Hotel Living (13 page)

“We'll work like restaurant chefs,” I said with a smile.

Gawel turned. Justin kept typing.

“Stop e-mailing,” I said.

“What's going on?” Justin asked. “You need a latte?”

“Stop talking,” I told Justin. “Now, I said that we'll work like restaurant chefs. So let's find out what's seasonal to put in the specials.” I paused, with a grin on my face.

“Could you—”

“Okay, here is the one-liner: We pick a current affair and we build a framework around it. Then, and
only
then, we fill it up with the client's numbers.”

The guys nodded to each other, puzzled.

“Just bear with me. For example, our client is getting murdered by this aggressively low-priced biotech, the underdog, right? We are supposed to present final recommendations end of February, which, if you Google, is Oscar season. So we can approximate their market to a duopoly and use game theory to build a couple of defense strategies, including a dominant one that we could call
A Beautiful Mind
.”

“No shit.”

“I'm not
done
yet. We'll use the bar scene from the movie to show how it's possible to improve the client's odds by helping them find their Nash equilibrium and settle on it. How they cannot protect their market share if they go into a pricing war, as the underdog
knows
that
they
know that with such a move they'll lose money.” I stopped to breathe.

Gawel stared at me responsively, giving me a scary high. There was science behind my nudging—game theory worked, they could outfox the bio—nevertheless, I was making something out of nothing. I was adding to Justin's suitcase and getting away with it, crafting more “entertainment” for managers; me, who'd studied quantum physics, for God's sake. Was I turning into a tabloid? Into the dark matter and energy I learned about in school?

Maybe a little nudging was okay, for
this
project. Sell, get promoted again, and rethink things.

“Seriously, it was nominated for eight Oscars,” I half joked with the client-lead a couple of weeks later. “I bet our biotech friends have seen the movie too.”

He was amused, but intrigued enough to buy that they were “Nash-locked” with the other side.

“Unless, of course, we change the rules of the game altogether,” I continued. “Strategy two: ‘Deterrence.' A much riskier strategy, and a really bad movie.”

A door had just opened, and Andrea had somehow been left outside. I am almost free, I thought.

IT WAS 2006 AND EVERYBODY
was smiling. “Uncertainty is your friend,” I preached at the backgammon tournament I set up on the client's outing. “It's a better strategic game than chess. See, if we lack uncertainty, then all rents will end up being equal, as strategies
can
and
will
be replicated.”

I became Jersey-provocative. Whether they believed me or not, they smiled.

I started to excite pharma executives, and that spring my “Innovate through Simplicity” taunt had a small following. I was the Commander whom Andrea would “kidnap” for thirty-six hours to send to an innovation panel in San Diego. And I was game. Flying in and out of towns, I rationalized my abuse of Ambien. I even groomed—some. I dropped by Kiehl's in Barneys and accepted Andrea's Outlook invite—“tentatively”—for a fitting at Dunhill. I got promoted, tripled the money I wired to Greece, and started to call my sister more often, as though something was about to happen.

But what could I do? Quit Command and get a real job? Move back home? I was the youngest Senior Engagement Manager. I was practically Andrea-free. I could work things to my equilibrium, the way I did with clients. Greece hadn't called me back yet. My sister never said: “We want
you
, not your money.” Not openly, not to me. And Erik? Well, I was a manager now; I would sleep better soon. I would work out my physical and mental depletion and help him fix up the patio. I could even bribe the Greeks and visit Pelio with him. Teach him how to fish and dive for clams in the Aegean. Things would get better because I was in the driver's seat.

“Pick a nice location for your big day,” I told Alkis over the phone after he reminded me of his mortgage and wedding plans with Cristina. “'Cause I'm so ready for a real vacation.”

“Whom with?” Alkis laughed. “Your sister? Or Erik,
again
?”

Bastard.

“How many times have you proposed but changed your mind?” I said viciously. “I bet you've racked up some loyalty points at Cartier by now.”

“That's right, I changed
my
mind. Something I seriously doubt you're able to do yourself. It's funny . . .”

“Funny what?”

“You outsmarted everyone in our Negotiation class and now you're scared to ask Erik to move in with you.”

