WHEN I GOT BACK TO the hut, there were no cars parked outside. The lights were on, but no one was there. A plastic bag was on my bed with a Post-it on it: “You know you want it.” I peeked in: there was a toga, basically. A pair of leather sandals lay on top of what looked like blue drapes. Half a shower later—forest freezing water—I caught up with Alkis, my fellow Montmelian refugee, at one of the many S&M preparties held in houses around the forest. It would be hours before a bunch of us made it, drunk, to the Château de Fleury.
Under Paul’s artistic direction, Alkis entered the château’s dungeon in chains. The enslaved president was paraded around the floor to be auctioned for whipping, and I was too wasted to remember if, or for how much, I was supposed to bail him out. Still, Alkis was dressed on the Disney side, not as Mapplethorpe as others. I scanned the chamber and saw the chain hooks on the walls that the Nazis had used to torture prisoners some sixty years before. At the end of the catacomb, a snake was being passed around. I needed another drink to make sense of all this, so I was heading toward the bathtub that served as a beer cooler when two Argentineans with permanent suntans offered me a shot.
“Are you from Buenos Aires?” I asked the one with a lollipop in his mouth.
“Via London investment banking.” He handed me another shot, though I was clearly still holding the first one.
His friend mumbled something about Chechen gunmen seizing a Moscow theater.
“Not if Paris Hilton’s performing,” the lollipop replied. “She should be on the cover of The Economist.”
They were dressed in dark suits and sunglasses, and I couldn’t tell what their costumes were. Men in Black? I didn’t get it. I did both my shots and tried to read those Latin type A’s—the lollipop, the lazy body language, their snubbing of the overachievers on the dance floor. “What are you dressed up as?” I asked.
“Investment banker,” replied the investment banker.
I waited for my jolt to fade, contemplating whether his exotic confidence was expected of me too. I wondered if I wasn’t meant to become a screw-you Greek guy with a success story that would make me a “game changer.”
“I need a beer,” I finally said, and walked to the massive tub. I reached for a bottle, but I was fought off by our Finance professor, who had showed up as Muammar Gaddafi.
“Yours.” I let Muammar keep the disputed Stella.
“You should become a Muslim,” Muammar yelled to a Swedish-Chinese Lara Croft by the tub.
“Can’t teach old cats new tricks,” she replied, with no trace of hesitation on her face.
“Bitch!” Muammar said. He turned to me: “I need to get some, man. My three-year-old is visiting from London next week.”
“Bring her to campus. Could help,” I said.
“Uh, you—you think so?” Muammar asked, wasted but dead serious.
“I’m kidding.”
He looked lost. “Uh, they tell me you’re good at backgammon.”
“Rumor,” I said.
“Rumors in this forest tend to be true.” Muammar’s sweat kept dripping down his medals and beer. “I know. Been stuck here five years now.”
I pointed toward the end of the catacomb, where Alkis was posing with the snake. “I gotta go bid him up,” I said, starting to make my way through Gomorrah, but Muammar grabbed my Spartan outfit.
“Hey!” he yelled.
I turned.
“Managing for . . . ?” Muammar asked.
“Value!” I pointed to him with my index finger.
“My Greek whiz! Teaching for . . . ?”
What? “Huh?”
“Pussy!”
“Well, maybe it is time you went back to Georgetown,” I said. “For a bit.”
“Pussy!” Muammar yelled, spitting an ice cube my way, taking a tumble, and hitting Paul, who was being trained as a dog by the two Argentineans. Before I realized what exactly was going on, Paul’s collar had gotten stuck. He started hyperventilating. With no one around sober enough to unbutton him, Paul looked at me in red fright.
“There’s an army knife in my car,” I said, and Paul toppled behind me toward the dungeon’s exit.
The three minutes to the parking lot felt like ten. I was numb under my costume’s skirt. My feet, in tight open sandals, were needled by frozen grass. Paul was chasing me, cursing and moaning like a bitch: “Cut it now! I can’t breathe!” he cried every five seconds.
