The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  James seemed relieved to hear this and he was smiling again.

  “What about the lights?” I asked David.

  David sighed and crossed his legs. “Leonard had every office installed with these motion detectors, so the lights turn off automatically if there’s no movement for five minutes or something like that.”

  James scoffed and shook his head like he understood what David was talking about even though Gutterson didn’t have an office of his own.

  “Except the sensors aren’t that good, so the lights go out every five minutes when I’m sitting there and I have to, like, wave my arms around to get them back on. It happens five hundred times a day and it’s ridiculous.” David uncrossed his legs and started fidgeting with a napkin.

  “So it’s all on track again?” James asked.

  “Margins up a little. Not like before but…” David shrugged.

  “What’s your secret, David?” This was asked by James with a wink in my direction.

  Suddenly David stopped fidgeting. “Secret? What do you mean?”

  “I mean”—James was leaning into him—“wanna give an old friend some tips?”

  David breathed in, relieved. “The three bars of gold, James: hard work, patience, confidence.”

  “You taking notes?” James winked at me. “I think that would go pretty well in your intro. Those three bars of gold.”

  He pounded his open palm on the table.

  “You told me nothing too poetic,” I said.

  “You know why?” And now James Gutterson was leaning into me. “Because that’s not poetry, buddy. That’s bullshit. And you need to use as much bullshit as you can lay your hands on.”

  “Well, I knew there was a reason bankers were rich and writers were broke.” I don’t know what led me to extend this any further.

  David stared impassively at both of us.

  “Hell, yeah,” James said. “You guys don’t bullshit enough. We, on the other hand, bullshit all the time. Right, Dave-o? Right?” James was elbowing David hard in the ribs before he raised his bottle, which was empty, for a toast. “Bullshitting! And to eight-

  point-four billion in offshore accounts!”

  “Eight-point-six,” David Taylor corrected, then flinched as he finished his drink in a single gulp.

  A few minutes later—after a few Leonard workers had wandered into the lounge and James became distracted drinking with them—David Taylor asked me to join him and Samona for dinner. He was about to pick her up from Printing Divine and then walk over to Woo Lae Oak on Mercer. I politely declined, but David insisted.

  “Why can’t it just be you and Samona?” I finally had to ask.

  “Because I don’t want to have dinner with my wife alone,” he said, standing up. “How’s that for an answer?”

  He saw the startled expression on my face and then, as I stood up, he put his hand on my shoulder like he used to do before our relay runs, a comforting gesture that had always made me feel like we were going to win. “I meant just not at the end of a long week,” he said, smiling sadly. “That’s all.” I had no idea why he was prodding me like this. “It’s a free dinner.”

  In the cab heading toward SoHo, he stared intensely at the city passing by as if he had never seen it before. For some reason the cab we were in seemed darker than most. I kept glancing awkwardly at David while he sighed in the blackness of the cab.

  Finally he said something when we hit traffic in Union Square.

  “My wife’s having an affair.”

  I froze.

  “Pardon?” I leaned toward him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  I was hoping the cab would start rolling and we could pretend he hadn’t said anything, but the night was already wrecked. David repeated the sentence louder.

  “I said that my wife is having an affair.” There was no inflection in his voice. “Samona.” He glanced over at me. “I thought it was obvious.”

  “Um, no…I mean, is it? I don’t know.”

  “You hadn’t heard anything?” David Taylor asked me.

  “Why would I?”

  “I guess you wouldn’t.” He was studying me in the darkness of the cab. “It’s just lately you seem more involved in our lives than you actually are. Maybe it’s just the work you’ve been doing at Leonard.”

  “Yeah. That must be it.” He looked away and seemed to lose interest in me. I leaned toward him. “Does she know you know this?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Are you sure you want me to come to dinner?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask me that anymore.”

  “David—”

  “Don’t. Forget I said anything.”

  16

  The Story of David and Samona

  Part 3: The Ailment

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS after Samona Ashley and David Taylor moved into their one-bedroom apartment in The Riverview, David contracted chlamydia.

