by Jeff Hobbs
“What I’m doing is giving a girl who hasn’t felt comfortable or beautiful in years a place where she feels comfortable and beautiful. I’m giving Aidan—who, as I’m sure you’ve seen, is borderline schizo—a bed to crash in while he calms down and moves on. And David…” he trailed off and took out a cigarette, then looked at me, those green eyes piercing the dim yellow light. “I’m just giving people what they want.”
“And what do you want?”
Ethan lit the cigarette and scanned the bar disinterestedly. A waitress noticed the cigarette and started to say something, but Ethan smiled at her, and she let it go. And then he said the following as if it made sense, as if it was the simplest thing in the world: “I want to know that people can change.”
21
THAT NIGHT IN Arthur’s Tavern, Ethan Hoevel told me another story.
When he reaches the twenty-first floor of 800 Seventh Avenue on July 8—the day after the lunch at Corotta—Ethan Hoevel compliments the receptionist’s lime-green Versace blouse. It’s six o’clock and the office is beginning to drain away on that Friday night. Ethan Hoevel is walking against its tide, down a narrow aisle, moving deeper into the building toward David Taylor’s office, his eyes falling on the young men in cheap to moderately expensive suits as they drift by.
He reaches David Taylor’s office just as the automatic light inside switches off. He listens to David sigh in the darkness and then watches the shadow of him wave an arm, and when the light clicks on, Ethan materializes in the doorway. David smiles sheepishly as Ethan quietly absorbs the office with his eyes, which scan the black leather couch, the Printing Divine poster, David Taylor, the view behind David’s desk—the river, the southwest corner of Central Park, even The Riverview—the antique clock, and then stop and lock onto something.
They’re dancing with their foreheads pressed together, her long dark fingers clasping his pale hand just below their faces. Ethan keeps staring at the photograph of Samona and David at their wedding in Darien and he’s thinking, Why would he hang it next to the clock? The very first moment of their marriage, immortalized, is hanging next to an antique clock whose ceaseless ticking must be nothing less than a steady reminder of how long David Taylor’s days are.
Ethan quickly looks away from the photograph as David starts picking up a stack of papers and sliding them into a file, and then he places the file into a drawer and stands.
This is my office. This is where I work. This is me. Thanks for coming. He’s just mumbling jittery and meaningless phrases until he finally meets Ethan’s eyes and seems to calm down. He takes a breath and says, “How was your class?”
“What?” Ethan surfaces from his reverie.
“The class you just got out of. How was it?”
“Oh.” Ethan shrugs. “You know. The usual.”
“I’d like to hear about it sometime. I always wanted to teach.”
Their eyes meet again. “That wouldn’t be a problem.” Ethan pauses and looks away. “Even if you want to sit in on a class—it’s no problem.”
“I just think it’s really impressive.”
Ethan Hoevel realizes strangely that David’s fawning over him, and he waits for David to glance away before he looks back and quickly studies his face: cleanly shaven, pale, skin unblemished, hair gently tussled, mouth and chin almost graceful. It’s all very harried and worn but at the same time still—in a way very specific to David Taylor—kind of gorgeous.
A mild distraction comes in the form of a beeping from his computer, where a graph and trading chart begin flashing that fifteen thousand shares of an energy company in Tulsa called Duke (actually, one of Randolph Torrance’s subsidiary companies) have hit their peak and the value is dropping. David explains how his computer program, Intertrade96, has been set to warn him whenever this happens, and how it’s time to sell.
Ethan says, “Cool,” but he seems uninterested, so David clicks his mouse quickly on the bottom left side of the screen before leading Ethan into Conference Room Three, where a canvas mat covers the floor scattered with sawdust and white flecks of paint and other remnants of removal. David gestures with his arm. Ethan walks into the middle of the room. He takes in the molded seams between the walls and ceiling. He stands in three different places and studies the room as if he’s channeling a certain vision. His eyes keep circling the room for a few minutes, and when they fall on David they stop circling.
