Rewind a few hours: after Nero came home from his tennis game, sweating heavily as he always did, he was a big perspirer, as he freely admitted, “I just have to run up the stairs and my shirt is soaked,” after he pulled off his shirt and wrapped himself in his heavy black toweling bathrobe, he summoned his three sons to a meeting in his study. “There are questions in your heads I want to address,” he told them. “In the first place, nothing is changing. I am still your father, that is number one, and with regard to you two, I will always love your late mother just as before, that is number two, and as to you, my youngest child, I continue to be sorry about the circumstances, but you know this, and you are my son as much as these other two, that is number three; and so, status quo, you understand this. Also, to get down to brass tacks: you are all aware that there exists a pretty ferocious prenuptial agreement which Vasilisa has signed without demur. Relax: your inheritance is safe. Status quo is maintained. Also, for me, after so many decades of being the father of all of you the idea of one more is not to be considered. Baby, I have said to her, to me baby is a four-letter word. This also, she does not object to. There will not be a fourth brother. There will not be a first sister. Status quo. This promise I give to you on this, my wedding day. From you, I want only acceptance of my wife. No gold is being dug here, no inheritance-stealing babies are being made. I was not obliged to inform you of these matters but I have chosen to do so. At my age I ask you for your blessing. It is not necessary, but I request it. I ask, please, permit your father to have his happy day.”
In the garden after the judge had come and done his work and gone and Nero and Vasilisa were man and wife I watched them dance again as they had danced in Florida, the years dropping away from the old man as he moved, so erect, so agile, so light on his feet, so attentive to his partner, the language of the dance whispering its magic words and making him seem young again. And she in his arms, releasing the power of her beauty, coming in close with her lips against his ear, then arching her bare back and leaning away from him, and again and again in toward him and out away from him, rhythmically, overpowering him by the most powerful spell of all, the come-here-go-away seduction; Vasilisa letting him hold her and move her, telling us without needing to tell us: I am fearless, I have him, with all the witching power of my body I have commanded him to hold me so tightly in his arms that even if he wanted to he could not let me fall.
This is not a dance, I thought, it’s a coronation.
The sons of Nero Golden watched and learned. Petya watching from an almost hidden place behind the children’s climbing frame and slide, holding the rods of the frame as if they were prison bars. At one point I was standing beside him and he said, “The quantity of love in our father is finite. It does not expand or contract. Now that it will be spread more thinly there will be less for us.” But whenever Vasilisa looked in his direction he smiled broadly. “It’s best not to antagonize the new queen,” he said solemnly, as if confiding a state secret. “She could decide at any moment to have us killed.”
His brother Apu stood under a tree surrounded by his customary group of downtown arty types, painters, club-goers and Italians, and, beside him, chain-smoking, in his usual velvet smoking jacket with white wing-collared shirt, Andy Drescher, the famous professional curmudgeon for whom he unaccountably had a soft spot. Andy was a New York icon who had not published anything since his two volumes of poetry back in the eighties but somehow lived well at the highest echelons of the city with no obvious source of income or other means of support. I imagined him in a small cold-water walk-up eating cat food from the can and then dusting off his velvet finery and heading out to the smartest soirées to smile with desirous resignation at pretty young men and sourly to bark his celebrated complaints. His list of things and people to complain about grew constantly longer and included, at the moment, going to the movies, Mayor Bloomberg, the concept of marriage, both gay and straight, the concept of watching television when one could be having sex, machinery (all types, but especially smartphones), the East Village, mood boards in fashion designers’ studios (which he called organized stealing), tourists, and writers who published books. He offended poor Riya that day (but then, he offended everybody) by mocking the Museum of Identity where Riya worked, and the idea that one could be whatever gender one chose if that was the way one felt. “I’m going to buy a ten-million-dollar apartment next week,” he told Riya. “Ask me how I can afford it.” Riya fell into the trap and asked. “Oh, I’m now a transbillionaire,” came the reply. “I identify as rich and so consequently I am.”
