Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

“I—” In spite of myself, I was relieved that I hadn’t been looking at porn once he began surfing back through the history. I’d meant to buy myself a cheap laptop with the five hundred bucks my dad had given me for Christmas, but somehow that money had gotten away from me—Missing Art, I told myself; no reason to panic over that word missing, destroyed art was missing art, wasn’t it? Even though I hadn’t put down a name, it worried me that I’d tried to check out the database from my school’s IP address. For all I knew, the investigators who’d been to see me had kept track, and knew that I was in Vegas; the connection, though small, was real.

The painting was hidden, quite cleverly as I thought, in a clean cotton pillowcase duct-taped to the back of my headboard. I’d learned, from Hobie, how carefully old things had to be handled (sometimes he used white cotton gloves for particularly delicate objects) and I never touched it with my bare hands, only by the edges. I never took it out except when Dad and Xandra weren’t there and I knew they wouldn’t be back for a while—though even when I couldn’t see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.

Taking it out, handling it, looking at it, was nothing to be done lightly. Even in the act of reaching for it there was a sense of expansion, a waft and a lifting; and at some strange point, when I’d looked at it long enough, eyes dry from the refrigerated desert air, all space appeared to vanish between me and it so that when I looked up it was the painting and not me that was real.

1622–1654. Son of a schoolteacher. Fewer than a dozen works accurately attributed to him. According to van Bleyswijck, the city historian of Delft, Fabritius was in his studio painting the sexton of Delft’s Oude Kerk when, at half past ten in the morning, the explosion of the powder magazine took place. The body of the painter Fabritius had been pulled from the wreckage of his studio by neighboring burghers, “with great sorrow,” the books said, “and no little effort.” What held me fast in these brief library-book accounts was the element of chance: random disasters, mine and his, converging on the same unseen point, the big bang as my father called it, not with any kind of sarcasm or dismissiveness but instead a respectful acknowledgment for the powers of fortune that governed his own life. You could study the connections for years and never work it out—it was all about things coming together, things falling apart, time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness. The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

Upstairs, the tap water from the bathroom sink was too chlorinated to drink. Nights, a dry wind blew trash and beer cans down the street. Moisture and humidity, Hobie had told me, were the worst things in the world for antiques; on the tall-case clock he’d been repairing when I left, he’d showed me how the wood had been rotted out underneath from the damp (“someone sluicing stone floors with a bucket, you see how soft this wood is, how worn away?”)

Time warp: a way of seeing things twice, or more than twice. Just as my dad’s rituals, his betting systems, all his oracles and magic were predicated on a field awareness of unseen patterns, so too the explosion in Delft was part of a complex of events that ricocheted into the present. The multiple outcomes could make you dizzy. “The money’s not important,” said my dad. “All money represents is the energy of the thing, you know? It’s how you track it. The flow of chance.” Steadily the goldfinch gazed at me, with shiny, changeless eyes. The wooden panel was tiny, “only slightly larger than an A-4 sheet of paper” as one of my art books had pointed out, although all that dates-and-dimensions stuff, the dead textbook info, was as irrelevant in its way as the sports-page stats when the Packers were up by two in the fourth quarter and a thin icy snow had begun to fall on the field. The painting, the magic and aliveness of it, was like that odd airy moment of the snow falling, greenish light and flakes whirling in the cameras, where you no longer cared about the game, who won or lost, but just wanted to drink in that speechless windswept moment. When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

v.

THE GOOD THING: I was pleased at how nice my dad was being. He’d been taking me out to dinners—nice dinners, at white-tablecloth restaurants, just the two of us—at least once a week. Sometimes he invited Boris to come, invitations Boris always jumped to accept—the lure of a good meal was powerful enough to override even the gravitational tug of Kotku—but strangely, I found myself enjoying it more when it was just my dad and me.

“You know,” he said, at one of these dinners when we were lingering late over dessert—talking about school, about all sorts of things (this new, involved dad! where had he come from?)—“you know, I really have enjoyed getting to know you since you’ve been out here, Theo.”

“Well, uh, yeah, me too,” I said, embarrassed but also meaning it.

“I mean—” my dad ran a hand through his hair—“thanks for giving me a second chance, kiddo. Because I made a huge mistake. I never should have let my relationship with your mother get in the way of my relationship with you. No, no,” he said, raising his hand, “I’m not blaming anything on your mom, I’m way past that. It’s just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close—” he laughed, sadly—“there wasn’t much room for three.”

