The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  I imagined: David Taylor taking deep breaths as a woman passes him being dragged by a huge golden retriever, and an old man pushes a stroller, and a young couple holds hands while they window-shop, and then David Taylor does everything in his power not to let these people take on more significance than they should, and then convinces himself that not only is this the right thing to do, but that this is also the heroic thing to do (in fact, he’s already completed the cost/benefit analysis of his decision—has actually written it out on Leonard Company stationery before ripping it to shreds).

  I imagined: David Taylor nodding to himself before walking into Printing Divine to reconcile with his wife.

  Then I looked up and Olivia was gawking. “Hey, listen,” she said while collecting the rest of Samona’s mail. “Don’t you think they deserve each other?”

  The pity with which she offered this consolation was obviously a response to what I’d been trying to hide on my face.

  Then I left Printing Divine and walked through the muggy grayness of NYU toward Tenth Street, and I splurged on a six-pack of Stella and cigarettes and the Post and I went up to the roof to read it back to front like I usually did, to forget about everything. The Yankees were looking strong and mean as the Red Sox loomed in the postseason; Gucci was coming out with a new line of beauty products for Fashion Week; the fire chief was (maybe) cheating on his wife; 32 percent of New York public school kids were failing the standardized tests. I finished the paper and downed four beers.

  I also reread David’s e-mail to Ethan.

  I also recited Samona’s note to Ethan.

  I began revising the Gowanus Canal pitch.

  I replied yes to an e-mail from an editor asking me to cover a lineup of Fashion Week shows.

  I assumed the events of the summer were behind me—after all, there wasn’t anything left to know.

  28

  WHICH WAS WHY it seemed unreal when, on the night of September 20, in a tent on one of the new Hudson Riverwalk promenades, a bright and very pale light enveloped all of us at Stanton Vaughn’s fashion show. Since I was looking up when these lights ignited, I experienced a temporary blindness and by the time I cleared my eyes Samona and David Taylor were taking their seats on the other side of the runway while Ethan shifted on the catwalk directly above them (I’d been looking at him when the lights changed), and I found my way, dazed, to the press section, where the gift bag under the seat (a silver cigarette lighter, white chocolates with Kama Sutra positions imprinted in gold icing, a miniature bottle of cologne, four ounces of cognac) wasn’t enough to distract me from the fact that we were all back at the beginning of the story together—college, a quad, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Ethan Hoevel with his unsettling eyes on the new couple, which would lead to a basement in Trumbull College and Thailand and then to a conference room under construction on the twenty-first floor of a skyscraper on Fifty-first and Broadway.

  The glaring white lights dimmed and a new light focused on the runway and generic alternative music pumped out of the speakers.

  And when the show ended and the lights faded up once again there was not a single word written on my notepad.

  Models were parading in a line and Stanton materialized behind them at the head of the runway grinning widely (which accentuated the jagged stitches over his left eye) and taking a bow even though most of the audience had already begun moving cattlelike toward the exit (passing James Gutterson on his way in) and the more important shows tonight at the SoHo House and the Maritime Hotel and Gotham.

  Samona stood.

  She turned to her husband and followed his gaze upward.

  Her mouth hardened, and that evasive smile didn’t exist anymore.

  David Taylor had located Ethan Hoevel on the catwalk, and now Samona had located him, too.

  And it was clear from the way they stood (side by side, gazing up at him independently of each other) that neither David nor Samona truly knew what the other had done—that whatever words they’d exchanged to “work things out” in Printing Divine a few days earlier had not included the name Ethan Hoevel, that they were both still very much lost in Ethan Hoevel’s world, and that I remained the only one who knew any of this. The awareness drove me to the bar on the other side of the emptying tent where I drank three glasses of wine with an urgency that surprised even me, and where I marveled at all of us being here, in this place, on this night, together.

