We had the movies in common, and liked to spend weekend afternoons at the IFC Center or Film Forum watching Tokyo Monogatari or Orfeu negro or Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. It was because of the movies that he shortened his name to echo Ray’s immortal Apu. His father objected, he confessed to me. “He says we are Romans, not Bengalis. But that is his preoccupation, not mine.” Nero Golden found our movie dates amusing. When I came by to pick up Apu he was sometimes waiting in the small backyard that gave out onto the communal gardens and, turning to face the house, he’d roar, “Apuleius! Your girlfriend’s here!”
One last note regarding his name: he spoke with admiration about the second-century author of The Golden Ass. “The guy inherited one million sesterces from his father in Algeria and still wrote a masterpiece.” And regarding his older brother’s name as well as his own: “If Petya’s the satyr, or even the satyr-icon, then I’m definitely the fucking donkey.” (Then, a dismissive shrug.) But late at night, when he’d had a few drinks, he inverted the thought. Which felt like a better fit; because, to tell the truth, of the pair, he was the priapically satyric one, while poor Petya was very often the long-eared ass.
On the night of the Goldens’ party in the Gardens, Petya and Apu met the Somali woman, and the ties that held the clan together began to break.
She had been brought to the gathering by her gallerist, who was now also, though not exclusively, Apu’s: a twinkling silver-haired rogue named Frankie Sottovoce who had gained notoriety in his youth by spray-painting the twelve-inch high letters NLF on one of the three monumental Claude Monet paintings of water lilies at the Museum of Modern Art, to protest the war in Vietnam, echoing the act of the unknown vandal who, in the same year, 1974, had scratched the two-foot-high letters IRA into the lower right-hand corner of Peter Paul Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, an act for which Sottovoce, when feeling boastful about his radical-left activist younger self, would also improbably claim responsibility. The paintings were easily restored, the IRA lost its war, the Vietcong won theirs, and the gallerist went on to have a distinguished career, and discovered and successfully promoted, among many others, the metal-cutting sculptor Ubah Tuur.
Ubah means “flower” or “blossom” in Somali, and is sometimes written as Ubax, the “x” in Somali being a throaty sound that Anglophone throats struggle to make, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Hence “Ubah,” a simplified concession to non-Somali pharyngeal incompetence. She was beautiful in the way the women of the Horn are beautiful, long-necked and graceful in the arms, and in the long summer evening she seemed to Petya a flowering tree beneath whose boughs he could rest, healed by her cooling shade, for the rest of his life. At a certain point in the evening she sang: not the ululating Somali song he had expected to emerge from those rich lips but Patti Smith’s famous ode to love itself, full of darkness and desire, with its comforting, treacherous repetitions, can’t hurt you now, can’t hurt you now…and by the time she was done he was lost. He rushed in her direction and stopped dead in front of her, at a loss. Overcome by his sudden rush of impossible, unspeakable love, he began to babble at his just-discovered dream girl about this and that, poetry and subatomic physics and the private lives of movie stars, and she listened gravely, accepting all his short-circuit non sequiturs as if they were entirely natural, and he felt, for once in his life, understood. Then she began to speak and he listened mesmerized, mongoose to her cobra. Afterwards he was able to repeat verbatim every single word that came out of her flawless mouth.
Her early work, she said, was inspired by the primitive artists she had met on a visit to Haiti, who cut oil drums in half, flattened the two halves, and then, using the simplest of tools—hammers and screwdrivers—cut and beat them into intricate latticework images of branches, foliage and birds. She talked to Petya for a long time about using a blowtorch to cut steel and iron into lacelike intricacies and showed him images of her work on her phone: the remains of wrecked (bombed?) cars and tanks, transformed into the most delicate filigree forms, the metal penetrated by shapely patterned air and acquiring an airiness of its own. She spoke in the language of the art world, war of symbols, desirable oppositions, the high-abstract insider jargon, describing her quest for empathetic images creating a balance as well as a clash by contrasting ideas and materials, and she examined, too, the absurdity of having opposing extremist stances, like a wrestler in a tutu. She was a brilliant speaker, charismatic and almost incomprehensibly fast, pushing a hand through her hair and clutching at her head as she spoke; but in the end he burst out (his autism forcing him to speak the truth), “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
Immediately he hated himself. What kind of a fool, with the words “I love you” stuck in his throat, offered his brilliant beloved scorn instead of adoration? Now she would hate him and would be justified in doing so and his life would be meaningless and damned.
