The Goldfinch (32 page)

I went back in my bedroom and stood on my desk chair and got down my suitcase—which was soft-sided and not too big—and packed it full of clean underwear, clean school clothes, and folded shirts from the laundry. Then I put in the painting, with another layer of clothes on top.

I zipped the suitcase—no lock, but it was only canvas—and stood very still. Then I went out into the hall. I could hear drawers opening and shutting in my mother’s bedroom. A giggle.

“Dad,” I said in a loud voice, “I’m going downstairs and talk to Jose.”

Their voices went dead silent.

“You bet,” said my father, through the closed door, in an unnaturally cordial tone.

I went back and got the suitcase and walked out of the apartment with it, leaving the front door cracked so I could get in again. Then I rode the elevator down, staring into the mirror that faced me, trying hard not to think about Xandra in my mother’s bedroom pawing through her clothes. Had he been seeing her before he left home? Didn’t he feel even a bit creepy about permitting her to root around in my mother’s things?

I was walking to the front door where Jose was on duty when a voice called: “Wait a sec!”

Turning, I saw Goldie, hurrying from the package room.

“Theo, my God, I’m sorry,” he said. We stood looking at each other for an uncertain moment and then—in an impulsive, what-the-hell movement, so awkward it was almost funny, he reached around and hugged me.

“So sorry,” he repeated, shaking his head. “My God, what a thing.” Goldie, since his divorce, often worked nights and holidays, standing at the doors with his gloves off and an unlit cigarette in his hand, looking out at the street. My mother had sometimes sent me down with coffee and doughnuts for him when he was in the lobby by himself, no company but the lighted tree and the electric menorah, sorting out the newspapers by himself at 5:00 a.m. on Christmas Day, and the expression on his face reminded me of those dead holiday mornings, empty-looking stare, his face ashy and uncertain, in the unguarded moment before he saw me and put on his best
hi kid
smile.

“I been thinking about you and your mother so much,” he said, wiping his brow. “
Ay bendito.
I can’t—I don’t even know what you must be going through.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking away, “it’s been hard”—which was for whatever reason the phrase I constantly fell back upon when people told me how sorry they were. I’d had to say it so much that it was starting to come out sounding glib and a bit phony.

“I’m glad you stopped by,” said Goldie. “That morning—I was on duty, you remember? Right out front there?”

“Sure I do,” I said, wondering at his urgency, as if he thought I might
not
remember.

“
Oh,
my God.” He passed his hand over his forehead, a little wild-looking, as if he himself had suffered only a narrow escape. “I think about it every single day. I still see her face, you know, getting into that cab? Waving goodbye, so happy.”

Confidentially, he leaned forward. “When I heard she died?” he said, as if telling me a big secret. “I called up my ex-wife, that’s how upset I was.” He pulled back and looked at me with raised eyebrows, as if he didn’t expect me to believe him. Goldie’s battles with his ex-wife were epic.

“I mean, we hardly talk,” he said, “but who I’m gonna tell? I gotta tell somebody, you know? So I called her up and told her: ‘Rosa, you can’t believe it. We lost such a beautiful lady from the building.’ ”

Jose—spotting me—had strolled back from the front door to join our conversation, in his distinctive springy walk. “Mrs. Decker,” he said—shaking his head fondly, as if there had never been anyone like her. “Always say hello, always such a nice smile. Considerate, you know.”

“Not like some of these people in the building,” said Goldie, glancing over his shoulder. “You know—” he leaned closer, and mouthed the word—“snobby. The kind of person stands there empty-handed with no packages or nothing and waits for you to open the door, is what I’m saying.”

“She wasn’t like that,” said Jose, still shaking his head—big head movements, like a somber child saying no. “Mrs. Decker was Class A.”

“Say, will you wait here a second?” Goldie said, holding up his hand. “I’ll be right back. Don’t leave. Don’t let him leave,” he said to Jose.

