Hotel Living (10 page)

Sinking back into my seat, I was ready to close my eyes when I caught Alkis watching a video—on his laptop this time—that showed a preacher in front of a massive, bright screen in a packed theater. The guy talked eagerly with his hands as people cheered. I changed my angle to get a better view, risking more of Alkis's “markets can demystify and democratize anything,” only to see Steve Jobs talking to Apple executives in a company auditorium. I looked at Alkis beaming, oblivious to my peeking, back to Jobs, back to Alkis, and I began connecting the dots between Command's narcissistic credo of “haute thinking” and Alkis's “ubiquitous commoditization” and equity obsession. For Alkis, for all the Alkises, strategy, retail, entertainment, personalized medicine, seduction,
anything
, could be deciphered into a recipe-driven craft. There were no business art forms left. With the “right story,” generations of skill sets could become irrelevant. We were back to a 1960s conglomerate thinking, when anything could be led by any one of us.

WE CHECKED IN AT THE
Lancaster on rue de Berri, off the Champs-Élysées.

“We are a
hôtel particulier
,” our porter said, squeezing with us into the hotel's tiny red elevator.

I didn't know what that meant. “Hotel what?” I asked.

The porter pressed the button for the top floor. “We believe that privacy is the new luxury,” he said, seriously. Seriously.

“Are you coming to L'Avenue tonight?” Alkis asked me. “I told Gawel to book a table.”

“Room service,” I said, trying to sort out the connection between privacy and dwarf spaces.

“Suit yourself,” Alkis said, and checked his watch. “Listen, I need to power-nap for forty-five, then hit the fitness room. How about we get together around two to go through tomorrow's schedule?”

“Power-nap?” I was jet-lagged; I saw ridiculousness everywhere.

“Yes, you put your muscles but not your brain to sleep,” Alkis said casually. “Which reminds me, we need a proper gym. Gawel should Google that.”

“Why don't we just ask at the front desk?” I said.

He gave me his you-are-delaying-deliverables face. “Stathis, you still think that
google
means
Google
? It's a verb! It means he needs to take
care
of it.”

DURING MY FIRST WEEK IN
Paris I was at the client's headquarters till eleven each night, trying to figure out what exactly we were supposed to do there. “A portfolio management exercise for their pipeline. Pretty straightforward,” stated Andrea's one-line e-mail from New York. By Friday, Alkis and I were at odds on pretty much everything: from which of the client's
drug candidates we would assess, to the evaluation process we would use, to our communication style, all the way to our shirts and ties.

We spent our first weekend between Command's satellite office in Paris and the business room of the Lancaster. Alkis was all about: “I'm from Bayswater . . . there are right and wrong answers, Stathis . . . at the end of the day, markets are linked, so we can buy, bypass, or pass on
anything
,” while he accused me of being “too process, too West Coast, too decision-
fucking
-analysis.”

“I HEAR THAT YOU AND
Alkis had a smooth takeoff,” Andrea said as the two of us strolled down rue François 1er toward avenue Montaigne. It was a freezing January night.

I rubbed my hands together and put them in my coat pockets. “So far, so good,” I said.

“Let's go for a quick drink at L'Avenue,” Andrea said, peering through the windows at Céline. “It's important we spend some quality time together before the project takes off.” She scrolled through her BlackBerry with her gloves on. “I have an hour. I want this to be our time.” She looked at me. “
Your
time. How are you feeling?”

“I'm excited,” I said, unexcitedly.

Once at the restaurant, we sat at a table for two by the door. The whole place was made of red velvet. I heard some Greek from farther inside, but I could not spot the table.

“The client loves you,” Andrea said, taking her purple gloves off one finger at a time.

“Nice gloves.” I returned the compliment in her currency.

“Lambskin,” she said, satisfied. “Should we get some appetizers too?” She made a naughty face.

“I'm Greek. I'm always hungry.”

She put the menu down. “Okay, let's not confuse things. We'll get to your Greekness in a second.” She corrected her posture. “Stathis . . .” She tilted her head sideways. “You will be in Paris for a while. Of course, I will be dropping in to provide you with thought leadership, but you will have to make some tactical decisions here by yourself. Is there anything I, we, can do to help? Let's get personal!” She let out a nervous laugh.

Who was
we
? Command? The partners? Alkis? Someone she was fucking on the client's side? And what did she want from me this time? I couldn't wait for this project to really take off, and then end, so I could get back to the States to be with Erik—whatever that meant. “I've done it before,” I said.

