by Mari Reiza
‘Fuck. I haven’t moved in fully, yet. Give me some time man,’ he claimed.
I was getting bored of coming to rich people’s houses and seeing empty spaces in wealthy surroundings. Where was their stuff? If they had managed such success in life they must have been interesting people at some point. Where were their How to Get Rich books, filthy novels, music collections, photo albums, the horrible knick-knacks their aunties had given them when they were growing up? Had they never had them? Where was all the real meat behind their CVs on LinkedIn and the beautiful pictures on their Instagram account?
Bev had always insisted that Peter had willfully decided to destroy any remnant of his previous life and threw away and re-bought everything every six months, and the scene in front me kind of proved her point.
Post-tour we hung out for a few minutes in the main living room.
‘Look at this,’ he urged, pointing at a proudly displayed harmonium hanging on a wall which he claimed to have bought on a soul searching trip to Rajasthan. Perhaps he was showing it as proof that he did own some belongings. It hung alongside some professional pictures of himself embodying happiness in Bali with some chick that I did not recognise (hopefully Peter did), and not far from a full-size golden replica of a Chinese warrior by the main fireplace. Maybe it was bigger than the original. It was savagery.
A waiter suddenly interrupted us to announce that party guests had started to arrive.
Peter had planned to hold the party under a marquee in the garden despite having an empty sumptuous house at his disposal, and had got his assistant Luz, as in the-light-that-takes-you-to-God, to organise some expensive but mediocre catering.
‘Someone Enterprise uses all the time,’ I heard him say to a guest.
The caterers had gone for the humble, laid-back look with paper plates and a table displaying serve-yourself house wine and beer. It was a total anticlimax set against the opulence of the mansion in the background, and I couldn’t help questioning: Why do Americans do these things? Why do rich people do these things? Why do they work so hard to be rich and then live so half-heartedly? Is it out of respect for the poor? Do they think that it helps them, the poor? For the first time since I joined, I suddenly questioned whether perhaps Peter was not the man I had thought him to be. I was appalled.
‘Poor food, bad wine… they always put me in a foul mood,’ I wanted to confess to Tobias, who had just arrived with Trojan and a bunch of other colleagues. But he, like most other guests, seemed ecstatic about the arrangements and I did not dare to comment.
As we sipped from our beer bottles, our feet on the fresh grass, cold sausage rolls in hand, all in a large circle around our host, Peter mentioned Oprah Winfrey had considered making an offer on the house some time ago but it was too pricey. He loved to boast. ‘Guys, the best treat to fill up my motor court is arriving on Monday!’ he added. It was something like a Ferrari Berlinetta, I had missed the exact model. Peter really felt on top of the world and I decided to leave him with his guests and meander around the garden.
When I rejoined the party, Nal had arrived late with his sickeningly sweet wife who treated him like a baby: ‘My sweetheart only has Sapphire gin, please,’ she was mentioning to a waiter.
Alakrita, who must have also arrived during my walk, broke it to her that there wasn’t any. ‘Strictly cheap wine and beer, I’m afraid,’ she giggled.
I smiled at her but my eyes were hijacked by Nal’s wife’s big new perfect boobs and the emeralds dangling from her neck amongst her luscious black curls. She didn’t need to be that endearing to her husband.
‘Daddy would have paid for those tits if Nal hadn’t,’ Alakrita whispered in top form down my ear.
She could save any party for me, even if I was trying my best to keep away from her, given my sexual infatuation.
After some chit chat, Alakrita moved to speak to Peter and I decided to circle too. It was the done thing in these parties. I saw Mike, the Silicon Valley twat, in a corner, in some bespoke jeans, surrounded by a crowd of hysterical female Enterprisers (three females made a crowd at Enterprise). Clara the nun was looking at him with teary eyes and a half-opened mouth, as if reaching some sort of climax hearing the knob talk.