Pick your fights. Deflate. “I don't even have enough room for my three shirts,” I said, and tried to laugh.

“Well, that's all you got, mate. Fucking empty shirts.”

I knew that Alkis cared, but he was complicating things. He was off the point, he was wrong. Things were balancing out, yet they were still fragile. There were no pockets for Erik, everything was on a continuum: from my job, to my friends, to the books I read and the sports I played. He referred to my approach to life as “New York retail. Everything exchangeable, no questions asked.” He saw no commitment on my part, “no staking whatsoever. Like your life's a Command project,” Erik said, but all I read was affection, his approval of what I did through playful attacks, the way my father had picked on my algorithmic approach to fishing. All fun and games, till a patio night that spring when I saw an end in Erik's words: “No irrevocable commitment of resources, no decisions. No
balls,” he spat.

“Come again?”

“Isn't that what you teach your clients? Optionality? Hedging? Guess what, you live it,” Erik said.

It was his gut, not his words, that made me go: “I haven't hedged you.”

“You never bought the option, I ain't your put,” he said, sucking an old paper cut on his thumb. “I ain't adding to your risk-free ride. Your commitment's to what you don't have.”

Erik paused to suck his fucking thumb while telling me that he's not mine. And his casualness, this paper-cut insignificance, tore down our pathetically planned patio in my mind.

As the weather got better, Erik started making a point of avoiding dinners and concerts. “I can't afford your eating alfresco,” he'd smirk.

If I got a freebie or tried to pay, he'd dismiss me.

“Dude, I won't be part of your agency cost!” he said, throwing my jargon in my face when I offered him Command seats for the Yankees.

I thought of clients listening to me, Gawel admiring me if not adoring me, and I fought back: “You get too much pleasure from telling us that you don't have a TV,” I countered when Erik shed a discussion on
Lost
during a dinner he joined at the last minute.

When the check arrived, I bundled resentment in camaraderie and passed him a fifty under the table. He grabbed my hand, pressing hard on my wrist till my fist opened. “Pick it up now,” he said, satisfied.

By summer our fights were constant.

“You realize that you've developed wardrobe syndrome,” Erik told me at 192 Books when I asked for a separate receipt for
Guns, Germs, and Steel
to expense on my Command account.

“Lost you,” I lied.

“You did, didn't you?” Erik mocked. “Let me explain. You can link anything to your work, to your clients. Expense it. Everything's wardrobe, used once for a performance. Your
relocation
was part of your professional development. You're still hotel living.”

I tossed away the receipt, but Erik kept staring at me with pity.

“And for what?” he said. “For smart-ass work stories and silly dinners.”

It was the first time I was completely sober and wanted to physically hurt him.

“Have you seen
Vanity Fair
at home?” I asked as casually as I could. “I can't find it.”

He gave me a shrug.

“The issue with Soros and your father. Thought I left it on the patio, but I can't find it. Did you take it?”

Erik shook his head in disbelief. “Mother . . .”

“You know which one, right? The one with the photo of your dad among his clients? Those ‘five remarkable women' or something?”

“Ask your higher power to find it for you,” Erik said, and walked out.

“Hey, wait a minute!” I yelled after him on Tenth Avenue. “You walking out on me? Come back! 'Cause when it comes to your family, your definitions are
so
strict.
Hey!
'Cause I can be a Jeevan too, an eco-warrior, a great communist!” I shouted. “Or are you guys hedging? You run for office while your brother takes over your dad's clinics?”

Erik stopped. He turned around and walked up to me, his finger pushing hard on my chest. “
Listen
to me, Feta! If you wanna fight, have the balls to talk about
me
! What I
do
, instead of who I
am
. Got it? You ain't in fucking
Europe
anymore.”

Right there on Tenth Avenue, smelling coffee in his breath, splashes of his spit on my face, I knew we were close to an end. Maybe he'd never seen me as an equal. I didn't. We'd met fleeing our homes but heading in opposite directions, crossing each other in an accident that I might have dragged out for too long. Seferis's poem came to mind: Helen and Paris never made it to Troy. The war was fought for nothing, for an empty shirt that ended up there instead. A decade after I'd left Greece, both Alkis and Erik were right. I was wardrobe. I was a fucking empty shirt.

