The Golden House

The Greek fleet had to set sail for Troy to retrieve the faithless Helen, and so the angry goddess Artemis had to be appeased so that she would allow a fair wind to blow, and so Iphigenia daughter of Agamemnon had to be sacrificed, and so her grieving mother Clytemnestra, Helen’s sister, would wait until her husband returned from the war and would then murder him, and so their son Orestes would avenge his father’s death by murdering his mother, and so the Furies would pursue Orestes, and so on. Tragedy was the arrival in human affairs of the inexorable, which might be external (a family curse) or internal (a character flaw) but in either case events would take their inescapable course. But it was at least a part of human nature to contest the idea of the inexorable, even though other words for tragedy’s superforce, destiny, kismet, karma, fate, were so powerful in every tongue. It was at least a part of human nature to insist on human agency and will, and to believe that the irruption into human affairs of chance was a better explanation for the failures of that agency and will than a predestined and irresistible pattern inherent in the narrative. The antic clothing of the absurd, the idea of the meaninglessness of life, was a more attractive philosophical garment to many of us than the tragedian’s somber robes, which, when worn, became both the evidence and the agents of doom. But it was also an aspect of human nature—just as powerful a characteristic of the contradictory human animal as its opposite—fatalistically to accept that there was indeed a natural order of things, and uncomplainingly to play the cards you were dealt.

Two urns of human ash on Nero Golden’s desk: was this tragic inexorability at work, or a dreadful, doubly random misfortune? And the demented Joker out there, swinging from the Empire State Building with his greedy eye on the White House: was he the consequence of an extraordinary concatenation of unpredictable mischances, or the product of eight years and more of public shamelessness of which he was the embodiment and apogee? Tragedy or chance? And were there escape routes for the family and the country, or was it wiser to sit back and accept one’s fate?

Nero Golden spent hours each day alone at his desk gazing upon the ashes of his sons, interrogating them for answers. To lessen his sadness Vasilisa brought him news of little Vespasian’s development, his first words, his first steps, but the old man was inconsolable. “I look at him, I look at Petya, I wonder, which of them is next,” he said. Vasilisa responded to this strongly. “As for my son, he is safe,” she said. “I will protect him with my life and he will grow up to be a strong and excellent man.” He looked up at her from his seat with a certain milky disapproval, but also vulnerability, even weakness in his gaze. “And my Petya,” he said. “Will you not protect him too?” She came to put a hand on his shoulder. “I think Petya’s crisis is already past,” she said. “The worst has happened and he is still with us and he will be better again, as he was before.”

“For the sons to die before the father,” he said. “It is as if the night falls when the sun is still in the sky.”

“Your house has a new sun shining upon it, a fine young prince,” she told him, “so the day ahead is bright.”

The summer was over. The weeks of heat wave declined toward cloudy humidity. The city buzzed with the usual September magic, its annual fall reincarnation, but Suchitra and I were in Telluride for the film festival; our series of interviews about classic movie moments had added up to a pretty good documentary, The Best Bits, featuring some impressive talking heads discussing the film scenes they loved most—not only Werner Herzog but also Emir Kusturica, Michael Haneke, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Doris Dörrie, David Cronenberg, and, in his last interview, the sadly departed Abbas Kiarostami—and we had been selected to bring it to the prestigious Labor Day weekend feast of cinema in the Colorado mountains, in the town where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid held up their first bank, and the benign (and not so benign) spirits of Chuck Jones and his dwatted wabbit and his daffy duck watched over us all. Even there, in that cinéaste Eden, the talk occasionally turned to the dead, in that year when the Starman, the Purple One, the Deer Hunter, Young Frankenstein (“that’s ‘Fraankensteen’!”), R2D2, the Bird on the Wire, and the Greatest had all taken their leave. But we had the movies—La La Land, Arrival, Manchester by the Sea—to occupy our minds and eyes, so death took a back seat at least while the festival was running, because real life, as we all well understood, was immortal, real life was the deathless stuff shining in the darkness up there on the silver screen.

Back in the city, in a state of considerable elation because of the good reception of our film at Telluride, I went to offer my respects to Nero, thinking also to invite him to the Russian Tea Room for vodka and blinis, to repay him for his boozy solicitude after my orphaning. I confess I was altogether too cheerfully high on our triumph in the Rockies, and may not have tried hard enough to adopt an appropriately mournful demeanor in that house of multiple calamities, but when I entered the Golden residence to find the great Nero in the living room taking tea, served on the best household china, with the ranting apocalyptic hobo who had reminded me of Klaus Kinski, and apparently taking the fellow’s babbling seriously, I failed, I admit it, to suppress a laugh, because this cut-price Fitzcarraldo, who had put on a battered top hat for the occasion and who was slurping his tea noisily from a rare Meissen porcelain cup, now also bore a striking resemblance to the Mad Hatter, and Nero, leaning intently toward him, made an adequate March Hare.

