The house had become both the expression of her beauty and of the intensity of her need. On oyster gray walls she hung large mirrors made up of smaller mirror squares, some at an angle, some tinted close to black, expressing, like the Cubists, the need for many perspectives at the same time. A grand new fireplace was installed in the great room, threatening cold-weather incandescence. New rugs underfoot, silken to the touch, the color of steel. The house was her language. She spoke to him through its renewal, knowing him to be a man influenced by surroundings, telling him wordlessly that if a king needs a palace, that palace requires, to be suitably palatial, a queen.
And slowly it worked. By Christmas he had recovered from the president’s electoral victory and had developed a powerful polemic against the defeated contender, the worst contender ever, he said at mealtimes, jabbing his fork at us to emphasize his point, there had never been a weaker contender in the history of contending, you couldn’t even call him a true contender, there had been no contest, it was like the guy surrendered before a punch was thrown, so next time round let’s not make the mistake of choosing a clown, let’s make sure it’s a guy with gravitas, who looks like he can lead. Next time. For sure.
By the inauguration the weather in the Golden house was much improved. It was not permitted to watch the ceremony on television, but the mood of the king and queen was jovial, and flirtatious. I knew that Nero Golden’s interior weather was changeable, and that his sexual vulnerability to his wife’s charms only increased as he grew older, and that the bedroom was where she invariably achieved the necessary alterations in his personal meteorology. But I didn’t know then what I know now—that he wasn’t well. Vasilisa, showing herself to be a master of timing, had sensed her opening and made her play. Before any of us, she saw what afterwards became sadly all too plain to us all: that he was weakening, that the time would soon come when he was no longer who he had been. She smelled the first intimation of that coming weakness as a shark smells a single drop of blood in water, and moved in for the kill.
Everything is a strategy. This is the wisdom of the spider.
Everything is food. This is the wisdom of the shark.
MONOLOGUE OF THE SPIDER TO THE FLY, OR OF THE SHARK TO ITS PREY
You see because it was specially made specially with those special crystals that glow in that special way when the flame takes them just so, glowing like diamonds in the Ali Baba cave which I didn’t know was in fact called Sesame yes that was the name of the cave did you know that well anyway that’s what I read in a magazine so when he says Open Sesame he’s addressing the cave by its name and I always thought it was just a magic word, sesame!, but never mind it’s the fire I’m talking about the fire I had made to represent the fire in your heart the fire in you that I love. You know that. I know you do. So here we are as we have been for some time now, are you happy, your happiness is the great work of my life so I hope you will answer yes, now you must ask if I am happy, and I reply, yes, but. Now you will say how can I say but when I know where I was when you found me and where I am now and I agree you have given me everything you have given me my life but still it is yes but, still yes there is a but. You don’t have to ask what is it you must know. I am a young woman. I am ready to be more than a lover although to be your lover is always first for me, you are always first for me, but I wish also to be, you know what I wish, a mother. And I understand yes that this violates the terms of our understanding because I said I would give that up for you and our love would be our child but the body wants what it wants and the heart also, it cannot be gainsaid. So this is where I stand my darling and it is a dilemma and I can see only one way forward although it breaks my heart and so I say to you with my heart breaking as I say it that because of my immense respect for you and my respect also for my own honor which obliges me to honor the terms of our understanding that my darling I must leave you. I love you so much but because of the needs of my young body and my broken heart I must go and find a way to have a child somehow though the idea of not being with you destroys me it is the only answer I can find, and so, my darling, I must say it. Goodbye.
