The Goldfinch

He saw me looking, flicked a showy incisor with his thumbnail. “New snaps.”

“I noticed.”

“Dentist in Sweden did it,” said Boris, signalling for a waiter. “Cost a fucking fortune. My wife kept after me—Borya, your mouth, disgraceful! I said no way am I doing this, but was the best money I ever spent.”

“When’d you get married?”

“Eh?”

“You could have brought her if you wanted.”

He looked startled. “What, you mean Myriam? No, no—” reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, punching around on his telephone, “Myriam’s not my wife! This—” he handed me the phone—“ this is my wife. What are you drinking?” he said, before turning to address the waiter in Polish.

The photo on the iPhone was of a snow-topped chalet and, out in front, a beautiful blonde on skis. At her side, also on skis, were a pair of bundled-up little blond kids of indeterminate sex. It didn’t look so much like a snapshot as an ad for some healthful Swiss product like yogurt or Bircher muesli.

I looked up at him stunned. He glanced away, with a Russianate gesture of old: yeah, well, it is what it is.

“Your wife? Seriously?”

“Yah,” he said, with a lifted eyebrow. “My kids, too. Twins.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes,” he said regretfully. “Born when I was very young—too young. It wasn’t a good time—she wanted to keep them—‘Borya, how could you’—what could I say? To be truthful I don’t know them so well. Actually the little one—he is not in the picture—the little one I have not met at all. I think he is only, what? Six weeks old?”

“What?” Again I looked at the picture, struggling to reconcile this wholesome Nordic family with Boris. “Are you divorced?”

“No no no—” the vodka had arrived, icy carafe and two tiny glasses, he was pouring a shot for each of us—“Astrid and the children are mostly in Stockholm. Sometimes she comes to Aspen to the winter, to ski—she was ski champion, qualified for the Olympics when she was nineteen—”

“Oh yeah?” I said, doing my best not to sound incredulous at this. The kids, as was fairly evident upon closer viewing, looked far too blond and bonny to be even vaguely related to Boris.

“Yes yes,” said Boris, very earnestly, with a vigorous nod of the head. “She always has to be where there is skiing and—you know me, I hate the fucking snow, ha! Her father very very right-wing—a Nazi basically. I think—no wonder Astrid has depression problems with father like him! What a hateful old shit! But they are very unhappy and miserable people, all of them, these Swedes. One minute laughing and drinking and the next—darkness, not a word. Dzikuj,” he said to the waiter, who had reappeared with a tray of small plates: black bread, potato salad, two kinds of herring, cucumbers in sour cream, stuffed cabbage, and some pickled eggs.

“I didn’t know they served food here.”

“They don’t,” said Boris, buttering a slice of black bread and sprinkling it with salt. “But am starving. Asked them to bring something from next door.” He clinked his shot glass with mine. “Sto lat!” he said—his old toast.

“Sto lat.” The vodka was aromatic and flavored with some bitter herb I couldn’t identify.

“So,” I said, helping myself to some food. “Myriam?”

“Eh?”

I held out open palms in our childhood gesture: please explain.

“Ah, Myriam! She works for me! Right-hand man, suppose you’d say. Although, I’ll tell you, she’s better than any man you’ll find. What a woman, my God. Not many like her, I’ll tell you. Worth her weight in gold. Here here,” he said, refilling my glass and sliding it back to me. “Za vstrechu!” lifting his own to me. “To our meeting!”

“Isn’t it my turn to toast?”

“Yes, it is—” clinking my glass—“but I am hungry and you are waiting too long.”

“To our meeting, then.”

“To our meeting! And to fortune! For bringing us together again!”

As soon as we’d drunk, Boris fell immediately on the food. “And what exactly is it that you do?” I asked him.

“This, that.” He still ate with the innocent, gobbling hunger of a child. “Many things. Getting by, you know?”

“And where do you live? Stockholm?” I said, when he didn’t answer.

He waved an expansive hand. “All over.”

“Like—?”

“Oh, you know. Europe, Asia, North and South America…”

“That covers a lot of territory.”

“Well,” he said, mouth full of herring, wiping a glob of sour cream off his chin, “am also small business owner, if you understand me rightly.”

“Sorry?”

He washed down the herring with a big slug of beer. “You know how it is. My official business so called is housecleaning agency. Workers from Poland, mostly. Nice pun in title of business, too. ‘Polish Cleaning Service.’ Get it?” He bit into a pickled egg. “What’s our motto, can you guess? ‘We clean you out,’ ha!”

I chose to let that one lie. “So you’ve been in the States this whole time?”

“Oh no!” He had poured us each a new shot of vodka, was lifting his glass to me. “Travel a lot. I am here maybe six, eight weeks of the year. And the rest of the time—”

“Russia?” I said, downing my shot, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Not so much. Northern Europe. Sweden, Belgium. Germany sometimes.”

“I thought you went back.”

“Eh?”

“Because—well. I never heard from you.”

“Ah.” Boris rubbed his nose sheepishly. “It was a messed up time. Remember your house—that last night?”

“Of course.”

“Well. I’d never seen so much drugs in my life. Like half an ounce of coka and didn’t sell one stitch of it, not even one quarter gram. Gave a lot away, sure—was very popular at school, ha! Everyone loved me! But most of it—right up my nose. Then—the baggies we found—tablets of all assortments—remember? Those little greens? Some very serious cancer-patient-end-of-life pills—your dad must have been crazy addicted if he was taking that stuff.”

“Yeah, I wound up with some of those too.”

“Well then, you know! They don’t even make those good green oxys any more! Now they have the junkie-defeat so you can’t shoot them or snort! But your dad? Like—to go from drinking to that? Better a drunk in the street, any old day. First one I did—passed out before I hit my second line, if Kotku hadn’t been there—” he drew a finger across his throat—“pfft.”

“Yep,” I said, remembering my own stupid bliss, keeling face-down on my desk upstairs at Hobie’s.

“Anyway—” Boris downed his vodka in a gulp and poured us both another—“Xandra was selling it. Not that. That was your dad’s. For his own personal. But the other, she was dealing from where she worked. That couple Stewart and Lisa? Those like super straight real-estate looking people? They were bankrolling her.”

I put down my fork. “How do you know that?”

“Because she told me! And I guess they got ugly when she came up short, too. Like Mr. Lawyer Face and Miss Daisy Tote Bag all nice and kind at your house… petting her on the head… ‘what can we do’… ‘Poor Xandra…’ ‘we’re so sorry for you’… then their drugs are gone—phew. Different story! I felt really bad when she told me, for what we’d done! Big trouble for her! But, by then—” flicking his nose—“was all up here. Kaput.”

“Wait—Xandra told you this?”

“Yes. After you left. When I was living over there with her.”

“You need to back up a little bit.”

Boris sighed. “Well, okay. Is long story. But we have not seen each other in long while, right?”

“You lived with Xandra?”

“You know—in and out. Four-five months maybe. Before she moved back to Reno. I lost touch with her after that. My dad had gone back to Australia, see, and also Kotku and I were on the rocks—”

“That must have been really weird.”

“Well—sort of,” he said restlessly. “See—” leaning back, signalling to the waiter again—“I was in pretty bad shape. I’d been up for days. You know how it is when you crash hard off cocaine—terrible. I was alone and really frightened. You know that sickness in your soul—fast breaths, lots of fear, like Death will reach a hand out and take you? Thin—dirty—scared shivering. Like a little half-dead cat! And Christmas too—everyone away! Called a bunch of people, no one picking up—went by this guy Lee’s where I stayed in the pool house sometime but he was gone, door locked. Walking and walking—staggering almost. Cold and frightened! Nobody home! So I went by to Xandra’s. Kotku was not talking to me by then.”

“Man, you had some kind of serious balls. I wouldn’t have gone back there for a million dollars.”

“I know, it took some onions, but was so lonely and ill. Mouth all gittering. Like—where you want to lie still and to look at a clock and count your heartbeats? except no place to lie still? and you don’t have a clock? Almost in tears! Didn’t know what to do! Didn’t even know was she still there. But lights were on—only lights on the street—came around by the glass door and there she was, in her same Dolphins shirt, in the kitchen making margaritas.”

“What’d she do?”

“Ha! Wouldn’t let me in, at first! Stood in the door and yelled a long while—cursed me, called me every name! But then I started crying. And when I asked could I stay with her?”—he shrugged—“she said yes.”

“What?” I said, reaching for the shot he’d poured me. “You mean like stay stay—?”

“I was scared! She let me sleep in her room! With TV turned to Christmas movies!”

“Hmn.” I could see he wanted me to press for details, only from his gleeful expression I was not so sure I believed him about the sleeping-in-her-room business, either. “Well, glad that worked out for you, I guess. She say anything about me?”

“Well, yes a little.” He chortled. “A lot actually! Because, I mean, don’t be mad, but I blamed some things on you.”

“Glad I could help.”

“Yes, of course!” He clinked my glass jubilantly. “Many thanks! You’d do the same, I wouldn’t mind. Honest, though, poor Xandra, I think she was glad to see me. To see anyone. I mean—” throwing his shot back—“it was crazy… those bad friends… she was all alone out there. Drinking a lot, afraid to go to work. Something could have happened to her, easy—no neighbors, really creepy. Because Bobo Silver—well, Bobo was actually not so bad guy. ‘The Mensch’? They don’t call him that for nothing! Xandra was scared to death of him but he didn’t go after her for your dad’s debt, not serious anyway. Not at all. And your dad was in for a lot. Probably he realized she was broke—your dad had fucked her over good and proper, too. Might as well be decent about it. Can’t get blood out of a turnip. But those other people, those friends of hers so called, were mean like bankers. You know? ‘You owe me,’ really hard, fucking connected, scary. Worse than him! Not so big sum even, but she was still way short and they were being nasty, all—” (mocking head tilt, aggressive finger point) “ ‘fuck you, we’re not going to wait, you better figure something out,’ like that. Anyway—good I went back when I did because then I was able to help.”

“Help how?”

“By giving her back the moneys I took.”

“You’d kept it?”

“Well, no,” he said reasonably. “Had spent it. But—had something else going, see. Because right after the coke ran out? I had taken the money to Jimmy at the gun shop and bought more. See, I was buying it for me and Amber—just the two of us. Very very beautiful girl, very innocent and special. Very young too, like only fourteen! But just that one night at MGM Grand, we had got so close, just sitting on the bathroom floor all night up at KT’s dad’s suite and talking. Didn’t even kiss! Talk talk talk! I all but wept from it. Really opened up our hearts to each other. And—” hand to his breastbone—“I felt so sad when the day came, like why did it have to be over? Because we could have sat there talking forever to each other! and been so perfect and happy! That’s how close we got to each other, see, in just that one night. Anyway—this is why I went to Jimmy. He had really shitty coke—not half so good as Stewart and Lisa’s. But everyone knew, see—everyone had heard about that weekend at MGM Grand, me with all that blow. So people came to me. Like—dozen people my first day back at school. Throwing their moneys at me. ‘Will you get me some… will you get me some… will you get some for my bro… I have ADD, I need it for my homework.…’ Pretty soon was selling to senior football players and half the basketball team. Lots of girls too… friends of Amber and KT’s… Jordan’s friends too… college students at UNLV! Lost money on the first few batches I sold—didn’t know what to ask, sold fat for low price, wanted everyone to like me, yah yah yah. But once I figured it out—I was rich! Jimmy gave me huge discount, he was making lots of green off it too. I was doing him big favor, see, selling drugs to kids too scared to buy them—scared of people like Jimmy who sold them. KT… Jordan… those girls had a lot of money! Always happy to front me. Coke is not like E—I sold that too, but it was up and down, whole bunch then none for days, for coka I had a lot of regulars and they called two and three times a week. I mean, just KT—”

“Wow.” Even after so many years, her name struck a chord.

“Yes! To KT!” We raised our glasses and drank.

“What a beauty!” Boris slammed his glass down. “I used to get dizzy around her. Just to breathe her same air.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No… God I tried… but she gave me a hand job in her little brother’s bedroom one night when she was wasted and in a very nice mood.”

“Man, I sure left at the wrong time.”

“You sure did. I came in my pants before she even got the zip down. And KT’s allowance—” reaching for my empty shot glass. “Two thousand a month! That is what she got for clothes only! Only KT already has so many clothes it is like, why does she need to buy more? Anyway by Christmas for me it was like in the movies where they have the ching-ching and the dollar signs. Phone never stopped ringing. Everybody’s best friend! Girls I never saw before, kissing me, giving me gold jewelry off their own necks! I was doing all the drugs I could do, drugs every day, every night, lines as long as my hand, and still money everywhere. I was like the Scarface of our school! One guy gave me a motorcycle—another guy, a used car. I would go to pick my clothes from off the floor—hundreds of dollars falling out from the pockets—no idea where it came from.”

“This is a lot of information, really fast.”

“Well, tell me about it! This is my usual learning process. They say experience is good teacher, and normally is true, but I am lucky this experience did not kill me. Now and then… when I have some beers sometimes… I’ll maybe hit a line or two? But mostly I do not like it any more. Burned myself out good. If you had met me maybe five years ago? I was all like—” sucking in his cheeks—“so. But—” the waiter had reappeared with more herring and beer—“enough about all that. You—” he looked me up and down—“what? Doing very nicely for yourself, I’d say?”

“All right, I guess.”

“Ha!” He leaned back with his arm along the back of the booth. “Funny old world, right? Antiques trade? The old poofter? He got you in to it?”

“That’s right.”

“Big racket, I heard.”

“That’s right.”

He eyed me up and down. “You happy?” he said.

“Not very.”

“Listen, then! I have great idea! Come work for me!”

I burst out laughing.

“No, not kidding! No no,” he said, shushing me imperiously as I tried to talk over him, pouring me a new shot, sliding the glass across the table to me, “what is he giving you? Serious. I will give you two times.”

“No, I like my job—” over-pronouncing the words, was I as wrecked as I sounded?—“I like what I do.”

“Yes?” He lifted his glass to me. “Then why aren’t you happy?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“And why not?”

I waved my hand dismissively. “Because—” I’d lost track quite how many shots I’d had. “Just because.”

“If not job then—which is it?” He had thrown back his own shot, tossing his head grandly, and started in on the new plate of herring. “Money problems? Girl?”

“Neither.”

“Girl then,” he said triumphantly. “I knew it.”

“Listen—” I drained the rest of my vodka, slapped the table—what a genius I was, I couldn’t stop smiling, I’d had the best idea in years!—“enough of this. Come on—let’s go! I’ve got a big big surprise for you.”

“Go?” said Boris, visibly bristling. “Go where?”

“Come with me. You’ll see.”

“I want to stay here.”

“Boris—”

He sat back. “Let it go, Potter,” he said, putting his hands up. “Just relax.”

“Boris!” I looked at the bar crowd, as if expecting mass outrage, and then back at him. “I’m sick of sitting here! I’ve been here for hours.”

“But—” He was annoyed. “I cleared this whole night for you! I had stuff to do! You’re leaving?”

“Yes! And you’re coming with me. Because—” I threw my arms out—“you have to see the surprise!”

“Surprise?” He threw down his balled-up napkin. “What surprise?”

“You’ll find out.” What was the matter with him? Had he forgotten how to have fun? “Now come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Why? Now?”

“Just because!” The bar room was a dark roar; I’d never felt so sure of myself in my life, so pleased at my own cleverness. “Come on. Drink up!”

“Do we really have to do this?”

“You’ll be glad. Promise. Come on!” I said, reaching over and shaking his shoulder amicably as I thought. “I mean, no shit, this is a surprise you can’t believe how good.”

He leaned back with folded arms and regarded me suspiciously. “I think you are angry with me.”

“Boris, what the fuck.” I was so drunk I stumbled, standing up, and had to catch myself on the table. “Don’t argue. Let’s just go.”

“I think it is a mistake to go somewhere with you.”

“Oh?” I looked at him with one half closed eye. “You coming, or not?”

Boris looked at me coolly. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose and said: “You won’t tell me where we’re going.”

“No.”

“You won’t mind if my driver takes us then?”

“Your driver?”

“Sure. He is waiting like two-three blocks away.”

“Fuck.” I looked away and laughed. “You have a driver?”

“You don’t mind if we go with him, then?”

“Why would I?” I said, after a brief pause. Drunk as I was, his manner had brought me up short: he was looking at me with a peculiar, calculating, uninflected quality I had never seen before.

Boris tossed back the rest of his vodka and then stood up. “Very well,” he said, twirling an unlit cigarette loosely in his fingertips. “Let’s get this nonsense over with, then.”

vi.

BORIS HUNG SO FAR back, when I was unlocking the front door at Hobie’s, that it was as if he thought my key in the lock was going to set off a massive townhouse explosion. His driver was double-parked out front in clouds of ostentatious fume. Once in the car, all the conversation between him and the driver had been in Ukrainian: nothing I’d been able to pick up even with my two semesters of Conversational Russian in college.

“Come in,” I said, barely able to suppress a smile. What did he think, the idiot, that I was going to jump him or kidnap him or something? But he was still on the street, fists in the pockets of his overcoat, looking back over his shoulder at the driver, whose name was Genka or Gyuri or Gyorgi or I’d forgotten what the fuck.

“What’s the matter?” I said. If I’d been less tanked, his paranoia might have made me angry, but I only thought it was hilarious.

“Tell me again, why are we having to come here?” he said, still standing well back.

“You’ll see.”

“And you live up here?” he said, suspiciously, looking inside the parlor. “This is your place?”

I’d made more noise than I’d meant with the door. “Theo?” called Hobie from the back of the house. “That you?”

“Right.” He was dressed for dinner, suit and tie—shit, I thought, are there guests? with a jolt I realized it was barely dinnertime, it felt like three in the morning.

Boris had slid in cautiously behind me, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, leaving the front door wide open behind him, eyes on the big basalt urns, the chandelier.

“Hobie,” I said—he had ventured out into the hall, eyebrows lifted, Mrs. DeFrees pattering apprehensively after him—“Hi, Hobie, you remember me talking about—”

“Popchik!”

The little white bundle—toddling dutifully down the hall to the front door—froze. Then a high-pitched scream as he began to run as fast as he could (which was not very fast at all, any more) and Boris—whooping with laughter—dropped to his knees.

“Oh!” snatching him up, as Popchik wriggled and struggled. “You got fat! He got fat!” he said indignantly as Popchik jumped up and kissed him on the face. “You let him get fat! Yes, hello, poustyshka, little bit of fluff you, hello! You remember me, don’t you?” He had toppled over on his back, stretched out and laughing, as Popchik—still screaming with joy—jumped all over him. “He remembers me!”

Hobie, adjusting his glasses, was standing by amused—Mrs. DeFrees, not quite so amused, standing behind Hobie and frowning slightly at the spectacle of my vodka-smelling guest rolling and tumbling with the dog on the carpet.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, putting his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket. “This would be—?”

“Exactly.”

vii.

WE DIDN’T STAY LONG—Hobie had heard a lot about Boris over the years, let’s go have a drink! and Boris was just as interested, and curious, as I might have been if Judy from Karmeywallag or some other mythical person of his past had turned up—but we were drunk and too boisterous and I felt that we might be upsetting Mrs. DeFrees, who though smiling politely was sitting rather still in a hall chair with her tiny beringed hands folded in her lap and not saying much.

So we left—Popchik in tow, paddling along excitedly with us, Boris shouting and delighted, waving at the car to go round the block and pick us up: “Yes, poustyshka, yes!”—to Popper—“That’s us! We have a car!”

