Hotel Living (18 page)

“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 with 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.

We cross Canal Street, and the boxy shape of the Soho Grand distracts me. I scan its windows for the room I lived in a year ago. I spot it three floors from the roof, its curtains two-thirds down; it's idling, clean and empty inside. I get a glimpse of Café Noir, my late-night hangout with Erik. “Fuck nostalgia,” I whisper. I turn to the screen in my cab, which is showing clips of Warren in Afghanistan. No warning, nothing. No Internet Zeus hacking my screen to protect me. I go for the Exit icon, but the driver hits the brakes, I'm suddenly thrown forward, I double-touch the screen, and Warren's up again, playing with children in a refugee camp. I'm not trained to deal with this.

“I'll walk,” I tell the driver, but he doesn't hear me. “Here's fine!” I shout.

He looks at me in the mirror and shakes his head.

“Carsick,” I say.

I walk up West Fourth to Sant Ambroeus on Perry. I get an espresso and a brioche, open their copy of the
FT
. I go straight for the Life & Arts section, which has Jay-Z's picture on the cover: “Show Me What You Got, FBI.” I flip the page to a caricature of Warren, who had “Lunch with the
FT
.” I throw the fucking paper aside and ask for the check.

“IT'S THE NEIGHBORHOOD YOU WANT
to be in,” the broker says in a thick New York accent. A cloud of perfume mixed with sweat surrounds me as I follow her through the dark corridor that apparently leads to the “one-and-a-
half
-bedroom” on Bank Street that she is talking up to me.

The living room is surprisingly sunny. Its bumpy white walls—nails and cables buried by dozens of sloppy paint jobs—look anaglyphic and whole, like the stone walls on a Greek island. I smile at the idea of my two villages, Trikeri and Greenwich, with comparably patched walls but little else in common.

“Does it come with roommates?” I point to a few pages of the
Daily News
spread on the floor, covered with rat droppings and a fresh glue trap.

“Honey, this is New York,” the broker replies. “It's a rent-stabilized building. In this neighborhood, who cares? You're a block from Magnolia Bakery and above Marc Jacobs. Literally!”

“Have you
seen
Marc Jacobs?” I mumble, walking into the half bedroom, or whatever this tiny second room is supposed to be.

“Once!” she shouts, dismissing my irony. “I was at Pastis with my girlfriends. Just five minutes from here. I'm telling you, this neighborhood . . . The unit is not available till December, but it's worth the wait,” she adds, trying to read my reaction.

“I'm not sure I can wait that long,” I say.

“Honey, do you know what I call these apartments?”

I really don't.

“I call them investment rentals!” she says proudly.

Erik hates the West Village. “Too pretty, too brunch, too nasal,” he used to say, in the same voice he used to express his indifference to Paris or Prague. “Overdecorated Ohio wet dreams,” he called them. I would grant him a pass on what's wrong with Ohio and listen to him talk up São Paulo and Caracas. “Cities! Think west-west Thirties. It's all about capacity. No bullshit West Village four-table restaurants. Got it?”

I did. That's why I'm all about the bullshit now. The more bullshit, the more “Tatiana” the restaurant, the better. Two months of sleeping in her loft, having thrown myself into her
life, and I'm still shocked by how opposite yet similar those two are, were. Erik was Erik. He was anti-everything, while Tatiana is game-all: art, money, love, fashion, MySpace, the full monty. She flaunts her background. “I got my mom's looks and stamina, and my father's brains and self-destruction,” she advertises. “And everything in between,” which is plenty: affairs, awards, arrests, a Braque, a UN ambassadorship, bankruptcy. There's no discretion in her world; nothing's off-limits. Tatiana is a superlative, the reason people like Andrea move to New York.

But look just under the surface, and you run into an Erik-Tatiana sameness. Both are always poor and procrastinating—chasing the right people, never money—but at the eleventh hour, doors magically open. They both crack down on the so-called norm with such juvenile militancy, with such terrorism, that people around them want more. Tatiana is the strongman we follow to the Blue Ribbon (her Pakistani kitchen) to talk about whatever
she
wants to talk about. My Erik replacement, clearly. My new stalling in living, only this time it comes in black: between the two of us we cover most conditions and pharmacopoeias. I have insomnia and sleeping pills, Tatiana has coke and bulimia. We share alcohol, but she's also a cutter—“managed” by Paxil and Adderall—which makes her more fucked up, thus more entertaining, and makes me a selfish enabler. Do I have guilt? Sure. But I need distraction, which right now is the only way I can see surviving.

“And this is the bedroom!” The broker startles me. “Not bad for West Village.”

There's another glue trap under a skull-stenciled window.

“Why do I see skulls everywhere?” I murmur.

“What, honey?”

