The Golden House

Lucius Apuleius Golden, a.k.a. Apu, the second pseudonymous Golden boy—for some reason, even though he was already forty-one, the word boy fitted better than man—was only a year younger than his brother Petya, their birthdays less than twelve months apart, their horoscope sign (Gemini) the same. He was a handsome, childish man, with a wicked goatish mischief in his smile, a gleeful giggle irresistibly combined with a pretense of constant melancholy, and an ever-changing monologue of lamentation in which he catalogued his failures with young women outside the toilets of late-night hot spots (his way of disguising a long string of successes in that area). He wore his hair shaved close to his skull—a concession to encroaching baldness—and wrapped himself in a voluminous pashmina shawl and didn’t get on with his older brother anymore. They both stated, in separate conversations with me, that they had been close as young children, but their relationship had eroded as they grew older, because of their irreconcilable temperaments. Apu, a wanderer in the city, an explorer of everything it had to offer, was unsympathetic to Petya’s “issues.” “That stupid brother of mine,” he told me when, as sometimes happened, we went out drinking. “He’s such a scaredy-cat.” And he went on to say, “He should be careful. Our father despises weakness and doesn’t want it near him. Once he decides you’re a weakling you’re dead to him. You’re fucking dead.” Then, as if he had just heard what he had said, heard the sound of the armor cracking, he drew back and corrected himself. “Don’t pay any attention. I’ve had too many drinks and anyway it’s just the way we talk. We talk a lot of nonsense. It doesn’t mean anything.”

I heard that speech as envy. Nero Golden was, as we could all see, deeply caring for and solicitous of his psychologically wounded firstborn son. Perhaps Apu didn’t get the attention from the patriarch he so openly craved. (I wondered often why the four Goldens all continued to live under the same roof, especially when it became plain that they weren’t getting along, but when I found the courage to ask Apu why that was I got nothing but cryptic, allegorical answers, owing more to One Thousand and One Nights or The Diamond as Big as the Ritz than to anything that might be called the truth. “Our father,” he might reply, “is the one who knows where the treasure cave is hidden, the one that responds to the words open, sesame. So we stay because we’re trying to find the map.” Or, “The house, you know, is literally built on an underground mass of pure gold. Every time we need to pay for things we just go into the cellar and scrape off a tiny piece.” It was as if the house exercised some power over them all—the genealogical house or the actual house, it was sometimes hard to separate them. For whatever thicker-than-water reason, they felt bound to one another, even if their actual feelings for one another deteriorated over time toward open hostility. The Caesars in their palace, their whole lives a great gamble, performing their dance of death.)

Apu’s greed for America was omnivorous. I reminded myself that of course he and Petya would have been here before, as much younger men, living with their parents in the Broadway loft during college vacations, in all probability knowing nothing about the benami house just a short walk away which their father was readying for the distant future. How Apu must have prospered sexually in that much younger, grittier city! No wonder he was glad to be back.

Soon after his arrival he asked me to tell him about the November night when Barack Obama was elected president. On that night I had been in a Midtown sports bar where a well-known doyenne of Upper East Side society, a Republican, was jointly hosting an election night party with a distinctly downtown Democrat film producer. At 11 P.M., when California declared and pushed Obama over the finish line, the room exploded with emotion, and I realized that I, like everyone else, had been unable to believe that what was happening would really happen, even though the numbers had clearly indicated an Obama victory a couple of hours earlier. The possibility of another stolen election was not far from our thoughts and so relief mingled with elation when the majority was definite, they can’t steal this now, I reassured myself, and felt tears on my face. When I looked at Apu after I told him this I saw that he was crying too.

After the big moment in the sports bar, I told him, I walked the streets half the night, going to Rockefeller Center and Union Square, watching the crowds of young people like myself shining with the knowledge that, perhaps for the first time ever, they had by their own direct actions changed their country’s course. I was drinking in the optimism that was flowing all around us, and, like a properly jaundiced literary person, I formulated this thought: “And now, of course, he will disappoint us.” I wasn’t proud of it, I said, but these were the words that came to mind.

