Hotel Living (11 page)

I looked at my watch, popped the one Ambien I had not used during the flight, and walked into my open bedroom. I closed the window and sat on my airbed, feeling it deflate for two seconds before my ass touched the wooden floor.

I grabbed some of my mail, which was spread out next to Paul's paper-thin laptop, bleeping that it was out of battery. An EBS Hong Kong wedding invitation in some green “fabulously ever after” recycled paper—why was I even invited?—envelopes from PG&E and Gap, and two handwritten cards, one from my nephew showing a fishing boat and wishing me happy birthday, the other with Klaus Maria Brandauer, or Klaus Kinski, or a clown of some sort, in a colonial outfit walking on a rice field. “
File, Kales Giortes.
A year ago you took me in. Zemar.” I stared at the pink stamp from the Union of Myanmar, mailed ten months back, but my eyes slowly got distracted by the prehibernation countdown on Paul's laptop. An Ambien animistic empathy urged me to plug it in, relieve its cries for help, as my mind flew back to the steps of the cottage at Chateau Marmont, where I'd stood with Zemar. “You don't know how to be in this world,” Zemar had told me,
smiling sheepishly, stoned and smacked up, as we looked out on the city lights of LA. “You've been dealt a good hand. You were born smart and handsome. I used to do your job. I've seen many Andreas and Eriks. It's all about working the hand you've been dealt, Stathis. You are not playing your cards right. You want to become Erik, who wants to be me, who wanted to be Erik's brother, who's obsessed with Erik. You don't know your full potential. You'll outdo them. And then you'll quit. We all do,” the junkie said, and rested his hand on my shoulder.

A MISSED CALL ON MY
cell phone woke me up the next morning. I listened to Erik's message—canceling his trip because he was “coming down with something.” I called back instantly, but it went straight to his voice mail. “Feel better” was all I left.

“Paul,” I shouted.

No one answered.

I needed coffee dangerously. I got up and walked into the kitchen to make some, but all I found was an empty box of instant next to Starbucks molded cups and notes from EBS-ers who had passed by. I couldn't even make out the handwriting in most of them. Then I just stood there and felt the pain.

“Fuck this!” I crunched up cups and notes—nasty coffee everywhere—throwing all kinds of shit in the sink. “And fuck me,” I whispered.

Unshowered, still wearing the same clothes from the flight, I walked down the street to Café de la Presse. I got a latte (weak, a milky joke) and tried Erik once more but, again, I only reached his voice mail. Why wasn't he picking up? He wasn't fucking dying. I hung up in a mix of outrage and guilt: he was sick, I tried to convince myself.

I asked for an extra shot in my latte and called my super about the bedroom door. He didn't know anything about “any door,” but he wanted to discuss with me “the serious complaints from the neighbors.” I said I'd have to call him back and dialed an ex-colleague from Redwood City, but, after several rings, that too went to voice mail. Through the café's windows I noticed Crate and Barrel across the street. It was a moody San Francisco morning. I strode in with my triple-shot latte.

“And how are
you
today?” Jane greeted me at the door, under a poster of a sailboat that reminded me of my nephew's card.

“I want a coffee table,” I told Jane without smiling back. For all practical purposes, I was a guest in my own home.

I spent the rest of the day putting together five pieces of wood. In the evening I went out by myself to get drunk and laid, and almost succeeded.

I was busy fucking on the half-inflated airbed when Paul walked into my no-bedroom-door one-bedroom.

“What the fuck!”

“Shit. I told you there was a chance of this happening.” I threw my boxers on and hopped into the living room. “I would have closed the door if I
had
one, Paul.”

“I'm sorry,” Paul said, and let out a nervous laugh. “We had a small accident. But don't worry, the door's getting fixed.”

“Accident?” I said, breathing heavily.

“My chess guru was doing an attention exercise and it turned into overdose. We broke down the door. We had to.”

I stared at Paul, flustered. Neither of us spoke. I was so tired of him and his bullshit.

“Stathis, it's getting fixed!”

“A chess guru was here,” I said, flatly. “Is he okay?”

“He's fine, he left you a note. He's paying for the door.”

“What's an attention exercise? Actually, I don't give a fuck. How about some privacy?”

He gave my boxers a glance. I was still hard.

“
Now!
” I yelled. “Privacy ain't a luxury, you know.”

Paul looked at me like I was speaking Greek.

“You're testing my patience, Paul. You, your stupid work, stupid Erik.
Everything!
”

Paul smiled just a notch, as if he was getting a kick out of disobeying orders.

“Then go down on me, bitch,” I said, straight-faced.