“Of course you have. Still, being away is never easy. Okay, let
me
start.” Her voice turned girly. “These days, because of my fiancé, I live between New York and Washington.”

“You live in Philadelphia?” I said.

“Let's order,” she said, thrusting her scarf off.

The light hanging above our table hit the pattern of gold skulls on her scarf, piercing my eyes. What's wrong with me? Work's the only certain thing in my life. “It was a joke,” I tried.

“It was a great joke,” she said flatly, then ordered a couple of appetizers, reading as much as possible from the menu, working on her French accent: “. . .
raviolis frais au
saumon. Et champagne, s'il vous plaît.
”

“Dirty vodka, straight up,” I told the obviously American waiter. “So,” I paused before my recovery line. “You were saying your boyfriend lives in Washington?”

“My boyfriend lives in several places. His job takes him all over the world.”

“I know who you're dating,” I said. The whole company did.

“Oh . . .” She tried to mask her brag as surprise. “You do? How come?”

“My Productivity Assistant told me. I mean, the guy runs a Fortune 100 company.”

“Oh, that . . .” She waved her hand dismissively.

Yes,
that
. That's why you made Partner, remember? When I brought up Porter's Five Forces, you said you hadn't seen the movie yet; and now you want to provide
me
with “thought leadership”? The only thing you're providing me with is the cure for my hangover, with your first-class narcissism. “I got confused when you said
boyfriend
,” I said with the tiniest of smiles. “He is sixty-five, seventy? Man-friend, maybe?”

“Whom are
you
dating, Stathis? I didn't have a chance to ask my PA.”

“No one,” I murmured.

“And why is that? Handsome, smart Greek guy like you?”

I was debating between
It's none of your fucking business
and
I couldn't find good dick in New York
. But plan C took over. “I've had commitment anxiety since 9/11,” I said as touchingly as I could.

Andrea looked puzzled. “I'm sorry, did you lose someone?”

“No. But I'm still dealing with the aftermath.”

“Stathis, it's 2005. Maybe . . .” It took her a second to work out that I was BSing, but it was 9/11, so I had PC immunity—she couldn't nail me on this one. She audited me for a moment, possibly weighing a full-blown assault—but then again, it's hard to read through Botox. “Work!” she announced, walking away from the turbulence. “We discussed lots of therapeutic areas today during the client meeting. Antiangiogenics, metabolics, etc., and most of them may well end up being within the scope of the prioritization exercise that we'll do for them, but I believe there's real value in some more peripheral areas.”

“Like?” I asked.

“Like . . . like the lifestyle space that was brought up.” She looked away, as if thinking this through for the first time.

“You were the one who brought it up,” I said.

“I did, and for good reason. It's an area where even marginal investments from the client could attract significant benefits for them—”

“I think it's interesting to put a light on Lifestyle,” I interrupted her. “I don't see why it can't be included in our pre-evaluation phase.”

“I believe it should receive more attention than just that,” she said, playing with her pearls. “I want a Command squad team to screen
everything
out there that could be an alliance or a potential joint venture for the client. From cosmeceuticals all the way to nourishment, weight, and hormone lifestyle opportunities. It's bio-
life
sciences, Stathis.”

This didn't make any sense. “Lifestyle is an interesting space, Andrea, but . . .” I shrugged my shoulder. “You were in the conference room. They talked unsatisfied areas, diseases begging for breakthroughs.”

“Aging is a disease too.”

I couldn't tell where was she heading with this crap.

“Andrea, they were talking RNA, DNA transistors. Pill nanomachines. Don't you think they are putting
real
innovation at risk if they move away from their core science?”

“
It's all out there!
” she shouted. “They should just go and
buy
innovation!” Some Russians next to us turned. I had never seen her lose it like that before.

An intense silence followed while she recovered. Composed again, she went on reciting the strategy trend of the moment: a fad in which big corporations would pay lip service to breakthrough work but actually outsource it, and instead push their internal focus to side areas, like innovative go-to-market, management, and operational processes.

“I thought you believed in hard-core innovation,” I said carefully. “I didn't realize that you had become a Bhidé fan all of a sudden.”

“Stathis, you think you're so clever, it's almost cute.
Almost
. What you don't understand is that I don't give a damn about the HBS loser you're trying to intimidate me with. And you know why? Because I have Greeks like you to write HBS case studies for me.”

“Why did you join Command?” I asked her.

“Why did you move to the States?”

