The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  With Ethan she’s basking in the mystery of it all.

  She hasn’t experienced this mystery since she was twenty-two and walking down a runway with cameras flashing around her.

  She hasn’t experienced this mystery since that time in her life when she was too young and too stupid to understand the pure and utter ridiculousness of certainty.

  And, as Samona goes to sleep—and she sleeps well—she marvels at the way the mystery that is Ethan Hoevel can make the memory of this night a romance, and not something more sinister.

  The marijuana she’d been smoking all afternoon had let her cross boundaries with me that I was sure, under different circumstances, she wouldn’t have, and that she would most likely regret.

  “So? What do you think? Honestly.”

  “I think—” I cut myself off from saying anything she didn’t want to hear as she started packing the bowl again. I could only stare at the envelope from James Gutterson. “Did Ethan tell you where he was that night?”

  “I didn’t even ask. Because with Ethan it’s not about those kinds of questions, don’t you see?”

  “What’s it about, Samona?”

  “It’s about me not being so needy that I have to ask them. It’s about me getting over all that. It’s about me…changing. Growing.”

  I watched her replay what she’d just said slowly in her mind and nod, convincing herself that it was true.

  “And that’s why this is romantic to you?” There was a long silence while she smoked, pursing her lips and looking at me, as if posing.

  Because she had no reply—and she didn’t want to dwell on the meaning of this long enough to invent one—she looked me gently in the eyes and said, “Listen, I really just want to thank you. For keeping your promise. I know it would have been easy to say something.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “And for listening,” she added. “You’re a good listener. That’s pretty uncommon nowadays.”

  I was remembering the metallic guitar riffs of “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”

  I was remembering our kiss and then all the sadness that flowed from that kiss.

  I marveled at how many times a person could tell himself a kiss means nothing and still not be able to eliminate the sadness.

  “Have you heard anything from David?” I finally asked.

  “I’m sure David’s at work,” she said, but this led her mind to another thought, and she muttered, “But what kind of freaking idiot doesn’t clean stains off his pants before putting them in the hamper?” She leaned forward and massaged her eyes.

  I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing or angry.

  Instead of reaching out to her, afraid of her reaction, I grabbed the envelope out of her stack of mail. I put it in my pocket just before she lifted her head and rubbed her hands together, accidentally knocking the pipe off the table and spilling ash on the floor. She left it there and peered up at me as if I had caught her in a lie.

  “David cheated on me with his British whore at the worst possible time.” She sounded almost defensive.

  “British whore? Is that what he told you?”

  “No. That’s what I just know.”

  “Why was it the worst time?”

  “At the risk of sounding like a total bitch: it happened when I was cheating on him.” She said this as if it should have been obvious.

  Clutching the envelope in my pocket, my thoughts mellowed from the weed, I wondered what exactly—besides boredom—would drive James Gutterson to send Samona Taylor a photograph of her husband screwing another man. And then I glanced at her face—the sculpted quality that enabled you to see only what you wanted to see, obscuring anything beyond that—and it struck me that when James Gutterson looked at her the way I was right now, he saw the fashion model, the girl he could never obtain, the girl who was too sophisticated for him.

  And embedded in the black-and-white image inside the envelope in my pocket was James’s cold, hard proof that Samona Taylor was just as broken as the rest of us.

  “Samona,” I finally said, my high suddenly fading, “does David know where you’re staying?”

  “No. He thinks I’m staying with one of my girlfriends.”

  “Before I go, can I just suggest that—in this situation—a small measure of restraint would be the smart thing.”

  She put her hand on mine and leaned forward. “I’m through with restraint. Restraint’s such a fucking bore.” She lowered her head. When she looked back up at me her eyes were completely glazed. “Ethan’s a lovely person,” she said. “A complicated person. Don’t you know that?”

  There was no reply from me.

  My hand was clenched around the envelope in my pocket.

  Stealing it was the only chance I would ever have to feel like I was the one taking care of Samona.

