The Tourists Read online

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Hobbs

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Dana Sloan

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hobbs, Jeff.

  The tourists / Jeff Hobbs.

  p. cm.

  1. Couples—Fiction. 2. Bisexual men—Fiction. 3. Manhattan

  (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.O234T68 2007

  813’.6—dc22 2006052269

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-3972-8

  ISBN 10: 1-4165-3972-7

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To Bret Easton Ellis, for reading this more times than anyone should have to read anything, and for teaching me, with extraordinary patience, how to write—or at least how to try. I am and will remain in awe.

  To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operations of sound thought.

  —DON DELILLO

  The Names

  I

  1

  A MEMORY from eight years ago:

  It’s late spring, our junior year at Yale—a time when classes are getting easier and one lazy day starts following another until it seems as if winter never really existed—and about a hundred of us are sitting on a quad lawn where the drama division is performing scenes from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I’m with Ethan Hoevel and the girl who introduced us earlier this year, and we’re all just hanging there taking in the calm, cool night before the parties start and things get out of hand.

  The show drags on and the night air grows colder and we’re wanting the thing to end so we can go on to the next thing, which is really all we ever want these days no matter where we are. And while an actor is crumpling under his heavy robes, his voice muffled by a white cotton beard, Ethan stops watching the play entirely and instead looks across the stage circle where David Taylor is sitting with Samona Ashley. We both know they’re the new couple still in their beginning—that dreamlike space where they aren’t yet daring each other to say the words that might actually have a consequence and instead can just laugh while touching each other’s face or steal a kiss in public that still feels intimate and exciting—which is why it doesn’t register with either of them that I’ve followed Ethan’s gaze to David wrapping his arm behind her, his hand on the small of her back, or that I’m studying her face as she leans into his hand and rests her head on his shoulder and props her knee gently over his thigh.

  My feelings for Samona Ashley don’t penetrate the world they’re in.

  But still, as David takes her chin in his hand to kiss her, I can’t help wondering how—on this night, in this moment—the dim light from a hundred dorm-room windows can give such an ethereal quality to their being together, and how it can illuminate so clearly their ignorance of all the awful things to come.

  When Samona prolongs the kiss by clasping her hands on the back of his neck—her dark skin standing out sharply against his pale skin; her curly black hair intermingling with his straight auburn hair; her soft curves pressing his lean, angular limbs—I force myself to turn to Ethan and murmur something vague and meaningless about the incompetent stage direction.

  But Ethan’s not listening—he’s still watching them with an unsettled gaze.

  And even though I’m already aware that for Ethan Hoevel, just like for David Taylor and Samona Ashley, it’s the beginning of something—Ethan will announce that he’s gay two weeks after this night in the spring of our junior year—it will only be much later, after everything ends, when I’ll be able to look back and imagine him visiting this moment often in his mind, always remembering this glimpse of David Taylor and Samona Ashley—two people he doesn’t even know—as the beginning of something that he, Ethan, has ended.

  Eight mostly uneventful years passed after the night on the quad, punctuated by four or five address changes, professional stasis, the beginnings and requisite endings of a few minor relationships, and—near the end—the onset of that lonely, latent kind of panic which accompanies the realization that you can no longer afford not to know where your life is heading.

  And then it was mid-May in New York City: that fleeting window made up of no more than two or three weeks when everyone sheds their black coats in favor of bare skin, still winter-pale. The parks, cafés, boutiques, bars—all of them were humming with skin seeing its first true daylight in months. It was a good time to teach yourself to live again, to learn all over what it’s like to walk on the street with your head up.

  Which was why, when Ethan called around nine o’clock, I left my apartment on Tenth Street to go meet him.

  The guy who lived one floor below mine was sitting on the stoop, smoking a cigarette, his Doberman pulling on a choke chain as I slipped by, hugging the railing. I headed west past the Second Avenue Deli and St. Mark’s Church, where the benches composed the usual gathering of homeless people staking their claim for the night alongside yuppie couples sharing Starbucks fruit salad out of clear plastic containers. A massive woman with hair down to her waist, knotted and dusty, stood in the center of the triangle of benches on grotesquely swollen bare feet. She called out in a honeyed voice: “One man suckin’ another man’s dick and no one knows what’s right,” saying it over and over before I hurried out of earshot, crossing diagonally down Stuyvesant to Ninth Street and Third Avenue.

  I stopped in a bookstore to browse new hardbacks I wanted but couldn’t afford, and then on to Astor Place, trying not to stare as I walked around a cluster of spike-haired kids smoking cigarettes and dope, lounging around the big steel cube that sat in the center of the island, wearing T-shirts stained with crude-ironic slogans that I didn’t understand. I turned down Lafayette, where the girls were already lining up behind a velvet rope for Wednesday-night karaoke at Pangea in hopes they looked enough like models to make it inside. I took Lafayette all the way down to Grand Street, where I turned west into SoHo, choosing my route more carefully now that I had to weave through couples window-shopping. I went south on West Broadway, hurrying past the chaos of Canal and into Tribeca with its way-past-

  their-prime rock clubs and new bistros that were never going to last. It was quieter down that way and I slowed my pace. The river was close and it was in the air: spring drifting fresh into the city from way up the Hudson where it was always cool.