I placed the knife between the collar and his neck, and felt his heart racing. I twisted the knife and Paul choked.
“Do it!” Paul ordered me after he stopped coughing. I pushed the knife hard, and vodka mixed with pieces of leather and sausage suddenly covered my feet.
“Bastard!” I yelled.
Paul bent, roaring, and a second burst landed inches from my sandals. He was shaking.
“You okay?” I said.
“I’m okay. Will you drive me home? Please?”
I was seriously drunk. Plus, I had to pick up this American dude, Erik, from the train station in a couple of hours and still hoped for a nap—a write-off, given where Paul lived.
“I’m fucking wasted, Paul,” I said, feeling his vomit freeze on my toes. “Where the hell’s your fiancée?”
Paul shook his head. “She stayed in London. Whore.” Then he vomited again.
I looked away in disgust. “I’ll take you home,” I said.
Driving on icy lanes, I watched for trees, deer, and Paul’s puke breath.
“I owe you one,” Paul said before passing out next to a bag of pot and a bunch of blue pills that were spread on his bed. I lifted his stash to pocket a nibble and, beneath it, saw a photo of Paul with his family. He must have been twenty, still had his hair; his arm was linked with his father’s. They were laughing, posing as if they had just dragged something big out of the sea. I thought of my father, working his fishing nets. His hands ran rhythmically, pulling and rowing. He never laughed.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said to no one. I put a pinch of Paul’s pot in my underwear (no pockets in my Spartan outfit) and walked out.
By the time I got back to the hut, there were still no cars parked outside. I sat in my car for a moment, gearing myself up for another icy shower. Again, I thought of my father. “Your body’s a fireplace in a cold mountain,” he told me when, at twelve, I had to jump into the freezing Aegean to retrieve the cross our priest had thrown in for the baptism of Jesus.
Ten minutes later, drying off with my blanket—towels still packed—I felt wide-awake.
Halfway to the train station to pick up the American, I noticed that I had a couple of cigarettes’ worth of time to kill. It was already light out, so I stopped at the boulders outside Barbizon in the middle of the forest. I got out of the car and climbed the least slippery–looking stone. The rock was icy and full of mist. Birds and squirrels were everywhere. My piss streamed twenty feet down, and the first sunlight through the oaks made my liquid sparkle. I rolled Paul’s stuff, lit it, and squatted, and at that moment when I wasn’t drunk anymore but not yet hungover either, in that false sense of calmness in the middle of my mess, my love-hate relationship with EBS seemed clear. The whole thing was simple, really. I was building a network by tucking wasted people into bed. Which would eventually mean money, opportunities, and all the buzzwords in the pamphlets. If that’s what it takes, so be it. I was fitting in—piss off, Paul—and with school ties built on either attentiveness or arrogance, we had bonding-via-fuck-you privileges; we had entertainment. By my second smoke, I felt free. Like I’d just woken up from a lithium treatment in a magical, liberating forest. Free to offend and be offended. None of the California correctness, no filtering or tact whatsoever. No repercussions either—which made the American’s French accent the first thing I noticed and made fun of as he struggled: “Abientot” to the schoolgirls who cheered him “Au revoir, Erik!” at t
he train station.
“Bienvenue à Fontainebleau, Erik,” I said in my Greekest accent. “Je m’appelle Stathis.”
“Stathis is Greek,” Erik said.
“Stathis is Greek. I’m Greek too,” I smart-assed, stoned, drunk, and sleepless.
“Everything cool, brother?” Erik said in working-class talk. Did I catch some South Boston in there?
Six-two, lean, with a boxer’s nose, black hair, and curved-down eyes, he was in a blue North Face jacket and jeans. No smile.
Driving us to Montmelian, I became the target of questions about everything around us. Granted, he was doing two master’s, one in journalism and one in urban planning; however, he was far more curious about the region, its history, its “palatial solar system,” than in EBS itself. “The region’s Haussmannization,” he explained, “which started centuries before Haussmann,” and moved on to the roles of different monarchs, regimes, and wars in the area over the last four hundred years. He asked if I’d visited the palace.
