Hotel Living (12 page)

“He is. I don't see him often myself. In fact, he was closer to my brother. He shows up out of nowhere every few years.”

“That's
so
Constantine,” Paul said, making both Erik and me turn. I hadn't seen this coming. Things were getting odder by the moment.

“His name is Zemar now,” Erik said, louder than necessary, and—surprise—one more silence followed as it dawned on me that everyone seemed to know Constantine or Zemar as this ghost, who randomly materialized in Greece, my EBS world, and Erik's, too. A phantom that blurred segments of my life that I was trying to compartmentalize. I knew there was more here than I could work out.

“Right,” Cristina at last giggled. “Of course. Makes sense. I knew he had converted—”

“Oh, he was always a wildcat,” Paul interrupted. “But fun. Though somehow he always scared me. There was a darker side. After all, he did date you, Cristina!”

“Crist
ina
!” Alkis pretended fury, and Paul laughed.

“Briefly,” Cristina said, and pointed at Paul. “Your ex dated him too. Gosh! Who didn't? All my girlfriends were crazy about him. I mean, in those days. I haven't seen him since that ski-safari at Val d'Isère. When was that?” She looked up. “Seven, eight years ago? He was high for the whole week. Still, I liked Constantine. I
like
Constantine.”

“Think of him as a brand,” Paul said, which sent Alkis into a fit, and half a Bellini over my ass.

I tried to dry my pants with my hands while scanning the dining room, pretending to be oblivious to the whole Zemar circus, but these guys wouldn't stop.

“Honestly, he needed to settle down,” Cristina said, her face brightening. “I was watching Reuters, streaming from Iraq, the other day and I thought of him. I even asked my HP for resolution.”

“Your Hewlett-Packard?”

“My higher power!”

The maître d' asked us to follow her.

I was drained when I finally sat down and ordered a beer. As soon as it arrived, I had the longest sip and checked out. When Alkis started on his Schwarzenegger meeting—accents, cigars, Learjet seating—I got up for a smoke. “I love Americans!” someone from our table shouted as I left.

WALKING BACK TO THE HOTEL,
Erik and I did not speak. In the room I flipped through TV channels indefinitely, unable to
concentrate. Everything blurred into one show, as if extreme makeovers happened after hurricanes in Florida, and polar bears were endangered in Iraq.

Erik changed into running clothes and stood still in the middle of the room. I pretended to pay him no mind, trying to postpone the EBS–Zemar tsunami coming my way, until I couldn't anymore.

“What?” I broke the silence, still looking at the screen.

“This ain't gonna happen.”

He wasn't talking about Zemar or EBS. He was talking us, already speeding down a one-way street. So I doubled, had to, hoping to salvage whatever I could. “It never was, Erik.”

“I was about to say . . . again.”

“You didn't,” I said, still looking at the screen.

“So you're ready for an all out. Good. You and me both.” He walked out wearing my sneakers and slammed the door.

I turned off the TV and looked at the remote control shaking in my hand. I got up, grabbed a scotch from the minibar, and dimmed the lights to Alkis-power-nap level. I downed the whiskey and lay back on the couch, listening to my watch ticking, feeling the ugly side of uncertainty building up in me. At work I sold clients “the beauty of potentiality.” “Its superiority to actuality,” the “value in
not
knowing” about the launch of a product, potential infidelities, or the success of a dinner party. Suddenly my “accept everything as a string of probabilities” line was a farce, a travesty.

I was still on the sofa when Erik returned. His nose was running. He undressed and jumped into the shower. I stared at my underwear in the middle of Erik's puddle of soggy clothes on the bathroom floor until steam filled the room and I could no longer see them. The running water stopped and the shower door swung open. Erik came out in a hotel robe, took a V8 from the minibar and
National Geographic
from the side table, and spread out on top of the bed covers.

“Good run?”

“Yes. Did you
power
-nap?” He raised his eyebrows. I could see his balls.

I didn't reply, still trying hopelessly to avoid the inevitable.

“What?” he said. “Are you gonna chicken out now?”

“No,” I said. “Let's fight. Isn't that what you came here for? And cross your legs, will you?”

“I don't do that.”

“Then wear some underwear, 'cause I'm tired of being shown your hangers.”

“You should try and show yours every now and then. You still got them, right?”

He made a cylinder with the
National Geographic
and started to tap his thigh.

“Dude, if you're going to keep tapping your bible like that, swear to God, I'm gonna puke.”

“Nah, I'm just a joker, man. Isn't that what you're into?”

“Yes, we're all clowns. And you're too fucking quick for us, Erik.”

“You're not bad yourself. Negotiation-analysis guy! Come on, pick a frame. Isn't that how you guys talk when you fight? No, wait! I got a couple for you. How about Alkis and his futurism? Or Cristina's ski-safari? Yes, you are all clowns. You belong onstage. Really.”