“
What the fuck?
” the naked guy shouted from my bedroom.

Paul stared at my crotch without moving. He didn't blink.

“That's what I thought,” I said. “You're a freak, Paul. A rich stalker with websites. You should be locked up. You're a sociopath,
exactly
like your father. You know
exactly
how to be in this world.”

Paul laughed. “Erik taught you all that?”

“Fuck Erik. You both've been dealt a good hand and you're fucking it up. I'm gonna play my hand right.”

“Yeah,” Paul said, nodding toward the naked guy in the bedroom, who was sniffing from a tiny bottle. “I can see that.”

On my way to Paris I didn't stop by New York, even though, after four voice mails, Erik bothered to invite me for “a quick stopover to hang out.” He was “bummed for not making it out West, passing up some good change too.” But healthwise, he said, he was better.

It was a long flight. Long enough for me to consider scenarios. What if Erik had asked me to stop over in New York only
after
I mentioned Zemar's card from Myanmar? What if his work in Tahoe had already been canned? My unfulfillment soared at thirty-five thousand feet. I was exhausted, and desperate for a clean sheet of paper.

B
ACK IN PARIS, MY HIATUS
from Erik was protected by eighty-hour weeks. Work was my medicine. I obsessed. I fought Andrea on Lifestyle relentlessly, all day long via e-mail on my BlackBerry, all the way back to the Lancaster. “Fuck the West Coast nice guy,” I signed my notes to Alkis.

Fuck them all: Andrea, Command, WASPs, Erik. I decided to be Greek and proud. It was 2005; we had nailed the Olympics and Eurocup. Finally, Greekness, that unprocessed masculinity, was selling. I would be the “peasant” consultant. I played up my Greek accent and took cabs instead of using our car service. I talked to the client spontaneously, using ungrammatical words like
optionality
instead of Command's
real options
mumbo jumbo.

“Strategic engineering,” I cut off Andrea, in a packed conference room, as she rambled on about Command's “decision analysis–backed hybrid alternatives” in a pathetic attempt to return the discussion to her Lifestyle agenda.

“How manly,” the client-lead gasped, touching her gold necklace.

“We take risks, 'cause that's what men do,” I said, and eyebrows rose in response.

“I'll teach you backgammon, show you how to deal with strategy and risk,” I talked back to Andrea when she threatened me with sensitivity training. With her Lifestyle pretty much bypassed by the client, I was growing some balls.

I BEGAN TO HAVE FUN
with phallic capitalism. I spotted a polished, feminine side in the white-collar man and pounded it; wasn't that expected of me? To be Greek? I dealt with privilege like a man, as though luxury was an accident, a by-the-way. I lived in hotels—“to be by the clients”—and slept around, sometimes with people I'd present to a few hours later. “It's a guy thing,” I told Alkis, who, primed for his banking job in London, partied along with me.

We went on working and drinking until, a couple of months after San Francisco, Andrea requested a debriefing meeting in New York.

Checking in at the Soho Grand, half awake, with two Ambien finally kicking in to end an all-nighter that had rolled into a transatlantic flight, I texted Erik: “I'm in town.”

We spent the weekend in my hotel. We didn't talk about San Francisco. We didn't argue about globalization, west Chelsea, consulting, Andrea, Zemar, Melissa, not even what used to be my “ridiculous accommodations.” My fear of asking for anything more, coupled with the battery-safe mode
that the French and Andrea kept me in, led to an Erik-you-win state. Which, oddly enough, and for the first time, made simply hanging out with him pleasing. I would spend a string of weekends in New York that winter.

“COME TO THINK OF IT,
Paris to New York isn't much longer than New York to San Francisco,” I told Alkis over the phone while waiting to board at de Gaulle.

“Funny, that.”

“Here we go again . . .”

“No, wait,” Alkis said. “I got a case study for you. You make VP, but Concorde's been long retired. It's tricky to jet-stalk these days, isn't it?”

“My next project is in New York,” I said, raising my voice. “Working on it. You know that.”

“What if it's not? What if it is? You've no
shite
what I'm talking about.”

Shite, indeed. He was talking about Erik like he was my vice, when I thought that the worst was behind us. We'd even diversified our whereabouts—carefully, of course—to include hangouts near my hotels in Soho. “We have tequilas at Café Noir and burgers at Kenn's Broome,” I mumbled into my cell phone. “Two bucks more than Empire Diner.”

“
What?
” Alkis laughed. “Are you losing it, mate?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don't sleep well. They're calling my flight.”

