The Goldfinch

“But you can’t like all of it exactly the same! And yes, absolutely, I keep coming back to the Deco,” Kitsey said to our patiently-hovering saleswoman, “but as much as I love it, it may not be quite right for us,” and then, to me: “What are your thoughts?”

“Whatever you want. Any of them. Really,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets and looking away when still she stood blinking respectfully at me.

“You are looking very fidgety. I wish you’d tell me what you like.”

“Yes, but—” I’d unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.

“Chinois? Or Birds of the Nile? Do say, Theo, I know you must prefer one of the two.”

“You can’t go wrong with either. Both are fun and fancy. And this one is simple, for everyday,” said the consultant helpfully, simple obviously being in her mind a key word in dealing with overwhelmed and cranky grooms. “Really really simple and neutral.” It seemed to be registry protocol that the groom should be allowed to select the casual china (I guess for all those Super Bowl parties I would be hosting with the guys, ha ha) while the “formal ware” should be left to the experts: the ladies.

“It’s fine,” I said, more curtly than I’d meant to, when I realized they were waiting for me to say something. Plain, white, modern earthenware wasn’t something I could work up a lot of enthusiasm for, particularly when it went for four hundred dollars a plate. It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they’d purchased through their decorators for the price of good Queen A

“China—” the bridal consultant traced the plate’s edge with a neutrally manicured finger. “The way I like for my couples to think of fine silver, fine crystal and china—? It’s the end-of-day ritual. It’s wine, fun, family, togetherness. A set of fine china is a great way to put some permanent style and romance in your marriage.”

“Right,” I said again. But the sentiment had appalled me; and the two Bloody Marys I’d had at Fred’s had not wholly washed the taste of it away.

Kitsey was looking at the earrings, doubtfully it seemed. “Well look. I will wear them for the wedding. They’re beautiful. And I know they were your mother’s.”

“I want you to wear what you want.”

“I’ll tell you what I think.” Playfully, she reached across the table and took my hand. “I think you need to have a nap.”

“Absolutely,” I said, pressing her palm to my face, remembering how lucky I was.

ii.

IT HAD HAPPENED REALLY fast. Within two months of my di

Not that Kitsey and I weren’t very different people, as well, but that was all right: after all, as Hobie had pointed out sensibly enough, wasn’t marriage supposed to be a union of opposites? Wasn’t I supposed to bring new undertakings to her life and she to mine? And besides (I told myself) wasn’t it time to Move Forward, Let Go, turn from the garden that was locked to me? Live In The Present, Focus On The Now instead of grieving for what I could never have? For years I’d been wallowing in a hothouse of wasteful sorrow: Pippa Pippa Pippa, exhilaration and despair, it was never-ending, incidents of virtually no significance threw me to the stars or plunged me into speechless depressions, her name on my phone or an e-mail signed “Love” (which was how Pippa signed all her e-mails, to everyone) had me flying for days whereas—if, when phoning Hobie, she didn’t ask to speak to me (and why should she?) I was crushed beyond any reasonable prospect. I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother’s death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren’t there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he’d spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?

It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap. And somehow I had done it; and there on the other side was Kitsey, looking at me with the amused, gooseberry-gray eyes.

We had fun together. We got on. It was her first summer in the city, “my whole life, ever”—the house in Maine was closed tight, Uncle Harry and the cousins had gone up to Canada to the Îles de la Madeleine—“and, I’m a bit at loose ends here with Mum, and—oh, please, do something with me. Won’t you please go out to the beach with me this weekend?” So on the weekends we went out to East Hampton, where we stayed in the house of friends of hers who were summering in France; and during the week we met downtown after I got off work, drinking tepid wine in sidewalk cafés, deserted Tribeca evenings with fever-hot sidewalks and hot wind from the subway grates blowing sparks from the end of my cigarette. Movie theaters were always cool, and the King Cole room, and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. Two afternoons a week—hatted, gloved, in Jack Purcells and tidy skirts, sprayed head to toe with medical-grade sunblock (for she, like Andy, was allergic to the sun) she drove out on her own to Shi