The Expatriates (24 page)

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asks.

He nods, and they go inside to the restaurant.

They sit down, and he looks around. All around, children are eating pizza, spaghetti, club sandwiches.

“They have Chinese food,” she says. “Chow fan, wonton noodle?”

“Maybe I have the pizza,” he says uncertainly.

“Want to look at the buffet?” she asks. They walk over and look at all the dishes. There is the usual international spread: a curry, a roast beef, a baked fish, sushi.

“Why don't we do this, so you can try everything,” she says. They take plates, and she tells him to point at everything he wants. Soon his plate is laden with a smorgasbord of different foods.

When they sit down, though, he picks at everything.

“You don't like?” she says.

He shrugs.

Just then, the boys from the swimming pool come through the door, hair wet, freshly changed from the pool. They swarm the buffet, grabbing plates before their mothers can even get a table.

“I get dessert,” Julian says.

He gets up so quickly she is behind him when she sees him stand next to one of the boys who is getting a piece of chocolate cake. In her mind, she is tut-tutting the fact that the boy is getting dessert before a main course when she sees Julian jostle him, quite deliberately. The plate teeters and falls, chocolate cake lies crumbled all over the floor. The boy lets out a wail and glares at Julian.

“You pushed me!” he shouts.

Julian painstakingly ignores him and takes a plate. He cuts himself a slice of the chocolate cake.

“You pushed me!” the boy shouts again.

Hilary is behind them, aghast and yet somehow exhilarated. She puts her hand behind Julian's back to guide him back to the table. They walk back together, side by side, unhurried and deliberate, and sit down. She sees the boy run to his mother and talk to her
excitedly, pointing at Julian. The woman rises and comes toward them, a pleasant-faced woman in her thirties.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “Michael told me that your”—she hesitates—“your child? Pushed him? And that's why he dropped the plate?”

Julian looks down at the floor, face a mask.

Hilary smiles at the woman. “I'm sorry?” she says. “What?”

The boy has joined his mother now. “He pushed me!” he says, still indignant.

“There must be some mistake,” Hilary says. “I don't think Julian pushed you.”

“I dropped the cake because of him!”

The mother looks beleaguered. “Why don't we just get another piece of cake?” she suggests. She takes her child's hand. “Sorry,” she says with a backward glance. “You know kids.”

Hilary sits with Julian and finally dares to look at him. He stares back at her, expressionless, waiting for her reaction.

She blinks, then smiles, breathes.

“Eat your chocolate cake, sweetie,” she says, heart beating fast, fast, faster. Is this what it means to feel alive?

H
ER
MOTHER
has had a job of sorts for several weeks. She's been helping out with a catering company run by an American. Her experience at Mercy's aunt's restaurant has come in useful, and she has been hired as a quasi manager, to communicate to the other mostly Chinese staff what is expected. Why they think she can do this when she cannot speak Cantonese at all is a good question, but she talks in her Korean-accented English and seems to be doing fine. She likes her coworkers and likes having a place to go.

There is a big party this week that they are doing in some warehouse in Wong Chuk Hang, and her mother wants her to work. She moves around the tiny studio, getting ready to go.

“Shirley pays a hundred dollars an hour, and I'm sure she'll pay you more—Columbia graduate!”

Her mother prattles on about the food and the preparation and the work to come—a kindness to her daughter, who she has recently come to realize has ruined her life.

All that jazz, as it were, came to pass, just as predicted. Two weeks ago, Charlie commented on her burgeoning waist, saying she had gained weight. The thing was, he said it in the loveliest way possible, saying, “Look! I'm taking good care of you. You have gained weight!”

She wasn't able to quash the look of horror on her face.

He misunderstood. “No, no,” he said. “It's good. I like it. You were too thin before.”

When she couldn't speak, he said, “What's wrong?”

And then it all came out, inelegantly, spastically, horribly. She kept
seeing his face, uncomprehending at first, then horrified, then, finally, finally—and she couldn't forget this—disgusted. The memory of his look makes her insides curl with embarrassment and self-loathing. When she visualizes it, she makes an involuntary grunt of horror. This good man, this good guy, was disgusted with her. She kept apologizing and apologizing for not telling him sooner, but it didn't matter. There was something so final about being pregnant with someone else's child. It's almost comical. Only the most evolved or self-aware or confident man would be okay with it, or someone who was infatuated beyond reason, and that would be someone who had aimed way above his station. Charlie was none of these, she knew, and so she could not blame him or fault him or even wish that he had acted differently. He had acted in an eminently reasonable way, and she had been a bloody, bloody fool to spool it out for even a week. Now she imagines him telling all his friends, the newly married Eddie Lais, with whom they had had a perfectly lovely dinner, with the new wife being super friendly to Mercy, the work colleagues, other Columbia people. Her news spreading slowly, sickly outward, like an oil stain on the fine cotton tablecloth of common decency. Now she is known for something else, other than having lost a child, and it is this. A new kind of pariah.