  “But the one part of all this I don’t understand?” she asked.

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “The one part I keep coming back to…the thing I don’t understand is”—and she paused now for emphasis—“why does this matter so much to you that you need to keep hearing it?”

  “I—didn’t ask you to tell me anything. I never asked.”

  Her face darkened with an anger that I didn’t feel I deserved. It was time for everything to end.

  “You know what I think the real answer is?”

  I was aware that I was looking at her, and then I looked away.

  “I think you do know he’s a lovely person,” she said softly. “At least, I think you did.” She paused again. “Once.”

  I walked quickly away from Printing Divine late that afternoon on August 31, stopping only to toss the crumpled envelope into a Dumpster outside Kelly & Ping.

  III

  24

  ETHAN CALLED a week after I saw James and Samona, and I found myself walking from my studio to his loft again—down Second Avenue past Houston, the din of live music in the bars lending an ominous, seedy quality to the Lower East Side, then all the way west on Broome until Watts Street branched off to the left, and then I took Greenwich south to Warren Street, my eyes wandering toward Ethan’s roof when it came into view. I took the elevator upstairs, grabbed a beer in the kitchen, and sat on the front end of the lounge chair beside Ethan Hoevel.

  “I have a small proposition for you,” he said almost immediately. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

  “Dare I ask?”

  “But first, you need to know why.”

  “Does this involve another story?”

  He nodded, and I settled back in the lounge, resetting the white screen in my mind while waiting for him to start the projector.

  On the night of August 24—the night that Samona twists her ankle—Ethan Hoevel leaves the loft on Warren Street and doesn’t see Stanton Vaughn outside. But Ethan only gives the street a cursory scan before he hails a cab on Church Street, which travels up the West Side Highway to Hell’s Kitchen and comes to a stop outside The Riverview.

  He doesn’t say anything when David Taylor opens the door. He just stares into David’s hazel eyes and then reaches out to touch the hair that’s still wet from a recent shower, and Ethan feels a screaming, raking need because he is about to relive a moment that has been haunting his fantasies.

  And though Ethan Hoevel has come to The Riverview this night to end whatever is happening between them, he changes his mind now.

  He’s looking at the man in front of him, and he knows that David Taylor is standing in the middle of what might be the first minute of his life that hasn’t involved some form of strategy or planning. Ethan knows how the man’s wife has left him; how his future is now uncertain; how all the many variations on the dream he once had are now obsolete. What Ethan also knows is that he erased all the anxieties which should have been coupled with these changes the first time he came into this man; David’s old habit of constantly sizing everything up (girth of his cock, level of his salary, quality of his suits), a habit cultivated b
y four years in a fraternity and eight years in finance and three years of marriage, seems muted. With Ethan standing in front of him, it doesn’t matter that Samona has stormed out of his life, or that he’d had to fire a bunch of young upstarts in order to save his own job, or that Ethan is better-looking than him, and has a longer dick and cooler clothes and those piercing eyes.

  Because it’s really just the pure physical pleasure of it all that astounds them both, and right now they can give in to the way they’ve lost control of themselves.

  They have sex in the bedroom that night, and Ethan is tender with him—much more so than David would have ever considered possible between men—and afterward, they’re lying next to each other, staring at the ceiling. Ethan lights a cigarette. David turns on his side to face him and then reaches across the gap between them and takes the cigarette but doesn’t smoke it—he simply holds it to Ethan’s mouth while asking him, “Would you call this a situation?”

  Ethan replies, “I wouldn’t call it anything.”

  “How did it—how did it happen?”

  “You called me.” Ethan props himself up on the pillow. “Why—why did you call?”

