NINE
June 2006
UK COMMANDERS HAVE A MORE accurate use of language. It goes back to their schooling,” Andrea said, projecting different typefaces on the wall of her office. “Good communication allows them more client impact. They advance faster.”
Good for them.
“There is something crisp and clean about London’s style. See there?” She circled an H, using her laser pointer.
What the hell was she talking about? Was she selling me a type of font or assigning me to a project in England?
“Are you a Verdana or a Calibri person?” she asked, pointing back and forth between impact and mission.
I didn’t know which one was which. I truly couldn’t see any difference.
“Er,” I wavered.
Andrea looked at me in shock.
“Calibri,” I gambled. Calibri was the font on Paul’s old business card. For some reason he was proud of it.
“Really?” She played with her butterfly-shaped necklace. Now that she was engaged to her CEO, pearls had been replaced by gems. “I don’t mean that their actual streets are clean. I mean that there’s something crisp about the way people live in London.”
Freak.
“I meant Verdana,” I said. “Ah, crisp! I get it!” I tried to end her font-masturbation. I had to finish the PowerPoint deck for the next day’s client presentation. It was a big meeting. A five-billion R&D investment was at stake. Andrea knew that and she was wasting my time, our time, by flexing her muscle, showing me who’s boss, playing up the importance of bullshit. Or, worse, she was slowly setting up one of her work traps again. “I’m off to Princeton. You’ll get the client deck tomorrow, first thing,” I said, and walked out.
“Seven a.m. sharp!” Andrea shouted after me.
I left New York Verdana-committed—I mean, what the fuck—but something sad was bugging me that I couldn’t pinpoint, something bigger than Andrea and her petty power games, or even her insider plots. As I sped down Fifth Avenue, the Ramones yelling, “I don’t wanna live my life again,” it hit me that I was afraid to leave Command. I didn’t want another job. I didn’t want to reboot into another three years of the same parody, desperate for downtime but always yearning for a project or two. I was too American to quit, too Greek to pretend I liked the constant all-nighters, the working on the weekends and holidays.
By 2006, I didn’t know many people who were happy to be consultants. The few of us from my class who were still here, the plateaued ones who hadn’t followed Alkis to an investment bank or a hedge fund, were carried by the inertia of depression. Drinking, cheating, obsessively exercising, crying, chewing Paxil, and snorting cocaine, we simply acted out while we waited (hoped, at some level) for all of this to end involuntarily, or to “come to terms with the brand-management job at a client campus in south NJ,” Alkis reminded me in his latest e-mail. He signed, “Come-to-Lehman, Alkis,” and I deleted him from my BlackBerry, Mailbox & Handheld, while checking in at the Forrestal in Princeton.
IT WAS APPROACHING TWO IN the morning when I signed for the third round of room-service martinis while still working on our real-options approach to optimizing the client’s licensing choices on pre–clinical trials compounds.
“How about we change the legend in the last chart?” I shouted to Gawel from across the suite as I charaded to night-shift Anthony for cigarettes.
“What are we going for instead?” Gawel yelled back at me.
“Call the distribution’s tenth percentile ‘Surprise’ and the fifth percentile ‘Bombshell,’ and if we must go further we’ll ‘9/11’ it or something,” I said. I eyed Anthony for a cigarette that we weren’t allowed by Command policy, anywhere, anytime. With the partners at DEFCON 2 on smokers, I was discreet.
He winked and passed me his pack.
I put a twenty in his pocket. We’d done this before.
Gawel stopped typing. “Stathis, how tactful, I mean, how politically correct do you think this is?”
“It’s not,” I replied, joining him at our war table. “So there’s a chance they’ll like it.”
Gawel mumbled something about Andrea to himself. The woman had recently made Command headlines when she quoted Samantha, her favorite character from Sex and the City, into a client pitch. Her upcoming wedding with the cosmetics baron was the only reason Washington had let the “incident” slide.
“Yeah, she’ll die of shame,” I mumbled back.