Then all of a sudden it seemed that Boris’s driver spoke English as well as Boris did, and we were all three of us pals—four of us, counting Popper, who was standing on his hind legs with his paws propped on the window glass and staring out very seriously at the lights of the West Side Highway as Boris gabbled to him and cuddled him and kissed him on the back of the neck while—simultaneously—explaining to Gyuri (the driver) in both English and Russian how wonderful I was, friend of his youth and blood of his heart! (Gyuri reaching around his body and across the seat with his left hand, to shake my hand solemnly in the rear) and how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?

“Yes,” said Gyuri gloomily as he made the turn onto Houston Street so hard and sharp I slid into the door, “it was the same with me and Vadim. Daily I grieve him—I grieve him so hard I wake in the night to grieve. Vadim was my brother—” glancing back at me; pedestrians scattering as he plowed into the crosswalk, startled faces outside tinted windows—“my more-than-brother. Like Borya and me. But Vadim—”

“This was a terrible thing,” Boris said quietly to me, and then, to Gyuri:—“yes, yes, terrible—”

“—we have seen Vadim go too soon in the ground. Is true, the radio song, you know it? Piano Man singer? ‘Only the good die young.’ ”

“He will be waiting for us there,” said Boris consolingly, reaching across the seat to pat Gyuri on the shoulder.

“Yes, that just is what I instructed him to do,” Gyuri muttered, cutting in front of a car so suddenly that I fell against my seat belt and Popchyk went flying. “These things are deep—they cannot be honored in words. Human tongue cannot express. But at the end—putting him to bed with the shovel—I spoke to him with my soul. ‘So long, Vadim. Hold the gates open for me, brother. Save me a seat up there where you at.’ Only God—” please, I thought, trying to keep a composed expression while gathering Popchyk in my lap, for fuck’s sake look at the road—“Fyodor, please help me, I have two big questions about God. You are college professor” (what?) “so perhaps you can answer for me. First question—” eyes meeting mine in the rear view mirror, holding up pointed finger—“does God have sense of humor? Second question: does God have cruel sense of humor? Such as: does God toy with us and torture us for His own amusement, like vicious child with garden insect?”

“Uh,” I said, alarmed at the intense way he was looking at me and not his upcoming turn, “well, maybe, I don’t know, I sure hope not.”

“This is not the right man to ask these questions,” Boris said, offering me a cigarette and then passing one to Gyuri across the front seat. “God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince. Now Gyuri—” reclining in clouds of smoke—“a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Will you look after the dog after you drop us off? Drive him around in back seat, wherever he wants to go?”

The club was out in Queens, I couldn’t have said where. In the red-carpeted front room, which felt like a room where you’d go to kiss your grandfather on the cheek after being freshly released from prison, large family-style gatherings of drinkers in Louis XVI–style chairs ate and smoked and shouted and pounded each other on the back around tables swagged with metallic gold fabric. Behind, on the deep lacquer-red walls, Christmas garlands and Soviet-era holiday decorations of wired bulbs and colored aluminum—roosters, nesting birds, red stars and rocket ships and hammer-and-sickles with kitschy Cyrillic slogans (Happy New Year, dear Stalin)—were slung up in exuberant and makeshift-seeming fashion. Boris (well in the bag himself; he’d been drinking from a bottle in the back seat) had his arm around me and, in Russian, was introducing me to young and old as his brother which I gathered people were understanding literally to judge from all the men and women who embraced me and kissed me and tried to pour me shots from magnums of vodka in crystal ice buckets.

Somehow, eventually, we made it to the rear: black velvet curtains guarded by a shaved-head, viper-eyed thug tattooed to the jawbone in Cyrillic. Inside, the back room was thumping with music and thick with sweat, aftershave, weed and Cohiba smoke: Armani, tracksuits, diamond and platinum Rolexes. I’d never seen so many men wearing so much gold—gold rings, gold chains, gold teeth in front. It was all like a foreign, confusing, brightly glinting dream; and I was at the uneasy stage of drunkenness where I couldn’t focus my eyes or do anything but nod and weave and allow Boris to drag me around through the crowd. At some point deep in the night Myriam reappeared like a shadow; after greeting me with a kiss on the cheek that felt somber and spooky, frozen in time like some ceremonial gesture, she and Boris vanished, leaving me at a packed table of stone-drunk, chain-smoking Russian nationals all of whom seemed to know who I was (“Fyodor!”) slapping me on the back, pouring me shots, offering me food, offering me Marlboros, shouting amiably at me in Russian without apparent expectation of reply—

Hand on my shoulder. Someone was removing my glasses. “Hello?” I said to the strange woman who was all of a sudden sitting in my lap.

Zhanna. Hi, Zhanna! What are you doing now? Not so much. You? Porn star, salon-tanned, surgically-augmented tits spilling out the top of her dress. Prophecy runs in my family: will you permit me to read your palm? Hey, sure: her English was pretty good though it was difficult to make out what she was saying with the racket in the club.

“I see you are philosopher by nature.” Tracing my palm with the Barbie-pink point of a fingernail. “Very very intelligent. Many ups and downs—have done a bit of everything in life. But you are lonely. You dream to meet a girl to be together with for the rest of your lives, is this right?”

Then Boris reappeared, alone. He pulled up a chair and sat down. A brief, amused conversation in Ukrainian ensued between him and my new friend which ended with her putting my glasses on my face and departing, but not before bumming a cigarette from Boris and kissing him on the cheek.

“You know her?” I said to Boris.

“Never saw her in my life,” said Boris, lighting up a cigarette himself. “We can go now, if you want. Gyuri’s waiting outside.”

viii.

BY NOW IT WAS late. The back seat of the car was soothing after all the confusion of the club (intimate glow of the console, radio turned low) and we drove around for hours with Popchik fast asleep in Boris’s lap, laughing and talking—Gyuri chiming in too with hoarsely-shouted stories about growing up in Brooklyn in what he called ‘the bricks’ (the projects) while Boris and I drank warm vodka from the bottle and did bumps of coke from the bag that he had produced from his overcoat pocket—Boris passing it up front to Gyuri every now and then. Even though the air was on, it was burning up in the car; Boris was sweaty in the face and his ears were flaming red. “You see,” he was saying—he’d already shouldered off his jacket; he was taking off his cuff links, dropping them in his pocket, rolling up his shirt sleeves—“it was your dad taught me how to dress proper. I am grateful to him for that.”

“Yeah, my dad taught us both a lot of things.”

“Yes,” he said sincerely—vigorous nod, no irony, wiping his nose with the side of his hand. “He always looked like gentleman. Like—such a lot of these guys at the club—leather coats, velour warm-ups, straight from immigration looks like. Much better to dress plain, like your dad, nice jacket, nice watch but klássnyy—you know, simple—try to fit in.”

“Right.” It being my business to notice such things, I’d already noticed Boris’s wristwatch—Swiss, retailing for maybe fifty thousand, a European playboy’s watch—too flashy for my taste but extremely restrained compared to the jewel-set hunks of gold and platinum I’d seen at his club. There was, I saw, a blue Star of David tattooed on the inside of his forearm.

“What’s that?” I said.

He held up his wrist for me to inspect. “IWC. A good watch is like cash in the bank. You can always pawn it or put it up in emergency. This is white gold but looks like stainless. Better to have watch that looks less expensive than it really is.”

“No, the tattoo.”

“Ah.” He pushed up his sleeve and looked at his arm regretfully—but I wasn’t looking at the tattoo any more. The light wasn’t great in the car but I knew needle marks when I saw them. “The star you mean? Is long story.”

“But—” I knew better than to ask about the marks. “You’re not Jewish.”

“No!” said Boris indignantly, pushing his sleeve back down. “Of course not!”

“Well then, I guess the question would be why…”

“Because I told Bobo Silver I was Jewish.”

“What?”

“Because I wanted him to hire me! So I lied.”

“No shit.”

“Yes! I did! He came by Xandra’s house a lot—snooping up and down the street, smelling for something rotten, like maybe your dad wasn’t dead—and one day I made up my nerve to talk to him. Offered myself to work. Things were getting out of hand—at school there was trouble, some people had to go to rehab, others got expelled—I needed to cut ties with Jimmy, see, do something else for a while. And yes, my surname is all wrong but Boris, in Russia, is the first name of many Jews so I thought, why not? How will he know? I thought the tattoo would be a good thing—to convince him, you know, I was ok. Had a guy do it who owed me a hundred bucks. Made up big sad story, my mother Polish Jew, her family in concentration camp, boo hoo hoo—stupid me, I did not realize that tattoos were against the Jewish law. Why are you laughing?” he said defensively. “Someone like me—useful to him, you know? I speak English, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian. I am educated. Anyhow, he knew damn well I wasn’t Jew, he laughed in my face, but he took me on anyway and that was very kind of him.”

“How could you work for that guy who wanted to kill my dad?”

“He didn’t want to kill your dad! That is not true, or fair. Only to scare him! But—yes I did work for him, almost one year.”

“What did you do for him?”

“Nothing dirty, believe or not! Assistant for him only—message boy, run errands back and forth, like this. Walk his little dogs! Pick up dry-cleaning! Bobo was good and generous friend to me at bad time—father almost, I can say this hand on my heart to you and mean it. Surely father more to me than my own father. Bobo was always fair to me. More than fair. Kind. I learned a lot from him, watching him in action. So I don’t mind so much wearing this star for him. And this—” he pushed his sleeve to the biceps, thorn-pierced rose, Cyrillic inscription—“this is for Katya, love of my life. I loved her more than any woman I ever knew.”

“You say that about everybody.”

“Yes, but with Katya, is true! Would walk through broken glass for her! Walk through Hell, through fire! Give my life, gladly! I will never love any person on the earth like Katya again—not even close. She was the one. I would die and be happy for only one day with her. But—” pushing his sleeve back down—“you should never get a person’s name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.”

ix.

I HADN’T DONE BLOW since Carole Lombard left town and there was no possibility of going to sleep. At six-thirty in the morning Gyuri was spinning around the Lower East Side with Popchik in the back (“I will take him to the deli! For a bacon egg and cheese!”) and we were wired and chattering in some dank 24-hour-a-day bar on Avenue C with graffiti-scrawled walls and burlap tacked over the windows to keep the sunrise out, Ali Baba Club, Three Dollar Shots, Happy Hour 10:00 AM to Noon, trying to drink enough beer to knock ourselves out a bit.

“You know what I did in college?” I was telling him. “I took Conversational Russian for a year. Totally because of you. I did really shitty in it, actually. Never got good enough to read it, you know, to sit down with Eugene Onegin—you have to read it in Russian, they say, it doesn’t come through in translation. But—I thought of you so much! I used to remember little things you’d say—all sorts of things came back to me—oh, wow, listen, they’re playing ‘Comfy in Nautica,’ do you hear that? Panda Bear! I totally forgot that album. Anyway. I wrote a term paper on The Idiot for my Russian Literature class—Russian Literature in translation—I mean, the whole time I was reading it I thought about you, up in my bedroom smoking my dad’s cigarettes. It was so much easier to keep track of the names if I imagined you saying them in my head… actually, it was like I heard the whole book in your voice! Back in Vegas you were reading The Idiot for like six months, remember? In Russian. For a long time it was all you did. Remember how for a long time you couldn’t go downstairs because of Xandra, I had to bring you food, it was like Anne Frank? Anyway, I read it in English, The Idiot, but I wanted to get there too, to that point, you know, where my Russian was good enough. But I never did.”

“All that fucking school,” said Boris, plainly unimpressed. “If you want to speak Russian, come to Moscow with me. You will speak it in two months.”

“So, are you going to tell me what you do?”

“Like I told you. This and that. Just enough to get by.” Then, kicking me under the table: “You seem better now, eh?”

“Huh?” There were only two other people in the front room with us—beautiful people, unearthly pale, a man and a woman both with short dark hair, eyes locked, and the man had the woman’s hand across the table and was nibbling and chewing on the inside of her wrist. Pippa, I thought, with a pang of anguish. It was nearly lunchtime in London. What was she doing?

“When I ran into you, you looked on your way to jump in the river.”

“Sorry, it was a rough day.”

“Nice set up you’ve got there though,” Boris was saying. He couldn’t see the couple from where he was sitting. “So you guys are partners?”

“No! Not like that.”

“I didn’t say so!” Boris looked at me critically. “Jesus, Potter, don’t be so touchy! Anyhow that was his wife, the lady, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said restlessly, leaning back in my chair. “Well, sort of.” The relationship of Hobie and Mrs. DeFrees was still a deep mystery, as was her still-extant marriage to Mr. DeFrees. “I thought she was a widow for ages but she’s not. She—” I leaned forward, rubbed my nose—“see, she lives uptown and he lives downtown, but they’re together all the time… she has a house in Connecticut, sometimes they go out together for the weekend. She’s married—but. I never see her husband. I haven’t figured it out. To tell you the truth I think they are probably just good friends. Sorry I’m going on. I really don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“And he taught you your trade! He seems like nice fellow. Real gentleman.”

“Huh?”

“Your boss.”

“He’s not my boss! I’m his business partner.” The glitter of the drugs was wearing off; blood swishing in my ears, sharp high pitch like crickets singing. “As a matter of fact I run the whole sales end of things pretty much.”

“Sorry!” said Boris, holding up his hands. “No need to snap. Only I meant it when I asked you to come work with me.”

“And how am I supposed to answer that?”

“Look, I want to repay you. Let you share in all the good things that have happened to me. Because,” he said, interrupting me grandly, “I owe you everything. Everything good that has happened to me in life, Potter, has happened because of you.”

“What? I got you in the drug-dealing business? Wow, okay,” I said, lighting one of his cigarettes and pushing the pack across to him, “that’s good to know, that makes me feel really great about myself, thanks.”

“Drug dealing? Who said drug dealing? I want to make things up to you! For what I did. I’m telling you, it’s a great life. We would have a lot of fun together.”

“Are you running an escort service? Is that it?”

“Look, shall I tell you something?”

“Please.”

“I am really sorry about what I did to you.”

“Forget it. I don’t care.”

“Why should you not share in some of these good profits I’ve made from you? Reap some of the cream for yourself?”

“Listen, can I say something, Boris? I don’t want to be involved in anything dodgy. No offense,” I said, “but I’m trying hard to get out from under something and, like I said, I’m engaged now, things are different, I really don’t think I want to—”

“Then why not let me help you?”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean—well, I’d rather not go into it but I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have, I want to put them right. That is, I’m trying to figure how to put them right.”

“Hard to put things right. You don’t often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.”

The beautiful pair had risen to leave, hand in hand, pushing aside the beaded curtain, drifting out together into the faint cold dawn. I watched the beads clicking and undulating in the slipstream of their departure, rippling with the sway of the girl’s hips.

Boris sat back. He had his eyes fixed on mine. “I’ve been trying to get it back for you,” he said. “I wish I could.”

“What?”

He frowned. “Well—this is why I came by the store. You know. Am sure you’ve heard, the Miami stuff. Was worried what you’d think when it hit the news—and, honest, was a little afraid they’d trace it back to you, through me, you know? Not any more, so much, but—still. Was up to my neck in it, of course—but I knew the set-up was bad. Should have trusted my instincts. I—” he dipped his key for another quick snort; we were the only people in the place; the little tattooed waitress, or hostess, or whoever she was, had disappeared into the sketchy back room where—from my very brief glimpse—people on yard sale sofas appeared to be gathered for a screening of some 1970s porn—“anyhow. It was terrible. I should have known. People got hurt and I’ve come up short, but I learned a valuable lesson from this. Always a mistake—here, wait, let me hit the other side—like I was saying, always a mistake to deal with people you don’t know.” He pinched his nose shut and passed the bag under the table to me. “It’s the thing you know, that you always forget. Never deal with strangers on the big stuff! Never! People can say ‘oh, this person is fine’—me, I want to believe it, it’s my nature. But bad things happen like that. See—I know my friends. But my friends of my friends? Not so well! It’s the way people catch AIDS, right?”

It was a mistake—I knew, even as I was doing it—to do any more blow; I’d done way too much already, jaw clenched tight and blood pounding in my temples even as the unease of the comedown had begun to steal over me, a brittleness like plate glass shivering.

“Anyway,” Boris was saying. He was speaking very fast, foot tapping and jittering under the table. “Have been trying to think how to get it back. Think think think! Of course I can’t use it myself any more. I’ve burned myself with it but good. Of course—” he shifted restlessly—“that’s not why I came to see you, exactly. Partly I wanted to apologize. To say ‘sorry’ to you in my own voice. Because—honestly, I am. And partly, too, with all this stuff in the news—I wanted to tell you not to worry, because maybe you are thinking—well, I don’t know what you’re thinking. Only—I didn’t like to think of you hearing all this, and being afraid, not understanding. Thinking it might be traced back to you. It made me feel very bad. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you. To tell you that I’ve kept you out of it—no one knows of your relation with me. And moreover to tell you, that I’m really, really trying to get it back. Trying very hard. Because—” three fingertips to forehead—“I’ve made a fortune off it, and I would really like for you to have it all to your own again—you know, the thing itself, for old times’ sake, just to have, to really be yours, keep in your closet or whatever, get out and look at, like in old days, you know? Because I know how much you loved it. I got to where I loved it myself, actually.”

I stared at him. In the fresh sparkle of the drug, what he was saying had begun, at last, to sink in. “Boris, what are you talking about?”

“You know.”

“No I don’t.”

“Don’t make me say it out loud.”

“Boris—”

“I tried to tell you. I begged you not to leave. I would have given it back to you if you had waited just one day.”

The beaded curtain was still clicking and undulating in the draft. Sinuous glassy wavelets. Staring at him, I was transfixed with the obscure, light sensation of one dream colliding with another: clatter of silverware in the harsh noon of the Tribeca restaurant, Lucius Reeve smirking at me across the table.

“No,” I said—pushing back in my chair in a cold prickle of sweat, putting my hands over my face. “No.”

“What, you thought your dad took it? I was kind of hoping you thought that. Because he was so in the hole. And stealing from you already.”

I dragged my hands down my face and looked at him, unable to speak.

“I switched it. Yes. It was me. I thought you knew. Look, am sorry!” he said when still I sat gaping at him. “I had it in my locker at school. Joke, you know. Well—” weakly smiling—“maybe not. Sort of joke. But—listen—” tapping the table to get my attention—“I swear, I wasn’t going to keep it. That was not my plan. How was I to know about your dad? If only you had spent the night—” he threw up his arms—“I would have given it to you, I swear I would have. But I couldn’t make you stay. Had to leave! Right that minute! Must go! Now, Boris, now! Wouldn’t wait even till morning! Must go, must go, this very second! And I was scared to say to you what I’d done.”

I stared at him. My throat was too dry and my heart had begun to pound so fast that all I could think to do was to sit very still and hope it would slow down.

“Now you are angry,” said Boris resignedly. “You want to kill me.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“I—”

“What do you mean, switch it?”

“Look—” glancing around nervously—“I am sorry! I knew it was not a good idea for us to get wired together. I knew this would end up coming out maybe in some ugly way! But—” leaning forward to put his palms on the table—“I have felt really bad about it, honest. Would I have come to see you, if not? Shouted your name on the street? And when I say I want to pay you back? I am serious. I am going to make it up to you. Because, you see, this picture made my fortune, it made my—”

“What’s in that package I’ve got uptown then?”

“What?” he said, his eyebrows coming down, and then, pushing away in his chair and looking at me with his chin pulled back: “You’re kidding me. All this time and you never—?”

