The Golden House

  There is a small closet by the door in which, on a shelf above the hanging coats, there stands a small leather valise. The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared. He was prepared for the great move from Bombay to New York, and he is prepared for this smaller departure now. He takes down the overnight bag, makes sure the keys to the other apartments are in his trouser pocket where they should be, and quietly leaves. He does not slam the door. He knows that in the apartment next door, where Petya sleeps along with the little cloud of helpers, there is a small maid’s room that is unoccupied. Nero does not need luxury right now. He needs a door to close and a bed behind it and that is enough. In the morning he will deal with what must be dealt with and he will have all his strength then. His head will once more be in control of his heart. He enters the maid’s room, removes his jacket and tie and shoes, doesn’t bother with the rest of it, and is quickly asleep.

  He has underestimated her. He has made an incorrect assessment both of his own vulnerability and of her determination. Beneath all his strength there is loneliness and she can smell that as a hunting dog smells its wounded quarry. Loneliness is weakness, and this is Baba Yaga in the skin of Vasilisa the Fair. If she wishes, she can eat him up. She can eat him up right now.

  Are you awake? Oh my darling I’m so sorry. I am so ashamed of myself. I was drunk, I’m sorry. I have a poor head for alcohol. I’m so sorry. I always knew she kind of had a thing for me but I never expected. I have sent her away, we will never see her again, I swear to you, she is out of my life, she doesn’t exist anymore. Please forgive me. I love you, please forgive me this one time and you will never have to forgive me again. I will make it up to you in one hundred ways, you will see, it will be my daily business to make you forget this and forgive. I was drunk so I became a little curious, I don’t even like women, I’m not that way, I didn’t even like it, actually I just passed out and went to sleep and when I woke up of course I was horrified, my God, what have I done, that man who has only been good to me, I apologize from the bottom of my heart, I kiss your feet, I wash your feet with my tears and dry them with my hair, I even thought for five seconds that maybe it will excite you, this was stupidity, stupidity caused by drink, I’m so sorry, when I’m drunk I can become a little irresponsible, a little wild, this is why I will never get drunk again except if you want me to, only if you want me a little wild and irresponsible in your arms, then it will be my complete pleasure to please you in that way, forgive me, accept my shame and my humble apology, where are you, let me come to you. Let me just come for one moment and apologize to your face, and then if you tell me to go, I will go, I will have deserved it, I know this, but do not make me go without one chance to tell you to your face that excuse me, I did a wrong thing, a very wrong thing, but I was drunk, and I ask you to see me standing before you in shame, and maybe you can find it in your heart to excuse me, to see in me all the love all the gratitude all the love standing before you and for the sake of that you may let me in, you may not shut the door in my face, you may see the truth in my eyes and forgive me, and if you do not then I have no rights, I will bow my head and go and you will never see me again, never see again my naked shame, never see my body trembling and sobbing before you for my shame, you will never see me, I will never be able to touch you again, so many things, never again, so many things that will never happen again, if you send me away, I will go, but maybe, for you are a great man, you will let me stay, it takes a great man to forgive, and this was a nothing, a mistake, a stupidity, and you may see that and let me stay, but let me come to you, I will come to you now, just as I am, wherever you are, if you want me to kneel naked at your door I will do it, I will do anything, everything, only let me come, where are you, only let me come.

  So this is the moment. He can hang up on her, cut his losses, be free. He has seen who she is, the mask slipped and she revealed herself, and all her words can’t make him unsee what he saw or unfeel what he felt when they turned the lights out and went into his bedroom—his bedroom!—and closed the door. He can walk away.

  She has bet everything on the one shot she has: that he will want to make himself unsee that sight, unfeel that feeling. That he will want to turn on the light, open the bedroom door, and find her there, alone, and waiting. That he will tell himself that story, the story of true love, and step into that tale.

  He doesn’t hang up, but listens. He goes back to the apartment where she is waiting. And of course she offers up her apology in many ways, and many of those ways are pleasing to him, but that is only the surface. Below that veneer is the truth, which is that she knows her power now, knows that in their relationship she is and always will be the stronger one, and that there isn’t much he can do about it.

  La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall.

  MONOLOGUE OF V. ARSENYEVA CONCERNING LOVE AND NEED

  Please. I require no sympathy regarding the poverty of my origin. Only those who have never been poor think there is anything sympathetic about poverty, and for this point of view the only proper response is contempt. I will not pause long to describe the hardships of my family though they were various. There was the question of food, and the question of clothing, and the question of warmth, but somehow there was never any question about a sufficiency of drink for my father, I might say an over-sufficiency. In my young years we moved to the town of Norilsk near the former gulag Norillag which of course shut down like sixty years ago but left behind the town, which the prisoners had originally built. At age twelve I learned that the town was forbidden to all non-Russians and so also not so easy to leave. So I understand the Communist oppression and also the afterwards not-Communist oppression but I have no interest in discussing. Also my father’s drunkenness. Poverty is a disgusting condition and to fail to emerge from it is also disgusting. Fortunately I excelled at all things both physical and mental and so I have been able to come to America and I am grateful for it but also I know my presence here is the fruit of my own labor so there is nobody actually to thank. I leave the past behind and I am myself in this place, wearing these clothes, now. The past is a broken cardboard suitcase full of photographs of things I no longer wish to see. Of sexual abuse also I will not speak though this also occurred. There was an uncle and after my parents’ divorce there was a mother’s boyfriend. I close the suitcase. If I send money home to my mother it is to say, please, keep the suitcase closed. Also for my father now are hospital bills for the cancer. I send money but I have no relationship. Case closed. I thank God I am beautiful because it allows me to leave ugliness out of my life. I am focused forward, one hundred percent. I am focused on love.

