The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  On one wall was a huge poster for Stanton’s “Boi-Wear” line featuring a darkly handsome teenage model with disheveled hair slouching down a runway. There was a long couch with an evergreen slip-cover draped over it, and where a canvas bag filled with clothes had been tossed. At the far end of the studio sat an expensive futon above which hung another poster, this one for Banana Republic—a model standing sullenly on a beach whom I placed as a much younger Stanton Vaughn. The only other furniture was a steel armoire, designed by Ethan, which held a plasma TV and a DVD player (on top of which was a bright red disc entitled Straight College Men IV). A thick layer of dust covered every surface except the table where Stanton now sat, snorting another line off the mirror. The studio was somewhere between exactly what I would have imagined Stanton’s apartment to be like and nothing I could have imagined at all.

  “I know, I know,” he muttered. “I should get a maid.”

  “I haven’t seen you since that lunch with all the Hoevels,” I said, staying calm with the help of the sake still coursing through me, highly aware of my own presence in the room.

  “Fuck—don’t remind me of that fucking nightmare.”

  Before he could start another tirade—and lose track of the real reason I was there—I changed the focus onto Stanton. “Is that your screenplay?” I gestured at the Final Draft window glowing in the darkness of the studio. Next to the laptop was a large ashtray overflowing with half-smoked Marlboros.

  “Yeah, I’m working on it.” He sniffed deeply as if to clear his nose, and then decided to use a Kleenex.

  “How’s it going?”

  “It’s all fucked up.” He was staring at me, as if he were deciding whether he wanted to tell me things about this person we both knew, or if he had changed his mind and wanted to kick me out.

  He made a motion for me to sit in a chair next to the sofa, but I declined.

  “Stanton, I just want to know what’s going on.”

  He shrugged. “You sure you don’t want any?”

  “It’s late.” I checked my watch—a hint for him to get moving.

  “Ethan’s having an affair.”

  This admission caused Stanton to do another line.

  Neither of us spoke for a long time. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head.

  He turned back to the desk for matches but there were none left.

  “You got a light?” he asked.

  I struck a match (I had grabbed a book by the door of Woo Lae Oak, because after the trauma of that dinner I was dying for a cigarette, but when Samona had kissed me on Houston and whispered into my ear, I suddenly didn’t want one anymore). Stanton took two deep drags and closed his eyes, exhaling. The smoke floated toward the ceiling.

  “He wasn’t even trying to hide it from me.”

  “But don’t you guys have an understanding?”

  “Yeah. You’re right. We did have an understanding.”

  Stanton was starting to breathe hard—his back was pushing up and down, straining against the tightness of the robe.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  Stanton spoke in a drug rush: “A few days ago. Ethan didn’t know I was coming over but when I was coming over never seemed to matter before until just a few weeks ago when he told me to start calling the loft before I came over to make sure he was there and I knew something was wrong. ‘Get into the habit of calling’ was the exact phrase.”

  “Stanton, I mean—”

  “And listen here, I don’t sneak up on people or follow people. I’m not like that. I go where I want to go. Ethan knew that about me. But that’s not the point. The point is: he shouldn’t be so shifty about his actions. We promised each other that. We promised that if either one of us ever had a problem, if either one of us wasn’t feeling good about the whole thing—whatever the hell we had—we’d be totally up-front about it. We’d talk. We’d work it out or not work it out, and we wouldn’t be shifty. That was our understanding.”

  “What happened, Stanton?”

  “I showed up. The doorman was there. I said, ‘Hey, Tommy,’ and hung around outside to smoke a cigarette before going upstairs. I heard Ethan coming out of the elevator and talking on his cell phone all hush-hush like, ‘I can’t wait to see you. I’ll see you in a minute.’ And he came outside and didn’t see me.”

  “You were hiding from him?”

  He took a deep breath. “What have I been telling you? What’s the point of all this? I’m. Not. Sneaky. I wasn’t hiding—Ethan simply failed to notice me there. And then he got in a cab and I got in another cab behind him and we took a little trip to Hell’s Kitchen.”