My laugh caused Kinski to draw himself up in what I understood from my long familiarity with the works of P. G. Wodehouse to be high dudgeon. “I amuse you?” he inquired as severely as one of Bertie Wooster’s formidable aunts. I waved my hands, no, no, not at all, and controlled myself.

“There is nothing humorous in what I am here to say,” Kinski boomed, returning his attention to his host. “I come to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.” The words of Shakespeare’s Richard II sat strangely in the mouth of an American tramp seated on a Louis XV chair drinking Lapsang from a Meissen cup, but never mind. “Sit down, René,” said Nero, beckoning me toward him and patting a place on the settee. “Have some tea and listen to this fellow. He’s damn good.” There was a new sweetness in Nero’s manner that was unsettling. He smiled, but it was more like a baring of the teeth than a sign of pleasure. His voice was soft, but it was a velvet glove concealing the painful rawness of his thought.

“It’s going to go badly,” Kinski said suddenly, the teacup shaking in his hand. “The mountain of evil is taller than the tallest building and the guns are all alive. I hear America cry out, where is God? But God is full of wrath because you stepped away from his path. You, America!”—here, oddly, he pointed directly at Nero—“you spurned God and now he punishes you.” “I spurned God and now he punishes me,” Nero repeated, and when I cast a glance in his direction I saw there were real tears in his eyes. The openly godless man, plunged into crisis, had invited this whiskey-breath malarkey merchant into his home and was actually being affected by his unhinged eschatology. I go away for five days, I thought, and when I come home the world has shifted on its axis. “Nero,” I began to say, “this man…”—but he waved me down. “I want to hear it,” he insisted. “I want to hear it all.”

So we had moved from Rome to Greece, and the man who had taken for himself the name of the last of the twelve Caesars was now trapped in a New York version of Oedipus the King, desperate for answers, with his version of blind Teiresias prophesying calamity. Kinski was hollering on but I had heard his shtick enough times to be bored by it, and switched off. Then Vasilisa was standing in the doorway and ended it. “Enough,” she commanded, and her finger, pointing at Kinski, silenced and demolished him. I imagined a science-fiction, Darth Sidious bolt of power emanating from that finger. The teacup trembled dangerously in the tramp’s hands but he set it down intact and jumped nervously to his feet. “How about a coupla dollars?” he retained the chutzpah to ask, “What about my fee?” “Leave,” she said, “or we’ll call the cops and they can see about your fee.”

When he was gone she turned on Nero and spoke to him with the same Nurse Ratched note of authority in her voice that she had used on Kinski.

“Don’t do that again,” she said.

Oh, I thought. We’re in the cuckoo’s nest.

My story has not, thus far, followed Nero Golden on his regular journeys to the apartment on York Avenue where he met his preferred prostitute, Mlle. Loulou. I myself have never in my life seen the inside of a brothel, never paid anyone for sex, a fact which speaks, perhaps, of moral probity—but also, contrariwise, of a naïf innocence, of some deficiency in the story of my manhood. My inexperience in the field made it difficult for my imagination to follow Nero on these excursions up whatever narrow stairway lit by red lightbulbs into whatever cushioned and perfumed boudoir; I knew that they had always been a part of his adult life and that, before he met his present wife, he would sometimes speak bawdily of his exploits to the most louche members of his poker circle, the pair of silver foxes named, perhaps, Karlheinz and Giambologna, or perhaps Karl-Otto and Giambattista, I forget—German and Italian playboys, anyway, politically ultraconservative, the Axis powers at the card table in their tan leather jackets and bright cravats, whose rich wives had died in puzzling circumstances and left them all their money. Regarding the practicality of associations with the call girl tribe they thought as one: you could fit them in between meetings and you didn’t have to remember their birthdays, and you could use the same nickname for them all, Mlle. Gigi, Mlle. Nastygal, Mlle. Babycakes, or Mlle. Loulou. The names the girls themselves gave you were fakes anyway. And—this, in marketing diction, was their USP, their unique selling proposition—for a price, they would do anything you wanted, and keep their mouths shut afterwards. On poker nights Nero and the playboys, Karl-Friedrich and Giansilvio, had boasted of the sexual feats they had persuaded their ladies of easy virtue to perform, and complimented the athletic strength, the gymnastic grace, the contortionist flexibility of their chosen whores. Nero alone spoke of his tart’s intelligence. “She is a philosopher,” he said. “I go to her for wisdom.” This brought forth braying laughter from Karl-Theodor and Giambenito. “And fucking!” they bellowed in unison. “Yes, also fucking,” Nero Golden agreed. “But the philosophy is a plus.” Tell us, they cried, share with us the wisdom of your whore. “For example,” Nero Golden answered, “she says, I allow you to buy my body because I see you have not sold your soul.” “That is not wisdom,” said Gianluca. “That is flattery.” “She speaks also of the world,” Nero went on, “and believes that a great catastrophe is coming, and only from the total collapse of everything will the new order be born.” “That is not wisdom,” said Karl-Ingo. “That is Leninism.” Then they all laughed uproariously and shouted, “Play cards!”

