Rushdie trumps us with the Joker

Nero (Golden) himself mostly stayed in his home office, even though the main premises of Golden Enterprises were in Midtown in a tower irritatingly owned by a certain Gary ‘Green’ Gwynplaine, a vulgarian whose name Nero could not bring himself to speak, and who liked to call himself the Joker on account of having been born with inexplicably lime-green hair.

Purple-coated, white-skinned, red-lipped, Gwynplaine made himself the mirror image of the notorious cartoon villain and seemed to revel in the likeness. Nero found his landlord intolerable, and announced to me one evening, apropos of nothing, and without explanation – this was his way, his train of thought emerging occasionally out of the tunnel of his mouth, whoever was in the immediate vicinity becoming the station at which it briefly stopped – ‘One world. When they let us in, I’ll be the first in the door.’ It took me a moment to understand that he wasn’t talking about pan-globalism but about One World Trade Center, which wouldn’t be ready for occupancy for a couple of years, and announcing his intention to leave the Joker’s building and move into the new tower built in the place of tragedy. ‘On the upper floors I can get a terrific deal,’ he clarified. ‘Fifty, sixty floors, OK, they can fill those, but above that? After what happened nobody wants to rent in that airspace. So, a great deal. The best deal in town. All that empty floor space needing occupation, finding nothing. Me, personally, I go where the bargain is. High in the sky? Fine. Lowball the price, I’ll take it. It’s a bargain. Lightning doesn’t strike twice.’

His employees rarely saw him. He allowed his hair to lengthen. I began to wonder about the length of his toenails. After Romney’s defeat his mood worsened and he was barely visible even to his wife and household. He took to sleeping on a fold-out cot in the office at the house and ordering pizza late at night. During the night he made phone calls to employees in various countries – at least I guessed they were employees – and in Manhattan too. His rule was that he would call you at any moment of the day or night and expect you to be alert and willing to discuss whatever he pleased, business or women or something in the paper. He would talk for hours to his telephone colleagues and that had to be OK with them. One evening in the Gardens when he was in one of his affable moods I put on my most innocent smile and asked him if he ever thought about Howard Hughes. ‘That freak,’ he answered. ‘You’re lucky I have a soft spot for you. Don’t ever compare me to that freak.’ But at the same time he began to retreat even further from the human gaze. Vasilisa was left to spend many days at the spa or up and down Madison in various stores and lunching with girlfriends at Bergdorf or Sant Ambroeus. Ignore a beautiful woman for too long and there will be trouble. How long is too long? Five minutes. Anything over an hour: catastrophe awaits.

The house had become both the expression of her beauty and of the intensity of her need. On oyster-grey walls she hung large mirrors made up of smaller mirror squares, some at an angle, some tinted close to black, expressing, like the Cubists, the need for many perspectives at the same time. A grand new fireplace was installed in the great room, threatening cold-weather incandescence. New rugs underfoot, silken to the touch, the colour of steel. The house was her language. She spoke to him through its renewal, knowing him to be a man influenced by surroundings, telling him wordlessly that if a king needs a palace, that palace requires, to be suitably palatial, a queen.

And slowly it worked. By Christmas he had recovered from the president’s electoral victory and had developed a powerful polemic against the defeated contender, the worst contender ever, he said at mealtimes, jabbing his fork at us to emphasise his point, there had never been a weaker contender in the history of contending, you couldn’t even call him a true contender, there had been no contest, it was like the guy surrenderedbefore a punch was thrown, so next time round let’s not makebefore a punch was thrown, so next time round let’s not makethe mistake of choosing a clown, let’s make sure it’s a guy with gravitas, who looks like he can lead. Next time. For sure.

By the inauguration the weather in the Golden house was much improved. It was not permitted to watch the ceremony on television, but the mood of the king and queen was jovial, and flirtatious. I knew that Nero Golden’s interior weather was changeable, and that his sexual vulnerability to his wife’s charms only increased as he grew older, and that the bedroom was where she invariably achieved the necessary alterations in his personal meteorology. But I didn’t know then what I know now – that he wasn’t well. Vasilisa, showing herself to be a master of timing, had sensed her opening and made her play. Before any of us, she saw what afterwards became sadly all too plain to us all: that he was weakening, that the time would soon come when he was no longer who he had been. She smelled the first intimation of that coming weakness as a shark smells a single drop of blood in water, and moved in for the kill.

Everything is a strategy. This is the wisdom of the spider.
Everything is food. This is the wisdom of the shark.

Excerpts taken with permission from Penguin Random House. Pages: 380;