The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  And since Ethan is something I didn’t expect, I can view our time together as simply another interesting thing that has happened to me—the “writer” I want to become pushes for it, the “artist” feels the need to cross borders, to taste everything, and so I can take comfort in the fact that I am using Ethan as much as he is using me.

  And that’s my mistake: I don’t see it as an affair; I’m content to think, okay, I’ll see what happens; I never take it as seriously as Ethan does. It’s just an unexpected development that I’ve really never fantasized about and consequently am unprepared for—Ethan presents himself to me from out of nowhere. None of it seems particularly weird or profound. It isn’t earthshaking. It doesn’t scare me after that first time. I simply find it ironic and experience it with a shrug. (Though if you told me a year before that I would be lying naked on Ethan Hoevel’s bed as if it is the most normal thing in the world, I would not have believed you. I would have walked away from you. I would have ignored you.)

  And, ultimately, there is a factor that was always going to end it.

  I simply never found boys beautiful, and there has always been a girl on campus—exotic, graceful, dark-skinned—who means something to me.

  Remnants of maybe our last conversation in May before the end of junior year. Eight months have passed since that night in the basement of Woolsey Hall.

  We are lying in Ethan’s bed in the darkness, afterward, sober, naked, our legs intertwined, talking about nothing and staring at the ceiling.

  “What will you miss?” he asks. “After we leave here?”

  I hesitate. “The strange moments.” I sigh, stretching my arms over my head. “The ones I didn’t expect.”

  “Like right now?” he asks.

  “Well, this whole year was sort of a surprise.” My weight shifts on the bed as I remove my leg from between his.

  “You were a surprise,” he says softly, resisting the movement of my leg.

  He thinks I am being playful but then sees that I’m not.

  “Well, becoming friends with you was a surprise as well,” I say. “And it was a really nice one. It’s kind of dumb to have to say this to each other.”

  He finally lets go of my leg. I am relieved.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—do we need to be talking about this?”

  He becomes silent, considering something.

  I reach over to the nightstand and finish a beer we opened before we fell into each other. I notice how intensely he’s watching me as I drink from the bottle.

  “What?” I ask, startled.

  “Where are we gonna be in five years?” he asks.

  Something in me tightens—a tiny cluster of fear. I try to brush it off by laughing. “Shit—I don’t even know where I’m gonna be five hours from now.”

  “You’ll be in your room passed out.” He pauses, turns away. “Or someone else’s room.”

  I am silent. He’s right. There is a girl who casually interests me. Ethan knows about her even though I’ve never brought her name up in front of him. What he doesn’t know is that—as usual—this girl is basically a defense mechanism against my feelings for Samona. But so what?

  “Well, it’s not looking that way now, is it?” I’m comfortable enough with Ethan that I can reach over and stroke his cheek, very briefly, just to calm him. “I mean, I’m here with you now.”

  “But I asked you about the future.” He turns over so his pale, narrow back faces me.

  The dreaded words. I don’t want to get defensive. I don’t want things to get out of hand. This is a phase of our friendship and not the friendship itself. This is not going to last forever. But, hopefully, we are. I say none of these things.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re good friends, Ethan.”

  He protests. “We’re more than that.”

  “What’s more than good friends?”

  And so it continues until Ethan officially comes out and—since there’s really nothing for me to come out of—we fight. I want to keep the friendship going but Ethan wants so much more than I will ever give him. I explain that he means more than that—I am longing to hold on to a friend who’s important to me—I dread the day that Ethan wants a commitment. When I finally tell him that I “probably” (it is such a careful speech I prepare) am not gay, that I, in fact, “do” love him but that our friendship needs to “move to another level,” that it is something I “don’t” regret, that I let it happen, that maybe I “even wanted it” to happen, and that “honestly” it has “not been a big deal for me” (that is the phrase that hurts Ethan the most) Ethan shuts down completely. It is the last time we speak, and it is what drives Ethan to the mechanical engineering lab up on Science Hill a mile away from campus where he will spend his entire senior year. In the end it is Ethan who leaves me.

  During that final year I occasionally bump into Ethan and he has nothing to say to me, but I’m busy with track meets and overwhelmed with three English classes and even though I miss hanging out (more than I ever imagined I would) I try hard to forget about him. I tell myself that no matter what you do or how you act people will always just drift in and out of your life and you really won’t be able stop them (unless you truly want to, Ethan would have argued) and most of the time you’ll just have to wipe the tear from your eye, and the ache in your chest will fade, and over time you will forget, and you will travel on, like Ethan Hoevel did.

  II

  10

  (The following text is an incomplete history, presented in installments, and based on information the author compiled beginning in the spring of 1996 and continuing until the present day. The sources of the information include but are not limited to conversations at biannual track reunions, the occasional drinks party with mutual acquaintances, circulated rumors, and the author’s own more directed research. Certain details reflect the author’s projections that he imagined to be true.)