“Stathis, I know you’re one of them,” Gawel said, his eyes fixed on his screen.
Little prick . . . What on earth . . . “I’m one of lots of things.”
“I’ve seen you smoking outside the Soho Grand,” Gawel said awkwardly. “You can smoke, I don’t care. My father’s Polish.”
What did “My father’s Polish” mean? That he was not? As opposed to his mother? It was 2 a.m.; I was on my third martini and desperate for distraction. “So that makes you what? Polish? Half Polish? A quarter? American?”
“I’m Polish American.”
“Well, I’m half Greek and half Greek, so I need to smoke.”
Gawel let out a shy smile. “I won’t tell. You are safe with me.”
I offered him Anthony’s pack and he took one. I threw him my lighter. When Gawel finally lit up—second try—I saw his hand shaking. I was typing a note to Andrea, explaining our progress on the presentation, when her e-mail hit my screen. “What the hell is she doing up at this hour?” I mumbled. We had agreed on a 7 a.m. deck transfer. She didn’t understand what “a cumulative distribution and a standard deviation” meant in my last draft. I sniffed to cover my laughter and restrained myself from reading her e-mail out loud. She finished her note by adding, “I found two typos. Something that really, really, exasperates me,” and she hoped that “that was a one-off thing.”
I clicked Delete and caught Gawel downing his martini.
“What was that?” I said.
“I told you, I’m Polish.”
“American.”
“Er, what time do we present tomorrow?”
He knew. I looked at my watch. “We present in six hours, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Stathis, I, you know . . . I have like . . .” Gawel was stuttering. “I have a half-hour drive to my hotel on the other side of Princeton. Plus, I need to be back here for printing by seven tomorrow. You think . . . would it be okay if I crashed on your sofa?”
I thought we might get to this, but still I felt a cold sweat. I looked at his messed-up hair, his cleft-chinned face colored in by an early-twenties abashment, while I was lonely, horny, and sad. His fingers swayed on his keyboard, and I thought of my no-war state with Erik since our fight on Tenth Avenue outside the bookstore two weeks back. Whatever our no-fighting, spend-the-minimum-time-together relationship meant for our future, it was still better than nothing. I had slept only with Erik in New York. Get your own fucking room, I thought. “Only if you snore,” I said.
An instant grin. “Why?” Gawel asked.
I finished my drink. “’Cause I’ll snore in my bedroom. And trust me, you’ll need to cancel it out.”
He went back to his computer, beaming. I smelled the vodka on his breath from across the table. I was helpless.
A sloppy e-mail to Andrea later, I placed a blanket by Gawel, who was pretending to nap. He bent to reach it and grabbed my hand without looking at me. We just stayed there.
“I know,” I said.
His grip got tighter, and quickly, superstitiously, I told myself that I loved Erik, privately, the way I used to cross myself before diving into the open Aegean, embarrassed to think that someone might see me. Gawel trembled when I kissed him. He hurried off his socks and unbuttoned me.
I felt his tongue clumping the head of my dick and I heard his T-shirt shrieking as I tore it.
“God, swallow my dick!”
I came fast down his throat just as his come hit my shirt, two feet away. Then he leaned back on the sofa and rested there, without spitting or rinsing.
“We all deserve some pause after coming.” I sat next to him. My dick and balls aside, I was fully dressed.
“Okay . . .”
“Something someone told me once.”
Gawel laughed. “Even Alkis?”
“Even Andrea.” I pulled Gawel sideways, spooning him in his T-shirt leftovers.
“Stathis . . .”
“It’s gonna be okay,” I said. “We’ll be okay.”
THREE HOURS LATER I WOKE up without an alarm. I had fallen asleep holding him. No Ambien, first time in a month. Gawel was facing me, still asleep. I left without showering, in the shirt I had slept in, spotted with come. I lingered at the door for a second, thinking of writing a note, but where would I start? “Good morning. Have a good time printing the client decks!” I left the hotel for the client at six, feeling grateful that I had a presentation to do and Andrea to deal with—another first.