June 2006

U
K COMMANDERS HAVE A MORE
accurate use of language. It goes back to their schooling,” Andrea said, projecting different typefaces on the wall of her office. “Good communication allows them more client impact. They advance faster.”

Good for them.

“There is something crisp and clean about London's style. See there?” She circled an
H
, using her laser pointer.

What the hell was she talking about? Was she selling me a type of font or assigning me to a project in England?

“Are you a Verdana or a Calibri person?” she asked, pointing back and forth between impact and mission.

I didn't know which one was which. I truly couldn't see any difference.

“Er,” I wavered.

Andrea looked at me in shock.

“Calibri,” I gambled. Calibri was the font on Paul's old business card. For some reason he was proud of it.

“Really?” She played with her butterfly-shaped necklace. Now that she was engaged to her CEO, pearls had been replaced by gems. “I don't mean that their actual streets are clean. I mean that there's something crisp about the way people live in London.”

Freak.

“I meant Verdana,” I said. “Ah,
crisp
! I get it!” I tried to end her font-masturbation. I had to finish the PowerPoint deck for the next day's client presentation. It was a big meeting. A five-billion R&D investment was at stake. Andrea knew that and she was wasting my time, our time, by flexing her muscle, showing me who's boss, playing up the importance of bullshit. Or, worse, she was slowly setting up one of her work traps again. “I'm off to Princeton. You'll get the client deck tomorrow, first thing,” I said, and walked out.

“Seven a.m. sharp!” Andrea shouted after me.

I left New York Verdana-committed—I mean, what the fuck—but something sad was bugging me that I couldn't pinpoint, something bigger than Andrea and her petty power games, or even her insider plots. As I sped down Fifth Avenue, the Ramones yelling, “I don't wanna live my life again,” it hit me that I was afraid to leave Command. I didn't want another job. I didn't want to reboot into another three years of the same parody, desperate for downtime but always yearning for a project or two. I was too American to quit, too Greek to pretend I liked the constant all-nighters, the working on the weekends and holidays.

By 2006, I didn't know many people who were happy to be consultants. The few of us from my class who were still here, the plateaued ones who hadn't followed Alkis to an investment bank or a hedge fund, were carried by the inertia of depression. Drinking, cheating, obsessively exercising, crying, chewing Paxil, and snorting cocaine, we simply acted out while we waited (hoped, at some level) for all of this to end involuntarily, or to “come to terms with the brand-management job at a client campus in south NJ,” Alkis reminded me in his latest e-mail. He signed, “Come-to-Lehman, Alkis,” and I deleted him from my BlackBerry, Mailbox & Handheld, while checking in at the Forrestal in Princeton.

IT WAS APPROACHING TWO IN
the morning when I signed for the third round of room-service martinis while still working on our real-options approach to optimizing the client's licensing choices on pre–clinical trials compounds.

“How about we change the legend in the last chart?” I shouted to Gawel from across the suite as I charaded to night-shift Anthony for cigarettes.

“What are we going for instead?” Gawel yelled back at me.

“Call the distribution's tenth percentile ‘Surprise' and the fifth percentile ‘Bombshell,' and if we must go further we'll ‘9/11' it or something,” I said. I eyed Anthony for a cigarette that we weren't allowed by Command policy, anywhere, anytime. With the partners at DEFCON 2 on smokers, I was discreet.

He winked and passed me his pack.

I put a twenty in his pocket. We'd done this before.

Gawel stopped typing. “Stathis, how tactful, I mean, how politically correct do you think this is?”

“It's not,” I replied, joining him at our war table. “So there's a chance they'll like it.”

Gawel mumbled something about Andrea to himself. The woman had recently made Command headlines when she quoted Samantha, her favorite character from
Sex and the City
, into a client pitch. Her upcoming wedding with the cosmetics baron was the only reason Washington had let the “incident” slide.

“Yeah, she'll die of shame,” I mumbled back.

“Stathis, I know you're one of them,” Gawel said, his eyes fixed on his screen.