  He stopped to let it sink in. I blinked a few times.

  I was picturing the scene: Ethan getting out at The Riverview. Stanton somehow following him upstairs, watching from around the corner or something as Samona let Ethan inside. He probably even put his ear up to the door, tuning in to their moans between his own sobs. I almost felt bad for him despite the freakishness of what he’d done as well as his failure to acknowledge his actions as abnormal in any way.

  “I’m sorry, Stanton.” I sighed.

  “Hey, I’m not sorry. I’m pissed. There’s a difference.” He wiped something off his face and did another line. “I gave Ethan everything, and I know he gave me a lot, too, but when he goes to some midtown high-rise to get banged in the ass by that little rich boy…” He paused to sigh out another thick cloud of smoke. “I saw it. I could see through the window at the end of the hallway from outside and I saw it. So fucking sordid!”

  I was relieved. It wasn’t her. It was someone else—some lark Ethan had slept with and forgotten about an hour later.

  I could leave now and head back to Tenth Street. I felt liberated.

  “You know something? It took me months before Ethan would let me get behind him for sex. It was this whole power thing. It was a ‘control issue,’ he kept saying. Months. It took me months to finally get him to do it. And then he lets this little faggot do it the first time they hook up?”

  He took out the last cigarette from the box and motioned for the matches.

  I had trouble lighting it—I was drained from the night—and he snatched them away from me. By then I’d realized tiredly that this was just another one of Stanton Vaughn’s ploys—to get me alone, to get me high, and eventually naked. I was ready to leave.

  “Stanton, I’m sorry, but I don’t know the guy.”

  Stanton looked at me. “I think you do know him.”

  I racked my mind but couldn’t come up with anyone. I really didn’t have any friends, and of the acquaintances I did have, few, if any, were gay.

  “Well, did you know the guy?” I asked, hoping he didn’t.

  Stanton calmed down, centered himself, and looked at me hard.

  And then Stanton Vaughn said the following.

  I remember it so well that I am quoting it verbatim:

  “I’ve been doing a little research of my own. He works at an office in midtown. He’s a fucking banker, for God’s sake. And—get this—he’s married. To. A. Woman. How do I know this? Because she runs this print studio in SoHo and Ethan asked me to give her my business as a favor—can you believe it? Well, you can, because you already know. And I give this woman—this slut hack—work during the most important time of my career, and this is how I get repaid: her husband fucks my boyfriend. I mean, tell me, please, what kind of sick, twisted, fucking game is that?” He inhaled, then exhaled again, then did a line. “And yes, you do know him. His name is David Taylor. And you just had dinner with the fucker.”

  I flashed on Samona’s face drifting toward the window.

  I flashed on the black jacket disappearing, which was exactly the same black jacket that was now draped over the chair where Stanton was sitting.

  There was a small cracking sound in the apartment. A leg supporting the desk had shifted, and the laptop slid dangerously close to the edge. Papers scattered across the floor, carpeting th
e dark wood. Stanton put his cigarette out and made a save for the mirror, laying it gently on the table in front of the sofa.

  I wasn’t aware that I was whispering to myself until Stanton pointed it out.

  19

  BY THE TIME I left Stanton Vaughn’s apartment an hour later on that night near the end of July (after turning down seven more offers of cocaine and deflecting four more come-ons—though there had probably been others that I hadn’t picked up on), Stanton—with varying combinations of bitterness and disbelief mixed in with his rage—had told me basically all that he knew or had heard.

  Which was how the journalist in me constructed the events of the last month and a half. And though the journalist was striving to ask the right questions (the journalist wanted to account and to verify and to figure everything out), there was another part of me that kept interrupting these questions in order to wander.

  And I surrendered to the wanderer, because this was the part that dreamed of these people and their dark hearts—the place where people loved.

