Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  Some fifteen years earlier, in the mid-’90s, I’d somehow found myself at a dinner on the Upper East Side where a magnum of 1959 Château Margaux was opened for coupling with a main course of leg of lamb and where, once I’d tasted from the glass poured for me, I finally understood the logic behind spending thousands of dollars on a bottle of something to drink. I was no connoisseur. I couldn’t tell a berry note from a chocolate nose or discern the hint of spring flowers the dining guest beside me picked up, she said, developing as it sat in the glass. What I experienced was, perhaps, all the more remarkable for my having so virgin a palate. On my tongue, the wine disappeared almost magically into pure sensation, an absorbing congeries of rich and dusky hints—insinuations of bitterness tempered by the faintest echoes of something once sweet, now round and gathering—a developing flavor that revealed some ideal to which my every previous encounter with red wine appeared to have been pointing all along. And even more remarkable than this almost disincarnate sensation was the disincarnation itself, the effortless sublimation of liquid into pure savor, conveying me to the threshold of some essential idea of wine itself, a frictionless passage into the immaterial that felt, quite frankly, like something metaphysical. My encounter with that ’59 Margaux was the only thing to which I could compare the taste of what Emily handed me, a liquid drink—bright and burry, nested in a honeycomb-and-oak envelope—exploding with disarming immediacy into something beyond sensation: a shard of lightning caught in loamy water. Julia was right. It looked like there was gold in it, and it tasted like it, too.

  “I mean, is that incredible?” Emily said, watching me.

  “You’re not kidding. What is it?”

  She held up the bottle. “Twenty-three-year Pappy Van Winkle. The holy grail of bourbons. I’ve heard about it, of course—but I’ve never had any.”

  “How much do you think that costs?” Julia asked.

  “If you can even get it. They make, like, seven hundred bottles of it every ten years. I have no idea what they charge at the distillery for it, but there’s someone on eBay selling an unopened bottle for fifteen thousand dollars.” Emily turned to me. “We ended up at Riaz’s the other night. I mean, his place—it’s unbelievable.”

  “Where is it?”

  “East End Avenue. He’s got the top four floors. You take an elevator to the first floor, and then he’s got his own elevator for the floors inside the apartment. There’s an indoor pool. And I don’t mean a Jacuzzi. A pool. It’s not small. Moroccan tile, foil arches. He took us into this room he’s got full of Sufi manuscripts. Another room, just for bourbon, bigger than my living room. The walls on two sides are covered, floor to ceiling, with bottles—a butcher-block bar in the middle. I saw the Van Winkle on the shelf and flipped out. I mean, I just wanted to hold it, but he brings it down and breaks the seal, then pours me a snifter. I almost fainted. He watched me drink it. I must have looked like I was having an orgasm. He told me to keep it.”

  “He just gave it to you?” I asked.

  She nodded. “‘I have more good bourbon than I’ll ever be able to drink,’ he said. ‘Seeing the pleasure it’s giving you is worth it.’”

  “That’s what he said?” Julia asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “He runs a hedge fund,” I answered. “He came to the show the other night and came backstage.”

  “Is he hot?”

  Emily considered the question: “I mean, that’s not the word I’d use for him, but he’s got something. Definitely.”

  “Money,” Julia said, her wolflike features sharpening with a thought.

  Emily went on to confess that she’d seen Riaz the next night, too. He called before the matinee, and she went down to meet him and a group of friends after the show for Champagne and Venetian calf’s liver at Cipriani, then for dinner a few blocks north at Carbone. After that, a smaller group of them gathered to get high at a loft on Church Street, where (she guessed) there was a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of art hanging on the living-room walls. Around midnight, the two of them left to get a drink at the Rose Bar, in the Gramercy Park Hotel, where Johnny Depp was sitting in the booth beside them and Kate Upton was making out with someone she didn’t recognize in another booth across the room. Finally, they met another bevy of Riaz’s finance buddies for bottle service at a private burlesque club on the Lower East Side called The Box. Emily estimated the evening had probably set him back fifteen thousand dollars. With wine—a Montrachet—the dinner bill alone had come to three and a half grand. “I’ve been in the city a long time. You see things. You hear about the kind of money people have. But it’s a whole other thing to experience it.”

