The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  For the first time in two years she feels real desire.

  When she hears him invite her to his loft in Tribeca, she hears herself answering “Yes.”

  When she enters the loft nine floors up on Warren Street, her eyes are tearing because it is the loft she’s always dreamed of, and it is almost too painful to stand in its center because it’s a reminder of all the things she wants and doesn’t have.

  And after Ethan opens a bottle of Domaines Ott on his moonlit roof, she feels his hand nestle gently against the small of her back, and another hand caressing the nape of her neck. And she lets him.

  An hour later she feels him thrusting up into her and they’re both moaning softly, in tandem, and as her orgasm nears she’s almost whimpering, and then Ethan stares into her eyes—shocked open by pleasure—for the duration of her release, and there’s something about the way he’s looking into her so steadily, as if he’s studying her, that makes her believe he doesn’t do this often, that she’s special.

  The awful fear that she will regret this night never finds her.

  She weeps with relief.

  And afterward as she dresses, tingling, he watches her from the bed, and she loves that he doesn’t feel the need to say anything.

  David is asleep when she returns to The Riverview that night.

  And instead of getting into bed with him, she takes a long shower, and even after all the wine she can’t sleep—she’s too excited—and so she finds her old yearbook and stares at the black-and-white photo of Ethan Hoevel, his expressionless face brought to life by those piercing eyes, and only then can she peacefully fall asleep.

  As I continued walking up Mercer Street and then east on Eighth, and the images unfolded, I understood that maybe with the wine and the sex but most likely with her opening of that yearbook, a relationship was set in motion.

  What I also knew (and what Samona couldn’t have known, because if she had, this relationship would have concluded before it was ever conceived) was that she and Ethan were already gravitating toward an unforeseen ending that was, in fact, embedded in another beginning that took place years ago, in a dormitory basement, in Trumbull College, on a crumpled couch, in a darkened corner.

  9

  I MEET ETHAN Hoevel during the first few weeks of our junior year in the fall of 1995, when an ex-girlfriend of mine, Debbie Wranger, who now lives across the hall from Ethan, introduces us, deciding that we will get along “quite well.” When I press her for further explanation, she just answers that Ethan and I are both “deep” and leaves it at that. The first night I meet Ethan the three of us go out to dinner at a sushi bar near campus and Ethan Hoevel doesn’t make that much of an impression on me at first. (I don’t even know he’s in my Literature of Imperialism class until he casually mentions it.) What I first assume is that Debbie wants me to meet a new boyfriend of hers; that the introduction of Ethan Hoevel is a slight dig at me for breaking off what, I thought at the time, was a fun one-night stand unfortunately stretched out over an entire sophomore term. In a way it works because I start thinking that Debbie Wranger is cuter than I’ve ever noticed before, and then the jealousy starts flaring since Ethan Hoevel is clearly much better looking than I—and he seems a lot more interesting, already beyond all the college bullshit but not in a pretentious way. It’s just that he has already begun focusing on grander things. Gradually, and over a lot of sake, Debbie Wranger and her motivations disappear from the conversation while Ethan and I talk about books and classes and the social scene. I like how he seems to choose his words carefully yet say them enthusiastically, like they’re off-the-cuff, and that, no matter what the topic is, he always says the thing you’re waiting to hear. As an insecure junior, I admire this right away.

  At the party at Woolsey Hall later that night, “Roam” is blasting out on the dance floor and the three of us—wasted not only on all the sake we have consumed but large cups of grain-alcohol punch as well—make a sandwich with Debbie in the middle, and then it gets turned inside out so that I’m in the middle, and Ethan is behind me, pressing into my back—but it’s cool, it’s in the moment—and we keep grinding away through “Like a Prayer” and “Stand!” and it’s a drunken threesome that’s getting a little out of control, but that’s what is fun about it—the night is so unexpected—and then at some point it ceases to be a threesome, because Debbie has stepped back to watch us before she slowly moves off the packed dance floor and disappears into the maze of the party, which leaves Ethan and me rocking out wildly to “Sweet Child o’ Mine” (the same song that will play later that year when I will kiss Samona Ashley at Sigma Alpha Epsilon). Then we take a break and squeeze ourselves onto a crowded sofa and talk so intimately about humdrum stuff—girls, classes, The Future—that everything boring suddenly seems revelatory, and the party ends sometime before dawn. As I walk back to my dorm I happily realize that I have met a genuinely interesting guy who finds me genuinely interesting, too. This has never happened before. There has always been a distance—that strange lack of intimacy I encounter with men. I pass out thinking that Ethan Hoevel has broken through that distance and in doing so has activated something in me.

