The Goldfinch

I let the curtain fall. I was pretty sure I was seeing things, in fact I saw things all the time, part of living in a modern city, this half-invisible grain of terror, disaster, jumping at car alarms, always expecting something to happen, the smell of smoke, the splash of broken glass. And yet—I wished I were a hundred percent sure it was my imagination.

Everything was dead quiet. The street light through the lace curtains cast spidery distortions on the walls. All the time, I’d known it was a mistake, keeping the painting, and still I’d kept it. No good could come of keeping it. It wasn’t even as if it had done me any good or given me any pleasure. Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning and the middle of the night, autumn, summer, changing with weather and sun. It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of light, that only lived in light—was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.

I got a glass of ice from the kitchen, went to the sideboard and poured myself a vodka, came back to my room and got my iPhone from my jacket pocket and—after reflexively dialing the first three digits of Jerome’s beeper—hung up and dialed the Barbours’ number instead.

Etta answered. “Theo!” she said, sounding pleased, the kitchen television going in the background. “You calling for Katherine?” Only Kitsey’s family and very close friends called her Kitsey; she was Katherine to everyone else.

“Is she there?”

“She’ll be in after di

“Mm—” I couldn’t help feeling pleased. “Will you tell her I phoned then?”

“When are you coming back to see us?”

“Soon, I hope. Is Platt around?”

“No—he’s out too. I’ll be sure to tell him you called. Come back to see us soon, all right?”

I hung up the phone and sat on the side of the bed drinking my vodka. It was reassuring to know that I could call Platt if I needed to—not about the painting, I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him with that, but insofar as dealing with Reeve about the chest. It was ominous that Reeve had said not a word about that.

Yet—what could he do? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed Reeve had overplayed his hand by confronting me so nakedly. What good was it going to do him to come after me for the furniture? What did he have to gain if I was arrested, the painting recovered, whisked out of his reach forever? If he wanted it, there was nothing for him to do but stand back and allow me to lead him to it. The only thing I had going for me—the only thing—was that Reeve didn’t know where it was. He could hire whomever he wanted to tail me, but as long as I kept clear of the storage unit, there was no way he could track it down.

Chapter 10.

The Idiot

i.

“OH, THEO!” SAID KITSEY one Friday afternoon shortly before Christmas, plucking up one of my mother’s emerald earrings and holding it to the light. We’d had a long lunch at Fred’s after having spent all morning going around Tiffany’s looking at silver and china patterns. “They’re beautiful! It’s just…” her forehead wrinkled.

“Yes—?” It was three; the restaurant was still chattering and crowded. When she’d gone to make a telephone call I’d pulled the earrings from my pocket and laid them on the tablecloth.

“Well, it’s just—I wonder.” She puckered her eyebrows as if at a pair of shoes she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to buy. “I mean—they’re gorgeous! Thank you! But… will they be quite right? For the actual day?”

“Well, up to you,” I said, reaching for my Bloody Mary and taking a large drink to conceal my surprise and a

“Because, emeralds.” She held an earring up to her ear, cutting her eyes thoughtfully to the side as she did it. “I adore them! But—” holding it up again to sparkle, in the diffuse luminance of the overheads—“emeralds aren’t really my stone. I think they may just seem a bit hard, you know? With white? And my skin? Eau de Nil! Mum can’t wear green either.”

“Whatever you think.”

“Oh, now you’re a

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes you are! I’ve hurt your feelings!”

“No, I’m just tired.”

“You seem in a really dire mood.”

“Please Kitsey, I’m tired.” We’d been expending heroic effort searching for an apartment, a frustrating process which we’d borne in mostly good humor although the bare spaces and empty rooms haunted with other people’s abandoned lives kicked up (for me) a lot of ugly echoes from childhood, moving boxes and kitchen smells and shadowed bedrooms with the life gone out of them all but more than this, pulsing throughout, a sort of ominous mechanical hum audible (apparently) only to me, heavily-breathing apprehensions which the voices of the brokers, ringing cheerfully against the polished surfaces as they walked around switching on the lights and pointing out the stainless-steel appliances, did little to dispel.

And why was this? Not every apartment we saw had been vacated for reasons of tragedy, as I somehow believed. The fact that I smelled divorce, bankruptcy, illness and death in almost every space we viewed was clearly delusional—and, besides, how could the troubles of these previous tenants, real or imagined, harm Kitsey or me?

“Don’t lose heart,” said Hobie (who, like me, was overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations left by time). “Look on it as a job. Sorting through a box of fiddly bits. You’ll turn up just the one as long as you grit your teeth and keep looking.”

And he was right. I’d been a good sport throughout, as had she, powering through from open house to open house of gloomy pre-wars haunted by the ghosts of lonely old Jewish ladies, and icy glass monstrosities I knew I could never live in without feeling I had sniper rifles trained on me from across the street. No one expected apartment hunting to be fun.

In contrast, the prospect of walking over with Kitsey to set up our wedding registry at Tiffany’s had seemed a pleasing diversion. Meeting with the Registry Consultant, pointing at what we liked and then wafting out hand-in-hand for a Christmas lunch? Instead—quite unexpectedly—I’d been knocked reeling by the stress of navigating one of the most crowded stores in Manhattan on a Friday close to Christmas: elevators packed, stairwells packed, flowing with shoals of tourists, holiday shoppers jostling five and six deep at the display cases to buy watches and scarves and handbags and carriage clocks and etiquette books and all kinds of extraneous merchandise in Signature Robin’s Egg Blue. We’d slogged round the fifth floor for hours, trailed by a bridal consultant who was working so hard to provide Flawless Service and assist us in making our choices with confidence that I couldn’t help but feel a bit stalked (“A china pattern should say to both of you, ‘this is who we are, as a couple’… it’s an important statement of your style”) while Kitsey flitted from setting to setting: the gold band! no, the blue! wait… which was the first one? is the octagonal too much? and the consultant chimed in with her helpful exegesis: urban geometrics… romantic florals… timeless elegance… flamboyant flash… and even though I’d kept saying sure, that one’s fine, that one too, I’d be happy with either, your decision Kits, the consultant kept showing us more and more settings, clearly hoping to wheedle some firmer show of preference from me, gently explaining to me the fine points of each, the vermeil here, the hand-painted borders there, until I had been forced to bite my tongue to keep from saying what I really thought: that despite the craftsmanship it made absolutely zero difference whether Kitsey chose the x pattern or the y pattern since as far as I was concerned it was basically all the same: new, charmless, dead-in-hand, not to mention the expense: eight hundred dollars for a made-yesterday plate? One plate? There were beautiful eighteenth-century sets to be had for a fraction of the price of this cold, bright, newly-minted stuff.