The Goldfinch

Old lady with a Chihuahua; little kids squabbling over a Popsicle. Up above Canal streamed a remote delirium of sirens, a formal offstage note that clashed with the ringing in my ears: something of mechanical warfare about it, sustained drone of incoming missiles.

With my hands pressed over my ears (which didn’t help the ti

Which—if I was honest—I deserved. How had I ever thought I could keep it hidden? I’d meant to deal with the painting for years, get it back where it belonged, and yet somehow I had kept on and on finding reasons not to. To think of it wrapped and sealed uptown made me feel self-erased, blanked-out, as if burying it away had only increased its power and given it a more vital and terrible form. Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.

xvi.

“HOBIE,” I SAID, “I’M in a jam.”

He glanced up from the Japaned chest he was retouching: roosters and cranes, golden pagodas on black. “Can I help?” He was outlining a crane’s wing with water-based acrylic—very different from the shellac-based original, but the first rule of restorations, as he’d taught me early on, was that you never did what you couldn’t reverse.

“Actually, the thing is. I’ve sort of gotten you in a jam. Inadvertently.”

“Well—” the line of his brush did not waver—“if you told Barbara Guibbory we’d help with that home she’s decorating in Rhinebeck, you’re on your own. ‘Colors of the Chakras.’ I never heard of such a thing.”

“No—” I tried to think of something fu

Hobie straightened up, stuck the paintbrush behind one ear, blotted his forehead with a wildly patterned handkerchief, psychedelic purple like an African violet had thrown up on it, something he’d found probably in a crazy old lady’s effects at one of his sales upstate. “What’s going on, then?” he said reasonably, reaching for one of the saucers he mixed his paint in. Now that I was in my twenties, the generational formality between us had vanished, so that we were collegial in a way it was difficult to imagine being with my dad had he lived—me always on edge, trying to figure out how fucked-up he was and what my percentage point was of trying to get any kind of straight answer.

“I—” I reached to make sure that the chair behind me wasn’t sticky before I sat. “Hobie, I’ve made a stupid mistake. No, a really stupid one,” I said, at his good-natured, dismissive gesture.

“Well—” he was dripping raw umber into the saucer with an eyedropper—“I don’t know about stupid, but I can tell you it wholly ruined my day last week to see that drill bit coming through Mrs. Wasserman’s tabletop. That was a good William and Mary table. I know she won’t see where I’ve patched the hole but believe me it was a bad moment.”

His half-attentive ma

“Theo,” he said, putting up a hand, closing his eyes—I’d stalled, going on and on about the uncashed check, dead end, bad position—“Stop. I get the picture.”

“I’m so sorry.” I was babbling. “I should never have done it. Never. But it’s a real nightmare. He’s pissed off and vindictive and he seems to have it in for us for some reason—you know, some other reason, something apart from this.”

“Well.” Hobie removed his glasses. I could see his confusion in just how gingerly he was feeling around in the pause that followed, trying to shape his response. “What’s done is done. No point making it worse. But—” he stopped, and thought. “I don’t know who this guy is, but if he thought that chest was an Affleck, he has more money than sense. To pay seventy-five thousand—that’s what he gave you for the thing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he needs his head examined, that’s all I can say. Pieces of that quality turn up once or twice in a decade, maybe. And they don’t appear on the scene from nowhere.”

“Yes, but—”

“Also, any fool knows, a real Affleck would be worth much more. Who buys a piece like that without doing their homework? An idiot, that’s who. Also,” he said, speaking over me, “you did the correct thing once he called you on it. You tried to refund his money, and he didn’t take it, that’s what you’re saying?”

“I didn’t offer to refund it. I tried to buy the piece back.”

“At a greater price than he paid! And how’s that going to look if he takes it to law? Which I can tell you, he won’t do.”

In the silence that followed, in the clinical blare of his work lamp, I was aware just how uncertain we both were how to move forward. Popchyk—napping on the folded towel that Hobie had set out for him between the clawed feet of a pier table—twitched and grumbled in his sleep.

“I mean,” said Hobie—he’d wiped the black off his hands, was reaching for his brush with a sort of apparitional fixity, like a ghost intent upon his task—“the sales end has never been my bailiwick, you know that, but I’ve been in this business a long time. And sometimes—” darting flick of the brush—“the edge between puffery and fraud is very cloudy indeed.”