The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  Twenty traders in two lines formed a straightaway across Sheep Meadow one Saturday afternoon in August. Ian used a crouching start. David was standing. Someone had come up with a real starter’s pistol, and all the commands were given—Runners take your marks, Get set, and then the gun. David slipped at the start of the race and faced a choice: either throw his hands in the air and forget the whole thing since there was only one more week left in the internship or else play catch-up and try to win.

  Something inside David Taylor—that fire which, as a freshman, had sent him around the track faster than anyone else in the Ivy League, amplified by the fact that this race was an opportunity to show these assholes who’d been torturing him all summer that he was in fact stronger than any of them—pushed him a half yard ahead of Ian Connor’s choppy strides just before the finish line, where Samona Ashley was standing. David had told her to be at the finish line so he could use her as a mark to keep him running a straight line.

  That half yard—David was sure of this ever since—was the sole reason he received one of only two offers from Merrill Lynch that year. It was a bear market, and a lot of salesmen and traders were losing their jobs, and though this wasn’t where the dream was supposed to flow, David Taylor—to the astonishment and horror of Samona, who’d spent much of the summer enduring his complaints—accepted the offer.

  Surprisingly, the choice was simple: while most of the guys in his class at Yale were going back to their final year of college wondering what they would do when they graduated (and tens of thousands of dollars in debt) David Taylor would have a job waiting for him. He would return to Yale in the fall of 1996 for his senior year and take it easy and focus on track and Samona and having fun. Plus, when he stopped to think about it, David could amuse himself at how he had neither worked very hard that summer nor been particularly good at the work he did. If he looked past the actual time spent and hours lost, it wasn’t such a bad gig after all. So when James Leonard invited him into his office to offer David the job—along with his congratulations and thanks for the $15,000 Leonard earned in two-to-one odds—David Taylor convinced himself that he had outsmarted them all. He shook James Leonard’s hand and gave two years of his life away. A half yard of flattened grass defined the beginning of David Taylor’s adulthood.

  The new plan: David would work hard and save up his money—a windfall for someone who had never been ambitious about anything other than running, and who had never expected to have a savings account worth more than a few nights out drinking—and then he would go back to school for his master’s in education and he’d be able to do it without student loans. Because of the state of the market at the time, he was placed in the much-maligned international group, but he had prepared himself for that. (It would only be two years, remember?) Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to live a little bit in the harsh light of the real world for a short while—it would make his dream all the more fulfilling.

  That was, in effect, the end of David Taylor’s dream—though he didn’t know that yet.

  There was a vital distraction that prevented him from realizing what he’d done.

  In the summer of 1997, just after college graduation, as David Taylor was moving into the apartment in Battery Park City with the fellow athlete from Yale, Samona Ashley was helping her parents adjust to the move from Connecticut to Minneapolis, where her father had been transferred, before she would decide what to do with her BA in art history and where to do it. She tried to spend the majority of her days browsing the Internet for positions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s (there were none available for which she was even remotely qualified), but it was still a total nightmare: “Tana from Ghana” was acting more manic than usual, which ultimately amounted to Samona being unable to lift a box or drink a Diet Coke without initiating some tirade on how she could definitely stand to lose “at least eight” pounds from her “backside.”

  Samona—even though she probably should have been accustomed to this by the time she was twenty-two, especially with all the counseling she received at Yale’s Mental Health Center—could never get used to being the focus of her mother’s tirades. And her father was no help—he chose not to take sides—which pissed Samona off because he was the one who had asked her to come to Minneapolis in the first place. He’d said he “missed having his girl around” and that she should “take as much time as she needed to figure her life out,” but each day that passed only cemented her belief that his reaching out had been just a ploy to divert Tana’s “difficult nature” (he used that phrase because he somehow assumed it would soothe her) onto someone else.

  The only saving grace was David Taylor calling her every night at eight o’clock from New York after The Simpsons reruns were over, before he went to bed. Samona never brought up how miserable she was in Minneapolis because David was so unhappy and still in shock that he was back to waking up every morning before 4 A.M. to get to an office he didn’t want to go to and sit at a desk until 6 P.M., and how had he ended up at Merrill Lynch in the first place? Why hadn’t Samona talked him out of it? How had he fooled himself into thinking he could take it for two years? What was he doing with his life? The nightly phone calls—even though they were all about David—provided exactly the kind of distraction Samona now craved, especially when he ended each conversation by telling Samona how beautiful she was and how much he missed her and that she was perfect—words she desperately needed to hear amid all the Tana-inspired self-loathing.

  She assumed correctly that there were the intermittent “random girls” in his life while she was away, but from the sound of his voice—its desperate tone—she also assumed correctly that he wasn’t excited by any of them the way other guys in his world were. The city was never a “playground” to David, which made him come off as more mature than the typical twenty-two-year-old. And since they hadn’t made any kind of commitment to each other, she couldn’t locate it in herself to fault him much for fooling around, and she never pried for details. In fact, Samona had a one-night stand of her own in Minneapolis one night in late June (a “friend of a friend”), but the faceless guy wasn’t exhilarating in the least, and he was too “small” and into his own pleasure to be anywhere near the realm of giving her an orgasm, and the awkwardness and detachment of the whole encounter made her long for what she’d had with David even more.

