With Vasilisa, however, things went very differently. Ours was always an afternoon assignation, the classic French cinq-à-sept. We did not sleep together. We didn’t sleep at all. Additionally, our lovemaking was wholly goal-oriented, dedicated to the creation of new life, which both terrified and excited me, even though she reassured me constantly that the baby would not be a burden to me, it would not change my life in the slightest way. This was procreation without responsibility. Strangely, the idea made me feel a little worse rather than a little better. “I can see,” she said in our park-view hotel eyrie, “that I’m going to have to do my best to make you feel good about this.” It was her firm conviction that baby-making required extreme excitement and she believed herself a professional in that field. “Baby,” she said throatily, “I can be a little bit a naughty girl, so I need you to tell me your secrets and then I can make them come true.” What followed was sex of a sort I’d never had before, more abandoned, more experimental, more extreme, and oddly more trusting. Traitors together, who did we have to trust except each other?
Suchitra: would she, during our less operatic bouts of sex, notice my body beginning to move in different ways, having learned new habits, dumbly asking for different satisfactions? How could she not? For I must be different, everything felt different to me, those three days a month had changed everything for me. And what about my monthly exhaustions after my afternoon romps? How to explain those, the regularity of their recurrence? Surely she suspected. She must suspect. Impossible to hide such alterations from her, my most intimate friend.
She didn’t seem to have noticed anything. At night we talked about work and fell asleep. Ours had never been a sex-every-night-or-else affair. We were comfortable with each other, happy just to hold each other and rest. This mostly happened at her apartment. (She was always happy for me to be there as long as there was no question of my moving in.) She didn’t much like coming to stay at the Golden house. Consequently we didn’t spend every night together; by no means. So as things turned out it wasn’t very hard to cover my traces. She continued to bring up the subject of me leaving the Macdougal Street place, however. “You could always get access to the Gardens through other neighbors,” she argued. “Your parents were well liked and on friendly terms with many of them.”
“I need more time with Nero,” I said. “The idea of a man who erases all his reference points, who wants to be connected to nothing in his history, I want to get to the bottom of this. Can such a person even be said to be a man? This free-floating entity without any anchor or ties? It’s interesting, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, “okay,” and turned over and went to sleep.
Later.
“What about the courtesan?” Suchitra asked me. “How much do you see of her?”
“She buys clothes,” I answered, “and sells penthouses to Russians.”
“I wanted to make a documentary about courtesans once,” she said. “Madame de Pompadour, Nell Gwynn, Mata Hari, Umrao Jaan. Did a lot of research. Maybe I’ll revive the project.”
She was definitely suspicious.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll move out.”
Cut.
When I looked at the world beyond myself I saw my own moral weakness reflected in it. My parents had grown up in fantasyland, the last generation in full employment, the last age of sex without fear, the last moment of politics without religion, but somehow their years in the fairy tale had grounded them, strengthened them, given them the conviction that by their own direct actions they could change and improve their world, and allowed them to eat the apple of Eden, which gave them the knowledge of good and evil, without falling under the spell of the spiraling Jungle Book Kaa-eyes of the fatal trustin-me Snake. Whereas now horror was spreading everywhere at high speed and we closed our eyes or appeased it. These words were not mine. In one of the curious small-town moments of life in Manhattan the same ranter I had seen in Central Park was walking down Macdougal Street below my window, speaking today about betrayal, his betrayal by his family, his employers, his friends, his city, his country, the universe, and the horror, spreading, and us, averting our gaze…as if my conscience had turned into a crackpot homeless man talking to himself without the excuse of a cellphone headset dangling from his ear. Warm weather; cold words. Was he flesh and blood or had my guilt conjured him up? I closed my eyes and reopened them. He was moving away toward Bleecker Street. Maybe it was a different guy.
I still had moments when my orphaning seemed to spread outward from me and fill the world, or at least that part of it which was in my field of vision. Unhinged moments. I allowed myself to think that it had been in the throes of one such unbalanced event that I agreed to Vasilisa Golden’s dangerous scheme. I allowed myself to think that the lament for the planet which increasingly filled my thoughts was born of my own little loss and that the world didn’t deserve to be thought of so poorly. If I rescued myself from my moral abyss the world would take care of itself, the hole in the ozone layer would close, the fanatics would retreat back into their dark labyrinths beneath the roots of trees and in the trenches at the bottom of the ocean and the sun would shine again and bright music would fill the air.
Yes, time to move out. But what would moving out solve? I was still addicted to my three afternoons a month on the fifty-third floor. The scheme was taking longer to bear fruit than Vasilisa had expected and she had begun to complain. She accused me of having a bad approach to the enterprise. I was jinxing it somehow. I should focus, concentrate, and above all I should want it. If I didn’t want it, it wouldn’t happen. The baby, not feeling fully desired, would not show up. “Don’t deny me this,” she said. “Maybe you just want to fuck me, yes? So you are prolonging matters. So, okay, I can undertake to still fuck you afterwards. At least from time to time.” When she spoke like this it made me want to weep, but my tears would only have strengthened her conviction that for some reason I was somehow withholding my most powerful sperm from her, that I was being, in her eyes, biologically dishonorable. I had entered a place of insanity and I wanted it all to be over, I didn’t want it to be over, I wanted her to become pregnant, no I didn’t, yes I did, no, I did not.
And then it happened. And she turned away from me forever and left me devastated. In love with another woman, yes, but devastated by the loss of our treacherous extraordinary delight.
In the movie I was imagining, the work which would be the ultimate betrayal, at this point the action had to switch away from Vasilisa to her husband. So: She walked out of the fifty-third floor suite and the door closed and that was that.
—Art requires betrayal, and trumps that betrayal, because the betrayal is transmuted into art. That’s right, right? Right?—
Slow dissolve.