Homeland Elegies(41)
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 Chateau 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…