Hotel Living

by Ioannis Pappos

  “That’s good news,” I said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” she said, flattered, almost flirty.

  Andrea wants my validation?

  She took a sip from her Airborne-Perrier, which dripped orange from her red lipstick. Then she reached into her reptile-leather briefcase and handed me a folder.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “This is what I’m going with for the pitch,” she said busily, checking her phone.

  I looked at the folder’s title and almost laughed. “Er,” I said, and made myself cough. “This is Command’s recommendations to their number-one competitor, from few months ago.” What’s going on here? I thought. “We’re not supposed to even look at this.” Let alone use it.

  “It’s only directional.” Andrea played with her phone nervously. “Stathis, you’re in the service business now. This is leveraging our knowledge bank. It’s called best practices. It helps our clients.” She started playing with her pearls, ’cause she was fucking lying. This was against Command policy. You can’t have teams working for competitors see each other’s work. She knew that. She finally looked at me. “I just e-mailed you a copy of this deck. Get online, delete the graphs that I have already marked, and change names, of course.” She rolled her eyes. “Just go through the whole thing and treat it with some imagination. I want to leave something behind with them, today. Now, I gotta call Washington. What time is your flight to LA?”

  This was fucked up. I wanted to talk to Alkis. “I’m boarding in twenty . . .” I tried.

  “No worries. We’ll get you upgraded on the next flight out.” She smiled harmlessly, but I had frozen.

  “Stathis, this is common practice. We’ve been using best practices to position our clients for success since long before you joined us. Honestly, if you can’t support me on this I’ll have to keep that under consideration for the rest of our work in Lake Forest. Where are you staying in LA?”

  I leaned back on the sofa to take the situation in. “I think the Chateau Marmont,” I mumbled slowly. “But they are full,” I added quietly. What the fuck was I saying? What the fuck did my hotel have to do with any of this? Crazy bitch.

  “Andrea, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this copy-and-paste thing between competitors—”

  “Okay, I’ll call Washington and explain that you’re not capable of on-the-fly teamwork. I’ll ask for remote support from there.” She picked up her phone again, but paused and looked at me. “What is it going to be?”

  Anyone who has ever worked in the service industry knows that when you join a firm, you want to do everything by the book. But you often find yourself debating how this book translates to the real world, to the client’s wish list, or to your VP’s demands. You don’t want to be difficult. Sometimes you don’t even want to deal, so you escape to comforting thoughts. I would see Erik soon. Everything would be all right.

  “I don’t want this to have my name on it,” I murmured, and opened my carry-on to get my laptop.

  “Who said it ever would?” Andrea asked and gave me a glance like I was a toddler riding my first bike. “Great!” she added. “I knew you wouldn’t want to start at Command as anything less than a straight team player. Don’t forget to highlight speed and innovation. I want it in every slide possible. I’ll get you to the Chateau. Let me call Washington and then Andre.”

  “Who’s Andre?” I asked.

  “The Chateau’s owner.”

  FOR THE TWO NIGHTS THAT Erik stayed in LA, I checked out of the Chateau Marmont and into the Standard, down the street.

  “Will you cut off the labels in your shirts too?” Alkis laughed when he found out about my “downgrade.”

  I said I would, barely listening to him, counting down to Erik’s arrival.

  “Genius to moron,” my indisputable mentor said, pitifully, and I was back.

  “Actually,” I said, “how about I stick ‘Armani’ on your rubbers so your girlfriend might finally get to have an orgasm.”

  To Alkis’s surprise, I didn’t pick Erik up from LAX. I didn’t even offer, trying to somehow square things with Erik in my mind. Then, of course, he didn’t mention needing a ride, feeding into our rivalry.

  At the Standard, I opened my room’s door to a flashing camera.

  “Feta Cheese!”

  Erik carried a bag the size of my work briefcase. He was bloody good-looking. “My fancy, horny Greek!” he yelled, surveying the room. “It’s good to see you, brother.” He gave the room another once-over and then said: “And your minibar! Let’s get you drunk and throw you in the pool.”

  “Let’s totally fuck,” I said, and belts and buckles hit the floor.

