The Goldfinch (5 page)

“Now, Rembrandt,” my mother said. “Everybody always says this painting is about reason and enlightenment, the dawn of scientific inquiry, all that, but to me it’s creepy how polite and formal they are, milling around the slab like a buffet at a cocktail party. Although—” she pointed—“see those two puzzled guys in the back there? They’re not looking at the body—they’re looking at
us.
You and me. Like they see us standing here in front of them—two people from the future. Startled. ‘What are
you
doing here?’ Very naturalistic. But then”—she traced the corpse, midair, with her finger—“the body isn’t painted in any very natural way at all, if you look at it. Weird glow coming off it, do you see? Alien autopsy, almost. See how it lights up the faces of the men looking down at it? Like it’s shining with its own light source? He’s painting it with that radioactive quality because he wants to draw our eye to it—make it jump out at us. And here”—she pointed to the flayed hand—“see how he calls attention to it by painting it so big, all out of proportion to the rest of the body? He’s even turned it around so the thumb is on the wrong side, do you see? Well, he didn’t do that by mistake. The skin is off the hand—we see it immediately, something very wrong—but by reversing the thumb he makes it look even
more
wrong, it registers subliminally even if we can’t put our finger on it, something really out of order, not right. Very clever trick.” We were standing behind a crowd of Asian tourists, so many heads that I could see the picture scarcely at all, but then again I didn’t care that much because I’d seen this girl.

She’d seen me, too. We’d been eyeing each other as we were going through the galleries. I wasn’t quite even sure what was so interesting about her, since she was younger than me and a little strange-looking—nothing at all like the girls I usually got crushes on, cool serious beauties who cast disdainful looks around the hallway and went out with big guys. This girl had bright red hair; her movements were swift, her face sharp and mischievous and strange, and her eyes were an odd color, a golden honeybee brown. And though she was too thin, all elbows, and in a way almost plain, yet there was something about her too that made my stomach go watery. She was swinging and knocking a battered-looking flute case around with her—a city kid? On her way to a music lesson? Maybe not, I thought, circling behind her as I followed my mother into the next gallery; her clothes were a little too bland and suburban; she was probably a tourist. But she moved with more assurance than most of the girls I
knew; and the sly, composed glance that she slid over me as she brushed past drove me crazy.

I was trailing along behind my mother, only half paying attention to what she was saying, when she stopped in front of a painting so suddenly that I almost ran into her.

“Oh, sorry—!” she said, without looking at me, stepping back to make room. Her face was like someone had turned a light into it.

“
This
is the one I was talking about,” she said. “Isn’t it amazing?”

I inclined my head in my mother’s direction, in an attitude of attentive listening, while my eyes wandered back to the girl. She was accompanied by a funny old white-haired character who I guessed from his sharpness of face was related to her, her grandfather maybe: houndstooth coat, long narrow lace-up shoes as shiny as glass. His eyes were close-set, and his nose beaky and birdlike; he walked with a limp—in fact, his whole body listed to one side, one shoulder higher than the other; and if his slump had been any more pronounced, you might have said he was a hunchback. But all the same there was something elegant about him. And clearly he adored the girl from the amused and companionable way he hobbled at her side, very careful where he put his feet, his head inclined in her direction.

“This is just about the first painting I ever really loved,” my mother was saying. “You’ll never believe it, but it was in a book I used to take out of the library when I was a kid. I used to sit on the floor by my bed and stare at it for hours, completely fascinated—that little guy! And, I mean, actually it’s incredible how much you can learn about a painting by spending a lot of time with a reproduction, even not a very good reproduction. I started off loving the bird, the way you’d love a pet or something, and ended up loving the way he was painted.” She laughed. “
The Anatomy Lesson
was in the same book actually, but it scared the pants off me. I used to slam the book shut when I opened it to that page by mistake.”

The girl and the old man had come up next to us. Self-consciously, I leaned forward and looked at the painting. It was a small picture, the smallest in the exhibition, and the simplest: a yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle.

“He was Rembrandt’s pupil, Vermeer’s teacher,” my mother said. “And this one little painting is really the missing link between the two of them—that clear pure daylight, you can see where Vermeer got his quality
of light from. Of course, I didn’t know or care about any of that when I was a kid, the historical significance. But it’s there.”

I stepped back, to get a better look. It was a direct and matter-of-fact little creature, with nothing sentimental about it; and something about the neat, compact way it tucked down inside itself—its brightness, its alert watchful expression—made me think of pictures I’d seen of my mother when she was small: a dark-capped finch with steady eyes.

“It was a famous tragedy in Dutch history,” my mother was saying. “A huge part of the town was destroyed.”

“What?”

“The disaster at Delft. That killed Fabritius. Did you hear the teacher back there telling the children about it?”

I had. There had been a trio of ghastly landscapes, by a painter named Egbert van der Poel, different views of the same smouldering wasteland: burnt ruined houses, a windmill with tattered sails, crows wheeling in smoky skies. An official looking lady had been explaining loudly to a group of middle-school kids that a gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over.

“Well, Egbert was Fabritius’s neighbor, he sort of lost his mind after the powder explosion, at least that’s how it looks to me, but Fabritius was killed and his studio was destroyed. Along with almost all his paintings, except this one.” She seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but when I didn’t, she continued: “He was one of the greatest painters of his day, in one of the greatest ages of painting. Very very famous in his time. It’s sad though, because maybe only five or six paintings survived, of all his work. All the rest of it is lost—everything he ever did.”

The girl and her grandfather were loitering quietly to the side, listening to my mother talk, which was a bit embarrassing. I glanced away and then—unable to resist—glanced back. They were standing very close, so close I could have reached out and touched them. She was batting and plucking at the old man’s sleeve, tugging his arm to whisper something in his ear.

