The Tourists Read online

  Stanton Vaughn is his own cliché: the southern farm boy cut from the football team, the aspiring actor who becomes the successful model who drops out. Stanton Vaughn is the guy who finally hooks up with the right connection one night on a rooftop on Little West Twelfth Street.

  That night occurs in the summer of 2002. By this time, Ethan has established himself as a set designer and he’s now doing the set for a low-key fashion show on a rooftop in the meatpacking district. Stanton—just out of a brief modeling career—is freelancing as a stylist. Stanton knows who Ethan Hoevel is, as does most everyone in the industry at this point, and Stanton is not shy about seeking Ethan out and mentioning to him that he wants to “get into design.” Stanton name-drops a few investors who have said they’d be interested in his work, and Ethan, who is bored and pissed off at the fashion show because this isn’t the kind of work he does anymore—he’s doing it as a favor for an ex-lover—just keeps nodding.

  So it seems strange at first that Stanton ends up staying the night in Ethan’s loft on Warren Street after this show.

  And it seems even stranger when they soon commit themselves to a relationship.

  Ethan will only confide in me later (after Stanton has essentially moved into the Warren Street loft) how it happens, how beneath all of Stanton Vaughn’s self-absorption, Ethan Hoevel starts to see something that entertains him. For instance, Stanton Vaughn has spent time in China. Depressed about his failed acting career, Stanton headed back south, and through a chain of events too routine to recount here ended up singing backup vocals for Peggy Randall, a country-and-western singer on the northern leg of an ill-fated tour. Her big song—“Lookin’ for a Woman to Love”—was the first country single about lesbianism and had become a cult hit with liberal college kids and fans of novelty songs. But among her intended audience, which is the audience that bought records, it only registered in one way: Peggy Randall was passionately loathed, then ignored. An executive at her record company decided to send Peggy Randall to China, where country labels were trying to break into that billion-plus market. Peggy Randall (and Stanton Vaughn) toured there for three weeks before being brought home, China proving to be as disinterested in her as Alabama and West Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky had been.

  And Ethan Hoevel has been wanting to go to China for a long time, but the logistics of going—embassies, tour groups, transportation—have always seemed too complicated for someone who prefers to travel on a whim.

  When Stanton Vaughn tells Ethan this story the night they meet, the bored and pissed-off Ethan decides to take Stanton back to the loft in Tribeca overlooking the Hudson River, where, after a bottle of Domaines Ott, Ethan starts asking questions relating to China and then moves to obscure alt-country bands and British fashion designers from the sixties—all the right questions even though Stanton can answer none of them. But this lack of worldliness appeals to Ethan Hoevel, because he’s so tired of all the fey, jaded fags he meets who only want to talk about their gym routine and the supplements they take and which movie star is in the closet and which club draws the hottest guys and how young is too young? Stanton Vaughn does not seem to be part of that circle Ethan has grown exhausted by, so things get serious very fast. The next week Ethan takes Stanton to Mexico with him. In late June of 2002, Stanton starts living in the loft and leaves traces of himself there in the slight touches of Japanese decor, the gold-leafed banana tree near the bay window, the coatrack laden with leather jackets. Ethan admits that he’s officially “seeing” Stanton only after I keep pressing him about it. But Ethan, as he’s telling me about his new “boy,” is noticing how “uncomfortable” I am about “the situation” (even though I have never met Stanton) and my discomfort “bothers” him, so Ethan’s resolution is as follows: Stanton and I will spend a day together, just the two of us—without Ethan.

