The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  But David didn’t notice Samona’s boredom.

  David had grown to love his job.

  Dreams faded away. Dreams were secondhand.

  Love was something entirely different.

  Dreams didn’t lead to love.

  David Taylor began believing that success, in all its many ironic and erratic forms, led to love.

  15

  From: James. Gutterson@Leonardco.com

  To: readyandwaiting@hotmail.com

  Sent: Thursday, July 22, 4:59 PM

  Subject: Re: working draft

  Buddy—looking over the work—need to talk about it—when can you come in? Gut.

  p.s. Not today or tomorrow—Edmonton’s screwingthemselves—again—in a SERIOUSLY bad mood aboutit.

  It had been two weeks since I submitted my draft to James Gutterson—six days late. It was a much harder job than I ever imagined, and I was completely the wrong person for it. But financial woes—the second most powerful motivator behind sex—paired with the need for distraction after my last encounter with Ethan and his family had driven me to endure the composition of 137 paragraphs and 13,642 words, every one of them lifeless, dry, and uninteresting. (And 87 totally recycled graphs were embedded in there as well.) There was a part of me that could write at length on what the latest fashion trends represented about our national psyche, and even if it wasn’t particularly satisfying, it also wasn’t painful, and I could be, at times, amused by my own masochism—which never lasted long enough because the pieces were churned out so quickly. But it took me over two hours to assemble a single paragraph about what The Leonard Company could do for you, and with every minute that passed it seemed as if my brain were shrinking into itself. It wasn’t encouraging, either, when I realized—quite often during the writing of this thing—that I was composing it for someone who sat on the twenty-first floor and read ice-hockey scores all day.

  Meanwhile, my phone didn’t ring all week, and as soon as the Leonard business was over with it would be back to making calls and drafting proposals about the comeback of trench coats and a new line of celebrity face cream and who was the next Colin Farrell. I would have to reenter that universe again—I had no choice, really.

  The upside happened halfway through the interminable process when—after plunging my face into a sink full of cold water to revive myself—it hit me that I’d lost the strange urge to find out what was going on with Ethan and Samona, et al., and I had lost track of them for most of July. This realization (I told myself that I was growing up; that I didn’t need them anymore; that I could move on from their world) enabled me to accept what I’d been actively avoiding: that David Taylor and James Gutterson and The Leonard Company were doing me a favor, and the least I could attempt was a halfway decent job and maybe even try to learn something. (In the end, what I learned was that—factoring in my age and current income—I would be lucky to have a single dollar to invest by the time I was fifty.)

  Yet the draft moved faster after that revelation, and early the following week I was happy enough with the document to e-mail it to James. It had been about forty hours of work (maybe half of that spent staring at the cruel blinking cursor) and after I sent it off it felt as if I had just escaped the one economics class I had taken at Yale—it all disappeared: the assigned reading, the working half-assed just to meet a due date, the pleading for more time, and all that was left was for James Gutterson to put my work to rest and then pay me and then I could save myself for maybe two more months in the apartment on Tenth Street—at least till the end of summer—before wandering off to something else.

  At the time, it seemed that simple.

  Late one afternoon—two days had passed since Edmonton’s string of moronic off-season trades—I once again pushed through the revolving doors at 800 Seventh Avenue and went through the same steps of calling up Gutterson’s office and being issued a giant visitor’s pass with my name on it. Gutterson’s face was set just inches away from the computer screen again, but there was now a spreadsheet where the articles about ice hockey had been. James was typing numbers from a sheet of paper into the computer.

  “Be right with you,” he said without looking up. “I messed up the fucking decimal points and I have to change each fucking one of them. Only forty-two more. So hold tight.” His two index fingers hovered over the keyboard in a childlike hunt-and-peck method of typing. “You know, someone should really devise a way to do this automatically.”

  “Hey, maybe I’ll go say hello to David while you’re working,” I suggested, after standing there realizing this could take James another thirty minutes. “Is that cool?”

  “I think he’s with a consultant right now. Someone’s redesigning the conference rooms.” James said this without looking away from the screen, a nod of the head toward a closed door to our right which was surrounded by electric tape. “Plus you and I are having drinks with him in about an hour so”—he squinted at the screen—“hold tight.”

  I waited while James typed in his agonizingly slow fashion, and as I glanced around his desk I noticed something that hadn’t been there before—the Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road.

  “Are you reading this?” I asked, trying to mask my surprise.

  “Hold on a sec. I’m…all…most…done. There!”

  With a final strike of the return key, he closed the window.

  A long moment passed as he stared at the screen.

  His jaw slowly dropped. “Oh…fuck…”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Very softly, he said, “I…forgot…to…save…it…” And then his voice rose to a shriek: “Fuck!”

  All across the twenty-first floor curious faces peeked over the tops of computers, but they disappeared quickly because apparently this happened to James Gutterson all the time.

  He shot a hard look my way as if my question was what had distracted him from hitting Control S, and so the calamity was directly attributable to me.

