The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  After two weeks David stopped leaving messages for her.

  A week after that, the World Trade Center fell. Samona was reading Marie Claire at Olivia’s when it happened, and she attempted to make three calls from her cell phone—first her father, then Olivia, then David—but the lines were already filled up and all she could get was that ferocious, incessant beeping.

  But when, during the days and weeks that followed, David never contacted her—not even an e-mail—she began to worry severely. She flashed on her favorite painting from art-history classes: Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which then turned gradually into: Where was David? What could have happened to him? What if he had a meeting downtown that morning? Why had she left him? Why hadn’t he called? What kind of bastard wouldn’t call her after what had happened? What kind of bitch was she to not have run toward him that day? What did one small misfire in judgment matter during times like these? How could she hold one night against him? Was she really so petty? Was she really so needy? Hadn’t she driven him away to begin with?

  On a Saturday evening near the end of September, she went to the Duane Reade near The Riverview, where all her prescriptions still had to be called in, to refill her birth control and get more Prevacid for her sensitive stomach. She found herself looking up at the tower repeatedly, to the window on the southeast side of the twenty-eighth floor, and then, after circling the block six times in her high heels, she went inside. She still had the keys. In the elevator, going up, she decided: If I catch him with someone, or if I see any signs, it’s over.

  Otherwise, we’ll talk.

  He was sitting on a stool at the window when she stepped into the room. He had a bottle of Belvedere on the windowsill, out of which he was drinking the vodka straight. He was staring downtown toward where he once worked on Vesey Street. Most of Tribeca was still cordoned, the floodlights glowing brightly in the dusk. He was alone.

  She went to the window and stood beside him.

  “What have you…been doing?” she asked uneasily.

  He gestured toward the bottle and shrugged.

  “I’ve been worried,” she said. “How come you never—”

  “I tried to call. There was no way to get through. I just figured you were at Olivia’s or somewhere.”

  “What about the day after? You could have gotten through the day after, or any day since then.”

  He stopped and looked up at her.

  “You could have, too.”

  He slipped his arm around her waist.

  Then he told her how he’d been at his desk that day, and he’d walked down the twenty-one flights of stairs with everyone else and come straight to The Riverview, and he’d never been in danger.

  They drank vodka in silence and smoked a pack of cigarettes.

  Later, she guided him into the bedroom.

  They lay there together and held each other. And when he finally brushed a few strands of hair from over her eyes and just looked at her, it was the gaze with which she responded that—for the first time since he’d hurried out of his office building on September 11—allowed David Taylor to feel something close to heroic. Amid all the news articles about the firemen and policemen who’d performed extraordinary acts of valor, the simple acts of holding Samona and comforting her made David Taylor feel like a throwback—someone who would have been happy in less vicious times, when people found their life partner young and settled down into a moderately pleasant routine together and took care of each other unquestioningly and didn’t have to go through all the bullshit of “finding yourself” and “figuring out what makes you happy first” (bullshit that in his mind was typified by the whole Mattie McFarlane “situation”) that, frankly, David was too tired for.

  It suddenly dawned on him, as they lay in their one-bedroom: I can be that guy, the one who knows exactly what he wants; it would be easy.

  At the same time, Samona was seeing clearly that she didn’t want to have to find anybody ever again. She didn’t want to be alone.

  She kissed him. They made love.

  They married eight months later.

  17

  WHEN THE CAB rolled up over the cobblestones outside Printing Divine, David tipped the driver. The lights inside had been dimmed, and the Closed sign was hanging in the window, antique driftwood carved in an elaborate script.

  “God, how I loathe this place.” David laughed grimly as he unlocked the door with his own key.

  The bell rang as we walked in and Samona—on cue—materialized above us, leaning over the loft’s railing, wearing a tight strapless white dress that contrasted beautifully with her skin.

  “Hey,” David called up. “You ready? I brought a friend. You mind?”

  Samona smiled at me and said softly, “Well, if I’d known, I would have invited a friend myself.”

  “I don’t get it,” David said. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that there are a lot of gorgeous girls who would love to meet your friend, that’s all.” Samona turned her smile to David.

  “Oh,” was all David Taylor said.

  I tried to ignore her, along with the whiny hum of awareness that I’d built a life in which I’d never be alluring enough to have her. I closed down and tried hard to concentrate on the moment that the three of us (or if I really wanted to be the poet James Gutterson accused me of being, was it the four of us?) were in.

  “That’s very thoughtful.” I coughed.

  We walked to Mercer Street and up two blocks—past the gallery where Samona and Ethan had met (and where I caught her glancing in the window)—and sat downstairs at Woo Lae Oak, a Korean restaurant with stone tables and orchids everywhere.

