The Expatriates (16 page)

I
N
THE
SPRING
, the odors come. The outdoor tiles are wet in the morning with accumulated moisture, and when you sniff, there is a sharp, moldy tinge to the air. It means the heat is coming. The early hours are cool and wet; the sun burns through by midday, and you can practically see the steam rising from the sidewalks. And through it all, a pungent, damp smell of rich, rotting soil, the plants growing at a furious rate, the insects
crick
ing and mating loudly, the very atoms in the air whizzing about, suffused with new heat energy after being dormant all winter.

Hilary had thought she had spring down to a science. On a certain day in March or April, she would sniff the air, feel the towels in the bathroom, then say the words: “Spring prep.” Puri would know to bring out the dehumidifier units, pack the woolens in crinkly tissue and cedar, and switch the HVAC units to cool, a procedure that takes all day and is not easily reversible. The assault against the elements begins.

But this year, there are moths—dozens, maybe hundreds of them, a new and disturbing development that Hilary has never experienced before. “They might as well be locusts,” she tells Olivia over the phone. “That would just make this year perfect. My annus horribilis.”

The first one rolls out of one of her sweaters as she is pulling it out on an unseasonably cool day, causing her to shriek loudly, although no one else is in the room with her. It is large and very much dead, with a body that is fat and inelegant, so unlike a butterfly's. She panics. So much cashmere, so much wool at stake! But as she pulls them out,
Puri's meticulous work undone in a matter of minutes, her sweaters are, oddly, unscathed. It reminds her of that scene in
The Great Gatsby
where Daisy is covered in Jay's shirts and she starts weeping because they are so beautiful. Instead, Hilary sits in her humidity-controlled walk-in closet, surrounded by expensive knits, and wishes she felt like crying instead of the constant dry pricking behind her eyeballs that feels like torture.

Soon she grows used to the moths, or as used to them as she ever will. They just blunder around, blind in their mindless fecundity, reproducing like mad, feeding on what, she doesn't know. She finds them on the carpets, in the bathrooms, in the kitchen cupboards. Puri sweeps them up without emotion and deposits them in the trash can in the kitchen, so when Hilary goes to throw away her used coffee filter or an empty carton of juice, she steps on the pedal and is given a small heart attack when the lid opens and she sees the layer of dead insects on the bottom.

She has, of course, called the exterminators, but unless she is willing to move out for a week, all they can do is recommend mothballs and giant planks of cedar, which she buys from them in great quantities, and now her house smells like a chemical factory and she has a headache when she wakes up every morning.

This is the salient fact: She is alone. She is alone in a king-size bed in an enormous house, with no husband and no children and, instead, a domestic helper and a driver.

David is still off on what she likes to think of as his petit midlife crisis, although there's nothing petit about it. It's been more than three months. Why she thinks of it as petit or grand mal, with the attendant link to seizures, she doesn't know, but whenever it balloons up in her consciousness, which it does actually less and less frequently these days, it comes in those words, sometimes italicized:
petit midlife crisis
. Will it evolve into
grand mal
? Will this be permanent, will their lives be forever changed? Would she be willing to take him back?

More important, does she get to have her own midlife crisis? she
wonders. When does she get to go completely off the rails? But the thing is, he's beaten her to the punch. If she does it now, who will be the one left behind, to witness, to suffer? There's no one—a tree falling in the woods with no sound. For this, for making it impossible for her to do what he has done, she hates him.

And yet, all this has brought David into sharp relief, made him into a real person, full of jagged edges and surprises. She had thought of him as someone or, if she's honest, something, a husband, who would always be there, and the fact that he has changed what she had thought of as an immutable fact brings her, sometimes, an ineffable, odd and painful pleasure. Good for you, she thinks, before it cuts into her again, the knowledge that her life is changed in some irreversible way. You were the brave one, she thinks, the one to make the bold, life-changing move. You rejected the life we had, the tepid approximation of happiness. You thought you deserved more. You did something. She is envious of that.

Her mother was a surprise. She took the news with aplomb, did exactly the right things. She didn't try to comfort her with anodyne words or hug her or tell her everything would be all right. Instead, she moved forward with a brisk practicality that was perfect.

