The Golden House

In truth, I had hoped for a gentler life. Even while I dreamed about arriving, at some wonderful point in the future, at a place of true distinction, I hoped for more kindness while I was making my way along the road. I did not understand then that Scylla and Charybdis, the two mythical monsters between whom Odysseus’s ship had to sail in the Strait of Messina—the one “rationalized” as giant rocks, the other as a ferocious whirlpool—are symbolic, on the one hand, of other people (the rocks on which we break ourselves and founder), and on the other, of the darkness circling within ourselves (which sucks us down, and we drown). Now that my film The Golden House is finally finished and about to make its debut on the festival circuit—almost a decade in the making, and after the upheavals in my private life near the end of that period, finishing it feels like a miracle—I should try to set down what I learned in the process. About the movie business I learned, for one thing, that when a person with money says to you, “I love this project. I love it. So creative, so original, there is nothing like it out there. I am going to back you one thousand percent, to the fullest of my ability, total support, one thousand and one percent, this is genius,” what he is saying, translated into English, is “hello.” And I learned to admire anyone who actually got his or her movie to the finish line and into theaters, whatever it was, Citizen Kane or Porky’s XXII or Dumb Fucks XIX, never mind, you made a movie, dudes, respect. About life outside the movie business I learned this: that honesty is the best policy. Except when it’s not.

We are icebergs. I don’t mean that we are cold, only that we are mostly under the surface, and the part of us that is hidden can sink the Titanic.

In those days after the Halloween shootings I spent much of my time in the Gardens, making myself available to the Goldens for whatever services might be required. With Suchitra’s agreement I spent several nights a week bedding down in Mr. U Lnu Fnu’s apartment. He had not rented out my old room and said he was glad of the company in an “awful time, awful time.” As for Suchitra in these last hours before the country voted, she was working something like twenty-hour shifts at the DAW editing facilities, cutting together footage which the Democrat presidential campaign wanted to use, in her capacity as a leading member of a Women in Media group which had volunteered its professional services to the team. She confessed to feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and a little low in spirits, and maybe I should have understood that much of that had to do with me. But I was in the Gardens not only for altruistic but also for almost predatory reasons, because of my strong instinct that the story I had set out to tell was about to give me the denouement it presently lacked, and that if I lay in wait for it, hiding in the Gardens shrubbery like a hungry lion in the long grasses at the foot of an acacia tree on the African plain, my prey would come trotting by. It had not occurred to me, crowded by deaths as my narrative already was, that there might also be a murder story unfolding. It was Vito Tagliabue who first alerted me to the possibility that Nero Golden was not in fact, or not only, the victim of slowly advancing senile dementia; that the truth was that he was slowly being poisoned by his wife.

Life in the Gardens had always been somewhat reminiscent of Rear Window. Everyone looked out and across at everyone else, all of us brightly illuminated in our windows, which were like miniature movie screens within the larger screen, playing out our dramas for our neighbors’ pleasure; as if the actors in movies could watch other movies while those other movies also watched them. In Rear Window James Stewart lived not far away, at the fictional “125 West Ninth Street,” which would, in the real world, be 125 Christopher Street—that is, Ninth Street west of Sixth Avenue—but the Gardens would have worked just as well. It was my plan to introduce, in my filmed version, a few residents who would be deliberate hommages to the characters in Hitchcock’s great film, Miss Torso the extrovert dancer, Miss Lonelyhearts the older single woman, and so on. Maybe even a traveling jewelry salesman, cast as a Raymond Burr lookalike. It had not been any part of my plan to develop the storyline to include an attempted murder, but this is what stories will do to you, they take off in unexpected directions and you have to hang on by their coattails. And so it was that I was crossing the Gardens from Mr. U Lnu Fnu’s building to the Golden house when Vito Tagliabue stuck his handsome head, its hair slicked back and glistening, out of his back door and actually said, to my immense surprise, “Pssst!”

It stopped me in my tracks and my brow, I admit, furrowed. “Excuse me,” I said, to clarify things, “did you just now say ‘Pssst’?”

“Si,” he hissed, beckoning me to him. “Is it a problem?”

“No,” I answered, approaching. “It’s just that I never heard anyone say ‘pssst’ before.”

He pulled me into his kitchen and shut the garden door. “What do they say, then?” He had an agitated air. “It is not an American word?”

“Oh, I guess they might say, ‘Hey!’ or ‘Excuse me?’ or ‘Got a minute?’ ”

“It’s not the same,” Vito Tagliabue pronounced.

“Anyway,” I said.

“Anyway,” he agreed.

