“Violence exists. I know this. The question of value remains.”
“You mean, in the case of yourself and your loved ones, you make an exception. In this case they must be in a charmed circle and the horror of the world cannot touch them and when it does it is a fault in reality.”
“Now you are just unpleasant. What do you know.”
“I am closer every day to death than you, old man, and you are very old,” she said, affectionately, embracing him. “And I am your fool, so I can tell you the truth.”
“Believe me,” he said, “I know more about death than you. It’s life that I can’t grasp.”
“Permit me to grasp this,” she said, and the subject changed.
After their session things got worse because Auntie Mercedes-Benz was nowhere to be seen. It later transpired that she had parked around the block and fallen asleep, and the earplug of the audio cord connected to her phone had fallen out, so she didn’t hear it ringing. Nero rang Mlle. Loulou’s door in a panic, utterly flustered, unable to handle the situation, and Loulou had to come down and hail a yellow cab and get into it with him and bring him home. When they got back to Macdougal Street he was still quivering and so with a sigh she got out of the car, helped him out of it, and rang the doorbell. Mlle. Loulou was a tall, striking woman from the place she insisted on calling “L’Indochine” and she maintained her composure when Vasilisa Golden herself answered the door. “Ma’am,” she said, “your husband is not himself.”
After a silence, Vasilisa answered coarsely. “Tell me,” she said, “can he still get it up?”
“If you don’t know that, lady,” Mlle. Loulou replied, turning to leave, “I’m surely not going to be the individual to fill you in.”
Death speaks, in Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppey (1933): “There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
I believe we all felt there would be another death. In those last weeks I didn’t often see Petya, perhaps nobody did except for the Australian, but it’s my conviction that he knew it too, that he saw Death threatening him in the marketplace and became desperate to avoid it, to mount a borrowed horse and gallop toward Samarra, believing he was escaping from what he was in fact riding to meet. The last of the three Golden men who had come with their father to America exuding such princely grandeur, such powerful strangeness, found in his brothers’ deaths the motivation he needed to survive, and he made an immense effort to pull his life back onto something like a proper course, to turn his back upon Death and reach out to life.
The cat was Nero’s idea. He had heard somehow, had received a message from somewhere out there in the nonstop jibberjabber of the information multiverse, that the company of cats could be helpful to autistic adults; and became convinced that a feline pet might be Petya’s salvation. Fuss and Blather duly showed Nero photographs online of immediately available pusses and when he saw the white alpine lynx he clapped his hands and said, “That’s the one.” Blather and Fuss tried to persuade him that an alpine lynx was closer to a wild beast than a pet, wouldn’t Petya be happier with a nice fat lazy long-haired chocolate or blue Persian, they suggested, but he was adamant in his new vague way and they gave up and went uptown to the cat shop and brought the monster home. It turned out that Nero knew his son. Petya immediately fell in love, named the cat Leo though she was female, and took her to his bosom, vanishing with her into the room of blue light. This was a cat who could leap up and catch a bird in flight, whose purr was like a roar, and who somehow, with a wild animal’s instinct, knew the way through the jungle of Petya’s inner torment to the good place in his heart. At night when the house was still and only the ghosts of the dead walked its corridors the cat sang softly in Petya’s ear and gave him back what he had lost, the blessed gift of sleep.
The world outside the haunted house had begun to feel like a lie. Outside the house it was the Joker’s world, the world of what reality had begun to mean in America, which was to say, a kind of radical untruth: phoniness, garishness, bigotry, vulgarity, violence, paranoia, and looking down upon it all from his dark tower, a creature with white skin and green hair and bright, bright red lips. Inside the Golden house the subject was the fragility of life, the easy suddenness of death, and the slow fatal resurrection of the past. Sometimes at night Nero Golden could be seen standing in the dark outside the room of his firstborn child, head bowed, hands folded, in a posture of what might have been thought—if he weren’t so widely known as an unbeliever—to be prayer. What might have been thought to be a father pleading with his son, not you too, live, live.
We didn’t know where death would come from. We didn’t guess that it had already, at least once, been inside the house.
After he turned away from his son’s closed door, Nero Golden would go back to his study, take the Guadagnini violin out of its case, and play his Bach Chaconne. On the other side of that closed door, Petya was cared for by his lynx, and the drinking was somewhat—but only somewhat—reduced. And he no longer cried out in anguish while he slept.
The Sottovoce lawsuit was settled suddenly, at twenty-five percent of the original claim. Frankie Sottovoce wasn’t well. There was a heart condition, an irregularity, and beneath the medical aspect a sickness also of the soul. The twinkle in his eye had dimmed and the familiar flamboyance of his waving arms had diminished into a languid flapping. Ubah’s death had hit him hard. It was clear that he had been carrying a secret torch for her but, seeing her deeply embroiled with Apu, had held back from declaring his feelings. Strangely for someone who spent his days in the hothoused, networking world of art, exuding extrovert bonhomie, the gallerist had led a secretive, often solitary private life, briefly married, childless, long divorced, living in a pricey suite at the Mercer Hotel and ordering room service whenever his presence was not required at an art function. A friendly man, he had few friends, and once in the Gardens he had spoken to Vito Tagliabue about Vito’s father Biaggio’s long incarceration in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo. “Your poor parent passed away alone and his body was discovered not by those who loved him but by a member of the hotel staff,” he said. “This will also be my fate. They will bring up a burger and a glass of red wine and find that they are too late to grant me my last supper.” His hidden feelings for Ubah had overwhelmed him after she died. Now, as the vengeful tide ebbed, he accepted that the destroyed work had been adequately insured and that his multimillion-dollar action against the Goldens had been born of the turbulence of his emotions. “I don’t care anymore,” he told his lawyers. “Let’s close it out.” I saw him just once in those days, at the Matthew Barney opening at Gladstone, and was shocked by the change in him, the paleness, the lassitude. “Good to see you, young man,” he greeted me, flapping a hand. “Good to see that there are still people who are full of gas and roaring ahead one hundred miles per hour.” I understood that he was telling me about himself, that his gas tank was dry, that he was running on empty. I tried to address the subject he would not raise. “She was an extraordinary woman,” I said. He looked angry in his new exhausted way. “So what?” he said. “Dead is not extraordinary, everybody does it. Art is extraordinary, almost nobody can do it. Dead is just dead.”