After that Riya stayed close to D, and together they watched the dancing queen in her moment of triumph, Beauty spinning around and around in the arms of the loving Beast, and all around her the Gardens, and all of us, invited and uninvited, real and fictional, as evening drew in and the strings of fairy lights in the trees heightened the enchanted Disney mood; my parents the professors happily dancing with each other, with eyes for nobody else, and sad U Lnu Fnu of the United Nations, and Mr. Arribista of Argentina, and the true aristocrats of the Gardens community, Vito and Blanca Tagliabue, Baron and Baroness of Selinunte, and me, all of us happily joining with one another, lubricated by plentiful champagne, eating the excellent food provided by the finest catering service in the city, and feeling, for the short blissful time-out-of-time that a wedding can sometimes create, happy, together, and one. Even the five tennis players with the expensive wristwatches painted grins onto faces that were not built for smiling and nodded in an approximation of fellow feeling at the others in the Gardens, and applauded the monarchs’ dance.
But there was a group that held itself apart and as the music played and darkness fell and gaiety grew they seemed to bunch closer and closer together as if to say, stay away from us, keep your distance, we aren’t a part of you. These were men with slicked-down hair worn slightly too long at the back, and beards of the designer-stubble variety, and uncomfortable body language, wearing ill-fitting tuxedoes with white shirt cuffs protruding much too far out of the jacket sleeves, men without women, drinking water or soda or nothing, shuffling their feet, smoking heavily, and all of a sudden I thought, my Godfather intuition maybe wasn’t just born from seeing the trilogy too many times, maybe I was onto something, because these people looked like they could be supplicants, people who had come to the don’s big day so that they could kiss his ring. Or (now the gangster movie trope really was getting me carried away) they looked like they could be packing heat. I ran the movie in my head, the sudden appearances of handguns from the bulging inside pockets of those badly tailored suits, blood spattering the wedding day with tragedy.
None of that happened. These gentlemen were in the hotel trade, we were informed, they were Mr. Golden’s business associates. It felt like being told that they dealt in olive oil: true, perhaps, but maybe also not the whole truth.
The oldest of the bridegroom’s sons was standing by the serving table with the gold tablecloth where trays of finger food awaited the hungry, methodically working his way through a sequence of pigs in blankets. A thought occurred to me. “Hey, Petya,” I went over to say, sounding as casual as I could, “what do you know about 2G Spectrum?” A ripple of confusion passed over his face, maybe because the word spectrum had a different immediate resonance for him, and maybe because his extraordinary memory and instinct for truth-telling was doing battle with the pledge of secrecy the Goldens had taken. Finally he decided the answer wasn’t covered by the pledge and therefore was not under embargo. “Telecommunications kerfuffle,” he said. “Shall I recite the list of companies involved? Adonis, Nahan, Aska, Volga, Azure, Hudson, Unitech, Loop, Datacom, Telelink, Swan, Allianz, Idea, Spice, S Tel, Tata. It should be added that in 2008 Telenor bought a majority share in the Unitech group’s telecommunications company and currently operates twenty-two licenses as Uninor. Datacom operates as Videocon. The Russian-based company Sistema owns a majority share in Telelink and is changing the operating name to MTS. Swan was originally a s
ubsidiary of the Reliance group. Idea has bought Spice. Bahrain Telecommunications and Sahara Group both hold substantial stakes in S Tel. A PIL which is to say Public Interest Litigation is under way and will reach the Supreme Court soon. It is expected that at least one minister and several corporation executives may be faced with serious jail time. The five megahertz 2G Spectrum is valued per megahertz…”
“I notice,” I said, “that you didn’t mention Eagle, or Verbunden Extratech, or Murtasín.”
“I was simply listing those companies named in the scam,” he said. “The corporations you mention have not been accused of any irregularity, nor are any actions pending against them. Are you thinking of writing a film about the admittedly amazing and inevitably in part corruption-tainted proliferation of mobile phones in that faraway country? If so, you should absolutely play the lead. Because you are so good-looking, you know, René, you really should be a movie star.”
