The Expatriates (18 page)

H
ILARY
IS
LIVING
her life more and more online. With the message boards, Facebook, and e-mails, she doesn’t need to go out for social interaction. And if she needs anything physical, she sends Puri and Sam out to get it, often with photos printed from the Internet of the exact kind of coffee or the brand of bread she wants, so they don’t bring back the wrong thing. She pores over adoption boards, infertility boards, expat boards; it is as if she wants to hear advice only from people she has never met and knows nothing about. Maybe she will migrate her life to a virtual world, where she will exist only as finger taps on a keyboard, a ghostly being made up of pithy comments and occasional snapshots. Anyway, she only really ever goes out to see Olivia now. Without work, without a husband, she has faded into the background. She never realized how much of her life was lived through David, through being married and being a couple. When she thinks of whom she would want to see, she cannot think of anyone, save Olivia. And apparently no one is very interested in seeing her either, as her phone remains silent and her e-mail inbox fills up only with sale notifications and reminders of club dinners.

She has heard of people being dropped after divorce or separation, but it’s still surprising to her. It’s not as if she thought she had so many friends, but it is shocking to realize that the world she thought she had constructed around her was so tenuous. Perhaps it’s because she doesn’t have children. She’s seen the close bonds that women with children form with one another, and that’s something she’s been shut out of completely. What is left? she wonders. Family. Is that it? And hers is so
small. Her mother calls her dependably, in between taking care of her father, who descends ever further into dementia. And also, she’s been thinking about what a husband is. David used to be family, but now he’s the enemy. She understands now the thin line between love and hate. Casual bonds are flexible, can be attenuated without destruction. Not so the fierce close ones.

When she got on Facebook for the first time, she was struck by how these hordes of middle-aged people had taken on this medium that seemed to be for the young, and made it their own. They posted photos of their thickening, graying selves with self-deprecating comments, boasted about their work achievements, introduced babies and grandbabies, corralled people to reunions. Scrolling through her two hundred friends, she is amazed by the affection she feels for all these people who represent so many different times in her life.

Is this a sign that you’ve given up? When you spend all your time thinking of the past? She’s made the mistake of contacting people after going through their photo albums and feeling a brief, unreal intimacy. She writes inappropriately close things like “Remember in high school when we skipped science third period and went to Union Square?” and she gets back a puzzled, reserved response like “Hilary Krall, I haven’t seen you in so long. You look great.” And she deletes the entire exchange out of embarrassment, because, of course, they hadn’t spent hours remembering shared time and feeling close and they probably think . . . what do they think? The truth, most likely. That she’s in a bad relationship and in a bad place and looking for something, anything, that might get her out. People post pictures of their best times, but it’s not so hard to see past the smiling faces.

Funny how people really don’t change that much. She sees one woman who was always quirky and alone, even in high school. A misfit, to use an unkind high school word. This woman’s loneliness and her growing madness are so palpable it’s uncomfortable. It’s all there in her page full of unanswered questions to friends and family, reminiscences of past injustices, unfocused shots of her pet birds, her
disheveled bedroom. Hilary clicks through a photo album, tries to compile an acceptable life for this woman, cannot.

How is it that life is so fragile? It’s not just life itself, and mortality; it’s more how a perfectly conventional-seeming life can collapse in a few short weeks. Several months ago, Hilary felt she was leading a normal life, and while she isn’t really mourning the loss of what was, after all, an imperfect life, there is still grief for the person she once thought she was. She feels vulnerable, a newborn trying to fashion a new life in the wake of all that has happened. She is moving toward the future but uncertainly, and without grace, she feels.

A moth blunders onto her screen.

She freezes.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” she screams, so loudly she surprises herself. It feels good. “MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKER!”

She remembers that Puri has gone out, to “market,” as she likes to say, using the word as a verb. Hilary is alone at home. She can scream as loudly and as long as she wants.

She screams it one more time, slamming down her laptop on the beastly, wormlike insect, smushing it between the screen and the keyboard. Then she puts her head down on her arms and starts to cry, big, gulping sobs that shake her body and wrench her lungs, wet the desk beneath her elbows. Has she cried before this? Of course, she hasn’t. It was a point of pride between her and her mother over Christmas break in Bangkok. Their family didn’t show feelings like that. They were stoics, proud in their impassivity.

She sobs on. Has something been taken from her? She doesn’t know. Was it a life she wanted? Did she want the husband, the child? Or was it something she had just been programmed to think?

Something showy about crying like this, alone. She starts to feel foolish, crying so loudly, and tries to stop. She succeeds, sits on her chair, feeling the stillness, feeling her body heave up and down as her breath regulates.

Julian.

She wants to see Julian. She is a better person when she’s with him. She’s thinking of others. He gets her out of herself. Julian.

She opens the computer, wipes off the remains of the moth with a tissue. Then she clicks her way back to the thread about her and Julian and begins to write. HappyGal to the defense.

