The Goldfinch (42 page)

As for the shop: I open it a few times a week by appointment, but mostly I keep myself busy below stairs with things sent to me by private clients. Mrs. Skolnik and several people in the neighborhood
have asked about you—everything’s much the same here, except Mrs. Cho at the Korean market had a little stroke (
very
little, she’s back at work now). Also that coffee shop on Hudson that I liked so much has gone out of business—very sad. I walked by this morning and it looks as if they’re turning it into a—well, I don’t know what you’d call it. Some sort of Japanese novelty store.

I see that as usual I’ve gone on too long and that I’m running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it’s all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there’s anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will.

xv.

T
HAT NIGHT, AT
B
ORIS’S
—lying drunk on my half of the batik-draped mattress—I tried to remember what Pippa had looked like. But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. “It was a lot of travelling—ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smelled like popcorn and horse manure. One night we were in San Antonio, and I was having a bit of a melt-down—wanting my own room, you know, my dog, my own bed—and Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess—I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a full moon, it’s like he’s telling me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever
I
am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where
you
are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.”

A rustle, next to me. “Potter?” said Boris. “You awake?”

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does the moon look like in Indonesia?”

“What are you on about?”

“Or, I don’t know, Russia? Is it just the same as here?”

He rapped me lightly on the side of the head with his knuckles—a
gesture of his that I had come to know, meaning
idiot.
“Same everywhere,” he said, yawning, propping himself up on his scrawny braceleted wrist. “And why?”

“Dunno,” I said, and then, after a tense pause: “Do you hear that?”

A door had slammed. “What’s that?” I said, rolling to face him. We looked at each other, listening. Voices downstairs—laughter, people knocking around, a crash like something had been knocked over.

“Is that your dad?” I said, sitting up—and then I heard a woman’s voice, drunken and shrill.

Boris sat up too, bony and sickly-pale in the light through the window. Downstairs, it sounded like they were throwing things and pushing furniture around.

“What are they saying?” I whispered.

Boris listened. I could see all the bolts and hollows in his neck. “Bullshit,” he said. “They’re drunk.”

The two of us sat there, listening—Boris more intently than me.

“Who’s that with him then?” I said.

“Some whore.” He listened for a moment, brow furrowed, his profile sharp in the moonlight, and then lay back down. “Two of them.”

I rolled over, and checked my iPod. It was 3:17 in the morning.

“Fuck,” groaned Boris, scratching his stomach. “Why don’t they shut up?”

“I’m thirsty,” I said, after a timid pause.

He snorted. “Ha! You don’t want to go out there now, trust me.”

“What are they doing?” I asked. One of the women had just screamed—whether in laughter or fright, I couldn’t tell.

We lay there, stiff as boards, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ominous crashing and bumping-around.

“Ukrainian?” I said, after a bit. Though I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I’d been around Boris enough that I was beginning to differentiate the intonations of spoken Ukrainian from Russian.

“Top marks, Potter.” Then: “Light me a cigarette.”

We passed it back and forth, in the dark, until another door slammed somewhere and the voices died down. At last, Boris exhaled, a final smoky sigh, and rolled over to stub it out in the overflowing ashtray beside the bed. “Good night,” he whispered.

“Good night.”

He fell asleep almost immediately—I could tell from his breathing—but I lay awake a lot longer, with a scratchy throat, feeling light-headed and sick from the cigarette. How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? Boris—oblivious—snored beside me. At last, towards dawn, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my mother: sitting across from me on the 6 train, swaying slightly, her face calm in the flickering artificial lights.

What are you doing here?
she said.
Go home! Right now! I’ll meet you at the apartment.
Only the voice wasn’t quite right; and when I looked more closely I saw it wasn’t her at all, only someone pretending to be her. And with a gasp and a start, I woke up.

xvi.

B
ORIS’S FATHER WAS A
mysterious figure. As Boris explained it: he was often on site in the middle of nowhere, at his mine, where he stayed with his crew for weeks at a time. “Doesn’t wash,” said Boris austerely. “Stays filthy drunk.” The beaten-up short wave radio in the kitchen belonged to him (“From Brezhnev era,” said Boris; “he won’t throw it away”), and so were the Russian-language newspapers and
USA Today
s I sometimes found around. One day I’d walked into one of the bathrooms at Boris’s house (which were fairly grim—no shower curtain or toilet seat, upstairs or down, and black stuff growing in the tub) and got a bad start from one of his dad’s suits, soaking wet and smelly, dangling like a dead thing from the shower rod: scratchy, misshapen, of lumpy brown wool the color of dug roots, it dripped horribly on the floor like some moist-breathing golem from the old country or maybe a garment dredged up in a police net.

