The Goldfinch(336)

And it’s been good for me, my time alone on the road. A year is how long it’s taken me to quietly wander round on my own and re-purchase the frauds still out, a delicate proceeding which I’ve found is best conducted in person: three or four trips a month, New Jersey and Oyster Bay and Providence and New Canaan, and—further afield—Miami, Houston, Dallas, Charlottesville, Atlanta, where at the invitation of my lovely client Mindy, the wife of an auto-parts magnate named Earl, I spent three fairly congenial days in the guest house of a spanking new coral-stone château featuring its own billiard parlour, “gentleman’s pub” (with authentic, imported, English-born barkeep), and indoor shooting range with custom track mounted target system. Some of my dot-com and hedge fund clients have second homes in exotic places, exotic to me anyway, Antigua and Mexico and the Bahamas, Monte Carlo and Juan-les-Pins and Sintra, interesting local wines and cocktails on terraced gardens with palm trees and agaves and white umbrellas whipping out by the pool like sails. And in between, I’ve been in a kind of bardo state, flying around in a gray roar, climbing with drop-spattered windows to laddered sunlight, descending to rainclouds and rain and escalators down and down to a tumble of faces in baggage claim, eerie kind of afterlife, the space between earth and not-earth, world and not-world, highly polished floors and glass-roof cathedral echoes and the whole anonymous concourse glow, a mass identity I don’t want to be a part of and indeed am not a part of, except it’s almost as if I’ve died, I feel different, I am different, and there’s a certain benumbed pleasure in moving in and out of the group mind, napping in molded plastic chairs and wandering the gleaming aisles of Duty Free and of course everyone perfectly nice when you touch down, indoor tennis courts and private beaches and—after the obligatory tour, all very nice, admiring the Bonnard, the Vuillard, light lunch out by the pool—a hefty check and a taxi ride back to the hotel again a good deal poorer.

It’s a big shift. I don’t know quite how to explain it. Between wanting and not wanting, caring and not caring.

Of course it’s a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. Coded messages in the in-flight magazines. Energy Shield. Uncompromising Care. Electricity, colors, radiance. Everything is a signpost pointing to something else. And, lying on my bed in some frigid biscuit-colored hotel room in Nice, with a balcony facing the Promenade des Anglais, I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel how even my sadness can make me happy, how wall to wall carpet and fake Biedermeier furniture and a softly murmuring French announcer on Canal Plus can all somehow seem so necessary and right.

I’d just as soon forget, but I can’t. It’s kind of the hum of a tuning fork. It’s just there. It’s here with me all the time.

White noise, impersonal roar. Deadening incandescence of the boarding terminals. But even these soul-free, sealed-off places are drenched with meaning, spangled and thundering with it. Sky Mall. Portable stereo systems. Mirrored isles of Drambuie and Tanqueray and Chanel No. 5. I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers—hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark—and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Because—isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?