Only half in jest she threw a glossy magazine at him. “Who do you think you are, excuse me? You think when their revolution comes they will put you among their holy ninety-nine percent because you drew some pictures? In my country we know something about what happens when the revolution comes. You should kneel with me before the Feodorovskaya Madonna and we will pray to the Blessed Virgin for our salvation, so we are not murdered in a windowless cellar by the army of the headless mouse.”
There was a change in Vasilisa Golden now. At some moments, when the light fell on her face in a certain way, she reminded me of Diane Keaton in her Godfather role, her face, mind and heart frozen by her daily need not to believe what was staring her in the face. But “Kay Adams” had married “Michael Corleone” believing him to be a good man. Vasilisa had married, so to speak, the Marlon Brando character himself, so she was under no illusion about the ruthlessness, amorality and dark secrets that are the inevitable consiglieri of men of power, and when the light fell on her face in another way it was clear that she wasn’t Diane Keaton after all. She was complicit. She suspected him of a terrible crime and she agreed with herself to set the suspicion aside because of the life she had chosen for herself, the life she deemed worthy of her beauty. And, perhaps, because she was now afraid. She still believed in her power over him, but she now also believed in his power, and knew that if she tried to pit her force against his, the consequences for her could be…extreme. She had not come into this house to face extreme consequences and so her strategy had to be altered. She had never been an innocent abroad. But in the aftermath of the shootings in Union Square she had grown tougher. She was clearer about the man with whom she was in bed and she knew that certain silences might be required of her if she was to survive.
REGARDING THE FAMILY: AN INTERROGATION
—Again, sir: why does a man abandon his homeland, change his name, and start his life afresh halfway across the world?—Why, because of grief, sir, the death of a beloved wife, which propelled him out of himself. Because of grief, and the need to leave it behind, and the leaving behind of it achieved by the shedding of the self.—Plausible. And yet one is not wholly convinced. And yet it remains to ask again: what of the preparations for departure, which predated the tragedy? An explanation for that must be given, surely?—You search for a subtext, then? You suspect shenanigans, skulduggery, jiggery-pokery?—Innocent until proven guilty. No charges against this patriarch in the 2G Spectrum scam. This, one concedes. And surely a fellow on the run from the law would, having rendered himself pseudonymous, affect a low profile? Surely such a fellow would not bruit himself abroad in his newfound land? Whereas this fellow, increasingly, and persistently, and with ever-increasing brio, does he not, bruits.—Sir, he does. Which may, as you say, denote innocence. But one thinks, also, of the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion acts according to its nature even when it is suicidal to do so. Additionally, or by way of confirmation, he is of brazen character, this fellow. He is sure, one feels, of his own invincibility, secure in the certainty of his own invulnerability. If indeed there are laws he has broken, or, how should one put this, people he has alienated—for one’s most dangerous adversaries are not necessarily law-abiding themselves—then he is certain he is beyond their reach. The reach of dangerous adversaries is not limitless. They may be dangerous on their own turf, but it is not easy for them to stretch beyond it, and they do not try to do so.—Or so I speculate. This is not my area of expertise.—But it is clear that Nero feels increasingly secure, and armored by this growing self-belief he goes forth a-scorpioning, blaring and foghorning, establishing, as they say nowadays, his brand.—A word with many meanings, sir, including these: an identifying mark formerly burned on criminals or slaves. A habit, trait, or quality that causes someone public shame or disgrace. A torch. A sword.—We shall see which of those, in this case, applies.
To continue: It had become clear by the election year of 2012 that Nero Golden did not intend to lead a quiet life. Of all the four-and-twenty-blackbird dainty-dishes into which he had stuck a finger during the course of his previous life it was the construction and development business that came most naturally to him and remained strongest in him, and so it was that the word GOLDEN, a golden word, colored gold, in brightly illuminated gold neon, and all in capital letters of gold, began to be seen on hard-hat sites around town, and out of town also, and the name’s owner began to be spoken of as a new power player in that most closed of elites, the small number of families and corporations who controlled the building of this golden city, New York.