But I couldn’t answer. My lips were moving but no sound was coming out.

Boris slapped the table. “You idiot. You mean you never even opened it up? How could you not—”

When I still didn’t answer him, face in hands, he reached across the table and shook me by the shoulder.

“Really?” he said urgently, trying to look me in the eye. “You did not? Never opened it to look?”

From the back room: a weak female scream, inane and empty, followed by equally inane hoots of male laughter. Then, loud as a buzz saw, a blender started up at the bar and seemed to go on for an excessively long time.

“You didn’t know?” said Boris, when the racket finally stopped. In the back room, laughter and clapping. “How could you not—”

But I couldn’t say a word. Multilayered graffiti on the wall, sticker tags and scribbles, drunks with crosses for eyes. In the back, a hoarse chant had risen of go go go. So many things were flashing in on me at once that I could hardly get my breath.

“All these years?” said Boris, half-frowning. “And you never once—?”

“Oh, God.”

“Are you okay?”

“I—” I shook my head. “How did you know I even have it? How do you know that?” I repeated, when he didn’t answer. “You went through my room? My things?”

Boris looked at me. Then he ran both hands through his hair and said: “You’re a blackout drunk, Potter, you know that?”

“Give me a break,” I said, after an incredulous pause.

“No, am serious,” he said mildly. “I am alcoholic. I know it! I was alcoholic from ten years old, when I took my first drink. But you, Potter—you’re like my dad. He drinks—he goes unconscious while he is walking around, does things he can’t remember. Wrecks the car, beats me up, gets in fights, wakes up with broken nose or in whole different town maybe, lying on bench in railway station—”

“I don’t do things like that.”

Boris sighed. “Right, right, but your memory goes. Just like his. And, I’m not saying you did anything bad, or violent, you are not violent like him but you know, like—oh, that time we went to the play pit at McDonald’s, the kid pit, and you are so drunk on the puffy thing the lady called the cops on you, and I got you out of there fast, standing in Wal Mart half an hour pretending to look at school pencils and then back on the bus, back to the bus stop, and that night you don’t remember any of it? Not one thing? ‘McDonald’s, Boris? What McDonald’s?’ Or,” he said, sniffling lavishly, talking over me, “or, that day you are totalled, wrecked, and make me go with you for ‘walk in the desert’? Okay, we go for a walk. Fine. Only you are so drunk you can barely walk and it is a hundred and five degrees. And you get tired of walking and lay yourself down in the sand. And ask me that I leave you to die. ‘Leave me, Boris, leave me.’ Remember that?”

“Get to the point.”

“What can I say? You were unhappy. Drank yourself unconscious all the time.”

“So did you.”

“Yes, I remember. Passing out on the stairs, face down, remember? Waking up on the ground, miles from home, feet sticking out from a bush, no idea how I got there? Shit, I emailed Spirsetskaya one time in the middle of the night, crazy drunk email, stating she is a beautiful woman and that I love her completely, which at that time I did. Next day at school, all hung over: ‘Boris, Boris, I need to talk to you.’ Well, what about? And there she is all gentle and kind, trying to let me down easy. Email? What email? No recollection whatsoever! Standing there red in the face while she is giving me xerox from poetry book and telling me I need to love girls my own age! Sure—I did plenty of stupid things. Stupider than you! But me,” he said, toying with a cigarette, “I was trying to have fun and be happy. You wanted to be dead. It’s different.”

“Why do I feel like you’re trying to change the subject?”

“Not trying to judge! It’s just—we did crazy things back then. Things I think maybe you don’t remember. No, no!” he said quickly, shaking his head, when he saw the look on my face. “Not that. Although I will say, you are the only boy I have ever been in bed with!”

My laugh spluttered out angrily, as if I’d coughed or choked on something.

“With that—” Boris leaned back disdainfully in his chair, pinched his nostrils shut—“pfah. I think it happens at that age sometimes. We were young, and needed girls. I think maybe you thought it was something else. But, no, wait,” he said quickly, his expression changing—I’d scraped back my chair to go—“wait,” he said again, catching my sleeve, “don’t, please, listen to what I’m trying to tell you, you don’t at all remember the night when we were watching Dr. No?”

I was getting my coat from the back of my chair. But, at this, I stopped.

“Do you?”

“Am I supposed to remember? Why?”

“I know you don’t. Because I used to like test you. Mention Dr. No, make jokes. To see what you would say.”

“What about Dr. No?”

“Not that long after I met you!” His knee was going up and down like crazy. “I think you weren’t used to vodka—you never knew what size to pour your drink. You came in with huge glass, like so, like water glass, and I thought: shit! You don’t remember?”

“There were lots of nights like that.”

“You don’t remember. I would clean up your vomit—throw your clothes in the wash—you would not even know I had done it. You would cry and tell me all kinds of things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Like…” he made an impatient face… “oh, it was your fault your mother died… you wished it was you… if you died, you would maybe be with her, together in the darkness… no point going into it, I don’t want to make you feel bad. You were a mess, Theo—fun to be with, most of time! up for anything! but a mess. Probably you should have been in hospital. Climbing on roof, jumping into the swimming pool? Could have broken your neck, it was crazy! You would lie on your back in the road at night, no streetlights, no way for anyone to see you, waiting for a car to come and run you over, I had to fight to get you up and drag you in the house—”

“I would have lain out in that godforsaken fucking street a long time before a car came by. I could have slept out there. Brought my sleeping bag.”

“I am not going to go into this. You were nuts. You could have killed us both. One night you got matches and tried to set the house on fire, remember that?”

“I was just joking,” I said uneasily.

“And the carpet? Big burned hole in the sofa? Was that a joke? I turned the cushions so that Xandra wouldn’t see it.”

“That piece of shit was so cheap it wasn’t even flame-retardant.”

“Right, right. Have it your way. Anyway, this one night. We are watching Dr. No, which I had never seen but you had, and I was liking it very much, and you are completely v gavno, and it’s on his island, and all cool, and he presses the button and shows that picture he stole?”

“Oh, God.”

Boris cackled. “You did! God help you! It was great. So drunk you are staggering—I have something to show you! Something wonderful! Best thing ever! Stepping in front of the television. No, really! Me—watching movie, best part, you wouldn’t shut up. Fuck off! Anyway, off you go, mad as hell, ‘fuck you,’ making all this noise. Bang bang bang. And then, down you come with the picture, see?” He laughed. “Funny thing—was sure you were bullshitting me. World-famous museum work? give me a break. But—it was real. Anyone could see.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth! Anyway—so funny! Here am I, so proudly teaching you to steal apples and candy from the magazine, while you have stolen world masterpiece of art.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

Boris chuckled. “No, no. You explained. Preserving it in safety. Big important duty in life. You’re telling me,” he said, leaning forward, “you really haven’t opened it up and looked at it? All these years? What is the matter with you?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said again. “When did you take it?” I said when he rolled his eyes away from me. “How?”

“Look, like I said—”

“How do you expect me to believe one word of this?”

Boris rolled his eyes again. He reached in his coat pocket; he punched up a picture on his iPhone. Then he handed it across the table to me.

It was the verso of the painting. You could find a reproduction of the front anywhere. But the back was as distinctive as a fingerprint: rich drips of sealing wax, brown and red; irregular patchwork of European labels (Roman numerals; spidery, quilled signatures), which had the feeling of a steamer trunk, or some international treaty of long ago. The crumbling yellows and browns were layered with an almost organic richness, like dead leaves.

He put the phone back in his pocket. We sat for a long while in silence. Then Boris reached for a cigarette.

“Believe me now?” he said, blowing a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth.

The atoms in my head were spinning apart; the sparkle of the bump had already begun to turn, apprehension and disquiet moving in subtly like dark air before a thunderstorm. For a long, somber moment we looked at each other: high chemical frequency, solitude to solitude, like two Tibetan monks on a mountaintop.

Then I stood without a word and got my coat. Boris jumped up too.

“Wait,” he said, as I shouldered past him. “Potter? Don’t go angry. When I said I would make it up to you? I meant it—

“Potter?” he called again as I stepped through the clattering bead curtain and out on to the street, into the dirty gray light of dawn. Avenue C was empty except for a solitary cab which seemed to be as glad to see me as I was to see it, and darted over to stop for me immediately. Before he could say another word I got in and drove off and left him there, standing in his overcoat by a bank of trash cans.

x.

IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding my teeth and a heart about to explode. Bureaucratic daylight: pedestrian morning blaring, bright with threat. By quarter of ten I was sitting on the floor of my room at Hobie’s house with my mind reeling like a spun-down top wobbling and veering from side to side. Strewn on the carpet around me were a pair of shopping bags; a never-used pup tent; a beige percale pillowcase that still smelled like my bedroom in Vegas; a tin full of assorted Roxicodones and morphs I knew I ought to flush; and a snarl of packing tape into which I’d cut, painstakingly, with an X-Acto knife, twenty minutes of delicate work, pulse throbbing in my fingertips, terrified of going in too hard and nicking the painting by mistake, finally getting the side open, peeling the tape off strip by strip by careful strip, with trembling hands: only to find—sandwiched in cardboard and wrapped with newspaper—a scribbled-up Civics workbook (Democracy, Diversity, and You!).

Bright multicultural throng. On the cover Asian kids, Latino kids, African American kids, Native American kids, a girl in a Muslim head scarf and a white kid in a wheelchair smiled and held hands before an American flag. Inside, within the book’s cheery dull world of good citizenship, where persons of different ethnicities all participated happily in their communities and inner-city kids stood around their housing project with a watering can, caring for a potted tree with branches illustrating the different branches of government, Boris had drawn daggers with his name on them, roses and hearts surrounding Kotku’s initials, and a set of spying eyes, peeping slyly to one side, above a partially filled out sample test:

Why does man need government?

to impose ideology, punish wrongdoers, and promote equality and brotherhood among peoples

What are some duties of an American citizen?

to vote for Congress, celebrate diversity, and fight the enemies of the state

Hobie, thankfully, was out. The pills I’d swallowed hadn’t worked, and after two hours of twisting and flopping on my bed in a torturous, falling, half-dream state—thoughts flying, exhausted from my heart beating so fast, Boris’s voice still running through my mind—I forced myself to get up, clear the mess strewn round my bedroom, and shower and shave: nicking myself in the process, since my upper lip was almost dentist-chair numb from the nosebleed I’d suffered. Then I made myself a pot of coffee, found a stale scone in the kitchen and forced myself to eat it, and was down in the shop and open for business by noon—just in time to intercept the mail lady in her plastic rain poncho (looking a bit alarmed, standing well back from rheumy-eyed me with my cut lip and my bloody Kleenex), although as she was handing the mail over to me with latex-gloved hands I realized: what was the point? Reeve could write Hobie all he wanted—phone Interpol—who cared any more.

It was raining. Pedestrians huddled and scurrying. Rain pelting hard at the window, rain beading on the plastic garbage bags at the curb. There at the desk, in my musty armchair, I tried to anchor myself or at least take some kind of comfort in the faded silks and dimness of the shop, its bittersweet gloom like rainy dark classrooms of childhood, but the dopamine slam had dropped me hard and left me with the pre-tremblings of something that felt very like death—a sadness you felt in your stomach first, beating on the inside of the forehead, all the darkness I’d shut out roaring back in.

Tunnel vision. All those years I’d drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn’t laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.

What way was there to make it okay? None. In a way Boris had done me a favor by taking the thing—at least, I knew that was how most people would see it; I was off the hook; no one could blame me; the greater part of my problems had been solved at a stroke but while I knew that any sane person would be relieved to have the painting off their hands, yet I’d never felt quite so scorched with despair, self-hatred, shame.

Warm weary shop. I could not stay still; I stood up and sat down, walked to the window and back again. Everything was sodden with horror. A bisque Pulcinella eyed me with spite. Even the furniture looked sickly and disproportionate. How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person on the basis of my secret uptown? Yet I had. The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.

xi.

WHEN HOBIE GOT HOME, around two, he walked in off the street with a jingle of bells like a customer.

“Well, that was certainly a surprise last night.” He was pink-cheeked from the rain, shrugging off his raincoat and shaking the water off; he was dressed for the auction house, Windsor-knotted tie and one of the beautiful old suits. “Boris!” He’d done well at his auction, I could tell by his mood; though he tended not to go in with strong bids he knew what he wanted and every so often in a slow session, when no one was up against him, he made off with a pile of beauties. “I gather you two made quite a night of it?”

“Ah.” I was hunched in a corner, sipping tea; my headache was ferocious.

“Funny to meet him after hearing so much about him. Like meeting a character in a book. I’d always pictured him as the Artful Dodger in Oliver—oh you know—the little boy, the urchin, what’s the actor’s name. Jack something. Ragged coat. Smear of dirt along the cheek.”

“Believe me, he was dirty enough back then.”

“Well you know, Dickens doesn’t tell us what happened to the Dodger. Grew up to be a respectable businessman, who knows? And wasn’t Popper out of his mind? I’ve never seen an animal so happy.

“Oh and yes—” half-turning, busy with his coat; he hadn’t noticed me go still at Popper’s name—“before I forget, Kitsey called.”

I didn’t answer; I couldn’t. I hadn’t thought of Popper even once.

“Late-ish—ten. Told her you’d run into Boris, you’d come by, you’d gone out, hope that was all right.”

“Sure,” I said, after an effortful pause, struggling to collect my thoughts which were galloping in several very bad directions at once.

“What must I remind you.” Hobie put his finger to his lips. “I was given a charge. Let me think.

“I can’t remember,” he said after a small start, shaking his head. “You’ll have to phone her. Dinner tonight, I know, at someone’s house. Dinner at eight! That I remember. But I can’t remember where.”

“The Longstreets,” I said, my heart plunging.

“That sounds right. Anyhow, Boris! Great fun—great charmer—how long’s he in town for? How long’s he here for?” he repeated amiably when I didn’t answer—he couldn’t see my face, staring out horrified into the street. “We should have him over for dinner, don’t you think? Why don’t you ask him to give us a couple of nights when he’s free? That is, if you like,” he said, when I didn’t reply. “Up to you. Let me know.”

xii.

ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER—exhausted, eyes streaming with pain from my headache—I was still frantically wondering how to get Popper back while simultaneously inventing, and rejecting, explanations for his absence. I left him tied in front of a store? Someone had snatched him? An obvious lie: quite apart from the fact that it was pouring rain, Popper was so old and cranky on the leash I could hardly drag him down to the fire hydrant. Groomer? Popper’s groomer, a needy-seeming old lady named Cecelia who worked out of her apartment, always had him back by three. Vet? Quite apart from the fact that Popper wasn’t sick (and why wouldn’t I have mentioned it if he was?) Popper went to the same vet that Hobie had known since the days of Welty and Chessie. Dr. McDermott’s office was right down the street. Why would I have taken him anywhere else?

I groaned, got up, walked to the window. Again and again I ran against the same dead end, Hobie walking in befuddled, as he was bound to do in an hour or two, looking around the store: “Where’s Popper? Have you seen him?” And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. “Where’s Popper?” No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment.

The ragged sheets of rain had slowed to a drizzle, shining sidewalks and water dripping from the awnings, and everyone on the street seemed to have seized the moment to throw on a raincoat and dash out to the corner with the dog: dogs everywhere I looked, galumphing sheepdog, black standard poodle, terrier mutts, retriever mutts, an elderly French bulldog and a self-satisfied pair of dachshunds with their chins in the air, prissing in tandem across the street. In agitation I went back to my chair, sat down, picked up the Christie’s house sale catalogue and began to leaf through it in a rattled way: horrible modernist watercolors, two thousand dollars for an ugly Victorian bronze of two buffalos fighting, absurd.

What was I going to tell Hobie? Popper was old and deaf, and sometimes he fell asleep in out-of-the-way places where he didn’t hear right away when we called, but soon enough it would be time for his dinner and I would hear Hobie walking around upstairs, looking for him behind the sofa and in Pippa’s bedroom and all his usual places. “Popsky? Here, boy! Dinnertime!” Could I feign ignorance? Pretend to search the house too? scratch my head in puzzlement? Mysterious disappearance? Bermuda Triangle? I’d returned, with sinking heart, to the groomer idea when the shop bell jingled.

“I started to keep him.”

Popper—damp, but otherwise looking none the worse for his adventure—stiffened his legs rather formally as Boris set him down on the floor and then paddled over to me, holding his head up so that I might scratch him under the chin.

“He did not miss you one bit,” said Boris. “We had a very nice day together.”

“What’d you do?” I said, after a long silence, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Sleeped, mostly. Gyuri dropped us off—” he scrubbed his darkened eyes, and yawned—“and we had a very nice nap together, the two of us. You know—how he used to curl up? Like a fur hat on my head?” Popper had never liked to sleep with his chin on my head like that—only with Boris. “Then—we woke up, and I had a shower and I took him for a walk—not far, he did not want to go far—and I made some phone calls and we ate a bacon sandwich and drove back in. Look, I am sorry!” he said impulsively when I didn’t answer, running his hand through his rumpled hair. “Really. And I am going to make it right again, and good, I will.”

The silence between us was crushing.

“Did you have fun last night anyway? I had fun. Big night out! Not feeling so hot this morning, though. Please say something,” he blurted when I didn’t reply. “I have been feeling very very bad about this all day.”

Popper had snuffled across the room to his water dish. Peacefully, he began to drink. For a long time there was no sound except his monotonous lapping and slurping.

“Really, Theo—” hand to heart—“I feel terrible. My feelings—my shame—I have no words for,” he said, more gravely, when still I did not answer. “And yes, I’ll admit it, part of me asks myself, ‘why did you wreck everything, Boris, why did you open your big mouth.’ But how could I lie and sneak? You’ll give me that, at least?” he said, rubbing his hands, agitatedly. “I am not cowardly. I told you. I admitted it. I didn’t want you to worry, not knowing what was going on. And I am going to make it up to you, somehow, I promise.”

“Why—” Hobie was busy downstairs with the vacuum but I lowered my voice all the same, the same angry whisper when Xandra was downstairs and we didn’t want her to hear us quarreling—“why—”

“Why what?”

“Why the hell did you take it?”

Boris blinked, a bit self-righteously. “Because you have Jewish Mafiya coming to your house, is why!”

“No, that’s not why.”

Boris sighed. “Well, is partly why—a little. Was it safe at your house? No! And not at school either. Got my old school book, wrapped it in newspaper and taped it same fatness—”

“I asked why did you take it.”

“What can I say. I am thief.”

Popper was still noisily slurping up the water. With exasperation I wondered if Boris had thought to put a bowl down for him in their so-nice day out.

“And—” lightly he shrugged—“I wanted it. Yes. Who would not?”

“Wanted it why? For money?” I said, when he didn’t answer.

Boris made a face. “Of course not. Can’t sell something like that. Although—must admit—one time I was in trouble, four-five years ago, I almost sold it outright, low low price, giveaway almost, just to be rid of it. Glad I did not. I was in a jam and I needed cash. But—” sniffing hard, wiping his nose—“trying to sell piece like that is the quickest way to get caught. You know that yourself. As negotiable instrument—different story! They hold it as collateral—they front you the goods. You sell the goods, whatever, return with the capital, give them their cut, picture is returned to you, game over. Understand?”

I said nothing, began to leaf through the Christie’s catalogue again, which was still lying open on my desk.

“You know what they say.” His voice both sad and cajoling. “ ‘Chance makes the thief.’ Who knows that better than you? I went in your locker looking for lunch money and I thought: what? Hello? What’s this? It was easy to slip it out and hide it. And then I took my old workbook to Kotku’s shop class, same size, same thickness—same tape and everything! Kotku helped me do it. I didn’t tell her why I was doing it though. You couldn’t really tell Kotku things like that.”

