The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

She moved with a thrilling quickness, gestures sudden and light, always perched on the edge of her chair like some long elegant marsh-bird about to startle and fly away.

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.”

This girl had bright red hair; her movements were swift, her face sharp and mischievous and strange, and her eyes were an odd color, a golden honeybee brown. And though she was too thin, all elbows, and in a way almost plain, yet there was something about her too that made my stomach go watery.

It was a small picture, the smallest in the exhibition, and the simplest: a yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle.

something about the neat, compact way it tucked down inside itself—its brightness, its alert watchful expression—made me think of pictures I’d seen of my mother when she was small: a dark-capped finch with steady eyes.

it thrilled me to see her for a moment as the girl saw her, as a stranger. Did she see how my mother’s nose had the tiniest bump at the top, where she’d broken it falling out of a tree as a child? or how the black rings around the light blue irises of my mother’s eyes gave her a slightly wild quality, as of some steady-eyed hunting creature alone on a plain?

Or—she was there and she wasn’t. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I had never understood before. But when I tried to say this out loud the words came out in a muddle and I realized with a cold slap that I was wrong. Both parts had to be together. You couldn’t have one part without the other.

It was time to go, well past time—my mother had made that perfectly clear—and yet I could see no path out of the space where I was and in fact in some ways it was hard to imagine being anywhere else in the world—that there was another world, outside that one. It was like I’d never had another life at all.

Over and over, I was reliving the moment where my mother and I had run up the museum steps. Her striped umbrella. Rain peppering and driving in our faces. What had happened, I knew, was irrevocable, yet at the same time it seemed there had to be some way I could go back to the rainy street and make it all happen differently.

yet it seemed I drew unwanted attention to myself hundreds of times a day: by having to ask for every little item, whether a wash cloth or the Band-Aids or the pencil sharpener; by not having a key, always having to ring when I came and went—even by my well-intentioned efforts to make my own bed in the morning (it was better just to let Irenka or Esperenza do it, Mrs. Barbour explained, as they were used to doing it and did a better job with the corners).

On our vocabulary list a few days before we’d had the word consanguinity: joined in blood. The old man’s face had been so torn up and ruined I couldn’t even say exactly what he’d looked like, and yet I remembered all too well the warm slick feel of his blood on my hands—especially since in some way the blood was still there, I could still smell it and taste it in my mouth, and it made me understand why people talked about blood brothers and how blood bound people together.

Suddenly she sat up, and put her arms around me, and kissed me; and all the blood rushed from my head, a long sweep, like I was falling off a cliff. “I—” Terror struck me. In a daze, by reflex, I reached to wipe the kiss away—only this wasn’t soggy, or gross, I could feel a trace of it glowing all along the back of my hand.

On some level, I was repelled by her—by her stuttery voice, her thick, shiny lip gloss that came in a tube that said Lip Glass; by the multiple pierce holes in her ears and the gap in her front teeth that she liked to worry with her tongue—but there was something sultry and exciting and tough about her too: an animal strength, a purring, prowling quality when she was out of her heels and walking barefoot.

The twilights out there were florid and melodramatic, great sweeps of orange and crimson and Lawrence-in-the-desert vermilion, then night dropping dark and hard like a slammed door.

What would Thoreau have made of Las Vegas: its lights and rackets, its trash and daydreams, its projections and hollow façades?

How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?

The worst thing about the explosion was how I carried it in my body—the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it. In my dreams, there was always a light way out and a dark way out. I had to go the dark way, because the bright way was hot and flickering with fire. But the dark way was where the bodies were.

I’d given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening so different from my father’s, but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company.

But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris—budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages—who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped. Even when he took things without asking, as he all too frequently did—little things were always disappearing, DVDs and school supplies from my locker, more than once I’d caught him going through my pockets for money—his own possessions meant so little to him that somehow it wasn’t stealing; whenever he came into cash himself, he split it with me down the middle and anything that belonged to him, he gave me gladly if I asked for it (and sometimes when I didn’t, as when Mr. Pavlikovsky’s gold lighter, which I’d admired in passing, turned up in the outside pocket of my backpack).

Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

But inwardly I was almost drunk at the lift in his mood—the same flood of elation I’d felt as a small child when the silences broke, when his footsteps grew light again and you heard him laughing at something, humming at the shaving mirror.

what seemed to baffle Xandra most was not his extreme drunkenness (he’d been virtually unconscious at the wheel) but the location of the accident—outside Vegas, heading west, into the desert. “He would have told me, he would have told me,” she was saying sorrowfully in response to some question or other of Courtney’s, only why, I thought bleakly, sitting on the floor with my hands over my eyes, did she think it was in my father’s nature to tell the truth about anything?

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.

How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.

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, in my darting sideways glance as I left the restaurant with Hobie, the very set of my head recalling his old, preening habit of checking himself out in any mirror-like surface.

With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game.

But those sparkling blue shallows—so enticing at first glance—had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.

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.

“It’s a joke, the Fabritius. It has a joke at its heart. And that’s what all the very greatest masters do. Rembrandt. Velázquez. Late Titian. They make jokes. They amuse themselves. They build up the illusion, the trick—but, step closer? it falls apart into brushstrokes. Abstract, unearthly. A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing. I

Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn’t been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect.

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.

I felt disincarnate, cut loose from myself. How it would feel to be back in my body again I couldn’t imagine.

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.

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.

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. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? 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.

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 combos of whatever booze and pills I happened to have on hand: only tolerance and ineptitude that I’d botched it, unpleasantly surprised when I woke up though relieved for Hobie that he hadn’t had to find me.

WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence:

I hadn’t even known I was hungry until I’d stepped into the hallway, but at that moment, standing there with a rough stomach and a bad taste in my mouth and the prospect of what would be my last freely chosen meal, it seemed to me that I’d never smelled anything quite so delicious as that sugary warmth: coffee and cinnamon, plain buttered rolls from the Continental breakfast.

“I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.’ ” “Yes—but why give it a name? Can’t they both be the same thing?”

Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean—mending old things, preserving them, looking after them—on some level there’s no rational grounds for it—”

it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you.

“Who’s to say that gamblers don’t really understand it better than anyone else? Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”

beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?

the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone.

It’s the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.

And—maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.