The Sottovoce lawsuit was settled suddenly, at twenty-five percent of the original claim. Frankie Sottovoce wasn’t well. There was a heart condition, an irregularity, and beneath the medical aspect a sickness also of the soul. The twinkle in his eye had dimmed and the familiar flamboyance of his waving arms had diminished into a languid flapping. Ubah’s death had hit him hard. It was clear that he had been carrying a secret torch for her but, seeing her deeply embroiled with Apu, had held back from declaring his feelings. Strangely for someone who spent his days in the hothoused, networking world of art, exuding extrovert bonhomie, the gallerist had led a secretive, often solitary private life, briefly married, childless, long divorced, living in a pricey suite at the Mercer Hotel and ordering room service whenever his presence was not required at an art function. A friendly man, he had few friends, and once in the Gardens he had spoken to Vito Tagliabue about Vito’s father Biaggio’s long incarceration in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo. “Your poor parent passed away alone and his body was discovered not by those who loved him but by a member of the hotel staff,” he said. “This will also be my fate. They will bring up a burger and a glass of red wine and find that they are too late to grant me my last supper.” His hidden feelings for Ubah had overwhelmed him after she died. Now, as the vengeful tide ebbed, he accepted that the destroyed work had been adequately insured and that his multimillion-dollar action against the Goldens had been born of the turbulence of his emotions. “I don’t care anymore,” he told his lawyers. “Let’s close it out.” I saw him just once in those days, at the Matthew Barney opening at Gladstone, and was shocked by the change in him, the paleness, the lassitude. “Good to see you, young man,” he greeted me, flapping a hand. “Good to see that there are still people who are full of gas and roaring ahead one hundred miles per hour.” I understood that he was telling me about himself, that his gas tank was dry, that he was running on empty. I tried to address the subject he would not raise. “She was an extraordinary woman,” I said. He looked angry in his new exhausted way. “So what?” he said. “Dead is not extraordinary, everybody does it. Art is extraordinary, almost nobody can do it. Dead is just dead.”
After the end of the lawsuit came the end of community service. Petya, off that hook as well, very determinedly revived. He came out of his room with Lett the therapist, cradling his cat in the crook of his left arm, and, finding his father standing there in pitiful love, placed his right hand on Nero’s shoulder, looked his father forcefully in the eye, and said, “We’re all going to be fine.” He repeated this sentence thirty-seven times, as if he were retweeting himself. To make it true by the force of repetition. To chase the Shadow away by unquenchably asserting and reasserting the Light. I was there that day, because after a hiatus Petya had texted me to ask me to come over. He wanted witnesses and that, I knew, was my place in the Golden story. Or it had been, until in Vasilisa’s bed I crossed the line that divides the reporter from the participant. Like a journalist throwing a grenade from the trenches, I was a soldier now; and therefore, like all soldiers, a legitimate target.
“Hi, gorgeous,” he said when he saw me. “Still the most handsome man in the world.”
Something about the Petya tableau that day resembled to my mind a grand oil painting, a Night Watch, maybe; we stood in Rembrandt’s golden light and luminous shadows and felt, or maybe I only imagine that we felt, like guardians of an embattled world. Petya with his alpine lynx and his solicitous Australian and his furrowed-brow father and his large crooked smile. And servitors at angles in the corners of the frame. Was I the only person in the Golden house that day who heard the beating of fatal wings, the proleptic sighs of the guilty undertaker, the slow falling of the curtain at the end of the play? I’m writing against time now, my words following not so long after the people in them, writing double, because I’m also finally finishing up my Golden screenplay, my fiction about these men who made fictions of themselves, and the two are blurring into each other until I’m not sure anymore what’s real and what I made up. In what I call real I don’t believe in ghosts and death angels but they keep pouring into what I invent like a ticketless crowd bursting through the gates at a big game. I’m sitting on the fault line between my outer world and the world within, astride the crack in everything, hoping some light gets in.
Inside the house it felt that month like a frozen time, a waiting time, the characters trapped in oil on canvas, striking attitudes, and unable to move. And outside in the street there was a plague of jokers, crazy slashmouthed clowns frightening the children, or their phantoms were, anyway. Very few people in the city claimed actually to have seen a creepy clown that fall but reports of them were everywhere, the reports put on fright wigs, the rumors stalked the streets giggling and making witchy fingers with both hands and screeching about the end time, the last of days. Ghost clowns in an unreal reality. Eschatological insanity coming to the polls, and the Joker himself screaming into a mirror, the molester screaming about molestation, the propagandist accusing the whole world of propaganda, the bully whining about being ganged up on, the crook pointing a crooked finger at his rival and calling her crooked, a child’s game become the national ugliness, I-know-I-am-but-what-are-you, and the days ticking away, America’s sanity at war with its dementedness, and people like me, who didn’t believe in superstitions, walking around with their hands in their pockets and their fingers crossed.
And then finally there was, after all, a scary clown.
After a long period of estrangement, Vasilisa wanted to talk. She took me into the Gardens and made sure we were out of range of interested ears. The new note of power in her voice told me she was still inhabiting her Big Nurse persona, still making it clear that from now on she was the one in the catbird seat. “He’s not the same man,” she said. “I am having to accustom myself to that. But he is the father of my child.”—This, to my face, looking me right in the eye! The daring of it was breathtaking. I felt the red mist rising. “If you contradict me,” she said, raising a hand before I had said a word, “I will have you killed. Be in no doubt that I know who to call.”
I turned to leave. “Stop,” she said. “This is not how I want our conversation to go. I want to say, I need your help with him.”