The Goldfinch

“The whole time we were together, he was talking about you. And—”

“And what?”

“Nothing!” I closed my eyes, overwhelmed with the wine, with her, with the impossibility of explaining it. “It’s just—his last moments on earth, you know? And the space between my life, and his, was very, very thin. There wasn’t any space. It was like something opened up between us. Like a huge flash of what was real—what mattered. No me, no him. We were the same person. Same thoughts—we didn’t have to talk. It was just a few minutes but it might have been years, we might as well still be there. And, um, I know this sounds weird—” in fact, it was a completely lunatic analogy, crackpot, insane, but I didn’t know any other way to work around to what I wanted to say—“but you know Barbara Guibbory, who does those seminars up in Rhinebeck, those past-life-regression things? Reincarnation and karmic ties and all that? Souls who have been together for a lot of lifetimes? I know, I know,” I said, at her startled (and slightly alarmed) look—“every time I see Barbara she tells me I need to chant Um or Rum or whatever to heal, like, the blocked chakras—‘deficient muladhara’—I’m not kidding you, that was her diagnosis of me, ‘unrooted…’ ‘constriction of the heart…’ ‘fragmented energy field…’ I was just standing there having a cocktail and minding my own business and here she comes drifting up telling me all these foods I need to eat to ground myself…” I was losing her, I could see it—“sorry, I’m wandering off topic a little, it’s just, well, we’ve had this discussion, all that stuff irritates the hell out of me. Hobie was standing there too drinking a big old Scotch and he said ‘What about me, Barbara? Should I eat some root vegetables? Stand on my head?’ and she just patted him on the arm and said ‘oh, no worries, James, you ARE an Advanced Being.’ ”

That got a laugh out of her.

“But Welty—he was one too. An Advanced Being. Like—not joking. Serious. Out of the ballpark. Those stories that Barbara tells—guru What’s-His-Name putting his hand on her head in Burma and in that one minute she was infused with knowledge and became a different person—”

“Well, I mean, Everett—of course he never met Krishnamurti but—”

“Right, right.” Everett—why this a

“That’s okay.”

Silence. Her eyes on mine. But unlike Kitsey—who was always at least partly somewhere else, who loathed serious talk, who at a similar turn would be looking around for the waitress or making whatever light and/or comic remark she could think of to keep the moment from getting too intense—she was listening, she was right with me, and I could see only too well how saddened she was at my condition, a sadness only worsened by the fact she truly liked me: we had a lot in common, a mental co

xxix.

THE NEXT DAY—WHICH was the day of the engagement party—all the closeness of the previous evening was gone; and all that remained (at breakfast; in our quick hellos in the hallway) was the frustration of knowing I would not have her to myself again; we were awkward with each other, bumping into each other coming and going, talking a little too loudly and cheerfully, and I was reminded (all too sadly) of her visit the previous summer, four months before she’d shown up with “Everett,” and the rich passionate talk we’d had out on the stoop, just the two of us, as it was getting dark: huddled side by side (“like a pair of old tramps”), my knee to her knee, my arm touching hers, and the two of us looking out at the people on the street and talking about all sorts of things: childhood, playdates in Central Park and skating at Wollman Rink (had we ever seen each other in the old days? Brushed past each other on the ice?), about The Misfits, which we’d just watched on TV with Hobie, about Marilyn Monroe, whom we both loved (“a little springtime ghost”) and about poor ruined Montgomery Clift walking around with handfuls of loose pills in his pockets (a detail I hadn’t known, and didn’t comment upon) and about the death of Clark Gable and how horribly guilty Marilyn had felt for it, how responsible—which somehow, oddly, spiraled into talk of Fate, and the occult, and fortune-telling: did birthdays have anything to do with luck, or lack of it? Bad transits; stars in unfortunate alignment? What would a palm reader say? Have you ever had your palm read? No—you? Maybe we should walk over to the Psychic Healer storefront on Sixth Avenue with the purple lights and the crystal balls, it looks like it’s open twenty four hours a day—oh right, you mean the lava-lamp place where the crazy Romanian woman stands in the door belching? talking until it was so dark we could hardly see each other, whispering though there was no reason to: do you want to go in? no, not yet, and the fat summer moon shining white and pure overhead, and my love for her was really just that pure, as simple and steady as the moon. But then finally we had to go inside and almost the instant we did the spell was broken, and in the brightness of the hallway we were embarrassed and stiff with each other, almost as if the house lights had been turned up at the end of a play, and all our closeness exposed for what it was: make-believe. For months I had been desperate to recapture that moment; and—in the bar, for an hour or two—I had. But it was all unreal again, we were back right where we started, and I tried to tell myself it was enough, just to have had her all to myself for a few hours. Only it wasn’t.

xxx.

ANNE DE LARMESSIN—KITSEY’S godmother—was hosting our party at a private club which even Hobie had never set foot in, but knew all about: its history (venerable), its architects (illustrious), and its membership (stellar, ru