  During the Randolph Torrance cocktail party at the end of May celebrating the acquisition of Fifteen Monkeys, Samona Taylor introduces Ethan Hoevel to David as her “benefactor” before explaining how they had “come across each other” at an art gallery in SoHo a month earlier and how he has been sending her clients on an almost weekly basis. This is a business element neither of them considered while writing the proposal and, David realizes, the element that is altering his prediction of utter failure for Printing Divine. David finally places Ethan Hoevel, whose brooding, pensive gaze makes David feel drunker than he is. The first thing that strikes him: Ethan Hoevel’s face is more handsome than his own, which is starting to show the first signs of bloat from too much vodka and sitting at a desk all day. He asks Ethan about Peru and receives a tired response vaguely related to teaching. “That must have been pretty amazing,” David Taylor says. Ethan’s nod and subsequent silence make David feel ashamed to be offering such a meaningless compliment to someone he doesn’t know. He sees himself through Ethan Hoevel’s eyes and sobers up. Samona sighs again.

  Ethan doesn’t stay long at the Randolph Torrance cocktail party but makes enough of an impression on David to linger in his mind. He finds the guy intriguing if for no other reason than he’s so different from the men David works with every day who are shaking it out to old Van Morrison songs while rubbing coke into their receding gums. David Taylor has never really known a gay man before (Randolph Torrance doesn’t count) and he starts to feel narrow-minded. He feels he lacks some basic awareness that there are other worlds, and other lives, that are much more complicated than his own. The following day at the office, David Taylor Googles Ethan Hoevel and—impressed by the hundreds of thousands of hits, mostly magazine archives—visits ethanhoeveldesigns.com. Five minutes turn into an hour. Browsing through Ethan Hoevel’s portfolio and gazing at all the beautiful things he’s designed make David forget about Samona, who is so over her head in the business he bought for her (until he remembers forty minutes in that it’s Ethan Hoevel who’s turning Printing Divine into a success, and so really it’s Ethan who’s creating this hell for him).

  Meanwhile, David has been tanking at work. Every move he makes is wrong. The war has apparently made Intertrade96 obsolete. That $150,000 he lost six years ago by checking the wrong box was just a knock-knock joke compared to the $25 million that has come through his screen and vanished into thin air this quarter alone. And since he isn’t making up for those losses by bringing in new clients, he is constantly waiting for Leonard to ask, “Could you come to my office for a moment, David?” And he never wants to go back to The Riverview, where Samona—if she isn’t out partying (which she has been doing a lot lately)—will be talking to her father on the phone while playing her New Age music and proudly showing him the dye stains on her fingertips. And as he reaches into the freezer for that bottle of Grey Goose he’ll notice the posting on the door of her long list of clients (the important ones triple underlined and highlighted in yellow). So instead, late at night, David Taylor moves away from his desk in his office at The Leonard Company and lies down on the black leather couch he bought at Jennifer Convertibles with Samona—their first joint purchase when they moved into The Riverview almost five years ago—for a few hours of half sleep until dawn.

  One night Samona calls to say she’s leaving work early since she’ll be flying to Milan the next day. David softens enough to stop at Bangkok Four—a Thai place he knows she likes—and brings dinner home. As David tries to concentrate on the questions being asked as answers on Jeopardy! Samona goes on and on about a world he cares so little about even though it is her world, and this realization saddens him and he cuts the talking with a kiss. They move into the bedroom and undress and try to make love for the first time in over a month, but David can’t get an erection. She works on him for twenty minutes (in a very perfunctory manner) and nothing happens. She says it’s okay, that he’s been stressed out, that maybe this is a sign to cool it for a while, but in the darkness of their bedroom he can hear her sighing again. He remains silent with his arm draped over his eyes.

  “Maybe you should turn around?” He starts rotating onto his knees.

  She sighs for a second time. “It makes my back hurt. Let’s just go to sleep.”

  “You’re leaving in the morning.”

  He’s on his knees now, working on himself. She’s lying on her back pulling the sheets up over her chest while David tugs them away. Then he stops stroking his penis (still flaccid) and stares down at Samona’s exposed body.

  “When did you stop waxing?” he asks.

