The Goldfinch (75 page)

In my shaky and agitated state, I’d turned almost unconsciously into the park and down the path to the Pond, where Andy and I had sat in our parkas on many winter afternoons in elementary school waiting for my mother to pick us up from the zoo or take us to the movies—
rendezvous point, seventeen hundred hours!
But at that point, unfortunately, I found myself sitting there more often than not waiting for Jerome, the bike messenger I bought my drugs from. The pills I’d stolen from Xandra all those years before had started me on a bad road: oxys, roxys, morphine and Dilaudid when I could get it, I’d been buying them off the street for years; for the past months, I’d been keeping myself (for the most part) to a one-day-on, one-day-off schedule (although what constituted an “off” day was a dose just small enough to keep from getting sick) but even though it was officially an “off” day I was feeling increasingly grim and the vodkas I’d had with Platt were wearing off and though I knew very well that I didn’t have anything on me still I kept patting myself down, my hands stealing again and again to my overcoat and the pockets of my suit jacket.

At college I had achieved nothing commendable or remarkable. My years in Vegas had rendered me unfit for any manner of hard work; and when at last I graduated, at twenty-one (it had taken me six years to finish, instead of the expected four), I did so without distinctions of any type. “Quite honestly, I’m not seeing a lot here that’s going to make a master’s program take a chance on you,” my counselor had said. “Particularly since you would be relying so heavily on financial aid.”

But that was all right; I knew what I wanted to do. My career as a dealer had started at about seventeen when I happened upstairs on one of the rare afternoons Hobie had decided to open the shop. By that time, I had begun to be aware of Hobie’s financial problems; Grisha had spoken only too truly about the dire consequences if Hobie continued to accumulate inventory without selling it. (“Will still be downstairs, painting, carving, the day they come and put evacuation notice on front door.”) But despite the envelopes from the IRS that had begun to accumulate among the Christie’s catalogues and old concert programs on the hall table (Notice of Unpaid Balance, Reminder Notice Balance Due, Second Notice Balance Due) Hobie couldn’t be bothered to keep the store open more than half an
hour at a time unless friends happened to stop in; and when it was time for his friends to go, he often shooed out the actual customers and locked up shop. Almost invariably I came home from school to find the “Closed” sign on the door and people peering in at the windows. Worst of all, when he did manage to stay open for a few hours, was his habit of wandering trustfully away to make a cup of tea while leaving the door open and the register untended; though Mike his moving man had had the foresight to lock the silver and jewelry cases, a number of majolica and crystal items had walked away and I myself had come upstairs unexpectedly on the day in question to find a gym-toned, casually dressed mom who looked like she’d just come from a Pilates class slipping a paperweight in her bag.

“That’s eight hundred and fifty dollars,” I said, and at my voice she froze and looked up in horror. Actually it was only two fifty, but she handed me her credit card without a word and let me ring up the sale—probably the first profitable transaction that had taken place since Welty’s death; for Hobie’s friends (his main customers) were only too aware that they could talk Hobie down to criminal levels on his already too-low prices. Mike, who also helped in the shop on occasion, hiked up the prices indiscriminately and refused to negotiate and in consequence sold very little at all.

“Well done!” Hobie had said, blinking delightedly in the glare of his work lamp, when I went downstairs and informed him of my big sale (a silver teapot, in my version; I didn’t want to make it seem like I’d outright robbed the woman, and besides I knew he was uninterested in what he called the smalls, which I’d come to realize through my perusal of antiques books formed a huge part of the inventory of the store). “Sharp-eyed little customer. Welty would have taken to you like a baby on the doorstep, ha! Taking an interest in his silver!”

From then on, I’d made it a habit to sit upstairs with my schoolbooks in the afternoons while Hobie busied himself downstairs. At first it was simply for fun—fun that was sorely missing from my dreary student life, coffees in the lounge and lectures on Walter Benjamin. In the years since Welty’s death, Hobart and Blackwell had evidently acquired a reputation as an easy mark for thieves; and the thrill of pouncing on these well-dressed filchers and pilferers and extorting large sums from them was almost like shoplifting in reverse.

But I also learned a lesson: a lesson which sifted down to me only by degrees but which was in fact the truest thing at the heart of the business.
It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—
any
object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.

In consequence, I’d started going through the store, removing some tags (so the customer would have to come to me for the price) and changing others—not all, but some. The trick, as I discovered through trial and error, was to keep at least a quarter of the prices low and jack up the rest, sometimes by as much as four and five hundred percent. Years of abnormally low prices had built up a base of devoted customers; leaving a quarter of the prices low kept them devoted, and ensured that people hunting for a bargain could still find one, if they looked. Leaving a quarter of the prices low also meant that, by some perverse alchemy, the marked-up prices seemed legitimate in comparison: for whatever reason, some people were more apt to put out fifteen hundred bucks for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling (correctly, but cheaply) for a few hundred.

That was how it had started; that was how Hobart and Blackwell, after languishing for years, had begun under my beady auspices to turn a profit. But it wasn’t just about money. I liked the game of it. Unlike Hobie—who assumed, incorrectly, that anyone who walked into his store was as fascinated by furniture as he was, who was extremely matter-of-fact in pointing out the flaws and virtues of a piece—I had discovered I possessed the opposite knack: of obfuscation and mystery, the ability to talk about inferior articles in ways that made people want them. When selling a piece, talking it up (as opposed to sitting back and permitting the unwary to wander into my trap) it was a game to size up a customer and figure out the image they wanted to project—not so much the people they were (know-it-all decorator? New Jersey housewife? self-conscious gay man?) as the people they wanted to be. Even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors; everyone was furnishing a stage set. The trick was to address yourself to the projection, the fantasy self—the connoisseur, the discerning bon vivant—as opposed to the insecure person actually standing in front of you. It was better if you hung back a bit and weren’t too direct. I soon learned how to dress
(on the edge between conservative and flash) and how to deal with sophisticated and unsophisticated customers, with differing calibrations of courtesy and indolence: presuming knowledge in both, quick to flatter, quick to lose interest or step away at exactly the right moment.

