The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  My reaction: I walked fast toward Tenth Street, vaguely giddy, because I couldn’t stop thinking of how basely satisfying it would be to see Ethan coming down. After all, everyone struggled—it’s why people lived here.

  14

  The Story of David and Samona

  Part 2: The Offer

  THROUGH THE routine and logic of David Taylor’s work, he quickly became more fundamentally sensible than he had ever been in college. By the winter of 1999, less than two years after graduation, the romance of the literature major had given way to the practicality of the trader. The trader knew better than to ask questions and demand answers from Samona as she—against all odds—kept coming back to him in the middle of the night, wearing revealing dresses gifted by retailers. Yes, he was as insecure about “the situation” as any guy would have been, but he was also aware of how much Samona needed him, and his ego reminded him that he was a good-looking guy who hadn’t gained too much weight after college, and he was easygoing and well-read, and he kept his cool in a humorless, stressful, numbers-based universe. He could have gotten other girls. In fact, he was conscious of a solid group of women who fantasized around the watercooler about David Taylor. He wasn’t above engaging in his share of flirting to make the days feel just a little bit shorter, either.

  And so David Taylor allowed Samona to stay with him in the Battery Park City two-bedroom (his roommate had moved out over the previous Christmas—conquered by the city and driven back home to Wichita) without ever making the kinds of accusations, phrased as questions, that really ought to have doomed them after a year and a half of this routine. They made love in the middle of the night whenever he was up for it, and that single moment of obliteration rejuvenated David two or three times a week. And after the lovemaking, during his morning walk to Vesey Street, he pictured the two of them in their New England Victorian, just off the Exeter campus, eating dinner after a peaceful day of teaching, drinking red wine on the veranda facing down the grassy hill that led into a valley before rising again into the red-and-yellow mountain slopes and the dorm buildings and the sports complex and the fields and a church in the center of a wide green.

  And because of his surprising behavior—because of his easy constancy, his new air of dignity—David became the one sure thing in Samona’s world of crazy people and hectic schedules and shallow conversations, half of which were swallowed up by thumping techno music and double cosmopolitans. She couldn’t help being charmed by the fact that David still watched two episodes of The Simpsons every night before turning in at eight. Wherever she was at that hour—usually at some cocktail function before dinner—she would think of him and often wish she could be there, because the simple fact that he was sleeping so early meant that he didn’t buy into any of the guest-list bullshit she had to deal with on a nightly basis. David Taylor was somehow above all that—he worked hard and remained quiet and didn’t seem to feel much need to impress. David Taylor was exactly the person he seemed to be, and being with him made Samona feel more real.

  The only times he truly grated on her were when he’d launch into the increasingly frequent rant at the guys from the office about having a model for a girlfriend and how stupid and superficial that world was (though, in ranting, he was also bragging that his girlfriend was a model, and at the same time, privately, he knew her world was no more stupid or superficial than the world he was in), and though she never argued—she agreed, of course—Samona didn’t understand why he even needed to lower himself.

  His go-to complaint was that no one she worked with had ever read a book. He would cross his arms and grin as if that explained everything.

  One night (which Samona had free because she’d been inexplicably “disinvited” from a function at the M•A•C cosmetics store), fueled by her sudden uncertainty about the extent to which she was still wanted in her world, Samona decided to challenge him: “When was the last time you actually read a novel, David?” This happened at a birthday party at an apartment on East Fifty-fifth Street. They were standing with a group in the corner, and the party was lame and Samona was bored. And though she’d said it only to amuse herself—she didn’t actually care about his reading list—he looked stunned, glaring at her with bloodshot eyes. So she finished her thought convincingly: “I mean, if that observation is your attempt to explain what’s wrong with my industry, then I’d just like to point out that I haven’t seen a single book anywhere in your apartment since I’ve been there.”

  David, once he sobered up, took her claim seriously and considered it progress.

  The next day, he bought a cherry-oak bookshelf and had all his old college books shipped from his parents’ house to be displayed in his office. He did this without telling Samona. She’s coming into her own, David thought proudly every time he glanced at his bookshelf (though he never picked up any of those books to actually read them). Samona Ashley was becoming a woman in New York City, picking up all the sass and arrogance and swagger that went along with that station while leaving behind all the hissy-fit whiny bullshit that her doting father and vicious mother had tagged her with at Yale.

  It was all happening under David Taylor’s watch. It made him forget that she was a model. It made him not care that she was still free-loading off him after almost a year. It made him believe more firmly that he might still be in love.

  Still, there were the usual kinks along the way.

  On one of the rare nights when Samona did not get home before David left for work, his mind wandered all morning. By the time his day was half over he had called the apartment three times and no one answered. He had tried her cell phone but it was turned off. When he was about to use his lunch break to head back to the apartment, something came in from a trader in Germany—sell eight thousand shares of Readycom. David’s job required him to check the sell box in the bottom right-hand corner of the spreadsheet, and forward it to the international trader. But David was so lost that morning that he checked the buy box in the bottom left-hand corner instead. When he called his apartment for the fourth time that morning, Samona answered. A girlfriend of mine…extreme heartbreak…needed to be calmed down…her head exploding from too much cocaine…didn’t want to call and wake you…must have gotten home just a few minutes after you left…so exhausted I turned off the phone…slept through the morning…I’m sorry, sweetheart, she whispered. David Taylor’s relief was so immense that he choked back a sob.