  What people call love, cynics say, it is really need. What people call forever, according to the cynical loveless, is really rental. I rise above such considerations, which are base. I believe in my good heart and its capacity for a great love. Need exists, that is clear, but must be satisfied, that is a precondition without which love cannot be born. One must water the soil so that the plant may grow. With a great man one must accommodate his greatness and he in turn will be great in his kindness and come to an agreement, and this is normal, it is, one may say, the watering of the soil. I am a matter-of-fact person, so I know a house must be built before one can live in it. First build a solid house, then have a happy life therein, forever. This is my way. I know his sons are afraid of me. Maybe afraid for their father, maybe for themselves, but they are thinking only of the house and not of the life within it. They do not think about love. The house I am building is the house of love. They should understand this but if they do not I will go on with the construction work nevertheless. Yes, they call it the golden house, but what is that if there is not love in every room, in every corner of every room? It is love that is golden, not money. They have never needed, those sons, what did they ever need? They live inside a magic spell. Their self-
deception is very great. They say they love their father but they are confusing need with love. They need him. Do they love him? I will have to see more evidence before I can reply. He should have love in his life while he can.

  That one with his witch, he should understand: his father is the wizard of his life. That one with his strange girl, he should understand: his father is his identity. That one with his broken head, he should understand: his father is his angel.

  Their worry is about inheritance. They should understand three things. In the first place, is it right that after I give this man my love, that I should be put out in the street? Of course not, and so provision must be made, that is matter of fact. In the second place, I have signed the agreement regarding our relationship he gave me to sign, just as he wanted it, without argument, this is my trust, this is my loving confidence. So they are all protected and need not fear me. In the third place, what they fear most of all is the coming of a brother or a sister. They fear my womb. They fear my womb’s desire to be filled. They don’t even know if their father is capable any more of fathering but they are afraid. To this, I shrug. They should understand that I am a person of great self-discipline. I am the general of myself and my body is the foot soldier that obeys what the general commands. In this case I understand what he has said, the man I love. He has been clear. At his age he is not prepared to go back to the beginning of being a parent, to have a baby, its squealing, its shit, to have a child whose adulthood he will not see. This he has said. This clause is in the agreement I have signed. I have signed the baby away. I have so instructed my body, my womb. There will be no baby with this man I love. Our love is the baby and that baby is already born and we are nurturing it. This, he wishes to do, and I also, his wish is also mine. This is love. This is how love triumphs over need. Those sons with all their need, let them learn love from their father, and from me.

  MONOLOGUE OF BABA YAGA INSIDE ARSENYEVA’S SKIN

  I await my time. I sit, I cook, I spin, with downcast eyes I am silent and let him speak. This is fine. I await my time.

  Everything is a strategy. This is the wisdom of the spider. Silently, silently spin. Let the fly buzz. Before I ate her and put on her skin I lay across the stove in my hut, the hut standing on a chicken leg, and I waited, and they came to me, and became my food, and in the end she came too, the one I wanted, and instead of swallowing her I dived inside and let her swallow me. It doesn’t matter what it looks like! I ate her even as I allowed her to eat me. It’s a special digestive trick: a reverse takeover of the feeder by the fed. And so farewell, chicken-legged hut in the forest! Goodbye forever, foul Russian smell! Now am I perfumed and clothed in beauty, my eyes behind her eyes, my teeth behind her teeth.

  Everything she does is false, every word a lie, because here I am inside her, pulling her strings, casting the web of her words and deeds around the little fly, the old fool. He believes she loves him! Ha ha ha ha ha! Cackle, cackle! That’s a good one, that is.

  See how I will live now! The automobiles, the cuisine, the furs. No more flying commercial! I hate flying commercial almost as much as flying on chicken legs or broomsticks. I spit on commercial flights. See me pass through General Aviation like a queen! I enter my P.J. and all around me grovel and seek my approval and my comfort, my joy, my ease. Feel the softness of my bed and the quality of my workout gear. I have a new personal trainer. No sex with him! Be careful! That was close.

  In the traditional world, it is known that for the female of the species metamorphosis is easier than for the male. A woman leaves her father’s house, sheds his name like old skin and puts on her husband’s name like a wedding dress. Her body changes and becomes capable of containing and then expelling other bodies. We are used to having people inside us, dictating our futures. Maybe a woman’s life gains its meaning through such metamorphoses, such swallowing and expulsions, but for a man it is the opposite. The abandonment of the past makes a man meaningless. What are these Golden men doing then, fleeing into meaninglessness, into the absurd? What force is so powerful that it drives these men away from the significance of their lives? They are ridiculous now. An exile is a hollow man trying to fill up with manhood once again, a phantom in search of lost flesh and bone, a ship in search of an anchor. Such men are easy prey.

