by Jeff Hobbs
“That’s really cool,” Suzanne said. Aidan was suddenly in the room and rolling his eyes at Suzanne.
Ethan plugged the small machine into a socket and air whispered through the vacuum. Angela gazed at the moving form with a distant smile. I had forgotten how severely beautiful it was even though, to Ethan, it was just the representation of the physics that made things beautiful—a bird, a swaying tree branch, a passing cloud—and not the thing itself.
“Make it go faster,” his mother whispered.
“Mom,” Aidan said. “It’s time to go.”
Ethan unplugged the machine and placed it back on the shelf.
Aidan shook my hand extra firmly and Angela Hoevel delivered another hug and Suzanne gave me a peck on the cheek. The three of them were off to see the Brooklyn Bridge, a trek Ethan, Stanton, and I opted out of, citing work reasons (plus everyone was doubtful that Angela would make it without falling asleep). Ethan rattled off the necessary plans for them to be reunited at eight o’clock that night for a reservation at Nobu. The car would pick them up from the St. Regis. Afterward they would watch the fireworks from the roof deck. Then Angela was calling out “I love you” to Ethan as the elevator door clattered shut, and they were gone.
Stanton went to a window, opened it, and leaned out with an arm propped on each side of the frame, like he desperately needed air and wanted to scream. Then he did, piercingly.
Ethan ignored him and cleared a plate of crackers and cheese.
I was standing by the elevator since they hadn’t asked me to leave.
Stanton drew himself back in. “Tell me something, Ethan. There’s something I’m really curious about.”
“Tell you what?” Ethan sighed. “What do you want to hear?”
“Tell me why you have to be such a faggot. I mean, I guess we’re both fags, but you are a fag-got.”
“I don’t know what you’re still doing here,” Ethan said tiredly.
“I’m here because you invited me, Ethan—”
“That’s not what I meant—”
Stanton cut him off. “I mean, I can handle you not telling your mom. I guess I kind of get it and I understand that’s about her and not you, but the problem is I’m not gonna sit around in front of your family and lie. About us. I’m not gonna do it.”
Ethan wiped a paper towel over the shiny chrome surface of the coffee table.
“You’re so off base, Stanton, and you don’t even know it.”
“Today was pathetic.” Stanton paused to take a deep breath. “You were pathetic.” He took another breath. “I think I still have the right to tell you that.”
“You sound like that terrible screenplay you wrote.” Ethan turned to watch as Stanton marched toward the elevator. “Oh, look at Stanton. It’s the dramatic exit. See Stanton storming to the elevator.”
In fact, there would be no dramatic exit because the elevator was probably just now hitting the ground floor depositing Angela and Aidan and Suzanne into the lobby and would not make it back up to nine for at least two minutes, during which Stanton stood next to me without even glancing my way until we could hear the cage rising up and its door finally opened. He mumbled under his breath and was facing away from us when the door closed.
There was a moment when it seemed as if Ethan had forgotten that I was still standing in the loft until he said, “If you’ve recovered from that outburst and you feel like staying, you can—I don’t know—check your e-mail. How’s that?” He was smiling but his voice sounded exhausted. He was about to move toward the kitchen when he suddenly stopped and looked at me. “Are you really going to take that job at Leonard?”
I shrugged. “It’s a job. It pays well…”
But Ethan didn’t care about the job.
He wanted to know about something else.
“So how is David—how’s David Taylor doing?”
It was such a strange question, and at the time I chose to interpret it as Ethan being evasive (which was the most obvious conclusion), and yet I didn’t want to let him escape me. I felt like this was a rare opportunity to get back at him somehow—get back at Ethan for all the small manipulations I’d allowed him.
(Of course, I didn’t stop to ask myself if this was, in fact, one of them.)
“Shouldn’t the real question be how’s Samona, Ethan? I mean, you two must have had fun in Thailand.”
He started to reply evenly, “Samona…” but something caught on the last long vowel of her name, and he crumpled up the paper towel and sat down, rubbing his temples, grimacing as if he were under some massive weight.
I softened. “Or maybe not.”
He looked up at me. “Do I need to ask how you found out?” Then quickly: “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
He motioned me to sit, and I did.
13
SOMETHING I’D learned through the hundreds of interviews I’d given over the years (even though most were less than thirty seconds long) was that, more often than not, it’s the way a person tells a story that actually tells the story—it’s the changes in tone, the inflections, the sighs, the glances to the floor and ceiling, past your shoulder, and, sometimes, directly into your blinking, watering eyes that provide the details words omit.
That was how I listened to Ethan tell me about Thailand. As had occurred over a month earlier when I saw Samona at Printing Divine, his words and gestures and expressions—some chosen carefully, some not—entered me, throwing relentless images onto the glass of my mind, and I had no choice but to sit there in the loft on Warren Street, gazing at the shifting, interlacing reflections of Ethan’s story.
