Hotel Living (5 page)

“Urban planning in Bequia . . . Cut me some slack. I didn't even know the island existed,” I said, and swam closer. “So, how're things coming along?”

“Slowly,” he said with a grimace.

“I guess you haven't gotten the kids eBay accounts yet?”

“No, but I can put you on Craigslist. And by the way, it's urban
and
regional planning. We're a full-service program.” Erik spit, and dived to mock-suck me.

I saw his saliva on the water's surface slowly diluting. I reached for it, tried to hold it together, but Erik touched my belly button, which made me ticklish. I grabbed his armpits and lifted him up.

“Fuck, bro! Is your Greek dick ever not hard?”

“I thought you didn't stereotype.” I saw Erik's full smile. “When you get close to me, I'm wood. Mathematics,” I said, and Erik kissed me.

LATER, AT THE CABIN, AS
I shot my come over his torso, I tasted the sea salt on Erik's chin and fell backward, crashing into his arm with my shoulder. I tried to lift it, but Erik held me there.

“We all deserve a pause after coming,” he said.

“Even Saddam?”

“Even Bush.”

I lit a cigarette, took a drag, and looked at the bird's nest on the ceiling. It was made from dirt and broken shells, perfectly curved, with a funnel-like entrance, holding on to nothing at the opening of the roof. Its acrobatic knack disturbed me; I saw our fragility in it. Erik and I were compatriots in leaving our upbringings. He was born in privilege but had a taste for discomfort and poverty. I was born with a talent for adapting. I tested well and left my backwater for good schools and jobs on his side of the world. Narcissistically, maybe, I saw us mirroring each other. He showed me how I should have grown up in Greece, taught me how I could have lived in Pelio, with no money, happy; how beautiful I used to be without knowing it. But then, I wasn't poor anymore. I couldn't go back in time; I couldn't even go back to Greece, which had turned Bequia into a familiar parallel universe. I reached and kissed Erik to share the homesick sea-salt taste in my mouth.

THE YEAR I MET ERIK,
2002, was the year I started writing everything down. In my e-mail I stored my homework, cover
letters, and application memos, my travel plans and party invites. E-mail covered our lives and made us all actors in a kind of reality theater. Composing them, we got to flesh out arguments and—pre–instant messaging—deliver our punch lines. We had the luxury of making up different personalities. We got to be funny, sarcastic, caring; we even
xoxo
-ed people we wouldn't stop to say hello to on campus.

Except Erik. He had none of that. His e-mails were to the point, factual. Journalistic. He ignored notes with any “contextual or personality agenda”—from “real-life cowards,” from “e-lames.”

I one-upped him, of course. I treated e-mail as a bore that needed containment. I used a PowerPoint-like writing mode, skipping verbs or nouns while scrutinizing his notes for any hidden signs of affection. I'd get an e-mail saying: “I think it's time we hit the road again,” and I'd microanalyze every word. I'd see an us-against-the-world camaraderie in
we hit.
I'd romanticize
the road.

After Erik went back to Oxford, we began meeting at off-season places on our free weekends. Worked for me. There was a quiet luxury to those foggy beaches, an antidote to the busy bar and amphitheaters on campus. We walked on a pier in Normandy on a freezing night, the only ones at the boardwalk's canteen. In Maincy, the echo of Erik's voice through the rooms of the Vaux le Vicomte was the only sound. He couldn't stop making comparisons. He argued about how much better life is in Brittany than Kansas. He defended the
woman at the Vendée museum's ticket counter for being five minutes late: “Why shouldn't she have lunch at the same time as the rest of us?” he snapped to the complaining peacoated family from Seattle.

By then our school days were reaching an end. Early that spring, both Alkis and I had accepted Associate positions at Command. Alkis would be in the London office; I was assigned to San Francisco. Paul broke up with his fiancée and decided to travel the world to “re-find” himself, and Erik finished his two master's degrees at Oxford, in journalism and urban planning. Come July he'd be the manager of a
west side
—he was specific on that—community board in New York and would freelance for
The Nation
. He'd make a fifth of my base.

I pictured Erik in two-dollar-pint dives with his mates in Manhattan and I got it: I loved Erik as a man, as a gentleman. He came from privilege, but there was an outcast within him. His was the ultimate intimacy that I had always craved. Erik was a city kid, running off in the summer to hang with the underdogs, breaking into the village church to steal oil and gas for the boat, speaking up for us when we were busted in whorehouses in Volos. True, times had changed. I'd be an Associate soon. I'd made my own choices and might even have deserved some credit. And yet I wanted Erik to see the childish way I wanted him, and for him to want me too, in that island camaraderie that was still haunting my mind.

