“Of course not,” she said.
“What then, you’ll pretend to go on trying for a while and then persuade him to adopt?”
“Adoption is out of the question.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“I will find a donor.”
“A sperm donor.”
“Yes.”
“How will you get him to agree to that if he doesn’t know his own sperm isn’t working?”
“He will never agree to it.”
“You’ll get a sperm donor without telling him? How is that even possible? Aren’t there documents that have to be signed? Isn’t his consent necessary?”
“He will never consent.”
“Then how?”
She reached across the table and took my hands in hers.
“My darling René,” she said, “that is where you come in.”
Later:
“I don’t want a stranger’s child,” she said. “I don’t want to be made pregnant by a spatula. I want to do it the real way, with someone I trust, someone who is like family to me, someone who is a lovely handsome guy who could easily, don’t be embarrassed that I say this, turn me on. Take it as a compliment, please. I want to do it with you.”
“Vasilisa,” I said. “This is a terrible idea. This would not only be to deceive Nero, but to do the dirty on Suchitra also.”
“Not to deceive,” she said. “And it will not be even a little dirty, except for reasons of our personal preference. I have no wish to interfere in your love affair. This is just something you would do privately for me.”
Later.
“Nero, René,” she said a little dreamily, “it’s almost like you have the same name, the same syllables, nearly the same, only the other way around. You see? It’s fate.”
It began to snow lightly. Falling faintly, faintly falling. Vasilisa turned up her coat collar and without another word thrust her hands deep into her pockets and walked purposefully into the west. Enfolded in whiteness your stunned narrator had what he would later describe as an out-of-body experience. It seemed to him that he heard ghostly music, as if the shuttered carousel were playing “Lara’s Theme” from Zhivago. It seemed to him that he was hovering over his right shoulder, watching himself as he followed her helplessly across the park and down to Columbus Circle, his body in that moment surrendering all agency and becoming hers to command, as if she were a Haitian bokor and he at lunch at Bergdorf Goodman had been administered the so-called zombie’s cucumber which confused his thought processes and made him her slave for life. (I am aware that by drifting into the third person and alleging the failure of my will I am making a bid to be exempted from moral judgment. I am further aware that “he couldn’t help it” is not a strong defense. Allow me this at least: that I am self-aware.)
His—my—Julie Christie fantasy faded and he—I—was thinking instead of the Polanski film Knife in the Water. The couple who invite a hitchhiker onto their boat. The woman ends up having sex with this interloper. Obviously I saw myself, uneasily, as the hitchhiker, the third point of a triangle. Maybe the couple in the movie had a bad marriage. The woman was clearly attracted to the hitchhiker and did not object to the sex. The hitchhiker was a blank slate on whom the married couple wrote their story. So also was I, following in Vasilisa’s footsteps so that she could write the story of her future in the manner in which she had decided it must be written. Here was West Sixtieth Street, and she swept through the doors of the five-star hotel there. I followed her into the elevator and we rose up to the fifty-third floor, bypassing the thirty-fifth-floor lobby. She already had the room key. Everything had been planned and, still in the grip of that curious languid passivity, I lacked the will to forestall what was to happen.
“Go inside quickly,” she said.
Later.
There’s a statement I’ve always attributed to François Truffaut, although now that I look I can’t find any evidence that he said it. So, apocryphally, “The art of the cinema,” Truffaut allegedly said, “is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.” As I stared at Vasilisa Golden silhouetted against a window beyond which lay the winter waters of the Hudson she looked to me like one of the goddesses of the screen who had escaped from the movies I loved, stepping off the screen into the movie theater like Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo. I thought of Ornella Muti bewitching Swann in Schlöndorff’s film of Proust; of Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker with her sensually twisting mouth captivating Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow; of Monica Vitti in Antonioni shrinking erotically against a corner and murmuring No lo so; of Emmanuelle Béart clothed in nothing but beauty in La belle noiseuse. I thought of the Godardettes, Seberg in Breathless and Karina in Pierrot le fou and Bardot in Le mépris, and then I tried to rebuke myself, reminding myself of the powerful feminist critiques of New Wave cinema, Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” theory in which she proposed that audiences were obliged to see these films from the point of view of the heterosexual male, with women reduced to the status of objects, etc. And Mailer popped into my head too, the prisoner of sex himself, but I dismissed him almost at once. On the subject of my self-awareness: yes, I’m aware of the fact that I live too much in my head, too deeply immersed in films and books and art, and so the movements of my heart, the treacheries of my true nature, are sometimes obscure to me. In the events I must now describe I was obliged to face directly who I actually was and then rely on female mercy to see me through. And there she was, standing before me: my demon queen, my nemesis, the future mother of my child.
Later.
Her manner at first was no-nonsense, peremptory, verging on the brusque. “Do you want a drink? Will that help? Don’t be such a schoolboy, René. We are both adults here. Get yourself a drink. Get me one also. Vodka. Rocks. The ice bucket is full. So! Let’s drink to our enterprise, which is, in a way, majestic. The creation of life. Why else are we put on this earth? The species insists on propagating itself. Let’s get this over with.”
