Life in the Gardens had always been somewhat reminiscent of Rear Window. Everyone looked out and across at everyone else, all of us brightly illuminated in our windows, which were like miniature movie screens within the larger screen, playing out our dramas for our neighbors’ pleasure; as if the actors in movies could watch other movies while those other movies also watched them. In Rear Window James Stewart lived not far away, at the fictional “125 West Ninth Street,” which would, in the real world, be 125 Christopher Street—that is, Ninth Street west of Sixth Avenue—but the Gardens would have worked just as well. It was my plan to introduce, in my filmed version, a few residents who would be deliberate hommages to the characters in Hitchcock’s great film, Miss Torso the extrovert dancer, Miss Lonelyhearts the older single woman, and so on. Maybe even a traveling jewelry salesman, cast as a Raymond Burr lookalike. It had not been any part of my plan to develop the storyline to include an attempted murder, but this is what stories will do to you, they take off in unexpected directions and you have to hang on by their coattails. And so it was that I was crossing the Gardens from Mr. U Lnu Fnu’s building to the Golden house when Vito Tagliabue stuck his handsome head, its hair slicked back and glistening, out of his back door and actually said, to my immense surprise, “Pssst!”
It stopped me in my tracks and my brow, I admit, furrowed. “Excuse me,” I said, to clarify things, “did you just now say ‘Pssst’?”
“Si,” he hissed, beckoning me to him. “Is it a problem?”
“No,” I answered, approaching. “It’s just that I never heard anyone say ‘pssst’ before.”
He pulled me into his kitchen and shut the garden door. “What do they say, then?” He had an agitated air. “It is not an American word?”
“Oh, I guess they might say, ‘Hey!’ or ‘Excuse me?’ or ‘Got a minute?’ ”
“It’s not the same,” Vito Tagliabue pronounced.
“Anyway,” I said.
“Anyway,” he agreed.
“There was something you wanted?”
“Yes. Yes. It is important. But it is hard to say. I speak in total confidence of course. I am certain of your integrity, that you will not say you heard this from me.”
“What is it, Vito.”
“It is a hunch. You say hunch? Yes, a hunch.”
I gestured with my hands, continue, please.
“This Vasilisa. This wife of Signor Nero. She is a hard case. She is ruthless. Like all…” he paused. I thought he was going to speak from personal bitterness, like all wives, or all women. “…like all Russians.”
“What are you saying, Vito.”
“I am saying, she will kill him. She precisely at the moment is killing him. I see his face when he walks here. This is not his old-age decline. This is something else.”
His ex-wife Bianca Tagliabue had moved into the house of her new lover, Carlos Hurlingham, my “Mr. Arribista,” across the way. Every day the new lovers flaunted themselves in the Gardens, humiliating Vito, rubbing his nose in their love. If anyone had murder on his mind, I thought, it was probably Vito himself. However, I humored him a little longer.
“How is she doing this,” I asked.
He shrugged operatically. “I don’t know. I have not the details. I just see him looking sick. Sick in the wrong way. Maybe something with his medications. He has to take many medications. So, is easy. Yes, something with the medications, I am sure. Almost sure.”
“Why would she do this,” I pressed him. Again, a shrug and a wave of the arms. “It is obvious,” he said. “All the other heirs, they are gone now. Only her baby remains. And if by chance Nero also”—here he drew a finger across his throat—“then who inherits? In Latin it is the phrase, cui bono?—who benefits?—you see? It is perfectly clear.”
At the heart of the matter was my child. My son aged two and a half who barely knew me, who kept forgetting my name, to whom I could not send gifts, with whom I could not play in the Gardens or beyond them, my son the heir to another man’s fortune, his mother’s passport to the future. My son in whose little face I so clearly saw my own. I was surprised that no one else seemed to notice the strong likeness, that in fact people said he looked just like his father who was not his father, a victory of the ostensible over the actual. People see what they are supposed to see.
Vespasian, what kind of a name was Vespasian, anyway. It irritated me more and more. “Little Vespa,” indeed. A little Vespa was what Audrey Hepburn drove so recklessly around the Eternal City on her Roman Holiday, with Gregory Peck panicky on the pillion. My son deserved a better handle than those movie stars’ handlebars. He deserved at the very least the name of one of the grand masters of the cinema, Luis or Kenji or Akira or Sergei, Ingmar or Andrzej or Luchino or Michelangelo, François or Jean-Luc or Jean or Jacques. Or Orson or Stanley or Billy or even, prosaically, Clint. I had begun to dream only-half-unseriously of a kidnapping, or running away with my Federico or Alfred and escaping into the world of cinema itself, plunging into the movies in the opposite direction to Jeff Daniels in the Woody Allen movie, breaking the fourth wall to dive into the movies rather than out of them into the world. Who needed the world when you could run across the desert behind Peter O’Toole’s camel or, with Kubrick’s astronaut Keir Dullea, murder the mad computer HAL 9000 while it sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do”? What was the point of reality if you could skip with a lion and a scarecrow down the Yellow Brick Road, or descend a grand staircase beside Gloria Swanson, ready for Mr. DeMille to shoot your close-up? Yes, my son and I, hand in hand, would marvel at the gigantic buttocks and breasts of the whores in Fellini’s Roma and sit in despair on a Roman sidewalk mourning a stolen bicycle and jump into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and fly back to the future and be free.
But it couldn’t happen. We were all trapped in Vasilisa’s charade, the child most of all, the child was her winning move. For a moment I wondered exactly how ruthless Vasilisa might be; had she somehow engineered the deaths of two of the three Golden boys at least, and might she also have put a hit out on the third if he hadn’t taken his own life? But I had seen too many movies, and was succumbing to the same melodrama as lovelorn, angry Vito Tagliabue. I shook my head to clear it. No, she was probably not a murderer or a commissioner of murders. She was just—“just!”—a conniving and manipulative creature who was close to winning her war.