“I'M NOT COMING TO YOUR
prom
!” Erik said, checking his Eurostar ticket on the Sunday of our last weekend away in France.

“The ball's in Versailles,” I appealed. “They have some kick-ass gardens there. May come in handy when you plan your west side park.”

“You'll e-mail me the photos,” Erik grumbled, still shuffling tickets.

“Right.” I looked at his bag and the Gare du Nord ticket booth. I checked for my keys, my hands in and out of my pockets, making the seconds register, making more of them. My Finance exam, in twelve hours, flashed before my eyes. A nod from him, just a fucking
I know
, and everything would be okay.

“So, later,” he said, and punched me on the shoulder.

“Sure.”

I saw the back of his North Face jacket as he sped toward security.

Driving back to Fontainebleau, radio off, throat sore, I kept policing my mind to stay in rejection-denial. Brainwashing myself that we were locked in a prisoner's dilemma, in some sort of emotional inarticulation, though feelings were mutual.

Monday, dry-mouthed with fever, staring at the exam sheet in front of me, unable to calculate the weighted average cost of capital, I was reflecting on Erik's sobriety against the EBS audacities around me—surely a trigger for falling for him—when it came to me that, a master's later, I was heading back to the Bay Area with a better salary, everything else pretty much equal. I failed.

A
T COMMAND WE CAN'T HAVE
fun without learning,” the head of human resources had told me over the phone after I accepted the offer. I thought she was kidding, sharing an office joke, but training was a fixation at Command: formal, informal, on the road, at client sites, “on the beach” (i.e., while waiting for client work), even during vacation at half-expensed “bettering retreats.” It never stopped.

In July 2003, Command's annual orientation was held outside Washington.

“You are management consultants now,” a senior-senior Partner christened us. “The new Beaujolais. The new Associates. Within weeks, leaders of major corporations will start paying lots and lots of money for
you
to tell them how to run their businesses. Simple as that.” He looked around the auditorium, nodding to show how pleased he was with what he saw. “Who wouldn't want your job?” he said. “Congratulations! You made it to Command!” he cheered. A nothing-can-go-wrong two-week fiesta was launched. A party of rising self-esteem.

VPs kept stressing to us that we would approach corporate challenges in “dramatically better ways than our competitors.” That there were “no dead ends for Commanders.” All we needed to do was “trust the fundamentals, the frameworks that create shareholder value: the markets, the brands, the
leadership
of your colleagues.”

Senior Associates put on superhero costumes to explain the “abundance paradigm.”

“There are no circles,” they said. “No cutting the cake, no zero-sum perspectives on resources. Just spirals of growth.”

Propaganda, sure, but I was attracted to the promise of making money. This was the pudding for ten years of studying, scholarships, and immigration forms. “Arriving”? Belonging to “the club”? Of course. But what intrigued me most was Command's credo that brainwashing a group of consultants—corporate observers and analysts, really; advisers, at best—about the sustainability of economic euphoria might in fact contribute to materializing it. As if the real economy was a state of mind: monitor it, believe in it, and it will keep growing. The paradoxical monitor-equals-influence law of quantum physics that I remembered from college had just gotten a tick. I saw myself as part of an experiment, about to walk a bridge that linked theory with business, and on the other side, the market's dividends might even exonerate me for fleeing my family and Greece.

I wasn't alone. Everyone nodded along. My class rarely if ever challenged the partners. They were the legitimate
source. Command's perpetual-spirals-of-growth theory—seen as solid and joyful—was taken as a given. As a matter of fact, we rationalized it, and then some. We got into make-mine-a-double mode: “Fee-based consulting is old-school,” Alkis told me over dinner on Cape Cod during our end-of-training weekend retreat.

“Come again?” I said.

“Actually, consulting
itself
is just a stepping-stone,” he said, pausing to read my expression. “Don't get me wrong, mate,” he hurried. “I'll enjoy building brands as much as the next Commander, but I don't see any reason that we should be loyal to either partners
or
clients.” He was drinking champagne, red wine, and a latte.

“Alkis, we haven't even started working yet,” I said. “And won't you need favors from ex-clients in order to build your fund, or whatever you plan to do after you leave Command?”

Alkis's eyes softened, the way they had at EBS when he thought he was about to teach me something. “It's our
right
to keep nexting, Stathis.”

