Hotel Living (6 page)

I'd be in New York soon. I smiled.

ERIK'S OFFICE WAS IN THE
McGraw-Hill Building, a depressing bluish-green art deco giant overlooking West Forty-Second Street. The second I entered the lobby I got the sense that I should take this skyscraper quite seriously, like it was a landmark or something. After what seemed to be a five-minute elevator ride, I found Erik in his two-room office on the twenty-sixth floor overlooking the Port Authority and the rest of Manhattan. Freshly shaved, in a blue oxford shirt and chinos, he was comfortable, his feet on his desk. Brown loafers—really. The other two people there, a young woman and a man, were typing in Hotmail accounts. Neither seemed older than twenty, and neither acknowledged me.

I walked over and offered my hand for him to shake, thrown by the J.Crew look.

Erik laughed, pushed my hand away, and said: “Good to see you, Feta. Here are the keys. I'll see you at home.” Then he dismissed me with a wink.

When I reached his office door, I hesitated and looked back. He was already typing away again on his laptop, his feet again up on the desk.
Give Stathis keys—check.
Like I was a piece of admin.

Leaning back in my cab seat, I felt his keys in my pocket. I took them out and looked at them, two sorry yellow keys in a locksmith bangle, and replayed in my mind the ease with which Erik had granted me access to his pad, as though my
impressions of and reactions to his place and stuff had little substance or were taken as a given.

My cab ride seemed shorter than the one in the elevator, and the driver handed me six back from a ten. I kept four and stepped out in front of Erik's building, off Tenth Avenue in the west Twenties, adjacent to an abandoned elevated railroad that crossed his neighborhood and ran along the southwest side of Manhattan.

I entered Erik's street-level studio, and there was practically nowhere to step. I was faced with a dilemma. I could either stand there or sit on his grimy futon, surrounded by high-tech lights, duct-taped cables, two bikes and locks, heating pipes, and musty Yellow Pages piled with keyboards wired to computer screens that never stopped flickering. Everything made the 250-square-foot space look like evidence of a future-gone-grim pad from
Brazil
. A four-foot-high storage loft above the kitchenette was his bedroom.

I moved a pair of smelly sneakers out of the way and sat on the futon. The screensaver on the computer facing me slide-showed beaches in Mozambique, soccer games in Africa, World Cup finals, deforestation, boxy Jeeps, Erik at the pyramids with his brother. All around me, equipment lights bleeped in abstract synchronicity, like a Xenakis mathematical concert. Erik's place looked like it was perfectly lived-in, like a machine god had come down and paused life in an ideal chaos. I wanted to touch everything, like a schoolgirl nosing around. I made up rules to check myself: don't log
into my e-mail from his desktop; don't look for photographs and notes, or for a second toothbrush in his bathroom.
How about I watch some TV
, I thought, but of course there was no set in sight. My mind was working up a headache. Maybe I could find some Advil by his bedside table or in his drawers. I got up, opened the door, and strolled down Tenth Avenue. Bought
Nature via Nurture
at 192 Books and ended up at the Empire Diner.

Four chapters later, Erik was finishing my burger at our booth. “I put my TV on the pavement when Bush got elected,” he said, stuffing French fries into his mouth.

“You killed your TV?” I joked.

“I needed a hiatus,” he mumbled with a full mouth. “For a bit. But it didn't really work. I watch news online now, streaming.”

“How's the quality?”

“Worse than your porn,” Erik said, smiling.

We sat there in silence for a second. We were the only customers. Empty bistros in Normandy flashed though my eyes. “Have you seen
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
?” I asked.

Erik stopped eating my fries. “I never saw that one. But if you're referring to what I think you are—” He wagged his finger at me in a Clinton–Lewinsky way. “Not my style.”

I didn't care if he was talking cheating, amateur porn, or any perversion or fetish I might have triggered. I was busy amortizing his shyness, his exclusivity on me. On us. I believed what I wanted to believe.

Erik picked up a toothpick and my book. “So, how you've been?” he asked, skimming the back cover.

Alone
, I thought. “Busy,” I said.

“How's Chicago?” Always browsing.

“Lake Forest? A joggerland.” I stuck to short responses, few words, my rally against his business-as-usual catch-up, as if the whole summer that we didn't speak had never happened.
Ask me why I'm here, motherfucker.