Across the marquee, Dimitri was telling someone I hardly knew how he had joined the party all the way from Israel, where he had been working with the President to build a brain hub. Or it could have been a military arsenal, the music had suddenly gone up a notch and I couldn’t hear properly. Next he was sharing some new self-help title with another junior lad from our New York office who looked puzzled.
I went in and out of circles of colleagues holding hands and giving the occasional mock-hug, congratulating people as much as I could, joining broken conversations including with Hammi and Bev who made a brief appearance with our CEO, although he did not even recognise me.
I kept an eye on Alakrita from afar the whole time. She looked absolutely racy in a short black lace dress with a plunge décolleté similar to the one Victoria Beckham would wear a few years later to Wimbledon, on a day when I was re-ingratiating myself with a corporate patient after a project had gone sour, his fault entirely of course.
After a few hours of the usual tedium, the party seemed to be winding down with most guests retreating slowly, when I managed to exchange a few more words with Peter, who had understandably been very busy all evening.
‘Where is your new girlfriend?’ I finally asked. I had not managed to talk to him about anything other than the house since I had arrived.
‘With her husband,’ he replied casually, or perhaps casually drunk.
I hadn’t known she was married.
Next he struggled, in a slurred voice, to justify his previous marriage breakdown, explaining how his first wife had deceived him about their moral platform by allowing him to think that he could have done whatever he wanted without remorse, because she would always better it. ‘The bitch stopped bettering it as she got old, she didn’t keep to her promise at all.’ He smiled and tripped over a small mound in the grass, small enough for the gardeners to have missed it. But he managed to recover, ‘Tis no way to sustain a marriage!’
He seemed to imply she had basically become pesky and grown family expectations and was spoiling his shagtastic time, and I told him it made perfect sense.
‘I hope the new chick will be more sincere,’ he insisted in a drunken hopeful cheer and disappeared behind some beautifully polished bushes perhaps for a nap, a pee or whatever else he could manage in his state, free as a blitzed angel.
Next I tried to look for Alakrita again but she wasn’t around. Only a few of the youngsters were left in the garden, colleagues I barely knew or cared for (and I doubted Peter cared for them himself). I suddenly felt drunk and tired and remembered I had not even had a shower since I had landed. I asked one of the maids to show me to my room, picked my trolley from the hall and went to bed.
The next morning I awoke to ‘Princes of the Universe’ playing loudly in Peter’s gold cabled stereo system. Did he really think he had the blood of kings in him?
I should not have peeked in.
I should not have peeked in and I would not have seen Peter’s large-sized, raw, Tarzan-trouser snake dangling along like erotic retribution, an inch from Alakrita’s perfect naked body on the golden Flap. It was a scene that would never be erased from my mind. A scene that probably marked the beginning of the end, or maybe it is only me attaching so much shit to it. I have sometimes thought of crashing my car on purpose, even if I don’t have a car, to try to blank that one image out of my memory forever. If only that were possible.
My hangover was atrocious and I felt like vomiting, and despite the chateau’s ten bathrooms I could not find one quickly when I needed it.
What did Peter-Moses have that I did not?
I mean aside from the imposing physique, a huge dick, seniority, power and fuck loads of money, what the heck does he have? I asked myself not for the first time.
It w
as pointless to pretend that I did not have the answer.
He had everything Enterprise wanted. And a lot of what I thought I wanted too.
The perception was that there was no limit to what Peter could do. He could have a revelation sparked by a CEO’s shoe lace. Under his guidance, one of his teams would scope it overnight into a visually pleasing document that would change the CEO’s corporation forever, fees running for Enterprise from the word go.
In his short-sightedness and eagerness to spread slander, Trojan went on broadcasting that Peter had a passion for permanent revolution because it printed money.
But it was different.
Despite being no great reader, Peter had devoured books by the American academic, Menand, and his story about ideas of the metaphysical club, he had told me once. He knew that ideas were just adaptable tools to cope with the world we found ourselves in, that as carriers we could create an environment where ideas thrived like viruses. For Peter, discoveries were not windfalls but an expected fact of his life and they did not happen only when loafing under trees.
