by Jeff Hobbs
“What are you going to do until your lease ends?” I asked.
“You’re looking at it. I don’t know. Try and enjoy this fucking city for once? And then haul ass outta here. I guess I’ll try and fuck the hell out of every girl I can. Isn’t that what I should have been doing all along?”
There was a silence, and he was about to add something else but I spoke first. “Do you have my check?”
He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his left hand. “Yeah. I was actually looking for that. It ought to be around here somewhere.” He shrugged evasively and then was lost in thought. He didn’t get up from the couch. “Um, can I mail it to you?” he asked meekly.
My voice hardened. “It would be great if I could get it, like, today. Really great, actually.”
“I know it would. But what does that matter if I can’t find it?” He finally lifted himself to his feet. “Look, buddy, I’m either gonna have to mail it to you or you’re gonna have to find it yourself. Because I’m beat and frankly, I’m in a generally pissed-the-
fuck-off mood.”
He picked up six darts from his bookshelf and hurled them at the dartboard, sidearmed, from six feet away, repeating “fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” with each hard, dull thud of metal on foam, his aim deteriorating rapidly. As I backed against the wall, he flung the last dart with all his strength. It plunged into the plaster wall above the board.
He gave me a sidelong glance, gesturing toward the darts. “A little help, please?”
I moved toward the door discreetly. “I really have to go.”
I entered the kitchen and heard, “Hey, do you want to see something even better than your check?” James left the darts and came forward menacingly. I was now eyeing the door, which was almost within reach. “Just something really quick. I think you’d appreciate it.”
“I’m actually in kind of a hurry. Maybe next time?”
“Just one second. Stay here.”
James Gutterson opened a drawer on a side table under the Che Guevara poster and pulled out an envelope.
“Look inside. C’mon, c’mon.” He thrust it into my hand, giddy. “It’s why Dave Taylor was so busy in the office while I was getting fired.”
As I opened the envelope, and as I unfolded the grainy black-and-white photograph that was inside—a video-camera still frame from an odd corner angle, dated in large Helvetica font on the lower right-hand corner to July 8, just past 7 P.M.—and as I stared at the image of two men I recognized engaged in a sex act on the table in a room they both thought had been locked, a room they assumed was theirs only, James went on, “You can keep that if you want—I made extras.”
I could see David Taylor’s face clearly. He was leaning against a table, his neck bent to the side, his mouth open, his head facing upward.
Ethan Hoevel’s shadow below him was not as clear, but if you knew Ethan like I did, his profile was undeniable.
“How did you…get this, James?” I stuttered.
He shrugged. “Pretty crazy what kinds of things happen in the office after hours, eh? It was back around cutback time, and I was taking a shit and then I went looking for Taylor to make sure I was okay. Heard some weird noises in one of the new conference rooms, peeked in, and…what the fuck?” He stared at me with bulging eyes and exaggerated awe. “I mean, have you ever…seen what those guys do, like, up close?” I shook my head, studying David Taylor’s face in the photo, marveling at the rawness of his expression. “Crazy, crazy. I could barely watch for more than a minute. And hey, you want to know the first thing I did when that fucker Taylor let me get sacked?”
I had an ominous feeling that I already did.
“Paid the security guys fifty bucks each for copies—totally worth it, of course—and sent one to Taylor’s bitch wife. A little going-away present—just to fuck with him.” He then added, “Suckaah!”
He waited a moment to let it all sink in, and he seemed disappointed that I wasn’t more shocked, that the image he’d provided didn’t blow my mind and instead I could just stare at it distantly. “Buddy, what’s your problem?” he asked. “Doesn’t anything ever get to you?”
I looked up. “Sometimes.”
That same afternoon I walked in silence through the weekend crowds of SoHo and turned onto Greene Street.
I pushed open the door to Printing Divine and the bell rang. Martha looked up from the front desk. It took her a moment to place me.
“She’s in her office” was all she said before turning back to her work.