  And for a moment, as they spread their napkins on their laps, Samona and David Taylor were simply another married couple that I was sitting across from, except that Samona was cheating on David—and so what? People cheated all the time. I’d seen it happening everywhere. I looked at David and smiled and decided that if they wanted to move forward through this elaborate, disorienting scenario, then I didn’t have to read into it beyond the meal we were about to have.

  And then I turned to Samona and there it was in the corner of her left eyelid—that seemingly extraneous detail Ethan had mentioned to me, that tiny circle of skin that had been seared by an ember on a beach in Thailand three weeks ago. It was flickering in the light of the candle, so glaringly obvious if you wanted to search for it as badly as I did. Lust brought me to it. Lust wouldn’t let me avoid it. Lust rendered sitting at the table with Samona and her husband a petrifying place to be—because there was no other distraction for the two of them except me.

  She caught me gazing, and she smiled but I couldn’t tell what the smile meant.

  “Thanks so much for having me, you guys,” I murmured.

  “Hey, it’s a real pleasure. Seriously, pal.” This was David.

  At first we talked about nothing—old vignettes from college, which was so far in the past that it seemed like exactly that: nothing. And David resorted to telling the same stories he told whenever I saw him: he joked about how he won the league championship the first chance he got, and then never again; he joked about how that race so many summers ago in Central Park against Ian Connor was what had gotten him the job at The Leonard Company; he joked about the magic spreadsheet he had found—the thing that had caused their life to end up in the place it now was; he joked about Samona’s modeling.

  It occurred to me that amid all the stories he told before the waiter came, there wasn’t a single one that—no matter how artfully David Taylor spun it—didn’t involve some form of shortcoming.

  Samona was gazing out the window onto Mercer Street, trying not to make a production of not listening, but she had heard it all before and she was moved to order another bottle of sake (since we had finished the first bottle in an alarmingly short period of time). Then David ran out of things to say and excused himself to use the men’s room, and though I wasn’t aware of it until David tossed his napkin on the table, I wa
s drunk and sitting alone across from Samona Taylor in a restaurant at a candlelit table, and I had dreamed of this so many times that now, when it was actually happening, it seemed unreal. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even remember whether we had ordered dinner yet.

  And then she spoke.

  “Do you remember when you tried to kiss me?”

  I didn’t respond.

  The distance between one kiss in college and the end of an eight-year relationship—all told encompassing almost three years of marriage and a thousand conversations and two apartments and an affair—seemed vast to me, and I couldn’t believe she remembered.

  “Weird thing to say, huh?” she went on. I shook my head blankly and focused on the scar in order to keep from spinning backward. “But it’s just that since Ethan—ever since Ethan, I’ve been remembering all these small things that I’d pretty much forgotten about…those days.”

  “What—what is it about Ethan?” I asked, glancing toward the bathroom, praying for David to come out and end this torture.

  “Don’t you already know?” She sounded suggestive. “He says you do.”

  “What—what do you mean?” I tried not to sound alarmed.

  I was relieved when she replied, “Ethan—he has this way of taking you back to that place where all you had to worry about was the person at the party you might have kissed.” She sighed and looked past me.

  “No, I don’t remember,” I finally said, comforted by the fact that Samona still didn’t know—that she didn’t have the capacity to draw the necessary connections between the present and the past.

  “Really?” she asked, pouting her lips in a way that made my heart pound harder—because it seemed like she wanted me to remember, to join in on her giddiness, and my noninterest had wounded her somehow. “You don’t remember kissing the drunk girl at the SAE party?”

  I tossed back another shot of sake. “No. I guess not.”

  “Well,” she said, her eyes drifting toward the back of the restaurant where the restrooms were. “You did.”

  “Don’t tell Ethan or David,” I said wryly. “Because then things might actually get complicated.”

  She stopped pouting and lingered on me, the solidity of her stare accentuating the scar. She looked to the restrooms again, waiting for David to come back.

  “You went to Milan, I hear.” She pursed her lips, and nodded. “How are the beaches in Milan?” I asked.

  “There aren’t any beaches in Milan,” she said.

  “You know what I meant, Samona.”

  “I suppose we all take risks.”

  “Not me.”

  “Yeah. Maybe not you.”

  As if in a dream David was sitting at the table again and he easily managed to move the conversation back to The Leonard Company and the renovations being done on the conference rooms. David’s smile faded into a steely expression—even when he chuckled—and after absently draining the second bottle of sake, he announced, “I’ve got some interesting news, speaking of old college friends—”

  “I wasn’t aware that we had been,” Samona interrupted.

  “We contracted Ethan Hoevel to design the new conference rooms,” David finished, undeterred.

  There was the long silence that David Taylor had anticipated.

  I assumed that Samona was already aware of this fact.

  “It’s a funny story actually—how this all happened.” David was staring at Samona. “Remember when he showed up at Randolph Torrance’s party? And I couldn’t remember him?”

  And then David Taylor turned and looked at me.

