The Expatriates (15 page)

“T
HAT
WASN
’
T
FLYING
. That was falling with style.”

The phrase is knocking around her head, surfacing at odd moments in the day: when she’s making her bed in the morning, waiting in line for a coffee. It’s a line from
Toy Story
, the movie, when Woody is denigrating Buzz Lightyear. She caught it on a lazy Sunday at home a week ago.

She doesn’t know why that phrase keeps coming up, but it has some resonance. Because she’s feeling kind of good. She feels good, and she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is she flying, or is she falling?

David comes by once or twice a week, on weekends, when he’s off work and has some time. She doesn’t think there’s anyone else. He seems to work an awful lot, and when he does go out, it seems to be with colleagues and mostly men.

He’ll text, the buzzer will ring, and she’ll let him up. He comes with a bottle of wine, and they’ll spend time at her place before going out and walking along Hollywood Road until they get to a restaurant. They’ll sit and have a meal, the two of them, looking out at the passersby.

And when they do, she can’t help it, she thinks: Everyone out there thinks I’m normal. They think we’re a couple. They think that this is all mine. It is thrilling and dangerous, and she allows herself to think it in small doses of outrageous happiness.

She wonders if she was just the girl in the bar, the girl to start the
ball rolling. If she could have been just any girl. She knows enough—barely—not to ask, but it is consuming her a little bit, as it would. She wants this to work, doesn’t want to self-sabotage, but she is who she is, right? Who would she be, what would the world be, if Mercy Cho didn’t screw things up by saying and doing the wrong thing?

If some other girl had been sitting there, in the lobby lounge of the Conrad hotel, on that December Thursday, would she be sitting here with David now?

But there is this now, this little window, where things are suspended in a magical way, where she is not the mess that everyone thinks she is and she has a life and a boyfriend. And when she’s with him, she’s okay! She’s funny and charming and not a nightmare. She feels as if she is juggling all of this, her new selves, and waiting for it all to fall apart.

“How are you supporting yourself?” he asks tonight as they’re finishing off a piece of mud pie. She is magically able to eat again, not feeding the emptiness inside her by fasting. She must have gained five pounds already. This morning, she had a cheeseburger for breakfast.

“I get jobs here and there,” she says. “I do a lot of different things.”

“Do you need any money?” he asks. It is so unexpectedly kind her eyes fill with tears. It has been so long since anyone has cared enough about her to ask something like this, and to have an older, mature person consider what she might need, as opposed to her throng of twenty-something self-absorbed friends, is disconcerting and an awful kind of pleasure.

He is living at a fancy furnished apartment in a hotel, where you can rent by the month. She hasn’t been invited over yet—a fact that seems to get larger and larger in her mind every time they see each other. It’s as if they exist inside a bubble, and she is afraid to pop the bubble, so she treads lightly.

Tonight they finish another bottle of wine, on top of the one they had at her place, and are feeling drunk and sedated. They drink wine, not cocktails, and so the way she’s drunk has changed, for the better.
No longer are there large segments of the evening that are blank, where she remembers only flashes of frenetic laughing, screaming, running; now it’s a smooth, continuous slip into a shifted reality, rather enjoyable and very grown-up.

So she never asks about his wife. She never asks about other women. She never talks about anything she thinks will break the bubble. Inside this bubble, everything is okay. Inside this bubble, she is a whole person. And for right now, that’s enough.

W
ELL
-
MEANING
WOMEN
throng the room. They are in yet another hotel function room learning about and supporting yet another good cause. Building schools in Cambodia, supporting the Philharmonic, recycling food from local restaurants to feed the hungry. A school mom whose daughter is friends with Daisy bought a table, and, having refused her last three invitations, Margaret thought she couldn’t refuse again. Taking a shower, putting on makeup, finding high heels, she thought, Here I am, going out into the world. She took a breath before entering the loud, echoey ballroom. But you have to start somewhere.

When she first arrived in Hong Kong, she went through that rite of tribe forming, the social ritual she hadn’t engaged in since high school or college. It was different from moving to a place where everyone already knew one another and you were the new person. It was more like college, because expats were always arriving and leaving in waves. A new crop, a new class—you met one another at coffees and gym classes and school meetings, and you sized one another up. The signifiers were so important: Are you wearing Dansko clogs or Jimmy Choo mules, are you a salon blonde or do you leave your hair in a ponytail, do you live in jeans or gym clothes or are you always in a suit? Do you want to talk about nannies or Rwanda? For the Chinese women, it was, Are you local, mainland, Taiwanese, or first-generation ABC? For the Americans, it was, Are you East Coast, West Coast, city, suburb, boonies? Are you finance, corporate, small business, or artist? Are you a teacher, or are you an entrepreneur? Do
you belong to the Country Club, the American Club, the Cricket? Are you an expat without a club? Against clubs? People found their own kind and broke off into their own communities.

