How we wronged her, the dead lady, when in our gossiping we ascribed her absence from New York to her infidelity. It was her absence, her tragedy, that made sense of her family’s presence among us. She was the meaning of this tale.
When the emperor Nero’s wife Poppaea Sabina died he burned ten years’ supply of Arabian incense at her funeral. But in the case of Nero Golden all the incense in the world couldn’t finally cover up the bad smell.
The legal term benami looks almost French, ben-ami, fooling the unwary into believing it might mean “good friend,” bon ami, or “well-liked,” bien-aimé, or something of the sort. But the word is actually of Persian origin, and its root is not ben-ami but bé-námi. Bé is a prefix meaning “without” and nám means “name”; thus benami, “without a name,” or anonymous. In India, benami transactions are purchases of property in which the ostensible buyer, in whose name the property is acquired, is just a front man, used to conceal the property’s real owner. In old American slang, the benami would be called the beard.
In 1988 the government of India passed the Benami Transactions (Prohibitions) Act, which both outlawed such purchases and made it possible for the state to recover property “held benami.” Many loopholes, however, remained. One of the ways in which the authorities have sought to close these loopholes is the institution of the Aadhaar system. Aadhaar is a twelve-digit social security ID number allocated to each Indian citizen for his or her lifetime and its use is mandatory in all property and financial transactions, allowing the citizen’s involvement in such transactions to be electronically traced. However, the man we knew as Nero Golden, an American citizen for over twenty years and the father of American citizens, was clearly ahead of the game. When what happened happened and everything came to light we learned that the Golden house was owned outright by a lady of a certain age, the same lady who served as the senior of Nero’s two trusted confidantes, and no other legal document could be shown to exist. But what happened did happen, and after that even the walls Nero had so carefully erected came tumbling down, and the full, appalling extent of his criminality stood before us, naked in the daylight of the truth. That was in the future. For now, he was simply N. J. Golden, our rich and—as we discovered—vulgar neighbor.
In the secret, grassy quadrangle of the Gardens, I crawled before I could walk, I walked before I could run, I ran before I could dance, I danced before I could sing, and I danced and sang until I learned stillness and silence and stood motionless and listening at the Gardens’ heart, on summer evenings sparkling with fireflies, and became, at least in my own opinion, an artist. To be precise, a would-be writer of films. And, in my dreams, a filmmaker, even, in the grand old formulation, an auteur.
I’ve been hiding behind the first person plural, and may do so again, but I’m getting around to introducing myself. I am. But in a way I’m not so different from my subjects, who were self-concealers also—the family whose arrival in my neck of the woods provided me with the big project for which I had, with growing desperation, been searching. If the Goldens were heavily invested in the erasure of their past, then I, who have taken it upon myself to be their chronicler—and perhaps their imagineer, a term invented for the devisers of rides in Disney theme parks—am by nature self-effacing. What was it that Isherwood said at the outset of Goodbye to Berlin? “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” But that was then, and this is the age of smart cameras that do all one’s thinking for one. Maybe I’m a smart camera. I record, but I’m not exactly passive. I think. I alter. Possibly I even invent. To be an imagineer, after all, is very different from being a literalist. Van Gogh’s picture of a starry night doesn’t look like a photograph of a starry night, but it’s a great depiction of a starry night nonetheless. Let’s just agree that I prefer the painting to the photograph. I am a camera that paints.
Call me René. I have always liked it that the narrator of Moby-Dick doesn’t actually tell us his name. Call-me-Ishmael might in “reality,” which is to say in the petty Actual that lay outside the grand Real of the novel, he might have been called, oh, anything. He might have been Brad, or Trig, or Ornette, or Schuyler, or Zeke. He might even have been called Ishmael. We don’t know, and so, like my great forebear, I forbear to say unto you plainly, my name’s René. Call me René: that’s the best I can do for you.
We proceed. Both my parents were college professors (do you note, in their son, an inherited note of the professorial?) who bought our house near the corner of Sullivan and Houston back in the Jurassic era when things were cheap. I present them to you: Gabe and Darcey Unterlinden, long-time married couple, not only respected scholars but beloved teachers, and, like the great Poirot (he’s fictional, but you can’t have everything, as Mia Farrow said in The Purple Rose of Cairo)…Belgians. Belgians long ago, I hastily clarify, Americans since forever, Gabe oddly persevering with a curious, heavy, and largely invented pan-European accent, Darcey comfortably Yankee. The professors were players of Ping-Pong (they challenged Nero Golden when they heard of his fondness for the game, and he beat them both soundly, though they were both pretty good). They were quoters of poetry to each other. They were baseball fans, oh, and giggling addicts of reality television, lovers of opera, jointly and constantly planning their never-to-be-written monograph on the form, to be called The Chick Always Dies.
They loved their city for its unlikeness to the rest of the country. “Rome iss not Italy,” my father taught me, “and London iss not England and Paris iss not France, and dis, where we are right now, dis is not de United States of America. Dis iss New York.”