Suddenly I have a premonition, an appalling hunch that Erik is changing. His new pals and hangouts . . . it is not that hard to see, really. He is going mainstream, upscale even, while I—just training, not good enough, now thrown away—grow more and more Tatiana-dependent, surrounded by drugs and Gotham glitter.

Fuck
your
skull, Erik! I'll take brunch and sleaziness, Nasal Village and Marc Jacobs. “Got an application form?” I ask.

TEN HOURS LATER I'M ON
a barstool in Teresa's red-walled dressing room on Forty-Second Street. God and Justin, behind the bar, make vodka–Red Bulls. Doors open and close in this postconcert backstage gathering turned celebration. Some are sober, others drunk, a few in headphones.

Teresa wears a long knitted cardigan, sits cross-legged on a sofa, and talks with fans whom Security escorts in and presents to her in groups of four or five. “Did you like the show?” she asks the fans. “Do you know who's over there?” She points at Tatiana.

“Tatiana!” the fans, most of them underage Latinos, correctly answer.

Two sofas away from Teresa, Tatiana is busy curling Alkis's thick black hair. “Are you a genius like Stathis?” she asks him.

“No one is as smart as Stathis. He just needs a real job,” Alkis says, and looks my way. “What do you do?” he asks Tatiana.

“I collect gift bags,” Tatiana answers, and Alkis laughs.

Ray consumes stuff in and out of the suite, in the bathroom, while on the phone, talking to Security, to Wardrobe . . . Every few minutes he sails over to Teresa to kiss her, but his jaw clasps from cheap cocaine or something, and she's standoffish.

“Do you want a drink?” Tatiana turns and asks Alkis as she walks to the bar.

“Sure,” Alkis says, and stares at Teresa, who is signing autographs.

Justin offers Tatiana a vodka-Bull. She takes a sip and makes a sour face. “If you give my mom's boyfriend your stuff, I'm gonna fucking kill you,” she tells Justin, but he shakes a glass with ice and vodka violently, pretending he can't hear her.

“Tell him!” Tatiana orders me.

“Justin, don't give her mom's boyfriend your stuff,” I repeat, but I can't keep a straight face.

“Don't laugh! Don't laugh!” she tells me, soberly. “You know that Ray has a coke problem.”

“Right,” I say, and do laugh. She can be protecting or projecting, or just desperate to be part of her mother's life—
envying her for Ray, or not. She's an addict; she can say anything.

A media mogul walks into the dressing room with his wife, a Teresa lookalike, the Asian version, and three bodyguards. The suite's main door closes behind them, and immediately things slow down as the big fish cuts across the room. Teresa stands up, and the couple kiss her. Then the three of them talk quietly.

“. . . I would close my eyes to get lost in your singing . . . but then I had to open them because I wanted to look at you . . .” I overhear the seventy-year-old billionaire saying while his wife rests her head on his shoulder.

“
So
don't wanna be famous,” Tatiana whispers to me while staring at them.

“You want to stay half-famous then?” I say, and she gives me a
fuck-off
look.

Teresa points to Tatiana. “She's my passion,” she tells the couple.

“No,
performing
is your passion!” Tatiana yells back to her mother, throwing the suite's temperature to an evening low.

Teresa gazes stoically at her daughter. She's either used to this or a good actress indeed.

“When are you going back to Los Angeles?” the trophy wife asks Teresa.

“First thing in the morning.
Depressed in Paris
goes into production next week.”

“Where's Kate?” Ray shouts as he bursts through the bathroom door, sniffing and spitting. It's embarrassing to see
him—his jaw is practically displaced—running into sofas in front of Teresa.

Tatiana fires Ray a look and snaps at Justin: “
Fuck
you. I asked you for one thing. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“We should go. Teresa needs to rest,” the trophy wife says, and the billionaire kisses Teresa again. “Call us!” The couple leave and people in headphones start running around again, but faster, like making up for lost time.

Tatiana goes back to Alkis and brushes his thigh. “Will you be my angel? Will you take me downtown?”

Alkis gets up and spreads his hands in the surrender position as Tatiana pulls him by his belt. “Call 911 . . .” he says, and they exit.

“I need a break,” Teresa tells Security. She sits back on her sofa and waves at me. “Stathis, can you come here for a second?”

I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but I don't feel good about this.

“Speechless,” I say, half-kneeling in front of her, leveraging all the body-language respect I can, hoping to make this as brief as possible. “I had never seen you perform live before.”

“Thank you. Now, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Did Ray do coke? Look me in the eyes and tell me the truth.”

I take a glimpse at Ray, who's popping back one vodka shot after another. Is she blind? It's comical to see how they tolerate him.

“If he did, it wasn't with me,” I reply.

“If you're going to be like this, you—” Teresa lashes out at him, but she suddenly chokes. “You . . .” she coughs, “. . . you should find a place to spend the night.”