“Lambskin,” she said, satisfied. “Should we get some appetizers too?” She made a naughty face.
“I’m Greek. I’m always hungry.”
She put the menu down. “Okay, let’s not confuse things. We’ll get to your Greekness in a second.” She corrected her posture. “Stathis . . .” She tilted her head sideways. “You will be in Paris for a while. Of course, I will be dropping in to provide you with thought leadership, but you will have to make some tactical decisions here by yourself. Is there anything I, we, can do to help? Let’s get personal!” She let out a nervous laugh.
Who was we? Command? The partners? Alkis? Someone she was fucking on the client’s side? And what did she want from me this time? I couldn’t wait for this project to really take off, and then end, so I could get back to the States to be with Erik—whatever that meant. “I’ve done it before,” I said.
“Of course you have. Still, being away is never easy. Okay, let me start.” Her voice turned girly. “These days, because of my fiancé, I live between New York and Washington.”
“You live in Philadelphia?” I said.
“Let’s order,” she said, thrusting her scarf off.
The light hanging above our table hit the pattern of gold skulls on her scarf, piercing my eyes. What’s wrong with me? Work’s the only certain thing in my life. “It was a joke,” I tried.
“It was a great joke,” she said flatly, then ordered a couple of appetizers, reading as much as possible from the menu, working on her French accent: “. . . raviolis frais au saumon. Et champagne, s’il vous plaît.”
“Dirty vodka, straight up,” I told the obviously American waiter. “So,” I paused before my recovery line. “You were saying your boyfriend lives in Washington?”
“My boyfriend lives in several places. His job takes him all over the world.”
“I know who you’re dating,” I said. The whole company did.
“Oh . . .” She tried to mask her brag as surprise. “You do? How come?”
“My Productivity Assistant told me. I mean, the guy runs a Fortune 100 company.”
“Oh, that . . .” She waved her hand dismissively.
Yes, that. That’s why you made Partner, remember? When I brought up Porter’s Five Forces, you said you hadn’t seen the movie yet; and now you want to provide me with “thought leadership”? The only thing you’re providing me with is the cure for my hangover, with your first-class narcissism. “I got confused when you said boyfriend,” I said with the tiniest of smiles. “He is sixty-five, seventy? Man-friend, maybe?”
“Whom are you dating, Stathis? I didn’t have a chance to ask my PA.”
“No one,” I murmured.
“And why is that? Handsome, smart Greek guy like you?”
I was debating between It’s none of your fucking business and I couldn’t find good dick in New York. But plan C took over. “I’ve had commitment anxiety since 9/11,” I said as touchingly as I could.
Andrea looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, did you lose someone?”
“No. But I’m still dealing with the aftermath.”
“Stathis, it’s 2005. Maybe . . .” It took her a second to work out that I was BSing, but it was 9/11, so I had PC immunity—she couldn’t nail me on this one. She audited me for a moment, possibly weighing a full-blown assault—but then again, it’s hard to read through Botox. “Work!” she announced, walking away from the turbulence. “We discussed lots of therapeutic areas today during the client meeting. Antiangiogenics, metabolics, etc., and most of them may well end up being within the scope of the prioritization exercise that we’ll do for them, but I believe there’s real value in some more peripheral areas.”
“Like?” I asked.
“Like . . . like the lifestyle space that was brought up.” She looked away, as if thinking this through for the first time.
“You were the one who brought it up,” I said.
“I did, and for good reason. It’s an area where even marginal investments from the client could attract significant benefits for them—”
“I think it’s interesting to put a light on Lifestyle,” I interrupted her. “I don’t see why it can’t be included in our pre-evaluation phase.”
“I believe it should receive more attention than just that,” she said, playing with her pearls. “I want a Command squad team to screen everything out there that could be an alliance or a potential joint venture for the client. From cosmeceuticals all the way to nourishment, weight, and hormone lifestyle opportunities. It’s bio-life sciences, Stathis.”
