The Golden House

I took my eyes off D Golden too. All that summer and fall Suchitra and I were busy with the Batwoman. In that electorally surreal year our sudden elevation by the video awards system to the status of political-ad stars had attracted the attention of progressive advocacy groups and big-money super-PACs supporting the Joker’s formidable, eminently qualified but unpopular opponent. The animated cartoon we made for one such advocacy group, with the help of some of the best artists ever to draw the Joker, went viral, the grinning villain in midtown New York screeching out lines his political incarnation had actually used, sneering at his own party, The fools! I could shoot someone dead in Times Square and I wouldn’t lose any votes! until a female superheroine in bat-gear swooped down to put him in a straitjacket and hand him over to the white-coated men from the funny farm. Political Batwoman was born and the candidate, or her people, reposted our ad on the official social media of the campaign, and it got three million hits in the first twenty-four hours, and in the end we made three follow-ups that all did just about as well. The election became a contest between the Batwoman and the Joker—Batwoman, who owned her dark side, but used it to fight for good, justice, and the American way, a leader who could save the country from becoming a calamitous Joke. We defined the struggle; it became what we said it was.

The Batwoman idea was Suchitra’s, though a lot of the scripting was done by me, or by the two of us together. We were a good team, but I kept wondering what she saw in me; we were so unequal, her nonstop creative brilliance so much brighter than my own little light, that there were times when I felt like her pet. Late one night when we were done with work I had enough to drink and asked her, and she laughed and laughed. “What a pair we are,” she said, “both of us so insecure and neither of us aware at all of the other’s insecurity.” Didn’t I see? I was the one with the education, I was the intellectual, I was the one who saw connections and references and echoes and arguments and shapes, she just knew how to point the camera and do a lot of other tech stuff. And that was absurdly undervaluing herself, but now it was her insecurity speaking. I reminded her of just one of the beautiful things she had taught me. An image has a shape and so does sound and so does montage and so does drama. The film sense is that art which ensures that the four shapes are the same. This was her adaptation of the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, director of Alexander Nevsky and The Battleship Potemkin. “Okay,” she conceded with a grin when I reminded her. “Yeah, okay, that was pretty good.”

Those confessions—my sense of creative inferiority, her feeling of intellectual lessness—brought us much closer. This is how we are: we fall in love with each other’s strengths, but love deepens toward permanence when we fall in love with each other’s weaknesses. We fell into the love that had been lying beneath our love like water below ice, and understood that while we had been having a lot of fun together we had been only skating on the surface, and now we were in as deep as we could go. I had never had a feeling like it, and nor had she, she said, and we stared at each other in a kind of happy disbelief. So this was where my attention was. As the Golden family plummeted, I soared. We soared, my honey lamb and I, and like the hawk in Oklahoma!, we made lazy circles in the sky.

“Oh, incidentally,” she said, somewhere in the middle of the bliss, “you know those three rules that I may have mentioned?”

“ ‘Make your own money, get your own apartment, and don’t ask me to marry you.’ Yes?”

“I think they may be negotiable.”

“Oh.”

“ ‘Oh’? Really? That’s all you’ve got?”

“I was just wondering,” I said, “how to break the news to my landlord, U Lnu Fnu.”

“For catfish,” said U Lnu Fnu, “I go sometimes to the Whole Foods on Union Square, but they don’t always have. Otherwise to Chinatown. Also necessary, vermicelli noodles, fish sauce, fish paste, ginger, banana stem, lemongrass, onions, garlic, chickpea flour. Sit and be patient, please. This is traditional breakfast of my country: mohinga. Sit down, please.”

“Mr. U,” I began. He stopped me with a gentle raised arm. “Now at the end I must correct you,” he said. “You know, this ‘U’ is not a name, but a title of respect given to older men holding senior positions. Also to monks. So ‘Mr. U’ is like saying, ‘Mr. Sir.’ Lnu was my father’s name which I also took. You should address me as Fnu. That is best.”

“Mr. Fnu…”

“Fnu. Now we are friends. Eat your mohinga.”

“Fnu.”