  “Hey, I gotta be out of here by six,” Erik said. “Okay if I borrow your rental?”

  It took me a second to breathe, but by then we were making out, so I got away with it.

  “You bet.” I played too cool to ask why. What the fuck for?

  “You okay?” Erik asked when I couldn’t come—my mind was spinning, speculating about Erik’s business in LA. “You used to bust a nut on demand. What happened? Did you just fuck the doorman?” he laughed.

  “Yikes,” I whispered.

  He squeezed my balls, which made me super hard. I blushed, bit his neck, and came soon after.

  “GET YOUR DUBYA, YOUR WALLET and come to Matsuhisa for dinner with us,” Alkis ordered me as soon as I answered my cell phone, a little past seven that evening.

  “Negative,” I said. “Erik and I are meeting a Greek guy who dropped out of Harvard to go fight in Afghanistan . . . You there?”

  “What’re you talking about?” Alkis asked, clearly amused.

  “Not exactly sure yet. An old friend of Erik’s, a London Greek, Constantine something, happens to be passing through LA. He is on his way to Iraq via, um, Mexico? He became—” I snorted—“a mujahid in the ’80s. He is a war correspondent now.”

  There was another pause.

  “Actually, I’m looking forward to this,” I said, trying to cover up my anxiety before meeting my opposite: this guy who gave up London for the Middle East, my hero’s hero, plus a Greek. A triple hat.

  “Are you guys doing drugs?”

  “No!” I choked while lighting a cigarette.

  “Hold on a minute,” Alkis said. “Is this the guy from that shipping family who they thought was dead? The one that Paul’s ex-girlfriend dated for like a week, ten years ago?”

  This was getting complicated.

  “No clue,” I said, letting my smoke out slowly. “But I guess we’ll find out.”

  AN HOUR LATER I WAS driving Alkis’s rental on Sunset, hitting holiday traffic. No one was moving except a guy behind me riding a Ducati, changing lanes. As his BMW jacket zigzagged into my mirror, Alkis’s question about Constantine began to make sense. I thought maybe I had overlapped—I must have—with some of Constantine’s brothers or cousins right after Trikeri. At thirteen I got a scholarship for the premier high school in Athens. It was a Greek institution, where 80 percent of the students were sons of politicians or benefactors and came to school in BMWs. The rest of us, from around the country, came on grants. We didn’t mingle.

  I had been stuck in traffic for a good hour and a half when Erik rang.

  “Embros,” I said.

  “Where are you?” Erik ignored my Greek.

  “In Echo Park, I think. Trying to find your no-sign bar on Sunset.”

  “It’s a former cop hangout.”

  “And that will help me spot it how?”

  “Just a drink-ordering tip.”

  “You’re worried. You shouldn’t be,” I said, and Erik hung up.

  When I finally found the garage-looking building, the only sign said cocktails, in neon. I walked in and saw Erik seated next to a skinny guy at the end of the bar.

  I was hearty, Greek: �
�Kalispera! Eimai o Stathis.”

  “My name is Zemar,” said Constantine, looking in my direction but not straight in the eye.

  I sat on Erik’s right and ordered a beer. On his left, this Zemar or Constantine or whoever, bearded, tired, with veins and wrinkles everywhere, with nothing Byronesque about him, held his bottle with both hands. I could smell his body odor from my seat.

  Erik was in the middle of a story about the last time they had seen each other, in Egypt, but Zemar was drifting away. He didn’t blink, even when he was asked to answer a question or pushed to deliver the punch line.

  Suddenly, Zemar woke up: “How is your brother?” he asked Erik.

  “Kevin is great,” Erik replied. “He moved to New York about a year ago. He’s dating this fashion girl. My mother wants grandchildren, so the pressure’s on.”

  Zemar forced a smile. A couple of teeth were missing.

  “He would have stopped over had he known you’d be in LA,” Erik said.

  “Is he still working with your father at the hospitals?” Zemar asked.

