"david laid a down payment on a house in short hills, new jersey...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: kitchen, a dining room, living room, a porch.  upstairs: two bedrooms and a study with 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.  other items for the house included a $30,000 dinning-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 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.

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.  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 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."

Jeff Hobbs

"The Tourists"