  What I didn’t know that night, and what I would figure out over the weeks that followed:

  Very late on Monday, the thirteenth of September, a resident working an all-night shift at Beth Israel hears a coughing, gurgling sound in room 343. She rushes in to find Aidan Hoevel choking on his own vomit, unable to turn his head to the side because he is still immobilized, and by the time the resident discovers with horror what’s happened—an acid reflux reaction caused by Aidan’s anesthesia and aided by the traces of alcohol still lingering in his system has begun filling his stomach with bile—the acid is already leaking into his lungs, and before they can even intubate his stomach for pumping, his right lung collapses, followed shortly by his left. Aidan Hoevel drowns quickly and is pronounced dead at 10:36 P.M.

  Two days later, Stanton Vaughn calls Ethan to tell him how sorry he is about Aidan, and that it isn’t his fault—that Aidan Hoevel has been en route to disaster for the majority of his life (something Ethan already knows and agrees with) and it was just a huge fucking unpreventable accident—and that Stanton still wants to see him; all he’s ever wanted is just to see Ethan. So Stanton suggests he comes to the fashion show on Monday. Ethan designed the set, after all, and the show will be a necessary distraction for the “at least minor grief” Ethan must be experiencing—and through all the begging forgiveness and pleading for more chances and the pronouncements of regret, Stanton Vaughn almost sounds sincere.

  And then James Gutterson—who’s leaving for Thunder Bay in a few days—sees a listing for Stanton Vaughn’s show in the Post Fashion Week spread which includes Samona’s name in very small print since she did the color work, and a little later—obliterated by seven martinis and an eight ball—he calls David Taylor to ask if he’s going (and really to find out if his mailings have gotten him divorced and/or fired), and when David tells him that he is in fact going—that he and Samona “had talked” and decided to try “working things out”—James pleads to be put on the guest list, at least for the after-party, and David (who’s so distracted by everything going on that he hasn’t even connected the pink slip he approved for James Gutterson’s termination a month ago with the letter and incriminating photograph James Leonard received from a “Troubled Employee”) says he doesn’t know about the show but, sure, he can probably get him into the after-party. He says this out of pity more than anything else: he can’t help feeling responsible for the downturn of his old colleague’s life into absolute wastedness even though James’s history at The Leonard Company was marked by nothing but laziness and failure.

  And somewhere in the midst of that week, Ethan Hoevel called a publicity contact to make sure I would be covering Stanton Vaughn’s show—that I would be in that tent with them all on the night of September 20.

  After I composed myself enough to turn and survey the crowd: Ethan was gone, David was squinting into the room with his hands in the pockets of the Prada suit Ethan had inspired him to buy, and Samona—wearing a strapless black cocktail dress and her hair straightened—stood a few feet away, her back to David as she talked animatedly with a potential client. The remaining crowd made a push toward the bar as the after-party started, and I drank another glass of wine and watched her and began falling into that place again—the place where it was so impossible not to see the soft brown nape of her neck flowing into her shoulders, and how the makeup that had been painstakingly applied still couldn’t hide the weariness in her face, and the way her skin turned pale, almost white, under the blue lights.

  In that place it didn’t matter that Ethan was somewhere close, hoveri
ng.

  And it didn’t matter that James Gutterson was at the other end of the bar, rubbing his gums, scanning the room hungrily.

  And it didn’t matter when David Taylor’s voice sounded close to my ear, dulled by the vodka gimlets he’d been pounding before the show. “It’s cool,” he said.

  I turned to him and blinked. “What is?”

  “The way you’re staring at my wife.”

  I was reduced to stammering out, “David—”

  He raised his hand and smiled. “Hey, it’s not like you’d try anything, right?”

  What made me angry was how easygoing he sounded—how he didn’t view me as a threat.

  “So are you still, you know, tight with Ethan Hoevel?” he went on, gently mocking. I offered a blank stare, and he added, “I mean you guys were pretty close in college, right?”

  “Not really.”

