One summer evening—this was during the Goldens’ first summer among us—they threw a glittering soirée, spilling out from their mansion onto the lawns we all shared. They had employed the city’s finest publicists and party planners, so a sizable selection of “everybody” showed up, a goodly proportion of the boldface menagerie as well as us, the neighbors, and that night Petya was on fire, glittering-eyed and babbling like a brook. I watched him twirl and pirouette in his Savile Row finery among and around the starlet and the singer and the playwright and the whore, and the money guys discussing the Asian financial crisis, who were impressed by his mastery of such terms as “Tom Yum Goong,” the Thai term for the crisis, and his ability to discuss the fate of exotic currencies, the collapse of the baht, the devaluation of the renminbi, and to have an opinion on whether or not the financier George Soros had caused the collapse of the Malaysian economy by selling the ringgit short. Perhaps only I—or his father and I—noted the desperation behind his performance, the desperation of a mind unable to discipline itself and descending, therefore, into the carnivalesque. A mind imprisoned by itself, serving a life sentence.
That night he talked and drank without stopping, and all of us who were there would carry fragments of that talk in our memories for the rest of our lives. What crazy, extraordinary talk it was! No limit to the subjects he reached for and used as punching bags: the British royal family, in particular the sex lives of Princess Margaret, who used a Caribbean island as her private boudoir, and Prince Charles, who wanted to be his lover’s tampon; the philosophy of Spinoza (he liked it); the lyrics of Bob Dylan (he recited the whole of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” as reverently as if it were a companion piece to “La Belle Dame sans Merci”); the Spassky-Fischer chess match (Fischer had died the year before); Islamic radicalism (he was against it) and wishy-washy liberalism (which appeased Islam, he said, so he was against it, too); the Pope, whom he called “Ex-Benedict”; the novels of G. K. Chesterton (he was a fan of The Man Who Was Thursday); the unpleasantness of male chest hair; the “unjust treatment” of Pluto, recently demoted to the status of “dwarf planet” after a larger body, Eris, was discovered in the Kuiper Belt; the flaws in Hawking’s theory of black holes; the anachronistic weakness of the American electoral college; the stupidity of non-electoral college students; the sexiness of Margaret Thatcher; and the “twenty-five percent of Americans”—on the far right of the political spectrum—“who are certifiably insane.”
Oh, but there was also his adoration of Monty Python’s Flying Circus! And all of a sudden he was flustered and stumbling to find the right words, because one of the dinner guests, a member of a prominent Broadway family of theater owners, had brought along, as his plus-one, the Python Eric Idle, who was then enjoying a revival of fame thanks to the Broadway success of Spamalot, and who arrived just as Petya was expounding, to the serenely elegant sculptor Ubah Tuur (of whom there will be much more to say in a moment), upon his hatred of musicals in general; he exempted only Oklahoma! and West Side Story, and had been offering us idiosyncratic snatches of “I Cain’t Say No” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” while explaining that “all other musicals were shit.” When he saw the Python standing there listening he blushed brightly and then rescued himself by including Mr. Idle’s musical among the blessed, and led the company in a rousing chorus of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
However, his near-gaffe had ruined his mood. He mopped perspiration from his brow, rushed indoors and disappeared. He did not rejoin the party; and then well after midnight, when most guests had left and only a few of the locals were taking the warm night air, the windows of Petya’s room on the upper floor of the Golden house were flung open and the big man climbed out onto the ledge, swaying drunkenly and dressed in a long black greatcoat that made him look like a Soviet-era student revolutionary. In his agitated condition he sat down heavily on the windowsill with his legs dangling, and cried out to the skies, “I am here by myself! I am here because of myself! I am here because of nobody! I am here all by myself!”
Time froze. We, in the garden, stood paralyzed, looking upward. His brothers, who were in the Gardens among us, seemed as incapable of movement as we. And it was his father, Nero Golden, who came silently up behind him and, grabbing him from behind in a great embrace, fell backwards with his son into the room behind. It was Nero who came to the window and, before he closed it, waved at us in furious dismissal.
“Nothing to see here. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing to see. Good night.”