Hotel Living (3 page)

In the parking lot outside the hut, Erik beat me in getting his bag from the trunk. He paused at my Spartan sword and the butt plug that Paul had worn around his neck as a pacifier.

“It's not what you think,” I said.

“I don't.”

Our first legit exchange in the twenty minutes we'd known each other.

Walking toward the hut, his steps tracing mine, I was disturbed and relieved all at once.

DURING THE NEXT FORTY-EIGHT HOURS
I only saw Erik in the background: jogging on the property, hanging out on the floor or by the fridge, drinking our French yogurts. Our interactions were logistical—where was this and what time was that—and brief.

“Aren't you cold?” I asked him when I saw him shirtless on Alkis's bed, reading a book and eating granola that he must have brought with him. You could have stored milk in the freaking room.

Erik shook his head while crunching his cereal.

“I have a class tomorrow at nine. Do you need a ride to campus?”

He didn't answer. He lifted his bowl and drank from it. As he cleaned his chin with his palm, an old scar on his upper arm became visible. “I was hoping to take Alkis's mountain bike there,” he finally said.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“Mike Davis.
Ecology of Fear
.”

“Nonfiction, I take it?”

“Always.”

I went to bed without my T-shirt. Half an hour later, I put it on.

“ERIK DOESN'T MAKE ANY
SENSE,”
I told Alkis the next day, walking into the campus bar.

Alkis smiled. “Apparently not. Look.”

Erik was doing shots at the bar, flanked by Paul and Muammar. Muammar was talking to Paul, Paul was talking to Erik, and Erik was looking at us.

“A round.” Alkis elbowed me. “Come on, I'm driving to Paris tonight. One for the road.”

There was something about Erik's indifference, his casual confidence, that enervated me. Something I couldn't pinpoint yet. I hesitated. “I got a deadline,” I swayed, but Paul spotted us, and we joined them in a round of bourbon shots.

“
Malaka!
You must read this.” Paul waved a piece of paper my way. “It's a poll the Dubyas bounced by Erik before it hits our inboxes during the American week.”

Paul and Muammar were fighting over the survey, grabbing it from each other's hands, reading questions out loud. “Its title—” Paul laughed. “‘Why do they hate us so much?'”

Erik looked at me and bowed slightly. Then he turned to chat with our school's French bartender, and that bugged me enough—the way you feel weird the day before you get sick, and you don't know why or what's wrong—that I left.

The fourth and last day of Erik's visit, I ran into him outside the hut. It was six or seven a.m.; there was barely any light. I was back from a case-study group turned into dinner, drinks, all-night slouching, and smoking, with eggs and cheap champagne for breakfast. Erik was back from jogging—“training for the New York marathon,” he said. It was zero Celsius and he was in shorts, a T-shirt, and my sneakers. He was about to say something, but I cut in.

“Any deer?” I asked.

“Just a couple of wild boars.”

“Wanna get back to bed?”

“With you?” he half smiled. First time in four days.

I stayed put. “Yes, with me.”

We fucked on Alkis' bed before I rushed into Finance late and red-eyed, so of course Muammar cold-called me. I couldn't remember shit about the case study—something about Chrysler's balance sheet before the Daimler acquisition—and I didn't even try to fake it. I'd never been unable to answer a question before. Paul turned and gave me a stunned, happy look, as though I had finally done something right.

“
What?
” I shrugged.

TEN DAYS LATER, ERIK'S ARTICLE
showed up in one of Oxford's student newspapers. He took EBS head on:

“For the first couple of days, EBS seems liberated and open to pursuing its wishes, as opposed to US business schools, long ago sterilized by political correctness, no longer able to shortcut to ingenuity or enjoy themselves. Actually, and in spite of all the bright, beautiful worldsters, the democratized champagne flowing in the campus canteen, and the weekly balls in the impressionism-inspiring Fontainebleau villages, EBS is a devastating place full of old, decomposing souls and the children of unfulfilled industrials, bitter politicians, or indifferent parents, trapped between the American dream—glimpsed through cult and cliché movies like
The Player
and
Jerry Maguire
—and a European license to decadence, exploitation, and toxic private equity shrouded under energy, software, or real-estate project finance. It's unclear whether it's more dangerous or silly. As if colonialism had walked a mere hundred meters in three hundred years: from the courts of the François I palace to a campus down the street playing Studio 54 with McKinsey recruiters serving as bouncers.”