“I still can’t believe you stole it.”

“Look. Am not going to make excuses. I took it. But—” he smiled winningly—“am I dishonest? Did I lie about it?”

“Yes,” I said, after a disbelieving pause. “Yes, you did lie about it.”

“You never asked me straight out! If you did, I would have told you!”

“Boris, that’s bullshit. You lied.”

“Well, am not lying now,” said Boris, looking around resignedly. “I thought you would have found out by now! Years ago! I thought that you knew it was me!”

I wandered away, to the stairs, trailed by Popchik; Hobie had shut the vacuum cleaner off, leaving a glaring silence, and I didn’t want him to hear us.

“I am not too clear—” Boris blew his nose sloppily, inspected the contents of the Kleenex, winced—“but am fairly sure it is in Europe somewhere.” He wadded the Kleenex and stuffed it in his pocket. “Genoa, outside chance. But my best guess is Belgium or Germany. Holland, maybe. They will be able to negotiate with it better because people are more impressed with it over there.”

“That doesn’t really narrow it down a lot.”

“Well, listen! Be glad it is not in South America! Because then, I guarantee, no chance you would see it again.”

“I thought you said it was gone.”

“I am not saying anything except I think I may be able to learn where it is. May. That is very different from knowing how to get it back. I have not dealt with these people before at all.”

“What people?”

Boris, uneasily, remained silent, casting his eyes about on the floor: iron bulldog figurines, stacked books, many little carpets.

“He doesn’t pee on the antiquities?” he inquired, nodding at Popchik. “All this nice furniture?”

“Nope.”

“He used to go all the time in your house. Your whole carpet downstairs smelled like pee. I think maybe because Xandra was not so good about taking him out before we got there.”

“What people?”

“Huh?”

“What people have you not dealt with.”

“It’s complicated. I will explain to you if you want,” he added hastily, “only I think we are both tired and now is not the time. But I am going to make a few calls and tell you what I find, right? And when I do, I will come back and tell you, promise. By the way—” tapping his upper lip with his finger.

“What?” I said, startled.

“Spot there. Under your nose.”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“Oh.” Standing there, he looked uncertain, as if he were on the verge of rushing in with some much more heated apology or outburst, but the silence that hung between us had a decidedly conclusive air, and he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well.”

“Well.”

“See you later, then.”

“Sure.” But when he walked out the door, and I stood at the window and watched him duck the drips from the awning and saunter away—his gait loosening and lightening as soon as he thought he was out of my view—I felt there was a pretty good chance it was the last I’d see of him.

xiii.

GIVEN HOW I FELT, which was near death basically, suffering from an ugly migrainous headache and engulfed with such misery I could barely see, there was little point keeping the shop open. So though the sun had come out and people were appearing on the street, I turned around the “Closed” sign and—with Popper trundling anxiously behind me—I dragged myself upstairs, half-sick with the pain hammering behind my eyes, to pass out for a few hours before dinner.

Kitsey and I were to meet at her mother’s apartment at 7:45 before heading over to the Longstreets’, but I arrived a little early—partly because I wanted to see her on her own for a few minutes before we went to dinner; partly because I had something for Mrs. Barbour—a rare-ish exhibition catalogue I’d found for her in one of Hobie’s estate lots, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt.

“No, no,” said Etta when I went to the kitchen to ask her to knock on the door for me, “she’s up and about. I took her some tea not fifteen minutes ago.”

What “up and about” meant, for Mrs. Barbour, was pyjamas and puppy-chewed slippers with what looked like an old opera coat thrown over. “Oh, Theo!” she said, her face opening with a touching, unguarded plainness that made me think of Andy on the rare occasions when he was actually pleased about something—such as his Nagler 22mm telescopic eyepiece arriving in the mail or his happy discovery of the LARP (Live Action Role Play) porn site, featuring busty sword-wielding lasses getting it on with knights and wizards and so forth. “What a dear, dear duck you are!”

“You don’t have it, I hope?”

“No—” leafing through it delightedly—“how perfect of you! You’ll never, ever believe it but I saw this show in Boston when I was in college.”

“That must have been some show,” I said, settling back into an armchair. I was feeling much happier than, an hour previous, I would have thought possible. Sick over the painting, sick with headache, despairing at the thought of dinner with the Longstreets, wondering how the hell I was going to make it through an evening of hot crab dip and Forrest delivering his views on the economy when all I basically wanted to do was blow my brains out, I’d tried to call Kitsey, with the intention of begging her to plead illness with me so we could skive off and spend the evening at her apartment, in bed. But—as often happened, infuriatingly, on Kitsey’s days out—my calls had gone unreturned, my texts and emails unanswered, my messages clicking straight through to voice mail—“I need to get a new phone,” she’d said fretfully, when I’d complained of these all-too-frequent communication blackouts, “there’s something wrong with it”—and though I’d asked her several times to walk in off the street with me to the Apple store and get a new one, she always had an excuse: lines too long, had to be somewhere, wasn’t in the mood, hungry, thirsty, needed to pee, couldn’t we do it another time?

Sitting on the side of my bed with eyes closed, annoyed at not being able to reach her (as I never seemed to be able to do, when I really needed to), I’d thought of calling Forrest and telling him I was ill. But as bad as I felt I still wanted to see her, even if it was only across the table at dinner with people I didn’t like. Hence—to force myself out of bed, uptown, and through the most deathly part of the evening—I’d swallowed what had been, for me, in the old days, a mild dose of opiates. But though it hadn’t knocked my headache out it had put me in a surprisingly good mood. I hadn’t felt so well in months.

“You and Kitsey are dining out tonight?” said Mrs. Barbour, who was still happily leafing through the catalogue I’d brought. “Forrest Longstreet?”

“That’s right.”

“He was in your class with Andy, wasn’t he?”

“Yes he was.”

“He wasn’t one of those boys who was so awful?”

“Well—” Euphoria had made me generous. “Not really.” Forrest, oafish and slow on the draw (“Sir, are trees considered plants?”) had never been intelligent enough to persecute Andy and me in any kind of focused or resourceful way. “But, yes, you’re right, he was part of that whole group, you know, Temple and Tharp and Cavanaugh and Scheffernan.”

“Yes. Temple. I certainly remember him. And the Cable boy.”

“What?” I said, mildly surprised.

“He’s certainly turned out badly,” she said without looking up from the catalogue. “Living on credit… can’t hold a job and also some trouble with the law, I hear. Wrote some bad checks, apparently his mother had a hard time keeping the people from pressing charges. And Win Temple,” she said, looking up, before I could explain that Cable hadn’t really been a part of that aggressive-jock crowd. “He was the one who knocked Andy’s head against the wall in the showers.”

“Yes, that was him.” What I mainly remembered about the showers was not so much Andy getting concussed on the tile as Scheffernan and Cavanaugh wrestling me down and trying to shove a stick of deodorant up my ass.

Mrs. Barbour—wrapped delicately in her coat, shawl over her lap as if riding in a sleigh to a Christmas party—was still leafing through her book. “Do you know what that Temple boy said?”

“Sorry?”

“The Temple boy.” Her eyes were on the book; her voice was bright, as if she were speaking to a stranger at a cocktail party. “What his excuse was. When they asked why he knocked Andy unconscious.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“He said, ‘Because that kid gets on my nerves.’ He’s an attorney now, they tell me, I certainly hope he holds his temper a bit better in the courtroom.”

“Win wasn’t the worst of them,” I said, after a languid pause. “Not by a long shot. Now Cavanaugh and Scheffernan—”

“The mother wasn’t even listening. Texting away on her cell phone. Some terribly urgent matter with a client.”

I looked at the cuff of my shirt. I’d taken care to change into a fresh one after work—if there was one thing my opiated years had taught me (not to mention my years of antiques fraud), it was that starched shirts and suits fresh from the cleaners’ went a long, long way toward hiding a multitude of sins—but I’d been loopy and careless from the morphine tabs, drifting around my bedroom and humming to Elliott Smith as I dressed, sunshine… been keeping me up for days… and (I noticed) one of my cuffs wasn’t done up properly. Moreover the knots I’d chosen weren’t even a matched pair: one purple, the other blue.

“We could have sued,” said Mrs. Barbour absent-mindedly. “I don’t know why we didn’t. Chance said he thought it would make things harder for Andy at school.”

“Well—” There was no way I could inconspicuously do up my cuff again. It would have to wait for the cab. “That thing in the shower was really Scheffernan’s fault.”

“Yes, that’s what Andy said, and the Temple boy too, but as for the actual blow, the concussion, there was no question—”

“Scheffernan was a sneaky guy. He pushed Andy into Temple—Scheffernan was across the locker room and laughing his head off with Cavanaugh and those guys by the time the fight started.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but David—” David was Scheffernan’s first name—“he wasn’t a bit like the others, always perfectly nice, so polite, we had him over here a good deal, and always so good about including Andy. You know how a lot of the children were, with birthday parties—”

“Yes, but Scheffernan had it in for Andy, always. Because Scheffernan’s mother was always forcing Andy down his throat. Making him ask Andy, making him come over here.”

Mrs. Barbour sighed and set down her cup. The tea was jasmine; I could smell it where I sat.

“Well, goodness knows, you knew Andy better than I did,” she said unexpectedly, drawing the embroidered collar of her wrap closer. “I never saw him for who he was and in some ways he was my favorite child. I wish I hadn’t been always trying to make him into someone else. Certainly you were able to accept him on his own terms, more than his father and I or God knows his brother. Look,” she said, in much the same tone, in the rather chilling silence that followed this. She was still leafing through the book. “Here’s St. Peter. Turning the little children away from Christ.”

Obediently I got up and circled behind. I knew the work, one of the great, stormy drypoints at the Morgan, the Hundred Guilder Print as it was called: the price that Rembrandt himself, according to legend, had been forced to pay to buy it back.

“He’s so particular, Rembrandt. Even his religious subjects—it’s as if the saints came down to model for him in the life. These two St. Peters—” she gestured to her own little pen-and-ink on the wall—“completely different works and years apart but the identical man, body and soul, you could pick him out of a line-up, couldn’t you? That balding head. Same face—dutiful, earnest. Goodness written all over him and yet always that twitch of worry and disquiet. That subtle shade of the betrayer.”

Though she was still gazing down at the book I found myself looking at the silver-framed photo of Andy and his father on the table beside us. It was only a snapshot but for a sense of foreshadowing, of transience and doom, no master of Dutch genre painting could have set up the composition more skillfully. Andy and Mr. Barbour against a dark background, snuffed candles in the wall sconces, Mr. Barbour’s hand on a model ship. The effect could have been no more allegorical, or chilling, if he’d had his hand on a skull. Above, in lieu of the hourglass beloved by the Dutch vanitas painters, a stark and slightly sinister clock with Roman numerals. Black hands: five minutes to twelve. Time running out.

“Mommy—” It was Platt, barging in, stopping cold to see me.

“Don’t bother knocking dear,” said Mrs. Barbour without glancing up from her book, “you’re always welcome.”

“I—” Platt goggled at me. “Kitsey.” He seemed rattled. He dug his hands in the bellows pockets of his field coat. “She’s been held up,” he said to his mother.

Mrs. Barbour looked startled. “Oh,” she said. They looked at each other and some unspoken something seemed to pass between them.

“Held up?” I asked amiably, looking between them. “Where?”

There was no answer to this. Platt—gaze fixed on his mother—opened his mouth and shut it. Rather smoothly, Mrs. Barbour put her book aside and said, without looking at me: “Well, you know, I slightly think she’s out there playing golf today.”

“Really?” I said, mildly surprised. “Isn’t it bad weather for that?”

“There’s traffic,” Platt said eagerly, with a glance at his mother. “She’s stuck. The expressway is a mess. She’s phoned Forrest,” he said, turning to me, “they’re holding dinner.”

“Maybe,” said Mrs. Barbour, thoughtfully, after a pause, “maybe you and Theo should go out and have a drink? Yes,” she said decisively, to Platt, as if the matter had been settled, folding her hands. “I think that’s an excellent idea. You two go out and get a drink. And you!” she said, turning to me with a smile. “What an angel you are! Thank you so much for my book,” she said, reaching to clasp my hand. “The most wonderful present in the world.”

“But—”

“Yes?”

“Won’t she need to come back here and freshen up?” I said, after a slightly confused pause.

“Sorry?” Both of them were looking at me.

“If she’s been playing golf? Won’t she need to change? She won’t want to go to Forrest’s in her golfing clothes,” I added, looking back and forth between the two of them, and then—when neither of them replied—“I don’t mind waiting here.”

Thoughtfully, Mrs. Barbour pursed her lips, with heavy-looking eyes—and all at once, I got it. She was tired. She hadn’t been expecting to have to sit around and entertain me, only she was too polite to say so.

“Although,” I said, standing up, self-consciously, “it is getting on, I could use a cocktail—”

Just then, the phone in my pocket, which had been silent all day, chimed loudly: incoming text. Clumsily—I was so exhausted I could hardly figure out where my own pocket was—I fumbled for it.

Sure enough, it was Kitsey, jingling with emoji. ♥♥Hi Popsy ♥ runningan hour late! Hope I caught you! Forrest & Celia holding dinner, meet you there 9pm, love you mostest! Kits

xiv.

FIVE OR SIX DAYS later, I still had not fully recovered from my evening with Boris—partly because I was busy with clients, auctions to go to, estates to look at, and partly because I had grueling events with Kitsey nearly every night: holiday parties, black-tie dinner, Pelléas et Mélisande at the Met, up by six every morning and bed well after midnight, one evening out until two a.m., scarcely a moment to myself and (even worse) scarcely a moment alone with her, which normally would have driven me crazy but in the circumstances kept me so submerged and embattled with fatigue that I didn’t have much time to think.

All week long, I’d been looking forward to Kitsey’s Tuesday with her girlfriends—not because I didn’t want to see her, but because Hobie had a dinner out and I was looking forward to being on my own, eating some leftovers from the fridge and going to bed early. But at closing time, seven p.m., I still had some catching-up to do in the shop. A decorator, miraculously, had shown up to inquire about some expensive, out of fashion, and impossible-to-sell pewter that had been gathering dust atop a cabinet since Welty’s day. Pewter wasn’t something I knew much about, and I was looking for the article I wanted in a back number of Antiques when Boris dashed up from the curb and knocked on the glass door, not five minutes after I’d locked up for the day. It was pelting rain; in the ragged downpour he was a shadow in an overcoat, unrecognizable, but the cadence of his rap was distinct from the old days, when he would circle around to the patio at my dad’s house and tap briskly for me to let him in.

He ducked in and shook himself violently so the water went flying. “You want to ride with me uptown?” he said without preamble.

“I’m busy.”

“Yes?” he said, in a voice at once so affectionate, and exasperated, and transparently, childishly hurt, that I turned from my book shelf. “And won’t you ask why? I think you might want to come.”

“Uptown where?”

“I am going to talk to some people.”

“And that would be about—?”

“Yes,” he said brightly, sniffling and wiping his nose. “Exactly. You don’t have to come, I was going to bring my boy Toly, but I thought for several reasons it might be good if you wanted to be there also—Popchyk, yes yes!” he said, stooping to pick up the dog, who had trundled up to greet him. “Glad to see you too! He likes bacon,” he said to me, scratching Popper behind the ears and rubbing his own nose at the back of Popper’s neck. “Do you ever cook bacon for him? Enjoys the bread too, when is soaked with grease.”

“Talk to who? Who is this?”

Boris pushed the dripping hair out of his face. “Guy I know. Named Horst. Old friend of Myriam’s. He got stung on this deal too—honest, I do not think he can help us, but Myriam suggested might not hurt to talk to him again? and I think maybe she is right about that.”

xv.

ON THE WAY UPTOWN, in the back of the town car, rain pounding so hard that Gyuri had to shout for us to hear him (“What a dog’s weather!”) Boris filled me in quietly about Horst. “Sad sad story. He is German. Interesting guy, very intelligent and sensitive. Important family too… he explained to me once but I forgot. His dad was part American and left him a load of money but when his mother remarried—” here he named a world-famous industrial name, with a dark old Nazi echo. “Millions. I mean you can’t believe how much money these people have. They are rolling in it. Money out the ass.”

“Yep, that’s a sad story, all right.”

“Well—Horst is a bad junkie. You know me—” philosophical shrug—“I don’t judge or condemn. Do what you like, I don’t care! But Horst—very sad case. He fell in love with this girl who was on it and she got him on it to o. Took him for everything, and when the money ran out, she left. Horst’s family—they have disowned him many years ago. And still he eats his heart out for this awful rotten girl. Girl, I say—she must be nearly forty. Ulrika her name is. Every time Horst gets a little money—she comes back for a while. Then she leaves him again.”

“What does he have to do with it?”

“Horst’s associate Sascha set up things with this deal. I meet the guy—he seems okay—what do I know? Horst told me that he had never worked with Sascha’s man in person, but I was in a hurry and I didn’t go into it the way I should and—” he threw up his arms—“poof! Myriam was right—she is always right—I should have listened to her.”

Water streamed down the windows, quicksilver heavy, sealing us into the car, lights winking and melting around us in a roar that reminded me of when Boris and I used to ride in the back of the Lexus in Vegas when my dad went through the car wash.

“Horst is usually a bit fussy about who he does business with, so I thought it would be okay. But—he is very restrained, you know? ‘Unusual’ is what he said. ‘Unconventional.’ Well what is that supposed to mean? Then when I get down there—these people are crazy. I mean like shooting-guns-at-chickens crazy. And situations like this—you want it calm and quiet! It was like, have they seen too much TV or something? like, this is how to act—? normally in this type situation everyone is very very polite, hush-hush, very peaceful! Myriam said—and she was right—forget about the guns! What kind of crazy thing is this for these people to keep chickens in Miami? Even a little thing like that—this is Jacuzzi neighborhood, tennis courts, you understand me—who keeps chickens? You don’t want a neighbor phoning in complaint because of chicken noise in the yard! But by that time—” he shrugged—“there I was. I was in. I told myself not to worry so much, but turned out I was right.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know. I got half the goods I was promised—rest coming in a week. That’s not un-typical. But then they were arrested and I didn’t get the other half and I didn’t get the picture. Horst—well, Horst would like to find it too, he is out some big green as well. Anyway I am hoping he has a bit more information than when we spoke last.”

xvi.

GYURI LEFT US OUT in the Sixties, not far at all from the Barbours’. “This is the place?” I said, shaking the rain off Hobie’s umbrella. We were out in front of one of the big limestone townhouses off Fifth—black iron doors, massive lion’s-head knockers.

“Yes—it’s his father’s place—his other family are trying to get him out legally but good luck with that, hah.”

We were buzzed in, took a cage elevator up to the second floor. I could smell incense, weed, spaghetti sauce cooking. A lanky blonde woman—short-cropped hair and a serene small-eyed face like a camel’s—opened the door. She was dressed like a sort of old-fashioned street urchin or newsboy: houndstooth trousers, ankle boots, dirty thermal shirt, suspenders. Perched on the tip of her nose were a pair of wire-rimmed Ben Franklin glasses.

