The Goldfinch

“Did Xandra get you interested in all this?”

“Xandra? Half the sports book in Vegas has an astrologer on speed dial. Anyway, like I was saying, all other things equal, do the planets make a difference? Yes. I would definitely have to say yes. It’s like, is a player having a good day, is he having a bad day, is he out of sorts, whatever. Honestly it helps to have that edge when you’re getting a little, how do I put it, ha ha, stretched, although—” he showed me the fat wad of what looked like hundreds, wrapped with a rubber band—“this has been a really amazing year for me. Fifty-three percent, a thousand plays a year. That’s the magic spot.”

Sundays were what he called major-ticket days. When I got up, I found him downstairs in a crackle of strewn newspapers, zinging around bright and restless like it was Christmas morning, opening and shutting cabinets, talking to the sports ticker on his BlackBerry and crunching on corn chips straight from the bag. If I came down and watched with him for even a little while when the big games were on sometimes he’d give me what he called “a piece—” twenty bucks, fifty, if he won. “To get you interested,” he explained, leaning forward on the sofa, rubbing his hands anxiously. “See—what we need is for the Colts to get wiped off the map during this first half of the game. Devastated. And with the Cowboys and the Niners we need the score to go over thirty in the second half—yes!” he shouted, jumping up exhilarated with raised fist. “Fumble! Redskins got the ball. We’re in business!”

But it was confusing, because it was the Cowboys who had fumbled. I’d thought the Cowboys were supposed to win by at least fifteen. His mid-game switches in loyalty were too abrupt for me to follow and I often embarrassed myself by cheering for the wrong team; yet as we surged randomly between games, between spreads, I enjoyed his delirium and the daylong binge of greasy food, accepted the twenties and fifties he tossed at me as if they’d fallen from the sky. Other times—cresting and then tanking on some hoarse wave of enthusiasm—a vague unease took hold of him which as far as I could tell had nothing very much to do with how his games were going and he paced back and forth for no reason I could discern, hands folded atop his head, staring at the set with the air of a man unhinged by business failure: talking to the coaches, the players, asking what the hell was wrong with them, what the hell was happening. Sometimes he followed me into the kitchen, with an oddly supplicant demeanor. “I’m getting killed in there,” he said, humorously, leaning on the counter, his bearing comical, something in his hunched posture suggesting a bank robber doubled over from a gunshot wound.

Lines x. Lines y. Yards run, cover the spread. On game day, until five o’clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom—autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day—but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn’t shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east.

The panic that overtook me then was hard to explain. Those game days broke up with a swiftness, a sense of losing blood almost, that reminded me of watching the apartment in New York being boxed up and carted away: groundlessness and flux, nothing to hang on to. Upstairs, with the door of my room shut, I turned all the lights on, smoked weed if I had it, listened to music on my portable speakers—previously unlistened-to music like Shostakovich, and Erik Satie, that I’d put on my iPod for my mother and then never got around to taking off—and I looked at library books: art books, mostly, because they reminded me of her.

The Masterworks of Dutch Painting. Delft: The Golden Age. Drawings by Rembrandt, His Anonymous Pupils and Followers. From looking on the computer at school, I’d seen that there was a book about Carel Fabritius (a tiny book, only a hundred pages) but they didn’t have it at the school library and our computer time at school was so closely monitored that I was too paranoid to do any research on line—especially after a thoughtlessly clicked link (Het Puttertje, The Goldfinch, 1654) had taken me to a scarily official-looking site called Missing Art Database that required me to sign in with my name and address. I’d been so freaked out at the unexpected sight of the words Interpol and Missing that I’d panicked and shut down the computer entirely, something we weren’t supposed to do. “What have you just done?” demanded Mr. Ostrow the librarian before I was able to get it back up again. He reached over my shoulder and began typing in the password.

“I—” In spite of myself, I was relieved that I hadn’t been looking at porn once he began surfing back through the history. I’d meant to buy myself a cheap laptop with the five hundred bucks my dad had given me for Christmas, but somehow that money had gotten away from me—Missing Art, I told myself; no reason to panic over that word missing, destroyed art was missing art, wasn’t it? Even though I hadn’t put down a name, it worried me that I’d tried to check out the database from my school’s IP address. For all I knew, the investigators who’d been to see me had kept track, and knew that I was in Vegas; the co

The painting was hidden, quite cleverly as I thought, in a clean cotton pillowcase duct-taped to the back of my headboard. I’d learned, from Hobie, how carefully old things had to be handled (sometimes he used white cotton gloves for particularly delicate objects) and I never touched it with my bare hands, only by the edges. I never took it out except when Dad and Xandra weren’t there and I knew they wouldn’t be back for a while—though even when I couldn’t see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.

Taking it out, handling it, looking at it, was nothing to be done lightly. Even in the act of reaching for it there was a sense of expansion, a waft and a lifting; and at some strange point, when I’d looked at it long enough, eyes dry from the refrigerated desert air, all space appeared to vanish between me and it so that when I looked up it was the painting and not me that was real.

1622–1654. Son of a schoolteacher. Fewer than a dozen works accurately attributed to him. According to van Bleyswijck, the city historian of Delft, Fabritius was in his studio painting the sexton of Delft’s Oude Kerk when, at half past ten in the morning, the explosion of the powder magazine took place. The body of the painter Fabritius had been pulled from the wreckage of his studio by neighboring burghers, “with great sorrow,” the books said, “and no little effort.” What held me fast in these brief library-book accounts was the element of chance: random disasters, mine and his, converging on the same unseen point, the big bang as my father called it, not with any kind of sarcasm or dismissiveness but instead a respectful acknowledgment for the powers of fortune that governed his own life. You could study the co