  The Story of David and Samona

  Part 1: The Dream

  AFTER GRADUATING in May of 1997, David Taylor began his job at Merrill Lynch as an “intermediary salesman” in the international market sector. He shared a two-bedroom sublet in Battery Park City with another Yale graduate who had a similar job at a different company. David took the apartment because it was within walking distance of the World Financial Center on Vesey Street.

  Each day started at 3:45 A.M. David Taylor woke up, showered, dressed, and walked through the predawn streetlight of downtown Manhattan. It was a fifteen-minute walk, and he made a point to do it every morning. These were fifteen minutes that he gave to himself before giving up the next sixteen hours to everyone else. These were the fifteen minutes when David Taylor would think about college and how he had often scheduled his classes so he wouldn’t have to be out of bed until noon. By 4:30 A.M. David Taylor was sitting at his desk in time for the opening of the overseas markets. His desk was in a large room on the twenty-first floor of building four, where David and eighteen other men his age sat under fluorescent lights, the borders of their workstations defined not by the walls of a cubicle but by computers and power cords. Investors would call David and tell him what to buy and what to sell. He plugged their numbers into his Excel spreadsheets and then passed the requests along to the floor traders.

  David Taylor had signed a two-year contract ($55,000 annually) at the end of which he would have to decide whether or not to leave Merrill Lynch.

  Some days he would spread twenty minutes of work over fourteen hours with the goal of being the first one in the office to leave. Since everyone else was doing the same thing, they usually coordinated their departures with one another via Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts, avoiding the screening of company e-mail. And everyone who had escaped would make his way to a bar in the Millenium Hilton for a few drinks (usually more than a few) where they would talk about the market—where it had been, where it was going, how someday they would reap the benefits—before making weak efforts to pair up with any ava
ilable girls and move on to the next place, or else go home. But David Taylor—who more often than not would forgo the routine girl chasing since he knew that if and when he went home with some oversexed young stranger, he’d then somehow have to wake himself up before dawn in an unfamiliar part of town and be even more tired and depressed than he already was—would usually just come back to the Battery Park City apartment by seven (he rarely saw his roommate, who worked domestic market hours) and he would eat Thai or Chinese takeout and watch back-to-back reruns of The Simpsons and maybe call Samona before going to bed no later than 8:30, and while falling asleep he would remember watching The Simpsons with his fraternity brothers and how he missed that camaraderie and the simple human contact of it all and its lack of desperation. That was really the only thing he noticed about his coworkers as the millennium approached—how desperate they all were to stay late, to get ahead, to make their millions young, to get laid, to get high on something more exciting than coke (which was “so eighties and early nineties”), to establish themselves as the plucky new wave of prodigies who were going to take over this antiquated world of finance before their window closed.

  David Taylor didn’t want to be a part of that.

  He never had the ambition to change anything bigger than himself. He just wanted to lay low, float under the radar, and get through “being a kid” fast so he could move on to the next segment of his life as quickly as possible.

  David Taylor was also aware of how lonely he was.

  Through all this, he spent a not insignificant portion of his time wondering how he arrived on the twenty-first floor at Four World Financial Center, staring into the green luminescence of his computer screen. What had happened to that dream he’d had, which had once seemed so conceivable? That dream which had been spawned during Thanksgiving break junior year, lying on his bed in the attic of a house outside Chicago reading Heart of Darkness for his Literature of Imperialism class, marveling at how he could be listening to the murmurs of his parents, who were sitting in the dining room downstairs drinking whiskey and arguing about the new brick patio—how this could be happening after three known affairs (his father, Patrick, who ran a small chain of hardware stores, had a short fling with David’s nanny and then another one-night stand with the widow who lived six houses away; his mother, Judy, had been fucking the squash coach at Northwestern University, where she was secretary to the dean of the English department, for years) and one second mortgage and ten thousand arguments over trivialities like the heating bill and how much rum to stir into the eggnog and what angle to set the grand piano and why did Patrick want to stop at one child when Judy still needed a daughter? What could they be talking about now, a day before Thanksgiving? How could they still be talking at all? How could they have allowed their lives to reach this point? Why hadn’t they just surrendered to each other at some stage along the way and then moved on to something at least mildly more fulfilling?

