The Golden House

  It is to the three sons of Nero Golden that we must now turn our attention, pausing only to state what all four Goldens, at one time or another, emphatically insisted upon—that their relocation to New York was not an exile, not a flight, but a choice. Which may well have been true of the sons, but, as we will see, in the case of the father, personal tragedy and private needs may not have been his only motives. There may have been people beyond whose reach he needed to place himself. Patience: I will not reveal all my secrets at once.

  Dandyish Petya—conservatively attired but invariably smart—had some words of his namesake Gaius Petronius, described by Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Plutarch as the arbiter elegantiarum or elegantiae arbiter, the judge of stylishness in Nero’s court, engraved on a bronze plaque above his bedroom door: “Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores. The far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind, the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting.” It was a strange choice of quotation, since the outside world was frightening to him. But a man may dream, and in his dreams be other than he is.

  I saw them in the Gardens several times a week. I grew closer to some of them than others. But to know the actual people was not the same as bringing them to life. By now I had begun to think, just write it down however it comes. Close your eyes and run the movie in your head, open your eyes and write it down. But first they had to stop being my neighbors, who lived in the Actual, and become my characters, alive in the Real. I decided to begin where they began, with their classical names. To get some clues to Petronius Golden I read The Satyricon and studied Menippean satire. “Criticize mental attitudes,” was one of my notes to myself. “Better than lampooning individuals.” I read the few extant satyr plays, Cyclops by Euripides, and the surviving fragments of The Net Fishers by Aeschylus and Sophocles’ The Trackers, as well as Tony Harrison’s modern “remake” of Sophocles, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. Did this ancient-world material help? Yes, in that it guided me toward the burlesque and the bawdy and away from the high-mindedness of tragedy. I liked the clog-dancing satyrs in the Harrison play and made a note, “Petya—bad dancer, so absurdly uncoordinated that people find him funny.” There was also a possible plot device here, because in both Fishers and Trackers the satyrs stumble upon magic babies—Perseus in the former play, Hermes in the latter. “Reserve possibility of introducing supernaturally powerful infants,” I wrote in my notebook, and beside it, in the margin, “??? or—NO.” So I was unclear not only about the story, and about the mystery at its heart, but also about the form. Would the surreal, the fantastic, play a part? At that moment, I was unsure. And the classical sources were as confusing as they were helpful. The satyr plays, to state the obvious, were Dionysiac, their origins probably lying in rustic homages to the god. Drink, sex, music, dance. So upon whom, in my story, should they shed most light? Petya “was” Petronius, but Dionysus was his brother…in whose story the question of sex—or gender, to avoid the word his lover, the remarkable Riya, so disliked—would be central….made a note. “The characters of the brothers, to some extent, will overlap.”

  And for Apu I went back to The Golden Ass, but, in my story, metamorphosis was to be a different brother’s fate. (The sibling overlap again.) I made, however, this valuable note. “A ‘golden story,’ in the time of Lucius Apuleius, was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue. A fairy tale. A lie.”

  And as for the magic baby: instead of my earlier “??? or—NO,” I have to say that, without the help of Aeschylus or Sophocles, the answer turned out to be YES. There would be a baby in the story. Magic or cursed? Reader: you decide.

  The sad, brilliant strangeness of the man we called Petya Golden was clear to everyone from the first day, when in the failing winter afternoon light he planted himself alone on a bench in the Gardens, a big man, like an enlargement of his father, large and heavy-bodied with his father’s sharp, dark eyes that seemed to interrogate the horizon. He wore a cream suit under a heavy herringbone tweed greatcoat, gloves and orange muffler, and there was an outsize cocktail mixer and a jar of olives beside him on the bench and a martini glass in his right hand, and while he sat there in his monologic solitude and his breath hung ghostly in the January air he just started talking aloud, explained to nobody in particular the theory, which he ascribed to the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, of why the perfect dry martini was like the Immaculate Conception of Christ. He was perhaps forty-two years old then and I, seventeen years his junior, approached him gingerly across the grass, ready to listen, instantly in love, as iron filings are drawn to the magnet, as the moth loves the fatal flame. As I approached I saw in the twilight that three of the Gardens’ children had paused in their play, abandoning their swings and jungle gym to stare at this strange, big man talking to himself. They had no idea what the crazy newcomer was talking about but were enjoying his performance anyway. “To make the perfect dry martini,” he was saying, “you must take a martini glass, drop an olive into it, and then fill it to the brim with gin, or, according to the new fashion, vodka.” The children giggled at the wickedness of this alcohol talk. “Then,” he said, jabbing the air with his left forefinger, “you must place a bottle of vermouth close to the glass in such a position that a single shaft of sunlight passes through the bottle and strikes the martini glass. Then you drink the martini.” He took a flamboyant gulp from his glass. “Here’s one I prepared earlier,” he said, clarifying for the benefit of the children, who now ran away, laughing with delighted guilt.