Having sex with men is a fight. Having sex with Samona Taylor makes Ethan Hoevel realize this. Every time Ethan has sex with a man it’s always a reminder of the pain he wants to forget: the anguish of the locker room, the struggle to stay hard while losing his virginity to that first girl rocking against him, the horrible months that followed after the one guy he had ever loved told Ethan that he was, in fact, straight. Nothing compares to that pain; that pain is something so particular and so crippling that in some ways it has always defined Ethan and made him into the man he now is. This is the torment Samona Taylor responds to in Ethan Hoevel’s eyes that night she first meets him at the gallery, even though she doesn’t know what it means yet. And when Ethan has sex with Samona he forgets about the roughness of men and their strength and selfishness and feels that it is possible to move toward someplace new. When he comes inside her, Stanton Vaughn and all those other demanding people he’s ever been involved with don’t matter. Because all he really wants is Samona: she’s new and relenting and vulnerable and she craves him and the muffled whimpers she emits while being fucked—which contrast so sharply with her sultry voice—instill in him the urge to make her feel cared for. In the midst of this, Samona Taylor becomes the only person who can make Ethan move on from everything he once desired.
So it comes about naturally that, near the end of June, Ethan Hoevel asks Samona to go to Thailand with him—not on business, just to escape.
Samona accepts Ethan’s invitation without even thinking, then goes home and tells David (per Ethan’s instructions) something about going to Milan for a few fashion shows and that he can reach her—if he needs to—by leaving a message on her cell phone since it’s all been arranged last-minute by Betsey Johnson’s people and she doesn’t have the details. This is at four in the morning, when he’s half-asleep. The town car that Ethan orders picks Samona up and then makes its way to Tribeca, where Ethan is standing outside his building, wearing a Ramones T-shirt and wraparound sunglasses, holding a backpack and a small garment bag, and when she first sees him Samona squeezes her legs together tightly because she has gotten wet, instantly, effortlessly, just from the sight of him (and that is what she whispers in Ethan’s ear on their way to the airport).
Most flights out of JFK that morning are—as usual—delayed, but the Lufthansa Flight 407 to Frankfurt leaves on schedule, and she rests her head on his shoulder
in the plane. The ocean is visible thirty-five thousand feet below through breaks in the clouds, and when Ethan closes his eyes to doze off he knows she’s watching him, and he knows what she’s thinking: this is what I’m supposed to be doing—this isn’t wrong and there’s nothing to regret; I’m no longer running around with nowhere to go. Because Ethan knows exactly what he’s giving her when he puts his arms around her in the Frankfurt terminal while waiting for the connecting flight to Duong Mang: Ethan is giving her purpose. And he knows she’s feeling that purpose after they ride in an open-roofed car that shuttles them from the chaos of the airport to the private resort at Pomtien Beach in Pattaya where Ethan has booked a private bungalow for the week—and again when they’re lying in the sun next to a cabana on a beach where the sand is smooth and the color of peach ice cream. She feels it when they run across that sand and plunge into the warm, clear water where they swim together near the coral reefs, diving deep into the crystalline water, and each time they surface a shimmering school of silver minnows twirls around them; she feels it later when they stand naked together under a hot shower attached to their cabana while he tongues her. This sense of purpose flows on as they spend their first night together and continues as they wake up and—without speaking—make love, and when they finish, and when he lays his head next to hers, panting, and when she runs her fingers through his thick dark hair until his breathing returns to normal, and when they have breakfast on the terrace overlooking the ocean, drinking mimosas before walking lazily toward the waves foaming across the shore. Ethan gives all this to Samona, and they let each day go by without consequence on a deserted beach on the other side of the world.
And on the last night in Pattaya, Samona starts asking questions.
They’re sitting on the sand, sharing a joint, and she’s admiring the fire Ethan built.
“I haven’t smoked a joint since college,” she says, breaking the silence. “Do you believe me?”
By only nodding his head, Ethan tries to indicate that he prefers the cracking of the fire and the sounds of distant waves to anything either of them might say.
“There are a lot of things I haven’t done since college,” she says.
“Like what?” He asks this as he inhales off the joint.
“I don’t know. It was simple back then. It was all very simple.” She sighs. “Everything just happened the way it was supposed to happen. Don’t you think?”
Ethan’s silence, and the way his face glows dimly outside the fringe of firelight, is unfamiliar to her.
“No,” he says grimly. “I don’t.”
“Why?” She tries to sit up a little but the pot weighs her down, even though she feels as if she’s floating.
“You have to love a place and time for it to be that simple,” Ethan says.
“So…you didn’t like college?”
“No,” he says. “I did not.”
Samona laughs and aims for playfulness. “Maybe that’s because you didn’t know me then?”
More silence from Ethan. He tilts his head slightly and sucks in on the joint again, and then he studies the spliff and blows on its tip. She reaches for his wrist, but she will have to shift her weight and isn’t capable of completing that action unless Ethan meets her halfway, which he doesn’t.
“I don’t think that was it—” he starts.
“Hey, I wasn’t being serious,” she says over him, slightly stung.
“There was just a lot of other stuff going on…”
“What kind of stuff?” She tries to hide the edge in her voice.
He leans forward again until his face comes into the direct light of the flames, his eyes gently on fire. “Just stuff. The usual.”