If any of my classmates heard it as the voice of reason, they didn't speak up. I wasn't sure what intrigued me most: that a single paragraph gave my fascination with EBS a corrective slap, or that we had been exposed by a mere passerby. But it all became clear soon enough.

In the hut's freaking freezing extra bedroom, I was preparing for job interviews with Alkis. He was role-playing the recruiter, while I kept nodding without listening.

“Stathis,
mate
!” Alkis shouted. “I'm
talking
to you! You got into an early round with Bain, will you
fucking
concentrate?”

I was thinking of that crazy communist and his article, of his Southie accent and his dick; I was thinking of Erik, nonstop. I was falling in love.

I
WAS ABOUT TO E-MAIL IN
my Decision Traps and Tools homework when Erik's handle showed up on my screen. I looked at his first and last names. Somehow they made more sense than the rest of the names in my in-box, as if the letters had been put together in a cubist structure that meant more than the sum of the letters.

I clicked on the e-mail and saw a one-line note in its body, which made me pause—was that all? I silently protested against this laconic sugar high of a next step. I gazed at the message in the unfocused way I looked at my classmates from the podium seconds before I presented my solution to a case study.

“Bro, I passed out on Eurostar and you're to blame for that . . . What are you doing next weekend? Wanna hang out in London? E.”

ENDLESS DAYS LATER, I WALKED
into a shabby neighborhood pub on Earls Court, dragging my carry-on. A couple of old-timers
turned to give me a glance. Erik, against the bar, in an M79 army vest, was working on a pint and talking to the bartender. They looked deep in the middle of a joke.

“Hey! My man!” Erik threw his arm around my neck and eyebrowed my suitcase's high-tech wheels. “Nice bag.”

“Good to see you,” I said. “I'd have dropped my bag off if I had a hotel addy, but—” I smiled at his jacket—“it looks you were busy enlisting.”

“Enough!” Erik made a cease-fire face. “This is my Greek mate, Stathis,” he said to the bartender. “This is Ian,” he said to me.

Ian reached for a glass from the bar's ceiling. The tattoo crawling up his arm looked like Jesus on the cross in a Manchester United outfit, or Madonna at a concert. “You're Greek,
malaka
?” Ian asked.

“Born and raised,” I said.

“My first wife was Greek.” He pushed a London Pride to me. “She liked
spanakorizo
and Telly Savalas.”

“Who loves ya, baby?” I tried, but it came out more Greek than New York Kojak.

Ian pointed at our pints. “The house,” he said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Don't get too cocky,” Erik warned me. “He told me his second wife's from Boston.”

“So he moved up in life.”

Erik managed a grin. “Plus, we're staying at his place.”

What?
“Come again?” I said.

“He has rooms upstairs for thirty pounds,” Erik said casually.

I had to restrain myself from looking around. Ian's pub was falling apart faster than Montmelian. “I'm in school debt and all, but, er, we have a bathroom, right?”

“Of course. There's a bathroom on our floor,” Erik said, studying his pint.

Right, what was I thinking.
“I spent two summers in a Greek camp. E. coli's a friend.” I lifted my pint.

“Cheers, mate!” Erik faked an English accent. “I thought we better see the room after a drink.”

“Or a few,” I murmured.

“More fun getting naked drunk anyway,” Erik said, his face unchanged. He didn't glance at me to check for a reaction; he took sex for granted.

“Maybe we stay that way. Be on the safe side,” I double dared.

“Drunk or naked?”

“I'm Greek. What's the difference?”

He smiled. “It's my birthday. Will you suck my dick?”

Prick. “Need ID for that one.”

FOUR PINTS, SIX SHOTS, AND
two fucks later, we were lying naked at opposite ends of a smaller-than-double bed, needing a shower and a new set of sheets. All through the evening we could hear footsteps and coughing from our floor. Given the time they took to get from the elevator to their room, our neighbors had to be in their eighties, or obese.

As I came later for a third time, growling, I heard a walker being dragged outside our door. Erik put his hand over my mouth, an act that somehow tamed him, while in the hallway outside I heard fragile hinges clap. When they had gone, Erik went to use the bathroom down the hall, buck naked, without shoes, which threw my tame-Erik hypothesis out the window. I walked there only to see how flooded it was and U-turned back to our room, hoping I wouldn't have to use the bathroom for the rest of the weekend. I pissed in empty beer bottles in our room, something that Erik found hilarious and competitive. He tried it, but without my precision.

