Hotel Living

by Ioannis Pappos

  I walk like a zombie among West Village nannies and babies, somehow grasping that my world has been reduced to a series of traumatic episodes that I will have to learn to deal with faster and faster. I am getting better at switching from obsession to apathy to anger to depression. I am getting better at erasing feelings, at slowly killing myself.

  By the time I text Gawel “140 franklin apt 2b,” my shock has already turned into hatred.

  I enter the loft, needing coke violently.

  “Fucking Tatiana!” I yell, after I trip over a casserole that has been stuck to the floor for two weeks—a cooking night turned blackout.

  I hobble to the coffee table, grab a large wooden box, and turn it upside down. Papers, photos, and junk shower everything. No little plastic bags, though. This is scary. This is unacceptable.

  “Tatiana!” I yell again to no one.

  I tramp to the kitchen counter and look under the meat slicer. Nothing makes sense in this fucking loft. I empty the bread box of minibar bottles and bracelets. A Formula One invitation folder looks strangely thick. I see two plastic bags inside and catch my breath.

  Three lines later, I lie down on the sofa and start jerking off. I’m buck naked when the doorman calls. “Send him up,” I answer, and cross the loft to unlock the door when I notice a woman from the building across the street staring at me. I shake my dick at her. “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” I try to mouth to her, but my jaw is clamped shut. I leave the door slightly open and walk back to the sofa, where perverts can’t see me.

  “Stathis!” Gawel yells. He’s all red cheeks and smiles. “Should I lock the door?” he asks.

  “Mind the casserole,” I say, and go on beating my meat.

  “I guess we’re all alone.”

  “Come here,” I say.

  Gawel walks timidly toward the sofa. “Finally, I see where you live. What is this? An artist’s studio?”

  I point at two lines on the coffee table. “Take them.”

  “Oh, no, thanks. I don’t do that stuff.” He takes his jacket off and sits next to me.

  I grab his neck and push his head to the coffee table. “Come on, do them! You can do this. You’ll like it more.”

  He snorts half a line and turns to look at me. Then he stares at the ceiling, where there is mixed footage of Bukowski, and Tatiana’s mother landing a 747.

  “Do it!” I yell, and Gawel finishes the line. “Did you feel that? Now do the other.” I pull his jeans down. “One more. Take it.” I put my thumb in my mouth and then I push it against his crack. He does the line as I thumb him.

  “Are you going to fuck me now?” he asks, trembling.

  I push him on the rug and bend him on all fours. I shove the head of my dick inside him.

  “Wait!” Gawel yells.

  “Fucking analyst!” I push my dick in farther. “Swallow my dick with your ass!”

  “Wait! Stathis!”

  “Polish shit!” I thrust my hand over his mouth and fuck him. He pushes my hand away and I grab his neck, choking him. He spins sideways and punches me on the chest, crying, which only makes me fuck harder. When he punches me again, I come.

  FOURTEEN

  December 2006

  MY MOOD IS FROZEN, LIKE the New York weather.

  “Get a life!” I yell to a tour guide who is helping women take photos of the brownstone where Carrie lived in Sex and the City. The women turn and look at me, smoking outside Sant Ambroeus, two blocks from my new apartment on Bank Street.

  “What?” I shout, itching for a fight, but they say nothing.

  Justin helped me move out of Tatiana’s loft and into the place on Bank. I threw out the gas stove (pilot lights freak me out), got an old but fancy mattress from Kate, and hired Tatiana to furnish my “one-and-a-half-, half”—she got a kick out of repeating the “half”—bedroom.

  “Constraints allow for interesting solutions,” Tatiana said at one point, referring to my pad. “Then again, you’re in your thirties and you have no furniture. Which is amazing. Gives me free rein.”

  Fine by me. Gloss it up, trash it down, bring bedbugs, as far as I’m concerned. Since I’m officially “on the beach” till BioProt kicks off, I “live” at Sant Ambroeus. I’m there every day, sitting uselessly on my barstool for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I haven’t been to the office for almost three weeks. I have managed to steer clear of Gawel, who hasn’t texted me since I raped him, and Andrea and all the other Command silliness. Not that long ago, I would justify my whereabouts; now, I just don’t care anymore.

