Hotel Living

by Ioannis Pappos

  Erik shook his head and burped. “Right. Forgot you’re the first Greek who crossed the Atlantic. By the way, I’m Olympiakos.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, the French don’t burp?”

  “Fuck you, and excuse me?”

  “You heard me. And you look like a Panathinaikos.”

  “Dude!” I almost stood up. “Stop fucking with me. You speak Greek?”

  “That’s about it,” Erik said.

  I prompted him with a wave. “Spill the beans. Now.”

  “I had this summer job in Hyannis, I must have been twelve, thirteen. A Greek dude there, Constantine, great guy, was teaching sailing during school breaks. He and my brother put together a soccer team. We stayed in touch till he dropped out of school, broke up with his fiancée, and went to Afghanistan to fight with the tribes. I’ve only seen him—”

  “I’m sorry.” I had to wiseass: “There’s yelling in the background and I thought you said that a Greek went to fight in Afghanistan.”

  Erik’s tone changed, his eyes fixed way out on the sea. “Maybe you come from different parts of Greece,” he muttered seriously.

  I was lost. Did I just make fun of someone who was to be taken seriously? A Greek hero? His hero? I wanted to bargain, undo if necessary, but Erik was already up, looking far into the sea. I was ready to call a time-out when I saw a flock of birds three hundred feet out near the opening of the reef, free-falling into the water from fifty feet up. The children were already calling Erik, pointing at the birds and shouting, pushing a dinghy into the water, robbing me of my own turf.

  JEEVAN NEVER LOOKED AT ME without laughing or smiling. He didn’t ask me any questions or say that he wanted to visit Greece, like unguarded people do the moment they meet me. In fact, he didn’t care about any travel that didn’t involve his dinghy. And yet I couldn’t see anything self-absorbed about him. There was something reassuring in his lack of curiosity and ambition: a consistency, a finality in accepting his life and whereabouts that reminded me of my father in Trikeri.

  Jeevan was ten when his family joined Moonhole’s “colony,” a self-sustaining community founded in the ’60s by an architect and his wife. The couple built their home from stone, wood, and whale bones under a natural arch of rock overlooking the sea. The first time I saw their house from Jeevan’s dinghy, I thought I was looking at a Robinson Crusoe version of the Treasury in Petra. It was a deserted, multilevel domicile carved into the landscape, looking all mystical and sacred, humble and natural. The day before my last on the island, I talked Jeevan into climbing it with me.

  He hadn’t been inside for years, he told me. He gave me the tour, smoking, laughing, and talking about the natural ideals of the free spirit and sharing that had run the community, “the colectiva,” in the early years, before rocks fell from the arch and most of the houses were abandoned.

  “We never sold out. Maybe we never had the chance.”

  “Where did the people go?”

  “We’re good ghosts,” Jeevan said, laughing, and passed me the joint. “There’s still no electricity. Just kerosene and propane.”

  Right then and there I knew I’d miss Bequia. And yet, at the tip of this small island, I couldn’t relax. I kept speculating, unsure why Erik went for me. I was trying to find an algorithm and clone it—isn’t that what people do? Work on things? I knew I was good at interviews, at first impressions. I put people at ease. I was good at making peace with anything, but I couldn’t get my head around Erik.

  Jeevan lit one more joint in the roofless attic of the house under the arch. He’d never asked about Erik and me, as if he understood the whole thing but wasn’t the least interested or surprised. We sat there for a while, looking at the archipelago below us, and then I caught myself murmuring Ian Hunter’s ballad “I Wish I Was Your Mother”:

  And then I would have seen you, would have been you as a child

  Played houses with your sisters

  And wrestled with all your brothers

  And then who knows, I might have felt a family for a while.

  ERIK GRABBED THE TREE BRANCH above him and started doing pull-ups, half in the air, half floating on the sea, counting lifts in Greek. The trees above us filtered the sun. To our right and left, rocks held us, kept the green waters calm, forming a natural harbor within the sea. I saw small fish cruising against white and black pebbles at the bottom, and each time Erik pulled up, a bit less of his cock rose above the water till I couldn’t see it at all.

