The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,138

San Bin!’ drinking this crazy ginseng tea they all drink, tastes like dust but I love the smell, like the smell of luck, and it was incredible, we were on such a run, good God, all these Chinese women lined up behind us, we were hitting every hand—Do you think,” he said to Xandra, “it would be okay if I took them back into the baccarat salon to meet Diego? I’m sure they’d get a huge kick out of Diego. I wonder if he’s still on shift. What do you think?”

“He won’t be there.” Xandra looked good—bright-eyed and sparkly—in a velvet minidress and jewelled sandals, and redder lipstick than she usually wore. “Not now.”

“Sometimes, holidays, he works a double shift.”

“Oh, they don’t want to go back there. It’s a hike. It’ll take half an hour to get there through the casino floor and back.”

“Yeah, but I know he’d like to meet my kids.”

“Yeah, probably so,” Xandra said agreeably, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass. The tiny gold dove on her necklace glistened at the base of her throat. “He’s a nice guy. But Larry, I mean it, I know you don’t take me seriously but if you start getting too chummy with the dealers some day you’re going to go down there and have security on your ass.”

My father laughed. “God!” he said jubilantly, slapping the table, so loudly that I flinched. “If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought Diego really was helping at the table today. I mean, maybe he was. Telepathic baccarat! Get your Soviet researchers working on that,” he said to Boris. “That’ll straighten out your economic system over there.”

Boris—mildly—cleared his throat and lifted his water glass. “Sorry, may I say something?”

“Is it speechmaking time? Were we meant to prepare toasts?”

“I thank you all for your company. And I wish us all health, and happiness, and that we all shall live until the next Christmas.”

In the surprised silence that followed, a champagne cork popped in the kitchen, a burst of laughter. It was just past midnight: two minutes into Christmas Day. Then my father leaned back in his chair, and laughed. “Merry Christmas!” he roared, producing from his pocket a jewelry box which he slid over to Xandra, and two stacks of twenties (Five hundred dollars! Each!) which he tossed across the table to Boris and me. And though in the clockless, temperature-controlled casino night, words like day and Christmas were fairly meaningless constructs, happiness, amidst the loudly clinked glasses, didn’t seem quite such a doomed or fatal idea.

Chapter 6.

Wind, Sand and Stars

i.

OVER THE NEXT YEAR, I was so preoccupied in trying to block New York and my old life out of my mind that I hardly noticed the time pass. Days ran changelessly in the seasonless glare: hungover mornings on the school bus and our backs raw and pink from falling asleep by the pool, the gasoline reek of vodka and Popper’s constant smell of wet dog and chlorine, Boris teaching me to count, ask directions, offer a drink in Russian, just as patiently as he’d taught me to swear. Yes, please, I’d like that. Thank you, you are very kind. Govorite li vy po-angliyski? Do you speak English? Ya nemnogo govoryu po-russki. I do speak Russian, a little.

Winter or summer, the days were dazzling; the desert air burned our nostrils and scraped our throats dry. Everything was funny; everything made us laugh. Sometimes, just before sundown, just as the blue of the sky began darkening to violet, we had these wild, electric-lined, Maxfield Parrish clouds rolling out gold and white into the desert like Divine Revelation leading the Mormons west. Govorite medlenno, I said, speak slowly, and Povtorite, pozhaluysta. Repeat, please. But we were so attuned to each other that we didn’t need to talk at all if we didn’t want to; we knew how to tip each other over in hysterics with an arch of the eyebrow or quirk of the mouth. Nights, we ate crosslegged on the floor, leaving greasy fingerprints on our schoolbooks. Our diet had made us malnourished, with soft brown bruises on our arms and legs—vitamin deficiency, said the nurse at school, who gave us each a painful shot in the ass and a colorful jar of children’s chewables. (“My bottom hurts,” said Boris, rubbing his rear end and cursing the metal seats on the school bus.) I was freckled head to toe from all the swimming we did; my hair (longer then than