Outside the half-open door, the last of the construction crew along with a few junior analysts are leaving, glancing curiously at the two men standing motionless, watching each other, not saying anything. Friday night: men returning home for a weekend, a few of them catching the jitney to the Hamptons.
Ethan says, “Well, yeah. I guess.”
David, anxious, asks, “What?”
“I’ll do it.”
Ethan is aware that he’s staring at David.
Ethan is also aware that because of this, David’s staring back.
“What do you see?” he asks Ethan.
He’s thinking green walls—jade—and chrome swivel chairs and a fiberglass table with monitors built into it and four large plasma screens on each wall and he’s thinking a silver chandelier but something low-key, complex, modern, and not garish and disco. David is barely listening.
“Well,” he starts. “I’m not the one making the final decisions but I like it.” And then, genuinely intrigued, he asks Ethan, “How do you do that? See all that in an empty white room? That’s what I don’t get.”
Ethan shrugs. “It’s just what I do.” He pauses, staring at David again. “I mean, how do you see a profitable trade in a bunch of numbers flowing across a screen?”
“It’s…” David doesn’t know how to begin explaining. “I guess it’s just what I do.” David is still meeting Ethan’s eyes, and Ethan knows he’s thinking, Is this how it happens between men? Is it this simple? “What made you decide to take on the job?” Ethan looks away, and then moves closer to David. “I mean, if it’s not something you normally do?”
Ethan shrugs again. “It’s a cool opportunity to do something different.”
This remark seems to move David Taylor considerably: that someone would need to come to The Leonard Company to find something different. Ethan senses this sadness and moves closer, but David is looking at the floor. Ethan startles him again. He asks David, “Do people have sex in these rooms? I mean, I’ve never worked in an office but you see the movies, you hear the rumors, all those Playboy cartoons…I mean, is that something that goes on?”
David deflects the tension in the room by laughing. “What—you want to take this into account?”
But Ethan’s serious.
David clears his throat.
“Sure. It happens. There’s a lock on the door. It’s private.” He pauses. “Christmas parties. Kind of innocent. Like college kids having sex in the library. Whatever.”
“Did you ever do that?” Ethan asks.
“In the library or here?”
“Library.”
“Um, me and Samona, yeah, one time.”
David shifts and puts his hands in his pockets to adjust his pants casually, which is when Ethan becomes aware that David’s penis is starting to stiffen.
David asks, “Did you?”
“Remember Amanda Callahan? Played lacrosse?”
David is suddenly a frat boy again and he can’t hide his giddiness. “Wait a minute. You had sex with Amanda Callahan? She was gorgeous.” And then David laughs to himself before admitting, “I hooked up with her once.”
Ethan is nearing David again. “Where did you guys do it?”
“In my room at SAE.”
Right now, in this moment, the two of them do not seem that different to each other.
“How did you know you were gay?” he asks Ethan.
“I didn’t know I was gay until I just felt that I was. I know that’s not an answer. But it’s hard to explain.”
“No, I know, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have
asked.” David looks away nervously.
“Don’t be. The thing I hated the most was how hard it was to admit it to others.” Ethan stops. “I don’t feel uncomfortable talking about it.”
“So when could you admit it? I mean, when could you admit that you were gay?”
“To myself? Or to everyone else?”
“Both.”
Ethan counters with, “When could you admit that you were straight?” He asks this very gently. He isn’t accusing David of anything.
“What do you mean?”
“When could you admit to yourself that you liked girls? When could you admit that you were straight to everyone else?”
“That’s…something I guess I never had to do.”
From Ethan Hoevel’s vantage point David Taylor is a little boy listening to a man in the center of an empty conference room, trying to make sense of him. David Taylor is waiting to be told what to do.
Ethan takes another step toward him, but David abruptly turns away and walks to the half-open door and stands there breathing heavily.
