The Golden House

It had been my plan, upon setting out in life, with the inspiration of my parents’ lives as the flag under which I sailed, to do my best to be—I admit publicly here to my previously private use of the word—wonderful. What else was there that was worth being? Rejecting humdrum, pedestrian, monosyllabic, demotic Renés, I had set my face toward polymathic exceptional selfhood, boarding my imaginary Argo in search of that golden fleece, without any real sense of where my personal Colchis might lie (except that it was probably somewhere in the vicinity of a movie theater) or how to navigate in its direction (except that a movie camera might be the closest thing to a steering wheel at my disposal). Then I found myself beloved of a fine woman, and standing on the threshold of the life in film that had become my heart’s desire. And in that happy state, I did my very best to destroy what I had made.

The reporter at the battlefront was faced every day with a choice: to participate or not to participate? Which was difficult enough when your nation was a combatant, your people were implicated and so, by extension, were you. But sometimes it wasn’t your battle that was being fought. It wasn’t even a war, more like a prizefight, and you found yourself by chance with a ringside seat. And then suddenly one of the fighters stretched out an arm like a lover inviting you into a threesome. Join us. At this point a sane, or at least a cautious, person would go into reverse gear and get out of there as fast as possible.

I did not. I understand that what this says about me is not entirely admirable. What follows, the account of how I joined the war, is even less admirable. For not only did I betray both my host in his own home, and the woman I loved and who loved me, I betrayed myself as well. And having done so I understood that the questions Nero Golden asked me to consider when thinking about him applied to me also. Is it possible for a man to be a good man when he is also a bad man? Is it possible for evil to coexist with goodness and if so do those terms mean anything anymore when they are pushed into such an uncomfortable and perhaps irreconcilable alliance? It may be, I thought, that when good and evil were separated they both became equally destructive; that the saint was as appalling and dangerous a figure as the out-and-out rogue. However, when rightness and wrongness were combined in the right proportions, just so, like whiskey and sweet vermouth, that was what constructed the classic Manhattan cocktail of the human animal (yes, with a splash of bitters and a rub of orange peel, and you can allegorize those elements as you please, and the rocks in the glass as well). But I had never been sure what to make of this yin-and-yang notion. Maybe the union of opposites to form human nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalize away their imperfections. Maybe it was just too neat, and the truth was that evil deeds trumped good ones. It didn’t matter, for example, that Hitler was kind to dogs.

It began in this way: Vasilisa asked me, as she sometimes would while I was a lodger in the Golden house, to accompany her on a shopping expedition to the high-end fashion emporia of Madison Avenue, because I trust your taste, darling, and Nero, all he wants is sexy, the more exposed the better, but that is wrong, isn’t it, we know this, sometimes concealed is more alluring than revealed. To tell the truth, shopping for clothes was among my least favorite pursuits; I bought my own clothes, when I did, mostly online, and quickly. In a fashionable store my attention span was limited. Suchitra wasn’t exactly anti-fashion—she had a number of friends who were in the industry and she wore the clothes they sent her with attitude and flair—but she was definitely anti-dawdling in stores, which was one of the many things that endeared her to me. For Vasilisa, however, the homes of exquisite dresses were her theater, and it fell to me to be her audience, applauding her entrances, back arched, looking over her shoulder at herself in the mirror, then at the human mirror that I represented, then at herself again, while a small gaggle of attendants applauded and cooed. And it was true, she looked exceptional in whatever she put on, she was one of the two hundred or so women in America for whom these clothes were made, she was like a snake who could slip in and out of many different skins, slithering from this to that, with her little forked tongue licking at the corners of her lips, adapting herself and being adored, dressing, as snakes do, to kill.

That afternoon there was an extra brightness to her beauty, an overdazzle, as if she, who didn’t need to try at all in the looks department, was trying much too hard. The assistants in many stores, the Fendivini, the Guccisti, the Pradarlings, responded by being even more adulatory than was their professional wont. This she received as the minimum she was due. And after such adoration, on the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman, sweeping into the restaurant, first-naming the staff, ignoring but while ignoring also receiving the admiring attention of thin expensive women of various ages, taking her seat at “her table” by the window, leaning forward with elbows on the table and both hands clasped beneath her chin, and looking directly into my eyes, she asked the catastrophic question.