“Between the metropolis and the hinterland,” my mother added her footnote, “always resentment, always alienation.”
“After 9/11, America tries to pretend it loves us,” said my dad. “How long does dat last?”
“Not so fucking long,” my mother completed his thought. (She was a user of swear words. She claimed she didn’t know she was doing it. They just slipped out.)
“Iss a bubble, like everyone says now,” my father said. “Iss like in de Jim Carrey movie, only expanded to big-city size.”
“The Truman Show,” my mother helpfully clarified. “And not even the whole city is in the bubble, because the bubble is made of money and the money isn’t evenly spread.”
In this they differed from the common opinion that the bubble was composed of progressive attitudes, or rather they held, like good post-Marxists, that liberalism was economically generated.
“De Bronx, Queens, maybe not so much in de bubble,” my father said.
“Staten Island, definitely not in the bubble.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Brooklyn. Yeah, maybe in the bubble. Parts of Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn’s great…” my father said, and then in unison they finished their favorite and much-repeated old joke, “…but iss in Brooklyn.”
“De point is, we like de bubble, and so do you,” my father said. “We don’t want to live in a red state, and you—you’d be done for in for example Kansas, where dey don’t believe in evolution.”
“In a way, Kansas does disprove Darwin’s theory,” my mother mused. “It proves the fittest are not always the ones who survive. Sometimes the unfittest survive instead.”
“But iss not just crazy cowboys,” my father said, and my mother jumped in.
“We don’t want to live in California.”
(At this point their bubble got confusing, becoming cultural as well as economic, right coast versus left coast, Biggie-not-Tupac. They didn’t seem to care about the contradictoriness of their position.)
“So dis iss who you are,” my father wanted me to know. “The boy in the bubble.”
“These are days of miracle and wonder,” my mother said. “And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t fucking cry.”
I had a happy childhood with the professors. At the heart of the bubble were the Gardens and the Gardens gave the bubble a heart. I was raised in enchantment, safe
from harm, cocooned in liberal downtown silk, and it gave me an innocent courage even though I knew that outside the magic spell the world’s dark windmills awaited the quixotic fool. (Still, “the only excuse for privilege,” my father taught me, “is to do something useful with it.”) I went to school at Little Red and to college on Washington Square. A whole life contained in a dozen blocks. My parents had been more adventurous. My father went to Oxford on a Fulbright, and after he finished, with a British friend in a Mini Traveller, he crossed Europe and Asia—Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India—back in that earlier-mentioned Jurassic era when dinosaurs roamed the earth and it was possible to make such journeys without losing your head. When he came home he had had his fill of the wide world and became, along with Burrows and Wallace, one of the three great historians of New York City, co-author, with those two gentlemen, of the multivolume classic Metropolis, the definitive history of Superman’s hometown where we all lived and where the Daily Planet arrived on the doorstep every morning and where, many years after old Supe, Spider-Man took up residence, in Queens. When I walked with him in the Village he pointed out where Aaron Burr’s place once stood, and once outside the movie multiplex on Second Avenue and Thirty-Second Street he told me the story of the Battle of Kip’s Bay, and how Mary Lindley Murray saved Israel Putnam’s fleeing American soldiers by inviting the British general William Howe to stop his pursuit and come to tea at her grand home, Inclenberg, on top of what would come to be known as Murray Hill.
My mother too had been intrepid in her fashion. When she was young she worked in public health with drug addicts and subsistence farmers in Africa. After I was born she narrowed her horizons and became first an expert in early childhood education and eventually a psychology professor. Our house on Sullivan Street, at the far end of the Gardens from the Golden mansion, was filled with the pleasing accumulated clutter of their lives, threadbare Persian rugs, carved wooden African statuary, photographs, maps and etchings of the early “New” cities on Manhattan Island, both Amsterdam and York. There was a corner dedicated to famous Belgians, an original Tintin drawing hanging next to a Warhol screen print of Diane von Furstenberg and the famous Hollywood production still of the beautiful star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with her long cigarette holder, once known as Miss Edda van Heemstra, afterwards much beloved as Audrey Hepburn; and below these, a first edition of Mémoires d’Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar on a small table next to photographs of my namesake Magritte in his studio, the cyclist Eddy Merckx, and the Singing Nun. (Jean-Claude Van Damme didn’t make the cut.)
In spite of this little nook of Belgiana they did not hesitate to criticize their country of origin when asked. “King Leopold II and the Congo Free State,” my mother said. “Worst colonialist ever, most rapacious setup in colonial history.” “And nowadays,” my father added, “Molenbeek. European center of fanatical Islam.”
In pride of place on the living room mantelpiece sat a decades-old, never-used block of hashish still wrapped in its original cheap cellophane packaging and stamped with an official Afghan government seal of quality bearing the likeness of the moon. In Afghanistan in the time of the king the hashish was legal and came in three price- and quality-controlled packages, Afghan Gold, Silver and Bronze. But what my father, who never indulged in the weed, kept in pride of place on the mantel was something rarer, something legendary, almost occult. “Afghan Moon,” my father said. “If you use that it opens de third eye in your pineal gland in de center of your forehead and you become clairvoyant and few secrets can be kept from you.”
