And in the meanwhile the great metropolis, hugging me to its bosom and trying to teach me the lessons of life. The boat on the pond where Stuart Little sailed reminding me of the beauty of innocence, and the space on Clinton Street where Judith Malina was still just about alive and her Living Theatre was still enjoying getting naked spoke to me of old-school don’t-give-a-fuck irreverence. And on Union Square the chess players played and maybe Death was playing there too, fast games of Blitz that grabbed lives like they didn’t matter or slow games, off the clock, that allowed the black angel to pretend he respected life while still recruiting his playing partners for his danse macabre. Absences spoke to me as well as presences: the shoe stores gone from Eighth Street, the eccentricity gone from the Upper West Side where once Maya Schaper ran Cheese and Antiques and, when asked why, liked to reply, “Because these are the things I love.” Everywhere I walked the city held me in its arms and whispered comfort in my ear.
On the night of Apu’s second opening at the Sottovoce Bowery space a block from the Museum of Identity (these pictures were smart and swift and technically adept and energetic and pop-arty and they failed to move me), Laurie Anderson’s large paintings depicting the forty-nine-day experience of her beloved deceased rat terrier Lolabelle in the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist zone between death and rebirth, were showing across town. Suchitra and I were standing in front of one of the largest images of that sweet-faced dog looking wide-eyed at us from the afterlife when all of a sudden the words It’s all right formed within me and then I said them aloud. “It’s all right,” I said, and a grin widened across my face. “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.” A shadow lifted from me and the future looked possible and happiness seemed conceivable and life began again. It was only much later, when I thought back, that I realized that that had been the forty-ninth day since my parents’ death.
I don’t believe in the bardo. But there you have it.
“FLASH! I LOVE YOU! BUT WE HAVE ONLY FOURTEEN HOURS TO SAVE THE EARTH!”
I was in the grip of a kind of euphoria that night, seized by the high of having forgiven my parents for dying and myself for remaining alive. Suchitra and I went home to the Gardens and I knew that it was time to do the forbidden thing. Already high on life, we broke open the long-preserved pack of Afghan Moon and inhaled. At once the third eyes in our pineal glands opened as my father had said they would and we understood the secrets of the world. We saw that the world was neither meaningless nor absurd, that in fact it had profound meaning and form, but that form and meaning had been hidden from us until now, concealed in the hieroglyphs and esoterica of power, because it was in the interests of the masters of the world to hide meaning from all but the illuminated. We understood also that it was up to the two of us to save the planet and that the force that would save the planet was love. With our heads spinning we understood that Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, totalitarian, whimsical and badly dressed in his bright red science fiction comic book evil genius cloak, was coming to conquer the human race, and that if sometimes Ming’s face blurred and began to look like the face of Nero Golden, then that was unfair because of his kindness to me of late, but could a man be simultaneously bad and good, we asked ourselves, and the Afghan Moon replied that irreconcilable contradiction and the union of opposites was the deepest mystery of all. Tonight was for love, said the Afghan Moon, tonight was for the celebration of living bodies and for saying farewell to the lost bodies of departed loved ones, but after the sun rose in the morning there would be no time to lose.
If you owed the bank a buck you were a deadbeat with an overdraft. If you owed a billion you were rich and the bank was working for you. It was difficult to know how wealthy Nero Golden actually was. His name was everywhere in those days, on everything from hot dogs to for-profit universities, it was walking around Lincoln Center thinking about donating a unit to refurbish Avery Fisher Hall as long as the old name got dumped and the Golden name was up there in block capitals made of gold. A unit was the shorthand term his name used to signify “one hundred million dollars,” one hundred million dollars being the price of entry into the world of the really rich, you really weren’t anybody until you had your unit. His name was walking that unit around town, it kind of wanted to put itself on the Tribeca Film Festival, but that would cost a lot less than a whole unit, so finally the Film Festival felt like chicken feed; what his name really, really wanted was to be way up there on Yankee Stadium. That would prove his name had conquered New York. After that they might just as well put it on top of City Hall.
I assumed he had brought serious funds with him when he came west, but there were persistent rumors that all his enterprises were highly leveraged, that the whole mega-business of his name was a flimflam game and bankruptcy was the shadow that went with his name whenever he took it for a stroll. I thought of him as a citizen not of New York but of the invisible city of Octavia which Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s book, a spiderweb city hanging in a great net over an abyss between two mountains. “The life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities,” Calvino wrote. “They know the net will last only so long.” I thought of him too as one of those characters in animated cartoons, Wile E. Coyote perhaps, who are constantly running off the edges of canyons, but who keep going, defying gravity, until they look down, and then they fall. The knowledge of the impossibility of the attempt brings about its calamitous ending. Nero Golden kept going, perhaps, because he never looked down.