“It's a skill I got from driving around Pelio, in Greece,” I said. “I can actually do it without stopping the car.”

“Liar!”

“If I stopped for more than twenty seconds, the relanti would die. You had to pour gas straight into the engine to get the car going again.”

“What did you do at traffic lights?”

“It's a mountain.” I paused. “Only thing, you wanna make sure your bottles are stored right.”

“You didn't, did you?”

“What? Spill?”

“Yeah.”

“Nope,” I said, remembering an old embarrassment. “But I did mix up the bottles once.”

Erik was excited.

“Hey, I was drunk.” I shrugged. “I kept extra gas in a bottle of Coke and I had pissed in a Sprite, thinking, green bottle, you know, less obvious, and easier to remember what's what.”

“Fucker!” He went for my abs with his foot, but I grabbed it.

“I was wasted, I couldn't smell the difference. So the fucking Datsun doesn't start, and I keep pouring piss in the carburetor till the butterfly gets totally fucked,” I said with a brief laugh. I lit a cigarette.

“Did you fuck up the car?”

“Not really.” I let out my smoke. “But when I figured it out, I had to run and crawl two miles to make the last ferry to Trikeri.”

“I have to run ten miles tomorrow,” Erik said, waving away my smoke. Then he picked up my briefs from the floor and threw them on my sticky torso. “Fuck it! Let's stay drunk. And it's your turn to bring the juice, amigo.”

IT WAS FRESH OUTSIDE. LONDON'S
Friday evening was in full force. People in work clothes talked eagerly while cutting one another off on the sidewalk, their taxis waiting for them. It would have been a three-minute walk to the liquor store had I followed Ian's shortcuts, but I stayed on Earls Court Road, feeling slightly proud, like I owned part of this pavement. As I passed the Court Tavern—packed, EBS-loud—suddenly my last three months were thrown into a new light. Though hidden within the forest vignettes, I saw some good turns in
my recent past, and I felt, this weekend, like I had become someone new. It was like I was a spy, as if I was sleeping with the enemy.

The moment I stepped into the clean liquor store, I strangely longed for Ian's pub, the very grime I'd detested growing up back home, which I was now “fortunate enough to be spared,” as my sister kept reminding me over the phone.

“May I help you?” the clerk asked.

“I'm all right,” I said, and picked up a bottle of Springbank and some Beck's. Then I asked him where they kept the champagne. He pointed to a bottle two pounds cheaper than our rent for the night.

ERIK WAS NAPPING NAKED ON
his stomach under the pillows when I made it back to our room. I was about to pop the bottle when his head surfaced.

“Bro, I haven't had champagne since the summer of '95,” he said sheepishly.

“Oh, yeah? What happened that spring?”

Erik looked at me, stunned. “The French resumed
nuke
tests?” He let his head fall back on the pillows. “I ain't fucking drinking it now,” he said, muffled.

I stared at his jogger's ass and messed-up hair while sorting out whether he was joking. Actually, technically he was inaccurate; the French hadn't resume their tests until that September. I thought of bringing up the French yogurts he
drank at Montmelian while I struggled not to laugh and to hold back the cork, a battle I lost. I filled a plastic cup.

“Happy birthday!” I cheered.

Erik grabbed my hand, pulling me to bed.

“I'm not having any, but my cock can,” he said, and stuck the head of his half-hard dick into the cup. “Wanna suck me now?”

I looked at Don Quixote's dick in front of me and thought of the Pauls on campus, and Bain & Company. “Nuke the bastards,” I said, and ripped my shirt off.

THERE WAS LITTLE HE WAS
not: mountain climber, marathon runner, activist, savvy traveler, skier, writer—started two alternative papers at Yale—community and labor union coordinator in South Boston, Beacon Hill–raised, son of a gynecologist and a Democratic pundit. He was everything I wasn't.

After London, Erik's name in my in-box became the title of a favorite book, movie, or brand—the most popular adjective, verb, and noun on campus. I would wait for a lecture to end before I opened his one-liners (“What's up, Competitive Advantage? Cooking for Thanksgiving with the Dubyas on campus? E.”) to stretch my high and replay London in my mind, hoping to break Erik's codes and understand what he saw in me and what I could become. Many a time, my speculations turned into doodles of possibility trees. In a Stats lecture
once, I borrowed the regression model from the blackboard to build a quiz assessing the pace and depth of my falling for him. I used parameters such as “willingness to travel” and “sex initiation,” plus “reading the other's mind,” only to come up with a spooky correlation between poor mind reading and fast falling, something I hastily credited to sloppy math. I deleted my stats-
Cosmopolitan
algorithm just in time—Paul ready to license its interactive version for Bellinis on campus.

