The Golden House

A gigantic insect. A monstrous vermin. A verminous bug. Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams to discover that he had been transformed in his own bed into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer. People disagreed on the best translation. The exact nature of the creature is not precisely specified in the Kafka story. Maybe a giant cockroach. The cleaning woman says he’s a dung beetle. He himself doesn’t seem too sure. Something horrible, anyway, with an armored back and little waving legs. “Into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer.” Not a thing anyone would want to be. A thing from which everyone finally turned away in horror, his employer, his family, even his beloved and formerly loving sister. A dead thing, in the end, to be taken out with the trash and disposed of by the cleaner. This was what he was becoming, D told himself, a monstrosity, even to himself.

He was walking uptown, lost in such morbid thoughts, and though the sunshine was bright he had the sense of being enclosed in darkness—of being, to be precise, brightly illuminated by a spotlight exposing him to the scrutiny and judgment of all, but surrounded by a black miasma that made it impossible for him to make out the faces of his judges. Only when he arrived at the door of his father’s house did he realize that his feet had brought him back to Macdougal Street. He fumbled in his pocket for the key and went indoors, hoping not to have to face his family. He wasn’t ready. He was not himself. If they saw him maybe they would see his metamorphosis written all over his body and cry out in horror, Ungeziefer! He wasn’t ready for that.

How strange the interior of the house seemed to him now! This was not only for the obvious reason, namely that his father’s mistress Vasilisa Arsenyeva had embarked upon a radical “modernizing” scheme of redecorations as soon as she moved in, thus stepping up a rung on the ladder of intimacy to the status of “live-in lover.” The fourth finger of her left hand was still bare, but, all the Golden sons agreed, it would probably not be long until a diamond sparkled there, and after the diamond, a band of gold would surely also appear. Certainly she had begun to behave proprietorially. The whole mansion had been repainted in a chic oyster gray color and everything old had been or was being replaced by everything new and “high-end”—the furniture, the rugs, the art, the lighting fixtures, the table lamps, the ashtrays, the picture frames. D had asked that his room be left untouched and she had respected that, so something, at least, was familiar. But he knew that his feeling of strangeness did not have its origins in the redecoration, but in himself. If, as he moved through the hallway and up the stairs, a mood of foreboding came over him, a sense that everything was about to change and that the change would be a kind of calamity, then the reason for his premonition was not to be found in oyster paint or silver velour sectional settees, it was not hanging in the new living room drapes or glowing in the new dining room chandelier or flickering in the new gas fireplaces whose flames in winter would heat up a bed of pebbles which would glitter with fashionable delight. It was true that this renewed environment was no longer the old-school, lived-in world Nero Golden had created for them to inhabit when they first arrived. It was possessed of a disturbing, ersatz otherness which the earlier version, also a kind of imitation of life, had somehow avoided. But no! It wasn’t the house. The change was in himself. He himself was the darkness he felt around him, he was the force pulling the walls closer, the ceilings lower, like a house in a horror movie, and creating an air of oppression and claustrophobia. The house, to tell the truth, was much brighter than before. It was he who had grown dark.

He was running from the thing he also knew he was moving toward. He knew it was coming, but that didn’t mean he liked it. He hated it, there was no escaping the fact, and that created the storm that surrounded him now. He wanted to go into his room and shut the door. He wanted to disappear.

When I think about D at this critical juncture I am reminded of Theodor W. Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in your own home.” Yes, to be uncomfortable with comfort, uneasy about the easy, to question the assumptions of what is usually, and happily, taken for granted, to make of oneself a challenge to what for most people is the space in which they feel free from challenges; yes! That is morality raised to a pitch at which it could almost be called heroism. In this instance D Golden’s “home” was an even more intimate space than the family house; it was nothing less than his own body. He was a misfit in his own skin, experiencing, in intense form, this newly important variation of the mind/body problem. His nonphysical self, the mind, was beginning to insist on being what the body, his physical self, denied, and the result was physical and mental agony.