“René, I can trust you? Really one hundred percent trust you? Because I need to trust somebody and I think there’s only you.”

This was, as the old Latin grammar books had it, a nonne question, one which expected the answer “yes,” these being the only questions Vasilisa Golden asked, yes questions, would you like to go shopping with me, do I look okay, can you zip me up, do you think the house looks beautiful, would you like a game of chess, do you love me. It was impossible to say no, and so, of course, I said yes, but I admit I metaphorically crossed my fingers behind my back. What a young rat I was! Never mind, all writers are thieves, and in those days I was hard at work. “Of course,” I said, “what is it.”

She opened her pocketbook and took out a folded letter and passed it across the table to me. “Shh,” she said. Two sheets of paper, from a medical diagnostic laboratory on the Upper West Side, the results of various tests on both Vasilisa and Nero Golden. She took back the page about herself. “This isn’t important,” she said, “with me everything is one hundred percent good.” I looked at the remaining document in my hand. I’m not good at reading these documents and she must have seen the confusion on my face and leaned in close across the table. “Is a seminogram,” she hissed. “An examination of the seed.” Oh. I looked at the various measures and comments. The words meant nothing. Motility. Oligozoospermia. NICE vitality. “What does it say,” I murmured. She sighed an exasperated sigh: were all men this useless even when discussing material so significant to their manhood? She spoke very quietly, mouthing the words exaggeratedly so that I could understand. It means he is too old to father a child. Ninety-nine percent for sure.

Now I understood the strain she was under, which had had the effect of making her turn her volume up too high. She had made her big play and Nero had given in—and then this. “It’s like he did it on purpose,” she said in the same very low voice. “Except I know he doesn’t know. He thinks he’s a tiger, a machine, he can make babies just by looking at a woman in the wrong way. This will hit him hard.”

“What will you do?”

“Eat your Caesar,” she said. “We’ll talk after lunch.”

There was snow on the ground in the park and a homeless orator sounding off on the way to the carousel. An old-timer, he was, this gent delirious with words: white man, bushy gray beard, wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows, denim overalls, fingerless gloves, circular-lensed John Lennon rimless glasses, he looked like he should have been playing washboard in a Southern jug band. His voice, however, had not a trace of the South, and the gentleman had a thesis to expound in what was a fairly florid vocabulary. The private lives of men and women in America, he wanted to tell us, were being abolished by the public lives of guns, which had become sentient and were attempting nothing less than the decimation and eventually the conquest of the human race. Three hundred million living guns in America, equal in number to the human population, and trying to create a little lebensraum by disposing of significant quantities of human beings. Weapons had come to life! They had minds of their own now! They wanted to do what was in their nature to do, i.e. and viz. and which was to say, to shoot. Consequently these living guns were enabling gentlemen to shoot off their pizzles while they were posing for nude selfies, pow!, and they were encouraging fathers to shoot their children accidentally at one hundred percent safe firing ranges, accidentally?, he didn’t think so!, pow!, and they were enticing little children to shoot their mothers in the head while they were driving the family SUV, blam!, and he hadn’t even gotten around to talking about mass murder yet, rat-a-tat!, college campuses, rat-a-tat-tat!, shopping malls! rat-a-tat-tat-tat!, fucking Florida, rat-a-ta-rat-a-ta-tat! He hadn’t even started talking about cops’ guns coming to life and getting the cops to take black lives, or crazy vets’ guns getting those crazy vets to shoot down police officers in cold blood. No! He hadn’t even begun to talk about that. What he was telling us here today in the winter park was that we were being invaded by killer machines. The inanimate weapon had become animated, like a toy coming to life in a horror movie, as if your stuffed teddy bear could think now and what was he thinking? He wanted to rip your throat out. How could anyone even think about their little private lives when this shit was going down?

