“Who loves ya, baby?” I tried, but it came out more Greek than New York Kojak.
Ian pointed at our pints. “The house,” he said, and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Don’t get too cocky,” Erik warned me. “He told me his second wife’s from Boston.”
“So he moved up in life.”
Erik managed a grin. “Plus, we’re staying at his place.”
What? “Come again?” I said.
“He has rooms upstairs for thirty pounds,” Erik said casually.
I had to restrain myself from looking around. Ian’s pub was falling apart faster than Montmelian. “I’m in school debt and all, but, er, we have a bathroom, right?”
“Of course. There’s a bathroom on our floor,” Erik said, studying his pint.
Right, what was I thinking. “I spent two summers in a Greek camp. E. coli’s a friend.” I lifted my pint.
“Cheers, mate!” Erik faked an English accent. “I thought we better see the room after a drink.”
“Or a few,” I murmured.
“More fun getting naked drunk anyway,” Erik said, his face unchanged. He didn’t glance at me to check for a reaction; he took sex for granted.
“Maybe we stay that way. Be on the safe side,” I double dared.
“Drunk or naked?”
“I’m Greek. What’s the difference?”
He smiled. “It’s my birthday. Will you suck my dick?”
Prick. “Need ID for that one.”
FOUR PINTS, SIX SHOTS, AND two fucks later, we were lying naked at opposite ends of a smaller-than-double bed, needing a shower and a new set of sheets. All through the evening we could hear footsteps and coughing from our floor. Given the time they took to get from the elevator to their room, our neighbors had to be in their eighties, or obese.
As I came later for a third time, growling, I heard a walker being dragged outside our door. Erik put his hand over my mouth, an act that somehow tamed him, while in the hallway outside I heard fragile hinges clap. When they had gone, Erik went to use the bathroom down the hall, buck naked, without shoes, which threw my tame-Erik hypothesis out the window. I walked there only to see how flooded it was and U-turned back to our room, hoping I wouldn’t have to use the bathroom for the rest of the weekend. I pissed in empty beer bottles in our room, something that Erik found hilarious and competitive. He tried it, but without my precision.
“It’s a skill I got from driving around Pelio, in Greece,” I said. “I can actually do it without stopping the car.”
“Liar!”
“If I stopped for more than twenty seconds, the relanti would die. You had to pour gas straight into the engine to get the car going again.”
“What did you do at traffic lights?”
“It’s a mountain.” I paused. “Only thing, you wanna make sure your bottles are stored right.”
“You didn’t, did you?”
“What? Spill?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope,” I said, remembering an old embarrassment. “But I did mix up the bottles once.”
Erik was excited.
“Hey, I was drunk.” I shrugged. “I kept extra gas in a bottle of Coke and I had pissed in a Sprite, thinking, green bottle, you know, less obvious, and easier to remember what’s what.”
“Fucker!” He went for my abs with his foot, but I grabbed it.
“I was wasted, I couldn’t smell the difference. So the fucking Datsun doesn’t start, and I keep pouring piss in the carburetor till the butterfly gets totally fucked,” I said with a brief laugh. I lit a cigarette.
“Did you fuck up the car?”
“Not really.” I let out my smoke. “But when I figured it out, I had to run and crawl two miles to make the last ferry to Trikeri.”
“I have to run ten miles tomorrow,” Erik said, waving away my smoke. Then he picked up my briefs from the floor and threw them on my sticky torso. “Fuck it! Let’s stay drunk. And it’s your turn to bring the juice, amigo.”
IT WAS FRESH OUTSIDE. LONDON’S Friday evening was in full force. People in work clothes talked eagerly while cutting one another off on the sidewalk, their taxis waiting for them. It would have been a three-minute walk to the liquor store had I followed Ian’s shortcuts, but I stayed on Earls Court Road, feeling slightly proud, like I owned part of this pavement. As I passed the Court Tavern—packed, EBS-loud—suddenly my last three months were thrown into a new light. Though hidden within the forest vignettes, I saw some good turns in my recent past, and I felt, this weekend, like I had become someone new. It was like I was a spy, as if I was sleeping with the enemy.