  We plied her for details and watched her enjoy an almost erotic relish in supplying them: the solicitude of waiters and waitresses accustomed to Riaz’s habits and his tips; the fresh truffle shavings—boy, were they thick!—on their family-size portion of linguine Alfredo at dinner; the Francis Bacon triptych she’d written about in college and under which she had found herself getting high in that Church Street loft; the silky leather of the Mercedes limousine driving them about town all night long. As Emily talked, I kept being drawn to Julia’s face. There was something about her eyes as she listened—something pointed and glistening—that magnified her radiance. She noticed my glances, and at one point, our eyes locked. I lengthened, shifting in my seat as she held my gaze. Her quick glance at my crotch quickened my pulse. As Emily went on, the looks between us flashed like arrows beneath the conversation. What was I seeing on Julia’s face that so drew me? And what was she seeing on my own that kept leading her eyes back to mine? I remembered what Jacques Lacan once said about desire…

  We desire the desire of the other.

  …and thought: Was Emily’s narration of the previous night’s splendors arousing a desire in Julia that I, perceiving it, desired? And was it my desire for her desire that she saw on my face—and seeing it, desired in return? Sounds like nonsense, I know. Yet what came to pass next was nothing like nonsense:

  Emily got up to go to the restroom. Julia stared at me as I shifted in my seat again, a subtle smile on her lips. Behind us, the lock on the bathroom door snapped shut. Then Julia whispered: “Take me somewhere.”

  It was after six. The next show wasn’t for two hours. I took her by the hand and led her through the double doors that opened onto the back of the stage. As we crossed behind the set’s flats, I felt her want to stop me.

  “Not here,” I said. “I know a place.”

  The rehearsal room upstairs was dark and furnished as we’d left it when we’d moved to the stage—the dinner table at one end, the living-room ensemble at the other. Julia led me to the couch, where every day for weeks I’d watched Ashraf rehearse hitting Emily across the face. I would watch her tumble to the floor and cower, looking for cover—all the while her hand furtively seeking a blood packet she would stick between her teeth. Seething, heaving, anguished, Ashraf would find her here, cornered against the cushions, and he would hit her again. And again. When he finally stopped, we would see the blood pouring from her mouth.

  Against the backrest, Julia kissed me now, her breath moist and hot, her thin, strong tongue seeking mine. All at once, she was naked below the waist and I was on my knees, my head between her legs. She was soaked. I kissed at her knob and pressed past to lick inside. Her moans were tight and short; her grip against the back of my head was strong. She thrust herself against me—against my nose, my teeth, my tongue—grinding now as she swelled, her sex dripping with my saliva. My fingers disappeared inside her, searching for her spot. She clucked as I ate, and my fingertip found her barely raised rough patch. I pressed. She moaned. I played and pushed and slobbered, my nose wet with her pleasure. I felt her nails in my head, and her body grew still against my mouth. Her noises were different now, quiet sobs, like muted cries for help. And then her pleasure seemed to change again, her grip on my head loosening now as the order of her sounds coalesced into
a high-pitched squeal, an alarm of disbelief. She pulled me up. “I want you inside,” she whispered into my ear, her hands already searching for me.

  “I don’t have a condom.”

  “I’m on the Pill.”

  “But—”

  “Why? Do you have something I don’t want?”

  “No, no,” I said.

  No sooner had I said that than her lips were on mine. She unbuckled and released me. I pushed her back, and she fell onto the ocher cushions, stained with stage blood. Her legs were parted; she was doused and gleaming.

  I wanted to eat her again, but she wouldn’t let me.

  “Fuck me. Hard. Now.”

  I saw myself in the rehearsal mirror across the room. I thought I looked scared. I looked away and poked at her, rubbing myself along her wetness. She pulled her shirt over her head, then grabbed me from behind and pushed me in. Her heat was electric. I started gently, but this was clearly not what she wanted. She pushed herself against me. “Harder,” she said.