“Then why have you never used it,” I asked.
“Because a world vissout mystery iss like a picture vith no shadows,” he said. “By seeing too much it shows you nossing.”
“What he means is,” my mother added, “that, (a), we believe in using our minds and not blowing them, and, (b), it’s probably adulterated, or cut, as the hippies used to say, with some dreadful hallucinogen, and (c), it’s possible that I would object strongly. I don’t know. He has never put me to the test.” The hippies, as if she had no memory of the 1970s, as if she had never worn a sheepskin jacket or a bandanna or dreamed of being Grace Slick.
There was no Afghan Sun, FYI. The sun of Afghanistan was the king, Zahir Shah. And then the Russians came, and then the fanatics, and the world changed.
But Afghan Moon…that helped me in the darkest moment of my life, and my mother was no longer able to object.
And there were books, inevitably, books like a disease, infesting every corner of our shabby, happy home. I became a writer because of course I did with those forebears, and maybe I chose movies instead of novels or biographies because I knew I couldn’t compete with the old folks. But until the Goldens moved into the big house on Macdougal, diagonally across the Gardens from ours, my post-graduation creativity had been stalled. With the boundless egotism of youth I had begun to imagine a mighty film, or a Dekalog-style sequence of films, dealing with migration, transformation, fear, danger, rationalism, romanticism, sexual change, the city, cowardice, and courage; nothing less than a panoramic portrait of my times. My preferred manner would be something I privately called Operatic Realism, my subject the conflict between the Self and the Other. I was trying to make a fictional portrait of my neighborhood but it was a story without a driving force. My parents didn’t have the doomed heroism of properly Operatic-Realist leads; nor did our other neighbors. (Bob Dylan was long gone.) My celebrated superstar-African-American-movie-director-in-a-red-baseball-cap film studies professor haughtily said after reading my early screenplays, “Very prettily done, kid, but where’s the blood? It’s too quiet. Where’s the engine? Maybe you should allow a flying saucer to land in the goddamn Gardens. Maybe you should blow up a building. Just make something happen. Make some noise.”
I didn’t know how. And then the Goldens arrived and they were my flying saucer, my engine, my bomb. I felt the excitement of the young artist whose subject has arrived like a gift in the holiday mail. I felt grateful.
It was the age of nonfiction, my father told me. “Maybe stop trying to make sings up. Ask in any bookstore,” he said, “iss de books on de nonfiction tables dat move while de made-up stories languish.” But that was the world of books. In the movies it was the age of superheroes. For nonfiction we had Michael Moore’s polemics, Werner Herzog’s Woodcarver Steiner, Wim Wenders’s Pina, some others. But the big bucks were in fantasy. My father admired and commended to me the work and ideas of Dziga Vertov, the Soviet documentarist who detested drama and literature. His film style, Kino-Eye or Ciné-Eye, aimed at nothing less than the evolution of mankind into a higher, fiction-free form of life, “from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man.” Whitman would have liked him. Maybe I-am-a-camera Isherwood too. I, however, resisted. I left the higher forms to my parents and Michael Moore. I wanted to make the world up.
A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their c
olleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.”
In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.
I miss them more than I can say.
Time passed. I acquired a girlfriend, lost her, acquired another, lost her as well. My secret movie script, my most demanding lover, disliked my attempts at these misconceived relationships with human beings, and sulked, and refused to yield up its secrets. My Late Twenties were steaming toward me, and I like a swooning nickelodeon hero lay helpless across the tracks. (My literary parents would no doubt have preferred that I refer, instead, to the climactic railway-tracks scene in Forster’s The Longest Journey.) The Gardens were my microcosm, and every day I saw the creatures of my imagination staring back at me from the windows of houses on both Macdougal and Sullivan, hollow-eyed, pleading to be born. I had pieces of them all but the shape of the work eluded me. At #XX Sullivan Street, on the first floor, with garden access, I had placed my Burmese—I should say Myanmaran—diplomat, U Lnu Fnu of the United Nations, his professional heart broken by his defeat in the longest-ever battle for the post of Secretary-General, twenty-nine consecutive rounds of voting without a winner, and in the thirtieth round he lost to the South Korean. Through him I planned to explore geopolitics, to dramatize the push by some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world toward the outlawing by the UN of the giving of religious offense, to bring to a head the vexed question of the use of the American veto in defense of Israel, and to arrange a visit to the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens by Aung San Suu Kyi herself. I knew, too, the story of U Lnu Fnu’s personal heartbreak, the loss of his wife to cancer, and I suspected that, derailed by the double defeat of his upright life, he might fall away from probity and finally be undone by financial scandal. When I thought of this the hollow-eyed man at the window of #XX Sullivan shook his head in disappointment and retreated into the shadows. Nobody wants to be the bad guy.