Little prick . . . What on earth . . .
“I'm one of lots of things.”

“I've seen you smoking outside the Soho Grand,” Gawel said awkwardly. “You can smoke, I don't care. My father's Polish.”

What did “My father's Polish” mean? That he was not? As opposed to his mother? It was 2 a.m.; I was on my third martini and desperate for distraction. “So that makes you what? Polish? Half Polish? A quarter? American?”

“I'm Polish American.”

“Well, I'm half Greek and half Greek, so I need to smoke.”

Gawel let out a shy smile. “I won't tell. You are safe with me.”

I offered him Anthony's pack and he took one. I threw him my lighter. When Gawel finally lit up—second try—I saw his hand shaking. I was typing a note to Andrea, explaining our progress on the presentation, when her e-mail hit my screen. “What the hell is she doing up at this hour?” I mumbled. We had agreed on a 7 a.m. deck transfer. She didn't understand what “a cumulative distribution and a standard deviation” meant in my last draft. I sniffed to cover my laughter and restrained myself from reading her e-mail out loud. She finished her note by adding, “I found two typos. Something that really, really, exasperates me,” and she hoped that “that was a one-off thing.”

I clicked Delete and caught Gawel downing his martini.

“What was that?” I said.

“I told you, I'm Polish.”

“American.”

“Er, what time do we present tomorrow?”

He knew. I looked at my watch. “We present in six hours, if that's what you're asking.”

“Stathis, I, you know . . . I have like . . .” Gawel was stuttering. “I have a half-hour drive to my hotel on the other side of Princeton. Plus, I need to be back here for printing by seven tomorrow. You think . . . would it be okay if I crashed on your sofa?”

I thought we might get to this, but still I felt a cold sweat. I looked at his messed-up hair, his cleft-chinned face colored in by an early-twenties abashment, while I was lonely,
horny, and sad. His fingers swayed on his keyboard, and I thought of my no-war state with Erik since our fight on Tenth Avenue outside the bookstore two weeks back. Whatever our no-fighting, spend-the-minimum-time-together relationship meant for our future, it was still better than nothing. I had slept only with Erik in New York.
Get your own fucking room
, I thought. “Only if you snore,” I said.

An instant grin. “Why?” Gawel asked.

I finished my drink. “'Cause I'll snore in my bedroom. And trust me, you'll need to cancel it out.”

He went back to his computer, beaming. I smelled the vodka on his breath from across the table. I was helpless.

A sloppy e-mail to Andrea later, I placed a blanket by Gawel, who was pretending to nap. He bent to reach it and grabbed my hand without looking at me. We just stayed there.

“I know,” I said.

His grip got tighter, and quickly, superstitiously, I told myself that I loved Erik, privately, the way I used to cross myself before diving into the open Aegean, embarrassed to think that someone might see me. Gawel trembled when I kissed him. He hurried off his socks and unbuttoned me.

I felt his tongue clumping the head of my dick and I heard his T-shirt shrieking as I tore it.

“
God
, swallow my dick!”

I came fast down his throat just as his come hit my shirt, two feet away. Then he leaned back on the sofa and rested there, without spitting or rinsing.

“We all deserve some pause after coming.” I sat next to him. My dick and balls aside, I was fully dressed.

“Okay . . .”

“Something someone told me once.”

Gawel laughed. “Even Alkis?”

“Even Andrea.” I pulled Gawel sideways, spooning him in his T-shirt leftovers.

“Stathis . . .”

“It's gonna be okay,” I said. “We'll be okay.”

THREE HOURS LATER I WOKE
up without an alarm. I had fallen asleep holding him. No Ambien, first time in a month. Gawel was facing me, still asleep. I left without showering, in the shirt I had slept in, spotted with come. I lingered at the door for a second, thinking of writing a note, but where would I start? “Good morning. Have a good time printing the client decks!” I left the hotel for the client at six, feeling grateful that I had a presentation to do and Andrea to deal with—another first.

Gawel walked into the conference room as I was trying to calm Andrea down; she didn't find the deck's colors bright enough.

“It's Command's standard template,” I explained. “Morning!” I shouted toward Gawel, who was holding a bunch of printouts under his arm. Andrea, in orchestration mode, didn't acknowledge him.