  The other regulars at Sant Ambroeus want no part of me. They smile at my bed head and roll their eyes when I smoke with the AA folks from next door. They make sure I know I’m breaching some rule of West Village etiquette. When I lived with Tatiana, everything was on fast-forward. People were in and out of town, in and out of rooms. Drugs and burgers were delivered at four in the morning, and I was surprisingly okay with all that. Now, I’m doing all right with my new neighborhood’s stillness. I guess I’m pretty flexible. Tom, my next-door neighbor, has been here for forty-five years. The same AA faces hang out on the street; they just sit there, waiting for something to happen. At three every afternoon Louise complains about the weather, sitting at Sant Ambroeus’s pink marble bar, which has become my new kitchen, desk, and living room. Fllanza, the barista, is my new “roommate,” and Eddy, a homeless guy on West Fourth Street, my self-appointed “neighborhood doorman.”

  “I don’t like these cows.” Eddy points at the Sex and the City group. “I sleep outside two seventy-eight and they step on my stuff.”

  “Do you want a croissant, Eddy?” I offer.

  My phone vibrates with an incoming text.

  “Lunch with Tatiana. Now. Alkis.”

  “Perry and West 4,” I respond.

  Half an hour later Alkis, in a gray suit and a tie with puppies playing with balls, walks into the restaurant. He looks at me like I’m from another planet.

  “Why are you wearing Birkenstocks at Sant Ambroeus?” he asks. It’s the dead of winter and I have no socks on, but Alkis is worried that I’m wearing Birkenstocks at Sant Ambroeus. “And why are you in your coat inside the restaurant? Are you chain-smoking?” he says, annoyed.

  “What did you do with my wife?” I ask, saving both of us some name-calling.

  “Tati will be late. She’s with Kate, picking up some things for your pad,” Alkis says.

  Todd, the waiter, greets Alkis by his first name—which is odd, given that Alkis lives in London, but I don’t care to ask how come, or how many times Tatiana has already brought Alkis here.

  We sit at the table three feet from the bar.

  “We call this the kitchen table.” Todd smiles, showing off his über-white teeth. “We keep it for the regulars.” He winks at Alkis.

  “Oh my God!” Fllanza screams from behind the bar. “Stathis, that is my favorite table. Enjoy!”

  “Is everybody retarded here?” Alkis mumbles, getting comfortable in his seat.

  “You’re not in Knightsbridge anymore.”

  Alkis gives me a contemptuous look. “When was the last time you shaved? EBS recruiting?” He picks up his leather-bound menu.

  “Do you still sign your e-mails ‘Come-to-Lehman’? Because I may have a CV crunched up in my back pocket for you.”

  “Okay.” Alkis smiles. “Let’s start over.” He puts down the menu. “How are you? How are things?” he asks. “When are you off to LA?”

  “Next week,” I say. “If everything goes as planned.”

  “What did you say you’d be doing for BioProt out there?”

  “The usual,” I reply, bored. “Portfolio management, pipeline and licensing prioritization. They added some bells and whistles, but nothing sexy.”

  “Who’s the account owner?”

  “A senior-senior from Washington, plus Andrea,” I say.

  Alkis punches the table. “Don’t get me st
arted on that bitch!” he yells. “Did I tell you that I e-mailed her husband’s CFO, cc’ing her, after she told me she’d spoken to him? The guy had no clue who I was.”

  “I don’t think they’re married,” I say.

  “Wait, it gets better. Three e-mails later, the cunt doesn’t even bother to explain to him who I am. Can you imagine?”

  I can.

  Alkis shakes his head.

  “Relax,” I say.

  “Relax? Stathis, her guy is going biotech. I mean, okay, Goldman is close to him, but I know I can help there.” All of a sudden he looks at me suspiciously. I can see him processing. “He’s not buying BioProt, is he?” Alkis blurts with a shit-eating grin on his face.