Through the glass partition behind the counter, Samona was swiveling in her chair as she talked on a cell phone. Even from my vantage point through the glass, I could tell from the expression on her face that she hadn’t received the “present” from James. I almost turned to leave before Samona saw me and waved me in.
I sighed—not quite ready for this—and leaned forward on the front desk, peering playfully at the notebook Martha was studying. She moved the notebook away from me. “Samona is in her office,” she said again with more emphasis, and went back to the notebook as if it was something very urgent and important. It struck me how much Martha must have resented that the success of Printing Divine could be entirely attributed not to her flawless and faithful interpretations of the cosmos, but rather to Samona’s husband’s seed capital and, more recently, to Samona’s affair with Ethan Hoevel, and that the latter was a secret she had to keep in order for the business to prosper.
This moved me back to Samona, who waved me in again, and I slid into her office, where the first thing I noticed as she clicked off the cell was the Diet Coke she sipped and how she just stared at me without saying anything. The second thing I noticed was the credit-card-sized bowl designed by Ethan Hoevel—like the one from the gallery show where I had reconnected with him so many years ago. It lay next to a Baggie half-filled with marijuana and the office reeked of it. The third thing I noticed was one of Stanton’s Boi-Wear outfits—a brown shirt with a big collar and the logo printed on the back, black bell-bottoms with rips just below the seat—laid out on the other side of the table. The fourth thing I noticed was the bag of ice wrapped around Samona’s ankle.
And as I scanned the floor in an imaginary line extending from her bare toes, the last thing I noticed was the wedding photo on the bottom bookshelf. It was the same photo that hung on a wall at The Leonard Company in a corner office on the twenty-first floor. The shelves held other pictures: Olivia wasted at the Yale-Harvard football game; Mr. and Mrs. Ashley posing, stiff and distant, a sprawling lake behind them; Samona and Martha standing in front of the shop at the party celebrating Printing Divine’s opening. But the wedding picture—luminous with the promise of a future and romance—was what I was staring at.
What are you going to do? What are you hoping for? Why are you hoping at all?
I shook myself out of it as Samona broke the silence. “I was just leaving a message for…Ethan.”
“Sorry about stopping in during working hours,” I murmured.
“It’s a Saturday.” She shrugged. Her bare shoulders flexed rigidly as she packed the small concavity with weed. She brought a lighter up to it and took a big hit. She closed her eyes and exhaled as she handed the pipe to me. She looked aimless and mellow and lost.
“I don’t think so, Samona.”
She shrugged again and leaned over to open a small refrigerator and pull out an open bottle of white wine. “Have a drink, then.”
“No, thanks.”
She set the wine on top of the refrigerator next to a stack of mail. Near the top of the stack was a small white envelope, its corners wrinkled and torn, the address—just visible—scrawled in writing I remembered from my visits to James’s office.
(There, in that envelope, was the reason I’d come.)
(I would bear witness as Samona opened it.)
(I would look on as the photograph wrenched her from the belief—ingrained in her by all the years of being mind-fucked by guys like her father and any half-decent-look
ing stud in high school and college, and then David, and then Ethan—that she was the singular force who had changed people this summer.)
(I would watch her face turn ashen as it hit her that she hadn’t been beautiful or strong or attentive enough to prevent what was now happening.)
(And then—finally—I would be waiting there across the table from Samona, in the position where I could show her how the steady adoration of a guy who didn’t matter could make all her hurt vanish, how maybe it wasn’t too late to alter certain decisions and eliminate certain regrets, how we could escape them together.)
“Are you in pain?” I asked, motioning toward her iced ankle.
“No. that’s nothing. Heels.” She held the pipe out. “Take it. Come on.”
I sucked through the pin-sized hole that was in the center of the card, my lips tasting the lipstick traces she had left.
I was already high when I handed the pipe back to her, watching her through swaying eyes.
She blinked at me a few times, then put the pipe down and asked harshly, “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Like…what?” I stammered.