She stared at him for a long moment and then burst into healing laughter. “It’s a defense mechanism,” she said. “One worries one will not be taken seriously if one lacks a sufficiency of theory, especially if one is female. Actually, my work speaks pretty clearly for itself. I push beauty into horror and I want it to disturb you and make you think. Come up to Rhinebeck and take a look.”
I’m now sure—as I piece together the puzzle of the Golden house, and try to reconstruct my memory of the exact sequence of events of that important night, setting them down as they come back to me—that this was the point of the evening at which things started to go wrong for Petya, as his desire to accept Ubah’s invitation did battle with the demons that obliged him to fear the outside world. He made a strange gesture with both arms, half-helpless, half-angry, and at once began to soliloquize in a rapid series of non sequiturs about whatever crossed his anguished mind. His mood grew darker as he expostulated on various topics, coming at last to the question of Broadway musicals and his dislike of most of them. Then came the awkward Python episode and his disappearance indoors and then his anguish on the windowsill. Love, in Petya, was never far from despair.
All that summer he was sad, locked in his room bathed in blue light, playing and (as we afterwards discovered) creating computer games of immense complexity and beauty, and dreaming of that haunting face behind a protective face mask and of the steel-cutting flame moving in her hand as she created fantasy and delicacy out of brute metal. He thought of her as a kind of superhero, his blowtorch goddess, and wanted above all things to be with her but he feared the journey, a Prince too full of troubles to be able to pursue his vanished Cinderella. Nor could he call her and tell her how he felt. He was like a continent of erratic garrulity containing a no-go zone of oral paralysis. And finally it was Apu who took pity on him and offered to help. “I’ll rent a car with blacked-out windows,” he declared. “We’re going to get you access.”
Apu swore, afterwards, that that had been his only motive: to get Petya across the frontier of his fear and give him a shot at the girl. But maybe he wasn’t telling the truth.
And so Petya screwed up his courage and made the call, and Ubah Tuur invited the brothers up for the weekend, and was understanding enough to tell him, “There’s a good solid fence all the way around the property, so maybe you can think of it as interior space, like your communal gardens. If you can get your head around that I can show you the work that’s standing on the land as well as what’s in the studio.”
In the last light of day, wearing her soiled work dungarees, her hair loosely piled up under a back-to-front Yankees baseball cap, the protective mask, just removed, dangling from the crook of her elbow: without even trying, she was a knockout. “Here, I want you to see this,” she said, and took Petya’s hand in hers, and led him through the crepuscular land littered with her giant intricate forms, like the lacy armor of immense gods, like battlefield detritus reworked by light-fingered elves, and he uncomplaining, believing in the existence of the fence he could not see in the failing li
ght, not even by the light of the full bright moon above; she rounded the long low farmhouse where she lived, led him between the farmhouse and the barn where she worked, and said, “Look.” And there at the foot of the land, where it fell sharply away, was the rolling river, the wide and silver Hudson, taking his breath away. For a long moment he didn’t even think about the fence, didn’t ask if he was safely enclosed or dangerously exposed to the frightening everything of the world, and when he did begin to ask, “Is there…” and as his hand fell to trembling she held it firmly and said, “The river is the wall. This is a safe place for us all.” And he accepted what she said and was not afraid, and stood there watching the water until she led the brothers indoors to dinner.