In the game of chess the move known as the Queen’s Gambit is almost never used because it gives up the most powerful piece on the board for the sake of a risky positional advantage. Only the true grandmasters would attempt so daring a maneuver, being capable of looking many moves down the road, considering every variation, and thus being certain of the sacrifice’s success: the laying down of the queen to kill the king. Bobby Fischer, in the much-bruited Game of the Century, playing with the black pieces, devastatingly used the Queen’s Gambit against Donald Byrne. During my time in the Golden house I learned that Vasilisa Arsenyeva Golden was an avid student of the “royal game,” and could demonstrate to me the famous twenty-two-move checkmate in which the Russian grandmaster Mikhail Tal used the queen-sacrifice to stymie his opponent, a certain Alexander Koblentz. Vasilisa and I would play chess in the idle afternoons when Suchitra was away shooting, and she would invariably win, but then show me how she had done it, insisting that I raise my standard of play. And so I see, in retrospect, that she was also teaching me the game of life, going so far as to demonstrate the move she was going to make before she made it. When she asked Nero Golden for a divorce I understood the depths of her brilliance. It was the winning move.
Her request shook him, and at first he retreated into crassness, quarreling with her loudly on the landing outside his office, causing the phantom servitors of the household to scurry for shelter, pointing out brutally that their financial agreement would be terminated by her exit, and that she would leave with nothing except a fancy wardrobe and some baubles. “See how far that takes you,” he barked, and went into his sanctum and slammed the door. Quietly, without attempting to open the slammed door, she entered her clothes closet and began to pack. I went to see her. “Where will you go?” I asked. At that moment, when she turned the blazing force of her gaze upon me, I saw for the first time the witch-queen unmasked, and actually took a step backwards and away. She laughed, and it was not her normal pretty-girl laughter but something entirely more savage. “I will go nowhere,” she snarled. “He will come crawling to me on his hands and knees and beg me to remain and swear to give me my heart’s desire.”
Night fell; night, which increased her power. The house was silent. Petya in his room bathed in blue light lost within himself and beyond his computer screens. Vasilisa in the master bedroom with the door open, seated erect on her side of the bed, fully clothed, an overnight bag packed and ready at her feet, her hands folded in her lap, all the lights off except for one small reading light outlining her trim silhouette. I, the spy, in the doorway of my room, waiting. And in the midnight hour her prophecy came true. The old bastard dragging himself defeated into her presence to acknowledge her majesty, to beg her to stay, and to agree to her terms. Standing before her with bowed head until she reaching up drew him down to her and fell backward onto her pillow and after that allowed him again the illusion of being master in his own house even though he knew as well as everyone else that she was the one on the throne.
—A child.
—Yes.
—My darling. Come to me.
She switched off the reading light.
It had been my plan, upon setting out in life, with the inspiration of my parents’ lives as the flag under which I sailed, to do my best to be—I admit publicly here to my previously private use of the word—wonderful. What else was there that was worth being? Rejecting humdrum, pedestrian, monosyllabic, demotic Renés, I had set my face toward polymathic exceptional selfhood, boarding my imaginary Argo in search of that golden fleece, without any real sense of where my personal Colchis might lie (except that it was probably somewhere in the vicinity of a movie theater) or how to navigate in its direction (except that a movie camera might be the closest thing to a steering wheel at my disposal). Then I found myself beloved of a fine woman, and standing on the threshold of the life in film that had become m
y heart’s desire. And in that happy state, I did my very best to destroy what I had made.
The reporter at the battlefront was faced every day with a choice: to participate or not to participate? Which was difficult enough when your nation was a combatant, your people were implicated and so, by extension, were you. But sometimes it wasn’t your battle that was being fought. It wasn’t even a war, more like a prizefight, and you found yourself by chance with a ringside seat. And then suddenly one of the fighters stretched out an arm like a lover inviting you into a threesome. Join us. At this point a sane, or at least a cautious, person would go into reverse gear and get out of there as fast as possible.