Ethan sighs. He knows he pushed too hard. He’s overstepped a boundary. He’s being a fool. Just because he’s succeeded in seducing straight guys in the past
(after a lot of alcohol and drugs and promises of introductions and besides they had all been boys and not married men for God’s sake)
what makes Ethan Hoevel think he’s capable of seducing David Taylor?
It’s never going to happen. The meeting is over. He looks at David standing in the door frame.
David stays there for a long time. The aisles are empty. Computers are humming. The offices that line the central wall are dark now, and locked. In David’s office—the only one still lit—the light clicks off automatically.
David Taylor closes the door to Conference Room Three, locking it in the same movement. He turns back into the room. The fluorescent lights flicker above them.
Ethan’s eyes are still fixed on David.
And because David is just standing there, lingering in the doorway, Ethan is able ask, “Does this feel complicated to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to do it?” Ethan asks. “Are you curious?”
“I don’t know,” and then, barely audible, “Maybe.”
And then as something tall and pale and beautiful moves toward David, he answers, “Yeah, I am.”
22
The Story of David and Samona
Part 4: The Gift
A LONG TIME ago, even before she left for college, Samona Ashley assured herself that she could sustain anything, live anywhere, be with anyone, as long as she wasn’t bored.
Standing on the tiny balcony in The Riverview Tower one cool October evening, gazing out over midtown and beyond it, Samona Taylor was drinking a gimlet and thinking about how bored she was.
At the same time, David Taylor was buying shares of a company in Lebanon. He had been home earlier to shower and Samona had told him blatantly that—since her period was coming in a day or two—maybe they should have sex. But David had been too tired and he was in a hurry anyway since the international conference call had been bumped up thirty minutes.
All of her friends were drifting away. No one was available that night in October. Sara was at home with a new child and an unfaithful husband. Olivia was at Palm on a blind date with a corporate attorney who, she recognized midway through appetizers, had no interest in her whatsoever (and whom she would marry six months later). Nikki was in rehab.
Regret. It was everywhere. Samona finished the gimlet.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to look at apartments this weekend?” Samona asked David that night when he came back from the office at 11:15.
He blinked at her. “You mean Tribeca?” he finally asked.
(Hadn’t this been shut and closed a million years ago?)
“Maybe.”
“My long day has made me invulnerable to impressionability.”
David Taylor knew how badly Samona wanted to move downtown but he didn’t really care. He was tired. He hadn’t worked out in months. His life was so regimented that he was afraid any change was only going to make things more complicated and exhausting. There were too many obligations already. (This is also what David Taylor began to consider his marriage.)
Later that night he softened to the point where they attempted to have sex—thinking maybe it would cheer them both up—but the only thing that seemed to get David hard was if Samona performed fellatio.
Samona Taylor decided to redecorate the apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of The Riverview Tower. It was the third time she’d undertaken this task since they’d moved in four years ago, and she began by getting rid of all the crap they had bought the last time at Pottery Barn and replacing it with modern Dutch (the teakettle, the wine rack, highball glasses) from a chic store in Nolita. She bought a Persian rug on a whim from a merchant on Lafayette. Samona began cruising auctions and soon David Taylor would come home at night to find that she had bought three watercolors that afternoon from an obscure French painter. He endured this for a while because at least she wasn’t complaining anymore.
When he sensed that she was getting antsy again a few weeks later, he decided to cut her off at the pass before Tribeca came up again. “Why don’t we have a dinner party?” He’d surprised her on purpose, and she could only look at him and blink. “I know, I know. But the place looks so amazing after all the work you’ve done, we might as well show it off, no?”
She thought about it, and—amazingly—she liked the idea.
The outcome of this suggestion consisted of planning exactly three dinner parties.
Complications: David Taylor could not stand any of Samona Taylor’s friends (the ones who were drifting away) but they didn’t like David, either (Olivia had noticed that David had developed a “smug chuckle”), but since David had no friends at the office the first party consisted of Olivia, Sara, and Nikki.