  She projected that he felt the same way about her. Ultimately, she was content simply to know that his days were filled with nothing, and she never had to admit to him how his unhappiness made her so much more at ease with her own.

  Near the end of the summer of 1997, when they’d both reached crisis point, David asked Samona to visit him. He purchased her ticket from a consolidator Web site, splurged on a car service at the airport, and Samona Ashley left her parents in the approaching coldness of a Minnesota autumn and flew to New York for what was supposed to be a two-week visit. She had not seen David Taylor since graduation in May. They made love as soon as she arrived, but it was different than she remembered. He didn’t have the energy he once had, and he didn’t move the same way. He never found that place inside her that he had found so quickly their first time together.

  Still, the simple presence of him within her took Samona so far from the bland condo in Minneapolis, her mother’s voice, her father’s unexpected apathy, and the growing awareness that her art-history degree was a useless sham and that she would never find a job she wanted. She didn’t need intense pleasure from David so much as she needed a means to ignore certain realities.

  She was lost and indecisive. She didn’t want to go back to Minneapolis, but she didn’t have the will to consider staying in New York—just seeing what the city had done to David in two months was enough to terrify her.

  When David proudly set her up (through one of the account VPs on his floor) with an interview at the home of a private art dealer specializing in Spanish and Italian Renaissance masters (which had been part of her thesis at Yale) she bought a low-key dress and went to his house in
Riverdale. She didn’t have high hopes but at least it was something to do. Then the door opened and his saggy eyes lit up suggestively, causing her to recoil. For the next hour and a half, she endured the seventy-year-old man staring relentlessly at her legs while she murmured perfunctory answers to his pointless questions, repeatedly tugging her skirt down below her knees. She knew the whole time that, since she refused to acknowledge his interest, she’d never hear from him again.

  “Please don’t worry, baby,” David pleaded with her over the phone while listening to her cry. “I’ll find something else for you.”

  “There is nothing else,” she sobbed back at him angrily, unable to decide what was more pathetic—how badly David wanted her to stay, or how badly she wanted to leave. “There’s nothing here for me, and I just have to get out of here. Like, tomorrow.”

  Her impromptu “going-away party” was at a bar that night with David’s “friends” from the office—people Samona found dully amusing. David was still trying desperately to cheer her up enough to make her stay a little longer. He was failing miserably—she kept having to go to the bathroom in order to hold back tears and, the last time, throw up—until he latched onto the story about Samona entering the model search at Yale—as a joke (he left out that she’d been prompted by him)—and how she had won anyway and her prize had been a set of free head shots and a meeting at the modeling agency that had sponsored the search (which she’d never set up), and this led to someone at the bar mentioning that as long as Samona was in town why not call the agency? Her face lit up slightly that night, and the following afternoon after David massaged her confidence over the phone (“The worst they can do is say no, which they won’t”) she did call them back. The agency had her come in for a set of head shots, and almost instantaneously she was contractually bound to a series of catalog photo shoots for two different cosmetics lines. Her look was “in” at that moment: “light-skinned island type” was how she often heard herself described. The half smile, the tentative expression, the way she was constantly looking away as if she was totally indifferent to the process (which she wanted to be but wasn’t)—it all captured the camera “in a very millennial way,” or so she was told.

  And so Samona Ashley’s two-week visit to see her boyfriend turned into two months. She started hitting the agency parties and charming all the right people in her own quiet, enigmatic way, and this led to an even more powerful agency wanting to represent her (maybe not one of the top five but definitely in the top ten), and she was also requested for the catwalk a few times, which paid extremely well even if they weren’t exactly top-tier shows. David Taylor accompanied her to the first few parties—when Samona was still shy about throwing herself into the mix and needed someone beside her other than the specter of her mother ranting about everything wrong with her body—but he was too tired to enjoy them and he completely resented the male models from Omaha or L.A. or Queens who tried hard to discuss current events they didn’t know anything about, and since all of the parties were during the week, David had a valid excuse to not accompany Samona anymore. His distaste turned out to be fine since, within three weeks of her first meeting, she had developed a base of acquaintances she hung with and suddenly she didn’t mind going places without him.

  They both knew that this logically should have been the end of their relationship. They were growing up. They were moving on. They weren’t in college anymore. It wasn’t a big deal as long as it happened painlessly (they told themselves independently of each other), right?

  But something strange kept occurring: she still came back to Battery Park City every night, climbing into bed just a few minutes before he had to get up for work, even though she didn’t have to—even though there were plenty of young guys (models, managers, agents, photographers) who would have been thrilled to take her home because, fortunately or unfortunately, Samona Ashley managed to exude sex without even trying.

  Every time she came back, it would confuse him.