“I know what you want to say. You want to go and live with your girl, so you are giving notice, but because you love the Gardens you want to ask if it is possible to keep the access key. And because you are polite and you know I am living in solitude you will say, you have come to be very fond of me, you want often to pay a visit, and yada yada yada.”

“You watched Seinfeld?”

“Every episode, also now reruns.”

“How did you know?”

“Your girl, she called me, because she knows you become tongue-tied when you have to ask for something. Which it is my pleasure to give. Keep the key. I will rent your room to someone else, naturally, but you are always welcome to pass by.”

“The Gardens are so beautiful at this time of year.”

“I will never go home,” the old diplomat said. “Not even to the changing Myanmar of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. There is a point on the journey at which the traveler sits down by the river and knows it’s the end of the road. There is a day when he accepts that the idea of return is an illusion.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, not finding any better words.

“Also the Goldens are so interesting, aren’t they,” said U Lnu Fnu, cheering up, actually clapping his hands, and revealing a hitherto unsuspected catty side to his character. “They are falling apart as one watches, and nowadays I have a lot of time to watch.”

What sort of man was I, breakfasting on fish and noodles with an elderly lonely Burmese (Myanmaran) gentleman and pretending my love for the Gardens was merely horticultural and nostalgic. What sort of man, planning to live with the woman who loved him, preserved his ability to enter the secret space where his secret child was to be found, daily, in a stroller, guarded by a fierce Russian matriarch; and yet kept his fatherhood secret, even from his true love. What sort of man, raised in that very space by people of principle, raised to be honorable and true, would succumb as readily as he had to a siren’s call. Perhaps all men were traitors. Perhaps good men were just traitors who had not yet reached the fork in their road. Or perhaps my desire to generalize from my own behavior was just a way of excusing myself for what I had too easily done.

And Suchitra making the call to my landlord: was that loving, or was that a little strange? Did she know more than I thought? And if so, what did her behavior mean?—But of course she knew nothing about the boy. Thus guilty secrets make paranoids of us all.

Even as my personal happiness increased, so did my unspoken self-criticism, and yet, and yet, in spite of everything, here in the Gardens was my son. How could I turn my back on him and walk away—even into a life rich with love? Often now, very often, I rued the day when I allowed myself—when I chose!—to be drawn into the orbit of the Golden house, displaying such poor foresight that I believed that they were and would be my subjects and my passports to my cinematic future, that I would be the one with power over the narrative, and I failed to see that I was the subject, not any Golden man, and that the way the story worked out would tell me more about myself than about anyone else. Like many young men I was in many ways a secret from myself and from those who loved me, and before all was done those secrets would have to be revealed.

After Hubris comes Nemesis: Adrasteia, the inescapable. A good man may be a bad man, and a bad woman may be good. To be untrue to thyself, youth!, that is the highest treason. Even the strongest fortresses can be taken by a siege. And the sky that we look upon may tumble and fall, and a mountain may crumble to the sea. And in the end your rough magic, O Prospero!, will eat you away unless, like Ariel, you set it free. Unless you break your staff.

The magic baby in Aeschylus’s The Net Fishers turned out to be the superhero Perseus. The magic baby in Sophocles’ The Trackers turned out to be the god Hermes. Now there was Vespasian, named for an emperor, the magic baby in the Gardens and in my heart. To survive, did I have to let him go? Did I have to set him free?

The Clinton Oaks Correctional Facility in Jefferson Heights, Minnesota, was the only maximum-security prison in the state. After the escape of two inmates, however, investigators found that guards there had routinely failed to perform security rounds, and made false entries into prison logbooks to say they had, when they hadn’t. As many as nineteen officers were subsequently disciplined for such failures. However, the negligence of the guards was not the primary factor in the prisoners’ escape. Love—or sex and desire, anyway—turned out to be the key. The inmates, the convicted murderers Carl Zachariassen and Peter Coit, who shared a prison cell and were serving life sentences with no possibility of remission, worked in the tailor shop at the facility, and became friendly with a prison worker, Mrs. Francine Otis, married, and a mother of two boys. The friendship deepened, let us not use stronger language than that, and Otis, as she afterwards confessed, had relations with both men in a storage closet leading off the long, narrow main work area of the tailor shop. Subsequently Otis brought the men the tools they needed, including metal-cutting equipment, and they proceeded with their plan. They cut rectangular holes in the steel at the backs of their cells, beneath the bunk beds, and put dummies made from sweatshirts in their beds to fool the guards when they made their rounds. (Though, as was afterwards established, the guards made no rounds that night.) Outside the hole in the cell wall was an unused catwalk which had not been patrolled for many years. They went down it five floors to a steam pipe which was off, because the weather was warm at that time of year, and cut a hole into it and crawled along to a manhole four hundred feet beyond the prison walls, where, using the tools provided by Francine Otis, they cut away the steel lock and chain with which the manhole was secured, and so made their escape.

