The Tourists

by Jeff Hobbs

  David registered with a mentorship nonprofit to spend three hours each month with an eleven-year-old boy from sad circumstances in Newark. Samona had been halfheartedly urging him to do this for three years, and for David it was a motion toward a greater ideal that he’d lost track of. The boy’s name was Leonard (David found this coincidence unsettling), and he was a little overweight but still wore T-shirts that hung down to his knees. Leonard’s father was in prison for manslaughter, his mother had run off with a crane operator, and Leonard lived with his single aunt and three younger cousins. The thing David noticed most was his oppressive quietness, which at first David assumed was due to being lonely and shy, but he soon realized was a reaction to all the gaping holes that lay between them—social, educational, financial—which David knew would be impossible to overcome, even if he tried hard. David’s hesitant questions like “How’s school going?” and “Do you have any brothers?” and “Hey, aren’t there any girls you like at school?” were answered with dull grunts and murmurs. After three get-togethers spread over four months, David decided that Leonard made him uncomfortable, and besides it was too much time spent getting to Newark and looking for parking near a baseball field to play catch, which gave him blisters anyway, and worrying about the Lexus being broken into or, worse, stolen. He resigned from the program. “Someone else will be a lot better at it,” he told the director during the brief phone call. Hearing himself say this—and believing the words—justified the decision.

  Instead, to take his mind off things, David started running again in June. He bought a pair of New Balance trainers, woke up a half hour early each morning, and jogged slowly through the silent suburban streets. He could only make it a half mile at first before he became nauseated. By the end of July he was up to a mile and a half and breathing easier. During each of these runs he concluded that there had to be millions of people unhappier than he was. There simply had to be.

  Samona started joining him. It was a gesture. She wanted to show that she was trying as hard as he was; that she, too, wanted it to work. David was polite and refrained from telling her how much she annoyed him—her steady, exaggerated breathing, the way she balled her hands into tight fists with the thumb sticking straight up, the constant stream of questions (“Don’t you think that house is totally pretentious?”; “Do you have time to pick up my skin cream at the M•A•C store on Twenty-second Street?”)—yet her presence also distracted him from the darkness of his thoughts. Soon David wasn’t so regretful of the series of choices he made that had landed him in this particular course in life, and he stopped dwelling on all the what-ifs. They both considered this to represent progress.

  30

  From: Svaughndelite@boiwear.com

  To: Undisclosed Recipients

  Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2:17 AM

  Subject: Sublet my studio!

  Dear Y’all,

  Yup, it’s happened—I sold my script to an indie and now I’m leaving this goddamn city behind…for La-La Land! I promise you all I will romp with those Hollywood flame-boys in ways they’ve never imagined.

  In the meantime, I want to sublet my studio. Most of you have seen it. I’m leaving it half-furnished. Taking my writing table, TV shit, computer (of course), posters, and clothes. Everything else is yours, including the bed (I promise no stains) for 1600/month, plus utilities. Think about it, boys.

  Regards, SV.

  Stanton Vaughn called me to follow up on the mass e-mail—“C’mon, you have to get out of the East Vill if you can afford it, y’know? I’ll even give you a discount!”—and after forcefully declining, I listened numbly as he told me he was just “moving on with this crazy shit-show known as my life” and “leaving everything else behind—which I should have done a long time ago, y’know” and he was “trying to quit smoking but it just doesn’t seem in the realm of possibility right now” and he was writing another screenplay. When I asked what it was about Stanton said, “How can you fall in love with someone if you fall in love with everyone?”

  “Have you heard from Ethan?” I couldn’t help asking.

  Stanton scoffed. “Ethan’s gone. Ethan disappeared.”

  “Do you—do you know where?”

  “No. And I don’t exactly think I’ll hear from him after what went down. Guess he went home to bury his brother and whatever…” He trailed off, and then: “What a fuckin’ nightmare, y’know?”

  I rarely thought of Stanton Vaughn after that conversation ended.

  Meanwhile, the Gowanus Canal story had been picked up and commissioned for a series in the Sunday New York Post focusing on underdeveloped, decaying places all over the five boroughs—the river bank under the George Washington Bridge, the dark corners of Prospect Park in Brooklyn and the east section of Van Cortland in the Bronx, the old armory building in Harlem, the Lower East Side between East Broadway and Henry Street. I figured being able to pay the rent would help me move on.

  But it didn’t.

  I needed more than relative stability.

  And I thought I might find it at the track reunion that December. We were at Spring Lounge in Nolita, and David Taylor sat across the table from me. He would smile sadly at the bland conversation and I noted the distance between us. When dinner ended (David paid for us all, as usual) David Taylor looked directly at me while he signed for the bill. People drifted away as David sat there drinking a beer, glancing up at me with a look that told me to stay there with him. And then it was just the two of us awkwardly walking outside where a recent snow had left mounds of dirt and ice on the curb. I scanned the street hoping to see a cab. David put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  “You used to do that before every race,” I murmured.

  “Where are you headed now?”

  I was wondering why David had wanted this moment to occur—what he hoped to get out of it.

  “Home.”

  “You know we plan on moving soon. Jersey.”

  I nodded at the “we” and buried my chin in the collar of my coat, marveling at the way David Taylor could act as if that summer had never existed, as if he had never pressed his body against Ethan Hoevel’s, as if I’d never been in love with his wife. He had somehow put all that to bed, and I was—once again—envious of David Taylor.

  A cab rolled up Lafayette.

  “You take this one,” he said.

  “You can have it, David.”

  He nodded and shook my hand weakly. “Hope to see you around sometime.”

  “Maybe at the next reunion?”

  And then he was gone.

