The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,301

be, I’d usually be a smart ass and say I wanted to be a blade runner or something like that.”

“God, I’m so haunted by that movie. I think about Tyrell’s niece a lot.”

“What do you mean?”

“That scene where’s she’s looking at the pictures on the piano. When she’s trying to figure out whether her memories belong to her or Tyrell’s niece. I go back through the past too, only looking for signs, you know? Things I should have picked up on, but missed?”

“Listen, you’re right, I think like that too, but, omens, signs, partial knowledge, there’s no logical way you could…” why couldn’t I ever get a sentence to come out right around her? “… can I just say how cuckoo it sounds? Especially when someone else says it? To blame yourself for not predicting the future?”

“Well—maybe, but Dr. Camenzind says we all do it. Accidents, catastrophes—something like seventy-five per cent of disaster victims are convinced there were warning signs they brushed off or didn’t pick up on correctly, and with children under eighteen, the percentage is even higher. But that doesn’t mean the signs weren’t there, does it?”

“I don’t think it’s like that. In hindsight—sure. But I think maybe it’s more like a column of figures where you add two numbers wrong at the start, and it throws the total. If you trace it back, you can see the mistake—the point where you would have had a different outcome.”

“Yes, but that’s almost as bad, isn’t it? To see the mistake, the place where you went wrong, and not be able to go back and fix it? My audition—” large gulp of wine—“pre-college orchestra at Juilliard, my solfège teacher had told me I might get second chair but if I played really well, I might have a shot at first. And I guess it was a big deal, sort of. But Welty—” yes, definitely, tears, eyes shining in the firelight—“I knew I was wrong nagging him to come uptown with me, there was no reason for him to come—Welty spoiled me rotten even when my mother was alive but after she died he spoiled me more, and it was a big day for me, sure, but was it as important as I made it seem? No. Because,” she was crying now, a little, “I didn’t even want to go to the museum, I wanted him to come uptown with me because I knew he’d take me out to lunch before the audition, anywhere I wanted—he should have stayed home that day, he had other stuff to do, they didn’t even let family sit in, he would have had to wait down the hall—”

“He knew what he was doing.”

She glanced up at me as if I’d said exactly the wrong thing; only I knew it was exactly the right thing if I could voice it correctly.

“The whole time we were together, he was talking about you. And—”

“And what?”

“Nothing!” I closed my eyes, overwhelmed with the wine, with her, with the impossibility of explaining it. “It’s just—his last moments on earth, you know? And the space between my life, and his, was very, very thin. There wasn’t any space. It was like something opened up between us. Like a huge flash of what was real—what mattered. No me, no him. We were the same person. Same thoughts—we didn’t have to talk. It was just a few minutes but it might have been years, we might as well still be there. And, um, I know this sounds weird—” in fact, it was a completely lunatic analogy, crackpot, insane, but I didn’t know any other way to work around to what I wanted to say—“but you know Barbara Guibbory, who does those seminars up in Rhinebeck, those past-life-regression things? Reincarnation and karmic ties and all that? Souls who have been together for a lot of lifetimes? I know, I know,” I said, at her startled (and slightly alarmed) look—“every time I see Barbara she tells me I need to chant Um or Rum or whatever to heal, like, the blocked chakras—‘deficient muladhara’—I’m not kidding you, that was her diagnosis of me, ‘unrooted…’ ‘constriction of the heart…’ ‘fragmented energy field…’ I was just standing there having a cocktail and minding my own business and here she comes drifting up telling me all these foods I need to eat to ground myself…” I was losing her, I could see it—“sorry, I’m wandering off topic a little, it’s just, well, we’ve had this discussion, all that stuff