“The registers went down, boss.”
I can see him, all proud, paying for his Esquire kill seconds before New York time-traveled back a hundred years. I’d tell him to try Dunhill next, but I’m getting desperate for downtime. So I bring up martial arts—he does Brazilian jujitsu for two hours a day—banking on ninety seconds of zoning out while he talks.
THE OUTDOOR STAIRWAY LEADING INTO the basement sake bar on Ninth Street is jammed. I smell caramel and dog shit from the garbage of the coffee shop next door.
“Our friends are inside,” Justin shouts at the doorman, but he doesn’t care.
I’m sweating like a pig. My shirt sticks to me in this muddy, gross New York weather that braces scrawny East Village kids while suffocating the rest of us. I pull my tie off and stuff it in my pants pocket.
Inside, we move through a dark bar area. At the end a Japanese curtain is lifted, revealing an even darker vaultlike space, the whole thing no larger than a New York one-bedroom, filled with claustrophobic booths, graffiti, and people with silver rings in the wrong places. We stand out in our suits, but no one looks at us.
Justin sheds his glove-tight jacket in one move. The collar of his shirt is the only thing not glued to him as he snakes to the last table, where two girls are sitting. “This is Kate and Tatiana,” Justin says, beaming. “This is Stathis, my project manager.”
“Good to meet you,” I say.
Kate smiles and looks at me for a good three seconds. She says nothing.
“Take your jacket off, Stathis?” Tatiana says, and brings a piece of white fish to her mouth. She can’t be more than nineteen. I try to figure her out before answering her command-question. A hundred pounds, olive skin, there’s an appetite in her green eyes I’ve only seen on horny peasants in my village in Greece. She swallows and waits for my reaction as soy sauce drips from her hands, while her stare says: This is my table, motherfucker.
I mumble something even I can’t hear and sit down opposite her. She’s in a man’s black suit and a T-shirt that says “Baghdad” under a Disneyland logo. She takes her jacket off. I can’t believe she’s doing this with sauce still on her fingers, but she does, bored, as if it’s a routine. I can see everyone’s nipples around the table. She has ridiculously perfect breasts.
For the next fifteen minutes Tatiana devours three hundred dollars’ worth of sake and bizarre meta-sushi plates while she flirts with Justin, talks to Kate, and stares at me.
“You know I’m quietly judging you,” she says after our third eye lock.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Seen Magnolia?” Kate steps in. “It’s a quote from the movie.”
I take my jacket off too, to show ease—something I only do in client meetings. “What do you do in New York?” I ask Kate. She’s beautiful in an American way, freckled.
“Where I come from, this is an impolite question,” Tatiana says.
“Tatiana grew up in Aix-en-Provence and Laurel Canyon,” Justin volunteers.
I nod, though I haven’t been to either. I’m not sure why he’s sharing this. What’s he trying to explain? Her aggressiveness, her looks, or her taste in movies? There’s definitely something moving in her soup.
“Yes, on holidays!” Kate laughs.
“I was at boarding school in England,” Tatiana explains. “And Kate’s a stylist.” She adds this casually, as though my “impolite” question is suddenly forgiven. “Kate is all about the electronic-bohemian look. She’s a genius.”
“I just don’t want to work for people who lunch,” Kate says, and kisses Tatiana quickly on the lips. “I don’t want to play on people’s insecurities. Honestly, I want to make luxury a small fraction of anyone’s wardrobe.”
“Isn’t that what it is already?” I ask.
“God, no!” Tatiana yells with a rhetoric-giggle. “It’s so unbalanced! You shouldn’t have to buy only indulgence. You can use uniqueness, suspense. Why don’t we see current affairs in fashion? I want to be inspired by the Middle East crisis. Reality. Crime. Seriously!”
I’m confused, and it’s not just my exhaustion. “Isn’t the purpose of luxury to escape reality?” I object, but Tatiana shakes her head.
“No, no, no!” she insists. “That’s exactly what we’re talking about. We need to redefine it. We’re talking luxury that everybody, and I mean everybody, can use for self-esteem. It’s about reality, not escape.”
I have no clue what we are talking about. My mind drifts to my mother’s gold cross and wedding band, the only jewelry she ever wore. I remember her probing a gutted sea bass to find her ring after she lost it while sorting my father’s catch, and me spotting it in his nets, saving the day.