“
Nexting
? Excuse me?”

“Clients will approach us with some real opportunities.” He leaned closer. “Clients will keep courting us to participate in their ventures. If you don't like this one, you jump ship at the next one.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked skeptically.

“I'm not talking about consulting. I'm talking equity. Listen, new brands will be made, whether we take advantage
of it or not. Someone will. So think of your job like a computer game that keeps throwing cele-brands your way.”

I nodded along, speculating about how many more words like
nexting
and fucking
cele-brands
Alkis was going to come up with during dinner.

“Actually, it's even sexier than that,” he smirked. “The markets will assess the brands that we'll build, but
pervasive
brands will become markets
themselves
.”

I finished my red and let him finish.

“
Of course they will
. Strong market players will become market makers. Look around: Craig Venter, Google, Elon Musk, Abby Cohen, Miramax. I can go on and on. Even juveniles like Tyler Brûlé, they're all Oprah-positioning fads and teams. Cele-brands today are both goods
and
markets.”

“Stop saying
cele-brands
,” I said seriously.

But Alkis went on. “Once you're endorsed by a cele-brand, you pick up or license anything. You recognize what skill set you lack and you just go out there and buy it, or hire it.” He made a peace sign to our waiter and then gestured toward my glass.

Who was Tyler Brûlé? Was Elon Musk a perfume? I was disturbed by Alkis's charade, and distracted by my glass and the surfer-looking waiter. See, after a year of living in Alkis's shadow on campus, at times beneath his scolding eye, I wanted to understand what it was about his Mediterranean looks and English accent that allowed him to father me. Where did he get the balls? I tried to grasp him. The thing
with Alkis was that he had no apparent flaws. You couldn't find the bad stuff mixed with the good, like we see in people's personalities and we have to accept or sometimes just tolerate—a C++ programming genius, say, who is also a nerd. When it came to Alkis, there were no tradeoffs. Much like our classmates had at school, Commanders gathered around him for both work and play.

“When you mix market playing with market making, you get unfair advantages,” I protested. “You let the winner take everything. You
know
that.”

“So?” Alkis shrugged, and the tattoo by the collar of his white shirt—a handgun—flickered. “Today, taking all, being ubiquitous, is more important than being correct or effective,” he said. “Being everywhere
is
being effective. Which is exactly what makes globalization our tribe's high-end problem. I love this place.” He raised his glass.

I mimicked him, not sure to whom exactly he referred as “our tribe.” Greeks? MBAs? Consultants? Bankers? And what did he love? The restaurant? Command? Cape Cod? I looked at the boats at the far end of the restaurant's patio, off the boardwalk, and thought of Erik, who had spent his summers here as a child with his family and his hero, Constantine.

I hadn't e-mailed Erik. I didn't want to legitimize his “later,” his illegit good-bye. Behind my ego was, of course, my fear of closure—Erik's official rejection. Just like my mother in Trikeri, who refused to see doctors, I felt that not knowing was better than facing the facts. Ten years later and
in a different part of the world, my demented choice to avoid closure with Erik was still a rural denial, a disillusioned ray of hope. Theoretically, technically, anything could still happen.

Alkis had moved on to “the anti-Western bias in Reuters's Middle East coverage,” and I pretended to listen, wondering what I would do if Erik walked into the restaurant right at that moment. Or if I ran into him back at the hotel in Chatham—how would we react? We hadn't communicated in six weeks. As far as I knew, he might have been in Cape Cod that very weekend. A scary thought, although at this particular time it played out as a happy encounter. “. . . until a bus blows up in central Jerusalem,” Alkis said, bringing me out of my zone. Then he waved “peace” to our waiter again, exposing his handgun tattoo again, and the world of juxtapositions we lived in which permitted me one more—one last, I promised myself—escape into Erikland. Had I said or done something better, the outcome might have been different with Erik. My what-if scenarios were all over the place—from sucking his dick better to meeting him before my “toxic MBA.” My magical endings varied wildly too: a fishing life with Erik and Jeevan in the Caribbean, building schools in South Boston, producing olive oil in Greece and exporting it to Manhattan restaurants for Alkis and his friends.

“Do you party these days?” Alkis asked as he massaged his shoulder, where the gun was.

A WEEK AFTER TRAINING, I
signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. The following week, I got my first client, my first project—an hour's drive north of Chicago.