“What?” said Boris, when I emerged.

“Your dad washes his own suits?” I said. “In the sink in there?”

Boris—leaning against the frame of the door, gnawing the side of his thumb nail—shrugged evasively.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, and then, when he kept on looking at me: “What? They don’t have dry cleaning in Russia?”

“He has plenty of jewelry and posh,” growled Boris around the side of
his thumb. “Rolex watch, Ferragamo shoes. He can clean his suit however he wants.”

“Right,” I said, and changed the subject. Several weeks passed with no thought of Boris’s dad at all. But then came the day when Boris slid in late to Honors English with a wine colored bruise under his eye.

“Ah, got it in the face with a football,” he said in a cheery voice when Mrs. Spear (‘Spirsetskaya,’ as he called her) asked him, suspiciously, what had happened.

This, I knew, was a lie. Glancing over at him, across the aisle, I wondered throughout our listless class discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson how he’d managed to black his eye after I’d left him the previous night to go home and walk Popper—Xandra left him tied up outside so much that I was starting to feel responsible for him.

“What’d you do?” I said when I caught up with him after class.

“Eh?”

“How’d you get that?”

He winked. “Oh, come on,” he said, bumping his shoulder against mine.

“What? Were you drunk?”

“My dad came home,” he said, and then, when I didn’t answer: “What else, Potter? What did you think?”

“Jesus, why?”

He shrugged. “Glad you’d gone,” he said, rubbing his good eye. “Couldn’t believe when he showed up. Was sleeping on the couch downstairs. At first I thought it was you.”

“What happened?”

“Ah,” said Boris, sighing extravagantly; he’d been smoking on the way to school, I could smell it on his breath. “He saw the beer bottles on the floor.”

“He hit you because you were drinking?”

“Because he was fucking plastered, is why. He was drunk as a log—I don’t think he knew it was me he was hitting. This morning—he saw my face, he cried and was sorry. Anyway, he won’t be back for a while.”

“Why not?”

“He’s got a lot going on out there, he said. Won’t be back for three weeks. The mine is close to one of those places where they have the state-run brothels, you know?”

“They aren’t state-run,” I said—and then found myself wondering if they were.

“Well, you know what I mean. One good thing though—he left me moneys.”

“How much?”

“Four thousand.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, no—” he slapped his forehead—“thinking in roubles, sorry! About two hundred dollars, but still. Should have asked for more but I didn’t have the nerve.”

We’d reached the juncture of the hallway where I had to turn for algebra and Boris had to turn for American Government: the bane of his existence. It was a required course—easy even by the desultory standards of our school—but trying to get Boris to understand about the Bill of Rights, and the enumerated versus implied powers of the U.S. Congress, reminded me of the time I’d tried to explain to Mrs. Barbour what an Internet server was.

“Well, see you after class,” said Boris. “Explain again, before I go, what’s the difference between Federal Bank and Federal Reserve?”

“Did you tell anybody?”

“Tell what?”

“You know.”

“What, you want to report me?” said Boris, laughing.

“Not
you.
Him.”

“And why? Why is that a good idea? Tell me. So I can get deported?”

“Right,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause.

“So—we should eat out tonight!” said Boris. “In a restaurant! Maybe the Mexican.” Boris, after initial suspicion and complaint, had grown to like Mexican food—unknown in Russia, he said, not bad when you got used to it, though if it was too spicy he wouldn’t touch it. “We can take the bus.”

“The Chinese is closer. And the food is better.”

“Yah, but—remember?”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I said. The last time we’d eaten there we’d slipped out without paying. “Forget that.”

xvii.

B
ORIS LIKED
X
ANDRA A
lot better than I did: leaping forward to open doors for her, saying he liked her new haircut, offering to carry things. I’d teased him about her ever since I’d caught him looking down her top when she leaned to reach her cell phone on the kitchen counter.

“God, she’s hot,” said Boris, once we were up in my room. “Think your dad would mind?”

“Probably wouldn’t notice.”

“No, serious, what do you think your dad would do to me?”

“If what?”

“If me and Xandra.”

“I dunno, probably call the police.”

He snorted, derisively. “What for?”

“Not you. Her. Statutory rape.”

“I wish.”

“Go on and fuck her if you want,” I said. “I don’t care if she goes to jail.”