I didn't respond. To fuck Erik?

“Allow me,” Andrea said, leaning forward from across the table. “You moved to the States to trade up. Whatever that was for you. Your work, your relationship, your one-bedroom. That's why people move to the States. To trade
up.
Our country was founded on Wall Street principles.”

“How does one trade up a cosmetics baron?” I asked.

“With a buyout emperor,” Andrea replied without thinking, and
fuck!
Now her whole bio-lifestyle spiel made perfect sense. Suddenly there was no doubt as to why she was pushing for beauty creams. It was pretty basic, really: even a simple announcement by the client that they were shifting their focus to Lifestyle, and their valuation would get a hefty correction. Her fat man-friend could buy the client at a discount.

“Suppose we talk them into Lifestyle,” I said. “Hasn't your man-friend gone shopping for biotechs these days?” Her bracelets clattered. “Allow me, now,” I went on. “Coincidence, I'm sure, but . . .” I made a what-do-I-know face. “Just thinking out loud—couldn't someone speculate some
convenience here too? Say, an acquisition? Look at biotech versus cosmetics multiples, and—”

“I don't understand what you're saying. I don't agree with you,” Andrea said, shaking, which made me register that we were not talking management consulting anymore. We were talking insider trading. I had to think fast and smart—and where the hell was Alkis when I really needed him?

“Andrea, you
cannot
not understand what I'm saying
and
not agree with me. Pick one.”

T
HE MOMENT WE WRAP THIS
project I'm done with Command,” Alkis told me on the Lancaster patio. He had just gotten back from an interview with a bank in London. It was our second month in Paris, and Andrea's potential plot had brought us closer. He poured half of my scotch into an empty glass. “This business with Andrea is just nuts. The bitch has no idea what she is doing,” he said, and motioned for a drag of my cigarette.

I passed him my smokes. I could tell that his interview had not gone well.

“Why would I want to make a million off her insider job, risking
my
name, when I can make twenty by building it up legitimately?” Alkis said.

He and I had finally reached some balance. We divided up the work. He'd be creating the client's alternate R&D portfolio strategies, and I'd evaluate them. Of course, there was some overlap when it came to deciding metrics of success, or when we picked distinctly different R&D strategies worth evaluating; and we shared poor Gawel, our Business Analyst, who swung between reporting to an evil and a less-evil project manager.

“Let me guess,” Erik told me over the phone as I entered my room after thirteen hours of nonstop work that Sunday. “You think you are the less-evil manager.”

“I'll give you that one, 'cause I'm exhausted,” I said, checking my watch. It was half-past midnight.

“You know that you can be intellectually obnoxious, right?” Erik went on, but I didn't pick up on any lecturing in his voice. He came across as protective, if anything.

I threw my laptop on the sofa and hopped onto the bed, crashing into the breakfast-request card on my pillow that doubled as my wake-up call at seven each morning. “Try intellectually dead right now,” I said.

“That's funny.” Erik snorted a laugh. “I leave Port Authority when you leave your client, but in a different time zone.”

“Stop bragging.”

“That's why you make what you make. I didn't go for that,” Erik said without hesitation.

I thought of his father's hospitals and his mother's book deals. Erik was judging me from behind trust-fund doors. I wanted to rally all the juice left in me and fight back, end things right there, but a deeper fear stopped me. Whether his approach to life was a result of luxury or principles, I was still drawn to his fuck-you independence, to his carelessness, which I could never experience except through him. I was the Senior Associate who fell for the communist, and I brought home the bacon. Now we could do anything we wished. Surf between self-interest and self-respect, live the quantum life
I studied: impossible for anyone to know both our positions and our momentum. We could get some curry with Melissa before she took us to the airport, fly off to help tag threatened sharks in the Bahamas. We could check TomDispatch's US imperialist theories on our BlackBerrys during French Open breaks. But how do you confess to that? How do you commit to spontaneity when its definition is its undefined randomness? How do you write an algorithm for chaos? “Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin,” von Neumann said. Isn't staging a lifestyle making a joke out of it? Out of us? Wouldn't I be exposed to Erik as a poser? Wouldn't I lose him? So I had to apply myself harder to the one thing I had: work. I had to stay on top of things, become more and more what Erik officially condemned while hoping that deep down he understood our unspoken symbiosis, and that he found me smart and interesting and potentially lovable.

“Which is such a stupid New York thing,” Erik said, bringing me back. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I see,” I said.