The Golden house was silent. He stood for a moment on the second-floor landing outside his father’s master suite. That door was closed, but the door of the room next to it, formerly a spare bedroom, now Vasilisa Arsenyeva’s dressing room, stood open, revealing in the late afternoon sunlight rack upon rack of shimmering gowns, shelf upon shelf of aggressively high heels. That’s going to be a problem for me, the words dropping into his consciousness from some unknown mother ship hovering just outside the atmosphere beyond the Kármán line, your pedal extremities are colossal, can’t use you ’cause your feet’s too big, I really hate you ’cause your feet’s too big. Yeah, Fats Waller, what you said. And now those big feet have walked him, of their own volition, right into the middle of that room where the scent of patchouli is stronger than anywhere else in the house, the scent she brought here to overpower all the scents that were here before, Vasilisa Arsenyeva, silent and haughty as cats are, leaving her spoor wherever she walks. And his hands are reaching out for those gowns, he’s burying his face in the odorous sequins, breathing in, breathing out, breathing in. The darkness around him receded; the room glowed with a light that might even have been happiness.

How long was he in there? Five minutes or five hours? He had no idea, so many emotions crowding in, his whole self a swirl of confusion, but how good it felt, how fine the fabric against his cheek, how astonishing the sensation of, of glamour, how could he deny that, and what followed from it, what was the right next step.

Then Vasilisa was standing in the doorway, watching him. “Can I help you,” she said.

Can I help you, really?, as if this was a department store and she was accusing him of shoplifting, so passive-aggressive, standing there so calm and even smiling slightly, don’t condescend to me, lady, can I help you, no, probably not. Okay, he’s in her closet, he’s nuzzling her frocks, this is true, but still, it’s not right. Or maybe this is just a language problem, maybe it’s a question she learned from a phrasebook, she doesn’t understand about inflections, either, ask the question that way and it sounds hostile when maybe, can it be, she meant it literally, she literally wants to help me and is asking how, she’s not judging me or angry and is actually holding out a hand to help, I don’t want to misread her here, the situation is embarrassing enough already, but yes, she’s coming right up to me and now she’s hugging me, and here’s another phrasebook phrase, “Let’s see what we can do for you.”

Vasilisa began pulling out stuff and holding it up against him, this one? this one?, she asked, and reassuringly, “You and I we are similar,” she said, “in the shape. Willowy, is that a word.” Yes, he nodded, it was a word. “Willowy like the willow tree,” she went on, herself reassured by the confirmation. “Your mother must have been tall and slim, like a fashion model.”

He stiffened. “My mother was a whore,” he said. He had begun to tremble. “She sold me to my father and vanished into Whoreistan.”

“Shh, shh,” she said. “Shh now. That is for another day. Just now it is a moment for you. Try this one.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to spoil your clothes.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have so many. Here, take off your shirt, slip this over your head. You see, only a little tight. What do you think?”

“Can I try that one?”

“Yes. Of course.”

(I want to leave them there for a minute, to give the two of them their privacy, averting my eyes discreetly and turning off my I-am-a-cellphone-camera, or perhaps turning it around, here is the landing, here are the stairs leading down to the entrance lobby where now, after the redecoration, the balloon dog keeps watch, the pickled piranha snarls from a wall, and neon words of love shine in lurid pink and green above the doorway, and here is the front door, opening. Enter Nero Golden. The king is back in his palace. I watch his face. He looks around, annoyed. He wants her standing here to greet him, where is she, didn’t she read his text. He hangs his hat and cane on the stand in the entrance hall and calls out.)

“Vasilisa!”

(Imagine my I-am-a-Steadicam racing upstairs now, up and into the room where she and the young fellow in her clothes stand transfixed by his voice, and she, Vasilisa, looks at D and understands that he still fears his father.)

“He’ll kill me. He’s going to kill me. Oh my God.”

“No, he absolutely will not kill you.”

She hands him back his street clothes.

“Put them back on. I’m going to distract him.”

“How?”

“I will bring him upstairs…”

“No!”

“…into the bedroom and close the door. When you hear me beginning to make a lot of noise you will know it’s safe to leave.”

“What sort of noise.”

“You can certainly guess what sort of noise. I don’t have to be explicit here.”

“Oh.”

She pauses in the doorway before going down to Nero.

“And D?”

“What! I mean, sorry, yes, what?”

“Maybe I am not a completely, thousand percent evil bitch.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Obviously. I mean no. Obviously not.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Thank you.”

