I nodded along, speculating about how many more words like nexting and fucking cele-brands Alkis was going to come up with during dinner.
“Actually, it’s even sexier than that,” he smirked. “The markets will assess the brands that we’ll build, but pervasive brands will become markets themselves.”
I finished my red and let him finish.
“Of course they will. Strong market players will become market makers. Look around: Craig Venter, Google, Elon Musk, Abby Cohen, Miramax. I can go on and on. Even juveniles like Tyler Brûlé, they’re all Oprah-positioning fads and teams. Cele-brands today are both goods and markets.”
“Stop saying cele-brands,” I said seriously.
But Alkis went on. “Once you’re endorsed by a cele-brand, you pick up or license anything. You recognize what skill set you lack and you just go out there and buy it, or hire it.” He made a peace sign to our waiter and then gestured toward my glass.
Who was Tyler Brûlé? Was Elon Musk a perfume? I was disturbed by Alkis’s charade, and distracted by my glass and the surfer-looking waiter. See, after a year of living in Alkis’s shadow on campus, at times beneath his scolding eye, I wanted to understand what it was about his Mediterranean looks and English accent that allowed him to father me. Where did he get the balls? I tried to grasp him. The thing with Alkis was that he had no apparent flaws. You couldn’t find the bad stuff mixed with the good, like we see in people’s personalities and we have to accept or sometimes just tolerate—a C++ programming genius, say, who is also a nerd. When it came to Alkis, there were no tradeoffs. Much like our classmates had at school, Commanders gathered around him for both work and play.
“When you mix market playing with market making, you get unfair advantages,” I protested. “You let the winner take everything. You know that.”
“So?” Alkis shrugged, and the tattoo by the collar of his white shirt—a handgun—flickered. “Today, taking all, being ubiquitous, is more important than being correct or effective,” he said. “Being everywhere is being effective. Which is exactly what makes globalization our tribe’s high-end problem. I love this place.” He raised his glass.
I mimicked him, not sure to whom exactly he referred as “our tribe.” Greeks? MBAs? Consultants? Bankers? And what did he love? The restaurant? Command? Cape Cod? I looked at the boats at the far end of the restaurant’s patio, off the boardwalk, and thought of Erik, who had spent his summers here as a child with his family and his hero, Constantine.
I hadn’t e-mailed Erik. I didn’t want to legitimize his “later,” his illegit good-bye. Behind my ego was, of course, my fear of closure—Erik’s official rejection. Just like my mother in Trikeri, who refused to see doctors, I felt that not knowing was better than facing the facts. Ten years later and in a different part of the world, my demented choice to avoid closure with Erik was still a rural denial, a disillusioned ray of hope. Theoretically, technically, anything could still happen.
Alkis had moved on to “the anti-Western bias in Reuters’s Middle East coverage,” and I pretended to listen, wondering what I would do if Erik walked into the restaurant right at that moment. Or if I ran into him back at the hotel in Chatham—how would we react? We hadn’t communicated in six weeks. As far as I knew, he might have been in Cape Cod that very weekend. A scary thought, although at this particular time it played out as a happy encounter. “. . . until a bus blows up in central Jerusalem,” Alkis said, bringing me out of my zone. Then he waved “peace” to our waiter again, exposing his handgun tattoo again, and the world of juxtapositions we lived in which permitted me one more—one last, I promised myself—escape into Erikland. Had I said or done something better, the outcome might have been different with Erik. My what-if scenarios were all over the place—from sucking his dick better to meeting him before my “toxic MBA.” My magical endings varied wildly too: a fishing life with Erik and Jeevan in the Caribbean, building schools in South Boston, producing olive oil in Greece and exporting it to Manhattan restaurants for Alkis and his friends.
“Do you party these days?” Alkis asked as he massaged his shoulder, where the gun was.
A WEEK AFTER TRAINING, I signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. The following week, I got my first client, my first project—an hour’s drive north of Chicago.
“Your hotel will be the Deer Path Inn in Lake Forest,” Command’s in-house travel agent e-mailed me. “A historic property with stone fireplaces, antiques & artifacts. A landmark!” he elaborated in bold and italicized letters before requesting my confirmation so he could make the reservation.
