The Golden House

Time passed. I acquired a girlfriend, lost her, acquired another, lost her as well. My secret movie script, my most demanding lover, disliked my attempts at these misconceived relationships with human beings, and sulked, and refused to yield up its secrets. My Late Twenties were steaming toward me, and I like a swooning nickelodeon hero lay helpless across the tracks. (My literary parents would no doubt have preferred that I refer, instead, to the climactic railway-tracks scene in Forster’s The Longest Journey.) The Gardens were my microcosm, and every day I saw the creatures of my imagination staring back at me from the windows of houses on both Macdougal and Sullivan, hollow-eyed, pleading to be born. I had pieces of them all but the shape of the work eluded me. At #XX Sullivan Street, on the first floor, with garden access, I had placed my Burmese—I should say Myanmaran—diplomat, U Lnu Fnu of the United Nations, his professional heart broken by his defeat in the longest-ever battle for the post of Secretary-General, twenty-nine consecutive rounds of voting without a winner, and in the thirtieth round he lost to the South Korean. Through him I planned to explore geopolitics, to dramatize the push by some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world toward the outlawing by the UN of the giving of religious offense, to bring to a head the vexed question of the use of the American veto in defense of Israel, and to arrange a visit to the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens by Aung San Suu Kyi herself. I knew, too, the story of U Lnu Fnu’s personal heartbreak, the loss of his wife to cancer, and I suspected that, derailed by the double defeat of his upright life, he might fall away from probity and finally be undone by financial scandal. When I thought of this the hollow-eyed man at the window of #XX Sullivan shook his head in disappointment and retreated into the shadows. Nobody wants to be the bad guy.

My imagined community was an international bunch. At #00 Macdougal Street there lived another solitary individual, an Argentine-American to whom I had given the temporary, working name of “Mr. Arribista,” the arriviste. About him, whatever his name finally became, Mario Florída, maybe, or Carlos Hurlingham, I had this treatment:

Arribista, the new citizen, plunges into the great country—“his” country, he marvels—as a man does who reaches a promised ocean after a long journey across a desert, even though he has never learned how to swim. He trusts the ocean to bear his weight; and it does. He does not drown, or not immediately.

Also this, which needed to be expanded:

Arribista has been, all his life, a square peg pushing sweatily against a round hole. Is this, at long last, a square hole for him to fit squarely within, or has he, during his long journeyings, become rounded? (If the latter, then the journey would be meaningless, or at least at its end he would have fitted in well where he began. He prefers the image of the square hole, and the grid system of the city streets seems to confirm that reality.)

And perhaps it was because of my own romantic failures that Arribista, like the gentleman from the UN, had been abandoned by the woman he loved:

His wife is also a fiction. Or, she crossed over many years ago from fact into fantasy, when she left him for another man, younger, more handsome, in all respects an improvement on poor Arribista, who is, as he well knows, in all ways that women like—looks, conversation, attentiveness, warmth, honesty—only averagely equipped. L’homme moyen sensible, who reaches for inexact hand-me-down phrases like that one to describe himself. A man clad in old familiar words, as if they were tweeds. A man without qualities. No, that isn’t true, Arribista corrects himself. He has qualities, he reminds himself. For one thing, he has this tendency when lost in the stream of consciousness to denigrate himself, and in this respect he is unfair to himself. As a matter of fact he is something very like an excellent person, excellent in the way of his new country, which celebrates excellence, which rejects the “tall poppy syndrome.” Arribista is excellent because he has excelled. He has done well; very well. He is rich. His story is a success story, the story of his very considerable success. It is an American story.

And so on. The imaginary Sicilian aristocrats in the house directly across the Gardens from the Golden place—provisionally, Vito and Blanca Tagliabue, Baron and Baroness of Selinunte—were still mysterious to me, but I was in love with their ancestry. When I pictured them stepping out of an evening, always in the height of fashion, to attend a ball at the Metropolitan Museum or a film premiere at the Ziegfeld or to see the new show by the new young artist in the newest gallery on the West Side, I thought of Vito’s father Biaggio, who

on a hot day near the south coast of Sicily, lightly tanned and in the prime of life, strides out across the wide expanse of his family estate, which went by the name of Castelbiaggio, holding his best shotgun by the barrel while resting the weapon on his right shoulder. He is wearing a broad-brimmed sun hat above an old burgundy smock, well-worn khaki jodhpurs and walking boots polished until they shone like the noonday sun. He has excellent cause to believe that life is good. The war in Europe is over, Mussolini and his moll Clara Petacci are hanging from their meathooks, and the natural order of life is coming back into being. The Barone surveys the marshaled ranks of his grape-heavy vines like a commanding officer taking the salute of his troops, then moves forward rapidly through wood and stream, up hill and down dale and then up again, heading for his favorite place, a little promontory high above his lands where he can sit cross-legged like a Tibetan lama and meditate on the goodness of life while looking out to the far horizon across the glinting sea. It is the last day of his life as a free man, because a moment later he spots a poacher with a full sack over his shoulder crossing his territory and without hesitation he raises his shotgun and shoots the fellow dead.