And also, she thinks he had already bought their tickets to go away. So now she has cost him thousands of dollars as well.

So she does what she always does when her life goes awry. After all, she's an expert. She puts it out of her mind and tries to move forward. Her prenatal visits are ongoing. She e-mailed David, delicately, about the cost. He e-mailed back immediately that she should send him all bills, then after the first two, he said she shouldn't have to submit forms like an expense report and then just transferred HK$75,000 into her account (almost US$10,000) and said she should let him know when she needed more. So there's that. It sits in her account, more money than she's ever had at one time. Maybe he sent it all at one go because he doesn't want a lot of contact with her, although he
always signs his e-mails saying he'd love to see her and hopes that she is feeling well. He never gives a date, though, or any other indication that he cares about what's happening with her. That should be a sign in and of itself.

She also told her mother, who took the news in the oddest way. She told her in halting Korean, and her mother took it in slowly. Then she hugged Mercy and, shaking a little bit, let her go to see the tears in her eyes. “I will have grandchild,” she said. “I am so happy.” Nothing about ruining her life or who the father is. She just let her be.

Actually, no one has asked her what she's going to do, whether she will keep the baby, any of the questions she would have thought natural. She knows it's getting late now to have an abortion, and she's felt no urge to have one. It's funny how she and her mother have both assumed that she's going to have the baby. It's not that they're religious about it, or because of any sort of dogma, other than she does feel like she's having a child, and the idea of not having it seems wildly improbable. She is pro-choice, always was, but this, her own body, is making the choice for her.

She hasn't even Googled when the last possible date would be, although she has gone onto several pregnancy websites and looked at what babies look like at different months. At the last appointment at the government hospital, she asked when she could get an ultrasound, and the doctor said since she was young and healthy, she wasn't lined up for one. That was when she decided to go private. After a little research, she ended up with an appointment at an obstetrician's in Wan Chai. Her first one is today, and she didn't tell her mother because she doesn't want her to ask if she can come.

“I'll ask Shirley if she need extra help for the party,” her mom says.

“Okay,” Mercy says, just to get her mother out the door.

After the door shuts and she is finally, blessedly alone, she showers and lies down on her bed, wrapped in a towel. Looking down, she opens up the towel to see how her stomach rises in a gentle peak. She sees the up and down of her breath. She sucks in her stomach, sees it
go flat, then suddenly lets go in a panic, feeling as if she is squashing her baby, although she knows that is not possible at this stage. The websites say you might feel little flutters inside at this point, as the tiny baby starts to move around. It might not even be a baby yet. It might still be an embryo. She hasn't gotten all the terms straight.

Her wet hair is warm against her scalp, and she feels water drops sliding off her face. Outside, a garbage truck beeps its slow retreat.

She gets up, dresses, leaves the apartment, and finds her way to the doctor's. In the lobby of the office building, a brass plaque, Wan Chai Obstetrics, announces the name of her new doctor, a Dr. Henry Leong. The elevator has fancy brass buttons covered by a sheet of plastic that is sprayed with disinfectant every hour, or so a notice claims. Hong Kong: still disinfectant mad, decades after SARS.

The doctor's office is pleasant, with fresh flowers and up-to-date magazines, although most of them are in Chinese. Private, public, private, public—the refrain keeps going through her head. Why does money have to make everything so much nicer? The receptionist hands her a clipboard to fill out and asks her to pee in a cup and weigh herself on the scale next to the desk. Mercy's the only one in the waiting room until the door buzzes open again and a woman of about thirty comes in with her husband.

Mercy fills out the form and eavesdrops on the new arrival, an Englishwoman who is discussing with her husband their upcoming babymoon.

“Angie said Bali was great, but the food is terrible. I think Thailand is a better bet.”

“Okay,” her husband says, scrolling through his phone.

“And there's a really lovely hotel in Phuket called the Andara. Bit expensive but think we should splurge since it's our last vacation as a couple.”

“Is it on the beach?”

As they make their way through the inanities of travel, Mercy finishes up and places the clipboard on the desk, then weighs herself.
The woman watches her and exclaims, “I can't believe how they have you weigh yourself out here in front of everybody!”

Mercy looks back and lifts an eyebrow, which she regrets instantly, as it then gives the woman a chance to talk to her.

“Do you know what you're having?” she asks, smiling, friendly. Perhaps she wants to make friends, mommy friends, and form a playgroup.

Mercy shakes her head, unwilling to talk, unwilling to unveil herself as a fellow native English speaker for fear of further intimacies. Better the woman thinks she is local, unable to converse.

But then the receptionist asks, “How much you weigh?” forcing her to speak.

“A hundred thirty-two,” she says softly, so the woman can't hear her, but of course she does, so when Mercy sits down, the woman pointedly starts talking to her husband again.

