The Golden House

If you owed the bank a buck you were a deadbeat with an overdraft. If you owed a billion you were rich and the bank was working for you. It was difficult to know how wealthy Nero Golden actually was. His name was everywhere in those days, on everything from hot dogs to for-profit universities, it was walking around Lincoln Center thinking about donating a unit to refurbish Avery Fisher Hall as long as the old name got dumped and the Golden name was up there in block capitals made of gold. A unit was the shorthand term his name used to signify “one hundred million dollars,” one hundred million dollars being the price of entry into the world of the really rich, you really weren’t anybody until you had your unit. His name was walking that unit around town, it kind of wanted to put itself on the Tribeca Film Festival, but that would cost a lot less than a whole unit, so finally the Film Festival felt like chicken feed; what his name really, really wanted was to be way up there on Yankee Stadium. That would prove his name had conquered New York. After that they might just as well put it on top of City Hall.

I assumed he had brought serious funds with him when he came west, but there were persistent rumors that all his enterprises were highly leveraged, that the whole mega-business of his name was a flimflam game and bankruptcy was the shadow that went with his name whenever he took it for a stroll. I thought of him as a citizen not of New York but of the invisible city of Octavia which Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s book, a spiderweb city hanging in a great net over an abyss between two mountains. “The life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities,” Calvino wrote. “They know the net will last only so long.” I thought of him too as one of those characters in animated cartoons, Wile E. Coyote perhaps, who are constantly running off the edges of canyons, but who keep going, defying gravity, until they look down, and then they fall. The knowledge of the impossibility of the attempt brings about its calamitous ending. Nero Golden kept going, perhaps, because he never looked down.

For many months I was busy closing up our house, locking up what I wanted to keep in a Manhattan Mini Storage facility on the West Side, the one with the funny billboards on the wall overlooking the Highway, New York has six professional sports teams, and also the Mets, and If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married, and “In my father’s house there are many rooms”—John 14:2—Clearly Jesus was not a New Yorker, and Remember, if you leave the city, you’ll have to live in America. Yeah, ha ha, I got it, but mostly I was in a sour mood again, trying hard not to show it in Suchitra’s company, but she knew what I was going through. Then the time came to put the house up for sale and Vasilisa Golden came up to me in the Gardens and put her arm around me and kissed me on the cheek and said, let me do this for you, let’s keep it in the family, which was such a nice thing to say that I just nodded dumbly and let her handle the sale.

Again, it was hard for me to be objective about the Goldens that year. On the one hand there was Nero’s kindness to me, and now his wife’s kindness also. On the other, there seemed little doubt that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Romney presidential campaign, and his remarks about the president and his wife teetered on the edge of bigotry, of course he likes the gays, he’s married to a man, that was a mild one. Very often he told his “funny Republican joke,” the one about the older white guy who goes up to a White House sentry at some point after the end of the present administration, several days in a row, and each time asks to meet President Obama. The third or fourth time he shows up, the exasperated officer says, Sir, you keep coming back and I keep telling you, Mr. Obama is no longer the president of these United States, and no longer resides at this address. So you know that and still you keep coming back and asking the same question and you get the same answer, so why do you keep asking? And the older white guy says, Oh, I just like to hear it.

This, I put up with, though I feared on Nero’s behalf that his dark side would overpower the light. I gave him to read the great short story “The Shadow” by Hans Christian Andersen about the man whose shadow detaches itself from him, travels the world, becomes more sophisticated than his former “owner,” returns to seduce and marry the princess to whom the man is betrothed, and, together with the (pretty ruthless) princess, condemns the real man to death. I wanted him to understand the danger his soul was in, if a godless person may be permitted to use such a term, but he wasn’t a reader of literature, and returned the book containing the story with a dismissive gesture of the hand. “I don’t like fairy tales,” he said.

But then…the two of them, husband and wife, summoned me to their presence and announced their decision regarding me. “What you need to do,” Vasilisa Golden said, “is to come to live with us in this house. It is a big house with many rooms and two of the three boys are not so much here anymore and the third is Petya who hardly comes out of his room. So there is plenty of space for yourself and you will be excellent company for us both.”

“Temporarily,” Nero Golden said.

“With the girl, who knows what happens,” Vasilisa pointed out. “You want to move in with her, you decide to break up, time will tell. Take the pressure off. You don’t need pressure right now.”

“For the moment,” Nero Golden said.