“How is your ‘tell me your strengths & weaknesses' season coming along? Any consultant bought your BS yet? E.”

Job interviews started early. A couple of months into the program, investment banks and consulting firms stormed into the forest with presentations, schmoozing events, and drinks and dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants in Barbizon. In late November, the first round of interviews started in the thirty suffocating five-by-seven-foot rooms that EBS had built for the process.

“You are from Greece, how exciting!” the Senior Associate from Command Consulting called out as I entered their chamber.

He'd spent his honeymoon there. A lovely time. And which island was I from? “Please sit—oh, this is Andrea Farrugia, a VP from our New York office.” He tried to introduce the late-thirties silk-wrapped woman who was sitting behind him, but she kept typing away on her laptop.

“It's nice to meet you,” I said, standing up—trying to shake her hand, for all I knew.

“Do you think you'll be ready for the Olympics on time?” she asked without looking up or slowing her binge-typing.

THE FRIDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS I
walked into the Washington headquarters of Command for my final round of interviews. I was confident, smart. I nailed case studies and personality tests, thinking of my Christmas break with Erik in Bequia—“pronounced
Beck-Way
,” he'd warned in his e-mail. By four p.m. I knew that Command would make me an offer. At six the next morning, I was on a two-stopover-flight-and-one-boat-ride journey to the Caribbean.

Erik had already been in the Grenadines for a whole month, part of “an eight-week Yale-Oxford off-site NGO-sponsored urban planning graduate credit project,” he rambled over the phone.

I tried to translate this train of organizations and adjectives into a single CV bullet.

“But UNICEF paid for my flight,” he punch-lined.

“Of course.” I laughed.

The two-second silence that followed made me regret my sarcasm. I didn't backtrack. I didn't go:
I mean . . .
Petrified, I couldn't tell whether my silence grew or shrank my balls in Erik's mind.

That evening I saw the island of Bequia, black, getting
larger, from the deck of the ferry I'd boarded on St. Vincent. The lights of Port Elizabeth sparkled as we headed straight toward them, at the southern end of the Caribbean. There was something familiar and definitive about our ride, the way the ferries cruised confidently into the port of Trikeri in Greece, sliding between adjacent fishing boats like they didn't exist or matter, or simply knew their exact place in a routine-reassured coexistence. I couldn't remember the last time I was more tired, jet-lagged, and happy.

Erik was leaning on a semirusted Toyota truck that looked like those death traps I used to drive around in Pelio. He was parked twenty feet from the ferry, radio on, driver's door wide open. He was tan, in a T-shirt and jeans. Barefoot.

“Hey, Feta!” Erik yelled. “
Kalos irthes
.”

“I thought I was your only coach in Greek,” I said with a grin.

He mussed my hair and pushed my head back. “The last one didn't have a garment bag. So you must be better.”

“Did he wear shoes?” I said, throwing my bag in the truck. “My uncle had this car. It's a stick, you know.”

“Nah, this one doesn't run on piss.”

“Let's see if it runs at all,” I said. I couldn't stop smiling.

“Careful. I'll put you in the back, and it's a bumpy ride to the lodge.”

Warm wind hit our faces as Erik drove past the port. The sea, all dark, was eight feet from my right, often less, as Erik
strayed to avoid potholes, dogs, and large spiders. I was half-asleep when we arrived at Moonhole, on the very west end of the island. The truck's radio played Joy Division as we walked into a log cabin and collapsed in the dark.

The next morning I woke up alone, in a room within nature. There was no glass in the windows, nor a door separating the room from the patio, just holes in stone walls. Tree roots surfaced in the middle of the floor, and a bird's nest clung to a round opening in the ceiling. Still in bed, I pulled my flight itinerary from under my sneakers. Erik's handwritten note on it said: “Sleepy Greek, welcome to the Arch! There's coffee. Ask Jeevan down the steps if you need anything. Back at noon. E.”

I couldn't really make sense of where I was, this unfinished, deserted, 1960s James Bond–meets–
National Geographic
eco-cabin. What arch?