  “What are you talking about?” She pulls the sheet back over herself. “Jesus, David. Please.”

  What hurts David more than his own embarrassment (and why should any man be embarrassed about this in front of his own wife—isn’t that what a marriage is all about?) is that the glaring fact that they will not be fucking tonight or any night for at least a week does not seem to bother her.

  While Samona is in Milan there’s a meeting at The Leonard Company regarding the conference rooms. Two of them will remain the same: elegant, polished mahogany, cozy, antique-laden. But there is a new movement to contemporize the other two, as junior data analysts are showing that The Leonard Company has been losing a large portion of the “young-investor demographic” and it’s time to meet the “trends of the age.”

  David flashes on the interiors from Ethan Hoevel’s Web site and blurts Ethan’s name, and the bored associates at the meeting perk up—James Leonard’s wife, in fact, had recently almost persuaded her husband to buy an Ethan Hoevel living-room set for their Hamptons home.

  David calls Ethan’s studio and listens to Ethan’s outgoing message that he’s out of town for a week. He clears his throat.

  “Hey there, this is David Taylor…from Yale?…We hung out a little at Randolph Torrance’s cocktail party a month or so ago…um, well, listen, Ethan, I’m up here at the office—The Leonard Company, our little hedge fund—did I tell you that before?—and we’re actually remodeling our conference rooms, looking to change things around here, you know? So…ah…I was hoping you’d consider maybe coming up for a look-see? It would be interesting to hear what you think, okay? Okay…um, ciao.”

  A few minutes later, while waiting for a lunch delivery from Prêt à Manger to arrive, David asks himself, cringing: Did you actually say “looksee”? Did you actually end that message with “ciao”? And then he wonders why he never mentioned Samona in the message.

  During the five lonely nights that follow, David Taylor sits at his desk or lies on his black leather couch or in the empty bedroom high above the city in The Riverview, wondering about all the wrong decisions he’s made during his life. On one of those nights, around 4 A.M., he goes back to ethanhoeveldesigns.com and orders a love seat—a sister model to the most popular chair, silver and paper-thin and curving. He has no idea where it will fit—unless he gets rid of the couch—but it is someth
ing new, and that’s what he likes most about it. After clicking the purchase button for the love seat, David checks Samona’s flights on the Alitalia Web site. The fact that the flight numbers and departure/arrival times she’d given him don’t match up seems alarming at first, but after thinking about it, he decides that Samona has always been flaky like that. This is the kind of mistake she’s prone to make.

  A very jealous Ethan Hoevel takes a cab back to Warren Street from Randolph Torrance’s party. The image of David Taylor placing his hand on Samona’s lower back forced him to leave.

  (But isn’t that why he went to the party in the first place? To see how this would make him feel?)

  At the light on Thirty-fourth and Park Ethan, filled with longing, almost tells the cabdriver to turn around but Stanton is waiting for him while working on his screenplay. Later that night, while fucking Stanton, Ethan sees only the mole below Stanton’s waist and the coarse hairs on his shoulders that Stanton waxes every month but that always grow back in a few days. He’s thinking about the expression on Stanton’s face that Ethan never looks at anyway because he only likes taking Stanton from behind and when did having sex with Stanton start making Ethan feel so angry? Stanton is always straining to change the position so that they can face each other or so that Stanton can fuck Ethan. It has become such a battle.

  Meanwhile, sex with Samona is a calm and serene experience and she surrenders totally when she’s with him. Ethan never takes his eyes off her face when they’re having sex. She rides him and his hands glance over her full breasts, his fingers flicking the black, erect nipples, and even when he goes down on her (she stopped waxing the black mat of pubic hair after he told her he liked plunging into it) he props up her torso so his eyes can always be pinned to her face and he watches as she bites her lower lip and the intense concentration that is creasing her expression, and then she’s coming and her mouth is open and then she’ll smile, and it isn’t the elusive smile she gave the camera when she was a model—the one that hides any feelings she may or may not have—but a smile that says: yes, I want to come again.