  “What happened to your dick?” I yelled.

  He let go of the branch and splashed into the sea-pool. “Go back to Greece!” he said when he got up. He spit seawater in my face.

  “Thought I was there for a moment. The sea, you counting in Greek . . .” I spit back but missed him.

  “Have you heard yourself speaking English?”

  “I try not to speak,” I answered.

  “When was the last time you were back home?” Erik asked, reaching for the branch again.

  I felt my fleeing-the-army insecurity rising, my Greek manhood threatened. “It’s been a while. Almost two years.”

  Erik glanced my way, pulling up.

  I didn’t say anything either, so he looked at me again.

  “I can’t go back. It’s just stupid, really,” I tried, casually. “I haven’t served in the Greek army.”

  Erik smiled. “And how does that make you feel?”

  “Educated,” I groaned.

  He did two more lifts before he let his body fall into the water again.

  “Well, you’re not the only Greek who skipped that one.”

  “Let me guess . . . Constantine!” I smiled.

  “Nope. His mother’s English. He didn’t have to. Dual citizenship or something.”

  “I guess he and I are from different hoods, after all.”

  “We got a chip there, island boy?”

  “Hell yeah,” I said. “And I can still join Uncle Sam, track him down in Afghanistan, and kick his Harvard ass.”

  Erik laughed. “I never said he went to Harvard, you punk!” He swam onto me and tried to push my head underwater, but I slipped to his side.

  “Island boy!” I said, raising my eyebrows. “How come you’re not in Beacon Hill for Christmas?” I asked.

  I caught his grin before he looked the other way. “’Cause I’m here with you,” Erik said, and I got jitters. The island laws I grew up with took compliments as shameful. A weakness for givers and receivers alike.

  “Or in the West Village, writing articles about the West Side Stadium?” I pressed on, pretending I missed his compliment, unable to handle what I wanted the moment it arrived.

  “You spend too much time online,” Erik said.

  I wanted an instant replay—I like being with you is what I wanted to say. But we rarely get a second go at anything, so I marched on, dragged down by sunk cost, betting on offense and hoping to recover by holding on to some principle I might not even have believed in. “Do I, now?” I said. “I read your article on EBS. ‘Sterilized’? ‘Ingenuity’? Not a Southie. You’re from Beacon Hill, so what’s up with the accent?”

  “You’re stereotyping me, Feta.”

  “Oh yeah? Did you pick up the talk during your Boston-I-Care outing?”

  “My pad’s in Roxbury, brother!” He grabbed my leg, pulling me closer. “Unlike the Greeks, I don’t live with Mom and Dad anymore.”

  “WASP-trash.”

  He laughed and lost his grip. I pushed his head under.

  “Greek prick!” he shouted, surfacing. “My article was work, just like hanging out with you.”

  “Urban planning in Bequia . . . Cut me some slack. I didn’t even know the island existed,” I said, and swam closer. “So, how’re things coming along?”

  “Slowly,” he said with a grimace.

>   “I guess you haven’t gotten the kids eBay accounts yet?”

  “No, but I can put you on Craigslist. And by the way, it’s urban and regional planning. We’re a full-service program.” Erik spit, and dived to mock-suck me.

  I saw his saliva on the water’s surface slowly diluting. I reached for it, tried to hold it together, but Erik touched my belly button, which made me ticklish. I grabbed his armpits and lifted him up.

  “Fuck, bro! Is your Greek dick ever not hard?”

  “I thought you didn’t stereotype.” I saw Erik’s full smile. “When you get close to me, I’m wood. Mathematics,” I said, and Erik kissed me.

  LATER, AT THE CABIN, AS I shot my come over his torso, I tasted the sea salt on Erik’s chin and fell backward, crashing into his arm with my shoulder. I tried to lift it, but Erik held me there.

  “We all deserve a pause after coming,” he said.

  “Even Saddam?”

  “Even Bush.”