  The moment he hung up the phone, Leonard called David into his office to inform him that a careless mistake David had just made cost the company $150,000. “More than two years of your salary,” Leonard was quick to add, and then, “This happens, but it only happens once.” David, of course, blamed Samona for turning off the phone when she must have known he would call. But he swallowed hard and accepted responsibility (for everything) and reminded himself that he was lucky to have Samona. When he came home that evening he took her out for an early dinner at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central before sending her off with a kiss to the round of parties she was attending that night.

  But David Taylor never forgot about that day.

  It was the fall of 1999—two years out of college—when Samona’s modeling career began its inevitable downturn. She only made it into one runway show in September Fashion Week. When she asked her agent what was up, he replied coolly that her “unique” look was going rapidly out of style. Her face didn’t fit into the new ad campaigns, which—as it was explained to her over and over by various agency reps—were becoming all about “good old-fashioned Americana as the end of the millennium looms.” People were looking for the Girl Next Door, and not the Forbidden Goddess (Samona had never thought of herself in that category). It was going to be miniskirts and retro-wear and ridiculous perfumes with names like Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and that’s just how the business went—in waves. (“Sometimes tsunamis,” someone at an agency told her, wide-eyed.) If Samona was really inspired to keep at it, she could still get gigs but they would eventually become smalle
r and less prestigious, and let’s face it, Samona Ashley never seemed like she really cared and she was never going to make it into the big shows—not quite tall enough. She pressed them for answers and was finally told flat out by a frustrated intern that “there was a limit for the overeducated Yale girl with too much attitude.”

  She cut the career off right there, before it could keep fizzling out.

  When Samona walked out of the agency for the last time, she hailed a cab on Madison and went back to David’s apartment, where he was smugly (at least that was how she interpreted it) reading The Economist while snacking on a microwave quesadilla, cheese pasted to the side of his mouth as he barely looked up at her. It all became instantaneously clear—he had wanted her to fail. He wanted her to stay in the apartment all day and be there whenever he needed her. He would be happy about what she had to tell him.

  “I’m done,” she said. “I’m through with it all.”

  She would never forget David’s surprising reaction: he put the magazine down, stood up, kissed her so gently on her forehead that her whole body tingled, and fixed her a Corona Extra.

  He said while squeezing the lime: “You’re so above them all anyway.”

  She thought: he’s right. Then she became immensely ashamed of herself, because here was a guy who never cared that she was a model, who only wanted her to enjoy what she did, who provided a home and a bed and nice dinners for her, who was always waiting for her when she stumbled wasted through the front door, who never, for over a year of her bullshit, descended to the petty levels of waist sizes and raw vegetable diets and standing on the scale eight to ten times a day, who only wanted to love her and be happy for her—no matter what.

  She savored that Corona and kept the empty bottle in a side-table drawer with old love letters and sentimental birthday cards from her girlfriends.

  What Samona didn’t know: David Taylor was not only happy that she decided to abandon modeling (or more accurately: that modeling decided to abandon her)—he was elated.

  At that point, David Taylor’s two-year program at Merrill Lynch was rapidly approaching its end, and with the market still down he knew he would be cut if there was even the slightest hint of a doubt in Leonard’s mind that David was going to re-sign. In fact, David Taylor was filling out grad school applications—which two years since leaving Yale and a year and a half since reading his last novel (The Horse Whisperer, by Nicholas Sparks) was slow going and uninspiring. The only reason he was pushing through them at all was the memory of a dream and the threat of unemployment. And he knew that Samona—as long as she was a model—would never settle into the life of a teacher in the hills of New England and live for the summers off and think about having children and being slightly poor. Her being a model had precluded even the thought of leaving the city.

  But now the unpredictability of the consumer dictated that she was fully dependent on him. And since there was no way she was going back to Minnesota—not after the year and a half she’d just experienced—this gave David, in his mind, some room to mold her into the woman he knew she could be. He would become giddy when he thought of being not only the cool teacher of Shakespeare and Dickens (both of whose works were gathering dust on the shelf in his office), but also the cool teacher with the smokin’-hot wife. It would be like when he first started dating her junior year, and his fraternity brothers scanned her, openmouthed with envy, whenever she was with him.

  So he let her sulk in the apartment, where her insecurities festered and her level of sobriety plunged until he was all she had anymore.

  In the meantime, he had to fulfill his Merrill Lynch contract, and there was that essay question on the teachers’ college program applications—Describe a moment in your life that has defined you— which had him totally stumped.