  David sighs and tells him about the night before—the night he called Ethan late and left a message—when he was walking from The Riverview to Atomic Wings on Tenth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street for dinner, and the intersections were buzzing with cars and trucks angling for the Lincoln Tunnel but the sidewalk along Forty-third Street seemed emptier than usual, which was the reason David Taylor took note when he bumped arms with a passing man. The man was a little younger, tall with big shoulders and very good-looking. He was wearing a leather jacket with yellow racing stripes. David Taylor couldn’t help noticing how extraordinarily handsome the man was, and as he glanced back over his shoulder to look again he saw that the man was just standing in the middle of the empty street staring at him with a vague aura of cold menace, and his face was grinning predatorily. David didn’t know that men did things like this in the streets of the city—he was being scanned. A surge of panic almost caused him to start running, and he turned right on Tenth Avenue and then walked quickly back to The Riverview, glancing over his shoulder every few steps, and he didn’t realize how unreasonably he was acting until he was back in the safety of his apartment drinking a glass of white Burgundy to calm his nerves. And then, bored and alone in the apartment, David got on the Internet and went to www.newschool.edu, which forwarded him to www.parsons.edu, where he looked up Ethan Hoevel on the “Meet Our Faculty” page and skimmed the résumé—…spent two years living in Peru, where he established his creative roots while helping third-world children raise their quality of life…work has been featured extensively in the periodicals Town & Country, Elle Decor, Martha Stewart Living, House Beautiful, Dwell …as well as the books A Roadmap for Product Development and The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity…unmatched in his field…a pioneer in combining classical artistic form with modern methodology…—and then David Taylor stared for a full minute at the thumb-nail picture of Ethan smiling in front of a blackboard diagram, and all David could think about was how it seemed so much more impressive than managing a hedge fund in an office at 800 Seventh Avenue. That was when he called Ethan and left the message: “Ethan, hi, it’s me, David…and I was…I guess, going through my closet and thinking maybe I could use a new suit…sooooo, this got me thinking about those guys you said you knew at, ah, Prada? If you could call me back, that would be, uh, cool. Okay, bye.”

  He explains all of this sheepishly to Ethan, who’s gently running his fingers along David’s stomach, and then down farther—testing him, seeing how far he’ll let them go before hesitating—and Ethan says, “We’ll get you a nice suit.”

  “Am I crazy?” David asks.

  Ethan’s hand reaches the tip of his penis, and he circles it with his index finger. David begins to stiffen, and Ethan pulls away.

  He flashes on something: a gift he’d given Stanton once, a vintage black leather jacket with yellow racing stripes down the arms.

  He pushes Stanton from his mind.

  “A weird guy comes on to you on the street and this makes you want to buy a new suit.” Ethan smiles. “No, I wouldn’t call that crazy.”

  Neither of them says anything for a long time.

  “But do you want to hear something crazy?” Ethan finally says, rolling over.

  David doesn’t know what he’s referring to. He begins reaching for a sheet that’s been pushed to the bottom of the bed. “What?”

  “I’m leaving for Lima in two weeks,” Ethan says flatly. “I bought two tickets.”

  It takes a few seconds for David to understand. “Ethan, there’s no way.”

  The pause doesn’t change Ethan’s eagerness, because manipulation is what Ethan knows how to do, and he’s been planning this since Samona moved in.

  “It’s just…it’s not possible,” David stammers.

  “Of course it’s possible,” Ethan says. “Just think about it.”

  “You want me to go to Peru with you? I have work.” David pauses and sits up enough to pull the sheet over him up to his waist. Ethan can see him looking around for his shirt. “This is all getting so…so…”

  “So what?”

  David won’t look him in the eye. “I don’t know. It’s so…”

  Ethan stares straight into David and lets him trail off into silence before using a comment Samona had made (offhand, somewhat scornfully): that David has marked two weeks’ vacation in October for a trip to Minnesota to see her parents.

  “You told me you had two weeks’ vacation coming up.”

  “When did I tell you that?” David looks up from the bed, surprised.

  “I don’t know. You guys were going to Minneapolis, right? Maybe Samona told me?”

  “When did Samona tell you that?”

