The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  “Normally, when this happens, we just take the roller out, but it’s probably too hot still, right?” Her voice came from behind me.

  “Personally, I blame Stanton Vaughn,” I said as a joke, handing her a clump of mangled sleeve. “How’d you get him, anyway?”

  There was another kind of pause behind me.

  I couldn’t see her but I knew she was there and I started thinking about a horror movie where half a man’s body was in one room and the other half was protruding from the wall in another, where an animal was waiting to choose the most vulnerable moment to strike, but it was so dark you couldn’t see what the animal was—the yellow gleam of its eyes the only reason you knew it was watching.

  “Samona?” I asked.

  “You know how I got him.”

  I tried to keep my voice steady, and even though I had finished the job, I stayed leaning inside the machine. “No. I don’t. How?”

  “Ethan.”

  A long pause.

  “That was thoughtful of him.” I came up out of the machine. She was holding a blue ice pack against her hand.

  Another long pause.

  She made a small gesture toward me. “You’ve got dye on your shirt.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll buy another one at Urban Outfitters.”

  A flash of a sad smile. She wanted to say something else. She lowered her head.

  “I wasn’t sure what you knew.” She moved toward the machine and turned on the power. It clanked and grinded for a few seconds before it began running again with a clean, smooth hum. The remains of the mangled shirt rolled onto a tray. “Even though you’re the only one who…knows anything, I think.”

  “That’s a dubious honor. But I guess…” I trailed off and studied the ceiling.

  “You guess what?”

  “I guess it brought me here. I mean, I barely knew you in college, and now it’s eight years later and all this stuff is going on…and I’m here. How weird is that?”

  “Eight years.” She just stood there looking guilty. “Yeah.”

  I took a deep breath. “Samona?”

  She looked up at me.

  “Does this whole thing make you nervous?” I said this gently, without accusation, but her sad smile hardened.

  “What do I have to be nervous about?” she snapped.

  I couldn’t reply because it would have come out desperate. She was standing next to me and I didn’t care if she noticed that I was staring at the stain that slashed across the blouse beneath her breasts. I wanted her to notice. I didn’t know where this confidence was coming from.

  “Will you tell me something about Ethan?” she said in a distant voice. “Something I don’t know yet.”

  “I’m not sure what you do know.”

  “Not very much,” she said. “Hardly anything.”

  “And is that…why you asked me here?” I tried to sound casual. I tried to stay calm. I tried to pretend that I didn’t care what her answer was. I looked away.

  “Kind of,” she answered, hesitant. “But not totally.”

  “He travels,” was all I could come up with. “He’s traveling all the time. It’s like his thing.”

  “And where does he go?”

  “Why don’t you ask him, Samona?”

  “I’m not sure he’d tell me.”

  “Where do you think he goes?” I asked.

  She paused and then, in a sad whisper, “Everywhere.” She shook her head. “Nowhere. I don’t know—I wasn’t close to Ethan at Yale like you were. I didn’t even know he went to our school.” She paused. “I guess I was too busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. Hanging out. Not studying. Student Activities Committee. Intramural volleyball. Getting wasted on a nightly basis. Going to the art museum.” She stopped to laugh, spiteful at how pointless it all sounded. “Whatever other shit I did while you and David were running around in circles every day.”

  The machine’s humming made it easier for the conversation to take on a more intimate tone.

  “So…how much did he tell you?” she asked. “About…us?”

  “Nothing.”

  We were motionless. She gazed past me and sighed.

  “Seriously,” I went on in order to end this. “Ethan doesn’t tell me very much. I don’t know him as well as you think I do—”

  “I get it, I know. But if you want…” She paused and seemed to weigh something in her mind before adding, “I can tell you—I’ll tell you how it happened.” She lowered her face, glancing up at me with a seductive meekness as she added, “I wouldn’t mind telling you.”

  I didn’t answer—I was reeling at her proposition and wondering what could possibly be motivating it—and she interpreted my silence as her cue to begin.

