The Expatriates (9 page)

The menu: Three canapés: sesame salmon tartare in phyllo tarts, Peking Duck spring rolls, mini cheese quiches for the vegetarians—vegans had an obligation to declare themselves in advance. Then a chicory salad with roasted garlic and goat cheese tumbles, and the main course: Chilean sea bass with an olive tapenade and mashed turnip, cappellini primavera for the vegetarians. For dessert, warm caramel tart with burnt-sugar ice cream and coffee or tea. A nice Italian pinot grigio and a red cabernet from Australia. Leafing through menus at her desk, she often floats above herself and sees the woman she’s become, eerily similar to her own mother, someone she thought she would never be. She knows that canapés have to be easily eaten in one bite, knows how much and what kind of wine to order for different crowds, has different sets of china and linens to set different moods.

The money has always come from the women in the family. Real estate, so quaint an industry in new-age San Francisco, but all those tech titans needed office space and places to live. It seemed quite natural to have David sign a prenup. “It’s the family custom,” she said at the time, nervous. It was true. Her father had signed one as well. Of course, her father had gone on to make his own fortune in real estate, then technology investments. “You should be so lucky,” her mother said. She had sized up David pretty well when they first met for lunch
at a pier-side restaurant. “He knows how to eat an oyster, at least,” she said after he’d gone to the bathroom. She had always been a snob.

David was as good about her family and the money as he could be expected to be. But it was always there, especially when they talked about buying a house or a car. David was a lawyer and earned a good living, but they lived as well as his boss and had a nicer car. She supplemented their housing allowance to get a bigger place, and they bought a Mercedes, new, in Hong Kong, where cars cost twice as much as they do in the United States.

Hilary doesn’t care about money all that much, but that’s probably because she’s never been without it.

Her mother was once a great beauty, but all of a sudden her face caved in, her body ballooned out, her hair frizzed, as if beauty were an all too temporary gift, perhaps from a witch or a fairy, to be cruelly taken away somewhere between your sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. Or maybe you just stopped caring. Not her mother. Hilary cannot reconcile her mother now with the one in the photos and in her memories. Lissom, shiny waves of mahogany hair, large brown eyes, always in a fitted sheath or silk blouse, immaculately pressed pants with a thin leather belt. Slim, slim, slim. This is the chant she grew up with. Of course. When she sees her mother after a long period, like at the airport—she still picks her up, dutiful daughter that she is—she is always shocked for a moment at the stranger who is waving at her, that stoutish matron who looks wrinkled and untidy, tired from the long flight.

How uncharitable, she knows, but what can you do to suppress your thoughts about your mother? Her mother mentions it sometimes, as she pushes away from the dinner table: “The metabolism goes, you’ll see,” and “I never thought I’d look this way.” Once, when they were standing together in a restaurant bathroom in front of the mirror, her mother said, “When you get older, Hilary, there will come a day when you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror. You will feel like the same sixteen-year-old girl, or twenty-five-year-old, or thirty,
but an old woman is staring back at you.” Hilary was uncomfortable with the confidence, but she nodded and quickly dried her hands.

Her mother comes once or twice a year, usually at Christmas. She is due to arrive in a few days, and they will spend three days in Hong Kong and a week in Bangkok, where her mother loves the Chatuchak Market and the food. Her father is ill, with dementia, and this is the only time her mother leaves him.

If she had a child, maybe she would understand her mother better.

She finishes her drink, goes down to find CK already setting up the ice bucket and the highball and wine glasses. CK is a freelance waiter and bartender, a Chinese man who has found a living working the expatriate dinner party circuit. He has been at her house so often he doesn’t need any direction, just comes in and starts placing the glasses and folding the napkins. She sees him at every third event she is at, at other people’s houses, always in his impeccable white shirt and sporting a steady smile. Once, leaving a party very late, she saw a man waiting at the bus stop and, startled, realized it was CK, in a black tank top and baggy pants. His deference was gone, and he seemed decades younger as he talked in Cantonese on his mobile phone and gesticulated with his other hand. His voice carried over as he talked easily, loudly. Where was the exaggerated bow, the ingratiating smile? Her heart sank as she thought of how he put on his face for his job, but was it really any different from a disgruntled accountant complaining loudly to his wife over dinner, then smiling and making a sycophantic comment to his boss in the elevator the next day? Wasn’t everyone just trying to make a living?

