The Golden House

There was once a wicked king who made his three sons leave their home and then kept them bottled up in a house of gold, sealing the windows with golden shutters and blocking the doors with stacks of American ingots and sacks of Spanish doubloons and racks of French louis d’or and buckets of Venetian ducats. But in the end the children turned themselves into birds resembling feathered snakes and flew up the chimney and were free. Once they were out in the open air, however, they found they could no longer fly, and tumbled painfully into the street to lie wounded and bewildered in the gutter. A crowd gathered, uncertain whether to worship or fear the fallen snake-birds, until someone threw the first stone. After that the hail of stones quickly killed all three of the changelings, and the king, alone in the golden house, saw all his gold in all his pockets all his stacks all his sacks all his buckets begin to glow more and more brightly until it caught fire, and burned. The disloyalty of my children has killed me, he said as the flames rose high all around him. But that is not the only version of the story. In another, the sons did not escape, but died with the king in the blaze. In a third variation, they murdered one another. In a fourth, they killed their father, simultaneously becoming both parricides and regicides. It is even possible that the king was not entirely wicked, or had some noble qualities as well as many appalling ones. In our age of bitterly contested realities it is not easy to agree upon what is actually happening or has happened, on what is the case, let alone upon the moral or meaning of this or any other tale.

The man calling himself Nero Golden veiled himself, in the first place, behind dead languages. He was fluent in Greek and Latin and had obliged his sons to learn them too. They conversed sometimes in the speech of Rome or Athens, as if these were everyday tongues, just a couple of the myriad vocabularies of New York. Earlier, in Bombay, he had told them, “Choose your classical names,” and in their choices we can see that the sons’ pretensions were more literary, more mythological, than the father’s imperial longings. They did not want to be kings, though the youngest, it will be noted, cloaked himself in divinity. They became Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus. After they made their choices their father used their chosen names for them always. Brooding, damaged Petronius became, in Nero’s mouth, either Petro or Petrón, making him sound like a brand of gasoline or tequila, or, finally and enduringly, Petya, which dispatched him from ancient Rome toward the worlds of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. The second son, lively, worldly, an artist and a man about town, insisted on choosing his own nickname. “Call me Apu,” he demanded, defying his father’s objection (“We are not Bengalis!”) and answering to nothing else, until the diminutive stuck. And the youngest, whose fate would be the strangest of all, became simply “D.”

It is to the three sons of Nero Golden that we must now turn our attention, pausing only to state what all four Goldens, at one time or another, emphatically insisted upon—that their relocation to New York was not an exile, not a flight, but a choice. Which may well have been true of the sons, but, as we will see, in the case of the father, personal tragedy and private needs may not have been his only motives. There may have been people beyond whose reach he needed to place himself. Patience: I will not reveal all my secrets at once.

Dandyish Petya—conservatively attired but invariably smart—had some words of his namesake Gaius Petronius, described by Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Plutarch as the arbiter elegantiarum or elegantiae arbiter, the judge of stylishness in Nero’s court, engraved on a bronze plaque above his bedroom door: “Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores. The far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind, the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting.” It was a strange choice of quotation, since the outside world was frightening to him. But a man may dream, and in his dreams be other than he is.