She smiles conspiratorially. I should end the scene there, a tight close-up of that sphinxlike Mona Lisa smile.

Later.

He has made his peace with patient, understanding Riya, and here they are with Ivy Manuel in the Jamaican place on Houston and Sullivan drinking dangerous cocktails late at night. Or, to reimagine it: the three people are seated around a simple round table in a completely black studio, drinking their drinks (dangerous cocktails are acceptable, even in Limbo), the world doesn’t exist except for them as they discuss profound questions of language and philosophy. (Deliberate reference: Jean-Luc Godard movie, Le gai savoir, 1969, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto. Considered too didactic by many, but sometimes didacticism is required.) At first D is in low spirits, quoting Nietzsche (author of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) asking “the Schopenhauerian question: Has existence then a significance at all?—the question which will require a couple of centuries even to be completely heard in all its profundity.” But gradually the two women cheer him up, encouraging him, supporting him, cajoling him, and then, after he gives a small nod of acceptance and smiles cautiously, introducing him little by little to the vocabulary of his future, a future in which the pronoun his will stop being his. The first and most important word is transition. In music, a momentary modulation from one key to another. In physics, a change of an atom, nucleus, electron, etc., from one quantum state to another, with emission or absorption of radiation. In literature, a passage in a piece of writing that smoothly connects two topics or sections to each other. In the present case…in the present case, the process by which a person permanently adopts the outward or physical characteristics of the gender with which they identify, as opposed to those of the gender they were assigned at birth. The process may or may not involve measures such as hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery.

“Don’t think about surgery,” the women say. “Don’t even let it cross your mind. We are nowhere near that point yet.” (When this scene is filmed the women actors can decide who says which line. But for now let’s say this is Riya speaking, and then Ivy, and so on.)

“You need to work out who you are. For this, there is professional help.”

“Right now you could be TG, TS, TV, CD. Whatever feels right to you.” Transgender, transsexual, transvestite, cross-dresser. “No need to go one step further than what feels right.”

“For this there is professional help.”

“It used to be, people got labels in front of their names. Like, TS Ivy, or CD Riya. Also there was Sex Change. ‘Look, here comes Sex Change Sally.’ The whole trans world has grown up now. Now she’s just Sally or whoever. No compartmentalization.”

“You should think about pronouns, however. Words are important. If you’re giving up he, who steps in? You could choose they. If you decide you don’t identify as either female or male. They equals unknown gender identity. Very private.”

“There’s also ze.”

“There’s also ey.”

“There’s also hir, xe, hen, ve, ne, per, thon, and Mx.”

“You see. There’s a lot.”

“Thon for example is a mixture of that and one.”

“Mx is instead of Ms. and is pronounced mix. This is one I personally like.”

“It’s more than pronouns, naturally. Some of this I told you at the Museum that first time. Words are important. You need to be certain of your identity unless your certainty is that you’re uncertain in which case maybe you’re genderfluid.”

“Or maybe transfeminine, because you’re born male, identify with many aspects of femaleness but you don’t feel you actually are a woman.”

“The word woman is being detached from biology. Also the word man.”

“Or if you don’t identify with woman-ness or man-ness maybe you’re nonbinary.”

“So, there’s no rush. There’s a lot to think about.”

“A lot to learn.”

“Transition is like translation. You’re moving across from one language into another.”

“Some people pick up languages easily. For others, it’s hard. But for this, there is professional help.”

“Think about the Navajo. They recognize four genders. As well as male and female there are the Nádleehi, the two-spirits, born as a male, but functioning in the role of a woman, or vice versa, obviously.”

“You can be what you choose to be.”

“Sexual identity is not a given. It’s a choice.”

D has remained silent up to now. Finally he speaks. “Didn’t the argument used to be the other way around? Being gay wasn’t a choice, it was a biological necessity? So now we’re saying it’s a choice after all?”

“Choosing an identity,” Ivy Manuel says, “is not like choosing cereal at the supermarket.”

“To say ‘choosing’ can also be a way of saying ‘being chosen.’ ”

“But it’s a choice now?”

“For this there is professional help. With help, your choice will become clear to you.”

“It will become necessary.”

“So then it won’t be a choice?”

“This is just a word. Why are you getting so hung up on this? It’s just a word.”

Blackout.