The Goldfinch(317)

Dear Hobie,



This is a hard letter to write and I’m sorry to be writing it.


Alternate sweats and frosts. I was seeing green spots. My fever was so high the walls seemed to be shrinking.


This isn’t about the bad pieces I’ve sold. I expect you’ll hear soon enough what it’s about.


Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time.

The effects of time, visible and invisible.


and, I don’t quite know how to say this but I guess what I’m thinking about is this sick puppy my mother and I found on the street in Chinatown. She was lying in a space between two garbage cans. She was a baby pit bull. Smelly, dirty. Skin and bones. Too weak to stand up. People just walking by her. And I got upset and my mother promised me that we’d pick her up if she was still there when we finished eating. And when we got out of the restaurant, there she still was. So we hailed a cab, I carried her in my arms, and when we got her home my mother made her a box in the kitchen and she was so happy and licked our faces and drank a ton of water and ate the dog food we bought her and threw it all right back up.

Well to make a long story short, she died. It wasn’t our fault. We felt like it was. We took her in to the vet, and bought her special food, but she only got sicker and sicker. We were both really fond of her by this time. And my mother took her in again, to a specialist at the Animal Medical Center. And the vet said—this dog has a disease, which I forget the name of, and she had it when you found her, and I know this is not what you want to hear but it is going to be a whole lot kinder if you euthanize her right now


My hand had been flying in reckless jerks and starts across the paper. But at the end of the page while reaching for another, I stopped, appalled. What I’d experienced as weightlessness, a sort of sweeping, last-chance glide, was not at all the eloquent and affecting farewell I’d imagined. The handwriting sloped and slopped all over the place and was not intelligent or coherent or even legible. There had to be some much briefer, and simpler, way to thank Hobie and say what I had to say: namely, that he shouldn’t feel bad, he’d always been good to me and done his best to help me, just as my mother and I had done our best to help this baby pit bull, who—it was actually a pertinent point, only I didn’t want to spin the story out too long—for all her sweet-tempered qualities had been incredibly destructive in the days leading to her death, she’d pretty much destroyed the whole apartment and ripped our sofa to pieces.

Maudlin, self-indulgent, tasteless. My throat felt as if the lining had been scraped out with a razor.

Off comes the upholstery. Look here: we have woodworm. We’ll have to treat it with Cuprinol.

The night I’d overdosed in Hobie’s upstairs bathroom, expecting not to wake up and waking up anyway with my cheek on the trippy old hexagonal floor tile, I’d been amazed at exactly how radiant a pre-war bathroom with plain white fittings could be when you were looking at it from the afterlife.

The beginning of the end? Or the end of the end?

Fabelhaft. Having the best fun ever.

One thing at a time. Aspirins. Cold water from the minibar. The aspirins rasped and stuck in my chest, like swallowing gravel, and I pounded trying to get them down, the booze had made me feel a whole lot sicker, thirsty, confused, fish hooks in my throat, water trickling absurdly down my cheeks, gasping and wheezing, I’d opened the wine as a treat (supposedly) but it was going down like turpentine, burning and razoring around in my stomach, should I run a bath, should I call down for something hot, something simple, broth or tea? No: the thing was simply to finish the wine or maybe just go right ahead and start in on the vodka; somewhere online I’d read that only two per cent of attempted suicides by overdose were successful, which seemed like an absurdly low number although one unfortunately borne out by previous experience. It aint gonna rain no mo’. That was somebody’s suicide note. It was only a farce. Jean Harlow’s husband, who killed himself on their wedding night. George Sanders’s had been the best, an Old Hollywood classic, my father had known it by heart and liked to quote from it. Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. And then, Hart Crane. Pivot and drop, shirt ballooning as he fell. Goodbye everybody! A shouted farewell, jumping off ship.

I no longer considered my body my own. It had ceased to belong to me. My hands, moving, felt separate, floating of their own accord, and when I stood it was like operating a marionette, unfolding myself, rising jerkily on strings.

Hobie had told me that when he was a young man he drank Cutty Sark because it was Hart Crane’s whiskey. Cutty Sark means Short Skirt.