Without saying a word she opened the door to us and walked off, leaving us alone in a dim, grimy, ballroom-sized salon which was like a derelict version of some high-society set from a Fred Astaire movie: high ceilings; crumbling plaster; grand piano; darkened chandelier with half the crystals broken or gone; sweeping Hollywood staircase littered with cigarette butts. Sufi chants droned low in the background: Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Someone had drawn on the wall, in charcoal, a series of life-sized nudes ascending the stairs like frames in a film; and there was very little furniture apart from a ratty futon and some chairs and tables that looked scavenged from the street. Empty picture frames on the wall, a ram’s skull. On the television, an animated film flickered and sputtered with epileptic vim, windmilling geometrics intercut with letters and live-action racecar images. Apart from that, and the door where the blonde had disappeared, the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raisonnés, books in German and English including Nabokov’s Despair and Heidegger’s Being and Time with the cover torn off, sketch books, art books, ashtrays and burnt tinfoil, and a grubby-looking pillow where drowsed a gray tabby cat. Over the door, like a trophy from some Schwarzwald hunting lodge, a rack of antlers cast distorted shadows that spread and branched across the ceiling with a Nordic, wicked, fairy-tale feel.

Conversation in the next room. The windows were shrouded with tacked-up bedsheets just thin enough to let in a diffuse violet glow from the street. As I looked around, forms emerged from the dark and transformed with a dream strangeness: for one thing, the makeshift room divider—consisting of a carpet sagging tenement-style from the ceiling on fishing line—was on closer look a tapestry and a good one too, eighteenth century or older, the near twin of an Amiens I’d seen at auction with an estimate of forty thousand pounds. And not all the frames on the wall were empty. Some had paintings in them, and one of them—even in the poor light—looked like a Corot.

I was just about to step over for a look when a man who could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty appeared in the door: worn-looking, rangy, with straight sandy hair combed back from his face, in black punk jeans out at the knee and a grungy British commando sweater with an ill-fitting suit jacket over it.

“Hello,” he said to me, quiet British voice with a faint German bite, “you must be Potter,” and then, to Boris: “Glad you turned up. You two should stay and hang out. Candy and Niall are making dinner with Ulrika.”

Movement behind the tapestry, at my feet, that made me step back quickly: swaddled shapes on the floor, sleeping bags, a homeless smell.

“Thanks, we can’t stay,” said Boris, who had picked up the cat and was scratching it behind the ears. “Have some of that wine though, thanks.”

Without a word Horst passed his own glass over to Boris and then called into the next room in German. To me, he said: “You’re a dealer, right?” In the glow of the television his pale pinned gull’s eye shone hard and unblinking.

“Right,” I said uneasily; and then: “Uh, thanks.” Another woman—bob-haired and brunette, high black boots, skirt just short enough to show the black cat tattooed on one milky thigh—had appeared with a bottle and two glasses: one for Horst, one for me.

“Danke darling,” said Horst. To Boris he said: “You gentlemen want to do up?”

“Not right now,” said Boris, who had leaned forward to steal a kiss from the dark-haired woman as she was leaving. “Was wondering though. What do you hear from Sascha?”

“Sascha—” Horst sank down on the futon and lit a cigarette. With his ripped jeans and combat boots he was like a scuffed-up version of some below-the-title Hollywood character actor from the 1940s, some minor mitteleuropäischer known for playing tragic violinists and weary, cultivated refugees. “Ireland is where it seems to lead. Good news if you ask me.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“Nor to me, but I’ve talked to people and so far it checks out.” He spoke with all a junkie’s arrhythmic quiet, off-beat, but without the slur. “So—soon we should know more, I hope.”

“Friends of Niall’s?”

“No. Niall says he never heard of them. But it’s a start.”

The wine was bad: supermarket Syrah. Because I did not want to be anywhere near the bodies on the floor I drifted over to inspect a group of artists’ casts on a beat-up table: a male torso; a draped Venus leaning against a rock; a sandaled foot. In the poor light they looked like the ordinary plaster casts for sale at Pearl Paint—studio pieces for students to sketch from—but when I drew my finger across the top of the foot I felt the suppleness of marble, silky and grainless.

“Why would they go to Ireland with it?” Boris was saying restlessly. “What kind of collectors’ market? I thought everyone tries to get pieces out of there, not in.”

“Yes, but Sascha thinks he used the picture to clear a debt.”

“So the guy has ties there?”

“Evidently.”

“I find this difficult to believe.”

“What, about the ties?”

“No, about the debt. This guy—he looks like he was stealing hubcaps off the street six months ago. “

Horst shrugged, faintly: sleepy eyes, seamed forehead. “Who knows. Not sure that’s correct but certainly I’m not willing to trust to luck. Would I let my hand be cut off for it?” he said, lazily tapping an ash on the floor. “No.”

Boris frowned into his wine glass. “He was amateur. Believe me. If you saw him yourself you would know.”

“Yes but he likes to gamble, Sascha says.”

“You don’t think Sascha maybe knows more?”

“I think not.” There was a remoteness in his manner, as if he was talking half to himself. “ ‘Wait and see.’ This is what I hear. An unsatisfactory answer. Stinking from the top if you ask me. But as I say, we are not to the bottom of this yet.”

“And when does Sascha get back to the city?” The half-light in the room sent me straight back to childhood, Vegas, like the obscure mood of a dream lingering after sleep: haze of cigarette smoke, dirty clothes on the floor, Boris’s face white then blue in the flicker of the screen.

“Next week. I’ll give you a ring. You can talk to him yourself then.”

“Yes. But I think we should talk to him together.”

“Yes. I think so too. We’ll both be smarter, in future… this need not have happened… but in any case,” said Horst, who was scratching his neck slowly, absent-mindedly, “you understand I’m wary of pushing him too hard.”

“That is very convenient for Sascha.”

“You have suspicions. Tell me.”

“I think—” Boris cut his eyes at the doorway.

“Yes?”

“I think—” Boris lowered his voice—“you are being too easy on him. Yes yes—” putting up his hands—“I know. But—all very convenient for his guy to vanish, not a clue, he knows nothing!”

“Well, maybe,” Horst said. He seemed disconnected and partly elsewhere, like an adult in the room with small children. “This is pressing on me—on all of us. I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you. Though for all we know his guy was a cop.”

“No,” said Boris resolutely. “He was not. He was not. I know it.”

“Well—to be quite frank with you, I do not think so either, there is more to this than we yet know. Still, I’m hopeful.” He’d taken a wooden box from the drafting table and was poking around in it. “Sure you gentlemen wouldn’t like to get into a little something?”

I looked away. I would have liked nothing better. I would also have liked to see the Corot except I didn’t want to walk around the bodies on the floor to do it. Across the room, I’d noticed several other paintings propped on the wainscoting: a still life, a couple of small landscapes.

“Go look, if you want.” It was Horst. “The Lépine is fake. But the Claesz and the Berchem are for sale if you’re interested.”

Boris laughed and reached for one of Horst’s cigarettes. “He’s not in the market.”

“No?” said Horst genially. “I can give him a good price on the pair. The seller needs to get rid of them.”

I stepped in to look: still life, candle and half-empty wineglass. “Claesz-Heda?”

“No—Pieter. Although—” Horst put the box aside, then stood beside me and lifted the desk lamp on the cord, washing both paintings in a harsh, formal glare—“this bit—” traced mid-air with the curve of a finger—“the reflection of the flame here? and the edge of the table, the drapery? Could almost be Heda on a bad day.”

“Beautiful piece.”

“Yes. Beautiful of its type.” Up close he smelled unwashed and raunchy, with a strong, dusty import-shop odor like the inside of a Chinese box. “A bit prosaic to the modern taste. The classicizing manner. Much too staged. Still, the Berchem is very good.”

“Lot of fake Berchems out there,” I said neutrally.

“Yes—” the light from the upheld lamp on the landscape painting was bluish, eerie—“but this is lovely… Italy, 1655‥… the ochres beautiful, no? The Claesz not so good I think, very early, though the provenance is impeccable on both. Would be nice to keep them together… they have never been apart, these two. Father and son. Came down together in an old Dutch family, ended up in Austria after the war. Pieter Claesz…” Horst held the light higher. “Claesz was so uneven, honestly. Wonderful technique, wonderful surface, but something a bit off with this one, don’t you agree? The composition doesn’t hold together. Incoherent somehow. Also—” indicating with the flat of his thumb the too-bright shine coming off the canvas: overly varnished.

“I agree. And here—” tracing midair the ugly arc where an over-eager cleaning had scrubbed the paint down to the scumbling.

“Yes.” His answering look was amiable and drowsy. “Quite correct. Acetone. Whoever did that should be shot. And yet a mid-level painting like this, in poor condition—even an anonymous work—is worth more than a masterpiece, that’s the irony of it, worth more to me, anyway. Landscapes particularly. Very very easy to sell. Not too much attention from the authorities… difficult to recognize from a description… and still worth maybe a couple hundred thousand. Now, the Fabritius—” long, relaxed pause—“a different calibre altogether. The most remarkable work that’s ever passed through my hands, and I can say that without question.”

“Yes, and that is why we would like so much to get it back,” grumbled Boris from the shadows.

“Completely extraordinary,” continued Horst serenely. “A still life like this one—” he indicated the Claesz, with a slow wave (black-rimmed fingernails, scarred venous network on the back of his hand)—“well, so insistently a trompe l’oeil. Great technical skill, but overly refined. Obsessive exactitude. There’s a deathlike quality. A very good reason they are called natures mortes, yes? But the Fabritius…”—loose-kneed back-step—“I know the theory of The Goldfinch, I’m well familiar with it, people call it trompe l’oeil and indeed it can strike the eye that way from afar. But I don’t care what the art historians say. True: there are passages worked like a trompe l’oeil… the wall and the perch, gleam of light on brass, and then… the feathered breast, most creaturely. Fluff and down. Soft, soft. Claesz would carry that finish and exactitude down to the death—a painter like van Hoogstraten would carry it even farther, to the last nail of the coffin. But Fabritius… he’s making a pun on the genre… a masterly riposte to the whole idea of trompe l’oeil… because in other passages of the work—the head? the wing?—not creaturely or literal in the slightest, he takes the image apart very deliberately to show us how he painted it. Daubs and patches, very shaped and hand-worked, the neckline especially, a solid piece of paint, very abstract. Which is what makes him a genius less of his time than our own. There’s a doubleness. You see the mark, you see the paint for the paint, and also the living bird.”

“Yes, well,” growled Boris, in the dark beyond the spotlight, snapping his cigarette lighter shut, “if no paint, would be nothing to see.”

“Precisely.” Horst turned, his face cut by shadow. “It’s a joke, the Fabritius. It has a joke at its heart. And that’s what all the very greatest masters do. Rembrandt. Velázquez. Late Titian. They make jokes. They amuse themselves. They build up the illusion, the trick—but, step closer? it falls apart into brushstrokes. Abstract, unearthly. A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing. I should say that that one tiny painting puts Fabritius in the rank of the greatest painters who ever lived. And with The Goldfinch? He performs his miracle in such a bijou space. Although I admit, I was surprised—” turning to look at me—“when I held it in my hands the first time? The weight of it?”

“Yes—” I couldn’t help feeling gratified, obscurely, that he’d noted this detail, oddly important to me, with its own network of childhood dreams and associations, an emotional chord—“the board is thicker than you’d think. There’s a heft to it.”

“Heft. Quite. The very word. And the background—much less yellow than when I saw it as a boy. The painting underwent a cleaning—early nineties I believe. Post-conservation, there’s more light.”

“Hard to say. I’ve got nothing to compare it to.”

“Well,” said Horst. The smoke from Boris’s cigarette, threading in from the dark where he sat, gave the floodlit circle where we stood the midnight feel of a cabaret stage. “I may be wrong. I was a boy of twelve or so when I saw it for the first time.”

“Yes, I was about that age when I first saw it too.”

“Well,” said Horst, with resignation, scratching an eyebrow—dime-sized bruises on the backs of his hands—“that was the only time my father ever took me with him on a business trip, that time at The Hague. Ice cold boardrooms. Not a leaf stirring. On our afternoon I wanted to go to Drievliet, the fun park, but he took me to the Mauritshuis instead. And—great museum, many great paintings, but the only painting I remember seeing is your finch. A painting that appeals to a child, yes? Der Distelfink. That is how I knew it first, by its German name.”

“Yah, yah, yah,” said Boris from the darkness, in a bored voice. “This is like the education channel on the television.”

“Do you deal any modern art at all?” I said, in the silence that followed.

“Well—” Horst fixed me with his drained, wintry eye; deal wasn’t quite the correct verb, he seemed amused at my choice of words—“sometimes. Had a Kurt Schwitters not long ago—Stanton Macdonald-Wright—do you know him? Lovely painter. It depends a lot what comes my way. Quite honestly—do you ever deal in paintings at all?”

“Very seldom. The art dealers get there before I do.”

“That is unfortunate. Portable is what matters in my business. There are a lot of mid-level pieces I could sell on the clean if I had paper that looked good.”

Spit of garlic; pans clashing in the kitchen; faint Moroccan-souk drift of urine and incense. On and on flatlining, the Sufi drone, wafting and spiraling around us in the dark, ceaseless chants to the Divine.

“Or this Lépine. Quite a good forgery. There’s this fellow—Canadian, quite amusing, you’d like him—does them to order. Pollocks, Modiglianis—happy to introduce you, if you’d like. Not much money in them for me, although there’s a fortune to be made if one of them turned up in just the right estate.” Then, smoothly, in the silence that followed: “Of older works I see a lot of Italian, but my preferences—they incline to the North as you can see. Now—this Berchem is a very fine example for what it is but of course these Italianate landscapes with the broken columns and the simple milkmaids don’t so much suit the modern taste, do they? I much prefer the van Goyen there. Sadly not for sale.”

“Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot.”

“From here, yes, you might.” He was pleased at the comparison. “Very similar painters—Vincent himself remarked it—you know that letter? ‘The Corot of the Dutch’? Same tenderness of mist, that openness in fog, do you know what I mean?”

“Where—” I’d been about to ask the typical dealer’s question, where did you get it, before catching myself.

“Marvelous painter. Very prolific. And this is a particularly beautiful example,” he said, with all a collector’s pride. “Many amusing details up close—tiny hunter, barking dog. Also—quite typical—signed on the stern of the boat. Quite charming. If you don’t mind—” indicating, with a nod, the bodies behind the tapestry. “Go over. You won’t disturb them.”

“No, but—”

“No—” holding up a hand—“I understand perfectly. Shall I bring it to you?”

“Yes, I’d love to see it.”

“I must say, I’ve grown so fond of it, I’ll hate to see it go. He dealt paintings himself, van Goyen. A lot of the Dutch masters did. Jan Steen. Vermeer. Rembrandt. But Jan van Goyen—” he smiled—“was like our friend Boris here. A hand in everything. Paintings, real estate, tulip futures.”

Boris, in the dark, made a disgruntled noise at this and seemed about to say something when all of a sudden a scrawny wild-haired boy of maybe twenty-two, with an old fashioned mercury thermometer sticking out of his mouth, came lurching out of the kitchen, shielding his eyes with his hand against the upheld lamp. He was wearing a weird, womanish, chunky knit cardigan that came almost to his knees like a bathrobe; he looked ill and disoriented, his sleeve was up, he was rubbing the inside of his forearm with two fingers and then the next thing I knew his knees went sideways and he’d hit the floor, the thermometer skittering out with a glassy noise on the parquet, unbroken.

“What…?” said Boris, stabbing out his cigarette, standing up, the cat darting from his lap into the shadows. Horst—frowning—set the lamp on the floor, light swinging crazily on walls and ceiling. “Ach,” he said fretfully, brushing the hair from his eyes, dropping to his knees to look the young man over. “Get back,” he said in an annoyed voice to the women who had appeared in the door, along with a cold, dark-haired, attentive-looking bruiser and a couple of glassy prep-school boys, no more than sixteen—and then, when they all still stood staring—flicked out a hand. “In the kitchen with you! Ulrika,” he said to the blonde, “halt sie zurück.”

The tapestry was stirring; behind it, blanket-wrapped huddles, sleepy voices: eh? was ist los?

“Ruhe, schlaft weiter,” called the blonde, before turning to Horst and beginning to speak urgently in rapid-fire German.

Yawns; groans; farther back, a bundle sitting up, groggy American whine: “Huh? Klaus? What’d she say?”

“Shut up baby and go back schlafen.”

Boris had picked up his coat and was shouldering it on. “Potter,” he said and then again, when I did not answer, staring horrified at the floor, where the boy was breathing in gurgles: “Potter.” Catching my arm. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Yes, sorry. We’ll have to talk later. Schiesse,” said Horst regretfully, shaking the boy’s limp shoulder, with the tone of a parent making a not-particularly-convincing show of scolding a child. “Dummer Wichser! Dummkopf! How much did he take, Niall?” he said to the bruiser who had reappeared in the door and was looking on with a critical eye.

“Fuck if I know,” said the Irishman, with an ominous sideways pop of his head.

“Come on Potter,” said Boris, catching my arm. Horst had his ear to the boy’s chest and the blonde, who had returned, had dropped to her knees beside him and was checking his airway.

As they consulted urgently in German, more noise and movement behind the Amiens, which billowed out suddenly: faded blossoms, a fête champêtre, prodigal nymphs disporting themselves amidst fountain and vine. I was staring at a satyr peeping at them slyly from behind a tree when, unexpectedly—something against my leg—I started back violently as a hand swiped from underneath and clutched my trouser cuff. From the floor, one of the dirty bundles—swollen red face just visible from under the tapestry—inquired of me in a sleepy gallant voice: “He’s a margrave, my dear, did you know that?”

I pulled my trouser leg free and stepped back. The boy on the floor was rolling his head a bit and making sounds like he was drowning.

“Potter.” Boris had gathered up my coat and was practically stuffing it in my face. “Come on! Let’s go! Ciao,” he called into the kitchen with a lift of his chin (pretty dark head appearing in the doorway, a fluttering hand: bye, Boris! Bye!) as he pushed me ahead of him and ducked behind me out the door. “Ciao, Horst!” he said, making a call me later gesture, hand to ear.

“Tschau Boris! Sorry about this! We’ll talk soon! Up,” said Horst, as the Irishman came up and grabbed the boy’s other arm from underneath; together they hoisted him up, feet limp and toes dragging and—amidst hurried activity in the doorway, the two young teenagers scrambling back in alarm—hauled him into the lighted doorway of the next room, where Boris’s brunette was drawing up a syringe of something from a tiny glass bottle.

xvii.

GOING DOWN IN THE cage elevator we were suddenly encased in stillness: grinding of gears, creaking of pulleys.

Outside, the weather had cleared. “Come on,” Boris said to me—nervously glancing up the street—he had his phone out of his coat pocket—“let’s cross, come on—”

“What,” I said—we just had the light, if we hurried—“are you calling 911?”

“No no,” said Boris distractedly, wiping his nose, looking around, “I don’t want to stand here waiting for the car, I’m calling him to pick us up other side of the park. We’ll walk across. Sometimes some of these kids push shots that are a little too big,” he said, when he saw me looking anxiously back in the direction of the townhouse. “Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.”

“He didn’t look fine.”

“No, but he was breathing and Horst has Narcan. That’ll bring him right out of it. Like magic, have you ever seen it? Throws you right in withdrawal. You feel like shit, but you live.”

“They should take him to the ER.”