  The dream that David contrived in response to his parents’ late night of drinking—what he considered the antithesis to the way they simply settled for each other and a life of mild discontent—began with him getting a master’s degree in education, preferably in New York or Boston or D.C. (those cities that drew stampedes of recent college grads seemed interchangeable). And while he was doing this, he’d substitute-teach part-time in local high schools and be that cool young person who gets high fives from all the male students and unrequited crushes from all the girls. He’d learn how to be tough and earn people’s attention, and at night he’d do something cool for spending money (his family in Chicago had none) like bartend in a neighborhood dive. And then very soon David would have his degree and take a salaried position as an English teacher in the public school system, where he’d get through the rigorous days by knowing he was doing something important and challenging and also by looking forward to the summer, which he would spend relaxing in the Hamptons or Cape Cod or the Jersey Shore (depending on what city he ended up in) with old fraternity brothers and whatever girl he happened to be dating. After a few years of this—having paid the necessary dues and rid himself of debt through city financial aid programs—David Taylor would move on to a private school that had an opening, preferably an exclusive boarding school in Massachusetts within driving distance of Boston and New York, where he’d live in a modest house with a yard, and coach track—working out alongside his runners, whipping the rich kids into shape—and teach Shakespearean romances to people who were too young to understand the subversiveness, but who wanted the class anyway because Mr. Taylor was leading it and Mr. Taylor kicked ass (“please, call me Dave,” he would say offhand, in the dream). Meanwhile his office window would overlook a set of rolling hills blanketed with the red-and-yellow leaves of autumn or purple with snow in the winter, and before long (he never harped on the particulars of this, but simply believed it would happen naturally) he would have a loving wife and two children and on the weekends he would play soccer with his sons on the football field inside of the track where he coached. And it never mattered—in the dream—that it was all just a glorified extension of the environment he was most accustomed to, and that David Taylor’s plans, someday, might be confronted by a reality which challenged the ease he so craved.

  What had happened to that dream?

  That dream had died—been murdered, actually, without David even knowing it—in the final weeks of his junior year at Yale, when David Taylor was just getting serious with Samona Ashley. And since she would be living in NYU housing that summer with two girlfriends while interning at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, David decided that he wanted to be in New York with Samona. He was going to live with two of his fraternity brothers (who were also interning in the city) on the Upper East Side and drink the summer away and spend most nights with Samona and on weekends they would go out to the Hamptons, where the Sigma Alpha Epsilon vice president’s parents had a house in Amagansett. That was the plan, and it seemed like a damned good one. So he posted his “résumé” on Jobtrak.com and did a keyword search on Manhattan and applied to basically anything that was available (which did not include much at the end of April): a psych research program at Sloan-Kettering which involved running CAT scans on paranoid schizophrenics, tutoring low-income children at Mentorship USA, assisting at an executive head-hunting firm, and a summer internship at Merrill Lynch.

  Merrill Lynch was at the bottom of David Taylor’s list.

  But they were the only one who requested an interview.

  David Taylor was interviewed by a guy only two years older than he who also ran track in college, and so David—who had been nervous about the interview—was put at ease almost immediately when his eight-hundred-meter championship became the main topic of their conversation. Within minutes, he was offered the internship, which he accepted because it meant he could drink with his friends and have sex with Samona and not worry about money and it would all be great. So he would have to wake up early during the week—big deal. He was young, he could handle it. This wouldn’t be a problem.

  He didn’t know that the dull and endless work would wear David Taylor down more fully than any track practice or fraternity pledge week ever had, or that the fun he had planned for the summer of 1996 would be eradicated by his utter weariness. He didn’t know that on Monday he wouldn’t even imagine there being such a thing as Friday, and when Friday finally arrived, it would seem unreal that Monday had ever existed—it would seem so far in the past. And on Saturdays it would seem even more unreal that another Monday was starting two days later, and he’d have to ride the 6 train to Grand Central and then navigate the hot, crowded platforms to transfer to the Times Square shuttle and then another subway car downtown before climbing up into the chaos of the World Trade Center. And that would be before the workday even began. David didn’t expect any of this, but this was how it happened.

  The internship lasted ten weeks. There were no weekends in the Hamptons (there was almost one, but it lasted only six hours because Samon
a had said she was coming and then didn’t show, which freaked David out enough to take an empty jitney back into Manhattan on a Friday night in July—a total disaster). The first three days of each week David could only concentrate on just getting through them and nothing else, and then he would go out with Samona and their friends on Thursday night, before spending a long and torturous Friday hungover in the office. The weekends were only about air-conditioning, dry cleaning, catching up on sleep.

  But since it was only ten weeks, there was always that light at the end of the tunnel, and the internship would be painfully endured and happily forgotten. What David couldn’t have predicted was that Ian Connor, the ex-runner who interviewed David at the beginning of that summer, would not believe that David Taylor had been honest about the track times listed on his résumé. David didn’t seem athletic enough to have that kind of speed, and this pissed Ian off all summer. On top of that, there was something in David Taylor’s easygoing smugness that pissed Ian Connor off even more. And since Ian Connor was trader as stereotype—aggressive, competitive, brash, crude—near the end of the summer of 1996 he challenged David to a 150-yard race in Central Park. Ian was shorter than David and a little stocky but he was basically still in shape—he lifted weights in the office gym each afternoon and took spin classes at Synergy in the evenings. David hadn’t run much that summer and wasn’t really all that interested (it was against NCAA training rules, too) but once word of the race leaked out, office wagers spiraled into the thousands, and since all of those wagering were his superiors, David felt he had no choice but to humor them. Before the race, James Leonard—the floor leader who had been at Merrill Lynch for twenty-seven years—told David Taylor that he had put $15,000 on David and he would “greatly appreciate it” if David won.