During a long reception hour, in which she hangs back against a wall and wonders why she arrives so accursedly promptly to everything and why she didn’t come when the lunch was starting instead of the reception—she is rusty at gaming these things—she watches all the chattering women gesturing with one hand and sipping sparkling water with the other. Finally a waiter comes through the room ringing a bell, indicating that they should go in. Margaret finds her way to her table, where she is seated next to Mindy, who is such a Mindy that Margaret wonders at the power of a name. Mindy has just arrived from North Carolina, where her husband worked at a furniture company. Now all the manufacturing has gone to China, and he has come to oversee production.

“It was that or find another job. His whole family has worked at the same company for generations. Of course, he’s in China all the time,” she says. “Chaana” is how she says it, with her gentle southern twang. “A lot of the time he spends five days there and is only back on the weekend. He oversees the factory to make sure they’re doing things right and there are no child-labor issues.” She says this with the wonder of a blond girl who has spent her entire life in the same one hundred square miles of North Carolina and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the world, with a Filipina housekeeper and shops on the street that sell vats of furry, dried deer penises.

“It’s hard,” Margaret says. “The thing is that everyone here is in the same boat, so the women become one another’s family.”

“You know what I miss? Good iced coffee!” Mindy confides. “The coffee here is terrible. Even the Starbucks tastes totally different.”

“It’s the water, plus the milk is not as good here,” Margaret says. “You know what I miss most? I miss Target. And how crazy is it that it’s all made in China, shipped to the United States, we buy it and bring it back? That carbon footprint is insane!” Mindy’s eyes light up.
This exchange, this expat back-and-forth, so familiar to Margaret, is not unsoothing to her. She’s done it so often that she’s on autopilot.

Mindy smiles at her, relieved to find someone saying all the things she needs to hear, and Margaret wonders how to signal that they are going to share this time at lunch and have a perfectly pleasant encounter but that this is not going to go beyond that. Margaret wants to say, I look like someone you might be friends with, but I’m not. There’s a hole inside me, and I can’t fill it with other people, although I wish I could. Newcomers all radiate the same desperation: to make friends, put down tenuous roots, survive in this new environment. She doesn’t worry about Mindy, though; there are plenty of people for her to be friends with. She knows she will see her in a few months with three other friends, in their Lululemons, doing a boot camp class on the beach, or having lunch at Zuma, all of them with their 1.6 kids at home and possibly a dog. Mindy will at some point put two and two together and realize that the woman she was talking to at that lunch in the first year of her arrival was
that
woman, the woman who lost the child, and whenever they run into each other, at the supermarket or the American Club or the Mandarin Hotel, her expression will assume the same semiapologetic, stricken, sympathetic look that Margaret gets from every other woman.

She looks around the table during a pause in the conversation with Mindy. Every woman there is well exercised, watches her diet, has two or three children, a husband. They all have shiny hair, and they are all wearing sheaths and daytime dresses perfect for the occasion. No one is breaking the rules of the ladies’ luncheon. They radiate well-being and privilege, and yet she is among them, so who is to say what’s behind any woman’s smiling face? She butters a roll and eats it.

On her other side, a woman introduces herself. “I’ve seen you at school,” she says. “You are Daisy’s mother, right?”

“Yes,” she replies.

“I’m Courtney’s mom.”

“I’ve heard of Courtney.” She smiles. She has heard not great things.

“Yes, I hear about Daisy as well.”

“What is your name?” Margaret asks.

“I’m Diana Robinson,” she says. She has a brittle smile, which she breaks out now. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” she continues.

“Oh?” Margaret says.

“I’m not sure if this is the right occasion to talk. Do you think we could have coffee later?”

In another life, Margaret would have acquiesced, but she’s no longer apologetic for not making herself available to others.

“I have to leave immediately after lunch, so I’m afraid I can’t. Don’t you think we can speak now?”

Diana leans over. Margaret can tell she is enjoying this a little bit. “It’s about our daughters. Courtney has told me some disturbing things.” She pauses.

“Yes?” Margaret says. She has no patience for the drama of the middle school mother.

“Apparently Daisy has been going on websites that are inappropriate.”

This does shock Margaret, although she tries not to let it show. “What sort of websites?”

“It’s nothing crazy, just she seems to be preoccupied with different kinds of problems. Like she’s shown Courtney pro-anorexia websites, cutting, stuff like that.” She stops. “Also, child-loss websites.”

Margaret’s sudden fury surprises even her with its intensity. “What?” she says, so loudly that everyone at the table stops their conversation and swivels their head toward her.

Diana nods her head. “It’s not
pornography
or anything”—she whispers the offensive word—“but it’s odd, and I think you should have someone talk to her. That is, if you don’t have someone already.”

“So let me get this straight,” Margaret says, feeling as if her head might explode from the restraint she has to show, trying to keep her voice from rising. “So you are telling me that my daughter is exploring
the Internet, about issues that lots of girls face, and that she is somehow corrupting your daughter? It seems rather harmless to me. Unless you’d like to explain to me how it’s not.”

Diana backtracks immediately, having misjudged so disastrously. Perhaps she thought that Margaret would be grateful, that she would thank her for watching out so vigilantly for her child. That they would become best friends, that she would have the famous tragedy victim by her side and they could navigate the tricky world of motherhood together.

“I think that every mother would want to know what her daughter is up to on the computer. I mean, we can’t be too careful these days,” she says, looking around the table for support. “Sometimes you have to stop things before they get out of control.”