—Families, sir? When you say families are you meaning to say, if I may put this delicately, famiglie?—No, sir, or not entirely. The industry in 2012 was much cleaner than previously. In the 1990s the construction companies all belonged to the mob and their bids were absurdly inflated. Now the Five Families’ influence was diminished. On some of Nero Golden’s sites the workers included nonunion. Twenty years earlier these workers would have been killed.—So you speak now of reputable persons: Doronin, Sumaida, Khurana, Silverstein, Stern, Feldman, the aristocrats of real estate.—Not entirely, sir, as I said. The mob abides. Now that it’s all over and all is out in the open we can point to Nero Golden’s covert dealings with such associates as the Philadelphia descendants of Petruchio “Chicken Little” Leone, and Atlantic City’s Arcimboldo “Little Archie” Antonioni, and in Miami Federico “Crazy Fred” Bertolucci. We may also mention that in New York City, several of the Golden towers were built by Ponti & Quasimodo Concrete Co.—“P&Q”—an operation in which there was a strong interest taken by Francesco “Fat Frankie” Palermo, an allegedly senior figure in the Genovese crime family.—This is known?—Now, at the end of l’affaire Golden, it is known. What is more, Nero Golden was clearly quite comfortable in his dealings with these individuals and the families behind them.—Comfortable.—Sir: revealingly at ease.
Two last questions: Did Chicken Little, Little Archie, Crazy Fred and Fat Frankie wear, upon their ample chins, designer stubble? And did they own, and in the evening sometimes wear, bad tuxedoes?—Sir: they did.
Here is Nero Golden, lifting his ban on the media, showing a photographer from a glossy free magazine around his beautiful home. (No more secrecy now; instead, everything on display.) Here is Nero Golden, showing another such magazine around his beautiful wife. He speaks of his wife as his inspiration, as his lodestar, as the source of his “renewal.” I am an old man, he says, and maybe for men such as myself it’s time to wind down, go on the boat, pick up the golf clubs, winter in Florida, pass the baton. This until recently I was ready to do, even though my sons, God knows, show little interest in the family business. My youngest, can you believe it, he works now for a girls’ youth club on the LES, he’s doing good works, and this is fine, but maybe I need him too, a little attention, please. And then, an artist, and then Petya. So it is. But such concerns do not worry me any longer because I am as a man reborn. A woman will do this for you. A woman like Mrs. Golden, she is the elixir of life, she turns a man’s hair black again, she tightens his abdomen, she puts miles back into his legs, and his mind, yes, his business mind also, she sharpens it like a knife. Look at her! Can you doubt me? Did you see her Playboy photos? Of course not ashamed, why would one be ashamed? To own one’s body, to care for it and make it excellent, to see no disgrace in beauty, that is liberation. She is the ideal of the liberated woman and also the ideal of the wife. Both sides of the coin. Yes: a lucky man. For sure. She’s the jackpot, no doubt.
REGARDING LOVE: A TRAGEDY
On the day my parents died I wasn’t in the car. It was Memorial Day weekend and they were heading out of town but I changed my mind at the last moment and stayed in the city because Suchitra Roy wanted me to help her cut a video for an Italian fashion house. Of course I was in love with Suchitra, everyone who ever crossed the path of that human dynamo fell at least a little bit in love with her, and for a long time I had been too scared of her sheer energy, the scale of the
woman, her black hair flying behind her in the wind on Sixth Avenue, her blue and gold skirt glowing above the latest sneakers, her arms spreading in a dozen different directions like a Hindu goddess managing to enfold the whole city in her embrace…too scared to admit to myself that I’d fallen for her, but by now there was no doubt about it, and the only question was, when was I going to tell her, or would I tell her at all. There was a voice in my head saying do it now, you fool, but a second, often louder voice, the voice of my cowardice, arguing that we had been friends for too long, that after a certain point it became impossible to transmute friendship into romantic love, that if one attempted to do so and failed one could be left without the friendship or the love, and here was Eliot’s Prufrock in my head again, agonizing in my own inner voice, Do I dare, and regarding the terrible and terrifying question of a declaration of love, Would it have been worth while / If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, / And turning toward the window, should say: / “That is not it at all, /That is not what I meant, at all.”
