The Golden House

“I don’t like your Goldens,” Suchitra said. “I’ve been meaning to say this. You should move out soon.” She offered clarification over our now-customary evening cocktail in the British-style pub near Washington Square: Irish whiskey on the rocks for her, vodka and soda for me. “Actually, I have no strong negative position on the sons, but the father…not for me, and his wife ditto. Mostly it’s just that house. It creeps me out. Can’t say why but it does. Feels like the Addams Family mansion. Don’t you feel it when you’re in there? It’s like a house of ghosts. These deracinated rich people rejecting their history and culture and name. Getting away with it because of the accident of skin color which allows them to pass. What kind of people are they, denying their race? I don’t care if you live in the land of your fathers or not, I’m not proposing some sort of anti-immigration nativist thing, but to pretend it doesn’t exist, that you never existed there, that it’s nothing to you and you’re nothing to it, that makes me feel they’re agreeing to be, in a way, dead. It’s like they are living their afterlife while they are still alive. I imagine them lying down in coffins at night. No, of course not really, but you know what I mean.”

Suchitra was an atypical New York woman. “I have had three rules for all my boyfriends,” she told me when we first became lovers. “Make your own money, get your own apartment, and don’t ask me to marry you.” She herself lived modestly in a two-room rental in Battery Park City. “In fact I live in one room,” she pointed out. “The garments and footwear have the other one.” It was a corner room with large windows so the river was the art on her wall, the fog sweeping in at dawn, the ice slabs of winter followed by the first sails of spring, the freighters, the tugboats, the ferries, the racing boat flying the rainbow flag of the local gay sailing club, her heart filling with love for her city whenever she looked at the view, never the same twice, the wind and light and rain, the dance of the sun and the water, and the apartment in the building across the street with the large brass telescope at the window and the clear view of her bed, rumored to be a pied-à-terre owned by Brad Pitt which he used to escape from his wife; and the green lady with the torch watching over it all from a little way away, enlightening the world. “The city is my live-in lover,” she told me right at the start. “She’d be jealous if a guy moved in.”

This was all fine by me. It was in my nature to prefer a deal of space and silence around me, and I liked an independent woman, so her conditions were easily met. On the question of marriage I had an open mind, but was happy to accept her firm position as consonant with my own. However, I now found myself in the zugzwang eventually faced by all liars, deceivers and cheats: the moment on the chessboard when one must make a move and there is no good move to make. It was early spring, and the property market had begun to move; there was a solid buyer for our old family house, and the deal was near completion, Vasilisa all business when she talked to me about it; no hint of our secret life in her voice or on her face. I had my inheritance and was about to receive a substantial boost to my capital as soon as the sale went through. My instinct for the moment was to stay where I was, eventually to rent, and look around until I found the right place to buy. So Suchitra’s encouragement to move out was wholly reasonable, but at odds with my desires. For three overt and one covert reasons, I resisted. I shared the first three with her, of course. “The house is quiet, (a),” I said. “It’s easy to work in. I have the space I need and I’m left mostly to my own devices. And (b), you know these people are at the heart of the work I’m trying to make. Yeah, there is something off about the old man, but he’s beginning to like having me around, I have a feeling he could open up to me at any moment, and that’s worth waiting a while for. I think Petya is a heavy burden on him and so his age is hitting him hard, he’s suddenly getting to act very old. And then there’s (c), which is that the Gardens have been my whole life and when I move out of the Golden house I lose access to them. I don’t know if I’m ready to do that, to live without that magic space.”

She didn’t argue. “Okay,” she said good-naturedly. “Just sounding off. You’ll let me know when you’re ready.”