This didn’t make any sense. “Lifestyle is an interesting space, Andrea, but . . .” I shrugged my shoulder. “You were in the conference room. They talked unsatisfied areas, diseases begging for breakthroughs.”
“Aging is a disease too.”
I couldn’t tell where was she heading with this crap.
“Andrea, they were talking RNA, DNA transistors. Pill nanomachines. Don’t you think they are putting real innovation at risk if they move away from their core science?”
“It’s all out there!” she shouted. “They should just go and buy innovation!” Some Russians next to us turned. I had never seen her lose it like that before.
An intense silence followed while she recovered. Composed again, she went on reciting the strategy trend of the moment: a fad in which big corporations would pay lip service to breakthrough work but actually outsource it, and instead push their internal focus to side areas, like innovative go-to-market, management, and operational processes.
“I thought you believed in hard-core innovation,” I said carefully. “I didn’t realize that you had become a Bhidé fan all of a sudden.”
“Stathis, you think you’re so clever, it’s almost cute. Almost. What you don’t understand is that I don’t give a damn about the HBS loser you’re trying to intimidate me with. And you know why? Because I have Greeks like you to write HBS case studies for me.”
“Why did you join Command?” I asked her.
“Why did you move to the States?”
I didn’t respond. To fuck Erik?
“Allow me,” Andrea said, leaning forward from across the table. “You moved to the States to trade up. Whatever that was for you. Your work, your relationship, your one-bedroom. That’s why people move to the States. To trade up. Our country was founded on Wall Street principles.”
“How does one trade up a cosmetics baron?” I asked.
“With a buyout emperor,” Andrea replied without thinking, and fuck! Now her whole bio-lifestyle spiel made perfect sense. Suddenly there was no doubt as to why she was pushing for beauty creams. It was pretty basic, really: even a simple announcement by the client that they were shifting their focus to Lifestyle, and their valuation would get a hefty correction. Her fat man-friend could buy the client at a discount.
“Suppose we talk them into Lifestyle,” I said. “Hasn’t your man-friend gone shopping for biotechs these days?” Her bracelets clattered. “Allow me, now,” I went on. “Coincidence, I’m sure, but . . .” I made a what-do-I-know face. “Just thinking out loud—couldn’t someone speculate some convenience here too? Say, an acquisition? Look at biotech versus cosmetics multiples, and—”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t agree with you,” Andrea said, shaking, which made me register that we were not talking management consulting anymore. We were talking insider trading. I had to think fast and smart—and where the hell was Alkis when I really needed him?
“Andrea, you cannot not understand what I’m saying and not agree with me. Pick one.”
SIX
THE MOMENT WE WRAP THIS project I’m done with Command,” Alkis told me on the Lancaster patio. He had just gotten back from an interview with a bank in London. It was our second month in Paris, and Andrea’s potential plot had brought us closer. He poured half of my scotch into an empty glass. “This business with Andrea is just nuts. The bitch has no idea what she is doing,” he said, and motioned for a
drag of my cigarette.
I passed him my smokes. I could tell that his interview had not gone well.
“Why would I want to make a million off her insider job, risking my name, when I can make twenty by building it up legitimately?” Alkis said.
He and I had finally reached some balance. We divided up the work. He’d be creating the client’s alternate R&D portfolio strategies, and I’d evaluate them. Of course, there was some overlap when it came to deciding metrics of success, or when we picked distinctly different R&D strategies worth evaluating; and we shared poor Gawel, our Business Analyst, who swung between reporting to an evil and a less-evil project manager.
“Let me guess,” Erik told me over the phone as I entered my room after thirteen hours of nonstop work that Sunday. “You think you are the less-evil manager.”
“I’ll give you that one, ’cause I’m exhausted,” I said, checking my watch. It was half-past midnight.
“You know that you can be intellectually obnoxious, right?” Erik went on, but I didn’t pick up on any lecturing in his voice. He came across as protective, if anything.
