The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  James pulled out a vial and—without even concealing it—did two massive bumps. “Taylor’s such a fucking pussy. It’s just so fucked up.” He rubbed his nose and then started laughing. “Did you know that all the models were going to be dudes?”

  I ordered another glass of merlot and then shuffled awkwardly down the bar away from him and didn’t realize I had put myself within talking distance of Stanton until I heard him say, “It’s over with me and Ethan—totally over.” I nodded uninterestedly as I surrendered to the fact that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  Samona stopped dancing and whispered in David’s ear. He nodded. She headed toward the bar and left David alone in the middle of the empty dance floor.

  I polished off my glass in one sip and ordered another.

  I glanced up and didn’t see Ethan anymore, and this didn’t scare me the way it should have.

  Because Samona was leaning on the bar three stools away, gesturing for the bartender.

  I took a deep breath, but before I could do anything James Gutterson came up from another bump and immediately locked on Samona Taylor’s profile. He took a sip of his vodka and leaned toward her. His anger was seething and naked—because in an hour he’d be lying in bed, unable to sleep because of all the coke, trying to masturbate, and in ten hours he’d be on a plane drinking a Bloody Mary, and a year from now he’d be coaching preteen hockey players on a pond in Thunder Bay, and five years after that he’d probably marry a fat girl—and all these small depressions that would one day sum up James Gutterson’s life were standing there now, mocking him in the form of Samona in a strapless dress.

  He whistled and she looked up from her reflection in the surface of the bar. She regarded James warily and motioned the bartender to hurry.

  “Will you answer one question?” This was James, grinning and breathing heavily through his nose. “How come you hate me so much?”

  Samona sighed without emotion and said nothing.

  James laughed and his eyes scanned her legs tucked under the bar as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. Slipping it casually into her purse, he said, “Did you know, beautiful, that your husband has been getting banged in the ass by the guy designing the conference rooms?”

  Her face went from indifferent to disbelieving to ashen in the span of a few seconds.

  I was invisible, three stools away, and it seemed as though I were watching a scene that I had witnessed before.

  She grabbed her purse and left the bar and walked quickly to the bathrooms in the far left corner of the tent. She moved right past David, who was searching for his jacket behind the DJ booth.

  And Stanton was saying, “You know the only thing I ever learned from Ethan was—” but he cut off as he traced Samona’s path back to where David Taylor was now scanning the room anxiously from the edge of the dance floor.

  Stanton stood up and approached him—this reminder of all his failures—and David immediately placed the face to a night almost a month ago along a deserted stretch of sidewalk on Forty-third Street. Before David could back away, Stanton grabbed his shoulder firmly and held him in place.

  (And I know this to have occurred, because I saw what was coming and followed Stanton across the room in order to be near it.)

  (I had lied to Ethan—it did matter to me.)

  “Do you want to know the really fucked-up part?” Stanton asked, shocking David into paralysis. “The totally fucked portion of all this is that your wife has been fucking Ethan Hoevel at the same time that Ethan Hoevel was fucking you.” Stanton stared at David and marveled. “You guys have quite the modern marriage.”

  I saw David Taylor’s face tighten—this suggestion making perfect and gruesome sense inside his head—as I walked past them on my way to the bathroom.

  But it was strangely just one of so many details (the music, the people, the past) and coursing through me now was a sense of liberation.

  Because David and Samona now knew what I knew.

  Because eight years was too long not to tell a girl that you loved her.

  Because that place—outside the bathroom, waiting for Samona Taylor—was where I was supposed to be.

  I leaned against the door frame, my heart pounding.

  I didn’t realize my eyes were closed until Ethan took my hand.

  He whispered, “Are you finally going to go in? Do you need my help?”

  And I was shaking as he used my hand to knock on the door.

  We both heard a sobbing voice. “Just a second. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “It’s me,” Ethan called softly.

  We heard her footsteps, and the lock clicked open.

  Then we went inside—Ethan first, then me. Samona stood with her back to the mirror and she looked at us. The photo was in her hand.

  He let go of me and moved a step closer to her.

  He said, “You’re so sexy, Samona.”

  He said, “You know you’re so sexy.”

  He said, “Don’t you know that, Samona?”

  I stood there watching their faces—hers in front of me, his in the mirror behind her. I didn’t exist. Ethan and Samona inhabited this room alone.

  “Why did you do this?” she murmured, holding up the photo.

  Ethan flinched and asked, “Does it even matter anymore?”

  He reached for her, but she pushed him away violently. Then she slapped his face.

  “It matters, Ethan. Things fucking matter.”

  She was running to the door but I was standing in her way; I was in her way and she was looking at me now—listening and waiting.

  I held my breath and leaned toward her. My gaze moved past her shoulder to Ethan. He was watching us in the mirror.

  I closed my eyes, and then I breathed out—so close that her hair moved in my breath—and was able to whisper, “I do remember when we kissed, Samona. I remember that.”

  Then she was gone, and it was too late. It didn’t matter anymore. It never really happened.

  I heard the door close and lock.

  I felt Ethan. His breath was warm on my neck.

  “No,” I said quietly.