  It confused him even more when she admitted to him that when she was being hit on, she would go so far as to attempt to make herself unattractive in some lame way—snorting when she laughed, acting like a ditz, telling them she was a dyke—before she figured out that acting moronic only seemed to heighten their interest.

  It was all a mystery to him.

  And it was too much for Samona to explain (not to mention that he wouldn’t ask her to) that though being the object of so much energy might have been amusing and diverting and flattering at first, it became immediately apparent that none of these guys (or girls) would ever take care of her. Sure, it could be fun; it made her feel sexy; she’d always been intrigued at the thought of having a three-way; the freewheeling drug use could be liberating; her mother was finally proud of her. But none of these reasons accounted for the fact that Samona Ashley was the kind of girl who needed someone to go home to—specifically, someone who had his own life and his own dreams and was dependable, and who didn’t think that nice suits, good looks, industry connections, and a shitload of money simply entitled him to some part of her she wasn’t willing to give.

  What made this man David Taylor and not anyone else she met who’d be more than happy to provide a spot for her in bed was Samona also finding that she couldn’t shed the feeling of supremacy to which her Yale diploma entitled her—the BA might not have been enough to get her a decent job, but it was more than enough to make her feel superior to the group of people she was exposed to, most of whom hadn’t gotten past high school. She found herself gravitating back toward David not out of loyalty or even pity but because David was on her level. He was able to challenge her, and he was able to do it with a gentle self-confidence that—having grown up as the object of Tana Ashley’s ferocity—Samona was easily drawn to.

  “Why are the office buildings in midtown so plain and ugly?” was a typical question.

  “I guess they didn’t teach you about cost-efficient architecture in art history,” was a typical answer.

  A lesser reason, of course, was that despite her relative financial stability, she’d been spending most of her earnings on clothes and drinks and didn’t have enough yet for her own place. And David was saving his money—he’d been doing this religiously (though less so once it became apparent that Samona would be staying for “a while”)—and he had his eye on the future.

  But for now, in the present, they had their domestic routine: Samona crawled into bed late at night smelling of smoke and sweat and vodka, and around 3:45 A.M. when his internal clock woke him, David would reach over and place his hand on her stomach, and they would make love for five to seven minutes before David would shower and head to work.

  If the odd overlapping of their schedules alarmed David Taylor—if Samona’s apparently exciting nightlife cast any doubts in him—he never said anything. Samona attributed it simply to his fear of losing her. Because—and both of them knew this—Samona was the one thing he had in his new world of nothing.

  She loved that about David.

  She loved that about New York.

  11

  THE WEEKS after seeing Samona at Printing Divine brought rejection on all fronts. Silence from my editors (even the most insistent ones) forced me to swallow my rapidly dwindling pride and start making “outreach calls.” Nothing was flying on the Gowanus Canal pitch, and the editor assigned to the Lower East Side piece I had written for The Observer had scrapped it entirely. The common response—from assistants whose voices sounded automated—was that there was a war going on, so magazines where I had connections (“Let’s face it, we aren’t exactly TNR”) wanted to take their audience away from everything that was wrong with the world. People wanted distractions from pain and terrorist threats and the falling markets and airport delays and unemployment and all our brave young soldiers in Iraq. They wanted product sampling—reviews of skin creams and wristband cuffs from Italy and the latest line of Christian Louboutin shoes. They wanted to be reassured that Monday was the new Thursday, that pink
was in and brown was out, that Schiller’s Liquor Bar was the new Pastis, that Lisa Davies was the new Kate Moss, that Marc Jacobs was the new Armani, and that a little bit of color injected into your outfit could make—or break—a Saturday night. They wanted “smart fluff.” The last thing anyone wanted, I was assured, were articles with a depressing edge. I would just have to wait for the world to cool down.

  An added fact: I was broke.

  And since there was nothing really going on with me that summer—except what was going on with three college friends—I spent my time conceiving and discarding roughly a dozen things I could do for a little money, including but not limited to bar-backing at Xunta or Doc Holliday’s or Lucy’s or some other dive bar nearby (not enough “service experience,” I was told), walking dogs (fear of being bitten), bicycle messenger (didn’t own a bike, couldn’t afford one), selling my furniture at a flea market (Ethan’s chairs were the only pieces worth more than five dollars), or the dreaded trip to a temp agency (didn’t own a dark suit, couldn’t afford one). And this was the state of being which compelled me during the third week of June (“Call if you’re compelled,” was how he’d left it) to return Ethan Hoevel’s message from the day after the Randolph Torrance party, and since I was about to ask for advice on work, this meant the careful and indignant speech I had been preparing had to be tossed out.

  (Even though I knew there was nothing I could say that might change his mind, I still wanted him to know that I disapproved of his relationship with Samona Taylor. Before the money crunch, I had been planning to ask him rhetorical questions like “What are you thinking?” and “Do you really want to destroy a marriage?” and “Is this just another fleeting experiment of yours that probably won’t last through summer?” because it was obvious that there were so many things Ethan Hoevel and Samona Taylor didn’t know about each other, and these things, I felt, mattered.)