The Golden House

Death speaks, in Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppey (1933): “There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

I believe we all felt there would be another death. In those last weeks I didn’t often see Petya, perhaps nobody did except for the Australian, but it’s my conviction that he knew it too, that he saw Death threatening him in the marketplace and became desperate to avoid it, to mount a borrowed horse and gallop toward Samarra, believing he was escaping from what he was in fact riding to meet. The last of the three Golden men who had come with their father to America exuding such princely grandeur, such powerful strangeness, found in his brothers’ deaths the motivation he needed to survive, and he made an immense effort to pull his life back onto something like a proper course, to turn his back upon Death and reach out to life.

The cat was Nero’s idea. He had heard somehow, had received a message from somewhere out there in the nonstop jibberjabber of the information multiverse, that the company of cats could be helpful to autistic adults; and became convinced that a feline pet might be Petya’s salvation. Fuss and Blather duly showed Nero photographs online of immediately available pusses and when he saw the white alpine lynx he clapped his hands and said, “That’s the one.” Blather and Fuss tried to persuade him that an alpine lynx was closer to a wild beast than a pet, wouldn’t Petya be happier with a nice fat lazy long-haired chocolate or blue Persian, they suggested, but he was adamant in his new vague way and they gave up and went uptown to the cat shop and brought the monster home. It turned out that Nero knew his son. Petya immediately fell in love, named the cat Leo though she was female, and took her to his bosom, vanishing with her into the room of blue light. This was a cat who could leap up and catch a bird in flight, whose purr was like a roar, and who somehow, with a wild animal’s instinct, knew the way through the jungle of Petya’s inner torment to the good place in his heart. At night when the house was still and only the ghosts of the dead walked its corridors the cat sang softly in Petya’s ear and gave him back what he had lost, the blessed gift of sleep.

The world outside the haunted house had begun to feel like a lie. Outside the house it was the Joker’s world, the world of what reality had begun to mean in America, which was to say, a kind of radical untruth: phoniness, garishness, bigotry, vulgarity, violence, paranoia, and looking down upon it all from his dark tower, a creature with white skin and green hair and bright, bright red lips. Inside the Golden house the subject was the fragility of life, the easy suddenness of death, and the slow fatal resurrection of the past. Sometimes at night Nero Golden could be seen standing in the dark outside the room of his firstborn child, head bowed, hands folded, in a posture of what might have been thought—if he weren’t so widely known as an unbeliever—to be prayer. What might have been thought to be a father pleading with his son, not you too, live, live.

We didn’t know where death would come from. We didn’t guess that it had already, at least once, been inside the house.

After he turned away from his son’s closed door, Nero Golden would go back to his study, take the Guadagnini violin out of its case, and play his Bach Chaconne. On the other side of that closed door, Petya was cared for by his lynx, and the drinking was somewhat—but only somewhat—reduced. And he no longer cried out in anguish while he slept.

The Sottovoce lawsuit was settled suddenly, at twenty-five percent of the original claim. Frankie Sottovoce wasn’t well. There was a heart condition, an irregularity, and beneath the medical aspect a sickness also of the soul. The twinkle in his eye had dimmed and the familiar flamboyance of his waving arms had diminished into a languid flapping. Ubah’s death had hit him hard. It was clear that he had been carrying a secret torch for her but, seeing her deeply embroiled with Apu, had held back from declaring his feelings. Strangely for someone who spent his days in the hothoused, networking world of art, exuding extrovert bonhomie, the gallerist had led a secretive, often solitary private life, briefly married, childless, long divorced, living in a pricey suite at the Mercer Hotel and ordering room service whenever his presence was not required at an art function. A friendly man, he had few friends, and once in the Gardens he had spoken to Vito Tagliabue about Vito’s father Biaggio’s long incarceration in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo. “Your poor parent passed away alone and his body was discovered not by those who loved him but by a member of the hotel staff,” he said. “This will also be my fate. They will bring up a burger and a glass of red wine and find that they are too late to grant me my last supper.” His hidden feelings for Ubah had overwhelmed him after she died. Now, as the vengeful tide ebbed, he accepted that the destroyed work had been adequately insured and that his multimillion-dollar action against the Goldens had been born of the turbulence of his emotions. “I don’t care anymore,” he told his lawyers. “Let’s close it out.” I saw him just once in those days, at the Matthew Barney opening at Gladstone, and was shocked by the change in him, the paleness, the lassitude. “Good to see you, young man,” he greeted me, flapping a hand. “Good to see that there are still people who are full of gas and roaring ahead one hundred miles per hour.” I understood that he was telling me about himself, that his gas tank was dry, that he was running on empty. I tried to address the subject he would not raise. “She was an extraordinary woman,” I said. He looked angry in his new exhausted way. “So what?” he said. “Dead is not extraordinary, everybody does it. Art is extraordinary, almost nobody can do it. Dead is just dead.”

