The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  Another reason for ditching the speech: I had a strong premonition that Ethan, of all people, would probably know the real reason I disapproved. And Ethan, of all people, wouldn’t spare me the humiliation of it all.

  Stanton Vaughn picked up the phone.

  “Is Ethan there?” was all I asked. Suddenly Ethan’s eyes—which I had always found hypnotic and beautiful—appeared in front of my line of vision, and I had to close my own to make the image go away.

  “He’s gone,” Stanton said.

  “Do you know what time he’ll be back?”

  “No. He’s gone gone. You know. On one of his trips. He might be back in a week. He might be back in a year. He was incredibly vague about it. As usual.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “What are you doing right now?” Stanton Vaughn said with what he deemed the appropriate measure of innuendo.

  “So do you know where he went, Stanton, or not?”

  Stanton sighed, giving up faster than he usually did. “He said Thailand, but I’m not sure I believe him. There was a message from his travel agent. Something about a Lufthansa flight. Does Lufthansa fly to Thailand? I don’t think so.”

  “I think they connect in Germany somewhere.”

  “I told him not to go.” I could hear Stanton lighting a cigarette and exhaling. “Thailand might as well be fucking Afghanistan. But he doesn’t listen to me anymore. Kids trying to blow up planes with their fucking shoes? Who wants to go anywhere? Who wants to get out of bed?”

  Suddenly my one mission in life was to get off the phone as quickly as possible.

  “I mean I’m just the fucking boyfriend after all, right?”

  “If you hear from Ethan, could you just tell him I called?”

  “He isn’t gonna call, man.” There was a pause filled with Stanton’s heavy breathing. “But hey, you wanna come over for a drink?”

  “I’m very busy here.”

  “That’s too bad.” He paused. “Really just too bad.”

  Later that day I found myself at the corner ATM staring at the two-digit number on the receipt that signified the money I had left in my account. I was also aware of the rent notice on my windowsill, as well as the fact that I was now looking for meals in Manhattan that cost less than five dollars. Somewhere in the world Ethan Hoevel was lying on a beach, and David Taylor was in his office trading millions, and Stanton Vaughn had a show coming up for Fall Fashion Week. I dipped to the bottom of my pride and e-mailed my résumé to James Gutterson, and an hour later followed up with a phone call to ask him if The Leonard Company job might still be available.

  The security desk stretched across the entire back wall of the lobby manned by four guards in navy-blue suits. I passed through the revolving door and noticed a number of construction workers walking through the metal detectors under a large banner announcing that The Leonard Company was renovating its floor: USHERING IN A NEW ERA WITH THE NEW CENTURY.

  The elevator moved so fast my ears popped moments before I was deposited on the twenty-first floor. After showing a suspicious receptionist the pass one of the security guards had given me, I moved through a huge open space where executive offices lined one wall, and the conference rooms along the other wall were covered by tarps and ladders under which a stream of construction workers disappeared, and between these two walls was a vast wasteland of open desks inhabited by men my age hatefully barking into phones while striking their computer keyboards. After a lap, I finally tagged James Gutterson at one of these desks in the far corner on the twenty-first floor. Gutterson seemed bigger than I remembered, but this was mostly because the space he inhabited was barely large enough for his chair to swivel around in. There were stacks of paper everywhere—most of them printouts of graphs sloping downward. Gutterson’s face was about three inches away from a computer screen, and he did not look up until I finally knocked on the plastic surface and murmured, “Hey.”

  “Have a seat, buddy.” Gutterson returned to staring at the computer.

  The desk was so small and cluttered that there was no room for another chair, so I moved one stack of paper onto another and simply sat against the desk.

  “Try not to move anything, okay?” he asked, his face immobile. “I have things just the way I need them.”

  The computer screen was a Yahoo! Sports page: MAPLE LEAFS TRADE JASMOVICH IN OFF-SEASON POWERPLAY. His eyes were scanning horizontally across the screen. After about five minutes he closed the window and shifted his weight in the chair until he was comfortable. He didn’t say anything.

