by Mari Reiza
‘Wasn’t this exactly why you had strictly separate bathrooms, to avoid such incidents?’ I asked.
‘No mud can resist me.’ He was definitely drunk.
Nearly a universal problem. Long live the Emperor Carpet Munching the Insatiable. Long live the only real cock in this world! I should have cheered. Instead I let him go on, adamant about his irresistibility and his right to do exactly as he pleased in an utterly consequence-free environment. Which was what he actually did.
‘I have earnt it,’ he insisted. ‘What is the point of having all this tossing power if I cannot use it to get laid?’
I tried to remain calm and focused on the waves. Peter had not even come to Rome when Hammi died.
After a bit I asked Peter for a tour of the house, to get him away from the terrace bar.
He said he had transferred most of his stuff to the Hamptons ahead of the move to London, as he had some works going at Bald Cypress Grove. His wife, he explained, had stayed there to direct the workers. ‘And to get it out of her system with the cunt-sucking architect,’ which he assured me suited him fine.
Peter rushed me through the sleek kitchen and living room, on to the master bedroom where we dwelled in his huge walk-in closet. He had made some comment about my suit and how he had some advice for me now that I was a Truth Leader. He looked at his suits with glazed eyes, and used some fake Greek column at the centre of the room to steady himself.
A Greek column in a walk-in closet? Americans are just terrible, I thought.
‘Hung men. All guilty,’ Peter’s voice interrupted my assessments on the merits of his villa’s designer.
I could sense a confession coming up, or more like a continuation of the parade of his accomplishments.
‘The Armani fellow in blue and black carré,’ he went on pointing to the first suit in line, ‘was a willing accomplice to the Sassicaia-assisted embezzlement of the new CEO of Corp., no more than three floors from where his most trusted man and Head of Strategy had been busy on a cocaine-fueled capricious romp performed on a two meter Latvian blond with a capacious rump, who had been temporarily on Enterprise’s payroll.’
‘Excellent,’ I grinned. He was almost poetic.
‘The grey Kiton further along,’ he wouldn’t let himself be stopped now, ‘is a classic.’
This lad had apparently been party to the whiskey-rich mentorship sessions with Alakrita.
‘A tiny burn mark is still visible just down by the groin,’ he added, ‘where she put out her cigarette the first time my hand accidentally slipped down her blouse.’ He sighed. ‘Women. They seldom know what they want!’
I was pretty sure Alakrita did know what she wanted but I didn’t dare contradicting Peter. Was I expected to ask for more? Yes I was.
‘That one?’ I ventured pointing at a beautiful, navy, single-button Brioni picked at random.
‘Oh yes, a witness the night of Matt’s party to celebrate him becoming Father at The Sanderson in London,’ he said proudly. ‘I was wearing it when I followed Zainab, claiming to pop out to get some cigars – nobody had warned me she was so young! – with Clara unfortunately tagging along sticking like a jellyfish,’ he laughed at the memory. ‘The wife had been there but left the party early with a headache.’
‘First or second wife?’
Peter ignored me. According to him, the Brioni bro had done well to withstand the hurried coupling with Zainab in that secluded garden in Notting Hill, the grass marks from the rubbing against the beautifully tended loan almost invisible to the undiscerning eye.
‘You see what the fuck I mean, Vittal!’
Drunken despair was what I saw, but I only smiled.
‘In the bleak world that we live in, all these smudges, tears and stitches become more precious than gold dust, bro,’ he concluded.
In a way, I could see his point. It was clearer than ever. Peter had a machete and a pair of fireballs hanging between his legs and a devil’s urge to keep his plumbing running, way worse than Hammi's. How could we have given so much power to such an obsessive man?
‘The dark grey pinstripe,’ he started again. ‘never to be washed,’ he announced solemnly. ‘Lucy, my heart’s passion,’ he sighed.
My body jumped.
Lucy was forever to be MY fucking heart’s passion and the weekend had suddenly become very daunting.