“Is it a business hotel?” I replied.
“It’s the only game in town,” the agent responded.
Late on Sunday night, I checked in at the Deer Path Inn. The manager explained that half their rooms were suites. “Including the Mrs. Frederick, where you will be staying,” he said.
“That’s great.” I faked interest.
“Your suite is named after a hundred-year-old lady who lived with us for thirty years,” my porter later said, helping me to my room.
With us? Was he born in the hotel? He looked like he was fourteen. I checked my watch. It was approaching midnight. “I’m not afraid of ghosts,” I said, handing him a ten.
For the next three months I was expected to “live” on the nearby campus of the client, a major pharmaceutical, and help managers there shape up the research and development strategy for their anti-infectives franchise.
Command protocol had it that I, the Associate, should never leave the client’s premises before my project leader did, and, “it goes without saying, never, ever before partners.” Once in a blue moon one of them would drop by.
“What about the client?” I asked my project leader.
“Oh, don’t worry about them,” he said. “They’re home by six. That’s when we start the real work.”
I didn’t care if it was a 24–7 job. Lake Forest was beyond sleepy. It was a don’t-wake-me-up suburb. On the weekends I ran, just to have something to do, which exposed me to a suburban Children of Men dystopia: it looked as though Lake Forest had been hit by mass infertility from the 1960s till the late ’80s. And yet everyone there was still jogging away happily. The young ones performed synchronized runs in groups of four or five. Their positions were choreographed, forming some version of a Greek phalanx to keep them at a minimum distance of ten feet from any fifteen-mile-per-hour cruising Grand Cherokee. They always greeted me, all of them at once, even if I was running in the opposite direction on the other side of the street.
“Good seeing you too!” I paused and yelled the first time, assuming that, in spite of their age, they were interning at the client.
After two runs it became obvious that the typical Lake Forest house was the size of the forty-room Inn, and equally sedated. “Oh, it’s a wonderful community,” the Russian midtwenties Deer Path Inn receptionist told me.
By my third weekend, the quietness was intolerable; the sounds of wind and cardinals outside Mrs. Frederick’s window stirred up déjà vu of wanting to escape from my village. “Fuck this cemetery. Got to get out of here,” I said to her portrait and headed out for a sprint. Forty-five minutes later, my runner’s high bolstered me enough to e-mail Erik. By then we had had no contact for almost three months.
“What the hell,” I began. After five deleted drafts, I simply asked if he was still alive.
He responded immediately, which filled me with joy and speculation. “Feta! Good to hear from you. How’s the West Coast treating you?”
Was he casual? Indifferent? Opportunistic, even?
We went on exchanging weekly notes on work and Donald Rumsfeld until, a few Sundays later, Erik asked me if I’d be in New York “anytime soon.” I pressed the New E-mail button instinctively and requested a meeting that Friday with Andrea Farrugia, the VP who’d interviewed me at EBS; the only VP I knew at our New York office. “To get your perspective on the competitiveness of macrolides and quinolones,�
� I typed.
Andrea replied at midnight:
“I don’t consider myself an anti-infectives expert, but I’m happy to share my thoughts. I’m only available for lunch after a meeting at the Sloan Kettering Institute. How is noon at Sant Ambroeus on Madison? Andrea.”
I responded immediately, “Perfect.”
IT WAS THE LONGEST WEEK in Lake Forest yet. On Thursday at lunchtime I fled the client’s headquarters “to spend three and a half days with Erik in New York,” I bragged to Alkis over the phone while driving to O’Hare. “He said I could totally crash at his place . . . Mate? You there?”
“Is that your cell phone? Or do I spot some Southie in your accent?”
“You’re funny,” I said.
I heard Alkis exhale. “Have fun. But remember, don’t overcompensate. The Dubya’s got nothing on you.”
I didn’t react. This was a compliment; I didn’t know how to react.
“We don’t tell you this often, but you’re not a shabby guy, Stathis. So just be yourself.”
“I’m always myself.”
“Really? ’Cause Erik thinks you’re going to New York for work. And based on your e-mail, Andrea thinks you’re going there for your project.”
“Well . . . Sure, the project too. Two birds with—”
“You’re not the kid who stole gas to push the boat out anymore. Get it together, mate.”