  Then I watched with an odd fascination as James slowly accepted the fact that he had forgotten to save the work. It had been done and there was no undoing it. Anger faded to simple regret.

  “Well, fuck it. It’s not like I get paid by the hour.” He switched on the screen saver before turning to me. “You know what this means?”

  “What?”

  “Might have to get really drunk tonight.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Getting drunk, my friend, is nothing to be sorry about.”

  I picked up Revolutionary Road. “Have you read this?”

  “No. A girl told me to read it,” he said. “Figure it’ll help me get her into bed.”

  James took the book from me and flipped through it. He checked out the back cover and grimaced, shaking his head.

  All the while I was thinking how I would love to meet a girl who had read Revolutionary Road and liked it enough to push it on me. I would pretend I hadn’t read it (twice already) and thank her for making me read such a great novel and then we could have long discussions about it and—

  The thought cut off and changed into something else, and suddenly—in my mind—I was giving the book to Samona in her print shop, and she was returning it to me a few days later, telling me how much the story meant to her, how she’d forgotten how utterly “delightful” reading could be, touching my arm intimately while asking me about my own writing, wanting to read my own stories…

  And just like that—the act of picking up a novel James Gutterson was reading in order to get laid—the distraction of the last three weeks was obliterated, and it was hitting me all over again that the one woman I was truly interested in was not only married, but was also having an affair with a gay man who’d once had feelings for me. Or something like that. I almost had to laugh at the absurdity—except the laughter would inevitably cause James to ask “What’s so funny?” and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to answer that without tears.

  James was looking up at me, holding the book. “Did you read
this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to tell me what it’s about?”

  “I think it’ll help your cause more, James, if you read it yourself.”

  “I don’t have time to read this shit.” He nodded toward the computer screen.

  The screen saver was a fluorescent orange line of text reading the time of day, ticking off the seconds as it bounced around the black screen.

  …5:23:42…5:23:43…5:23:44…5:23:45…

  “Come on, man. Just give me an idea of what it’s about. Just enough to bullshit with her for five or ten minutes.”

  “Will that really be long enough to get her into bed?”

  “Well, it all depends on the number of cosmos she’s had,” he said. “I’m thinking by the time we get to the book, it’ll be three or four. Just e-mail me a summary and some, I don’t know, plot points or whatever. It’ll take you two seconds.”

  “Sure.”

  And then I reminded him of why I was there. I held up a copy of the booklet I had printed out.

  James nodded solemnly and started lifting stacks of paper off his desk but he couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in any of his drawers. “I know I printed it out somewhere,” he muttered, hunched over his desktop. He came up empty-handed, and then looked—again, regretfully—at his computer screen.

  …5:25:13…5:25:14…5:25:15…

  “Listen,” James started. “I read the draft—most of it—and you’re a good writer, but it’s way too…poetic or something. You just have to tone it down…” He made a lowering motion with his hands, palms facing the floor. And then he shrugged. “That’s all, really. Other than that, it’s fine…Just, y’know: KISS.”

  “What?”

  “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

  “Oh, right, right…”

  “Don’t forget who you’re writing for.”

  “Well, it is called corporate literature.”

  James looked at me blankly until something connected and he forced out a labored chuckle. “Just take a quick pass and simple it up, eh?”

  I sighed. “Sure.”

  He leaned back, stretched his arms over his head, and groaned. Then he looked at me in a very thoughtful way. “Why are people always trying to dress everything up? Making it look fancier than it really is? Things are pretty simple. Why make it more complicated? Don’t you think so?”

  “Are you still talking about…my work?”

  “I’m talking about the big picture, dawg. And I don’t talk about the big picture that much, so listen carefully.”

  I couldn’t help but be amused.

  “If people could just keep it simple, then the world we live in would be a much less fucked-up place.”

  “That’s so…Zen.”

  “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

  “You might have something there, James.”

  “Straight up. Let’s get drunk.” James was putting on a wrinkled jacket, and after straightening his tie, he pulled out his cell phone.

  “I’ll leave a message for Taylor to hook up with us after his”—James suddenly bulged his eyes and mimicked the mincing stereotype of a gay man—“consultation!”

  …5:26:39…5:26:40…5:26:41…

  I was finishing my first beer and James had downed his second. We were in a dimly lit cocktail lounge called China Club on Forty-seventh Street off Broadway (the kind of place where martinis cost fourteen dollars) and it was beginning to fill up with young men like ourselves getting out of work and we were waiting for David Taylor while James talked about ice hockey.

  “It’s just so intense and you can’t understand it from playing another sport like track or football. You can’t understand hockey until you play hockey.”

  I raised my hands in mock surrender. “I don’t presume to.” (It occurred to me that this was a phrase I’d once used too often in college until Ethan had become annoyed.)

