I await my time. I sit, I cook, I spin, with downcast eyes I am silent and let him speak. This is fine. I await my time.
Everything is a strategy. This is the wisdom of the spider. Silently, silently spin. Let the fly buzz. Before I ate her and put on her skin I lay across the stove in my hut, the hut standing on a chicken leg, and I waited, and they came to me, and became my food, and in the end she came too, the one I wanted, and instead of swallowing her I dived inside and let her swallow me. It doesn’t matter what it looks like! I ate her even as I allowed her to eat me. It’s a special digestive trick: a reverse takeover of the feeder by the fed. And so farewell, chicken-legged hut in the forest! Goodbye forever, foul Russian smell! Now am I perfumed and clothed in beauty, my eyes behind her eyes, my teeth behind her teeth.
Everything she does is false, every word a lie, because here I am inside her, pulling her strings, casting the web of her words and deeds around the little fly, the old fool. He believes she loves him! Ha ha ha ha ha! Cackle, cackle! That’s a good one, that is.
See how I will live now! The automobiles, the cuisine, the furs. No more flying commercial! I hate flying commercial almost as much as flying on chicken legs or broomsticks. I spit on commercial flights. See me pass through General Aviation like a queen! I enter my P.J. and all around me grovel and seek my approval and my comfort, my joy, my ease. Feel the softness of my bed and the quality of my workout gear. I have a new personal trainer. No sex with him! Be careful! That was close.
In the traditional world, it is known that for the female of the species metamorphosis is easier than for the male. A woman leaves her father’s house, sheds his name like old skin and puts on her husband’s name like a wedding dress. Her body changes and becomes capable of containing and then expelling other bodies. We are used to having people inside us, dictating our futures. Maybe a woman’s life gains its meaning through such metamorphoses, such swallowing and expulsions, but for a man it is the opposite. The abandonment of the past makes a man meaningless. What are these Golden men doing then, fleeing into meaninglessness, into the absurd? What force is so powerful that it drives these men away from the significance of their lives? They are ridiculous now. An exile is a hollow man trying to fill up with manhood once again, a phantom in search of lost flesh and bone, a ship in search of an anchor. Such men are easy prey.
—What? What does that stupid one say? The youngest son? “This is a time of many metamorphoses, many genders, and the world is more complex than you believe, Chicken-Leg, Spider-Woman!” Is that what he’s trying to tell me, glaring at me while he clings to his Nouvelle Vague lover’s arm? We will see, sweetie pie. Let’s see how things work out and who’s standing up laughing at the end, smoking a cigarette at the end of the world. You are Dionysus, and, I admit, a little bit weird, but I am Baba Yaga, the weirdest sister of them all. I am Baba Yaga the Witch.—
I conceal this voice deep inside myself, so deep that she, myself, can convince herself she cannot hear it, that it is not her truest voice. At the level of the skin, of the tongue, a different voice speaks, and she tells herself a different story, in which she is virtuous and her deeds are justified, both absolutely, by moral standards, and empirically, by the events around her. By him, the old one, the king in the golden house, who he is, how he treats her, what his faults are. But there it is, the deep voice speaking, commanding her at the deepest level, the level of the molecules of instruction, twined into the four helical amino acids of her being, which is also mine. It is who I is. It is who she am.
It was hard for the youngest of the Goldens to give up the habit of loneliness. He had felt lonely from his earliest days as the odd-one-out child of an illicit liaison, partly accepted, partly resented in the grand houses he was obliged to call his home, first in Bombay, then in New York. Even in large crowds, he had felt alone, and yet now, with only Riya for company, he was visited by feelings he at first found hard to name. Eventually he found the words. Togetherness, companionship. He was becoming one half of a joint entity. The word love felt alien on his lips and tongue, like a parasitic visitor from another planet, but, occupying Martian or not, the word had certainly landed in his mouth, and taken root. I am in love, he said to himself in the bathroom mirror. It seemed to him that the mirror-face speaking in sync with his own actually belonged to someone else, a person he did not know. He was becoming this person, he thought, a self unknown to himself. Love had begun to stir forces in him that would soon transform him completely and irreversibly. This information had lodged itself in his thoughts and the idea of imminent transformation had begun to alter things in his brain, just as the word love had started to affect his speech. But it was knowledge which, for a time, he repressed.
He was the first one to move out of the Macdougal Street house. “Let the old man do what he wants,” he had told his brothers in Florida, but that didn’t mean he had to stick around to watch. One day Vasilisa Arsenyeva arrived followed by quantities of expensive luggage which hinted that Nero Golden might not have been her first benefactor. Clearly she had already moved beyond the initial agreement, which was non-cohabitational. Very soon afterwards Nero’s youngest son packed his own bags and left for Chinatown, where Riya had found them a small, clean third-floor walk-up in a salmon-pink building with the window frames picked out in bright yellow paint. Below them on the second floor was Madame George Tarot Crystal Ball Horoscope Tell Ur Future, and, at street level, Run Run Trading Inc. with its hanging ducks, its striped blue and pink parasols shading its trays of produce, and its ferocious lady proprietor, Mrs. Run, who also owned the building and refused all requests to change lightbulbs in the hall or turn up the heating when the weather got cold. Riya was immediately at loggerheads with Mrs. Run but she didn’t want to give up on the place because outside the sitting room window was the flat roof of the neighboring building and on sunny days they could slide open the sash window and climb through and it was like having a backyard in the sky.
They had begun to dress alike, in the winter in motorcycle leather, aviator shades and Brando caps, and sometimes behind the shades he added smudged eyeshadow like hers, so that people thought them twins, both pale, both physically frail-looking, both escapees from the same art-house movie. And in the spring she, and so also he, affected spiky black hair and she like a Goth Moreau sat out on the roof with a large acoustic guitar and sang the song of their love, “Elle avait des yeux, des yeux d’opale / qui me fascinaient, qui me fascinaient,” with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth,
“Chacun pour soi est reparti
Dans le tourbillon de la vie…”