  Two hands reached around me and slid down my chest.

  “No, Ethan.”

  A tongue trailed along the back of my neck and then it flicked my ear. “We’re not any different right now,” he whispered.

  “Please. No.” I was whimpering.

  “I want to forget everything, just like you. I just want to pull away and forget and not be here anymore.”

  Fingers slid inside my mouth and stifled my voice and I wet them with my tongue as I bent my neck back, knowing that after this moment—because I had let him take this moment from me—I would never see Ethan Hoevel’s face again.

  That’s when the summer ended.

  And as I walked home in the middle of the night, I knew that James Gutterson would still be at the bar, looking at his watch and realizing distantly that his plane was leaving in five hours, and his teeth weren’t numb anymore but his jaw was sore and there was no one left to talk to except for this trim, angry man in a leather jacket with a rancid scar across his forehead, lighting a cigarette two stools down—Stanton Vaughn, whose party was over as a distant voice faded into a techno version of “Besame Mucho” and men in blue jumpsuits dismantled the tent—and then James, the big guy in gray slacks and a black button-down, would stand and point a finger at him and say, “Hey, you can’t smoke in here,” and in response Stanton would then blow smoke in his face and turn away and hear “Listen, you little f—” before swinging his arm with all the rage built up through the last three sweltering months, sending them both to the floor as James, with the hand that wasn’t being pinned behind his back, would strike a very carefully aimed blow at the line of stitches above Stanton Vaughn’s eye, ripping them apart.

  As I walked through Union Square, I knew that David Taylor would be feeling his own end of summer in the stillness of being near the river as he stared at a bus depot and
drifted past a darkened art gallery and the white noise of the city grew muffled, and he’d inhale a deep breath and turn toward Tenth Avenue, pausing to take his jacket off, and then he’d stop walking when he saw—across the street and halfway down the block—Ethan Hoevel hailing a cab, and for David Taylor there’d be so many choices left to be made—millions of them actually, every day—and the thought would make his mind reel as he stepped back behind the corner until Ethan disappeared, and then he’d continue slowly north to Twenty-third Street and find a cab and rest his head on the back of the seat and roll down the window, closing his eyes and picturing the mist drifting over the mountains; Ethan’s profile fading away, indifferent; the jade earrings he never bought Samona, and then he would be walking through the Riverview lobby and standing in the elevator rising up to his apartment and then the doors would open and he’d become aware that he left his jacket, the one he had bought to impress Ethan Hoevel, in the cab with his keys and wallet.

  And when I stopped in a deli on Tenth Street for cigarettes that I didn’t want, I knew that Samona would be sitting outside their door with her knees tucked up against her chest, a crumpled sheet of matte paper on the floor a few feet away, and she would watch her husband shuffle across the beige carpeting, beneath the bright lights and past the plastic floral arrangements, and she would catch his reflection in the gilded mirror that panels the length of the hallway—golden hues, slightly distorted—and she’d murmur, “I left my key ring…” and not finish because she had left it at Ethan’s loft a week earlier, so instead she’d look up at David and not tell him where her keys were, and she’d say gently, “Do you mind getting them from the doorman?” and her husband would then hesitate a moment, about to speak until she would cut him off by raising her hand and whispering, “Tomorrow.”

  I got to my door, and I decided to linger on the stoop for a minute—not even to smoke, but just to sit there—and a slight breeze passed which carried downtown to Warren Street, where I knew Ethan would be stepping into his loft, and the loft’s dimness and emptiness would intensify the dull ache that had been gripping him all the way home, and then he’d climbed to the roof and opened a bottle of wine to soothe this ache, and only then would it hit Ethan Hoevel, as he stood there watching the river, that he was alone.

  IV

  29

  The Story of David and Samona

  Part 5: The Settlement

  SAMONA WAS ANGRY and then the anger hardened into a pointed sadness. She cried for a few days and then flew to Minnesota because she couldn’t stay in that awful apartment with David. She did not tell either of her parents what had happened because she could barely admit it to herself.

  David went to The Leonard Company every day but didn’t do anything. He just stared into his screens for twelve hours at a time. The blinking cursors had never seemed more useless. Every five minutes the light switched off and he would either wave an arm or sit in the dark. There were trades waiting to be put through and assets waiting to be transferred but David Taylor didn’t care anymore.

  Sitting in The Riverview with a tall glass of vodka, David called his lawyer and asked about the cost/benefit of filing for a divorce. This call was made after David Taylor found the photograph of him and Ethan Hoevel in Conference Room Three inside Samona’s nightstand drawer.

  David Taylor went to Minneapolis with the necessary papers to be signed, and it was not lost on him that they had been meaning to visit her parents in October anyway. Samona’s father let him into the house. Samona was in her room, staring at a wall. All she said when she saw David was, “Did I miss anything?”

  Tana cooked dinner and when they sat down to eat wondered aloud why everyone was silent. David looked so grim when she asked this that Samona’s mother unhappily decided not to say anything else. Samona’s father took David out for drinks since he had always been fond of David—they had both been SAE, after all, and they were brothers in a nostalgic sense—and he told him what a special girl Samona was, just like her mother, Tana, was special—“challenging but special” was how he phrased it—and that all marriages have their “highs and lows” and that somehow he knew David and Samona would find a way out of whatever it was they were lost in. David had no idea what to say to the man.