And yet, with this Lucius Reeve, I had screwed up badly. What he wanted I didn’t know. In fact he was so relentless in sidestepping my apologies and directing his anger full-bore on Hobie that I was starting to think that I had stumbled into some preexisting grudge or hatred. I didn’t want to tip my hand with Hobie by bringing up Reeve’s name, though who could bear such a fierce grudge against Hobie, most well-intentioned and unworldly of persons? My Internet research had turned up nothing on Lucius Reeve apart from a few innocuous mentions in the society pages, not even a Harvard or Harvard Club affiliation, nothing but a respectable Fifth Avenue address. He had no family that I could tell, no job or visible means of support. It had been stupid of me to write him a check—greediness on my part; I’d been thinking about establishing a lineage for the piece, though at this point even an envelope of cash placed under a napkin and slid across the table was no assurance he was going to let the matter drop.

I was standing with my fists in the pockets of my overcoat, glasses fogged from the spring damp, staring unhappily into the muddy waters of the Pond: a few sad brown ducks, plastic bags washing in the reeds. Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors—in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever—but my mother’s bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given by its anonymous donor a more mysterious and welcoming message:
EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY
. It had been Her Bench since before I was born; in her early days in the city, she had sat there with her library book on her afternoons off, going without lunch when she needed the price of a museum pass at MoMA or a movie ticket at the Paris Theatre. Further along, past the Pond, where the path turned empty and dark, was the unkempt and desolate patch of ground where Andy and I had scattered her ashes. It was Andy who had talked me into sneaking over and scattering them in defiance of the city rule, scattering them moreover in that particular spot:
well, I mean, it’s where she used to meet us.

Yeah, but rat poison, look, these signs.

Go on. You can do it now. No one’s coming.

She loved the sea lions, too. We always had to walk over and look at them.

Yeah but you definitely don’t want to dump her over there, it smells like fish. Besides it creeps me out having that jar or whatever in my room.

vi.

“M
Y
G
OD
,”
SAID
H
OBIE
when he got a good look at me under the lights. “You’re white as a sheet. You’re not coming down with something?”

“Um—” He was just going out, coat over his arm; behind him stood Mr. and Mrs. Vogel, buttoned-up and smiling poisonously. My relations with the Vogels (or “the Vultures,” as Grisha called them) had cooled, significantly, since I’d taken over the shop; mindful of the many, many pieces they’d in my view as good as stolen from Hobie, I now tacked on a premium to anything I even vaguely suspected they were interested in; and though Mrs. Vogel—no fool—had taken to telephoning Hobie directly, I usually managed to thwart her by (among other means) claiming to Hobie that I’d already sold the piece in question and forgotten to tag it.

“Have you eaten?” Hobie, in his gentle woolly-mindedness and unwisdom, remained completely unaware that the Vogels and I no longer held each other in anything but the very highest regard. “We’re just running down the street for dinner. Come with us, why don’t you.”

“No thanks,” I said, conscious of Mrs. Vogel’s gaze boring into me, cold fraudulent smile, eyes like agate chips in her smooth, aging-milkmaid face. As a rule I took pleasure in stepping up and smiling back in her teeth—but in the stern hall lights I felt clammy and used-up, demoted somehow. “I think, um, I’ll eat in tonight, thanks.”

“Not feeling well?” said Mr. Vogel blandly—balding midwesterner in rimless glasses, prim in his reefer coat, tough luck to you if he was the banker and you were late with the mortgage. “What a shame.”

“Lovely to see you,” Mrs. Vogel said, stepping forward and putting her plump hand on my sleeve. “Did you enjoy Pippa’s visit? I wish I’d got to see her but she was so busy with the boyfriend. What did you think of him—what was his name—?” turning back to Hobie. “Elliot?”

“Everett,” said Hobie neutrally. “Nice boy.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning to shoulder my coat off. The appearance of Pippa fresh off the plane from London with this “Everett” had been one of the uglier shocks of my life. Counting the days, the hours, shaky from
sleeplessness and excitement, unable to stop myself looking at my watch every five minutes, leaping at the doorbell and literally running to throw open the door—and there she stood, hand-in-hand with this shoddy Englishman?

“And what does he do? A musician too?”

“Music librarian actually,” said Hobie. “Don’t know what that entails nowadays with computers and all.”

“Oh, I’m sure Theo knows all about it,” said Mrs. Vogel.

“No, not really.”

“
Cy
brarian?” said Mr. Vogel, with an uncharacteristically loud and merry chuckle. Addressing me: “Is it true what they say, that young people today can make it through school without once setting foot in a library?”

“I wouldn’t know.” A music librarian! It had taken every ounce of possession I had to keep my face empty (guts crumbling, end of everything) to accept his moist English hand,
Hullo, Everett, you must be Theo, heard so much about you,
blah blah blah, while I stood frozen in the doorway like a bayoneted Yank staring at the stranger who’d run me through to death. He was a slight, wide-eyed bounce of a guy, innocent, bland, infuriatingly cheerful, dressed in jeans and hoodie like a teenager; and his quick, apologetic smile when we were alone in the living room had sent me blank with rage.