  Since it was just a few blocks away I walked over to Greene Street to see Samona that evening. I had no idea what I was going to say exactly and when I got there I stood around outside and scuffed my shoes on the icy sidewalk, looking in the windows from across the street, trying to steal a glance at her face, her profile, her shadow—just a glance was all I wanted anymore. But I couldn’t see anything, and then I finally worked up the nerve to go inside only to be told by Martha that—as of two weeks ago—Samona wasn’t a part of Printing Divine anymore.

  I went home for Christmas.

  The year ended.

  I informed my list of editors that I would not be “participating” in Winter Fashion Week that February.

  I hadn’t seen Ethan since September, and no one I knew had any idea where he’d gone. And still I couldn’t free myself from that muted feeling of detachment I’d felt ever since leaving Ethan Hoevel’s roof last May (and in some ways, ever since coming to New York): the feeling of being rooted in a particular moment that was gone; the feeling of existing in an opportunity that you’ve already missed; the feeling of knowing how a single moment can ensure you’ll never get it back again.

  And when a UPS man buzzed the apartment on Tenth Street near the beginning of spring, I went down the six flights of stairs and signed for a box the size of a small television set. It was heavy and I had to stop twice to rest on the way back to my apartment. Ethan Hoe
vel’s name and the address of a Mail Boxes Etc. on Mercer were attached, along with a note taped under the top flap, which said: What’s more than “good friends”?

  Inside the box was the black wing encased in a glass vacuum.

  When I plugged it in the air didn’t flow through the way it had been intended—the current wasn’t strong enough since the air was leaking out through the glass I had broken.

  I put it up on my bureau in the top corner of the room and stared at it for a while. It grew dark outside, and I was alone amid the shadows cast by streetlights and the dull murmurs of city noise drifting up and the frigid air seeping through the windows, and then, in that place, I no longer needed to wonder where Ethan had disappeared to—whether it was home to Long Beach or off traveling by himself or somewhere else I probably couldn’t imagine if I tried. Because what I was left with was this thing he’d made, which took me back to a particular moment in our lives: we hadn’t spoken in almost two semesters and Ethan Hoevel invited me to his lab to see his senior project, and I didn’t know where I was heading and had no idea what would happen to any of us and all I could really be certain of was that it was snowing and dark and I was trudging alone uphill. After I arrived outside the lab and stood in the cold too long, I finally went in. Ethan was waiting for me in his small cluttered office. We didn’t touch. He simply motioned toward the glass case and, without explaining what it was, turned it on. As we both watched the wing oscillate in its vacuum he quietly said, “Do you like it?” and he moved around the table beside me and he was so close I could feel him breathing. The only other sound was the soft whisper of air flowing through the vacuum, and that was when I understood how he’d created this thing out of the disenchantment that I’d caused.

  That night, in my dream, I take the same route to his loft that I usually do: down Lafayette, across Grand, down West Broadway, and I enter the elevator (in the dream I know the code). The rug is rolled up in the living room. The furniture’s gone. The bedroom/studio has been disassembled. Most of the cookware from all over the world is packed in boxes.

  I open the refrigerator for a beer but it’s empty. I hear U2’s new album playing softly as background music while I climb the spiral staircase to the roof. Ethan is sitting in a chair drinking a glass of wine and smoking a cigarette, watching the helicopters flying low over the river. It’s getting cold but he’s only wearing a denim jacket. It fits him well.

  And since Ethan doesn’t see me (it’s a dream and he didn’t know I was coming) I just gaze at the back of his head. And even though he must hear my heavy breathing and be aware that I’m standing there, he doesn’t turn around.

  I leave silently and walk along the river smoking cigarettes for a while before heading home along Jane Street.

  I don’t need to think about him.

  People fade, people disappear—it’s happening all the time.

  I can move on.

  These are the things I tell myself when I wake up.

  Acknowledgments

  David Halpern—a great agent and a great, great friend. Sarah Self, who was kind enough to read an unpublished, unagented wannabe “writer,” and then make a tremendous phone call, for which I will always be grateful. Terra Chalberg for her many, many insights and unwavering intelligence in editing this book.

  Mom and Dad for reading to me when I broke my leg at age three, and for being there always. Bryan, Lindsay, Andy, Grandma, and all my family, for love and support beyond my capacity to describe.

  Kathy Robbins, Yaniv Soha, Kate Rizzo, and everyone at the Robbins Office. My teachers: Hugh Atkins, John Crowley, Nelson Donegan, Laurie Edinger, John MacKay, David Marshal, John Robinson. My friends and family: Thom Bishops, Carter Coleman, James, Martina, Jackson, and Louis Donahower, Josie Freedman, James Jordan, Mara Medoff, Seamus Moran, Alexia Paul, Marty Scott, Marion and Henry Silliman, Cara Silverman, Halsey and Gretchen Spruance, Jess and Andy Wuertele, David Yamner. The always-inspiring Learnard Girls: Emmie, Ruthie, Lainie, Annie, Pixie, and Batab. Martin and Sugar Goldstein for welcoming me to “The Family” in true Brooklyn style.

  My best friend, Noah, who slept faithfully at my feet throughout the lengthy and quite boring (for him, since he’s a dog) composition of these pages.

  Lastly, Rebecca, for an infinity of reasons that have nothing to do with this or any book, and one that does: I will forever cherish The Tourists for the chance it gave to meet and fall in love with my wife.

  About the Author

  JEFF HOBBS graduated from Yale in 2002 with a BA in English language and literature. Hobbs spent three years in New York and Tanzania while working with the African Rainforest Conservancy. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rebecca, and their dog, Noah.