  The Gardens were a safe space for all the children whose homes had access to them, and so they ran about unguarded. There was a moment, after the martini lecture, when some of the neighborhood mothers grew concerned about Petya, but there was no need for them to worry about him; children were not his vice of choice. That honor was reserved for the booze. And his mental condition was a danger to nobody but himself, though it could be disconcerting to the easily offended. The first time he met my mother he said, “You must have been a beautiful young woman but you’re old and wrinkly now.” We Unterlindens were strolling in the morning Gardens when Petya in his greatcoat, muffler and gloves came up to introduce himself to my parents, and this was what he said? This was his first sentence after “Hello”? I bridled and opened my mouth to scold, but my mother put a hand on my arm and shook her head, kindly. “Yes,” she replied. “I see that you are a man who tells the truth.”

  “On the spectrum”: I hadn’t heard the term before. I think that in many ways I have been a kind of innocent, and autism for me was not much more than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and other cruelly named “idiot savants” reciting lists of prime numbers and drawing incredibly detailed maps of Manhattan from memory. Petya, my mother said, was certainly high on the autism spectrum. She wasn’t certain if what afflicted him was HFA, high-functioning autism, or AS, which was Asperger’s. Nowadays, Asperger’s is no longer considered a separate diagnosis, having been folded into the spectrum on a “severity scale.” Back then, just a few years ago, most people were as ignorant as I, and Asperger’s sufferers were often put into the dismissive box marked “mad.” Petya Golden may have been tormented, but he was by no means mad, not even close to it. He was an extraordinary, vulnerable, gifted, incompetent human being.

  He was physically clumsy, and sometimes, when agitated, clumsy too in the mouth, stammering and stuttering and being infuriated by his own ineptitude. He also had the most retentive memory of anyone I ever met. You could say a poet’s name, “Byron,” for example, and he would do twenty minutes of Don Juan with his eyes closed. “I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.” In search of heroism, he said, he had tried to be a revolutionary Communist at university (Cambridge, which he left without his architecture degree because of his affliction), but admitted he didn’t try hard
enough to be a good one, and besides there was the disadvantage of his wealth. Also, his condition was scarcely conducive to good organization and dependability, so he would not make a good cadre, and anyway his greatest pleasure lay not in revolt but in argument. He liked nothing better than to contradict everyone who offered him an opinion, and then to bludgeon that individual into submission by using his apparently inexhaustible storehouse of arcane, detailed knowledge. He would have argued with a king over his crown, or a sparrow over a crust of bread. He also drank far too much. When I sat down to drink with him in the Gardens one morning—his drinking began at breakfast—I had to pour the booze into a plant while his attention was distracted. It was impossible to keep up with him. But the industrial quantities of vodka he put away appeared to have no effect whatsoever on that faultily wired but still prodigious brain. In his room on an upper floor of the Golden house he was bathed in blue light and surrounded by computers and it was as if those electronic brains were his real equals, his truest friends, and the gaming world he entered through those screens was his real world, while ours was the virtual reality.

  Human beings were creatures he had to put up with, with whom he would never feel at home.

  What was hardest for him—in those early months before we found out the answers for ourselves, which eventually I told him we had done, to put him at his ease, which it failed to do—was to avoid spilling the family beans, their real names, their origins, the story of his mother’s death. Ask him a direct question and he would answer honestly because his brain made it impossible for him to lie. Yet out of loyalty to his father’s wishes he managed to find a way. He trained himself in locutions of avoidance, “I will not answer that question,” or, “Maybe you should ask someone else,” statements his nature could accept as true and therefore allow himself to make. Sometimes, it’s true, he skated perilously close to treason. “As to my family,” he said one day, apropos of nothing, as was his wont (his conversation was a series of random bombs falling out of the blue sky of his thought), “consider the nonstop insanity that went on in the palace during the time of the twelve Caesars, the incest, the matricide, the poisonings, the epilepsy, the dead babies, the stench of evil, and of course there’s Caligula’s horse to consider. Mayhem, dear boy, but when the Roman in the street looked up at the palace what did he see?” Here an arch, dramatic pause, and then, “He saw the palace, dear boy. He saw the bloody palace, immovable, unchanging, there. Indoors, the powerful were fucking their aunties and cutting off each other’s dicks. Outside, it was clear that the power structure remained unchanged. We’re like that, Papa Nero and my brothers. Behind the closed doors of the family, I freely admit, it’s hell in there. Remember Edmund Leach in his Reith lectures. ‘The family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets is the source of all our discontents.’ Too bloody true in our case, old sport. But as far as the Roman in the street is concerned, we close ranks. We form the bloody testudo and forward march.”

