The Goldfinch (86 page)

“Oh yeah?”

“You on lock?”

“What?” Between Yiddish and gutter Russian, jumbled through a slur of Brooklynese and slang picked up from rap songs, sometimes Grisha’s idioms didn’t make it into any kind of English I could understand.

Grisha snorted noisily. “I don’t think you understanding me right, champ. I am asking is everything square with you. With the laws.”

“Hang on,” I said—I was in the middle of a column of figures—and then looked up from the calculator: “Wait, what are you talking about?”

“You my brother, not condemning or judging. I just need to know, all right?”

“Why? What happened?”

“Peoples are hanging around the shop, keeping an eye on. You know anything about it?”

“Who?” I glanced out the window. “What? When was this?”

“I wanted to ask you. Scared to drive out to Borough Park to meet with my cousin Genka for some business he got going—afraid of getting these guys on me.”

“On you?” I sat down.

Grisha shrugged. “Four, five times now. Yesterday, getting out of my truck, I saw one of them hanging around out front again, but he slipped across the street. Jeans—older—very casual dressed. Genka, he don’t know nothing about it but he’s freaked, like I say we got some stuff going, he told me to ask you what you knew about it. Never talks, just stands and waits. I am wondering if it is some of your business with the Shvatzah,” he said discreetly.

“Nope.” The Shvatzah was Jerome; I hadn’t seen him in months.

“Well then. I hate to break it to you but I think is maybe poh-lices smelling around. Mike—he has noticed too. He thought it was because of his child supports. But the guy just hangs around and does nothing.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Who knows? But one month, at least. Mike says longer.”

“Next time, when you see him, will you point him out to me?”

“He might be private investigator.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because in some ways he looks more like ex-cop. Mike thinks this—Irish, they know from cops, Mike said he looked older, like poh-lice retired from the force maybe?”

“Right,” I said, thinking of the heavyset guy I’d seen out my window. I’d spotted him four or five times subsequently, or someone who looked like him, lingering out front during business hours—always when I was with Hobie or a customer, inconvenient to confront him—although he was so innocuous-looking, hoodie and construction-worker boots, I could hardly be sure. Once—it had scared me, badly—I’d seen a guy who looked like him lingering out in front of the Barbours’ building but when I got a better look I’d been sure I was wrong.

“He’s been around for a while. But this—” Grisha paused—“normally I would not say anything, maybe is nothing, but yesterday…”

“Well, what? Go on,” I said, when he massaged his neck and looked guiltily to the side.

“Another guy. Different. I’d seen him hanging about the shop before. Outside. But yesterday he came in the shop to ask for you by your name. And I did not like the looks of him at all.”

I sat back abruptly in my chair. I’d been wondering when Reeve would take it in his head to drop by in person.

“I did not talk to him. I was out—” nodding—“so. Loading the truck. But I saw him go in. Kind of guy you notice. Nice dressed, but not like a client. You were at lunch and Mike was in the shop by himself—guy comes in, asks, Theodore Decker? Well, you’re not in, Mike says so. ‘Where is he.’ Lot a lot a questions about you, like do you work here, do you live here, how long, where you are, all sorts.”

“Where was Hobie?”

“He didn’t want Hobie. He wanted you. Then—” he drew a line on the desk top with his finger—“out he comes. Walks around the shop. Looks here, looks there. Looks all around. This—I see from where I am, across the street. It looks strange. And—Mike did not mention this visit to you because he said maybe is nothing, maybe something personal, ‘better keep out of it,’ but I saw him too and thought you should know. Because, hey, game recognize game, you get me?”

“What’d he look like?” I asked, and then—when Grisha did not reply—“Older fellow? Heavy? White hair?”

Grisha made an exasperated sound. “No no no.” Shaking his head with resolute firmness. “This was nobody’s grandpappy.”

“What’d he look like, then?”

“He looked like a guy you would not want to get into a fight with, is what he looked like.”

In the silence that followed, Grisha lit a Kool and offered me one. “So what should I do,
Mazhor?
”

“Sorry?”

