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.
“I didn’t choose this country.”
“You came back,” I said.
“To do my share.”
“Of what? Declassification?”
“Yes.” Erik laughed. “Whatever it takes.”
“And you picked the right hood?” I pressed.
He pushed his plate toward Melissa, who was already eating his chicken bites, and motioned to the waiter for more beers. “I picked the only hood where we can preserve without penalizing the classless,” Erik said.
“So preservation is to blame now?” I smiled.
His manner changed. “I’m the journalist, amigo. I didn’t say that. I said urban preservation criminalizes poverty. That’s how we preserve in this country. We push the poor out of the city.”
“Three more beers! Now!” Melissa yelled, eating with her hands.
I looked at her dirty nails and mustache. Cabs were parked and double-parked on both sides of Ninth Avenue. What if Alkis or Paul walked in at that moment?
“That’s the way to do it,” Erik said to Melissa, and I wondered if—correction, when—Erik would pick up a New York accent.
FOUR
TWO WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ERIK told me he was going to Hawaii for the holidays to cover an eco-event and kayak with his brother. He didn’t ask me anything about my holiday plans, which were nonexistent.
“Your name is at the airport in Athens,” my sister told me that same week.
If I traveled back to Greece, the army could force me to enlist for a minimum of eighteen months. I’d lose both my job and my American green card. So, once again, my sister and I talked about our never-materializing plan: that I would buy the whole family a trip somewhere in Europe. My father’s work, my sister’s kids, my mother’s health and fear of flying: the trip was always postponed for one reason or another. By 2003 I hadn’t seen my family for three years, a period long enough that I could pick up on the pity on colleagues’ faces when I had to respond to their query on how long had it been since I’d visited Greece.
“You’re choosing comfort and privilege over family,” Paul told me at a conference in downtown Chicago when I dodged his question about when my next trip to Trikeri would happen.
I was not proud, but I didn’t doubt that my choices were right, necessary. “Even globalization has its limits,” I retaliated. “You know better, Paul. You just came back from”—pretending to be—“surfing in the South Seas.”
He took a sip of his pink cocktail. “You know why I like you?”
“’Cause I used to let you copy my homework?”
“Because you’re a white-collar prostitute with a small-village story to sell,” Paul said.
Whatever.
And yet, driving back to Lake Forest by myself—the rest of the Commanders on their way to Washington or San Francisco—I was restless. Paul wasn’t from a shitty island. He didn’t know what it meant to grow up among a population of two hundred, or what rural life is really like. Not all of us were born to be my father or Jeevan, who spent their live
s fishing and fixing boats for tourists like Paul and his friends. Whoever had the luck or the balls to ditch that might actually get to open a savings account, or drink wine that leaves less of a hangover than retsina. I worked for it. I studied, I put in the hours. I deserved it both ways: my family and Command. Fuck you Paul, and Christmas. And that Friday-night jam.
In my room at the Deer Path Inn, I ordered a steak and called Reception to ask how to get a DVD.
“We have a small collection at the front desk,” the Russian receptionist said. “I can bring it to your room so you can choose.”
“Thank you, but I’ll come down in a few,” I said, and hung up.
I took off my shoes and lay on top of my bedspread. I lit a cigarette and dialed my sister from Mrs. Frederick’s phone. Now that I’d been gone for a decade, our weekly calls were more or less standard. We would talk about our parents, my nephew and niece, and the new family dog, and then she would thank me for the money I wired on the fifteenth of each month.
I had just made a paper boat out of the Guest Comment Card when my sister told me that a marine patrol had retired our father’s fishing boat.
“An ad hoc inspection,” she added, distracted.
“Oh,” I said. “Maybe it is for the best . . .” I stopped midsentence. There was bittersweetness in the sound of my voice.
Then she surprised me: “Are you happy?”
We never got personal, acknowledged our time apart, or talked about our hopes and yearnings.
“Yes,” I managed, turning my paper boat into an ashtray.
“That’s good,” she said. There was something aged in her voice.
“It is.”
“Markos started taking English in high school. He wants to study in New York, like you.”
“Well, I went to school in California,” I said, instantly realizing the idiocy of my argument. This wasn’t going well. “We have a few years for that one, right?”
“Six,” my sister said.
“That’s a long time.”
“It seems that way.”
Was she referring to me? Was this my taxing call, my bill for walking? I took a drag and recalled the night I had found out about my scholarship to study abroad. I ended up at the top of Pelio, the lights from Volos across the bay giving in to the dawn. One of the few moments in my life that I thought I had perfect clarity. I would leave home—too island-isolated, too windy to speak or hear emotions—and find myself. Learn and gain, even destroy—the way the Greeks have been rising and falling for three thousand years now. But here I was, thousands of miles away, lured by the Eriks of my new world—equally muted islands—by their WASPy heritage, by their dividends. Sure, I was an Associate, I was one of them, but I’d traded my island’s silence for that of New England. It was ironic, really; I finally had the balls to talk emotions, but there was no one around who’d listen.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” I said into the receiver. “How about we get Markos a computer for Christmas? So he can practice.”
She took her time. “When do they celebrate Christmas in Brindasi? The same days we do?” she asked.
“It’s Brindisi,” I said. Since I left Greece, I had never corrected my sister. Our call was becoming unbearable. I fought an impulse to hang up. “Of course they do,” I added.
“Are you drinking enough orange juice?” she asked me.
I left my room for the reception desk in my suit and socks. The Russian woman was alone behind the desk, reading a paperback of Under the Tuscan Sun. A DVD folder, open in front of her, had Pearl Harbor and Monsters, Inc. in its first page.
“A few are out.” She put her book aside. “But most of them should be there.”
“I’m sure I’ll find something,” I said. “I just wanna veg, really.”
She smiled. “I know. That’s my favorite thing to do after work too. Usually with a movie I’ve already seen.”
I flipped the page. There was Lord of the Rings something, Chocolat, an empty holder, and Erin Brockovich.
“Are you going to New York for the holidays?” she asked in a harmless Midwestern way.
“Er, not sure.” I concentrated on the folder in front of me. An image of my unfurnished apartment in San Francisco—thus, my holiday plans—flashed through my mind.
“Oh, you must! It’s the best time to visit New York. John and I were there last Christmas. We went to three Broadway shows. Have you seen any plays this season?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, only Off-Broadway,” I lied.
“We love that city. The restaurants, the museums . . . We went to Tavern on the Green, where John proposed. It was so romantic. The next day we had brunch at Pastis, in the Meatpacking District. It’s so much fun. Have you ever been?”
Work lunches aside, Erik’s three-dollar beer and spicy chicken had been my only wine-and-dines in Manhattan. In fact, west Chelsea was the only neighborhood I knew. I followed its district manager around like a puppet when my base was in the six digits and New York was waking up from its 9/11 and dot-com mournings—people drinking and dining in the four corners of each Manhattan intersection.
“Yes, it’s fun,” I agreed. “Couldn’t get a table, though.” I flipped one more page, to Forrest Gump, Braveheart, and Titanic. Could these movies be more fucking predictable?
“Have you been to the Guggenheim?” she asked with a scouting look on her face.
Still in my suit, the radiator’s heat hitting me, I was nauseated. My only entertainment options, straight from a Dallas/Fort Worth inbound flight, lay in front of me. And this Russian-Midwestern receptionist kept rubbing it in.
“I have a friend there,” I said, loosening my tie.
Her Midwestern smile turned Russian. “A special friend,” she said—she didn’t ask.
Special alright. I thought of the public hearings that Erik ran and I attended, standing at the back of the room, sometimes straight from the airport after seventy-hour weeks when I didn’t know if or when I’d see him again. I wished she’d shut the fuck up.
“I’ll take this one.” I took out a disc and closed her stupid folder.
“Oh!” She was surprised. “I love that movie.”
I rushed back to Mrs. Frederick, threw Forrest Gump behind the door and my jacket on the couch, and downed an Ambien with a minibar vodka. It was dawn when I woke up, starving. I found my dinner on the coffee table and had it for breakfast, with my tie still on.
That Saturday I talked Erik into a Los Angeles stopover, where I’d invited myself to spend the holidays with Alkis and his girlfriend.
“We’ll be at the Chateau,” Alkis told me from London.
I was puzzled. “Chateau?”
“The Chateau Marmont,” Alkis explained. “Call them soon, they book up fast.”
“What damage are we talking here?”
“You’ve been on expenses for four months now, you wanker. What on earth are you crying about?”
I hung up and dialed the number he gave me.
“Good morning, Chateau Marmont?” someone answered, practically singing to me. I couldn’t tell if it was a man, a woman, or a child.
“Uh, reservations,” I said.
“For the restaurant or the hotel?”
“The hotel.”
“Hold on, please.”
“This is Derek’s suite at Chateau Marmont’s reservation line. Please leave me a message and I will get back to you.”
I just held the receiver. Derek’s voice made me uncomfortable; his busy indifference said I wasn’t good enough or something. I hung up.
THE RUSSIAN GAVE ME A lift to O’Hare, but not before a “long overdue” tour of Lake Forest that in an unwary moment I had accepted. We started from the Inn’s own wedding suite, where she pointed out to me a white hart or stag, the Inn’s crest. Something that I was “probably fam
iliar with from Alexander the Great.” We drove by Lake Forest College, a fitness center, and Mr. T’s or Michael Jordan’s residence—she wasn’t a hundred percent sure whose.
My cell phone flashed Andrea’s number.
When I picked up, there was some static. “I’m on my way to Lake Forest,” Andrea said. “Are you at the Deer Something Inn?”
I tried to explain my situation, but she spoke over me. “Stathis, meet me at the Admirals Club at O’Hare in thirty minutes. It’s across Gate 8. Terminal 3. I have another call I have to take. I’ll see you soon,” she said, and hung up.
FROM A LOOK AROUND THE Admirals Club, you could tell it was Christmas. Club members and ground staff (one in a red-nosed-reindeer sweater) were in corporate cheer. Andrea waved to me from one of the sofas overlooking the terminal, at the back of the lounge. She wore a wool coat, its red echoed by her lipstick.
“Stathis!” She smiled her bleached teeth to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to brief you from New York, but everything happened so suddenly,” she said, and threw an Airborne tablet into her Perrier, making a double-bubble drink. “I was on the phone with our client throughout my flight, so I’m glad I got hold of you.”
Our client? I tried not to look confused as I sat next to her. Too much perfume. “That’s okay. Of course,” I said, warily.
“I’m heading to an off-the-record meeting with your friends in Lake Forest,” she said. “We want to get their metabolics therapeutic area too, but they are already in talks with McKinsey, so we have to act fast.”
I tried to warn her about the bubbles mushrooming above her glass, getting ready to spill all over her laptop, but she was on a roll: “You guys cannot handle both anti-infectives and metabolics by yourselves; we need to beef up the account. I’m getting a team together from Washington.”
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