AFTER PARIS I PUSHED FOR
a project in New Jersey so I could spend my weekends in New York. With Erik.

“Less expensive than those Friday-to-Monday trips to San Francisco. And much more productive,” I sold to Andrea. “But I need a hotel downtown,” I added, hoping to seal my non–west Chelsea bars with Erik. “I have to be close to the Holland Tunnel to get to Princeton on time.”

“That's understandable” was all Andrea said.

By early 2006 I even gave up on trying to notch down my accommodations for Erik. He didn't get the difference between the Mercer, the Soho Grand, and the W. They were all “Marcjacobsland” to him.

Sunday mornings, with Erik still sleeping next to me, I would room-service a latte and catch up on the week's e-mails. Around 10 a.m. Erik would curse something and crawl out of bed to go pee.

“Can't do it with a hard-on,” I yelled to him on the Sunday I heard him pissing onto the cement floor and the porcelain seat, and finally into the toilet bowl.

“I ain't Greek,” Erik said, muffled, sleepwalking back to bed.

I fought off the temptation to call him on the cleaning staff, his turf. A couple of hours away from the first EBS–Erik brunch, I was tense.

Tucked in, Erik turned onto his stomach and put his hand between my abs and my laptop. “Tell your client to push the boat out again,” he said under the pillows. “'Cause budget is a dying species, right?”

I clicked on “Empty Recycle Bin,” and that crunchy tossing sound came up. There.

He got me on the ribs and I punched his left arm, hard.

“Motherfucking
fucker
!” he yelled.

“That's the cleaning crew calling you.”

Two separate showers later, we dressed and walked in silence down the street to Bubby's. New York's winter breeze pierced us. I was still jumpy. The brunch ahead was already smothering me. I felt trapped between my two worlds: too communist for Alkis, too Republican for Erik.

Björk was screaming and Alkis smiling as we entered the restaurant, packed with tall investment bankers and their Asian girlfriends. I winked at Alkis, which was all I could do with a dozen or so people in the ten feet between us. Next to me, an iPod-ed seven-year-old stood on a bench in a sea of
New York Times
sections, sticking crocodile-dog icons on the restaurant's window. I saw Paul, down the bar, paying for a couple of pink drinks in pyramid-shaped glasses while answering his BlackBerry. He was in “gym-sofa clothes,” per the instructions in Alkis's girlfriend's “NY brunch for the unacceptables who skipped the engagement party” Evite.

Then we were pushed. I grabbed the sticker-graffiti kid just in time, as he fell over the edge of the bench. “Here, buddy,” I said, handing him his Keith Haring play–touch screen from the floor.

“Hey, mate!” Alkis said, wrapping his arm around my neck.

“Alkis! Congrats! I was looking forward to this,” I said.

I was about to make sure Alkis and Erik reconnected on firm ground, but two hands belted around me from behind.

“
Malaka
, amore,” Cristina whispered in my ear. She smelled like peaches. “You are too handsome,” she flirted with Erik, while she was still holding on to me. She reached over and gave him a quick kiss on the lips.

“This is Cristina, my fiancée,” Alkis said, faking an apologetic face.

Then Cristina turned and kissed me. She looked curvier, definitely healthier than she had the last time I'd seen her with Alkis. She gave me a big Italian smile.

“Hi,” Erik said to Cristina.

“They told me our table's next,” Cristina said. “Oh, God! Who
is
this guy?” She touched Paul's arm as he squeezed toward us, BlackBerry first.

“Paul,” I said. We hadn't seen each other since San Francisco.

“Stathis.” Paul kept typing.

“Hey,” Erik said. “Good to see you, Paul.”

“Hi.”

“Oh, Paul is busy,” Cristina said, teasingly. “He just launched a new blog for Wall Street.”

“It's a
media
venture,” Paul corrected her without looking up.

“A media venture,” Cristina echoed. “He's been looking at corporate lofts since Thursday.”

“Anything good?” Erik asked Paul.

“Not a thing,” Paul replied. He finally looked up.

“Takes some walking.”

“I just want it done and over with,” Paul said, but the beeping sound from his machine distracted him. “Okay, this is priceless. It's the third time they've rescheduled this week.” He smiled. “I'm sorry. My New York Realtor is utterly insane.”

“What are you doing with Wall Street?” I asked Paul.

“We are launching AccostingPE. It's a private equity outlet.”

“He's turning Accosting into the next Condé Nast,” Cristina said. “Oh my God, did I choose the wrong guy?” She laughed.

That was impossible.