“You’re already so disenchanted, while I’m a dreamer,” Apu asked, still weeping. “But awful things have happened to me and my family. Nothing terrible has ever happened to you or yours.”

Thanks to my parents, I knew something by then about Apu’s “awful things”—but I wondered about his tears. Could this relatively recent arrival in America already be so invested in his new country that an election result could make him cry? Had he already bonded with the country in his youth and was now feeling the rebirth of that long-lost love? Were they the tears of a sentimentalist or a crocodile? I put that question away and thought, when you get to know him better you’ll have the answer. And so I took another step toward becoming an occasional spy; I was absolutely clear, by now, that these were people worth spying on. As for what he said about me, it was not entirely accurate, because I was, on the whole, caught up in the early fervor of the Obama presidency, but it was prescient, because as the years passed my alienation from the system grew, and eight years later when people younger than myself (most of them young, white and college educated) expressed their desire to rip that system up and throw it away, I didn’t agree, because that kind of grand gesture seemed like an expression of the same spoiled luxuriousness that its proponents claimed to hate, and when such gestures were made they invariably led to something worse than what had been discarded. But I got it, I understood the alienation and anger, because much of it was mine as well, even if I ended up at a different, more cautious, gradualist, and, in the eyes of the generation following mine, contemptible point on the (political) spectrum.

He was mystically inclined, drawn to all things spiritual, but, as I say, mostly concealed his passion from us, although there was no reason to conceal it, because New Yorkers were just as much in love with weird belief systems as he was. He found a witch, a mãe-de-santo in Greenpoint, and in her cramped terreiro he followed her in the worship of her favored Orisha (a minor deity) and of course of the Supreme Creator Oludumaré as well. But he was unfaithful to her even though she instructed him in sorcery, and followed with equal enthusiasm a Canal Street Kabbalist named Idel, who was an adept in the ways of the forbidden Practical Kabbalah, which sought through the use of white magic to affect and change the sphere of the divine itself, and the world as well. He also went eagerly, led by friends who found his eagerness seductive, into the world of Buddhist Judaism, and meditated along with the city’s growing cohorts of “BuJus”—classical composers, movie stars, yogis. He practiced Mysore yoga and became a master of the Tarot and studied numerology and books bought in antiquarian bookstores that explored the black arts and gave instructions concerning the construction of pentacles and magic circles within which the amateur wizard could be safe while casting his spells.

It was soon clear that he was an exceptionally gifted painter, of a technical facility as great as Dalí’s (though put to better use), figurative in an age of conceptualism, his male and female figures, often nude, contained within, or containing, or surrounded by, or surrounding, the symbolist icons of his arcane studies, flowers, eyes, swords, cups, suns, stars, pentagrams, and male and female sexual organs. Before long he had a studio space off Union Square and was making vivid portraits of le tout New York, the elite ladies (yes, mostly ladies, though some striking young men as well) who were overjoyed to strip off for him and to be painted into a lush world of high spiritual meaning, wrapped in tulips or swimming in the rivers of Paradise or Hell, before returning to the temples of Mammon where they lived. Because of his remarkable technical control he developed a rapid fluency of style which meant he could usually complete a portrait in a day and that, too, endeared him to the fast-lane crowd. His first solo show was in 2010, curated by the Bruce High Quality Foundation in a Chelsea pop-up space, and took its title from Nietzsche, The Privilege of Owning Yourself. He began to be a famous artist, or, as he put it with a kind of cynical comic modesty, “famous on twenty blocks.”