The traitor fears that his guilt is written on his face. My parents always told me I was incapable of keeping a secret and that when I lied they saw a red light flashing on my forehead. I had begun to wonder if Suchitra had started seeing that light, and if her urgings that I leave the Golden house sprang from her suspicion that my time under that roof was not entirely innocent. My greatest fear was that she would notice some sexual difference in me. I had never believed sex to be primarily an Olympic sport; arousal and attraction were the results of a depth of feeling between the parties, of the strength of the connection. This was also Suchitra’s view. She was an impatient lover. (Her schedule was so busy that she didn’t have time to dawdle over anything.) Foreplay was minimal between us. At night she’d draw me down and say, “Just get inside me now, that’s what I want,” and afterwards she professed herself satisfied, being the type who came quickly and often. I had chosen not to feel in any way belittled by this, though I could have felt almost irrelevant to the proceedings. She was simply too caring a person intentionally to slight my prowess.

With Vasilisa, however, things went very differently. Ours was always an afternoon assignation, the classic French cinq-à-sept. We did not sleep together. We didn’t sleep at all. Additionally, our lovemaking was wholly goal-oriented, dedicated to the creation of new life, which both terrified and excited me, even though she reassured me constantly that the baby would not be a burden to me, it would not change my life in the slightest way. This was procreation without responsibility. Strangely, the idea made me feel a little worse rather than a little better. “I can see,” she said in our park-view hotel eyrie, “that I’m going to have to do my best to make you feel good about this.” It was her firm conviction that baby-making required extreme excitement and she believed herself a professional in that field. “Baby,” she said throatily, “I can be a little bit a naughty girl, so I need you to tell me your secrets and then I can make them come true.” What followed was sex of a sort I’d never had before, more abandoned, more experimental, more extreme, and oddly more trusting. Traitors together, who did we have to trust except each other?

Suchitra: would she, during our less operatic bouts of sex, notice my body beginning to move in different ways, having learned new habits, dumbly asking for different satisfactions? How could she not? For I must be different, everything felt different to me, those three days a month had changed everything for me. And what about my monthly exhaustions after my afternoon romps? How to explain those, the regularity of their recurrence? Surely she suspected. She must suspect. Impossible to hide such alterations from her, my most intimate friend.

She didn’t seem to have noticed anything. At night we talked about work and fell asleep. Ours had never been a sex-every-night-or-else affair. We were comfortable with each other, happy just to hold each other and rest. This mostly happened at her apartment. (She was always happy for me to be there as long as there was no question of my moving in.) She didn’t much like coming to stay at the Golden house. Consequently we didn’t spend every night together; by no means. So as things turned out it wasn’t very hard to cover my traces. She continued to bring up the subject of me leaving the Macdougal Street place, however. “You could always get access to the Gardens through other neighbors,” she argued. “Your parents were well liked and on friendly terms with many of them.”

“I need more time with Nero,” I said. “The idea of a man who erases all his reference points, who wants to be connected to nothing in his history, I want to get to the bottom of this. Can such a person even be said to be a man? This free-floating entity without any anchor or ties? It’s interesting, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, “okay,” and turned over and went to sleep.

Later.

“What about the courtesan?” Suchitra asked me. “How much do you see of her?”

“She buys clothes,” I answered, “and sells penthouses to Russians.”

“I wanted to make a documentary about courtesans once,” she said. “Madame de Pompadour, Nell Gwynn, Mata Hari, Umrao Jaan. Did a lot of research. Maybe I’ll revive the project.”

She was definitely suspicious.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll move out.”

Cut.

When I looked at the world beyond myself I saw my own moral weakness reflected in it. My parents had grown up in fantasyland, the last generation in full employment, the last age of sex without fear, the last moment of politics without religion, but somehow their years in the fairy tale had grounded them, strengthened them, given them the conviction that by their own direct actions they could change and improve their world, and allowed them to eat the apple of Eden, which gave them the knowledge of good and evil, without falling under the spell of the spiraling Jungle Book Kaa-eyes of the fatal trust-in-me Snake. Whereas now horror was spreading everywhere at high speed and we closed our eyes or appeased it. These words were not mine. In one of the curious small-town moments of life in Manhattan the same ranter I had seen in Central Park was walking down Macdougal Street below my window, speaking today about betrayal, his betrayal by his family, his employers, his friends, his city, his country, the universe, and the horror, spreading, and us, averting our gaze…as if my conscience had turned into a crackpot homeless man talking to himself without the excuse of a cellphone headset dangling from his ear. Warm weather; cold words. Was he flesh and blood or had my guilt conjured him up? I closed my eyes and reopened them. He was moving away toward Bleecker Street. Maybe it was a different guy.