“Why?” said Boris reasonably. “What will the emergency people do? Give Narcan, that’s what. Horst can give it to him quicker than they can. And yes—he will come to puking himself and feeling like stabbed through the head, but better there than in ambulance, BOOM, shirt cut open, mask jammed down on him, peoples slapping his face to wake him, laws involved, everyone very harsh and judgmental—believe me, Narcan, very very violent experience, you feel bad enough when you come round without being in hospital, bright lights and everyone very disapproving and hostile, treating you like shit, ‘drug addict,’ ‘overdose,’ all these nasty looks, maybe not letting you go home when you want, psych ward maybe, social worker marching in to give you the big ‘So Much to Live For’ talk and maybe on top of it all, nice visit from the cops—Hang on,” he said, “one moment please,” and started talking in Ukrainian on the phone.

Darkness. Under the foggy corona of the street lamps, park benches slick with rain, drip drip drip, trees sodden and black. Sopping footpaths deep with leaves, a few solitary office workers hurrying home. Boris—head down, hands thrust in pockets, staring at the ground—had got off his call and was muttering to himself.

“Sorry, what?” I said, looking at him sideways.

Boris compressed his lips, tossed his head. “Ulrika,” he said darkly. “That bitch. That was her that answered the door.”

I wiped my brow. I felt jittery and sick and had broken out in a cold sweat. “How do you know these people?”

Boris shrugged. “Horst?” he said, kicking up a shower of leaves. “We know each other from years back. I know Myriam through him—I am grateful to him for introducing us.”

“And—?”

“What?”

“On the floor back there??”

“Him? That fell?” Boris made his old who knows? face. “They’ll take care of him, don’t worry. It happens. They’re always fine. Really,” he said, in a more earnest tone. “Because—listen, listen,” he said, digging me in the side with his elbow. “Horst has these kids hanging around a lot—changes a lot, always a new crowd—college age, high school age. Rich kids mostly, trust fund, who might want to trade him some art or a painting they took maybe from their family? They know to come to him. Because—” tossing his head, tossing the hair from his eyes—“Horst himself, when he was a kid, you know—long time ago, nineteen eighties—he went for one year, or two, to one of these fancy-boy schools around here where they make you wear the jacket. Some place not too far away. He showed me it once, in a cab. Anyway—” he sniffed—“boy on the floor? He is not some poor boy from the street. And they will not let something happen to him. Let’s hope he learns his lesson. Many of them do. He will never be so sick in his life after he gets that shot of Narcan. Besides, Candy’s a nurse and she’ll look after him when he comes to. Candy? The brunette?” he said, digging me in the ribs again when I didn’t answer. “Did you see her?” He chortled. “Like—?” He reached down and drew a fingertip above his kneecap to simulate the line of her boots. “She’s terrific. God, if I could get her away from that Niall guy, the Irish, I would. We went out to Coney Island one day, just the two of us, and I never had such a good time. She likes to knit sweaters, can you imagine that?” he said, looking at me slyly from the corner of his eye. “Woman like that—would you think she is woman who enjoys to knit sweaters? But she does! Offered to make me one! She was serious, too! ‘Boris, I will knit you a sweater any time you like. Just tell me what color and I will do it!’ ”

He was trying to cheer me up but I still felt too shaken to talk. For a while we both walked with heads down and there was no noise except the two of us clicking along the park path in darkness, our footsteps seeming to echo forever and beyond the city night enormous around us, car horns and sirens sounding like they were coming from half a mile away.

“Well,” said Boris presently, throwing me another sideways glance, “at least I’ve got it figured out now, eh?”

“What?” I said, startled. My mind was still on the boy and my own near misses: blacking out in the bathroom upstairs at Hobie’s, head bloody where I’d hit it on the edge of the sink; waking up on the kitchen floor at Carole Lombard’s with Carole shaking me and screaming, lucky it was four minutes, I was calling 911 if you didn’t come to in five.

“Pretty sure of it. It was Sascha took the picture.”

“Who?”

Boris glowered. “Ulrika’s brother, funny enough,” he said, folding his arms across his narrow chest. “And two boots make a pair, if you know what I mean. Sascha and Horst are pretty tight—Horst will never hear anything against him—well. Hard not to like Sascha—everyone does—he is friendlier than Ulrika, but our personalities never came together. Horst was straight as string, they all say, till he fell in with those two. Studying philosophy… set to go into running the dad’s company… and here you see him now. That said, I never thought Sascha would go against Horst, not in one hundred years. You followed all that in there?”

“No.”

“Well, Horst thinks Sascha’s word is gold but I am not so sure. And I do not think the picture is in Ireland, either. Even Niall, the Irish, does not think it. I hate that she is back, Ulrika—I can’t say plainly what I think. Because—” hands deep in pockets—“I’m a little surprised Sascha would dare this, and I dare not say it to Horst, but I think no other explanation—I think whole bad deal, arrest, blow-up with the cops, all that, was excuse for Sascha to make off with painting. Horst has dozens of people living off him—he is far too gentle and trusting—mild in his soul, you know, believes the best of people—well, he can let Sascha and Ulrika steal from him, fine, but I will not let them steal from me.”

“Mmn.” I hadn’t seen very much of Horst but he hadn’t seemed particularly mild in his soul to me.

Boris scowled, kicking at the puddles. “Only problem, though? Sascha’s guy? The one he set me up with? Real name—? No clue. He called himself ‘Terry’ which was not right—I don’t use my own name either but ‘Terry,’ Canadian, give me a fucking break! He was from Czech Republic, no more ‘Terry White’ than I am! I think he is street criminal—fresh out of jail—know-nothing, uneducated—plain brute. I think Sascha picked him up somewhere, to use for shill, and gave him cut in exchange for throwing the deal—peanuts kind of cut, probably. But I know what ‘Terry’ looks like and I know he has connections in Antwerp and I am going to call my boy Cherry and get him on it.”

“Cherry?”

“Yes—is my boy Victor’s kliytchka, we call him that because his nose is red, but also because his Russian name, Vitya, is close to Russian word for cherry. Also, there is famous soap opera in Russia, Winter Cherry—well, hard to explain. I tease Vitya about this programme, it makes him very annoyed. Anyhow—Cherry knows everyone, everything, hears all the inside talk. Two weeks before it happens—you hear it all from Cherry. So no need to worry about your bird, all right? I am pretty sure we will sort it all out.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort it out’—?”

Boris made an exasperated noise. “Because this is closed circle, you understand? Horst is right on the money about that. No one is going to buy this painting. Impossible to sell. But—black market, barter currency? Can be traded back and forth forever! Valuable, portable. Hotel rooms—going back and forth. Drugs, arms, girls, cash—whatever you like.”

“Girls?”

“Girls, boys, what have you. Look look,” he said, holding up a hand, “I am not involved in anything like that. I was too close to being sold myself as a boy—these snakes are all over Ukraine, or used to be, every corner and railway station, and I can tell you if you are young and unhappy enough it seems like good deal. Normal-seeming guy promises restaurant job in London or some such, supplies air ticket and passport—ha. Next thing you know you are waking up chained by the wrist in some basement. Would never be involved with any such. It is wrong. But it happens. And once painting is out of my hands, and Horst’s—who knows what it is being traded for? This group holds it, that group holds it. Point being—” upheld forefinger—“your picture is not going to disappear in collection of oligarch art freak. It is too too famous. No one wants to buy it. Why would they? What can they do with it? Nothing. Unless cops find it—and they have not found it, this we know—”

“I want the cops to find it.”

“Well—” Boris rubbed his nose briskly—“yes, all very noble. But for now, what I do know is that it will move, and only move in relatively small network. And Victor Cherry is great friend, and owes me big. So, cheer up!” he said, grasping my arm. “Don’t look so white and ill! And we will talk soon again, I promise.”

xviii.

STANDING UNDER A STREETLAMP where Boris had left me (“cannot drop you home! I am late! Somewhere to be!”) I was so shaken that I had to look around to get my bearings—frothy gray façade of the Alwyn, like some lurid dementia of the Baroque—and the floodlights on the cutwork, the Christmas decorations on the door of Petrossian struck some deep-embedded memory gong: December, my mother in a snow hat: here baby, let me run around the corner and buy some croissants for breakfast…

I was so distracted that a man coming fast round the corner whacked straight into me: “Watch it!”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking myself. Even though the accident had been the other guy’s fault—too busy honking and yakking away on his cell phone to look where he was going—several people on the sidewalk had directed their disapproving looks at me. Feeling short-winded and confused, I tried to think what to do. I could catch the subway down to Hobie’s, if I felt like catching the subway, but Kitsey’s apartment was closer. She and her roommates Francie and Em would all be out on their Girls’ Night (no point texting or calling, as I knew from experience; they usually went to a movie), but I had a key and I could let myself in and make myself a drink and lie down while I waited for her to come home.

The weather had cleared, wintry moon crisp through a gap in the storm clouds, and I began to walk east again, pausing every now and then to try and hail a cab. I wasn’t in the habit of stopping by Kitsey’s without phoning, mainly because I didn’t care much for her roommates nor they for me. Yet despite Francie and Em and our stilted pleasantries in the kitchen, Kitsey’s apartment was one of the few places I felt truly safe in New York. No one knew how to reach me at Kitsey’s. There was always the sense that it was temporary; she didn’t keep many clothes there and lived mostly out of a suitcase on a luggage rack at the foot of her bed; and for reasons inexplicable I liked the empty, restful anonymity of the flat, which was cheerfully but sparsely decorated with abstract-patterned rugs and modern furnishings from an affordable design store. Her bed was comfortable, the reading light was good, she had a big-screen plasma television so we could lie around and watch movies in bed if we felt like it; and the stainless-steel fridge was always well-stocked with Girl Food: hummus and olives, cake and champagne, lots of silly take-out vegetarian salads and half a dozen kinds of ice cream.

I scrabbled for the key in my pocket, then absent-mindedly unlocked the door (thinking about what I might find to eat, would I have to order up? she would have had dinner, no point waiting) and almost bumped my nose when the door caught on the chain.

I closed the door, and stood for a minute, puzzled; I opened it again so it caught with a rattle: red sofa, framed architectural prints and a candle burning on the coffee table.

“Hello?” I called and then again: “Hello?” more loudly, when I heard movement inside.

I’d been pounding hard enough to raise the neighbors when Emily, after what seemed like a very long time, came to the door and looked at me through the gap. She was wearing a ratty, at-home sweater and the kind of loudly patterned pants that made her rear end look a lot bigger. “Kitsey’s not here,” she said flatly without unchaining the door.

“Fine, I know,” I said irritably. “That’s okay.”

“I don’t know when she’ll be back.” Emily, whom I’d first met as a fat-faced nine-year-old slamming a door on me in the Barbours’ apartment, had never made any secret of the fact that she didn’t think I was good enough for Kitsey.

“Well, will you let me in, please?” I said, annoyed. “I want to wait for her.”

“Sorry. Now’s not a good time.” Em still wore her wheat-brown hair in a short cut with bangs, just as she had when she was a kid, and the set of her jaw—straight out of second grade—made me think of Andy, how he’d always hated her, Emmy Phlegmmy, the Emilizer.

“This is ridiculous. Come on. Let me in,” I said again, irritably, but she only stood there impassively in the crack of the door, not quite looking me in the eye but somewhere to the side of my face. “Look, Em, I just want to go back to her room and lie down—”

“I think you’d better come back later. Sorry,” she said, in the incredulous silence that followed this.

“Look, I don’t care what you’re doing—” Francie, the other roommate, made at least a pretense of sociability—“I don’t want to bother you, I just want to—”

“Sorry. I think you’d better leave. Because, because, look, I live here,” she said, raising her voice above mine—

“Good grief. You can’t be serious.”

“—I live here,” she was blinking in discomfort, “this is my place and you can’t just come barging in here any time you want.”

“Give me a break!”

“And, and—” she was upset too—“look, I can’t help you, it’s a really bad time now, I think you’d better just go. All right? Sorry.” She was closing the door on me. “See you at the party.”

“What?”

“Your engagement party?” said Emily, re-opening the door a crack and looking at me so that I saw her agitated blue eye for a moment before she shut it again.

xix.

FOR SOME MOMENTS I stood in the hallway in the abrupt stillness that had fallen, staring at the pinhole of the closed door, and in the silence I imagined I could hear Em inches away on the other side of the door and breathing just as hard as I was.

Well, that’s it, you’re off the bridesmaid list, I thought, turning away and clattering back down the stairs with a lot of ostentatious noise and feeling at once furious and oddly cheered by the incident, which more than confirmed every uncharitable thought I’d ever entertained about Em. Kitsey had apologized more than once for Em’s ‘brusqueness’ but this, in Hobie’s phrase, took the proverbial cake. Why wasn’t she at the movies with the others? Was she with some other guy in there? Em, though thick-ankled and not very attractive, did have a boyfriend, a dud named Bill who was an executive at Citibank.

Shiny black streets. Once out of the lobby, I ducked into the doorway of the florist next door to check my messages and text Kitsey before heading downtown, just in case; if she was just getting out of her movie, I could meet her for dinner and a drink (alone, without the girlfriends: the weirdness of the incident seemed to call for it) and—definitely—a speculative and humorous talk on the behavior of Em.

Floodlit window. Mortuary glow from the cold case. Beyond the fog-condensed glass, trickling with water, winged sprays of orchids quivered in the fan’s draft: ghost-white, lunar, angelic. Up front were the kinkier numbers, some of which sold for thousands of dollars: hairy and veined, freckled and fanged and blood-flecked and devil-faced, in colors ranging from corpse mold to bruise magenta—even one magnificent black orchid with gray roots snaking out its moss-furred pot. (“Please darling,” Kitsey had said, correctly intuiting my plans for Christmas, “don’t even think about it, they’re all too gorgeous and they die the moment I touch them.”)

No new messages. Quickly, I texted her (Hey call me, have to talk to you, something hilarious just happened xxxx) and just to be sure she wasn’t out of the movie yet, dialed her cell again. But as it was clicking through to voice mail, I saw a reflection in the glass, in the green jungle depths in back of the shop, and—in disbelief—turned.

It was Kitsey, head down, in her pink Prada overcoat, huddled arm in arm and whispering with a man whom I recognized—I hadn’t seen him in years, but I knew him instantly—same set of shoulder and loose-boned slink of a gait—Tom Cable. His crinkly brown hair was still long; he was still dressed in the same clothes that rich stoner kids had worn at our school (Tretorns, huge thick-knit Irish sweater without an overcoat) and he had a bag from the wine shop looped over his arm, the same wine shop where Kitsey and I sometimes ran together for a bottle. But what astonished me: Kitsey, who always held my hand at a slight distance—tugging me along behind her, winsomely swinging my arm like a child playing London Bridge—was nestled deep and sorrowfully into his side. As I watched, blank at the unfathomable sight of this—they were waiting for the light, bus whooshing past, far too wrapped up in each other to notice me—Cable, who was talking to her quietly, tousled her hair and then turned and pulled her to him and kissed her, a kiss she returned with more mournful tenderness than any kiss she’d ever given me.

Moreover, I saw—they were crossing the street; quickly I turned my back; I could see them perfectly well in the window of the lighted shop as they went into the front door of Kitsey’s apartment building only a few feet away from me—Kitsey was upset, she was talking quietly, in a low voice husky with emotion, leaning into Cable with her cheek pressed against his sleeve as he reached around lovingly to squeeze her on the arm; and though I couldn’t make out what she was saying, the tone of her voice was all too clear: for even in her sadness her joy in him, and his in her, was undisguisable. Any stranger on the street could have seen it. And—as they glided past me, in the dark window, a pair of affectionate ghosts leaning against each other—I saw her reach up quickly to dash a tear from her cheek, and found myself blinking in astonishment at the sight: for somehow, improbably, for the first time ever, Kitsey was crying.

xx.

I WAS AWAKE MUCH of the night; and when I went down to open the store the next day, I was so preoccupied I sat staring into space for a half an hour before I realized I’d forgotten to turn the ‘Closed’ sign around.

Kitsey’s twice-weekly trips to the Hamptons. Strange numbers flashing, quick hang-ups. Kitsey frowning at the phone mid-dinner and shutting it off: “Oh, just Em. Oh, just Mommy. Oh, just a telemarketer, they’ve got me on some list.” Texts coming in at the middle of the night, submarine blips, bluish sonar pulse on the walls, Kitsey jumping up bare-assed from bed to shut the thing off, white legs flashing in the dark: “Oh, wrong number. Oh, just Toddy, he’s out drunk somewhere.”

And, very nearly as heart-sinking: Mrs. Barbour. I was well aware of Mrs. Barbour’s light touch in tricky situations—her ability to manage delicate matters behind the scenes—and while she hadn’t told me a direct lie, as far as I knew, information had definitely been elided and finessed. All sorts of little things were coming back to me, such as the moment a few months before when I’d walked in on Mrs. Barbour and heard her saying in a low urgent voice to the doorman, over the intercom, in answer to a ring from the lobby: No, I don’t care, don’t let him up, keep him downstairs. And when Kitsey, not thirty seconds later, after checking her texts, had bounced up and announced unexpectedly she was taking Ting-a-Ling and Clemmy for a spin round the block! I hadn’t thought a thing about it, despite the unmistakable frost of displeasure that had crossed Mrs. Barbour’s face, and the renewed warmth and energy with which—when the door clicked shut after Kitsey—she had turned back to me and reached to take my hand.

We were to see each other that night: I was to accompany her to the birthday party of one of her friends, and then stop by the party of a different friend, later on. Kitsey, though she hadn’t phoned, had sent me a tentative text. Theo, what’s up? I’m at work. Call me. I was still staring at this uncomprehendingly, wondering if I should return the message or not—what could I possibly say?—when Boris came bursting in the front door of the shop. “I have some news.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, after a moment’s distracted pause.

He wiped his forehead. “We can talk here?” he said, looking around.

“Uh—” shaking my head to clear it. “Sure.”

“I have a sleepy head today,” he said, rubbing his eye. His hair was standing up in every direction. “Need a coffee. No, don’t have time,” he said blearily, raising a hand. “Can’t sit, either. Can only stay one minute. But—good news—I have a good line on your picture.”

“How’s that?” I said, waking abruptly from my Kitsey fog.

“Well, we will soon see,” he said evasively.

“Where—” struggling to focus—“is it all right? Where are they keeping it?”

“These are questions I cannot answer.”

“It—” I was having a hard time collecting my thoughts; I took a deep breath, drew a line on the desktop with my thumb to compose myself, looked up—

“Yes?”

“It needs a certain temperature range and a certain humidity—you know that, right?” Someone else’s voice, not mine. “They can’t just be keeping it in a damp garage or any place.”

Boris pursed his lips in his old derisive manner. “Believe me, Horst took care of that picture like it was his own baby. That said—” he closed his eyes—“I cannot say about these guys. I am sad to report that they are not geniuses. We will have to hope they have enough brains not to keep it behind the pizza oven or something. Joking,” he said loftily, when he saw me gaping in horror. “Although, from what I hear, it is being kept in a restaurant, or near a restaurant. In same building with, anyway. We will talk about it later,” he said, raising a hand.

“Here?” I said, after another disbelieving pause. “In the city?”

“Later. It can wait. But here is the other thing,” he said, in an urgently hushing tone as he looked about the room and over my head. “Listen, listen. This is what I really came to tell you. Horst—he never knew your name was Decker, not until he asked me on the telephone today. You know a guy named Lucius Reeve?”

I sat down. “Why?”

“Horst says to stay away from him. Horst knows you are an antiques dealer but he didn’t connect the dots with this other thing until he knew your name.”

“What other thing?”

“Horst would not go into it a lot. I do not know what your involvement is with this Lucius, but Horst says to stay clear of him and I thought it important that you know it right away. He crossed Horst badly on unrelated matter and Horst got Martin after him.”

