The Goldfinch(333)

“Hobie—”

“Oh, Reeve. You should have heard him.” All the energy seemed to have left him; he looked limp and defeated. “The old serpent. And—I want you to know, as far as that went—art theft? I took up for you in no uncertain terms. Whatever else you’d done—I was certain you hadn’t done that. And then? Not three days later? What turns up in the news? What very painting? Along with how many others? Was he telling the truth?” he said, when I still didn’t answer. “Was it you?”

“Yes. Well, I mean, technically no.”

“Theo.”

“I can explain.”

“Please do,” he said, grinding the heel of his hand into his eye.

“Sit down.”

“I—” Hopelessly he looked around, as if he was afraid of losing all his resolve if he sat down at the table with me.

“No, you should sit. It’s a long story. I’ll make it short as I can.”



vii.



HE DIDN’T SAY A word. He didn’t even answer the telephone when it rang. I was bone-tired and aching from the plane, and though I steered clear of the two dead bodies, I gave him the best account of the rest of it that I could: short sentences, matter of fact, not trying to justify or explain. When I was finished he sat there—me shaken by his silence, no noise in the kitchen except the flatline hum of the old fridge. But, at last, he sat back and folded his arms.

“It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn’t it?” he said.

I was silent, not knowing what to say.

“I mean only—” rubbing his eye—“I only understand it, as I get older. How funny time is. How many tricks and surprises.”

The word trick was all I heard, or understood. Then, abruptly, he stood up—all six foot five of him, something stern and regretful in his posture or so it seemed to me, ancestral ghost of the beatwalking cop or maybe a bouncer about to toss you out of the pub.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Rapidly he blinked. “What?”

“I’ll write you a check for the whole amount. Just hold it until I tell you it’s okay to cash it, that’s all I ask. I never meant you any harm, I swear.”

With a full-armed gesture of old, he swatted away my words. “No, no. Wait here. I want to show you something.”

He got up and creaked into the parlor. He was gone a while. And—when he came back—it was with a falling-to-pieces photo album. He sat down. He leafed through it for several pages. And—when he got to a certain page—he pushed it across the table to me. “There,” he said.

Faded snapshot. A tiny, beaky, birdlike boy smiled at a piano in a palmy Belle Époque room: not Parisian, not quite, but Cairene. Twinned jardinières, many French bronzes, many small paintings. One—flowers in a glass—I dimly recognized as a Manet. But my eye tripped and stopped at the twin of a much more familiar image, one or two frames above.

It was, of course, a reproduction. But even in the tarnished old photograph, it glowed in its own isolated and oddly modern light.

“Artist’s copy,” said Hobie. “The Manet too. Nothing special but—” folding his hands on the table—“those paintings were a huge part of his childhood, the happiest part, before he was ill—only child, petted and spoiled by the servants—figs and tangerines and jasmine blossoms on the balcony—he spoke Arabic, as well as French, you knew that, right? And—” Hobie crossed his arms tight, and tapped his lips with a forefinger—“he used to speak of how with very great paintings it’s possible to know them deeply, inhabit them almost, even through copies. Even Proust—there’s a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she’s sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so—the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting’s blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because—the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.”

“No,” I said, though I wasn’t thinking of the painting but of Hobie’s changelings. Pieces enlivened by his touch and polished until they looked as if they’d had pure, golden Time poured over them, copies that made you love Hepplewhite, or Sheraton, even if you’d never looked at or thought about a piece of Hepplewhite or Sheraton in your life.