  “But I saw you guys together all the time.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  David scowled, exasperated, and shook his head. “I was just curious.”

  And this exchange moved me outside to smoke a cigarette on the promenade, where it was twilight and warm and breezy. The lights from Jersey and the buildings along the West Side Highway reflected off the wavelets of the river. Army helicopters hovered low, a reminder of where we all were now. But the world felt different there, away fromeveryone; it was casual and hazy and calm. The seasons were changing—it would be fall soon—and it didn’t seem to matter anymore what I knew and felt; it seemed like none of it needed to push me back into all the regret hovering over that tent tonight, and instead I could just walk home and smoke and sleep and not be burdened with disappointment anymore.

  Then I turned around and saw that Ethan had been standing behind me. He leaned close and took the last drag off my cigarette. Our shoulders touched.

  He said, “There are moments—and you won’t believe me when I say this—but there are actually moments when you are a much more interesting person than you think you are.”

  Our shoulders touched again, and his hand brushed my arm gently and then moved to the back of my neck and I was thinking about how I had followed him to the basement of Trumbull College and how I’d convinced myself so many different times that those moments didn’t matter.

  We were kids then. I’d been repeating this to myself for eight years. Just fucking kids.

  I stopped and pushed his hand away.

  He accepted this—my rejection—with a smile because it was an easy game for Ethan Hoevel, a game he could rely on in the midst of all the pain and uncertainty he’d caused.

  Standing there against the rail with the glowing vein of water behind him, the sky a weak red fading into a harsh dark blue, Ethan Hoevel looked undeniably alone.

  “How’s Aidan?” I asked, and he shook his head and glanced across the river and didn’t tell me that his brother had died five days ago.

  (Later, after that night was over, I would decide that he’d refused to allow the realities to interfere with what he wanted to happen at Stanton Vaughn’s party—he’d craved the distraction of it all for a few more hours before the summer ended.)

  “How come you never said anything?” he asked. “How could the whole summer go by, and you had every chance and you never told anyone anything?”

  “You knew I wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah. But why?”

  “Because—I wasn’t involved. Because none of it mattered to me.”

  He squinted and his eyes became less piercing and he gave me that familiar, knowing smile. “Was that it or was it…something else?”

  I didn’t answer. I knew that Ethan was waiting for me to answer, and I refused. When he didn’t hear what he so badly desired—the words that would take him back to a place and time when he was just a smart, young, interesting kid, when he was just distancing himself from Long Beach enough to start creating his own world, when his brother didn’t hate him, when relationships had no consequences, when no one wanted anything from him, when no one knew anything about him, when the only thing that mattered to Ethan Hoevel was the two of us in a room alone together, when he didn’t have to go seeking a consciousness that was different and novel in order to pursue a particular kind of happiness that was really only an illusion anyway—he just took a step back and looked at me and smiled.

  That smile was the only time I ever saw desperation in Ethan Hoevel.

  I was suddenly afraid of him and his influence over me.

  A moment later the velvet rope lifted.

  He took my wrist. His face was reckless and inviting and beautiful and his eyes were suddenly scornful of all the threats waiting for us inside that door.

  And then I went in with him—because I wanted to convince myself that my fear of Ethan Hoevel shouldn’t exist anymore.

  The after-party had officially started and long horizontal lights in the shape of inverted pyramids were flashing around the sides of the tent but failed to add the necessary excitement to the anonymous techno music and the empty dance floor.

  I was already scanning the room for her when we heard, “Thanks for coming to my party,” and Stanton pushed between Ethan and me, an arm around each of us, a bright red drink in a martini glass sloshing dangerously close to my face while his head turned to Ethan and I used that to slip out of his embrace. But Stanton didn’t notice because Ethan was looking down the bar where David Taylor and James Gutterson were drinking vodka tonics.

  Stanton was already drunk and oblivious and pulled at Ethan’s arm to the point where Ethan winced and said, “Why do you keep wasting yourself over me?”