  —What? What does that stupid one say? The youngest son? “This is a time of many metamorphoses, many genders, and the world is more complex than you believe, Chicken-Leg, Spider-Woman!” Is that what he’s trying to tell me, glaring at me while he clings to his Nouvelle Vague lover’s arm? We will see, sweetie pie. Let’s see how things work out and who’s standing up laughing at the end, smoking a cigarette at the end of the world. You are Dionysus, and, I admit, a little bit weird, but I am Baba Yaga, the weirdest sister of them all. I am Baba Yaga the Witch.—

  I conceal this voice deep inside myself, so deep that she, myself, can convince herself she cannot hear it, that it is not her truest voice. At the level of the skin, of the tongue, a different voice speaks, and she tells herself a different story, in which she is virtuous and her deeds are justified, both absolutely, by moral standards, and empirically, by the events around her. By him, the old one, the king in the golden house, who he is, how he treats her, what his faults are. But there it is, the deep voice speaking, commanding her at the deepest level, the level of the molecules of instruction, twined into the four helical amino acids of her being, which is also mine. It is who I is. It is who she am.

  It was hard for the youngest of the Goldens to give up the habit of loneliness. He had felt lonely from his earliest days as the odd-one-out child of an illicit liaison, partly accepted, partly resented in the grand houses he was obliged to call his home, first in Bombay, then in New York. Even in large crowds, he had felt alone, and yet now, with only Riya for company, he was visited by feelings he at first found hard to name. Eventually he found the words. Togetherness, companionship. He was becoming one half of a joint entity. The word love felt alien on his lips and tongue, like a parasitic visitor from another planet, but, occupying Martian or not, the word had certainly landed in his mouth, and taken root. I am in love, he said to himself in the bathroom mirror. It seemed to him that the mirror-face speaking in sync with his own actually belonged to someone else, a person he did not know. He was becoming this person, he thought, a self unknown to himself. Love had begun to stir forces in him that would soon transform him completely and irreversibly. This information had lodged itself in his thoughts and the idea of imminent transformation had begun to alter things in his brain, just as the word love had started to affect his speech. But it was knowledge which, for a time, he repressed.

  He was the first one to move out of the Macdougal Street house. “Let the old man do what he wants,” he had told his brothers in Florida, but that didn’t mean he had to stick around to watch. One day Vasilisa Arsenyeva arrived followed by quantities of expensive luggage which hinted that Nero Golden might not have been her first benefactor. Clearly she had already moved beyond the initial agreement, which was non-cohabitational. Very soon afterwards Nero’s youngest son packed his own bags and left for Chinatown, where Riya had found them a small, clean third-floor walk-up in a salmon-pink building with the window frames picked out in bright yellow paint. Below them on the second floor was Madame George Tarot Crystal Ball Horoscope Tell Ur Future, and, at street level, Run Run Trading Inc. with its hanging ducks, its striped blue and pink parasols shading its trays of produce, and its ferocious lady proprietor, Mrs. Run, who also owned the building and refused all requests to change lightbulbs in the hall or turn up the heating when the weather got cold. Riya was immediately at loggerheads with Mrs. Run but she didn’t want to give up on the place because outside the sitting room window was the flat roof of the neighboring building and on sunny days they could slide open the sash window and climb through and it was like having a backyard in the sky.

  They had begun to dress alike, in the winter in motorcycle leather, aviator shades and Brando caps, and s
ometimes behind the shades he added smudged eyeshadow like hers, so that people thought them twins, both pale, both physically frail-looking, both escapees from the same art-house movie. And in the spring she, and so also he, affected spiky black hair and she like a Goth Moreau sat out on the roof with a large acoustic guitar and sang the song of their love, “Elle avait des yeux, des yeux d’opale / qui me fascinaient, qui me fascinaient,” with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth,

  “Chacun pour soi est reparti

  Dans le tourbillon de la vie…”

  For this was how their relationship had developed: into something loving, yes, but also scratchy, fractious, and that was his fault, she said, for she was all in, had been from the beginning, she was an all-or-nothing person, but he was somewhere in between.

  “Yes, I love you, this is why we are living together, but you don’t own me, your family knows a lot about owning things, but I’m not property, and you need to understand my freedom. And besides, there are important things you aren’t telling me about yourself, and I need to know those things.”

  When she spoke like this a dizziness came over him, as if the whole world was flying apart into fragments, and he was very afraid of the fragmented world and what it meant for him, the song was right, life was a whirlwind, un tourbillon. But he had told her everything, he pleaded, he had spilled the family secrets to her like a child at his first confession. “I don’t even know why I went along with what the old man wanted,” he said. “Leaving there, coming here, changing identities, all of it. It wasn’t my mother who died at the hotel. It wasn’t even anyone I liked. I don’t even know who my mother was, she vanished, so it’s like he killed her long ago. Or like a Z-Company boss had her killed.”