDs and school supplies from my locker, more than once I’d caught him going through my pockets for money—his own possessions meant so little to him that somehow it wasn’t stealing; whenever he came into cash himself, he split it with me down the middle and anything that belonged to him, he gave me gladly if I asked for it (and sometimes when I didn’t, as when Mr. Pavlikovsky’s gold lighter, which I’d admired in passing, turned up in the outside pocket of my backpack).

The funny thing: I’d worried, if anything, that Boris was the one who was a little too affectionate, if affectionate is the right word. The first time he’d turned in bed and draped an arm over my waist, I lay there half-asleep for a moment, not knowing what to do: staring at my old socks on the floor, empty beer bottles, my paperbacked copy of The Red Badge of Courage. At last—embarrassed—I faked a yawn and tried to roll away, but instead he sighed and pulled me closer, with a sleepy, snuggling motion.

Ssh, Potter, he whispered, into the back of my neck. Is only me.

It was weird. Was it weird? It was; and it wasn’t. I’d fallen back to sleep shortly after, lulled by his bitter, beery unwashed smell and his breath easy in my ear. I was aware I couldn’t explain it without making it sound like more than it was. On nights when I woke strangled with fear there he was, catching me when I started up terrified from the bed, pulling me back down in the covers beside him, muttering in nonsense Polish, his voice throaty and strange with sleep. We’d drowse off in each other’s arms, listening to music from my iPod (Thelonious Monk, the Velvet Underground, music my mother had liked) and sometimes wake clutching each other like castaways or much younger children.

And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet—fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream. We never spoke of it; it wasn’t quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about. And yet, more than once, I had wondered if I should step up my nerve and say something: draw some kind of line, make things clear, just to make absolutely sure he didn’t have the wrong idea. But the moment had never come. Now there was no point in speaking up and being awkward about the whole thing, though I scarcely took comfort in the fact.

I hated how much I missed him. There was a lot of drinking going on at my house, on Xandra’s end anyway, a lot of slammed doors (“Well, if it wasn’t me, it had to be you,” I heard her yelling); and without Boris there (they were both more constrained with Boris in the house) it was harder. Part of the problem was that Xandra’s hours at the bar had changed—schedules at her work had been moved; she was under a lot of stress, people she’d worked with were gone, or on different shifts; on Wednesdays and Mondays when I got up for school, I often found her just in from work, sitting alone in front of her favorite morning show too wired to sleep and swigging Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle.

“Big old exhausted me,” she said, with an attempt at a smile, when she saw me on the stairs.

“You should go for a swim. That’ll make you sleepy.”

“No thanks, I think I’ll just hang out here with my Pepto. What a product. This is definitely some bubble-gum flavored awesomeness.”

As for my dad: he was spending a lot more time at home—hanging out with me, which I enjoyed, though his mood swings wore me out. It was football season; he had a bounce in his step. After checking his BlackBerry he high-fived me and danced around the living room: “Am I a genius or what? What?” He consulted spread breakdowns, matchup reports, and—occasionally—a paperbacked book called Scorpio: Your Sports Year in Forecast. “Always looking for an edge,” he said, when I found him running down the tables and punching out numbers on the calculator like he was figuring out his income tax. “You only have to hit fifty-three, fifty-four percent to grind out a good living on this stuff—see, baccarat is strictly for entertainment, there’s no skill to it, I set myself limits and never go over, but you can really make money at the sports book if you’re disciplined about it. You have to approach it like an investor. Not like a fan, not even like a gambler because the secret is, the better team usually wins the game and the linemaker is good at setting the number. Your linemaker has got limitations, though, as to public opinion. What he’s predicting is not who’s going to win but who the general public thinks is going to win. So that margin, between sentimental favorite and actual fact— fuck, see that receiver in the end zone, another big one for Pittsburgh right there, we need them to score now like we need a hole in the head—anyway, like I was saying, if I really sit down and do my homework as opposed to Joe Beefburger who picks his team by looking five minutes at the sports page? Who’s got the advantage? See, I’m not one of these saps that gets all starry-eyed about the Giants rain or shine—shit, your mother could have told you that. Scorpio is about control—that’s me. I’m competitive. Want to win at any price. That’s where my acting came from, back when I acted. Sun in Scorpio, Leo rising. All in my chart. Now you’re a Cancer, hermit crab, all secretive and up in your shell, completely different MO. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just how it is. Anyway, whatever, I always take my lead from my defensive-offensive lines, but all the same it never hurts to pay attention to these transits and solar-arc progressions on game day—”