“And how's that different from . . . Oh, me? Oh . . . er . . . I . . . see . . . went to school in, uh, Connecticut.” I went for his Southie accent. “Hmm . . . well . . . it was in New Haven, you know.”

“I ain't your fucking Gawel, Stathis! You haven't figured that out yet?”

“Answer the question,” I said. “You went to Yale. How's that shitty little stage any different? 'Cause it's hysterical, really.”

“There
is
a difference. There're ways to spend your time and money. You sell privileged ignorance or indifference. I'm done with your EBS bullshit. You're on your own.”

My heart was pounding. “You need to make money to be able to spend any,” I said.

Erik stared at me, stunned, for a good three seconds. “I don't have sixty bucks for fuckups like you,” he said, stood up, and grabbed his backpack, searching for something inside. “Fuck,” he muttered.

“Neither do I. That's why I see them when I see them. And I eat with Melissa and listen to her. It's called
life
. And if I wanna have an impact, I have to listen and talk. I don't ban. I don't become
binary
, Erik, with-us-or-
against
-us.”

“You excuse them, and that makes you a
pathetic
little dick.” He started packing.

“Man, you're not
listening
to me! Are they clumsy? Fucked up? Sure. But who isn't? Look around you. Sustainability? There was never
any sustainability
!” I pointed at his magazine. “Open your fucking bible. It's full of life cycles. This notion of perpetuity is made up! Fahey went to fucking business school. Mike Davis used analysts to write his books. What the
fuck
?”

Erik laughed. “You cunt! Weren't you the one asking Zemar for sustainability? Know what? You think you can consult me, but you're just being dumb. Or you'll say anything out of desperation.”

I was standing next to him without breathing. “Either way, fucked up,” I said.

He let his backpack drop. “I don't want to see them again.”

“How old are you?”

His eyes narrowed. “I want to punch you so hard right now.”

I pushed him onto the bed and pressed hard against his torso. “Look at me, man.”

“Fuck you,” he whispered.

“Look how good I am. Just
look
at me.”

He cupped my face, hurting me. “Move to New York,” he said.

Locked in his stare, I felt his breath. I was living by the day.

D
EEP, DEEP DOWN, SOMEHOW, SOMETHING
didn't go exactly as planned, and that's why most of you are here.” That was our dean's opening line in his EBS welcome speech. Four years later, nothing could better have captured my move to New York.

“What does it matter where you live?” Alkis said over the phone from London. “You are a consultant. You live where you work.” Plus, I had nothing to figure out about New York, he argued.

“I got New York credit!” I joked, but he had a point. Empire Diner, US Open seats from Command, Melissa, ambitious misfits. I could see my move as a simple technicality.

In February 2006 I called my super in San Francisco and told him that I wouldn't be renewing my lease. He could keep my airbed and coffee table. In return, he agreed to ship my EBS books across the country.

The night I moved in, the bartender at Billymark's fixed three tequila shots. “Here's to our neighborhood newbie!”

“Easiest move ever!” I cheered my sublet of a small studio—it had a decent patio, though—down the street from the bar.

“You call this moving?” Erik laughed. “Stathis, you never moved! Everything's furnished, delivered, how do you call it, er, outsourced!” He kept laughing. “Three times a day, seven days a week.”

“Who cooks for one?” I said with a shrug.

“You're making a Chateau Marmont cottage in west Chelsea,” Erik said, and downed his shot.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, and threw mine back.

Erik nodded to the bartender. “Keep them coming.”

My first official fall in New York was split between workdays in Princeton and weekends in my studio, on West Twenty-Ninth Street. In New Jersey, I led a Command team in building an oncology strategy for a major pharmaceutical company that was fighting off a biotech. I was assigned Gawel and Justin—an Alkis mini-me, a fresh-from-Tuck, work-and-party-hard associate. Things ran smoothly.

Erik—his place a couple of blocks from mine—was on my patio with or without me. He fought off squirrels and brought over leftover plants from Hudson River Park by Twelfth Avenue. He had people over, and let friends of friends crash in my absence. He drank my wine and moved my
Economist
stash next to the toilet because “they wanted Clinton to walk,” he explained.

“I thought they kinda retracted that,” I lazily protested.

“The damage was done, wasn't it?” Erik responded quickly. “And they didn't exactly oppose the invasion in Iraq either.”

He made Greek salads—good ones, too—in my strictly-one-person kitchen, and talked about how he'd make “real salads” when the tomatoes he planted came into season, “if those damn squirrels don't get 'em first.” He began to befriend my neighbors and the kids on the basketball court across from the post office at the end of my block. He went to “organic bullshit” markets and found furniture on the streets on Wednesday nights, our neighborhood's recycling day, and carried them up the two flights of stairs.