“Your hotel will be the Deer Path Inn in Lake Forest,” Command's in-house travel agent e-mailed me. “A historic property with stone fireplaces, antiques & artifacts. A landmark!” he elaborated in bold and italicized letters before requesting my confirmation so he could make the reservation.

“Is it a business hotel?” I replied.

“It's the only game in town,” the agent responded.

Late on Sunday night, I checked in at the Deer Path Inn. The manager explained that half their rooms were suites. “Including the Mrs. Frederick, where you will be staying,” he said.

“That's great.” I faked interest.

“Your suite is named after a hundred-year-old lady who lived with us for thirty years,” my porter later said, helping me to my room.

With
us
? Was he born in the hotel? He looked like he was fourteen. I checked my watch. It was approaching midnight. “I'm not afraid of ghosts,” I said, handing him a ten.

For the next three months I was expected to “live” on the nearby campus of the client, a major pharmaceutical, and help managers there shape up the research and development strategy for their anti-infectives franchise.

Command protocol had it that I, the Associate, should never leave the client's premises before my project leader
did, and, “it goes without saying, never,
ever
before partners.” Once in a blue moon one of them would drop by.

“What about the client?” I asked my project leader.

“Oh, don't worry about them,” he said. “They're home by six. That's when we start the real work.”

I didn't care if it was a 24–7 job. Lake Forest was beyond sleepy. It was a don't-wake-me-up suburb. On the weekends I ran, just to have something to do, which exposed me to a suburban
Children of Men
dystopia: it looked as though Lake Forest had been hit by mass infertility from the 1960s till the late '80s. And yet everyone there was still jogging away happily. The young ones performed synchronized runs in groups of four or five. Their positions were choreographed, forming some version of a Greek phalanx to keep them at a minimum distance of ten feet from any fifteen-mile-per-hour cruising Grand Cherokee. They always greeted me, all of them at once, even if I was running in the opposite direction on the other side of the street.

“Good seeing you too!” I paused and yelled the first time, assuming that, in spite of their age, they were interning at the client.

After two runs it became obvious that the typical Lake Forest house was the size of the forty-room Inn, and equally sedated. “Oh, it's a
wonderful
community,” the Russian midtwenties Deer Path Inn receptionist told me.

By my third weekend, the quietness was intolerable; the sounds of wind and cardinals outside Mrs. Frederick's
window stirred up déjà vu of wanting to escape from my village. “Fuck this cemetery. Got to get out of here,” I said to her portrait and headed out for a sprint. Forty-five minutes later, my runner's high bolstered me enough to e-mail Erik. By then we had had no contact for almost three months.

“What the hell,” I began. After five deleted drafts, I simply asked if he was still alive.

He responded immediately, which filled me with joy and speculation. “Feta! Good to hear from you. How's the West Coast treating you?”

Was he casual? Indifferent? Opportunistic, even?

We went on exchanging weekly notes on work and Donald Rumsfeld until, a few Sundays later, Erik asked me if I'd be in New York “anytime soon.” I pressed the New E-mail button instinctively and requested a meeting that Friday with Andrea Farrugia, the VP who'd interviewed me at EBS; the only VP I knew at our New York office. “To get your perspective on the competitiveness of macrolides and quinolones,” I typed.

Andrea replied at midnight:

“I don't consider myself an anti-infectives expert, but I'm happy to share my thoughts. I'm only available for lunch after a meeting at the Sloan Kettering Institute. How is noon at Sant Ambroeus on Madison? Andrea.”

I responded immediately, “Perfect.”

IT WAS THE LONGEST WEEK
in Lake Forest yet. On Thursday at lunchtime I fled the client's headquarters “to spend three and a half days with Erik in New York,” I bragged to Alkis over the phone while driving to O'Hare. “He said I could
totally
crash at his place . . . Mate? You there?”

“Is that your cell phone? Or do I spot some Southie in your accent?”

“You're funny,” I said.

I heard Alkis exhale. “Have fun. But remember, don't overcompensate. The Dubya's got nothing on you.”

I didn't react. This was a compliment; I didn't know how to react.

“We don't tell you this often, but you're not a shabby guy, Stathis. So just be yourself.”

“I'm always myself.”

“Really? 'Cause Erik thinks you're going to New York for work. And based on your e-mail, Andrea thinks you're going there for your project.”

“Well . . . Sure, the project too. Two birds with—”

“You're not the kid who stole gas to push the boat out anymore. Get it together,
mate
.”

“Cops. Gotta go!” I lied, and tossed the phone into the passenger seat.