Yearning to be a humble hero
In which Bianca lives on a bottle of wine; Lucy recounts her glass incident; and things start unravelling.
We yearned to do the right thing as if it was the pearl inside. We had been trained not to distinguish between personal preference and moral imperative, until they were both one and the same. We wanted to lament the suffering of the disadvantaged and promise them that we would make a better world. Given the podium we had gifted ourselves at Enterprise, we felt that responsibility, it was intrinsic. But we also wanted to hang on to our privileged position in life because turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. So it was a brittle balance. It had to be a better world with us still at the top, which made total sense because we were convinced it could not have been achieved any other way.
For example, we strongly encouraged ourselves to give back to our communities.
We knew that we were metropolitan men who valued change, praised mobility and wanted autonomy and freedom to realise things constantly. Our human attachments were wide-ranging and thin and we put equality (at least of some kind), before fraternity (did we?). But we also knew that many of our patients and humans at large were inferior beings, bound by their communities, looking for security and continuity and valuing stronger human associations. Therefore, we constantly turned to communities we called ours, where we took on pro-bono contracts and charity advisory board roles. We arranged for influencing speakers to perform at the local schools attended by our children, and gave free business guidance to our neighbourhood golf clubs. We helped the homeless off the street, wrote stories for sick kids (or sponsored some lowly minions to do it), hosted conferences for scientists to eradicate Alzheimer’s, and handed out unparalleled opportunities to women and minorities from whom we expected irrevocable gratefulness.
These were in no way marketing ploys because we did not like to market ourselves. We only wanted to be loved, to be revered, for people to be grateful and understand that we were their saviours.
What was the largest group of people you could convince of a plan to build a different future? It was us.
We only kept working hard because we knew what we were doing was worth more than looking after our own wives and children. It was in a different league. It was looking after all the women and children of the world. Using our extraordinary capabilities to save other people made us feel happy, loved and fulfilled.
Perhaps, we were hoping to glorify ourselves through heroism. Patronising? Why?
When Superman saves the defenceless girl at the top of the burning building because he is the only one who can fly, does she feel that he is patronising? Is she not supremely grateful and does she not fall in love with him?
So what, it was not our fault that nobody else could fly.
The doing-the-right-thing psychology was our holy grail.
Peter excelled at instilling it, it’s not for nothing that he was one of the most revered Truth Leaders and CEO-in-waiting, leading his people to the promised land. Although, I didn’t call him Peter-Moses anymore, especially after the Hamptons incident. Still, I had to admit that he managed to inculcate in all of us the subconscious desire to do the right thing, HIS right thing. ‘God has given you half the equation,’ Peter said to the troops, ‘the ability to lead people to shape the world. We owe him the restraint to do good by it.’
And we needed his subliminal certainty so that we could sing and sting, suck our patients dry and rip their eyeballs out, convinced that we were saving them.
‘All human beings but the wicked want to do virtuous deeds,’ was how Peter could motivate us to achieve goals that we would have never tho
ught we could.
Because, at Enterprise, there were no drugs, no hookers, and we were not motivated by money. The true ticket was doing-the-right-thing, which kept us lined like golden bullets.
We pretended to be humble, low-key heroes who didn’t need to show off knowledge, influence or position, and received praise shyly. We didn’t need to be hypocritically humble (though we were occasionally encouraged to rehearse that look of the perpetually destitute), but were required to show unassuming behaviour because all leaders were servants to their people. ‘To lead, to serve, NOT to become big swinging dicks,’ we had coined it before BA… the first part anyway.
Any one hero who got bigger than Enterprise would have to be eliminated because ego was the enemy.
Our heroes lived in a sea of morality. Morality was key to our narrative. We would drive the fanciest cars, eat in the most deluxe private rooms of the hottest restaurants, wear the finest clothes and reside in the best-run mansions, as secretly as possible so the world could perceive our decency.
