Her early work, she said, was inspired by the primitive artists she had met on a visit to Haiti, who cut oil drums in half, flattened the two halves, and then, using the simplest of tools—hammers and screwdrivers—cut and beat them into intricate latticework images of branches, foliage and birds. She talked to Petya for a long time about using a blowtorch to cut steel and iron into lacelike intricacies and showed him images of her work on her phone: the remains of wrecked (bombed?) cars and tanks, transformed into the most delicate filigree forms, the metal penetrated by shapely patterned air and acquiring an airiness of its own. She spoke in the language of the art world, war of symbols, desirable oppositions, the high-abstract insider jargon, describing her quest for empathetic images creating a balance as well as a clash by contrasting ideas and materials, and she examined, too, the absurdity of having opposing extremist stances, like a wrestler in a tutu. She was a brilliant speaker, charismatic and almost incomprehensibly fast, pushing a hand through her hair and clutching at her head as she spoke; but in the end he burst out (his autism forcing him to speak the truth), “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
Immediately he hated himself. What kind of a fool, with the words “I love you” stuck in his throat, offered his brilliant beloved scorn instead of adoration? Now she would hate him and would be justified in doing so and his life would be meaningless and damned.
She stared at him for a long moment and then burst into healing laughter. “It’s a defense mechanism,” she said. “One worries one will not be taken seriously if one lacks a sufficiency of theory, especially if one is female. Actually, my work speaks pretty clearly for itself. I push beauty into horror and I want it to disturb you and make you think. Come up to Rhinebeck and take a look.”
I’m now sure—as I piece together the puzzle of the Golden house, and try to reconstruct my memory of the exact sequence of events of that important night, setting them down as they come back to me—that this was the point of the evening at which things started to go wrong for Petya, as his desire to accept Ubah’s invitation did battle with the demons that obliged him to fear the outside world. He made a strange gesture with both arms, half-helpless, half-angry, and at once began to soliloquize in a rapid series of non sequiturs about whatever crossed his anguished mind. His mood grew darker as he expostulated on various topics, coming at last to the question of Broadway musicals and his dislike of most of them. Then came the awkward Python episode and his disappearance indoors and then his anguish on the windowsill. Love, in Petya, was never far from despair.
All that summer he was sad, locked in his room bathed in blue light, playing and (as we afterwards discovered) creating computer games of immense complexity and beauty, and dreaming of that haunting face behind a protective face mask and of the steel-cutting flame moving in her hand as she created fantasy and delicacy out of brute metal. He thought of her as a kind of superhero, his blowtorch goddess, and wanted above all things to be with her but he feared the journey, a Prince too full of troubles to be able to pursue his vanished Cinderella. Nor could he call her and tell her how he felt. He was like a continent of erratic garrulity containing a no-go zone of oral paralysis. And finally it was Apu who took pity on him and offered to help. “I’ll rent a car with blacked-out windows,” he declared. “We’re going to get you access.”
Apu swore, afterwards, that that had been his only motive: to get Petya across the frontier of his fear and give him a shot at the girl. But maybe he wasn’t telling the truth.
And so Petya screwed up his courage and made the call, and Ubah Tuur invited the brothers up for the weekend, and was understanding enough to tell him, “There’s a good solid fence all the way around the property, so maybe you can think of it as interior space, like your communal gardens. If you can get your head around that I can show you the work that’s standing on the land as well as what’s in the studio.”
In the last light of day, wearing her soiled work dungarees, her hair loosely piled up under a back-to-front Yankees baseball cap, the protective mask, just removed, dangling from the crook of her elbow: without even trying, she was a knockout. “Here, I want you to see this,” she said, and took Petya’s hand in hers, and led him through the crepuscular land littered with her giant intricate forms, like the lacy armor of immense gods, like battlefield detritus reworked by light-fingered elves, and he uncomplaining, believing in the existence of the fence he could not see in the failing light, not even by the light of the full bright moon above; she rounded the long low farmhouse where she lived, led him between the farmhouse and the barn where she worked, and said, “Look.” And there at the foot of the land, where it fell sharply away, was the rolling river, the wide and silver Hudson, taking his breath away. For a long moment he didn’t even think about the fence, didn’t ask if he was safely enclosed or dangerously exposed to the frightening everything of the world, and when he did begin to ask, “Is there…” and as his hand fell to trembling she held it firmly and said, “The river is the wall. This is a safe place for us all.” And he accepted what she said and was not afraid, and stood there watching the water until she led the brothers indoors to dinner.
He became his loquacious self again in the warm yellow light of her kitchen, eating her mango curry chicken, its sweetness doing battle on his palate with the berbere spices mixed into it. But while he talked on and on about his enthusiasm for the video-gaming world, interspersing accounts of the latest games with recitals of river poetry under the influence of the shining river, her attention wandered. The night lengthened and the script of the visit was thrown away and Ubah Tuur felt an unexpectedness rise in her; a treachery. How is it you’re not married, she asked Petya, a man like you, you’re a catch. But while she said it her eyes slid across to Apu, who was sitting perfectly still, he told me, doing nothing, but afterwards Petya accused him of mumbling, you were muttering something, you bastard, you used black magic on her, while he, Petya, tried to answer Ubah, the words stumbling, a long time ago, yes, someone, but since then the waiting, the waiting for an emotional imperative, and she, talking to him but looking at his brother, And so now, have you found the emotional imperative, flirtatious, but her eyes on Apu, and he, mumbling, according to Petya, though he himself always denied to me that he mumbled.
I know what you did, you rat, Petya would shriek later, maybe you put something in her food also, the spices would have disguised it, some evil chicken entrail powder you got from your Greenpoint witch, and the mumbling, what were you saying, a hex, a hex.
And Apu straight-faced, making matters worse, Where is my father’s pet son now? What about two plus two is four? Four plus four is eight? I did nothing. Nothing.
You fucked her, Petya wailed.
Well, yes. I did that. I’m sorry.
It may have gone somewhat differently. I wasn’t there. It may well have been that the usually loquacious Petya was tongue-tied all night, silenced by love, and lively worldly Apu monopolized the talk, and the woman. It may be that she, Ubah, universally held to be a graceful courteous woman, not usually reckless, surprised herself on this occasion by yielding to sudden lust for the wrong brother, her fellow artist, the rising star, the ladies’ man, the charmer. The motivations of desire are obscure even to the desirous, the desiring and the desired. I do betray / My nobler part to my gross body’s treason, Bard of Avon, Sonnet 151. And so without full knowledge of the why and wherefore, we inflict mortal wounds on those we love.