The Goldfinch (33 page)

They were deep in their own world; for all the attention they were paying to me I might as well have been in Idaho but that was fine with me; I knew this story. My dad, who’d been a drama star in college, had for a brief while earned his living as an actor: voice-overs in commercials, a few minor parts (a murdered playboy, the spoiled son of a mob boss) in television and movies. Then—after he’d married my mother—it had all fizzled out. He had a long list of reasons why he hadn’t broken through, though as I’d often heard him say: if my mother had been a little more successful as a model or worked a little harder at it, there would have been enough money for him to concentrate on acting without worrying about a day job.

My dad pushed his plate aside. I noticed that he hadn’t eaten very much—often, with my dad, a sign that he was drinking, or about to start.

“At some point, I just had to cut my losses and get out,” he said, crumpling his napkin and throwing it on the table. I wondered if he had told Xandra about Mickey Rourke, whom he viewed apart from me and my mother as the prime villain in derailing his career.

Xandra took a big drink of her wine. “Do you ever think about going back to it?”

“I
think
about it, sure. But—” he shook his head as if refusing some outrageous request—“no. Essentially the answer is no.”

The champagne tickled the roof of my mouth—distant, dusty sparkle, bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive.

“I mean, the
second
he saw me, I knew he didn’t like me,” my dad was saying to her quietly. So he had told her about Mickey Rourke.

She tossed her head, drained the rest of her wine. “Guys like that can’t stand competition.”

“It was all Mickey this, Mickey that, Mickey wants to meet you, but the minute I walked in there I knew it was over.”

“Obviously the guy’s a freak.”

“Not then, he wasn’t. Because, tell you the truth, there really was a resemblance back in the day—not just physically, but we had similar acting styles. Or, let’s say, I was classically trained, I had a range, but I could do the same kind of stillness as Mickey, you know, that whispery quiet thing—”

“Oooh, you just gave me chills.
Whispery.
Like the way you
said
that.”

“Yeah, but Mickey was the star. There wasn’t room enough for two.”

As I watched them sharing a piece of cheesecake like lovebirds in a commercial, I sank into a ruddy, unfamiliar free-flow of mind, the dining room lights too bright and my face flaming hot from the champagne, thinking in a disordered but heated way about my mother after her parents died and she had to go live with her aunt Bess, in a house by the train tracks with brown wallpaper and plastic covers on the furniture. Aunt Bess—who fried everything in Crisco, and had cut up one of my mother’s dresses with scissors because the psychedelic pattern disturbed her—was a chunky, embittered, Irish-American spinster who had left the Catholic Church for some tiny, insane sect that believed it was wrong to do things like drink tea or take aspirin. Her eyes—in the one photograph I’d seen—were the same startling silver-blue as my mother’s, only pink-rimmed and crazed, in a potato-plain face. My mother had spoken of those eighteen months with Aunt Bess as the saddest of her life—the horses sold, the dogs given away, long weeping goodbyes by the side of the road, arms around the necks of Clover and Chalkboard and Paintbox and Bruno. Back in the house, Aunt Bess had told my mother she was spoiled, and that people who didn’t fear the Lord always got what they deserved.

“And the producer, you see—I mean, they all knew how Mickey was, everyone did, he was already starting to get a reputation for being difficult—”

“She didn’t deserve it,” I said aloud, interrupting their conversation.

Dad and Xandra stopped talking and looked at me as if I’d turned into a Gila monster.

“I mean, why would anybody say that?” It wasn’t right that I was speaking aloud, and yet the words were tumbling unbidden out of my mouth as if someone had pushed a button. “She was so great and why was
everybody so horrible to her? She never deserved any of the stuff that happened to her.”

My dad and Xandra exchanged a glance. Then he signalled for the check.

xx.

B
Y THE TIME WE
left the restaurant, my face was on fire and there was a bright roar in my ears, and when I got back to the Barbours’ apartment, it wasn’t even terribly late but somehow I tripped over the umbrella stand and made a lot of noise coming in and when Mrs. Barbour and Mr. Barbour saw me, I realized (from their faces, more than the way I felt) that I was drunk.

Mr. Barbour flicked off the television with the remote control. “Where have you been?” he said, in a firm but good-natured voice.

I reached for the back of the sofa. “Out with Dad and—” But her name had slipped my mind, everything but the X.

Mrs. Barbour raised her eyebrows at her husband as if to say:
what did I tell you?