Since Samona Taylor didn’t cook (rebellion against her mother), she ordered in prepared foods from Citarella. This caused the setting to seem vaguely impersonal while showing up how desperate Samona Taylor was becoming.
David coasted through the dinner stylishly, thinking at one point, Who would have thought ten years ago that I would be the host of a dinner party with girls I didn’t like in an apartment I rented in Manhattan after a long day at the bank?
Ultimately, the forced giggling and boring reminiscing about “college shenanigans” moved him to excuse himself to the bedroom, where he organized his desk before figuring out he was drunk. Then he went to sleep.
The second dinner party was canceled at the last minute after a particularly acrimonious fight between Samona and David.
The third party consisted of only Samona and Martha, an old friend from the year Samona had been a model—the year Samona thought she was going to make it.
That dinner with Martha—and David’s absence from it, for which he cited work reasons—was the genesis of Printing Divine.
Being with Martha offered up intense associations with that year of modeling that Samona thought she had forgotten. But it all came back to her: Lot 61, The Apartment, Lotus, cameras flashing at her, the makeup sessions, the free clothes, the elation at being selected for a show—even a small one. Samona Taylor convinced herself that though this period might not have been great or even very productive, where she existed now was definitely not an improvement. She convinced herself that the year after college was the last time that she had felt alive.
After getting over this initial nostalgia, Samona and Martha talked.
According to Martha, there was a burgeoning market for fashion printing, and Martha felt old and was tired of being a stylist, and of course the stars were in line—Samona was a Virgo (adaptable) and Martha was a Taurus (persistent)—so: Why not?
Samona Taylor listened, wide-eyed, nodding her head excessively, and kept refilling her red wine. Then she envisioned a future without Martha and the fashion
print business. She shuddered.
David Taylor would ask Samona to stop using the pill.
And then David would tell her one Sunday morning about this great house in Summit or Chatham or fucking Englewood, and that they might as well just do it since the mortgage rates were so low.
Because somewhere along the line—either while she had been walking a runway or bidding on a $3,000 Impressionist imitation at Sotheby’s or drinking a glass of wine by herself in front of a 7th Heaven rerun—Samona Taylor had decided that she did not want children and she did not want a house in Darien or Greenwich or Englewood.
Because Samona knew that silence—the quiet that David Taylor craved—was the deadening end of everything. The “quaint” streets named Cherry Hill and Orchard Avenue and Devonshire Way, the ostentatious mailboxes, the pudgy kids missing layups in the hoop that hung above the three-car garage, the endless hours of children wasting their lives in a basement playing Doom—Samona Taylor knew that the semblance of normalcy that was so strenuously maintained only fed the particular darkness that hung unseen over each day.
Samona knew that David only wanted this move to happen because he was still giddy about being “a throwback” and getting married at a young age and his wife not having to work because he could support her. He bragged about these things constantly at bars and parties before he got too drunk to articulate them. Sometimes he’d be subtle about it, but usually not. He formed his own expressions like, “What can I say? I knew what I wanted to do. I did it!” and “It was crazy that after the nineties happened, people thought you didn’t have to settle down and get married till your late thirties. Well, I said fuck that!” and “I just figured that if someone needs a lot of time to find himself, then there can’t be too much to find” and “I don’t want Samona to work. It wouldn’t be good for her.”
Very soon it stopped bothering her that he never used the word we because she’d be too busy sighing to herself to listen very closely. What made his boasting all the more painful for Samona was her knowledge that between the lines, all it meant was that her husband didn’t have a life: he ate; he slept; he worked; sometimes he had sex with his wife but mostly he was too tired; sometimes there was a dinner at a pretty good restaurant but he would always get too drunk before the food arrived; maybe he would catch part of a movie on HBO that amused him but he could only watch half of it before drifting off into a heavy, dreamless sleep. David Taylor’s life had been stripped to its basics in order for him to become a success, and the only way he knew how to separate himself from everyone else—in David Taylor’s mind—was that he’d been “man” enough to get married.