“Anyway, if you ask me,” my mother was saying, “this is the most extraordinary picture in the whole show. Fabritius is making clear something that he discovered all on his own, that no painter in the world knew before him—not even Rembrandt.”

Very softly—so softly I could barely hear her—I heard the girl whisper: “It had to live its whole life like that?”

I’d been wondering the same thing; the shackled foot, the chain was terrible; her grandfather murmured some reply but my mother (who seemed totally unaware of them, even though they were right next to us) stepped back and said: “Such a mysterious picture, so simple. Really tender—invites you to stand close, you know? All those dead pheasants back there and then this little living creature.”

I allowed myself another stealthy glimpse in the girl’s direction. She was standing on one leg, with her hip swung out to the side. Then—quite suddenly—she turned and looked me in the eye; and in a heart-skip of confusion, I looked away.

What was her name? Why wasn’t she in school? I’d been trying to make out the scribbled name on the flute case but even when I leaned in as far as I dared without being obvious, still I couldn’t read the bold spiky marker strokes, more drawn than written, like something spray-painted on a subway car. The last name was short, only four or five letters; the first looked like R, or was it P?

“People die, sure,” my mother was saying. “But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose
things.
From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.”

The grandfather had drifted away, a few paintings over; but she was loitering a few steps behind, the girl, and kept casting glances back at my mother and me. Beautiful skin: milky white, arms like carved marble. Definitely she looked athletic, though too pale to be a tennis player; maybe she was a ballerina or a gymnast or even a high diver, practicing late in shadowy indoor pools, echoes and refractions, dark tile. Plunging with arched chest and pointed toes to the bottom of the pool, a silent
pow,
shiny black swimsuit, bubbles foaming and streaming off her small, tense frame.

Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn’t think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in
me.
And yet it was the main reason I’d gone in those houses with Tom: I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to, wanted to look under their beds and in
their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus. Years had passed, and I still hadn’t stopped thinking about the dark-haired children in Catholic school uniforms—brother and sister—I’d seen in Grand Central, literally trying to pull their father out the door of a seedy bar by the sleeves of his suit jacket. Nor had I forgotten the frail, gypsyish girl in a wheelchair out in front of the Carlyle Hotel, talking breathlessly in Italian to the fluffy dog in her lap, while a sharp character in sunglasses (father? bodyguard?) stood behind her chair, apparently conducting some sort of business deal on his phone. For years, I’d turned those strangers over in my mind, wondering who they were and what their lives were like, and I knew I would go home and wonder about this girl and her grandfather the same way. The old man had money; you could tell from how he was dressed. Why was it just the two of them? Where were they from? Maybe they were part of some big old complicated New York family—music people, academics, one of those large, artsy West Side families that you saw up around Columbia or at Lincoln Center matinees. Or, maybe—homely, civilized old creature that he was—maybe he wasn’t her grandfather at all. Maybe he was a music teacher, and she was the flute prodigy he had discovered in some small town and brought to play at Carnegie Hall—

“Theo?” my mother said suddenly. “Did you hear me?”

Her voice brought me back to myself. We were in the last room of the show. Beyond lay the exhibition shop—postcards, cash register, glossy stacks of art books—and my mother, unfortunately, had not lost track of the time.

“We should see if it’s still raining,” she was saying. “We’ve still got a little while”—(looking at her watch, glancing past me at the Exit sign)—“but I think I’d better go downstairs if I’m going to try to get something for Mathilde.”

I noticed the girl observing my mother as she spoke—eyes gliding curiously over my mother’s sleek black ponytail, her white satin trenchcoat cinched at the waist—and it thrilled me to see her for a moment as the girl saw her, as a stranger. Did she see how my mother’s nose had the tiniest bump at the top, where she’d broken it falling out of a tree as a child? or how the black rings around the light blue irises of my mother’s eyes
gave her a slightly wild quality, as of some steady-eyed hunting creature alone on a plain?

“You know—” my mother looked over her shoulder—“if you don’t mind, I just might run back and take another quick look at
The Anatomy Lesson
before we leave. I didn’t get to see it up close and I’m afraid I might not make it back before it comes down.” She started away, shoes clacking busily—and then glanced at me as if to say:
are you coming?

This was so unexpected that for a split second I didn’t know what to say. “Um,” I said, recovering, “I’ll meet you in the shop.”

“Okay,” she said. “Buy me a couple of cards, will you? I’ll be back in a sec.”

And off she hurried, before I had a chance to say a word. Heart pounding, unable to believe my luck, I watched her walking rapidly away from me in the white satin trenchcoat. This was it, my chance to talk to the girl;
but what can I say to her,
I thought furiously,
what can I say?
I dug my hands in my pockets, took a breath or two to compose myself, and—excitement fizzing bright in my stomach—turned to face her.

But, to my consternation, she was gone. That is to say, she wasn’t gone; there was her red head, moving reluctantly (or so it seemed) across the room. Her grandpa had slipped his arm through hers and—whispering to her, with great enthusiasm—was towing her away to look at some picture on the opposite wall.

I could have killed him. Nervously, I glanced at the empty doorway. Then I dug my hands deeper in my pockets and—face burning—walked conspicuously across the length of the gallery. The clock was ticking; my mother would be back any second; and though I knew I didn’t have the nerve to barge up and actually say something, I could at the very least get a last good look at her. Not long before, I had stayed up late with my mother and watched
Citizen Kane,
and I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for the rest of his life. Someday I too might be like the old man in the movie, leaning back in my chair with a far-off look in my eyes, and saying: “You know, that was sixty years ago, and I never saw that girl with the red hair again, but you know what? Not a month has gone by in all that time when I haven’t thought of her.”