It was an offer of true generosity—admittedly a short-term offer—made in absolute good faith; and I didn’t see how I could accept it. I opened my mouth to object and Vasilisa raised an empress’s hand. “There is no question of refusing,” she said. “Go and pack your bags and we will send people to carry them.”

So in the fall of 2012 I went to live in the Golden house, temporarily, for the moment, feeling, on the one hand, deeply grateful, like a serf offered a bedroom in a palace, and, on the other, as if I had done a deal with the devil. The only way of knowing which it was, would be to unwrap all the mysteries around Nero, his present as well as his past, so that I could truly judge him, and maybe to do that it would be better to be within the walls than outside them. They opened the gates and pulled me into their world and then I was the wooden horse standing inside the gates of Troy. And inside me, Odysseus and the warriors. And standing before me, the Helen of this American Ilium. And before our story was done I would betray them, and the woman I loved, and myself. And the topless towers would burn.

The “boys,” Nero’s sons, came to see him every day, and these were unusual encounters, speaking of his immense authority over them, not so much father-son meetings as cap-in-hand obeisances paid by subjects to their master. I understood that any film treatment, fictionalized, of course, would have to deal with this strangely authoritarian relationship. Some of the explanation was undoubtedly financial. Nero was generous with money, so that Apu was able to get himself a place in Montauk and spend weeks at a time painting there, and partying as well. Young D Golden in Chinatown gave every appearance of living on a budget, and was working, these days, as a volunteer at a girls’ club on the Lower East Side, which would have obliged him to live on Riya’s salary, but the truth was, as Vasilisa was quick to inform me, that he took the money his father gave him. “He has many expenses right now,” she said, but declined to elaborate further, as was the way in the Golden house, whose members did not discuss significant matters with one another, as if they were secrets, even though they knew that everyone knew everything. But maybe, I thought, the sessions between the father and his sons were also like confessionals, where the “boys” admitted their “sins” and were, in some way, to some degree, and in return for unknown penances and expiations, “forgiven.” That was the way to write it, I thought. Or, a more interesting possibility. Maybe the sons were the parent’s priests as well as the other way around. Maybe each possessed the other’s secrets, and each gave the other absolution and peace.

It was usually quiet in the big house, which was perfect for me. I had been given a room on the uppermost floor with dormer windows looking down over the Gardens and I was utterly content, and busy. As well as my longer-term movie project I was working with Suchitra on a short-form video series for a cable VOD network, well-known indie film faces talking about favorite movie moments, the bottom-stamping scene in Jiri Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (I preferred the greater formality of the UK title to the American Closely Watched Trains), Toshiro Mifune introducing the character of his shabby, itchy samurai warrior in Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, Michael J. Pollard’s first scene in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (“dirt in the fuel line—just blowed it away”), the winter peacock spreading its tail feathers in Fellini’s Amarcord, the child who falls out of a window and bounces, unhurt, in Truffaut’s L’argent de poche (“Pocket Money”), the closing moments of Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (“Fat Man, you shoot a great game of pool.”—“So do you, Fast Eddie.”), and my personal favorite, the matchstick game in Alain Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad (“Last Year at Marienbad”), featuring the granite-faced, Draculaesque Sacha Pitoëff (“It’s not a game if you can’t lose.”—“Oh, I can lose, but I never do.”) We had already filmed a number of talented young American actors and filmmakers (Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Todd Solondz, Parker Posey, Jake Paltrow, Chloë Sevigny) expressing their admiration for these classic films and I was honing my editing skills on my laptop by assembling the material into sharp three-minute pieces to be embedded on a wide range of websites. Suchitra was leaving this work to me while she set up her own first film as writer-director, crossing the line from the production side, and we were both deeply immersed in our work, coming together late at night to tell each other the day’s news, eat fast and too late, and either make love quickly or simply fall asleep exhausted in each other’s arms, either in my artist’s garret or her studio apartment. In the aftermath of tragedy, this was how I found my way back to joy.

In my spare moments I studied the dynamics of the Golden house. Cleaning services, kitchen help, the handyman Gonzalo came and went, so unobtrusively as to seem virtual, phantom children of the age of the post-real. The two dragon ladies were unquestionably actual, arrived each morning buzzing with efficiency, sequestered themselves in a room next to Nero’s office, and did not reappear until they buzzed off at night like hornets escaping through an open door. All sounds seemed muffled, as if the laws of science themselves operated within these walls with, so to speak, white gloves on.