  “Well, yes and no. They started a biotech fund together. And now a bunch of Kevin’s mates from Wharton have jumped in. It’s actually taking off,” Erik said with a who-would-have-thought shrug. He quickly transitioned into a story about when Zemar dropped out of Harvard fifteen or twenty years ago and disappeared into the Hindu Kush mountains to fight against Red Army leftovers and Arabs. He asked Zemar about the tribes’ religious conflict with Islam, about paganism and mountain legends. Honestly.

  Still, Zemar took him seriously. He answered slowly, patiently, even smiled here and there, showing more wrinkles as he defended Islam from Erik’s “Hindu mountain spirituality.” But Erik kept going.

  “I do not like horned phantoms!” Zemar told Erik at one point, and I almost spilled my beer. Were they on drugs? We were post-9/11, in the middle of an illegit invasion, and Erik, a journalist, was chatting with a war correspondent about fucking ghosts and Sanskrit epics that I bet he’d Googled. Or had they made sure they rushed through the good stuff before I arrived? Was this a conspiracy?

  “Where I live these days, they have a white stag for a crest,” I said. “A Russian told me that Alexander the Great, a Greek, captured it. Maybe he dragged it all the way out to Afghanistan and became a ghost,” I said with a grin.

  Neither of them laughed or said anything. Zemar’s grip on his bottle got tighter, his yellow fingers brighter. Erik looked at me—for the first time that evening—like I had committed sacrilege. He turned back to Zemar: “When is your wedding?” he asked.

  “We are still working on the date. Jennifer is converting.”

  “Becoming Greek Orthodox?” I said. No doubt in my sound.

  “Muslim.”

  I was drinking fast, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass if he had changed his name, his religion, or his fucking sex, for that matter. But a high school pride, an elemental instinct, had been ticked off, and I wanted to be acknowledged as one Greek to another. “Where do the tribes stand post-9/11?” I asked.

  “I am not going to discuss any US involvement,” Zemar said with an air of statesmanship, setting boundaries.

  “I’m sure it’s hard for you,” I pushed. “I mean, staying objective. From a warrior to a correspondent . . .”

  “Why?” Erik jumped in. “Isn’t that what you consultants are going for? Advise and stake? Alkis and his equity-based fees you make fun of?”

  Was Erik in love with him? Or was Zemar just Erik’s wet dream of a career path? A guy who’d been given all the opportunities in the world but chose extreme hardship and poverty, who reduced Erik’s hanging out with Melissa to a fucking hors d’oeuvre. “If you see the two as comparable,” I said to Erik, looking at Zemar.

  Zemar let go of his beer and stared back at me. His bottle was full. “Shouldn’t we?” he said. “We don’t live in a lab. There’s an opportunity cost in everything we do. Didn’t they teach you that at EBS?”

  “Isn’t your family in shipping?” I asked.

  Erik’s lips parted. An I-don’t-believe-you’re-going-there expression was on his face.

  Zemar locked on me. “How big’s your dick, mate?”

  “He’ll fill you in on the opp cost there. But I can tell you it’s Greek,” I said. “And since we’re not in a lab, maybe you’ll get a better bang for your buck if you invest in sustainability. Like labor issues. Or, God forbid, if you pay taxes on your family’s vessels instead of flying first-class to Peshawar.”

  “Shut up, Stathis!” Erik said.

  “No worries, I’m done,” I said, and stood up like a madman. I tossed a ten onto the bar and started for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Erik asked.

  I turned. “To the Chateau Marmont,” I said, surprisingly together. “To get drunk and get blow room-serviced for Christmas. Which, by the way, I can afford, after working my ass off in Lake fucking Forest.”

  I got out onto the street in a rage. Racing down Sunset, changing lanes like a motherfucker, I wanted to make a U-turn, go back, and beat the shit out of that beer-petting freak, and Erik. But I saw a no u-turn sign—a sign, I thought—and sped onward. I checked in at the Chateau without checking out of the Standard.

  Maybe because of my flustered face, or for some reason, Josh at the front desk upgraded me to a cottage at the far end of the property. “An elevated house with a private balcony overlooking LA,” Josh said.

