Thank You for Smoking

"I can't believe I'm not there to greet you personally." Nick was left to interpret this as he chose. "Jeff is really looking forward to meeting you. I'll pick you up at the hotel first thing. Here's my home number, call me anytime, in the middle of the night, whenever. Whatever you need. I mean that, okay?"

"Okay," Nick said.

A half hour later they pulled up in front of a hotel. It was not the Peninsula, where Gazelle had made reservations, but the Encomium, very palmy, open, and grand, with an enormous Yitzak McClellan fountain bleu outside. An assistant manager was waiting for him at the curb.

"Yes, Mr. Naylor, we've been expecting you. The manager asked me to relay his sincere regrets that he couldn't be here to greet you personally. Are these," he said, regarding the three brutish women surrounding Nick, "ladies in your party?" Nick said that they were.

"Will you all be staying together?"

"No, no," Nick said.

"If you'd follow me, please."

Nick's bags were whisked away. Check-in formalities were dispensed with. The assistant manager handed him a magnetic card to operate his own private elevator, and led him up in the outside glass elevator to a huge penthouse suite with sunken marble bathtub, fireplace, balcony, waterfall, and immense bed already turned down. There were Hockneys on the wall; originals. Nick's very own butler, an immaculate young Asian fellow, was standing there in white tie holding a silver tray with a vodka negroni on the rocks in a Baccarat tumbler. Nick's drink. Now this was good advance.

"We took the liberty of calling your office this morning as soon as we knew you were coming," explained the assistant manager.

"May I pour your bath?" the butler said.

The phone rang.

"May I get that for you? Mr. Naylor's suite. Yes, please hold. It's for you, sir. Mr. Jack Bein of ACT." "Nick, Jack. Is everything all right?" "Yes, Jack," Nick said. "Everything is fine." "You're sure?" "I think so."

"Just sign for everything. Don't worry about it." All this was — free? What a great town.

"I want you to call me if you're not happy," Jack said, "for whatever reason. If you wake up in the middle of the night and you just want to talk. I'm here. I know what it is to be alone in a strange town. Take this number down, it rings on my bedside table. Only three people in the world have this number, Michael Eisner, Michael Ovitz, Jeff, of course, and now you. And my mother makes five. Do you have a mother? They're great, aren't they? I'll see you for breakfast. Is Haiphong there?"

"Who?"

"The butler. They did give you a butler, didn't they? Jesus Christ on Rollerblades, what's going on there?"

"Is your name Haiphong?" Nick asked the butler. "Yes, Jack, he's here."

"Put him on."

"He wants to speak with you," Nick said, handing over the phone. Haiphong said "yes sir" crisply many times and hung up. "May I send up the masseuse, sir? She's very good. Highly trained."

"Well, I. "

"I'll send her right up."

"Haiphong," Nick said, "can I ask you something?"

"Yes, sir."

"Is Mr. Bein connected somehow with this hotel?" "All ACT guests and out-of-town clients stay at the Encomium, sir."

"Ah," Nick said.

"I'll send Bernie right up."

Nick sat back in a chaise longue and sipped his vodka negroni and looked out the window at the sun setting over Santa Monica and the ocean. The Campari and vodka was just starting to make him comfortably numb when Haiphong knocked to announce that Bernie had arrived. She was in her mid-twenties, pretty, muscular, and blond, with a big California smile—"Hi there! — in a white V-necked leotard.

The few times he'd indulged in massage — never in a "massage" parlor — Nick had always felt a little awkward, but Bernie put him at ease with her friendly, open manner and soon he was starkers on the slanted table, with a towel over his privies. She gave him a massage menu — Swedish, Shiatsu, hot oil, Tibetan, etc. — but strongiy recommended something called NMT, or Neuro-Muscular Therapy, which, she said, had been invented by a much-wounded Vietnam veteran who, fed up with Western medicine, had studied Oriental healing techniques. It wasn't very relaxing; in fact it caused Nick significant, groaning, teeth-clenching pain as she knuckled into his vertebrae, kneaded his sternocleidomastoids and traps, crunched his lumbar region with her elbows, and then pinched his skin till it burned — in order, she explained, to bring the blood up to the surface. This last torture she called "bindegewebs," a technique that had been invented by the Germans; naturlich.