“Cops. Gotta go!” I lied, and tossed the phone into the passenger seat.
I’d be in New York soon. I smiled.
ERIK’S OFFICE WAS IN THE McGraw-Hill Building, a depressing bluish-green art deco giant overlooking West Forty-Second Street. The second I entered the lobby I got the sense that I should take this skyscraper quite seriously, like it was a landmark or something. After what seemed to be a five-minute elevator ride, I found Erik in his two-room office on the twenty-sixth floor overlooking the Port Authority and the rest of Manhattan. Freshly shaved, in a blue oxford shirt and chinos, he was comfortable, his feet on his desk. Brown loafers—really. The other two people there, a young woman and a man, were typing in Hotmail accounts. Neither seemed older than twenty, and neither acknowledged me.
I walked over and offered my hand for him to shake, thrown by the J.Crew look.
Erik laughed, pushed my hand away, and said: “Good to see you, Feta. Here are the keys. I’ll see you at home.” Then he dismissed me with a wink.
When I reached his office door, I hesitated and looked back. He was already typing away again on his laptop, his feet again up on the desk. Give Stathis keys—check. Like I was a piece of admin.
Leaning back in my cab seat, I felt his keys in my pocket. I took them out and looked at them, two sorry yellow keys in a locksmith bangle, and replayed in my mind the ease with which Erik had granted me access to his pad, as though my impressions of and reactions to his place and stuff had little substance or were taken as a given.
My cab ride seemed shorter than the one in the elevator, and the driver handed me six back from a ten. I kept four and stepped out in front of Erik’s building, off Tenth Avenue in the west Twenties, adjacent to an abandoned elevated railroad that crossed his neighborhood and ran along the southwest side of Manhattan.
I entered Erik’s street-level studio, and there was practically nowhere to step. I was faced with a dilemma. I could either stand there or sit on his grimy futon, surrounded by high-tech lights, duct-taped cables, two bikes and locks, heating pipes, and musty Yellow Pages piled with keyboards wired to computer screens that never stopped flickering. Everything made the 250-square-foot space look like evidence of a future-gone-grim pad from Brazil. A four-foot-high storage loft above the kitchenette was his bedroom.
I moved a pair of smelly sneakers out of the way and sat on the futon. The screensaver on the computer facing me slide-showed beaches in Mozambique, soccer games in Africa, World Cup finals, deforestation, boxy Jeeps, Erik at the pyramids with his brother. All around me, equipment lights bleeped in abstract synchronicity, like a Xenakis mathematical concert. Erik’s place looked like it was perfectly lived-in, like a machine god had come down and paused life in an ideal chaos. I wanted to touch everything, like a schoolgirl nosing around. I made up rules to check myself: don’t log into my e-mail from his desktop; don’t look for photographs and notes, or for a second toothbrush in his bathroom. How about I watch some TV, I thought, but of course there was no set in sight. My mind was working up a headache. Maybe I could find some Advil by his bedside table or in his drawers. I got up, opened the door, and strolled down Tenth Avenue. Bought Nature via Nurture at 192 Books and ended up at the Empire Diner.
Four chapters later, Erik was finishing my burger at our booth. “I put my TV on the pavement when Bush got elected,” he said, stuffing French fries into his mouth.
“You killed your TV?” I joked.
“I needed a hiatus,” he mumbled with a full mouth. “For a bit. But it didn’t really work. I watch news online now, streaming.”
“How’s the quality?”
“Worse than your porn,” Erik said, smiling.
We sat there in silence for a second. We were the only customers. Empty bistros in Normandy flashed though my eyes. “Have you seen Sex, Lies, and Videotape?” I asked.
Erik stopped eating my fries. “I never saw that one. But if you’re referring to what I think you are—” He wagged his finger at me in a Clinton–Lewinsky way. “Not my style.”
I didn’t care if he was talking cheating, amateur porn, or any perversion or fetish I might have triggered. I was busy amortizing his shyness, his exclusivity on me. On us. I believed what I wanted to believe.
Erik picked up a toothpick and my book. “So, how you’ve been?” he asked, skimming the back cover.
