The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,223

she knew just how beautiful I found her. But this had never happened. Angrily, I concentrated on her flaws, willfully studying the photographs that caught her at awkward ages and less flattering angles—long nose, thin cheeks, her eyes (despite their heartbreaking color) naked-looking with their pale lashes—Huck-Finn plain. Yet all these aspects were—to me—so tender and particular they moved me to despair. With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination, from the antique valentines and embroidered Chinese coats she collected to her tiny scented bottles from Neal’s Yard Remedies; there had always been something bright and magical about her unknown faraway life: Vaud Suisse, 23 rue de Tombouctou, Blenheim Crescent W11 2EE, furnished rooms in countries I had never seen. Clearly this Everett (“poor as a churchmouse”—his phrase) was living off her money, Uncle Welty’s money rather, old Europe preying off young America, to use a phrase I’d employed in my Henry James paper in my last semester of school.

Could I write him a check to make him leave her alone? Alone in the shop, in the slow cool afternoons, the thought had crossed my mind: fifty thousand if you walk out tonight, a hundred if you never see her again. Money was a concern with him, clearly; during his visit he’d always been digging anxiously in his pockets, constant stops at the cash machine, taking out twenty bucks at a time, good God.

It was hopeless. There was simply no way in hell she could matter half as much to Mr. Music Library as she did to me. We belonged together; there was a dream rightness and magic to it, inarguable; the thought of her flooded every corner of my mind with light and poured brightness into miraculous lofts I hadn’t even known were there, vistas that seemed to exist not at all except in relationship to her. Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention a recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy. Certain objects that passed through the shop—a Pleyel piano; a strange little scratched-up Russian cameo—seemed to be tangible artifacts of the life that she and I, by rights, ought to be living together. I wrote thirty-page emails to her that I erased without sending, opting instead for the mathematical formula I’d devised to keep from making too big a fool of myself: always three lines shorter than the email she’d sent, always one day longer than I’d waited for her reply. Sometimes in bed—adrift in my sighing, opiated, erotic reveries—I carried on long candid conversations with her: we are inseparable, I imagined us saying (cornily) to each other, each with a hand on the other’s cheek, we can never be apart. Like a stalker, I hoarded a snippet of autumn-leaf hair I’d retrieved from the trash after she’d trimmed her bangs in the bathroom—and, even more creepily, an unwashed shirt, still intoxicating with her hay-smelling, vegetarian sweat.

It was hopeless. More than hopeless: humiliating. Always leaving the door of my room partially open when she came to visit, a not-so-subtle invitation. Even the adorable drag in her step (like the little mermaid, too fragile to walk on land) drove me crazy. She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone. Twice I’d tried to kiss her: once drunk in a taxicab; once at the airport, desperate at the thought that I would not be seeing her again for months (or, who knew, years)—“I’m sorry,” I said, a beat too late—

“It’s okay.”

“No, really, I—”

“Listen—” sweet unfocused smile—“it’s fine. But they’re boarding my flight soon” (they weren’t, in fact). “I have to go. Take care of yourself, okay?”

Take care. What on earth did she see in this “Everett”? I could only think how boring she must find me if she preferred such a lukewarm gloop of a guy to me. Someday,