The Goldfinch

Artist’s loft, without the art!

‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.’

It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless.

Caught between sneezes, I gave a bright, Russian-accented shrug I’d picked up from Boris: anything.

I know. I was dying for a beer but I knew better than to go in a deli and try to buy one without ID.

And when I looked away for a second and then looked back, I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn’t allowed to turn around—it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were—but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn’t alive, not exactly, she wasn’t dead either because she wasn’t yet born, and yet never not born—as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions, the before-Christmas smile of someone with a secret too wonderful to let slip, just yet: well, you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you? But just as she was about to speak—drawing an affectionate exasperated breath I knew very well, the sound of which I can hear even now—I woke up.

But—more than anything—I liked him because he treated me as a companion and conversationalist in my own right

Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is.

Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world

Yet somehow I’d developed a workable way of thinking about Martin’s death, or thinking around it, rather. The act—the eternity of it—had thrown me into such a different world that to all practical purposes I was already dead. There was a sense of being past everything, of looking back at land from an ice floe drifted out to sea. What was done could never be undone. I was gone