“Listen,” Erik said. “How you choose to work is your business. But the way you're working right now can bloody kill you.”

“If I didn't know better, I'd say you sound caring,” I tried.

“I want you to be good at what you do,” Erik said. “How's your sleep?”

“I have a feeling that tonight's going to be just fine.”

“I miss you, man,” he said.

“I think tonight's gonna be excellent.”

“Clown.”

We laughed. I grabbed a pillow to shove behind my head, and Erik said: “It would be fun to do a road trip in France. We could even go for a run in the forest, in Montmelian.”

My exhaustion vanished. I didn't need a pillow; I was already up. “Really?” I said.

“Would love that, amigo. But I have to be in Tahoe end of this month. There is a summit I have to cover for
The Nation
.”

A brief silence followed.

“Wanna . . . come along?” Erik said timidly, and I felt a second rush.

“That's a tricky one,” I said cautiously, detaining myself. “I was planning a Friday-to-Monday trip to New York in a few weeks. I guess I could steal an extra day and meet you in San Francisco. I still live there, remember?”

“It's a date.”

Six hours later I was up by myself—no latte, no knocking at my door.

Walking on the Champs-Élysées' forty-foot-wide sidewalks, the stores still closed, everything clean and in place, my whole life felt simple, really. The client, Andrea, my sister, the Greek army. Riding in an empty train, I imagined my weekend with Erik in San Francisco. I pictured us driving up the coast on Route 1, or in Tahoe, or wherever—in the city, in traffic, it didn't matter. Then I started making a list.
I had to find an Erik-restaurant. Buy some furniture before he arrived. I would have to move fast, but I would be in California—I could just walk into Crate and Barrel. “Simple and quick,” I said out loud, and a cartoon balloon popped above my head: it struck me that speed and innovation, Andrea's own medicine, might be just the weapon I was looking for to fight off her scheme. I wondered if there could be a link, a common denominator between being fast and being novel—and what if that link was exactly what I felt in the train: simplicity? I arrived at the client in serious brainstorm mode. I began to look for simplicity everywhere.

“HOW ABOUT WE EXPLAIN MODERN
portfolio theory in the next slide?” Gawel asked me hours later. We were the last two bodies left at the client site.

I kept PowerPointing, but Gawel went on: “Andrea said that Markowitz's efficient frontier is the best way to show the bang for the buck for Lifestyle.”

“Are you sure she didn't say Malkovich instead?” I asked. “Fuck Markowitz and fuck Andrea.”

Gawel didn't say anything.

I stood up. “Gawel, it's okay, it's fine. Of course we'll use portfolio theory. But look at you.” I grabbed his iPod from the top of his gym bag. “
One
button!” I leaned over his desk and clicked on his homepage. Google came up. “
One
entry,” I said.

Gawel didn't know where to look.

“Relax,” I said, and stopped his chair from swinging. “We will still use good ole Markowitz to figure out which of their drug candidates they should put in clinical trials, but we need to camouflage our prioritization.”

He was fixated on his Google screen.

“Listen. We need to mask your portfolio prioritization model. How can I explain this . . . Clients don't have time to understand how we do what we do, the same way people don't have time to read manuals before they use their phones. Nobody
cares
about understanding how things work anymore. They just want them to work. We need to build an iPod-like portfolio management model. A Google-like interface around what we do.”

“I'm not sure I'm following you,” Gawel said. “I'm not sure Andrea will understand. I'm not sure Alkis will understand, either.”

“Leave Andrea to me. Don't worry about Alkis, goddammit. Alkis comes every time Steve Jobs launches a product.”

It was after-hours and I was on the verge of a breakthrough.

THE FOLLOWING THREE WEEKS WERE
my most productive in Paris. I knew I couldn't challenge Andrea to her face, but once the simplicity virus got into me, I saw a chance to distract the client—maybe I could sabotage her plan. Everything had to look simpler. In the client reports I prepared, I killed Command jargon everywhere I could—from footnotes all the way
to hard-core analyses. I replaced the word
probability
with
uncertainty
or
chance
. I simplified my work and told the client to do the same. I was a decent brander: “Innovate through Simplicity” was my message. The French liked it, or at least they were curious about it. Alkis loved it. “You're selling them simplicity, whatever
that
means, instead of Andrea's Lifestyle junk?” he laughed. “Kudos for screwing over the bitch and her boyfriend. I knew the moment I met her she'd be a filthy cunt.”

With Alkis watching my back, I marched on. But Andrea was skeptical.