Gawel walked into the conference room as I was trying to calm Andrea down; she didn’t find the deck’s colors bright enough.
“It’s Command’s standard template,” I explained. “Morning!” I shouted toward Gawel, who was holding a bunch of printouts under his arm. Andrea, in orchestration mode, didn’t acknowledge him.
“Morning,” Gawel replied without looking my way, counting the printed decks.
I was about to press for a look, but he slipped out to fetch extra highlighters. I almost stormed after him.
“Focus?” Andrea yelled.
I was taken aback. “I’m listening.”
“I mean the projector, Stathis!” She jolted a metal box and one of her flamingo-painted nails irked and bent against the lens. “Damn it!” she cried.
PRESENTING, I SURPRISED MYSELF. DISTRACTED by Gawel—the little punk was taking notes, avoiding my stare throughout the presentation—I was lighter, lean, Command-crisp, while Andrea cut in every three minutes to say, “Which is one of the reasons we are here today.”
“ISN’T IT GREAT WHEN WE all play nice?” Andrea said at the end of our postpresentation debrief.
Gawel nodded.
“Right.” I collected my papers.
“I’ll see you tonight at the benefit,” Andrea said, ready to stalk two clients from our meeting whom she spotted as they were about to enter the next conference room. All of a sudden, as if she had changed her mind, she stepped toward me: “Presenting in a dirty shirt is unacceptable.”
“I got Parkinson’s.”
“Come with me,” she ordered Gawel, her stare firmly on me.
I traced him with my eyes. At the corner, he looked back and gave me a timid smile.
I drove back to New York in joy and fear. Gawel’s last look was playing again and again like breaking news in my mind, giving me a thrill, a hard-on, and a silly face I had last worn before EBS. Then fright would float in and I’d try to calm myself by thinking things out in a rational way. Gawel, Erik, Command, me—all I needed was some order, some quality decision making, just like I did at work. How about the utilitarian approach, “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” I said out loud, thinking of multivariable decision frameworks, while my brakes against the tunnel traffic screamed how multivariably, multi-back-and-forth, utterly multifucked I was. The more I thought about it, the more panic snaked into me. I knew I had crossed a line, and with a subordinate to boot. Unethical, stupid, and dangerous.
In the tunnel, I switched on the headlights and thought of our office ordinate. This trick made us all look more or less together, commanding, attractive even, coating what happened with Gawel so that it looked almost involuntary. He was the apprentice and I was the mentor, and, after four years of battling with Erik for interrelational supremacy, this clarity was in its own right a romance. That and the fact that a young man listened to me, looked me in the eye, and idealized me—me, of all people—turned a blow job into the first light coming from Tribeca while I was exiting a four-year tunnel of emotional depletion.
In Manhattan, on my way to the office, I stopped by my place to shower and change my shirt. Throwing my keys on the coffee table, I noticed Erik’s brother’s invitation for that evening: “Kevin’s new pad is finally ready!”
What if Erik finds out about Gawel, I thought. “Science fiction,” I said out loud, and jumped into the shower to scrub it off.
I stood there motionless, looking at the blue tiles on the shower floor—water pounding my head and chest—thinking of what on earth I’d talk about with Gawel at the benefit, his ginger hair and blue eyes, and I started to jerk off, ruffled by the fact that I’d have to sneak out in time to make it to Kevin’s; Zemar’s latest cryptic postcard; back to Gawel taking my dick, doggy-style this time; Erik’s soft snoring, which I’d grown to like; Alkis and Cristina’s e-mailed sonogram; two clients, one hopefully new; Jeevan’s peaceful stare, fishing at sunset before jumping off the boat to cool off; and fucking Erik by the wash of the sea, until I came.
THE LIGHTS DIMMED AS A picture of the High Line was projected onto the fifteen-foot screen of the Wall Street ballroom.
“I have powers of subpoena, and if you don’t quiet down I’ll cite you,” Eliot Spitzer said from the podium. The eight hundred attendees of the Friends of the High Line 2006 Benefit laughed. “For me, it is part of what makes Manhattan, Manhattan,” said the video narrator, identified as “actor, NYC resident,” and people applauded.