  The surprise (that neither one of them wanted to admit) was that it was David, and not Samona, who had strayed.

  Samona Ashley was becoming disoriented as she floated through galleries in Chelsea and waited around fashionable restaurants for friends to show up and noticed the bell-shaped pattern of flab on older women’s bodies during yoga. She found herself sighing all the time. She was sighing when David would get out of bed at six in the morning and accidentally awaken her, and sighing in the evenings when, after telling David she didn’t feel like going out, he would return to the apartment with a cardboard box of pasta and some randomly chosen vegetables for her to prepare, and sighing sometimes during sex when David was working hard toward an orgasm (that might or might not happen) and Samona would have to close the eyes she had once kept open. She’d focus on David’s pleasure in order to increase her own, but even this stopped helping since she couldn’t tell whether David was having any fun. She sighed because he was gone all the time and because he was always so tired. She sighed because he was transferring his fatigue onto her.

  Samona was twenty-five and her life had already become perfunctory.

  (It somehow escaped her that she was the one who couldn’t find a job.)

  Meanwhile, the increasing frequency of her sighs was not lost on David Taylor. He was particularly attuned to the way she read the Sunday Styles section of the Times every weekend—her eyes glazed with a kind of mournfulness for something she’d let slip away. At first he tried to console her. “Sweetheart, that world wasn’t it for you. You don’t need any of that. You can and will do better.” She barely responded to him, even with all the overemphasis, and he shut himself up before he became too bitter or resentful. The bottom line was he was the one taking care of her; David was giving her a life far easier than that of most other girls her age—it was the year 2001, after all, and everyone in his or her twenties needed a job; he never pushed her; he never tried to make her feel guilty or beholden; he never begrudged depositing money into her bank account; he’d been faithful ever since she’d officially moved in with him.

  David Taylor knew that he was a good boyfriend. More than good, actually. And if she wanted his sympathy, she’d have to fucking earn it or else pull away. And then it hit David Taylor during one of those Sunday mornings: somehow, he’d become the catch in this relationship.

  He was now the one who could do better.

  This scared him into sending her away. He wanted to preempt the moment when their fears and frustrations would escalate to a gruesome fight that would end it all. Because, ultimately, he didn’t want that to happen—he liked taking care of Samona.

  He made the suggestion during an unusually intense auditing period after a particularly bad quarter.

  “Minneapolis?” she responded, incredulous. “You want me to visit my parents? Alone?”

  He spoke with the calmness of someone who knew more than she. “Samona, you haven’t been back there for almost three years. They’re your parents.”

  “I see them twice a year in Darien. Is that not enough?”r />
  “I just think it would probably mean a lot to them if—”

  “Is that supposed to be some kind of convincing argument?”

  “It would mean a lot to me, Samona, if you took a break.” She sighed, waiting expectantly, and he tacked on, “From the city. The city’s getting to be too much for you.”

  “Is it the city, or is it something else?”

  He sighed. “We’re twenty-five, Samona. Twenty-five, and we’re having a conversation that people don’t have till they’re…at least thirty.”

  She nodded at the last part. She agreed, of course—and when he phrased it in terms of getting older, she quickly realized that this was going to be “for the best.” They continued to discuss in a more civilized manner over take-out sushi and an expensive bottle of pinot grigio and both became mildly optimistic. This wasn’t “a break”—it didn’t need to be. It was just “time to think independently and make good decisions.” He was lecturing, but she let him continue with only a small sigh that he didn’t notice as he went on to explain, in his own polite and logical manner, how the “claustrophobia” of a situation like theirs (he wisely didn’t use the word dependence) could lead to a particular kind of “closed-offness” in which “you might not notice the possibilities and opportunities other than the ones lying right directly ahead.”