But Erik kept on chitchatting, “. . . bio versus pharmaceuticals versus generics . . . ,” his toothpick fencing.

“You know something?” I cut in. “I'm here to see you.”

“Wanna get takeout and go home?” he asked with a cocky smile.

Fuck takeout and fuck you.
“Let's get rubbers first,” I countered, pathetically trying to handle—undo the undoable, really—my perfectly dismissed confession. I wanted to whack his fucking face, so I walked up to the register and paid.

That night I couldn't get any shut-eye on Erik's futon because of the high-tech indoor city lights, so we slept and fucked sideways in the four-foot-high storage bedroom above his stove. At some point, a used rubber fell into a pot below.

“Why do you spell Erik with a
K
?” I asked, looking at the rubber floating on two-day-old marinara sauce.

“I feel more Scandinavian,” he said.

“Why's that?”

“Fewer hang-ups. I throw away the sauce, rinse the pot, and keep eating.”

I fell asleep with my arm under his neck.

AT FIVE TO NOON THE
next day I was at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue. There were no stools at the bar. The two guys standing there, one in aviator sunglasses, were drinking espressos while reading Italian newspapers. Farther inside the restaurant, women were already having lunch, most of them on their cell phones.

Andrea walked in, sparkling like her pearls. She was in her late thirties, about five-ten, with long straight blond hair and an American clean and busy-looking face, wearing a cypress-green coat and matching scarf. “Best espresso in the city,” she said with a firm handshake through butter-soft leather gloves.

“Excellent,” I said. “Thank you for making the time.”

“Of course. We call it Lunch and Learn.” Andrea nodded to the maître d', who approached her and whispered something in her ear. She nodded with a confident grin, and we were led to a corner table. A double espresso was placed in front of her as we sat down.

“Thank you, Todd.” She took her gloves off, studying me. “So, how are things in Chicago?” she asked and immediately busied herself with a PalmPilot, or some such device I'd never seen before, which slid open and unfolded three times into
two screens and a keyboard. Suddenly her fingers froze. She looked up. “Wait. Let's get to know each other. Who are your sponsor, mentor, and buddy?”

I knew two of the three, though I wasn't a hundred percent sure who was what, or what the titles meant exactly. I was ready to share some names when Todd leaned over me: “Would you like something to drink?”

“Just water.”

“Try the espresso,” Andrea demanded. “We won't have time for coffee after lunch.”

“Espresso.”

“Good.” She looked pleased. “So what's going on in Chicago? And why are you here?”

I took a sip of water carefully; her Batman accessory was taking up half the table. “It's a fun project,” I said. “We are building their 2010, 2020 anti-infectives strategy, which is exactly the type of work I always wanted, you may recall from my interview. I—”

“Stop,” Andrea interrupted. “Let me tell you what's going on in Chicago.” She downed her espresso. “They need speed and innovation. As simple as that. They need speed to deal with the blessing turned curse of having too many drug candidates in the preclinical stage. Of having too many choices. And they need innovation to move beyond the pharma sector's expectations. Can we
do
that? Can we fix their opportunity cost of predictability? Can we speed up their disgracefully slow growth?”

One of her screens flashed and I thought of Erik's apartment.

Todd looked at me. “Would you like to hear the specials?”

“Just tell him the signatures,” Andrea ordered.

I SPENT THE REST OF
the fall traveling between Lake Forest and Manhattan. Fourteen-hour workdays were followed by weekends, seven of them, with Erik. After one of those Friday-evening flights, I ran into schoolmates from EBS. There was an assumption in our greeting, an implicit expectancy, as if Terminal C at LaGuardia were an alumni lounge. Jokes about “the coalition of the willing” mixed with talk of Starbucks's European expansion and the new governor of California. Then more jokes about Alkis and his latest girlfriend, and, although we parted with unrealistic promises, for the first time I felt somewhat integrated into my new world, made up of work and Erik.

At the curb outside the terminal, waiting for a cab, I considered the idea of just going along with Erik as is. No confirmations. Everything unexpressed. Maybe our status quo was not a bad thing, after all. A balance not to be discussed, nor disturbed.

