The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,151

were hanging outside by the pool and they were dazzling, billowing and flapping like sails. I closed my eyes, red burning through my eyelids, sinking back into the (suddenly very comfortable) couch as if it were a rocking boat, and thought about the Hart Crane we’d been reading in English. Brooklyn Bridge. How had I never read that poem back in New York? And how had I never paid attention to the bridge when I saw it practically every day? Seagulls and dizzying drops. I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights…

“I could strangle her,” Boris said abruptly.

“What?” I said, startled, having heard only the word strangle and Boris’s unmistakably ugly tone.

“Scrawny fucking bint. She makes me so mad.” Boris nudged me with his shoulder. “Come on, Potter. Wouldn’t you like to wipe that smirk off her face?”

“Well…” I said, after a dazed pause; clearly this was a trick question. “What’s a bint?”

“Same as a cunt, basically.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, who does she.”

“Right.”

There followed a long and weird enough silence that I thought about getting up and putting some music on, although I couldn’t decide what. Anything upbeat seemed wrong and the last thing I wanted to do was put on something dark or angsty that would get him stirred up.

“Um,” I said, after what I hoped was a decently long pause, “The War of the Worlds comes on in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll give her War of the Worlds,” said Boris darkly. He stood up.

“Where are you going?” I said. “To the Double R?”

Boris scowled. “Go ahead, laugh,” he said bitterly, elbowing on his gray sovietskoye raincoat. “It’s going to be the Three Rs for your dad if he doesn’t pay the money he owes that guy.”

“Three Rs?”

“Revolver, roadside, or roof,” said Boris, with a black, Slavic-sounding chuckle.

ix.

WAS THAT A MOVIE or something? I wondered. Three Rs? Where had he come up with that? Though I’d done a fairly good job of putting the afternoon’s events out of my mind, Boris had thoroughly freaked me out with his parting comment and I sat downstairs rigidly for an hour or so with War of the Worlds on but the sound off, listening to the crash of the icemaker and the rattle of wind in the patio umbrella. Popper, who had picked up on my mood, was just as keyed-up as I was and kept barking sharply and hopping off the sofa to check out noises around the house—so that when, not long after dark, a car did actually turn into the driveway, he dashed to the door and set up a racket that scared me half to death.

But it was only my father. He looked rumpled and glazed, and not in a very good mood.

“Dad?” I was still high enough that my voice came out sounding way too blown and odd.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at me.

“There was a guy here. A Mr. Silver.”

“Oh, yeah?” said my dad, casually enough. But he was standing very still with his hand on the banister.

“He said he was trying to get in touch with you.”

“When was this?” he said, coming into the room.

“About four this afternoon, I guess.”

“Was Xandra here?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

He lay a hand on my shoulder, and seemed to think for a minute. “Well,” he said, “I’d appreciate if you didn’t say anything about it.”

The end of Boris’s joint was, I realized, still in the ashtray. He saw me looking at it, and picked it up and sniffed it.

“Thought I smelled something,” he said, dropping it in his jacket pocket. “You reek a bit, Theo. Where have you boys been getting this?”

“Is everything okay?”

My dad’s eyes looked a bit red and unfocused. “Sure it is,” he said. “I’m just going to go upstairs and make a few calls.” He gave off a strong odor of stale tobacco smoke and the ginseng tea he always drank, a habit he’d picked up from the Chinese businessmen in the baccarat salon: it gave his sweat a sharp, foreign smell. As I watched him walk up the steps to the landing, I saw him retrieve the joint-end from his jacket pocket and run it under his nose again, ruminatively.

x.

ONCE I WAS UPSTAIRS in my room, with the door locked, and Popper still edgy and pacing stiffly around—my thoughts went to the painting. I had been proud of myself for the pillowcase-behind-the-headboard idea, but now I realized how stupid it was to have the painting in the house at all—not that I had any options unless