Andrea leaned forward at the Command-sponsored table. “He’s at the central table in front,” she whispered to no one in particular, and the ends of her hair dipped into her risotto. A couple of junior associates stretched to catch a look of the movie star.
“Gawel didn’t make it?” I asked Andrea, relaxed.
She kept looking at the screen, enchanted. Rotating pictures of west Chelsea mixed with quotes from activists, actors, and politicians identified as “High Line supporters.”
“You’re almost on what I call a flying carpet. It’s a completely different vantage point.”
“It’s up in the clouds.”
“A demiparadise.”
“It really works for everybody. Because this is, in fact, going to be one of the coolest places to live in all of Manhattan.”
“I didn’t invite analysts,” Andrea bothered to answer me at the end of the slide show.
Then footage from a public hearing I had attended during one of my New York weekends, back in 2003, played. It showed an artist sobbing, explaining to Erik’s community board that the High Line was the first thing she looked at when she woke up in the morning. In the video’s background I made out Erik, with a microphone, facilitating the hearing.
Then I spotted Paul, sitting pretty at the table to my left. When we locked stares he motioned to the screen—where Erik was still visible—and threw a piece of bread my way, which I caught before it hit Andrea.
“I hope you do realize that we are here for a number of reasons,” she said with a what-the-hell-do-you-think-you’re-doing face.
“There’s sauce in your hair,” I said.
The lights came up and the New York attorney general presented awards to a fashion designer, an actor, and the City Council speaker, all of whom were honored for “their early and continued support of the High Line project.”
“I did exactly what Josh and Robert asked me to do,” opened one of the honorees.
I stood up to go out for a cigarette.
“Don’t leave yet!” Andrea grabbed my wrist. “I want to take a picture of all of us in front of the High Line.”
“Sorry?”
“Oh, they do that every year. Everybody has their picture taken in front of a life-size High Line poster.”
“I’ll close my eyes,” I said, and wiggled my wrist free.
“I need one of those,” I said, pointing to the towel, but Paul turned and looked at the flags.
“I thought all you wanted was a beach shack back home.”
“That, too. The gift bag.” I pointed again. “My towels are all white, stolen, and stained by Erik.”
“So, you don’t come.” He passed me the bag. “Take it. Let’s get out of here.”
“A partner-bitch is inside.”
“Fuck her.”
“Someone has to,” I murmured. “For everyone’s sake.”
Paul was on his cell phone throughout our cab ride to my place. “I enjoyed working with you, I learned from you, but you were born to apologize! It’s 2006 and privacy is getting redefined . . . No, no, no! We are not stalking them, we are accosting them . . .”
Once home, I got two beers from the fridge, turned the music on, and walked out onto the patio. It was a clear June night, and I could still hear Paul inside: “. . . thank you for your administrative . . .” mixed with Jamiroquai’s “. . . this corner of the earth is like me in many ways . . .” when the sound of Gawel’s incoming text went off.
“How’s the benefit?”
I had a moment of low-oxygen dizziness, mixed with an about-to-get-busted rush. I sat down, loosened my tie, and thought of Gawel, wondering how it would feel to be twenty-three again. I remembered the years right after Stanford, working in Redwood City. I went to the supermarket and cooked. I had routines, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t exactly Gawel, but I was less jaded back then. If I had an affair or got promoted, I was childishly proud. I believed in myself. And what if I’d met Erik then, prior to all the EBS and Command decay, when I had a real job and real friends? Would I still have fallen for him? Followed him to New York? Or, better, would I be equally obsessed with him if I had real problems, like making rent or getting a job? Maybe not. But there I was, not twenty-three any more, not middle-aged either, in a smart suit and loosened tie, on my patio, gazing at the Big Dipper and the North Star, replaying my juvenile habit of making sure I knew where Polaris—my grandfather’s compass during the war—was in the sky above.
Hotel Living Page 13