“Cristina is psychic,” Alkis said with a laugh. “I mean, we're all in the business of the future,” he added, this time seriously. “What's the next premium, the next big thing? Health? Security? Sex?” He tried to reach Cristina's neck, but she slowly pushed his hand away.

“Are you guys here for work or fun?” Erik asked Cristina. He looked genuinely interested.

“Both,” Alkis stepped in. “Cristina is here for work and I had a meeting in California. So we were like, let's just take a couple of days off and hang out in New York.”

“What does Cristina do?” Erik asked.

“She's with PPR.”

“What's that?”

“Gucci.”

I saw Erik's
but-of-course
look.

“You remember Erik from the forest?” I asked, trying to make Paul stop typing.

“Yes,” said Paul. He gave Erik a glance. “You're that journalist from Oxford, right?”

“Well, not exactly. Not anymore,” Erik said. “Now I work for the city.”

“Oh, my ex-girlfriend's law firm was on Chancery Lane. I'm the only person I know who actually likes the city. We used to lunch on—”

“I work
for
the city. Of New York,” Erik said.

Paul narrowed his eyes. “Are you from New Jersey?” he asked Erik.

What on earth . . .
Erik would never acknowledge an insult to Jersey, and Paul somehow knew that, so I was both curious and terrified to see where Erik would go with this. But Alkis jumped in:

“Hey, Paul!” he shouted. “Why can't you lose weight as fast as you lose your hair?”

Erik turned to Alkis slowly, signaling that he was not through with Paul. “How long we got you in town for?” Erik asked Alkis.

“I was hoping to leave tomorrow,” Alkis replied. “But I'm not sure if Paul's done with the third degree.”

“What are you cooking
this
time?” I asked Paul.

“Come on, now,” Paul said shyly, like he was asking for forgiveness about San Francisco. “We are covering the turn
around of a public telecom in Europe, and Alkis is advising them on private equity compensation for their management team.”

I knew about Alkis's project. I could see how this topic could go south, fast.

“Are you guys doing private equity in the
public
sector?” Erik asked Alkis.

“Well . . . I guess you could say that,” Alkis admitted. “But we are open-minded about it.”

“And how exactly do you do that?” Erik asked, his laugh lines shaping. Here we go.

Alkis paused, which was enough for Paul to butt in: “They are multi-stakeholder minded while bottom-line focused,” he said seriously. No one spoke, so Paul went on with his shit. “It's in the art of giving advice, really. Stathis can explain this better. He's a consultant.”

“What about continuity and sustainability?” Erik asked. “Is that part of your art?”

There was another uncomfortable silence until Cristina reached Erik's arm. “I'm so thirsty. Darling, you are taller and stronger. Will you get me a Bloody Mary? Virgin, darling. Please.”

“I'm not sure I can reach too far with this arm.” Erik gave me a dirty look and began to shuffle toward the bar.

I was Paul-gripped.

“
What?
” Paul finally yelled at me.

“The art of giving advice, Paul?
Seriously?
”

“Want my Erik review now or should I e-mail it to you?” Paul said.

I was ready to “fuck you” him again, along with his website, his father, and his country—I mean, I'd never work there, or would I?—but Alkis laughed. “You twats!” he sneered. “What the hell are you crying about? You both bull for a living.”

“We can't all be in private equity, Alkis,” I said, annoyed by being equated with Paul. “Some of us have to think about R&D. You never know, you might need innovation after you cash-cow everything with other people's money.”

“
Yeah
, Alkis,” Paul shammed.

“Watch it, I still have pictures of you on a leash,” Alkis threatened him.

“Be my guest!” Paul chuckled. “It's not like my father's getting reelected anyway. Post them!”

But Alkis wasn't listening. He was busy lifting the Haring-graffiti kid.

“Oh, thank you,” the kid's mother said as she searched for her son's iPod between the Week in Review and Sunday Styles. “It's a white Shuffle,” she told Alkis, worried.

I noticed the boy's Athens 2004 Olympic T-shirt and thought of my niece, more or less the same age. How many times had I actually seen her? Three? Four? Then, from the corner of my eye, I caught Erik squeezing his way back through the waiting room, tomato juice spilling over the polo of mine he was wearing, and I was happy for the distraction,
one of those everyday things—a bad haircut, an unprocessed hotel receipt—that help me forget where I really am in my life.

“My hero!” Cristina welcomed Erik back. “Now, Alkis tells me that you grew up with Constantine.”

Erik gave me a quick look. “Well . . . I know him,” he conceded. An Erik first. “Why? Are you a friend of his?”

“I knew him at Harvard,” Cristina said. “I haven't seen him for years and years. How is he? I can't believe he's getting married!”