“Well, take it on in to bed, pal,” said Mr. Barbour cheerfully, in a voice that managed, in spite of everything, to make me feel a little bit better about life in general. “But try not to wake Andy up.”

“You don’t feel sick, do you?” Mrs. Barbour said.

“No,” I said, though I did; and for a large part of the night I lay awake in the upper bunk, miserable and tossing as the room spun around me, and a couple of times starting up in heart-thudding surprise because it seemed that Xandra had walked in the room and was talking to me: the words indistinct, but the rough, stuttery cadence of her voice unmistakable.

xxi.

“S
O
,”
SAID
M
R.
B
ARBOUR
at breakfast the next morning, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he pulled out the chair beside me, “festive dinner with old Dad, eh?”

“Yes, sir.” I had a splitting headache, and the smell of their French
toast made my stomach twist. Etta had unobtrusively brought me a cup of coffee from the kitchen with a couple of aspirins on the saucer.

“Out in Las Vegas, do you say?”

“That’s right.”

“And how does he bring in the bacon?”

“Sorry?”

“How does he keep himself busy out there?”

“Chance,” said Mrs. Barbour, in a neutral voice.

“Well, I mean… that is to say,” Mr. Barbour said, realizing that the question had perhaps been indelicately phrased, “what line of work is he in?”

“Um—” I said—and then stopped. What
was
my dad doing? I hadn’t a clue.

Mrs. Barbour—who seemed troubled by the turn the conversation had taken—appeared about to say something; but Platt—next to me—spoke up angrily instead. “So who do I have to blow to get a cup of coffee around this place?” he said to his mother, pushing back in his chair with one hand on the table.

There was a dreadful silence.

“
He
has it,” said Platt, nodding at me. “
He
comes home drunk, and
he
gets coffee?”

After another dreadful silence, Mr. Barbour said—in a voice icy enough to put even Mrs. Barbour to shame—“That’s quite enough, Pard.”

Mrs. Barbour brought her pale eyebrows together. “Chance—”

“No, you won’t take up for him this time. Go to your room,” he said to Platt. “Now.”

We all sat staring into our plates, listening to the angry thump of Platt’s footsteps, the deafening slam of his door, and then—a few seconds later—the loud music starting up again. No one said much for the rest of the meal.

xxii.

M
Y DAD—WHO LIKED TO
do everything in a hurry, always itching to “get the show on the road” as he liked to say—announced that he planned to get everything wrapped up in New York and the three of us in Las Vegas
within a week. And he was true to his word. At eight o’clock that Monday morning, movers showed up at Sutton Place and began to dismantle the apartment and pack it in boxes. A used-book dealer came to look at my mother’s art books, and somebody else came in to look at her furniture—and, almost before I knew it, my home began to vanish before my eyes with sickening speed. Watching the curtains disappear and the pictures taken down and the carpets rolled up and carried away, I was reminded of an animated film I’d once seen where a cartoon character with an eraser rubbed out his desk and his lamp and his chair and his window with a scenic view and the whole of his comfortably appointed office until—at last—the eraser hung suspended in a disturbing sea of white.

Tormented by what was happening, yet unable to stop it, I hovered around and watched the apartment vanishing piece by piece, like a bee watching its hive being destroyed. On the wall over my mother’s desk (among numerous vacation snaps and old school pictures) hung a black and white photo from her modelling days taken in Central Park. It was a very sharp print, and the tiniest details stood out with almost painful clarity: her freckles, the rough texture of her coat, the chickenpox scar above her left eyebrow. Cheerfully, she looked out into the disarray and confusion of the living room, at my dad throwing out her papers and art supplies and boxing up her books for Goodwill, a scene she probably never dreamed of, or at least I hope she didn’t.

xxiii.

M
Y LAST DAYS WITH
the Barbours flew by so fast that I scarcely remember them, apart from a last-minute flurry of laundry and dry cleaning, and several hectic trips to the wine shop on Lex for cardboard boxes. In black marker, I wrote the address of my exotic-sounding new home:

Theodore Decker c/o Xandra Terrell

6219 Desert End Road

Las Vegas, NV

Glumly, Andy and I stood and contemplated the labeled boxes in his bedroom. “It’s like you’re moving to a different planet,” he said.

“More or less.”

“No I’m serious. That address. It’s like from some mining colony on Jupiter. I wonder what your school will be like.”

“God knows.”

“I mean—it might be one of those places you read about. With gangs. Metal detectors.” Andy had been so mistreated at our (supposedly) enlightened and progressive school that public school, in his view, was on a par with the prison system. “What will you do?”