The manhunt lasted three weeks, and involved over eight hundred officers as well as helicopters and search dogs. Zachariassen and Coit, as Otis afterwards confessed, had originally planned to meet her at a location on Route 35, where she had promised to have clothes, money, and guns waiting for them, and, sadly, delusionally, was expecting them to take her with them so that they could begin a new life of love and sex in Canada; but in the event they decided not to meet her, which was just as well for her, as their original scheme had been to take what she brought them and then murder her. During the next three weeks they were sighted a few times, their scent was picked up by dogs, DNA traces were found in a forest cabin, and in the end they were cornered in the Kabetogama State Forest not far from the Canadian border. Coit was captured alive, but Zachariassen was killed resisting arrest, receiving three shots in the head. The manhunt was widely reported on the national news.

We took our eyes off D Golden because we believed that Riya Z was with [him] every day, that her eyes would see everything that needed to be seen. But for three weeks, after her father escaped from Clinton Oaks, every minute of every day and night until he was shot dead in the Kabetogama Forest, Riya was out of her mind. And this, too, was the moment when D was asked to withdraw from the 2-Bridge club. It was the perfect storm; D needing her most at the moment when her attention was elsewhere.

They’re saying on the news he’s trying to get to Canada but that’s crap, she said, irrationally. He’s trying to get to me.

This was a Riya D had never seen, frightened, uncertain, a weak electricity crackling at her edges. The one thing [he] had believed in was her. In her, [he] had found [his] miracle rock. Then she crumbled and [he] couldn’t bear it.

Why would he come here to the city. It’s so far, the risk is too great, and in the city he would surely be seen and caught.

The city is where you go to hide, she said. In the country, in small towns or in the fields or forests, everybody sees you and everyone knows your business. In the city you are invisible because nobody cares.

But this is halfway across the country. He won’t come.

He promised me he would come. He will come.

Zachariassen didn’t come. He was running for the border in a northern forest. But in spite of the reports of sightings far from New York she remained convinced he was on his way, and so she got out the pearl-handled Colt revolver and loaded it and put it in her pocketbook and even after that she was like a cat on a hot tin roof. At the Museum of Identity her colleagues noted the wild-eyed frazzle in her, the uncalm, shocking in one usually so self-possessed, and everyone had a solution, maybe she needed a vacation, maybe she was unhappy in her relationship, maybe she should start taking kava kava which was one hundred percent organic and herbal and would really help her relax.

At night she hardly slept and sat instead by the bedroom window expecting that her murderous parent might at any moment climb up onto the flat roof outside, and on more than one occasion she came close to shooting a cat. Also more than once she did something she had never done before, which was to consult the drag queen Madame George downstairs at the Tarot Crystal Ball Horoscope Tell Ur Future salon, and when Madame George assured her that her future was long and bright she said, that’s wrong, deal the cards again, and even though the fortune teller added, your boyfriend, bring him down here, he’s the one I’m worried about, she didn’t do as she was asked, because she thought she knew D’s problems and didn’t need a drag queen’s help to understand him, and right now just for once it wasn’t all about him it was about her and her evil bastard of a father coming after her in the night. She went to see the termagant owner of the pink and yellow building and started telling Mrs. Run too loudly, much too loudly, that it was about time the building got a proper security system, with a video entry phone and an alarm and better locks on the exterior and interior, much better locks, anybody could get in, it was a tough and dangerous town, and she stopped only when Mrs. Run told her, “You come to me ask for lightbulb in hall, I think about it. You come to me like a hopping vampire jiangshi creature with screaming in your mouth and in one minute time I say to you, get outa my house right away. So you choose now.” Riya stopped dead, and stood silent and panting in the hallway while Mrs. Run snapped her fingers under her nose and turned her back and walked off into the Run Run Trading store to glare angrily at the hanging ducks. And Riya, perspiring and breathing heavily, didn’t even then understand that she was out of her mind with fear, but D Golden, watching her with great alarm from the top of the first flight of stairs, understood all right and it knocked [him] off-balance as well.