America changed them both, Petya and Apu—America, that divided self—polarizing them as America was polarized, the wars of America, external and internal, becoming their wars as well; but in the beginning, if Petya arrived in New York as the heavy-drinking polymath who was afraid of the world and found living in it a constant hardship, then Apu came as the sober romantic artist and promiscuous metropolitan, flirting with everything that was visionary yet with a clarity of vision that allowed him to see people plain, as his portraits showed: the panic in the eyes of the fading dowager, the vulnerable ignorance in the stance of the ungloved boxing champion, the courage of the ballerina with blood in her slippers like the Ugly Sister who cut off her toes to squeeze her foot into Cinderella’s glass shoe. His portraits were anything but sycophantic; they could be very harsh. Yet people hastened to his door with fat checks in their hands. To be done by Apu Golden, nailed to his canvas, became desirable, valuable. It became a thing. Meanwhile, away from his studio, he ran voraciously through the city, embracing it all like a young Whitman, the undergrounds, the clubs, the power stations, the prisons, the subcultures, the catastrophes, the flaming comets, the gamblers, the dying factories, the dancing queens. He was his brother’s antithesis, a gluttonous agoraphile, and came to be thought of as a magic creature, an escapee from a fairy tale, though nobody could say for certain whether he was charmed or doomed.

He was a far more flamboyant dresser than his older brother, and his look altered frequently. He wore contact lenses in many colors, sometimes different colors for each eye, and until the very end I did not know what his natural eye color was. His clothing embraced all the fashions of the planet. On a whim he would abandon the pashmina shawl and put on, instead, the Arab dishdasha, the African dashiki, the South Indian veshti, the bright shirts of Latin America or, sometimes, in a Petya-low-key mood, the buttoned-up gravity of the bespoke English three-piece tweed suit. He might be seen on Sixth Avenue in a maxi-skirt or a kilt. This mutability confused many of us about his orientation, but as far as I know he was conventionally heterosexual; though it is true that he was a sort of genius of compartmentalization, he kept different groups of friends in sealed-off boxes and nobody in one box was even aware of the existence of other, different containers. So it’s possible that he had a secret life beyond the frontiers of heterosex, maybe even a promiscuous one. But in my opinion that is unlikely. As we shall see, he was not the Golden brother for whom gender identity was an issue. In his mystical explorations, however, he certainly did develop a number of peculiar, occultist affiliations which he didn’t care to discuss. But now that everything is known I can begin to reconstruct that life he kept concealed.

We had the movies in common, and liked to spend weekend afternoons at the IFC Center or Film Forum watching Tokyo Monogatari or Orfeu negro or Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. It was because of the movies that he shortened his name to echo Ray’s immortal Apu. His father objected, he confessed to me. “He says we are Romans, not Bengalis. But that is his preoccupation, not mine.” Nero Golden found our movie dates amusing. When I came by to pick up Apu he was sometimes waiting in the small backyard that gave out onto the communal gardens and, turning to face the house, he’d roar, “Apuleius! Your girlfriend’s here!”

One last note regarding his name: he spoke with admiration about the second-century author of The Golden Ass. “The guy inherited one million sesterces from his father in Algeria and still wrote a masterpiece.” And regarding his older brother’s name as well as his own: “If Petya’s the satyr, or even the satyr-icon, then I’m definitely the fucking donkey.” (Then, a dismissive shrug.) But late at night, when he’d had a few drinks, he inverted the thought. Which felt like a better fit; because, to tell the truth, of the pair, he was the priapically satyric one, while poor Petya was very often the long-eared ass.

On the night of the Goldens’ party in the Gardens, Petya and Apu met the Somali woman, and the ties that held the clan together began to break.

She had been brought to the gathering by her gallerist, who was now also, though not exclusively, Apu’s: a twinkling silver-haired rogue named Frankie Sottovoce who had gained notoriety in his youth by spray-painting the twelve-inch high letters NLF on one of the three monumental Claude Monet paintings of water lilies at the Museum of Modern Art, to protest the war in Vietnam, echoing the act of the unknown vandal who, in the same year, 1974, had scratched the two-foot-high letters IRA into the lower right-hand corner of Peter Paul Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, an act for which Sottovoce, when feeling boastful about his radical-left activist younger self, would also improbably claim responsibility. The paintings were easily restored, the IRA lost its war, the Vietcong won theirs, and the gallerist went on to have a distinguished career, and discovered and successfully promoted, among many others, the metal-cutting sculptor Ubah Tuur.