Also, after not one but two vodkas: “Today is just to break the ice. Today it is not the right time for baby making. After today I will inform you when I am ovulating and you will make yourself available. I always know precisely when it happens, I am on time, like the trains in the Italy of Mussolini. This suite will be available permanently. Here is your key. I will meet you here, three occasions in total during each cycle. At other times our relationship will be as it was. You accept, of course.”
It was the voice she used when speaking to the household staff, and it came close to waking me from my dream. “No, honey, don’t take a bad attitude,” she said in an entirely different voice, low, alluring. “We are both here, which means we have already made all the important decisions. Now is the time for pleasure, and from now on you are going to have much pleasure, I assure you of that.”
“Yes,” I said, but some note of doubt must have crept into my voice, because now she turned up the sexual volume. “Darling, of course yes, and so am I, because look at you, a gorgeous boy like you. Let’s go into the bedroom now. I can’t wait any longer.”
What a gambler she was! How swiftly she had recovered from being dealt an unexpectedly bad hand! For it must have been a dreadful blow to her, to receive the seminogram results, devastating for her plans for the future, yet in spite of the suddenness of the crisis she had moved instantly, intuitively, to conceal the information from her husband. And then, without any hesitation, she had bet the farm on me, backing her confidence in her judgment of my character and in her own powers of attraction (she saw in me both the seriousness which meant I could be trusted to keep her secret, and the weakness which meant I would be unable to resist her considerable charms). This in spite of her knowledge that if her stratagem failed and her husband learned the truth her position would become untenable and she might even be in danger. And so might I; she brought me into her conspiracy without any regard for my safety, my future. But I can’t blame her, for I found her irresistible, the offer of her body overwhelming, and
I led myself willingly into her trap. And now I was in it: her co-conspirator, as morally compromised as she was, and no longer had any choice but to go through with it, and keep her confidences, which were also mine. I had as much to lose as she.
She drew me down to her on the bed. “Pleasure makes beautiful babies,” she said. “But is also pleasurable for its own sake.”
Cut.
“I don’t like your Goldens,” Suchitra said. “I’ve been meaning to say this. You should move out soon.” She offered clarification over our now-customary evening cocktail in the British-style pub near Washington Square: Irish whiskey on the rocks for her, vodka and soda for me. “Actually, I have no strong negative position on the sons, but the father…not for me, and his wife ditto. Mostly it’s just that house. It creeps me out. Can’t say why but it does. Feels like the Addams Family mansion. Don’t you feel it when you’re in there? It’s like a house of ghosts. These deracinated rich people rejecting their history and culture and name. Getting away with it because of the accident of skin color which allows them to pass. What kind of people are they, denying their race? I don’t care if you live in the land of your fathers or not, I’m not proposing some sort of anti-immigration nativist thing, but to pretend it doesn’t exist, that you never existed there, that it’s nothing to you and you’re nothing to it, that makes me feel they’re agreeing to be, in a way, dead. It’s like they are living their afterlife while they are still alive. I imagine them lying down in coffins at night. No, of course not really, but you know what I mean.”
Suchitra was an atypical New York woman. “I have had three rules for all my boyfriends,” she told me when we first became lovers. “Make your own money, get your own apartment, and don’t ask me to marry you.” She herself lived modestly in a two-room rental in Battery Park City. “In fact I live in one room,” she pointed out. “The garments and footwear have the other one.” It was a corner room with large windows so the river was the art on her wall, the fog sweeping in at dawn, the ice slabs of winter followed by the first sails of spring, the freighters, the tugboats, the ferries, the racing boat flying the rainbow flag of the local gay sailing club, her heart filling with love for her city whenever she looked at the view, never the same twice, the wind and light and rain, the dance of the sun and the water, and the apartment in the building across the street with the large brass telescope at the window and the clear view of her bed, rumored to be a pied-à-terre owned by Brad Pitt which he used to escape from his wife; and the green lady with the torch watching over it all from a little way away, enlightening the world. “The city is my live-in lover,” she told me right at the start. “She’d be jealous if a guy moved in.”
This was all fine by me. It was in my nature to prefer a deal of space and silence around me, and I liked an independent woman, so her conditions were easily met. On the question of marriage I had an open mind, but was happy to accept her firm position as consonant with my own. However, I now found myself in the zugzwang eventually faced by all liars, deceivers and cheats: the moment on the chessboard when one must make a move and there is no good move to make. It was early spring, and the property market had begun to move; there was a solid buyer for our old family house, and the deal was near completion, Vasilisa all business when she talked to me about it; no hint of our secret life in her voice or on her face. I had my inheritance and was about to receive a substantial boost to my capital as soon as the sale went through. My instinct for the moment was to stay where I was, eventually to rent, and look around until I found the right place to buy. So Suchitra’s encouragement to move out was wholly reasonable, but at odds with my desires. For three overt and one covert reasons, I resisted. I shared the first three with her, of course. “The house is quiet, (a),” I said. “It’s easy to work in. I have the space I need and I’m left mostly to my own devices. And (b), you know these people are at the heart of the work I’m trying to make. Yeah, there is something off about the old man, but he’s beginning to like having me around, I have a feeling he could open up to me at any moment, and that’s worth waiting a while for. I think Petya is a heavy burden on him and so his age is hitting him hard, he’s suddenly getting to act very old. And then there’s (c), which is that the Gardens have been my whole life and when I move out of the Golden house I lose access to them. I don’t know if I’m ready to do that, to live without that magic space.”
