The Golden House

Eighteen years after Apu was born the old man had an extramarital involvement and was not careful and a pregnancy resulted which he chose not to have aborted, because, in his opinion, it was always his business to do the choosing. The mother was a poor woman whose identity did not become known (a secretary? a whore?) and in return for a certain financial consideration she gave the child up to be raised as his father’s son, left town, and disappeared from her baby’s story. So like the god Dionysus the child was twice born, once of his mother and then again into his father’s world. Dionysus the god was always an outsider, a god of resurrection and arrival, “the god that comes.” He was also androgynous, “man-womanish.” That this was the pseudonym the youngest child of Nero Golden chose for himself in the classical-renaming game reveals that he knew something about himself before he knew it, so to speak. Though at the time the reasons he gave for his choice were, in the first place, that Dionysus adventured far and wide in India, and indeed the mythical Mount Nysa where he was born might have been located on the subcontinent; and, in the second place, that he was the deity of sensual delight, not only Dionysus but, in his Roman incarnation, also Bacchus, god of wine, disorderliness and ecstasy, all of which—Dionysus Golden said—sounded like fun. However, he soon announced that he preferred not to be known by the divine name in full, and went by the plain, near-anonymous single-letter nickname, “D.”

His integration into the family had been no easy matter. With his half brothers, from the beginning, he had poor relations. All his childhood he had felt excluded. They called him Mowgli and howled comically at the moon. His wolf-mother was some jungle whore; theirs was the mother wolf of Rome. (At this point it seems they had decided to be Romulus and Remus, though Apu later denied this to me, or rather suggested that it had been an idea in D’s head, not his own.) They had already mastered Latin and Greek when D was still learning to talk, and they used these secret languages to banish him from their conversations. They both afterwards denied this, too, but admitted that the way he entered the family, and also the age gap, had created serious difficulties, questions of loyalty and natural affection. Now, as a young man, D Golden when in his brothers’ company alternated between ingratiation and rage. It was plain that he needed to love and be loved; there was a tide of emotion in him that needed to wash over people and he hoped for a returning tide to wash over him. When this kind of passionate reciprocity didn’t happen he snapped and ranted and withdrew. He was twenty-two years old when the family took possession of the Golden house. Sometimes he seemed wise beyond his years. At other times he behaved like a four-year-old child.

When, as a child, he plucked up his courage and asked his father and stepmother about the woman who gave him birth, his father would simply throw up his hands and leave the room. His stepmother would grow angry. “Leave it!” she cried one fateful day. “That was a woman of no consequence. She went away, got sick and died.”

What was it like, to be Mowgli, born of a woman of no consequence, who had been so cruelly cast off by his father and then in the outer darkness had died one of the myriad deaths of the forgotten poor? I heard a shocking story later, from Apu, after the code of silence was broken. There had been a time when the old man’s relationship with their mother was in difficulties. He raged at her and she shouted back. I sat up and paid attention because this was the first time in my conversations with the Goldens that the faceless, nameless woman, Nero’s wife—since ancient times an unlucky thing to be—had walked out onto the stage and opened her mouth; and because, according to the story, Nero had shouted and screamed, and she had screamed and shouted back at him. This was not the Nero I knew, in whom the force of his rage was kept under control, emerging only in the form of self-glorifying bombast.

At any rate: after the explosion the family split into two camps. The older boys took their mother’s side but Dionysus Golden stood firmly by his father and persuaded the patriarch that his wife, Petya and Apu’s mother, was not fit to run the household. Nero summoned his wife and ordered her to surrender the keys; and after that for a time it was D who gave instructions and ordered groceries and decided what food would be cooked in the kitchens. It was a public humiliation, a dishonoring. Her sense of her own honor was profoundly linked to that iron ring, a majestic O three inches in diameter, from which hung maybe twenty keys, large and small, keys to the larder, to cellar strongboxes packed with gold ingots and other arcana of the rich, and to various secret crevices all over the mansion where she concealed only she knew what: old love letters, wedding jewelry, antique shawls. It was the symbol of her domestic authority, and her pride and self-respect hung there along with the keys. She was the mistress of the locks, and without that role she was nothing. Two weeks after she was commanded by her husband to give up the key ring, the deposed lady of the house attempted to take her own life. Pills were swallowed, she was found by Apu and Petya slumped at the foot of the marble stairs, an ambulance came. She was clutching Apu by the wrist and the ambulance men said, please come with us, her holding on to you is important, she’s holding on to life.