Now, in the time of his decline—his admittedly slow mental deterioration—Nero went uptown to his chosen lady less often. But from time to time he did go, perhaps wanting to listen to her hard-won truths in much the same way as he had been willing to listen to Kinski the tramp. In the aftermath of his double loss he was lost in a fog of meaninglessness and was looking everywhere to find a way of making the world make sense once again. He was still able to function fairly well as long as he was amongst people he knew. He had forged a relationship with a Haitian limo driver androgynously named Claude-Marie whom he now kept on retainer, knowing him to be both competent and discreet, and as a result could travel from Macdougal Street to York Avenue, do what he had to do there, and return without any trouble. On the particular day of which I must now speak, however, Claude-Marie was in a court of law embroiled in a bitter divorce, and sent along his Auntie Mercedes-Benz instead. Auntie Benz’s real name was something Creole-French and unknown; the automobile name by which she now went was an honorific bestowed upon her by admiring relatives. In her day she had been a fine and skillful chauffeuse but in her white-haired years she had grown eccentric. Her driving was unsteady, and so Nero arrived at Mlle. Loulou’s door somewhat shaken up.

“Hello, little fool,” he said. It was his name of love for her. “Your big fool is here.”

“You are sad,” she said, in the false French accent he liked her to adopt. “Maybe I punish you a little and you punish me a little and you feel better comme toujours?”

“I need to sit for a minute,” he said. “A strange driver. I felt, yes, I felt afraid.”

“You have death on your mind, chéri,” she said. “It’s completely understandable. A twice-broken heart will not soon mend.”

He did not know who she was outside this room with the red sofa and the gold bedspread and he didn’t care. The person she was inside this room was sufficient for his needs. Confessors and philosophers were what he sought. The sex, which anyway, these days, was difficult, was almost beside the point. Some light had turned off inside him and arousal seemed like a nostalgic city in a country he had left behind. “Why have these things happened,” he asked her, “and what do they mean.”

“Life is cheap,” she said. “You said so yourself, you told me, to Mr. Gorbachev.”

“I said the Russians said so. But I am old and so inevitably life becomes precious, no?”

“A boy is killed for selling cigarettes on the street, paf! A girl is killed for playing with a toy plastic gun in a playground, bof! Sixty people shot in Chicago on the Fourth of July, pow-pow-pow! A rich boy kills his father for cutting his monthly allowance, zap! A girl in a crowd dancing to music asks a stranger to stop grinding against her ass and he shoots her in the face, take that, bitch, die. And I haven’t even reached the West Coast yet. Tu comprends?”

“Violence exists. I know this. The question of value remains.”

“You mean, in the case of yourself and your loved ones, you make an exception. In this case they must be in a charmed circle and the horror of the world cannot touch them and when it does it is a fault in reality.”

“Now you are just unpleasant. What do you know.”

“I am closer every day to death than you, old man, and you are very old,” she said, affectionately, embracing him. “And I am your fool, so I can tell you the truth.”

“Believe me,” he said, “I know more about death than you. It’s life that I can’t grasp.”

“Permit me to grasp this,” she said, and the subject changed.

After their session things got worse because Auntie Mercedes-Benz was nowhere to be seen. It later transpired that she had parked around the block and fallen asleep, and the earplug of the audio cord connected to her phone had fallen out, so she didn’t hear it ringing. Nero rang Mlle. Loulou’s door in a panic, utterly flustered, unable to handle the situation, and Loulou had to come down and hail a yellow cab and get into it with him and bring him home. When they got back to Macdougal Street he was still quivering and so with a sigh she got out of the car, helped him out of it, and rang the doorbell. Mlle. Loulou was a tall, striking woman from the place she insisted on calling “L’Indochine” and she maintained her composure when Vasilisa Golden herself answered the door. “Ma’am,” she said, “your husband is not himself.”

After a silence, Vasilisa answered coarsely. “Tell me,” she said, “can he still get it up?”

“If you don’t know that, lady,” Mlle. Loulou replied, turning to leave, “I’m surely not going to be the individual to fill you in.”