In the last light of day, wearing her soiled work dungarees, her hair loosely piled up under a back-to-front Yankees baseball cap, the protective mask, just removed, dangling from the crook of her elbow: without even trying, she was a knockout. “Here, I want you to see this,” she said, and took Petya’s hand in hers, and led him through the crepuscular land littered with her giant intricate forms, like the lacy armor of immense gods, like battlefield detritus reworked by light-fingered elves, and he uncomplaining, believing in the existence of the fence he could not see in the failing light, not even by the light of the full bright moon above; she rounded the long low farmhouse where she lived, led him between the farmhouse and the barn where she worked, and said, “Look.” And there at the foot of the land, where it fell sharply away, was the rolling river, the wide and silver Hudson, taking his breath away. For a long moment he didn’t even think about the fence, didn’t ask if he was safely enclosed or dangerously exposed to the frightening everything of the world, and when he did begin to ask, “Is there…” and as his hand fell to trembling she held it firmly and said, “The river is the wall. This is a safe place for us all.” And he accepted what she said and was not afraid, and stood there watching the water until she led the brothers indoors to dinner.
He became his loquacious self again in the warm yellow light of her kitchen, eating her mango curry chicken, its sweetness doing battle on his palate with the berbere spices mixed into it. But while he talked on and on about his enthusiasm for the video-gaming world, interspersing accounts of the latest games with recitals of river poetry under the influence of the shining river, her attention wandered. The night lengthened and the script of the visit was thrown away and Ubah Tuur felt an unexpectedness rise in her; a treachery. How is it you’re not married, she asked Petya, a man like you, you’re a catch. But while she said it her eyes slid across to Apu, who was sitting perfectly still, he told me, doing nothing, but afterwards Petya accused him of mumbling, you were muttering something, you bastard, you used black magic on her, while he, Petya, tried to answer Ubah, the words stumbling, a long time ago, yes, someone, but since then the waiting, the waiting for an emotional imperative, and she, talking to him but looking at his brother, And so now, have you found the emotional imperative, flirtatious, but her eyes on Apu, and he, mumbling, according to Petya, though he himself always denied to me that he mumbled.
I know what you did, you rat, Petya would shriek later, maybe you put something in her food also, the spices would have disguised it, some evil chicken entrail powder you got from your Greenpoint witch, and the mumbling, what were you saying, a hex, a hex.
And Apu straight-faced, making matters worse, Where is my father’s pet son now? What about two plus two is four? Four plus four is eight? I did nothing. Nothing.
You fucked her, Petya wailed.
Well, yes. I did that. I’m sorry.
It may have gone somewhat differently. I wasn’t there. It may well have been that the usually loquacious Petya was tongue-tied all night, silenced by love, and lively worldly Apu monopolized the talk, and the woman. It may be that she, Ubah, universally held to be a graceful courteous woman, not usually reckless, surprised herself on this occasion by yielding to sudden lust for the wrong brother, her fellow artist, the rising star, the ladies’ man, the charmer. The motivations of desire are obscure even to the desirous, the desiring and the desired. I do betray / My nobler part to my gross body’s treason, Bard of Avon, Sonnet 151. And so without full knowledge of the why and wherefore, we inflict mortal wounds on those we love.
A dark house. Creaking floorboards. Movements. There is no need to rehearse the banal melodrama of the act. In the morning the guilt on the faces of both the guilty, as easy to read as a headline. Large, heavy Petya, lithe, shaven-headed Apu, the woman between them like a storm cloud. There’s nothing to explain, she said. It’s what happened. I think you both should go.
And then Petya imprisoned by his fear of the world in his brother’s rented car with darkened windows trembled with humiliated, unmanned fury in the back seat, three hours of silent horror as they drove back to the city. At such moments a man’s thoughts may begin to turn to murder.
Eighteen years after Apu was born the old man had an extramarital involvement and was not careful and a pregnancy resulted which he chose not to have aborted, because, in his opinion, it was always his business to do the choosing. The mother was a poor woman whose identity did not become known (a secretary? a whore?) and in return for a certain financial consideration she gave the child up to be raised as his father’s son, left town, and disappeared from her baby’s story. So like the god Dionysus the child was twice born, once of his mother and then again into his father’s world. Dionysus the god was always an outsider, a god of resurrection and arrival, “the god that comes.” He was also androgynous, “man-womanish.” That this was the pseudonym the youngest child of Nero Golden chose for himself in the classical-renaming game reveals that he knew something about himself before he knew it, so to speak. Though at the time the reasons he gave for his choice were, in the first place, that Dionysus adventured far and wide in India, and indeed the mythical Mount Nysa where he was born might have been located on the subcontinent; and, in the second place, that he was the deity of sensual delight, not only Dionysus but, in his Roman incarnation, also Bacchus, god of wine, disorderliness and ecstasy, all of which—Dionysus Golden said—sounded like fun. However, he soon announced that he preferred not to be known by the divine name in full, and went by the plain, near-anonymous single-letter nickname, “D.”
His integration into the family had been no easy matter. With his half brothers, from the beginning, he had poor relations. All his childhood he had felt excluded. They called him Mowgli and howled comically at the moon. His wolf-mother was some jungle whore; theirs was the mother wolf of Rome. (At this point it seems they had decided to be Romulus and Remus, though Apu later denied this to me, or rather suggested that it had been an idea in D’s head, not his own.) They had already mastered Latin and Greek when D was still learning to talk, and they used these secret languages to banish him from their conversations. They both afterwards denied this, too, but admitted that the way he entered the family, and also the age gap, had created serious difficulties, questions of loyalty and natural affection. Now, as a young man, D Golden when in his brothers’ company alternated between ingratiation and rage. It was plain that he needed to love and be loved; there was a tide of emotion in him that needed to wash over people and he hoped for a returning tide to wash over him. When this kind of passionate reciprocity didn’t happen he snapped and ranted and withdrew. He was twenty-two years old when the family took possession of the Golden house. Sometimes he seemed wise beyond his years. At other times he behaved like a four-year-old child.