“Have you heard of bedbugs?” I asked once. But when it came to domesticity, I was always brushed off.

“Didn't you use to take in dogs from around your village?”

I began to register details, the silly trivia people talk about when they describe relationships: the exact spot on Erik's face where he always started shaving. The way he took off and put on his work shirts—already buttoned up. His gymlike rhythm while working on the patio: brisk before a halt, then all fired up again as he moved a plant or a bag of soil. His caring, protective voice when he talked on the phone to his older brother, Kevin—a strange dance that I couldn't explain except by the fact that Erik was the book-smarter of the two. In a way, Kevin gave me hope. I would never become Jeevan, the saint, or Zemar, the daredevil, but I could be Kevin, accepted and loved just the way he was, the fund manager absolved.

“Plants are more important than art or work,” Erik said that spring, and another time I would have fired back, “What
about people?” But the patio was bonding us, we were getting along, and I was in New York, finally making a home.

SOMEHOW THINGS BEGAN TO MAKE
sense. Between managing Andrea and having Erik and that silly patio, between reading, cooking, and drinking, I thought I was on my way to adulthood. I was relaxed, and it turned out to be one of the most peaceful, productive, and loving times of my life.

We read on a futon that Erik had dragged onto the patio next to the tomatoes, beneath quarreling squirrels, neighbors having sex, and sirens screaming down Ninth Avenue.

“I kinda like the police sound track,” I said during a nonfiction Sunday.

“Narcissist!”

I chuckled. “Where did
that
come from?”

“You'll get it,” Erik said, and kept reading.

“I grew up listening to waves. Sirens are exciting.”

“They're exciting 'cause you'll never be chased by them.”

“'Cause you have?”

Erik turned and gave me a
wanna-bet
smile.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Got a record too?”

“Damn right!” Erik said, and touched the scar on his upper arm.

“I thought you said that was a car accident.”

“During a chase.”

“
Really?
Did you hit a supermarket in Roxbury?”

“Punk!” Erik laughed. I laughed back.

“I know you wanna tell me,” I said.

He put his book down. “Okay. So we're leaving a Red Sox game and the brakes die on us, and we red-light a major one.”

“I believe you,” I said unconvincingly.

“Now cops are chasing us, but we can't stop. So my cousin fences the car right up next to the wire of this parking lot. Windows smashed, paramedics, cops don't buy our story . . .”

“Did they take you to your dad's hospital?” I asked seriously.

“Fuckass!” Erik jumped on me, but I was expecting him, so I sprang off the futon. “Stop dancing,” he yelled and threw my copy of
Real Options
after me, which I kicked in midair.

“Bequia! One on one!” I said, and started tapping our soccer ball with my knees.

“You were lucky,” Erik mumbled.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“Stop talking. You'll drop the ball two floors down to Guadeloupe again,” Erik said.

“You didn't pass it to me right. Look! Look how you're supposed to hit the ball. Above the knee, Erik. On the thigh. Jump and swing. Jump and swing. Control, don't trap.”

“You play soccer like you dance
zeibekiko
.”

I laughed but kept freestyling. “You play
football
like a dancing slave. Said Zemar taught you?”

Erik threw his Mike Davis at me and I kicked the ball at his face. Making a fist in time, he bounced it off the patio.

I ground my teeth. “It's a
sublet
, you dick!” I said as seriously as I could. “Gotta be decent, discreet.”

“Dance
now
.”

I burst onto the futon and onto him, clamping his neck with my knees. He tried to break loose and grabbed my crotch. “You wood?” Erik laughed.

“Is your verb-skipping a Southie thing?” I squeezed his neck harder. “Or is texting fucking with your brain?”

“
C'est quoi ce bordel?
” my neighbor shouted.

“Greek slut!” Erik said.

“Bloomberg whore!”

Weather permitting, we slept outdoors. I barely thought of Greece.

WEEKDAYS IN PRINCETON, WE WERE
making progress, getting closer to solid findings, but somehow I wasn't translating goodwill to more work. I wasn't really selling.

“Business development is the only way to partnership,” Andrea murmured during my professional development meeting as she flipped through my “Basket of Skill Sets” folder.

She was still sore about Paris, and she knew that I suspected her motives and moves. She still had the upper hand, but now she was a touch scared of me too.

“I lifted ‘Business Development' to ‘Primary Focus,'” I offered.

She dropped my folder onto her desk and turned to her new espresso machine, which was sitting-pretty on a tea trolley I had seen in conference rooms. She pressed the machine's big round red button and went back to my “2006 Goals” subfolder and my “Focus Card,” which she put between my “Upward & Downward Evaluation Matrix” and my “Command Years Scorecard
.
”

“Yes, I see that,” Andrea said, nodding. “It used to be under ‘Substantial.' Are you sure you don't want an espresso?” she asked, and once again leaned over the machine, which was warily silent.