B
EING
WITH
HER MOTHER
makes her thirteen all over again. But her mother has changed too. Their relationship keeps teetering and swinging back and forth, unsteady, reshaping itself with every awkward exchange.

This is not a normal visit. Her mother has not left the United States for at least twenty years. Mercy thinks she probably had to get a passport to come here. So some planning happened.

Her mother has left her father, it seems. Something about gambling debts, and the theft of her nest egg, her
gae-don
, the Korean women’s tradition of lending money to one another at monthly meetings, and also something, muttered darkly, about other women.

What a mess. This is what she comes from.

That first afternoon, when she gets out of the taxi, her mother asks where she has been. But that is just one small blip of maternal concern, a flare struck and gone, it seems, forever. If it’s possible, her mother seems even more lost than she is.

They go up together in the tiny, rickety elevator with her mother’s suitcase.

“This is where you live,” her mother says in Korean, standing uncomfortably close to Mercy, because the suitcase is taking up half the elevator.

“I know, it’s not nice,” she says.

“When we immigrated to Queens, our apartment was very small, and we didn’t have our own bathroom,” her mother says. The elevator doors open, and she leads her mother down the tiny, narrow
hallway lit by fluorescent lights. She takes out her keys and unlocks the door.

“Ta-da,” she says as she swings it open to her studio, her messy bed, with clothes strewn all over it—remnants of her rejected dressing choices before meeting David this morning.

“Very small,” her mother says without emotion.

“Only one bed,” she points out.

“It is big enough. We can share,” her mother says, with finality.

Over coffee later, after her mother has showered and changed and they have made their way to a little café down the street, Mercy asks, tentatively, how long she is here for.

“I don’t know,” her mother says. “Things are strange at home.”

She sips at her plain coffee. She never ordered latte or cappuccino, or the fancy drinks.

“I flew through Seoul,” she says. “On Korean Air. Incheon Airport is so modern!”

“I know,” Mercy says. “It makes JFK look third world.”

“Things have changed so much in Asia,” her mother says. “I wonder what it would be like if we had stayed in Korea. Before, America used to be the best place, but now I think it is not so good.”

“I miss America,” Mercy says. And she realizes it is true. That there is no reason for her to be here in Hong Kong, with her married lover—Can he even be termed a lover? The implied constancy is not there—and a baby, or, rather, an embryo and all the messiness in her life. But she can’t go back now.

“I bought the ticket through Mrs. Choi at church,” her mother says, putting down her cup. “And she says I can set the return date whenever I want. It is very flexible. And I can stop in Seoul on the way back. But I wanted to rush to see you. You are never home, and you never return my phone calls.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Mercy says.

“So, do you have a job?” her mother asks.

Mercy’s silence is her answer. Her mother rips off a piece of the
almond croissant they are sharing—powdered sugar is sprinkled on her chin. How disappointing for her mother, she thinks, to have a daughter like her, but how used to it she must be. Just as Mercy is used to men being disappointing, having had her father as a model. She and her mother—they are lost in these patterns, unable to kick out into another, freer, better life.

“Hong Kong is very expensive, isn’t it?” her mother asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“I’m staying for some time,” says her mother, “so I help you with the rent.”

When Mercy went to college, she met not only those wealthy aliens; she also met other Korean Americans from different parts of the country. She understood the Queens Koreans, how most of them came from struggling families, dry cleaners and deli owners and ministers, but there was a whole other breed, like the Korean American kids from Beverly Hills or Bloomfield Hills, or the wealthier suburbs of Long Island. Their parents were doctors or real estate developers or just businessmen more successful than her dad. It wasn’t the wealth that bothered her, though; it was the fact that their parents seemed so normal, and they assumed that other Koreans were just like them. They complained about overbearing mothers, fathers who were disappointed that they hadn’t gone to Harvard, grandmothers who were a pain. It was this assumption that her family was like theirs, that her parents were together, a team, and that they had the time or the inclination to care about where Mercy went to school or how she led her life.

It wasn’t that her mother didn’t love her but that she didn’t know how to help her, being in a terrible relationship herself.

“Do you think I can get a job here?” her mother asks.

She feels a panic open up inside her. The world she has so carefully been trying to hold together, the fragile bubble, seems on the verge of collapsing.

“I don’t—” she begins, but someone is tapping her shoulder.

“Hey,” says a young man behind her.

She twists around, looks at his face, trying to place him.

“Charlie,” he says. “From Columbia. We saw each other a while back at the Conrad?”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “Great to see you.” The day she met David.

He looks expectantly at her and then her mother.