I put a couple of dollars in the can at his feet and we moved on. This was no time for the Second Amendment to enter the conversation. “I’ll tell you what I am going to do,” Vasilisa said. “I’m going to protect Nero from this information and so by the way are you. Sit down here. We are going to doctor the form.” We were at one of the tables by the carousel. Behind us the carousel itself was shuttered for the winter. She got out her pen and methodically altered the handwritten figures. “Motility I, Roman numeral,” she said, “that’s bad. That means zero motility, and without motility there is no forward movement, you understand me. But if I put a little V after the I, so now it’s Motility IV, that’s perfect, that’s A-OK. And here, sperm concentration, 5 million per milliliter, very low, but now I put a little 1 before the 5, and 15 million, this is normal according to World Health Organization, I looked it up. And so on, here, here, here. Improvement, improvement, improvement. You see? Now he’s fine. Now he is totally capable of fatherhood.”

She actually clapped her hands. The power of the smile of happiness spreading across her face was such that it could almost convince the person upon whom it was unleashed (me) that fiction was fact, that falsifying a diagnosis would actually alter that diagnosis in the real world. Almost, but not quite. “That may take care of his ego,” I said, “but the baby won’t arrive by stork, will it.”

“Of course not,” she said.

“What then, you’ll pretend to go on trying for a while and then persuade him to adopt?”

“Adoption is out of the question.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“I will find a donor.”

“A sperm donor.”

“Yes.”

“How will you get him to agree to that if he doesn’t know his own sperm isn’t working?”

“He will never agree to it.”

“You’ll get a sperm donor without telling him? How is that even possible? Aren’t there documents that have to be signed? Isn’t his consent necessary?”

“He will never consent.”

“Then how?”

She reached across the table and took my hands in hers.

“My darling René,” she said, “that is where you come in.”

Later:

“I don’t want a stranger’s child,” she said. “I don’t want to be made pregnant by a spatula. I want to do it the real way, with someone I trust, someone who is like family to me, someone who is a lovely handsome guy who could easily, don’t be embarrassed that I say this, turn me on. Take it as a compliment, please. I want to do it with you.”

“Vasilisa,” I said. “This is a terrible idea. This would not only be to deceive Nero, but to do the dirty on Suchitra also.”

“Not to deceive,” she said. “And it will not be even a little dirty, except for reasons of our personal preference. I have no wish to interfere in your love affair. This is just something you would do privately for me.”

Later.

“Nero, René,” she said a little dreamily, “it’s almost like you have the same name, the same syllables, nearly the same, only the other way around. You see? It’s fate.”

It began to snow lightly. Falling faintly, faintly falling. Vasilisa turned up her coat collar and without another word thrust her hands deep into her pockets and walked purposefully into the west. Enfolded in whiteness your stunned narrator had what he would later describe as an out-of-body experience. It seemed to him that he heard ghostly music, as if the shuttered carousel were playing “Lara’s Theme” from Zhivago. It seemed to him that he was hovering over his right shoulder, watching himself as he followed her helplessly across the park and down to Columbus Circle, his body in that moment surrendering all agency and becoming hers to command, as if she were a Haitian bokor and he at lunch at Bergdorf Goodman had been administered the so-called zombie’s cucumber which confused his thought processes and made him her slave for life. (I am aware that by drifting into the third person and alleging the failure of my will I am making a bid to be exempted from moral judgment. I am further aware that “he couldn’t help it” is not a strong defense. Allow me this at least: that I am self-aware.)

His—my—Julie Christie fantasy faded and he—I—was thinking instead of the Polanski film Knife in the Water. The couple who invite a hitchhiker onto their boat. The woman ends up having sex with this interloper. Obviously I saw myself, uneasily, as the hitchhiker, the third point of a triangle. Maybe the couple in the movie had a bad marriage. The woman was clearly attracted to the hitchhiker and did not object to the sex. The hitchhiker was a blank slate on whom the married couple wrote their story. So also was I, following in Vasilisa’s footsteps so that she could write the story of her future in the manner in which she had decided it must be written. Here was West Sixtieth Street, and she swept through the doors of the five-star hotel there. I followed her into the elevator and we rose up to the fifty-third floor, bypassing the thirty-fifth-floor lobby. She already had the room key. Everything had been planned and, still in the grip of that curious languid passivity, I lacked the will to forestall what was to happen.