In the ambulance the two paramedics played good cop, bad cop.—Stupid bitch scaring your family, you think we have nothing better to do, we have serious things to deal with, real injuries, emergencies that are not self-inflicted, we should just leave you to die.—No the poor thing, don’t be so hard on her, she must be so sad, it’s all right darling, we will look after you, things will get better, every cloud has a silver lining.—To hell with the silver lining, she doesn’t even have a cloud, look at her house, her money, these people think they own us.—Don’t mind him darling, it’s just his way, we are here to take care of you, you’re in good hands now. She was trying to mutter something but Apu couldn’t make out the words. He knew what they were doing, they were trying to keep her from slipping into unconsciousness, and afterwards, after the stomach pump which he had had to watch because of her claw-hand clutching at his wrist, when she was conscious again in a hospital bed, she told him, The only thing I was trying to say in the ambulance was, my child, will you please punch that rude bastard on the nose.

She returned home in a kind of triumph, because of course she was restored to her position as head of the household and the traitor child who was not her child begged for her forgiveness, and she told him she forgave him, but actually she never did, and barely spoke to him again for the rest of her life. Nor did he truly want her forgiveness. She had called his mother a woman of no consequence and deserved everything he had inflicted upon her. After that his brothers slammed emotional doors in his face and told him he was lucky they were not violent men. He swallowed his pride and pleaded for their forgiveness also. It did not come quickly. But as the years passed a reserved cordiality slowly grew up between them, a brevity of interaction that outsiders mistook for inarticulate brotherly love, but was no more than mutual toleration.

Unasked questions hung in the air, unsolved mysteries: Why did the young boy who grew up to be D Golden want so desperately to run the household that he would humiliate his stepmother to fulfill his desire? Was it to prove he belonged? Or was it, as it could so easily have been, to avenge the dead woman who gave him birth?

“I don’t know,” Apu said dismissively when I asked him. “He can be an extraordinary little shit when he wants.”

From his acute sense of difference rooted in his illegitimacy, D Golden constructed a form of Nietzschean elitism to justify his isolation. (Always when considering the Golden men, one encounters the shadow of the Übermensch.) “How should there be a ‘common good,’ ” he quoted the philosopher in the Gardens. “The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.” This struck me as no more than youthful posing; just a few months older than he, I recognized in him my own weakness for philosophizing. D was in fact quite the striker of poses, a Dorian Gray type, slender, lissom, bordering on the effeminate. His self-image—that only he of all his tribe had the capacity for greatness, only he had the depth of character to plunge deeply into sorrow, that only he was rare—sounded pretty straightforwardly defensive in origin. But I had much compassion for him; he had been dealt a tough hand, and we all build our walls, do we not, and maybe we don’t even know what we are building them against, what force will finally storm them and destroy our little dreams.

I went with him sometimes to listen to music. There was a redheaded singer he liked called Ivy Manuel who did a weekly late-night set in a place on Orchard Street, sometimes wearing a tiara on her head to prove she was a queen. She sang cover versions of “Wild Is the Wind” and “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Under the Bridge” before moving on to a few of her own, and D sitting in front of her at a little round black iron table closed his eyes and swayed to Bowie and Cohen and put his own words to the Chili Peppers under his breath. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t been born yet, sometimes I feel I don’t want to be born. Ivy Manuel was his friend because, he said—not joking—all the straight girls he met wanted to hit on him but Ivy was lesbian so they could actually have a friendship. He was the most beautiful of all those Goldens, as any magic mirror would readily have confirmed, and he could be the most beguiling of them too. All of us in the houses on the Gardens were victims of his wounded openness and in the larger neighborhood too he quickly became a figure. He professed to be disturbed by the attention. Everywhere I go people look at me, he said, there’s always someone looking, like I’m someone, like they expect something from me. Get over yourself, Ivy told him, nobody wants shit from you. He grinned and bowed his head in mock-apology. Charm was his disguise as it was Apu’s; beneath the surface he was brooding and often sad. From the beginning he was the one with the darkest darkness in him, even though he came into the world like sunshine, with a full head of white-blond hair. The hair darkened toward chestnut, and the skies of his character grew overcast also, there were frequent downward spirals into gloom.

Ivy didn’t make a big deal out of her sexuality, as a musician she didn’t like to hang labels on herself. “I have no problem being out, but I don’t think it has anything to do with my music,” she said. “I like who I like. I don’t want people to not listen to my music because of that and I don’t want people to listen to my music because of that.” But her audience was skewed heavily female, a lot of women plus the charming young man who didn’t want people to look at him, and me.

