“There’s also ze.”
“There’s also ey.”
“There’s also hir, xe, hen, ve, ne, per, thon, and Mx.”
“You see. There’s a lot.”
“Thon for example is a mixture of that and one.”
“Mx is instead of Ms. and is pronounced mix. This is one I personally like.”
“It’s more than pronouns, naturally. Some of this I told you at the Museum that first time. Words are important. You need to be certain of your identity unless your certainty is that you’re uncertain in which case maybe you’re genderfluid.”
“Or maybe transfeminine, because you’re born male, identify with many aspects of femaleness but you don’t feel you actually are a woman.”
“The word woman is being detached from biology. Also the word man.”
“Or if you don’t identify with woman-ness or man-ness maybe you’re nonbinary.”
“So, there’s no rush. There’s a lot to think about.”
“A lot to learn.”
“Transition is like translation. You’re moving across from one language into another.”
“Some people pick up languages easily. For others, it’s hard. But for this, there is professional help.”
“Think about the Navajo. They recognize four genders. As well as male and female there are the Nádleehi, the two-spirits, born as a male, but functioning in the role of a woman, or vice versa, obviously.”
“You can be what you choose to be.”
“Sexual identity is not a given. It’s a choice.”
D has remained silent up to now. Finally he speaks. “Didn’t the argument used to be the other way around? Being gay wasn’t a choice, it was a biological necessity? So now we’re saying it’s a choice after all?”
“Choosing an identity,” Ivy Manuel says, “is not like choosing cereal at the supermarket.”
“To say ‘choosing’ can also be a way of saying ‘being chosen.’ ”
“But it’s a choice now?”
“For this there is professional help. With help, your choice will become clear to you.”
“It will become necessary.”
“So then it won’t be a choice?”
“This is just a word. Why are you getting so hung up on this? It’s just a word.”
Blackout.
At 7 A.M. on the morning of his wedding, one of the hottest days of the summer, with hurricane warnings on the weather reports, Nero Golden went, as usual, to play tennis at Fourth and Lafayette with three members of his close-knit group of friends-slash-business-partners-slash-clients. These mysterious men, there were five of them in all, I think, all looked alike: tough, walnut brown from prolonged exposure to expensive sunshine in expensive locations, with thinning hair worn close to the head, clean-shaven, strong-jawed, barrel-chested, hairy-legged. In their sporting whites they looked like a team of retired Marines, except that Marines could never have afforded the watches they wore; I counted two Rolexes, a Vacheron Constantin, a Piaget, an Audemars Piguet. Rich, powerful alpha males. He never introduced them to us or invited them to the Gardens to engage in social chat. They were his guys. He kept them to himself.
When I asked his sons how the old man had made his fortune I got a different answer every time. “Construction.” “Real estate.” “Safes and strongboxes.” “Online betting business.” “Yarn trading.” “Shipping.” “Venture capitalism.” “Textiles.” “Film production.” “Mind your own business.” “Steel.” After my parents the professors had identified him for me I began, to the best of my ability, quietly to investigate the truth or otherwise of these extremely various assertions. I found that the man we knew as N. J. Golden had formed habits of secrecy long before he arrived among us, and the web of false fronts, proxies and ghost corporations he had set up to protect his dealings from public scrutiny was far too complex for me—just a young man dreaming of the movies—to penetrate from a distance. He had his fingers in many pies, with a reputation as a fearsome raider. He cloaked himself in benami anonymity but when he made his move, everyone knew who the player was. He had had a nickname back in the country that could not be named. “The Cobra.” If I ever succeeded in making a movie about him, I thought, maybe that should be its title. Or maybe King Cobra. But after due consideration I set those titles aside. I already had my title.
The Golden House.
My investigations led me to the notorious 2G Spectrum scam, which had recently hit the headlines in the country that could not be named. It appeared that in that no-name country members of the no-name government had corruptly sold cellphone frequency licenses to favored corporations for startlingly low prices, and something like $26 billion had accrued in illicit profits to the companies so favored. According to Time magazine, which a few people still read in those days, it ranked second on their Top Ten Abuses of Power list, right behind the Watergate affair. I read the names and stories of the companies that had been granted the licenses and found the same kind of web favored by Nero, an intricate system of companies owned by other companies in which yet other companies bought significant shares. My best guess was that Nero was the force behind the biggest of these companies, Eagle Telecom, which had merged with a German business, Verbunden Extratech, and then sold forty-five percent of its stock to Abu Dhabi’s Murtasín, who renamed it Murtasín-EV Telecom. Legal proceedings were being initiated against many of the new license-holders in a series of special courts set up by the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI. This was my “aha” moment. I had never believed that Nero would have made such elaborate plans to leave his country for no reason—he could not have foreseen the death of his wife in the terrorist attack on the iconic old hotel—and his possible involvement in this immense scandal provided a much more convincing reason for him to make preparations in case he needed to fly the coop. Naturally I did not dare to confront him with my suspicions. But my imaginary film, or my dreamed-of series of films, was becoming much more attractive; a financial and political thriller, or a series of such thrillers, with my neighbors at the very heart of it. This was exciting.
Weddings always make me think of the movies. (Everything makes me think of the movies.) Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate hammering on a glass wall in a church in Santa Barbara to steal Katharine Ross away from the altar. Grannies dancing in New Delhi in the rainy season in Monsoon Wedding. The ominous spilling of wine on the wedding gown in The Deer Hunter. The Bride shot in the head on her wedding day in Kill Bilclass="underline" Vol. 2. Peter Cook performing the mawiage cewemony in The Pwincess Bwide. The unforgettable wedding banquet in Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, at which the guests at a rural Chinese marriage in impoverished Shaanxi province are served wooden fish instead of real food, because there are no actual fish to be had, but at a wedding it is important to have fish on the table. But when Nero Golden married Vasilisa Arsenyeva in the Macdougal-Sullivan Historic Gardens at four o’clock in the afternoon, what inescapably came to mind was the most celebrated of all the wedding scenes ever filmed, except that this time it wasn’t Connie Corleone dancing with her father, this time the patriarch danced with his own young bride, as I imagined the rich Italian-American melody written for the movie scene by the director’s father Carmine Coppola welling up and drowning out the actual music of that moment in the Gardens, which with lamentable banality was a recording of the Beatles singing “In My Life.”