Maybe all I needed was a glossary to trust and translate. When Erik said “I so wanna suck your dick,” I could interpret affection, even love.
I still have a chance
, I thought as I slid into the backseat of the cab and right into old hopes and habits.

My weekends' main activity was following Erik around Tenth Avenue in west Chelsea, his district, one of the last downtown neighborhoods where you could still forget you were in Manhattan. Nightclubs and galleries had started to move in, but the landscape still had a Pittsburgh feel about it, a sense of industrial abandonment. Erik pointed at rezoned fields full of trucks, and lots that were up for bidding. We strolled by rail yards that seemed to go nowhere. Everything around us looked stout; nothing was conventionally pretty. Rectangular structures occupied more than a block, streets tunneling through them. There were no shops, nothing, just random pedestrians for whom I couldn't see a destination on the street. Or some kids just sitting there, staring at us, under the High Line—the abandoned freight railroad that blocked the sun from Erik's apartment. Soon the landscape became repetitive. We would turn the corner to more barren streets, some of them as quiet as those in Lake Forest.

We walked to Billymark's on Ninth Avenue for two-dollar happy hour, and from there up the street to the Pakistani kitchen for dinner with Melissa, Erik's “favorite cabdriver,” the only cabdriver he knew.

Once at the restaurant, Erik picked up the neighborhood's paper and checked the column by the journalist, who had written that Erik's “use of a rent-subsidized apartment”—Erik being the manager of the district's community board—“was a conflict of interest.”

“Well, it's up to the board now,” Erik said and shrugged,
clearly indifferent to our faces, which were turned radioactive green by the fluorescent lights reflecting off the restaurant's pistachio walls. I needed sunglasses—our table, chairs, and pakora sauce were all in pastel yet shining colors. An old guy in what looked like a corner shop within the restaurant yelled in Punjabi through his internal window. When I read his sign out loud, “We fix all cell phones,” Erik shook his head as though I had crossed some line of political correctness by noticing a cell phone shop within a Pakistani restaurant.

I let it go and made eye contact with Melissa. She was a Barbara Bush look-alike: hair, wrinkles, surprised-looking face . . .

“It's for the tips, Stathis,” Melissa said, catching me gawking at the large cotton camellia brooch on her L.L.Bean flannel shirt. She turned to Erik: “What you gonna do if they evict you?”

“They'll be doing me a favor,” Erik said. “I live in my work, I walk too much. I'll move to the Bronx, with you!”

“Then we'll be neighbors!” Melissa laughed. “I can take you into town on my morning shifts.”

“You know I can't afford you.”

“You gonna bike or run to work?” She kept laughing.

“Lady, you saw me jogging once and you almost ran me over.”

“Parks are for runners. Streets are for cars.”

“Not in my district. We'll make it a walker's hood.” Erik's Southie was acting up.

Melissa looked at me. Her eyes were wide open. “He was jogging in fucking Harlem!”

“I was legit.” Erik smiled.

She forked some chicken. “He was running naked in a snowstorm,” she said with her mouth full. “No one around. I thought I would be the last person to see him alive. I honked, I yelled . . .” She waved her fork at Erik. “He kept running. I had to chase his freezing ass down the street.”

“Sorry, I don't run in a team.” Erik laughed.

“What's wrong with that?” I said.

“I don't need one more class in my life. I'm not like you,” Erik said, satisfied.

I wasn't following, but I could tell he smelled blood.

“Let's see,” he said, and looked at the ceiling. “Stanford class of '98? EBS '03? Command '03? Bay Area Sailing Team I-don't-know-when . . . What's next? Friends of the High Line, class of 2004?”

Was I accused of being a zealous immigrant? Today's version of the never-ending American story? A successful Melissa? Fine. I was an educated immigrant. He knew that, he acknowledged that, so why couldn't education be our bond? Our stick between Melissa and corporate? If we had anything in common, we were both into reconciling reality with ideas. We spiced things up—like the smell from the kitchen, which was getting stronger by the minute. The Pakistani music louder; the same song had been playing for half an hour, pounding my head after my absurdly long week, flight, and
lack of sleep in Erik's sarcophagus of a bedroom. “Isn't that how you grow up in this country?” I countered, feeling the swollen glands in my neck.