The Goldfinch

The cold water, hitting my sore throat, threw me into goosebumps and into a visceral bodily memory from boyhood: painful desert sunlight, painful afternoon hangover, teeth chattering in the air-conditioned chill. Boris and I so sick we kept retching, and laughing about retching, which made us retch even harder. Gagging on stale crackers from a box in my room.

“Well—” Boris stealing a glance at me sideways—“something going around maybe. If was not Christmas Day, I would run down and get something to help your stomach. Here here—” dumping some food on a plate, shoving it at me. He picked up the champagne bottle from the ice bucket, looked at the level again, then poured the remainder of the split into my half-empty orange juice glass (half empty, because he had drunk it himself).

“Here,” he said, raising his champagne glass to me. “Merry Christmas to you! Long life to us both! Christ is born, let us glorify Him! Now—” gulping it down—he’d turned the rolls on the tablecloth, was heaping out food to himself in the ceramic bread dish—“I am sorry, I know you want to hear about everything, but I am hungry and must eat first.”

Pâté. Caviar. Christmas bread. Despite everything, I was hungry too, and I decided to be grateful for the moment and for the food in front of me and began to eat and for a while neither of us said anything.

“Better?” he said presently, throwing me a glance. “You are exhausted.” Helping himself to more salmon. “There is a bad flu going round. Shirley has it too.”

I said nothing. I had only just begun to adjust myself to the fact that he was in the room with me.

“I thought you were out with some girl. Well—here is where Gyuri and I have been,” he said, when I didn’t answer. “We have been in Frankfurt. Well—this you know. Some crazy time it’s been! But—” downing his champagne, walking to the minibar and squatting down to look inside—

“Do you have my passport?”

“Yes I have your passport. Wow, there is some nice wine in here! And all these nice baby Absoluts.”

“Where is it?”

“Ah—” Loping back to the table with a bottle of red wine under his arm, and three minibar bottles of vodka which he stuck in the ice bucket. “Here you go.” Fishing it from his pocket, tossing it carelessly onto the table. “Now”—sitting down—“shall we drink a toast together?”

I sat on the edge of the bed without moving, my half-eaten plate of food still in my lap. My passport.

In the long silence that followed, Boris reached across the table and flicked the edge of my champagne glass with middle finger, sharp crystalline ting like a spoon on an after di

“May I have your attention, please?” he inquired ironically.

“What?”

“Toast?” Tipping his glass to me.

I rubbed my hand over my forehead. “And you are what, here?”

“Eh?”

“Toasting what, exactly?”

“Christmas Day? Graciousness of God? Will that do?”

The silence between us, while not exactly hostile, took on as it grew a distinctly glaring and unmanageable tone. Finally Boris fell back in his chair and nodded at my glass and said: “Hate to keep asking, but when you are through with staring at me, do you think we can—?”

“I’m going to have to figure all this out at some point.”

“What?”

“I guess I’ll have to sort this all out in my mind some time. It’s going to be a job. Like, this thing over there… that over here. Two different piles. Three different piles maybe.”

“Potter, Potter, Potter—” affectionate, half-scornful, leaning forward—“you are a blockhead. You have no sense of gratitude or beauty.”

“ ‘No sense of gratitude.’ I’ll drink to that, I guess.”

“What? Don’t you remember our happy Christmas that one time? Happy days gone by? Never to return? Your dad—” grand flinging gesture—“at the restaurant table? Our feast and joy? Our happy celebration? Don’t you honor that memory in your heart?”

“For God’s sake.”

“Potter—” arrested breath—“you are something. You are worse than a woman. ‘Hurry, hurry.’ ‘Get up, go.’ Didn’t you read my texts?”

“What?”

Boris—reaching for his glass—stopped cold. Quickly he glanced at the floor and I was, suddenly, very aware of the bag by his chair.

In amusement, Boris stuck his thumbnail between his front teeth. “Go ahead.”

The words hovered over the wrecked breakfast. Distorted reflections in the domed cover of the silver dish.

I picked up the bag and stood; and his smile faded when I started to the door.

“Wait!” he said.

“Wait what?”

“You’re not going to open it?”

“Look—” I knew myself too well, didn’t trust myself to wait; I wasn’t letting the same thing happen twice—

“What are you doing? Where are you going?”

“I’m taking this downstairs. So they can lock it in the safe.” I didn’t even know if there was a safe, only that I didn’t want the painting near me—it was safer with strangers, in a cloakroom, anywhere. I was also going to phone the police the moment Boris left, but not until; there was no reason dragging Boris into it.

“You didn’t even open it! You don’t even know what it is!”

“Duly noted.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe I don’t need to know what it is.”

“Oh no? Maybe you do. It’s not what you think,” he added, a bit smugly.

“No?”

“No.”

“How do you know what I think?”

“Of course I know what you think it is! And—you are wrong. Sorry. But—” raising his hands—“is something much, much better than.”

“Better than?”

“Yes.”

“How can it be better than?”

“It just is. Lots lots better. You will just have to believe me on this. Open and see,” he said, with a curt nod.

“What is this?” I said after about thirty stu

“That is not all of it.” Rubbing the back of his head with the flat of his hand. “Fraction of.”

I looked at it, then at him. “Fraction of what?”

“Well—” smirking—“thought more dramatic if in cash, no?”

Muffled comedy voices floating from next door, articulated cadences of a television laugh track.

“Nicer surprise for you! That is not all of it, mind you. U.S. currency, I thought, more convenient for you to return with. What you came over with—a bit more. In fact they have not paid yet—no money has yet come through. But—soon, I hope.”

“They? Who hasn’t paid? Paid what?”

“This money is mine. Own personal. From the house safe. Stopped in Antwerp to get it. Nicer this way—nicer for you to open, no? Christmas morning? Ho Ho Ho? But you have a lot more coming.”

I turned the stack of money over and looked at it: forward and back. Banded, straight from Citibank.

“ ‘Thank you Boris.’ ‘Oh, no problem,’ ” he answered, ironically, in his own voice. “Glad to do it.’ ”

Money in stacks. Outside the event. Crisp in the hand. There was some kind of obvious content or emotion to the whole thing I wasn’t getting.

“As I say—fraction of. Two million euro. In dollars much much more. So—merry Christmas! My gift to you! I can open you an account in Switzerland for the rest of it and give you a bank book and that way—what?” he said, recoiling almost, when I put the stack of bills in the bag, snapped it shut, and shoved it back at him. “No! It’s yours!”

“I don’t want it.”

“I don’t think you understand! Let me explain, please.”

“I said I don’t want it.”

“Potter—” folding his arms and looking at me coldly, the same look he’d given me in the Polack bar—“a different man would walk out laughing now and never come back.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“I—” looking around the room, as if at a loss for a reason why—“I will tell you why not! For old times’ sake. Even though you treat me like a criminal. And because I want to make things up to you—”

“Make what up?”

“Sorry?”

“What, exactly? Will you explain it to me? Where the hell did this money come from? How does this fix a fucking thing?”