“Well—” My mother and I tiptoeing around the apartment, whispering, trying to avoid him. Secrets, laughter. “I mean, I just—”

“No, no, I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m the dad, I’m the one who should have known better. It’s just that it got to be a kind of vicious circle if you know what I mean. Me feeling alienated, bummed-out, drinking a lot. And I never should have let that happen. I missed, like, some really important years in your life. I’m the one that has to live with that.”

“Um—” I felt so bad I didn’t know what to say.

“Not trying to put you on the spot, pal. Just saying I’m glad that we’re friends now.”

“Well yeah,” I said, staring into my scraped-clean crème brûlée plate, “me too.”

“And, I mean—I want to make it up to you. See, I’m doing so well on the sports book this year—” my dad took a sip of his coffee—“I want to open you a savings account. You know, just put a little something aside. Because, you know, I really didn’t do right by you as far as your mom, you know, and all those months that I was gone.”

“Dad,” I said, disconcerted. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh, but I want to! You have a Social Security number, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I’ve already got ten thousand set aside. That’s a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I’ll open an account in your name, okay?”

vi.

APART FROM SCHOOL, I’D hardly seen Boris, except for a Saturday afternoon trip when my dad had taken us in to the Carnegie Deli at the Mirage for sable and bialys. But then, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, he came thumping upstairs when I wasn’t expecting him and said: “Your dad has been having a bad run, did you know that?”

I put down Silas Marner, which we were reading for school. “What?”

“Well, he’s been playing at two hundred dollar tables—two hundred dollars a pop,” he said. “You can lose a thousand in five minutes, easy.”

“A thousand dollars is nothing for him,” I said; and then, when Boris did not reply: “How much did he say he lost?”

“Didn’t say,” said Boris. “But a lot.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just bullshitting you?”

Boris laughed. “Could be,” he said, sitting on the bed and leaning back on his elbows. “You don’t know anything about it?”

“Well—” As far as I knew, my father had cleaned up when the Bills had won the week before. “I don’t see how he can be doing too bad. He’s been taking me to Bouchon and places like that.”

“Yes, but maybe is good reason for that,” said Boris sagely.

“Reason? What reason?”

Boris seemed about to say something, then changed his mind.

“Well, who knows,” he said, lighting a cigarette and taking a sharp drag. “Your dad—he’s part Russian.”

“Right,” I said, reaching for the cigarette myself. I’d often heard Boris and my father, in their arm-waving “intellectual talks,” discussing the many celebrated gamblers in Russian history: Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, other names I didn’t know.

“Well—very Russian, you know, to complain how bad things are all the time! Even if life is great—keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.” He was wearing a discarded dress shirt of my father’s, washed nearly transparent and so big that it billowed on him like some item of Arab or Hindu costume. “Only, your dad, sometimes is hard to tell between joking and serious.” Then, watching me carefully: “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“He knows we talk. That’s why he told me. He wouldn’t tell me if he didn’t want you to know.”

“Yeah.” I was fairly sure this wasn’t the case. My dad was the kind of guy who in the right mood would happily discuss his personal life with his boss’s wife or some other inappropriate person.

“He’d tell you himself,” said Boris, “if he thought you wanted to know.”

“Look. Like you said—” My dad had a taste for masochism, the overblown gesture; on our Sundays together, he loved to exaggerate his misfortunes, groaning and staggering, complaining loudly of being ‘wiped out’ or ‘destroyed’ after a lost game even as he’d won half a dozen others and was totting up the profits on the calculator. “Sometimes he lays it on a bit thick.”

“Well, yes, is true,” said Boris sensibly. He took the cigarette back, inhaled, and then, companionably, passed it to me. “You can have the rest.”

“No, thanks.”

There was a bit of a silence, during which we could hear the television crowd roar of my dad’s football game. Then Boris leaned back on his elbows again and said: “What is there to eat downstairs?”

“Not a motherfucking thing.”

“There was leftover Chinese, I thought.”

“Not any more. Somebody ate it.”

“Shit. Maybe I’ll go to Kotku’s, her mom has frozen pizzas. You want to come?”

“No, thanks.”