“You want me to get you a cab,
manito?
” said Jose, eyeing the suitcase.

“No,” I said, glancing back at the elevator. “Listen, Jose, will you keep this for me until I come back and get it?”

“Sure,” he said, picking it up and hefting it. “Happy to.”

“I’ll come back for it myself, okay? Don’t let anybody else have it.”

“Sure, I get it,” said Jose pleasantly. I followed him into the package room, where he tagged the bag and hoisted it onto a top shelf.

“You see?” he said. “Out of the way, baby. We don’t keep nothing up high there except some packages people got to sign for and our own personal stuff. Nobody’s going to release that bag to you without your personal signature, you understand? Not to your uncle, your cousin, nobody. And I’ll tell Carlos and Goldie and the other guys, don’t give that bag to nobody but you. Okay?”

I was nodding, about to thank him, when Jose cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said, in a lowered voice. “I don’t want to worry you or nothing but there’ve been some guys coming around lately asking after your dad.”

“Guys?” I said, after a disjointed silence. “Guys,” coming from Jose, meant only one thing: men that my dad owed money to.

“Don’t worry. We told them nothing. I mean, your dad’s been gone for what, like a year? Carlos told them none of you lived here no more and they aint been back. But—” he glanced at the elevator—“maybe your dad there, he don’t want to be spending a lot of time in the building just now, you know what I’m saying?”

I was thanking him when Goldie returned with what looked to me like a gigantic wad of cash. “This is for you,” he said, a bit melodramatically.

For a minute I thought I’d heard him wrong. Jose coughed and looked away. On the package room’s tiny black and white television (its screen no
bigger than a CD case) a glamorous woman in long jangling earrings brandished her fists and shouted abusive Spanish at a cowering priest.

“What’s going on?” I said to Goldie, who was still holding the money out.

“Your mother, she didn’t tell you?”

I was mystified. “Tell me what?”

It seemed that—one day shortly before Christmas—Goldie had ordered a computer and had it delivered to the building. The computer was for Goldie’s son, who needed it for school, but (Goldie was hazy about this part) Goldie hadn’t actually paid for it, or had only paid for part of it, or his ex-wife had been supposed to pay for it instead of him. At any rate, the delivery people were hauling the computer out the door again and loading it back into their van when my mother happened to come downstairs and see what was going on.

“And she paid herself, that beautiful lady,” Goldie said. “She saw what was happening, and she opened her bag and she took out her checkbook. She said to me, ‘Goldie, I know your son needs this computer for his schoolwork. Please let me do this thing for you, my friend, and you pay me when you can.’ ”

“You see?” said Jose, unexpectedly fierce, glancing back from the television, where the woman was standing in a graveyard now, arguing with a tycoon-looking guy in sunglasses. “That’s your mother that did that.” He nodded at the money, almost angrily. “
Sí, es verdad,
she was Class A. She cared about people you know? Most women? They spend that money on gold earrings or perfume or some things for themselves like that.”

I felt strange taking the money, for all sorts of reasons. Even in my shock, something about the story felt dodgy (what kind of store would deliver a computer that wasn’t paid for?). Later, I wondered: did I look that destitute, that the doormen had taken up a collection for me? I still don’t know where the money came from; and I wish I had asked more questions, but I was so stunned by everything that had happened that day (and more than anything by the sudden appearance of my dad, and Xandra) that if Goldie had confronted me and tried to give me a piece of old chewing gum he’d scraped off the floor I would have held out my hand and taken it just as obediently.

“None of my business, you know,” Jose said, looking over my head as
he said it, “but if I was you, I wouldn’t tell anybody about that money. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, put it in your pocket,” said Goldie. “Don’t walk around waving it out in your hand like that. Plenty of people on the street would kill you for that much cash.”

“Plenty of people in this building!” said Jose, overcome with sudden laughter.