Three weeks of Riya’s craziness intensifying [his] inner turmoil. [His] days alone in the apartment, [his] nights crowded by her claustrophobia-inducing fear. [His] own fear, [his] fear of [himself], magnified by her fear of the shadow of her father. And in the end the shadows were too strong, they took possession of [his] mind and spirit. And none of us there to see it, or to help.

I did go to see [him] one last time, although I didn’t know it was the last time. While Riya was at work trying to hold down her job in spite of her near-hysterical terror of the imagined proximity of Zachariassen-on-the-run, I took [him] for a walk through Chinatown. On a bench in Kimlau Square at the confluence of eight streets, below the proud benign gaze of the statue of the war hero Lieutenant Benjamin Ralph Kimlau of the 380th Bombardment Group of the Fifth Air Force, lost in aerial combat against Japan in 1944, D Golden confessed [his] failure to reconcile the warring elements within [himself]. That day [he] was wearing a check shirt, cargo pants, and aviator shades, the faintest trace of lipstick, and a pink baseball cap over [his] long hair, which now reached below shoulder level. “Look at me,” [he] wailed. “Miserable in men’s clothes, too scared to go public in a dress, and this painted mouth and pink hat, what a sad little gesture.” I repeated what everyone told [him], step by step, transition was a magic journey of a thousand and one nights, and [he] just shook his head. “No open-sesame moment for me. No immortal storyteller to tell my pathetic story.” I just waited for the more that I could see was coming. “I have dreams now in which every night I see the hijra of my childhood, dressed up as Michael Jackson, doing pencil turns in the street, banging on my car window, shrieking dance with me. When I wake up I’m sweating cold sweat. Truth is, I know what the hijra is saying, he she, insisting it would have to be all or nothing. If you’re going to do it you have to go all the way. Operation, everything, like a real hijra. Anything less feels dishonest, like dressing up as Michael when you’re just a sex worker at Chowpatty Beach. But, oh God. Truth is, I’m too weak, too scared, too fucking terrified,” [he] said. “Maybe Apu is the lucky one.”

[He] looked around. “Where are we?” [he] asked. “I’m lost.”

I took [him] back to [his] apartment. And this is how I remember [him] now, marooned on a bench amid eight roads of traffic, knowing [he] couldn’t be a hero in [his] private war, the cars flowing toward [him] and away, and [he] unable to pick a direction, not knowing which way was home.

They killed Zachariassen and that was on the evening news and Riya calmed down, at once, as if a switch had been thrown, she just let out a great sigh and breathed out all her craziness and there she was again, restored to her old self, “real” Riya rescued from the counterfeit of her fear, apologizing to everyone for her temporary insanity, normal service had been resumed, she assured everyone, don’t worry about me. And soon enough, sure enough, we didn’t. And so all of us, except D Golden, forgot about the gun.

[He] arrived at the Golden House in splendor, emerging from the back of a Daimler limousine deliberately chosen to echo the vehicle in which all the Goldens had arrived on Macdougal Street to take possession of their new home. A liveried chauffeur held the door open and lowered a little flight of steps so that D’s feet in their curvy-heeled Walter Steiger shoes could find their way down to street level without a misstep. [He]—no!—Now it had become appropriate to change her pronouns and say simply she, her, herself!—very well then, she was wearing a long scarlet Alaïa evening dress, over which her cascade of hair shone alluringly in the sun, and she carried a small jewel-encrusted Mouawad bag. So, dressed to kill, handing her key to the chauffeur so that he might open the front door for her, D Golden for the last time entered her father’s house—for the first time, perhaps, as herself—her true self, the self she had always feared she might be, and whom she had had such difficulty in setting free.

