Hotel Living

by Ioannis Pappos

  “What is this?” I say.

  “Isn’t this what you were searching for?” Tatiana hands me Zemar’s card. “I keep forgetting to bring it to you.”

  “Shit,” I murmur. “It’s one of them. Where was it? I looked for them everywhere.”

  “Stuck under the projector for balance. I found it when Justin dropped a joint and burned it. Yes, that all-you-can-eat-sushi piece of shit burned my projector!”

  Alkis zooms to the card. “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” I say, putting the card in my coat pocket. “Just a note from a Greek friend.”

  Alkis turns to Tatiana: “How is Stathis’s place coming along?”

  “It’s stressing me out. I want it perfect,” Tatiana replies.

  “Now, now. It’s just a job, baby,” Alkis says, comforting her.

  “Alkis, my life’s my job!”

  “I’m the Greek. I’m the rude one,” I say flatly, and Tatiana smiles. For a second.

  “What style are you going for?” Alkis presses on. “Bachelor minimal?” He’s hopeless.

  “I’m going Mario Savio, Berkeley,” Tatiana throws out absentmindedly.

  “Is Mario . . . Mario . . . from the Beatrice Inn?” I’ve never seen Alkis scared before. “Is he a designer?”

  “Mario Savio!” Tatiana vents. “From Berkeley in the sixties! Dammit, Alkis! Do you know anything about the free-speech movement? The guy’s dead, for Christ’s sake. My father’s writing a script about him.”

  I make a what-do-we-know shrug. “She wants a library in my kitchen and books in my fridge. She’s going for the leftish poet, revolutionary look.”

  “Don’t forget Osama bin Laden!” Alkis says, throws his napkin on the table, and stands up.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s finish the wine.”

  “E-mails came in,” Alkis gripes, and reaches into his pocket.

  “Leave it,” I say, and he does.

  “I’ll call you from Long Island,” he tells Tatiana.

  She nods, eager for him to disappear.

  Alkis gives me a dirty look and storms out.

  “Have I missed something?” I ask, leaning back in my seat.

  “I’m pregnant,” Tatiana says, but I can tell by the cast in her eyes that there’s more. “And it’s Ray’s.”

  I feel Zemar’s scrunched-up card coming unfolded in my coat pocket. “I think I raped someone. And I feel nothing about it.”

  “So what happens next?” Tatiana asks.

  FIFTEEN

  WHEN YOU DO DRUGS, THINGS change. You acquire a tolerance for the fact that almost nothing turns out as planned. I see Tatiana’s big eyes, and I don’t have to ask what she needs from me or why. A ghost, she roams around my half-furnished apartment in gypsy-glam clothes, trying to feed me mashed broccoli while decorating my place. I’m her “case study,” she says. She seeks to set-dress my barren studio with the “sophisticated frivolity” of “yesteryear.” She wants to “bottle nomad seduction, a leftish spirit, but have it be today.”

  Do these concepts make any sense? Did they ever?

  She presents me with monochrome posters of fat children, her mother in a Pirelli calendar, Philip Morris’s blurry new logo, a portrait of Hunter S. Thompson, and an ad from the eighties that says, “If you were flying the Concorde tomorrow, you’d wear a Rolex.”

  I don’t get it, but I smile anyway.

  “What have we got in there?” Tatiana says, pointing at my Starving Students box.

  “My textbooks from EBS,” I say, a bit embarrassed.

  “Looks like they’ve been sealed up for years. Why do you keep them?” she asks.

  I have a hard time answering. “I can’t let go. Believe it or not, I used those books to try to understand Erik.”

  “It’s nostalgia. Stop doing that.”

  “No, seriously,” I say tenderly. “I thought that business algorithms would help me optimize a relationship. I can’t believe I’m actually saying that.”

  “Stop it,” Tatiana says again and holds my hand.

  She looks sick enough to be admitted to St. Vincent’s, yet she’s still lovely. I sit on the floor by the box and pull her next to me. “I have. I am,” I say.

  She takes her keys out and slits the box open. “So are we going to be able to get rid of these books?” she asks.

  “I don’t care about them anymore. I’ve no use for them. After Erik, I don’t think I even care about work.”

  “Why?”

  “I pushed hard at Command to impress him, at a time when he was unimpressible,” I shrug. “Now he is impressed, just not with me.” In the box I see my Decision Traps and Tools textbook. “I guess I picked the wrong problem to solve, at the wrong time,” I say. “Or something like that.”

  “When did you know what was in store for you?” Tatiana asks.

  “I went on for years choosing not to hear what Erik was saying, and hearing what Erik was not saying. During one of our fights he stopped to suck a cut on his thumb. He was so casual about it, like he was telling me he’d already checked out, or that he’d never been there in the first place.”

  Tatiana’s grip on my hand tightens. “I am here,” she says, so I kiss her.

  “When did you know what was in store for you?” I ask.

  “It’s not the same.” She buries her head in my shoulder. “She can have Ray. The guy’s a user.”

  “Beside the point, Tati. Rejection is always rejection. It can hurt.”

  “I’m not infected by specialism. I’m not Teresa. I can handle it,” Tatiana says.

  I feel her tears down my neck. I look at the stuff she put up on my walls, all sorts of junk and shit. There’s a collage showing Moby eating a steak, next to a poster of Robin Byrd in Debbie Does Dallas. All this crap doesn’t add up, but it’s okay in some weird way.

  “You’re good with contradictions,” I say, and kiss the dirty tears on her face.

  “The fact that people die in Java doesn’t make my suffering any less,” Tatiana sobs.

  “When was the last time you called her mom?”

  “You are my family now.” She takes my hand and walks us to Kate’s old mattress. We lie down next to a paper plate with a bunch of carrots and a bag of coke.

  “Pain is good. It makes you forget things,” Tatiana says, takes a bump, and rests her head on my arm.

  We stay there. It’s so quiet that I can hear a blend of her breathing and her watch ticking. Then she trembles, so I spoon her.

  “Keep your hands on my tummy,” Tatiana says.

  I do.

  “I’m leaving for LA soon,” I whisper in her ear, and try to feel her pregnancy on my palms. I try to keep her warm. “I may be there for a while.”

  “Don’t.”

  I kiss her hair and ear. “I’ll protect you,” I say, but I am not sure how.

  SIXTEEN

  West Hollywood

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO A city more lethargic than Los Angeles, nor lived in a hotel more narcotic than the Chateau Marmont. There is an off-season air to the place that makes loneliness feel like a natural state. Weekends, I lie on my sofa smoking with an ashtray on my chest, watching the dust float in the rays of sun coming through the drapes. I count the pastel tiles above the kitchen sink and mellow out in my idleness. Everything seems slower in LA, sedated, more tolerable, especially my perception of myself. I left New York a coke-addled, sex-hungry zombie, and I still am, but here I look the part less. By switching from West Village bathrooms to LA cottages, I see everything through a veil, happening behind a fence or a pool house. I like it. Fading out of sight is a privilege in the hills.

  I moved into the Chateau’s main building the way a hyena hovers near lions, distressingly close to the cottage where I told Erik I loved him but far enough away to stare at the memory from a distance. Josh, at the front desk, gave me a junior suite on the third floo
r. “A quiet floor, far from—” he looked back at his screen—“cottage 88, where you stayed the last time you were with us.”

  Three weeks in, I still have not done that 88 walk yet. I’m not ready to face the stoop where for a moment I thought I had Erik.

  “He moved into Warren’s brownstone in Brooklyn,” Melissa told me during our ride to JFK, smelling of baba ghanoush. She spotted them with Parker, “their son,” at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “Warren’s son,” she corrected when I stared at her in the rearview mirror. Was I in touch? Would I be back for Parker’s birthday party? “Yes, maybe. Here.” I handed her Zemar’s postcard. I didn’t have Erik’s new address, so there. Melissa was now the custodian for the two-word note from the Bora-Bora kid turned Tora Bora phantom.

  It’s after midnight and the only sound in my suite is the drone, the never-ending throb that, nightly, mesmerizes me in the Hollywood Hills. Close to two, I leave for the pool. People start showing up from the gardens, like ghosts: “. . . my quasi-girlfriend . . . ,” I overhear, “. . . enough blow to kill a small animal . . .” Things play out. There’s an interface in the hills that helps one come to terms with life, or at least become resigned to it.

  “I’M AT THE CHATEAU FOR twenty-four, pushing on some other BioProt front,” I read in Andrea’s e-mail. “Tomorrow I’m off to Silicon Valley. I’ll be back next week, of course, but can we connect while I’m checking out in the morning?”

  “Works,” I respond.

  THE NEXT MORNING AROUND NINE o’clock, Andrea is in her metal-leather sunglasses at the front desk.

  “I hear good things about your work,” she greets me. “As always.”

  “This is LA,” I say.

  “Yes, right.” She reads from her BlackBerry with her shades on.

  “People love you or hate you.”

  “So, what’s the client’s status?” she asks.

  “We are about to launch a screening marathon for them. We’ll be looking at bio, genomics, and academic institutes for alliances or acquisitions.”

  “You can charge me,” Andrea tells Josh, behind the desk. She presents a credit card from an ostrich-skin wallet. “Stathis, remember that we are not here to solve world hunger. We are here to help them make a difference for the handful of stakeholders involved.” She turns to Josh: “I don’t need to see the printed bill. I need to sign. Now.”

  “Of course,” Josh says.

  “I’m in a hurry,” she explains to me. “Where were we?”

  “Their stakeholders,” I offer.

  “Right. Which means that we need to prioritize. And, Stathis, I’m done with innovation. I want to see value via diversification. No excuses, no exceptions.” She spreads her signature across the credit card invoice; she practically graffitis the desk. “I know you’ll do an outstanding job,” she says, and starts walking toward the elevator.

  “About that,” I cry after her.

  She turns and slides off her sunglasses. She looks at me, alarmed.

  “I’m not sure that we’re a hundred percent aligned with BioProt management as far as the diversification strategy,” I say.

  Her eyes turn suspicious. “Carry on.”

  “I don’t think they’re comfortable with us favoring short-term returns, investments outside their core science,” I say calmly.

  Her expression turns icy. “Core science? Diversified biotechs are still biotechs.”

  “Lifestyle is pushing it, Andrea. Really.”

  “Stathis, sometimes we have to recognize that clients may not see things quite the same way we do, but that doesn’t mean that they or we see things poorly.” Andrea-isms follow: “. . . ill fitted versus ill suited . . . slender victories still victories . . . painfully shy clients . . .”

  I look down. Her heels are made of the same bird as her wallet.

  “I’m not sure that you understand their competencies,” I say. “We are about to fill their pipeline with moisturizers.” There.

  “Stathis, Stathis . . .” She has the air of a schoolmistress. “Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it. Let’s keep communication open. I’m glad you’re on the team,” she lies baldly, and presses the elevator button.

  That was way too easy. “The bitch got someone on the client side,” I murmur after the doors shut behind her.

  THE MARQUISE-SHAPED CLOCK IN TERESA’S Maserati says two, but the sun begins to set as Ray and I drive up the hills. Ray gives the sky a wary look as it begins to rain. I turn and lean over, and through the back window I see red rays of sunlight spilling through the clouds as we enter God’s private road.

  “This is a De Tomaso,” I say, touching the redwood dashboard. “They don’t make the Quattroporte like this anymore.”

  “It’s a fucking toilet,” Ray slurs. “I had to get it towed to Costa Mesa last week to have the transmission replaced.”

  “We used to jerk off to pictures of cars like this where I grew up. Do I get to drive her to BioProt?”

  Ray gives me a you’re-kiddin’-me look. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Tell Charlie to deliver to the Chateau,” I say, and his cowboy-angelic smile springs up. “Just this week that Teresa’s in town,” I add, to save face while I try to connect myself with his coke dealer.

  “You got it.” Ray hits the clutch hard as we start up the hill toward God’s pergola parking lot. The Maserati complains and spins.

  “Watch it!” I shout. Chickens cluck and flap their wings as they scatter. “God has chickens in LA?” I laugh.

  “Crazy old bitch.”

  We park next to God’s Alfa Romeo. Ray reaches into the glove compartment and takes out a .45 Glock.

  “Brother, do you have to carry that everywhere we go?” I ask.

  “I need to protect kids like you from the cougars in the hills,” Ray says, and steps out of the car. He seems almost Greek, which gives me a blind spot. I can’t see him as dangerous, even when he mixes guns with drugs.

  I get out of the car and stretch my arms, transfixed by the nonstop view from downtown LA all the way to Santa Monica and the ocean. I’ve seen rainy sunsets before, but never this apocalyptic: skyscrapers, smog, chickens, sun through the rain—they all blend into an end-of-the-world scene, like in a movie.

  I step out from under the pergola, and the rain hits my face. A few feet onto the lawn and I’m surrounded by hundreds of anthills, perfect little cones, getting pounded by water. On my left is God’s house, a glass-walled hangar-like creation projecting hedonism and consent. Its wave-shaped roof cascades to three gentle boulders that touch the glass skin of the house. One of them is split between the terrace and the living room, penetrating the house. The other two flank a curved Noguchi swimming pool.

  “Move your ass!” Ray yells, and he bolts downhill in the opposite direction from the house, toward a geodesic dome–like pavilion that blisters from the soil.

  “What’s in the ball?” I shout.

  “A little wet here!” Ray waves me toward the dome. “Come!” He looks excited; it has to be drugs.

  The dome is a library. Books upon books, on circular shelves holding on to the dome’s belly. And yet there’s nothing conducive to reading. There are no chairs or sofas, no ladder that I can find to reach the high shelves. It’s as though one is supposed to magically take down a book and then leave, or not be there at all. I walk across the empty space nervously, like I am trespassing on an unfinished art installation, or on a giant framework’s guts—HAL 9000’s memory made up of hundreds of colored book spines, processing me. When I reach the other side, I try to break into the designer’s mind. Edmund Hillary next to The Art of Draping by urban planning. What is this?

  “The hell are we doing here?” I ask, but Ray shushes me. He drops a book on the floor and reaches into his pocket.

  We share four fat lines on top of How Proust Can Change Your Life and
then start the walk uphill. It is the first time that I have my own bag in my pocket, and I feel terribly muscular, like I could stand a direct hit by a two-hundred-pound Warren bomb. A heavy-metal version of “Careless Whisper” comes from God’s house, and I feel Ray’s hand on my arm. “Not a word to Teresa.”

  I nod.

  Stepping into Tatiana’s mother ship, I lock eyes on its plaster pseudo-ceiling and then scan up to a Nagasaki Fat Man roof.

  “Saddam! Osama!” Ray yells at God’s poodles, who are jumping on him. “Sit! Sit! Where’s Bush? Where’s your toy?”

  Osama takes a quick sniff of me and goes back to Ray, who feeds him mints, or coke. Saddam dances around as we start to walk through this concrete nothing—no furniture, save two built-in rectangular ashtrays sprouting straight up from the floor, the only geometric references within a perfectly organic space. The music grows louder, and at the rear of this hangar space we see faces in a MasterCard-logo-shaped sunken living room, like an old drained pool in the middle of an auditorium.

  “What does God do again?” I ask under my breath.

  “She married a few times,” Ray answers.

  We go down the steps to the first of the two round mosaic-slated living rooms, which are separated from each other by metal-mesh draperies falling thirty feet from the ceiling. Teresa, in a “Fiat” sweatshirt, gets up from a round sofa and kisses me on the lips.

  “I love her,” she whispers in my ear.

  I look into her eyes to see, confirm, that she knows what she knows, but Teresa turns to the eight or so loungers: “It’s a script about real actors who play nonactors in a reality show.”

  “There’s tequila and wine,” God tells Ray. “And some vodka in the other room.” She points to the metal-mesh drapes. She wears a poncho made of loosely knit-together square-end neckties. She smells like cigarettes.

  “I saw your chickens jump around your Carabo,” I say to God.

  “My beauties,” God chants.

  “Do you have a rooster too?” I ask.