Some nigiri lands in front of me and I’m back to Tatiana. The girls are already off on a “new New York” discussion. How “all these glass condos will bring back Gotham.” They talk about how the “best views look into, not out of, the units,” about bird shit on the glass that will make peeping in on people “like watching old damaged footage.”
“. . . spiderweb-looking window cracks . . .”
“. . . most interesting suicides . . .”
I feel spent. I understand enough to know that they’ll keep cruising through topics for the rest of the night.
“How is our godmother?” Tatiana suddenly asks Kate.
“Oh my God! You won’t believe this,” Kate says. “She’s hosting this new reality show in Spain. It’s insane, honestly. They take old, mentally retarded people and make them sing and dance to sleazy songs. Totally out of control. Live, with hundreds of sixteen-year-olds screaming.”
Tatiana’s eyes widen. “Love it!”
“I thought you were into artsy movies,” Justin says. “Like Magnolia.”
Tatiana reaches for his hand. “Justin, babe . . .” she says. There’s polite contempt in her voice. “The only difference is from post-, okay, apocalyptic, to post-postmodernism. Remember the frog scene in the movie? The plague scene? What’s the difference from the reality show? In Spain, the singers are plagued people, when the real plague is all those kids encouraging them and making them stars. That’s where the real art is, the performance. Really.”
Justin looks at me quickly. He takes down his sake like water. Suddenly I feel protective of him, which I’ve never felt before.
“Do they shoot in asylums or do they escort them into studios?” I ask.
Tatiana’s eyes lock on me. I can see she’s about to lose it. “You know, Stathis? The writers that you read have not written a single word in decades to criticize TV commercials showing chimpanzees in dresses drinking tea. It’s 2006 now, and we talk about it. And that’s shocking to you. Makes your nipples stiff.”
My first thought is, I don’t know what to argue first. My second thought is, I don’t have to. All I want is to sit back and be distracted.
IN A TRIBECA BUILDING WE walk down the hallway that leads to the loft Tatiana shares with a photographer. To our right are life-size cutouts of Saddam Hussein and Martha Stewart, smiling and posing in front of a wall with dozens of Gucci and Nokia logos. I hear Mick Jagger singing “You see I bounce back quicker than most” from inside the loft, and I’m both relieved and scared that it won’t be just the four of us.
“Is your roommate here?” Justin asks Tatiana.
“No,” she says, confused, and opens the door.
The music and the AC burst through as one shock wave. I walk in and fall into a post-sake take-it-all-in state. A canopy bed at the center of the loft sits on an island of beach sand. It’s surrounded by freestanding floor-to-ceiling photographs of a toddler smoking, slum houses, and a portrait of Edgar Bronfman Jr. flanked by two other CEOs. A gigantic puzzle of The Scream is half-finished and glued to a wall like mold. Its remaining pieces, thousands of them, are scattered between clothes, Polaroids, glue traps, pizza boxes, and jewelry. There’s a real or fake
Mao leaning against the bedroom wall that’s been vandalized with mascara and earrings. Strangely, I don’t see any sand scattered out of place.
I sit on a sofa surrounded by kilims, arabesque art, and large ashtrays—I recognize a couple from hotels I’ve lived in. Across from me, hanging on the wall, is a leather costume, a woman’s one-piece bathing-suit-shaped outfit that looks like a motorcycle. It actually has steering handles with rearview mirrors built onto it. Justin touches one of its mirrors, which is tilted to face upward, and then puts his finger on his tongue. He picks up a rolled twenty-dollar bill from the floor and goes into an all-out hounding around the coffee table.
“Is this your mother’s?” Kate fiddles with the motorcycle-looking dress.
“Thierry gave it to her when she went to Cannes,” Tatiana says. “She hated it, so she gave it to me.”
“Adore!” Kate says, stunned. “When are we going to LA to raid her wardrobe again?”
“Stop obsessing about my mom! I’m the beautiful one,” Tatiana says, and walks to the fridge. “There’s no sake, so we’re having tequila,” she shouts over her shoulder. “Stathis, this is a mobile sofa. Push the pillow all the way back so the cushion wraps around you.”