Alone, I thought. “Busy,” I said.
“How’s Chicago?” Always browsing.
“Lake Forest? A joggerland.” I stuck to short responses, few words, my rally against his business-as-usual catch-up, as if the whole summer that we didn’t speak had never happened. Ask me why I’m here, motherfucker.
But Erik kept on chitchatting, “. . . bio versus pharmaceuticals versus generics . . . ,” his toothpick fencing.
“You know something?” I cut in. “I’m here to see you.”
“Wanna get takeout and go home?” he asked with a cocky smile.
Fuck takeout and fuck you. “Let’s get rubbers first,” I countered, pathetically trying to handle—undo the undoable, really—my perfectly dismissed confession. I wanted to whack his fucking face, so I walked up to the register and paid.
That night I couldn’t get any shut-eye on Erik’s futon because of the high-tech indoor city lights, so we slept and fucked sideways in the four-foot-high storage bedroom above his stove. At some point, a used rubber fell into a pot below.
“Why do you spell Erik with a K?” I asked, looking at the rubber floating on two-day-old marinara sauce.
“I feel more Scandinavian,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“Fewer hang-ups. I throw away the sauce, rinse the pot, and keep eating.”
I fell asleep with my arm under his neck.
AT FIVE TO NOON THE next day I was at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue. There were no stools at the bar. The two guys standing there, one in aviator sunglasses, were drinking espressos while reading Italian newspapers. Farther inside the restaurant, women were already having lunch, most of them on their cell phones.
Andrea walked in, sparkling like her pearls. She was in her late thirties, about five-ten, with long straight blond hair and an American clean and busy-looking face, wearing a cypress-green coat and matching scarf. “Best espresso in the city,” she said with a firm handshake through butter-soft leather gloves.
“Excellent,” I said. “Thank you for making the time.”
“Of course. We call it Lunch and Learn.” Andrea nodded to the maître d’, who approached her and whispered something in her ear. She nodded with a confident grin, and we were led to a corner t
able. A double espresso was placed in front of her as we sat down.
“Thank you, Todd.” She took her gloves off, studying me. “So, how are things in Chicago?” she asked and immediately busied herself with a PalmPilot, or some such device I’d never seen before, which slid open and unfolded three times into two screens and a keyboard. Suddenly her fingers froze. She looked up. “Wait. Let’s get to know each other. Who are your sponsor, mentor, and buddy?”
I knew two of the three, though I wasn’t a hundred percent sure who was what, or what the titles meant exactly. I was ready to share some names when Todd leaned over me: “Would you like something to drink?”
“Just water.”
“Try the espresso,” Andrea demanded. “We won’t have time for coffee after lunch.”
“Espresso.”
“Good.” She looked pleased. “So what’s going on in Chicago? And why are you here?”
I took a sip of water carefully; her Batman accessory was taking up half the table. “It’s a fun project,” I said. “We are building their 2010, 2020 anti-infectives strategy, which is exactly the type of work I always wanted, you may recall from my interview. I—”
“Stop,” Andrea interrupted. “Let me tell you what’s going on in Chicago.” She downed her espresso. “They need speed and innovation. As simple as that. They need speed to deal with the blessing turned curse of having too many drug candidates in the preclinical stage. Of having too many choices. And they need innovation to move beyond the pharma sector’s expectations. Can we do that? Can we fix their opportunity cost of predictability? Can we speed up their disgracefully slow growth?”
One of her screens flashed and I thought of Erik’s apartment.
Todd looked at me. “Would you like to hear the specials?”
“Just tell him the signatures,” Andrea ordered.
I SPENT THE REST OF the fall traveling between Lake Forest and Manhattan. Fourteen-hour workdays were followed by weekends, seven of them, with Erik. After one of those Friday-evening flights, I ran into schoolmates from EBS. There was an assumption in our greeting, an implicit expectancy, as if Terminal C at LaGuardia were an alumni lounge. Jokes about “the coalition of the willing” mixed with talk of Starbucks’s European expansion and the new governor of California. Then more jokes about Alkis and his latest girlfriend, and, although we parted with unrealistic promises, for the first time I felt somewhat integrated into my new world, made up of work and Erik.
Hotel Living Page 5