I could imagine Peter reciting, whilst fucking Alakrita, ‘My genius can produce ideas that transcend humanity and at this time I no longer feel my mortality.’
Then I visualised Alakrita, driven to distraction, breaking four collector gramophone records over his head. He had never listened to them anyway. Worse. She would reach out for the sharp letter opener inadvertently left on a side table by his bed, and make a hole by Peter’s right ear with the force of Lady Justice.
I hear you, Reader. ‘A vision doesn’t count a fig if you don’t have the resources,’ you say.
But Peter always had a client who had.
There was invariably someone to buy his ideas for millions of dollars, and afterwards his team would write an inspirational case study for generations of Enterprisers to come. Peter’s lads would then celebrate at some incredible carousing event, where they managed to open the hotel disco up all on their own. ‘Clever fucks!’ Leaving a mess of furniture, expensive empty bottles and some female sexy underwear behind. Being at the top of the world was so much fun for Peter and his boys!
The perception was Peter could achieve anything and he never failed.
Other than when he mounted an Enterprise expedition to the North Pole. But he excelled even in failure. He erased any trace of it ever happening, then brought in a polar explorer to offer Enterprisers ten-minute whiteboard sessions at five hundred dollars a pop, so they could still feel that they could have done it. Anything that was world-shaping, Peter could achieve, and in time, anything that Peter achieved became world-shaping.
‘He has the Midas touch,’ our CEO would say.
And, most importantly, he knew that he should not beat himself up about it, that the impulse to paint one’s own person or group as superior was a syndrome found in human societies everywhere, and it could be generally accepted.
The real question was, could I accept it from myself?
Trojan and Tobias get busy
Following the recent restructuring, Trojan and Tobias had become co-heads of a big European industry practice, forced into inseparability like Tintin’s Dupont & Dupont brothers, despite there being enough fog and tides to divide them. And they had also become indissoluble in the quest for lapping it up to their Tintin, Peter-Moses, though they would surely never display a veneer of Peter’s ballsy confidence, to live up to the magnificence of Enterprise history.
On an anxious day, I was certain Trojan would reflect in front of the mirror, ‘Am I really a superior human being? Is this superiority contrary to mainstream liberal thinking which would have taught us not to judge any life better than another? Would it be better to judge ourselves not superior but unique, which is what underpins our success? Is it not against equality and democracy to feel superior? Are we narcissists? Are narcissists more likely to self-nominate as leaders? If we become great leaders, does that not support our case that we are special and superior? Does this make our belief self-perpetuating? Would it prevail without any external intervention to become the root of evil?’
Why worry so much! He was already the root of evil, he was Trojan.
I was sure Tobias, on the other hand, dealt with moving up in the Enterprise world in a different way. He felt trapped inside a console confined to a fiction around a monstrous certitude that he had been elected for a higher purpose. It seemed he had held on to something the PEN-er Rahim had once told him (trying to impress him, no doubt): ‘The world has become so good with computers that the number of potential simulations outnumbers possible realities, so it is not unlikely that we are all living in fiction.’
And Tobias had indeed settled to be cocooned inside his own mad fiction, where he was busy keeping Enterprise alive.
‘Two hundred million dollars of cost savings, thirty million of extra revenue, ten million additional profits. Double points. Four hundred incoming talented geniuses, six hundred and forty workshops, two hundred and five worksheets, twenty charge codes. Extra time. Fifty projects, thirty companies, another promotion, fifty more patients. I am so busy. I am so busy. So much to do. Can’t remember. I can’t be disturbed. Cate, Cate.’ We knew he had the hots for Cate, his muse, which made him one of the few Enterprisers able to feel close to PEN-ers. ‘Two hundred plus ten million plus fifty million, no it was ten. I got lost again. I am so busy. I am so important. I cannot be disturbed.’
