America changed them both, Petya and Apu—America, that divided self—polarizing them as America was polarized, the wars of America, external and internal, becoming their wars as well; but in the beginning, if Petya arrived in New York as the heavy-drinking polymath who was afraid of the world and found living in it a constant hardship, then Apu came as the sober romantic artist and promiscuous metropolitan, flirting with everything that was visionary yet with a clarity of vision that allowed him to see people plain, as his portraits showed: the panic in the eyes of the fading dowager, the vulnerable ignorance in the stance of the ungloved boxing champion, the courage of the ballerina with blood in her slippers like the Ugly Sister who cut off her toes to squeeze her foot into Cinderella’s glass shoe. His portraits were anything but sycophantic; they could be very harsh. Yet people hastened to his door with fat checks in their hands. To be done by Apu Golden, nailed to his canvas, became desirable, valuable. It became a thing. Meanwhile, away from his studio, he ran voraciously through the city, embracing it all like a young Whitman, the undergrounds, the clubs, the power stations, the prisons, the subcultures, the catastrophes, the flaming comets, the gamblers, the dying factories, the dancing queens. He was his brother’s antithesis, a gluttonous agoraphile, and came to be thought of as a magic creature, an escapee from a fairy tale, though nobody could say for certain whether he was charmed or doomed.
He was a far more flamboyant dresser than his older brother, and his look altered frequently. He wore contact lenses in many colors, sometimes different colors for each eye, and until the very end I did not know what his natural eye color was. His clothing embraced all the fashions of the planet. On a whim he would abandon the pashmina shawl and put on, instead, the Arab dishdasha, the African dashiki, the South Indian veshti, the bright shirts of Latin America or, sometimes, in a Petya-low-key mood, the buttoned-up gravity of the bespoke English three-piece tweed suit. He might be seen on Sixth Avenue in a maxi-skirt or a kilt. This mutability confused many of us about his orientation, but as far as I know he was conventionally heterosexual; though it is true that he was a sort of genius of compartmentalization, he kept different groups of friends in sealed-off boxes and nobody in one box was even aware of the existence of other, different containers. So it’s possible that he had a secret life beyond the frontiers of heterosex, maybe even a promiscuous one. But in my opinion that is unlikely. As we shall see, he was not the Golden brother for whom gender identity was an issue. In his mystical explorations, however, he certainly did develop a number of peculiar, occultist affiliations which he didn’t care to discuss. But now that everything is known I can begin to reconstruct that life he kept concealed.
We had the movies in common, and liked to spend weekend afternoons at the IFC Center or Film Forum watching Tokyo Monogatari or Orfeu negro or Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. It was because of the movies that he shortened his name to echo Ray’s immortal Apu. His father objected, he confessed to me. “He says we are Romans, not Bengalis. But that is his preoccupation, not mine.” Nero Golden found our movie dates amusing. When I came by to pick up Apu he was sometimes waiting in the small backyard that gave out onto the communal gardens and, turning to face the house, he’d roar, “Apuleius! Your girlfriend’s here!”
One last note regarding his name: he spoke with admiration about the second-century author of The Golden Ass. “The guy inherited one million sesterces from his father in Algeria and still wrote a masterpiece.” And regarding his older brother’s name as well as his own: “If Petya’s the satyr, or even the satyr-icon, then I’m definitely the fucking donkey.” (Then, a dismissive shrug.) But late at night, when he’d had a few drinks, he inverted the thought. Which felt like a better fit; because, to tell the truth, of the pair, he was the priapically satyric one, while poor Petya was very often the long-eared ass.
On the night of the Goldens’ party in the Gardens, Petya and Apu met the Somali woman, and the ties that held the clan together began to break.
She had been brought to the gathering by her gallerist, who was now also, though not exclusively, Apu’s: a twinkling silver-haired rogue named Frankie Sottovoce who had gained notoriety in his youth by spray-painting the twelve-inch high letters NLF on one of the three monumental Claude Monet paintings of water lilies at the Museum of Modern Art, to protest the war in Vietnam, echoing the act of the unknown vandal who, in the same year, 1974, had scratched the two-foot-high letters IRA into the lower right-hand corner of Peter Paul Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, an act for which Sottovoce, when feeling boastful about his radical-left activist younger self, would also improbably claim responsibility. The paintings were easily restored, the IRA lost its war, the Vietcong won theirs, and the gallerist went on to have a distinguished career, and discovered and successfully promoted, among many others, the metal-cutting sculptor Ubah Tuur.
Ubah means “flower” or “blossom” in Somali, and is sometimes written as Ubax, the “x” in Somali being a throaty sound that Anglophone throats struggle to make, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Hence “Ubah,” a simplified concession to non-Somali pharyngeal incompetence. She was beautiful in the way the women of the Horn are beautiful, long-necked and graceful in the arms, and in the long summer evening she seemed to Petya a flowering tree beneath whose boughs he could rest, healed by her cooling shade, for the rest of his life. At a certain point in the evening she sang: not the ululating Somali song he had expected to emerge from those rich lips but Patti Smith’s famous ode to love itself, full of darkness and desire, with its comforting, treacherous repetitions, can’t hurt you now, can’t hurt you now…and by the time she was done he was lost. He rushed in her direction and stopped dead in front of her, at a loss. Overcome by his sudden rush of impossible, unspeakable love, he began to babble at his just-discovered dream girl about this and that, poetry and subatomic physics and the private lives of movie stars, and she listened gravely, accepting all his short-circuit non sequiturs as if they were entirely natural, and he felt, for once in his life, understood. Then she began to speak and he listened mesmerized, mongoose to her cobra. Afterwards he was able to repeat verbatim every single word that came out of her flawless mouth.