“Listen,” she says finally, “I'm having kind of a terrible day.”

The woman nods curtly and continues speaking pointedly to her husband.

Mercifully, her name is called, and she goes into the waiting room. The nurse takes her blood pressure and leaves her with a cotton gown to change into. Mercy takes off her clothes except her underwear and folds them neatly. She lays them on the surface next to the sink. She wonders if she should take her underwear off as well. The one time she got a massage at an expensive spa, courtesy of the ever-generous Philena, she wondered the same thing. She sits down on the crinkly paper.

A knock on the door.

“Hello,” says the doctor, a soft-faced, aristocratic-looking Chinese man, in British-accented English. Outside, his credentials had been displayed prominently on the wall—Edinburgh, some other vaguely posh-sounding school.

“Hello,” she says.

“So.” He scans her file. “The date of your last period was approximately January 24.” He takes out a little wheel. “So that puts you at”—he spins it—“almost four months. A Halloween baby.” He looks up. “You
took your time getting here. Most of my patients are here the moment they miss their first period.”

“Well,” she says, “I was being seen at the public hospital up until now.”

Behind the clear glass of his spectacles, a recalibration. Swift, but Mercy is an expert at recognizing these sorts of social calculations.

“I see,” he says. “So you've been taking good care of yourself.” It is more a statement than a question. “Folic acid and prenatals?”

“Um, no,” she says. “I'm not so good at that kind of stuff.”

“I see,” he says again. “Well, while you're under my care, that
stuff
”—he repeats her word—“is nonnegotiable. You must start taking the pills, although you should have been taking them from day one. Actually, it's already too late for the folic acid, but you can start on the prenatal vitamins. They may cause a little constipation, because they're rich in iron.”

“But does everyone have a perfect pregnancy?” She can't help asking. “I mean, I'm sure lots of your patients don't know they're pregnant for a while, and have acted”—she pauses here, not quite sure what she's going to say— “I mean, acted like they weren't pregnant.”

“I don't know anything about that,” he says.

She's been here only three minutes, and she's already alienated this doctor. She feels exhausted.

“I'll take the pills,” she says.

“Are you feeling all right?” he asks.

“Yes, fine,” she says. “But this is all kind of new.”

He looks at her. “Yes, it's a big change. You're going to be a mommy.”

The stern, aristocratic doctor using a word like “mommy” makes her uncomfortable. He wheels over a large machine and starts tapping at a keyboard. His hands are as soft and white as flour, a gold wedding ring on his pudgy finger.

“Have you had a scan yet?”

“An ultrasound? No. The public hospital didn't offer them.”

“Scoot down here.” He taps on the bottom of the chair. When he sees her underwear, he gives an exasperated sigh. “You have to take off
your underwear,” he says. “The baby is still small, so we will give you a transvaginal scan.”

She gets off the chair and takes off her underwear, adding it to the pile. It looks sad and wrinkled.

He puts a condom on what looks like a giant dildo and holds it up and says, “I'm going to insert this, so don't be surprised.” He glides it in as she breathes deeply. On the screen, black and white pixels glitter and wobble.

“There's your baby,” he says, pointing with his free hand to what is recognizably a baby, with a head and body.

“Oh, my,” Mercy says faintly. “There it is.”

“It's around ten centimeters now. Starting to grow.” He rolls a mouselike ball on the keyboard around. “I'm just taking some measurements.” He rolls and taps. “Everything looks good. You are young, so this should be routine. Too many women getting pregnant too old.”

Mercy is so rapt she can't even take offense at what the man is saying. She can't breathe. Her thickening waist, just now becoming apparent, is housing a baby, a human being, something that will come into the world in just a few months. There's a man she's just met who's just inserted a plastic dildo inside her and is showing her something she cannot comprehend. The baby wriggles on the screen.

“It's so weird,” she says. “I can't feel the baby, but it's totally moving.”

For the first time, the doctor looks at her with what looks like approval. She has finally reacted in what he deems a suitable way.

“Yes, it's moving all around. Next time, I'll probably be able to tell you if it's a girl or a boy. Sometimes I can already tell at this stage, but you have a shy one.”

“I can't believe it,” she says.

The rest of the exam goes in a blur. Dr. Leong never asks her about a husband or the baby's father, making her wonder if he knows about her. She's paranoid, she knows, but Hong Kong can be that small.

She thanks the doctor, and he leaves. Slowly she gets dressed. She's
seen her baby. She is holding three printouts of the baby's image. The baby is real.

When she goes out, she goes to the reception desk to pay.

“Appointments are $1,200 each visit, and here's the schedule of payment, including the hospital costs,” the receptionist says. She is a chubby young woman with a plastic name tag that says her name is Minky. She hands Mercy a sheet with the costs. There's a separate line for multiple births.