The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  On his return from Peru, David checks his messages from his cell phone while waiting for his luggage in the terminal at JFK.

  He’s been flying for nine hours and is entering a dull state of depression when the first thing he hears is James Leonard’s voice: “David. Please come to my office as soon as you get in. Thanks.”

  David embraces Ethan in a formalized way before getting into his own cab, since Ethan is going downtown and David is heading up to The Leonard Company.

  When David walks into Leonard’s office—after being told to wait five minutes in the chair next to his secretary’s desk, a tactic he knows is designed to create anxiety—Leonard says, “Close the door please, David.”

  James Leonard’s aged and handsome face is looking at David with a kind of calculated curiosity.

  Then David sits down, and there’s a silent stretch of pointed unease before James asks with a stern expression, “How was your vacation?”

  David answers automatically. “It was pretty good. A little break always helps.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I was in Peru.”

  “Really?” James asked. He keeps studying David as if looking for an answer. “Did you go to Machu Picchu?”

  “No. We mostly stayed in Cuzco. It was very pretty.” The answer is well practiced and flawlessly executed.

  “Was Samona with you?”

  “Actually, no.”

  James leans back, surprised. “Oh?”

  “She stayed in the city.” David clarifies, “I mean she stayed home.”

  “How come?”

  “She needed a break, too, James.” David weakly attempts a chuckle.

  James offers a sad smile. “But you’ve been spending all of your time at the office.”

  “Right. No, I know. We just—I mean, I just needed to get away…it hasn’t been all that easy…”

  “It’s been a tough year for everyone,” James concedes. “It’s just the market. You can’t blame yourself.” He pauses. “You know that, don’t you?”

  David looks at his own feet and admires how the weaves in the carpet all flow in the same direction before nodding his head.

  James sighs and swivels his computer screen toward David. On the screen is a spreadsheet for Duke Energy. “Does this ring a bell?”

  “Yeah,” David says, leaning toward the screen, relieved because he clearly remembers taking care of this. “Right, yeah—for Randolph Torrance. I put that trade through before I left.”

  “As sure a sell as I’ve ever seen.”

  David’s recollection of the actual moment becomes more vague as a result of the accusatory tone of James’s voice. “Is there—is there a problem?” But he now knows exactly what happened.

  The sell box is on the right-hand corner of the computer screen. The buy box is on the left.

  “The question concerning me is why did you buy?” James would usually be too dignified to let David Taylor scramble for an answer, but today he sits back in his chair and doesn’t speak until David meets his stare. “Thirty-four years in the business. Twenty-nine at Merrill Lynch. Five more building this company. Trust me, David, I’ve seen my share of bear markets. What I’m saying is, you can’t let it affect you more than it should. Otherwise, you don’t belong in this business.”

  “Sure.” David is still squinting into the screen, his eyes scanning the graphs.

  “Insider trading. Depression. Divorce. Even suicide. Some real sad sacks. I’ve seen them all. Too many times.”

  “Yes. Right.”

  “And I also recall telling you years ago that this kind of fuckup—the kind that costs me money off a sure deal—only happens once in a career. Which is what brings us to this.”

  There’s a pause during which David Taylor stares out the window behind James, at the view facing downtown toward SoHo, Tribeca, Wall Street.

  James opens a drawer and brings out a sheet of plain white paper and a folded photograph. James hands them both to David. He watches David’s eyes as he unfolds the picture. He raises his hand when David’s face shoots up, shocked.

  “Read it.”

  David reads the letter silently to himself.

  (The second phone call I made after speaking with James Leonard was to James Gutterson, who by that time—remember, this was a few months after that summer ended—had settled in the attic apartment of a small house in Thunder Bay. After I pressed him about it over the phone, he recited the letter to me verbatim. When I thanked him, he responded, “What-the-fuck-ever. Not like any of that bullshit matters to me anymore.”)

  Mr. James E. Leonard, Managing Director

  The Leonard Company

  800 Seventh Avenue, 21st Floor

  New York, NY 10038

  September 10th, 2004

  Dear Mr. Leonard,

  On behalf of the respectability of The Leonard Company name, I would like to inform you of troubling developments that have taken shape of late. Mr. David Taylor, one of your junior vice presidents and a respected member of the Leonard “team,” has been conducting an illicit affair on the property of the most respected Leonard Company. He is engaged in an extramarital affair with the young man hired to redesign Conference Rooms 2 and 3 on the respected twenty-first floor. Now I of all people acknowledge that what a man does in his private life ought to remain private, but when he conducts himself in such a disrespectful manner within the respected halls of The Leonard Company, I feel it is my duty as an employee to bring said behavior to the attention of our respected managing director—you, sir.

  Respectfully Concerned,

  A Troubled Employee

  David then studies the photograph. To him it seems like someone else, someone who isn’t David Taylor—but that doesn’t matter.

  He’s positive that he will momentarily be terminated from The Leonard Company.