  I smoked half a cigarette outside Ethan’s loft on Warren and Greenwich because I was still feeling a little tense since he called—he had that effect on me. Even the somber, folksy music coming down from the roof didn’t help ease that tension.

  The doorman got up from his New York Post (cover: BROOKLYN MAN DROWNS IN PROSPECT PARK TRAGEDY) to punch in the elevator code. Ethan had never given it to me; his way of keeping me at arm’s length. The elevator took a full two minutes to reach the ninth floor while I watched the slanting shafts of light crawl down the wall inside the cage. Then the door creaked open into Ethan’s loft, which tonight was lit red by a Japanese crepe-paper lamp that sat near a window.

  It was the apartment that people in the city aspired to their whol
e lives: the entire ninth floor, long and wide, whitewashed hardwood, floor-to-ceiling windows looking down onto Warren Street, and filled with sleek furniture Ethan had designed himself. A faux-marble round pod—half bedroom, half design studio—occupied the center of the loft. Narrow walkways curved around either side of it past bookshelves and into a stainless-steel kitchen with a glass door refrigerator, inside of which a six-pack of Budweiser was waiting for me. I snatched two, moving around the stacks of cast-iron cookware from all over the world—mementos of his frequent traveling—and the exotic spice jars lined up behind the counter. Bay windows looked out over the river and beyond to Jersey City. In the far corner, a spiral staircase led to the roof. The door at the top was open and the music drifted toward me: Ani DiFranco in one of her less angry moods, which seemed okay for this kind of night.

  Ethan had his feet up on the wall facing west over the river where the Hoboken ferry was making its way toward the Jersey City lights. A half-full bottle of Domaines Ott sat in his lap next to an empty wineglass, which he filled as I settled in the lounge chair beside him. Ethan was tall, dark, wire-thin, recalling a handsome and much less freakish incarnation of Joey Ramone. It was chilly but there was no wind, so he was only wearing an undershirt and shredded vintage Wranglers.

  I pointed to five spotlights interweaving in the black sky above us. “What do you think those are?”

  He gazed at the lights and feigned deep concentration before answering, “Either a movie premiere or the warning of another terrorist threat?”

  “Moving in patterns…says…premiere?”

  He shrugged and sipped his wine and took the cigarette I was offering. I lit it for him casually.

  “Haven’t heard from you in a while, Ethan.”

  “I’ve been busy.” He stopped to pour another glass of rosé. He seemed to consider something before adding, “Very busy, in fact.”

  Then there was more silence until he started humming along with the Ani DiFranco song, which I recognized but couldn’t name.

  “Busy with work?” I finally asked.

  “Not really—no more than usual.”

  “Traveling, then?”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t been wanting to go away for a while. Maybe sometime soon.”

  “Any…good parties, then?” I was flailing a bit.

  “Parties.” He sighed. “I’m over it.” He started humming again until the song ended. “But you first. What’s really going on with you?”

  I took a drag to relax before telling him work was slow but steady and the apartment was a mess and I was really looking forward to summer—the usual—and I added that the last girl I’d allowed myself to get excited about, Amy, had found someone better—actually her ex-boyfriend named “Brian something”—and she’d said good-bye to me over the cell phone about two weeks before.

  He nodded and gazed out over the water while I talked. And after I finished—without turning to me—he asked, “So how’d she say it?”

  “Say what?”

  “Good-bye.”

  “I think it was something like: ‘I hope to catch up—take care.’” Ethan put his smoke out and lit another as I added, “It’s one of the last things you hear from a person who never wants to see you again, right?”

  “Definitely,” he agreed, wincing. “Take care.”

  “It’s so fucking despairing.”

  The word lingered as the disc changed to U2 and we just drank and took drags as “Where the Streets Have No Name” pulsed across the rooftop, and then we were nodding our heads to the music and didn’t need to talk for a while because we’d both been in this place before—some random night, the two of us sitting alone, letting the music amplify the moment until all its small details seemed far-reaching.

  Ethan tapped out the bass line on the armrest of my lounge, and I was studying his face in the dim cigarette glow while “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” faded in slowly. A light breeze swept through his hair, briefly lifting it away from his eyes. I realized that he hadn’t looked at me tonight—not directly—and that his voice had been sounding so much softer and more distant than it usually did. I wondered why he’d called.

  Leaning forward to open the other beer, I tried to hide the hesitancy in my voice as I asked, “So what’s…going on…with you?”

  “I’m sleeping with someone new,” he said, seemingly offhand as he turned the music down and put out the half-finished cigarette. “Wait, is that what you’re asking?”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Actually, yeah. She is.”

