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.