Hotel Living

by Ioannis Pappos

“I’ll come with you, sexy,” her mother says.

  “No!” Tatiana yells at her mother. “We’ll meet you at Bungalow.”

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER RAY IS naked next to me on Teresa’s bed. There’s one more whitetip between his waist and his thigh, and coke all over his fingertips as he plays with Tatiana’s pussy.

  “I’m not in the vagina business,” I tell Ray.

  “Yo!” He laughs. “Fuck off! For real?”

  Tatiana gets on all fours to do a line from her mother’s nightstand. I see razor cuts on her inner thighs before I shove my tongue into a bag of coke. The bitter powder races in me, next to the lines from the Gin Blossoms: “. . . you were the best I’d ever had . . .” I kneel behind Ray and push my dusty tongue into his hole right as he starts to fuck Tatiana. He groans and pounds her silly.

  TWELVE

  October 2006

  THERE ARE FOUR OF US around the conference-room table at Command’s office in midtown Manhattan. Our squares of networked phones, our slides and laptops and flash drives are spread everywhere as we fine-tune my presentation to the CEO of a biotech company.

  “I don’t believe in numbers,” the senior-senior Partner who sits three feet away from Andrea tells me. “I believe in ranges,” he explains, provoking in me an urge to ask him what time it is, or in what conference room we are pitching BioProt. “I want some forward thinking, some real intellectual muscle,” the senior-senior goes on, and I feel like I am at dinner with Tatiana’s godmother, or at a quantum physics lecture at Stanford. What’s wrong with him? Or is my hangover making me hear things?

  “Easy!” Justin blurts, and Andrea fires him a how-dare-you look.

  “For Stathis . . .” Justin manages, and the two partners, slowly, their eyes still surveying him, return to their laptops.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I instant-message him.

  “ICE MC—‘Easy,’” Justin types back.

  “What???”

  “Come on, boss . . . ‘This shows real intellectual muscle. Easy’ . . . ICE MC’s lyrics u were dancing to w/ Tati at Bungalow last night.”

  “You should get fired!” I type, and close the window.

  “Two hours till showtime,” Andrea announces after consulting her watch. “Stathis, can you project the master deck from your laptop onto the big screen for me?”

  I do.

  She looks at the screen with narrowed eyes. She moves her pen in and out of her mouth. “Okay, go to Segmentation.”

  I do.

  “Keep going, keep going . . . There! Stop. Now, can you make the colors in your boxes a bit brighter?”

  “I used our color template,” I tell Andrea while nodding in the senior-senior’s direction.

  “I know, I know.” Andrea raises her hand, and her Rolex-bracelet combo rattles. “We may go a touch off our colors, but trust me, I know BioProt. They drive orange Lamborghinis in LA.”

  Why are you here, then?

  The senior-senior studies the slide on the wall. “As long as we stay Command about it,” he cautions.

  “Easy,” I say, avoiding Justin’s face.

  My eyes hurt; I don’t think I can see the colors on my screen properly. I’m so hungover I don’t even remember being at Bungalow last night. I go to Bookmarks and click on Accosting, a link I must have checked twenty times since yesterday, and the site’s landing page comes up. I scroll down until I find a picture of Warren leaving a gym, with Erik behind him. It’s hard to identify Erik, but I can. There are almost a dozen postings underneath their photo. “Who’s that cute guy with Warren?” GiuseppeForever comments. Then Justin coughs artificially and I look up. He waggles his head to the big screen, which shows an almost life-size Warren in his shorts. I smash the power button on my laptop and a complaining shriek comes out.

  Andrea jumps out of her seat. “What just happened?”

  “My laptop crashed. It’s very rare, really.” I try to smile, but the bitch is delirious. She is raising hell, she wants a backup. Now!

  “Justin, go to IT and get a machine in here. Go!” the senior-senior orders.

  He tries to calm Andrea down. “We’ll be fine,” he says reassuringly, and gestures to her Zen position.

  She is still upset when at last, and only hesitantly, she goes back to her typing, her face telling us that we are all incompetent and any further screwups will make her cosmetics-billionaire fiancé blacklist Command to a handful of clients.