  How many good male friends do I have? Except for David Taylor there is really no one—and even David is a victim of his own tact. Men in my world never feel the need to get to know one another. When you grow up in the suburbs with parents so straight they both wear pajamas to bed and don’t kiss in public, being “good friends” with a guy doesn’t necessarily constitute closeness. There’s no confiding, no tears, no feeling of emptiness when someone’s not around, and instead we have sports, part-time jobs, nights spent hanging out in local burger joints—all essentially meant to waste time until we’re old enough to move somewhere else. There’s no attachment because, in the end, the relationships are as much based on what we don’t know about each other as on what we do know. Then I leave Baltimore for college and it’s the same thing except with different people and the added element of being half-drunk most of the time. So I never stop to consider these distances as problematic until I meet Ethan Hoevel and get my first glimpse of real sadness. Because Ethan—even on the first night I meet him—embodies a supreme sorrow (which he doesn’t try to conceal) that I respond to. I am the one who always tries to keep things light. I am the one who always moves on to the less controversial topic. That’s all I know how to do—I am the optimistic person who has never been wrecked by pain or doubt or suffering; these sensations have never been a presence in my small, stable life. The feelings I have for Samona and my meek way of dealing with them are the closest I’ve come to genuine torment, and at the end of the day those don’t add up to anything, really.

  But Ethan has this way of bending our conversation toward the world’s greater darkness—often in unflinching detail, ruminating about fate and luck and death and the cruelty of the universe—and of forcing this unfamiliar sensibility to resonate with me. Ethan Hoevel knows—it seems he has experienced directly—that things don’t always work out for the best, that life travels over a very jagged arc, and this is a different attitude from the privileged classmates surrounding us whose lives are blossoming with an infantile optimism (including me up to this point). There is pain coursing through Ethan Hoevel, and I soon feel an overwhelming urge to console him.

  In the beginning all I can tell him is, “You usually get through the hard times by realizing that everything will work itself out for the best in the end.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  Ethan sees how shocked I am and then softens. “I guess they would for someone like you.”

  This is another blow because, at this time, Ethan is pretty much right.

  I stay calm, my voice remaining low. “Why do you say something like that? How are we any different?”

  (He doesn’t answer then. But we are different. I just don’t know it yet.)

  Because Ethan Hoevel knows—somehow—that all the years of one’s life can lead easily up to a single defin
ing moment which will be—most likely—a disappointment. And since, once that moment passes, there will presumably be plenty of time left to live, it will take so much strength not to let that disappointment define the rest of it. In the rarefied world of our university, so many of our peers don’t really give a shit about anything except the next dance, the next party, the next hookup, the way they look. The disappointments that occur here are so mundane—a kiss turned away, a glass of wine spilled, a keg sputtering out, a term paper failed—that even if things don’t go as expected, there is only a vague complaining before moving on to the next thing. But Ethan’s complaints are so pointed, so filled with something close to heartbreak, so crushingly honest, that I become angry at myself and Debbie Wranger and everyone else around us who are so naive and deceitful and ignorant. The pain in Ethan’s gleaming eyes is honest, and it is his honesty that will shape me.

  “I’m going to tell you something and I’m not sure how you’ll take it.”

  I am not surprised. I don’t care. It registers quickly. By this time I am already aware.

  “I know what you’re going to tell me, Ethan, and it’s cool.”

  He glances at me and thinks things through.

  We are in my room, drinking beer, listening to a mixed CD Ethan burned for me, mostly U2 and Jeff Buckley. We’re pregaming before the parties start. I am propped up against two pillows on my bed, back against the wall, and Ethan is cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward, ripping the label off his bottle.

  “I thought you must have known from the first night.”

  “I didn’t really think about it.”

  “I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “Well, I guess when we were dancing…”

  He grins and looks away. “You never said anything.”

  I shrug. “There was nothing to say.”

  “Or maybe you weren’t paying attention.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Guess? I barely knew you.”

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

  “Why weren’t you sure how I’d take it? I mean, you’re making this more about me than it is about you.” I sip my beer.

  “Maybe it’s easier that way.”

  Ethan always knew, he tells me then. He knew when he made the eighth-grade soccer team, and he knew while he lost his virginity to the hottest girl in high school when he was only a freshman. He knew in tenth grade when he bought beers for the straight friends he found attractive, hoping to win their approval with the purchase of a six-pack (Ethan Hoevel never got carded), and he knew when he was dancing between three girls on a kitchen table at a high school graduation party. He knew when he was joking around in locker rooms after practice when he tried to keep his gaze at eye level with other teammates (despite his slim frame Ethan Hoevel was strong—he had muscle—and fast and was on the football team, where a litany of internalized torture presented itself, the most prominent being the unrequited love for the gorgeous quarterback), and Ethan knew when his sculpture teacher would talk about how the ancient Greeks relished capturing the beauty of the male form and he was involuntarily paying closer attention.