  “When I was in the shop or something.” Ethan sighs. “Look, so were you going or not?”

  David considers. “We were going to. Yeah.”

  The word we bothers Ethan, and he pushes a little harder.

  “I want you to come with me,” Ethan says. “It’ll be cool for you to get away.” (He almost uses the word us, but decides in the end that it’s too much.)

  David rubs his eyes. Ethan reaches for his shoulder and begins to rub it gently, but David pulls away farther.

  He is aware of Ethan’s unwavering gaze.

  David Taylor says, “I can’t.”

  There’s an awkward pause before Ethan accepts this and nods but makes no move to get out of bed—he waits for David to ask him to leave.

  David’s eyes shift around the room as he looks for an anchor—the skiing pictures from Jackson Hole, the closet filled with navy-blue suits, the vanity with most of Samona’s jewelry, the iPod and Bose speakers—but fails to connect with any of it.

  “Okay…well…um…”

  Ethan nods casually and gets out of bed and begins dressing, wondering how it went wrong. Did he push too hard or not hard enough?

  Regardless, with his refusal, David Taylor has become much more interesting.

  The only question for Ethan now is: How long will it take for David to say yes?

  He takes a cab home, still planning the trip in his head, unwilling to relinquish the thought of it.

  Because it’s almost September, and Ethan Hoevel has to leave New York.

  He has to leave because he cannot handle Aidan any longer. Everything about Aidan has quickly become grating: his laugh, his insomnia, his PlayStation. It’s been two weeks since Aidan Hoevel came to stay in the loft on Warren Street, and Aidan has shown no signs of moving on or even looking for a job—a job that will be difficult to find with Aidan’s thin résumé (a résumé he has never written). Instead Aidan Hoevel watches TV and DVDs and plays video games while eating cheeseburgers, and drinks beer or whatever else is lying around. He will not stop complaining about how expensive everything is in this city even though Ethan is footing the bill. After the fir
st few all-nighters, the situation has become worse. Aidan becomes immobile, and he spends most of the day talking to Ethan (and Samona when she’s there) about absolutely nothing (“Why are manhole covers round?” “These chairs hurt my ass”) and Ethan will sit there and think about different methods of erasing a human being from this world. Ethan Hoevel has learned a lot about his brother and he cannot endure any of it.

  He has to leave because Stanton Vaughn isn’t hanging out on Warren Street after dark anymore, and Ethan has learned (with a chill) that he prefers Stanton watching and waiting (for what? Ethan doesn’t know for sure). He’s grown to like the reliability of Stanton’s presence and what scares him is not knowing where Stanton is anymore. This has become a troubling thing for Ethan. Yes, Stanton is and always has been ridiculous and confused, but now he is also out there, and a threat because of all the things he knows. (Samona Taylor has not heard from Stanton since her run-in with him at the end of summer, and Printing Divine is dealing exclusively with one of Stanton’s assistants, a hot young kid Stanton started keeping around after Ethan broke it off.) The threatening allure of Stanton Vaughn is what Ethan Hoevel was first attracted to (Stanton has punched Ethan several times during sex; Stanton made scenes at Cipriani’s on West Broadway just for the sake of having people stare at him; Stanton stole cars when he was young; Stanton carries a switchblade) but now Ethan worries about what he brought out in Stanton—how maybe Ethan’s actions escalated the imbalance.

  But mostly, Ethan Hoevel has to leave because when he comes back to Samona Taylor from The Riverview in the early hours of that Tuesday morning near the end of August, he finds her lying naked in his bed with a bag of ice on her ankle and she’s awake but she keeps her eyes closed. She doesn’t say anything. Ethan pretends she’s asleep.

  It is the first time Ethan cannot look at her face.

  It is also the first time he does not want to have sex with her.

  Their relationship is beginning to resemble a marriage. And being accounted for (even though she knows better than to say it out loud, she’s still wondering) is something Ethan has never wanted to deal with.