For many months I was busy closing up our house, locking up what I wanted to keep in a Manhattan Mini Storage facility on the West Side, the one with the funny billboards on the wall overlooking the Highway, New York has six professional sports teams, and also the Mets, and If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married, and “In my father’s house there are many rooms”—John 14:2—Clearly Jesus was not a New Yorker, and Remember, if you leave the city, you’ll have to live in America. Yeah, ha ha, I got it, but mostly I was in a sour mood again, trying hard not to show it in Suchitra’s company, but she knew what I was going through. Then the time came to put the house up for sale and Vasilisa Golden came up to me in the Gardens and put her arm around me and kissed me on the cheek and said, let me do this for you, let’s keep it in the family, which was such a nice thing to say that I just nodded dumbly and let her handle the sale.
Again, it was hard for me to be objective about the Goldens that year. On the one hand there was Nero’s kindness to me, and now his wife’s kindness also. On the other, there seemed little doubt that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Romney presidential campaign, and his remarks about the president and his wife teetered on the edge of bigotry, of course he likes the gays, he’s married to a man, that was a mild one. Very often he told his “funny Republican joke,” the one about the older white guy who goes up to a White House sentry at some point after the end of the present administration, several days in a row, and each time asks to meet President Obama. The third or fourth time he shows up, the exasperated officer says, Sir, you keep coming back and I keep telling you, Mr. Obama is no longer the president of these United States, and no longer resides at this address. So you know that and still you keep coming back and asking the same question and you get the same answer, so why do you keep asking? And the older white guy says, Oh, I just like to hear it.
This, I put up with, though I feared on Nero’s behalf that his dark side would overpower the light. I gave him to read the great short story “The Shadow” by Hans Christian Andersen about the man whose shadow detaches itself from him, travels the world, becomes more sophisticated than his former “owner,” returns to seduce and marry the princess to whom the man is betrothed, and, together with the (pretty ruthless) princess, condemns the real man to death. I wanted him to understand the danger his soul was in, if a godless person may be permitted to use such a term, but he wasn’t a reader of literature, and returned the book containing the story with a dismissive gesture of
the hand. “I don’t like fairy tales,” he said.
But then…the two of them, husband and wife, summoned me to their presence and announced their decision regarding me. “What you need to do,” Vasilisa Golden said, “is to come to live with us in this house. It is a big house with many rooms and two of the three boys are not so much here anymore and the third is Petya who hardly comes out of his room. So there is plenty of space for yourself and you will be excellent company for us both.”
“Temporarily,” Nero Golden said.
“With the girl, who knows what happens,” Vasilisa pointed out. “You want to move in with her, you decide to break up, time will tell. Take the pressure off. You don’t need pressure right now.”
“For the moment,” Nero Golden said.
It was an offer of true generosity—admittedly a short-term offer—made in absolute good faith; and I didn’t see how I could accept it. I opened my mouth to object and Vasilisa raised an empress’s hand. “There is no question of refusing,” she said. “Go and pack your bags and we will send people to carry them.”
So in the fall of 2012 I went to live in the Golden house, temporarily, for the moment, feeling, on the one hand, deeply grateful, like a serf offered a bedroom in a palace, and, on the other, as if I had done a deal with the devil. The only way of knowing which it was, would be to unwrap all the mysteries around Nero, his present as well as his past, so that I could truly judge him, and maybe to do that it would be better to be within the walls than outside them. They opened the gates and pulled me into their world and then I was the wooden horse standing inside the gates of Troy. And inside me, Odysseus and the warriors. And standing before me, the Helen of this American Ilium. And before our story was done I would betray them, and the woman I loved, and myself. And the topless towers would burn.
The “boys,” Nero’s sons, came to see him every day, and these were unusual encounters, speaking of his immense authority over them, not so much father-son meetings as cap-in-hand obeisances paid by subjects to their master. I understood that any film treatment, fictionalized, of course, would have to deal with this strangely authoritarian relationship. Some of the explanation was undoubtedly financial. Nero was generous with money, so that Apu was able to get himself a place in Montauk and spend weeks at a time painting there, and partying as well. Young D Golden in Chinatown gave every appearance of living on a budget, and was working, these days, as a volunteer at a girls’ club on the Lower East Side, which would have obliged him to live on Riya’s salary, but the truth was, as Vasilisa was quick to inform me, that he took the money his father gave him. “He has many expenses right now,” she said, but declined to elaborate further, as was the way in the Golden house, whose members did not discuss significant matters with one another, as if they were secrets, even though they knew that everyone knew everything. But maybe, I thought, the sessions between the father and his sons were also like confessionals, where the “boys” admitted their “sins” and were, in some way, to some degree, and in return for unknown penances and expiations, “forgiven.” That was the way to write it, I thought. Or, a more interesting possibility. Maybe the sons were the parent’s priests as well as the other way around. Maybe each possessed the other’s secrets, and each gave the other absolution and peace.