  I took a swallow of beer. “She?”

  He nodded. “A gorgeous girl. Just…really sort of…I don’t know: she’s gorgeous.”

  “Gorgeous,” I finally said. “That’s so very poetic of you, Ethan.”

  “I guess you would know since you’re the writer,” he replied evenly, ignoring my sarcasm. “But what else can I say? She’s gotten to me.”

  “Well, well, Ethan Hoevel’s finally been had—and by a woman, no less.” I forced a laugh. “How do I know her?”

  “It’s someone we went to college with.”

  He chose this moment to turn toward me, and I leaned away—that strange smirk etched onto his face made me anxious.

  He locked his arms over his head. His spine cracked.

  And a dull ache rose in my chest even before he said, “It’s Samona.”

  I was remembering dark and flawless skin. I was flashing on deep brown eyes, almost black. I was hearing the echo of that alluring, sultry voice. It still haunted me.

  “Samona Ashley,” Ethan said.

  “You mean Samona Taylor, right?” The words streamed out with an unintended urgency. “Because you’re…you’re aware that she’s…married, right? And that you still have a boyfriend. Right, Ethan? You’re aware of these facts?” I shook my head slowly.

  He rolled his eyes, mocking me with his calmness. “How did I know you’d go there?”

  “It just seems like…like there’s a certain gravity here and—”

  “Yes, but does the gravity have anything to do with the reasons you just stated?” He smiled suggestively while waiting for me to answer, but I could only keep shaking my head and sit deeper in the lounge chair. “Yeah, she’s married,” he went on quietly. “Yeah, I’m with Stanton. Yeah, it’s wrong. But”—he turned away again—“only if you choose to see it that way.”

  “Is there any other way to see it?”

  He sighed and opened another bottle of wine that was hidden in the corner by his feet. “Not for you, I guess.”

  The intro to “With or Without You” drifted into the background, and we both became quiet. I sipped my beer and gazed around us. To the north the Credit Suisse, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings stood in an evenly spaced trifecta. And though the roof used to be nestled in the shadow of the World Trade Center before it fell, Wall Street was still a sharp skyline. East was the Brooklyn Bridge and the dim neighborhoods beyond.

  Then my beer was gone, and I took a deep breath.

  “And does Samona know, Ethan, that you’re—”

  “A fag?” He cut me off.

  “Well, I was going to say queer but…yeah.” I paused. “Does she?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I walked up the river toward Jane Street that night, and as I passed the Holland Tunnel, the roar of cars moving in and out of the city shook me with the realization that maybe by now—as I walked along the water alone—Samona was already in the lounge chair where I’d been sitting, and maybe she was whispering into Ethan’s ear with that deep and sultry voice and maybe he was whispering things back to her, and maybe this whole thing had begun with that—a whisper.

  There were so many questions that all of the answers seemed impossibly distant, and I didn’t want to confront any of them.

  Because Samona Ashley had shown me once that the ultimate rejection resided in the silence of watching her walk away.

  Because even eight years of nois
e in New York City wasn’t enough to purge that silence.

  Because jealousy was as undeniable as it was destructive.

  Back in my apartment, a deadline for an article was waiting: a vague, uninteresting piece I was writing up for The Observer about the redevelopment of a street on the Lower East Side, things everyone who read the Times or even the Post already knew. Meaning: I spent the following five days on hold with city officials or talking to Chinatown business owners in a language I didn’t understand or having my computer crash on government Web sites. And since there was nothing to write anyway, I let myself be distracted by Ethan’s far-flung eyes and the way he’d held his wineglass tight with all five fingers and the grating sound of his laughter and the moment he’d said her name so allusively.

  When Ethan Hoevel screened me on his cell a week later, I stammered something like, “Hey, it’s me…uh, I don’t know, just calling…I’m…around…”

  He didn’t return the call, of course—all I got from Ethan was silence.

  2

  ETHAN DISAPPEARS after we graduate college. School has been hard for him. After coming out near the end of our junior year at a traditional Ivy League university complete with the Gothic architecture that hides exclusive secret societies (which is only to say that it isn’t an easy place for anyone to come out—despite the large gay populace on campus and the generally liberal attitude), Ethan finds it especially stressful and needs to escape. So he graduates with honors—the only Spanish-language and mechanical-engineering double major our school has ever produced—and spends a year and a half teaching gym class to kids in small mountain villages in Peru.

  The rest of us take the more conventional route. I bring my belongings home to the suburbs outside Baltimore and spend two weeks explaining to my father (a mid-level accountant) why I “lack the necessary programming for business school” while assuring my mother (fourth-grade teacher) that I “will give serious thought to the kind of girls I have relationships with.” And while I’m being strategically bombarded by these two people (who got married in 1964, and who never left the suburbs) I can’t help but feel wholly indifferent to the basic assumptions they cling to regarding my life experiences thus far; I’ve outgrown any feelings of guilt associated with all the things they don’t know about me.