I threw my laptop on the sofa and hopped onto the bed, crashing into the breakfast-request card on my pillow that doubled as my wake-up call at seven each morning. “Try intellectually dead right now,” I said.
“That’s funny.” Erik snorted a laugh. “I leave Port Authority when you leave your client, but in a different time zone.”
“Stop bragging.”
“That’s why you make what you make. I didn’t go for that,” Erik said without hesitation.
I thought of his father’s hospitals and his mother’s book deals. Erik was judging me from behind trust-fund doors. I wanted to rally all the juice left in me and fight back, end things right there, but a deeper fear stopped me. Whether his approach to life was a result of luxury or principles, I was still drawn to his fuck-you independence, to his carelessness, which I could never experience except through him. I was the Senior Associate who fell for the communist, and I brought home the bacon. Now we could do anything we wished. Surf between self-interest and self-respect, live the quantum life I studied: impossible for anyone to know both our positions and our momentum. We could get some curry with Melissa before she took us to the airport, fly off to help tag threatened sharks in the Bahamas. We could check TomDispatch’s US imperialist theories on our BlackBerrys during French Open breaks. But how do you confess to that? How do you commit to spontaneity when its definition is its undefined randomness? How do you write an algorithm for chaos? “Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin,” von Neumann said. Isn’t staging a lifestyle making a joke out of it? Out of us? Wouldn’t I be exposed to Erik as a poser? Wouldn’t I lose him? So I had to apply myself harder to the one thing I had: work. I had to stay on top of things, become more and more what Erik officially condemned while hoping that deep down he understood our unspoken symbiosis, and that he found me smart and interesting and potentially lovable.
“Which is such a stupid New York thing,” Erik said, bringing me back. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I see,” I said.
“Listen,” Erik said. “How you choose to work is your business. But the way you’re working right now can bloody kill you.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you sound caring,” I tried.
“I want you to be good at what you do,” Erik said. “How’s your sleep?”
“I have a feeling that tonight’s going to be just fine.”
“I miss you, man,” he said.
“I think tonight’s gonna be excellent.”
“Clown.”
We laughed. I grabbed a pillow to shove behind my head, and Erik said: “It would be fun to do a road trip in France. We could even go for a run in the forest, in Montmelian.”
My exhaustion vanished. I didn’t need a pillow; I was already up. “Really?” I said.
“Would love that, amigo. But I have to be in Tahoe end of this month. There is a summit I have to cover for The Nation.”
A brief silence followed.
“Wanna . . . come along?” Erik said timidly, and I felt a second rush.
“That’s a tricky one,” I said cautiously, detaining myself. “I was planning a Friday-to-Monday trip to New York in a few weeks. I guess I could steal an extra day and meet you in San Francisco. I still live there, remember?”
“It’s a date.”
Six hours later I was up by myself—no latte, no knocking at my door.
Walking on the Champs-Élysées’ forty-foot-wide sidewalks, the stores still closed, everything clean and in place, my whole life felt simple, really. The client, Andrea, my sister, the Greek army. Riding in an empty train, I imagined my weekend with Erik in San Francisco. I pictured us driving up the coast on Route 1, or in Tahoe, or wherever—in the city, in traffic, it didn’t matter. Then I started making a list. I had to find an Erik-restaurant. Buy some furniture before he arrived. I would have to move fast, but I would be in California—I could just walk into Crate and Barrel. “Simple and quick,” I said out loud, and a cartoon balloon popped above my head: it struck me that speed and innovation, Andrea’s own medicine, might be just the weapon I was looking for to fight off her scheme. I wondered if there could be a link, a common denominator between being fast and being novel—and what if that link was exactly what I felt in the train: simplicity? I arrived at the client in serious brainstorm mode. I began to look for simplicity everywhere.
“HOW ABOUT WE EXPLAIN MODERN portfolio theory in the next slide?” Gawel asked me hours later. We were the last two bodies left at the client site.
