The Goldfinch

I’d thought, having successfully escaped the bar, I might see a movie—that maybe the solitude of a movie theater would set me aright, some near-empty afternoon showing of a film ending its popular run. But when, lightheaded and sniffling with cold, I got to the theater on Second and Thirty-Second, the French cop film I wanted to see had already started and so had the mistaken-identity thriller. All that remained were a host of holiday movies and intolerable romantic comedies: posters of bedraggled brides, battling bridesmaids, a dismayed dad in a Santa hat with two howling babies in his arms.

The cabs were starting to go off duty. High above the street, in the dark afternoon, lights burned in lonely offices and apartment towers. Turning away, I continued to drift downtown, with no very clear idea where I was going or why, and as I walked I had the oddly appealing sensation that I was undoing myself, unwinding myself thread by thread, rags and tatters falling away from me in the very act of crossing Thirty-Second Street and flowing along amongst the rush-hour pedestrians and rolling along from the next moment to the next.

At the next theater, ten or twelve blocks down, it was the same story: the CIA film had started, as had the well-reviewed biopic of a 1940s leading lady; the French cop movie didn’t start for another hour and a half; and unless I wanted the psychopath film or the searing family drama, which I didn’t, it was more brides and bachelor parties and Santa hats and Pixar.

By the time I made it to the theater at Seventeenth Street I didn’t stop at the box office at all but kept walking. Somehow, mysteriously, in the process of crossing Union Square, swept along in a dark eddy that had hit me from nowhere, I’d arrived at the decision to call Jerome. There was a mystic joy in the idea, a saintly mortification. Would he even have pharms on such short notice, would I have to buy regular old street dope? I didn’t care. I hadn’t done drugs in months but for whatever reason, an evening nodding and unconscious in my bedroom at Hobie’s had begun to seem like a perfectly reasonable response to the holiday lights, the holiday crowds, the incessant Christmas bells with their morbid funeral note, Kitsey’s candy-pink notebook from Kate’s Paperie with tabs reading MY BRIDESMAIDS MY GUESTS MY SEATING MY FLOWERS MY VENDORS MY CHECKLIST MY CATERING.

Stepping back quickly—the light had changed, I’d almost walked in front of a car—I reeled and nearly slipped. There was no point dwelling on my unreasoning horror of a large public wedding—enclosed spaces, claustrophobia, sudden movements, phobic triggers everywhere, for some reason the subway didn’t bother me so much it had more to do with crowded buildings, always expecting something to happen, the puff of smoke, the fast-ru

Then too: I hoped that the escalating social roar which I’d been riding like a boat in a hurricane would slow, post-wedding, since all I really wanted was to get back to the halcyon days of summer when I’d had Kitsey all to myself: di

“Sorry, afraid not.” The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job. And—all these pregnant women? “Oh, Theo! Isn’t he adorable!” Kitsey unexpectedly thrusting a friend’s newborn at me—me in all sincere horror leaping back as if from a lighted match.

“Oh, sometimes it takes us guys a while,” said Race Goldfarb complacently, observing my discomfort, raising his voice above the infants wailing and tumbling in a na

“Right,” I said politely, going into the kitchen and pouring myself a huge vodka. My dad too had been wildly squeamish around pregnant women (had in fact been fired from a job for one too many ill-advised remarks; those breeder cracks hadn’t gone over too well at the office) and, far from the conventional “melting into goo” wisdom, he’d never been able to stand kids or babies either, much less the whole doting-parent scene, dumbly-smiling women feeling up their own bellies and guys with infants bound to their chests, would go outside to smoke or else skulk darkly at the margins looking like a drug pusher whenever he was forced to attend any sort of school event or kiddie party. Apparently I’d inherited it from him and, who knew, maybe Grandpa Decker as well, this violent procreative disgust buzzing loudly in my bloodstream; it felt inborn, wired-in, genetic.

Nodding the night away. The dark-throated bliss of it. No thanks, Hobie, already ate, think I’ll just head up to bed with my book. The things these people talked about, even the men? Just thinking about that night at the Goldfarbs’ made me want to be so wrecked I couldn’t walk straight.

As I approached Astor Place—African drum players, drunks arguing, clouds of incense from a street vendor—I felt my spirits lifting. My tolerance was sure to be way down: a cheering thought. Only one or two pills a week, to get me through the very worst of the socializing, and only when I really really needed them. In lieu of the pharms I’d been drinking too much and that really wasn’t working for me; with opiates I was relaxed, I was tolerant, I was up for anything, I could stand pleasantly for hours in unbearable situations listening to any old tiresome or ridiculous bullshit without wanting to go outside and shoot myself in the head.

But I hadn’t phoned Jerome in a long time, and when I ducked in the doorway of a skate shop to make the call, it went straight to voice mail—a mechanical message that didn’t sound like his. Has he changed his number? I thought, starting to worry after the second try. People like Jerome—it had happened with Jack, before him—could drop off the map pretty suddenly even if you were in regular contact.