“Martin?”

Boris waved a hand. “You didn’t meet Martin. Believe me, you would remember if you did. Anyway, this Lucius guy is no good to be mixed up with for someone in your business.”

“I know.”

“What are you into him for? If I may ask?”

“I—” Again I shook my head, at the impossibility of going into it. “It’s complicated.”

“Well, I don’t know what he has on you. If you need my help, of course you have it—I am pledging it to you—Horst too, I daresay, because he likes you. Nice to see him so involved and talkative yesterday! I do not think he knows so many persons with whom he can be himself and share his interests. It is sad for him. Very intelligent, Horst. He has a lot to give. But—” he glanced at his watch—“sorry, I do not mean to be rude, I have to be somewhere—I am feeling very hopeful about the picture! I think, possibility, we may get it back! So—” he stood, and bravely knocked his breastbone with his fist—“courage! We will speak soon.”

“Boris?”

“Eh?”

“What would you do if your girl was cheating on you?”

Boris—heading out the door—did a double take. “Come again?”

“If you thought your girl was cheating on you.”

Boris frowned. “Not sure? You have no proof?”

“No,” I said, before realizing this wasn’t strictly true.

“Then you must ask her, straight out,” said Boris decisively. “In some friendly and unprotected moment when she is not expecting it. In bed maybe. If you catch her at the right moment, even if she lies—you will know it. She will lose her nerve.”

“Not this woman.”

Boris laughed. “Well, you have found a good one, then! A rare one! Is she beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“Rich?”

“Yes.”

“Intelligent?”

“Most people would say so, yes.”

“Heartless?”

“A bit.”

Boris laughed. “And you love her, yes. But not too much.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you are not mad, or wild, or grieving! You are not roaring out to choke her with your own bare hands! Which means your soul is not too mixed up with hers. And that is good. Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.”

He clapped me twice on the shoulder and then departed, leaving me to stare into the silver case with a renewed sense of despair at my dirtied-up life.

xxi.

KITSEY, WHEN SHE OPENED the door to me that night, was not actually quite so composed as she might have been: she was talking of several things at once, new dress she wanted to buy, tried it on, couldn’t decide, put it on hold, storm up in Maine—tons of trees down, old ones on the island, Uncle Harry had phoned, how sad! “Oh darling—” flittering around adorably, raising up on tiptoe to reach the wineglasses—“will you? Please?” Em and Francie, the roommates, were nowhere in evidence, as if they and their boyfriends had wisely am-scrayed before my arrival. “Oh, never mind—I’ve got them. Listen, I had such a good idea. Let’s go have a curry before we stop by Cynthia’s. I’m craving one. What’s that hidey-hole on Lex you took me to—that you like? What’s it called? The Mahal something?”

“You mean the fleabag?” I said stonily. I hadn’t even bothered to take off my coat.

“Excuse me?”

“With the greasy rogan josh. And the old people that depressed you. The Bloomingdale’s sale crowd.” The Jal Mahal Restaruant (sic) was a shabby, tucked-away Indian on the second floor of a storefront on Lex where not a thing had changed since I was a kid: not the pappadums, not the prices, not the carpet faded pink from water damage near the windows, not even the waiters: the same heavy, beatific, gentle faces I remembered from childhood when my mother and I had gone there after the movies for samosas and mango ice cream. “Sure, why not. ‘The saddest restaurant in Manhattan.’ What a great idea.”

She turned to me, and frowned. “Whatever. Baluchi’s is closer. Or—we can do what you want.”

“Oh yeah?” I stood leaning against the door frame with my hands in my pockets. Years of living with a world class liar had rendered me merciless. “What I want? That’s rich.”

“Sorry. I thought a curry might be nice. Forget it.”

“That’s okay. You can stop it now.”

She looked up with a vacant smile on her face. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t give me that. You know good and well what I’m talking about.”

She said nothing. A stitch appeared in her pretty forehead.

“Maybe this will teach you to keep your phone switched on when you’re with him. I’m sure she was trying to call you on the street.”

“Sorry, I don’t know—?”

“Kitsey, I saw you.”

“Oh, please,” she said, blinking, after a slight pause. “You can’t be serious. You don’t mean Tom, do you? Really, Theo,” she said, in the deadly silence that followed, “Tom’s an old friend, from way back, we’re really close—”

“Yes, I gather.”

“—and he’s Em’s friend too, and, and, I mean,” blinking furiously, with an air of being unjustly persecuted, “I know how it may have seemed, I know you don’t like Tom and you have good reason not to. Because, I know about the stuff when your mother died and sure, he behaved really badly, but he was only a kid and he feels really awful about the way he acted—”

“Feels awful?”

“—but, but he’d had some bad news last night,” she continued rapidly, like an actress interrupted mid-speech, “some bad news of his own—”

“You talk about me with him? You two sit around discussing me and feeling sorry for me?”

“—and Tom, he turned up here to see us, Em and me, both of us, out of the blue, right before we were supposed to go out to the movie, that’s why we stayed in and didn’t go out with the others, you can ask Em if you don’t believe me, he didn’t have anywhere else to go, he’d had a bad upset, something personal, he only wanted someone to talk to, and what were we to—”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

“Listen. I don’t know what Em told you—”

“Tell me. Does Cable’s mother still have that house in East Hampton? I remember how she used to always dump him off at the country club for hours on end after she fired the babysitter, or after the babysitter quit rather. Tennis lessons, golf lessons. He probably turned out to be a pretty good golfer, no?”

“Yes,” she said coldly, “yes he is pretty good.”

“I could say something cheap here but I won’t.”

“Theo, let’s not do this.”

“May I run my theory by you? Do you mind? I’m sure it’s wrong in a few particulars but I think this is basically it. Because I know you were seeing Tom, Platt told me as much when I ran into him on the street, and he wasn’t too thrilled about it either. And yeah,” I said when she tried to interrupt, in a voice just as hard and dead as I felt. “Right. No need to make excuses. Girls always did like Cable. Funny guy, really entertaining when he wants to be. Even if he has been writing bad checks lately or stealing from people at the country club or any of these other things I hear—”

“—That’s not true! That’s a lie! He never stole anything from anybody—”

“—and Mommy and Daddy never liked Tom much, or probably at all, and then after Daddy and Andy died you couldn’t keep it up, not in public anyway. Too upsetting to Mommy. And, as Platt has pointed out, numerous times—”

“I won’t see him any more.”

“So you’re admitting it.”

“I didn’t think it mattered until we were married.”

“Why is that?”

She brushed the hair from her eyes and said nothing.

“Didn’t think it would matter? Why? You didn’t think I would find out?”

Angrily she glanced up. “You’re a cold fish, you know that?”

“Me?” I looked away and laughed. “I’m the one who’s cold?”

“Oh, right. ‘Wronged party.’ ‘Terribly high principles.’ ”

“Higher than some, it seems.”

“You’re thoroughly enjoying this.”

“Believe me, I’m not.”

“Oh no? I’d never know it from that smirk.”

“And what am I supposed to do? Not say anything?”

“I’ve said I won’t see him any more. Actually I told him I wouldn’t a while back.”

“But he’s insistent. He loves you. He won’t take no for an answer.”

To my astonishment, she was blushing. “That’s right.”

“Poor little Kits.”

“Don’t be hateful.”

“Poor baby,” I said again, jeeringly, since I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She was scrabbling in the drawer for the corkscrew, and she turned and regarded me bleakly. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t expect you to understand but it’s rough to be in love with the wrong person.”

I was silent. Walking in, I’d gone so cold with rage at the sight of her that I’d tried to tell myself that she was powerless to hurt me or—God forbid—make me feel sorry for her. But who knew better the truth of what she was saying than me?

“Listen,” she said again, putting down the corkscrew. She’d seen her opening and she was taking it: just like on the tennis court, ruthless, watching her opponent’s weak side…

“Get away from me.”

Too heated. Wrong tone. This was going the wrong way. I wanted to be cold and in control of things.

“Theo. Please.” There she was, hand on my sleeve. Nose pinking up, eyes pink with tears: just like poor old Andy with his seasonal allergies, like some ordinary person you might actually feel sorry for. “I’m sorry. Truly. With all my heart. I don’t know what to say.”

“Oh no?”

“No. I’ve done you a great disservice.”

“Disservice. That’s one way of putting it.”

“And, I mean, I know you don’t like Tom—”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Theo. Does it really matter to you as much as all that? No, you know it doesn’t,” she said quickly. “Not if you have to think about it. Also—” she stopped for a moment before she plunged on—“not to put you on the spot, but I know all about your things and I don’t care.”

“Things?”

“Oh, please,” she said wearily. “Hang out with your sleazy friends, take all the drugs you want. I don’t care.”

In the background, the radiator began to bang and set up a tremendous clatter.

“Look. We’re right for each other. This marriage is absolutely the right thing for both of us. You know it and I know it. Because—I mean, look, I know. You don’t have to tell me. And, I mean too—things are better for you now since we’ve been seeing each other, aren’t they? You’ve straightened up a lot.”

“Oh yeah? ‘Straightened up’? What’s that supposed to mean.”

“Look—” she sighed in exasperation—“no point pretending, Theo. Martina—Em—Tessa Margolis, remember her?”

“Fuck.” I didn’t think anybody knew about Tessa.

“Everyone tried to tell me. ‘Stay away from him. He’s darling but he’s a drug addict.’ Tessa told Em she stopped seeing you after she caught you snorting heroin at her kitchen table.”

“It wasn’t heroin,” I said hotly. They’d been crushed morphine tablets and it had been a terrible idea to snort them, total waste of a pill. “And anyway, Tessa certainly didn’t have any scruples about blow, she used to ask me to get it for her all the time—”

“Look, that’s different and you know it. Mommy,” she said, talking over me—

“—Oh yeah? Different?” Raising my voice over hers. “How is it different? How?”

“—Mommy, I swear—listen to me, Theo—Mommy loves you so much. So much. You saved her life coming along when you did. She talks, she eats, she takes an interest, she walks in the park, she looks forward to seeing you, you can’t imagine how she was before. You’re part of the family,” she said, pressing her advantage. “Truly. Because, I mean, Andy—”

“Andy?” I laughed mirthlessly. Andy had entertained no illusions whatsoever about his sicko family.

“Look, Theo, don’t be like this.” She’d recovered now: friendly and reasonable, something of her father in her directness. “It’s the right thing to do. Marrying. We’re a good match. It makes sense for everyone involved, not least us.”

“Oh yeah? Everyone?”

“Yes.” Perfectly serene. “Don’t be like that, you know what I mean. Why should we let this spoil things? After all, we’re better people when we’re with each other, aren’t we? Both of us? And—” pale little smile; her mother, there—“we’re a good couple. We like each other. We get along.”

“Head not heart, then.”

“If that’s how you want to put it, yes,” she said, looking at me with such plain pity and affection that—quite unexpectedly—I felt my anger drop out from under me: at her cool intelligence, all her own, clear as a silver bell. “Now—” stretching up on tiptoe, to kiss me on the cheek—“let’s both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let’s be happy together and have fun always.”

xxii.

SO I SPENT THE night—we ordered in, later, and then went back to bed. But though on some level it was all easy enough pretending everything was the same (because, in some way, hadn’t we both been pretending all along?) on another I felt nearly suffocated by the weight of everything unknown, and unsaid, pressing down between us, and later when she lay curled against me asleep I lay awake and stared out the window feeling completely alone. The silences of the evening (my fault, not Kitsey’s—even in extremis Kitsey was never at a loss for words) and the seemingly unbridgeable distance between us had reminded me very strongly of being sixteen and never having the faintest idea what to say or do around Julie, who though she definitely couldn’t be called a girlfriend was the first woman I’d thought of as such. We’d met outside the liquor store on Hudson when I was standing outside money in hand wanting someone to go in and buy me a bottle of something and there she came billowing around the corner, in batlike, futuristic garb incongruous with her clumping walk and farm-girl looks, her plain-but-pleasing face of a prairie wife of the 1900s. “Hey kid—” hoisting her own wine bottle out of the bag—“here’s your change. No really. Don’t mention it. Are you going to stand out here in the cold and drink that?” She was twenty-seven, nearly twelve years older than me, with a boyfriend just finishing business school in California—and there was never any question that when the boyfriend came back I wasn’t to come by or contact her ever again. We both knew. She hadn’t had to say it. Galloping up the five flights to her studio, on the rare (to me) afternoons I was permitted to come see her, I was always bursting with words and feelings too big to contain but all the things I’d planned to say to her always vanished the instant she opened the door and instead of being able to engage in conversation for even two minutes like a normal person, I would instead hover speechless and desperate three steps behind her, hands plunged in pockets, hating myself, while she walked barefoot around the studio looking hip, talking effortlessly, apologizing for the dirty clothes on the floor and for forgetting to pick up a six-pack of beer—did I want her to run downstairs?—until at some point I would almost literally hurl myself at her mid-sentence and knock her over on the day bed, so violently sometimes my glasses flew off. It had all been so wonderful I’d thought I would die but lying awake afterward I’d been sick with emptiness, her white arm on the coverlet, streetlights coming on, dreading the eight o’clock hour which meant she would have to get up and dress for her job, at a bar in Williamsburg where I wasn’t old enough to stop in and visit her. And I hadn’t even loved Julie. I’d admired her, and obsessed over her, and envied her confidence, and even been a little afraid of her; but I hadn’t really loved her, no more than she’d loved me. I wasn’t so sure I loved Kitsey either (at least not the way I’d once wished I loved her) but still it was surprising just how bad I felt, considering I’d been through the routine before.

xxiii.

EVERYTHING WITH KITSEY HAD pushed Boris’s visit temporarily from my mind but—once I went to sleep—it all came back sideways in dreams. Twice I woke and sat bolt-upright: once, from a door swinging open nightmarishly into the storage locker, while kerchiefed women fought over a pile of used clothes outside; then—drifting back asleep, into a different staging of the same dream—storage unit as flimsy curtained space open to the sky, billowing walls of fabric not quite long enough to touch the grass. Beyond was a prospect of green fields and girls in long white dresses: an image fraught (mysteriously) with such death-charged and ritualistic horror that I woke gasping.

I checked my phone: 4:00 a.m. After a miserable half hour I sat up bare-chested in bed in the dark and—feeling like a crook in a French movie—lit a cigarette and stared out at Lexington Avenue which was practically empty at that hour: cabs just coming on duty, just going off, who knew which. But the dream, which had seemed prophetic, refused to dissipate and hung like a poisonous vapor, my heart still pounding from the airy danger of it, its sense of openness and hazard.

Deserves to be shot. I’d worried enough about the painting when I believed it to be safely maintained year round (as I’d been assured, by the storage brochure, in brisk professional tones) at a conservatorially acceptable 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 percent humidity. You couldn’t keep something like that just anywhere. It couldn’t take cold or heat or moisture or direct sun. It required a calibrated environment, like the orchids in the flower shop. To imagine it shoved behind a pizza oven was enough to make my idolater’s heart pound with a different, but similar, version of the terror I’d felt when I thought the driver was going to chuck poor Popper off the bus: in the rain, in the middle of nowhere, out by the side of the road.

After all: just how long had Boris had the picture? Boris? Even Horst, avowed art-lover, hadn’t with that apartment of his struck me as overly particular about conservatorial issues. Disastrous possibilities abounded: Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only seascape he’d ever painted, according to rumor all but ruined from being stored improperly. Vermeer’s masterpiece The Love Letter, cut off its stretchers by a hotel waiter, flaking and creased from being sandwiched under a mattress. Picasso’s Poverty and Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape, water-damaged after being hidden by some numbskull in a public toilet. In my obsessive reading the story that haunted me most was Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, stolen from the oratory of San Lorenzo and slashed from the frame so carelessly that the collector who’d commissioned the theft had burst out crying when he saw it and refused to take it.

Kitsey’s phone, I’d noticed, was missing from its usual place: the charger dock on the windowsill where she always grabbed for it first thing in the morning. Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night to see the backlight glowing blue in the dark on her side of the bed, under the covers, from her secret nest of sheets. ‘Oh, just checking the time,’ she said, if I tumbled over drowsily to ask what she was doing. I imagined it switched off and buried deep in the alligator bag with Kitsey’s usual mess of lip gloss and business cards and perfume samples and cash floating loose, crumpled twenties falling out every time she reached for her hairbrush. There, in that fragrant jumble, Cable would be calling repeatedly in the night, leaving multiple texts and voice mails for her to find when she woke in the morning.

What did they talk about? What did they say to each other? Oddly enough: it was easy to imagine their interaction. Bright chatter, a sense of sly connivance. Cable calling her silly names in bed and tickling her until she shrieked.

Grinding out my cigarette. No form, no sense, no meaning. Kitsey disliked it when I smoked in her bedroom but when she found the cigarette butt smashed out in the Limoges box on her dresser I doubted she was going to have anything to say about it. To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.

xxiv.

SINCE I COULDN’T GET back to sleep I left without waking Kitsey, in the icy black hour before sun-up, shivering as I dressed in the dark; one of the roommates had come in and was running a shower and the last thing I wanted was to bump into either of them on the way out.

By the time I got off the F train, the sky was turning pale. Dragging home in the bitter cold—depressed, dead tired, letting myself in at the side door, trudging up to my room, smudged-up glasses, reeking of smoke and sex and curry and Kitsey’s Chanel No. 19, stopping to greet Popchik, who had bundled down the hall and was looping-the-loop with unusual excitement at my feet, pulling my rolled necktie out of my pocket so I could hang it on the rack on the back of the door—my blood almost froze when I heard a voice from the kitchen: “Theo? Is that you?”

Red head, poking around the corner. It was her, coffee cup in hand.

“Sorry, did I scare you? I didn’t mean to.” I stood transfixed, dumbfounded, as she put out her arms to me with sort of a happy crooning noise, Popchik whining and capering in excitement at our feet. She was still wearing the things she’d slept in, candy striped pyjama bottoms and a long sleeved T-shirt with an old sweater of Hobie’s over it, and she still smelled like tossed bedsheets and bed: oh God, I thought, closing my eyes and pressing my face into her shoulder with a rush of happiness and fear, swift draft from Heaven, oh God.

“Lovely to see you!” There she was. Her hair—her eyes. Her. Bitten-down nails like Boris’s and a pout to her lower lip like a child who’d sucked her thumb too much, red tousled head like a dahlia. “How are you? I’ve missed you!”

“I—” All my resolutions gone in a second. “What are you doing here?”

“I was flying to Montreal!” Harsh laugh of a much younger girl, a hoarse playground laugh. “Stopping over to see my friend Sam for a few days and then going to meet Everett in California.” (Sam? I thought.) “Anyway my plane got re-routed—” she took a gulp of her coffee, wordlessly offered the cup to me, want some? no? another gulp—“and I was stuck at Newark, and I thought, why not, I’ll take the rain check and come into the city and see you guys.”

“Huh. That’s great.” You guys. I was included in that, too.

“Thought it might be fun to pop in, since I won’t be here for Christmas. Also since your party’s tomorrow. Married! Congratulations!” She had her fingertips on my arm and when she stretched up on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek I felt her kiss go all through me. “When do I get to meet her? Hobie says she’s a dreamboat. Are you excited?”

“I—” I was so stunned I put my hand to the place where her lips had been, where I still felt the press of them glowing, and then when I realized how it must look took it rapidly away. “Yes. Thanks.”

“It’s good to see you. You’re looking well.”