“Hello, CK,” she says. His name was Cheng Kiang or something like that, but of course he told all his Western clients to call him CK. Whatever was easier for them.

“Hello, Mrs. Starr,” he says, smiling.

CK and Puri have a funny relationship. Now they are friends, but they had it out the first few times about whose responsibility it was to clean the glasses. Puri, no fool, said it was his job. He said his job
was outside the kitchen. Now they have come to a compromise: He brings the glasses into the kitchen and puts them neatly in the sink for Puri to wash. Everyone saves face.

The cook and his assistant have arrived and are clearing space on the tiny counter. The kitchens in Hong Kong are small and uninviting, as the mistress of the house is never expected to be in one.

“Hello, do you have everything you need?” Hilary asks. She stumbles over a box of pre-prepped entrees.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Starr?” asks the cook. He is of an indeterminate race—Tibetan? half-Indian? half-Chinese?—but speaks perfect English. He has been here once before, but she doesn’t remember his name.

“Fine, it’s nothing.” She waves him away. She is more deliberate after a drink.

She dials David, gets his voice mail. “Tell me your ETA, please,” she says, and hangs up.

“I’ll have a glass of the white,” she tells CK. He pours with a flourish and hands it to her. She sits down on the couch and crosses her legs, cool in the flurry of activity around her. Another Saturday night. Another dinner party.

She remembers one of the first ones she was invited to in Hong Kong. A woman, unpopular, it later turned out, leaned over to her and said, “Out here, you’re not a real woman unless you have four kids.” She left, back to New Jersey, a year or two after Hilary arrived, but she thought of her sometimes and her casual, unthinking cruelty.

She hears David arrive downstairs and gets up to greet him.

“You look nice,” he says. She looks down at her black dress with filmy chiffon sleeves to cover the upper arms she is sensitive about. “Thank you,” she says.

“Everything set?” he asks. He smells like alcohol, or maybe it’s her.

“It always is,” she says. When did her marriage shift so that the simplest comments come to seem like snipes? She doesn’t remember,
but it has, indisputably, shifted. She remembers Olivia’s face hovering over the glass of hot tea.

“Okay,” he says. “Great. I’m going upstairs to freshen up.”

She looks at the retreating back of her husband as he goes up the stairs, a slim, handsome back in a gray suit. She spirals up, out of her body, so that she is looking down at the house, at the husband and wife, having a dinner party, like paper dolls, or those Sims characters in that computer game that used to be popular. Sometimes she feels so old.

M
ERCY
SITS
in the restaurant, sipping coffee. She had actually had something to do today. She remembered when she got up from bed to fix the salad she had been thinking about. On her computer, a reminder popped up: “Lunch with Sandra Parnells, Conrad hotel.”

Mercy avoids old friends, as they’re too concerned about her, or not concerned enough, and she can’t abide either. But this was a complete stranger, a friend of a friend, who e-mailed her a few days ago as she was new in town—a woman who followed her husband to Hong Kong and is now looking for a job. Pleasant enough, but Mercy watched the woman slowly realize that Mercy is not someone who is going to be helpful or useful or anything. Her face recalibrated; she was waiting for the lunch to end. So Mercy helped her out: She said she had to run, let Sandra pay for the salad Mercy had picked at, and then watched her leave.

Now she is sitting in the hotel lobby restaurant, nursing a coffee, loath to return to her rabbit warren of an apartment. When she does come out and see people, the outside world, it seems unbearably bright for the first fifteen minutes, and then she adjusts and can imagine herself living again. But this is dangerous to do too often, to imagine things changing. Suddenly she recognizes someone from across the room. He is a Chinese boy to whom she never spoke in college. He didn’t run in her crowd, was a bit FOB—fresh off the boat, as the immigrants call one another—but they had a few classes together. Nerdy, but would be handsome if only someone taught him how to dress. She can tell he recognizes her by the way he keeps looking over.

Finally he stops on his way out. He is tall, wears a double-breasted navy suit with a purple tie. Terrible, cheap shoes. He has a backpack. Still nerdy.