Nero stood on the landing at the head of the stairs, flanked by Mss. Blather and Fuss, with a fire in his eye. “The children of kings are born to kill their fathers,” he said. “Also, those garments are the possessions of my wife.”

Vasilisa Golden emerged to stand beside her husband. “Then this is the thief I’ve been searching for,” she said.

D neither looked up nor replied. She moved gracefully through the house to the French windows, and out into the Gardens. Well, what a fluttering of curtains at windows then ensued! Seemed everyone living on the Gardens wanted a look. D, she paid no attention to any of that, she walked over to the bench where once, years earlier, her brother Petya had sat and made children laugh with his stories. There she sat down with the stolen pocketbook in her lap and her hands folded over it—Riya’s pocketbook!—and she closed her eyes. There were children playing up and down the Gardens and their shrieks and laughter were the soundtrack of her silence. She wasn’t in a rush. She waited.

Vito Tagliabue, the abandoned and cuckolded husband, came out to offer her his solidarity, saluting her courage and congratulating her on her fashion sense and then not knowing what else to say. She inclined her head graciously, accepting both salute and congratulations, and indicating that he was now dismissed. The Baron of Selinunte backed away, as if in the presence of royalty, as if turning his back on her would be a breach of protocol, and when he fell over a toddler’s abandoned and multicolored plastic tricycle it introduced a happy note of slapstick into the otherwise sober moment. D’s lips twitched in a small but definite smile and then, calm, unhurried, she resumed her meditation.

In the film I would intercut her stillness with a scene of rapid movement, RIYA coming home, finding her clothes closet open and untidy and the pocketbook containing the weapon missing, and a note left on her dressing table, a single sheet of paper folded in half; and then RIYA sprinting into the street, hailing a cab, there isn’t one, then there’s one that doesn’t stop, and then finally she gets one.

Once the children had gone indoors to eat or rest or whatever children did these days in front of whichever screens, D Golden in the Gardens opened his eyes and rose to his feet, and began to walk.

And RIYA in the taxi, urging the driver to hurry, and he arguing back, sit still, lady, you’re the passenger and I’m the driver, let me drive my cab. She slumps back into her seat and closes her eyes (intercut, in the Gardens, a reprise of D opening her eyes) and on the soundtrack we hear D’s voice reading the suicide note.

D GOLDEN (V/O)

It isn’t because of the difficulties of my own life that I do this. It’s because there’s something wrong with the world which makes it unbearable to me. I can’t put my finger on it, but the world of human beings doesn’t function well. The indifference of people to one another. The unkindness of people. It is disenchanting. I am a passionate human being but I don’t know how to reach out to anyone anymore. I don’t know how to touch you, Riya, though you are the kindest person I know. In the Old Testament God destroyed the city of Sodom but I am not God and can’t destroy Sodom. I can only remove myself from its precincts. If Adam and Eve came into the world in the Garden of Eden then it’s appropriate that I, who am both Eve and Adam, take my leave from the world in a Garden too.

I think of Maurice Ronet in Louis Malle’s Le feu follet (1963), also moving around his city, Paris, carrying a gun, saddened by the human race, and closing in on suicide.

She walked the length of the Gardens, slowly, formally, one end to the other end, and then, at the far end from Nero’s property, her former home, and outside what had been my own family’s home, she turned, and her grandeur was that of a queen. Then she walked back, halfway back, and stopped, and opened her purse.

And because it’s a movie, at this point it’s necessary for RIYA to burst through the French windows of the Golden house and cry out.

RIYA

Don’t.

Now there were faces at every window. The residents of the Gardens, abandoning all discretion, stood behind glass transfixed by the approaching horror. After Riya Z’s cry, nobody spoke, and Riya, too, ran out of words to say. There was something of the gladiator about D Golden at this moment, she had the air of a warrior waiting for the verdict of the emperor’s thumb. But she was her own emperor now, and had already delivered her verdict. Slowly, deliberately, wrapped in the solitude of her decision, and with the peacefulness of her ultimate clarity, she took the pearl-handled Colt out of the jewel-encrusted handbag, placed the tip of the barrel against her right temple, and fired.