Peter set a clear example again. His menagerie at Bald Cypress Grove included: a pleasantly plump husband and wife Spanish-speaking maids team; a foul-tempered Colombian baby-nurse who spent her time building up phone bills to her mum in a hospital in Cartagena de Indias (the Peters did not have a baby yet but wanted to be ready); an all-muscle-no-brain Cuban handyman who Peter suspected was sleeping with his wife (in addition to the architect, who was only a temporary fling) and should be kept happy at all times; a retired Iranian taxi driver turned full-time landscaper who had flooded Peter’s garden twice at the cost of fifty grand; and an Indian cook who was so thin that he had to run in the shower to get wet, which is not a good sign for a cook, but then Peter’s wife was permanently on a carrot and yogurt diet anyway. Oh yes, and a body-guard cum driver who came with a shotgun included in the price and was cheaper than hiring a full-time copter pilot, Peter claimed. This was the name of humility, as long as it was done quietly, unassumingly, almost without wanting it.
The thing was, in America, the world of adult service was reliable and very cost-effective. You could buy anything from fat to slim bitches, servile asslickers to toughies, soilers to inspirators to conspirators, geeks, embroilers and anything else you wanted. In America, there was a market for everything. And we were in a position to afford all we wanted. Peter was, for sure.
But despite the riches, we had to pretend hard that these things did not bring us any pleasure, so we would often throw cheap, finger-food picnics for the gallery, on paper plates in communal gardens, no high-society postprandial games required, if only to prove to ourselves and the rest of the world that we could be humble.
I always remembered Carlo telling me what he loved most about the UK, that he could park his Ferrari (God bless Goldman Sachs, again!) on the streets without being the object of envy and without finding its doors keyed when he came back. Given what I had endured to amass my little pot of gold (not enough for a Ferrari but still…) at Enterprise, why couldn’t I enjoy it without remorse?
Bianca lives on a bottle of wine
Bianca broke it to us at the Christmas offsite that she lived on a thousand pounds a month.
‘She is only a PEN-er so it serves her right to have a PEN-er salary,’ Alakrita said. She could be a real bitch but we all agreed. Although, I was surprised at how low Bianca’s salary was.
But Enterprise leadership tried hard not to know about these discrepancies. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ You could not be guilty for something that you hadn’t known about. Could you? Alakrita was so drunk that she dared asking Bianca how could she live with it.
‘Shut up, Alakrita.’
She was a real handful sometimes but Bianca wasn’t going to waive her opportunity to take centre stage that easily.
‘An old bike for a car, no cleaner, Primark clothes I can turn with creative genius,’ she explained with pride (although creative genius was only her opinion). ‘I share a one-bed flat with my brother for four hundred a month, five hundred with bills because we don’t pay council tax (a tax evader, we would have to report her). Fifty a week for food then bits and bobs, leaving almost forty a week for entertainment.’ Bianca stopped and showed her white teeth.
Forty a week did not even buy Alakrita a round of drinks at the Blue Bar at the Berkeley, which she had made her home-from-home since she had moved to London.
Bianca then looked straight at me, ‘Yes, I live on that bottle of wine that you just ordered,’ she said attacking me with her stare, her white teeth still shining against her dark skin.
I had not been very thoughtful but how did she know the price for Château d’Yquem?
We had been at the Grove, and I had been trying to impress Alakrita, I admit. I had fucked up. I could see it. I had got a showy Château d’Yquem (and Alakrita probably had no idea what it was? Another country like Alto Adige!). I was a moron.
There was a long silence.
But why could Carlo wash his mouth in Château d’Yquem and be fine, whereas I had ordered it once and was a moron? Was that fair? Next my mind switched to imagining myself in a Primark suit like Bianca’s, the rough material scratching my crotch. Would I be able to think properly?
Bianca’s voice brought me back from my reverie. ‘Which means that, unlike you guys, I can get so much enjoyment out of this wine when I drink it. Thank you for sharing your fortunes with me,’ she added, still fixed on a bullet target on my forehead.