The Goldens all told stories about themselves, stories in which essential information about origins was either omitted or falsified. I listened to them not as “true” but as indications of character. The yarns a man told about himself revealed him in ways that the record could not. I thought of these anecdotes as card players’ “tells,” the involuntary gestures that give away a hand—the rubbing of the nose when the hand is strong, the fingering of an earlobe when it’s weak. The master player watches everyone at the table to discover their tells. This was how I tried to watch and listen to the Golden men. Yet one night when I went with D to the place on Orchard Street to hear Ivy Manuel sing Bowie’s ch-ch-ch-ch and Mitchell’s don’t-it-always-seem-to-go and an odd funny science-fiction song of her own called “The Terminator,” regarding the usefulness of time travel to potential saviors of the human race, and afterwards I sat drinking beers with the two of them in the empty venue, I missed the most obvious tell of all. I think it was Ivy who raised the increasingly complex subject of gendering, and D responded with a story from Greek mythology. Hermaphroditus was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite with whom a nymph named Salmacis fell so deeply in love that she begged Zeus to unite them forever, and so they became one, the two of them in a single body in which both sexes remained manifest. At the time I thought it was a way of saying how close he felt to Ivy Manuel, how they were joined forever as friends. But he was telling me stranger things and I didn’t know how to listen; things about himself.

The point about metamorphosis is that it’s not random. Philomela, assaulted by her brother-in-law Tereus, raped and with her tongue cut out, flew away from him as a nightingale, free, and with the sweetest singing voice. As in the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, the gods permit that bodies be transformed into other bodies under the pressure of desperate needs—love, fear, liberation, or the existence within one body of a secret truth which can only be revealed by its mutation.

He carried three silver dollars in his pockets at all times so that he could cast the ancient Chinese hexagrams of divination. He cast one that night in the place on Orchard Street. Five unchanging broken lines and an unchanging unbroken one at the top. “Twenty-three,” he said, “it figures,” and put the coins away. I knew nothing about the I Ching, but later that night I googled the hexagrams. In the age of the search engine all knowledge is just a motion away. Hexagram 23 is named “Stripping,” and is described as the hexagram of splitting apart. Its inner trigram means “shake” and “thunder.”

“Let’s go home,” he said, and walked out on us without looking back.

I let him go. I don’t chase after people who indicate that they have had enough of my company. And maybe my own sensitivities got in the way of my understanding; because it was a long time before I thought, maybe there are reasons other than vanity, narcissism and shyness for his fear of being watched.

Always in the beginning some pain to assuage, some wound to heal, some hole to fill. And always at the end failure—the pain incurable, the wound not healed, the remnant, melancholy void.

To the question about the nature of goodness I asked at the very beginning of this narrative, I can at least give a partial answer: the life of the young woman who fell in love with Dionysus Golden one afternoon on a Bowery sidewalk and who stood by him and enfolded him in that unshakable love through everything that followed—that is, for me, one of the best definitions of a good life I have found in my own relatively brief, relatively parochial existence. “Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches,” Montherlant told us—happiness writes in white ink on a white page—and goodness, I’d add, is as elusive to pin down in words as joy. Yet I must try; for what these two found, and held on to, was nothing less than that—happiness created by goodness, and sustained by it, too, against extraordinary odds. Until unhappiness destroyed it.

From the day he first met her—she was wearing a white shirt and a black pencil skirt and smoking an unfiltered French cigarette on the sidewalk outside the Museum of Identity—he understood that there was no point trying to keep secrets from her, because she could read his mind as clearly as if there had been an illuminated series of news stories crawling across his forehead.

“Ivy said we should meet,” he said. “I thought it was a stupid idea.”

“Why did you come, in that case?” she said, turning her head away, looking bored.

“I wanted to see you, to see if I’d want to see you,” he told her. This interested her, but only vaguely, it seemed.

“Ivy told me your family is exiled in some way you don’t care to discuss,” she said. Her eyes as wide as the sea. “But now that you are standing here I see that you personally are probably in exile from yourself, maybe ever since the day you were born.” He frowned, evidently annoyed. “And you know this how?” he asked, sharply. “Are you a museum curator or a shaman?”

“There is a particular kind of sadness,” she replied, dragging on her Gauloises, looking like Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou, “that reveals a man’s alienation from his own identity.”

“This modern obsession with identity revolts me,” he said, perhaps too emphatically. “It is a way of narrowing us until we are like aliens to one another. Have you read Arthur Schlesinger? He opposes perpetuating marginalization through affirmations of difference.” He was wearing a trench coat and a snap-brim fedora because summer was coming but had not yet arrived, like a woman making false promises of love.

“But that is what we are, aliens, all of us.” A faint shrug of the shoulders and the suggestion of a moue. “The point is to become more precise about the types of aliens we choose to be. And yes I have read that old dead straight white man. You should look at Spivak’s work on strategic essentialism.”

“Do you want to go somewhere for a whiskey,” he asked, still sounding irritated as he asked it, and she continued to regard him as someone a little simple who was in need of intelligent assistance. Her stockings had black seams running up the backs of her calves. “Not now,” she said. “Now, you should come inside and learn about the new world.”

“How about after that?”

“After that, still no.”