I saw them in the Gardens several times a week. I grew closer to some of them than others. But to know the actual people was not the same as bringing them to life. By now I had begun to think, just write it down however it comes. Close your eyes and run the movie in your head, open your eyes and write it down. But first they had to stop being my neighbors, who lived in the Actual, and become my characters, alive in the Real. I decided to begin where they began, with their classical names. To get some clues to Petronius Golden I read The Satyricon and studied Menippean satire. “Criticize mental attitudes,” was one of my notes to myself. “Better than lampooning individuals.” I read the few extant satyr plays, Cyclops by Euripides, and the surviving fragments of The Net Fishers by Aeschylus and Sophocles’ The Trackers, as well as Tony Harrison’s modern “remake” of Sophocles, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. Did this ancient-world material help? Yes, in that it guided me toward the burlesque and the bawdy and away from the high-mindedness of tragedy. I liked the clog-dancing satyrs in the Harrison play and made a note, “Petya—bad dancer, so absurdly uncoordinated that people find him funny.” There was also a possible plot device here, because in both Fishers and Trackers the satyrs stumble upon magic babies—Perseus in the former play, Hermes in the latter. “Reserve possibility of introducing supernaturally powerful infants,” I wrote in my notebook, and beside it, in the margin, “??? or—NO.” So I was unclear not only about the story, and about the mystery at its heart, but also about the form. Would the surreal, the fantastic, play a part? At that moment, I was unsure. And the classical sources were as confusing as they were helpful. The satyr plays, to state the obvious, were Dionysiac, their origins probably lying in rustic homages to the god. Drink, sex, music, dance. So upon whom, in my story, should they shed most light? Petya “was” Petronius, but Dionysus was his brother…in whose story the question of sex—or gender, to avoid the word his lover, the remarkable Riya, so disliked—would be central….made a note. “The characters of the brothers, to some extent, will overlap.”

And for Apu I went back to The Golden Ass, but, in my story, metamorphosis was to be a different brother’s fate. (The sibling overlap again.) I made, however, this valuable note. “A ‘golden story,’ in the time of Lucius Apuleius, was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue. A fairy tale. A lie.”

And as for the magic baby: instead of my earlier “??? or—NO,” I have to say that, without the help of Aeschylus or Sophocles, the answer turned out to be YES. There would be a baby in the story. Magic or cursed? Reader: you decide.

The sad, brilliant strangeness of the man we called Petya Golden was clear to everyone from the first day, when in the failing winter afternoon light he planted himself alone on a bench in the Gardens, a big man, like an enlargement of his father, large and heavy-bodied with his father’s sharp, dark eyes that seemed to interrogate the horizon. He wore a cream suit under a heavy herringbone tweed greatcoat, gloves and orange muffler, and there was an outsize cocktail mixer and a jar of olives beside him on the bench and a martini glass in his right hand, and while he sat there in his monologic solitude and his breath hung ghostly in the January air he just started talking aloud, explained to nobody in particular the theory, which he ascribed to the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, of why the perfect dry martini was like the Immaculate Conception of Christ. He was perhaps forty-two years old then and I, seventeen years his junior, approached him gingerly across the grass, ready to listen, instantly in love, as iron filings are drawn to the magnet, as the moth loves the fatal flame. As I approached I saw in the twilight that three of the Gardens’ children had paused in their play, abandoning their swings and jungle gym to stare at this strange, big man talking to himself. They had no idea what the crazy newcomer was talking about but were enjoying his performance anyway. “To make the perfect dry martini,” he was saying, “you must take a martini glass, drop an olive into it, and then fill it to the brim with gin, or, according to the new fashion, vodka.” The children giggled at the wickedness of this alcohol talk. “Then,” he said, jabbing the air with his left forefinger, “you must place a bottle of vermouth close to the glass in such a position that a single shaft of sunlight passes through the bottle and strikes the martini glass. Then you drink the martini.” He took a flamboyant gulp from his glass. “Here’s one I prepared earlier,” he said, clarifying for the benefit of the children, who now ran away, laughing with delighted guilt.

The Gardens were a safe space for all the children whose homes had access to them, and so they ran about unguarded. There was a moment, after the martini lecture, when some of the neighborhood mothers grew concerned about Petya, but there was no need for them to worry about him; children were not his vice of choice. That honor was reserved for the booze. And his mental condition was a danger to nobody but himself, though it could be disconcerting to the easily offended. The first time he met my mother he said, “You must have been a beautiful young woman but you’re old and wrinkly now.” We Unterlindens were strolling in the morning Gardens when Petya in his greatcoat, muffler and gloves came up to introduce himself to my parents, and this was what he said? This was his first sentence after “Hello”? I bridled and opened my mouth to scold, but my mother put a hand on my arm and shook her head, kindly. “Yes,” she replied. “I see that you are a man who tells the truth.”