  “I flashed on our friend here”—David gripped my shoulder and gave it the familiar squeeze—“and then I remembered very clearly who Ethan Hoevel was.” David looked at us with that practiced, professional ease that revealed nothing.

  I was thinking about a night in college:

  David comes by my dorm room to borrow a book, but he doesn’t call first, and when he comes in I’m sitting on one end of my couch and Ethan’s lying down on the other, his legs resting on my lap while we watch an Aerosmith video on MTV, and it’s so conspicuous how rapidly I untangle myself when David walks in, and the hurt in Ethan’s eyes is raw and unmistakable.

  Finally Samona cleared her throat, rattling me back to the present. “Why is that a funny story?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I don’t get the punch line.” This was me.

  David ignored us and went on. “Well, we started getting reacquainted and he was telling me what he was doing and I mentioned to him how that week there’d been a meeting about the renovations to the conference rooms that had been initially planned and how they really weren’t reflecting that modern edge we were looking for—that indefinable thing we wanted to make us seem more appealing to young investors—and so a week later Ethan Hoevel came by and talked to a couple of us and had some great ideas and he was hired.” David drank deeply from his glass of sake and chased it with beer.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  Samona said this, and suddenly three things became clear to me.

  David knew about my junior-year relationship with Ethan Hoevel.

  Samona didn’t know that Ethan was gay.

  And Samona—amazingly—could not realize in Woo Lae Oak that David knew about her affair; she still thought it belonged to her only.

  Food began arriving, and while plates were being arranged on the table, Samona looked loosely in my direction, as if her gaze had been wandering all over the place and had suddenly, accidentally, fallen on me.

  “I’m sorry we haven’t seen each other since you stopped by that day,” she said.

  David barely looked up from the food he was eating. But why should he care? I was gay. I was no threat to him or his wife.

  “Things just got very busy,” Samona was saying, and then she looked out the window behind me, focusing on something, following it across her line of vision with a curious look, and then coming back to David, and then coming back to me.

  I turned around and saw the back of a dark jacket disappear at the edge of the window.

  And then there was silence and David and I ate quickly and Samona didn’t eat anything and David paid the check while the two of us shared a small dessert.

  Outside, I waited while David hailed a cab on Houston.

  “I hope to see you soon.” Samona said this very softly into my ear after she kissed my cheek. Her whisper was warm against my skin, and I couldn’t help what stirred inside of me. “Take care.”

  And then she climbed through the cab door David was holding open for her.

  David took an extra moment to look at me, but it was impossible to discern what he was thinking.

  The cab pulled away from the curb and I walked north, straight through NYU, her last words lingering forcefully.

  Hope was not the right word.

  Desire was so much stronger than hope.

  Hope cares too much about the forces working against it.

  Desire doesn’t give a shit about anything.

  Mercer ended on Eighth Street. That was when my cell phone rang.

  I pulled it out of my jacket. I recognized the number and answered just before the call went to voice mail.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on my way home. Why?”

  “Do you want to get a drink?”

  I sighed. “Not really, Stanton.”

  “I really need to talk to you. If you don’t want to get a drink, then come over.”

  “Let me guess: this is about Ethan, right?” I said with heavy sarcasm. “Look, Stanton, you’re a really nice guy but—”

  “I’m serious. It’s not about just Ethan anymore. It’s about someone else you know.”

  “Who?” I asked, something tightening in my chest.

  Stanton breathed in. “It’s about the person Ethan is having an affair with.”

  I found myself turning toward the West Village.

&nbs
p; 18

  STANTON VAUGHN kept an apartment on Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue—a chic address but a dingy brownstone—even though he spent most of his time at Ethan’s. But that night he was not in the loft on Warren Street, and he let me wait a long time after I hit the buzzer. I was deciding whether to hit it again or just leave

  (but you wanted to hear about Samona and all the things you still didn’t know and you were hoping that Stanton would clarify it all)

  when the shrill sound of the door unlocking made the decision for me. Lightbulbs were flickering along the narrow hallways where paint peeled off the walls in large, random patches. The door to 4C was adorned with an old Christmas wreath, brown and covered with bells and candy canes and little doves. Stanton opened the door before I could knock and just stood there for a moment in an open bathrobe, a gray wife-beater and a pair of boxer briefs beneath it. Dark circles sagged under his eyes, and his hair—usually so stylishly groomed—tufted up sharply over each ear, and his characteristic four-day stubble looked closer to ten days.

  He ushered me in and then shut the door, double-locking it.

  Inside 4C, the narrow studio reeked of cigarette smoke. Stanton sat at a makeshift desk in front of a laptop and a printer and a thick stack of paper and a mirror where half a pile of white powder had been arranged into lines. He offered up the coke, which I refused because I knew it wouldn’t take me anywhere I wanted to go.