  So on a humid, wet afternoon in early August of that year, Stanton and I meet at the Second Avenue Deli, where he buys me a pastrami sandwich with money Ethan gave him for the occasion. I do not eat. We walk silently all the way west to the river, and he matches my pace while his hand keeps brushing my hip—that’s how close he is—and then we stop for a soda at Chelsea Piers (Diet Coke for him, Dr Pepper for me) and watch some boys play street hockey, and then back through Chelsea (predictably, an unnerving array of guys on the street seem to know him), where we end up seeing a Sean Penn movie at the Clearview on Twenty-third, and where Stanton Vaughn keeps trying to grip my thigh with a hand that I continually brush away until I have to move to another row in the near empty theater. I am not sure if Stanton is genuinely interested in me or if it is a test Ethan wants to see me pass—though I can’t wrap my head around what the desired results are. Either way—it isn’t going to happen. After the movie Stanton tells me he has his own place in the West Village and invites me over for a glass of wine, but it’s all so boring and prefab: the “wicked” grin, the distinctive “gleam” in his eyes, the alarming combination of hope and desire he isn’t trying to hide. I don’t want Stanton, so we part ways. I am too frazzled to even pick up the phone and call Ethan when I get back to the apartment on Tenth Street.

  When that afternoon has finally (thankfully) ended, I know the following things: I know how Stanton Vaughn was cut as a sophomore from the Clarksdale High School football team in the fall of 1993 (the same season that Ethan and I enrolled at Yale). I know how he moved toward his interest in hooking up with guys by entering the drama division, where he ended up starring in the school’s spring production that year. I know that Stanton Vaughn played Lennie in Of Mice and Men(a piece of casting that causes my mind to reel) and, emboldened by the response, I know that Stanton moved forward: out of Clarksdale and toward Little Rock and then Cleveland and then Chicago—acting small parts in dinner theaters—and finally all the way to New York City, where he hoped for the big break that would never come. I know that his Mississippi drawl (which he had buried) manifested itself whenever he cursed. I know how Stanton Vaughn fell into modeling—he slept with the “right” connection. I know that, ultimately, Stanton couldn’t handle being a model because Stanton can’t handle rejection.

  The one thing I don’t know: What does Ethan Hoevel see in him?

  “You might have heard this already,” Stanton says to me that afternoon as we walk out of the movie theater. “But most male models don’t do well. At least not for very long. It’s a tough business.”

  Stanton’s defending himself, trying to make me see that he isn’t the user I think he is. He wants to make himself sympathetic. He wants me to buy Stanton Vaughn. I let him make the pitch:

  Near the end of the modeling, Stanton was spending his days lugging a leather portfolio around on subways where all those fucking kids from the Bronx were screaming and fat women hogged up the available seats reading romance paperbacks and he’d wait in the lobbies of agencies with a bunch of other guys—all of them identical-looking—and there was always some kind of soft-core hip-hop shit playing in the background, Usher or Janet Jackson everywhere, and Stanton would give his portfolio to a girl just out of F.I.T. because her parents told her she had to vacate the Park Avenue apartment and do something with her life and the girl just out of F.I.T. would look at Stanton and (with a cute little squint) say, “I don’t think you’re right for this shoot,” and Stanton would want to strangle the fuck out of her because he had just ridden all the way across town on the fucking subway and everything about the business was horrendous.

  “Do you want to see my portfolio?” he asks me coyly, turning toward the Village. “It’s in my apartment.”

  I vow silently that I am never moving through the doorway of Stanton Vaughn’s apartment (even though, later, at one point, I will).

  So I try to change the focus. I find that it’s easy as long as it remains centered on him.

  “But weren’t you in the shows?”

  Stanton liked the shows but after a month or two passed—and that’s if you’re doing well—there’s always some scrawny st
ylist yelling at you because your shoulders are getting too big or you’re eating too much sushi (carbs! carbs!) instead of sashimi and you’ve gotta stop lifting weights (Pilates! Pilates!) because you need to be leaner, but Stanton had to lift weights or else he felt soft and useless, and the money from shows really wasn’t that good and it definitely didn’t make up for all the hassle.

  “Aren’t you a stylist, too?” I ask once the tirade ends.

  “I’m a designer.”

  (Which reminds me how after Ethan decided to get involved with Stanton Vaughn that June, he then launched Stanton’s career as a designer almost instantaneously, setting him up with a publicist and a few key investors and getting the word of mouth rolling, which is all a moderately talented, sporadically inspired person like Stanton Vaughn needs to get started.)