“Oh, this is my mom,” she says. As they shake hands and exchange pleasantries, she gets the feeling she often does, where she floats away, above herself, and observes the scene. She feels a deep pleasure at the fact that this scenario, this snapshot, is so normal. Here is a girl who lives in Hong Kong, whose mother is visiting, who is introducing her mother to another acquaintance, an old college friend she has run into. She sees it happening all over town, all the time, and always feels on the outside, like that will never be her, and all of a sudden, here it is, happening, although everything on the inside is so very different. She’s so different, and marked, but this instant makes her feel normal. In a sudden moment of insight, she wonders if everyone feels this way.

“Maybe I’ll see you around,” Charlie says. But he lingers.

Her mother sees the look on his face and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. After all, this is a boy/man with a suit and a briefcase. A man with a job.

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asks suddenly.

“Oh,” she says. “Um, well, my mom just got here, and that was a bit of a surprise, so I have no idea.”

“There’s this party at my friend’s house,” he starts.

“Oh, yeah?”

“A bunch of kids from Yale are throwing it, but they’re pretty cool.” She has almost forgotten that this is how people her age talk, having sequestered herself for so long.

“Great,” she says.

“Wanna go?”

A party for twenty-somethings. This is what she should be doing. Not hiding out from having been implicated in a hideous crime and
getting impregnated by a detached married man. She feels the gap sharply, suddenly. Maybe this is why she says yes. Maybe this is why she gives Charlie her e-mail address and phone number. He walks away smiling, and she remains, feeling that she has duped him and it is all going to come crashing down. Her mother comes back, smiling, saying that he looked like a nice boy. “Chinese men,” she says, “are better than Korean men. They treat their women well.” And Mercy is back to where she started, feeling like a fraud, that she is the architect of her own awful destiny.

But it’s as if fate helps her to make bad decisions. Because her mother is here, it is easy (and truthful) to tell David that she can’t see him for a bit. After the news, he clearly needs a bit of a break as well.

“She didn’t come because . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.

“No,” she says. “She has no idea. Just a coincidence.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Buzz me when she leaves.”

And she hangs up and suddenly feels, can it be? Free. She feels a bit freer. She’s burst from one situation into another.

So then she’s free to go to this party with Charlie, which delights her mother, because even with her track record, she is still Korean enough to think that a man can save a woman. Especially someone with Mercy’s destiny, who needs so much saving.

So Charlie wants to pick her up, which is really nice, but her mom is staying with her, so she meets him downstairs in the lobby at nine.

“You look nice,” he says.

“Thanks,” she says. “So do you.”

“Do you want to get something to eat before we go?”

So they go to a bistro nearby and get a table outside, because the night is not too cool, and start with cocktails. The chairs are tippy, and the table’s marble top is stained with red wine. She’s been here before, with David, and feels awkward, but none of the waiters recognize her, and she begins to relax.

She thinks just for a minute if, if, she should drink, but this baby,
this tiny accumulation of cells inside her, is so minuscule and so easily ignored, such a thought and nothing else, that after the first sip of Tanqueray and tonic, she manages to forget about the whole thing entirely.

From then on, it’s a typical twenty-something date. Lots of cocktails to get loose and happy, a big meal, he pays, no awkwardness, and they get into a cab at eleven and go to the party, which is at some guy’s parents’ place, which means it’s an enormous apartment with lots of rooms with pictures of the absent parents, who have gone to Colombo for the weekend. There is a strobe light strung up and a rooftop where people are dancing with lit cigarettes in one hand and beer bottles in the other. Lots of her friends are there, and they scream with happy drunkenness to see her.

“Haven’t seen you in
sooooo
long,” they say, and hug, giddy with alcohol. They are so drunk they forget to ask how she is, which she likes very much.

After this happens for the fourth time, Charlie pulls her aside. He doesn’t know her situation. “You’re popular,” he says, his face flushed and happy.

“You’re handsome,” she says.

And then they kiss.

The night flashes by, in corners of rooms with beds with multiple couples making out, staggering to bathrooms to fall on the toilets, spilling vodka as she pours some more. When she looks at a clock, it says 1:00 a.m., then it says 3:00, and they’re at another club, Charlie by her side.

“Where were you?” she tries to ask.

“I’m here,” he says. But he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. She’s saying, “Where were you before all this other stuff happened, where were you when you could have saved me?”

But then she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, she’s in his apartment, and it’s ten in the morning.

Luckily, her clothes are all still on. And his are too. He lies, disheveled, snoring lightly.

She gets up and almost throws up. There was a
shawarma
pit stop at some point last night, and the garlicky meat stink in her mouth is nauseating. She goes to the bathroom and finds some mouthwash. Gargles. She looks at herself in the mirror, mottled pale skin, sunken eyes, greasy hair. The bathroom is small and humid and messy, a boy’s bathroom, with hairs stuck to the shower wall and mold in the grout. She sits down on the toilet and pees. It smells sweet, like fermented juice, residue of all the alcohol.

Bad decisions.

She wipes and gets up to look at herself in the bathroom mirror while she’s washing her hands. Poor, pregnant, hungover Mercy.

So many bad decisions.