“Do me and Genka need to worry?”

“I don’t think so. Right,” I said, hitting a little awkwardly the triumphant palm that he held up for me to slap, “okay, but will you do me a favor? Will you come and get me if you see either of them again?”

“Sure thing.” He paused, looking at me critically. “You sure me and Genka don’t need to worry?”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re doing, do I?”

Grisha flipped a dirty handkerchief from his pocket and scrubbed his purpled nose with it. “I don’t like this answer from you.”

“Well, be careful, whatever. Just in case.”

“
Mazhor,
I should say the same of you.”

iv.

I
HAD LIED TO
Kitsey; I didn’t have a thing to do. Outside Barneys, we kissed goodbye on the corner of Fifth before she walked back to Tiffany to look at the crystal—we hadn’t even made it to the crystal—and I went to catch the 6. But instead of joining the stream of shoppers pouring down the stairs to the station I felt so empty and distracted, so lost and tired and unwell, I stopped instead to look in at the dirty window of the Subway Inn, straight across from the loading dock at Bloomingdale’s, a time warp straight out of
The Lost Weekend
and unchanged since my father’s drinking days. Outside: film-noir neon. Inside: same grimy red walls, sticky tables, broken floor tiles, strong Clorox smell, and a concave bartender with a rag over his shoulder pouring a drink for a bloodshot solitary at the bar. I remembered my mom and me losing my dad at Bloomingdale’s once, and
how—mysteriously to me, at the time—she’d known to leave the store and walk straight across the street and find him here, throwing back four-dollar shots with a wheezy old Teamster and a bandanna-wearing senior who looked homeless. I’d stood waiting inside the doorway, overpowered by the waft of stale beer and fascinated by the warm secretive dark of the place, the Twilight Zone glow of the jukebox and the Buck Hunter arcade game blinking away in the depths—“Ah, the smell of old men and desperation,” my mother had said wryly, wrinkling her nose as she exited the bar with her shopping bags and caught me by the hand.

A shot of Johnnie Walker Black, for my dad. Two shots maybe. Why not? The dark recesses of the bar looked warm, comradely, that sentimental boozy aura that made you forget for a moment who you were and how you’d ended up there. But at the last moment, starting in the doorway so the bartender glanced over at me, I turned away and kept walking.

Lexington Avenue. Wettish wind. The afternoon was haunted and dank. I walked right by the stop on Fifty-First Street, and the Forty-Second stop, and still I kept going to clear my head. Ash-white apartment blocks. Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange feeling of being already dead, of moving in a vaster sidewalk grayness than the street or even the city could encompass, my soul disconnected from my body and drifting among other souls in a mist somewhere between past and present, Walk Don’t Walk, individual pedestrians floating up strangely isolated and lonely before my eyes, blank faces plugged into earbuds and staring straight ahead, lips moving silently, and the city noise dampened and deafened, under crushing, granite-colored skies that muffled the noise from the street, garbage and newsprint, concrete and drizzle, a dirty winter grayness weighing like stone.

I’d thought, having successfully escaped the bar, I might see a movie—that maybe the solitude of a movie theater would set me aright, some near-empty afternoon showing of a film ending its popular run. But when, lightheaded and sniffling with cold, I got to the theater on Second and Thirty-Second, the French cop film I wanted to see had already started and so had the mistaken-identity thriller. All that remained were a host of holiday movies and intolerable romantic comedies: posters of bedraggled
brides, battling bridesmaids, a dismayed dad in a Santa hat with two howling babies in his arms.

The cabs were starting to go off duty. High above the street, in the dark afternoon, lights burned in lonely offices and apartment towers. Turning away, I continued to drift downtown, with no very clear idea where I was going or why, and as I walked I had the oddly appealing sensation that I was undoing myself, unwinding myself thread by thread, rags and tatters falling away from me in the very act of crossing Thirty-Second Street and flowing along amongst the rush-hour pedestrians and rolling along from the next moment to the next.

