After the end of the lawsuit came the end of community service. Petya, off that hook as well, very determinedly revived. He came out of his room with Lett the therapist, cradling his cat in the crook of his left arm, and, finding his father standing there in pitiful love, placed his right hand on Nero’s shoulder, looked his father forcefully in the eye, and said, “We’re all going to be fine.” He repeated this sentence thirty-seven times, as if he were retweeting himself. To make it true by the force of repetition. To chase the Shadow away by unquenchably asserting and reasserting the Light. I was there that day, because after a hiatus Petya had texted me to ask me to come over. He wanted witnesses and that, I knew, was my place in the Golden story. Or it had been, until in Vasilisa’s bed I crossed the line that divides the reporter from the participant. Like a journalist throwing a grenade from the trenches, I was a soldier now; and therefore, like all soldiers, a legitimate target.
“Hi, gorgeous,” he said when he saw me. “Still the most handsome man in the world.”
Something about the Petya tableau that day resembled to my mind a grand oil painting, a Night Watch, maybe; we stood in Rembrandt’s golden light and luminous shadows and felt, or maybe I only imagine that we felt, like guardians of an embattled world. Petya with his alpine lynx and his solicitous Australian and his furrowed-brow father and his large crooked smile. And servitors at angles in the corners of the frame. Was I the only person in the Golden house that day who heard the beating of fatal wings, the proleptic sighs of the guilty undertaker, the slow falling of the curtain at the end of the play? I’m writing against time now, my words following not so long after the people in them, writing double, because I’m also finally finishing up my Golden screenplay, my fiction about these men who made fictions of themselves, and the two are blurring into each other until I’m not sure anymore what’s real and what I made up. In what I call real I don’t believe in ghosts and death angels but they keep pouring into what I invent like a ticketless crowd bursting through the gates at a big game. I’m sitting on the fault line between my outer world and the world within, astride the crack in everything, hoping some light gets in.
Inside the house it felt that month like a frozen time, a waiting time, the characters trapped in oil on canvas, striking attitudes, and unable to move. And outside in the street there was a plague of jokers, crazy slashmouthed clowns frightening the children, or their phantoms were, anyway. Very few people in the city claimed actually to have seen a creepy clown that fall but reports of them were everywhere, the reports put on fright wigs, the rumors stalked the streets giggling and making witchy fingers with both hands and screeching about the end time, the last of days. Ghost clowns in an unreal reality. Eschatological insanity coming to the polls, and the Joker himself screaming into a mirror, the molester screaming about molestation, the propagandist accusing the whole world of propaganda, the bully whining about being ganged up on, the crook pointing a crooked finger at his rival and calling her crooked, a child’s game become the national ugliness, I-know-I-am-but-what-are-you, and the days ticking away, America’s sanity at war with its dementedness, and people like me, who didn’t believe in superstitions, walking around with their hands in their pockets and their fingers crossed.
And then finally there was, after all, a scary clown.
After a long period of estrangement, Vasilisa wanted to talk. She took me into the Gardens and made sure we were out of range of interested ears. The new note of power in her voice told me she was still inhabiting her Big Nurse persona, still making it clear that from now on she was the one in the catbird seat. “He’s not the same man,” she said. “I am having to accustom myself to that. But he is the father of my child.”—This, to my face, looking me right in the eye! The daring of it was breathtaking. I felt the red mist rising. “If you contradict me,” she said, raising a hand before I had said a word, “I will have you killed. Be in no doubt that I know who to call.”
I turned to leave. “Stop,” she said. “This is not how I want our conversation to go. I want to say, I need your help with him.”
I laughed out loud at that. “You really are an extraordinary human being,” I said. “If in fact you are a human being. That these two remarks can come out of your mouth consecutively is awe-inspiring. But not really indicative of your membership of the human race.”
“I understand that there is a trouble between us,” she said. “But Nero is innocent of that and it is for Nero that I ask. The grief in him as well as the decline of his mind. Which is slow, the medication helps, but it is also inevitable. The progression. I fear for him. He wanders off. I need someone to go with him. Even if he goes to that woman I want you to go there as well. He is looking for answers. Life has become an agony and he wants a solution to its mystery. I don’t want him to find it in her arms.”
“I can’t do it,” I told her. “I’m preparing a feature film. It’s a busy time.”
“You won’t do it,” she said. “That is what you’re saying. You have become a selfish man.”
“You have many resources,” I said. “People at your disposal. Use them. I’m not your employee.” I spoke sharply. I didn’t feel in the mood to be ordered around by her.
She was wearing a long white dress, tight in the bodice, loose below the waist, with a high lacy ruff of a collar. She leaned against a tree and I thought all at once about Elvira Madigan, eponymous heroine of Bo Widerberg’s beautiful film, the doomed lover walking a tightrope in a wood. She closed her eyes and spoke in a voice like a sigh. “It’s all such a charade,” she said. “The family name is not the name. Mlle. Loulou is not Loulou. Maybe I am not me and that lady playing the part of my mother is just somebody I hired to play the part. You know what I mean? Nothing is real.” These were scattered thoughts and I saw that beneath her self-control she was in a torment of her own. “Only my child is real,” she said. “And through him I will come into a real place in the end.” She shook her head. “Until then everyone is a kind of performance,” she said. “Maybe even you. You have become like a priest confessor to this family but you are no priest, who are you really, what do you want, maybe I should be suspicious, maybe you are the Judas.” Then she laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said, briskly, beginning to move away. “We are all on edge. Things will improve one day. And yes, go, be with your girl, who knows nothing of anything, and it’s better that way.”
That was another of her threats, of course, I thought, watching her as she retreated. She would not “have me killed” but she would, if necessary, destroy my happiness by telling Suchitra what I had done. I knew then that I had to be the first to tell Suchitra, whatever the cost. I had to find the courage for the truth and hope our love was strong enough to survive it.