  I unplug the projector from my machine and press the Power button. I open PowerPoint, and then I go back to Accosting. I scroll down Paul’s website until photos of Teresa with Ray, in matching sweatshirts, walking, dining, and kissing in the West Village, come up. In one of them, Tatiana and Kate walk behind them. In another, I recognize my back as I hail a cab. The last one shows Ray kissing Tatiana on the cheek as she jumps in the backseat with me. “Teresa, for the boys!” someone commented.

  When Teresa started dating Ray a few weeks ago, nobody was surprised. Nobody among us talked about it. Not Tatiana, not once. The fact that Teresa instantly got serious with her twenty-five-year-old trainer, who used to fuck her daughter—and me—seemed part of some pervading momentum. It was as if I was living EBS paranoia again, but now, after Erik, I browse life like a movie that I don’t care how it ends.

  “Yes!” the senior-senior answers his phone. “No, we are actually good,” he says, eyeballing me. “We are about to send it.” He laughs. “Oh my God! Did I just reduce myself to a brand manager?” More laughs. “Okay, okay, what will Charles think if he gets the same e-mail as Carter? For fun, tell me . . . humor me . . .” His imbecilic prattle goes on for the ten minutes it takes these Commanders to guess and second-guess who to cc on the simplest e-mail. It’s a company-wide sport masked as healthy downtime: who to include or who to bcc. Questions that feed Command’s paranoid culture of everyone-suspecting-everyone-else. It’s so intrinsic and bankrupt—it lacks a Big Brother centralized efficiency—that it’s almost Soviet. I listen to the senior-senior’s petty schemes and I can’t tell if his problem is stupidity, insecurity, or just fat.

  “Washington is here,” he says after he hangs up. He puts on his jacket and grabs his papers and laptop. “Stathis, I know we’ll have fun with this.”

  “That’s a great three-piece on you,” Andrea tells him.

  “Mohair. Thank you. I like your necklace.”

  She gives him a naughty smile as he walks out of the room. “It’s estate,” she says, but the senior-senior is gone.

  Andrea looks at me, chastened, and I look at my laptop. Gawel’s instant message pops up on my screen. I right-click Unavailable, close Accosting, and go about LA-ing the colors in the segmentation boxes—Andrea loves “French, almost electric blue.” But I hear her fingernails tapping on the table. “Stathis, may I bother you for a second?” Her voice sounds strangely attentive.

  I look up.

  “Have you presented to a CEO before?” she asks.

  “Once,” I tell her.

  “That’s what I thought.” She exhales. “Stathis, you’re obviously a good consultant—that’s why we asked you to do the presentation—but do you know how to handle people with real power? I’ve met CEOs on different occasions—” She stops and starts again. “I mean, what I want to say is, I should give you a few pointers for when you get up there to present.”

  We are the only two left in the conference room, so I can stare at her as I try to sort her out. Too woman for Washington, too thirsty for Command, she fucks a CEO and wears jewelry to work. I’m actually quite taken by how blind she is to all the WASPiness around us. My hangover makes me charitable, and I want to cue her that we are both Command outliers. “Thank you,” I say, and for once I mean it.

  “First of all, you don’t speak proper English,” Andrea says. “You are not a native English speaker, so sometimes you use an informal tone. Th
e other day you said: ‘It’s sunny in retail,’ and ‘Don’t spend too many calories on licensing.’” She goes on and I nod along, pretending that I am interested, that I’m listening. What she doesn’t get is that my Greekness is the one thing I have going for me. Clients listen to my accent, the imperfections of my grammar, my angst about finding the right word—“Is it affect or effect?” I asked a thrilled audience in Atlanta—and they think that if this communication stretch is happening, is real, and is given some slack, then my strange, “tavern,” strategic choices just might work. They give me the benefit of the doubt as an aftermath to the colorful Greek state they are already in, while I, well, I keep sliding into darker habits.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” I say, and start for the door.

  “You’re walking out on me?” Andrea asks.

  “Call of nature. I’ll be right back,” I yell from the hallway.

  “I want to talk body language next. Stillness!” Andrea shouts over her jingling bangles.

  Justin hangs over the restroom’s sink. His head is tilted sideways with some kind of pot, which looks like a sake jar, up against one nostril. Water—what I hope is water—runs out the other one.

  “What the hell you doing?” I ask, and Justin stands up straight.

  “Nasal douching. Cleans whatever’s left in there,” he says. “I know it’s disgusting, but it works.”

  “Fucking kidding me,” I say, and walk to the urinals. I begin to pee and the smell of formalin hits me. I close my eyes and think of nothing. When Justin blows his nose, I wake up, still peeing.

  “Wanna try?” Justin asks. I see him raising his jar in the mirror above my head. “It will open up your sinuses for the presentation. You did some serious snow with Tati last night.”

  “Will you shut up?” I yell at him while scanning the bathroom through the mirror. I piss everywhere.

  “Boss, relax! No one’s here. I already checked.”

  “Thanks, I’ll pass.”

  “Suit yourself,” Justin says, and rinses his nose some more.

  I get that quiver down the spine as my bladder finally empties. I shake, zip up, and flush.

  “Ray gave me the nasal rinser,” Justin brags when his head is up again. “Teresa can tell if he’s done blow from his sinuses.”

  “What’s Ray gonna do now that you got his kit?” I ask.

  “Don’t know,” Justin says seriously, missing my sarcasm. “I guess he had to give it up since he moved in with her at Soho House.”

  “You hang out with Ray and Teresa?” I say.

  “No more than you do,” he says, defensively. “Ray and I work out together. Hey, boss, I almost forgot. Alkis messaged me. He said that he’ll totally stop over if we can get him backstage at Teresa’s show at Madison Square Garden tomorrow. I’m sure he called you . . .”

  He didn’t, but I nod my head, pretending I know what Justin is talking about.

  “Gawel wants to come too,” Justin adds. “Can you ask Tatiana for backstage passes? She doesn’t pick up, and Ray is maxed out to his army buds.”

  “Gawel?” I ask, surprised but casual.

  “He called me.”

  “How come?” I try not to look suspicious.

  Justin shrugs.

  “Gawel knows that you hang out with Teresa’s daughter?”

  “I may have mentioned it,” Justin says. “What’s the matter, boss?” He looks at me, concerned.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I wash my hands and linger by the mirror, shocked at how crappy I look. My eyes are red and puffy. I don’t believe they’ll let me pitch to a prospective client like this.

  “Hey, thanks for the projector,” I tell Justin.

  “Of course. But what were you doing?”

  “Oh,” I try to downplay things. “A b-school friend of mine founded Accosting. It’s a stupid site, but he asked me to take a look.”

  “No shit! That’s the first thing I read every day. Has everything that happened downtown the night before. I’m on Accosting more than I am on Bloomberg.”

  His frat excitement’s killing me. “Of course you are,” I say, and feel the mucus in my coke-railed nostrils. I gotta move out of Tatiana’s loft if I wanna make it to Christmas.

  “Fuck it. Fix me up,” I say.

  “Bend your head sideways,” says the kid with the toy. “Breathe from your mouth.”

  “WE ARE HERE TODAY BECAUSE you set some kick-ass goals for 2010,” I begin my presentation in the jammed conference room.

  “My big fat Greek capitalist!” BioProt’s CEO roars, and a tsunami of laughter sweeps the room.

  “But he’s so thin!” Andrea screams, and she leans her head back the Alkis way.

  THREE HOURS LATER ANDREA AND I walk into Nello on Madison Avenue. She does her phony thing: “Fegatini con balsamico, prosciutto e melone. And a glass of champagne.” And I do mine: “Dirty vodka, straight up.”

  “The BioProt team loved you,” she tells me after the waiter leaves. “They want you in LA for a prelaunch meeting in December. So you’re officially on the beach until then.”

  “I understand,” I say.

  She tries to swap pleasantries, but all I offer is a mild smile here and there. After a few minutes she gives up.

  “I’m flying to the Dominican Republic this weekend,” she declares. “So I’ll be quick.”

  “I’m going to Banana Republic this weekend,” I say.

  She throws me a pitiful glance. “I am not going to accept another Stathis, Stathis. This is not going to be like Paris. Is that clear?” she asks.

  “Paris?” I play dumb.

  “BioProt will go Lifestyle,” she announces. “That’s what we are doing. Cosmeceuticals; weight and hormone aids. Got that? Is it clear in that smart, stubborn Greek head of yours?”

  I’m far from shocked.

  “Maybe,” I say, blinking, wondering how much she is willing to risk to help her man take over BioProt. How far is she willing to go to trade up? “Suppose we do,” I say, hesitantly. “Why not?” I shrug. Erik did. He traded my patio for Warren’s brownstone, or penthouse, or wherever TV people live. Warren, the next-generation Stathis, someone better, part of the “machine,” for Erik to fight with. Then again, Warren might be immune to criticism, falling in that blind spot within Erik’s pick-and-choose portfolio of protests. Like Kevin’s job, or his own indulgence in running marathons. My ex was a hypocrite whom I fell in love with. Someone who had perfected the art of signaling underperformance, in order to get noticed. A reverse snob, thus the ultimate snob, who drove me bloodied and bowed all the way to addiction. A long-sleeping fear of what-does-all-this-say-about-me wakes up. “We feed on what we don’t have,” Alkis once told me. There. My excuse, explanation, and failure to get what I want. Now, bitter, I’m not sure which I hate more: the fact that Erik is still so much a part of me that I act out on Andrea, or the fact that I used corporate frameworks, Andrea’s world, to interpret my relationship with him.

  “Anything to keep you trading up,” I tell Andrea with a wink.

  “Spare me your nerdy crap,” Andrea says furiously. “You’re not that innocent, yourself. Beautiful Mind, my ass! You’ve got no idea whom you’re messing with, Greek boy.”

  “I don’t? I thought your man was on the cover of—”

  “I’ve tolerated your work-and-play-hard song long enough. I know what you do. I could have you deported with one phone call. And we all know what’s waiting for you back home in Greece . . .”

  I can’t believe I’m not recording this.

  She further raises her already-raised eyebrows, and I see Ray’s whitetip coming right up to me. It’s not the Greek Army that worries me; it’s her insider meddling, once again, that scares the hell out of me. I can see my ass thrown in jail before the Greek Army has its way wi
th it.

  “There was science behind Beautiful Mind,” I say calmly. “Game theory works; you can use it to outsmart your client’s competitors.” I pause, choosing between Alkis’s play-the-game and Erik’s (the Erik I knew) nuke-the-fuckers. “Sure, Beautiful Mind was a show, I’ll give you that,” I add. “But it still looked after the client’s, only the client’s, best interests. And go ahead, send me to the stupid Greek Army. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  Andrea leans forward. “This is going to be done my way.”

  A BLOCK FROM NELLO, I check my BlackBerry. It must be the fifteenth time today, an obsession this fall; I’m still hoping for that message from Erik that will fix everything. I delete “Guess who got promoted at Lehman,” “Alkis and Cristina are parents!,” and “Command CARES.” Fuck ’em. Fuck EBS, babies, Alkis, Lehman, and all the success stories in the world. A text from Gawel reads: “Good luck at the presentation.” I’m on the verge of collapsing, but like a cranky kid who doesn’t wanna go to bed, I text him back: “Want to?” My phone vibrates as I hail a cab.

  “East Village,” I say to the driver, who’s mumbling on his cell. “Tonight!” I slap the plastic window between us.

  IT’S ONE OF THOSE SATURDAY mornings that fill you with hope and get you up early, ready to fix everything. Those rare times when you feel like you’ll get a grip on things. I shower and dress at Tatiana’s—indifferent to the bathroom smell and the guy passed out in the hall outside her bedroom—grab my wallet and cell, and flee Franklin Street for the West Village.

  I wave down a cab, sensing this air of Saturday morning in Manhattan, this eagerness about the possibilities ahead. I’ll make something out of my weekend.

  The cab cruises up Sixth Avenue, and I crave my espresso and the FT I’ll get on West Fourth. Today I have a plan. I am meeting with a broker to check out an apartment, finally working on my exit from Tatiana’s loft. I’ll have lunch with Alkis, I’ll call my sister and catch up with my nephew. We’ll talk iPod, or whatever he wants for Christmas. I’ll book those tickets for all of us to meet in Paris. I’ll hit the gym, buy a new book, and power-nap before Teresa’s show. I might even call up Gawel and explain to him—carefully, caringly—that he deserves better. And what the hell, I’ll drop a postcard to Jeevan in Bequia, the coolest person I’ve met in the last ten years. This will be the weekend of my mending.