At the next theater, ten or twelve blocks down, it was the same story: the CIA film had started, as had the well-reviewed biopic of a 1940s leading lady; the French cop movie didn’t start for another hour and a half; and unless I wanted the psychopath film or the searing family drama, which I didn’t, it was more brides and bachelor parties and Santa hats and Pixar.

By the time I made it to the theater at Seventeenth Street I didn’t stop at the box office at all but kept walking. Somehow, mysteriously, in the process of crossing Union Square, swept along in a dark eddy that had hit me from nowhere, I’d arrived at the decision to call Jerome. There was a mystic joy in the idea, a saintly mortification. Would he even have pharms on such short notice, would I have to buy regular old street dope? I didn’t care. I hadn’t done drugs in months but for whatever reason, an evening nodding and unconscious in my bedroom at Hobie’s had begun to seem like a perfectly reasonable response to the holiday lights, the holiday crowds, the incessant Christmas bells with their morbid funeral note, Kitsey’s candy-pink notebook from Kate’s Paperie with tabs reading MY BRIDESMAIDS MY GUESTS MY SEATING MY FLOWERS MY VENDORS MY CHECKLIST MY CATERING.

Stepping back quickly—the light had changed, I’d almost walked in front of a car—I reeled and nearly slipped. There was no point dwelling on my unreasoning horror of a large public wedding—enclosed spaces, claustrophobia, sudden movements, phobic triggers everywhere, for some reason the subway didn’t bother me so much it had more to do with crowded buildings, always expecting something to happen, the puff of smoke, the fast-running man at the crowd’s margin, I couldn’t even bear being in a movie theater if there were more than ten or fifteen people in it,
I would turn around with my fully paid ticket and walk right out. And yet somehow this massive, jam-packed church ceremony was springing up around me like a flash mob. I would swallow a few Xanax and sweat my way through it.

Then too: I hoped that the escalating social roar which I’d been riding like a boat in a hurricane would slow, post-wedding, since all I really wanted was to get back to the halcyon days of summer when I’d had Kitsey all to myself: dinners alone, watching movies in bed. The constant invitations and gatherings were wearing me down: brightly-shifting whirlwinds of her friends, crowded evenings and hectic weekends that I weathered with my eyes squeezed shut and clutching on for dear life: Linsey? no, Lolly? sorry… and this is—? Frieda? Hi, Frieda, and… Trev? Trav? nice to see you! Politely I stood around their antique farm tables, drinking myself into a stupor as they chatted about their country houses, their co-op boards, their school districts, their gym routines—that’s right, seamless transition from breast feeding although we’ve had some big changes in the nap schedule lately, our oldest just starting pre-K and the fall color in Connecticut is stunning, oh yes, of course, we all have our annual trip with the girls but you know these boys’ trips we do twice a year, out to Vail, down to the Caribbean, last year we went fly-fishing in Scotland and we hit some really outstanding golf courses—but oh, that’s right, Theo, you don’t golf, you don’t ski, you don’t sail, do you.

“Sorry, afraid not.” The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at a bar; sometimes, the affable sense of committee among the men particularly gave me the slight feeling of being interviewed for a job. And—all these pregnant women? “Oh, Theo! Isn’t he adorable!” Kitsey unexpectedly thrusting a friend’s newborn at me—me in all sincere horror leaping back as if from a lighted match.

“Oh, sometimes it takes us guys a while,” said Race Goldfarb complacently, observing my discomfort, raising his voice above the infants wailing and tumbling in a nanny-supervised area of the living room. “But let me tell you, Theo, when you hold that little one of your own in your arms for the first time—?” (patting his wife’s pregnant tummy)—“your heart just breaks a little. Because when I first saw little Blaine?” (sticky-faced, staggering around unattractively at his feet) “and gazed into those big blue eyes?
Those beautiful baby blues? I was
transformed.
I was in
love.
It was like: hey, little buddy! you are here to teach me everything! And I’m telling you, at that first smile I just melted into goo like we all do, didn’t I, Lauren?”