  I lit a cigarette, took a drag, and looked at the bird’s nest on the ceiling. It was made from dirt and broken shells, perfectly curved, with a funnel-like entrance, holding on to nothing at the opening of the roof. Its acrobatic knack disturbed me; I saw our fragility in it. Erik and I were compatriots in leaving our upbringings. He was born in privilege but had a taste for discomfort and poverty. I was born with a talent for adapting. I tested well and left my backwater for good schools and jobs on his side of the world. Narcissistically, maybe, I saw us mirroring each other. He showed me how I should have grown up in Greece, taught me how I could have lived in Pelio, with no money, happy; how beautiful I used to be without knowing it. But then, I wasn’t poor anymore. I couldn’t go back in time; I couldn’t even go back to Greece, which had turned Bequia into a familiar parallel universe. I reached and kissed Erik to share the homesick sea-salt taste in my mouth.

  THE YEAR I MET ERIK, 2002, was the year I started writing everything down. In my e-mail I stored my homework, cover letters, and application memos, my travel plans and party invites. E-mail covered our lives and made us all actors in a kind of reality theater. Composing them, we got to flesh out arguments and—pre–instant messaging—deliver our punch lines. We had the luxury of making up different personalities. We got to be funny, sarcastic, caring; we even xoxo-ed people we wouldn’t stop to say hello to on campus.

  Except Erik. He had none of that. His e-mails were to the point, factual. Journalistic. He ignored notes with any “contextual or personality agenda”—from “real-life cowards,” from “e-lames.”

  I one-upped him, of course. I treated e-mail as a bore that needed containment. I used a PowerPoint-like writing mode, skipping verbs or nouns while scrutinizing his notes for any hidden signs of affection. I’d get an e-mail saying: “I think it’s time we hit the road again,” and I’d microanalyze every word. I’d see an us-against-the-world camaraderie in we hit. I’d romanticize the road.

  After Erik went back to Oxford, we began meeting at off-season places on our free weekends. Worked for me. There was a quiet luxury to those foggy beaches, an antidote to the busy bar and amphitheaters on campus. We walked on a pier in Normandy on a freezing night, the only ones at the boardwalk’s canteen. In Maincy, the echo of Erik’s voice through the rooms of the Vaux le Vicomte was the only sound. He couldn’t stop making comparisons. He argued about how much better life is in Brittany than Kansas. He defended the woman at the Vendée museum’s ticket counter for being five minutes late: “Why shouldn’t she have lunch at the same time as the rest of us?” he snapped to the complaining peacoated family from Seattle.

  By then our school days were reaching an end. Early that spring, both Alkis and I had accepted Associate positions at Command. Alkis would be in the London office; I was assigned to San Francisco. Paul broke up with his fiancée and decided to travel the world to “re-find” himself, and Erik finished his two master’s degrees at Oxford, in journalism and urban planning. Come July he’d be the manager of a west side—he was specific on that—community board in New York and would freelance for The Nation. He’d make a fifth of my base.

  I pictured Erik in two-dollar-pint dives with his mates in Manhattan and I got it: I loved Erik as a man, as a gentleman. He came from privilege, but there was an outcast within him. His was the ultimate intimacy that I had always craved. Erik was a city kid, running off in the summer to hang with the underdogs, breaking into the village church to steal oil and gas for the boat, speaking up for us when we were busted in whorehouses in Volos. True, times had changed. I’d be an Associate soon. I’d made my own choices and might even have deserved some credit. And yet I wanted Erik to see the childish way I wanted him, and for him to want me too, in that island camaraderie that was still haunting my mind.

  “I’M NOT COMING TO YOUR prom!” Erik said, checking his Eurostar ticket on the Sunday of our last weekend away in France.

  “The ball’s in Versailles,” I appealed. “They have some kick-ass gardens there. May come in handy when you plan your west side park.”

  “You’ll e-mail me the photos,” Erik grumbled, still shuffling tickets.

  “Right.” I looked at his bag and the Gare du Nord ticket booth. I checked for my keys, my hands in and out of my pockets, making the seconds register, making more of them. My Finance exam, in twelve hours, flashed before my eyes. A nod from him, just a fucking I know, and everything would be okay.

  “So, later,” he said, and punched me on the shoulder.

  “Sure.”