  I stare at the happy puppies on his tie. The more I look at them, the more they look like rabbits, and I ask myself in which parallel universe I would ever wear such a thing. I wonder why I haven’t explained Andrea’s plot, and why I know I won’t. It’s not the rabbits, nor my growing distance from Alkis—Tatiana is the only reason we are having lunch today—that stops me from spilling the beans about Andrea and BioProt. It’s the fact that I’m neither intrigued nor scared by work schemes anymore. It’s the fact that my phone vibrates and although I’m already bored with Alkis, I don’t pick up. The fact that I haven’t spoken to my family for more than a month and that the idea of doing so, the idea of talking about myself, nauseates me. The fact that I’ve lost touch with everyone pre-Tatiana, and I like it that way. Tatiana is my family now, has became my family in that New York sense of the word. Sure, a fucked-up family, but one that accepts me as is, no questions asked.

  “Buying BioProt? Don’t know. I guess he could.” I shrug. “Are those puppies or rabbits?” I point at his tie.

  “It’s Hermès, so it doesn’t matter. And I’m not buying your shrug,” Alkis says.

  “Fine, he’s buying BioProt.” I say it so trivially that he has to let it go. “Do you think I care?” Alkis just looks at me. “Are you hungry? ’Cause I’m starving.”

  We order some pasta and a bottle of red.

  “You and Tatiana have been glued together,” I say. “Does Cristina know?”

  “Cristina’s cool,” Alkis says, checking out Fllanza.

  “Aren’t you supposed to spend your weekends with your daughter?”

  “It’s all good.”

  “So everybody is clear on where things stand,” I say.

  “We’re working things out. Listen . . .” Alkis breathes. I can tell we are about to have a dear-diary moment. “You know Tatiana, she is different,” he says, trying to stay cool, but his excitement is breaking through. He grabs my arm, brotherly. “Slobs like us from Bayswater or Greece, we like the streets. Tatiana is so street. Good God, is she ever street.” All pretense at hiding his enthusiasm vanishes.

  “She can be,” I say.

  “She’s the first girl I’ve gone out with who drinks like me, parties like me, pigs out like me. She even fucks like me, man. And here is the best part: she’s also so not street.”

  “She can be confusing,” I say.

  “You see, I like that,” Alkis says. “I think it’s hysterical that she’s always broke but so comfortable around money. It’s like she was born with a taste for it, an ease with it. There’s an haute provincialism in her pussy that drives my dick crazy.”

  I smile. Both Tatiana and Alkis are predators. Maybe there’s something there. “Did you just say ‘haute provincialism’? What if your mates from Bayswater heard you?”

  “Stathis, I’m with Lehman now.” Alkis actually says that.

  “Tatiana is crazy,” I say seriously. “You have to be careful. She’s the promise that’s never delivered.”

  Alkis leans closer. “No, she is not.”

  “Okay, she is not.”

  “She’s inconsistent, but she’s not unpredictable,” Alkis says. “She opened up to me. She told me that she was a fat kid, which made her body-conscious and gave her that love-hate thing with her mother. She told me they filed for bankruptcy.”

  “She talks to her mother like a lover,” I say. “She’s competing with her.”

  “She talks to her father like a cheated-on mistress. So what? You need the context. They are artists. That’s their thing, Stathis. The whole thing’s an act.”

  Fllanza poses behind the bar. “I guess that’s the premium today, isn’t it?” I murmur.

  “What?” Alkis asks, confused.

  “Everything is an act, a fucking stage. That’s how we get our highs, in food, sex, apartments. Everything. ‘Normalcy is failure.’ Didn’t you teach that to the clients in France?”

  “And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m just tired,” I say, and get up. “I’m stepping out for a smoke.”

  “Accountant!” Alkis whispers.

  Outside, Eddy waves to me for a cigarette. I give him one, but he sticks it behind his ear, then checks his reflection in the side mirror of the all-black SUV parked next to us. The driver inside, watching something on the console screen, looks up and waves familiarly to Eddy. If you weren’t born and raised here, I don’t think there’s anything that can prepare you for New York; the contradictions are staggering. When Henry Kravis eats at the far table at Sant Ambroeus, the “good” table, only a hundred-year-old wall separates him from the AA meeting room next door. He sips his Valpolicella, hearing—like I do—people cheer their sobriety anniversaries.