“Morning,” Gawel replied without looking my way, counting the printed decks.

I was about to press for a look, but he slipped out to fetch extra highlighters. I almost stormed after him.

“
Focus?
” Andrea yelled.

I was taken aback. “I'm listening.”

“I mean the
projector
, Stathis!” She jolted a metal box and one of her flamingo-painted nails irked and bent against the lens. “
Damn it!
” she cried.

PRESENTING, I SURPRISED MYSELF. DISTRACTED
by Gawel—the little punk was taking notes, avoiding my stare throughout the presentation—I was lighter, lean, Command-crisp, while Andrea cut in every three minutes to say, “Which is one of the reasons we are here today.”

“ISN'T IT GREAT WHEN WE
all play nice?” Andrea said at the end of our postpresentation debrief.

Gawel nodded.

“Right.” I collected my papers.

“I'll see you tonight at the benefit,” Andrea said, ready to stalk two clients from our meeting whom she spotted as they were about to enter the next conference room. All of a sudden, as if she had changed her mind, she stepped toward me: “Presenting in a dirty shirt is unacceptable.”

“I got Parkinson's.”

“Come with me,” she ordered Gawel, her stare firmly on me.

I traced him with my eyes. At the corner, he looked back and gave me a timid smile.

I drove back to New York in joy and fear. Gawel's last look was playing again and again like breaking news in my mind, giving me a thrill, a hard-on, and a silly face I had last worn before EBS. Then fright would float in and I'd try to calm myself by thinking things out in a rational way. Gawel, Erik, Command, me—all I needed was some order, some quality decision making, just like I did at work. How about the utilitarian approach, “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” I said out loud, thinking of multivariable decision frameworks, while my brakes against the tunnel traffic screamed how multivariably, multi-back-and-forth, utterly multi
fucked
I was. The more I thought about it, the more panic snaked into me. I knew I had crossed a line, and with a subordinate to boot. Unethical, stupid, and dangerous.

In the tunnel, I switched on the headlights and thought of our office ordinate. This trick made us all look more or less together, commanding, attractive even, coating what happened with Gawel so that it looked almost involuntary. He was the apprentice and I was the mentor, and, after four years of battling with Erik for interrelational supremacy, this clarity was in its own right a romance. That and the fact that a young man listened to me, looked me in the eye, and ideal
ized me—
me
, of all people—turned a blow job into the first light coming from Tribeca while I was exiting a four-year tunnel of emotional depletion.

In Manhattan, on my way to the office, I stopped by my place to shower and change my shirt. Throwing my keys on the coffee table, I noticed Erik's brother's invitation for that evening: “Kevin's new pad is finally ready!”

What if Erik finds out about Gawel
, I thought. “Science fiction,” I said out loud, and jumped into the shower to scrub it off.

I stood there motionless, looking at the blue tiles on the shower floor—water pounding my head and chest—thinking of what on earth I'd talk about with Gawel at the benefit, his ginger hair and blue eyes, and I started to jerk off, ruffled by the fact that I'd have to sneak out in time to make it to Kevin's; Zemar's latest cryptic postcard; back to Gawel taking my dick, doggy-style this time; Erik's soft snoring, which I'd grown to like; Alkis and Cristina's e-mailed sonogram; two clients, one hopefully new; Jeevan's peaceful stare, fishing at sunset before jumping off the boat to cool off; and fucking Erik by the wash of the sea, until I came.

THE LIGHTS DIMMED AS A
picture of the High Line was projected onto the fifteen-foot screen of the Wall Street ballroom.

“I have powers of subpoena, and if you don't quiet down I'll cite you,” Eliot Spitzer said from the podium. The eight
hundred attendees of the Friends of the High Line 2006 Benefit laughed. “For me, it is part of what makes Manhattan, Manhattan,” said the video narrator, identified as “actor, NYC resident,” and people applauded.

Andrea leaned forward at the Command-sponsored table. “He's at the central table in front,” she whispered to no one in particular, and the ends of her hair dipped into her risotto. A couple of junior associates stretched to catch a look of the movie star.