I did not. I understand that what this says about me is not entirely admirable. What follows, the account of how I joined the war, is even less admirable. For not only did I betray both my host in his own home, and the woman I loved and who loved me, I betrayed myself as well. And having done so I understood that the questions Nero Golden asked me to consider when thinking about him applied to me also. Is it possible for a man to be a good man when he is also a bad man? Is it possible for evil to coexist with goodness and if so do those terms mean anything anymore when they are pushed into such an uncomfortable and perhaps irreconcilable alliance? It may be, I thought, that when good and evil were separated they both became equally destructive; that the saint was as appalling and dangerous a figure as the out-and-out rogue. However, when rightness and wrongness were combined in the right proportions, just so, like whiskey and sweet vermouth, that was what constructed the classic Manhattan cocktail of the human animal (yes, with a splash of bitters and a rub of orange peel, and you can allegorize those elements as you please, and the rocks in the glass as well). But I had never been sure what to make of this yin-and-yang notion. Maybe the union of opposites to form human nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalize away their imperfections. Maybe it was just too neat, and the truth was that evil deeds trumped good ones. It didn’t matter, for example, that Hitler was kind to dogs.
It began in this way: Vasilisa asked me, as she sometimes would while I was a lodger in the Golden house, to accompany her on a shopping expedition to the high-end fashion emporia of Madison Avenue, because I trust your taste, darling, and Nero, all he wants is sexy, the more exposed the better, but that is wrong, isn’t it, we know this, sometimes concealed is more alluring than revealed. To tell the truth, shopping for clothes was among my least favorite pursuits; I bought my own clothes, when I did, mostly online, and quickly. In a fashionable store my attention span was limited. Suchitra wasn’t exactly anti-fashion—she had a number of friends who were in the industry and she wore the clothes they sent her with attitude and flair—but she was definitely anti-dawdling in stores, which was one of the many things that endeared her to me. For Vasilisa, however, the homes of exquisite dresses were her theater, and it fell to me to be her audience, applauding her entrances, back arched, looking over her shoulder at herself in the mirror, then at the human mirror that I represented, then at herself again, while a small gaggle of attendants applauded and cooed. And it was true, she looked exceptional in whatever she put on, she was one of the two hundred or so women in America for whom these clothes were made, she was like a snake who could slip in and out of many different skins, slithering from this to that, with her little forked tongue licking at the corners of her lips, adapting herself and being adored, dressing, as snakes do, to kill.
That afternoon there was an extra brightness to her beauty, an overdazzle, as if she, who didn’t need to try at all in the looks department, was trying much too hard. The assistants in many stores, the Fendivini, the Guccisti, the Pradarlings, responded by being even more adulatory than was their professional wont. This she received as the minimum she was due. And after such adoration, on the seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman, sweeping into the restaurant, first-naming the staff, ignoring but while ignoring also receiving the admiring attention of thin expensive women of various ages, taking her seat at “her table” by the window, leaning forward with elbows on the table and both hands clasped beneath her chin, and looking directly into my eyes, she asked the catastrophic question.
“René, I can trust you? Really one hundred percent trust you? Because I need to trust somebody and I think there’s only you.”
This was, as the old Latin grammar books had it, a nonne question, one which expected the answer “yes,” these being the only questions Vasilisa Golden asked, yes questions, would you like to go shopping with me, do I look okay, can you zip me up, do you think the house looks beautiful, would you like a game of chess, do you love me. It was impossible to say no, and so, of course, I said yes, but I admit I metaphorically crossed my fingers behind my back. What a young rat I was! Never mind, all writers are thieves, and in those days I was hard at work. “Of course,” I said, “what is it.”
She opened her pocketbook and took out a folded letter and passed it across the table to me. “Shh,” she said. Two sheets of paper, from a medical diagnostic laboratory on the Upper West Side, the results of various tests on both Vasilisa and Nero Golden. She took back the page about herself. “This isn’t important,” she said, “with me everything is one hundred percent good.” I looked at the remaining document in my hand. I’m not good at reading these documents and she must have seen the confusion on my face and leaned in close across the table. “Is a seminogram,” she hissed. “An examination of the seed.” Oh. I looked at the various measures and comments. The words meant nothing. Motility. Oligozoospermia. NICE vitality. “What does it say,” I murmured. She sighed an exasperated sigh: were all men this useless even when discussing material so significant to their manhood? She spoke very quietly, mouthing the words exaggeratedly so that I could understand. It means he is too old to father a child. Ninety-nine percent for sure.
