The Goldfinch

“Oh, she’s amazing,” I’d said venomously. “I’ve been in love with her ever since we were kids.”

Which—in all sorts of ways I was still coming to realize—was absolutely true. The interplay of past and present was wildly erotic: I drew endless delight from the memory of nine-year-old Kitsey’s contempt for geeky thirteen-year-old me (rolling her eyes, pouting when she had to sit by me at di

Every day, I had multiple occasions to remind myself how lucky I was. Kitsey was never tired; Kitsey was never unhappy. She was appealing, enthusiastic, affectionate. She was beautiful, with a luminous, sugar-white quality that turned heads on the street. I admired how gregarious she was, how engaged with the world, how amusing and spontaneous—“little feather-head!” as Hobie called her, with a great deal of tenderness—what a breath of fresh air she was! Everyone loved her. And for all her infectious lightness of heart, I knew it was an extremely petty cavil that Kitsey never seemed very moved by anything. Even dear old Carole Lombard had got teary-eyed about ex-boyfriends and abused pets on the news and the closing of certain old-school bars in Chicago, where she was from. But nothing ever seemed to strike Kitsey as particularly urgent or emotional or even surprising. In this, she resembled her mother and brother—and yet Mrs. Barbour’s restraint, and Andy’s, were somehow very different from Kitsey’s way of making a flippant or trivializing comment whenever anyone brought up something serious. (“No fun,” I’d heard her say with a half-whimsical sigh, wrinkling her nose, when people inquired about her mother.) Then too—I felt morbid and sick even thinking it—I kept watching for some evidence of sorrow about Andy and her dad, and it was starting to disturb me that I hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t their deaths affected her at all? Weren’t we supposed to at least talk about it at some point? On one level, I admired her bravery: chin up, carrying on in the face of tragedy or whatever. Maybe she was just really really guarded, really locked-down, putting up a masterly front. But those sparkling blue shallows—so enticing at first glance—had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.

Kitsey was tapping my wrist. “What?”

“Barneys. I mean, since we’re here? Maybe we should take a spin round the Homes department? I know Mother won’t love it if we register here but it might be fun to go for something a little less traditional for everyday.”

“No—” reaching for my glass, knocking the rest of it back—“I really need to get downtown, if that’s all right. Supposed to meet a client.”

“Will you be coming uptown tonight?” Kitsey shared an apartment in the East Seventies with two roommates, not far from the office of the arts organization where she worked.

“Not sure. Might have to go to di

“Cocktails? Please? Or an after-di

“I’ll try. Promise. Don’t forget those,” I said, nodding at the earrings, which were still lying on the tablecloth.

“Oh! No! Of course not!” she said guiltily, grabbing them up and throwing them into her bag like a handful of loose change.

iii.

AS WE WALKED OUTSIDE together, into the Christmas crowds, I felt unsteady and sorrowful; and the ribbon-wrapped buildings, the glitter of windows only deepened the oppressive sadness: dark winter skies, gray canyon of jewels and furs and all the power and melancholy of wealth.

What was wrong with me? I thought, as Kitsey and I crossed Madison Avenue, her pink Prada overcoat bobbing exuberantly in the throng. Why did I hold it against Kitsey that she didn’t seem haunted over Andy and her dad, that she was getting on with her life?

But—clasping Kitsey’s elbow, rewarded by a radiant smile—I felt momentarily relieved again, and distracted from my worries. It had been eight months since I left Reeve in that Tribeca restaurant; no one had yet contacted me about any of the bad pieces I’d sold though I was fully prepared to admit my mistake if they did: inexperienced, new to the business, here’s your money back sir, accept my apologies. Nights, lying awake, I reassured myself that if things got ugly, at least I hadn’t left much of a trail: I’d tried not to document the sales any more than I’d had to, and on the smaller pieces had offered a discount for cash.

But still. But still. It was only a matter of time. Once one client stepped forward, there would be an avalanche. And it would be bad enough if I wrecked Hobie’s reputation but the moment there were so many claims that I stopped being able to refund people’s money, there would be lawsuits: lawsuits in which Hobie, co-owner of the business, would be named. It would be hard to convince a court he hadn’t known what I was doing, especially on some of the sales I’d made at the Important Americana level—and, if it came down to it, I wasn’t even sure that Hobie would speak up adequately in his own defense if that meant leaving me out to hang alone. Granted: a lot of the people I’d sold to had so much money they didn’t give a shit. But still. But still. When would someone decide to look under the seats of those Hepplewhite dining chairs (for instance) and notice that they weren’t all alike? That the grain was wrong, that the legs didn’t match? Or take a table to be independently evaluated and learn that the veneer was of a type not used, or invented, in the 1770s? Every day, I wondered when and how the first fraud might surface: a letter from a lawyer, a phone call from the American Furniture department at Sotheby’s, a decorator or a collector charging into the store to confront me, Hobie coming downstairs, listen, we’ve got a problem, do you have a minute?

If the marriage-wrecking knowledge of my liabilities surfaced before the wedding, I wasn’t sure what would happen. It was more than I could bear to think of. The wedding might not go off at all. Yet—for Kitsey’s sake, and her mother’s—it seemed even more cruel if it surfaced after, especially since the Barbours were not nearly so well-off as they had been before Mr. Barbour’s death. There were cash flow problems. The money was tied up in trust. Mommy had had to reduce some of the employees to part time hours, and let the rest of them go. And Daddy—as Platt had confided, when attempting to interest me in more antiques from the apartment—had gone a bit bonkers at the end and invested more than fifty percent of the portfolio in VistaBank, a commercial-banking monster, for “sentimental reasons” (Mr. Barbour’s great-great-grandfather had been president of one of the historic founding banks, in Massachusetts, long since stripped of its name after merging with Vista). Unfortunately VistaBank had ceased paying dividends, and failed, shortly before Mr. Barbour’s death. Hence Mrs. Barbour’s drastically reduced support of the charities with which she had once been so generous; hence Kitsey’s job. And Platt’s editorial position at his tasteful little publishing house, as he’d often reminded me when in his cups, paid less than Mommy in the old days had paid her housekeeper. If things got bad, I was pretty sure Mrs. Barbour would do what she could to help; and Kitsey, as my spouse, would be obligated to help whether she wanted to or not. But it was a dirty trick to play on them, especially since Hobie’s lavish praise had convinced them all (Platt especially, concerned with the family’s dwindling resources) that I was some kind of financial magician sweeping in to his sister’s rescue. “You know how to make money,” he’d said, bluntly, when he told me how thrilled they all were Kitsey was marrying me instead of some of the layabouts she’d been known to go around with. “She doesn’t.”