She didn’t appear to notice how dumbstruck, how dizzy, how completely gobsmacked I was at the sight of her. Or maybe she did notice and didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

“Where’s Hobie?” I said. I wasn’t asking because I cared, but because it was a little too good to be true to be alone in the house with her, and a little frightening too.

“Oh—” she rolled her eyes—“he insisted on going to the bakery. I told him not to bother but you know how he is. He likes to get me those blueberry biscuits that Mama and Welty used to buy me when I was little. Can’t believe they even make them any more—they don’t have them every day, he says. Sure you don’t want some coffee?” moving to the stove, just the trace of a limp in her walk.

It was extraordinary—I could hardly hear a word she was saying. It was always like this when I was in the room with her, she overrode everything: her skin, her eyes, her rusty voice, flame-colored hair and a tilt to her head that sometimes gave her a look like she was humming to herself; and the light in the kitchen was all mixed up with the light of her presence, with color and freshness and beauty.

“I have some CDs I’ve burned for you!” Turning to look at me over her shoulder. “Wish I’d thought to bring them. Didn’t know I’d be stopping though. I’ll be sure and pop them in the mail when I get back home.”

“And I have some CDs for you.” There was a whole stack of them in my room, things I’d bought because they reminded me of her, so many I’d felt funny sending them. “And books.” And jewelry, I neglected to say. And scarves and posters and perfume and records on vinyl and a Make-Your-Own-Kite kit and a toy pagoda. An eighteenth-century topaz necklace. A first edition of Ozma of Oz. Buying the things had been mostly a way of thinking of her, of being with her. Some of it I’d given to Kitsey but still there was no way I could come out of my room with the gigantic pile of stuff I’d actually bought for her over the years because it would look completely insane.

“Books? Oh, that’s great. I finished my book on the plane, I need something else. We can swap.”

“Sure.” Bare feet. Blush-pink ears. The pearl white skin at the scoop neck of her T-shirt.

“Rings of Saturn. Everett said he thought you might like it. He says hi, by the way.”

“Oh right, hi.” I hated this pretense of hers, that Everett and I were friends. “I’m, er—”

“What?”

“Actually—” My hands were shaking and I wasn’t even hung over. I could only hope she didn’t see. “Actually I’m just going to duck in my room for a second, all right?”

She looked startled, touched her fingertips to her forehead: silly me. “Oh, right, sorry! I’ll just be in here.”

I didn’t start to breathe again until I was in my room with the door shut. My suit was okay, for yesterday’s, but my hair was dirty and I needed a shower. Should I shave? Change my shirt? Or would she notice? Would it look weird that I’d run in and tried to clean up for her? Could I get in the bathroom and brush my teeth without her noticing? But then suddenly I had a rush of counter-panic that I was sitting in my room with the door closed, wasting valuable moments with her.

I got up again and opened the door. “Hey,” I yelled down the hall.

Her head appeared again. “Hey.”

“Want to go to the movies with me tonight?”

Slight beat of surprise. “Well sure. What?”

“Documentary about Glenn Gould. Been dying to see it.” In fact I’d already seen it, and had sat in the theater the whole time pretending she was with me: imagining her reaction at various parts, imagining the amazing conversation we would have about it after.

“Sounds fantastic. What time?”

“Sevenish. I’ll check.”

xxv.

ALL DAY, I WAS practically out-of-body with excitement at the thought of the evening ahead. Downstairs, in the store (where I was too busy with Christmas customers to devote undivided attention to my plans), I thought about what I would wear (something casual, not a suit, nothing too studied) and where I would take her to dinner—nothing too fancy, nothing that would put her on guard or seem self-conscious on my part but really special all the same, special and charming and quiet enough for us to talk and not too terribly far from Film Forum—besides which, she’d been out of the city for a while, she’d probably enjoy going someplace new (“Oh, this little place? yeah, it’s great, glad you like it, a real find”) but apart from all the above (and quiet was the main thing, more than food or location, I didn’t want to be anyplace where we were going to have to yell) it was going to have to be someplace I could get us in at short notice—and then too, there was the vegetarian issue. Someplace adorable. Not too expensive to raise alarms. It couldn’t look as if I was going to too much trouble; it had to seem thoughtless, unplanned. How the hell could she be living with this goofball Everett? With his bad clothes and his rabbit teeth and his always-startled eyes? Who looked as if his idea of a hot time was brown rice and seaweed from the counter at the back of the health food store?

And so the day crawled; and then it was six, and Hobie was home from his day out with Pippa, and he was poking his head in the store.

“So!” he said, after a pause, in a cheerful but cautious tone that reminded me (ominously) of the tone my mother had taken with my dad when she came home and found him buzzing about on the verge of an upswing. Hobie knew how I felt about Pippa—I’d never told him, never breathed a word of it, but he knew; and even if he hadn’t, it would have been perfectly visible to him (or any stranger walking in off the street) that I practically had sparks flying out of my head. “How’s everything?”

“Great! How was your day?”

“Oh wonderful!” with relief. “I was able to get us in at Union Square for lunch, we sat at the bar, wish you’d been with us. Then we went up to Moira’s, and the three of us walked over to the Asia Society, and now she’s out doing a bit of Christmas shopping. She says you, ah, you’re meeting her later tonight?” Casual, but with the unease of a parent wondering if an erratic teenager is really going to be okay taking the car out. “Film Forum?”

“Right,” I said nervously. I didn’t want him to know I was taking her to the Glenn Gould movie since he knew I’d already seen it.

“She said you two are going to the Glenn Gould?”

“Well, um, I was dying to go again. Don’t tell her I’ve been,” I said impulsively; and then: “Did you, er—?”

“No no—” hastily, drawing himself up—“I didn’t.”

“Well, um—”

Hobie rubbed his nose. “Well, listen, I’m sure it’s great. I’m dying to see it as well. Not tonight though,” he added quickly. “Some other time.”

“Oh—” trying hard to sound bummed-out, doing a bad job of it.

“In any case. Want me to mind the shop for you? In case you want to go upstairs for a wash and a brush-up? You should be leaving here no later than six-thirty if you plan on walking over there, you know.”

xxvi.

ON THE WAY OVER, I couldn’t help humming and smiling. And when I turned the corner and spotted her standing out in front of the theater I was so nervous I had to stop and compose myself for a moment before rushing in to greet her, helping her with her bags (she, laden with shopping, babbling about her day), perfect, perfect bliss of standing in line with her, huddling close because it was cold, and then inside, the red carpet and the whole evening ahead of us, clapping her gloved hands together: “oh, do you want some popcorn?” “Sure!” (me springing to the counter) “Popcorn’s great here—” and then, walking into the theater together, me touching her back casually, the velvety back of her coat, perfect brown coat and perfect green hat and perfect, perfect, little red head—“here—aisle? do you like the aisle?” we’d gone to the movies just enough (five times) for me to make careful note of where she liked to sit, plus, I knew it well enough from Hobie after years of inconspicuously questioning him as much as I dared about her tastes, her likes and dislikes, her habits, slipping the questions in casually, one at a time, for almost a decade, does she like this, does she like that; and there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o’clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with given my generalized anxiety and hatred of crowded places, and more people trickling in even after the film had already started but I didn’t care, it could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine. And the music! Glenn Gould at the piano, wild-haired, ebullient, head thrown back, emissary from the realm of angels, rapt and consumed by the sublime! I kept stealing looks at her, unable to help myself; but it was at least half an hour in before I had the nerve to turn and look at her full-on—profile washed white in the glow from the screen—and realized, to my horror, that she wasn’t enjoying the film. She was bored. No: she was upset.

I spent the rest of the film miserable, hardly seeing it. Or, rather, I was seeing it but in a wholly different way: not the ecstatic prodigy; not the mystic, the solitary, heroically quitting the concert stage at the height of his fame to retreat into the snows of Canada—but the hypochondriac, the recluse, the isolate. The paranoiac. The pill popper. No: the drug addict. The obsessive: glove-wearing, germ-phobic, bundled year round with scarves, twitching and racked with compulsions. The hunched nocturnal weirdo so unsure how to conduct even the most basic relations with people that (in an interview which I was suddenly finding torturous) he had asked a recording engineer if they couldn’t go to a lawyer and legally be declared brothers—sort of the tragic, late-genius version of Tom Cable and me pressing cut thumbs in the darkened back-yard of his house, or—even more strangely—Boris seizing my hand, bloody at the knuckles where I’d punched him on the playground, and pressing it to his own bloodied mouth.

xxvii.

“THAT UPSET YOU,” I said impulsively when we were leaving the theater. “I’m sorry.”

She glanced up at me as if shocked I’d noticed. We’d come out into a bluish, dream-lit world—the first snow of the season, five inches on the ground.

“We could have left if you wanted.”

In answer she only shook her head in a sort of stunned way. Snow whirling down magical, like a pure idea of North, the pure North of the movie.

“Well, no,” she said reluctantly. “I mean, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it—”

Floundering up the street. Neither of us had the proper shoes. The crunch of our feet was loud and I listened, attentively, waiting for her to continue and ready to grasp her elbow in a moment if she slipped, but when she turned to look at me all she said was: “Oh, God. We’re never going to get a cab, are we?”

Mind racing. What about dinner? What to do? Did she want to go home? Fuck! “It’s not that far.”

“Oh, I know, but—oh, there’s one!” she cried—and my heart plunged until I saw, thankfully, that someone else had grabbed it.

“Hey,” I said. We were near Bedford Street—lights, cafés. “What do you say we try up here?”

“For a cab?”

“No, for something to eat.” (Was she hungry? Please God: let her be hungry.) “Or a drink, at least.”

xxviii.

SOMEHOW—AS IF BY pre-arrangement of the gods—the half-empty wine bar we’d ducked into, on impulse, was warm and golden and candle-lit and much, much better than any of the restaurants I’d planned for.

Tiny table. My knee to her knee—was she aware of it? Quite as aware as I was? Bloom of the candle flame on her face, flame glinting metallic in her hair, hair so bright it looked about to catch fire. Everything blazing, everything sweet. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover—because Pippa was exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he’d chosen to be happy with, and in fact that picture was an ideal of happiness in its way, the hike of his shoulders and the slightly embarrassed quality of her smile, that open-ended look like they might just wander off anywhere they wanted together, and—there she was! her! and she was talking about herself, affectionate and old-shoe, asking me about Hobie and the shop and my spirits and what I was reading and what I was listening to, lots and lots of questions but seeming anxious to share her life with me too, her chilly flat expensive to heat, depressing light and damp stale smell, cheap clothes on the high street and so many American chains in London now it’s like a shopping mall, and what meds are you on and what meds am I on (we both had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a malady that in Europe had different initials, it seemed, and got you sent to a hospital for Army vets if you weren’t careful); her tiny garden, which she shared with half a dozen people, and the batty Englishwoman who’d filled it with ailing tortoises she’d smuggled from the south of France (“they all die, of cold and malnutrition—it’s really cruel—she doesn’t feed them properly, crumbled bread, can you imagine, I buy them turtle food at the pet store without telling her”)—and how terribly she wanted a dog, but of course it was hard in London with the quarantine which they had in Switzerland too, how did she always end up living in all these dog-unfriendly places? and wow, I looked better than she’d seen me in years, she’d missed me, missed the hell out of me, what an amazing evening—and we’d been there for hours, laughing over little things but being serious too, very grave, she being both generous and receptive (this was another thing about her; she listened, her attention was dazzling—I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn’t say to anyone else, certainly not Kitsey, who had a brittle way of deflating serious comments by making a joke, or switching to another topic, or interrupting, or sometimes just pretending not to hear), and it was an utter delight to be with her, I loved her every minute of every day, heart and mind and soul and all of it, and it was getting late and I wanted the place never to close, never.

“No no,” she was saying, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass—the shape of her hands moved me intensely, Welty’s signet on her forefinger, I could stare at her hands the way I could never stare at her face without seeming like a creep. “I loved the movie, actually. And the music—” she laughed, and the laugh, for me, had all the joy of the music behind it. “Knocked the breath out of me. Welty saw him play once, at Carnegie. One of the great nights of his life, he said. It’s just—”

“Yes?” The smell of her wine. Red-wine stain on her mouth. This was one of the great nights of my life.

“Well—” she shook her head—“the concert scenes. The look of those rehearsal halls. Because, you know—” rubbing her arms—“it was really, really hard. Practice, practice, practice—six hours a day—my arms would ache from holding the flute up—and, well, I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of it too, that positive-thinking crap that it’s so easy for teachers and physical therapists to dole out—‘oh, you can do it!’ ‘we believe in you!’—and falling for it and working hard and working harder and hating yourself because you’re not working hard enough, thinking it’s your fault you’re not doing better and working even harder and then—well.”

I was silent. I knew all about this from Hobie, who had spoken of it in great distress and at some length. It seemed that Aunt Margaret had been perfectly correct to send her to the wacko Swiss school with all the doctors and the therapy. Though to all normal standards she’d recovered from the accident completely, still there was a bit of neural damage, just enough to matter on the high end, slight impairment of fine motor skills. It was subtle but it was there. For almost any other vocation or avocation—singer, potter, zookeeper, any doctor apart from a surgeon—it wouldn’t have mattered. But for her it did.

“And, I don’t know, I listen to a lot of music at home, fall asleep with the iPod every night, but—when’s the last time I went to a concert?” she said sadly.

Falling asleep with the iPod? Did that mean that she and what’s-his-name weren’t having sex? “And why don’t you go to concerts?” I said, filing away this bit of info for later. “Audiences bother you? Crowds?”

“Knew you’d understand.”

“Well, I’m sure that this has been suggested to you, because it’s certainly been suggested to me—”

“What?” What was the charm of that sad smile? How could you break it down? “Xanax? Beta-blockers? Hypnosis?”

“All of the above.”

“Well—if it was a panic attack, maybe. But it’s not. Remorse. Grief. Jealousy—that’s the worst of all. I mean—this girl Beta—that’s a stupid name isn’t it, Beta? Really mediocre player, I don’t mean to be snotty but she could hardly keep up with the section when we were kids and she’s in the Cleveland Philharmonic now and it upsets me more than I would admit to just anyone. But they don’t have a drug for any of that, do they?”

“Er—” actually they did, and Jerome, up on Adam Clayton Powell, was doing a booming business in it.

“The acoustics—the audiences—it triggers something—I go home, I hate everyone, I talk to myself, have arguments with myself in different voices, I’m upset for days. And—well, I told you, teaching, I tried it, it wasn’t for me.” Pippa didn’t have to work, thanks to Aunt Margaret’s and Uncle Welty’s money (Everett didn’t work either, thanks to same—the ‘music librarian’ thing, I’d gathered, though presented originally as a striking career choice, was really more along the lines of an unpaid internship, with Pippa footing the bill). “Teenagers—well I won’t even go into the torture of that, watching them head off to conservatory or to Mexico City for the summer to play in the symphony. And the younger kids aren’t serious enough. I’m annoyed with them for being kids. To me—it’s like they’re taking it too lightly—throwing what they have away.”

“Well, teaching’s a shit job. I wouldn’t want to do it either.”

“Yes but—” gulp of wine—“if I can’t play, what else is there? Because I mean—I’m around music, sort of, with Everett, and I keep going to school and keep taking courses—but quite honestly I don’t like London that much, it’s dark and rainy and I don’t have a whole lot of friends there, and in my flat sometimes I can hear someone crying at night, just this terrible broken weeping from next door, and I—I mean, you’ve found something you like to do, and I’m so glad, because sometimes I really wonder what I’m doing with my life.”

“I—” Desperately I tried to think of just the right thing to say. “Come home.”

“Home? You mean here?”

“Of course.”

“What about Everett?”

I had nothing to say to this.

She looked at me critically. “You really don’t like him, do you?”

“Um—” What was the point of lying? “No.”

“Well—if you knew him better, you would. He’s a good guy. Very serene and even-tempered—very stable.”

I had nothing to say to this, either. I was none of these things.

“Also London—I mean I’ve thought about coming back to New York—”

“You have?”

“Of course. I miss Hobie. A lot. He jokes how he could rent me an apartment here for what we spend on the phone—of course he’s living back in the days when long distance to London cost five dollars a minute or whatever. Pretty much every time we speak, he tries to talk me into coming back… well, you know Hobie, he never says it outright, but you know, constant hints, always tells me about jobs opening up, positions at Columbia and stuff—”

“He does?”

“Well—on some level I can’t fathom that I live so far away. Welty was the one who took me to music lessons and to the symphony but Hobie was the one always home, you know, who went upstairs and made me a snack after school and helped me plant marigolds for my science project. Even now—when I have a bad cold? when I can’t remember how to cook artichokes or get candle wax off the tablecloth? who do I call? Him. But—” was it my imagination, was the wine getting her worked up a little bit?—“tell you the truth? Know why I don’t come back more? In London—” was she about to cry? “I wouldn’t tell everybody this, but in London at least I don’t think every second about it. ‘This is the way I walked home the day before.’ ‘This is where Welty and Hobie and I had dinner the next-to-last time.’ At least there I don’t think quite so much: should I turn left here? Should I turn right? My whole destiny hanging on whether I take the F train or the 6. Awful premonitions. Everything petrified. When I come back here I’m thirteen again—and I mean, not in a good way. Everything stopped that day, literally. I even stopped growing. Because, did you know? I never got one inch taller after it happened, not one.”

“You’re a perfect size.”

“Well, it’s fairly common,” she said, ignoring my clumsy compliment. “Injured and traumatized children—they quite often fail to grow to normal height.” She went in and out, unconsciously, of her Dr. Camenzind voice—even though I’d never met Dr. Camenzind I could sense the moments when Dr. Camenzind took over, a kind of cool distancing mechanism. “Resources are diverted. The growth system shuts down. There was one girl at my school—Saudi princess who was kidnapped, when she was twelve? The guys who did it were executed. But—I met her when she was nineteen, nice girl, but tiny, like only four eleven or something, she was so traumatized that she never grew an inch past the day they snatched her.”

“Wow. That underground cell girl? She was at school with you?”

“Mont-Haefeli was weird. You had girls who’d been shot at while fleeing the presidential palace, and then you had girls who got sent there because their parents wanted them to lose weight or train for the Winter Olympics.”

She accepted my hand in hers, without saying anything—all bundled up, she hadn’t let them take her coat. Long sleeves in summer—always swathed in half a dozen scarves, like some sort of cocooned insect wrapped in layers—protective padding for a girl who’d been broken and stitched and bolted back together again. How could I have been so blind? No wonder the film had upset her: Glenn Gould huddled year-round in heavy overcoats, pill bottles piling up, concert stage abandoned, snow growing deeper round him by the year.

“Because—I mean, I’ve heard you talk about it, I know you’re as obsessed as I am. But I go over and over it too.” The waitress had inconspicuously poured her more wine, refilled it to the top without Pippa even asking or seeming to notice: dear waitress, I thought, God bless you, I’m leaving you a tip to knock your socks off. “If only I’d signed up to audition on Tuesday, or Thursday. If only I’d let Welty take me to the museum when he wanted… he’d been trying to get me up to that show for weeks, he was determined that I see it before it came down.… But I always had something better to do. More important to go to the movies with my friend Lee Ann, whatever. Who, incidentally, vanished into thin air after my accident—never saw her again after that afternoon at the stupid Pixar film. All these tiny signs that I ignored, or didn’t fully recognize—everything could have been different if only I’d been paying attention—like, Welty was trying so hard to get me to go earlier, he must have asked a dozen times, it was like he had a sense of it himself, something bad going to happen, it was my fault we were even there that day—”

“At least you hadn’t been expelled from school.”