Ubah means “flower” or “blossom” in Somali, and is sometimes written as Ubax, the “x” in Somali being a throaty sound that Anglophone throats struggle to make, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Hence “Ubah,” a simplified concession to non-Somali pharyngeal incompetence. She was beautiful in the way the women of the Horn are beautiful, long-necked and graceful in the arms, and in the long summer evening she seemed to Petya a flowering tree beneath whose boughs he could rest, healed by her cooling shade, for the rest of his life. At a certain point in the evening she sang: not the ululating Somali song he had expected to emerge from those rich lips but Patti Smith’s famous ode to love itself, full of darkness and desire, with its comforting, treacherous repetitions, can’t hurt you now, can’t hurt you now…and by the time she was done he was lost. He rushed in her direction and stopped dead in front of her, at a loss. Overcome by his sudden rush of impossible, unspeakable love, he began to babble at his just-discovered dream girl about this and that, poetry and subatomic physics and the private lives of movie stars, and she listened gravely, accepting all his short-circuit non sequiturs as if they were entirely natural, and he felt, for once in his life, understood. Then she began to speak and he listened mesmerized, mongoose to her cobra. Afterwards he was able to repeat verbatim every single word that came out of her flawless mouth.

Her early work, she said, was inspired by the primitive artists she had met on a visit to Haiti, who cut oil drums in half, flattened the two halves, and then, using the simplest of tools—hammers and screwdrivers—cut and beat them into intricate latticework images of branches, foliage and birds. She talked to Petya for a long time about using a blowtorch to cut steel and iron into lacelike intricacies and showed him images of her work on her phone: the remains of wrecked (bombed?) cars and tanks, transformed into the most delicate filigree forms, the metal penetrated by shapely patterned air and acquiring an airiness of its own. She spoke in the language of the art world, war of symbols, desirable oppositions, the high-abstract insider jargon, describing her quest for empathetic images creating a balance as well as a clash by contrasting ideas and materials, and she examined, too, the absurdity of having opposing extremist stances, like a wrestler in a tutu. She was a brilliant speaker, charismatic and almost incomprehensibly fast, pushing a hand through her hair and clutching at her head as she spoke; but in the end he burst out (his autism forcing him to speak the truth), “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

Immediately he hated himself. What kind of a fool, with the words “I love you” stuck in his throat, offered his brilliant beloved scorn instead of adoration? Now she would hate him and would be justified in doing so and his life would be meaningless and damned.

She stared at him for a long moment and then burst into healing laughter. “It’s a defense mechanism,” she said. “One worries one will not be taken seriously if one lacks a sufficiency of theory, especially if one is female. Actually, my work speaks pretty clearly for itself. I push beauty into horror and I want it to disturb you and make you think. Come up to Rhinebeck and take a look.”

I’m now sure—as I piece together the puzzle of the Golden house, and try to reconstruct my memory of the exact sequence of events of that important night, setting them down as they come back to me—that this was the point of the evening at which things started to go wrong for Petya, as his desire to accept Ubah’s invitation did battle with the demons that obliged him to fear the outside world. He made a strange gesture with both arms, half-helpless, half-angry, and at once began to soliloquize in a rapid series of non sequiturs about whatever crossed his anguished mind. His mood grew darker as he expostulated on various topics, coming at last to the question of Broadway musicals and his dislike of most of them. Then came the awkward Python episode and his disappearance indoors and then his anguish on the windowsill. Love, in Petya, was never far from despair.

All that summer he was sad, locked in his room bathed in blue light, playing and (as we afterwards discovered) creating computer games of immense complexity and beauty, and dreaming of that haunting face behind a protective face mask and of the steel-cutting flame moving in her hand as she created fantasy and delicacy out of brute metal. He thought of her as a kind of superhero, his blowtorch goddess, and wanted above all things to be with her but he feared the journey, a Prince too full of troubles to be able to pursue his vanished Cinderella. Nor could he call her and tell her how he felt. He was like a continent of erratic garrulity containing a no-go zone of oral paralysis. And finally it was Apu who took pity on him and offered to help. “I’ll rent a car with blacked-out windows,” he declared. “We’re going to get you access.”

Apu swore, afterwards, that that had been his only motive: to get Petya across the frontier of his fear and give him a shot at the girl. But maybe he wasn’t telling the truth.

