Cut.
“I don’t like your Goldens,” Suchitra said. “I’ve been meaning to say this. You should move out soon.” She offered clarification over our now-customary evening cocktail in the British-style pub near Washington Square: Irish whiskey on the rocks for her, vodka and soda for me. “Actually, I have no strong negative position on the sons, but the father…not for me, and his wife ditto. Mostly it’s just that house. It creeps me out. Can’t say why but it does. Feels like the Addams Family mansion. Don’t you feel it when you’re in there? It’s like a house of ghosts. These deracinated rich people rejecting their history and culture and name. Getting away with it because of the accident of skin color which allows them to pass. What kind of people are they, denying their race? I don’t care if you live in the land of your fathers or not, I’m not proposing some sort of anti-immigration nativist thing, but to pretend it doesn’t exist, that you never existed there, that it’s nothing to you and you’re nothing to it, that makes me feel they’re agreeing to be, in a way, dead. It’s like they are living their afterlife while they are still alive. I imagine them lying down in coffins at night. No, of course not really, but you know what I mean.”
Suchitra was an atypical New York woman. “I have had three rules for all my boyfriends,” she told me when we first became lovers. “Make your own money, get your own apartment, and don’t ask me to marry you.” She herself lived modestly in a two-room rental in Battery Park City. “In fact I live in one room,” she pointed out. “The garments and footwear have the other one.” It was a corner room with large windows so the river was the art on her wall, the fog sweeping in at dawn, the ice slabs of winter followed by the first sails of spring, the freighters, the tugboats, the ferries, the racing boat flying the rainbow flag of the local gay sailing club, her heart filling with love for her city whenever she looked at the view, never the same twice, the wind and light and rain, the dance of the sun and the water, and the apartment in the building across the street with the large brass telescope at the window and the clear view of her bed, rumored to be a pied-à-terre owned by Brad Pitt which he used to escape from his wife; and the green lady with the torch watching over it all from a little way away, enlightening the world. “The city is my live-in lover,” she told me right at the start. “She’d be jealous if a guy moved in.”
This was all fine by me. It was in my nature to prefer a deal of space and silence around me, and I liked an independent woman, so her conditions were easily met. On the question of marriage I had an open mind, but was happy to accept her firm position as consonant with my own. However, I now found myself in the zugzwang eventually faced by all liars, deceivers and cheats: the moment on the chessboard when one must make a move and there is no good move to make. It was early spring, and the property market had begun to move; there was a solid buyer for our old family house, and the deal was near completion, Vasilisa all business when she talked to me about it; no hint of our secret life in her voice or on her face. I had my inheritance and was about to receive a substantial boost to my capital as soon as the sale went through. My instinct for the moment was to stay where I was, eventually to rent, and look around until I found the right place to buy. So Suchitra’s encouragement to move out was wholly reasonable, but at odds with my desires. For three overt and one covert reasons, I resisted. I shared the first three with her, of course. “The house is quiet, (a),” I said. “It’s easy to work in. I have the space I need and I’m left mostly to my own devices. And (b), you know these people are at the heart of the work I’m trying to make. Yeah, there is something off about the old man, but he’s beginning to like having me around, I have a feeling he could open up to me at any moment, and that’s worth waiting a while for. I think Petya is a heavy burden on him and so his age is hitting him hard, he’s suddenly getting to act very old. And then there’s (c), which is that the Gardens have been my whole life and when I move out of the Golden house I lose access to them. I don’t know if I’m ready to do that, to live without that magic space.”
She didn’t argue. “Okay,” she said good-naturedly. “Just sounding off. You’ll let me know when you’re ready.”
The traitor fears that his guilt is written on his face. My parents always told me I was incapable of keeping a secret and that when I lied they saw a red light flashing on my forehead. I had begun to wonder if Suchitra had started seeing that light, and if her urgings that I leave the Golden house sprang from her suspicion that my time under that roof was not entirely innocent. My greatest fear was that she would notice some sexual difference in me. I had never believed sex to be primarily an Olympic sport; arousal and attraction were the results of a depth of feeling between the parties, of the strength of the connection. This was also Suchitra’s view. She was an impatient lover. (Her schedule was so busy that she didn’t have time to dawdle over anything.) Foreplay was minimal between us. At night she’d draw me down and say, “Just get inside me now, that’s what I want,” and afterwards she professed herself satisfied, being the type who came quickly and often. I had chosen not to feel in any way belittled by this, though I could have felt almost irrelevant to the proceedings. She was simply too caring a person intentionally to slight my prowess.