I decided to stay and work with her, and at the end of the edit we would go out for a beer and I would declare myself. Yes. I would. So I did not get into my parents’ car, and because of that I am alive today. Life and death are both meaningless. They happen or don’t happen for reasons that have no weight, from which you learn nothing. There is no wisdom in the world. We are all fortune’s fools. Here is the earth and it is so beautiful and we are so lucky to be here with one another and we are so stupid and what happens to us is so stupid and we don’t deserve our stupid luck.
I’m making no sense. Let me tell you about the road.
The Long Island Expressway was a road full of family stories and when in the summer we drove out to our borrowed place on Old Stone Highway in The Springs—owned by a Columbia University grandee who, having once developed full-blown Lyme disease and suffered from it for several years, no longer wished to travel to the kingdom of the tick—we checked off all the familiar landmarks. Mineola, the cemetery there, I had a great-aunt and -uncle in whose posthumous direction to nod a respectful head. Great Neck, Little Neck, raised thoughts of Gatsby in us all, and though we did not drive by Remsenburg, where P. G. Wodehouse had lived for so many years during his postwar exile from England, we often imagined, as we drove, a fictional universe in which Fitzgerald’s and Wodehouse’s creations might visit one another. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might have intruded on the rarefied world of the Eggs, silly-ass Bertie stepping into sensible Nick Carraway’s shoes, and Reginald Jeeves the fish-eating, Spinoza-loving gentleman’s gentleman and genius finding a way to give Jay Gatsby the happy-ever-after ending with Daisy Buchanan for which he so profoundly longed. Dix Hills, my father in a creaky Belgian dad-joke effort invariably pronounced with a French accent. Dee Heels. And I said, I always said, that it sounded to me like a daytime soap star. And Wyandanch; as we passed that exit one parent or the other would inevitably tell the story of the Montaukett chief or sachem of that name who sold most of the East End of Long Island to an Englishman named Lion Gardiner, and later died of the plague. Wyandanch often cropped up again when we had reached the East End and my parents reminisced about the story of Stephen Talkhouse, Wyandanch’s descendant, who walked fifty miles a day every day between Montauk, Sag Harbor and East Hampton. And in between Wyandanch and Talkhouse we passed a sign directing us toward an entirely fictitious Native American lady, Shirley Wading River. In reality this road sign led to two distinct communities, one called Wading River and the other Shirley, but Shirley Wading River grew large in our family lore. As sci-fi buffs we sometimes put her together with the post-apocalyptic Chiefs, Three Hydrogen Bombs and Makes Much Radiation, from William Tenn’s 1958 classic Eastward Ho!, and at other times we imagined her gigantic, like Grendel’s mother, or a sort of giant Australian-style wandjina or ancestor, shaping the landscape as she walked.
They listened to the radio as they drove. The oldies channel, 101.1, for music, WNYC for words, until the signal faded and then they waited until East Hampton Music showed up on the dial, the sign that the weekend was about to begin, nights of soft rock and lobster roll, that was another dad-joke. In between the New York stations and WEHM there were audiobooks and that year their plan was to listen to Homer. I think—I can’t be sure, but I think—that by the time they set off for their Memorial Day weekend they had reached Book Four of the Odyssey, Telemachus visiting the palace of Menelaus on the day his daughter, the daughter of recaptured Helen of Troy, married Achilles’ son.
So maybe they were listening to the passage in which Menelaus recounts the day that Helen came to the great wooden horse, suspecting that there were Greek warriors within, and with immense and seductive deception imitated the voices of all their wives (I imagine her reaching up and caressing the wooden belly of the beast erotically as she spoke), so sensually that Diomed, Menelaus himself and Ulysses too wanted to spring out of the horse then and there; but Ulysses restrained himself and his fellows, save only Anticlus, who was about to cry out, and would have done so, had Ulysses not clapped two brawny hands over his mouth and kept them there, and, according to some versions of the tale, strangled the life out of him to protect the hidden Greeks. Yes, maybe that immortal moment rang in their ears, when the metal pipe lying in the road just lying there metal fucking pipe fell off some fucking truck did the truck driver stop no he didn’t did he even know no he probably didn’t did he secure his load properly no he absolutely fucking didn’t because there in the road
the metal pipe
in the HOV lane because these were my parents my beloved my only and they weren’t speedsters no sir they preferred to trundle along safely in the no entry no exit multiple occupancy sensible road use lane marked with a diamond because why who cares why but on this occasion not so fucking safe because the metal pipe
rolling
I’m approaching the horror and must take a break to compose myself and maybe write more later.
