I had come to despise the second Mrs. Golden for her airs, for the way she discarded me like a used tissue once I had served her purpose, for the gun in her handbag, for her sanctimonious worship of an imitation icon, for her fake babushka mother, for the undeniable truth that everything she did, every gesture, every inflection of her voice, every kiss, every embrace, was motivated not by true feeling but by cold-blooded calculation. The wisdom of the spider, the wisdom of the shark. She was loathsome. I loathed her and wanted to do her harm.
In the retired police inspector’s British-Indian delivery, in his rigid self-control, in his voice that was never raised even when cursing Nero Golden to eternal damnation, I recognized something of myself. Maybe Suchitra had been right when she said that everyone in my story was an aspect of my own nature. Certainly I heard myself not only in Mr. Mastan’s suppression of feeling but also, at this moment, in Nero’s impotent dotard’s shriek. I was no dotard, not yet, but I knew something about powerlessness. Even now as I chose to cast away the shackles placed by Vasilisa on my tongue I understood that the truth would hurt me most of all. Yet I would tell it. When Riya called me summoning me to the Golden house, something’s going to happen, Riya in her own state of distress and confusion, in which mourning was now mingled with dreadful knowledge, provoked in me a flood of feeling I didn’t immediately understand but whose meaning had now, abruptly, become clear.
The election was upon us and Suchitra in her usual indefatigable way had volunteered to work the phones and then on Tuesday do the legwork and get out the vote. She should have been the one with whom I first sat down, calmly, to confess, to explain, to express my love and beg forgiveness. I owed her that at the very least and instead here I was up on my hind legs in the Golden living room with my mouth open and the fateful words trembling on my lips.
No, there’s no need to set down the words themselves.
Near the end of Satyajit Ray’s sublime Pather Panchali can be found what I consider to be the greatest single scene in the history of the cinema. Harihar the father of little Apu and his older sister Durga, who left them in their village with their mother Sarbajaya while he went to the city to try to earn some money, returns—having done well—with gifts for his children, not knowing that in his absence young Durga has fallen ill and died. He finds Sarbajaya sitting on the pyol, the porch of their home, silenced by tragedy, unable to welcome him home or respond to what he tells her. Not understanding, he begins to show her the children’s gifts. Then in an extraordinary moment we see his face change when Sarbajaya, whose back is to the camera, tells him the news about Durga. At this moment, understanding the inadequacy of dialogue, Ray allows music to surge up and fill the soundtrack, the high piercing music of the tar-shehnai crying out the parents’ grief more eloquently than their words ever could.
I have no music to offer. I offer only silence instead.
When I had said what there was to say, Riya walked across the room to stand in front of me. Then, raising her right hand, she hit me as hard as she could on the left side of my face. That is for Suchitra, she said. Then with the back of her hand she hit me even harder on the right side, and told me, That is for you. I stood still and did not move.
What did he say? Nero, in the confusion of the morning, wanted to know. What is he talking about?
I went over to where he sat, got down on my haunches, and looked him in the eye, and said it again.
I am the father of your son. Little Vespa. Your only surviving child is not yours. He is mine.
Vasilisa descended upon me in Byronic fury, came down like the wolf on the fold, but before she reached me I saw a light come on in the old man’s eyes and then there he was, present again, alert, the man of power returning from his cloudy wandering exile and reentering his skin.
Bring the boy, he commanded his wife. She shook her head. He shouldn’t be a part of this, she said.
Bring him at once.
And when Little Vespa was brought—Vasilisa holding him, the babushka mother beside her, the two women’s bodies half turned away from the man of the house, shielding the child between them—Nero looked keenly at the boy, as if for the first time, then at me, then back at him, and back at me again, and so on, many times; until the child, unprovoked but perceiving the crisis as children can, burst into noisy tears. Vasilisa gestured to the older woman, enough. The boy was removed from his father’s presence. He did not look in my direction even once.
Yes, Nero said. I see. He said no more but I seemed to see, hanging in the air above his head, the terrible words once thought by Emma Bovary about her daughter Berthe. It’s strange how ugly this child is.
You see nothing, said Vasilisa, moving toward him.
Nero Golden raised his hand to stop her in her tracks. Then, lowering the hand, he spat on the back of it.
Tell me everything, he said to me.
I told him.
I don’t have to listen to this, Riya said, and left the house. I refuse to listen to this, said Vasilisa, and stayed in the room, listening.
When I had finished he thought for a long time. Then he said, his voice strong and low, Now my wife and I must speak alone.
I turned to go, but before I left the room he said a strange thing.
If some harm should befall us both, I appoint you the boy’s guardian. I will have the lawyers draw up the paperwork today.
No harm will befall us both, Vasilisa said. Also, it’s the weekend.
We will speak privately now, Nero answered her. Please show René out.
As I walked away down Macdougal toward Houston, the adrenaline drained from my body and I was seized by fear for the future. I knew what had to be done, what I could not avoid doing. I tried to call Suchitra. Voicemail. I texted her, we need to speak. I wandered in the city making my way home down Sixth Avenue and over into Tribeca, blind to the streets. On the corner of North Moore and Greenwich I got her reply. Home late what. There was no way to answer. No prob see you whenever. I turned right on Chambers and walked past Stuyvesant High School. I expected the worst. What else could happen? What could she think of me, of what I had to tell her? Only the worst.
But if human nature were not a mystery, we’d have no need of poets.
Later. Let’s say, quite a while later. Some wise man once suggested that Manhattan below 14th Street at 3 A.M. on November 28 was Batman’s Gotham City; Manhattan between 14th and 110th Streets on the brightest and sunniest day in July was Superman’s Metropolis. And Spider-Man, that Johnny-come-lately, hung upside down in Queens thinking about power and responsibility. All these cities, the invisible imaginary cities lying over and around and interwoven with the real one: all still intact, even though after the election the Joker—his hair green and luminous with triumph, his skin white as a Klansman’s hood, his lips dripping anonymous blood—now ruled them all. The Joker had indeed become a king and lived in a golden house in the sky. The citizens reached for clichés and reminded themselves that there were still birds in the trees and the sky hadn’t fallen and it was, often, still blue. The city still stood. And on the radio and on the music apps playing in the Bluetooth headphones of the careless young the beat went on. The Yankees still worrying about their pitching rotation, the Mets still underperforming, and the Knicks still doomed by the curse of being the Knicks. The internet was still full of lies and the business of the truth was broken. The best had lost all conviction and the worst were filled with passionate intensity and the weakness of the just was revealed by the wrath of the unjust. But the Republic remained more or less intact. Let me just set that down because it was a statement often made to comfort those of us who were not easily to be comforted. It’s a fiction in a way, but I repeat it. I know that after the storm, another storm, and then another. I know that stormy weather is the forecast forever and happy days aren’t here again and intolerance is the new black and the system really is rigged only not in the way the evil clown has tried to make us believe. Sometimes the bad guys win and what does one do when the world one believes in turns out to be a paper moon and a dark planet rises and says, No, I am the world. How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born. What I did was to retreat into private life—to hold on to life as I had known it, its dailiness and strength, and to insist on the ability of the moral universe of the Gardens to survive even the fiercest assault. And now therefore let my little story have its final moments in the midst of whatever macro garbage is around as you read this, whatever manufactroversy, whatever horror or stupidity or ugliness or disgrace. Let me invite the giant victorious green-haired cartoon king and his billion-dollar movie franchise to take a back seat and let real people drive the bus. Our little lives are perhaps as much as we are able to comprehend.