I try it. The three of them switch into production mode automatically. Tatiana prepares shots, Justin sorts out the three walled iPods, and Kate goes through the large wooden box on the coffee table. She empties US Open tickets, jeweled sex toys—or just jewelry—shutoff notices from ConEd, and pictures of Tatiana with the Dalai Lama, Monica Lewinsky, and her look-alike mother, until she finds the two tiny plastic bags she was searching for. She waves one of the coke bags to me with a Eureka! smile on her face. I nod and look away. Through the bedroom door I see what must be an Oscar statuette on the floor, peeking out beneath dirty laundry. Then a screen starts to unfold slowly from the ceiling, with a live version of Heartbeat City playing on it. Tatiana gives Justin a massive coffee-table book with Brezhnev kissing Erich Honecker on the mouth on its cover. Justin starts to cut cocaine on the propaganda kiss and talks about Bungalow 8.
HALF-NAKED ON THE FLOOR, JUSTIN ropes his shirt around Tatiana’s long hair. She snorts two lines and then tries to do a tequila shot off his abs. Justin laughs, and tequila rushes, pauses, and rushes again from his stomach onto the sapphire rug.
“Are you having fun?” Tatiana asks me, resting her head on my lap, her feet on Justin’s chest.
“Did you do the graffiti on the Warhol?” I reply.
“Stathis, you don’t really own art unless you make it your own. Same way you don’t really own your sofa until you spill something on it,” she says, and she begins to unbutton my shirt while Justin rubs her feet, kisses and makes out with them.
Kate leans over and helps Justin out of his pants. Then she whispers something in Tatiana’s ear and the two of them get up and go to the bedroom.
I look at some framed lace panties on the wall, trying not to think about how many work rules I’ve broken so far. I have to review the bastard.
Justin, in his boxers, paces around the loft. “Got Viagra or Levitra on you, boss?”
I stay silent, a license we both know I burned some two hours ago. But Justin’s antsy. “I’ve done seven big ones. How the fuck am I gonna fuck her now?”
“Sorry, I didn’t ask for any on our way out.”
“That’s dick!” Justin says. “Cialis?” he asks with a childlike hope.
I spot a Dartmouth logo on his boxers.
I’M LYING HALF-NAKED ON THE canopy bed with sand all over my sweaty feet. Tatiana, next to me, tries on my tie as a bra. “I wear only men’s clothes,” she explains.
“Things in common.”
She cuts lines on a bed tray while the speakers sing “must have me confused / with some other guy,” mixed with lusty giggles from another iPod. Across the loft, in the bedroom, I see Justin, naked, pushing a shiny dildo into Kate; I realize it’s the Oscar. They moan-laugh. Tatiana takes off my tie and puts two bumps on her tits. I do both of them and suck the leftovers. The coke, bitter, slides down my throat. Tatiana wants me to take off my pants, try on her Disneyland/Baghdad T-shirt.
“Why?” I ask.
“I want it stretched,” she says, and snorts a line.
“I don’t sleep with girls.”
“I’m . . . I’m twenty.”
“I like guys,” I say.
“I don’t believe you. You’re depressed.” Then, “My roommate moved out. Move in with me.”
I don’t laugh or say no, which is utterly insane. I studied physics and have an MBA, a fucking job. I wire money to my parents on the fifteenth of each month. I ran into decadence before but managed it. So why do I feel like I just landed where I’m supposed to be: with the totally flawed? “I don’t want to be alone,” I hear myself saying.
“What is his name?” Tatiana asks, and I hear compassion through cocaine.
ELEVEN
September 2006
WITH OBVIOUS AND DELIBERATE LABOR, the cabdriver doles out one-dollar bills to change my twenty.
I’m late. “Keep fifteen,” I say, and he briskly hands me a five that appears out of nowhere.
I jump out into a cool New York evening and onto the square pavement off Sixth and Bleecker. About fifty people are dining at a flock of outdoor tables, fenced in by another twenty who are waiting to be seated. I catch Italian, Spanish, and broken English.
Tatiana, in an oversize white shirt, probably mine, sits in the eye of the storm. She touches the lower arm of a dark-haired guy who’s with her. Her long brown hair hides her smile, but I see those large green eyes spotting me. She lets go of his arm.
“My VP has issues,” I say when I reach them. “I’m sorry.” I lean over Tatiana and she lets me kiss her on the lips, but she’s all business.