  “But you were styling, right? When Ethan found you?” I mention his name for the first time that day.

  “When we found each other.” He winces.

  “I don’t want to get into semantics with you but Ethan got it all started, right?” I haven’t learned yet that the only way to deal with Stanton Vaughn is to retreat.

  He stops dead on the corner of Twenty-first Street and Eighth Avenue. He points a finger at me. His eyes frighten me.

  “I’m a designer, okay? Ethan was there because he’s my partner. But I am the source. AKA: the creative drive? Get it?”

  I put up my hands. “Got it.”

  It hit Stanton one day that the money was never going to be that good for him walking the ramps in shows (the real money was in catalogs, and Stanton Vaughn didn’t have that “paternal vibe” that the catalogs liked) and that even if he did pursue it, all of it would soon be gone anyway because there were armies of other guys—younger, fresher, better-looking—waiting to replace him and it hit Stanton (he was filling in at the last moment for a no-show at Calvin Klein) that it wasn’t the guy walking the runway that was making the real money (a few hundred bucks upped to a measly thousand during Fashion Week—come on) but it was the guy who designed the clothes who made a killing. Stanton had been looking in the wrong direction. Stanton decided then—for longevity’s sake—he needed to design.

  He doesn’t have Ethan’s talent. But he has something almost as powerful—an intimidating and forceful rage. In fact it underlines every word he speaks. Maybe it comes from growing up in the rural South with the ubiquitous cheating and abusive failure of a father and the mother addicted to forgiveness, both of whom Stanton left behind all those years ago. Or maybe this rage materialized when he arrived in Manhattan, with all its concrete surfaces and sharp corners that were so tough to navigate. But it is the rage of Stanton Vaughn that will fuel his success, enabling him to bully his way into advertisements, investors, showcases. He pours rage into his designs. He pours it into his relationship with Ethan (who reveals to me a few nights later that Stanton Vaughn is the best sex he’s ever had with a man; “Don’t underestimate the power of hate-fucking,” Ethan says in the same awful and hypnotized drawl that James Gutterson will use at the lunch at Corotta).

  To his credit—as much as I don’t want to go here—Stanton is beautiful. He has all the prerequisites: tall and big-shouldered with a boyish waist and thick shaggy hair that sweeps across a nicely chiseled all-American face. He insists on blaming his failure in modeling on the fact that his shoulders are too big. But he persists in admitting that, in the end, it all worked out. “Without these shoulders I’d still be on the L train with my portfolio.” I try to decipher this sentence—knowing that in Stanton’s head it makes perfect sense—as we pass the restaurant where Ethan got me drunk the night I met him after he returned from Peru.

  “You want to see my portfolio?” he asks again.

  My afternoon alone with Stanton Vaughn ends with the dripping suggestion of those words. And as I try to erase it from my mind on the way home, I never once consider the possibility that he will still be in Ethan’s life—let alone calling me on the telephone to hang out at Urban Outfitters—two years later in the summer of 2004.

  In front of Urban Outfitters Stanton was staring unhappily at the display window. There were three racks—shirts, pants, and sport coats (Stanton designed what he liked to call “Boi-Wear,” which was reflected in his logo: a lean muscled chest with conspicuous nipples). The shirts were the most distinctive—a weird blend of retro-punk with a smattering of Egyptian symbols, what Stanton referred to as urban-sheik. This line sold far better than the more upscale one he designed—suits in monochromatic blacks and browns and grays, and generally not much different from what you would find at Club Monaco or Banana Republic, just more expensive. Stanton had already shouted at a teenage cashier to “fetch” the manager and another tirade began once the boy scampered away. Oh fuck—Stanton should have known that a fucking Urban Outfitters in the fucking East Village—of all fucking places—wasn’t going to do it right. How fucking hard is it to display clothes on a fucking rack? All it takes is a little fucking common sense. Urban Outfitters was so fucked up (as were Barneys and Blooming-dale’s apparently) and Stanton should have never agreed to distribute there. He had let his sponsors talk him into getting the momentum going for Fall Fashion Week. But that’s why he wanted me: I was the witness to this catastrophe. And it was a catastrophe since Stanton was a perfectionist, y’know? Like Ethan. That’s why Ethan and Stanton got along so well—they were both perfectionists. They always understood the perfectedness of each other. And Stanton had to be a fucking perfectionist because he was a fucking designer.

