Hotel Living (2 page)

“What about entrepreneurship?”

He narrowed his eyes. “That's okay. For the Brits.”

“I respect money,” I said.

“Stathis, you respect money 'cause you don't have any. You grew up in a fishing village in Greece. Look around. People didn't come here to have a career or become rich. This is not Wharton. You get to play with classmates who
happen
to be royals. With me! You learn how to manage down schoolmates from Japan and India, and how to dress up for balls and Michelin-starred restaurants in Barbizon. You're in a Fitzgerald camp for children.” He pulled the towel from my shoulders and dried off his face and neck.

“Sounds exhausting,” I said, glancing around awkwardly. The campus bar was getting busy. A guy from my finance group was staring at us. I wasn't sure how to deal with the bar, with EBS—with anything. Paul was deconstructing a world that I was trying to enter just by being there. I was probably a joke for him. Amusing. There could never be a real friendship between us. “I thought they taught us that managing and leading are different,” I half joked.

He tossed the towel back at me. “You're full of shit—that's why
you
are here.”

I took issue. Pollyanna or not, I'd left my village with some sense of responsibility. I'd taken out student loans for EBS, which meant that skills and career goals were vested there,
and since its academic intensity was considered one of the highest in the world, I took EBS seriously.

Yet, proving Paul's point, half my class already had jobs lined up, which allowed for a campus hedonism of epidemic proportions: a final year of partying, of “don't-ask-but-please-do-tell” promiscuity mixed with sleeping pills, pills, driving drunk in the forest, and any other type of self-indulgence as long as you stayed cocky or “MBA-bohemian” about it. Each week was dedicated to a country, whose students hosted alcohol-soaked blowouts that built up to weekend wickedness. On top of that, there were “party playoffs”: the Summer Ball, hosted either at the Château de Courances or at Versailles; the Winter Ball; the Montmelian Ball—all black tie—the Bois le Roi parties; the Farmers' party (planned around a cave); the “Crossover” party—for crossing the middle of the academic year—where guys wore girls' clothes and vice versa; and, of course, that evening's S&M party in the chambers of the Château de Fleury-en-Bière, an EBS tradition that sent students all the way to Pigalle sex shops to get outfits, and summed up all my campus disillusionments about Paul's play-for-future-network mantra. He was selling me indulgence as the first step toward old-world entitlement; a puzzling concept, but after three years of programming C++—and another ten of studying, working, and constantly proving myself—I didn't mind a sample. I mean, come on, I was in a French forest. I could play for a change. For a bit.

I finished my pint and hit the bar with my glass. “Are you bringing your fiancée to the S&M tonight?” I asked, trying to find out how deep his dirt went.

“That's where we met two years ago.” Paul smiled teasingly. “So, what do you think?”

My curiosity had put me on the spot. “You said you wanted to work on your engagement,” I said carefully. “So, I guess not?”

Paul gave my empty glass a once-over, almost reached for it, gave me a brother-handshake instead. I mirrored him tentatively, awkwardly—hand, arm, and shoulder, then hand again—guessing that I was being rewarded for my answer. He slowly stretched and disengaged our sweaty fingers. “Try again,” Paul said. Once more, I looked around.

WHEN I GOT BACK TO
the hut, there were no cars parked outside. The lights were on, but no one was there. A plastic bag was on my bed with a Post-it on it: “You know you want it.” I peeked in: there was a toga, basically. A pair of leather sandals lay on top of what looked like blue drapes. Half a shower later—forest freezing water—I caught up with Alkis, my fellow Montmelian refugee, at one of the many S&M preparties held in houses around the forest. It would be hours before a bunch of us made it, drunk, to the Château de Fleury.

Under Paul's artistic direction, Alkis entered the château's dungeon in chains. The enslaved president was paraded
around the floor to be auctioned for whipping, and I was too wasted to remember if, or for how much, I was supposed to bail him out. Still, Alkis was dressed on the Disney side, not as Mapplethorpe as others. I scanned the chamber and saw the chain hooks on the walls that the Nazis had used to torture prisoners some sixty years before. At the end of the catacomb, a snake was being passed around. I needed another drink to make sense of all this, so I was heading toward the bathtub that served as a beer cooler when two Argentineans with permanent suntans offered me a shot.

“Are you from Buenos Aires?” I asked the one with a lollipop in his mouth.

“Via London investment banking.” He handed me another shot, though I was clearly still holding the first one.

His friend mumbled something about Chechen gunmen seizing a Moscow theater.

“Not if Paris Hilton's performing,” the lollipop replied. “She should be on the cover of
The
Economist
.”

They were dressed in dark suits and sunglasses, and I couldn't tell what their costumes were.
Men in Black?
I didn't get it. I did both my shots and tried to read those Latin type A's—the lollipop, the lazy body language, their snubbing of the overachievers on the dance floor. “What are you dressed up as?” I asked.

“Investment banker,” replied the investment banker.

I waited for my jolt to fade, contemplating whether his exotic confidence was expected of me too. I wondered if I
wasn't meant to become a screw-you Greek guy with a success story that would make me a “game changer.”

“I need a beer,” I finally said, and walked to the massive tub. I reached for a bottle, but I was fought off by our Finance professor, who had showed up as Muammar Gaddafi.

“Yours.” I let Muammar keep the disputed Stella.

“You should become a Muslim,” Muammar yelled to a Swedish-Chinese Lara Croft by the tub.

“Can't teach old cats new tricks,” she replied, with no trace of hesitation on her face.

“Bitch!” Muammar said. He turned to me: “I need to get some, man. My three-year-old is visiting from London next week.”

“Bring her to campus. Could help,” I said.

“Uh, you—you think so?” Muammar asked, wasted but dead serious.

“I'm kidding.”

He looked lost. “Uh, they tell me you're good at backgammon.”

“Rumor,” I said.

“Rumors in this forest tend to be true.” Muammar's sweat kept dripping down his medals and beer. “I know. Been stuck here five years now.”

I pointed toward the end of the catacomb, where Alkis was posing with the snake. “I gotta go bid him up,” I said, starting to make my way through Gomorrah, but Muammar grabbed my Spartan outfit.

“Hey!” he yelled.

I turned.

“Managing for . . . ?” Muammar asked.

“Value!” I pointed to him with my index finger.

“My Greek whiz! Teaching for . . . ?”

What? “Huh?”

“Pussy!”

“Well, maybe it is time you went back to Georgetown,” I said. “For a bit.”

“
Pussy!
” Muammar yelled, spitting an ice cube my way, taking a tumble, and hitting Paul, who was being trained as a dog by the two Argentineans. Before I realized what exactly was going on, Paul's collar had gotten stuck. He started hyperventilating. With no one around sober enough to unbutton him, Paul looked at me in red fright.

“There's an army knife in my car,” I said, and Paul toppled behind me toward the dungeon's exit.

The three minutes to the parking lot felt like ten. I was numb under my costume's skirt. My feet, in tight open sandals, were needled by frozen grass. Paul was chasing me, cursing and moaning like a bitch: “Cut it now! I can't breathe!” he cried every five seconds.

I placed the knife between the collar and his neck, and felt his heart racing. I twisted the knife and Paul choked.

“Do it!” Paul ordered me after he stopped coughing. I pushed the knife hard, and vodka mixed with pieces of leather and sausage suddenly covered my feet.

“
Bastard!
” I yelled.

Paul bent, roaring, and a second burst landed inches from my sandals. He was shaking.

“You okay?” I said.

“I'm okay. Will you drive me home? Please?”

I was seriously drunk. Plus, I had to pick up this American dude, Erik, from the train station in a couple of hours and still hoped for a nap—a write-off, given where Paul lived.

“I'm fucking wasted, Paul,” I said, feeling his vomit freeze on my toes. “Where the hell's your fiancée?”

Paul shook his head. “She stayed in London. Whore.” Then he vomited again.

I looked away in disgust. “I'll take you home,” I said.

Driving on icy lanes, I watched for trees, deer, and Paul's puke breath.

“I owe you one,” Paul said before passing out next to a bag of pot and a bunch of blue pills that were spread on his bed. I lifted his stash to pocket a nibble and, beneath it, saw a photo of Paul with his family. He must have been twenty, still had his hair; his arm was linked with his father's. They were laughing, posing as if they had just dragged something big out of the sea. I thought of my father, working his fishing nets. His hands ran rhythmically, pulling and rowing. He never laughed.

“Don't worry about it,” I said to no one. I put a pinch of Paul's pot in my underwear (no pockets in my Spartan outfit) and walked out.

By the time I got back to the hut, there were still no cars parked outside. I sat in my car for a moment, gearing myself up for another icy shower. Again, I thought of my father. “Your body's a fireplace in a cold mountain,” he told me when, at twelve, I had to jump into the freezing Aegean to retrieve the cross our priest had thrown in for the baptism of Jesus.

Ten minutes later, drying off with my blanket—towels still packed—I felt wide-awake.

Halfway to the train station to pick up the American, I noticed that I had a couple of cigarettes' worth of time to kill. It was already light out, so I stopped at the boulders outside Barbizon in the middle of the forest. I got out of the car and climbed the least slippery–looking stone. The rock was icy and full of mist. Birds and squirrels were everywhere. My piss streamed twenty feet down, and the first sunlight through the oaks made my liquid sparkle. I rolled Paul's stuff, lit it, and squatted, and at that moment when I wasn't drunk anymore but not yet hungover either, in that false sense of calmness in the middle of my mess, my love-hate relationship with EBS seemed clear. The whole thing was simple, really. I was building a network by tucking wasted people into bed. Which would eventually mean money, opportunities, and all the buzzwords in the pamphlets. If that's what it takes, so be it. I was fitting in—piss off, Paul—and with school ties built on either attentiveness or arrogance, we had bonding-via-fuck-you privileges; we had entertainment. By my second smoke, I felt free. Like I'd just woken up from a lithium treatment in a magical, liberating forest. Free to offend and be
offended. None of the California correctness, no filtering or tact whatsoever. No repercussions either—which made the American's French accent the first thing I noticed and made fun of as he struggled: “Ab
ie
ntot” to the schoolgirls who cheered him “Au revoir, Er
ik
!” at the train station.

“Bienvenue à Fontainebleau, Erik,” I said in my Greekest accent. “Je m'appelle Stathis.”

“Stathis is Greek,” Erik said.

“Stathis
is
Greek. I'm Greek too,” I smart-assed, stoned, drunk, and sleepless.

“Everything cool, brother?” Erik said in working-class talk. Did I catch some South Boston in there?

Six-two, lean, with a boxer's nose, black hair, and curved-down eyes, he was in a blue North Face jacket and jeans. No smile.

Driving us to Montmelian, I became the target of questions about everything around us. Granted, he was doing two master's, one in journalism and one in urban planning; however, he was far more curious about the region, its history, its “palatial solar system,” than in EBS itself. “The region's Haussmannization,” he explained, “which started centuries before Haussmann,” and moved on to the roles of different monarchs, regimes, and wars in the area over the last four hundred years. He asked if I'd visited the palace.

“Once,” I told him—for a recruiting dinner.

Did I know about the pope's imprisonment there, or Napoleon's role? Had I been to the White Horse Courtyard?

“The white
what
?” I asked, clearly irritated.

“La cour du Cheval Blanc,” he answered seriously.

I reflexively laughed at his French again, wondering why my body language wasn't registering with him. Or was it just natural to pound a person with questions when first meeting them? As if discovering someone slowly was a luxury left for Greek villages, something gone extinct for the online, overeducated dicks in the Western world.

When he brought up the treaty of Fontainebleau, I casually said: “Which one?” hoping to end our harlequin of exchange. But that didn't work either. Erik asked me what sports I played, if I had a mountain bike, trekked, or climbed in some of the best rocks to do that.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “these are the rocks that named it Fontaine-la-Montagne during the French Revolution.”

I did not laugh. I thought of the frosted rock I had just climbed and wanted to ask him why and where on earth he'd homeworked that crap. Haussmannization? In a Southie accent? Something did not square here, but with my hangover kicking in I just drove. Dreading a smoking spiel, I cracked open my window and lit up fast.

“We're about to get to Montmelian,” was all I said, and we drove the last couple of miles in silence.