The Golden House

REGARDING MICE AND GIANTS, PERCENTAGES, AND ART

Apu Golden heard about the large gathering of protesters against the arrogance of the banks which had begun occupying an open space in the Financial District and when he went down to look, wearing a Panama hat, khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt so as not to stand out too much, he found himself enchanted by the carnivalesque character of the crowd, the beards, the shaven heads, the lending library, the kisses, the odors, the passionate activists, the crazy old coots, the cooks, the young, the old. “Even the policemen seemed to be smiling,” he told me, “well, some of them, let’s be truthful, some of the others were the usual Cro-Magnon you-cross-the-road-to-avoid-contact-with-them types.” He liked the visual and also literary aspects of the event, the recitals of poetry, the placards made from old cardboard boxes, the cutout fists and V-signs, and he was impressed most of all by the support being given to the protesters by the mighty dead. “So wonderful,” he told me, “to see Goethe lying down among the sleeping bags, G. K. Chesterton standing in line for soup, Gandhi wiggling his fingers in the form of silent applause called up-twinkles—or actually of course it’s Ghandi because nobody can spell anymore, spelling is so boozhwa. Even Henry Ford is there, his words rippling through the crowd via the technique of the human microphone.” I went down there with him because his giggling enthusiasm was infectious and watched with admiration the speed and accuracy of his pencil as it captured the thronging scene, and yes, sure enough, there in his drawings were the immortal ghosts among the crowd, Goethe pompously pontificating, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” and “Ghandi” reciting his old chestnut, “First they ignore you, then they blah blah blah, then you win.” “He never said that,” Apu pointed out. “It’s just an internet meme, but what to do, nobody knows anything, like I said, knowing things is boozhwa too.” Chesterton and Henry Ford in their tailcoats seemed incongruous here but they too were given respectful audience, their sentiments being right on the money, so to speak, “An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended,” old G.K. opined, “on finding defenses for the indefensible conduct of the powerful,” and H. Ford standing by his assembly line cried out, “If the people of this nation understood our banking and monetary system, I believe there would be a revolution tomorrow morning.” “It’s impressive,” Apu said, “how the internet has made philosophers of us all.” I personally preferred the cardboard declamations of an anonymous thinker who seemed motivated primarily by hunger, “One day the poor will have nothing left to eat except the rich,” he admonished us, and on another cardboard speech bubble he expressed the same thought more pithily. “Eat a banker.” This thinker wore an Anonymous mask, the mustachioed smiling white-faced Guy Fawkes face popularized by the Wachowskis in V for Vendetta, but when I asked him about the man whose face he was wearing he admitted he had never heard of the Gunpowder Plot and did not remember, remember the fifth of November. Such was this would-be revolution. Apu sketched it all.

He showed this work in a space run by Frankie Sottovoce on the Bowery, a “grittier” environment than Sottovoce’s Chelsea galleries. It was a joint show with Jennifer Caban, the most prominent artist-activist of that argumentative instant, who, at one point during the opening, lay full-length in a bathtub full of fake money; and they were soon both acclaimed and derided for their partisanship. Apu resisted the bathtub photos and also the partisan label. “For me the aesthetic aspect is always primary,” he tried to argue, but the zeitgeist wasn’t listening, and in the end he surrendered to the descriptions that were imposed on him and the measure of political celebrity they conferred. “Maybe now I am famous on more than twenty blocks,” he mused to me. “Maybe now it’s more like thirty-five or forty.”

In the house on Macdougal Street Apu’s new agitprop notoriety was accorded scant respect. Nero Golden himself said nothing, neither praise nor damnation, but the thin line of his lips said as much as speech would have. He left it to his wife to let rip. Vasilisa on the living room floor surrounded by glossy home decoration magazines paused in her work to give Apu a Russian earful. “Those beggars in the street, making noise and filth and for what? Do they think the power they are attacking is so weak, it will quail before the rabble? They are like a mouse that stamps on the foot of a giant. The giant feels nothing and doesn’t even care to squash the mouse. Who cares, really? The mouse will run away soon. What will they do when winter comes? The weather will crush them. No need for anyone else to waste effort. Also, they have no leaders, this peasants’ army you love. They have no program. Therefore, they are nothing. They are a mouse without a head. They are a dead mouse that does not know it is dead.”

Only half in jest she threw a glossy magazine at him. “Who do you think you are, excuse me? You think when their revolution comes they will put you among their holy ninety-nine percent because you drew some pictures? In my country we know something about what happens when the revolution comes. You should kneel with me before the Feodorovskaya Madonna and we will pray to the Blessed Virgin for our salvation, so we are not murdered in a windowless cellar by the army of the headless mouse.”

There was a change in Vasilisa Golden now. At some moments, when the light fell on her face in a certain way, she reminded me of Diane Keaton in her Godfather role, her face, mind and heart frozen by her daily need not to believe what was staring her in the face. But “Kay Adams” had married “Michael Corleone” believing him to be a good man. Vasilisa had married, so to speak, the Marlon Brando character himself, so she was under no illusion about the ruthlessness, amorality and dark secrets that are the inevitable consiglieri of men of power, and when the light fell on her face in another way it was clear that she wasn’t Diane Keaton after all. She was complicit. She suspected him of a terrible crime and she agreed with herself to set the suspicion aside because of the life she had chosen for herself, the life she deemed worthy of her beauty. And, perhaps, because she was now afraid. She still believed in her power over him, but she now also believed in his power, and knew that if she tried to pit her force against his, the consequences for her could be…extreme. She had not come into this house to face extreme consequences and so her strategy had to be altered. She had never been an innocent abroad. But in the aftermath of the shootings in Union Square she had grown tougher. She was clearer about the man with whom she was in bed and she knew that certain silences might be required of her if she was to survive.