“There was something you wanted?”

“Yes. Yes. It is important. But it is hard to say. I speak in total confidence of course. I am certain of your integrity, that you will not say you heard this from me.”

“What is it, Vito.”

“It is a hunch. You say hunch? Yes, a hunch.”

I gestured with my hands, continue, please.

“This Vasilisa. This wife of Signor Nero. She is a hard case. She is ruthless. Like all…” he paused. I thought he was going to speak from personal bitterness, like all wives, or all women. “…like all Russians.”

“What are you saying, Vito.”

“I am saying, she will kill him. She precisely at the moment is killing him. I see his face when he walks here. This is not his old-age decline. This is something else.”

His ex-wife Bianca Tagliabue had moved into the house of her new lover, Carlos Hurlingham, my “Mr. Arribista,” across the way. Every day the new lovers flaunted themselves in the Gardens, humiliating Vito, rubbing his nose in their love. If anyone had murder on his mind, I thought, it was probably Vito himself. However, I humored him a little longer.

“How is she doing this,” I asked.

He shrugged operatically. “I don’t know. I have not the details. I just see him looking sick. Sick in the wrong way. Maybe something with his medications. He has to take many medications. So, is easy. Yes, something with the medications, I am sure. Almost sure.”

“Why would she do this,” I pressed him. Again, a shrug and a wave of the arms. “It is obvious,” he said. “All the other heirs, they are gone now. Only her baby remains. And if by chance Nero also”—here he drew a finger across his throat—“then who inherits? In Latin it is the phrase, cui bono?—who benefits?—you see? It is perfectly clear.”

At the heart of the matter was my child. My son aged two and a half who barely knew me, who kept forgetting my name, to whom I could not send gifts, with whom I could not play in the Gardens or beyond them, my son the heir to another man’s fortune, his mother’s passport to the future. My son in whose little face I so clearly saw my own. I was surprised that no one else seemed to notice the strong likeness, that in fact people said he looked just like his father who was not his father, a victory of the ostensible over the actual. People see what they are supposed to see.

Vespasian, what kind of a name was Vespasian, anyway. It irritated me more and more. “Little Vespa,” indeed. A little Vespa was what Audrey Hepburn drove so recklessly around the Eternal City on her Roman Holiday, with Gregory Peck panicky on the pillion. My son deserved a better handle than those movie stars’ handlebars. He deserved at the very least the name of one of the grand masters of the cinema, Luis or Kenji or Akira or Sergei, Ingmar or Andrzej or Luchino or Michelangelo, François or Jean-Luc or Jean or Jacques. Or Orson or Stanley or Billy or even, prosaically, Clint. I had begun to dream only-half-unseriously of a kidnapping, or running away with my Federico or Alfred and escaping into the world of cinema itself, plunging into the movies in the opposite direction to Jeff Daniels in the Woody Allen movie, breaking the fourth wall to dive into the movies rather than out of them into the world. Who needed the world when you could run across the desert behind Peter O’Toole’s camel or, with Kubrick’s astronaut Keir Dullea, murder the mad computer HAL 9000 while it sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do”? What was the point of reality if you could skip with a lion and a scarecrow down the Yellow Brick Road, or descend a grand staircase beside Gloria Swanson, ready for Mr. DeMille to shoot your close-up? Yes, my son and I, hand in hand, would marvel at the gigantic buttocks and breasts of the whores in Fellini’s Roma and sit in despair on a Roman sidewalk mourning a stolen bicycle and jump into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and fly back to the future and be free.

But it couldn’t happen. We were all trapped in Vasilisa’s charade, the child most of all, the child was her winning move. For a moment I wondered exactly how ruthless Vasilisa might be; had she somehow engineered the deaths of two of the three Golden boys at least, and might she also have put a hit out on the third if he hadn’t taken his own life? But I had seen too many movies, and was succumbing to the same melodrama as lovelorn, angry Vito Tagliabue. I shook my head to clear it. No, she was probably not a murderer or a commissioner of murders. She was just—“just!”—a conniving and manipulative creature who was close to winning her war.

The new closeness that grew up between Nero and Riya after the three deaths put a Siberian scowl on the second Mrs. Golden’s beautiful (if slightly frozen) face, but came as no surprise to me. The three-times-unfathered father had nobody with whom to mourn Apu or Petya but her grief about D’s death was equal to his own. There was no noun in any language they knew that named the parent whose child had died, no equivalent of widower or orphan, and no verb to describe the loss. Bereavement wasn’t exact but it would have to do. They sat together in Nero’s study in the silence of their loss, their silence like a conversation in which everything that needed to be said was said, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett silently suffused by sadness both for the world and for themselves. He was frail, complaining sometimes of dizziness, at others of nausea, and he would doze off and wake up again several times in an evening. There were failures of memory. Sometimes he didn’t remember she was there. But at other times he was once again his old sharp self. His decline wasn’t a straight-line graph. There were ups and downs, though the trend was inescapably downward.

