The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,141

with us (where she’d had some interesting things to say about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) and though she had a reputation for being standoffish, she liked Boris. Anyone could see it. She laughed when he made jokes, acted goofy in his study group, and I’d seen her talking enthusiastically to him in the hall—Boris talking back just as enthusiastically, in his gesticulating Russian mode. Yet—mysteriously—he didn’t seem attracted to her at all.

“But why not?” I asked him. “She’s the best-looking girl in our class.” I’d always thought that Danes were large and blonde, but Saffi was smallish and brunette, with a fairy-tale quality that was accentuated by her glittery stage makeup in the professional photo I’d seen.

“Good looking yes. But she is not very hot.”

“Boris, she is smoking hot. Are you crazy?”

“Ah, she works too hard,” said Boris, dropping down beside me with a beer in one hand, reaching for my cigarette with the other. “Too straight. All the time studying or rehearsing or something. Kotku—” he blew out a cloud of smoke, handed the cigarette back to me—“she’s like us.”

I was silent. How had I gone from AP everything to being lumped in with a derelict like Kotku?

Boris nudged me. “I think you like her yourself. Saffi.”

“No, not really.”

“You do. Ask her out.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, although I knew I didn’t have the nerve. At my old school, where foreigners and exchange students tended to stand politely at the margins, someone like Saffi might have been more accessible but in Vegas she was much too popular, too surrounded by people—and there was also the biggish problem of what to ask her to do. In New York it would have been easy enough; I could have taken her ice skating, asked her to a movie or the planetarium. But I could scarcely see Saffi Caspersen sniffing glue or drinking beer from paper bags at the playground or doing any of the things that Boris and I did together.

iv.

I STILL SAW HIM—just not as much. More and more he spent nights with Kotku and her mother at the Double R Apartments—a transient hotel really, a broken down motor court from the 1950s, on the highway between the airport and the Strip, where guys who looked like illegal immigrants stood around the courtyard by the empty swimming pool and argued over motorcycle parts. (“Double R?” said Hadley. “You know what that stands for, right? ‘Rats and Roaches.’ ”) Kotku, mercifully, didn’t accompany Boris to my house all that much, but even when she wasn’t around he talked about her constantly. Kotku had cool taste in music and had made him a mix CD with a bunch of smoking hot hip-hop that I really had to listen to. Kotku liked her pizza with green peppers and olives only. Kotku really really wanted an electronic keyboard—also a Siamese kitten, or maybe a ferret, but wasn’t allowed to have pets at the Double R. “Serious, you need to spend more time with her, Potter,” he said, bumping my shoulder with his. “You’ll like her.”

“Oh come on,” I said, thinking of the smirky way she behaved around me—laughing at the wrong time, in a nasty way, always commanding me to go to the fridge to fetch her beers.

“No! She likes you! She does! I mean, she thinks of you more as a little brother. That’s what she said.”

“She never says a word to me.”

“That’s because you don’t talk to her.”

“Are you guys screwing?”

Boris made an impatient noise, the sound he made when things didn’t go his way.

“Dirty mind,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes, and then: “What? What do you think? Do you want me to make you a map?”

“Draw you a map.”

“Eh?”

“That’s the phrase. ‘Do you want me to draw you a map.’ ”

Boris rolled his eyes. Waving his hands around, he started in again about how intelligent Kotku was, how “crazy smart,” how wise she was and how much life she had lived and how unfair I was to judge her and look down on her without bothering to get to know her; but while I sat half listening to him talk, and half watching an old noir movie on television (Fallen Angel, Dana Andrews), I couldn’t help thinking about how he’d met Kotku in what was essentially Remedial Civics, the section for students who weren’t smart enough (even in our extremely non-demanding school) to pass without extra help. Boris—good at mathematics without trying and better in languages than