And after this it would be revealed that the dead youth was a relative of the local Mafia don, and the Mafia don would declare that Biaggio too must die to pay for his crime, and then there would be agitations and protestations, and delegations from the political authority and also from the Church, arguing that for the Mafia don to kill the local milord would be, well, extremely visible, extremely hard to ignore, it would make more trouble for the Mafia don than would be comfortable for him, so for the sake of his own ease perhaps he could forgo this murder. And in the end the Mafia don relents,

I know all about this Barone Biaggio, hmm, about his suite in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo—what is it? Suite 202 or 204 or maybe both?—he goes there to party and to whore, hmm?, which is fine, it is our place, we go there for the same reasons, and so, if he goes there today and stays there for the rest of his fucking life we will not kill the little fucker but if he tries to set foot outside the hotel he should remember that the corridors are crawling with our guys and the whores work for us as well and before his foot touches the ground of the square outside the building he will be dead, his bloodied head with the bullet in his forehead will hit the ground before his fucking shoe. Hmm? Hmm? Tell him that.

In the screenplays and treatments for screenplays that I carried around in my head the way Peter Kien in Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé carried whole libraries, the “baron in the suite” remained imprisoned in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, Palermo, Sicily, until his dying day, forty-four years later, he went on partying and whoring in there, food and drink was brought to him every day from his family’s kitchen and wine cellar, his son Vito was conceived there on one of his long-suffering wife’s infrequent visits (but born where his long-suffering wife preferred, in her bedroom at Castelbiaggio), and when he died his coffin left by the front door, feet first, surrounded by an honor guard composed of most of the staff of the hotel, and several of the whores.—And Vito, disillusioned by Palermo, by the Mafia and by his father too, grew up to make his home in New York, and became determined to lead the opposite life to his father’s, utterly faithful to his wife Blanca, but refusing to spend a single evening stuck alone with her and the children at home.

I fear I may have given the reader an unnecessarily poor impression of my character. I would not wish you to think of me as an indolent fellow, a ne’er-do-well and a burden on my parents, still in need of a real job after getting on for three decades of life on earth. The truth is that, then as now, I was and am rarely out on the town at night, and I rose and rise early in the morning in spite of being a lifelong insomniac. I was also (and remain) an active member of a group of young filmmakers—we had all been to graduate school together—who, under the leadership of a dynamic young Indian-American producer-writer-director called Suchitra Roy, had already made a host of music videos, embedded internet content for Condé Nast and Wired, documentaries that appeared on PBS and HBO, and three well-regarded theatrically released, independently financed feature films (all three had been selections at Sundance and SXSW and two had won Audience Awards) in which we had persuaded A-list performers to work for scale: Jessica Chastain, Keanu Reeves, James Franco, Olivia Wilde. I offer this brief CV now so that the reader may feel in good hands, the hands of a credible and not inexperienced storyteller, as my narrative acquires what will be increasingly lurid characteristics. I also introduce my work colleagues because their running critique of this, my personal project, was and continues to be valuable to me.

All that long hot summer we would meet for lunch at our favorite Italian restaurant on Sixth Avenue just below Bleecker Street, sitting out at a sidewalk table wearing substantial sun hats and Factor 50, and I would tell Suchitra what I was doing and she would ask the tough questions. “I understand that you want your ‘Nero Golden’ to be something of a mystery man, that’s fine, I see that that’s right,” she told me. “But what is the question his character asks us, which the story must finally address?” At once I knew the answer, though I hadn’t ever quite admitted it even to myself until that moment.

“The question,” I told her, “is the question of evil.”

“In that case,” she said, “sooner or later, and the sooner the better, the mask must begin to slip.”

The Goldens were my story, and others could steal it. Muckrakers could purloin what was mine by the divine right of I-was-here-first, the squatter’s rights of this-is-my-turf. I was the one who dug in this dirt for longest, seeing myself, almost, as a latter-day A. J. Weberman—Weberman the soi-disant Village “garbologer” of the 1970s, who rooted around in Bob Dylan’s trash to discover the secret meanings of his lyrics and the details of his private life, and although I never went that far, I thought about it, I confess, I thought about attacking the Golden garbage like a cat in search of a fishbone.