One night she took him uptown to the Park Avenue Armory where in a semicircle of eleven tall concrete towers professional mourners from around the world performed the myriad sounds of that most silent of silences, death. A blind accordionist from Ecuador played yaravíes in one tower, and three Cambodian mourners who had escaped the efforts of the Khmer Rouge to eradicate their kind performed the ceremony called kantomming, playing a flute and large and small gongs. The performances were not long, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, but their resonances echoed within Riya and Nero long after they left the space. Nero said only, “The bird was useful.” Alone in one of the towers a giant and nonspecific bird, something like a rooster, was seated on a concrete shelf, a mourner from Burkina Faso completely hidden inside his bird suit with a bird head sitting on his own, and bells on his ankles that jingled softly when he moved his feet. The bird mourner made no sound apart from that occasional faint jingle, and sat very still except for the occasional very slight shudder, and his grave and kindly presence was powerful enough to heal just a little of Riya’s and Nero’s pain. “Do you want to go again,” Riya asked Nero when they were out on the sidewalk again. “No,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

One night after many nights of wordlessness Nero did speak. The study was in darkness. They needed no light.

“You shouldn’t quit your job, daughter,” he said. He had started calling her that.

The statement, made without any preamble or shadow of a doubt, caught her off guard.

“You know what, thank you, but this is stuff you don’t understand,” she said, too harshly. “This is my stuff, or it was for a long time.”

“You are right,” he said. “This question of gender is beyond my comprehension. Man, woman, okay. Homosexual, all right, I know it exists. This other world, men with surgically constructed organs, women without women’s parts, you lost me. You’re right. I’m a dinosaur, and my mind is not one hundred percent. But you? You know this inside out. You are right. This is your stuff.”

She didn’t reply. They had grown comfortable in their silences; there was no need to answer him.

“It’s about him, I know,” he said. “You blame yourself and so you abandon your field.”

“My field,” she said. “It should be a soft safe place for understanding. Instead it’s a war zone. I choose peace.”

“You’re not at peace,” he said. “So much of this identity subject you have no problem with. Black, Latino, women, this is all fine. It’s this in-between sex area that you call the war zone. If you want peace there, maybe be the peacemaker. Don’t run away from the fight.”

He heard a question in her silence. “Why, you think I can’t inform myself a little?” he said. “You think because my brain is slowly weakening, shrinking like a cheap shirt, that it’s all gone? Not yet dead, young woman. Not dead yet.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Take the leave of absence. Think things through. Don’t quit.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Me,” he said, “I shifted my identity too.”

Later, after Riya has left, the old man is alone in the darkened room. The landline telephone rings. He decides whether or not to answer, reaches out, pulls his hand back, reaches out again, answers.

Yes.

Golden sahib.

Who is this.

I do not think so you will remember my name. I was a small fry in a very big frying pan.

What is your name.

Mastan. Formerly Inspector, Mumbai CID, subsequently Himachal Pradesh. Afterwards, private sector. Presently retired.

Pause.

Mastan. I remember.

That is honor for me. That such a big big seth should recall. What a memory, sir. Your own son could not recall, a much younger man.

You met one of my sons.

Sir, in Mumbai, sir. Goes now by name Apu. Which is to say, went by said name. Apologies for my clumsy English. Condolences on your loss.

How did you get this number.

Sir, I was police officer, subsequently private security. These things are possible.

Pause.

What do you want.

Only to talk, sir. I have no authority, no power, I am retired, this is USA, no jurisdiction, nothing, cold case, and you are a so so powerful man and I, nobody. Only to clarify certain things. To satisfy myself before reaching my end. For my own satisfaction only.

And I should see you, why.

In case you want to know identity of persons who killed your son. I am supposing only that this is of interest.

Long pause.

Tomorrow morning. Nine A.M.

Sharp, sahib. On the dot. Thanking you in advance.

Still later, Riya is asleep, and is woken by her cellphone. To her very great surprise, the caller is Nero Golden.

Can you come?

Now? It’s the middle of the night.

I need to talk, and now I have the words, and maybe tomorrow I won’t have them.

Give me a moment.

Daughter, I need you now.