“We are far from a simplistic company!” she e-mailed me, cc'ing Alkis.

I contemplated replying-all and spelling out the difference between
simple
and
simplistic
, but did not. I did not have to; the more the client liked me, the more Andrea had to turn a blind eye to my ways.

She kept crossing e-mail swords with me, of course: “Whatever process you agree on with the client, I still want to see an attractive Lifestyle strategy in the alternatives that we will evaluate.”

I did. I evaluated Lifestyle like any other strategy we developed, because now I could afford to. The client had already adopted me. I was their portfolio management “conservat
eur
,” and therefore Andrea's Lifestyle travesty would not receive any special treatment. No favors. Yet I was still on thin ice with Command. I had to justify my simplicity, my process of abbreviation.

“I'm not cutting off Command intelligence,” I explained in an e-mail to Washington. “I'm embedding it.”

“Tricking managers into consulting crap is innovation in its own right!” I joked with Alkis while I was packing for San Francisco.

He threw his head back, faking an out-of-control reaction to my nerdy hilarity. A bank had just offered him a job, and now he was raiding my minibar.

“Mate, the real innovation is that you saved our asses from Andrea's whip,” Alkis said, then turned sharply serious: “For now. I'm out of here, but I want you to stay away from her. Got that?”

Once again, he was fathering me.

“Are you joining the capital markets for ethical reasons?” I tried to shift our chat. But Alkis was right. I thought I could outsmart Andrea, and that illusion allowed her and Command to have a hold over me.

IT WAS A MUGGY NIGHT
when I walked into my apartment in San Francisco. Paul, lying on my sofa, was reading
Wired
magazine. I ran over the dates in my mind. It had been a good five months since I'd stood inside what I officially called my home.

“Are you indispensable now?” Paul asked, tossing his magazine on top of my Starving Students moving box, which he used as a coffee table. He stood up. He looked thinner than he had the
last time I saw him, a year before in London, when he had quit his bank job to go around the world again, and once again, yes, to “reinvent” himself.

We hugged awkwardly.

“Well, who isn't these days,” I said. “How are you?”

“Not bad, actually,” Paul said. “Not bad.”

“I'm sorry about your mother, Paul.”

I had heard she'd passed on.

“Yes.” He shrugged. “Thank you. I got your e-mail.”

“When did you come to San Francisco?”

“Right after the funeral. About a month ago.”

Through a hole in the moving box I got a glimpse of my hummus-stained Finance book and remembered the cold weekend in France when I had first met Erik. I began counting the years since, but stopped. It didn't matter; I was about to spend the weekend with him.

“How was Asia?” I asked eagerly, covering for my silly face.

“Fun. You must go.”

“How long did you backpack for?”

“Four months,” Paul answered.

“Did you see anyone?”

“I spent a week with my ex in Hong Kong.” He forced a laugh. “She's married now.”

“I didn't know that,” I said.

“Yeah. It was a bit intense.” He looked at me briefly. “I mean, it was interesting. She is into the whole baby thing. It's on my blog.”

I was about to check on him, how he felt, the works . . . but I saw my semi-inflated airbed and realized that there was no door to my bedroom, though clearly there used to be one. I wasn't sure where to start, but Paul was on a roll: “I'm having dinner with an investor in the Mission. You should join.”

“Investor?” I asked, my eyes still glued to the space where the door should have been.

“Accosting has been getting some serious traffic, so we'll fund a media company behind it. An umbrella for more verticals.”

“Accosting?”

“AccostingCelebrities.com.”

I gave Paul a funny look. He had been to university. His father was a prime minister, for Christ's sake. “Seriously?” I said.

“Yes, traffic's been crazy,” Paul continued, oblivious to my surprise. “We are like: ‘Yes! Come work for us. Sure, invest in us . . .'”

“No, I mean, right. I mean . . . Seriously?
That's
the name of your blog?”

“It's a media website. You get the updates.”

I had never really figured Paul out. He had a couple of million in the bank and a thirst for social peeping—a creepy obsession that went all the way back to EBS and kept him from doing something with his life. Was this website part of his fight against his supernova parents? Or had he finally
given up on competing with them? His chosen path forward to make fun of his heritage.

“Are you accosting your father?” I giggled.

“Funny, Stathis . . . We just signed a lease for a small space in Nolita. I have to be in New York next week.” His cell phone rang. “Speak of the devil. It's my ex. Her husband is helping me with Accosting. I got to take this. Hello?”