He says this to end the conversation—to make sure Samona Taylor understands that they have an unspoken agreement about the things they don’t know about each other, and that if they knew these things they couldn’t be here together right now.
And she seems to get it as she leans back, nodding to herself.
“What about you?” he asks, much more formally.
“What do I miss?” She reaches for the joint and leans back on one arm, arching her spine, hoping he’ll notice the way her breasts push upward. “I don’t know. Sunday brunch in the cafeteria. Being able to walk two blocks to see your best friend.”
“Or boyfriend.”
Is this a statement or a question—Samona can’t tell.
“Or…girlfriend?” she says tentatively.
A pause, and then, “Yeah.”
“And all the dancing, and all the parties, and how even then you thought none of this really matters. Those were the simple things. Those were the things I loved.” She tries to blow a smoke ring and fails. “Come on, Ethan, you must have loved something.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “I never really loved my life or anything in it.”
They’re quiet for a long time. He has never said anything like this before with such harsh practicality. She stares at the silhouette of Ethan’s face, and he loosens his jaw and smiles, playing it off as though it’s just marijuana talking.
“What do you imagine love to be like, then?” she asks.
“Something that exists outside of circumstance.”
She’s watching him, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“I mean, life moves along according to certain circumstances—”
“That’s not true, Ethan—”
“Wait, let me finish, okay?”
She doesn’t want him to.
He continues. “I’m saying that everything is circumstance. Who your parents are, whether they stay married or get divorced, what you look like, where you go to school, who you meet there, what kind of job you land when it’s all over, where you live, who you live with—all that shit. That’s all circumstance, Samona. And what’s any of that got to do with love?” Ethan waits for her to respond, but he’s lost her. He shrugs. “Love only happens when you can step out of—all that.”
She can’t come up with anything to say. This is not a conversation she’s interested in having anymore. A shadow comes over her face and she looks down and Ethan can tell she’s flashing on her husband.
“That’s not very romantic,” she says. “That way of looking at things.”
“There are a lot of different ways to define romance.” He pauses. “But in the way you’re thinking about it, no, I guess it’s not.”
“So let me get this straight: what you’re saying is…you’ve never loved someone?” He looks at her for a long time, and then he shakes his head. She reaches out toward his thigh teasingly, intimately, then stops. “Can I ask you something?”
“I don’t know if you want to.”
“How do you know what it is?”
“I’m sitting here. I see you. I pay attention.”
“And why don’t you think I should ask it?”
“Because you’re afraid of what the answer will be.”
After a moment of indecision she decides not to ask (the question being something like: “What is Ethan Hoevel doing on a deserted beach in Thailand with a married woman who really doesn’t have a lot to say?”) and instead continues reaching for him. “I just…hope we have stepped out of circumstance, like you said.”
“You want what we’re sharing to be called love, Samona? Do you want that, really?”
“Maybe,” she says, needing a moment to convince herself of this.
Ethan adjusts the burning logs—the fire is dying—and suddenly one of the logs collapses and a glowing ember flies into Samona’s face, where she feels it sear the corner of her left eye. She isn’t aware that she has cried out until Ethan is holding her, stroking her cheek, making sure she’s okay, and she says she is and he tells her with a smile, “That’s what you get for asking questions you shouldn’t be asking.” She is so wasted on the weird Indonesian grass that she just nods.
“But don’t do that anymore,” she says.
“Don’t do what?”
“Do
n’t feel things and not say them. You do that all the time. Don’t.”
Ethan sits there, serene, brushing his fingertips along her skin, her head cradled in his lap, and she squeezes his hand.
I hung there a moment, still attuned to his signals and the way they were saturated with a particular kind of mournfulness. Over the span of time it had taken him to tell me about Thailand, I’d become certain that Ethan Hoevel didn’t know what he longed for anymore.
He lit a cigarette and was about to take a drag. Then his movement stopped. He was focused on me, genuinely interested, inviting a response.
“I guess I’m just…not sure if you really like her,” I began hesitantly, “or if it’s some kind of experiment to you.”
He nodded—he’d expected this, somehow—and then everything inside him lashed out. “Like your experiment? Like that experiment you tested out all those years ago back in school?” He stood up, glaring at me. “Is that the kind of experiment you’re talking about?”
“It’s not the same,” was all I could come up with in a weak voice. He was moving closer to me. “Ethan…we were just a bunch of kids then…and the consequences were different…and things matter more now—they matter…”
“No, you’re wrong about that one,” Ethan said. “They don’t. They actually matter less to me.” And then he stopped walking forward, disgusted with everything. “Oh Jesus, what in the hell do you know anyway?”
The last thing we said to each other that afternoon:
“Do you love her?”
(This was me.)
“I’d like to.”
(This was Ethan.)
I took the same route home (up the river, east on Jane Street) that I’d taken the night Ethan first mentioned Samona’s name.
Why had he wanted to see me after not returning any of my calls for four weeks? As I look back on it now, I realize that what Ethan truly wanted from me was sympathy. He wanted me to hear his story and to see that certain things he had set in motion were now feeling heavy and immense and involving. He wanted me to feel sorry for him, like I had back in college.