Now I understood the strain she was under, which had had the effect of making her turn her volume up too high. She had made her big play and Nero had given in—and then this. “It’s like he did it on purpose,” she said in the same very low voice. “Except I know he doesn’t know. He thinks he’s a tiger, a machine, he can make babies just by looking at a woman in the wrong way. This will hit him hard.”
“What will you do?”
“Eat your Caesar,” she said. “We’ll talk after lunch.”
There was snow on the ground in the park and a homeless orator sounding off on the way to the carousel. An old-timer, he was, this gent delirious with words: white man, bushy gray beard, wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows, denim overalls, fingerless gloves, circular-lensed John Lennon rimless glasses, he looked like he should have been playing washboard in a Southern jug band. His voice, however, had not a trace of the South, and the gentleman had a thesis to expound in what was a fairly florid vocabulary. The private lives of men and women in America, he wanted to tell us, were being abolished by the public lives of guns, which had become sentient and were attempting nothing less than the decimation and eventually the conquest of the human race. Three hundred million living guns in America, equal in number to the human population, and trying to create a little lebensraum by disposing of significant quantities of human beings. Weapons had come to life! They had minds of their own now! They wanted to do what was in their nature to do, i.e. and viz. and which was to say, to shoot. Consequently these living guns were enabling gentlemen to shoot off their pizzles while they were posing for nude selfies, pow!, and they were encouraging fathers to shoot their children accidentally at one hundred percent safe firing ranges, accidentally?, he didn’t think so!, pow!, and they were enticing little children to shoot their mothers in the head while they were driving the family SUV, blam!, and he hadn’t even gotten around to talking about mass murder yet, rat-a-tat!, college campuses, rat-a-tat-tat!, shopping malls! rat-a-tat-tat-tat!, fucking Florida, rat-a-ta-rat-a-ta-tat! He hadn’t even started talking about cops’ guns coming to life and getting the cops to take black lives, or crazy vets’ guns getting those crazy vets to shoot down poli
ce officers in cold blood. No! He hadn’t even begun to talk about that. What he was telling us here today in the winter park was that we were being invaded by killer machines. The inanimate weapon had become animated, like a toy coming to life in a horror movie, as if your stuffed teddy bear could think now and what was he thinking? He wanted to rip your throat out. How could anyone even think about their little private lives when this shit was going down?
I put a couple of dollars in the can at his feet and we moved on. This was no time for the Second Amendment to enter the conversation. “I’ll tell you what I am going to do,” Vasilisa said. “I’m going to protect Nero from this information and so by the way are you. Sit down here. We are going to doctor the form.” We were at one of the tables by the carousel. Behind us the carousel itself was shuttered for the winter. She got out her pen and methodically altered the handwritten figures. “Motility I, Roman numeral,” she said, “that’s bad. That means zero motility, and without motility there is no forward movement, you understand me. But if I put a little V after the I, so now it’s Motility IV, that’s perfect, that’s A-OK. And here, sperm concentration, 5 million per milliliter, very low, but now I put a little 1 before the 5, and 15 million, this is normal according to World Health Organization, I looked it up. And so on, here, here, here. Improvement, improvement, improvement. You see? Now he’s fine. Now he is totally capable of fatherhood.”
She actually clapped her hands. The power of the smile of happiness spreading across her face was such that it could almost convince the person upon whom it was unleashed (me) that fiction was fact, that falsifying a diagnosis would actually alter that diagnosis in the real world. Almost, but not quite. “That may take care of his ego,” I said, “but the baby won’t arrive by stork, will it.”