The Goldfinch(82)
Jose’s eyes went quickly to my father and Xandra. He was a big, handsome guy from the Dominican Republic, something about him reminiscent of the young Muhammad Ali—sweet-tempered, always kidding around, but you didn’t want to mess with him. Once, in a moment of confidence, he had pulled up his uniform jacket and shown me a knife scar on his abdomen, which he said he’d gotten in a street fight in Miami.
“Happy to do it,” he said in English, in an easy voice. He was looking at them but I knew he was talking to me. “I’ll take you up. Everything is okay?”
“Yep, we’re fine,” said my dad curtly. He was the very one who’d insisted that I study Spanish as my foreign language instead of German (“so at least one person in the family can communicate with these fucking doormen”).
Xandra, who I was starting to think was a real dingbat, laughed nervously and said in her stuttery quick voice: “Yeah, we’re fine, but the flight really took it out of us. It’s a long way from Vegas and we’re still a little—” and here she rolled her eyes and waggled her fingers to indicate wooziness.
“Oh yeah?” said Jose. “Today? You flew into LaGuardia?” Like all the doormen he was a genius at small talk, especially if it was about traffic or weather, the best route to the airport at rush hour. “I heard big delays out there today, some problem with the baggage handlers, the union , right?”
All the way up in the elevator, Xandra kept up a steady but agitated stream of chatter: about how dirty New York was compared to Las Vegas (“Yeah, I admit it, everything’s cleaner out west, I guess I’m spoiled”), about her bad turkey sandwich on the airplane and the flight attendant who “forgot” (Xandra, with her fingertips, inserting the quotations manually) to bring Xandra the five dollars change from the wine she ordered.
“Oh, ma’am!” said Jose, stepping in the hallway, wagging his head in the mock-serious way he had. “Airplane food, it’s the worst. These days you’re lucky if they feed you at all. Tell you one thing in New York, though. You going to find you some good food. You got good Vietnamese, good Cuban, good Indian—”
“I don’t like all that spicy stuff.”
“Good whatever you want, then. We got it. Segundito,” he said, holding up a finger as he felt around on the ring for the passkey.
The lock tumbled with a solid clunk, instinctive, blood-deep in its rightness. Though the place was stuffy from being shut up, still I was leveled by the fierce smell of home: books and old rugs and lemon floor cleaner, the dark myrrh-smelling candles she bought at Barney’s.
The bag from the museum was propped on the floor by the sofa—exactly where I’d left it, how many weeks before? Feeling light-headed, I darted around and inside to grab it as Jose—slightly blocking my irritated father’s path, without quite appearing to—stood just outside the door listening to Xandra, arms folded. The composed but slightly absent-minded look on his face reminded me of the way he’d looked when he’d had to practically carry my dad upstairs one freezing night, my dad so drunk he’d lost his overcoat.—Happens in the best of families, he’d said with an abstract smile, refusing the twenty-dollar bill that my father—incoherent, vomit on his suit jacket, scratched-up and dirty like he’d been rolling on the sidewalk—was trying hard to push into his face.
“Actually, I’m from the East Coast?” Xandra was saying. “From Florida?” Again that nervous laugh—stuttery, sputtering. “West Palm, to be specific.”
“Florida you say?” I heard Jose remark. “Is beautiful down there.”
“Yeah, it’s great. At least in Vegas we’ve got the sunshine—I don’t know if I could take the winters out here, I’d turn into a Popsicle—”
The instant I picked the bag up, I realized it was too light—almost empty. Where the hell was the painting? Though I was nearly blind with panic, I didn’t stop but kept going, down the hallway, on autopilot, back to my bedroom, mind whirring and grinding as I walked—
Suddenly—through my disconnected memories of that night—it came back to me. The bag had been wet. I hadn’t wanted to leave the picture in a wet bag, to mildew or melt or who knew what. Instead—how could I have forgotten?—I’d set it on my mother’s bureau, the first thing she’d see when she came home. Quickly, without stopping, I dropped the bag in the hallway outside the closed door of my bedroom and turned into my mother’s room, light-headed with fear, hoping that my father wasn’t following but too afraid to look back and see.