I still had moments when my orphaning seemed to spread outward from me and fill the world, or at least that part of it which was in my field of vision. Unhinged moments. I allowed myself to think that it had been in the throes of one such unbalanced event that I agreed to Vasilisa Golden’s dangerous scheme. I allowed myself to think that the lament for the planet which increasingly filled my thoughts was born of my own little loss and that the world didn’t deserve to be thought of so poorly. If I rescued myself from my moral abyss the world would take care of itself, the hole in the ozone layer would close, the fanatics would retreat back into their dark labyrinths beneath the roots of trees and in the trenches at the bottom of the ocean and the sun would shine again and bright music would fill the air.

Yes, time to move out. But what would moving out solve? I was still addicted to my three afternoons a month on the fifty-third floor. The scheme was taking longer to bear fruit than Vasilisa had expected and she had begun to complain. She accused me of having a bad approach to the enterprise. I was jinxing it somehow. I should focus, concentrate, and above all I should want it. If I didn’t want it, it wouldn’t happen. The baby, not feeling fully desired, would not show up. “Don’t deny me this,” she said. “Maybe you just want to fuck me, yes? So you are prolonging matters. So, okay, I can undertake to still fuck you afterwards. At least from time to time.” When she spoke like this it made me want to weep, but my tears would only have strengthened her conviction that for some reason I was somehow withholding my most powerful sperm from her, that I was being, in her eyes, biologically dishonorable. I had entered a place of insanity and I wanted it all to be over, I didn’t want it to be over, I wanted her to become pregnant, no I didn’t, yes I did, no, I did not.

And then it happened. And she turned away from me forever and left me devastated. In love with another woman, yes, but devastated by the loss of our treacherous extraordinary delight.

In the movie I was imagining, the work which would be the ultimate betrayal, at this point the action had to switch away from Vasilisa to her husband. So: She walked out of the fifty-third floor suite and the door closed and that was that.

—Art requires betrayal, and trumps that betrayal, because the betrayal is transmuted into art. That’s right, right? Right?—

Slow dissolve.

“You know where I come from,” Nero Golden said, narrowing his eyes. “I know you know. Nobody can keep things sub rosa these days.” Late at night he had brought me into his sanctum, wanting to talk. I was simultaneously excited and afraid.—Afraid, because was he about to confront me with information about what I’d been getting up to with Mrs. Golden? Had he had us followed, was there a private eye’s folder of photographs on his desk? The thought was profoundly disquieting.—And excited, because this could also be the opening up I’d hoped for, the confessional moment when an aging man, tiring of the unknown self he had wrapped around himself, wanted, once again, to be known.—“Yes, sir,” I said. “Don’t say that to me!” he shouted, mostly good-naturedly. “Just go on pretending you’re an ignorant little squirt and act surprised when I tell you something. Okay?” “Works for me,” I said.

During his wife’s pregnancy the deterioration in Nero Golden’s well-being gradually became apparent to us all. He was not so far from the end of his eighth decade and his mind was beginning its slow treason. He still went out at eight each morning dressed in immaculate tennis whites with a white baseball cap on his head, swishing his racket through the air with his usual I-mean-business air about him, and still returned sweaty and exuding a certain strong-jawed contentment ninety minutes later. But one day, just a few days before my late-night summons, there had been an unfortunate episode. He had been crossing the street when a car, a vintage Corvette, jumped the light at the Bleecker-Macdougal intersection and bumped into him. Just barely bumped into him, just hard enough to knock him over, not hard enough to break any bones. His response was to jump up, immediately forgive the driver, refuse to make any kind of report or complaint, and invite the driver, a careless white individual with a thick head of wavy white hair, back to the house for a coffee. This behavior was so outrageously out of character that everyone began to worry. It was a while however before the extent of the problem was diagnosed. “I’m fine, fine,” Nero said after the Corvette incident. “Stop making a fuss. I was just taking care of the guy because he was obviously shaken up. It was the right thing to do.”