  Whatever else there is to say about Nero Golden—and by the time I’m done, much will be said, much of it horrifying—there was no questioning his devotion to his firstborn child. Plainly in some sense Petya would always remain part child, lurching unpredictably into crazy mishaps. As if AS wasn’t enough, by the time he came to live among us his agoraphobia was pretty bad. The communal Gardens, interestingly, didn’t scare him. Sealed off from the city on all four sides, they qualified, somehow, in that strange broken-mirror mind, as being “indoors.” But he rarely went into the streets. Then one day he took it upon himself to tilt at his mental windmills. Defying his hatred of the undefended world, challenging himself to overcome his demons, he plunged meaninglessly into the subway. The household panicked at his disappearance and a few hours later there was a call from the police precinct at Coney Island which had him in a holding cell because, growing afraid in a tunnel, he began to create a considerable disturbance, and when a security officer came on board at the next station Petya began to abuse him as a Bolshevik apparatchik, a political commissar, an agent of the secret state; and was handcuffed. Only Nero’s arrival in a large, grave, apologetic limousine saved the day. He explained his son’s condition and, unusually, was listened to, and Petya was released into his father’s custody. That happened, and, afterwards, worse things as well. But Nero Golden never wavered, looked constantly for cutting-edge medical help, and did his best for his firstborn son. When the final tally is made, that must weigh heavily in the scales of justice, on his side.

  What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don’t know the answer to such questions anymore. A cloud of ignorance has blinded us, and in that fog the strange, broken mind of Petya Golden fitfully shone like a manic guiding light. What a presence he might have been! For he was born to be a star; but there was a flaw in the program. He was a brilliant talker, yes; but he was like a whole cable box full of talk-show networks that jumped channels frequently and without warning. He was often frenziedly cheerful but his condition caused a deep pain in him, because he was ashamed of himself for malfunctioning, for failing to get better, for obliging his father and a posse of doctors to keep him functional and put him back together when he broke.

  So much suffering, so nobly borne. I thought of Raskolnikov. “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

  One summer evening—this was during the Goldens’ first summer among us—they threw a glittering soirée, spilling out from their mansion onto the lawns we all shared. They had employed the city’s finest publicists and party planners, so a sizable selection of “everybody” showed up, a goodly proportion of the boldface menagerie as well as us, the neighbors, and that night Petya was on fire, glittering-eyed and babbling like a brook. I watched him twirl and pirouette in his Savile Row finery among and around the starlet and the singer and the playwright and the whore, and the money guys discussing the Asian financial crisis, who were impressed by his mastery of such terms as “Tom Yum Goong,” the Thai term for the crisis, and his ability to discuss the fate of exotic currencies, the collapse of the baht, the devaluation of the renminbi, and to have an opinion on whether or not the financier George Soros had caused the collapse of the Malaysian economy by selling the ringgit short. Perhaps only I—or his father and I—noted the desperation behind his performance, the desperation of a mind unable to discipline itself and descending, therefore, into the carnivalesque. A mind imprisoned by itself, serving a life sentence.

  That night he talked and drank without stopping, and all of us who were there would carry fragments of that talk in our memories for the rest of our lives. What crazy, extraordinary talk it was! No limit to the subjects he reached for and used as punching bags: the British royal family, in particular the sex lives of Princess Margaret, who used a Caribbean island as her private boudoir, and Prince Charles, who wanted to be his lover’s tampon; the philosophy of Spinoza (he liked it); the lyrics of Bob Dylan (he recited the whole of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” as reverently as if it were a companion piece to “La Belle Dame sans Merci”); the Spassky-Fischer chess match (Fischer had died the year before); Islamic radicalism (he was against it) and wishy-washy liberalism (which appeased Islam, he said, so he was against it, too); the Pope, whom he called “Ex-Benedict”; the novels of G. K. Chesterton (he was a fan of The Man Who Was Thursday); the unpleasantness of male chest hair; the “unjust treatment” of Pluto, recently demoted to the status of “dwarf planet” after a larger body, Eris, was discovered in the Kuiper Belt; the flaws in Hawking’s theory of black holes; the anachronistic weakness of the American electoral college; the stupidity of non-electoral college students; the sexiness of Margaret Thatcher; and the “twenty-five percent of Americans”—on the far right of the political spectrum—“who are certifiably insane.”

  Oh, but there was also his adoration of Monty Python’s Flying Circus! And all of a sudden he was flustered and stumbling
to find the right words, because one of the dinner guests, a member of a prominent Broadway family of theater owners, had brought along, as his plus-one, the Python Eric Idle, who was then enjoying a revival of fame thanks to the Broadway success of Spamalot, and who arrived just as Petya was expounding, to the serenely elegant sculptor Ubah Tuur (of whom there will be much more to say in a moment), upon his hatred of musicals in general; he exempted only Oklahoma! and West Side Story, and had been offering us idiosyncratic snatches of “I Cain’t Say No” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” while explaining that “all other musicals were shit.” When he saw the Python standing there listening he blushed brightly and then rescued himself by including Mr. Idle’s musical among the blessed, and led the company in a rousing chorus of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

  However, his near-gaffe had ruined his mood. He mopped perspiration from his brow, rushed indoors and disappeared. He did not rejoin the party; and then well after midnight, when most guests had left and only a few of the locals were taking the warm night air, the windows of Petya’s room on the upper floor of the Golden house were flung open and the big man climbed out onto the ledge, swaying drunkenly and dressed in a long black greatcoat that made him look like a Soviet-era student revolutionary. In his agitated condition he sat down heavily on the windowsill with his legs dangling, and cried out to the skies, “I am here by myself! I am here because of myself! I am here because of nobody! I am here all by myself!”