Ginny, the woman who sponsored the table, looks aghast at the drama that is transfixing the rest of the group. Margaret takes a deep breath. She is not going to lose it today, on this woman, at this table.

“I think you’re overreacting,” she says simply. “Oh, look. The video is starting.”

Margaret turns deliberately around so that she can watch the screen. As the video starts, she steams. She knows this woman, this kind of woman. She thrives on her children’s social lives, the drama, as if she is living it herself. She doesn’t separate her life from her children’s, living through them, like some sick parasite with no life of its own.

But slowly she starts to watch the video instead, coming out of her head. It is the usual charity video fare, with images of children set to a sentimental song. There are two songs that are particularly popular and, she supposes, appropriate for these types of films. It grates to hear the same melody designed to elicit tears over and over again. Still, the videos always affect Margaret, and most women at these gatherings, as they’re supposed to, until they open their checkbooks and assuage the guilt of having their own well-fed, lovingly cared for children at home. The charity is about providing art access to children in low-income
housing in Hong Kong, and their bright smiles, their bright eyes, set to a crooning ballad, bring tears to Margaret’s eyes. It’s like crying to a Barry Manilow song.

The head of the charity, a Chinese socialite with an indecipherable pan-European accent, gives a speech. Afterward they are given time to eat the main course. Margaret gets up to go to the bathroom and runs into Frannie Peck, putting on lipstick. She hasn’t seen her since Phuket.

“How are you?” she asks, kissing her on the cheek.

“Good. Enjoying yourself?”

Margaret shrugs. “It’s a good cause.”

Frannie winks. “I know. These things give me hives as well.”

Margaret is reminded of the time she saw Frannie crying behind the wheel of the car. People surprise you all the time.

“How do we escape?” she asks, grinning.

“God, I don’t know. I’m here with Winnie Leong, whose husband works with mine. Who are you here with?”

“Ginny McGrady.”

Hilary comes into the bathroom.

“Hilary!” Margaret says. “I haven’t seen you in months! Thanks so much for that great dinner before the break. How was your holiday? Sorry we didn’t see you in Bangkok, but it got so complicated.”

Hilary looks uncomfortable. “Okay,” she says. She looks at Frannie, still fixing her face at the mirror. “Oh, you might as well know,” she says in a low voice. “David’s having a midlife crisis, and he seems to have left me.”

“What?” Margaret says, shocked. “What are you talking about? We just had dinner all together!”

Frannie leaves unobtrusively.

“Sit down,” Margaret says, and pulls up a stool.

“Oh, I’m fine.” Hilary reconsiders her words. “Well, not fine, but I’m surviving. I breathe, and I put one foot in front of the other.”

“I’m shocked,” Margaret says. “Did you have any inkling?”

“No. It was right after the dinner, actually. He went out and . . . never came back.” Hilary laughs, a short, regretful bark.

“Really?” Margaret can’t believe that David Starr is capable of something that requires such emotional range. “It’s really uncharacteristic, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Hilary says. “But the older I get, the more I think that people are just unknowable, you know? And life is just full of, I don’t know, surprises? Shit?”

“I know,” Margaret says.

“Of course you know,” Hilary says. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s enough shit to go around,” Margaret says, and she laughs. Hilary laughs too, and they sit in the little velvet sitting room of the hotel bathroom in a companionable silence until someone comes in and breaks the spell, and they get up and shake themselves off.

They go out, and the lunch is a little more bearable, and Margaret can make it through until the serving of the dessert, at which time it is deemed socially acceptable to get up, thank your hostess, and leave.

It’s the first time she has gone out socially in ages, ever since they got back from vacation three months ago.

When they got home from the break in January, they entered a cold and quiet house. Essie had gone home to the Philippines for home leave and was not due back for several days.

The children disappeared upstairs, and Clarke went up to take a shower as she opened the suitcases and put the dirty clothes in piles in the kitchen. She started a load, hearing the rhythmic lull of the washing machine, inhaling the scent of too-sweet detergent, pleasantly alone in the room.

She was thirsty, dehydrated from the flight. In the cupboard, there were two glasses that a wealthy, impractical family friend had given to her and Clarke as a wedding present more than a decade ago. Fabulously expensive, they were paper-thin crystal highball glasses that shattered at a sideways glance. They started out with twelve, and after more
than ten years of living and moving and children, two remained. She got one, filled it with cold Pellegrino from the fridge, and gulped down the cool, refreshing, salty bubbles. Bubbly water, an acquired adult taste, she thought.

Suddenly the relief she had let herself feel only in small dribbles came crashing in. Her tension, her worry, her relief, and still, of course, her sadness, made her unable to stand, and she made her way to the table, supporting herself with the hand that was not holding her water. She collapsed onto a chair, letting herself feel the immensity of what she had avoided on the vacation. She had avoided something that would have destroyed her as surely as if she had stood in front of a bus. How could she live, knowing that one more thing would have sent her sailing straight over the edge? One fragile child, two fragile children, three . . . The infinite variety of things that can go wrong with one life, multiplied by five.