REGARDING THE FAMILY: AN INTERROGATION

—Again, sir: why does a man abandon his homeland, change his name, and start his life afresh halfway across the world?—Why, because of grief, sir, the death of a beloved wife, which propelled him out of himself. Because of grief, and the need to leave it behind, and the leaving behind of it achieved by the shedding of the self.—Plausible. And yet one is not wholly convinced. And yet it remains to ask again: what of the preparations for departure, which predated the tragedy? An explanation for that must be given, surely?—You search for a subtext, then? You suspect shenanigans, skulduggery, jiggery-pokery?—Innocent until proven guilty. No charges against this patriarch in the 2G Spectrum scam. This, one concedes. And surely a fellow on the run from the law would, having rendered himself pseudonymous, affect a low profile? Surely such a fellow would not bruit himself abroad in his newfound land? Whereas this fellow, increasingly, and persistently, and with ever-increasing brio, does he not, bruits.—Sir, he does. Which may, as you say, denote innocence. But one thinks, also, of the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion acts according to its nature even when it is suicidal to do so. Additionally, or by way of confirmation, he is of brazen character, this fellow. He is sure, one feels, of his own invincibility, secure in the certainty of his own invulnerability. If indeed there are laws he has broken, or, how should one put this, people he has alienated—for one’s most dangerous adversaries are not necessarily law-abiding themselves—then he is certain he is beyond their reach. The reach of dangerous adversaries is not limitless. They may be dangerous on their own turf, but it is not easy for them to stretch beyond it, and they do not try to do so.—Or so I speculate. This is not my area of expertise.—But it is clear that Nero feels increasingly secure, and armored by this growing self-belief he goes forth a-scorpioning, blaring and foghorning, establishing, as they say nowadays, his brand.—A word with many meanings, sir, including these: an identifying mark formerly burned on criminals or slaves. A habit, trait, or quality that causes someone public shame or disgrace. A torch. A sword.—We shall see which of those, in this case, applies.

To continue: It had become clear by the election year of 2012 that Nero Golden did not intend to lead a quiet life. Of all the four-and-twenty-blackbird dainty-dishes into which he had stuck a finger during the course of his previous life it was the construction and development business that came most naturally to him and remained strongest in him, and so it was that the word GOLDEN, a golden word, colored gold, in brightly illuminated gold neon, and all in capital letters of gold, began to be seen on hard-hat sites around town, and out of town also, and the name’s owner began to be spoken of as a new power player in that most closed of elites, the small number of families and corporations who controlled the building of this golden city, New York.

—Families, sir? When you say families are you meaning to say, if I may put this delicately, famiglie?—No, sir, or not entirely. The industry in 2012 was much cleaner than previously. In the 1990s the construction companies all belonged to the mob and their bids were absurdly inflated. Now the Five Families’ influence was diminished. On some of Nero Golden’s sites the workers included nonunion. Twenty years earlier these workers would have been killed.—So you speak now of reputable persons: Doronin, Sumaida, Khurana, Silverstein, Stern, Feldman, the aristocrats of real estate.—Not entirely, sir, as I said. The mob abides. Now that it’s all over and all is out in the open we can point to Nero Golden’s covert dealings with such associates as the Philadelphia descendants of Petruchio “Chicken Little” Leone, and Atlantic City’s Arcimboldo “Little Archie” Antonioni, and in Miami Federico “Crazy Fred” Bertolucci. We may also mention that in New York City, several of the Golden towers were built by Ponti & Quasimodo Concrete Co.—“P&Q”—an operation in which there was a strong interest taken by Francesco “Fat Frankie” Palermo, an allegedly senior figure in the Genovese crime family.—This is known?—Now, at the end of l’affaire Golden, it is known. What is more, Nero Golden was clearly quite comfortable in his dealings with these individuals and the families behind them.—Comfortable.—Sir: revealingly at ease.

Two last questions: Did Chicken Little, Little Archie, Crazy Fred and Fat Frankie wear, upon their ample chins, designer stubble? And did they own, and in the evening sometimes wear, bad tuxedoes?—Sir: they did.

Here is Nero Golden, lifting his ban on the media, showing a photographer from a glossy free magazine around his beautiful home. (No more secrecy now; instead, everything on display.) Here is Nero Golden, showing another such magazine around his beautiful wife. He speaks of his wife as his inspiration, as his lodestar, as the source of his “renewal.” I am an old man, he says, and maybe for men such as myself it’s time to wind down, go on the boat, pick up the golf clubs, winter in Florida, pass the baton. This until recently I was ready to do, even though my sons, God knows, show little interest in the family business. My youngest, can you believe it, he works now for a girls’ youth club on the LES, he’s doing good works, and this is fine, but maybe I need him too, a little attention, please. And then, an artist, and then Petya. So it is. But such concerns do not worry me any longer because I am as a man reborn. A woman will do this for you. A woman like Mrs. Golden, she is the elixir of life, she turns a man’s hair black again, she tightens his abdomen, she puts miles back into his legs, and his mind, yes, his business mind also, she sharpens it like a knife. Look at her! Can you doubt me? Did you see her Playboy photos? Of course not ashamed, why would one be ashamed? To own one’s body, to care for it and make it excellent, to see no disgrace in beauty, that is liberation. She is the ideal of the liberated woman and also the ideal of the wife. Both sides of the coin. Yes: a lucky man. For sure. She’s the jackpot, no doubt.