  “I was at a gallery on Mercer Street right after this place opened. He was there, too. He recognized me from school and started talking to me…” She closed her eyes and trailed off, and I assumed she would end there—a few simple sentences, tinged with enough innuendo to satiate whatever curiosity had brought me to her but still vague enough to be set aside and, ultimately, ignored.

  Then I would leave her shop and move on; I would screen Ethan if he called again; I wouldn’t reply to e-mails from Samona or David; I’d pull away and focus on work and pretty soon the summer would be over.

  Except that she didn’t stop—she only paused to take a breath.

  Then she told me exactly what happened that night.

  And through it all I stood there, listening soberly, frozen, because:

  (and the following awareness became fully and painfully clear only then, while she spoke)

  I had built my world in such a way that the only thing I could offer Samona Taylor—my only significance to her—was that I happened to share small histories with both her husband and her lover, these histories rendering me the most appropriate person to hear her confession and, just by allowing her to tell it to me, absolve her. But what Samona Taylor didn’t know was that hearing her story threw me back into an alternate reality I’d spent the last eight years trying to forget, and

  (this was the most crippling part) in that reality, I could have had her—I could have had Samona Ashley—and we could have moved through the city together, sealed off from everyone else, and I wouldn’t have had to be alone.

  Then the way Samona finished forced me out of my regret.

  “And now I need a promise from you.” Finally I looked at her face.

  “Does…it matter that I’ve never made a promise I’ve been able to keep?”

  She smiled. “I have to ask you not to say anything. Not that you would, but…okay?”

  “Samona…” I started.

  And then the bell above the door rang and Martha was back. She heard the press running again and called up, “Fantastic!”

  Samona brushed a tear from her face and composed her expression.

  She said, “I hope to catch up with you soon,” and made me take a sandwich home.

  I left without saying good-bye.

  8

  I WAS HALFWAY home that afternoon, and Samona’s words would not leave my head; they played and replayed, over and over and over. There was something about their echo—the persistence of it—that was more than just a painful annoyance.

  Part of me wanted to be involved. Part of me wanted to be a character in the story of Samona Taylor and Ethan Hoevel. Part of me wanted to be standing beside them.

  And then I stopped on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Street, and this turned out to be the moment in which certain events coalesced vividly in my mind; events which I couldn’t help myself from reimagining; events that hurt me as I filled in details that she’d left out; events that Samona Taylor had chosen to recount to a guy she assumed was too inconsequential not to listen and too uncomplicated not to keep the secret.

  In early May during the summer before she turns thirty, Samona Taylor goes to a certain gallery opening in SoHo where she’s supposed to meet Olivi
a (Olivia knows the artist) and then the two of them will have dinner at Balthazar. But Olivia has to cancel because her husband isn’t feeling well, and Samona is sitting alone in Printing Divine shutting down the computer and turning off the stereo, and she is dreading the empty night waiting in front of her, and since the gallery is only a few blocks away on Mercer, she decides to walk to the gallery anyway, have one or two glasses of wine, and then take a cab back to The Riverview. But the third glass of wine (she did not intend on having) goes straight to her head, and then David calls her cell phone because he won’t be home until after midnight and it’s just so typical and frustrating that she simply says, “See you later,” and clicks off. Samona has never been comfortable at parties without someone she can cling to, but that third glass of wine pushes her over the hump and she starts feeling, well, sophisticated. Having just opened Printing Divine (made official by the small piece about it in the Sunday Styles section of the Times and a photo of her on Page Six at the party celebrating the opening and the mention in “BizBash”), Samona thinks she might be recognized, but this hope fades, and after thirty minutes of overhearing conversations between Park Avenue socialites and Tribeca hipsters with trust funds (“But the artist hasn’t found his identity yet…”) she starts feeling lonely and sad, and she’s waiting for someone she can reject, some asshole dressed in Prada with whom she can flirt before ridiculing, which will then give her the excuse she needs to leave the gallery on Mercer Street and head up to the boring comfort of the apartment in The Riverview, where she might talk to her father for a few minutes on the phone before falling asleep in an empty bed. But no one comes and she can only float through the gallery for so long before sadness completely overwhelms her.