After the end of the lawsuit came the end of community service. Petya, off that hook as well, very determinedly revived. He came out of his room with Lett the therapist, cradling his cat in the crook of his left arm, and, finding his father standing there in pitiful love, placed his right hand on Nero’s shoulder, looked his father forcefully in the eye, and said, “We’re all going to be fine.” He repeated this sentence thirty-seven times, as if he were retweeting himself. To make it true by the force of repetition. To chase the Shadow away by unquenchably asserting and reasserting the Light. I was there that day, because after a hiatus Petya had texted me to ask me to come over. He wanted witnesses and that, I knew, was my place in the Golden story. Or it had been, until in Vasilisa’s bed I crossed the line that divides the reporter from the participant. Like a journalist throwing a grenade from the trenches, I was a soldier now; and therefore, like all soldiers, a legitimate target.

“Hi, gorgeous,” he said when he saw me. “Still the most handsome man in the world.”

Something about the Petya tableau that day resembled to my mind a grand oil painting, a Night Watch, maybe; we stood in Rembrandt’s golden light and luminous shadows and felt, or maybe I only imagine that we felt, like guardians of an embattled world. Petya with his alpine lynx and his solicitous Australian and his furrowed-brow father and his large crooked smile. And servitors at angles in the corners of the frame. Was I the only person in the Golden house that day who heard the beating of fatal wings, the proleptic sighs of the guilty undertaker, the slow falling of the curtain at the end of the play? I’m writing against time now, my words following not so long after the people in them, writing double, because I’m also finally finishing up my Golden screenplay, my fiction about these men who made fictions of themselves, and the two are blurring into each other until I’m not sure anymore what’s real and what I made up. In what I call real I don’t believe in ghosts and death angels but they keep pouring into what I invent like a ticketless crowd bursting through the gates at a big game. I’m sitting on the fault line between my outer world and the world within, astride the crack in everything, hoping some light gets in.

Inside the house it felt that month like a frozen time, a waiting time, the characters trapped in oil on canvas, striking attitudes, and unable to move. And outside in the street there was a plague of jokers, crazy slashmouthed clowns frightening the children, or their phantoms were, anyway. Very few people in the city claimed actually to have seen a creepy clown that fall but reports of them were everywhere, the reports put on fright wigs, the rumors stalked the streets giggling and making witchy fingers with both hands and screeching about the end time, the last of days. Ghost clowns in an unreal reality. Eschatological insanity coming to the polls, and the Joker himself screaming into a mirror, the molester screaming about molestation, the propagandist accusing the whole world of propaganda, the bully whining about being ganged up on, the crook pointing a crooked finger at his rival and calling her crooked, a child’s game become the national ugliness, I-know-I-am-but-what-are-you, and the days ticking away, America’s sanity at war with its dementedness, and people like me, who didn’t believe in superstitions, walking around with their hands in their pockets and their fingers crossed.

And then finally there was, after all, a scary clown.

After a long period of estrangement, Vasilisa wanted to talk. She took me into the Gardens and made sure we were out of range of interested ears. The new note of power in her voice told me she was still inhabiting her Big Nurse persona, still making it clear that from now on she was the one in the catbird seat. “He’s not the same man,” she said. “I am having to accustom myself to that. But he is the father of my child.”—This, to my face, looking me right in the eye! The daring of it was breathtaking. I felt the red mist rising. “If you contradict me,” she said, raising a hand before I had said a word, “I will have you killed. Be in no doubt that I know who to call.”

I turned to leave. “Stop,” she said. “This is not how I want our conversation to go. I want to say, I need your help with him.”

I laughed out loud at that. “You really are an extraordinary human being,” I said. “If in fact you are a human being. That these two remarks can come out of your mouth consecutively is awe-inspiring. But not really indicative of your membership of the human race.”

“I understand that there is a trouble between us,” she said. “But Nero is innocent of that and it is for Nero that I ask. The grief in him as well as the decline of his mind. Which is slow, the medication helps, but it is also inevitable. The progression. I fear for him. He wanders off. I need someone to go with him. Even if he goes to that woman I want you to go there as well. He is looking for answers. Life has become an agony and he wants a solution to its mystery. I don’t want him to find it in her arms.”

“I can’t do it,” I told her. “I’m preparing a feature film. It’s a busy time.”

“You won’t do it,” she said. “That is what you’re saying. You have become a selfish man.”

“You have many resources,” I said. “People at your disposal. Use them. I’m not your employee.” I spoke sharply. I didn’t feel in the mood to be ordered around by her.