And so Petya screwed up his courage and made the call, and Ubah Tuur invited the brothers up for the weekend, and was understanding enough to tell him, “There’s a good solid fence all the way around the property, so maybe you can think of it as interior space, like your communal gardens. If you can get your head around that I can show you the work that’s standing on the land as well as what’s in the studio.”

In the last light of day, wearing her soiled work dungarees, her hair loosely piled up under a back-to-front Yankees baseball cap, the protective mask, just removed, dangling from the crook of her elbow: without even trying, she was a knockout. “Here, I want you to see this,” she said, and took Petya’s hand in hers, and led him through the crepuscular land littered with her giant intricate forms, like the lacy armor of immense gods, like battlefield detritus reworked by light-fingered elves, and he uncomplaining, believing in the existence of the fence he could not see in the failing light, not even by the light of the full bright moon above; she rounded the long low farmhouse where she lived, led him between the farmhouse and the barn where she worked, and said, “Look.” And there at the foot of the land, where it fell sharply away, was the rolling river, the wide and silver Hudson, taking his breath away. For a long moment he didn’t even think about the fence, didn’t ask if he was safely enclosed or dangerously exposed to the frightening everything of the world, and when he did begin to ask, “Is there…” and as his hand fell to trembling she held it firmly and said, “The river is the wall. This is a safe place for us all.” And he accepted what she said and was not afraid, and stood there watching the water until she led the brothers indoors to dinner.

He became his loquacious self again in the warm yellow light of her kitchen, eating her mango curry chicken, its sweetness doing battle on his palate with the berbere spices mixed into it. But while he talked on and on about his enthusiasm for the video-gaming world, interspersing accounts of the latest games with recitals of river poetry under the influence of the shining river, her attention wandered. The night lengthened and the script of the visit was thrown away and Ubah Tuur felt an unexpectedness rise in her; a treachery. How is it you’re not married, she asked Petya, a man like you, you’re a catch. But while she said it her eyes slid across to Apu, who was sitting perfectly still, he told me, doing nothing, but afterwards Petya accused him of mumbling, you were muttering something, you bastard, you used black magic on her, while he, Petya, tried to answer Ubah, the words stumbling, a long time ago, yes, someone, but since then the waiting, the waiting for an emotional imperative, and she, talking to him but looking at his brother, And so now, have you found the emotional imperative, flirtatious, but her eyes on Apu, and he, mumbling, according to Petya, though he himself always denied to me that he mumbled.

I know what you did, you rat, Petya would shriek later, maybe you put something in her food also, the spices would have disguised it, some evil chicken entrail powder you got from your Greenpoint witch, and the mumbling, what were you saying, a hex, a hex.

And Apu straight-faced, making matters worse, Where is my father’s pet son now? What about two plus two is four? Four plus four is eight? I did nothing. Nothing.

You fucked her, Petya wailed.

Well, yes. I did that. I’m sorry.

It may have gone somewhat differently. I wasn’t there. It may well have been that the usually loquacious Petya was tongue-tied all night, silenced by love, and lively worldly Apu monopolized the talk, and the woman. It may be that she, Ubah, universally held to be a graceful courteous woman, not usually reckless, surprised herself on this occasion by yielding to sudden lust for the wrong brother, her fellow artist, the rising star, the ladies’ man, the charmer. The motivations of desire are obscure even to the desirous, the desiring and the desired. I do betray / My nobler part to my gross body’s treason, Bard of Avon, Sonnet 151. And so without full knowledge of the why and wherefore, we inflict mortal wounds on those we love.

A dark house. Creaking floorboards. Movements. There is no need to rehearse the banal melodrama of the act. In the morning the guilt on the faces of both the guilty, as easy to read as a headline. Large, heavy Petya, lithe, shaven-headed Apu, the woman between them like a storm cloud. There’s nothing to explain, she said. It’s what happened. I think you both should go.

And then Petya imprisoned by his fear of the world in his brother’s rented car with darkened windows trembled with humiliated, unmanned fury in the back seat, three hours of silent horror as they drove back to the city. At such moments a man’s thoughts may begin to turn to murder.