The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t turn around, that to look at her directly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; she had come to me the only way she could, and our eyes met in the glass for a long still moment;

I LIKE TO THINK of myself as a perceptive person (as I suppose we all do)

And there was something festive and happy about the two of us, hurrying up the steps beneath the flimsy candy-striped umbrella, quick quick quick, for all the world as if we were escaping something terrible instead of running right into it.

He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.”

But no matter what we had agreed upon beforehand, no matter how much sense it made, somehow I still couldn’t quite believe she had walked away from the museum without me.

Dave smiled. “You say that like it’s something to be ashamed of. But feeling better doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten about your mother. Or that you loved her any less.” Resenting this supposition, which had never occurred to me, I looked away from him and out the window, at his depressing view of the white brick building across the street.

Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flower-garlanded hearts. Pippa’s face pale in the dark.

“I remember you,” I said.

her kiss (with the peculiar flavor of what I now believe to have been a morphine lollipop) still sticky on my lips.

I was silent. Andy, I knew, was loyal; I trusted him, I valued his opinion, and yet his conversation sometimes made me feel as though I was talking to one of those computer programs that mimic human response.

Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.

No you don’t, I thought, staring her insolently in the eye. She gave me an odd look. “You’d be surprised, Theo,” she said,

but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands.

They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.

Without thinking, I sat down in Mr. Barbour’s chair and began scanning the dense text for any further mention of my painting (already I’d begun to think of it as mine; the thought slid into my head as if I’d owned it all my life)

detoxed on the sofa with a basket of Easter candy and a bottle of Valium.”

light shining into my eyes, wishing that I were anywhere else (Tibet, Lake Tahoe, the moon)

though God knows she didn’t deserve this.…” She sure didn’t, I thought.

It occurred to me that if I didn’t already know how my mother had died, no power on earth could have convinced me they hadn’t murdered her.

there were no landmarks, and it was impossible to say where we were going or in which direction. The skyline was monotonous and unchanging and I was fearful that we might drive through the pastel houses altogether and out into the alkali waste beyond, into some sun-beaten trailer park from the movies.

I also hate vegas <3

I MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances—which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn’t beat me up.

But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying “Apparently” in answer to almost anything I said, making me feel stupid. “Um, I can’t find the can opener.” “Apparently.” “There’s going to be a lunar eclipse tonight.” “Apparently.” “Look, sparks are coming out of the wall socket.” “Apparently.”

“You think I beat girls up?” I said. He shrugged. “She might have deserved it.” “Um, we don’t hit women in America.” He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. “No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.”

“Oh, boo hoo hoo.” Boris was always threatening to kill himself for one reason and another.

“No, no, I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m the dad, I’m the one who should have known better. It’s just that it got to be a kind of vicious circle if you know what I mean.

“Well, I’ve already got ten thousand set aside. That’s a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I’ll open an account in your name, okay?”

was hard to believe that my dad could be dead when his cigarettes were still on the kitchen counter and his old white tennis shoes were still by the back door.

I knew him well enough to know that if you asked him the right way, at the right moment, he would do almost anything;

we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street—which was, of course, I love you.

It was as if the desert, its openness, had retrained my distance vision. Everything seemed dank and closed-in.

“That was your father that died. Your own father. And you act like it was, I don’t know, I’d say the dog, but not even the dog. Because I know you’d care if it was the dog got hit by a car, at least I think you would.” “Let’s say I cared about him exactly as much as he did about me.”

Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.

Possible? I could have taken it? An alternate future was flashing through my mind:

it was as if his death weren’t real but only a rehearsal, a trial run; the real death (the permanent one) was yet to happen and there was time to stop it if only I found him,

I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong—only that I did,

I mooned about looking at her things, wondering where she was and what she was doing and trying hard to feel connected to her

Yet even in death my dad was ineradicable, no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture—for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk,

Priceless. I rolled to face the wall. The recovered Rembrandt had been valued at forty million. But forty million was still a price.

stolen paintings were almost impossible to trace unless people tried to sell them, or move them, which was why only twenty per cent of art thieves were ever caught.

it was as if a black curtain had come down on my life in Vegas.

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.

For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep,

She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone.

the edge between puffery and fraud is very cloudy indeed.”

things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.

The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.

GIVEN HOW I FELT, which was near death basically, suffering from an ugly migrainous headache and engulfed with such misery I could barely see,

sick with headache, despairing at the thought of dinner with the Longstreets, wondering how the hell I was going to make it through an evening of hot crab dip and Forrest delivering his views on the economy when all I basically wanted to do was blow my brains

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”

“Listen,” she said. “I don’t expect you to understand but it’s rough to be in love with the wrong person.”