  It was agreed: she could spend some quality time with her father (Samona still called Keith once a day) while David would clear everything off his desk, and when she came back he would have more time for her. She proposed that he should think about becoming a mentor to inner-city children during whatever free time he had (“Which isn’t much,” he reminded her) and that an activity like that would take him back to some of that youthful idealism he’d (and she phrased this carefully) “given up in order to maintain a certain standard of living” and now it was David nodding along as she convinced him that doing something community-oriented like that would mean that he could still have that old dream that she always loved hearing about (well, not always, but…) and that he could have it both ways. They could have it all.

  She got him so revved up that the conversation ended with him saying, “Hell, if it works out we might even start looking at places in Tribeca!”

  He didn’t mean to say that—he just blurted it out.

  At the end of August 2001, on the third day after Samona Ashley flew to Minneapolis, David Taylor finally gave up on work at a not-unreasonable 9:30. He planned to a buy a six-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale at the deli on the corner of Forty-eighth and Eleventh and watch ER at ten, and then either a rerun of Friends or The Drew Carey Show and wait for an Ambien to take effect. But James Gutterson, one of the new analysts fresh out of Cornell, caught him in the lobby of Fifty-first and Seventh (they had exited from different elevators). He was with a few of the guys from The Leonard Company Corporate Ice Hockey Team (that, yes, James Gutterson had started) and since they had beaten HSBC’s “pussy squad” the night before, they were going out to celebrate. When James Gutterson invited him to come along, David found himself agreeing. And on the third night of Samona Ashley’s absence, David Taylor was not missing his girlfriend at all.

  He felt like a normal, successful guy in his midtwenties.

  The group went to a sports bar in the Flatiron district and David bought the first round for the squad. While David was toasting their victory he noticed a young intern from London sitting in the corner with a girlfriend, and the young intern was staring at him. Three pints of lager and two vodka tonics later, while the ice-hockey team was breaking into a spirit song, the intern was still staring, and Samona Ashley didn’t exist, and the night was wide open.

  It was the British accent that won David Taylor over. It made her seem elegant and intelligent even as she offered up the most banal interpretations of Dickens that David had ever heard. (David wanted to talk about novels, and because the young intern was from London, David made certain primitive associations and brought up the literary giant.)

  David did not care who saw them leave the sports bar together.

  Mattie had a serious boyfriend (who was still in the U.K.). She was four years younger than David (cool). She was interning in his department (not cool). But none of it really mattered to him because Samona was gone and the way he remembered it they’d decided to “take a break” (he’d momentarily forgotten the rest) and he was imagining the expression on Mattie McFarlane’s face during orgasm.

  The only thing that mattered to David Taylor was that they fuck at her place and not The Riverview.

  He followed Mattie into a small studio where she pushed him onto a couch strewn with shoes and cats and a pillow inscribed with her initials, and promptly sucked him off. David came loudly and fourteen minutes later he was hard again. This vitality had been missing from the sex he’d been having with Samona.

  (There she was, in his mind, sighing.)

  The day before Samona Ashley came home from Minneapolis, David Taylor woke up at 3 A.M. to take a piss. He almost screamed. It felt as if a branding iron had been pushed down his urethra and straight through to his anus. He stumbled back to bed and endured a severe anxiety attack with the help of two one-milligram Xanax.

  David Taylor’s internist diagnosed him with chlamydia eight hours before Samona’s plane was scheduled to land. He bought the necessary treatments (both oral and anal) and was hiding them in a piece of Gucci luggage in their spacious walk-in closet when Samona entered the apartment, six hours ahead of schedule.

  Her time away had been rejuvenating, exactly as David had predicted. Tana had been on her best behavior (it didn’t matter to Samona that Keith had bribed her with a promised Christmas vacation to St. Croix) and said nothing when Samona helped herself to a second scoop of low-fat Häagen-Dazs. She’d gone to a Twins game with her father and eaten chicken fingers with French fries and Bud Light in sixteen-ounce cups and didn’t feel guilty about it until the following morning (she fasted all the next day). They’d talked about David for three innings. She explained their “situation” (omitting the unsavory details) and Keith had wrapped his arm around her and said, “If he loves you enough to let you come home to us and take this time to think it over, on your own, and he’s waiting for you in New York, then he must love you almost as much as I do. He also must be thinking about the future—you know, long term.”