“Once,” I told him—for a recruiting dinner.
Did I know about the pope’s imprisonment there, or Napoleon’s role? Had I been to the White Horse Courtyard?
“The white what?” I asked, clearly irritated.
“La cour du Cheval Blanc,” he answered seriously.
I reflexively laughed at his French again, wondering why my body language wasn’t registering with him. Or was it just natural to pound a person with questions when first meeting them? As if discovering someone slowly was a luxury left for Greek villages, something gone extinct for the online, overeducated dicks in the Western world.
When he brought up the treaty of Fontainebleau, I casually said: “Which one?” hoping to end our harlequin of exchange. But that didn’t work either. Erik asked me what sports I played, if I had a mountain bike, trekked, or climbed in some of the best rocks to do that.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “these are the rocks that named it Fontaine-la-Montagne during the French Revolution.”
I did not laugh. I thought of the frosted rock I had just climbed and wanted to ask him why and where on earth he’d homeworked that crap. Haussmannization? In a Southie accent? Something did not square here, but with my hangover kicking in I just drove. Dreading a smoking spiel, I cracked open my window and lit up fast.
“We’re about to get to Montmelian,” was all I said, and we drove the last couple of miles in silence.
In the parking lot outside the hut, Erik beat me in getting his bag from the trunk. He paused at my Spartan sword and the butt plug that Paul had worn around his neck as a pacifier.
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
“I don’t.”
Our first legit exchange in the twenty minutes we’d known each other.
Walking toward the hut, his steps tracing mine, I was disturbed and relieved all at once.
DURING THE NEXT FORTY-EIGHT HOURS I only saw Erik in the background: jogging on the property, hanging out on the floor or by the fridge, drinking our French yogurts. Our interactions were logistical—where was this and what time was that—and brief.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked him when I saw him shirtless on Alkis’s bed, reading a book and eating granola that he must have brought with him. You could have stored milk in the freaking room.
Erik shook his head while crunching his cereal.
“I have a class tomorrow at nine. Do you need a ride to campus?”
He didn’t answer. He lifted his bowl and drank from it. As he cleaned his chin with his palm, an old scar on his upper arm became visible. “I was hoping to take Alkis’s mountain bike there,” he finally said.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
“Mike Davis. Ecology of Fear.”
“Nonfiction, I take it?”
“Always.”
I went to bed without my T-shirt. Half an hour later, I put it on.
“ERIK DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE,” I told Alkis the next day, walking into the campus bar.
Alkis smiled. “Apparently not. Look.”
Erik was doing shots at the bar, flanked by Paul and Muammar. Muammar was talking to Paul, Paul was talking to Erik, and Erik was looking at us.
“A round.” Alkis elbowed me. “Come on, I’m driving to Paris tonight. One for the road.”
There was something about Erik’s indifference, his casual confidence, that enervated me. Something I couldn’t pinpoint yet. I hesitated. “I got a deadline,” I swayed, but Paul spotted us, and we joined them in a round of bourbon shots.
“Malaka! You must read this.” Paul waved a piece of paper my way. “It’s a poll the Dubyas bounced by Erik before it hits our inboxes during the American week.”
Paul and Muammar were fighting over the survey, grabbing it from each other’s hands, reading questions out loud. “Its title—” Paul laughed. “‘Why do they hate us so much?’”
Erik looked at me and bowed slightly. Then he turned to chat with our school’s French bartender, and that bugged me enough—the way you feel weird the day before you get sick, and you don’t know why or what’s wrong—that I left.
The fourth and last day of Erik’s visit, I ran into him outside the hut. It was six or seven a.m.; there was barely any light. I was back from a case-study group turned into dinner, drinks, all-night slouching, and smoking, with eggs and cheap champagne for breakfast. Erik was back from jogging—“training for the New York marathon,” he said. It was zero Celsius and he was in shorts, a T-shirt, and my sneakers. He was about to say something, but I cut in.
