But my son, my son. Impossible to be far away from him, impossible also to be close. Vasilisa Golden, heavily pregnant, on the point of delivering, walked in the Gardens every day with her headscarfed babushka of a mother, a cliché flown in to be of service in a melodrama, and I thought: my son is in the grip of people who don’t even speak English as a first language. This was an unworthy thought, but in my frenzy of frustrated fatherhood I had no thoughts except unworthy ones. Should I spill the beans? Should I remain silent? What would be best for the boy? Well, of course what would be best for him would be to know who his true father was. But I was also, I admit, more than a little afraid of Nero Golden, the fear of the young artist just starting out for the fully evolved and puissant man of the world, even in his present, slowly deteriorating state. What would he do? How might he react? Would the child be in danger? Would Vasilisa? Would I?—Well, I certainly would, I thought. I had repaid his kindness after my orphaning by impregnating his wife. At her request, it’s true, but he would not accept that as an excuse, and I feared his fists; his fists at the very least. But how could I remain silent for a lifetime? I had no answers, but the questions bombarded me night and day, and there was no bomb shelter to be found.
I felt like a fool—worse than a fool, like an errant child, guilty of a great naughtiness and fearing adult retribution—and there was nobody to talk to. For the first time in my life I felt some appreciation for the Catholic device of the confessional and the forgiveness of God that followed it. If I could have found a priest at that moment, and if a string of mea maxima culpas would have silenced the incessant interrogation taking place within me, I would gladly have gone that route. But none was available. I had no connection to that churchy world. And my parents were gone and my new landlord, U Lnu Fnu, while undoubtedly a calm and calming presence and a seasoned diplomat, had already been unhappy at his previous tenant’s talkativeness, and would certainly recoil from the radioactively emotive material I needed to unload. Suchitra was obviously out of the question. I knew, by the way, that if I could not calm myself soon she would smell a rat and that would be the worst of all possible ways for the truth to come out. No, the truth must not come out. The truth would ruin too many lives. I had to find a way of silencing the possessive voice, the voice of fatherly love that wanted its secret to be known, shouting in my ear. A therapist, then? That was the secular confessor-figure of our times. I had always loathed the idea of going to a stranger for help in examining one’s life. I myself was the would-be storyteller; I hated the idea of someone else understanding my own story better than I. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said and drank the hemlock, but that examination, I had always thought, should be an examination of the self by the self; autonomous, as a true individual should be, leaning on no man for explanations or absolution, free. Therein lay the Renaissance humanist idea of the self expressed in, for example, Pico della Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate, “The Dignity of Man.” Well! That high-mindedness had flown out of the window when Vasilisa announced she was with child. Ever since then, the wild storm had raged within me, beyond my power to assuage. Time, perhaps, to swallow one’s pride and find professional help? For a moment I thought of turning to Murray Lett, but saw at once that that was a stupid idea. There were excellent therapists among my parents’ circle of friends. Maybe I should turn to one of them. Maybe I needed someone to take the weight of my knowledge from me and put it in a safe and neutral place; a psychological sapper to defuse the bomb of the truth. So I wrestled with my demons; but after much inner wrangling I chose, rightly or wrongly, not to seek a stranger’s help after all, but elected to confront those demons alone.
Meanwhile the folk of the Gardens were fully absorbed in the drama unfolding at the Tagliabue place across from the Golden house, where the greatly put-upon wife Blanca Tagliabue, tired of being left at home to mind the kids while her husband Vito went out on the town, and bored of his (truthful, I believe) protestations of absolute fidelity, had begun an affair with the neighborhood’s wealthy Argentine resident, Carlos Hurlingham, whom I had dubbed “Mr. Arribista” in one of my treatments, had left the children in the care of nannies, and had flown off in Se?or Hurlingham’s “P.J.” to take a look at the famous Iguazu Falls on the Argentine-Brazilian border and no doubt to indulge in various south-of-the-border activities while she was there. Vito was beside himself with rage and grief and stormed around the Gardens raging and griefing, giving immense pleasure to all his neighbors. If I had not been so preoccupied with my own difficulties I would have found some pleasure in the fact that all the disparate characters in my Gardens narrative were beginning to link and combine to form a coherent shape. But at that moment I cared only for my own sadness and so failed to keep up with the Tagliabue-Hurlingham telenovela as it unfolded.
That wasn’t very important. They were at best minor characters and might not make it past the cutting-room floor. What was much worse was that in my distress I took my eye off Petya Golden. I’m not saying I could have prevented what followed if I had been more vigilant. Maybe Murray Lett should have intuited it. Maybe nobody could have done anything. But I regret my negligence nonetheless.
The Sottovoce galleries, two generous spaces all the way west on Twenty-First and Twenty-Fourth Streets, had both been taken over by one of the season’s big shows, of new work by Ubah Tuur. The large-scale pieces, reminiscent of Richard Serra’s metal monsters, but slashed and transformed by knives of flame into exquisite lacy patterns, so that they also seemed to be giant curved rusted-metal versions of the latticework stone jalis of India, stood illumined by spotlights like more playful, fanciful relatives of the stark alien “sentinels” in Kubrick’s 2001. In the Twenty-First Street location I ran into the ebullient Frankie Sottovoce, pink-cheeked with windblown white hair, waving his arms and giggling with delight. “It’s a big hit. Only the most major collectors and museums. She’s a star.”
I looked around for the artist but she wasn’t there. “You just missed her,” Sottovoce said. “She was here with Apu Golden. You should come again. They are here all the time. Most mornings. You know her from the party in the Gardens. She’s great. So incredibly smart. And beautiful, my God.” He shook a hand loosely as if it were recovering from being scorched by her beauty’s flame. “She’s a force,” he concluded, and skipped away to seduce someone more important.
“Oh,” he paused, turning back to me, his love of gossip briefly overpowering his business instinct. “The other Golden came too, the older brother, you know.” He tapped his temple to indicate the crazy one. “He saw her here with Apu and I don’t think it made him so happy. Took off like a bat out of hell. Maybe a little rivalry thing? Hmm hmm?” He laughed his silly high giggling laugh and was gone.
That’s when I should have guessed. That’s when I should have seen in my mind’s eye the red tide rising in Petya’s face, as he understood that after all this time the woman he loved remained in his brother’s arms, the woman his brother stole from him, ruining his best chance of happiness. That treacherous night under Ubah’s roof long ago, reborn in all its power in his thoughts, as if it had happened right at that moment. The rage reborn too, and with it a lust for vengeance. That one glimpse of Ubah and Apu hand in hand was all it took, and what followed, followed with the horrifying inevitability of a gunshot after a trigger is pulled. I should have known there would be trouble. But I was thinking of other things.