He became his loquacious self again in the warm yellow light of her kitchen, eating her mango curry chicken, its sweetness doing battle on his palate with the berbere spices mixed into it. But while he talked on and on about his enthusiasm for the video-gaming world, interspersing accounts of the latest games with recitals of river poetry under the influence of the shining river, her attention wandered. The night lengthened and the script of the visit was thrown away and Ubah Tuur felt an unexpectedness rise in her; a treachery. How is it you’re not married, she asked Petya, a man like you, you’re a catch. But while she said it her eyes slid across to Apu, who was sitting perfectly still, he told me, doing nothing, but afterwards Petya accused him of mumbling, you were muttering something, you bastard, you used black magic on her, while he, Petya, tried to answer Ubah, the words stumbling, a long time ago, yes, someone, but since then the waiting, the waiting for an emotional imperative, and she, talking to him but looking at his brother, And so now, have you found the emotional imperative, flirtatious, but her eyes on Apu, and he, mumbling, according to Petya, though he himself always denied to me that he mumbled.
I know what you did, you rat, Petya would shriek later, maybe you put something in her food also, the spices would have disguised it, some evil chicken entrail powder you got from your Greenpoint witch, and the mumbling, what were you saying, a hex, a hex.
And Apu straight-faced, making matters worse, Where is my father’s pet son now? What about two plus two is four? Four plus four is eight? I did nothing. Nothing.
You fucked her, Petya wailed.
Well, yes. I did that. I’m sorry.
It may have gone somewhat differently. I wasn’t there. It may well have been that the usually loquacious Petya was tongue-tied all night, silenced by love, and lively worldly Apu monopolized the talk, and the woman. It may be that she, Ubah, universally held to be a graceful courteous woman, not usually reckless, surprised herself on this occasion by yielding to sudden lust for the wrong brother, her fellow artist, the rising star, the ladies’ man, the charmer. The motivations of desire are obscure even to the desirous, the desiring and the desired. I do betray / My nobler part to my gross body’s treason, Bard of Avon, Sonnet 151. And so without full knowledge of the why and wherefore, we inflict mortal wounds on those we love.
A dark house. Creaking floorboards. Movements. There is no need to rehearse the banal melodrama of the act. In the morning the guilt on the faces of both the guilty, as easy to read as a headline. Large, heavy Petya, lithe, shaven-headed Apu, the woman between them like a storm cloud. There’s nothing to explain, she said. It’s what happened. I think you both should go.
And then Petya imprisoned by his fear of the world in his brother’s rented car with darkened windows trembled with humiliated, unmanned fury in the back seat, three hours of silent horror as they drove back to the city. At such moments a man’s thoughts may begin to turn to murder.
Eighteen years after Apu was born the old man had an extramarital involvement and was not careful and a pregnancy resulted which he chose not to have aborted, because, in his opinion, it was always his business to do the choosing. The mother was a poor woman whose identity did not become known (a secretary? a whore?) and in return for a certain financial consideration she gave the child up to be raised as his father’s son, left town, and disappeared from her baby’s story. So like the god Dionysus the child was twice born, once of his mother and then again into his father’s world. Dionysus the god was always an outsider, a god of resurrection and arrival, “the god that comes.” He was also androgynous, “man-womanish.” That this was the pseudonym the youngest child of Nero Golden chose for himself in the classical-renaming game reveals that he knew something about himself before he knew it, so to speak. Though at the time the reasons he gave for his choice were, in the first place, that Dionysus adventured far and wide in India, and indeed the mythical Mount Nysa where he was born might have been located on the subcontinent; and, in the second place, that he was the deity of sensual delight, not only Dionysus but, in his Roman incarnation, also Bacchus, god of wine, disorderliness and ecstasy, all of which—Dionysus Golden said—sounded like fun. However, he soon announced that he preferred not to be known by the divine name in full, and went by the plain, near-anonymous single-letter nickname, “D.”