And now I was alone with him in his lair after dark. What was in store for me now? He offered me a cigar; I refused. A cognac; I refused also. I’ve never been a brandy drinker. “Take something,” he commanded, so I accepted a vodka shot. “Prosit,” he said, raising his own glass imperiously. “Bottoms up.” I downed the shot, noting that he only applied his lips to the rim of his cognac balloon in the most perfunctory fashion. “Another one,” he said. I wondered if he was trying to get me drunk again. “In a little while,” I said, covering my shot glass with the palm of my left hand. “Let’s not rush things.” He leaned forward, slapped me on the knee and nodded. “Good, good. A sensible man.”

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “Once upon a time in Bombay—you see? I name the old city by its old name, the first time that word passes my lips since I land in America, you should be honored by my intimacy—there was a man named Don Corleone. No, of course that wasn’t his name, but his name will mean nothing to you. Even the name he actually used wasn’t his name either. A name is nothing, it’s a handle, as they say here, just a way of opening a door. ‘Don Corleone’ gives you an idea of the kind of man he was. It’s my way of opening his door. Except this Don never killed a man or fired a gun. I want to tell you about this type. He came originally from the south but like everyone else ended up in the big city. Humble origins. Totally humble. Father ran cycle repair shop near Crawford Market. Boy helped daddy fix bikes, looked at big cars going past, vroom! Studebaker, vroom! Cadillac, and he thought, one day, one day—like everyone else. He grew up, worked at the docks unloading cargo. Simple porter, seventeen-eighteen years old, but with an eye for opportunity. Pilgrim ships came back from the Mussalman holy places, the pilgrims brought back contraband. Transistor radio, Swiss watch, gold coins. Dutiable items. Heavily dutiable. Don Corleone helped them smuggle the items, in his underwear, his turban, wherever. They rewarded him. He acquired some funds.

“Now a lucky meeting with a fisherman smuggler from Daman. One Mister Bakhia. At that time Daman was Portuguese colony. Slack scrutiny. Bakhia and Don Corleone started smuggling from Dubai and Aden, via Daman, loose borders, into India. Good business. Don Corleone moved up the social register. Made friends with heads of other crime families. V. Mudaliar, K. Lala, et cetera. Then pally with politicos, including one certain Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indira. These are facts. By the 1970s he was a big cheese, top banana. There was a young police officer on his tail who wouldn’t be bribed. Honest fellow. Honesty a disadvantage in that job. One Inspector Mastan. Don Corleone had him transferred to nowhere and when the officer was on the plane Don Corleone came aboard just to wave him goodbye. Safe travels Mastan. Have a good trip. Cheeky. Like that. So confident in those times.

“He lived both well and also abstemiously. The best suits, best ties, best cigarettes, State Express 555, and a Mercedes-Benz. A big house on Warden Road, like a palace, but he lived simply in one room on the terrace upstairs. Fifteen feet by ten feet. No more. Downstairs there were movie stars coming and going, and he put a lot of money into the motion pictures, you know. And at least three films made about his own life, featuring the top talent. Married a starlet also. Her name meant Goldie. But in the mid-seventies he fell. Sanjay Gandhi turned out to be a false friend and Don Corleone had a year and a half of incarceration. Knocked the stuffing out of him. Quit smuggling completely. First became a religious fellow like the smuggling pilgrims who gave him his first break. Afterwards tried politics. In the mid-nineties, after the rise of the top family, Zamzama Alankar’s Z-Company, there came the first terrorist attacks in Bombay, people thought he was involved, but he was too scared for that stuff. Innocent, innocent, innocent. Next year, heart attack, dead. Hell of a story.”

“Was it really a natural death?” I asked. “He must have had enemies?”