  “Busy?” I asked.

  “You know it.” He rubbed his temples with his fingertips. His stomach was actually resting on those monster thighs, remnants of afternoons gliding across the ice trying to shatter anyone in the way. With his feet tucked back under the chair and his hands resting in his lap, James Gutterson resembled, for a moment, the Buddha in a rumpled Hugo Boss suit.

  “I really appreciate you seeing me, James.”

  He dug through the piles on his desk and a huge stack of graphs fell to the floor, spilling out into the walkway. James winced and then went to his bottom drawer as I started picking up the pages and then he sat up with another stack of paper and a few reference books along with the last three years of The Leonard Company annual reports.

  “Here’s all you need,” James said, smiling as he dropped everything into my arms, the weight of it all causing me to lose my balance. “There’s an outline somewhere in there that’ll tell you how we want this thing laid out.”

  “Thanks.”

  There was a moment of silence during which I became aware of how heavily and somberly James was breathing. He slapped his big thighs and they trembled. “So.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “Have fun. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “I don’t think that would be possible,” I said, gesturing at the stack I was holding.

  “Aw, come on, it won’t be so bad.” He smiled good-naturedly.

  I doubted that but nodded like everything was cool. “Is David around?”

  The smile turned into a forced grin. “Mr. Taylor has his own office.” He glanced to the opposite corner of the floor. “And that door is closed, sooo this means Mr. Taylor must be quite busy.”

  “Oh, of course, right.”

  James wasn’t even grinning anymore. “It would be great to see some kind of draft done by the end of this week.” He saw my brow furrow with concern. “Well,” he relented. “Early next week at the latest. This whole thing has been on the table way too long.”

  He was already turning away. As I rearranged the material to make it easier to carry, he opened a new window: MIGHTY DUCKS OUT-LOOK NOT SO MIGHTY FOR OCTOBER.

  I walked over a mat of tarp and under a ladder to get to David Taylor’s office, where his secretary stopped me and—after picking up the phone and reading the name on my pass, eyeing me warily as if I were intruding—said, “He wasn’t expecting you but go on in.”

  David Taylor’s desk was about fifteen times the size of James Gutterson’s, and the office was color-coordinated in conservative bleached whites and faded browns with a graceful wood molding along its corners where the walls met the ceiling. David was framed at his desk between a new iMac computer and an old Bloomberg screen, and behind him floor-to-ceiling windows faced west across town where the Hudson River was barely visible between skyscrapers.

  “This is a surprise,” David said with a half smile. “What are you doing here?”

  I deposited the stack on the leather couch and mentioned the meeting with James Gutterson.

  “Right. Right,” David said, leaning back and stretching his arms high over his head. The cracking of his back snapped throughout the office. “Yeah, I knew that. James told me you e-mailed him. Right. Just very busy today. Things just keep slipping my mind.” I noted the deep circles under his eyes.

  “So how goes it?” I asked.

  “Fair to middling, as the older generation likes to
say.” He slumped forward against the desk.

  A bookshelf had been built into the wall on the right side of the room, its bottom shelf packed with thick binders marked by year, and the shelf above it held all the corporate lit for the same period. A full set of the Encyclopædia Britannica took up the third shelf, and in the top three shelves were books I recognized from college organized alphabetically by author, starting with Aristotle’s Poetics and ending with a Yeats collection and between them were the Brontë sisters and Dostoyevsky and Ralph Ellison and Faulkner and Hemingway and Melville, Plato and Shakespeare, Sophocles and Tolstoy. I imagined that David Taylor had never read any of these books and that they only existed as a reminder of the days when the definition of responsibility was reading the books you were assigned. I wished I had bypassed David’s office and just taken the elevator down to the lobby.

  The left side of the office was mostly empty space, halfheartedly filled with a black leather couch, and above it a framed poster with a woman’s lithe body walking down a runway outlined above the words PRINTING DIVINE in large script. I scanned his track-and-field certificates surrounding the poster and an antique wall clock ticking loudly above them. On the left side of the clock I stopped on a photograph of David and Samona slow-dancing at their wedding. I turned away.