They spent that night together in her Second Avenue apartment. There was so much to talk about that they did not have sex, which was overrated, he said. She didn’t argue but made a mental note. In the morning he went downstairs to get her croissants, coffee, whiskey, cigarettes, and the Sunday papers. The keys were on top of a little mahogany table in the hall, a sort of box on legs, not an antique but a good reproduction. He lifted the lid and saw the gun lying on the small red velvet cushion, a pearl-handled Colt revolver, also a good reproduction, probably. He picked it up, spun the revolving cylinder, put the business end against his temple. Afterwards he said he did not pull the trigger, but she was watching him through the open bedroom door and heard the click as the hammer hit an empty chamber. “Found the keys,” he said. “I’ll get breakfast.”

“Don’t spill anything,” she called after him. “I don’t want a mess on the hall carpet.”

Riya, that was her name. Quite a girl. Just three or four years older than he was but already holding down a senior position at the Museum, as well as crooning love songs some nights on Orchard Street, and making her own indie fashion line from old lace and black silk, often with floral brocade motifs, Oriental-themed, Chinese- and Indian-style. She was half Indian and half Swedish-American, her long Scandinavian surname, Zachariassen, too much of a mouthful for American mouths, so just as he was D Golden she went by Riya Z.

The alphabet is where all our secrets begin.

“Come inside and learn about the new world.” There was a museum for Native Americans on Bowling Green and there was the Italian American Museum on Mulberry Street and the Polish American Museum in Port Washington and there were two museums for the Jews, uptown and downtown, and those were identity museums too obviously but the MoI—the Museum of Identity—was after bigger game, its charismatic curator Orlando Wolf was after identity itself, the mighty new force in the world, already as powerful as any theology or ideology, cultural identity and religious identity and nation and tribe and sect and family, it was a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field, and at the heart of the Identity Museum was the question of the identity of the self, starting with the biological self and moving far beyond that. Gender identity, splitting as never before in human history, spawning whole new vocabularies that tried to grasp the new mutabilities.

“God is dead and identity fills the vacuum,” she said to him at the doorway to the gender zone, her eyes filled with the bright zeal of the true believer, “but it turns out gods were gender benders from the start.”

Her black hair was cut short and close to the head. “Great haircut,” he said.

They were standing amid pots and seals and stone statuary from Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. “The Great Mother, Plutarch says, was an intersex deity—the two sexes both present in her, not yet split apart.”

Maybe if he rented an old convertible, red and white with fins, they could go for a drive, maybe all the way across America. “Have you seen the Pacific Ocean?” he asked her. “It’s probably a disappointment like everything else.”

They went on walking. The Museum was dark, punctuated by brightly illuminated objects, like exclamations in a monastery. “These Stone Age objects could be transgender priestesses,” she said. “You should really pay attention. It’s as important for cis people as for the MTF community.”

The word took him back to childhood; suddenly he was studying Latin again, with fierce attention, to destroy his brothers’ power to exclude him by using the secret language of Rome. “Prepositions that take the accusative,” he said. “Ante, apud, ad, adversus / circum, circa, citra, cis. / Contra, erga, extra, infra. Never mind. Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul. I get it. The Alps now divide the sexes.”

“I don’t like that word,” she said.

“What word?”

“Sex.”

Oh.

“Anyway, God is not dead,” he said. “Not in America, anyway.”

MTF was male to female, FTM was vice versa. Now she was pouring words over him, gender fluid, bigender, agender, trans with an asterisk: trans*, the difference between woman and female, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, nonbinary, and, from Native American culture, two-spirit. The Phrygian goddess Cybele had MTF servitors called gallae. In the African room the MTF okule and the FTM agule of the Lugbara tribe, the transsexual Amazons of Abomey, Queen Hatshepsut in male clothing and false beard. In the Asia room he stopped in front of the stone figure of Ardhanarishvara, the half-woman god. “From Elephanta Island,” he said, and clapped his hand to his mouth. “You didn’t hear me say that,” he said to her with genuine ferocity.

“I was going to show you the fanchuan costumes from cross-dressing Chinese operas,” she said, “but maybe you’ve had enough for today.”

“I should go,” he said.

“I’ll take that whiskey now,” she replied.

And at breakfast the next morning, sitting up in white sheets eating a croissant, smoking a cigarette and with another glass of whiskey in her hand, she murmured softly, “I know the name of the country you won’t name,” she said, “and I also know the name of the city you won’t talk about.” She whispered the words into his ear.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he said. “But I want to know why you have a gun in the little table in the hall.”

“To shoot men who think they are in love with me,” she answered. “And maybe myself as well, but I haven’t made my mind up about that.”

“Don’t tell my father what you know,” he said, “or you probably won’t need to make that decision.”

I close my eyes and run the movie in my head. I open my eyes and write it down. Then, again, I close my eyes.