  He knows that, without Samona, this will leave him completely alone as he looks for a new job.

  He flashes on teacher’s college. Somehow, he remembers the dream he once had.

  He has the money in his 401(k) to live comfortably—though not luxuriously—for most of his life, even at a teacher’s salary.

  Especially if he finds someplace more modest than the Riverview apartment.

  And if Samona repays his investment with minor interest.

  In his mind, he sees clearly that this is what the whole summer has been leading up to: David Taylor being fired the day he returns from Peru with Ethan Hoevel two weeks after his wife leaves him.

  And, during the long minute James gives him to process the situation, David Taylor is slightly happier than he’s been since the day he won the footrace in Central Park.

  James says, “I don’t presume to put much stock in anonymous letters or possibly doctored photos, especially during cutback time. And it’s not my business, really, except in as far as whatever might have happened, seems to have happened in the office…”

  David is breathing in and it’s all he can do to pay attention. He turns the photograph over. He studies the date. He glances at his own, clearly illuminated face. He starts planning out the rest of his life, year by year in bullet points, and he feels rejuvenated:

  Teacher’s college.

  Public school placement.

  The satisfaction of giving back.

  Gaining of respect; shedding of self-loathing.

  The summers off.

  The beach weekends.

  Applying to private school positions.

  Leaving New York behind.

  The cozy house in New England.

  He stops flashing forward at this point—the point at which he might think about starting a family.

  He comes back to Samona.

  And then he’s planning out everything he’ll have to say to get her back (“It didn’t mean anything, Samona,” “We were happy once,” “We can do it all again,” “You cheated too, right?,” “We’ll forgive each other, right?”) when James Leonard, through the haze, says something very unex
pected.

  “You’ve been with me down a hard road and—mostly—you’ve been a great asset. You’ve helped expand from a little five-billion-dollar hedge fund to—what is it now?—eight-point-nine? At any rate, how goddamned good you are at this job is something I’d be an idiot to ignore on principle.”

  “What are you—what do you mean?”

  James Leonard interprets the whiny desperation in David’s voice as the appropriate reaction of a man who wants—needs—his job. “What I mean is, now that you’ve had some time away, let’s settle back in, okay? I’m behind you. We all are. That’s what being part of a team means.”

  When David walks out of James Leonard’s office, he still has a job.

  The bright images of an alternate future fade just as quickly as they’d been illuminated, and then they disappear entirely while he brings the Duke Energy deal up on his computer to start the damage control with Randolph Torrance (who will formally void his contract with David the following Monday, citing “outrageous negligence to the basic tenets of finance”) and then someone from the mailroom calls up concerning the package he’d ordered from Ethan Hoevel Designs (the guy reads this slowly off the shipping label and mispronounces Hoevel so that it comes out sounding like “how-evil”) which has not been picked up and what does David want them to do?

  Later, as David Taylor sits at his desk in front of his computer, the light in his office clicks off but he doesn’t wave his arm to bring it back on. He’s moved the wedding photo off the wall and placed it on his desk, where it’s propped against the side of the Bloomberg screen. With the computer glow now the only light, David alternates between looking at the space where the photo was—a faint rectangular impression left in the thin film of dust (which automatically acts as a reminder to David Taylor to have his office cleaned)—and then back at the actual frame and the image inside it. David wants to throw it, just hurl the thing against the clock or else at the shelves with all the books whose contents he’s forgotten and stopped caring about. The sound of it shattering keeps echoing through his mind. But David Taylor doesn’t do this. David Taylor only stares until he doesn’t want to throw it anymore.

  And then he begins writing an e-mail to Ethan Hoevel, unaware that Ethan will forward the e-mail to me. Because right now, I am really the only person left in Ethan Hoevel’s world.

  To: readyandwaiting@hotmail.com

  From: ethan@ethanhoeveldesigns.com

  Sent: 10:49 AM, Sunday, September 12

  Subject: Fwd: (no subject)

  Thought you might be interested…

  To: ethan@ethanhoeveldesigns.com

  From: David. Taylor@Leonardco.com

  Sent: 12:09 AM Saturday, September 11

  Subject: (no subject)

  sorry been busy. disaster zone over here. but i have to tell you something—i don’t think this is me—who i am. i don’t regret it. not really—i let it happen right? and part of me wanted it to. but so much else going on. just trying not to make a big deal out of this. but what’s going on with you? i want to know. take care. d.

  The coda to the message was the Leonard Company confidentiality disclaimer.

  And as the journalist in me imagined David Taylor carefully writing and revising the words over and over (between conference calls with young analysts and follow-ups to Randolph Torrance and his lawyer) to make them seem gentle, sensitive, casual—just like I’d tried to do eight years earlier—and that other part of me imagined Ethan reading them, wondering why they didn’t carry the same weight they once had, trying to decipher what had changed since junior year of college—to locate what in him had hardened so much, and why—I decided that there was only one more thing left for me to do.