“Ha!” said Goldie, cracking up himself, and then said something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

“
Cuidado,
” said Jose—wagging his head in the way he did, mock-serious, but unable to keep from smiling. “That’s why they don’t let Goldie and me work on the same floor,” he said to me. “They got to keep us separated. We have too good a time.”

xix.

O
NCE
D
AD AND
X
ANDRA
showed up, things started moving fast. At dinner that night (at a touristy restaurant I was surprised my dad had chosen), he took a call at the table from somebody at my mother’s insurance company—which, even all these years later, I wish I’d been able to hear better. But the restaurant was loud and Xandra (between gulps of white wine—maybe
he’d
quit drinking, but she sure hadn’t) was alternately complaining because she couldn’t smoke and telling me in a sort of unfocused way how she’d learned to practice witchcraft out of a library book when she was in high school, somewhere in Fort Lauderdale. (“Actually, Wicca it’s called. It’s an earth religion.”) With anyone else, I would have asked exactly what it involved, being a witch (spells and sacrifices? deal with the devil?) but before I had a chance she’d moved on, how she’d had the opportunity to go to college and was sorry she hadn’t done it (“I’ll tell you what I was interested in. English history and like that. Henry the Eighth, Mary Queen of Scots”). But she’d ended up not going to college at all because she’d been too obsessed with this guy. “
Obsessed,
” she hissed, fixing me with her sharp, no-color eyes.

Why being obsessed with the guy kept Xandra from going to college, I never found out, because my dad got off the phone. He ordered (and it gave me a funny feeling) a bottle of champagne.

“I can’t drink this whole damn thing,” said Xandra, who was into her second glass of wine. “It’ll give me a headache.”

“Well, if I can’t have champagne, you might as well have some,” my father said, leaning back in his chair.

Xandra nodded at me. “Let
him
have some,” she said. “Waiter, bring another glass.”

“Sorry,” said the waiter, a hard-edged Italian guy who looked like he was used to dealing with out-of-control tourists. “No alcohol if he’s under eighteen.”

Xandra started scrabbling in her purse. She was wearing a brown halter dress, and she had blusher, or bronzer, or some brownish powder brushed under her cheekbones in such a strong line that I had an urge to smudge it in with my fingertip.

“Let’s go outside and have a smoke,” she said to my father. There was a long moment where they exchanged a smirky look that made me cringe. Then Xandra pushed her chair back and—dropping her napkin in the chair—looked around for the waiter. “Oh, good, he’s gone,” she said, reaching for my (mostly) empty water glass and slopping some champagne into it.

The food had arrived and I’d poured myself another large but surreptitious glass of champagne before they returned. “Yum!” said Xandra, looking glazed and a bit shiny, tugging her short skirt down, edging around and slithering back into her seat without bothering to pull her chair out all the way. She flapped her napkin into her lap and pulled her massive, bright-red plate of manicotti towards her. “Looks awesome!”

“So does mine,” said my dad, who was picky about his Italian food, and whom I’d often known to complain about overly tomatoey, marinara-drenched pasta dishes exactly like the plate in front of him.

As they tucked into their food (which was probably fairly cold, judging by how long they’d been gone), they resumed their conversation in mid-stream. “Well, anyway, didn’t work out,” he said, leaning back in his chair and toying rakishly with a cigarette he was unable to light. “That’s how it goes.”

“I bet you were great.”

He shrugged. “Even when you’re young,” he said, “it’s a tough game. It’s not just talent. It has a lot to do with looks and luck.”

“But still,” said Xandra, blotting the corner of her lip with a napkin-wrapped
fingertip. “An actor. I can so totally see it.” My dad’s thwarted acting career was one of his favorite subjects and—though she seemed interested enough—something told me that this wasn’t the very first time she had heard about it either.

“Well, do I wish I’d kept going with it?” My dad contemplated his non-alcoholic beer (or was it three percent? I couldn’t see from where I was sitting). “I have to say yes. It’s one of those lifelong regrets. I would have loved to do something with my gift but I didn’t have the luxury. Life has a funny way of intervening.”