  I focused in on James and what he was saying about the guys who could bench-press four plates on each side and how they came at you twenty miles per hour while you went after a puck you could barely see that’s probably going fifty. How players nowadays looked at everything through a damn face mask because of pussy NCAA rules commissions and James was a purist because he grew up playing on Thunder Bay in Alberta and do you think they ever wore masks? Shit, Gretzky played until he was thirty-eight and do you think he ever wore a mask?

  I thought it was a rhetorical question but he waited expectantly until I shook my head, and then he was talking about how his old man laced up his first pair of skates for him on his second birthday (we were regressing, I realized idly) and how he would skate across a frozen bay all afternoon and then it was the junior league, high school, PG year, Cornell, a year in Russia (was I listening correctly?) and all he wanted to do was kill people and then score.

  “Did you ever try to go pro?” It was the only thing to ask him.

  “Yeah, that year in Russia.” James drained his beer. “But they play dirty hockey over there. Plus all you can drink is vodka, so your face gets all fat and the girls are way too pale. Personally, I like dark skin.” He nudged me. “You know what I mean?”

  “Like David’s wife?” I asked, regretting it.

  “You tell me how a scrawny stiff like David Taylor landed a piece like that,” Gutterson said, with a mixture of bitterness and awe. “Tell me how he not only landed her but got her to marry him, and I’ll buy you another beer. Unbelievable.”

  “I think it was kind of complicated.”

  I suddenly became more interesting to James Gutterson.

  “Yeah? How?”

  “Forget it. I don’t know.” I was shaking my head even though my own answer to that exact question had been consuming me to the point where I’d been writing it down. For me the whole point of writing was, in the end, to finish the story—to shut it away and hopefully get paid and then move on to the next one. It was a livelihood, and it had never been a problem to maintain that separation. But why was I finding this so impossible? Why did they have to be everywhere? Faced with James Gutterson’s ripe, anticipating gaze, all I could do was keep shaking my head and mutter, “I don’t know why I said that. It was all very simple.”

  “I’ll tell you the simple part.” He rubbed his index finger and thumb together, and I leaned away from him. “Cash: Taylor made it, she wanted it. Nothing simpler than that. You have cash, you can do whatever and who ever the hell you want.” He paused—flashing on something—and his face darkened with a crooked smirk. “And trust me, Taylor does.”

  “Does what?” I blurted, intrigued and a little uneasy.

  “Huh?” James was zoning out. He was watching the waitress behind the bar as she washed a set of highballs.

  “He doesn’t, like, cheat on her. Not David Taylor.” I said this firmly, because I was pretty sure that—except for one time I’d heard about before they got married—David had never strayed. James laughed with the particular guffaw of someone who knows things you don’t, which caused me to tack on, “It just seems like he’s too busy to mess around. Right?”

  He kept laughing and shook his head slowly. “Look, okay, you’re a writer. I can tell you like to listen in and you notice things. And I’m sure there’s plenty of shit you’ve heard about our friend David Taylor. But trust me, buddy”—he paused, as if the story had grown more suspenseful for me, and he wanted to prolong my interest—“there’s plenty of shit you haven’t. And I’ll just leave it at that.”

  He took a deep sip from his beer.

  “James,” I urged him on, “will you just tell me what we’re talking about?”

  “Nope.” James said this quietly, with no emphasis.

  “Why not?”

  “Because one: he’s walking toward us right now, and two”—he raised an eyebrow ominously—“I’m sure you’ll hear about it sometime from a more reliable source than me. Ha!”

  He pounded his Kirin Light down on the table, where David Taylor was now pulling up a chair.
<
br />   “Do I want to know?” he asked me, gesturing at James.

  “No, you really don’t,” I said.

  David shook both our hands—a mock formality that always eased everyone.

  “Taylor, this is the first time I think I’ve seen you in daylight,” James said, eyeing me.

  “It’s starting to ease up.”

  The bags were gone from under David’s eyes and his hair looked freshly cut and neatly tousled with styling gel. He was wearing a very chic four-button gray Prada suit that he was a little too old for but still managed to pull off; in fact it made him look trimmer and more youthful than I had seen him in ages. But the strange thing was that this metamorphosis hadn’t made him any less nervous. David Taylor was not a calm man that night (later I would find out why) and he ordered a double Grey Goose on the rocks. It arrived quickly. In response to our stares he informed us, “I’m a little wound up.”

  “So what’s happening up there behind all the closed doors?” James was asking. “Besides all the renovating.”

  “I’ve been sorting some things out,” David said. “Those fucking autolights are ruining my universe.”

  “Wait—are you gonna get a bigger office after the renovation?” James eyed me again to the point where I had to glance away.

  “No,” David said, his eyes darting around the lounge. “I was just consulting with someone about decorating. Giving it a little bit of bam!” He did an Emeril Lagasse impersonation that took a moment to register.

  “I’m sure you were, buddy.” James grinned. “I’m sure.”

  David did a quick double take at James and blinked. “They’re still working on the conference rooms,” he said drily. “That’s all.”