  I tried.

  “Harder,” she said again.

  “I don’t want to come.”

  “Then don’t come.”

  Her forbidding tone freed me. I started to move now more like I thought she wanted me to. “Fuck me like you hate me,” she hissed quietly. “Fuck me like I’m garbage.” I held her against the couch, my face inches from hers, and started to drive against her harder than I thought I should. “Like I’m garbage,” she said again and again.

  I looked up and saw us in the mirror. I didn’t recognize myself. My face was flush, my eyes wide with anger and need. I saw my dark body and, beneath it, the heap of her glimmering whiteness. I watched myself drive into her over and over. “Yes, yes, yes…” I heard her chant as I played at rage. I stared down at her body. It glowed and mocked me. I suddenly needed more of it. I pawed and groped. I gripped her ribs and shoved and knocked and pushed. No purchase on her white flesh was enough to satisfy me. I wanted to own it. I wanted to destroy it.

  She stared up into my eyes now, her head tilted, her upper lip curled, a searching, helpless look on her face. I fucked her with a fury I didn’t know I could muster, and as I did, whatever she was seeing on my face appeared to be what she wanted to see. The refrain of her unruly sounds now began, words dissolving into the host of almost animal sounds she started to make, the croak and blare of a climax breaking forth from somewhere much deeper inside her than before. She came, and I came, too, but my orgasm didn’t end with my release. Impossibly, I stiffened further, long with lust as I kept at her. The more I did, the more I wanted, the more she came, the harder I got, the harder I gave. I lost track of time. I don’t know if we were at it four minutes or forty. All I know is I never experienced anything like it before. Or since.

  3.

  I wouldn’t hear from Riaz until six months later, in the spring of 2013, when the play he’d come to see was awarded a Pulitzer. His congratulatory note to me was warm. I responded in kind. He replied with what seemed a halfhearted invitation to meet up for a drink: he was busy; never the master of his schedule; could we look to a night week after next or sometime before Memorial Day? As the appointed evening approached, an inevitable excuse was made, another date proposed, followed by another excuse and request—now sent from his secretary’s email account—to reschedule.

  Fine, I replied. I didn’t expect a follow-up.

  Two weeks later, on the eve of Ramadan, I was surprised to see his name come up in my in-box. He wanted to wish me well, whether I was planning to fast or not. (I wasn’t.) For him, our holy month was a time to reflect, he wrote, to indulge his gratitude for what he had rather than his desire for what he didn’t. Even on the days he didn’t fast—which was most of them, some years—he tended to moderation and appreciation amid the striving. It was a sane-making time of the year. The email contained no changes of font style or size, which might have signaled formulaic copy interpolated into the body, and it was specific enough in places for me to conclude he’d actually taken the time to write this note to me alone. Another note arrived two days later, just after a series of suicide bombings in Rawalpindi, where much of his extended family still lived and where—I’d mentioned in an earlier email to him—he knew some of mine did, too. The tragedy initiated an intimacy, and our correspondence now took a self-revealing turn. I would learn that his parents, like my own, had immigrated to America after the quotas for people from the subcontinent were lifted in 1965; they’d settled first in Philadelphia, then moved to Pittston, a town along the Lackawanna River just south of Scranton, where his father found a job managing the furnaces at an industrial glass manufacturer called Lackawanna Glass Works. I learned, too, he was not only the firstborn son on either side of an enormous family but also the first of the extended brood to be born in America. This fact alone, he wrote, he thought largely responsible for his success; it had meant expectations of existential magnitude; he guessed his name was likely uttered in the prayers of no less than a hundred members of his family each and every day—after all, he financially supported more than twice as many.