  Someone catches Samona near the door just as she is leaving.

  (Ethan Hoevel would inform me later that summer how he’d been at the same gallery on Mercer Street that night because he’d known that one of Stanton Vaughn’s investors would be attending the opening, and since the problem of Indonesia was being associated with Stanton Vaughn’s name with an alarming frequency, this particular investor had been having “serious doubts” about Stanton’s future and hadn’t returned any of Stanton’s calls. So Ethan Hoevel deemed it a good idea to casually—accidentally—bump into the investor at the opening, with Stanton, of course, since Stanton always had more credibility when Ethan was with him. But Stanton never showed up that night—Stanton was actually screwing a young sculptor in Williamsburg—and so Ethan Hoevel was at the gallery alone, and he finally found the investor and flattered him by gushing about how great the art was and how it was such a wise move to invest in this artist at the very moment he was finding his identity, then used that to segue into Stanton and how “Boi-Wear” still had serious potential even though, yes, it was true, the industry had been losing interest because of a particular allegation regarding the labor situation in Indonesia, but the sweatshops were just harsh rumors in a harsh business—even though, as he thought about it, Ethan didn’t actually know where Stanton got his materials and that was because, it just hit him, he had never seen the receipts—and the investor was buying it because it was coming straight from Ethan Hoevel. Then, at the end of his speech, as Ethan extended his arm for a handshake, he trailed off, because across the room he saw Samona Ashley floating alone in a corner next to two panels dotted with planetary bodies, and she was studying each panel separately even though they were meant to be taken in together from a distance. He saw her over the shoulder of Stanton’s investor, who was in the midst of telling Ethan that he would keep his stake in “Boi-Wear,” and then Ethan didn’t have to stay at the gallery anymore. But he didn’t leave because he was staring at Samona, who looked sort of lost and maybe a little sad, a woman who—if she left the brightly lit gallery on Mercer Street and walked through cool, dark, presummer SoHo, alone—would only become more lost and sad.)

  The first thing Samona notices about this man is the way his eyes are so intensely, achingly green. And she immediately likes what he’s wearing: a vintage pair of 517 Levi’s (she can’t remember the last time David wore a pair of jeans), authentic cowboy boots, a black Calvin Klein T-shirt, and a gray sport coat from Barneys. Those two things (the eyes and the clothes) are the reasons Samona Taylor lets this tall, thin man stop her at the door of the gallery on Mercer Street rather than dismissing him with a flash of her wedding band and the well-practiced turn of her shoulder, like she has dismissed so many others.

  “Have we met before?” he asks.

  “I don’t think so,” she says. “Should I recognize you?”

  “Jeez, I was hoping you would,” he says. “Because I recognize you.”

  Samona studies the face in front of her. She doesn’t know who it is. She hasn’t seen him anywhere recently. But then a time and place she has nearly forgotten comes back to her and she smiles, embarrassed.

  “I remember you now. You went to Yale.”

  “That’s it.” His relief touches her.

  She barely remembers him, and for some reason, on that night, she’s glad about that fact. She wants them to remain strangers at first. She wants to move through the process of getting to know this man.

  They go back into the gallery, reintroducing each other, and when she hears his name she recognizes it right away from the trade magazines, and she tells him about her new business and then Ethan Hoevel starts advising her on how to get Printing Divine more press—he has seen the piece in the Times and the mention on Page Six but has she ever thought about hiring a PR firm because he knows some good ones, and soon Samona Taylor isn’t listening anymore because she has lost herself in Ethan’s sadly entrancing eyes. It happens that easily.

  When he asks her if she wants to grab a bite to eat, she decides to keep the reservation that Olivia made at Balthazar and the two of them leave the gallery together and walk to Spring Street. Even though she has a table reserved, the maître d’ knows Ethan and seats them in one of the three coveted booths saved for celebrity walk-ins that overlook the teeming restaurant.

  “I’m not trying to impress you,” Ethan says, a little sheepishly.

  “Well, maybe that’s why I’m so impressed,” Samona says, her head swimming with the four glasses of Yellow Tail she drank at the gallery.

