Yes, I was playing with fire, but the human program is powerful, and it wants what it wants. The idea of having no contact with my own flesh and blood was appalling to me, and so, once I had left the Golden house, I shamelessly ingratiated myself with Nero Golden, for whom the newborn child, his first in a long time, was also an obsession. Telling him I wanted to make sure we stayed in touch after all his kindness, after he had been as generous to me as if he were my own family, so that now he felt like family to me (I warned you that I was shameless), I suggested that we continue our new practice of meeting for a meal—tea, perhaps?—at the Russian Tea Room. “Oh, and it would be great if you bring the baby along,” I innocently added. The old man fell for it, and so I was able to watch my little fellow grow, and play with him, and hold him in my arms. Nero came to the Tea Room with the baby and his nanny, and the nanny handed the kid to me without any argument, and receded into a corner of the restaurant. “It’s amazing how good you are with the boy,” Nero Golden told me. “I get the feeling you’re getting a little broody yourself. That girl of yours is terrific. Maybe you should knock her up.”
I held my son close. “It’s okay,” I said. “This little guy is more than enough for now.”
The child’s mother was not happy about my strategy. “I prefer it that you make yourself scarce,” Vasilisa called me to say. “The boy has excellent parents who can provide him with everything he requires and then some, which you naturally cannot. I don’t know what is your motive, but I’m guessing maybe it is financial. This is my mistake, it should have been discussed ahead of time. So, okay, if you have a figure in mind, say what it is, and let’s see how it corresponds with the figure in my mind.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said. “I just want sometimes to have tea with my son.”
This caused a silence, in which I could hear both her incredulity and relief. Then, finally, “Fine,” she said with considerable irritation. “However, he is not your son.”
Suchitra, that Sunday, was also a little puzzled by my interest in the boy. “Is this some kind of hint?” she asked me in her straight-out shoot-from-the-hip way. “Because let me say I have a whole career developing here and stopping in my tracks to be somebody’s baby mama is not in my plans at the present time.”
“What can I tell you, I just like babies,” I said. “And the great thing about somebody else’s baby is, when you’re done playing, you get to hand it back.”
They had kept Petya out of jail. The absence of persons from the building, and the consequential lack of damage to human beings, meant that the crime was classified as arson in the third degree, a class C felony. New York law stated that the minimum punishment for a C felony was one to three years in jail, and the maximum punishment was five to fifteen. However if extenuating circumstances could be demonstrated, judges were allowed to impose alternative sentences involving much less jail time, or even none at all. The “best criminal defense lawyers in America” successfully argued that Petya’s HFA be taken into consideration. The crime passionnel argument, which might have been effective in, for example, France, was not used. Petya was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation followed by treatment, and to be placed under community supervision and to pay the fees required, as well as making full restitution for the damage he had caused. Nero hired Murray Lett on a full-time basis and the therapist dropped his other clients and moved into Petya’s apartment to protect him from self-harm and to work on his many issues. Lett’s role was accepted by the court, which made things easier. That took care of the criminal aspect, and Petya duly reported as required to his supervising officers, submitted to random drug testing, agreed to electronic monitoring by a bracelet locked around his ankle, acquiesced in strict probation conditions, and performed his hours of community service silently and without complaint, working on the maintenance and upkeep of public buildings, permitted to work indoors because of his recrudescent agoraphobia, painting, plastering, hammering, wordlessly, uncomplainingly, passively; detached from his body, or so it appeared, allowing his limbs to do what was required of them while his thoughts went elsewhere, or nowhere.
The question of financial restitution was more complex. A civil suit for damages had been brought by Frankie Sottovoce, naming Nero as well as Petya, and that was ongoing. Ubah Tuur was not involved. It turned out that Sottovoce had bought the pieces from her outright before the opening, so that at the time of the fires they belonged to him. She already had her money. The gallery was insured, but there was a sizable gap, the Sottovoce lawyers argued, between what the insurance company would pay and what the Tuur pieces would be worth if placed on the open market. Also the buildings required gut renovations and there would be much income lost from shows that could not be put on while that happened. So, a multimillion-dollar case, remaining unsettled—though the bottom line was that Petya’s earnings from his baller apps were amply sufficient to settle the suit in full—with the Golden lawyers using all the delays of the law in the hope of finally bringing Sottovoce to the negotiating table to make a more easily bearable deal, and using, too, all the concomitant legal loopholes or (perhaps a better term) flexibilities to keep Petya out of prison while the financial matters were being settled.
It was Apu Golden who first intuited that, whatever the outcome of the civil suit, Petya’s fire had badly damaged the house of Golden as well as the two Sottovoce galleries. (It had also ended his own relationship with Frankie Sottovoce, who had unceremoniously suggested he should find a new artistic home.) I visited him in the Union Square studio and he offered me some Chinese green tea from Hangzhou and a plate piled with chunks of hard Italian cheese. “I want to speak to you like a brother,” he said. “Like an honorary brother, because at this point you are that. Look at our family. You know what I’m saying? Look at it. We are, I’m sorry to put it bluntly, a wreck. It’s the beginning of the fall of the Usher place. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Macdougal Street house cracks in half and falls into the street, you know what I mean? Yeah. I have intimations of doom.”