Nero himself mostly stayed in his home office, even though the main premises of Golden Enterprises were in Midtown in a tower irritatingly owned by a certain Gary “Green” Gwynplaine, a vulgarian whose name Nero could not bring himself to speak, and who liked to call himself the Joker on account of having been born with inexplicably lime-green hair. Purple-coated, white-skinned, red-lipped, Gwynplaine made himself the mirror image of the notorious cartoon villain and seemed to revel in the likeness. Nero found his landlord intolerable, and announced to me one evening, apropos of nothing, and without explanation—this was his way, his train of thought emerging occasionally out of the tunnel of his mouth, whoever was in the immediate vicinity becoming the station at which it briefly stopped—“One world. When they let us in, I’ll be the first in the door.” It took me a moment to understand that he wasn’t talking about pan-globalism but about One World Trade Center, which wouldn’t be ready for occupancy for a couple of years, and announcing his intention to leave the Joker’s building and move into the new tower built in the place of tragedy. “On the upper floors I can get a terrific deal,” he clarified. “Fifty, sixty floors, okay, they can fill those, but above that? After what happened nobody wants to rent in that airspace. So, a great deal. The best deal in town. All that empty floor space needing occupation, finding nothing. Me, personally, I go where the bargain is. High in the sky? Fine. Lowball the price, I’ll take it. It’s a bargain. Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”

His employees rarely saw him. He allowed his hair to lengthen. I began to wonder about the length of his toenails. After Romney’s defeat his mood worsened and he was barely visible even to his wife and household. He took to sleeping on a fold-out cot in the office at the house and ordering pizza late at night. During the night he made phone calls to employees in various countries—at least I guessed they were employees—and in Manhattan too. His rule was that he would call you at any moment of the day or night and expect you to be alert and willing to discuss whatever he pleased, business or women or something in the paper. He would talk for hours to his telephone colleagues and that had to be okay with them. One evening in the Gardens when he was in one of his affable moods I put on my most innocent smile and asked him if he ever thought about Howard Hughes. “That freak,” he answered. “You’re lucky I have a soft spot for you. Don’t ever compare me to that freak.” But at the same time he began to retreat even further from the human gaze. Vasilisa was left to spend many days at the spa or up and down Madison in various stores and lunching with girlfriends at Bergdorf or Sant Ambroeus. Ignore a beautiful woman for too long and there will be trouble. How long is too long? Five minutes. Anything over an hour: catastrophe awaits.

The house had become both the expression of her beauty and of the intensity of her need. On oyster gray walls she hung large mirrors made up of smaller mirror squares, some at an angle, some tinted close to black, expressing, like the Cubists, the need for many perspectives at the same time. A grand new fireplace was installed in the great room, threatening cold-weather incandescence. New rugs underfoot, silken to the touch, the color of steel. The house was her language. She spoke to him through its renewal, knowing him to be a man influenced by surroundings, telling him wordlessly that if a king needs a palace, that palace requires, to be suitably palatial, a queen.

And slowly it worked. By Christmas he had recovered from the president’s electoral victory and had developed a powerful polemic against the defeated contender, the worst contender ever, he said at mealtimes, jabbing his fork at us to emphasize his point, there had never been a weaker contender in the history of contending, you couldn’t even call him a true contender, there had been no contest, it was like the guy surrendered before a punch was thrown, so next time round let’s not make the mistake of choosing a clown, let’s make sure it’s a guy with gravitas, who looks like he can lead. Next time. For sure.

By the inauguration the weather in the Golden house was much improved. It was not permitted to watch the ceremony on television, but the mood of the king and queen was jovial, and flirtatious. I knew that Nero Golden’s interior weather was changeable, and that his sexual vulnerability to his wife’s charms only increased as he grew older, and that the bedroom was where she invariably achieved the necessary alterations in his personal meteorology. But I didn’t know then what I know now—that he wasn’t well. Vasilisa, showing herself to be a master of timing, had sensed her opening and made her play. Before any of us, she saw what afterwards became sadly all too plain to us all: that he was weakening, that the time would soon come when he was no longer who he had been. She smelled the first intimation of that coming weakness as a shark smells a single drop of blood in water, and moved in for the kill.

Everything is a strategy. This is the wisdom of the spider.

Everything is food. This is the wisdom of the shark.