They went ahead to Bangkok, without David, and they decided to share a room and upgrade to the Joseph Conrad Suite in the old wing of the Oriental. They had stiff drinks by the Chao Phraya River, watching the fat catfish surface, looking for bread crumbs. They meandered through Chatuchak Market and bought rattan baskets and brass tableware, fingered dusty ruby beads, and otherwise pretended that life was normal. Hilary managed to breathe through it, survive the trip, and come back to a cold, empty house. Her mother left the day after they returned to Hong Kong, although she had offered to stay longer. Hilary knows that leaving her father for long periods of time makes her mother nervous. She pities her mother now, having to take care of her husband, worry about her daughter, worry about the fact that she might never have grandchildren.

Her mother asked, gingerly. She usually never did, but one late night, as they nursed coffees after Thai food, she asked how that all was going.

“I mean, I know, now, it might be different. But what was the status before all this nonsense?”

Hilary had thought that trying to have children would kill her, but this new wound, on top of the old one, was so painful she squinted as she tried to explain to her mother.

“We have been trying, and also, you know, with Julian, who you know about.”

“You have to do right by Julian,” her mother said. “But the situation is obviously different now.” She was never a supporter of the entire exercise to begin with, and now it lay in tatters. When Hilary asked if she wanted to meet Julian, she shook her head. “Only when you decide everything.”

“I know.” Hilary didn't know how she was going to begin to explain it to Julian and the administrators. Obviously, she wouldn't, for a while, and he would continue coming.

“You still don't want to do fertility?” her mom asked. “You know, just if you want to have a baby, regardless of what happens with David. Melissa Bissinger's daughter has these beautiful twin girls, and we know the doctor in San Francisco.”

“No,” Hilary said. “I don't know why I don't, didn't, want to. I just feel like it should happen on its own.”

Her mother looked askance at her. “And it didn't.” A pause. “And it's not.” They both don't know which tense to use.

“I know.”

“And you're thirty-eight now.”

“I know.”

Her mother stirred her coffee.

“It's funny, you know, Hilary. Life happens, and sometimes it happens so slowly that you have the time to get used to it. That's the mercy of it. You may wake up one day and be older and be fine with
not having children. There's no reason why you absolutely have to have them.”

“Thank you, Mother,” she said, with no inflection, although she had not meant to sound ungrateful. It was so hard to speak when you didn't know what you were trying to convey, let alone what you were feeling.

“You were and are one of the great joys of my life,” her mother said.

Hilary flushed. In the annals of her reserved family, this was tantamount to her mother throwing off her clothes and shouting her love for her child on the streets.

“Thank you, Mother,” she said again.

And that was how that holiday went.

She has been seeing more and more of Julian, going to visit him as much as she can. She is lucky. The woman in charge of his group home is kind, wishes for him to be adopted, so turns the other way when Hilary shows up again and again. Hilary knows not to push it too much, but she is growing attached, longing to see his face, hear his accented English. Sometimes she goes like a stalker just to watch him get off the bus, carouse with his friends in Cantonese. Boys are like puppies, she realizes, climbing on one another, poking, scrambling around one another.

He is here today, and after his lesson, she asks him if he'd like to go out for ice cream, even though it's a cold spring day. They get in the car, and she tells Sam to go to Times Square, the vast mall in Causeway Bay. There's an ice cream shop there.

Once they arrive, and she's walking through, holding Julian's hand, she realizes she's made a mistake.

There is so much stuff. There is so much to look at, so much to buy—all the accouterments of a privileged life. There's a luxury-handbag store with purses that cost a year's pay for Puri; there are sneaker stores with hundreds of styles, electronics shops with phones and iPods and computers. Julian is seven, old enough to covet. He stares, wide-eyed, at all he doesn't have.

They order ice cream. He just wants chocolate, shies away from all the bewildering choices, and has to be pressed to order toppings or to get two flavors. Hilary has seen three-year-olds order complicated mixed concoctions—half bubble gum, half mint chip, with marshmallows and rainbow sprinkles—with the confidence that comes from being loved and cossetted, their desires listened to and often granted. Watching Julian eat his chocolate ice cream with the rainbow sprinkles she insisted on, she feels awful for him. She must, she must, make a decision, even without David.

He is quiet, as always, and she talks to him in a constant, soothing torrent of inanities: “Piano is so great for you, you have such an ear, are you enjoying the ice cream?” He listens, is aware, but doesn't try to respond.

Later, when she drops him off at his group home, he is clutching a bag with a new pair of sneakers, which she is sure will bring her a reprimand from Miss Chiu, the woman in charge, about how she should not buy Julian gifts, that they are confusing to him and unfair to the other children. But this fifty-dollar bribe, this small token, how can she not give this offering up to the universe, if not to absolve her, then to lessen her burden of guilt?

“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.