  Stanton (who had presumably played this conversation a hundred times in his head but never with this beginning) let go in order to flail his arm toward a banker named David Taylor. “You think you can change him?” Stanton asked. “Is that what you think? Your brother’s dead and I’m a wreck and you still think you can take that guy to Peru and fuck his brains out and he’ll just change for you and everything will be okay?” And then he turned to me. “What are you staring at?”

  “Stanton, calm down,” Ethan consoled, and I took small steps away from them.

  “I am calm!” Stanton raised his arms, wide-eyed. “I’m so fucking calm.” People around the room turned.

  I kept backing away until I reached the bar, where David saw me, winced, and muttered, “What did you think of the show?”

  I was watching Stanton push Ethan away as James Gutterson spat out, “Two words: menswear.”

  I said, “I think that’s one word,” but he looked at me so contemptuously that I regretted saying anything. I turned back to David and, being as bland and polite as I could, asked, “Are you going to hang out awhile?”

  And David, with a hardened, expressionless glare, replied, “As soon as Samona stops talking to people, we’re leaving. Trust me.” There it was again—that awful, patronizing self-assurance that, in the end, would come to define David Taylor.

  He shrugged and took a big sip of his vodka tonic.

  I scanned the room again before asking, “So where is Samona?”

  He leaned back, a little bit startled by my brazenness. “I don’t know—this is work for her.”

  James laughed. “You can’t even make that sound halfway convincing.”

  “So you two just…figured everything out?” This was me, fueled enough by my encounter with Ethan to finally be able to say what I wanted. “And everything’s fine now?”

  “Yeah, I don’t get that,” James said. “How does that happen?”

  “People fuck up, you know,” David shot back without missing a beat—without even thinking about it. “Happens all the time, every minute. We fucked up and then we talked about it and we made promises to each other and that’s just what people do when they fuck up. In the real world, that’s how you make everything okay again.” David nodded absently at his own answer before adding, “So, yeah—it’s all fine.”

  There was a brief silence marked only by James’s laughter
, and then David glanced up at the balcony where Ethan was now standing alone. James—by following his eyes—located the guy who had redesigned Conference Room Three, and a cruel grin spread across his lips.

  Ethan met David’s gaze, and as David looked away—ashamed that he’d looked, that he’d been unable to stop himself from looking—Ethan Hoevel smiled.

  David turned back to me.

  “Must have made a lot of promises,” I told him, trying to channel Ethan’s elusiveness.

  But I failed. He didn’t get it, and he responded only by gesturing at James nonchalantly. It was a diversion from what had just occurred. “Oh, your prospectus is up on the Web site—and I reissued your check personally.”

  But I wasn’t listening to his charitable, cringe-inducing voice because I’d spotted Samona as she walked toward us from the direction of the bathroom. She came straight to the bar, where David handed her a cosmo and James Gutterson was now talking about his 6 A.M. flight out of JFK to Ontario the next morning. “I always get stuck next to the fat guys with, like, pieces of their bodies spilling onto me—” He stopped talking in order to leer at Samona.

  I hadn’t eaten all day and the wine was already hitting me and I let my eyes linger on her. That she didn’t even look back at me—didn’t even think it—did nothing to subdue my yearning. It only made the yearning more powerful as she drained her glass and with an overhead glance to where Ethan Hoevel was still standing—still alone—grabbed David’s hand and pulled him onto the empty dance floor.

  James muttered to himself, the cruel, bitter grin still etched on his face.

  Stanton was at the far end of the bar holding a drink, the stitches clearly making his forehead throb, appearing to find the whole party loud and confusing.

  Ethan shifted against the rail.

  And we were all watching the same thing: David Taylor moving his weight from one foot to the other, upper teeth clenched over his lower lip, shoulders rotating awkwardly from side to side while Samona moved around him gracefully, leading him, glancing up to the balcony every so often.