“On the spectrum”: I hadn’t heard the term before. I think that in many ways I have been a kind of innocent, and autism for me was not much more than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and other cruelly named “idiot savants” reciting lists of prime numbers and drawing incredibly detailed maps of Manhattan from memory. Petya, my mother said, was certainly high on the autism spectrum. She wasn’t certain if what afflicted him was HFA, high-functioning autism, or AS, which was Asperger’s. Nowadays, Asperger’s is no longer considered a separate diagnosis, having been folded into the spectrum on a “severity scale.” Back then, just a few years ago, most people were as ignorant as I, and Asperger’s sufferers were often put into the dismissive box marked “mad.” Petya Golden may have been tormented, but he was by no means mad, not even close to it. He was an extraordinary, vulnerable, gifted, incompetent human being.

He was physically clumsy, and sometimes, when agitated, clumsy too in the mouth, stammering and stuttering and being infuriated by his own ineptitude. He also had the most retentive memory of anyone I ever met. You could say a poet’s name, “Byron,” for example, and he would do twenty minutes of Don Juan with his eyes closed. “I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.” In search of heroism, he said, he had tried to be a revolutionary Communist at university (Cambridge, which he left without his architecture degree because of his affliction), but admitted he didn’t try hard enough to be a good one, and besides there was the disadvantage of his wealth. Also, his condition was scarcely conducive to good organization and dependability, so he would not make a good cadre, and anyway his greatest pleasure lay not in revolt but in argument. He liked nothing better than to contradict everyone who offered him an opinion, and then to bludgeon that individual into submission by using his apparently inexhaustible storehouse of arcane, detailed knowledge. He would have argued with a king over his crown, or a sparrow over a crust of bread. He also drank far too much. When I sat down to drink with him in the Gardens one morning—his drinking began at breakfast—I had to pour the booze into a plant while his attention was distracted. It was impossible to keep up with him. But the industrial quantities of vodka he put away appeared to have no effect whatsoever on that faultily wired but still prodigious brain. In his room on an upper floor of the Golden house he was bathed in blue light and surrounded by computers and it was as if those electronic brains were his real equals, his truest friends, and the gaming world he entered through those screens was his real world, while ours was the virtual reality.

Human beings were creatures he had to put up with, with whom he would never feel at home.

What was hardest for him—in those early months before we found out the answers for ourselves, which eventually I told him we had done, to put him at his ease, which it failed to do—was to avoid spilling the family beans, their real names, their origins, the story of his mother’s death. Ask him a direct question and he would answer honestly because his brain made it impossible for him to lie. Yet out of loyalty to his father’s wishes he managed to find a way. He trained himself in locutions of avoidance, “I will not answer that question,” or, “Maybe you should ask someone else,” statements his nature could accept as true and therefore allow himself to make. Sometimes, it’s true, he skated perilously close to treason. “As to my family,” he said one day, apropos of nothing, as was his wont (his conversation was a series of random bombs falling out of the blue sky of his thought), “consider the nonstop insanity that went on in the palace during the time of the twelve Caesars, the incest, the matricide, the poisonings, the epilepsy, the dead babies, the stench of evil, and of course there’s Caligula’s horse to consider. Mayhem, dear boy, but when the Roman in the street looked up at the palace what did he see?” Here an arch, dramatic pause, and then, “He saw the palace, dear boy. He saw the bloody palace, immovable, unchanging, there. Indoors, the powerful were fucking their aunties and cutting off each other’s dicks. Outside, it was clear that the power structure remained unchanged. We’re like that, Papa Nero and my brothers. Behind the closed doors of the family, I freely admit, it’s hell in there. Remember Edmund Leach in his Reith lectures. ‘The family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets is the source of all our discontents.’ Too bloody true in our case, old sport. But as far as the Roman in the street is concerned, we close ranks. We form the bloody testudo and forward march.”

