The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

I’d gotten the string untied and streetlights and watery rain reflections were rolling over the surface of my painting, my goldfinch, which—I knew incontrovertibly, without a doubt, before even turning to look at the verso—was real.

Running my fingertip incredulously around the edges of the board, like Doubting Thomas across the palm of Christ.

it was harder to deceive the sense of touch than sight, and even after so many years my hands remembered the painting so well that my fingers went to the nail marks immediately, at the bottom of the panel, the tiny holes where (once upon a time, or so it was said) the painting was nailed up as a tavern sign, part of a painted cabinet, no one knew.

I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

like a pair of minor Flemish noblemen hovering at the margin of a nativity painting.

have put into words what I felt, though it was something deep and primary that Welty had shared with me, and I with him, in the museum all those years ago.

if anything, pleased. He was broadshouldered and bored-looking, in a soft gray coat, and despite his age there was something petulant and cherubic about him, overly ripe, soft white hands and a soft managerial blandness.

apron and I was staring at a lighted sign Beetaalautomaat op where Boris’s head had been;

like a skip in a DVD throwing me forward in time, because I have no memory at all of picking the pistol off the floor, only

he was shaking my shoulder it was mostly mouth movements and nonsense through soundproof glass. The smoke from the fired gun was oddly the same bracing ammonia smell of Manhattan thunderstorms and wet city pavements.

I couldn’t answer. Glazed, dizzy, trembling. My heart, after the collision and freeze of the moment, had begun to pound with hard, sharp,

I felt disincarnate, cut loose from myself. How

“That’s your canal over there. The Herengracht.”

Tonal gradations. Weirdly enlivened darks. The small ghostly moon above the

bell gables was so tiny it looked like the moon of a different planet, hazed and occult, spooky clouds lit with just the barest tinge of blue and brown.

Cities, centuries. In and out I glided of slow moments, delightful, shades drawn, empty cloud dreams and evolving shadows, a stillness like Jan Weenix’s gorgeous trophy pieces, dead birds with bloodstained feathers hanging from a foot, and in whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an

emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.

All the holy books were right. Clearly ‘worry’ was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused

Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

This was the body: fallible, subject to malady. Illness, pain. Why did people get so worked up about it? I put on every piece of clothing in my suitcase (two shirts, sweater, extra trousers, two pairs of socks)

Andy was like no way am I getting in that boat and I was like sure I understand, so I took apart the sailboat screw by screw, and put the pieces in my suitcase, we were carrying it overland, sails and all, this was the plan, all you had to do was follow the canals and they’d take you right where you wanted to go or maybe just right back where you started but it was a bigger job than I’d thought, disassembling a sailboat, it was different than taking apart a table or chair and the pieces were too big to fit in the luggage and there was a huge propeller I was trying to jam in with my clothes and Andy was bored and off to the side playing

chess with someone I didn’t like the looks of and he said well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along

Somehow my dream of the sailboat had bled through and infected the hotel room, so it was a room but also the cabin of a ship: built-in cupboards (over my bed and under the eaves) neatly fitted with countersunk brass and enamelled to a high nautical gloss.

For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.

But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

My dad at the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There’s always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known. Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the troub...

only racketed-up the variform confusion and displacement: no logic, no structure, what was on next, you didn’t know, could be anything, Sesame Street

in Dutch, Dutch people talking at a desk, more Dutch people talking at a desk, and though there was Sky News and CNN and BBC none of the local news was in English (nothing that mattered, nothing pertaining to me or the parking garage) though at one point I had a bad start when, flipping through the channels past an old American cop show, I stopped astonished at the sight of my twenty-five-year-old father: one of his many non-speaking roles, a yes-man hovering behind a political candidate

blink glancing into the camera and straight across the ocean and in...

But the biggest shock was how straightforward he looked—my already (circa 1985) criminally dishonest and sliding-into-alcoholism father. None of his character, or his future, was visible in his face. Instead he looked resolute, attentive, a model of certainty and promise.

The act—the eternity of it—had thrown me into such a different world that to all practical purposes I was already dead. There was a sense of being past everything, of looking back at land from an ice floe drifted out to sea. What was done could never be undone. I was gone.

But for all foreseeable time to come—for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water—the painting would be remembered and mourned.

Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.

An act of God: that was what the insurance companies called it, catastrophe so random or arcane that there was otherwise no taking the measure of it. Probability

but some events fell so far outside the actuarial tables that even insurance underwriters were compelled to haul in the supernatural in order to explain them—rotten luck, as my father had said mournfully one night out by the pool, dusk falling hard, smoking Viceroy after Viceroy to keep the mosquitoes away, one of the few times he’d tried to talk to me about my mother’s death, why do bad things happen, why me, why...

a profession of faith and the best answer he had to give me, on a par with Allah Has Written It or It’s the Lord...

head to Fortune, the greatest ...

Bad planets. There’s a shape to this thing, a larger pattern. If we’re just talking story, kid, you got it. He’d

at his Scorpio book, flipping coins, consulting the stars. Whatever you said about my

Chance plays tricks, my dad had liked to say. Systems, spread breakdowns.

Then on the opposite page a different ad, for digital cameras, scrawled in artsy letters and signed Joan Miró: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second

and think of it all your life

Sometimes it’s about playing a poor hand well, I remembered my dad saying drowsily, half asleep on the couch.

that the world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone, my mother dead on a marble floor, stop it stop it, muttering aloud to myself in elevators, in cabs, leave me alone, I want to die, a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had—more than once—driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate

But there wasn’t enough to be sure of finishing myself off. I didn’t want to waste what I had on a few hours of oblivion only to wake up again in my cage

Objects seeking out their rightful owners. They had human qualities. They were shifty or honest or suspicious or fine.

It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.

The wet sleet pelting against the windowpanes had a kind of deep historical weight to it, starvation, armies marching, a never-ending drizzle of sadness.

Then—at a blare of trumpets—I started. The liturgical chant had given way to a burst of inappropriately festive orchestration. Melodic, brassy. A wave of frustration boiled up in me. Nutcracker Suite.

Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she’d been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall.