Hotel Living (15 page)

Kevin stood up, half-barefoot. “Captain Stathis! It was good to see you. Hey—” he squeezed my triceps. “There's some biotech stuff I want to bounce by you. We should get together.”

“Anytime,” I said. “And thanks for tonight. Fun.”

Erik was still binge-talking. He looked my way and made a military salute.

I raised my eyebrows and walked out.

In the cab, Erik's good-bye kicked off a lecture in my head from Alkis about “plateau-equals-failure” frustration. I was ready to call it a night, but the booze in me questioned my plan. “What happens when I'm not there is irrelevant to me.” Another Alkis-aphorism that I found challenging in New York. Wanting something to go my way, I decided to ditch Paul and Soho House.

Half an hour and an Ambien later, I was backwashing a beer on the patio when I heard Erik skipping up the stairs. The door creaked and banged, and I saw him—he didn't say a word walking in—pick up some paper from the coffee table. He yawned, and with his free hand he reached the top of the patio door, stretching out his shirt, making visible the thin line of hair that reached down from his belly button. Unlike me, he was still as lean as he had been when we met in France.

“You didn't go out with Paul,” Erik said, checking both sides of Zemar's postcard.

“I didn't know you were coming.”

He let go of the door. “Interesting,” he said, and Frisbee'd the card to the sofa. “Why? Were you expecting someone else?”

“Would that've been a problem?”

His body language changed as he walked by me to his plants.

I felt the Alkis-plateau again. Slouching in my chair, I knocked over my beer bottle and sent it rolling to his pots. Erik picked it up. Then he turned and looked at me. “Are you high?” he asked.

“Will you answer me?” I insisted.

“Yes, it would have been a problem,” he replied, impatiently. “You're my bud, right?” He bent over his plants again.

“I'm your
bud
? What's that? 'Cause I'm done trying to interpret what you mean,” I said. “Fuck that,” I whispered.

“Then go to bed,” Erik said, feeling the leaves, sticking his hands in the soil.

“Why? You horny?”

“I lost my wood when I saw you with Paul. Plus I don't wanna get anything on your High Line towel.”

I stood up, holding on to the back of my chair. “Right, of course. The High Line, our dead moose.”

Erik stopped nursing. “You're a fucking mess. What did you take? Ambien?”

“You can't change the subject on me twice.”

“Fine.” He stepped toward me, and our faces leveled. “Tell Paul and Andrea that the wait at St. Vincent's is an hour long, while their cash goes to a rusty railroad, which—”

“
Paul's
cash?”

“
Which
is the roof to the homeless whom you guys will push to Jersey after you're done with your renovation.”

“Is that your worry?” I laughed. “'Cause homeless'll come back. They always do.”

“No,
you're
my worry. You talk safety on the streets, then you run amok with your pills at the Standard. You use the fear of developers so Barry and Diane can sell more shoes and ad space.”

“Maybe you can talk some sense into them at your parents' parties,” I said softly, which made the sound of the incoming text on my cell more acute.

“Wanna check that? It might be your new pen pal, Zemar.”

“You love me?” I said.

He stared in disbelief, not moving.

“I fucking love you,” I said. “Do you love me?” I reached for his shoulder, but he struck my hand down, soil flying from his hands, sobering me up.

“Look at you. Smart and
pathetic
. Actually, no, you're dangerous. You take something bad and you turn it into a joke. You
masturbate
through simplicity.”

I felt like I was at the end of a rush. “Then it won't stick, will it?” I said. “But here's what does: masturbators like your brother bragging about their dick size.”

“Swear to God, leave Kevin out of this.”

“Oh yeah? Tell me, how is his size any different from your dad's money he inherited? Or did he work for his dick?”

His fists formed.

“What?” I shouted. “You don't
look
at me? 'Cause I talk money? What the fuck you gonna do when you have to split half a billion with your brother?
Huh?
”

“You Greek piece of
shit
!”

I felt the cement burning my back, the soil from his hands scrubbing my neck, the metallic taste of blood as his watch sliced my lip, happy Ambien flashes of me swimming with my sister in the Aegean, sleeping with Erik in Normandy. He locked my neck with his elbow. I got his stomach from the side and saw his fist coming down on my face, suddenly stopping midair.

“
Come on, you dick!
” I yelled.

“You're not worth my punch.” He spit hard on my face. His liquid fogged up everything.

July 2006

T
HERE'S A HEAT WARNING OUT,”
the driver says as we cruise along the Jersey Turnpike back to Manhattan.

“Got any limo-bar peanuts?” Justin asks him.

The driver studies Justin in the rearview mirror. There's no bar in the car.

Justin glances at his watch. “It's after nine. I need a burger, boss,” he tells me. “I need some alcohol immunity before I get to those girls downtown. Wanna come along?”

I get that Friday-night air in his voice, but it's Wednesday, which reminds me of his calling card—martial arts, partying, and seventeen-year-old girls—and the fact that we have nothing in common.

I reach for my cell phone and speed-dial the office. I get Andrea's voice mail and I start summarizing the presentation we just wrapped up. It was my first big pitch without a VP in tow, so I work in a couple of self-deprecating expressions, Washington's favorite way of signaling confidence and comfort when describing a kick-ass meeting: “. . . if I could still think
straight at the time . . .” I hear myself babbling, “. . . which, of course, was the most unintelligent thing I could have said . . .” By the time I hang up, I'm disoriented. It may be the haze or just my exhaustion—I've already put in forty, fifty hours this week. I rest my head back and fall in and out of sleep.

“Boss, the girls are fun,” Justin insists. “Tatiana is
nuts
. You should totally come.”

I have a slight fever and I need a drink, badly. I worry about the note I got yesterday that I have to vacate my sublet by the end of the month, and about the fact that I have been officially and irrevocably beaten out of a four-year on-again-off-again relationship, when I was always on. I haven't slept ten hours since Sunday, trapped in an Ambien drowsiness that I have come to like; it dulls the pain some. I don't want to talk to anyone, and I definitely don't want to hear how good I still have it.

“Not a hundred percent,” I tell Justin, but the idea of being alone scares me too. Numbing myself and watching others is how I deal with rejection.

Justin faces me. “You owned the room today, Stathis. You were technical but philosophical. I think they really liked us.”

“They were easy on us,” I mumble.

“Nah, you nailed that Black-Scholes question. Andrea would've frozen. How do I get to be a manager like you two years out of business school, man?”

It's been three years, and his sucking up is pre-drinks, so he's trespassing. I look at his tight suit. “Wear a fucking suit,” I say.

“It's McQueen,” he shoots back, fingering his sleeve.

“I know how much you make,” I say, looking out my window.

“Barneys Warehouse! Know what, I paid for it like fifteen seconds before the blackout.”

“And?” I don't get it.

“The registers went
down
, boss.”

I can see him, all proud, paying for his
Esquire
kill seconds before New York time-traveled back a hundred years. I'd tell him to try Dunhill next, but I'm getting desperate for downtime. So I bring up martial arts—he does Brazilian jujitsu for two hours a day—banking on ninety seconds of zoning out while he talks.

THE OUTDOOR STAIRWAY LEADING INTO
the basement sake bar on Ninth Street is jammed. I smell caramel and dog shit from the garbage of the coffee shop next door.

“Our friends are inside,” Justin shouts at the doorman, but he doesn't care.

I'm sweating like a pig. My shirt sticks to me in this muddy, gross New York weather that braces scrawny East Village kids while suffocating the rest of us. I pull my tie off and stuff it in my pants pocket.

Inside, we move through a dark bar area. At the end a Japanese curtain is lifted, revealing an even darker vaultlike space, the whole thing no larger than a New York one-
bedroom, filled with claustrophobic booths, graffiti, and people with silver rings in the wrong places. We stand out in our suits, but no one looks at us.

Justin sheds his glove-tight jacket in one move. The collar of his shirt is the only thing not glued to him as he snakes to the last table, where two girls are sitting. “This is Kate and Tatiana,” Justin says, beaming. “This is Stathis, my project manager.”

“Good to meet you,” I say.

Kate smiles and looks at me for a good three seconds. She says nothing.

“Take your jacket off, Stathis?” Tatiana says, and brings a piece of white fish to her mouth. She can't be more than nineteen. I try to figure her out before answering her command-question. A hundred pounds, olive skin, there's an appetite in her green eyes I've only seen on horny peasants in my village in Greece. She swallows and waits for my reaction as soy sauce drips from her hands, while her stare says: This is my table, motherfucker.

I mumble something even I can't hear and sit down opposite her. She's in a man's black suit and a T-shirt that says “Baghdad” under a Disneyland logo. She takes her jacket off. I can't believe she's doing this with sauce still on her fingers, but she does, bored, as if it's a routine. I can see everyone's nipples around the table. She has ridiculously perfect breasts.

For the next fifteen minutes Tatiana devours three hundred
dollars' worth of sake and bizarre meta-sushi plates while she flirts with Justin, talks to Kate, and stares at me.

“You know I'm quietly judging you,” she says after our third eye lock.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Seen
Magnolia
?” Kate steps in. “It's a quote from the movie.”

I take my jacket off too, to show ease—something I only do in client meetings. “What do you do in New York?” I ask Kate. She's beautiful in an American way, freckled.

“Where I come from, this is an impolite question,” Tatiana says.

“Tatiana grew up in Aix-en-Provence and Laurel Canyon,” Justin volunteers.

I nod, though I haven't been to either. I'm not sure why he's sharing this. What's he trying to explain? Her aggressiveness, her looks, or her taste in movies? There's definitely something moving in her soup.

“Yes, on holidays!” Kate laughs.

“I was at boarding school in England,” Tatiana explains. “And Kate's a stylist.” She adds this casually, as though my “impolite” question is suddenly forgiven. “Kate is all about the electronic-bohemian look. She's a genius.”

“I just don't want to work for people who lunch,” Kate says, and kisses Tatiana quickly on the lips. “I don't want to play on people's insecurities. Honestly, I want to make luxury a small fraction of anyone's wardrobe.”

“Isn't that what it is already?” I ask.

“God, no!” Tatiana yells with a rhetoric-giggle. “It's so unbalanced! You shouldn't have to buy
only
indulgence. You can use uniqueness, suspense. Why don't we see current affairs in fashion? I want to be inspired by the Middle East crisis. Reality. Crime. Seriously!”

I'm confused, and it's not just my exhaustion. “Isn't the purpose of luxury to escape reality?” I object, but Tatiana shakes her head.

“No, no,
no
!” she insists. “That's exactly what we're talking about. We need to redefine it. We're talking luxury that everybody, and I mean
everybody
, can use for self-esteem. It's about reality, not escape.”

I have no clue what we are talking about. My mind drifts to my mother's gold cross and wedding band, the only jewelry she ever wore. I remember her probing a gutted sea bass to find her ring after she lost it while sorting my father's catch, and me spotting it in his nets, saving the day.

Some nigiri lands in front of me and I'm back to Tatiana. The girls are already off on a “new New York” discussion. How “all these glass condos will bring back Gotham.” They talk about how the “best views look
into
, not out of, the units,” about bird shit on the glass that will make peeping in on people “like watching old damaged footage.”

“. . . spiderweb-looking window cracks . . .”

“. . . most interesting suicides . . .”

I feel spent. I understand enough to know that they'll keep cruising through topics for the rest of the night.

“How is our godmother?” Tatiana suddenly asks Kate.

“Oh my God! You won't believe this,” Kate says. “She's hosting this new reality show in Spain. It's insane, honestly. They take old, mentally retarded people and make them sing and dance to sleazy songs. Totally out of control. Live, with hundreds of sixteen-year-olds screaming.”

Tatiana's eyes widen. “Love it!”

“I thought you were into artsy movies,” Justin says. “Like
Magnolia
.”

Tatiana reaches for his hand. “Justin, babe . . .” she says. There's polite contempt in her voice. “The only difference is from post-, okay, apocalyptic, to post-postmodernism. Remember the frog scene in the movie? The plague scene? What's the difference from the reality show? In Spain, the singers are plagued people, when the real plague is all those kids encouraging them and making them stars. That's where the real art is, the performance. Really.”

Justin looks at me quickly. He takes down his sake like water. Suddenly I feel protective of him, which I've never felt before.

“Do they shoot in asylums or do they escort them into studios?” I ask.

Tatiana's eyes lock on me. I can see she's about to lose it. “You know, Stathis? The writers that you read have not
written a single word in
decades
to criticize TV commercials showing chimpanzees in dresses drinking tea
.
It's 2006 now, and we talk about it. And that's shocking to you. Makes your nipples stiff.”

My first thought is,
I don't know what to argue first.
My second thought is,
I don't have to. All I want is to sit back and be distracted.

IN A TRIBECA BUILDING WE
walk down the hallway that leads to the loft Tatiana shares with a photographer. To our right are life-size cutouts of Saddam Hussein and Martha Stewart, smiling and posing in front of a wall with dozens of Gucci and Nokia logos. I hear Mick Jagger singing “You see I bounce back quicker than most” from inside the loft, and I'm both relieved and scared that it won't be just the four of us.

“Is your roommate here?” Justin asks Tatiana.

“No,” she says, confused, and opens the door.

The music and the AC burst through as one shock wave. I walk in and fall into a post-sake take-it-all-in state. A canopy bed at the center of the loft sits on an island of beach sand. It's surrounded by freestanding floor-to-ceiling photographs of a toddler smoking, slum houses, and a portrait of Edgar Bronfman Jr. flanked by two other CEOs. A gigantic puzzle of
The Scream
is half-finished and glued to a wall like mold. Its remaining pieces, thousands of them, are scattered between clothes, Polaroids, glue traps, pizza boxes, and jewelry. There's a real or fake Mao leaning against the bedroom wall
that's been vandalized with mascara and earrings. Strangely, I don't see any sand scattered out of place.

I sit on a sofa surrounded by kilims, arabesque art, and large ashtrays—I recognize a couple from hotels I've lived in. Across from me, hanging on the wall, is a leather costume, a woman's one-piece bathing-suit-shaped outfit that looks like a motorcycle. It actually has steering handles with rearview mirrors built onto it. Justin touches one of its mirrors, which is tilted to face upward, and then puts his finger on his tongue. He picks up a rolled twenty-dollar bill from the floor and goes into an all-out hounding around the coffee table.

“Is this your mother's?” Kate fiddles with the motorcycle-looking dress.

“Thierry gave it to her when she went to Cannes,” Tatiana says. “She hated it, so she gave it to me.”

“Adore!” Kate says, stunned. “When are we going to LA to raid her wardrobe again?”

“Stop obsessing about my mom! I'm the beautiful one,” Tatiana says, and walks to the fridge. “There's no sake, so we're having tequila,” she shouts over her shoulder. “Stathis, this is a mobile sofa. Push the pillow all the way back so the cushion wraps around you.”

I try it. The three of them switch into production mode automatically. Tatiana prepares shots, Justin sorts out the three walled iPods, and Kate goes through the large wooden box on the coffee table. She empties US Open tickets, jeweled sex toys—or just jewelry—shutoff notices from ConEd, and
pictures of Tatiana with the Dalai Lama, Monica Lewinsky, and her look-alike mother, until she finds the two tiny plastic bags she was searching for. She waves one of the coke bags to me with a
Eureka!
smile on her face. I nod and look away. Through the bedroom door I see what must be an Oscar statuette on the floor, peeking out beneath dirty laundry. Then a screen starts to unfold slowly from the ceiling, with a live version of
Heartbeat City
playing on it. Tatiana gives Justin a massive coffee-table book with Brezhnev kissing Erich Honecker on the mouth on its cover. Justin starts to cut cocaine on the propaganda kiss and talks about Bungalow 8.

HALF-NAKED ON THE FLOOR, JUSTIN
ropes his shirt around Tatiana's long hair. She snorts two lines and then tries to do a tequila shot off his abs. Justin laughs, and tequila rushes, pauses, and rushes again from his stomach onto the sapphire rug.

“Are you having fun?” Tatiana asks me, resting her head on my lap, her feet on Justin's chest.

“Did you do the graffiti on the Warhol?” I reply.

“Stathis, you don't really own art unless you make it your own. Same way you don't really own your sofa until you spill something on it,” she says, and she begins to unbutton my shirt while Justin rubs her feet, kisses and makes out with them.

Kate leans over and helps Justin out of his pants. Then she whispers something in Tatiana's ear and the two of them get up and go to the bedroom.