I looked like a jerk. But I had enough people around me pretending to be brave, fair and thoughtful, which made for the dullest life on earth. I raised my glass and toasted to Bianca. And she joined me.
I was not going to apologise for who I was anymore.
Lucy’s glass incident
A few weeks later, Lucy knocked on my office door. She had taken a few extra days off around Christmas and had come back in the new year looking frail. We exchanged tired happy New Year greetings, my excitement to see her knocked down by her fragile looks. I invited her to sit facing me at the desk, and immediately felt that I should have ushered her to the armchair by the coffee table for a more relaxed chat, even if I hated the word chat.
The pale light of day fell slantwise across Lucy’s face where she was sitting, making her a ghost. It confirmed how I had started everything wrong that morning. Lucy, my heart’s passion, looked like an unearthly gaoler of terrible secrets. She had large circles under her black-lined eyes that had deepened into the colour of London fog, a tone acquainted with bad things to happen, like Jack the Ripper.
‘I flushed a baby down the toilet. It was dead again,’ she said next.
Shit. I wasn’t prepared for that. It was enough for cardiac arrest. I gripped my chair.
‘Apparently, the lining of my uterus can’t tell good from bad and has turned me into a baby-killer.’
It was worse than reading Veronika Decides to Die. How on earth had I got so suddenly embroiled in this story?
‘I have had enough,’ she talked again. ‘I have been to so many mercenary doctors that my private parts don’t feel private anymore. The last time in hospital after my fourth miscarriage, it all went wrong, and I woke up in the reanimation room, three hours later than scheduled, next to a neighbouring child crying and with a compulsion to vomit that materialised immediately. It came so quickly. And then I saw a huge black woman, a hundred kilos at least, rushing from the opposite end of the room with a big needle and stabbing my thigh,’ she gesticulated in case I had not got the picture. ‘‘Anti-emetic so you don’t puke on my floor,’ the nurse said.’
I remained silent.
Next Lucy told of the operating theatre that had looked like a cheap IKEA kitchen. ‘It was theatre two,’ she said. She knew it by heart. ‘I checked my wedding band and it was still there, taped to my finger, in case they had had to aggressively manhandle me whilst I was asleep. It could have fallen off. It was terrifying.’
I had never heard anything like it, never confronted such deep emotion, in my o
ffice! I was lost.
‘I know that hospital’s fourth floor as if it were my favourite hotel,’ she added.
I was pretending to be dead, waiting for an opening to leg it from the horror movie. Did I not love this woman? Did I not want to reassure her, to calm her and to hug her? I had gone numb. I thought even if I hadn’t been a coward, what kind of utterance would have been worthy of breaking such an account? It was hard to judge, and I had never been good at judging anything, or I was just making excuses for myself as usual.
Lucy said that after the operation, it took them a year of greedy clinicians to realise how wrong things had gone.
‘Endless appointments with doctors who dealt with women treating breeding like another minutely controlled, not-to-be-missed experience that could be perfected with money,’ she complained. ‘Then another two interventions to put things right. How doctors like to play God when they can?’
She was failing them. She was not doing what they asked. She had put her life in their hands and it was their life now, they would decide. Until she snapped, she added.
I was still frozen on my chair. I wondered whether she was aware that I was there and what she expected from me.
‘I promised myself that I would decide,’ she continued. ‘I kicked and screamed and refused to go to the hospital with my newly dead baby but stayed at home,’ she was fighting tears. ‘The doctors did not call me again. I was grieving, traumatised, and a gold mine that had ceased to be profitable. I was best left alone. These things happened. Everything always just happened, as long as it did not happen to them, to their wives and their daughters. They saw drama every day. They tried to do God’s work against this drama and that was that. They tried the best they could.’ She said all of this very quickly, as if every word hurt her.
Enterprisers were supposed to be like doctors, putting their patients first. Was it like these doctors? Was our professionalism an excuse to print money?