  The next day, I went by Printing Divine to see Samona.

  I walked into the empty waiting area and heard Martha running the machines upstairs, getting ready for Fashion Week while muttering, “I might as well be self-employed.” Ignoring her, I closed the door softly, so the bell wouldn’t ring, and then I saw someone through the glass partition in Samona’s office; it was her old college friend Olivia, collecting piles of mail and folders.

  I knocked on the glass and Olivia’s mild alarm signified that she didn’t remember me, and it wasn’t until after we made the vague Yale connection and I told her I’d seen Samona a few days ago and just wanted to make sure she was all right that Olivia started slipping me the disjointed fragments—the way college girls gossip, pushing secrets off her chest in a perky voice—of what had happened:

  Samona Taylor had gone to Olivia’s directly from Ethan’s loft the night Aidan fell.

  She’d been freaked out to the point of shaking, which Olivia just assumed had to do with the probable divorce that was looming.

  They had a late dinner and talked about nothing important because Olivia’s husband was there, too, and Tim “had had a rough day—he was kind of a bore.”

  In the kitchen Samona helped Olivia load the dishwasher and said vacantly, “Thank you so much for having me. It really means a lot.”

  “Well, you know you’re always welcome.”

  “I’ll try not to be for too long. But can we not talk about it? Can we just laugh about all the things that happened? I left my husband because he cheated on me. Let’s play a game and try to find the humor in that.” She paused. “Maybe I’ll just start dating women.”

  Olivia said, “Do you remember when we kissed?”

  Samona shoved another plate in the rack. “We were so drunk. Wait—wasn’t it a dare?”

  “Yeah,” Olivia said, trying to figure out how the dare was made.

  “It was…but who made the dare?”

  This was a sincere question. They both thought about it for a moment and the smile left Samona’s face.

  “It was David.”

  “That’s right,” Olivia said. “At SAE.”

  “It was four in the morning.”

  The game ended.

  They leaned against the granite counter while Olivia split the last of the chardonnay into two glasses.

  Samona raised her glass and then stopped, considering something.

  “Do you remember a guy named Ethan Hoevel?”

  “Isn’t he helping out with your…”—Olivia didn’t quite know what to call it—“business?”

  “I mean, do you remember him from school?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know.” There was a pause and then Olivia asked, “Why?”

  Unease creased Samona’s face, and now Olivia became curious, intrigued (though she was bashful about admitting this to me) that Samona Ashley Taylor—the princess with the best stories, the needy one—was now so lost.

  Samona turned away. “Nothing.”

  “Come on,” Olivia pressed. “What?”

  “Do you remember if he was gay or not? Can you think of any reason why I’d assume that he wouldn’t be gay?”

  Olivia looked at Samona (who was anxiously waiting for an answer) while thinking: I’m pretty sure Ethan Hoevel was gay. But this was only based on a few hazy rumors Olivia could barely remember.

  Olivia pressed her hand against her forehead like she was thinking deeply and then shook her head. “To be honest, I think I partied way too hard to remember much of anything.”

  After the kitchen was clean, she cuddled Samona Taylor in the guest bedroom the way they used to do in college (and also during her brief “break” from David) while Samona complained about having eaten what her mother Tana would have called an “indulgent” meal—sugar-glazed salmon, pasta with chopped bacon, a large Caesar salad, and chocolate cake with buttercream frosting—and then Olivia left her alone with the special Fashion Week preview insert in the Post entitled “One Week and Counting.”

  A few minutes later, while Olivia was going over testimonies for court the next day and her husband watched SportsCenter, they heard retching sounds coming from the bathroom, but neither of them wanted to deal with what they knew Samona was doing.

  The next morning, Olivia
found a spare toothbrush stained with flecks of the vomit it had induced—a problem Olivia thought had been taken care of back in college, when David had urged her to go to the Mental Health Center for counseling.

  Olivia came back to me at this point and asked, “Do you know anything about…what was going on?”

  I was already backing out of the office. “I guess it’s…complicated.”

  “Well, at least it’s not my problem anymore, thank God.”

  I stopped. And even though the reason I’d gone to the office that day was to figure out how to despise Samona Ashley Taylor—to lock her away and forget her—I knew in that moment that being in love with Samona was something I had to continue living with.

  Off my look she added, “He came by here this morning, I guess. And talked to her. She was in such a rush to get her stuff out of my place that she forgot all her files for Fashion Week, and I have a meeting near their apartment later, so I’m just going to drop it off.”

  “She’s moving back in with him?” I blurted out.

  She nodded, grinning. “He must have been awfully smooth to get out of that one. I mean, right?”

  I imagined: David Taylor getting out of a cab outside Printing Divine, and then walking around the block twice, glancing absently in store windows, and then standing outside the shop scuffing his $450 Prada loafers (the ones that go with his new suit) on the sidewalk.