  David was rubbing his hands down his face, smiling sadly, as if he was about to tell me a tragic joke.

  “I lost fourteen million dollars yesterday. Just me. By myself. Fourteen million dollars. How does that sound to you?”

  “Pretty much unfathomable.”

  “Actually, it’s not as bad as it sounds.” David paused. “It just means I have to…get with the program, I guess.” He rubbed his face again. “Risks.” He sighed. The smile was gone. “I fashioned a nice little career by taking risks and hitting them. It was sort of like a fairy tale for a bit. It was good while it lasted, you know? But now…desperate times…”

  “Desperate measures.” He let me complete the sentence.

  “Actually, just conservative measures. I know what to do. Which just makes the days longer.”

  Suddenly he seemed confused as to the reason for my presence.

  I was reminded of the way David Taylor used to run track—how he was not the kind of runner to hold back and explode in the last hundred meters, how at the beginning of his career, once or twice, he ran himself out too early and died at the end while the other runners overtook him, and how he learned from that mistake and started running more conservatively, measuring his pace to wear the other runners down.

  I was staring out the window behind David’s desk as I pictured this.

  “Admiring the view?” I heard him ask.

  “I was just thinking about track,” I said. “About school.”

  “Aww, be careful or you’re gonna get me very, very depressed,” he muttered. “I definitely do not need to be reminded of our glory days.”

  “For some more than others.”

  “Oh, come on, you were really good.”

  “But you were really great.”

  He didn’t disagree. He straightened the pages in a folder, then closed it.

  I motioned to the Printing Divine poster.

  “So, how is this new business of Samona’s doing?”

  He laughed but was forcing it. It became apparent that she hadn’t told him I’d seen her. I wondered what that meant.

  “I can’t believe it, but she’s actually doing really well. Like, in the last two weeks enough business has come in so that she’s getting near the profit margin, which is totally unbelievable. And unexpected.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said, not sure if David Taylor was lying to me.

  “Is it?” He sighed. “I barely see her anymore. She’s so busy she’s never there when I get home. She’s planning for all these shows in September, I guess, and get this—”

  “What?” He was looking at me, wide-eyed.

  “Well, on Thursday she tells me she has to go away on business and explained something way too boring and complicated for me to pay attention to and then she left the next day and I’m still, like, shell-shocked that my wife is traveling on business. She’s in Milan at a fashion show or something.” He looked at his hands and splayed his fingers, studying them. “I was pretty worried about the security on Alitalia, but I guess she got there all right.”

  The phone rang.

  In the wedding picture their faces were nearly touching as they danced.

  His hand rested on the ringing phone. “I probably will have to take this, but you know what? I spent a hell of a lotta money so my wife could have a little hobby that would amuse her and all of a sudden right now it’s like: What the hell did I do that for?”

  Our eyes met briefly before he picked up the phone, and after saying “What’s up?” gestured that it was an important call, and I held up a hand, nodding. I lifted my stack off the couch and let myself out of the office. On the street there were only two things I was thinking of as I blindly made my way down Broadway.

  There are no shows in Milan during this time of year.

  And the security on Alitalia was “reliable” according to The New York Times.

  But, by then, I had already made the other connection.

  The security on Alitalia didn’t matter since they had taken Lufthansa.

  The bank material—which I spent the next three days perusing—was a thousand pages of dry text accompanied by simple graphs trying to put a positive spin on a stagnant economy (think: “increasing potential” instead of “decreasing return”; think: “excess output” instead of “consumer drop”; think: “more efficient workforce” instead of “lay-offs”). The graphs simply switched the x and y axes so that the lines sloped up instead of down. All this job would succeed in doing was make me feel ashamed and embarrassed since it was the kind of work I had spent the last five years struggling to avoid. I told myself that the reason I couldn’t concentrate on any of it was that I was holed up in an apartment on Tenth Street that I was about to be kicked out of, but I knew that the real reason—the distracting mystery of why I couldn’t focus—had to do with the fact that I wanted to know where exactly Ethan Hoevel and Samona Taylor had traveled.