  She didn’t think he meant it, but she felt better.

  Tana was asleep when they got home, but later in the night Samona heard her parents having sex through the thin walls of the duplex condominium. A rush of feeling coursed through her in response to Tana’s low-pitched moans, and Samona Ashley regretted all the times she’d judged her mother. Her parents seemed happy, and this was something that she hadn’t been at all prepared for.

  The next morning, when Samona sifted through the fridge and took only a Diet Coke for breakfast, her mother smiled, gratified, and Samona warily reached out: she asked Tana from Ghana for advice.

  Tana said simply, “If you’re bored, it’s your own damn fault.”

  And Samona thought to herself that she’d been a fool to get so bored with David Taylor and let that boredom cause her to overlook certain realities: David took care of her; he always answered her questions, even the stupidest ones; he handled her craziness (she viewed her fits as “crazy” now, in that moment, in the kitchen with her mother) in the same caressing way that Keith handled Tana’s.

  It hit her: that’s all Samona had ever really needed or wanted in a man.

  And David Taylor wasn’t the type of guy who would ever change on her.

  She flew back to New York a half day early, and found David staring at her, wide-eyed, from the bedroom door.

  Samona kissed him lightly on the mouth and then, in a move that surprised both of them, kissed him harder. She thanked him for sending her away. She told him about the Twins game, and hiking a lake trail with her father, and eating her mother’s light West African recipes that had made her so sick as a child but which now she’
d grown up enough to enjoy.

  It took every vestige of strength in David Taylor’s body to stand still without scratching himself or shaking violently. He had forgotten what real pain felt like, even though he had spent four years at Yale running himself through various thresholds of it. So far in David Taylor’s relatively young life there had been nothing to compare with this. And the worst part was that Samona wanted him. She had been away too long without him. She told him she was getting wet just standing there. She wanted to make love. Now.

  She reached for him, but he backed away. Samona interpreted this as a game and playfully reached for him again. David stepped away even farther. And then Samona was chasing him around the apartment, and David was running away from her, terrified. His muscles were tight from the pain and his jaw was clenched in agony as his uri-nary tract grated with every movement. And Samona was laughing because she had never been so happy to see him, and she became aroused because, she assumed, they were actually playing a sex game. Her mother’s words echoed gleefully in her head, and she realized that she never had to be bored again.

  Finally, David Taylor couldn’t run anymore. He collapsed on the couch. He didn’t have the strength to fight her advances. Suddenly she was on him, eating his lips, and when she unzipped his pants and pulled them down, David Taylor began to cry, his underwear at his knees, entirely helpless. But Samona didn’t notice because she was staring at the erection that was sticking straight up and she was asking, confused, chuckling uneasily, “What’s that? Did you…come already?” Samona instinctively began sighing again when she noticed that her boyfriend was weeping.

  He told her everything.

  That night Samona left The Riverview and stayed with Olivia.

  When David called her the next day from the office she informed him that he was “a dress I’ve bought but might return.”

  By the beginning of September, the burning went away.

  Samona Ashley used this time to take stock. She went out to nightclubs and bars with Sara and Nikki and Olivia, where men stared at her (many of them better-looking than David Taylor) and her friends egged her on. She gave out her number a few times but usually changed one or two of the digits, because none of it made her feel anything. It was so fucking confusing: this was what she’d been missing out on in being loyal to David Taylor, and yet (and she credited this to her modeling days spoiling her) it was all so lame. She shared Olivia’s bed at her apartment on the Upper West Side, where they talked about men and settling and Samona cried and Olivia held her, the two of them cuddling like they used to do in college (they had even hooked up once on a dare) and Samona ate peanut-butter coffee swirls at Tasti D-Lite every morning and thought about what her mother would say (which would sicken her and make her throw up).