  But he never acted on it until the beginning of his third year at Yale (just before he met me) when he found himself getting a blow job in the bathroom at a popular pizzeria off campus, leaning against a wall under a naked lightbulb, a beautiful drunken girl’s head bobbing up and down a few feet below the line of graffiti scrawled across the wall that he was staring at: DARREN BROADBENT IS A FAG Instantly Ethan reached down to the girl and told her she could stop. The epiphany was that simple, but what was it exactly? Who was Darren Broadbent? Was Darren Broadbent actually gay or was it a random slur? Or had someone written this happily, made ecstatic by the thought that Darren Broadbent was, in fact, gay and they could not control their joy over the news? Ethan read a lot into that one slashing line of graffiti—he gave it an ambiguity that it certainly did not deserve. But that was, for whatever reason, the catalyst. And the next night Ethan agreed to go back to the room of a senior who had been cruising him all term and at four in the morning he was sitting on the bed and the senior’s hand was on Ethan’s thigh, and then in a rush, their lips met and a warm, strong tongue pushed itself into Ethan’s mouth and Ethan knew there was no way he would ever stop this because once you were liberated you could never go back to the way things were.

  He waits for me to say something else—a very specific thing that I know he wants to hear—but he’s going to have to ask.

  “I wasn’t sure if you were—”

  “What?” I cut him off.

  “If maybe—”

  “Maybe what?” I do it again. This is my way of not letting the moment occur.

  “If you were…too?”

  I just stare at him and don’t answer, watching his expression gradually shift from confusion to expectance to desire.

  “What would it matter if I was?” I finally say. “We’re friends. Right?”

  He frowns. “I didn’t expect such a cool reaction from you.”

  I’m shrugging again. “I’m a cool guy.”

  Ethan’s coming out doesn’t seem to change anything between us for a while. I try to pretend that what I said to him (“I’m a cool guy”) is true and I then become loosely involved with a girl because we’re both willing and there’s no reason not to—I don’t care about her enough to get hurt in the end, and when I’m with her, I usually picture Samona. Ethan spends a few more nights with the senior and manages to keep it hushed even as he becomes bolder about his new self. There are always parties, and classes become more important, and another track season starts, and at the end of the tunnel is graduation.

  The night it begins is in November. Almost eight weeks have passed since we shared our first dinner with Debbie Wranger, and the two of us are in Trumbull College and bored and drunk and it’s a sorority party that we don’t want to stay at, but it’s too cold outside to go anywhere else and so we’re just standing in the corner figuring out what to do, trying to form a plan. He tells me to follow him to the basement.

  “What for?” I ask.

  “Privacy,” he says in the dim blue light of the common room.

  “Ethan, I don’t want to hang out in the basement.”

  (But I am just saying this—at this point, I simply need the extra push.)

  “Follow me.”

  I hesitate only because that’s what I always do. I know what is going to happen—Ethan has been subtly pushing for it ever since we first met—but I am not sure if I’m ready. When I hesitate in the common room of Trumbull College, Ethan gazes at me with an expression I have never seen on him before. He has become empowered by something because this new expression says, basically: I dare you.

  He leads us downstairs. The basement is a concrete room illuminated by a lone fluorescent bulb. It is just a kitchen: sink, microwave, refrigerator, a table with a row of empty beer bottles lined up along the edge, and a long, clumpy sofa pushed into a darkened corner. I will remember how the wooden rafters lining the ceiling creak under the weight of the party. I will remember Ethan locking the door. I will remember him turning around and saying, “So they don’t catch us.” I will remember him pulling two beers out of the fridge. I will remember him flopping down on the couch and motioning for me to join him. I will remember waiting but not sitting on the couch next to him. I will remember him leaning over and kissing me. I will remember thinking I can do this, and then I am kissing him back harder. And then the two of us fall onto the couch, and the rafters keep creaking loudly above us. In the basement of Trumbull College I am totally aware of the present—the locked door, the solidity of the room and the heaviness of what is happening in it, the beer bottles that suddenly seem so fragile I almost want to rearrange them, the two of us searching for different things in the same embrace. We finish quickly and almost on cue there’s a pounding on the door that Ethan locked. We stare at each other for a moment, dazed by what just happened.

  I am
not going to be the one who looks away first because I feel that I still have to prove that I am the liberal guy, that I am not uptight, that everything is cool.

  Still locked onto me, Ethan gets up from the couch, and before unlocking the door, before turning away, he hesitates for another moment. When I see what that hesitation means, I look away.

  That junior year it isn’t kept hidden but what is there to hide? I am a jock on the track team who has about eight conquests to his credit, and Ethan isn’t out of the closet and identified by his sexuality yet, so no one’s going to guess anything anyway. The surface we present is one of two friends who simply hang out together. He has his life and I have mine. Junior year is a busy world, and I am half-stunned with work, and track practice takes up every afternoon, and I’m trying to move through everything with an easy smile. In other words: we aren’t holding hands while walking across the quad. When my mother asks over the phone if I’m “seeing anyone,” I give her vague details without using any pronouns and am amused by the way she draws her own conclusions. When my father forwards an e-mail from his accounting office with a stupid gay joke (Question: What do you call a fart in the men’s room of a gay bar? Answer: A love call), I e-mail back one of my own (Question: Why did the gay man take a job at the loading dock? Answer: He loved taking deliveries in the rear).