The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person on the basis of my secret uptown?

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

trompe l’oeil… because in other passages of the work—the head? the wing?—not creaturely or literal in the slightest, he takes the image apart very deliberately to show us how he painted it. Daubs and patches, very shaped and hand-worked, the neckline especially, a solid piece of paint, very abstract. Which is what makes him a genius less of his time than our own. There’s a doubleness.

greatest painters who ever lived. And with The Goldfinch? He performs his miracle in such a bijou space. Although I admit, I was surprised—” turning to look at me—“when I held it in my hands the first time? The weight of it?”

“Heft. Quite. The very word. And the background—much less yellow than when I saw it as a boy.

“that was the only time my father ever took me with him on a business trip, that time at The Hague.

Der Distelfink. That is how I knew it first, by its German name.”

Here is my experience. 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.”

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all

the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.

I’d bought because they reminded me of her, so many I’d felt funny sending them. “And books.” And jewelry, I neglected to say. And scarves and posters and perfume and records on vinyl and a Make-Your-Own-Kite kit and a toy pagoda. An eighteenth-century topaz necklace. A first edition of Ozma of Oz. Buying the things had been mostly a way of thinking of her, of being with her. Some of it I’d given to Kitsey but still there was no way I could come out of my room with the gigantic pile of stuff I’d actually bought for her over the years because

“Well—if it was a panic attack, maybe. But it’s not. Remorse. Grief. Jealousy—that’s the worst of all. I mean—this girl

it’s dark and rainy and I don’t have a whole lot of friends there, and in my flat sometimes I can hear someone crying at night, just this terrible broken weeping from next door, and I—I mean, you’ve found something you like to do, and I’m so glad, because sometimes I really wonder what I’m doing with my life.”

cold? when I can’t remember how to cook artichokes or get candle wax off the tablecloth? who do I call? Him. But—” was it my imagination, was the wine getting her worked up a little bit?—“tell you the truth? Know why I don’t come back more? In

Everything stopped that day, literally. I even stopped growing. Because, did you know? I never got one inch taller after it happened, not one.”

“Mont-Haefeli was weird. You had girls who’d been shot at while fleeing the presidential palace, and then you had girls who got sent there because their parents wanted them to lose weight or train for the Winter Olympics.”

“Because—I mean, I’ve heard you talk about it, I know you’re as obsessed as I am. But I go over and over it too.”

But I always had something better to do. More important to go to the movies with my friend Lee Ann, whatever. Who, incidentally, vanished into thin air after my accident—never saw her again after that afternoon at the stupid Pixar film. All these tiny signs that I ignored, or didn’t fully recognize—everything could have been different if only I’d been paying attention—like, Welty was trying so hard to get me to go earlier, he must have asked a dozen times, it was like he had a sense of it himself, something bad going to happen, it was my fault we were even there that day—” “At least you hadn’t been expelled from school.”

But I think maybe it’s more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake—the point where you would have had a different outcome.”

didn’t even want to go to the museum, I wanted him to come uptown with me because I knew he’d take me out to lunch before the audition, anywhere I wanted—he should have stayed home that day, he had other stuff to do, they didn’t even let family sit in, he would have had to wait down the hall—” “He knew what he was doing.”

“It’s just—his last moments on earth, you know? And the space between my life, and his, was very, very thin. There wasn’t any space. It was like something opened up between us. Like a huge flash of what was real—what mattered. No me, no him. We were the same person. Same thoughts—we didn’t have to talk. It was just a few minutes but it

might have been years, we might as well still be there.

it’s like Welty’s energy, or force field—God that sounds so corny but I don’t know what else you’d call it—it’s been

with me from that hour on.

Because—was I interested in antiques? No. Why would I be? And yet there I was. Going through his inventory. Reading his notes in the margins of auction catalogues. His world, his things. Everything up there—it

“did you ever think how weird, that he sent me to your house? Chance—maybe. But it didn’t seem like chance to me. It was like he saw who I was, and he was sending me exactly where I needed to be, to who I needed to be with. So yeah—” coming to myself a bit; I was

schools, third and fourth and fifth homes in Hyères and Hyannis and Paris and London and Jackson Hole and Jupiter and wasn’t it hideous how terribly built up Vail had become, remember when it was just a darling little village.… where do you ski, Theo? Do you ski? Why then, definitely you

“Certainly.” You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit.

He looked at me; he looked across the room at Boris. “You know, if you need anything,” he said unexpectedly. “You can always ask.”

We have art in order not to die from the truth.

“My painting’s there?” “No.” Boris had retrieved

Redbreast Flake tin was at the bottom of my sock drawer and I grabbed it up too and then dropped it and shut the drawer on it, quick.

their bright summer green fused in my mind with her and with happiness.

got the first edition of Ozma of Oz and dashed off a note so quickly I didn’t have time to second-guess. Safe trip. I love you. No kidding. This I blew dry and tucked in the book, which

The resulting tableau on the carpet (Emer...

wellies, Ozma’s color) was almost as if I’d stumbled on a haiku or some other perfect combination of words to ex...

clock, submerged memories from childhood, doors opening to bright old daydreams where we walked together on summer lawns—before, resolutely, going back to my room for the necklace which had called to me in an auction house showroom with her name: lifting it from its midnight velvet box and, carefully, draping it over one of the boots so a splash of gold caught the light. It was topaz, eighteenth ...

I still wasn’t quite awake and none of it seemed to have any more reality than the fleeting dream of Pippa I’d had on the plane where I’d spotted her in a park with many tall fountains and a Saturn-ringed planet hanging low and majestic in the sky.

damp alleys too narrow for cars, foggy little ochreous shops filled with old prints and dusty porcelains. Canal footbridge: brown water, lonely brown duck. Plastic cup half-submerged and bobbing. The wind was raw and wet with blown pinpricks of sleet and the space around us felt close and dank.

café walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel, the cobblestoned loneliness of a city that felt—to me, anyway—like a place where you might come to let the water close over your head.

Smoky desert twilight, shades drawn. Make up your mind. Let’s face it. No way. Same shadows on his face. Gold light glinting off the doors by the pool.

“when you think of what this picture has gone through—what it must have gone through—I don’t know if you understand, Boris, how much care has to be taken even to ship a painting? Just to pack it properly? Why take any chances?”

gray dream alleys with unpronounceable names, gilded buddhas and Asian embroideries, old maps, old harpsichords, cloudy cigar-brown shops with crockery and goblets and antique Dresden jars. The sun had come out and there was

and bright by the canals, a breathable glitter. Gulls plunged and cried. A dog ran by with a live crab in its mouth.

Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children’s picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows.

On the street: multicolored neon angels, in silhouette, leaning out from the tops of the buildings like ship figureheads. Blue spangles, white spangles, tracers, cascades

On the Good Ship Lollipop. “This is Shirley T,” he said to me,

like a living shadow, darkness flying to darkness.

Medieval city: crooked streets, lights draped on bridges and shining off rain-peppered canals, melting in the drizzle. Infinity of anonymous shops, twinkling window displays, lingerie and garter belts, kitchen utensils arrayed like surgical instruments, foreign words everywhere, Snel bestellen, Retro-stijl, Showgirl-Sexboetiek. “Back door was open to the alley,” said

chucked me gaily in the arm with the bottle while humming we wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas