Hotel Living (4 page)

I needed coffee badly. I walked out onto the patio and forgot about it. Loud birds circled in the sky. Below me, in front of me, everywhere, the big blue ocean spread out. To my right were rocks, with trees bulging above and between them. To my left were more cabins made of gray stone and mortar, arranged at different levels among the land formations. Their walls had no corners or edges, just sweeping forms, as if extensions of the hill. A chill—less of a where-am-I, more of a
when
-am-I—ran through me.

I found Jeevan under a tree outside a cave house on a hundred-foot-long beach. He was busy rolling a joint, ten feet
from a rod with a rusty bell tied to a fishing line that disappeared into the water. “Lazy fishing,” my father used to call that. There was no one else in sight.

My steps on the sand made Jeevan look up. “You Stathis?” He laughed. Late forties, skinny, years in the sun, he had more cloth in his hair than on his body.

“Yes, I'm Stathis. You must be Jeevan.”

“Welcome to Moonhole, my brother.” He lit the joint and offered it to me.

I paused. It must have been nine a.m., pre-coffee, pre-everything. Still, I was so mesmerized by the last-person-on-earth feel of the place that I wanted an in. I took a hit and felt it from my brain to my toes. I sat down under the tree, among tiny tortoises and what looked like broken whale bones. The breeze came in rushes, rotating the color of the sea from bright blue to darker to black. “Thank you, Jeevan.” I passed back the joint. “Damn strong.”

“See the moon?” He pointed to the sky. “In a couple of months we'll see it through the arch. I keep the good stuff for then,” Jeevan said, scratching his sweaty armpit while having a puff. Then he got up and disappeared into the cave house.

I looked up to the fading moon. Everything seemed to be in a different orbit in this place, reversed or halted in yesteryear. The tortoises walked away from the water, and the whale bones were dark. I was trying to break one with a stone when Jeevan returned, holding a jar with something like fruit
punch in it. “Erik's a friend of mine. He told me to take care of you,” he said with a smile.

I looked at Jeevan and then at the jar.

“It's rum punch! The colony's drink!” he yelled.

I was ready to ask what the story was with the arch and the colony, to find out what on earth he was talking about, where the hell I was, but Jeevan took a sip and offered me the jar. I stared at it for a moment, wondering how long the punch had been sitting out. “Perfect,” I heard myself whisper as the sea changed again.

By the time Erik came back, I was passed out in our cabin.

I SPENT MY MORNINGS SMOKING,
having “breakfast” with Jeevan, and swimming off deserted cliffs at Moonhole. When the sun settled good and the sea stopped changing colors, I'd have a siesta. In the afternoon I would join Erik and his young local friends in saving baby turtles from “evil, bloody birds” at the turtle sanctuary in Park Bay. We weighed and fed the turtles, checked for trauma from birds, and moved them around the shallow nursing pools, following the park custodian's assessments on the turtles' “preferences and well-being.” It was a skill I couldn't crack; as if one needed some tuning-in, some leveling with the silent turtles before one got to understand them.

Erik's entourage got bigger by the day. Kids kept showing up out of nowhere, while I couldn't work out how these ten-
year-olds made it from Port Elizabeth to the turtle sanctuary with no bus, cars, or bikes in sight. When I asked, they'd just shrug. I tried to explain what I saw by a bay of a small island without letting go of rationality; my Greek rural instincts failing me. I went as far as conceptualizing an
HBR
case study around them, hypothesizing on the kids' timely appearances and disappearances, hoping to explain this mystery with a b-school operations principle that I thought I must be missing. They were unguarded, ubiquitous, screaming little monsters, splashing into the three-foot-deep pools, weight lifting the turtles, even throwing them to one another, ready to drop everything for a game of soccer on the beach. But the turtles were oblivious to their yells. They didn't swim away, hide, or bite, adding to my Cartesian angst, which had been making me a touch less Greek every day since I left home a decade ago.

Late in the afternoon on Christmas, I jumped into the water to rinse off an hour of soccer. After some strokes, I pushed my head back for an almost 360-degree view of the horizon. I could hear the kids' yells and the metallic sound of their footsteps on the sand, through the water. I closed my eyes and floated.

“Little punks! That was murder,” Erik said, handing me a Carib when I got out. He sat next to me on the beach. “Jesus!”

I smiled. “We stood our ground. For a bit.”

“Oh yeah?” He clung to my bottle, looked at me funny. “Last ten minutes I couldn't even get close to the ball.”

I took a sip. “I couldn't
see
the ball,” I said. “We started with twelve. I turn around and there are twenty-five, thirty. They kept popping up, like in a video game. Swapping sides, too. I didn't know who I was playing with or against.”

“I know.” Erik nodded. “We'll have to go shirts and skins next time.”

“Oh, you
have
a shirt?”

“I was hoping you'd leave one or two behind. As long as they don't say EBS,” Erik said with a wink.

“You still got my socks I left at Ian's.”

“Oh, those.” Erik smiled. “Those are at my dry cleaner's back home.”

“You do own a suit, right?”

“
Now!
” He pointed a finger. “That's irrelevant.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “You beat me one-on-one—okay, two-on-two, I get Learie, you get Gokul—and I'll leave behind my polo shirt. If we kick your asses, we take Jeevan's dinghy out to Tobago Cays on Sunday.”

“Feta, Jeevan's
bell
's gonna ring before you beat me in soccer,” Erik said. All Southie.

“The planet calls it football. You kick the ball with your feet. Noticed?”

Erik shook his head and burped. “
Right
. Forgot you're the first Greek who crossed the Atlantic. By the way, I'm Olympiakos.”

“
Excuse
me?”

“Sorry, the French don't burp?”

“Fuck you, and
excuse
me?”

“You heard me. And you look like a Panathinaikos.”

“Dude!” I almost stood up. “Stop fucking with me. You speak Greek?”

“That's about it,” Erik said.

I prompted him with a wave. “Spill the beans. Now.”

“I had this summer job in Hyannis, I must have been twelve, thirteen. A Greek dude there, Constantine, great guy, was teaching sailing during school breaks. He and my brother put together a soccer team. We stayed in touch till he dropped out of school, broke up with his fiancée, and went to Afghanistan to fight with the tribes. I've only seen him—”

“I'm sorry.” I had to wiseass: “There's yelling in the background and I thought you said that a Greek went to fight in Afghanistan.”

Erik's tone changed, his eyes fixed way out on the sea. “Maybe you come from different parts of Greece,” he muttered seriously.

I was lost. Did I just make fun of someone who was to be taken seriously? A Greek hero?
His
hero? I wanted to bargain, undo if necessary, but Erik was already up, looking far into the sea. I was ready to call a time-out when I saw a flock of birds three hundred feet out near the opening of the reef, free-falling into the water from fifty feet up. The children were already calling Erik, pointing at the birds and shouting, pushing a dinghy into the water, robbing me of my own turf.

JEEVAN NEVER LOOKED AT ME
without laughing or smiling. He didn't ask me any questions or say that he wanted to visit Greece, like unguarded people do the moment they meet me. In fact, he didn't care about any travel that didn't involve his dinghy. And yet I couldn't see anything self-absorbed about him. There was something reassuring in his lack of curiosity and ambition: a consistency, a finality in accepting his life and whereabouts that reminded me of my father in Trikeri.

Jeevan was ten when his family joined Moonhole's “colony,” a self-sustaining community founded in the '60s by an architect and his wife. The couple built their home from stone, wood, and whale bones under a natural arch of rock overlooking the sea. The first time I saw their house from Jeevan's dinghy, I thought I was looking at a
Robinson Crusoe
version of the Treasury in Petra. It was a deserted, multilevel domicile carved into the landscape, looking all mystical and sacred, humble and natural. The day before my last on the island, I talked Jeevan into climbing it with me.

He hadn't been inside for years, he told me. He gave me the tour, smoking, laughing, and talking about the natural ideals of the free spirit and sharing that had run the community, “the
colectiva
,” in the early years, before rocks fell from the arch and most of the houses were abandoned.

“We never sold out. Maybe we never had the chance.”

“Where did the people go?”

“We're good ghosts,” Jeevan said, laughing, and passed me the joint. “There's still no electricity. Just kerosene and propane.”

Right then and there I knew I'd miss Bequia. And yet, at the tip of this small island, I couldn't relax. I kept speculating, unsure why Erik went for me. I was trying to find an algorithm and clone it—isn't that what people do? Work on things? I knew I was good at interviews, at first impressions. I put people at ease. I was good at making peace with anything, but I couldn't get my head around Erik.

Jeevan lit one more joint in the roofless attic of the house under the arch. He'd never asked about Erik and me, as if he understood the whole thing but wasn't the least interested or surprised. We sat there for a while, looking at the archipelago below us, and then I caught myself murmuring Ian Hunter's ballad “I Wish I Was Your Mother”:

      
And then I would have seen you, would have been you as a child

      
Played houses with your sisters

      
And wrestled with all your brothers

      
And then who knows, I might have felt a family for a while.

ERIK GRABBED THE TREE BRANCH
above him and started doing pull-ups, half in the air, half floating on the sea, counting lifts in Greek. The trees above us filtered the sun. To our right and
left, rocks held us, kept the green waters calm, forming a natural harbor within the sea. I saw small fish cruising against white and black pebbles at the bottom, and each time Erik pulled up, a bit less of his cock rose above the water till I couldn't see it at all.

“What happened to your dick?” I yelled.

He let go of the branch and splashed into the sea-pool. “Go back to Greece!” he said when he got up. He spit seawater in my face.

“Thought I was there for a moment. The sea, you counting in Greek . . .” I spit back but missed him.

“Have you heard yourself speaking English?”

“I try not to speak,” I answered.

“When was the last time you were back home?” Erik asked, reaching for the branch again.

I felt my fleeing-the-army insecurity rising, my Greek manhood threatened. “It's been a while. Almost two years.”

Erik glanced my way, pulling up.

I didn't say anything either, so he looked at me again.

“I can't go back. It's just stupid, really,” I tried, casually. “I haven't served in the Greek army.”

Erik smiled. “And how does that make you feel?”

“Educated,” I groaned.

He did two more lifts before he let his body fall into the water again.

“Well, you're not the only Greek who skipped that one.”

“Let me guess . . . Constantine!” I smiled.

“Nope. His mother's English. He didn't have to. Dual citizenship or something.”

“I guess he and I are from different hoods, after all.”

“We got a chip there, island boy?”

“Hell yeah,” I said. “And I can still join Uncle Sam, track him down in Afghanistan, and kick his Harvard ass.”

Erik laughed. “I never said he went to Harvard, you punk!” He swam onto me and tried to push my head underwater, but I slipped to his side.

“Island boy!” I said, raising my eyebrows. “How come you're not in Beacon Hill for Christmas?” I asked.

I caught his grin before he looked the other way. “'Cause I'm here with you,” Erik said, and I got jitters. The island laws I grew up with took compliments as shameful. A weakness for givers and receivers alike.

“Or in the West Village, writing articles about the West Side Stadium?” I pressed on, pretending I missed his compliment, unable to handle what I wanted the moment it arrived.

“You spend too much time online,” Erik said.

I wanted an instant replay—
I like being with you
is what I wanted to say. But we rarely get a second go at anything, so I marched on, dragged down by sunk cost, betting on offense and hoping to recover by holding on to some principle I might not even have believed in. “Do I, now?” I said. “I read your article on EBS. ‘Sterilized'? ‘Ingenuity'? Not a Southie. You're from Beacon Hill, so what's up with the accent?”

“You're stereotyping me, Feta.”

“Oh yeah? Did you pick up the talk during your Boston-I-Care outing?”

“My pad's in Roxbury,
brother
!” He grabbed my leg, pulling me closer. “Unlike the Greeks, I don't live with Mom and Dad anymore.”

“WASP-trash.”

He laughed and lost his grip. I pushed his head under.

“Greek prick!” he shouted, surfacing. “My article was work, just like hanging out with you.”