  I saw the back of his North Face jacket as he sped toward security.

  Driving back to Fontainebleau, radio off, throat sore, I kept policing my mind to stay in rejection-denial. Brainwashing myself that we were locked in a prisoner’s dilemma, in some sort of emotional inarticulation, though feelings were mutual.

  Monday, dry-mouthed with fever, staring at the exam sheet in front of me, unable to calculate the weighted average cost of capital, I was reflecting on Erik’s sobriety against the EBS audacities around me—surely a trigger for falling for him—when it came to me that, a master’s later, I was heading back to the Bay Area with a better salary, everything else pretty much equal. I failed.

  THREE

  AT COMMAND WE CAN’T HAVE fun without learning,” the head of human resources had told me over the phone after I accepted the offer. I thought she was kidding, sharing an office joke, but training was a fixation at Command: formal, informal, on the road, at client sites, “on the beach” (i.e., while waiting for client work), even during vacation at half-expensed “bettering retreats.” It never stopped.

  In July 2003, Command’s annual orientation was held outside Washington.

  “You are management consultants now,” a senior-senior Partner christened us. “The new Beaujolais. The new Associates. Within weeks, leaders of major corporations will start paying lots and lots of money for you to tell them how to run their businesses. Simple as that.” He looked around the auditorium, nodding to show how pleased he was with what he saw. “Who wouldn’t want your job?” he said. “Congratulations! You made it to Command!” he cheered. A nothing-can-go-wrong two-week fiesta was launched. A party of rising self-esteem.

  VPs kept stressing to us that we would approach corporate challenges in “dramatically better ways than our competitors.” That there were “no dead ends for Commanders.” All we needed to do was “trust the fundamentals, the frameworks that create shareholder value: the markets, the brands, the leadership of your colleagues.”

  Senior Associates put on superhero costumes to explain the “abundance paradigm.”

  “There are no circles,” they said. “No cutting the cake, no zero-sum perspectives on resources. Just spirals of growth.”

  Propaganda, sure, but I was attracted to the promise of making money. This was the pudding for ten years of studying, scholarships, and immigration forms. “Arriving”? Belonging to “the club”? Of course. But what intrigued me mos
t was Command’s credo that brainwashing a group of consultants—corporate observers and analysts, really; advisers, at best—about the sustainability of economic euphoria might in fact contribute to materializing it. As if the real economy was a state of mind: monitor it, believe in it, and it will keep growing. The paradoxical monitor-equals-influence law of quantum physics that I remembered from college had just gotten a tick. I saw myself as part of an experiment, about to walk a bridge that linked theory with business, and on the other side, the market’s dividends might even exonerate me for fleeing my family and Greece.

  I wasn’t alone. Everyone nodded along. My class rarely if ever challenged the partners. They were the legitimate source. Command’s perpetual-spirals-of-growth theory—seen as solid and joyful—was taken as a given. As a matter of fact, we rationalized it, and then some. We got into make-mine-a-double mode: “Fee-based consulting is old-school,” Alkis told me over dinner on Cape Cod during our end-of-training weekend retreat.

  “Come again?” I said.

  “Actually, consulting itself is just a stepping-stone,” he said, pausing to read my expression. “Don’t get me wrong, mate,” he hurried. “I’ll enjoy building brands as much as the next Commander, but I don’t see any reason that we should be loyal to either partners or clients.” He was drinking champagne, red wine, and a latte.

  “Alkis, we haven’t even started working yet,” I said. “And won’t you need favors from ex-clients in order to build your fund, or whatever you plan to do after you leave Command?”

  Alkis’s eyes softened, the way they had at EBS when he thought he was about to teach me something. “It’s our right to keep nexting, Stathis.”

  “Nexting? Excuse me?”

  “Clients will approach us with some real opportunities.” He leaned closer. “Clients will keep courting us to participate in their ventures. If you don’t like this one, you jump ship at the next one.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked skeptically.

  “I’m not talking about consulting. I’m talking equity. Listen, new brands will be made, whether we take advantage of it or not. Someone will. So think of your job like a computer game that keeps throwing cele-brands your way.”