“Columbia, right?” His voice still carries a slight Chinese accent.

She nods.

“You had an interesting name. Not the usual Asian name . . .”

“I still have it,” she says. “Mercy. You’re . . .”

“Charlie,” he says. “Charlie Leung. I work here in Hong Kong. You live here now?”

“For a couple years.”

“What do you do?”

She hesitates. He sees it, rescues her. “Sorry, I shouldn’t ask.”

“No, it’s okay,” she says. But then can’t think of what to say.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” he says.

“Yes.” She waits, but he bows a little bow, formal, how odd, and turns to leave.

She has never seen him around in Hong Kong, which means that he must not go to the same places she and her friends do. Maybe more of a local. Hong Kong is so small that if you go out enough, you will run into every expat at some point in the same five restaurants that people frequent. The restaurants change, but the scene never does.

Next table over is a man at lunch with a redheaded woman, a business lunch that has seemingly stretched into something longer and more meaningful.

“I’m in a bit of a pickle,” the woman says cheerfully, sipping her coffee, and Mercy can almost see the man’s face soften, fall in love. It seems so easy, so ubiquitously available: love and happiness. It happens every day. Later she will see the man with his wife, a different woman, and realize, with a sense of relief that is almost palpable, that the world is complicated indeed. That everyone has secrets and despair and romance in them. It makes her feel better.

Another man comes and sits down at the bar and orders a martini. He is in a suit but somehow looks louche. Three thirty now, when all
the responsible work people have long ago gone back to the office and the stragglers are the housewives who have had a second or third glass of wine, the freelancers who have no meetings, nowhere else to be. A man in a suit at the bar at three o’clock is a man to avoid.

He scans the room; his eyes alight on Mercy.

“Hi there,” he says. “Do you want a drink?”

Of course she says yes. Of course she sits down with him. She may not eat, but she drinks. Falling into another bad decision. It feels like coming home.

Men. Men are a disaster for her.

“You are a pig,” she said to one obnoxious man at a bar who had propositioned her in a particularly crude way.

“And you are a chick who loves bacon,” he said back. And she laughed, because she thought it was actually a pretty funny thing to say, and then she spent the night with him, which was a pretty stupid thing to do. She sees him sometimes in Central during the day and ducks her head or goes into a shop to avoid him. He never seems to see her. She doesn’t know if it would be worse if he pretended not to know her or actually didn’t remember her. Or if he tried to be nice.

Another guy once said, nodding toward his beer, “Do you know how to take the head off the foam?”

“No,” she said.

He swirled a finger around his ear and stuck it in the white foam. It dissolved instantly. He grinned.

“Am I supposed to be charmed?” she said. “Impressed?”

“The oil in the earwax makes it go away,” he said.

She got up and left.

But all too often, she didn’t.

Even when she was younger, she always liked the wrong men. In high school, all her crushes turned out to be gay or those boys who were unattainable. The one guy at college she had really, really been into
had lately been in the news for being fired for writing an incredibly misogynistic e-mail, about his colleagues at the New York investment bank where he worked, that had gone viral. All this makes her very uncertain about her judgment.

She doesn’t understand why men seem to treat her as if she doesn’t matter, as if she’s someone to spend a few hours with. All around her, she sees her friends in relationships; boyfriends who call to see what the agenda is for the weekend, who plan trips, who want to get married. She meets the guy at the bar who wants to have sex for a few weeks.

And so, today, she sits down with David and proceeds to get very, very drunk.

They sit so long, they see a couple come in to have an early dinner with their three children. They look Indonesian or Malaysian, and the children range from five to ten or so. They have three maids trailing them, in matching uniforms. The mother, in head-to-toe designer wear of the most glittery kind, and the father, in a shiny Adidas tracksuit, sit down and both bring out their phones and start tapping on them. The five-year-old boy plays on an iPad that one of the maids holds up for him, like a human tripod. Another maid massages hand cream onto the hands of the middle girl. The maids stand up, as if they are not allowed to sit. Everyone in the restaurant is staring at them.

“Unbelievable,” says Mercy.

“Happens all the time in this part of the world,” David says.