  Then something unexpected happened:

  The computers on his floor were shuffled around, and he found Intertrade96. It was just an icon on the screen of his new PC that looked like an antique cash register with two miniature white men in suits standing on top of it shaking hands. While dragging it to the trash, he accidentally double-clicked and opened a spreadsheet saturated with formulas too complicated for him to even try deciphering. For fun, he plugged a few stock-exchange numbers from that afternoon into the appropriate boxes, and he came out of that day 250 percent in the black. When he walked out of the office after the market closed and James Leonard came forward to shake his hand, David Taylor felt an ecstasy that surpassed any triumph on the track. In the space of fourteen hours just weeks before his contract was up, it all came together: the persistence in getting the job done well, and walking to work each morning, and staying until he had finished everything, and getting along with virtually everyone from the mail boy to James Leonard—it was all about that handshake at the end of the day, and it all became, somehow, right.

  He took Samona out to Nobu that night, and he relished the sensation of not feeling guilty that the $35 salmon tartare appetizer he prodded her to order wasn’t cheating them out of savings they’d need for car payments and dental insurance. He studied her face as he ordered a $115 bottle of sake—the amazement in her eyes—and took pride that this wasn’t an illusion. It was sexy. It was happening. It was almost heroic.

  When they got home from dinner—buzzed from the sake but not wasted—he fucked her so hard she screamed.

  The next night it was Balthazar, followed by Blue Ribbon and even a venture out to Peter Lugers in Williamsburg (where she declined the steak and ate only a salad).

  And like one of those signs you’re not allowed to ignore, this windfall was accompanied a week later by another unexpected opportunity. After twenty-nine years at Merrill Lynch, James Leonard decided to start his own hedge fund and asked David Taylor to come with him. The hours would be much more comfortable (David would never have to wake up at 3:45 A.M. again) and he would have his own office on the twenty-first floor of a building on Seventh Avenue at Fifty-first Street and he would get to work in sales as well as trading, since that’s “what you were meant for,” as James Leonard told him. “It’s about building relationships, and I’ve rarely seen someone so young with as much talent for it as you have.” Where James Leonard got that idea, David Taylor couldn’t even begin to fathom. But deep within, David couldn’t help suspecting that this potential windfall was as much related to a footrace in Central Park three years ago on a hot, clear day in late August as it was to Intertrade96.

  David looked at this choice the way a trader would: if he dropped out of finance, there was the chance he wouldn’t get into the grad school program he wanted. He also wouldn’t have much money because he hadn’t saved like he had meant to (he had for a while, but after Samona moved in full-time the money had seeped away even though he’d been so careful) which dictated that he would have to get a job while attending grad school, and worse than that: Samona would have to work, too; Samona might not want to deal with the hardship and uncertainty of it all; she might leave him; he’d be alone; he didn’t like to go out much; he didn’t want to have to go through the hassle of finding another girl to be with; there were simply no guarantees—of anything.

  His dream now appeared risky, and his job had unexpectedly become a sure thing.

  This all happened within the space of three weeks.

  David Taylor went with Jim Leonard and became one of the first associates at The Leonard Company. It was a decision he made more quickly than he would have liked to admit.

  A few months after David received his signing bonus in the fall of 1999—more or less a gift from James Leonard to his protégé—David and Samona signed the lease on a new apartment. It was on the twenty-eighth floor of a Hell’s Kitchen luxury high-rise on Forty-third Street and Eleventh Avenue, called The Riverview (though their particular apartment faced east toward Queens). David had pushed for The Riverview because it was a closer walk to his new office than any of the other places they looked at (but once they moved into the spacious one-bedroom with the stainless-
steel kitchen and two bathrooms, David started taking cabs to Fifty-first and Seventh because he was tired from all the moving and unused to his new schedule and didn’t want to walk anymore and four avenues was farther than it sounded—he simply didn’t have the time).

  Samona couldn’t find a job (and never really looked that hard). David paid the $2,800 rent. He told her to take all the time she needed. He understood that the last year had been a strain on her and it was okay to wait for the perfect opportunity, and that in the meantime she should consider their new apartment a job—she should make it into her dream home.

  “My dream home is in Tribeca,” she said meekly. “It’s much cooler downtown.”

  “Just you wait,” was his strong and comforting reply. “Just wait.”

  The perfect career opportunity for Samona never managed to materialize—the nineties were almost over and the job market was competitive. But this didn’t bother David Taylor. After the substantial raise from his Merrill Lynch salary and his new contract (which included commissions from the investors he brought into The Leonard Company) he began making his own sales (with the aid of the ever-reliable Intertrade96, of course) and quickly became the Midas of the new hedge fund. Everyone kept asking David Taylor for his secret. (There was even a small and quiet investigation to make sure no insider trading was going down, but it was all clean—the formulas locked in his computer were honest.) David told them the truth: he had a spreadsheet program and the figures were solid. It was all simple binary code. By the end of that first year at The Leonard Company—exactly twelve months after they moved into The Riverview—David Taylor was making $250,000 plus commissions plus bonus, which was more than enough for Samona Ashley’s “extended job search” to fade away. And so she filled her days with shopping sprees, and visiting art galleries (thinking: I could run a gallery better than any of these twenty-year-old socialite hacks if I only had the time), Bikram yoga, talking to her dad, decorating and redecorating and redecorating the Riverview apartment (essentially treating it as her own gallery space), and having lunch with Olivia or Nikki or Sara, which inevitably led to the New York benefit circuit and the requisite cocktail parties. Samona Ashley became bored.