“This is my roommate, Stathis,” she says. “Ray is my trainer. He just came back from Iraq. He was in combat there.”
“Excellent” escapes my mouth, and I immediately wonder what exactly excellent means here.
“Hello!” Ray stands up and shakes my hand, which is unheard of below Fourteenth Street. An inch shorter than me, lean but solid, he has a rude boy’s face and two days’ beard.
“Welcome back,” I say, sitting down across from him, Tatiana on my left. Her eyes are fixed on him, but so are mine.
“I’ve been back for three months now, but thank you.” He grants me a surprisingly innocent smile.
Desperate for post-Command vodka, I scan the pavement for a waiter. When one comes by, Tatiana calls out eight or nine plates, all in Mediterranean languages and single words: “. . . osso bucco, controfiletto, croquetas, gamberoni, two vodka martinis, and a bottle of Cortese.” Ray orders whiskey. I don’t say a word—don’t have to. I just sit back and watch Tatiana’s cell phone vibrate nonstop, practically crawling around the table.
“I didn’t know you worked out,” I tell Tatiana after our waiter leaves. “Which gym do you guys go to?”
“No . . .” She shakes her head. “Ray trains in a private space on Perry Street.”
I look at Ray’s biceps under his white T-shirt and try to remember the last time I worked out. Probably before I moved in with Tatiana, a good month ago. I tried doing push-ups at her loft once, but the smell of her bathroom—of puke, permanently—got to me. I’m not entirely sure whether Yolima, our housecleaner, actually exists, or whether the sheets on my canopy bed have ever been changed.
“How long have you two been training?” I ask.
They check with each other. “We had some cancellations,” Ray says at last.
“We’ve worked out once. Anything else, Stathis?” Tatiana says, and loosens my tie with one jerk.
She peeks at her watch, which I notice is my watch, the same watch that Erik once borrowed. “It’s stressful. I’m afraid I’ll lose it,” he told me when he returned it to me
the following day. Now I wish he’d kept the stupid Rolex. Maybe I would see him wearing it if we ran into each other, in that happenstance way that people play out in their minds when they go through breakups with no closure. My problem: I don’t seem to be able to stomach things and move on. Three months on, all my calls to Erik unanswered, and I still don’t hit the gym or choose my own food in restaurants. I don’t make decisions, so Tatiana, my new “higher power and concierge”—yes, fuck you, Erik—makes them for me.
I spend my nights in restaurants and clubs now, or at Tatiana’s loft listening to coked-up nonsense from her boyfriend—of the week—her schoolmates, crashers, BlackBerry’ed drug dealers, cousins, and “coworkers.” I don’t even know what exactly she does for a living. Is she an actress? Model? Stylist? Nothing? “Tati’s a collector of all trades,” Kate, a permanent standby, joked once, but not really. “She has an appetite for food, clothes, people. She has an appetite for adopting, like she did with you.” Kate laughed at me, or with me, the latest member of Tatiana’s surrogate family. “No, seriously,” Kate insisted. “What interests me is how Tatiana sorts through New York. She’s an artist. A life artist.”
Yellow and green dishes arrive, sparkling in olive oil. Tatiana speed-fires through three plates of shrimp and fettuccine while she rants about movies, Nokia gadgets, and beer. Works for me; I’m happy zoning out.
“You know that, right?” Tatiana suddenly asks me, as if checking to see whether I’m paying attention.
“Er, yes, love beer,” I mumble.
“I’m talking about Stella McCartney, Stathis.” She turns to Ray: “There’s nothing Stathis doesn’t get. It’s just that he’s a bit preoccupied right now. He’s heartbroken. But he’ll be better later tonight.”
Why? “Later?” I ask, but Tatiana ignores me.
“Ray, how long did you say you were overseas?” she asks.
“I was on active duty for two years.”
She goes tenderly for his hand, but at the last second she picks up her vibrating cell phone instead. “My lover!” she yells, answering. “When did you get in? . . . Oh baby, are you jet-lagged? . . . How was the set?” She laughs. “I’m at Da Silvano . . . with Stathis . . . roommate . . . of course . . . When I think about you I touch myself . . . Miss you more! . . . Okay, I’ll see you in a bit.”
Hotel Living Page 15
