The Insatiables
Page 5
“Yes, Pumpkin?” I didn’t know why he called me Pumpkin, but I let it go.
“Could you please start sending buses back? Some of the attendees are ready to go.”
“Sure thing, Pumpkin,” he said. “It’ll take at least thirty minutes to get there though.”
“Whatever it takes,” I said.
I curbed the car at the store, hoping no one would notice. I wasn’t taking any risk that I would have to back out of a parking space. I ran to the liquor aisle and bought every bottle of tequila they had, balancing them in my arms on the way back out to the car. Then I floored it back to the party.
A few people were huddled together under the archway as I walked through to the courtyard. They had called a taxi because they were “freezing to death.” Two of them were the complainers from Tennessee. I sidestepped them to get to the bar and, in my haste, lost hold of one of the bottles of tequila in my arms. It smashed on the ground in a loud shatter, unleashing the bitter, woody perfume of Jose Cuervo into the air. Miguel came out of the building and scowled. But I had to get the intact bottles to the bartender before Gus noticed that the margaritas had run out. Maybe he already had. I ran ahead and promised to be back quickly, my right palm out in a gesture of apologetic submission. When I came back Miguel had already taken a broom and dustpan and cleaned up the glass, and he told me to go away.
As I stood near the courtyard’s entrance, it seemed like there was something I was supposed to be doing, but I couldn’t remember what. The after-dinner performers, a local band, had started setting up on a stage adjacent to the bar. They were all in good spirits despite the chill in the air. The first empty bus arrived, and the group of people huddled under the archway (whose taxi never came) rushed to get on. Dessert was being served in the courtyard, but people started getting up to leave as soon as they heard wheels crunching over gravel. About half of the group did seem to be having fun, which fractionally redeemed me. The band started to play. Despite the fact that I was paying them to be there, I felt guilty that no one really watched them.
As more buses arrived, more people got up to leave. In twenty minutes, all of the attendees had gone. The band manager asked me if I wanted the band to keep playing. Waitstaff collected dishes and pulled linens off the tables. The bartender packed up all the unopened bottles of tequila I’d just needlessly fetched from the store.
“Sure, one more song,” I said.
I grabbed an untouched crème caramel from one of the vacant tables, pulled a chair up in front of the stage, and took a big bite. The band played a cover of “Hotel California,” and I ate my dessert in solitude.
7
Earlier that same evening, Celeste had finally arrived in San Francisco. She’d had just enough time to fetch her tire-marked Tumi from the baggage carousel and get a cab to the hotel before it was time to set up for the after-party. She checked in and changed clothes, gulped down a few gulps of mineral water from a glass bottle bearing a paper neck-tag that said “$7.00,” and headed for the elevator, where she pushed P for penthouse.
It was among the more elegant penthouses we had ever rented, with long picture windows and velvet curtains the color of blood. There were ornate gueridons holding silver candelabras and huge vases of fresh white hydrangeas perched on polished sideboards.
Celeste had hired the penthouse for Gus to host “after-dinner drinks with a few friends,” and she spent the next two hours moving furniture, showing the DJ and karaoke machine guys where to set up, and stocking the pantry with liquor and mixers. Gus always demanded that no hotel staff be present at his parties; the attendees would make their own drinks, thankyouverymuch, so as to have no potential witnesses to the inevitable debauchery.
I texted Celeste to let her know that the group would arrive early; the first bus left a full hour before scheduled. She wrote back to let me know everything was ready. By nine-thirty our people, already tipsy from copious margaritas and seemingly hungry for chaos, started streaming in through the penthouse’s double doors.
The suite was large enough for thirty or forty people to fit comfortably among its various rooms. But for the seventy or eighty that showed up, the entryway resembled a Vegas night club—bodies so densely packed together you could barely move. I went up to check on Celeste, but when I saw the mayhem I turned back toward the elevator. Celeste liked these parties, where, according to her, she could watch “rich people get drunk and make poor-people decisions.” But they made me feel uncommonly lonely. They reminded me just how much of an outsider I was, and how desperately I wanted to be an insider.
I’d just pressed the down arrow when Max Bateman approached.
“You didn’t have to yell at us earlier, Halley,” he said. “I think you owe S—and me—an apology.”
I was silent for a moment, and I’m sure my face flushed. I considered ignoring him.
“You owe us an apology,” he repeated. “S— isn’t here at the moment, but you can apologize to me. I’ll pass the message along.”
“Max.” I laughed uncomfortably.
“You’re being really unprofessional,” he said. “You embarrassed us in front of a bunch of people. Just say you’re sorry, and we’ll call it even.”
My narrow shot at Level 2 still lingered in the distance. And I wanted him to go away. So I swallowed my embarrassment and my pride and said I was sorry.
“That’s better, Halley,” he said in his most managerial tone. The elevator doors opened, and I stepped inside, bound to spend the rest of the night thinking of all the things I should have said.