Whatever else there is to say about Nero Golden—and by the time I’m done, much will be said, much of it horrifying—there was no questioning his devotion to his firstborn child. Plainly in some sense Petya would always remain part child, lurching unpredictably into crazy mishaps. As if AS wasn’t enough, by the time he came to live among us his agoraphobia was pretty bad. The communal Gardens, interestingly, didn’t scare him. Sealed off from the city on all four sides, they qualified, somehow, in that strange broken-mirror mind, as being “indoors.” But he rarely went into the streets. Then one day he took it upon himself to tilt at his mental windmills. Defying his hatred of the undefended world, challenging himself to overcome his demons, he plunged meaninglessly into the subway. The household panicked at his disappearance and a few hours later there was a call from the police precinct at Coney Island which had him in a holding cell because, growing afraid in a tunnel, he began to create a considerable disturbance, and when a security officer came on board at the next station Petya began to abuse him as a Bolshevik apparatchik, a political commissar, an agent of the secret state; and was handcuffed. Only Nero’s arrival in a large, grave, apologetic limousine saved the day. He explained his son’s condition and, unusually, was listened to, and Petya was released into his father’s custody. That happened, and, afterwards, worse things as well. But Nero Golden never wavered, looked constantly for cutting-edge medical help, and did his best for his firstborn son. When the final tally is made, that must weigh heavily in the scales of justice, on his side.

What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don’t know the answer to such questions anymore. A cloud of ignorance has blinded us, and in that fog the strange, broken mind of Petya Golden fitfully shone like a manic guiding light. What a presence he might have been! For he was born to be a star; but there was a flaw in the program. He was a brilliant talker, yes; but he was like a whole cable box full of talk-show networks that jumped channels frequently and without warning. He was often frenziedly cheerful but his condition caused a deep pain in him, because he was ashamed of himself for malfunctioning, for failing to get better, for obliging his father and a posse of doctors to keep him functional and put him back together when he broke.

So much suffering, so nobly borne. I thought of Raskolnikov. “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

One summer evening—this was during the Goldens’ first summer among us—they threw a glittering soirée, spilling out from their mansion onto the lawns we all shared. They had employed the city’s finest publicists and party planners, so a sizable selection of “everybody” showed up, a goodly proportion of the boldface menagerie as well as us, the neighbors, and that night Petya was on fire, glittering-eyed and babbling like a brook. I watched him twirl and pirouette in his Savile Row finery among and around the starlet and the singer and the playwright and the whore, and the money guys discussing the Asian financial crisis, who were impressed by his mastery of such terms as “Tom Yum Goong,” the Thai term for the crisis, and his ability to discuss the fate of exotic currencies, the collapse of the baht, the devaluation of the renminbi, and to have an opinion on whether or not the financier George Soros had caused the collapse of the Malaysian economy by selling the ringgit short. Perhaps only I—or his father and I—noted the desperation behind his performance, the desperation of a mind unable to discipline itself and descending, therefore, into the carnivalesque. A mind imprisoned by itself, serving a life sentence.