His integration into the family had been no easy matter. With his half brothers, from the beginning, he had poor relations. All his childhood he had felt excluded. They called him Mowgli and howled comically at the moon. His wolf-mother was some jungle whore; theirs was the mother wolf of Rome. (At this point it seems they had decided to be Romulus and Remus, though Apu later denied this to me, or rather suggested that it had been an idea in D’s head, not his own.) They had already mastered Latin and Greek when D was still learning to talk, and they used these secret languages to banish him from their conversations. They both afterwards denied this, too, but admitted that the way he entered the family, and also the age gap, had created serious difficulties, questions of loyalty and natural affection. Now, as a young man, D Golden when in his brothers’ company alternated between ingratiation and rage. It was plain that he needed to love and be loved; there was a tide of emotion in him that needed to wash over people and he hoped for a returning tide to wash over him. When this kind of passionate reciprocity didn’t happen he snapped and ranted and withdrew. He was twenty-two years old when the family took possession of the Golden house. Sometimes he seemed wise beyond his years. At other times he behaved like a four-year-old child.
When, as a child, he plucked up his courage and asked his father and stepmother about the woman who gave him birth, his father would simply throw up his hands and leave the room. His stepmother would grow angry. “Leave it!” she cried one fateful day. “That was a woman of no consequence. She went away, got sick and died.”
What was it like, to be Mowgli, born of a woman of no consequence, who had been so cruelly cast off by his father and then in the outer darkness had died one of the myriad deaths of the forgotten poor? I heard a shocking story later, from Apu, after the code of silence was broken. There had been a time when the old man’s relationship with their mother was in difficulties. He raged at her and she shouted back. I sat up and paid attention because this was the first time in my conversations with the Goldens that the faceless, nameless woman, Nero’s wife—since ancient times an unlucky thing to be—had walked out onto the stage and opened her mouth; and because, according to the story, Nero had shouted and screamed, and she had screamed and shouted back at him. This was not the Nero I knew, in whom the force of his rage was kept under control, emerging only in the form of self-glorifying bombast.
At any rate: after the explosion the family split into two camps. The older boys took their mother’s side but Dionysus Golden stood firmly by his father and persuaded the patriarch that his wife, Petya and Apu’s mother, was not fit to run the household. Nero summoned his wife and ordered her to surrender the keys; and after that for a time it was D who gave instructions and ordered groceries and decided what food would be cooked in the kitchens. It was a public humiliation, a dishonoring. Her sense of her own honor was profoundly linked to that iron ring, a majestic O three inches in diameter, from which hung maybe twenty keys, large and small, keys to the larder, to
cellar strongboxes packed with gold ingots and other arcana of the rich, and to various secret crevices all over the mansion where she concealed only she knew what: old love letters, wedding jewelry, antique shawls. It was the symbol of her domestic authority, and her pride and self-respect hung there along with the keys. She was the mistress of the locks, and without that role she was nothing. Two weeks after she was commanded by her husband to give up the key ring, the deposed lady of the house attempted to take her own life. Pills were swallowed, she was found by Apu and Petya slumped at the foot of the marble stairs, an ambulance came. She was clutching Apu by the wrist and the ambulance men said, please come with us, her holding on to you is important, she’s holding on to life.
In the ambulance the two paramedics played good cop, bad cop.—Stupid bitch scaring your family, you think we have nothing better to do, we have serious things to deal with, real injuries, emergencies that are not self-inflicted, we should just leave you to die.—No the poor thing, don’t be so hard on her, she must be so sad, it’s all right darling, we will look after you, things will get better, every cloud has a silver lining.—To hell with the silver lining, she doesn’t even have a cloud, look at her house, her money, these people think they own us.—Don’t mind him darling, it’s just his way, we are here to take care of you, you’re in good hands now. She was trying to mutter something but Apu couldn’t make out the words. He knew what they were doing, they were trying to keep her from slipping into unconsciousness, and afterwards, after the stomach pump which he had had to watch because of her claw-hand clutching at his wrist, when she was conscious again in a hospital bed, she told him, The only thing I was trying to say in the ambulance was, my child, will you please punch that rude bastard on the nose.