The moment I stepped into the clean liquor store, I strangely longed for Ian’s pub, the very grime I’d detested growing up back home, which I was now “fortunate enough to be spared,” as my sister kept reminding me over the phone.
“May I help you?” the clerk asked.
“I’m all right,” I said, and picked up a bottle of Springbank and some Beck’s. Then I asked him where they kept the champagne. He pointed to a bottle two pounds cheaper than our rent for the night.
ERIK WAS NAPPING NAKED ON his stomach under the pillows when I made it back to our room. I was about to pop the bottle when his head surfaced.
“Bro, I haven’t had champagne since the summer of ’95,” he said sheepishly.
“Oh, yeah? What happened that spring?”
Erik looked at me, stunned. “The French resumed nuke tests?” He let his head fall back on the pillows. “I ain’t fucking drinking it now,” he said, muffled.
I stared at his jogger’s ass and messed-up hair while sorting out whether he was joking. Actually, technically he was inaccurate; the French hadn’t resume their tests until that September. I thought of bringing up the French yogurts he drank at Montmelian while I struggled not to laugh and to hold back the cork, a battle I lost. I filled a plastic cup.
“Happy birthday!” I cheered.
Erik grabbed my hand, pulling me to bed.
“I’m not having any, but my cock can,” he said, and stuck the head of his half-hard dick into the cup. “Wanna suck me now?”
I looked at Don Quixote’s dick in front of me and thought of the Pauls on campus, and Bain & Company. “Nuke the bastards,” I said, and ripped my shirt off.
THERE WAS LITTLE HE WAS not: mountain climber, marathon runner, activist, savvy traveler, skier, writer—started two alternative papers at Yale—community and labor union coordinator in South Boston, Beacon Hill–raised, son of a gynecologist and a Democratic pundit. He was everything I wasn’t.
After London, Erik’s name in my in-box became the title of a favorite book, movie, or brand—the most popular adjective, verb, and noun on campus. I would wait for a lecture to end before I opened his one-liners (“What’s up, Competitive Advantage? Cooking for Thanksgiving with the Dubyas on campus? E.”) to stretch my high and replay London in my mind, hoping to break Erik’s codes and understand what he saw in me and what I could become. Many a time, my speculations turned into doodles of possibility trees. In a Stats lecture once, I borrowed the regression model from the blackboard to build a quiz assessing the pace and depth of my falling for him. I used parameters such as “willingness to travel” and “sex initiation,” plus “reading the other’s mind,” only to come up with a spooky correlation between poor mind reading and fast falling, something I hastily credited to sloppy math. I deleted my stats-Cosmopolitan algorithm just in time—Paul ready to license its interactive version for Bellinis on campus.
“How is your ‘tell me your strengths & weaknesses’ season coming along? Any consultant bought your BS yet? E.”
Job interviews started early. A couple of months into the program, investment banks and consulting firms stormed into the forest with presentations, schmoozing events, and drinks and dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants in
Barbizon. In late November, the first round of interviews started in the thirty suffocating five-by-seven-foot rooms that EBS had built for the process.
“You are from Greece, how exciting!” the Senior Associate from Command Consulting called out as I entered their chamber.
He’d spent his honeymoon there. A lovely time. And which island was I from? “Please sit—oh, this is Andrea Farrugia, a VP from our New York office.” He tried to introduce the late-thirties silk-wrapped woman who was sitting behind him, but she kept typing away on her laptop.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, standing up—trying to shake her hand, for all I knew.
“Do you think you’ll be ready for the Olympics on time?” she asked without looking up or slowing her binge-typing.
THE FRIDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS I walked into the Washington headquarters of Command for my final round of interviews. I was confident, smart. I nailed case studies and personality tests, thinking of my Christmas break with Erik in Bequia—“pronounced Beck-Way,” he’d warned in his e-mail. By four p.m. I knew that Command would make me an offer. At six the next morning, I was on a two-stopover-flight-and-one-boat-ride journey to the Caribbean.