  I didn’t know much about his business back then. He would never walk me through the details of what he actually did (and I wouldn’t do my writer’s due diligence until much later, when I decided to tell his story here). I remember him describing himself to a group of my friends—the evening of my forty-second birthday—as a merchant of debt, riffing off the birthday gift a group of my theater mates had pooled their resources to buy and frame for me that year: a single page of The Merchant of Venice from the Second Folio. Riaz’s quip drew a flurry of questions about the apparent absurdity of selling debt, all of which he fielded graciously, answering in simpler terms than I would have thought possible:

  Debt had value?

  Yes. Like any loan, debt generated a regular payment, and that payment, the simple fact of it—depending on how reliably it was expected to be made—could be sold.

  But who would want to buy it?

  Big money. And the bigger the money, the more urgent the need to find a lucrative parking place, a spot you could put all that cash and watch it grow.

  How did it work?

  Managers in control of the world’s various mountains of money bought loans from original lenders in order to have the scheduled loan payments appear on their books; cash flowing in like that—month in, month out—was enough to put those managers’ restless minds at ease, and for good reason. It was usually easy money.

  But how did it work, exactly? How did you make money holding debt?

  Holding a good loan—whether for a car or credit card, home or university tuition—meant you could expect it to be paid in full, pocketing not only the profit from the interest paid but also the entirety of the underlying principal as well. As long as you’d done your homework right and bought the right loans to the right loanees, he explained, debt was the best investment out there.

  Assessing the viability of loans of all sorts—according to Google—was the expertise of Riaz’s firm, Avasina Associates. Their website was sleek and unrevealing, like a willfully spare downtown storefront, advertising exclusivity by signaling its lack of interest in your business. The clutter of press on the first page of the search results revealed that he’d made a fortune in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis, loading up on home loans nobody wanted anymore, renegotiating the terms to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, later selling those renegotiated loans to municipalities across the country. He was much lauded in the pieces I read and had even ended up on a CBS Sunday Morning segment about compassionate finance. How had he kept people in their homes and made a killing? “There’s no substitute for good old hard work,” he replied coyly against the backdrop of the East River as seen through the mural-size windows of his kitchen. In 2011, Forbes magazine had lauded the “monster trade” that returned to its municipal investors an “eye-popping” 30 percent and went on to wonder if—with a little luck!—Riaz might soon end up on its list of the four hundred richest American
s. Cheekily, I sent him a link to the article with a note asking if he might have some good news in the coming year. He sent back one that read: “Fake it ’til you make it”—punctuated by a winking-face-with-tongue emoji.

  I’ve skipped around a bit…

  It would take another half year of appointments scheduled and rescheduled over email before we were to meet again in person. It was the fall of 2013, and the occasion was an invitation to join him at a gala in honor of the New Khalwati Order, a modern Sufi dergah on Duane Street across from Duane Park in Tribeca, led, since the death of its founder, by a white convert, the wayward scion of a famous Austrian mining family who called herself Mariam Meriha. I was already acquainted with Sheikha Maria—as she was known to her followers—having met her on two occasions, once at the dergah itself, where I’d gone one Ramadan Thursday in the mid-aughts to participate in their weekly service. I found her kind and clueless in her tall white sikke and abundant shawls. After a sermon in which she exhorted us all to care for ourselves, she led us through a disheveled hourlong dhikr—or Sufi ceremonial chanting of the divine name—that culminated, comically, in a welter of whirling urban professionals tumbling into each other and over themselves, a scene that I could only have imagined, before seeing it with my own eyes, as a scene in some satiric novel about Muslims in America.

  Riaz and I arranged to meet up before the gala for a drink. When I arrived, he was leaning against the thick zinc counter at the end of the bar, already halfway through a Manhattan and chewing on the Maraschino. Almost at once I found myself struck by the same thick charisma I’d discerned the first night we met. I’d remembered him as stout, but looking at him in his two-piece suit, I could tell he wasn’t. Not really. As we chatted, some part of me was only watching him, trying to make sense of—what was it, exactly? Charm? Confidence? Magnetism? There was not a whit of will or self-manipulation about it, but something muter and more elemental at work, like the balanced girth of a standing stone on Salisbury Plain. I observed him as we spoke, wondering: Is it the money?