  David and Samona walked around the rim of a lake near her parents’ home and they told each other the things they already knew. The words took some of the horror away. David was carrying the papers with him. When they sat together on a rock at the far end of the water David placed the papers between them. They both stared down at all the small type and the bold lines where their signatures would be. This was when they stopped and considered their two options.

  If they ended it, they would be erasing the last eight years of their lives together. David would have his job at The Leonard Company, and Samona would have a print shop on the outskirts of SoHo. David would forgive the investment in Printing Divine. Samona would leave the apartment. They would learn to live again, because that’s what people did. They would do it with interest rates and fabric racks and updating magazine subscriptions—they would do it by busying themselves with the little things.

  This prospect seemed utterly devoid of hope, and it led to the second option that neither had seriously considered. They could stay together. They wouldn’t be able to forget everything that had happened but they could try to forgive. And if they found that they couldn’t forgive, then they could pretend. And if they found they couldn’t pretend anymore, the divorce papers weren’t going anywhere—that would always be an out. They agreed it would be so much easier living together. Maybe it was worth a try.

  Before leaving the rock, Samona and David made a desperate vow.

  They went back to New York.

  David returned to work at The Leonard Company.

  Samona spent fewer hours at Printing Divine. She took mornings and evenings off and gave more responsibility to Martha and the young (and drop-dead gorgeous, Samona couldn’t help but notice) assistant she had hired at the end of summer. The two of them soon developed a bond that shut Samona out of every decision being made. She became attuned to the sidelong glances, the muffled giggling, the bitter challenges to everything Samona said, no matter how inconsequential, and she believed that the two of them were ganging up on her to make her feel useless and—worse than that—incompetent. When she mentioned this to David between sobs, he told her gently that she “didn’t need to be involved in that world anymore.”

  David laid a down payment on a house in Short Hills, New Jersey. He had found it during the winter and put everything in motion right away. Samona did not object. The adjustments—glassing in the porch, laying a brick patio, installing an island in the kitchen—were completed by the end of April, and they left The Riverview during the first week of May.

  It was a nice house on Knollwood Road. A two-story, pale yellow neo-Colonial with black shutters on a one-acre plot of land. Downstairs: a kitchen, a dining room, living room, a porch. Upstairs: two bedrooms and a study with an angled ceiling. There was a stone-lined pond in back. There were brick pillars at the driveway’s entrance. There was a mailbox with the silhouette of a bird flying in front of the sun.

  David Taylor bought a new oak desk for his home office and placed it in the study next to the black leather couch, which had been moved from his office at The Leonard Company (he gave the Ethan Hoevel Designs love seat to James Leonard’s wife as a birthday gift). Other items for the house included a $30,000 dining-room table that seated six with a leaflet extension to accommodate four more, a piano, a Sony home-entertainment system with a forty-

  two-inch flat-screen TV, DVD player, surround sound, and a three-thousand-disc hi-fi CD changer that worked like a jukebox, a John Deere 2004 model lawn mower, a Krups espresso machine, and a king-size antique “opium bed” from a gallery on Wooster Street. They woke to the sound of water being filtered through the fishpond.

  They would walk to town for mediocre Italian food or ice cream or a movie.
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  They set their espresso machine on an automatic timer which had coffee brewing in the morning before they woke up. They drank it together before David drove his new Lexus seven miles to the train station. The train ride was then forty-six minutes to Penn Station. Since Short Hills was relatively far out on the morning commute (eleven stops) David always had his own seat while he ate a bagel and read the Times and stared absently at the satellite towns passing by.

  Unless she was meeting a friend in the city or going to an auction at Christie’s, Samona stayed home reading magazines while she drank coffee in her nightgown until noon, at which point she got dressed. Then she would drive the Passat David had bought her to the Short Hills Mall a mile away or else she’d stay home and sketch or research the interior design company she wanted to start. She filled small notebooks with arcane details about this phantom company that she knew was never going to happen. She went to yoga four times a week.

  Each day at Penn Station David would take the subway uptown to Forty-ninth and Broadway, where he hoped to avoid the car displaying the dermatologist ad with pictures of a homely woman with repulsive acne. He would use the walk from Forty-ninth to Fifty-first to clear his head and get ready for another day. On his thirtieth birthday there was a banner in the office, and a cake was brought in and presented to him by James Leonard.

  If Samona was in the city for the day, sometimes David would head to wherever she was for lunch. He never stepped into Woo Lae Oak again, and she stayed away from Balthazar. During meals, they talked mostly about movies they wanted to rent. Occasionally they would have a minor argument.

  When they began having sex again, they didn’t use condoms or any contraceptive for that matter because there was no chance for Samona to become pregnant—the chlamydia David Taylor had contracted from Mattie McFarlane had left him sterile. This development didn’t bother them because they had both made the decision—independently of each other—that bringing a child into the world they now inhabited was not something they wanted to do.