“By that time,” said Nero Golden, “he wasn’t worth killing anymore.”

A long silence.

“And this was the story you wanted to tell me,” I said finally. “Can I ask why?”

A long silence.

“No,” he said.

Cut.

It was as if he were deliberately tantalizing me. This is the world in which he had grown up, that was clearly a part of the message he was sending; but was he admitting to being a participant in that world or explaining his final rejection of it, by leaving it behind him? Or both? He had participated but now he wanted out and that meant going far away, too far for anyone to come after him. Based on what he had said, there was no way to know for certain. Also, relieved as I was not to be confronted with that feared folder containing evidence of my assignations with his wife, I was happy to receive the Don Corleone story as given, drink one more vodka shot, and withdraw. An old man reminiscing about the past; he wasn’t the first such, nor would he be the last. He was beginning to forget the present—little things, where did he put his keys, appointments, birthdays—but he had people to remind him of most of that, and his memory for the past seemed, if anything, to be growing sharper. I suspected—and hoped—there would be more nighttime sessions like the one just completed. I wanted all his stories—needed them, so that, in the end, I could make him up.

The news of impending fatherhood appeared if anything to comfort Nero, underlining, as he seemed to need to underline, the continuing force of his masculinity. And in business that strength seemed, for a time, undiminished, as the immense work being undertaken on the West Side of Manhattan proved to us all. The huge Hudson Yards redevelopment had been undertaken by the Related Companies L.P. and Goldman Sachs in a joint venture with Oxford Properties Group Inc. It proceeded on the basis of a $475 million construction loan obtained by the Related/Oxford joint venture from “various parties.” I’m pretty close to one hundred percent sure that Nero Golden, under this or that company name, was one of the lenders alongside the big boys, Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group and the luxury retailers Coach. His initial investment in the redevelopment of the twenty-six acres had come a number of years earlier, under the EB-5 investment program which allowed immigrants to the United States to invest capital and in return acquire a green card and eventually citizenship. This finally explained to me how Nero and his sons had been able to decamp to America at such short notice and arrive with full rights of work and residence. Subsequently, in the year of Vasilisa’s pregnancy, Golden made a further investment in the form of a mezzanine loan, which was similar to a second mortgage, except that it was secured by the stock of the company that owned the property, as opposed to the real estate. So, theoretically, if the property owner failed to make the interest payments, Nero could have foreclosed on the stock in a matter of a few weeks, and by owning the stock would have gained control of the property. As far as I know, this had not happened. But, leveraged or not leveraged, super-investor or billion-dollar-debtor, he was playing for the highest stakes in the biggest real estate game in town.

The name of the entity making the mezzanine loan was GOVV Holdings. When the Roman emperor Nero died (A.D. 68), ending the reign of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, there followed (A.D. 69) the Year of the Four Emperors, in which Nero’s immediate successor Galba was overthrown by Otho who in turn was toppled by Vitellius who didn’t last long, and was replaced by the man who became the first emperor of the Flavian dynasty: Vespasian. Galba-Otho-Vitellius-Vespasian: G-O-V-V.

When Vasilisa bore Nero a son later that year, he was named Vespasian, as if Nero intuited that the child came from a different bloodline, and would in the end establish a new dynasty of his own.

I said nothing, of course.