These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell. And now that so much is hidden, now that we live in surfaces, in presentations and falsifications of ourselves, the seeker after truth must pick up his shovel, break the surface and look for the blood beneath. Espionage isn’t easy, however. Once they were settled in their lavish home, the old man grew obsessed by the fear of being spied on by truth-seekers, he called in security personnel to sweep the property for listening devices, and when he discussed family matters with his sons, he did it in their “secret languages,” the tongues of the ancient world. He was sure we were all snooping into his business; and of course we were, in an innocent village-gossip way, according to the natural instincts of ordinary people by the parish pump or water cooler, trying to fit new pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of our lives. I was the most inquisitive of all of us, but with the blindness of the foolishly obsessed Nero Golden didn’t see that, thinking of me—quite inaccurately—as a no-account ne’er-do-well who had not found a way of making his fortune and could therefore be discounted, who could be erased from his field of vision and ignored; which suited my purposes excellently.

There was one possibility that I confess didn’t occur to me, or to any of us, even in our edgy, paranoid era. Because of their open and generous alcohol consumption, their comfort in the presence of unveiled women, and their evident failure to practice any of the major world religions, we never suspected that they might be…oh, my…Muslims. Or of Muslim origin, at least. It was my parents who worked that out. “In the age of information, my dear,” my mother said with justifiable pride when they had done their work at their computers, “everyone’s garbage is on display for all to see, and all you need to know is how to look.”

It may seem generationally upside down but in our house I was the internet-illiterate one while my parents were the super-techies. I stayed away from social media and bought “hard copies” of the Times and Post every morning at the corner bodega. My parents, however, lived inside their desktops, had had Second Life avatars ever since that other world went online, and could find the “proverbial eedle in the e-stack,” as my mother liked to say.

They were the ones who began to unlock the Goldens’ past for me, the Bombay tragedy that had driven them across the world. “It wasn’t so difficult,” my father explained, as if to a simpleton. “These are not low-key people. If a person iss vell known, a straightforward image search vill probably vork.”

“All we had to do,” my mother said, with a grin, “was to go right in the front door.” She handed me a folder. “Here’s the skinny, sugar,” she said, in her best hard-boiled gumshoe accent. “Heartbreaking material. Stinks worse than a plumber’s handkerchief. No wonder they wanted to leave it behind them. It’s like their world got broken like Humpty Dumpty. Couldn’t put it together again, so they took off and came here, where broken people are a dime a dozen. I get it. Sad stuff. We’ll be sending in our expense sheet for your early attention.”

There were people, that year, claiming that the new president was a Muslim, there was all that trumped-up birth certificate crap, and we weren’t going to fall into the elephant trap of bigotry. We knew about Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and in the days after the planes hit the buildings we had agreed, all of us in the Gardens, not to blame the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. We remembered the fearfulness that made taxi drivers put little flags on their dashboards and stick God Bless America decals on the partition screen, and attacks on Sikhs in turbans embarrassed us because of our countrymen’s ignorance. We saw the young men in their Don’t Blame Me I’m Hindu T-shirts and we didn’t blame them and were embarrassed that they felt the need to wear sectarian messages to ensure their safety. When the city calmed down and got its groove back we felt proud of our fellow New Yorkers for their sanity and so, no, we weren’t going to get hysterical about that word now. We had read the books about the prophet and the Taliban and so on and we didn’t pretend to understand everything but I made it my business to inform myself about the city from which the Goldens had come and which they did not wish to name. For a long time its citizens had prided themselves on intercommunal harmony and many Hindus were nonvegetarians there and many Muslims ate pork and it was a sophisticated place, its upper echelons were secular, not religious, and even now as that golden age faded into the past it was really Hindu extremists who were oppressing the Muslim minority, so the minority was to be sympathized with, not feared. I looked at the Goldens and I saw cosmopolitans, not bigots, and so did my parents, and we left it there, and felt good about doing it. We kept what we had learned to ourselves. The Goldens were fleeing from a terrorist tragedy and a grievous loss. They were to be welcomed, not feared.

But I couldn’t deny the words that had tumbled out of my mouth in reply to Suchitra’s challenge. The question is the question of evil.

I didn’t know where the words had come from, or what they meant. I did know that I would pursue the answer in my Tintinish, Poiroty, post-Belgian way, and that when I found it, I would have the story that I had decided was mine and mine alone to tell.