The Goldfinch

Chapter 4 | Part 19

ONCE DAD AND XANDRA showed up, things started moving fast. At dinner that night (at a touristy restaurant I was surprised my dad had chosen), he took a call at the table from somebody at my mother's insurance company —which, even all these years later, I wish I'd been able to hear better. But the restaurant was loud and Xandra (between gulps of white wine—maybe he'd quit drinking, but she sure hadn't) was alternately complaining because she couldn't smoke and telling me in a sort of unfocused way how she'd learned to practice witchcraft out of a library book when she was in high school, somewhere in Fort Lauderdale. ("Actually, Wicca it's called. It's an earth religion.") With anyone else, I would have asked exactly what it involved, being a witch (spells and sacrifices? deal with the devil?) but before I had a chance she'd moved on, how she'd had the opportunity to go to college and was sorry she hadn't done it ("I'll tell you what I was interested in. English history and like that. Henry the Eighth, Mary Queen of Scots"). But she'd ended up not going to college at all because she'd been too obsessed with this guy. "Obsessed," she hissed, fixing me with her sharp, no-color eyes.
Why being obsessed with the guy kept Xandra from going to college, I never found out, because my dad got off the phone. He ordered (and it gave me a funny feeling) a bottle of champagne.
"I can't drink this whole damn thing," said Xandra, who was into her second glass of wine. "It'll give me a headache."
"Well, if I can't have champagne, you might as well have some," my father said, leaning back in his chair.
Xandra nodded at me. "Let him have some," she said. "Waiter, bring another glass."
"Sorry," said the waiter, a hard-edged Italian guy who looked like he was used to dealing with out-of-control tourists. "No alcohol if he's under eighteen."

Xandra started scrabbling in her purse. She was wearing a brown halter dress, and she had blusher, or bronzer, or some brownish powder brushed under her cheekbones in such a strong line that I had an urge to smudge it in with my fingertip.
"Let's go outside and have a smoke," she said to my father. There was a long moment where they exchanged a smirky look that made me cringe. Then Xandra pushed her chair back and—dropping her napkin in the chair —looked around for the waiter. "Oh, good, he's gone," she said, reaching for my (mostly) empty water glass and slopping some champagne into it.
The food had arrived and I'd poured myself another large but surreptitious glass of champagne before they returned. "Yum!" said Xandra, looking glazed and a bit shiny, tugging her short skirt down, edging around and slithering back into her seat without bothering to pull her chair out all the way. She flapped her napkin into her lap and pulled her massive, bright- red plate of manicotti towards her. "Looks awesome!"
"So does mine," said my dad, who was picky about his Italian food, and whom I'd often known to complain about overly tomatoey, marinara- drenched pasta dishes exactly like the plate in front of him.
As they tucked into their food (which was probably fairly cold, judging by how long they'd been gone), they resumed their conversation in mid-stream. "Well, anyway, didn't work out," he said, leaning back in his chair and toying rakishly with a cigarette he was unable to light. "That's how it goes."
"I bet you were great."
He shrugged. "Even when you're young," he said, "it's a tough game. It's not just talent. It has a lot to do with looks and luck."
"But still," said Xandra, blotting the corner of her lip with a napkin- wrapped fingertip. "An actor. I can so totally see it." My dad's thwarted acting career was one of his favorite subjects and—though she seemed interested enough—something told me that this wasn't the very first time she had heard about it either.
"Well, do I wish I'd kept going with it?" My dad contemplated his non-alcoholic beer (or was it three percent? I couldn't see from where I was sitting). "I have to say yes. It's one of those lifelong regrets. I would have loved to do something with my gift but I didn't have the luxury. Life has a funny way of intervening."

They were deep in their own world; for all the attention they were paying to me I might as well have been in Idaho but that was fine with me; I knew this story. My dad, who'd been a drama star in college, had for a brief while earned his living as an actor: voice-overs in commercials, a few minor parts (a murdered playboy, the spoiled son of a mob boss) in television and movies. Then—after he'd married my mother—it had all fizzled out. He had a long list of reasons why he hadn't broken through, though as I'd often heard him say: if my mother had been a little more successful as a model or worked a little harder at it, there would have been enough money for him to concentrate on acting without worrying about a day job.
My dad pushed his plate aside. I noticed that he hadn't eaten very much—often, with my dad, a sign that he was drinking, or about to start.
"At some point, I just had to cut my losses and get out," he said, crumpling his napkin and throwing it on the table. I wondered if he had told Xandra about Mickey Rourke, whom he viewed apart from me and my mother as the prime villain in derailing his career.
Xandra took a big drink of her wine. "Do you ever think about going back to it?"
"I think about it, sure. But—" he shook his head as if refusing some outrageous request—"no. Essentially the answer is no."
The champagne tickled the roof of my mouth—distant, dusty sparkle, bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive.
"I mean, the second he saw me, I knew he didn't like me," my dad was saying to her quietly. So he had told her about Mickey Rourke.
She tossed her head, drained the rest of her wine. "Guys like that can't stand competition."
"It was all Mickey this, Mickey that, Mickey wants to meet you, but the minute I walked in there I knew it was over."
"Obviously the guy's a freak."
"Not then, he wasn't. Because, tell you the truth, there really was a resemblance back in the day—not just physically, but we had similar acting styles. Or, let's say, I was classically trained, I had a range, but I could do the same kind of stillness as Mickey, you know, that whispery quiet thing —"
"Oooh, you just gave me chills. Whispery. Like the way you said that."

"Yeah, but Mickey was the star. There wasn't room enough for two."
As I watched them sharing a piece of cheesecake like lovebirds in a commercial, I sank into a ruddy, unfamiliar free-flow of mind, the dining room lights too bright and my face flaming hot from the champagne, thinking in a disordered but heated way about my mother after her parents died and she had to go live with her aunt Bess, in a house by the train tracks with brown wallpaper and plastic covers on the furniture. Aunt Bess—who fried everything in Crisco, and had cut up one of my mother's dresses with scissors because the psychedelic pattern disturbed her—was a chunky, embittered, Irish-American spinster who had left the Catholic Church for some tiny, insane sect that believed it was wrong to do things like drink tea or take aspirin. Her eyes—in the one photograph I'd seen—were the same startling silver-blue as my mother's, only pink-rimmed and crazed, in a potato-plain face. My mother had spoken of those eighteen months with Aunt Bess as the saddest of her life—the horses sold, the dogs given away, long weeping goodbyes by the side of the road, arms around the necks of Clover and Chalkboard and Paintbox and Bruno. Back in the house, Aunt Bess had told my mother she was spoiled, and that people who didn't fear the Lord always got what they deserved.
"And the producer, you see—I mean, they all knew how Mickey was, everyone did, he was already starting to get a reputation for being difficult —"
"She didn't deserve it," I said aloud, interrupting their conversation.
Dad and Xandra stopped talking and looked at me as if I'd turned into a Gila monster.
"I mean, why would anybody say that?" It wasn't right that I was speaking aloud, and yet the words were tumbling unbidden out of my mouth as if someone had pushed a button. "She was so great and why was everybody so horrible to her? She never deserved any of the stuff that happened to her."
My dad and Xandra exchanged a glance. Then he signalled for the check.