Homeland Elegies(55)

Footnotes


1 If I’ve been drawn to fill more space in these pages detailing the various luxurious appurtenances of my time with Riaz than describing the man himself, there is a logic to it. I’m not sure my time with him ever really encompassed much more than my avid delight at the sundry rare benefits I enjoyed because of him. A flat, abstracted portrayal—punctuated by moments of ecstatic material wonder—is perhaps closer to the truth of so much of my actual experience of him, less a person to me than an idea, an object, a protector, a purveyor of fulfillments, a means to some ever-elusive end, and I suspect this was mutual, at least the means-to-some-end part of it. Of course, I’m leaving out the many episodes of human warmth that would have conveyed a fundamental tenderness beneath his otherwise almost mineral mien. I’m ignoring the moments of touching vulnerability, such as when, the morning after an all-night blowout at his palatial digs—replete with drugs and costumed dwarfs and a protracted donnybrook between two New York titans of debt over Benghazi and the Clinton emails—I walked into his bedroom and found him on all fours with a penis in each end. I’d long since concluded Riaz was gay—he never dated women, and I found his gaze often lingering on strapping young men like the two he was sandwiched between that morning—and I suspected, despite his fabulous wealth and forward thinking, that he still harbored a profound and crippling Muslim shame about it. In the days that followed, I saw a more fragile man than I ever had seen and ever would see again, his resolute core softened, his need for a real friend finally revealed—or so it seemed. It was during the first week of the US Open that year, and we spent two days wandering the grounds, eating hot dogs, drinking beer, dipping in and out of luxury boxes. He told me of his first crush, a boy in the fourth grade he still dreamed about; he told me he suspected his sister, too, had been gay, which he thought was why she’d killed herself. For those two days, he seemed like a different person to me, light, pliant, able to convey with little more than a sidelong smile that he appreciated—even needed—me. And then, just as suddenly, it all vanished. Had it taken two full days to sound me out? To be sure that I, a fellow Muslim, was more than happy to accept him as he was? Or was he fishing for something else? I would come to wonder if perhaps I’d been an object of sexual interest to him all along, if perhaps he thought I was gay, too, locked even deeper in that closet than he was. Whatever the reason for the brief window of his appealing availability, by Labor Day weekend, it was gone, and that dazzling, ceramic impenetrability was back…





Pox Americana





VI.





Of Love and Death


It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.

—D. W. Winnicott





Of the women I slept with during my season of sexual fecklessness, I least expected Asha would have been the one to give me syphilis. Incidences of the so-called Great Pretender were surging in this era of transactional sex, and it was much reported that parts of Brooklyn were showing rates of the disease not seen since the nineteenth century. That year, I’d had quite a bit of sex in Williamsburg, where the numbers preponderated, and thus assumed—wrongly—that I’d contracted the malady somewhere between Bedford and Graham Avenues. After the diagnosis, I strained to recall even the most peripheral apprehension of an incipient chancre—a discoloration, say, on any of the various vulvic folds at which I’d slobbered, into which I’d pushed—but my recollections were vague at best, for by the time the panties were off I wasn’t usually much given to the inspecting mood. The shaved pubus was legion then, and I would end up suspecting I’d simply missed the lesion, mistaking it for yet another ingrown hair on the verge of releasing its pus.

Asha was well and smoothly groomed, without so much as a bump or razor scratch from her mons pubis down to below her introitus. Every three weeks, she would pop two Advil and drive the mile and a half from the fourplex she owned in the Montrose section of Houston to the wax salon closer to downtown, where her aesthetician poured and spread scorching wax onto her labia, waited a half minute, then ripped the seal, which plucked every nascent hair from its follicle. Asha was long accustomed to keeping her genitals hair-free, though not as a capitulation—unwitting or not—to the pornographic ideal engulfing us all. No. Her bald sex was a Muslim thing. The trips to Apple and Eve Brazilian Wax were a holdover from her childhood years as a believer.1 There were others: the hodgepodge Ramadan fasting, the avoidance of pork, the use of her right hand when she ate and of her left whenever she reached for toilet paper, and of course, lingering guilt over the more than occasional indulgences in Cab Franc and Syrah. My point is she wasn’t exactly a believer, and she wasn’t exactly not. She’d grown up with these things (as had I), and they clearly still held some meaning for her (as they did not for me), even if that meaning had almost nothing to do anymore with a yearning for heaven or a fear about ending up in hell.

I say “almost” only because Asha was never really clear about what she actually thought when it came to the end of life or the end of times. Both her parents are religious, though Asha used to joke that her mother’s faith had as much Oprah and Jeane Dixon in it as it had of the Prophet Muhammad. As a teen, she ran into some fairly baroque trouble with them over normal teenage things that only ever got her “American” friends yelled at or, at worst, grounded. There was more corporal punishment in her family than most in this country would be comfortable with (usually by her mother’s hand), and several times she found herself locked in her room for days at a time and occasionally starved (as her father had been as a child). Typical of Asha’s generous embrace of things as they are was that she never seemed bitter about any of it. She didn’t hold it against her parents that, as she put it, they couldn’t make their peace with the consequences of having had children in a culture that wasn’t their own. She saw their dilemma with compassion. At root, she believed, they never really understood how American they weren’t.