No.
There is no later.
Now.
The pipe was seven feet long. It rolled into the path of another car which gave it what the reports called a glancing blow. The pipe spun about, somehow got itself up so that it bounced end over end, and smashed through the windshield of my parents’ car and hit my father in the head, killing him instantly. Their car, out of control, veered out of the HOV lane into the path of the fast traffic and in the multiple collision that followed my mother was also killed. To get them out of the vehicle, the emergency services had to send for the Jaws of Life, but they were both gone. Their bodies were taken to North Shore University Hospital at Plainview, in Nassau County, where they were both pronounced dead on arrival. At midnight, just after I had fearfully declared my love to Suchitra Roy in the British-style pub on the corner of Bleecker and LaGuardia and been given the almost entirely unexpected news that she also had deep feelings for me, I received the call.
For a good deal of that year I stopped thinking almost completely. All I heard was the thunderous beating of the death angel’s gigantic wings. Two people saved me. One was my new beloved, brilliant, loving Suchitra.
The other was Mr. Nero Golden.
With their characteristic carefulness—WHICH DIDN’T SAVE THEIR LIVES DID IT, THE CARELESSNESS OF OTHERS ERASES OUR OWN CARE, THE CARELESSNESS OF A PIPE REARING UP, SMASHING INTO MY FATHER’S FACE, OF WHICH MINE IS A POOR ECHO, WE WHO COME AFTER ARE THE COUNTERFEITS OF THE REAL ONES WHO PRECEDED US AND ARE GONE FOREVER, STUPIDLY, MEANINGLESSLY, SLAUGHTERED BY A RANDOM PIPE, OR A BOMB IN A NIGHTCLUB, OR A DRONE—my parents had left their affairs in good order. There were all the necessary, careful legal documents, carefully composed, which ensured that my status as sole heir was protected, and there was insurance to pay what the state required of that heir, and there would be a sum of money. So for the time being my domestic arrangements didn’t need to change, though probably in the medium term the house would need to be sold. It was too big for me, its value was high, the maintenance expenses and property t
axes and so on would be difficult for me to come up with, and ET CETERA I DIDN’T CARE. I walked the streets in a blind rage and all at once it was as if all the anger gathering in the air poured into me too, I could feel it, the anger of the unjustly dead, the young men shot for walking in a stairwell while black, the young child shot for playing with a plastic gun in a playground while black, all the daily black death of America, screaming out that they deserved to live, and I could feel, too, the fury of white America at having to put up with a black man in a white house, and the frothing hatred of the homophobes, and the injured wrath of their targets, the blue-collar anger of everyone who had been Fannie Mae’d and Freddie Mac’d by the housing calamity, all the discontent of a furiously divided country, everyone believing they were right, their cause was just, their pain was unique, attention must be paid, attention must finally be paid to them and only them, and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be. I had been brought up by those dear departed Belgians to believe that “right” and “wrong” were ideas that came naturally to the human animal, that these concepts were born in us, not made. We believed that there was a “moral instinct”: hardwired into the DNA in the way that, according to Steven Pinker, the “language instinct” was. This was our family answer to the religious allegation that persons without religion could not be moral beings, that only the moral structure of a religious system validated by some sort of Supreme Arbiter could give human beings a firm grip on good and evil. My parents’ answer to that was “Hogwash,” or alternatively a term they had learned from Australian friends and gleefully adopted as their own: “Horse puckie.” Morality came before religion and religion was our ancestors’ way of responding to that built-in need. And if that was so then it followed that it was perfectly possible to lead a good life, to have a strong sense of right and wrong, without ever letting God and his harpies into the room.