I kept PowerPointing, but Gawel went on: “Andrea said that Markowitz’s efficient frontier is the best way to show the bang for the buck for Lifestyle.”
“Are you sure she didn’t say Malkovich instead?” I asked. “Fuck Markowitz and fuck Andrea.”
Gawel didn’t say anything.
I stood up. “Gawel, it’s okay, it’s fine. Of course we’ll use portfolio theory. But look at you.” I grabbed his iPod from the top of his gym bag. “One button!” I leaned over his desk and clicked on his homepage. Google came up. “One entry,” I said.
Gawel didn’t know where to look.
“Relax,” I said, and stopped his chair from swinging. “We will still use good ole Markowitz to figure out which of their drug candidates they should put in clinical trials, but we need to camouflage our prioritization.”
He was fixated on his Google screen.
“Listen. We need to mask your portfolio prioritization model. How can I explain this . . . Clients don’t have time to understand how we do what we do, the same way people don’t have time to read manuals before they use their phones. Nobody cares about understanding how things work anymore. They just want them to work. We need to build an iPod-like portfolio management model. A Google-like interface around what we do.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Gawel said. “I’m not sure Andrea will understand. I’m not sure Alkis will understand, either.”
“Leave Andrea to me. Don’t worry about Alkis, goddammit. Alkis comes every time Steve Jobs launches a product.”
It was after-hours and I was on the verge of a breakthrough.
THE FOLLOWING THREE WEEKS WERE my most productive in Paris. I knew I couldn’t challenge Andrea to her face, but once the simplicity virus got into me, I saw a chance to distract the client—maybe I could sabotage her plan. Everything had to look simpler. In the client reports I prepared, I killed Command jargon everywhere I could—from footnotes all the way to hard-core analyses. I replaced the word probability with uncertainty or chance. I simplified my work and told the client to do the same. I was a decent brander: “Innovate through Simplicity” was my message. The French liked it, or at least they were curious about it. Alkis lo
ved it. “You’re selling them simplicity, whatever that means, instead of Andrea’s Lifestyle junk?” he laughed. “Kudos for screwing over the bitch and her boyfriend. I knew the moment I met her she’d be a filthy cunt.”
With Alkis watching my back, I marched on. But Andrea was skeptical.
“We are far from a simplistic company!” she e-mailed me, cc’ing Alkis.
I contemplated replying-all and spelling out the difference between simple and simplistic, but did not. I did not have to; the more the client liked me, the more Andrea had to turn a blind eye to my ways.
She kept crossing e-mail swords with me, of course: “Whatever process you agree on with the client, I still want to see an attractive Lifestyle strategy in the alternatives that we will evaluate.”
I did. I evaluated Lifestyle like any other strategy we developed, because now I could afford to. The client had already adopted me. I was their portfolio management “conservateur,” and therefore Andrea’s Lifestyle travesty would not receive any special treatment. No favors. Yet I was still on thin ice with Command. I had to justify my simplicity, my process of abbreviation.
“I’m not cutting off Command intelligence,” I explained in an e-mail to Washington. “I’m embedding it.”
“Tricking managers into consulting crap is innovation in its own right!” I joked with Alkis while I was packing for San Francisco.
He threw his head back, faking an out-of-control reaction to my nerdy hilarity. A bank had just offered him a job, and now he was raiding my minibar.
“Mate, the real innovation is that you saved our asses from Andrea’s whip,” Alkis said, then turned sharply serious: “For now. I’m out of here, but I want you to stay away from her. Got that?”
Once again, he was fathering me.
“Are you joining the capital markets for ethical reasons?” I tried to shift our chat. But Alkis was right. I thought I could outsmart Andrea, and that illusion allowed her and Command to have a hold over me.
IT WAS A MUGGY NIGHT when I walked into my apartment in San Francisco. Paul, lying on my sofa, was reading Wired magazine. I ran over the dates in my mind. It had been a good five months since I’d stood inside what I officially called my home.
Hotel Living Page 9