She didn’t argue. “Okay,” she said good-naturedly. “Just sounding off. You’ll let me know when you’re ready.”
The traitor fears that his guilt is written on his face. My parents always told me I was incapable of keeping a secret and that when I lied they saw a red light flashing on my forehead. I had begun to wonder if Suchitra had started seeing that light, and if her urgings that I leave the Golden house sprang from her suspicion that my time under that roof was not entirely innocent. My greatest fear was that she would notice some sexual difference in me. I had never believed sex to be primarily an Olympic sport; arousal and attraction were the results of a depth of feeling between the parties, of the strength of the connection. This was also Suchitra’s view. She was an impatient lover. (Her schedule was so busy that she didn’t have time to dawdle over anything.) Foreplay was minimal between us. At night she’d draw me down and say, “Just get inside me now, that’s what I want,” and afterwards she professed herself satisfied, being the type who came quickly and often. I had chosen not to feel in any way belittled by this, though I could have felt almost irrelevant to the proceedings. She was simply too caring a person intentionally to slight my prowess.
With Vasilisa, however, things went very differently. Ours was always an afternoon assignation, the classic French cinq-à-sept. We did not sleep together. We didn’t sleep at all. Additionally, our lovemaking was wholly goal-oriented, dedicated to the creation of new life, which both terrified and excited me, even though she reassured me constantly that the baby would not be a burden to me, it would not change my life in the slightest way. This was procreation without responsibility. Strangely, the idea made me feel a little worse rather than a little better. “I can see,” she said in our park-view hotel eyrie, “that I’m going to have to do my best to make you feel good about this.” It was her firm conviction that baby-making required extreme excitement and she believed herself a professional in that field. “Baby,” she said throatily, “I can be a little bit a naughty girl, so I need you to tell me your secrets and then I can make them come true.” What followed was sex of a sort I’d never had before, more abandoned, more experimental, more extreme, and oddly more trusting. Traitors together, who did we have to trust except each other?
Suchitra: would she, during our less operatic bouts of sex, notice my body beginning to move in different ways, having learned new habits, dumbly asking for different satisfactions? How could she not? For I must be different, everything felt different to me, those three days a month had changed everything for me. And what about my monthly exhaustions after my afternoon romps? How to explain those, the regularity of their recurrence? Surely she suspected. She must suspect. Impossible to hide such alterations from her, my most intimate friend.
She didn’t seem to have noticed anything. At night we talked about work and fell asleep. Ours had never been a sex-every-night-or-else affair. We were comfortable with each other, happy just to hold each other and rest. This mostly happened at her apartment. (She was always happy for me to be there as long as there was no question of my moving in.) She didn’t much like coming to stay at the Golden house. Consequently we didn’t spend every night together; by no means. So as things turned out it wasn’t very hard to cover my traces. She continued to bring up the subject of me leaving the Macdougal Street place, however. “You could always get access to the Gardens through other neighbors,” she argued. “Your parents were well liked and on friendly terms with many of them.”
“I need more time with Nero,” I said. “The idea of a man who erases all his reference points, who wants to be connected to nothing in his
history, I want to get to the bottom of this. Can such a person even be said to be a man? This free-floating entity without any anchor or ties? It’s interesting, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, “okay,” and turned over and went to sleep.
Later.
“What about the courtesan?” Suchitra asked me. “How much do you see of her?”
“She buys clothes,” I answered, “and sells penthouses to Russians.”
“I wanted to make a documentary about courtesans once,” she said. “Madame de Pompadour, Nell Gwynn, Mata Hari, Umrao Jaan. Did a lot of research. Maybe I’ll revive the project.”
She was definitely suspicious.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll move out.”
Cut.
When I looked at the world beyond myself I saw my own moral weakness reflected in it. My parents had grown up in fantasyland, the last generation in full employment, the last age of sex without fear, the last moment of politics without religion, but somehow their years in the fairy tale had grounded them, strengthened them, given them the conviction that by their own direct actions they could change and improve their world, and allowed them to eat the apple of Eden, which gave them the knowledge of good and evil, without falling under the spell of the spiraling Jungle Book Kaa-eyes of the fatal trust-in-me Snake. Whereas now horror was spreading everywhere at high speed and we closed our eyes or appeased it. These words were not mine. In one of the curious small-town moments of life in Manhattan the same ranter I had seen in Central Park was walking down Macdougal Street below my window, speaking today about betrayal, his betrayal by his family, his employers, his friends, his city, his country, the universe, and the horror, spreading, and us, averting our gaze…as if my conscience had turned into a crackpot homeless man talking to himself without the excuse of a cellphone headset dangling from his ear. Warm weather; cold words. Was he flesh and blood or had my guilt conjured him up? I closed my eyes and reopened them. He was moving away toward Bleecker Street. Maybe it was a different guy.