  That opportunity arose a little over a week later, when Ethan Hoevel—back from wherever it was he’d taken her—called out of the blue on July 3.

  “Hey.”

  “Ethan. Where’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been away but that’s not why I’m calling.” He sounded rushed. “I forgot to tell you that my mom and older brother are both visiting for the holiday weekend—long story—and I’m hoping you can help me out.”

  “Um, maybe. I’m kind of busy. What do you need?”

  “You remember my family, right?”

  12

  AIDAN HOEVEL JR.—Ethan’s older brother by eleven months—held a particular stature in my memory as one of the few individuals about whom Ethan would talk at length with any kind of weightiness. I’d only seen Aidan once, at our graduation in New Haven in the spring of 1997. From a distance I’d watched as Ethan and Aidan and their mother, Angela Hoevel, posed for a photograph—Ethan standing tall in a black gown while Angela beamed at his side, bulging proudly out of her flowered sundress. But behind them, and with a noticeable separation, Aidan Hoevel had cast a mean shadow over their uncertain pride. Aidan Hoevel—a shorter, less handsome version of Ethan—was clenching his teeth through a fierce smile, which showed clearly that he couldn’t ever be happy for his brother. And the reason he couldn’t be happy had to do with a promise Ethan had made once, a promise that even then, on graduation day, Aidan knew would be broken.

  That was the same Aidan Hoevel—teeth clenched, bitterness underlying every word and facial expression—whom I found ranting at the intimate group composed of Ethan, Stanton, Angela Hoevel, and Aidan’s new girlfriend, Suzanne, in the living room of Ethan’s loft when I walked in on the afternoon of July 4. The old elevator’s cage slapped and clanked when it opened,
but no one seemed to notice me entering the room except Ethan, who was sitting in one of his streamlined red velvet chairs in the far corner, between the bay window and gold-leafed banana tree. Ethan lifted his head and nodded slightly, both hands clasped under his chin, and I noticed his deep tan. And then Ethan turned back to glare at his brother.

  Aidan Hoevel was going on about how “as soon as you walk outta the airport it’s the only thing you hear: people blaring their horns for nothing and it was like what the fuck?” These people were—in order of offending Aidan—taxi drivers, Wall Street traders doing well enough to buy a goddamn Lexus, and rich mommies with kids packed in the back of their $80,000 SUVs—and what’s up with that? According to Aidan Hoevel, it was simply a warped understanding between everyone: “I won’t look you in the eye or smile while you’re visiting the Big Apple, but I will honk my horn at you because I am an enraged New Yorker—I am enraged at goddamn tourists like yourself.”

  Stanton Vaughn interrupted Aidan, and even though this was the first time he had met Ethan’s brother, he was not compelled to hold back.

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  Aidan feigned surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve never heard people blaring their horns on the 405?”

  Stanton was sitting between Ethan and Suzanne, directly across from Aidan and Angela Hoevel, who shared a space on a small sofa Ethan had designed.

  (I did not know the specifics of the conversation that had taken place before Aidan and Angela and Suzanne arrived at Warren Street. All I knew was that Suzanne worked for a medical supplies company in Mission Viejo that was about to open offices in Boston and New York, and she was coming to the city to oversee the staffing. So Ethan had offered to fly Angela and Aidan to New York at the same time—not expecting them to take him up on it, of course. He’d ended up purchasing two business-class tickets for his mother and his brother—as well as upgrading Aidan’s girlfriend from the coach seats her company had booked—and putting them up in two luxurious suites at the St. Regis, an offer that Aidan had refused at first, and then, after Angela demanded that he accept his brother’s generosity, relented and came along. I also knew that Stanton had been introduced to the group as only a “friend” and that now Aidan Hoevel was regarding him—this designer who was obviously balling his little brother—with a barely controlled hostility that he was keeping in check only for the sake of Angela.)