Lucius Apuleius Golden, a.k.a. Apu, the second pseudonymous Golden boy—for some reason, even though he was already forty-one, the word boy fitted better than man—was only a year younger than his brother Petya, their birthdays less than twelve months apart, their horoscope sign (Gemini) the same. He was a handsome, childish man, with a wicked goatish mischief in his smile, a gleeful giggle irresistibly combined with a pretense of constant melancholy, and an ever-changing monologue of lamentation in which he catalogued his failures with young women outside the toilets of late-night hot spots (his way of disguising a long string of successes in that area). He wore his hair shaved close to his skull—a concession to encroaching baldness—and wrapped himself in a voluminous pashmina shawl and didn’t get on with his older brother anymore. They both stated, in separate conversations with me, that they had been close as young children, but their relationship had eroded as they grew older, because of their irreconcilable temperaments. Apu, a wanderer in the city, an explorer of everything it had to offer, was unsympathetic to Petya’s “issues.” “That stupid brother of mine,” he told me when, as sometimes happened, we went out drinking. “He’s such a scaredy-cat.” And he went on to say, “He should be careful. Our father despises weakness and doesn’t want it near him. Once he decides you’re a weakling you’re dead to him. You’re fucking dead.” Then, as if he had just heard what he had said, heard the sound of the armor cracking, he drew back and corrected himself. “Don’t pay any attention. I’ve had too many drinks and anyway it’s just the way we talk. We talk a lot of nonsense. It doesn’t mean anything.”
I heard that speech as envy. Nero Golden was, as we could all see, deeply caring for and solicitous of his psychologically wounded firstborn son. Perhaps Apu didn’t get the attention from the patriarch he so openly craved. (I wondered often why the four Goldens all continued to live under the same roof, especially when it became plain that they weren’t getting along, but when I found the courage to ask Apu why that was I got nothing but cryptic, allegorical answers, owing more to One Thousand and One Nights or The Diamond as Big as the Ritz than to anything that might be called the truth. “Our father,” he might reply, “is the one who knows where the treasure cave is hidden, the one that responds to the words open, sesame. So we stay because we’re trying to find the map.” Or, “The house, you know, is literally built on an underground mass of pure gold. Every time we need to pay for things we just go into the cellar and scrape off a tiny piece.” It was as if the house exercised some power over them all—the genealogical house or the actual house, it was sometimes hard to separate them. For whatever thicker-than-water reason, they felt bound to one another, even if their actual feelings for one another deteriorated over time toward open hostility. The Caesars in their palace, their whole lives a great gamble, performing their dance of death.)
Apu’s greed for America was omnivorous. I reminded myself that of course he and Petya would have been here before, as much younger men, living with their parents in the Broadway loft during college vacations, in all probability knowing nothing about the benami house just a short walk away which their father was readying for the distant future. How Apu must have prospered sexually in that much younger, grittier city! No wonder he was glad to be back.
Soon after his arrival he asked me to tell him about the November night when Barack Obama was elected president. On that night I had been in a Midtown sports bar where a well-known doyenne of Upper East Side society, a Republican, was jointly hosting an election night party with a distinctly downtown Democrat film producer. At 11 P.M., when California declared and pushed Obama over the finish line, the room exploded with emotion, and I realized that I, like everyone else, had been unable to believe that what was happening would really happen, even though the numbers had clearly indicated an Obama victory a couple of hours earlier. The possibility of another stolen election was not far from our thoughts and so relief mingled with elation when the majority was definite, they can’t steal this now, I reassured myself, and felt tears on my face. When I looked at Apu after I told him this I saw that he was crying too.
After the big moment in the sports bar, I told him, I walked the streets half the night, going to Rockefeller Center and Union Square, watching the crowds of young people like myself shining with the knowledge that, perhaps for the first time ever, they had by their own direct actions changed their country’s course. I was drinking in the optimism that was flowing all around us, and, like a properly jaundiced literary person, I formulated this thought: “And now, of course, he will disappoint us.” I wasn’t proud of it, I said, but these were the words that came to mind.
“You’re already so disenchanted, while I’m a dreamer,” Apu asked, still weeping. “But awful things have happened to me and my family. Nothing terrible has ever happened to you or yours.”
Thanks to my parents, I knew something by then about Apu’s “awful things”—but I wondered about his tears. Could this relatively recent arrival in America already be so invested in his new country that an election result could make him cry? Had he already bonded with the country in his youth and was now feeling the rebirth of that long-lost love? Were they the tears of a sentimentalist or a crocodile? I put that question away and thought, when you get to know him better you’ll have the answer. And so I took another step toward becoming an occasional spy; I was absolutely clear, by now, that these were people worth spying on. As for what he said about me, it was not entirely accurate, because I was, on the whole, caught up in the early fervor of the Obama presidency, but it was prescient, because as the years passed my alienation from the system grew, and eight years later when people younger than myself (most of them young, white and college educated) expressed their desire to rip that system up and throw it away, I didn’t agree, because that kind of grand gesture seemed like an expression of the same spoiled luxuriousness that its proponents claimed to hate, and when such gestures were made they invariably led to something worse than what had been discarded. But I got it, I understood the alienation and anger, because much of it was mine as well, even if I ended up at a different, more cautious, gradualist, and, in the eyes of the generation following mine, contemptible point on the (political) spectrum.