Hotel Living Read Free Page B

on icy lanes, I watched for trees, deer, and Paul’s puke breath.
    â€œI owe you one,” Paul said before passing out next to a bag of pot and a bunch of blue pills that were spread on his bed. I lifted his stash to pocket a nibble and, beneath it, saw a photo of Paul with his family. He must have been twenty, still had his hair; his arm was linked with his father’s. They were laughing, posing as if they had just dragged something big out of the sea. I thought of my father, working his fishing nets. His hands ran rhythmically, pulling and rowing. He never laughed.
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” I said to no one. I put a pinch of Paul’s pot in my underwear (no pockets in my Spartan outfit) and walked out.
    By the time I got back to the hut, there were still no cars parked outside. I sat in my car for a moment, gearing myself up for another icy shower. Again, I thought of my father. “Your body’s a fireplace in a cold mountain,” he told me when, at twelve, I had to jump into the freezing Aegean to retrieve the cross our priest had thrown in for the baptism of Jesus.
    Ten minutes later, drying off with my blanket—towels still packed—I felt wide-awake.
    Halfway to the train station to pick up the American, I noticed that I had a couple of cigarettes’ worth of time to kill. It was already light out, so I stopped at the boulders outside Barbizon in the middle of the forest. I got out of the car and climbed the least slippery–looking stone. The rock was icy and full of mist. Birds and squirrels were everywhere. My piss streamed twenty feet down, and the first sunlight through the oaks made my liquid sparkle. I rolled Paul’s stuff, lit it, and squatted, and at that moment when I wasn’t drunk anymore but not yet hungover either, in that false sense of calmness in the middle of my mess, my love-hate relationship with EBS seemed clear. The whole thing was simple, really. I was building a network by tucking wasted people into bed. Which would eventually mean money, opportunities, and all the buzzwords in the pamphlets. If that’s what it takes, so be it. I was fitting in—piss off, Paul—and with school ties built on either attentiveness or arrogance, we had bonding-via-fuck-you privileges; we had entertainment. By my second smoke, I felt free. Like I’d just woken up from a lithium treatment in a magical, liberating forest. Free to offend and beoffended. None of the California correctness, no filtering or tact whatsoever. No repercussions either—which made the American’s French accent the first thing I noticed and made fun of as he struggled: “Ab ie ntot” to the schoolgirls who cheered him “Au revoir, Er ik !” at the train station.
    â€œBienvenue à Fontainebleau, Erik,” I said in my Greekest accent. “Je m’appelle Stathis.”
    â€œStathis is Greek,” Erik said.
    â€œStathis is Greek. I’m Greek too,” I smart-assed, stoned, drunk, and sleepless.
    â€œEverything cool, brother?” Erik said in working-class talk. Did I catch some South Boston in there?
    Six-two, lean, with a boxer’s nose, black hair, and curved-down eyes, he was in a blue North Face jacket and jeans. No smile.
    Driving us to Montmelian, I became the target of questions about everything around us. Granted, he was doing two master’s, one in journalism and one in urban planning; however, he was far more curious about the region, its history, its “palatial solar system,” than in EBS itself. “The region’s Haussmannization,” he explained, “which started centuries before Haussmann,” and moved on to the roles of different monarchs, regimes, and wars in the area over the last four hundred years. He asked if I’d visited the palace.
    â€œOnce,” I told him—for a recruiting dinner.
    Did I know about the pope’s imprisonment there, or Napoleon’s role? Had I