WAITING FOR VESPASIAN

It was during the pregnancy of his wife, while he awaited the birth of the little emperor Vespasian, that Nero Golden became obsessed by the penis of Napoleon Bonaparte. This should have been enough of an indication of his deteriorating mental state to send up warning signals, but instead was treated indulgently by the family, like an old man’s amusing hobbyhorse. When he wasn’t preoccupied by business affairs, or by the life burgeoning in Vasilisa’s womb, or by the demands of being the father of his sons, Nero embarked on his pursuit of the French imperial member. Regarding which, the following: After the death of Bonaparte on St. Helena, an autopsy was carried out, during which various organs, including the unimpressive phallus, were removed for reasons now unknown. The little Napoleon eventually came into the hands (I should rephrase that, perhaps) of an Italian priest, and was then sold on, owned for a time by a London bookseller, and making its way across the Atlantic, first to Philadelphia, and next to New York where it was exhibited in 1927 at the Museum of French Arts and described by one newspaper as a “shriveled eel” and by no less an authority than Time magazine as “a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace.” In 1977 it was bought at auction by the noted urologist John Lattimer as part of his quest to bring dignity to his profession, ownership passing to his daughter after his death along with his other possessions, including Hermann Göring’s underpants and the bloodstained shirt collar President Lincoln was wearing at Ford’s Theatre. All these memorabilia now resided in Englewood, New Jersey; Napoleon’s organ was wrapped in cloth and kept in a little box with a monogrammed N on the lid, inside a suitcase, in a storage room, and all of this irked Nero, who wanted it to be given the imperial honor it deserved.

“This is what should happen,” he told me. “I will buy the item and we will return it to the people of France and you will make the documentary film, you and your girl. I will personally bring the container to Paris and enter the Hôtel des Invalides and approach the sarcophagus of Bonaparte where I will be greeted by high officials of the Republic, maybe even by the president, and I will beg leave to place the container on top of the sarcophagus so that Napoleon can finally be reunited with his lost manhood. I will state in a small oration that I do this as an American, in a kind of repayment for the French gift to America of the Statue of Liberty.”

He wasn’t joking. He managed somehow to acquire the home landline number of the house in Englewood and cold-called Mr. Lattimer’s daughter, who hung up on him. After that he asked his two dragons—Ms. Blather and Mistress Fuss—to try, which they did until they were accused of harassment by the person at the other end of the line. Now he was strongly considering a personal trip to New Jersey, checkbook in hand, to try to close the deal. It took all Vasilisa’s powers of dissuasion to stop him going. “The owner does not want to sell, my dear,” she said. “If you show up she would be within her rights to call the cops.”

“Money talks,” he grumbled. “You can buy a man’s lifelong home in the morning if you offer the right price and get him to move out before lunchtime. You can buy a government if you have sufficient cash. And I can’t buy a one-and-a-half-inch johnson?”

“Give it up,” his wife said. “This isn’t what’s important right now.”

That year we were all engaged in deflecting the subject. No doubt Nero had ambiguous feelings about the son he had been bullied into having. No question that I, as the actual author of the new storyline, had deeply ambiguous feelings about being, so to speak, the uncredited ghostwriter of the new life. Of Vasilisa’s feelings I can say nothing. At times she was as enigmatic as the sphinx. And of the reactions of the existing Golden men, more must now be said. This was the year, for example, that Apu Golden began smashing objects to make his increasingly political art, exhibiting broken things to represent a broken society and the anger of the people at its brokenness. “People’s lives are smashed up,” he said, “and they are ready to smash everything up because why the fuck not.”

And everywhere I went that year, it seemed, I ran into the ranter from the park. In Vasilisa’s second trimester, he walked across the shot on Twenty-Third Street outside the SVA Theatre, where Suchitra and I were filming a street interview with Werner Herzog for my classic-movie-moments video series. At the very moment that I uttered the words “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” the old tramp crossed behind Herzog and myself, looking exactly, exactly, like the great wild-eyed madman, the Zorn Gottes Klaus Kinski himself, muttering about the accelerating speed of evil, about the growing mountain of evil right in the middle of the city, and who cared? Did anyone in America even care? Children were shooting their fathers’ dicks off in the bedroom. Did anyone even notice? It was like global warming, the fires of Hell were melting the great ice sheets of evil and the levels of evil were rising all over the world, no flood barriers could keep them out. Blam! Blam! he cried, reverting to an earlier theme. The gun monsters are coming to get you, the Decepticons, the Terminators, look out for your children’s toys, look out in your squares and malls and palaces, look out on your beaches and churches and schools, they’re on the march, blam! blam!—those things can kill.

“That guy is fabulous,” Herzog said with genuine admiration. “We should put him in the movie and maybe I will interview him.”