“Like you’re judging me.” She studied my face, then softened again. “Though I guess you can’t help it, being a writer.”
“I’m not judging you, and I’m not really a writer…” I drifted off—she was taking another hit.
“Whatever. As long as you’re aware that everything you think about me is wrong.” I was trying to identify the conversation we were having. “As long as you’re aware there are things you don’t know.”
“Samona, I didn’t come here to—”
“You didn’t?” she asked spitefully. “You didn’t come to tell me I’m a bad person? That I’m just another one of those fucked-up ex–fashion models you like to write about?”
I glanced at the envelope on the shelf. “Actually, no.”
“Then why did you come? What are you doing here?”
“I just…wanted to see you and—”
“Look.” She sighed. “I’m being paranoid. But I can explain it to you. I can tell you a story that will prove you’re all wrong about me.”
Her shifting tone was dizzying.
“What kind of story?”
“I’d call it a romance.”
“Oh? Does the romance end in marriage?”
“No. This one starts when the marriage is already over.” She looked away and smiled. “More than half of all marriages end in divorce, you know.”
“Does it really matter what I think?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she replied thoughtfully. “Because I know I’m not the person I used to be—people change, you know—but that doesn’t make me this evil human being. So yeah, it does matter—it matters to me.”
I tried to let the words stand alone without projecting the meaning I longed for.
She didn’t include many details in what she told me next, nor did she speak for very long. It was really just an outline, as if she was trying to straighten out certain hazy developments in her own head—trying to tell herself that she wasn’t confused anymore. Meanwhile, I followed along dutifully, painting in the corners of the canvas she was laying out.
On the night of August 23, a week after she moves into the Warren Street loft, Samona undresses and lies in Ethan’s bed and waits for him to fuck her, and when he does, she relishes his low murmurs informing her not how beautiful she is (which was always David Taylor’s fallback) but how sexy she is. He tells her where to put her tongue and how to rotate her hips in small circles to increase the intensity of her orgasm—things most people feel awkward saying, but Ethan does not. When he asks her to turn around so he can take her from behind, she’s excited. And when he tongues her and then enters, she finds it painful and thrilling. She doesn’t think to ask questions.
This goes on for about fifteen minutes before Ethan loses his erection and pulls out softly. He blames it on the creaking in the lower left-hand corner of the bed.
Ethan’s phone—in his jeans on the floor—rings. He reaches down, looks at the ID, and turns the ringer off.
Samona Taylor is still awake, her eyes locked open as Ethan lies zonked out beside her, when Aidan comes back to the loft on Warren Street at 3 A.M. after a night of binge drinking. Her irritation—at Aidan for being the man he is, and at Ethan for not being able to finish earlier—makes her brave, and she checks the incoming calls list on Ethan’s cell phone and sees David Taylor at the top.
That stupid conference room, is all she thinks.
The next morning—the third Monday in August—while Ethan Hoevel is trying to finish a few sketches on a makeshift desk he set up outside the pod, Samona Taylor pours herself coffee and is delighted to find soy milk in the fridge. She sits in a chair he designed a long time ago, a translucent bowl, and asks Ethan nonsensical questions—about the weather, the terrorists, the industry—which he stifles with vague rhetorical responses like: “What makes you think I know anything?” “What makes you think I haven’t been extraordinarily lucky in what I do?” “Are you sure?” “There’s a little bit of circumstance in everything” and “Isn’t that what you just said?”
She finally pulls away when they hear Aidan Hoevel groaning just before noon.
She walks through Tribeca to Printing Divine and is calm again, deciding that she should start keeping a lower profile at social events and acclimate herself to the sweeping change in her life. She will ignore the nightly invitations and spend as much time as she can in the loft on Warren Street. She buys a Diet Coke from a vendor on Greene Street and sings to herself—Dave Matthews, “Crash”—until she arrives at Printing Divine and finds a saggy-eyed Martha upstairs. Martha has been in the shop all weekend because she works more efficiently alone listening to her favorite Patsy Cline CDs instead of the New Age music Samona insists on during business days (and she probably doesn’t want to hear about Samona’s disastrous love life anymore).
