The Goldfinch

ALL DAY, I WAS practically out-of-body with excitement at the thought of the evening ahead. Downstairs, in the store (where I was too busy with Christmas customers to devote undivided attention to my plans), I thought about what I would wear (something casual, not a suit, nothing too studied) and where I would take her to di

And so the day crawled; and then it was six, and Hobie was home from his day out with Pippa, and he was poking his head in the store.

“So!” he said, after a pause, in a cheerful but cautious tone that reminded me (ominously) of the tone my mother had taken with my dad when she came home and found him buzzing about on the verge of an upswing. Hobie knew how I felt about Pippa—I’d never told him, never breathed a word of it, but he knew; and even if he hadn’t, it would have been perfectly visible to him (or any stranger walking in off the street) that I practically had sparks flying out of my head. “How’s everything?”

“Great! How was your day?”

“Oh wonderful!” with relief. “I was able to get us in at Union Square for lunch, we sat at the bar, wish you’d been with us. Then we went up to Moira’s, and the three of us walked over to the Asia Society, and now she’s out doing a bit of Christmas shopping. She says you, ah, you’re meeting her later tonight?” Casual, but with the unease of a parent wondering if an erratic teenager is really going to be okay taking the car out. “Film Forum?”

“Right,” I said nervously. I didn’t want him to know I was taking her to the Gle

“She said you two are going to the Gle

“Well, um, I was dying to go again. Don’t tell her I’ve been,” I said impulsively; and then: “Did you, er—?”

“No no—” hastily, drawing himself up—“I didn’t.”

“Well, um—”

Hobie rubbed his nose. “Well, listen, I’m sure it’s great. I’m dying to see it as well. Not tonight though,” he added quickly. “Some other time.”

“Oh—” trying hard to sound bummed-out, doing a bad job of it.

“In any case. Want me to mind the shop for you? In case you want to go upstairs for a wash and a brush-up? You should be leaving here no later than six-thirty if you plan on walking over there, you know.”

xxvi.

ON THE WAY OVER, I couldn’t help humming and smiling. And when I turned the corner and spotted her standing out in front of the theater I was so nervous I had to stop and compose myself for a moment before rushing in to greet her, helping her with her bags (she, laden with shopping, babbling about her day), perfect, perfect bliss of standing in line with her, huddling close because it was cold, and then inside, the red carpet and the whole evening ahead of us, clapping her gloved hands together: “oh, do you want some popcorn?” “Sure!” (me springing to the counter) “Popcorn’s great here—” and then, walking into the theater together, me touching her back casually, the velvety back of her coat, perfect brown coat and perfect green hat and perfect, perfect, little red head—“here—aisle? do you like the aisle?” we’d gone to the movies just enough (five times) for me to make careful note of where she liked to sit, plus, I knew it well enough from Hobie after years of inconspicuously questioning him as much as I dared about her tastes, her likes and dislikes, her habits, slipping the questions in casually, one at a time, for almost a decade, does she like this, does she like that; and there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o’clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with given my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places, and more people trickling in even after the film had already started but I didn’t care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine. And the music! Gle

I spent the rest of the film miserable, hardly seeing it. Or, rather, I was seeing it but in a wholly different way: not the ecstatic prodigy; not the mystic, the solitary, heroically quitting the concert stage at the height of his fame to retreat into the snows of Canada—but the hypochondriac, the recluse, the isolate. The paranoiac. The pill popper. No: the drug addict. The obsessive: glove-wearing, germ-phobic, bundled year round with scarves, twitching and racked with compulsions. The hunched nocturnal weirdo so unsure how to conduct even the most basic relations with people that (in an interview which I was suddenly finding torturous) he had asked a recording engineer if they couldn’t go to a lawyer and legally be declared brothers—sort of the tragic, late-genius version of Tom Cable and me pressing cut thumbs in the darkened back-yard of his house, or—even more strangely—Boris seizing my hand, bloody at the knuckles where I’d punched him on the playground, and pressing it to his own bloodied mouth.

xxvii.

“THAT UPSET YOU,” I said impulsively when we were leaving the theater. “I’m sorry.”

She glanced up at me as if shocked I’d noticed. We’d come out into a bluish, dream-lit world—the first snow of the season, five inches on the ground.

“We could have left if you wanted.”

In answer she only shook her head in a sort of stu

“Well, no,” she said reluctantly. “I mean, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it—”

Floundering up the street. Neither of us had the proper shoes. The crunch of our feet was loud and I listened, attentively, waiting for her to continue and ready to grasp her elbow in a moment if she slipped, but when she turned to look at me all she said was: “Oh, God. We’re never going to get a cab, are we?”

Mind racing. What about di

“Oh, I know, but—oh, there’s one!” she cried—and my heart plunged until I saw, thankfully, that someone else had grabbed it.

“Hey,” I said. We were near Bedford Street—lights, cafés. “What do you say we try up here?”

“For a cab?”

“No, for something to eat.” (Was she hungry? Please God: let her be hungry.) “Or a drink, at least.”