Boris laughed, and threw out some fake-looking gang sign. “Suit yourself, yo,” he said, in his “gangsta” voice (discernible from his regular voice only by the hand gesture and the “yo”) as he got up and roll-walked out. “Nigga gotz to eat.”

vii.

THE PECULIAR THING ABOUT Boris and Kotku was how rapidly their relationship had taken on a punchy, irritable quality. They still made out constantly, and could hardly keep their hands off each other, but the minute they opened their mouths it was like listening to people who had been married fifteen years. They bickered over small sums of money, like who had paid for their food-court lunches last; and their conversations, when I could overhear them, went something like this:

Boris: “What! I was trying to be nice!”

Kotku: “Well, it wasn’t very nice.”

Boris, running to catch up with her: “I mean it, Kotyku! Honest! Was only trying to be nice!”

Kotku: [pouting]

Boris, trying unsuccessfully to kiss her: “What did I do? What’s the matter? Why do you think I’m not nice any more?”

Kotku: [silence]

The problem of Mike the pool man—Boris’s romantic rival—had been solved by Mike’s extremely convenient decision to join the Coast Guard. Kotku, apparently, still spent hours on the phone with him every week, which for whatever reason didn’t trouble Boris (“She’s only trying to support him, see”). But it was disturbing how jealous he was of her at school. He knew her schedule by heart and the second our classes were over he raced to find her, as if he suspected her of two-timing him during Spanish for the Workplace or whatever. One day after school, when Popper and I were by ourselves at home, he telephoned me to ask: “Do you know some guy named Tyler Olowska?”

“No.”

“He’s in your American History class.”

“Sorry. It’s a big class.”

“Well, look. Can you find out about him? Where he lives maybe?”

“Where he lives? Is this about Kotku?”

All of a sudden—surprising me greatly—the doorbell rang: four stately chimes. In all my time in Las Vegas no one had ever rung the doorbell of our house, not even once. Boris, on the other end, had heard it too. “What is that?” he said. The dog was running in circles and barking his head off.

“Someone at the door.”

“The door?” On our deserted street—no neighbors, no garbage pickup, no streetlights even—this was a major event. “Who do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. Let me call you back.”

I grabbed up Popchyk—who was practically hysterical—and (as he wriggled and shrieked in my arms, struggling to get down) managed to get the door open with one hand.

“Wouldja look at that,” a pleasant, Jersey-accented voice said. “What a cute little fella.”

I found myself blinking up in the late afternoon glare at a very tall, very very tanned, very thin man, of indeterminate age. He looked partly like a rodeo guy and partly like a fucked-up lounge entertainer. His gold-rimmed aviators were tinted purple at the top; he was wearing a white sports jacket over a red cowboy shirt with pearl snaps, and black jeans, but the main thing I noticed was his hair: part toupee, part transplanted or sprayed-on, with a texture like fiberglass insulation and a dark brown color like shoe polish in the tin.

“Go on, put him down!” he said, nodding at Popper, who was still struggling to get away. His voice was deep, and his manner calm and friendly; except for the accent he was the perfect Texan, boots and all. “Let him run around! I don’t mind. I love dogs.”

When I let Popchyk loose, he stooped to pat his head, in a posture reminiscent of a lanky cowboy by the campfire. As odd as the stranger looked, with the hair and all, I couldn’t help but admire how easy and comfortable he seemed in his skin.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Cute little fella. Yes you are!” His tanned cheeks had a wrinkled, dried-apple quality, creased with tiny lines. “Have three of my own at home. Mini pennys.”

“Excuse me?”

He stood; when he smiled at me, he displayed even, dazzlingly white teeth.

“Miniature pinschers,” he said. “Neurotic little bastards, chew the house to pieces when I’m gone, but I love them. What’s your name, kid?”

“Theodore Decker,” I said, wondering who he was.

Again he smiled; his eyes behind the semi-dark aviators were small and twinkly. “Hey! Another New Yorker! I can hear it in your voice, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

“A Manhattan boy, that would be my guess. Correct?”

“Right,” I said, wondering exactly what it was in my voice that he’d heard. No one had ever guessed I was from Manhattan just from hearing me talk.

“Well, hey—I’m from Canarsie. Born and bred. Always nice to meet another guy from back East. I’m Naaman Silver.” He held out his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Silver.”