“Go inside quickly,” she said.

Later.

There’s a statement I’ve always attributed to François Truffaut, although now that I look I can’t find any evidence that he said it. So, apocryphally, “The art of the cinema,” Truffaut allegedly said, “is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.” As I stared at Vasilisa Golden silhouetted against a window beyond which lay the winter waters of the Hudson she looked to me like one of the goddesses of the screen who had escaped from the movies I loved, stepping off the screen into the movie theater like Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo. I thought of Ornella Muti bewitching Swann in Schlöndorff’s film of Proust; of Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker with her sensually twisting mouth captivating Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow; of Monica Vitti in Antonioni shrinking erotically against a corner and murmuring No lo so; of Emmanuelle Béart clothed in nothing but beauty in La belle noiseuse. I thought of the Godardettes, Seberg in Breathless and Karina in Pierrot le fou and Bardot in Le mépris, and then I tried to rebuke myself, reminding myself of the powerful feminist critiques of New Wave cinema, Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” theory in which she proposed that audiences were obliged to see these films from the point of view of the heterosexual male, with women reduced to the status of objects, etc. And Mailer popped into my head too, the prisoner of sex himself, but I dismissed him almost at once. On the subject of my self-awareness: yes, I’m aware of the fact that I live too much in my head, too deeply immersed in films and books and art, and so the movements of my heart, the treacheries of my true nature, are sometimes obscure to me. In the events I must now describe I was obliged to face directly who I actually was and then rely on female mercy to see me through. And there she was, standing before me: my demon queen, my nemesis, the future mother of my child.

Later.

Her manner at first was no-nonsense, peremptory, verging on the brusque. “Do you want a drink? Will that help? Don’t be such a schoolboy, René. We are both adults here. Get yourself a drink. Get me one also. Vodka. Rocks. The ice bucket is full. So! Let’s drink to our enterprise, which is, in a way, majestic. The creation of life. Why else are we put on this earth? The species insists on propagating itself. Let’s get this over with.”

Also, after not one but two vodkas: “Today is just to break the ice. Today it is not the right time for baby making. After today I will inform you when I am ovulating and you will make yourself available. I always know precisely when it happens, I am on time, like the trains in the Italy of Mussolini. This suite will be available permanently. Here is your key. I will meet you here, three occasions in total during each cycle. At other times our relationship will be as it was. You accept, of course.”

It was the voice she used when speaking to the household staff, and it came close to waking me from my dream. “No, honey, don’t take a bad attitude,” she said in an entirely different voice, low, alluring. “We are both here, which means we have already made all the important decisions. Now is the time for pleasure, and from now on you are going to have much pleasure, I assure you of that.”

“Yes,” I said, but some note of doubt must have crept into my voice, because now she turned up the sexual volume. “Darling, of course yes, and so am I, because look at you, a gorgeous boy like you. Let’s go into the bedroom now. I can’t wait any longer.”

What a gambler she was! How swiftly she had recovered from being dealt an unexpectedly bad hand! For it must have been a dreadful blow to her, to receive the seminogram results, devastating for her plans for the future, yet in spite of the suddenness of the crisis she had moved instantly, intuitively, to conceal the information from her husband. And then, without any hesitation, she had bet the farm on me, backing her confidence in her judgment of my character and in her own powers of attraction (she saw in me both the seriousness which meant I could be trusted to keep her secret, and the weakness which meant I would be unable to resist her considerable charms). This in spite of her knowledge that if her stratagem failed and her husband learned the truth her position would become untenable and she might even be in danger. And so might I; she brought me into her conspiracy without any regard for my safety, my future. But I can’t blame her, for I found her irresistible, the offer of her body overwhelming, and I led myself willingly into her trap. And now I was in it: her co-conspirator, as morally compromised as she was, and no longer had any choice but to go through with it, and keep her confidences, which were also mine. I had as much to lose as she.

She drew me down to her on the bed. “Pleasure makes beautiful babies,” she said. “But is also pleasurable for its own sake.”

Cut.