“I'm good, thanks,” I replied, worrying that her new toy was broken, and what impact that might have on my professional development.

But then she turned, holding a glass filled with espresso. She leaned back against her desk, not quite smiling, one hand flat on my folders, the other holding her cup, and enjoyed a sip.

“Stathis,” she said, looking quickly up to the ceiling. “Your basket is strong. You're in the tenth percentile on both leadership and quant. You get good client feedback, and Command is not an up-or-out firm, but . . . What I want to see next—what
your
challenge should be next is to introduce clients to more of our offerings. And the ticket here is . . .” she prompted me with her free hand: “Something sexy?” She tilted her head. “
Innovation!
What else?” She raised a shoulder and took another sip.

Seriously—after her failed insider-trading trick in Paris, Georgina Clooney was back at her innovation tune. She was so shameless that I had to look away to avoid laughing.

I left her office wondering how Andrea's innovabullshit and seven folders of my professional development, of
my
bullshit, could make middle managers buy more slides and Excel spreadsheets.

A week before Thanksgiving I dispatched Justin to research literature on how to “introduce management frameworks to corporate America.” “And I want sexy stories,” I ordered. I'd never used the word
sexy
at work with a straight face before.

Two days before the holidays, Justin walked into our Princeton war room with his Victorinox carry-on in tow. When all nine pockets were empty, we were buried under a mountain of books, articles, and Post-it notes on business frameworks exploiting metaphors from history and war (“Alexander the Great's art of strategy”), instincts and emotions, paradoxes and controversy (“Teams don't work,” “Throw your annual budget plans in the garbage”), family life, ecosystems (animals as well as cataclysmic events), thermodynamics, mythology (including fucking Greek gods, or was it Greek gods fucking?), cognitive behavior, semiotics, and the Zen impact on the bottom line. Honestly.

I spent the rest of the morning feeling like I was stuck at the business section of Borders at Logan, thinking about the man-hours wasted on those metaphors. But it was the mid '00s; there was time and budget for anything.

Later that day, I was on the treadmill at the client's gym, smiling, thinking of Erik's reaction to the “labors of Hercules in the corporate boardroom.” Still, I knew I had to push things to the point of ridicule to have a chance at being heard, and hopefully sell—and for the life of me, I couldn't get Oprah off my treadmill's screen. I pressed the Channel button twice, but she was still there, looking astounded, when an Aztec warrior–heart-monitoring-gloved hand pointed at the side of my treadmill's frame.

“You need to plug in here first,” a familiar voice said.

I reduced my speed and saw Justin, beaming next to me in hard-core athletech gear. A bottle of smartwater and a video gadget were hooked to his gladiatorial Home Depot–like belt. His T-shirt said: “Hwa, Won, Yu.”

“I didn't know you worked out,” Justin said, all cocky after his intervention.

“Surprise,” I said. “I didn't know you were off to Baghdad.”

“Funny, boss. Are you just running, or working on volume too?”

“Running, mainly. And how many times have I told you that I am not your boss. We don't have bosses at Command. I'm your senior, and it's for this project only.”

“Trying to look young now, are we?”

From the corner of my eye I caught Gawel, in a plain T-shirt and shorts, looking our way from the other side of the gym. Without a suit, he looked high school.

“What's . . . ‘Hwa, Won, Yu'?” I struggled.

“They are hapkido's main principles,” Justin explained. “Nonresistance, circular movement, and water.”

“I'm surprised they didn't jump out of your suitcase this morning,” I said, but Justin was fixing a button on his fist-weapon glove-watch.

“I gotta keep moving, boss. If I drop below my heart range, my monitor will beep.”

“We can't have that, now,” I mumbled, and went back to my Hercules thoughts and my skepticism about placing myself in this stupid business-metaphor fad. What I needed was a potent nondrug paradigm that I could just plug into Jersey pharmacos.
But how can I turn an indie script into a summer box-office hit
, I thought, when I noticed Master Justin, two machines down, stretch-stepping while browsing a big-screen catastrophe on his gadget. Could I be missing some sort of sensation here? At the end of the day, who was my audience, and what did they really need in order to have a good day at work? These were managers who would pick the
New York Post
over the
New York Times
. A corporate-world craving everyday, Brooklyn thrills. I had to make my projects newsworthy. Keep them simple, but give them a populist twist: a surprise, a juxtaposition. I started sensationalizing our oncology project, Murdoching its challenges and deliverables.

The next day I walked into our war room feeling smart. “Let's have some fun!”

“Mornin',” Gawel and Justin mumbled.