This was a new thing with him that summer. Petya had recently decided, against the evidence of everyone’s eyes but his own, that I was the most handsome man in the world. At first he declared that I was “more handsome than Tom Cruise,” then I became “much better looking than Brad Pitt,” and these days I was “a hundred times as gorgeous as that George Clooney.” Sic transit gloria, Tom, Brad, George, I thought. Petya was not expressing homosexual longings. He was telling it the way he saw it, as he always did, and all I could do was say thanks.
“Something like that,” I answered him. “But I don’t think there’s a role for me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Write one in immediately. A big role. The romantic lead. You’re so sexy, René. I’m serious. You’re a sexpot.”
Maybe weddings bring out the romance in us all.
And at a certain point in the gaiety of the night, I did not fail to notice, Nero Golden was absent, and there was a light in his office window, and the men in the bad tuxedoes were absent also. Petya was on the dance floor. He was a bad dancer, so absurdly uncoordinated that people found him funny, the five tennis players half-tried to stifle their alpha-male sniggers, but fortunately Petya, transported by music, did not seem to notice. And then Vasilisa was dancing with her girlfriends, all glamorous, all real estate brokers, doing their New York versions of Cossack dances involving candles and shawls and hand-clapping and high kicks and boots. Instead of fur hats and military uniforms there were gossamer dresses and female skin but nobody was complaining, we danced in a circle around the dancing girls and clapped in unison and shouted “Hey! Hey!” when we were told to and drank the vodka shots we were given to drink and yes, Russia was good, Russian culture was fine, what a good Russian time we were having, one and all, and then Nero Golden reappeared in full Cossack costume, so there was at least one fur hat and one blue military coat with golden braid and buttons, and the girls danced around him like their captain, their king, which he was, and he waved his special shashka saber in the air above their heads, and we danced around them, and drank, and shouted “Hey! Hey!” some more, and so Nero and his beauty were wed.
The hotel-trade gentlemen in the bad tuxedoes, however, did not return.
A strange summer mist crept into the Gardens that night after midnight and made them look like the setting for a Japanese ghost story, Ugetsu, perhaps, or Kwaidan. The guests had all gone home and the debris of the celebration had been cleared away by the diligent staff of the catering company, to whom generous tips had been handed out by Nero Golden himself. A single lantern still hung from the branch of a tree, its candle sputtering to its end. I heard one single hoot of what might have been an owl, but it is possible I might have been mistaken. In the sky a pale moon glowing faintly through gathering rainclouds. A hurricane was coming. All was still before the storm.
As once before, my insomnia drove me out of my bed. I pulled on a sweatshirt and blue jeans and stepped out into the misty air and all at once it thickened and I was all alone in the swirl, as if the universe had vanished and there was only me. Then from far away I heard a sound, which was repeated, growing louder with each repetition. It was the sound of a man caught up in a wretched misery, sobbing uncontrollably. A cry to touch the heart.
I approached on tiptoe, my curiosity struggling against my more civilized instinct to give the weeping man his privacy. Not trusting the mist to conceal me, I did my best to lurk in the shrubbery, feeling a little ashamed (but only, I have to say, a little) of the victory of my voyeuristic desires. Finally I saw him, and was, I confess, astonished to recognize the night’s star player, around whom everything had revolved, the bridegroom himself, kneeling on the damp grass in expensive pajamas and beating his breast with his fists, ululating like a professional mourner at a funeral. What could have driven him out here in the small hours, abandoning his marital bed to howl at the vanishing moon? I crept as close as I dared and heard, or so I believe, these words: “Forgive me! I killed you both.”