Martha has gotten everything done except the last Stanton Vaughn cycle, which still needs retouching because the purple dye ran out. Samona says she’ll take care of that while Martha takes the rest of the day off. Martha accepts the offer, and Samona turns out the best-looking set of fabric she ever produced for Stanton Vaughn. Looking over them at the end of the day, extremely self-satisfied, she attributes the perfect bleed and the overall fine look of them to the loft on Warren Street and the new place she’s found in life.
Samona closes the shop at ten o’clock that night and after walking through Tribeca she approaches the loft on Warren Street. She notices a shadow across the street and the yellow ember of a cigarette tip. When she realizes the shadow is watching her she starts walking faster.
The click of her heels on the concrete suddenly sounds like a roar.
When she looks over her shoulder and watches as the shadow throws the cigarette away and moves quickly toward her, Samona is thinking three things:
She wrote her senior thesis at Yale on The Scream.
Why in the hell is she wearing heels?
David.
Then one of the heels turns sideways, and she falls. Pain shoots up her tendons but she isn’t injured. Samona tries to remember the safety class from college orientation. Is she supposed to scream in this situation? Or does screaming make it worse? She can’t remember. Suddenly Stanton Vaughn is beside her, helping Samona up, but seeing Stanton’s familiar face doesn’t make Samona feel any safer because Stanton Vaughn has always given her the creeps.
Samona Taylor says, “Oh, it’s you.”
Stanton replies, “And I scared you, didn’t I?”
“No. You didn’t.”
Stanton says, “I’m sorry” at the same time she’s saying, “I just get easily freaked.”
From where she’s standing Samona sees Jamie, the new doorman, leaning out of the lobby for a cigarette and she feels a little safer. Her one goal in life is to get upstairs as quickly as possible without bringing up Ethan Hoevel or the fashion prints or anything
that might extend this encounter. Stanton doesn’t seem to be listening to her anyway—he’s staring up at Ethan’s roof deck.
Finally, he brings his gaze back down. “So, how do you like living here?”
“I’m not living here.”
“Just stopping by after a long day at the office, then?” he says, making a suggestion she doesn’t want to interpret.
“It’s not really your concern, Stanton.” She starts moving past him.
“Right. Of course it isn’t.” And then he says the oddest thing: “Don’t tell him I was down here.”
She hurries upstairs, passing Aidan as he watches the Hilary Swank movie about the woman who pretends to be a man somewhere in Texas, and she hears Aidan saying, “Hey, gorgeous, you’ve got to watch this. It’s the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen.”
The first thing Samona Taylor does when she finds Ethan Hoevel on the roof is tell him about Stanton Vaughn.
Having located Ethan and told him how afraid she is, Samona is expecting him to soothe her, to comfort her, to acknowledge the situation, to say the right thing.
Ethan puts his glass of wine on a piece of slate and continues to stare out over the river, where two army helicopters are circling the sky, reminding him of another threat.
Ethan’s silence frightens Samona in a new way as he stands up and walks by her.
She limps behind him down the stairs and into the living room, where Ethan waits for the elevator.
“I’ll go talk to Stanton,” he explains.
And they’re all now watching the TV: Hilary Swank is shot and left dead on the floor while Chloë Sevigny weeps uncontrollably. Aidan Hoevel is rolling with laughter.
Samona lets Ethan get into the elevator. She doesn’t stop him.
And when Ethan does not come back to the loft on Warren Street that night, Samona Taylor will not be able to prevent herself from looking back on that moment and knowing she made a mistake in letting him go. And yet the uncertainty that is Ethan Hoevel does not bother her in the way she expects it to.
Certainty is something Samona has known her entire adult life—in the form of David’s plans—and she’s become tired of it.