Erik had already been in the Grenadines for a whole month, part of “an eight-week Yale-Oxford off-site NGO-sponsored urban planning graduate credit project,” he rambled over the phone.
I tried to translate this train of organizations and adjectives into a single CV bullet.
“But UNICEF paid for my flight,” he punch-lined.
“Of course.” I laughed.
The two-second silence that followed made me regret my sarcasm. I didn’t backtrack. I didn’t go: I mean . . . Petrified, I couldn’t tell whether my silence grew or shrank my balls in Erik’s mind.
That evening I saw the island of Bequia, black, getting larger, from the deck of the ferry I’d boarded on St. Vincent. The lights of Port Elizabeth sparkled as we headed straight toward them, at the southern end of the Caribbean. There was something familiar and definitive about our ride, the way the ferries cruised confidently into the port of Trikeri in Greece, sliding between adjacent fishing boats like they didn’t exist or matter, or simply knew their exact place in a routine-reassured coexistence. I couldn’t remember the last time I was more tired, jet-lagged, and happy.
Erik was leaning on a semirusted Toyota truck that looked like those death traps I used to drive around in Pelio. He was parked twenty feet from the ferry, radio on, driver’s door wide open. He was tan, in a T-shirt and jeans. Barefoot.
“Hey, Feta!” Erik yelled. “Kalos irthes.”
“I thought I was your only coach in Greek,” I said with a grin.
He mussed my hair and pushed my head back. “The last one didn’t have a garment bag. So you must be better.”
“Did he wear shoes?” I said, throwing my bag in the truck. “My uncle had this car. It’s a stick, you know.”
“Nah, this one doesn’t run on piss.”
“Let’s see if it runs at all,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Careful. I’ll put you in the back, and it’s a bumpy ride to the lodge.”
Warm wind hit our faces as Erik drove past the port. The sea, all dark, was eight feet from my right, often less, as Erik strayed to avoid potholes, dogs, and large spiders. I was half-asleep when we arrived at Moonhole, on the very west end of the island. The truck’s radio played Joy Division as we walked into a log cabin and collapsed in the dark.
The next morning I woke up alone, in a room within nature. There was no glass in the windows, nor a door separating the room from the patio, just holes in stone walls. Tree roots surfaced in the middle of the floor, and a bird’s nest clung to a round opening in the ceiling. Still in bed, I pulled my flight itinerary from under my sneakers. Erik’s handwritten note on it said: “Sleepy Greek, welcome to the Arch! There’s coffee. Ask Jeevan down the steps if you need anything. Back at noon. E.”
I couldn’t really make sense of where I was, this unfinished, deserted, 1960s James Bond–meets–National Geographic eco-cabin. What arch?
I needed coffee badly. I walked out onto the patio and forgot about it. Loud birds circled in the sky. Below me, in front of me, everywhere, the big blue ocean spread out. To my right were rocks, with trees bulging above and between them. To my left were more cabins made of gray stone and mortar, arranged at different levels among the land formations. Their walls had no corners or edges, just sweeping forms, as if extensions of the hill. A chill—less of a where-am-I, more of a when-am-I—ran through me.
I found Jeevan under a tree outside a cave house on a hundred-foot-long beach. He was busy rolling a joint, ten feet from a rod with a rusty bell tied to a fishing line that disappeared into the water. “Lazy fishing,” my father used to call that. There was no one else in sight.
My steps on the sand made Jeevan look up. “You Stathis?” He laughed. Late forties, skinny, years in the sun, he had more cloth in his hair than on his body.
“Yes, I’m Stathis. You must be Jeevan.”
“Welcome to Moonhole, my brother.” He lit the joint and offered it to me.
I paused. It must have been nine a.m., pre-coffee, pre-everything. Still, I was so mesmerized by the last-person-on-earth feel of the place that I wanted an in. I took a hit and felt it from my brain to my toes. I sat down under the tree, among tiny tortoises and what looked like broken whale bones. The breeze came in rushes, rotating the color of the sea from bright blue to darker to black. “Thank you, Jeevan.” I passed back the joint. “Damn strong.”
