The Goldfinch

Jose, looking past me, had spotted my father, and Xandra, hanging back slightly. “Hello, Mr. Decker,” he said, in a more formal tone, reaching around me to take my dad’s hand: politely, but no love lost. “Is nice to see you.”

My father, with his Personable Smile, started to answer but I was too nervous and interrupted: “Jose—” I’d been racking my brains for the Spanish on the way over, rehearsing the sentence in my mind—“ mi papá quiere entrar en el apartamento, le necesitamos abrir la puerta.” Then, quickly, I slipped in the question I’d worked out earlier, on the way over: “¿Usted puede subir con nosotros?”

Jose’s eyes went quickly to my father and Xandra. He was a big, handsome guy from the Dominican Republic, something about him reminiscent of the young Muhammad Ali—sweet-tempered, always kidding around, but you didn’t want to mess with him. Once, in a moment of confidence, he had pulled up his uniform jacket and shown me a knife scar on his abdomen, which he said he’d gotten in a street fight in Miami.

“Happy to do it,” he said in English, in an easy voice. He was looking at them but I knew he was talking to me. “I’ll take you up. Everything is okay?”

“Yep, we’re fine,” said my dad curtly. He was the very one who’d insisted that I study Spanish as my foreign language instead of German (“so at least one person in the family can communicate with these fucking doormen”).

Xandra, who I was starting to think was a real dingbat, laughed nervously and said in her stuttery quick voice: “Yeah, we’re fine, but the flight really took it out of us. It’s a long way from Vegas and we’re still a little—” and here she rolled her eyes and waggled her fingers to indicate wooziness.

“Oh yeah?” said Jose. “Today? You flew into LaGuardia?” Like all the doormen he was a genius at small talk, especially if it was about traffic or weather, the best route to the airport at rush hour. “I heard big delays out there today, some problem with the baggage handlers, the union, right?”

All the way up in the elevator, Xandra kept up a steady but agitated stream of chatter: about how dirty New York was compared to Las Vegas (“Yeah, I admit it, everything’s cleaner out west, I guess I’m spoiled”), about her bad turkey sandwich on the airplane and the flight attendant who “forgot” (Xandra, with her fingertips, inserting the quotations manually) to bring Xandra the five dollars change from the wine she ordered.

“Oh, ma’am!” said Jose, stepping in the hallway, wagging his head in the mock-serious way he had. “Airplane food, it’s the worst. These days you’re lucky if they feed you at all. Tell you one thing in New York, though. You going to find you some good food. You got good Vietnamese, good Cuban, good Indian—”

“I don’t like all that spicy stuff.”

“Good whatever you want, then. We got it. Segundito,” he said, holding up a finger as he felt around on the ring for the passkey.

The lock tumbled with a solid clunk, instinctive, blood-deep in its rightness. Though the place was stuffy from being shut up, still I was leveled by the fierce smell of home: books and old rugs and lemon floor cleaner, the dark myrrh-smelling candles she bought at Barney’s.

The bag from the museum was propped on the floor by the sofa—exactly where I’d left it, how many weeks before? Feeling light-headed, I darted around and inside to grab it as Jose—slightly blocking my irritated father’s path, without quite appearing to—stood just outside the door listening to Xandra, arms folded. The composed but slightly absent-minded look on his face reminded me of the way he’d looked when he’d had to practically carry my dad upstairs one freezing night, my dad so drunk he’d lost his overcoat.—Happens in the best of families, he’d said with an abstract smile, refusing the twenty-dollar bill that my father—incoherent, vomit on his suit jacket, scratched-up and dirty like he’d been rolling on the sidewalk—was trying hard to push into his face.

“Actually, I’m from the East Coast?” Xandra was saying. “From Florida?” Again that nervous laugh—stuttery, sputtering. “West Palm, to be specific.”

“Florida you say?” I heard Jose remark. “Is beautiful down there.”

“Yeah, it’s great. At least in Vegas we’ve got the sunshine—I don’t know if I could take the winters out here, I’d turn into a Popsicle—”

The instant I picked the bag up, I realized it was too light—almost empty. Where the hell was the painting? Though I was nearly blind with panic, I didn’t stop but kept going, down the hallway, on autopilot, back to my bedroom, mind whirring and grinding as I walked—

Suddenly—through my disco

From the living room, I heard Xandra say: “I bet you see a lot of celebrities on the street here, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. LeBron, Dan Aykroyd, Tara Reid, Jay-Z, Mado

My mother’s bedroom was dark and cool, and the faint, just-detectable smell of her perfume was almost more than I could bear. There sat the painting, propped among silver-framed photographs—her parents, her, me at many ages, horses and dogs galore: her father’s mare Chalkboard, Bruno the Great Dane, her dachshund Poppy who’d died when I was in kindergarten. Steeling myself against her reading glasses on the bureau and her black tights stiff where she’d draped them to dry and her handwriting on her desk calendar and a million other heart-piercing sights, I picked it up and tucked it under my arm and walked quickly into my own room across the hall.

My room—like the kitchen—faced the airshaft, and was dark without the lights on. A dank bath towel lay crumpled where I’d thrown it after my shower that last morning, atop a heap of dirty clothes. I picked it up—wincing at the smell—with the idea of throwing it over the painting while I found a better place to hide it, maybe in the—

“What are you doing?”

My father stood in the doorway, a darkish silhouette with the light shining behind him.

“Nothing.”

He stooped and picked up the bag I’d dropped in the hall. “What’s this out here?”

“My book bag,” I said, after a pause—though the thing was clearly a mom’s collapsible shopping tote, nothing I, or any kid, would ever take to school.

He tossed it in the open door, crinkling his nose at the smell. “Phew,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face, “it smells like old hockey socks in here.” As he reached inside the door and flipped the light switch, I managed with a complex but spasmodic movement to throw the towel over the picture so (I hoped) he couldn’t see it.

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“A poster.”

“Well look, I hope you’re not pla

I felt that I needed to make a reply, especially since it was the longest and friendliest-seeming thing he’d said since he’d shown up, but somehow I couldn’t quite pull my thoughts together.

Abruptly, my father said: “Your mother wasn’t so easy to live with either, you know.” He picked up something that looked like an old math test from my desk, examined it, and then threw it back down. “She played her cards way too close to the vest. You know how she used to do. Clamming up. Freezing me out. Always had to take the high road. It was a power thing, you know—really controlling. Quite honestly, and I really hate to say this, it got to the point where it was hard for me to even be in the same room with her. I mean, I’m not saying she was a bad person. It’s just one minute everything’s fine, and the next, bam, what did I do, the old silent treatment…”