Let me say now that I am not a believer in the claims of the mystically or supernaturally inclined. I have no time for heaven, hell, limbo, or any other posthumous vacation destinations. I do not believe that I will be reincarnated, neither as a dung beetle nor as George Clooney or his successor in cuteness. In spite of the enthusiasms of Joyce, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, I turn my back on metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives was probably my favorite movie that year but I do not believe that Uncle Boonmee, or I, had any previous tours of duty here on Earth. I am uninterested in demon seeds; Damien, Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby, you can keep right on sitting there on the pulp fiction shelf. I have no time for angels or devils or creatures from blue lagoons. All of which is why I am at a loss to explain what I saw that night, and why I try to tell myself that it was a hallucination caused by taking too heavy a dose of Ambien (which had failed to knock me out) and then wandering woozily into the fog: some sort of waking nightmare. But the figure of the penitent Nero was real enough, and what I saw, what I know I saw, what I think I know I saw even though my rational mind rejects the idea, was the fog around him gathering, like some kind of ectoplasm, into two human shapes, the shapes of women, standing in front of the kneeling man to hear his bitter regret. The shapes did not speak, nor did they fully achieve solid form, remaining blurred and indistinct, but the thought came into my head, as clearly as if someone had said the words aloud, that these were the two mothers of his sons, the wife who died at the Taj and the poor abandoned woman who gave up her child and who, according to Mrs. Golden, had died a lonely anonymous death in one of the places where the destitute go to die.
Forgive me. I killed you both. How should such a plea, made on a man’s wedding night, be understood? As his expression of his guilt at finding new happiness while the unhappy dead lay at his feet? Or as his discovery that the haunting past had a far stronger hold on his emotions than the shallow, if young and beautiful, present? And where, right now, was the new Mrs. Golden, and what was her opinion of her husband blubbering to ghosts in the garden? An unpropitious beginning, it had to be said. I stepped away into the fog and made my way back to my bed, where, strange to say, I immediately fell asleep and slept the sleep of the just.
The next morning Vasilisa announced the next phase of her scheme to cleanse and renew the house from top to bottom, out with the old!, in with the new! New lamps for old! And he, the old man, acquiesced. But hers was no mere act of interior redecoration. “In Russia,” she said, “we are not so stupid as to think that demons do not exist.” This, while I was listening (I was by then a frequent and welcome visitor). “Excuse me, René, I understand that you are a skeptic, but reality is not a matter of choice. It does not care about your opinion on the matter. The world is as it has always been. Go to Orthodox church in Russia and you see the people brought by their families with the Devil sitting in their eyes, persons filled with hatred, also profane individuals, obscene individuals, individuals with much coldness of heart. Then, it starts. Firs
t the priest comes with the holy water and throws it and he is reciting also the passages from Holy Gospels in which Jesus, he drives the demons out, and my God, they come out, man’s voice comes out of woman, there is shaking of the body and hissing and shrieks of revenge against the priest, and the holy water burns them, you see, and many persons sound like animal, like cow, like bear, like pig. There is vomiting and falling down. It is terrible but good. In this house it is different. Maybe it is not persons who are possessed but the house itself. You have brought the evil with you from the old country and now it is in the walls, the rugs, in the dark corners and the toilets also. There are phantoms residing here, maybe these ones of yours, maybe also older things, who must be driven out. If you want to watch when priest comes, I will permit, I know you are a creative young man in search of materials, but stand there near Holy Mary and speak when it begins only the words of the Jesus prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. Doesn’t matter if you don’t believe but just say this and the words will keep you safe from harm.”
Newly installed in pride of place in the spacious first-floor “great room” of the Golden house, her face kissed by a strengthening wind blowing in through the French windows opening onto the Gardens, a wind moist with the promise of rain: an immaculate early copy of the Feodorovskaya icon of the Mother of God, the original of which hung at the Alexander Palace in the small chapel on the left side of the bedroom of the last Romanov Tsarina, Alexandra, who would pray to the Virgin for hours every day. This was surprising. The sons of Nero Golden made no secret of their lack of religious belief and although I had not heard him speak on the subject I had assumed that their father felt the same way, and was indeed the fountainhead, so to speak, of their shoulder-shrugging irreligion. Yet this sacred image was Nero’s wedding gift to his young wife, and now, without argument, he stood beside her before the Mother of God with clasped hands and bowed head and indicated that it was time for the exorcism to commence, and all three of the younger Goldens had been marshaled by him and were present and serious-faced, as instructed. And here right on cue was the Russian Orthodox priest, a beard in a tent, beginning to chant and to toss holy water over us all, and just at that moment Hurricane Irene showed up, the sky blackened, the heavens opened, and blazing lightning filled the room. The priest cried out in Russian and Vasilisa translated his words.