The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,199

Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place. Maybe it was just I’d sobered up a bit, no longer the chronic waste and splendor of those blazing adolescent drunks, our own little warrior tribe of two rampaging in the desert; maybe this was just how it was when you got older, although it was impossible to imagine Boris (in Warsaw, Karmeywallag, New Guinea, wherever) living a sedate prelude-to-adulthood life such as the one I’d fallen into. Andy and I—even Tom Cable and I—had always talked obsessively about what we were going to be when we grew up, but with Boris, the future had never appeared to enter his head any further than his next meal. I could not envision him preparing in any way to earn a living or to be a productive member of society. And yet to be with Boris was to know that life was full of great, ridiculous possibilities—far bigger than anything they taught in school. I’d long ago given up trying to text him or call; messages to Kotku’s phone went unanswered, his home number in Vegas had been disconnected. I could not imagine—given his wide sphere of movement—that I would ever see him again. And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old Polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

And—sometimes, unexpectedly, with a sharpness that was almost pain—I remembered my father. Chinatown made me think of him in its flash and seediness, its slippery unreadable moods: mirrors and fishtanks, shop windows with plastic flowers and pots of lucky bamboo. Sometimes when I walked down to Canal Street for Hobie, to buy rottenstone and Venice turpentine at Pearl Paint, I ended up drifting over to Mulberry Street to a restaurant my dad had liked, not far from the E train, eight stairs down to a basement with stained Formica tables where I bought crispy scallion pancakes, spicy pork, dishes I had to point at because the menu was in Chinese. The first time I’d shown up at Hobie’s laden with greasy paper bags his blank expression had stopped me cold, and I stood in the middle of the floor like a sleepwalker awakened mid-dream wondering what exactly I’d been thinking—not of Hobie, certainly; he wasn’t the person who craved Chinese food all hours of the day and night.

“Oh, I do like it,” said Hobie hastily, “only I never think of it.” And we ate downstairs in the shop straight from the cartons, Hobie seated atop a stool in his black work apron and sleeves rolled to the elbow, the chopsticks oddly small-looking in his large fingers.

iii.

THE INFORMAL NATURE OF my stay at Hobie’s worried me too. Though Hobie himself, in his foggy beneficence, didn’t appear to mind me at his house, Mr. Bracegirdle clearly viewed it as a temporary arrangement and both he and my counselor at school had taken great pains to explain that though the dormitories at my college were reserved for older students, something could be worked out in my case. But whenever the topic of living arrangements came up, I fell silent and stared at my shoes. The residence halls were crowded, fly-specked, with a graffiti-scrawled cage lift that clanked like a prison elevator: walls papered with band flyers, floors sticky with spilled beer, zombified mob of blanket-wrapped hulks drowsing on the sofas in the TV room and wasted-looking guys with facial hair—grown men in my view, big scary guys in their twenties—throwing empty forty-ounce cans at each other in the hall. “Well, you’re still a bit young,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, when—cornered—I expressed my reservations, although the true reason for my reservations was something I couldn’t discuss: how—given my circumstances—could I possibly live with a roommate? What about security? Sprinkler systems? Theft? The school is not responsible for the personal property of students, said the handbook I’d been given. We recommend that students take out a dorm insurance policy on any valuable objects that may be accompanying them to school.

In a trance of anxiety, I threw myself into the task of being indispensable to Hobie: running errands, cleaning brushes, helping him inventory his restorations and sort through fittings and old pieces of cabinet wood. While he carved