That night he talked and drank without stopping, and all of us who were there would carry fragments of that talk in our memories for the rest of our lives. What crazy, extraordinary talk it was! No limit to the subjects he reached for and used as punching bags: the British royal family, in particular the sex lives of Princess Margaret, who used a Caribbean island as her private boudoir, and Prince Charles, who wanted to be his lover’s tampon; the philosophy of Spinoza (he liked it); the lyrics of Bob Dylan (he recited the whole of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” as reverently as if it were a companion piece to “La Belle Dame sans Merci”); the Spassky-Fischer chess match (Fischer had died the year before); Islamic radicalism (he was against it) and wishy-washy liberalism (which appeased Islam, he said, so he was against it, too); the Pope, whom he called “Ex-Benedict”; the novels of G. K. Chesterton (he was a fan of The Man Who Was Thursday); the unpleasantness of male chest hair; the “unjust treatment” of Pluto, recently demoted to the status of “dwarf planet” after a larger body, Eris, was discovered in the Kuiper Belt; the flaws in Hawking’s theory of black holes; the anachronistic weakness of the American electoral college; the stupidity of non-electoral college students; the sexiness of Margaret Thatcher; and the “twenty-five percent of Americans”—on the far right of the political spectrum—“who are certifiably insane.”

Oh, but there was also his adoration of Monty Python’s Flying Circus! And all of a sudden he was flustered and stumbling to find the right words, because one of the dinner guests, a member of a prominent Broadway family of theater owners, had brought along, as his plus-one, the Python Eric Idle, who was then enjoying a revival of fame thanks to the Broadway success of Spamalot, and who arrived just as Petya was expounding, to the serenely elegant sculptor Ubah Tuur (of whom there will be much more to say in a moment), upon his hatred of musicals in general; he exempted only Oklahoma! and West Side Story, and had been offering us idiosyncratic snatches of “I Cain’t Say No” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” while explaining that “all other musicals were shit.” When he saw the Python standing there listening he blushed brightly and then rescued himself by including Mr. Idle’s musical among the blessed, and led the company in a rousing chorus of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

However, his near-gaffe had ruined his mood. He mopped perspiration from his brow, rushed indoors and disappeared. He did not rejoin the party; and then well after midnight, when most guests had left and only a few of the locals were taking the warm night air, the windows of Petya’s room on the upper floor of the Golden house were flung open and the big man climbed out onto the ledge, swaying drunkenly and dressed in a long black greatcoat that made him look like a Soviet-era student revolutionary. In his agitated condition he sat down heavily on the windowsill with his legs dangling, and cried out to the skies, “I am here by myself! I am here because of myself! I am here because of nobody! I am here all by myself!”

Time froze. We, in the garden, stood paralyzed, looking upward. His brothers, who were in the Gardens among us, seemed as incapable of movement as we. And it was his father, Nero Golden, who came silently up behind him and, grabbing him from behind in a great embrace, fell backwards with his son into the room behind. It was Nero who came to the window and, before he closed it, waved at us in furious dismissal.

“Nothing to see here. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing to see. Good night.”

For a period after the something-like-suicide-attempt Petya Golden found it hard to emerge from his curtained room, which was illuminated by the lights of a dozen screens and a host of lamps with pale blue lightbulbs, and in which he remained day and night, hardly sleeping, busily engaged in his electronic mysteries, including playing chess against anonymous e-opponents in Korea and Japan, and, as we afterwards discovered, rushing himself through a crash course in the history and development of video games, understanding the war-gaming programs devised in the 1940s to run on the earliest digital computers, Colossus and ENIAC, then rushing contemptuously through Tennis for Two, Spacewar!, and the early arcade games, through the age of Hunt the Wumpus and Dungeons & Dragons, skipping past the banalities of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and on and on through SimCity, World of Warcraft, and the more sophisticated subjectivities of Assassin’s Creed and Red Dead Redemption and then into levels of sophistication at which none of us could guess; and watching the vulgar fictions of reality television; and subsisting on grilled Double Gloucester cheese sandwiches prepared by himself on a small electric stove; feeling, all this while, profoundly sickened by himself and the burden he had to bear. Then his internal weather changed and he moved from self-hatred to hatred of the world, and, in particular, as the world’s nearest representative authority figure, of his father. One night that summer, insomnia, my constant friend, forced me to get out of bed around 3 A.M., pull on some clothes and wander into the communal gardens to take the warm night air. The houses were all asleep; all but one. In the Golden residence the lights were on in a single second-floor window, in the room Nero Golden used as an office. I couldn’t see the old man but Petya’s silhouette, with the broad shoulders and the flat-top haircut, was easily recognizable. What was startling was the extreme animation of that silhouetted figure, the arms waving, the weight shifting from leg to leg. He turned slightly, and looking at him in near-profile I understood that he was screaming with rage.