  It went on and on until the manager was walking toward us. He was our age (as was everybody we knew in Manhattan during that time) and he enjoyed arguing with Stanton, and was actually smiling when he forced Stanton to show him his business card and then Stanton had to call the distributor on his cell phone before the manager would even discuss changing the display. Because the fucking shirts go in the fucking front and they’re the ones that catch the eye—it’s the fucking shirts that draw the buyer in and didn’t anyone understand that? Didn’t anyone understand anything?

  When it was all conscientiously prolonged and all the necessary calls had been made, the manager had the teenage boy switch the pants and the jackets and move the shirts up to the front of the display window. Stanton wouldn’t leave until this was finished, and he didn’t offer to help. He was too preoccupied with closely analyzing the stitching on a pant leg and shaking his head as if someone had just fucked up something else. And then he just continued glaring at the manager and the teenage boy, his arms crossed, tapping his left boot impatiently. He ignored the small group of people who had gathered on the sidewalk outside, captivated by Stanton’s flailing arms throughout the dispute. Stanton was wearing a vintage leather jacket with yellow racing stripes on the sleeves and silver zippers everywhere, and ripped jeans with patches; as much as it bothered me, it was hard not to notice that he looked good, like he usually did—the tight red T-shirt complimenting his taut abdomen, the jacket making his broad shoulders look even bigger. I turned my mind away. It was strangely cold out for June.

  “You need any clothes?” Stanton asked when we were walking away from the store an hour later.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  He looked me over and fingered the collar of my clearance-sale T-shirt. “Really? I don’t think so.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I need a drink,” Stanton said. “I’m thinking sangria.”

  “A little early in the day, isn’t it?”

  He looked at his watch—a silver Timex implanted in a thick leather band. “It’s almost cocktail hour,” Stanton said. “Jesus, when did the casually employed get so soft?”

  “Stanton, I have work,” I said tiredly. “I’m busy.”

  “You don’t have shit to do. You know it and I know it. We need sangria.”

  “I’m going home and you’re not following me this time.”

  “Look, I have to talk to you.” Stanton stopped walking and sudde
nly his face crinkled in an expression that was meant to denote concern but failed. “It’s…about Ethan.”

  I stopped walking, too.

  Stanton glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “I’m worried about him,” he said. “About Ethan.”

  “What about Ethan?”

  We went to Xunta, a tapas bar on Eleventh which had just opened for the evening—Latin music, red Christmas-tree lights intertwined with fishnets hanging from the ceiling—and we were the only ones in the place. We sat at the bar, where the first carafe of sangria went straight to my head and I was so starving that I started pounding the empty jam jar against my mouth to dislodge the orange and lemon sections from the bottom of the glass. Stanton ordered calamari and blood sausage, but the plates were so small that the food didn’t do anything to kill my hunger or soak up the carafes of jug wine and rum, and meanwhile the smell of the sausages bubbling with juice was only making me nauseated.

  I was waiting for Stanton to tell me why he was so concerned about Ethan (the only reason I was sitting with him in Xunta) but I was soon darkly drunk and starting to spin. Instead of Ethan, the first carafe revolved around Stanton’s new one-man show entitled Stanton’s Revenge, and I just stared at him, slack-jawed, while he went on and on about this long monologue he had written and wanted to perform off-Broadway, and how it would start with Stanton being cut from the football team back in Clarksdale, and it would ascend through the trials of his acting career before peaking with his first sexual experience with a man. The ending would be his debut as a serious up-and-coming designer on the New York scene, and the fame that followed.