  I opened the cottage door—no luggage, no porter—and saw an old wooden floor. The cottage smelled like my grandmother’s house in Pelio. I downed both minibar vodkas and called for more. But I was restless, I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t sit still. My Erik-anxiety and my grandma’s smell were creeping up on me.

  I walked out and into the garden, all the way to a dead end with a hidden table behind the pool. Two girls were there, looking as if they had just stepped out of a Pimm’s commercial.

  Was I at the party in Bungalow 3 the night before, the one wearing a red scarf asked. She had a certain birthright in her voice, a curiosity toward me mixed with boredom.

  “I’m from Greece,” I said, for no reason.

  Was I there working? her friend asked me while petting a golden retriever.

  Was she asking if I worked in LA? Or at the hotel? Suddenly all I wanted was to go back and hide in my room.

  “I lost a friend,” I said, and turned around.

  In the cottage I drank from the room-serviced bottle till I passed out with my cell in my hand.

  Erik’s number buzzing on my palm woke me up. I jumped. “Erik,” I answered before it got to ring twice.

  “The game’s on,” Erik said.

  “Where are you?” I heard my own voice, sounding sleepy but thrilled.

  “Outside the Chateau Marmont, on Sunset. I think.”

  “Walk to your right. You’ll see a door with no sign on it. Before the parking lot. I’ll meet you there.”

  I left the cottage barefoot and rushed down from the balcony, three steps at a time. Pacing through the garden toward Sunset, I cursed the cross-shaped pond that I had to navigate around. I opened the garden door and found Erik standing on the pavement with his bag.

  “Wanna play?” He grabbed my hair and kissed me. I felt his tongue in my mouth. “Hey—” he slowly pushed me back—“Zemar’s off to Mexico tomorrow and needs a place to crash. Do you think we might have a sofa for him?”

  “We’re good,” I said, and tried to look into his eyes, but Erik shoved his tongue back into my mouth.

  I knew he wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for Zemar being desperate, and yet little was better than nothing.

  “Mint,” Erik said, pulling out.

  SMOKING NAKED IN BED, I punched Erik’s shoulder. He snatched my hand and I knew, right then, that things were about to change.

  “Why don’t you just
say it,” Erik said, and looked at me.

  “I totally fucking love you.”

  He took a drag from my cigarette, first time, and palmed the right side of my face with, what I saw, care in his eyes. “I better swallow you then,” he said.

  ERIK’S SNORING NEXT TO ME woke me up. I stared at him, trying to spot REM in his eyes, his involuntary smiles or angst, his dreams, but I couldn’t. Then I looked at my watch, which said six a.m. I got up but couldn’t find my boxers. I picked up Erik’s from the floor and threw them on, then walked into the living room to a smell stronger than it had been the evening before. There was incense burning, and wood. Zemar was sleeping on the sofa next to his traveling bag, which had been half emptied all over the floor. It seemed like everything Zemar had was in pairs. There were two cell phones, two beaten-up passports—one British and one that I couldn’t make out, not Greek—two linen scarves, English pounds, bandages all over, two syringes, a standard Ronson lighter, and a duty-free pack of Marlboros. Two books lay on the coffee table: The Plague of Fantasies was next to Michelin’s map of Mexico.

  I took a pack of cigarettes, along with his lighter, and walked out to the balcony. I sat on the top step and lit up, dazed by the city lights still clear below, a sparkling chaos that beckoned me to sort it all out. I spotted Sunset and then gazed east, trying to discover both Echo Park and the reason I lost it. I remembered yelling at Zemar and, through him, at Erik and myself, battling posh communism and perhaps my walking away from home. Two birds with one stone, I thought, and smiled. I dragged on my cigarette on the balcony’s concrete floor and drew a matrix, just the way I nailed case studies at work: X-ing privilege against collectivism and Y-ing life goals against upbringings. Erik and I were at odds in this two-by-two, but a year on, finally, it looked like our prisoner’s dilemma might be giving in. I said I love you, he swallowed my come. Was I decoding? Was I translating? “None of your fucking business,” I murmured to myself, laughing, and manned up to walk down the steps and smell the roses in the garden.