“See the moon?” He pointed to the sky. “In a couple of months we’ll see it through the arch. I keep the good stuff for then,” Jeevan said, scratching his sweaty armpit while having a puff. Then he got up and disappeared into the cave house.
I looked up to the fading moon. Everything seemed to be in a different orbit in this place, reversed or halted in yesteryear. The tortoises walked away from the water, and the whale bones were dark. I was trying to break one with a stone when Jeevan returned, holding a jar with something like fruit punch in it. “Erik’s a friend of mine. He told me to take care of you,” he said with a smile.
I looked at Jeevan and then at the jar.
“It’s rum punch! The colony’s drink!” he yelled.
I was ready to ask what the story was with the arch and the colony, to find out what on earth he was talking about, where the hell I was, but Jeevan took a sip and offered me the jar. I stared at it for a moment, wondering how long the punch had been sitting out. “Perfect,” I heard myself whisper as the sea changed again.
By the time Erik came back, I was passed out in our cabin.
I SPENT MY MORNINGS SMOKING, having “breakfast” with Jeevan, and swimming off deserted cliffs at Moonhole. When the sun settled good and the sea stopped changing colors, I’d have a siesta. In the afternoon I would join Erik and his young local friends in saving baby turtles from “evil, bloody birds” at the turtle sanctuary in Park Bay. We weighed and fed the turtles, checked for trauma from birds, and moved them around the shallow nursing pools, following the park custodian’s assessments on the turtles’ “preferences and well-being.” It was a skill I couldn’t crack; as if one needed some tuning-in, some leveling with the silent turtles before one got to understand them.
Erik’s entourage got bigger by the day. Kids kept showing up out of nowhere, while I couldn’t work out how these ten-year-olds made it from Port Elizabeth to the turtle sanctuary with no bus, cars, or bikes in sight. When I asked, they’d just shrug. I tried to explain what I saw by a bay of a small island without letting go of rationality; my Greek rural instincts failing me. I went as far as conceptualizing an HBR case study around them, hypothesizing on the kids’ timely appearances and disappearances, hoping to explain this mystery with a b-school operations principle that I thought I must be missing. They were unguarded, ubiquitous, screaming l
ittle monsters, splashing into the three-foot-deep pools, weight lifting the turtles, even throwing them to one another, ready to drop everything for a game of soccer on the beach. But the turtles were oblivious to their yells. They didn’t swim away, hide, or bite, adding to my Cartesian angst, which had been making me a touch less Greek every day since I left home a decade ago.
Late in the afternoon on Christmas, I jumped into the water to rinse off an hour of soccer. After some strokes, I pushed my head back for an almost 360-degree view of the horizon. I could hear the kids’ yells and the metallic sound of their footsteps on the sand, through the water. I closed my eyes and floated.
“Little punks! That was murder,” Erik said, handing me a Carib when I got out. He sat next to me on the beach. “Jesus!”
I smiled. “We stood our ground. For a bit.”
“Oh yeah?” He clung to my bottle, looked at me funny. “Last ten minutes I couldn’t even get close to the ball.”
I took a sip. “I couldn’t see the ball,” I said. “We started with twelve. I turn around and there are twenty-five, thirty. They kept popping up, like in a video game. Swapping sides, too. I didn’t know who I was playing with or against.”
“I know.” Erik nodded. “We’ll have to go shirts and skins next time.”
“Oh, you have a shirt?”
“I was hoping you’d leave one or two behind. As long as they don’t say EBS,” Erik said with a wink.
“You still got my socks I left at Ian’s.”
“Oh, those.” Erik smiled. “Those are at my dry cleaner’s back home.”
“You do own a suit, right?”
“Now!” He pointed a finger. “That’s irrelevant.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “You beat me one-on-one—okay, two-on-two, I get Learie, you get Gokul—and I’ll leave behind my polo shirt. If we kick your asses, we take Jeevan’s dinghy out to Tobago Cays on Sunday.”
“Feta, Jeevan’s bell’s gonna ring before you beat me in soccer,” Erik said. All Southie.
“The planet calls it football. You kick the ball with your feet. Noticed?”
Hotel Living Page 3