“Any deer?” I asked.
“Just a couple of wild boars.”
“Wanna get back to bed?”
“With you?” he half smiled. First time in four days.
I stayed put. “Yes, with me.”
We fucked on Alkis’ bed before I rushed into Finance late and red-eyed, so of course Muammar cold-called me. I couldn’t remember shit about the case study—something about Chrysler’s balance sheet before the Daimler acquisition—and I didn’t even try to fake it. I’d never been unable to answer a question before. Paul turned and gave me a stunned, happy look, as though I had finally done something right.
“What?” I shrugged.
TEN DAYS LATER, ERIK’S ARTICLE showed up in one of Oxford’s student newspapers. He took EBS head on:
“For the first couple of days, EBS seems liberated and open to pursuing its wishes, as opposed to US business schools, long ago sterilized by political correctness, no longer able to shortcut to ingenuity or enjoy themselves. Actually, and in spite of all the bright, beautiful worldsters, the democratized champagne flowing in the campus canteen, and the weekly balls in the impressionism-inspiring Fontainebleau villages, EBS is a devastating place full of old, decomposing souls and the children of unfulfilled industrials, bitter politicians, or indifferent parents, trapped between the American dream—glimpsed through cult and cliché movies like The Player and Jerry Maguire—and a European license to decadence, exploitation, and toxic private equity shrouded under energy, software, or real-estate project finance. It’s unclear whether it’s more dangerous or silly. As if colonialism had walked a mere hundred meters in three hundred years: from the courts of the François I palace to a campus down the street playing Studio 54 with McKinsey recruiters serving as bouncers.”
If any of my classmates heard it as the voice of reason, they didn’t speak up. I wasn’t sure what intrigued me most: that a single paragraph gave my fascination with EBS a corrective slap, or that we had been exposed by a mere passerby. But it all became clear soon enough.
In the hut’s freaking freezing extra bedroom, I was preparing for job interviews with Alkis. He was role-playing the recruiter, while I kept nodding without listening.
“Stathis, mate!” Alkis shouted. “I’m talking to you! You got into an early round with Bain, will yo
u fucking concentrate?”
I was thinking of that crazy communist and his article, of his Southie accent and his dick; I was thinking of Erik, nonstop. I was falling in love.
TWO
I WAS ABOUT TO E-MAIL IN my Decision Traps and Tools homework when Erik’s handle showed up on my screen. I looked at his first and last names. Somehow they made more sense than the rest of the names in my in-box, as if the letters had been put together in a cubist structure that meant more than the sum of the letters.
I clicked on the e-mail and saw a one-line note in its body, which made me pause—was that all? I silently protested against this laconic sugar high of a next step. I gazed at the message in the unfocused way I looked at my classmates from the podium seconds before I presented my solution to a case study.
“Bro, I passed out on Eurostar and you’re to blame for that . . . What are you doing next weekend? Wanna hang out in London? E.”
ENDLESS DAYS LATER, I WALKED into a shabby neighborhood pub on Earls Court, dragging my carry-on. A couple of old-timers turned to give me a glance. Erik, against the bar, in an M79 army vest, was working on a pint and talking to the bartender. They looked deep in the middle of a joke.
“Hey! My man!” Erik threw his arm around my neck and eyebrowed my suitcase’s high-tech wheels. “Nice bag.”
“Good to see you,” I said. “I’d have dropped my bag off if I had a hotel addy, but—” I smiled at his jacket—“it looks you were busy enlisting.”
“Enough!” Erik made a cease-fire face. “This is my Greek mate, Stathis,” he said to the bartender. “This is Ian,” he said to me.
Ian reached for a glass from the bar’s ceiling. The tattoo crawling up his arm looked like Jesus on the cross in a Manchester United outfit, or Madonna at a concert. “You’re Greek, malaka?” Ian asked.
“Born and raised,” I said.
“My first wife was Greek.” He pushed a London Pride to me. “She liked spanakorizo and Telly Savalas.”
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