I reached my room, closed the door behind me with a sigh of relief, and became myself again. It was luxuriously quiet. Phil Collins swam in tranquil circles inside his travel aquarium. Housekeeping had turned the bed down and the hotel catering department had sent me a box of chocolates. I stretched my tired, sore body under the covers and savored with anticipation the six hours of uninterrupted sleep that lay ahead. Delicious exquisite sleep. I wanted to inhale it like an ambrosial fog. I stared at the ceiling in the dark, listening to hotel sounds. Muffled hallway conversations. Intermittent banging from unknown origins. The ringing of my cell phone. I considered letting it go to voicemail.
“Hello?” I said.
“Halley? This is Jacques Dubois.” He cleared his throat then, as if he was about to say something really important. “My room is right next to the outdoor waterfall of the hotel, and it is very noisy. I am trying to sleep. I cannot. Will you ask the hotel to turn this waterfall off?”
I was silent for a pause. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
He hung up.
I lay there for a few minutes, on the verge of sleep. The phone rang again.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Halley?” a young man’s voice asked.
“Yes?”
“What time is breakfast in the morning?”
I mentally cursed Molly for not getting my agenda booklets done.
“Seven,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, and then his tone changed. “So . . . what’re you doing?”
I hung up.
Five minutes later, the phone rang again.
“Hello?” I said in an exasperated voice.
“Miss, this is Jordi from the front desk. I am calling to tell you that one of your meeting attendees, Mr. Darren Clevenger, was just sent by ambulance to the hospital.”
“What?” I said, sitting up. “Is he okay?”
Jordi didn’t know what the emergency was, only that Darren wasn’t dead. He gave me directions to the hospital, which was about ten minutes away. I rose heavily and put my clothes back on. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, didn’t bother with makeup, and told Phil Collins I’d be back. As I walked through the dimly lit lobby, noticing the group of French and Korean managers huddled together out front, smoking cigarettes, it occurred to me that I should tell Gus what was happe
ning, so I took the elevator back up to the penthouse.
By the time I got there, the group had already drunk all of the liquor Celeste had stocked for the entire duration of the meeting. When I stepped off the elevator, hotel banquet staff had just arrived to deliver more. I watched their faces as Celeste guided them to the pantry, surveying the damage the group had done. People danced on tables and chaises. A few people in the hall were playing bumper cars with stolen laundry carts, captains steering the carts from behind while passengers sitting in baskets that usually held soiled sheets and towels screamed happily. A picture had fallen off the wall and lay broken on the floor. Max had ordered twenty room service pizzas and expensed them, and half-eaten pieces of pizza lay facedown on rugs. Someone urinated into an aluminum umbrella stand in the corner, bracing himself against the wall with his shoulder. People sat in a circle, playing a drinking game with a whole bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. I heard what sounded like two people having sex in one of the closets.
This was the after-hours version of our world, a place of blind, careless destruction, where the liquor and all its consequences were paid for by somebody else. We were primates, dripping with chemical lust for the only two things in the universe that mattered: sex and power.
According to company veterans, Findlay hadn’t started out this way. Its evolution had been complex. Austerity had been the dogma of the founding generation and, even in the midst of wild success, business had been an economical affair. The founders possessed an innate vigilance, a frugality that came from knowing what it was like to live without. They passed their philosophies on to the second generation, and the second generation followed suit. But the second generation was decades removed from the hardships that had shaped the founders, and so restraint would never be part of their DNA. They were a bit spoiled. And by the time the third generation came along, all evidence of thrift was beginning to disappear. Rampant prosperity had been the standard for so long that even the founders, many of whom were still around, had begun to forget how they’d gotten there. They all had the sense that they would never die.
But that was only one piece of it. It’s easy to write mischief off as pure moral decay, but that wasn’t the whole story. Generation 3 may have been spoiled and decadent, but their work environment also had a completely different set of challenges than the founders had. When the founders started, there was almost no competition for their products. They didn’t have mobile phones or email or websites. Information didn’t yet move at the speed of thought. They had not yet embarked upon a global venture that required them to be “on” twenty-four hours a day. Their personal lives and their work lives were still separate, whereas Generation 3 came of age in a world that created more information in a week than humanity had created in its first two hundred millennia. Reputations could be made and broken at the speed of a Tweet. Socialization went digital, and someone was always watching. The founding work ethic had been preserved, but it was no longer a matter of working from nine to five and going home. The phones stayed on. And as the world spun faster, so did everyone’s need for escape. Kicking back and having a few drinks was their chance to turn it all off. The harder they worked, the more they used those phones. The more they used those phones, the more money they made, and the more they needed to escape. The more professional by day, the more debauched by night. Morals loosened. Bank accounts overflowed. The parties got bigger. And they had us—their Service Staff—to clean up the messes.
Next to the fireplace in the living room, Gus had his arm around a blonde sales rep sitting on his lap, a Level 2 named Lauren Miller. Lauren was a new rep from Los Angeles whose claim to fame was appearing on MTV’s Spring Break in college and, whilst dancing on a platform in the middle of a swimming pool, getting accidentally kicked in the head by 50 Cent. We’d all heard her tell the story at least a dozen times. Celeste referred to her as “turkey-on-white” because when she came to meetings she always demanded plain turkey sandwiches on plain white bread for every meal, which we always made and kept in a cooler for her under the hospitality desk.
Gus and Lauren sang a duet of “Let It Be” on karaoke and had a whole group sing-a-long thing happening with the others gathered around. All of Gus’s paranoia and sulkiness disappeared when he drank, and the old hedonist in him came out. I leaned in to tell him about Darren. He lowered the microphone a couple inches, mouthed an “okay,” and went back to singing. Almost immediately he would forget I had spoken to him, and when he found out secondhand the following day about the ambulance and the hospital, he would ask me irritably why I hadn’t briefed him.
I followed the blue GPS arrow toward the hospital, eyes darting back and forth from screen to road, trying to imagine what could have possibly happened to Darren. This wasn’t the first time a meeting attendee had been rushed to an emergency room. At a dinner activity in a bowling alley in Atlanta, Georgia, a woman tripped on the slick wood floor and cracked the back of her head open. Another woman, during an awards banquet, complained that her head was “exploding” and promptly had a stroke on the hotel terrace. During a different sales meeting, a guy went into cardiac arrest on the floor in the hotel hallway. I hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those nights.
My phone rang, and I had to fish it out of my coat pocket.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Halley!” a voice bubbled. “Can you tell me what time breakfast is tomorrow morning?”
“Seven,” I said.
I drove past ground-lit pear trees, the occasional saxophone player, strings of red paper lanterns floating above the street. San Francisco was awake with fluorescent energy. People meandered the streets and crowded in front of bars. I turned the radio off and rolled the windows down, letting the cool air and the noise clear my head. I was no longer tired when I walked through the sliding glass door of the sterile white emergency room.
The nurse at the window informed me that Darren had come in with heart attack symptoms. He would describe it all to me later in more detail. It had started at the welcome reception, a bit of nausea he attributed to just being tired. On the return bus, jostling over bumps in the dark, he sat dizzily in a window seat next to a sales rep from Oklahoma, who talked nonstop about her new blog. That was when the sweating began, and he wondered if maybe he was getting the flu. Drunken bus conversations seemed to echo in his ears. The walls started closing in. He prayed he would just make it back to his hotel room without vomiting. He thought of how much he wanted to be home in his quiet apartment reading a book. He began to lose his breath. By the time he reached his hotel room he knew that something was seriously wrong.
His chest seized painfully; his heart palpitated. He called the front desk with the hope that they had someone on staff who could come and take a look at him, maybe listen to his heart. But the receptionist needed to play it safe, so he called the ambulance. Two huge men entered Darren’s room with a first aid kit and a red plastic backboard. They asked him questions, which he answered politely. He wondered silently if his condition was serious enough to warrant this, and simultaneously hoped it wasn’t and it was: he wanted to go back to bed, but he also didn’t want to look like an idiot boy crying wolf. They strapped him onto the backboard and carried him to the freight elevator, which was being held open by several hotel housekeepers who’d gathered to help if they could. Soon he was closing his eyes to the bright interior ambulance lights as they raced through the California night.
Darren had had a panic attack, the nurse said. He was doing fine but they wanted to keep him on watch for a couple hours. I could go back to the hotel and wait for their call or I could stay. I stopped by his curtained bed to tell him I was there, and then went to sit in the waiting room. My phone rang.
“Hello?”
I could hear party noise in the background. “Halleeeey!” someone said.
“Yes?” I said.
“What time does breakfast start?”
“Seven.”
“God damn it,” I mumbled.
“What?” he said nervously.
“I don’t suppose you happen to know how to put a car like this in reverse?”
“Seriously?” he replied. He looked at me like I was about to tell a joke.
I didn’t flinch.
He looked down for a second, put his hand under the gearshift and lifted up on something I couldn’t see. And the shifter moved smoothly across and up to R.
“Gah! How did you do that?”
“There’s a little lever under there,” he said, and he moved it up and down a few times with his two middle fingers.
“Oh my god, Darren, thank you!” I said.
“No problem.”
“No, really,” I said with a deep sigh. “Thanks.”
He looked out the window as I drove. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep until he spoke. “Did you tell Gus?”
I wasn’t sure if my response would be pleasing or displeasing to him. “Yeah,” I said.
He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I’m not a total wuss, you know.”
“Okay,” I said.
He paused. “It’s just . . . well, all this. It’s great, don’t get me wrong. But . . . sometimes I get the feeling that I could drop dead and no one would notice.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said.
Twenty minutes later I arrived back to my quiet room, bone-bushed. I would have given anything to lie down and sleep for twenty-four straight hours. I sat on the edge of the bed contemplating defection. But, France. So I got in the shower. I put my contacts back into stinging, bloodshot eyes. I pulled on my business suit and went down to the vast, empty meeting room. The first hungover attendee who showed up for breakfast an hour later drank a full glass of orange juice and then vomited all over the floor in front of my hospitality desk.