She was wearing a long white dress, tight in the bodice, loose below the waist, with a high lacy ruff of a collar. She leaned against a tree and I thought all at once about Elvira Madigan, eponymous heroine of Bo Widerberg’s beautiful film, the doomed lover walking a tightrope in a wood. She closed her eyes and spoke in a voice like a sigh. “It’s all such a charade,” she said. “The family name is not the name. Mlle. Loulou is not Loulou. Maybe I am not me and that lady playing the part of my mother is just somebody I hired to play the part. You know what I mean? Nothing is real.” These were scattered thoughts and I saw that beneath her self-control she was in a torment of her own. “Only my child is real,” she said. “And through him I will come into a real place in the end.” She shook her head. “Until then everyone is a kind of performance,” she said. “Maybe even you. You have become like a priest confessor to this family but you are no priest, who are you really, what do you want, maybe I should be suspicious, maybe you are the Judas.” Then she laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said, briskly, beginning to move away. “We are all on edge. Things will improve one day. And yes, go, be with your girl, who knows nothing of anything, and it’s better that way.”

That was another of her threats, of course, I thought, watching her as she retreated. She would not “have me killed” but she would, if necessary, destroy my happiness by telling Suchitra what I had done. I knew then that I had to be the first to tell Suchitra, whatever the cost. I had to find the courage for the truth and hope our love was strong enough to survive it.

And Elvira Madigan, I thought, another pseudonym. That was not the ill-fated Danish tightrope walker’s real identity. Hedvig Jensen; that’s who she really was. Bearer of the commonest of names.

Yes: I had been drawn into the Golden world of make-believe, and only the truth could set me free.

Leo the cat was to Petya what the magic feather had been to Dumbo. With the lynx in his arms he became again the brilliantly strange man we first met, walking in the Gardens, talking loudly to anyone who’d listen, and making the children laugh. It was a mild fall, beautiful weather in a crazy time, so his greatcoat remained in its closet, but there was a rainbow-striped scarf flung carelessly around his neck, and his gallery of outrageous suits was on parade, the broad-lapel cream suit in which he had first appeared among us, a leprechaun-green three-piece when he wanted to channel Oscar Wilde, a double-breasted chocolate outfit, dark chocolate with a broad milk chocolate check. The cocktail mixer was in one hand, and the martini glass in the other, and the olive jar sat on the bench as before. But now, beside the jar of olives there was an iPad and to this the children gravitated like planets around a sun, while Petya showed them, and encouraged them to play, the beta versions of his latest games. The games were his stories now, and the children plunged in eagerly, voyaging to the worlds inside his head. For a few beautiful days, thoughts of death were pushed aside, and the bright book of life stood open at a new page.

“You realize,” Suchitra said, “that this has become a movie about you, and all these Golden boys are aspects of your own nature.”

“No they’re not,” I protested.

“In a good way,” she said. “It makes the film a more personal testament. All the characters are the auteur. It’s like Flaubert. Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

“But I’m not an artist,” I said, “not sexually conflicted, not autistic, not a Russian gold digger, not a powerful old man in decline.” I did not add, “not a baby,” because of course the baby was partly me. Fifty percent. A big part. A big part that was being kept out of my reach. A guilty secret to which I still had not found the courage to confess.

We were in the editing suite at DAW on West Twenty-Ninth Street and Batwoman, freeze-framed, was watching us from the Avid screen. Our fourth and last Bat-video was in its final stages. The Joker was trying to foment an insurrection that would destroy U.S. democracy. At a packed MetLife Stadium mobs of crazy clowns howled hatred at the sky. How much could one fierce female Bat do? Well, that depended on you. Vote for the first Bat president of the United States. Because this election is no joke.

“You carry their questions with you wherever you go. The question of Apu’s life, remember what his father said to you? Is it necessary to be profound, or can you remain permanently on the surface? You need to answer this question also. D Golden, as his father also said, was all about ambiguity and pain. I feel it in you also, some ambiguity. I feel that you are in pain. As for Petya, he’s hemmed in by himself, he can’t escape his nature, though he so much wants to be free. And maybe his games, the games he invents, are his freedom. That’s the place where he isn’t afraid. Maybe that’s a place you also need to find. You’ve been standing on the threshold for so long, maybe it’s time you finally went in through the door. And the old man…”

“You’re going to tell me I’m like him too? He’s kind of a monster, even in his fallen state….”

“He is enfolded in tragedy, and so are you. He has lost sons, you lost parents. Your grief defines you and shuts you off from other people. That’s what I think.”

“Are we having a fight?” I asked. Her words had packed quite a punch.

“No,” she said, wide-eyed, meaning it. “Why do you think that? I’m just saying what I see.”

“You’re being pretty hard on me.”

“I just see who you can be and I want you to see it too. Be profound. Own your tragedy. Find your freedom. Resolve your ambiguity, whatever it is. Maybe it’s about me.”

I have to tell her about the baby, I thought. That’s what’s shutting me off.

“No,” I said. “About you, I’m certain. Profoundly certain. Not ambiguous at all.”

“Okay,” she said, closing the subject, breaking into a big, wide smile. “Good. Let’s finish Batwoman.”

Zap! Pow! Bof!—Take that, you giggling loon!—Ow! Unfair! Why is everyone against me? Owww! It’s a fix! Everybody’s a liar! Only the clown tells the truth!—Blam!—Ow.