MONOLOGUE OF THE SPIDER TO THE FLY, OR OF THE SHARK TO ITS PREY

You see because it was specially made specially with those special crystals that glow in that special way when the flame takes them just so, glowing like diamonds in the Ali Baba cave which I didn’t know was in fact called Sesame yes that was the name of the cave did you know that well anyway that’s what I read in a magazine so when he says Open Sesame he’s addressing the cave by its name and I always thought it was just a magic word, sesame!, but never mind it’s the fire I’m talking about the fire I had made to represent the fire in your heart the fire in you that I love. You know that. I know you do. So here we are as we have been for some time now, are you happy, your happiness is the great work of my life so I hope you will answer yes, now you must ask if I am happy, and I reply, yes, but. Now you will say how can I say but when I know where I was when you found me and where I am now and I agree you have given me everything you have given me my life but still it is yes but, still yes there is a but. You don’t have to ask what is it you must know. I am a young woman. I am ready to be more than a lover although to be your lover is always first for me, you are always first for me, but I wish also to be, you know what I wish, a mother. And I understand yes that this violates the terms of our understanding because I said I would give that up for you and our love would be our child but the body wants what it wants and the heart also, it cannot be gainsaid. So this is where I stand my darling and it is a dilemma and I can see only one way forward although it breaks my heart and so I say to you with my heart breaking as I say it that because of my immense respect for you and my respect also for my own honor which obliges me to honor the terms of our understanding that my darling I must leave you. I love you so much but because of the needs of my young body and my broken heart I must go and find a way to have a child somehow though the idea of not being with you destroys me it is the only answer I can find, and so, my darling, I must say it. Goodbye.

In the game of chess the move known as the Queen’s Gambit is almost never used because it gives up the most powerful piece on the board for the sake of a risky positional advantage. Only the true grandmasters would attempt so daring a maneuver, being capable of looking many moves down the road, considering every variation, and thus being certain of the sacrifice’s success: the laying down of the queen to kill the king. Bobby Fischer, in the much-bruited Game of the Century, playing with the black pieces, devastatingly used the Queen’s Gambit against Donald Byrne. During my time in the Golden house I learned that Vasilisa Arsenyeva Golden was an avid student of the “royal game,” and could demonstrate to me the famous twenty-two-move checkmate in which the Russian grandmaster Mikhail Tal used the queen-sacrifice to stymie his opponent, a certain Alexander Koblentz. Vasilisa and I would play chess in the idle afternoons when Suchitra was away shooting, and she would invariably win, but then show me how she had done it, insisting that I raise my standard of play. And so I see, in retrospect, that she was also teaching me the game of life, going so far as to demonstrate the move she was going to make before she made it. When she asked Nero Golden for a divorce I understood the depths of her brilliance. It was the winning move.

Her request shook him, and at first he retreated into crassness, quarreling with her loudly on the landing outside his office, causing the phantom servitors of the household to scurry for shelter, pointing out brutally that their financial agreement would be terminated by her exit, and that she would leave with nothing except a fancy wardrobe and some baubles. “See how far that takes you,” he barked, and went into his sanctum and slammed the door. Quietly, without attempting to open the slammed door, she entered her clothes closet and began to pack. I went to see her. “Where will you go?” I asked. At that moment, when she turned the blazing force of her gaze upon me, I saw for the first time the witch-queen unmasked, and actually took a step backwards and away. She laughed, and it was not her normal pretty-girl laughter but something entirely more savage. “I will go nowhere,” she snarled. “He will come crawling to me on his hands and knees and beg me to remain and swear to give me my heart’s desire.”

Night fell; night, which increased her power. The house was silent. Petya in his room bathed in blue light lost within himself and beyond his computer screens. Vasilisa in the master bedroom with the door open, seated erect on her side of the bed, fully clothed, an overnight bag packed and ready at her feet, her hands folded in her lap, all the lights off except for one small reading light outlining her trim silhouette. I, the spy, in the doorway of my room, waiting. And in the midnight hour her prophecy came true. The old bastard dragging himself defeated into her presence to acknowledge her majesty, to beg her to stay, and to agree to her terms. Standing before her with bowed head until she reaching up drew him down to her and fell backward onto her pillow and after that allowed him again the illusion of being master in his own house even though he knew as well as everyone else that she was the one on the throne.

—A child.

—Yes.

—My darling. Come to me.

She switched off the reading light.