  Eddy motions for another cigarette, and I give him a funny look. I light both of us and check my phone. There are two missed calls from Andrea, one from Paul, and one from an unknown number. I speed-dial my voice mail. “I’ve lost you” is all my sister left, and for a moment I think of how my life would have been had I never left Greece, something I rarely do anymore—had I never gotten that scholarship to study abroad. Maybe I’d live in Athens, that cementopolis, and work for the National Bank of Greece, anticipating my week in Mykonos every summer. Other times I imagine myself in Trikeri with just a bathing suit and a Buck knife to my name, fishing and playing backgammon, fucking goats in the winter and maybe a tourist in the summer. No, screw Greece. I’m here. That’s that.

  I take a long drag and scrape up whatever courage is left in my dirty lungs. Then I go through my cell contacts till I reach “Melissa Cabdriver.” Her phone rings twice, but I hang up. I take another drag and study her contact stored in my cell. I never saved her last name; I don’t think I ever asked her what it was. She was “Melissa” the “Cabdriver.” Isn’t that interesting? Maybe Erik was right. What would he have said had he gone through my contacts in those days? But Erik never snooped. Unlike me, he was not the suspicious kind.

  I type: “Melissa, Stathis here. How are you? It’s been forever. I’m heading to LA next week. Can you take me to the airport?” I read the draft twice before I delete “Can you” and type “Care to” instead. Nah, go real. I delete “Care to” and retype “Can you.” I add “Hi” before “Melissa.” What if she forwards my note to Erik with a at the end? What if she doesn’t text at all? “When we fall for someone, we fall for everything about them,” Tatiana once said, referring to Ray and her mother, the only time she spoke about them. “We fall for their neighbors, friends, groceries, addictions,” Tatiana said. I breathe and press Send.

  Inside, Alkis is eating. “The pasta was getting cold,” he apologizes with a full mouth.

  “No worries, mate,” I say, still on a high from texting Melissa, my last bridge left to Erik. I peek at my watch. “Are you taking the afternoon off?” I ask Alkis.

  He nods, eating. “A Partner has a weekend holiday thing in Southampton,” he says. “He invited foreigners and ‘orphans.’ I told Tatiana that you guys should come, but . . .” he waves “blah-blah” with his hand. “Are you going to her godmother’s for the holidays?”

  “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “So.” Alkis looks self-conscious as he swigs from his red. “What’s Tati’s story on me?”
/>   I shake my head. “Not my style.”

  “Ballpark, Stathis. Ballpark. The headlines.”

  “Headlines don’t matter,” I say, and smile back. “They rarely translate to the bottom line. You used to say that shit, remember?”

  “Did you just do crack outside?”

  “What happened to: ‘Delivery is for Division Two, for the Tokyo office.’ You preached that. Why do you think Tatiana will bother with keeping promises?”

  His face gets angry. “Will you stop jerking off for once? This is serious.”

  “So what if she says she’s smitten! Are you fifteen? Tatiana’s an addict. You can glamorize her as much as you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s a mess.”

  “Hey!” He points his fork at me. “I’ve no problem with partying, never did, but you’re supposed to be her friend, you quant-fuck! Or do you just tag along so you can get into the subMercer and the Bungalow?”

  “I’m with her ’cause she gives me a home, whatever that means in New York. I love her, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need help,” I say, and pause a second. “And maybe I do too,” I add. It’s the first time I’ve said that out loud.

  Tatiana walks in, looking all miserable.

  “I’m not through with you,” Alkis says under his breath, his fork still pointing at me.

  “Go close a fucking deal so you can buy her more dresses,” I whisper rapidly.

  “Hi,” Tatiana exhales, without looking at either of us.

  Alkis’s face relaxes. “Hey, baby.”

  “Hi,” Tatiana repeats. She sits down, barely letting Alkis touch her. “I’m starving. Nice tie, by the way,” she says, searching through her bag.

  “Thank you!” He is clueless about her scorn. “Let’s get you some food.”

  Alkis calls over Todd.

  “I’ll just have what these guys have,” Tatiana tells Todd.

  “Would you like the penne or the linguine?” Todd asks.

  “Both?” she says, as if Todd asked her something ridiculous. “And a negroni.”

  Todd leaves, and Tatiana gets back to her bag. She presents a piece of paper, of sorts. It’s been folded three or four times and is practically shredded.