The Goldfinch

I had nothing to say to this.

She looked at me critically. “You really don’t like him, do you?”

“Um—” What was the point of lying? “No.”

“Well—if you knew him better, you would. He’s a good guy. Very serene and even-tempered—very stable.”

I had nothing to say to this, either. I was none of these things.

“Also London—I mean I’ve thought about coming back to New York—”

“You have?”

“Of course. I miss Hobie. A lot. He jokes how he could rent me an apartment here for what we spend on the phone—of course he’s living back in the days when long distance to London cost five dollars a minute or whatever. Pretty much every time we speak, he tries to talk me into coming back… well, you know Hobie, he never says it outright, but you know, constant hints, always tells me about jobs opening up, positions at Columbia and stuff—”

“He does?”

“Well—on some level I can’t fathom that I live so far away. Welty was the one who took me to music lessons and to the symphony but Hobie was the one always home, you know, who went upstairs and made me a snack after school and helped me plant marigolds for my science project. Even now—when I have a bad cold? when I can’t remember how to cook artichokes or get candle wax off the tablecloth? who do I call? Him. But—” was it my imagination, was the wine getting her worked up a little bit?—“tell you the truth? Know why I don’t come back more? In London—” was she about to cry? “I wouldn’t tell everybody this, but in London at least I don’t think every second about it. ‘This is the way I walked home the day before.’ ‘This is where Welty and Hobie and I had di

“You’re a perfect size.”

“Well, it’s fairly common,” she said, ignoring my clumsy compliment. “Injured and traumatized children—they quite often fail to grow to normal height.” She went in and out, unconsciously, of her Dr. Camenzind voice—even though I’d never met Dr. Camenzind I could sense the moments when Dr. Camenzind took over, a kind of cool distancing mechanism. “Resources are diverted. The growth system shuts down. There was one girl at my school—Saudi princess who was kidnapped, when she was twelve? The guys who did it were executed. But—I met her when she was nineteen, nice girl, but tiny, like only four eleven or something, she was so traumatized that she never grew an inch past the day they snatched her.”

“Wow. That underground cell girl? She was at school with you?”

“Mont-Haefeli was weird. You had girls who’d been shot at while fleeing the presidential palace, and then you had girls who got sent there because their parents wanted them to lose weight or train for the Winter Olympics.”

She accepted my hand in hers, without saying anything—all bundled up, she hadn’t let them take her coat. Long sleeves in summer—always swathed in half a dozen scarves, like some sort of cocooned insect wrapped in layers—protective padding for a girl who’d been broken and stitched and bolted back together again. How could I have been so blind? No wonder the film had upset her: Gle

“Because—I mean, I’ve heard you talk about it, I know you’re as obsessed as I am. But I go over and over it too.” The waitress had inconspicuously poured her more wine, refilled it to the top without Pippa even asking or seeming to notice: dear waitress, I thought, God bless you, I’m leaving you a tip to knock your socks off. “If only I’d signed up to audition on Tuesday, or Thursday. If only I’d let Welty take me to the museum when he wanted… he’d been trying to get me up to that show for weeks, he was determined that I see it before it came down.… But I always had something better to do. More important to go to the movies with my friend Lee A

“At least you hadn’t been expelled from school.”

“Were you expelled?”

“Suspended. Bad enough.”

“It’s weird to think—if it had never happened. If we hadn’t both been there that day. We might not know each other. What do you think you would be doing now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, a bit startled. “I can’t even imagine.”

“Yeah, but you must have an idea.”

“I wasn’t like you. I didn’t have a talent.”

“What’d you do for fun?”

“Nothing that interesting. The usual. Computer games, sci-fi stuff. When people asked me what I wanted to be, I’d usually be a smart ass and say I wanted to be a blade ru

“God, I’m so haunted by that movie. I think about Tyrell’s niece a lot.”

“What do you mean?”

“That scene where’s she’s looking at the pictures on the piano. When she’s trying to figure out whether her memories belong to her or Tyrell’s niece. I go back through the past too, only looking for signs, you know? Things I should have picked up on, but missed?”

“Listen, you’re right, I think like that too, but, omens, signs, partial knowledge, there’s no logical way you could…” why couldn’t I ever get a sentence to come out right around her? “… can I just say how cuckoo it sounds? Especially when someone else says it? To blame yourself for not predicting the future?”

“Well—maybe, but Dr. Camenzind says we all do it. Accidents, catastrophes—something like seventy-five per cent of disaster victims are convinced there were warning signs they brushed off or didn’t pick up on correctly, and with children under eighteen, the percentage is even higher. But that doesn’t mean the signs weren’t there, does it?”

“I don’t think it’s like that. In hindsight—sure. But I think maybe it’s more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake—the point where you would have had a different outcome.”

“Yes, but that’s almost as bad, isn’t it? To see the mistake, the place where you went wrong, and not be able to go back and fix it? My audition—” large gulp of wine—“pre-college orchestra at Juilliard, my solfège teacher had told me I might get second chair but if I played really well, I might have a shot at first. And I guess it was a big deal, sort of. But Welty—” yes, definitely, tears, eyes shining in the firelight—“I knew I was wrong nagging him to come uptown with me, there was no reason for him to come—Welty spoiled me rotten even when my mother was alive but after she died he spoiled me more, and it was a big day for me, sure, but was it as important as I made it seem? No. Because,” she was crying now, a little, “I didn’t even want to go to the museum, I wanted him to come uptown with me because I knew he’d take me out to lunch before the audition, anywhere I wanted—he should have stayed home that day, he had other stuff to do, they didn’t even let family sit in, he would have had to wait down the hall—”

“He knew what he was doing.”

She glanced up at me as if I’d said exactly the wrong thing; only I knew it was exactly the right thing if I could voice it correctly.