“Mister!” He laughed fondly. “I love a polite kid. They don’t make many like you any more. You Jewish, Theodore?”

“No, sir,” I said, and then wished I’d said yes.

“Well, tell you what. Anybody from New York, in my book they’re an honorary Jew. That’s how I look at it. You ever been to Canarsie?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it used to be a fantastic community back in the day, though now—” He shrugged. “My family, they were there for four generations. My grandfather Saul ran one of the first kosher restaurants in America, see. Big, famous place. Closed when I was a kid, though. And then my mother moved us over to Jersey after my father died so we could be closer to my uncle Harry and his family.” He put his hand on his thin hip and looked at me. “Your dad here, Theo?”

“No.”

“No?” He looked past me, into the house. “That’s a shame. Know when he’ll be back?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Sir. I like that. You’re a good kid. Tell you what, you remind me of myself at your age. Fresh from yeshiva—” he held up his hands, gold bracelets on the tanned, hairy wrists—“and these hands? White, like milk. Like yours.”

“Um”—I was still standing awkwardly in the door—“would you like to come in?” I wasn’t sure if I should invite a stranger in the house, except I was lonely and bored. “You can wait if you want. But I’m not sure when he’ll be home.”

Again, he smiled. “No thanks. I have a bunch of other stops to make. But I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna be straight with you, because you’re a nice kid. I got five points on your dad. You know what that means?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, bless you. You don’t need to know, and I hope you never do know. But let me just say it aint a good business policy.” He put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Believe it or not, Theodore, I got people skills. I don’t like to come to a man’s home and deal with his child, like I’m doing with you now. That’s not right. Normally I would go to your dad’s place of work and we would have our little sit-down there. Except he’s kind of a hard man to run down, as maybe you already know.”

In the house I could hear the telephone ringing: Boris, I was fairly sure. “Maybe you better go answer that,” said Mr. Silver pleasantly.

“No, that’s okay.”

“Go ahead. I think maybe you should. I’ll be waiting right here.”

Feeling increasingly disturbed I went back in and answered the telephone. As predicted, it was Boris. “Who was that?” he said. “Not Kotku, was it?”

“No. Look—”

“I think she went home with that Tyler Olowska guy. I got this funny feeling. Well, maybe she didn’t go home home with him. But they left school together—she was talking to him in the parking lot. See, she has her last class with him, woodwork skills or whatever—”

“Boris, I’m sorry, I really can’t talk now, I’ll call you back, okay?”

“I’m taking your word for it that wasn’t your dad in there on the horn,” said Mr. Silver when I returned to the door. I looked past him, to the white Cadillac parked by the curb. There were two men in the car—a driver, and another man in the front seat. “That wasn’t your dad, right?”

“No sir.”

“You would tell me if it was, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

I was silent, not knowing what to say.

“Doesn’t matter, Theodore.” Again, he stooped to scratch Popper behind the ears. “I’ll run him down sooner or later. You’ll be sure to remember what I told him? And that I stopped by?”

“Yes sir.”

He pointed a long finger at me. “What’s my name again?”

“Mr. Silver.”

“Mr. Silver. That’s right. Just checking.”

“What do you want me to tell him?”

“Tell him I said gambling’s for tourists,” he said. “Not locals.” Lightly, lightly, with his thin brown hand, he touched me on the top of the head. “God bless.”

viii.

WHEN BORIS SHOWED UP at the door around half an hour later, I tried to tell him about the visit from Mr. Silver, but though he listened, a little, mainly he was furious at Kotku for flirting with some other boy, this Tyler Olowska or whatever, a rich stoner kid a year older than us who was on the golf team. “Fuck her,” he said throatily while we were sitting on the floor downstairs at my house smoking Kotku’s pot. “She’s not answering her phone. I know she’s with him now, I know it.”

“Come on.” As worried as I was about Mr. Silver, I was even more sick of talking about Kotku. “He was probably just buying some weed.”

“Yah, but is more to it, I know. She never wants me to stay over with her any more, have you noticed that? Always has stuff to do now. She’s not even wearing the necklace I bought her.”

My glasses were lopsided and I pushed them back up on the bridge of my nose. Boris hadn’t even bought the stupid necklace but shoplifted it at the mall, snatching it and running out while I (upstanding citizen, in school blazer) occupied the salesgirl’s attention with dumb but polite questions about what Dad and I ought to get Mom for her birthday. “Huh,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.

