The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,222

blew in. And yet every time I devised some pretext to get her on her own, here he came, thump thump thump, sheepish grin, arm around her shoulder, wrecking everything. Conversation in the next room, a burst of laughter: were the two of them talking about me? Putting his hands on her waist! Calling her “Pips!” The only even vaguely tolerable or amusing moment of his visit was when Popchik—territorial in his old age—had jumped up unprovoked and bitten him on the thumb—“oh, God!” Hobie rushing for the alcohol, Pippa fretting, Everett trying to be cool but visibly put out: sure, dogs are great! I love them! we just never had them because my mom’s allergic. He was the “poor relation” (his phrase) of an old schoolmate of hers; American mother, numerous siblings, father who taught some incomprehensible mathematical/philosophical something-or-other at Cambridge; like her, he was a vegetarian “verging on vegan;” to my dismay, it had emerged that the two of them were sharing a flat (!)—he had of course slept in her room during the visit; and for five nights, the whole time he was there, I’d lain awake bilious with fury and sorrow, ears attuned to every rustle of bedclothes, every sigh and whisper from next door.

And yet—waving goodbye to Hobie and the Vogels, have a great time! then turning grimly away—what could I have expected? It had enraged me, cut me to the bone, the careful, kindly tone she had taken with me around this “Everett”—“no,” I said politely, when she asked me whether I was seeing someone, “not really,” although (I was proud of it in a lucid, gloomy way) I was in fact sleeping with two different girls, neither of whom knew about the other. One of them had a boyfriend in another town and the other had a fiancé whom she was tired of, whose calls she screened when we were in bed together. Both of them were pretty and the girl with the cuckolded fiancé was downright beautiful—a baby Carole Lombard—but neither of them was real for me; they were only stand-ins for her.

I was irritated at how I felt. To sit around “heartbroken” (the first word, unfortunately, that came to mind) was foolish, it was maudlin and contemptible and weak—oh boo hoo, she’s in London, she’s with someone else, go pick up some wine and fuck Carole Lombard, get over it. But the thought of her gave me such continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock: what time was it in London? always adding and subtracting, totting up the time difference, compulsively checking the London weather on my phone, 53 degrees Fahrenheit, 10:12 p.m. and light precipitation, standing on the corner of Greenwich and Seventh Avenue by boarded-up St. Vincent’s heading downtown to meet my dealer, and what about Pippa, where was she? in the back of a taxicab, out at dinner, drinking with people I didn’t know, asleep in a bed I’d never seen? I desperately wanted to see photos of her flat, in order to add some much-needed detail to my fantasies, but was too embarrassed to ask. With a pang I thought of her bedsheets, what they must be like, a dark dorm-room color as I imagined them, tumbled, unwashed, a student’s dark nest, her freckled cheek pale against a maroon or purple pillowcase, English rain tapping against her window. Her photographs, lining the hall outside my bedroom—many different Pippas, at many different ages—were a daily torment, always unexpected, always new; but though I tried to keep my eyes away always it seemed I was glancing up by mistake and there she was, laughing at somebody else’s joke or smiling at someone who wasn’t me, always a fresh pain, a blow straight to the heart.

And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn’t see her as I did—if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her—that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if