I couldn’t hear anything. The study windows were well soundproofed. Some of us suspected them of actually being inch-thick bulletproof glass, a hypothesis to which the silent image of Petya shouting lent much credence. Why did Nero Golden feel the need to bulletproof his windows? No answer to that one; the rich in New York feel the need to protect themselves in unpredictable ways. In my family of academics we adopted an air of interested amusement when faced with our neighbors’ eccentricities, the painter permanently attired in silk pajamas, the magazine editor who never removed her sunglasses no matter what the hour, and so on. So, bulletproof glass, no biggie. In a way the dumb-show accentuated the power of Petya Golden’s hysterical performance. I am an admirer of German expressionist cinema in general and of the work of Fritz Lang in particular, and all of a sudden the words “Dr. Mabuse” popped unbidden into my head. At the time I brushed the thought aside, because I was more preoccupied by another consideration: perhaps Petya really was going off his rocker, not just metaphorically, but actually. Perhaps behind the autism and agoraphobia lay an actual derangement, an insanity. I resolved to watch him more carefully from then on.

What was the argument about? There was no way to know; but to my mind it seemed like an expression of Petya’s savage complaint against life itself, which had dealt him such a poor hand. The next day the old man was to be seen pensive on a bench in the Gardens, sitting there like stone, silent, immovable, unapproachable, with a darkness on his face. Many years later, when we knew everything, I remembered thinking about Lang’s great film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler that summer night in the Gardens under Nero Golden’s illuminated, silenced window. The film, of course, is about the career of a criminal mastermind.

No hint of the dramatic events at the Goldens’ party ever reached the newspapers (or the gossip websites, or any of the other digital megaphones birthed by the new technology). In spite of the high celebrity content of the guest list, in spite of the hovering team of waitstaff who might have been tempted by the easy money on offer for a salacious phone call, the code of silence under which the Goldens lived appeared to wrap itself around all who entered their presence, so that not a whisper of scandal ever escaped their powerful, almost Sicilian force field of omertà. Nero had hired the most powerful members of the city’s tribe of publicists, whose most important task was not to get, but to suppress, publicity; and so what happened in the Golden house very largely stayed in the Golden house.

I believe now that Nero Golden knew in his heart that his performance as a New Yorker without a past was short-lived. I think he knew that in the end the past would not be denied, that it would come for him, and have its way. I think that he was using his immense capacity for bravado to stave off the inevitable. “I’m a man of reason,” he informed his dinner guests on the night of Petya’s meltdown. (He had a weakness for self-praising orations.) “A man of affairs. If I may say so, a great man of affairs. Believe me. Nobody knows affairs better than I do, let me tell you that. Now, America is too God-bothered for my liking, too wrapped up in superstitions, but I’m not that kind of man. That kind of thing gets in the way of commerce. Two plus two is four, that’s me. The rest is mumbo jumbo and gobbledygook. Four plus four is eight. If America wants to be what America is capable of being, what she dreams of being, she needs to turn away from God and toward the dollar bill. The business of America is business. That is what I believe.” Such was his bold (and often repeated) assertion of pragmatic capitalism, which reassured me, incidentally, that we Unterlindens had been right about his irreligious nature; and yet he was, they all were, in the grip of a huge fantasy: the idea that men would not be judged by who they once were and what they had once done, if they only decided to be different. They wanted to step away from the responsibilities of history and be free. But history is the court before which all men, even emperors and princes, finally must stand. I think of Longfellow’s paraphrase of the Roman Sextus Empiricus: The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.