Boris scowled, his brow like a thundercloud. “She’s a whore. Other day? Was pretending to cry in class—trying to make this Olowska bastard feel sorry for her. What a cunt.”

I shrugged—no argument from me on that point—and passed him the reefer.

“She only likes him because he has money. His family has two Mercedes. E class.”

“That’s an old lady car.”

“Nonsense. In Russia, is what mobsters drive. And—” he took a deep hit, holding it in, waving his hands, eyes watering, wait, wait, this is the best part, hold on, get this, would you?—“you know what he calls her?”

“Kotku?” Boris was so insistent about calling her Kotku that people at school—teachers, even—had begun calling her Kotku as well.

“That’s right!” said Boris, outraged, smoke erupting from his mouth. “My name! The kliytchka I gave her. And, other day in the hallway? I saw him ruffle her on the head.”

There were a couple of half-melted peppermints from my dad’s pocket on the coffee table, along with some receipts and change, and I unwrapped one and put it in my mouth. I was as high as a paratrooper and the sweetness tingled all through me, like fire. “Ruffled her?” I said, the candy clicking loudly against my teeth. “Come again?”

“Like this,” he said, making a tousling motion with his hand as he took one last hit off the joint and stubbed it out. “Don’t know the word.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, rolling my head back against the couch. “Say, you ought to try one of these peppermints. They taste really great.”

Boris scrubbed a hand down his face, then shook his head like a dog throwing off water. “Wow,” he said, running both hands through his tangled-up hair.

“Yeah. Me too,” I said, after a vibrating pause. My thoughts were stretched-out and viscid, slow to wade to the surface.

“What?”

“I’m fucked up.”

“Oh yeah?” He laughed. “How fucked up?”

“Pretty far up there, pal.” The peppermint on my tongue felt intense and huge, the size of a boulder, like I could hardly talk with it in my mouth.

A peaceful silence followed. It was about five thirty in the afternoon but the light was still pure and stark. Some white shirts of mine 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 I wanted to hide it in the dumpster a few houses down (which had never been emptied the whole time I’d lived in Vegas) or over in one of the abandoned houses across the street. Boris’s house was no safer than mine, and there was no one else I knew well enough or trusted. The only other place was school, also a bad idea, but though I knew there had to be a better choice I couldn’t think of it. Every so often they had random locker inspections at school and now—connected as I was, through Boris, to Kotku—I was possibly the sort of dirtbag they might randomly inspect. Still, even if someone found it in my locker—whether the principal, or Mr. Detmars the scary basketball coach, or even the Rent-a-Cops from the security firm whom they brought in to scare the students from time to time—still, it would be better than having it found by Dad or Mr. Silver.

The painting, inside the pillowcase, was wrapped in several layers of taped drawing paper—good paper, archival paper, that I’d taken from the art room at school—with an inner, double layer of clean white cotton dishcloth to protect the surface from the acids in the paper (not that there were any). But I’d taken the painting out so often to look at it—opening the top flap of the taped edge to slide it out—that the paper was torn and the tape wasn’t even sticky any more. After lying in bed for a few minutes staring at the ceiling, I got up and retrieved the extra-large roll of heavy-duty packing tape left over from our move, and then untaped the pillowcase from behind the headboard.

Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow.

Little bird; yellow bird. Shaking free of my daze I slid it back in the paper-wrapped dishtowel and wrapped it again with two or three (four? five?) of my dad’s old sports pages, then—impulsively, really getting into it in my own stoned, determined way—wound it around and around with tape until not a shred of newsprint was visible and the entire X-tra large roll of tape was gone. Nobody was going to be opening that package on a whim. Even if with a knife, a good one, not just scissors, it would take a good long time to get into it. At last, when I was done—the bundle looked like some weird science-fiction cocoon—I slipped the mummified painting, pillowcase and all, in my book bag, and put it under the covers by my feet. Irritably, with a groan, Popper shifted over to make room. Tiny as he was, and ridiculous-looking, still he was a fierce barker and territorial about his place next to me; and I knew if anyone opened the bedroom door while I was sleeping—even Xandra or my dad, neither of whom he liked much—he would jump up and raise the alarm.