The “boys,” Nero’s sons, came to see him every day, and these were unusual encounters, speaking of his immense authority over them, not so much father-son meetings as cap-in-hand obeisances paid by subjects to their master. I understood that any film treatment, fictionalized, of course, would have to deal with this strangely authoritarian relationship. Some of the explanation was undoubtedly financial. Nero was generous with money, so that Apu was able to get himself a place in Montauk and spend weeks at a time painting there, and partying as well. Young D Golden in Chinatown gave every appearance of living on a budget, and was working, these days, as a volunteer at a girls’ club on the Lower East Side, which would have obliged him to live on Riya’s salary, but the truth was, as Vasilisa was quick to inform me, that he took the money his father gave him. “He has many expenses right now,” she said, but declined to elaborate further, as was the way in the Golden house, whose members did not discuss significant matters with one another, as if they were secrets, even though they knew that everyone knew everything. But maybe, I thought, the sessions between the father and his sons were also like confessionals, where the “boys” admitted their “sins” and were, in some way, to some degree, and in return for unknown penances and expiations, “forgiven.” That was the way to write it, I thought. Or, a more interesting possibility. Maybe the sons were the parent’s priests as well as the other way around. Maybe each possessed the other’s secrets, and each gave the other absolution and peace.
It was usually quiet in the big house, which was perfect for me. I had been given a room on the uppermost floor with dormer windows looking down over the Gardens and I was utterly content, and busy. As well as my longer-term movie project I was working with Suchitra on a short-form video series for a cable VOD network, well-known indie film faces talking about favorite movie moments, the bottom-stamping scene in Jiri Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (I preferred the greater formality of the UK title to the American Closely Watched Trains), Toshiro Mifune introducing the character of his shabby, itchy samurai warrior in Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, Michael J. Pollard’s first scene in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (“dirt in the fuel line—just blowed it away”), the winter peacock spreading its tail feathers in Fellini’s Amarcord, the child who falls out of a window and bounces, unhurt, in Truffaut’s L’argent de poche (“Pocket Money”), the closing moments of Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (“Fat Man, you shoot a great game of pool.”—“So do you, Fast Eddie.”), and my personal favorite, the matchstick game in Alain Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad (“Last Year at Marienbad”), featuring the granite-faced, Draculaesque Sacha Pito?ff (“It’s not a game if you can’t lose.”—“Oh, I can lose, but I never do.”) We had already filmed a number of talented young American actors and filmmakers (Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Todd Solondz, Parker Posey, Jake Paltrow, Chlo? Sevigny) expressing their admiration for these classic films and I was honing my editing skills on my laptop by assembling the material into sharp three-minute pieces to be embedded on a wide range of websites. Suchitra was leaving this work to me while she set up her own first film as writer-director, crossing the line from the production side, and we were both deeply immersed in our work, coming together late at night to tell each other the day’s news, eat fast and too late, and either make love quickly or simply fall asleep exhausted in each other’s arms, either in my artist’s garret or her studio apartment. In the aftermath of tragedy, this was how I found my way back to joy.
In my spare moments I studied the dynamics of the Golden house. Cleaning services, kitchen help, the handyman Gonzalo came and went, so unobtrusively as to seem virtual, phantom children of the age of the post-real. The two dragon ladies were unquestionably actual, arrived each morning buzzing with efficiency, sequestered themselves in a room next to Nero’s office, and did not reappear until they buzzed off at night like hornets escaping through an open door. All sounds seemed muffled, as if the laws of science themselves operated within these walls with, so to speak, white gloves on.
Nero himself mostly stayed in his home office, even though the main premises of Golden Enterprises were in Midtown in a tower irritatingly owned by a certain Gary “Green” Gwynplaine, a vulgarian whose name Nero could not bring himself to speak, and who liked to call himself the Joker on account of having been born with inexplicably lime-green hair. Purple-coated, white-skinned, red-lipped, Gwynplaine made himself the mirror image of the notorious cartoon villain and seemed to revel in the likeness. Nero found his landlord intolerable, and announced to me one evening, apropos of nothing, and without explanation—this was his way, his train of thought emerging occasionally out of the tunnel of his mouth, whoever was in the immediate vicinity becoming the station at which it briefly stopped—“One world. When they let us in, I’ll be the first in the door.” It took me a moment to understand that he wasn’t talking about pan-globalism but about One World Trade Center, which wouldn’t be ready for occupancy for a couple of years, and announcing his intention to leave the Joker’s building and move into the new tower built in the place of tragedy. “On the upper floors I can get a terrific deal,” he clarified. “Fifty, sixty floors, okay, they can fill those, but above that? After what happened nobody wants to rent in that airspace. So, a great deal. The best deal in town. All that empty floor space needing occupation, finding nothing. Me, personally, I go where the bargain is. High in the sky? Fine. Lowball the price, I’ll take it. It’s a bargain. Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”
His employees rarely saw him. He allowed his hair to lengthen. I began to wonder about the length of his toenails. After Romney’s defeat his mood worsened and he was barely visible even to his wife and household. He took to sleeping on a fold-out cot in the office at the house and ordering pizza late at night. During the night he made phone calls to employees in various countries—at least I guessed they were employees—and in Manhattan too. His rule was that he would call you at any moment of the day or night and expect you to be alert and willing to discuss whatever he pleased, business or women or something in the paper. He would talk for hours to his telephone colleagues and that had to be okay with them. One evening in the Gardens when he was in one of his affable moods I put on my most innocent smile and asked him if he ever thought about Howard Hughes. “That freak,” he answered. “You’re lucky I have a soft spot for you. Don’t ever compare me to that freak.” But at the same time he began to retreat even further from the human gaze. Vasilisa was left to spend many days at the spa or up and down Madison in various stores and lunching with girlfriends at Bergdorf or Sant Ambroeus. Ignore a beautiful woman for too long and there will be trouble. How long is too long? Five minutes. Anything over an hour: catastrophe awaits.
The house had become both the expression of her beauty and of the intensity of her need. On oyster gray walls she hung large mirrors made up of smaller mirror squares, some at an angle, some tinted close to black, expressing, like the Cubists, the need for many perspectives at the same time. A grand new fireplace was installed in the great room, threatening cold-weather incandescence. New rugs underfoot, silken to the touch, the color of steel. The house was her language. She spoke to him through its renewal, knowing him to be a man influenced by surroundings, telling him wordlessly that if a king needs a palace, that palace requires, to be suitably palatial, a queen.