‘I’m coming, Daddykins, I’m coming,’ said Cate.
‘Two thousand and five plus fifty, plus thirty. I cannot take that call. I cannot take it. Five transoceanic trips, two weeks. Need an extra life. Fifty hours, two hundred and seventy meetings this month. Am I missing a meeting? No. Let’s move that plane. Where am I? No, game over! Cate, Cate. Help me.’
‘I am here, sexy hairy.’
‘Thanks, sweetie. The hundredth slide. Where were we?’
‘Sorry baby.’
‘Let’s shorten that meeting. How many minutes? One hundred minutes. A thousand extra points. Forty meetings. One hundred into forty, let’s make it two minutes.’
‘My pleasure, sugar.’
‘Two minutes plus thirty million. Two extra lives. I am so busy. I am so busy. Love you. I am so important. You cannot disturb me.’
‘Love you, baby.’
‘No, game over!! Ooooooover!’
The way I tried to rationalise it was that Tobias had become Eshu, enticing fictional souls into characters after unique revelations about the nature of the Universe. Cate obliged and responded to the needs of this damaged soul, struggling to find a way to be attracted to him because if she didn’t, no one else would, and she would destroy another life (maybe she felt that she had failed her husband already). And because Tobias might fulfill her dream to be fucked on hotel carpets, which her husband wouldn’t.
But I still worried about Tobias and Cate’s relationship, that it wasn’t even a sexual relationship but Quixotic love, an experiment in alchemy, and that they would give birth to a bright blue armadillo and feed him Turkish delight whilst building their next game level.
Despite T&T, the Machiavellian and the utopian, being in opposite ends of the beyond-repair spectrum, together they displayed a united front, almost mastering their roles in having a high opinion of themselves and needing nobody’s opinion, other than Peter’s of course. They were Peter’s rug.
Could such ingratiating people really be honest men?
And for the next three years, T&T would not do one thing without the other, as if joined at the hip, with every decision taking twice as long because it had to be double stamped, even if it was about whose name was to appear first on a letterhead, T or T.
This eventually prompted and exhausted Gert Rottenmeier – the prudish office manager who could not stand them constantly bothering her and sucking up to Peter-Moses, who she abhorred – to hire a new PEN-er.
And this is how Lucy, my heart’s passion, landed in Enterprise.
Lucy joins
Pete
r had loved Lucy from day one. He extended his offer straight away with T&T licking his arse and telling him what an amazing choice he had made, as usual.
My first impression when I finally met her a few weeks later was that she was older than I had expected but preserved the hummingbird colours of the young. I realised straight away I was being poetic, which had not happened for some time.
Lucy was at most five years my junior and had a celestial air, that of an upmarket, olive-skinned fortune teller, a turquoise earring hanging long from her left ear in the shape of a scalene triangle, her thick, dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair smelling of a strange innocence. Her lips made an irresistible tight O in nude pink or deep red depending on the day, an ophidian biting its tail in a sign of eternity, or a Phoenician lucky eye. Mantis green, big, honest eyes. I could not claim that I possessed the ability to assess a person at a stroke like Carl Jung, but I could see straight away why Peter had liked her. She passed my mental undressing test easily, and you had the feeling that she chose what you saw.
She told me that she had a degree in marine biology but would have rather trained as a mime artist or studied theatre design at the Académie Julian in Paris. ‘I was born an actress but without the voice,’ she said. I thought that she could have been a patron of the arts, a bohemian take on Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, or more like a Marella Agnelli. She was seductive and sensual but not in a generic passive way. She felt liberated and liberating, like she would have thrived free even before the women’s liberation of the 1920s.
I soon invited her for a quick drink in Soho after work, which was foolish of me. She said yes, which was even more unexpected and cheered me up. Why not? I thought that there was a higher probability at this stage of any random woman other than my wife liking me. And Lucy seemed to have definitely revived something inside me, something a bit different to the desperate appetite for sex that I felt with Alakrita.