  Ethan consults with the sommelier and orders an expensive Burgundy she’s never heard of, and then he concentrates solely on her in a way that makes her particularly aware that right now there’s no droning on about market quotes or arguments concerning the print shop and the possibility of moving to the suburbs. She notices that even though the booth is oversize with just the two of them in it, they’re sitting more closely than they were when they first slid in, and Samona wonders when this happened.

  “So I know what you’re doing now,” Ethan says. “But I don’t know where you’ve been all these years.”

  “Well, I’m—” Samona is trying to decide what to tell him, what she wants him to know, and then she sees him glance at the wedding band.

  “Married?” he asks.

  “Yes. I’m married.”

  “To that guy we went to school with? The runner?”

  “Yeah.” She laughs. “Do you know him?”

  “If it’s the same guy you were dating in college, yeah, I think I do. He was someone very…” Ethan searches for the right word and comes up with “…prominent.”

  “David Taylor.” She says the name flatly.

  “That’s right,” Ethan says. “David Taylor.”

  Samona wants to change the subject.

  “And what about you?” she asks. “Were you—one of those prominent guys?”

  “If I had been, wouldn’t you have remembered me?”

  “I guess so.” She feels as if the balance between them keeps tilting.

  Ethan registers this. “Forget it. It was a big school. I guess I was prominent in my own piece of it.”

  “That’s a little evasive. Don’t you want me to know?”

  A curious expres
sion creases her face, like she’s just remembered something.

  And Samona asks if Ethan Hoevel knew a guy who ran track with David Taylor. Because she recalls that the two of them—Ethan and this guy—seemed to hang out a lot during junior year, and she’d been aware of this only because David Taylor had intimated to her—without getting into the specifics that he did not have—that this guy had become “a serious part” of Ethan Hoevel’s world.

  Ethan’s face hardens as he sips his wine, and after he sips the wine again, he says, “Yes.”

  But Samona is still lost in her memory and murmurs, “So what does it mean to be in ‘Ethan Hoevel’s World’?” And then she shakes her head as if to clear it, and says, “I’m a little drunk.”

  From then on, Ethan Hoevel does not take his eyes off her, even when she wants him to while she’s savoring every bite of her risotto. The food sobers her up and she starts feeling relaxed again and expansive and Ethan has such immense confidence in himself, which Samona finds extremely (she does not want to go to this place—she’s been fighting it all night) arousing. She has met a thousand men in this city who exuded confidence, but only in reaction to the demands the city placed on them. It never felt genuine to her—and not one of them ever managed to turn her on. Ethan’s confidence is darker—she discerns a torrent of conflicting thoughts buried beneath his cool exterior—and yet seems to manifest itself so effortlessly. This complicated and sexy—yes, sexy, definitely sexy—confidence is something she has never seen in David Taylor. But sitting in the large red booth at Balthazar (they have moved even closer to each other) she understands that she’s never been looking for it. David glazed over with fatigue and routine a long time ago; David’s eyes are bloodshot from the stagnant glow of the computer screen; David has been fading away from her.

  And now, his leg pressing against hers, she’s sitting with a successful artist—lucid, gorgeous, alive—who’s staring at her as if he wants to know everything.

  Before the meal ends she is telling Ethan about the marriage and her discontent, the sadness and hopelessness, how he made her beg for the money to start Printing Divine, and what rendered the begging even more pathetic was that it wasn’t just about a print shop—what David really wanted her to beg for was the chance to do something with her life, and then she’s telling Ethan how they argue almost daily about her desire to find a loft in Tribeca instead of staying in their cookie-cutter one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen, and how she dreads the inevitable moment at every dinner when David, after two tumblers of Grey Goose, brings up the subject of having children and moving to Connecticut or, worse, New Jersey, and—after Ethan and Samona have put another bottle of Burgundy away—how their lovemaking never lasts long enough, and Ethan just keeps staring at her through those tortured eyes, and she slowly decides that it isn’t his confidence that is so attractive, but his pain.