They have ascertained that they are both American, both sarcastic, both a little bit bitter. She notices the ring on his finger but is careful not to ask. Nothing inappropriate has happened. They are just two strangers having a drink in the afternoon. It makes her feel grown up, this possibility of a married man, an opening into a world she has never contemplated before. They segue into flirtatious back-and-forth.

“Like, really, what kind of name is Tucker?” she asks. “Or Chet? Only white people have those names.”

“Korean names are odd too, like Yumi or Yuri.”

“Those are Japanese names,” she says.

“I knew a Korean girl named Yuri!” he says triumphantly.

“I’m sure you did,” she says drily.

“Hey, now,” he says.

“Hey, now,” she repeats, mocking him.

“Now you’ve hurt my feelings,” he says. “Don’t you feel bad?”

“Not at all.”

“Want another drink?” he asks.

“Better not,” she says. “Drinking at four in the afternoon. You must be a dissolute kind of guy.”

There’s a pause. All this sparring is going to lead to something, or not.

“Well,” he says, “if you’re not going to have another drink with me, I do have a dinner party to get to.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” she says.

He gets up to go but lingers.

“I guess I’ll see you around?”

“Maybe.” She’s not that desperate.

He considers, says it. “Where do you hang out?”

A better man would have asked for her number or e-mail, but she’s not used to better men.

“I know the bartender at Il Dolce, so I’m there for drinks sometimes.” A little crumb laid for a trail to follow.

“Okay.” He leans in for a kiss on the cheek. “Lovely to meet you, Mercy.” He smells of the cigarette they shared outside and the Macallan he’s been drinking.

She sits at the bar, with a lovely fizzy feeling in her stomach. Maybe this man is the way out, maybe this is the sparkly path to the future. She knows it’s the alcohol talking, mostly, but that’s okay. She’s had her fill of the past. She wants to break out of the mold everyone thinks she should be in. Everyone thinks for her too much, has their nose in her business, tells her what they think she should be doing. On rare occasions, something good happens to her, like two years ago, between jobs, when she found out she had enough miles for a free ticket and booked a flight to Italy just to get the hell out of the hole she was in,
and people thought she was extravagant or foolhardy. One friend, Tracy, who everyone said came into a $10 million trust fund when she turned twenty-one, sat her down and told her she had to think about her career. “You can’t just go to Italy whenever you want,” she said, this from a girl who had gone to Italy twice in the past three years, plus India and Thailand and Australia.

“Why not?” Mercy asked, wondering why Tracy cared.

“It’s irresponsible. You don’t know where your next job is coming from. And . . .” It was unseemly, was what Tracy wanted to say but couldn’t. But she couldn’t understand how difficult it was for Mercy to sit in her tiny apartment day after day and do nothing.

“You can’t just get job after job,” Tracy said. “You need a plan.” As if plans were so easy to come by. Or careers. “You’re getting older,” she said. As if Mercy didn’t notice that all around her, people were getting promotions and getting important, or getting married, or having kids, or moving to other places. As if she were unaware. As if.

“You went to Italy,” Mercy pointed out. “Last summer.”

Tracy paused. “It’s different,” she said. She wasn’t embarrassed in the least.

Tracy is different from Mercy. It is just a fact to her. This is the dissonance. Mercy thinks she is like her friends, and they think she is different. It was not so apparent in college, but now in postcollege life, in real life, it is obvious that they think she is different. If she believes that too, that she is different, it seems like giving up, and then where does she go from there?

The trip to Italy didn’t pan out. She couldn’t find a cheap enough hotel and had to factor in traveling money and realized she couldn’t swing it, and then when she tried to get the miles back, it cost so much to put them back in her account that she hesitated, and when she called back two weeks later to do it, it was too close to the date and she lost all those miles. Of course. But, she thinks. But. It was almost worth it to have had that giddy day of possibility when she booked the trip, imagining the wonderful things she might do, the small, tiny espressos she
might drink standing up at small cafés, and the old stones and fountains she would wander around and look at. It was almost worth it.

Mercy walks home, pleasantly drunk in the crisp December air, swaying a little, dreaming of a higher authority—one that sees all the injustices meted out to her, that sees all the good things she tries to do, no matter if they don’t work out or no one notices—and that she will be found to be correct: Everyone will see that she has suffered more, been given less. How unfair, they will say. There will, finally, be justice.