It was usually quiet in the big house, which was perfect for me. I had been given a room on the uppermost floor with dormer windows looking down over the Gardens and I was utterly content, and busy. As well as my longer-term movie project I was working with Suchitra on a short-form video series for a cable VOD network, well-known indie film faces talking about favorite movie moments, the bottom-stamping scene in Jiri Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (I preferred the greater formality of the UK title to the American Closely Watched Trains), Toshiro Mifune introducing the character of his shabby, itchy samurai warrior in Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, Michael J. Pollard’s first scene in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (“dirt in the fuel line—just blowed it away”), the winter peacock spreading its tail feathers in Fellini’s Amarcord, the child who falls out of a window and bounces, unhurt, in Truffaut’s L’argent de poche (“Pocket Money”), the closing moments of Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (“Fat Man, you shoot a great game of pool.”—“So do you, Fast Eddie.”), and my personal favorite, the matchstick game in Alain Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad (“Last Year at Marienbad”), featuring the granite-faced, Draculaesque Sacha Pitoëff (“It’s not a game if you can’t lose.”—“Oh, I can lose, but I never do.”) We had already filmed a number of talented young American actors and filmmakers (Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Todd Solondz, Parker Posey, Jake Paltrow, Chloë Sevigny) expressing their admiration for these classic films and I was honing my editing skills on my laptop by assembling the material into sharp three-minute pieces to be embedded on a wide range of websites. Suchitra was leaving this work to me while she set up her own first film as writer-director, crossing the line from the production side, and we were both deeply immersed in our work, coming together late at night to tell each other the day’s news, eat fast and too late, and either make love quickly or simply fall asleep exhausted in each other’s arms, either in my artist’s garret or her studio apartment. In the aftermath of tragedy, this was how I found my way back to joy.
In my spare moments I studied the dynamics of the Golden house. Cleaning services, kitchen help, the handyman Gonzalo came and went, so unobtrusively as to seem virtual, phantom children of the age of the post-real. The two dragon ladies were unquestionably actual, arrived each morning buzzing with efficiency, sequestered themselves in a room next to Nero’s office, and did not reappear until they buzzed off at night like hornets escaping through an open door. All sounds seemed muffled, as if the laws of science themselves operated within these walls with, so to speak, white gloves on.
Nero himself mostly stayed in his home office, even though the main premises of Golden Enterprises were in Midtown in a tower irritatingly owned by a certain Gary “Green” Gwynplaine, a vulgarian whose name Nero could not bring himself to speak, and who liked to call himself the Joker on account of having been born with inexplicably lime-green hair. Purple-coated, white-skinned, red-lipped, Gwynplaine made himself the mirror image of the notorious cartoon villain and seemed to revel in the likeness. Nero found his landlord intolerable, and announced to me one evening, apropos of nothing, and without explanation—this was his way, his train of thought emerging occasionally out of the tunnel of his mouth, whoever was in the immediate vicinity becoming the station at which it briefly stopped—“One world. When they let us in, I’ll be the first in the door.” It took me a moment to understand that he wasn’t talking about pan-globalism but about One World Trade Center, which wouldn’t be ready for occupancy for a couple of years, and announcing his intention to leave the Joker’s building and move into the new tower built in the place of tragedy. “On the upper floors I can get a terrific deal,” he clarified. “Fifty, sixty floors, okay, they can fill those, but above that? After what happened nobody wants to rent in that airspace. So, a great deal. The best deal in town. All that empty floor space needing occupation, finding nothing. Me, personally, I go where the bargain is. High in the sky? Fine. Lowball the price, I’ll take it. It’s a bargain. Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”
His employees rarely saw him. He allowed his hair to lengthen. I began to wonder about the length of his toenails. After Romney’s defeat his mood worsened and he was barely visible even to his wife and household. He took to sleeping on a fold-out cot in the office at the house and ordering pizza late at night. During the night he made phone calls to employees in various countries—at least I guessed they were employees—and in Manhattan too. His rule was that he would call you at any moment of the day or night and expect you to be alert and willing to discuss whatever he pleased, business or women or something in the paper. He would talk for hours to his telephone colleagues and that had to be okay with them. One evening in the Gardens when he was in one of his
affable moods I put on my most innocent smile and asked him if he ever thought about Howard Hughes. “That freak,” he answered. “You’re lucky I have a soft spot for you. Don’t ever compare me to that freak.” But at the same time he began to retreat even further from the human gaze. Vasilisa was left to spend many days at the spa or up and down Madison in various stores and lunching with girlfriends at Bergdorf or Sant Ambroeus. Ignore a beautiful woman for too long and there will be trouble. How long is too long? Five minutes. Anything over an hour: catastrophe awaits.