The Expatriates (7 page)

She wanted the hours back. She wanted to go back ten hours, to when life was understandable. She wanted to not ever have to go to the bathroom again. She wanted to have a kind stranger lead a crying G back to her, to be enfolded tight in her waiting arms, to be squeezed, to feel the corporeal flesh of him, the shaking, sobbing child. This was understandable. The absence of him was incomprehensible. Most of all, she wanted to erase Mercy from her life. To absent the girl and get her boy back. That was what she wanted.

H
ILARY
PAUSES
. There is a stain on the piano's ebony surface.

“Puri,” she calls. “There is a water mark here from where Julian left his glass during his lesson.”

At some point in her life, she realized that she never says anything directly anymore. She has become a master of indirection, or misdirection. She will say, “Mr. Starr is arriving from Kuala Lumpur at 11:00 p.m. tonight” or “I stained this blouse with red wine at dinner,” when she should say, “Please keep the lights on and notify the gate guard that Mr. Starr will be late” or “Send this out for dry cleaning.”

Puri, of course, cannot always decode the message, and Hilary will come across the garment, still stained, folded neatly in her closet, or David will complain that the guard didn't let his airport car into the complex without an ID check.

She has noticed how, as she grows older, she is more and more reluctant to say anything directly, even to her husband.

She will tell him, “I haven't told anyone else about that,” when she means to say, “Don't tell anyone.” When David later says he has mentioned it to a friend, she gets upset, and he will exclaim, in the simple way of men, “Why didn't you just tell me you wanted to keep it private?” and she will retire, injured. He should have intimated, she thinks. Intimated, because they are supposed to be intimate. He should have known.

So she does not say, “Please try to get the stain off the piano.” She walks into the kitchen and says, “Puri, I'm leaving now.”

Julian is sitting there, having a snack. Usually she would be there
with him, but she forgot her lunch appointment and now cannot cancel. He is seven, wary. He comes, once a week, for his piano lesson, paid for by the Starrs, a new arrangement that has already revealed itself to be static and in need of change, but one that she has no idea how to alter. She sat with him during his lesson, as she always does, watching his slender fingers hover over the keys. He is talented. She found Julian in foster care, half Indian, half Chinese, left by his teenage mother. At the table now, he looks up and gives a shy smile, with his light brown skin and beautiful dark eyes, ringed with impossibly long lashes. How odd, she thinks, to not know whether his mother was the Chinese or the Indian half. The system must know, she thinks, but she doesn't want to ask. But this seems a vital part of the equation. He will want to know, she thinks, and he should be able to find out. She should find out for him.

“I have to go out for lunch, Julian. Sorry I couldn't reschedule it. Sam will come to take you back in fifteen minutes, after he drops me off. I'll see you next week.”

She thinks he understands her but isn't sure. His English is almost nonexistent, but he is agreeable. He gets in the car to come here, he plays the piano, he eats the snack they give him, and then she takes him back to the group home. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and goes home. Another odd event in his odd life.

Sam is waiting downstairs for her in the car. She gets in, and even in the cooler air, the interior is redolent of body odors. Humors, she thinks. The humors of the body, escaping through those tiny pores, roiling around the interior of the car.

Chinese or Filipino? everyone had asked when she said she was hiring a driver. Sam is Indian, an anomaly, but he grew up in Hong Kong, speaks fluent Cantonese, and knows every street in Hong Kong. She thought he would be happy to see Julian visit, but he is odd about it. Later she realizes that he thinks Julian is a street child, beneath him, a proper working man with a family. She realizes that everyone wants to find his own level.

Sam starts the car, and they go to the club.

Hilary sits, hidden behind sunglasses, waiting for her friend Olivia. Children are playing on the lawn while their mothers sip tea and gossip. A boy falls and cries. His mother goes to comfort him. She is a woman Hilary sees at the club every time she is there: a woman with three children, two girls, one boy. Today the woman is in dark jeans that show her wide hips and bottom and a white wool sweater that is stretched across her large breasts and hugs the shelf of flesh above the waistband of her jeans. The muffin top, Hilary knows it is called, the soft, doughy edge that tips over the waistband of your pants. The woman stands up and returns to her group of friends.

Hilary views the thickening torsos and thighs of her peers with a visceral disgust. How can they let themselves go like that, these women, as if it didn't matter? Even if they did have children, surely it can't be too much work to refrain from shoving éclairs and cream puffs down their throats for a few months? She was a heavy child, but she lost weight, and she kept it off. She looks at their arms, spilling out of their clothes like ham hocks, and the way their faces are cushioned in multiple folds, what she calls carb-face, and is nauseated. They have plates of food in front of them, chicken satay in congealing pools of oil, half-eaten grilled cheese sandwiches, glistening mounds of French fries with violent squirts of tomato ketchup.

They are so cheerful, the mothers, so enamored of themselves and their lives, as if the fact of bearing children earned them some unnamed right to sit in the dappled sun with their warm drinks cooling in the winter air and their disheveled hair and their ketchup-stained clothes. Hilary loathes them. She loathes them so much.

They are so lucky.

A year had passed before she thought anything wrong. She had gone off the pill, but it had been a casual event, after a dinner with a lot of wine, a lot of giggling about pulling the goalie, about whether they were really this old. They had not had a great longing for children; it was more
of a maybe-it's-about-time—they had been married two years. She supposed, they had both not been against it. The irony of their casual decision! She was thirty; they had just moved to Hong Kong. When it didn't happen, month after month, she got nervous, figured out when she was ovulating by taking her temperature, made sure David was in town during her fertile time, as he traveled so much for his job. Sex became a chore, a baby-making effort. But nothing happened.

It has been eight years now, eight years during which she has seen friends have one or two or three children, or twins, a veritable frenzy of fertility, pregnancies, baby showers, births, and hospital visits, until they slimmed down and told her again, over lunch, apologetically, that they were pregnant again.

And yet she doesn't want to go any further. The hormones, she has heard, make you fat, swollen, moody. She has been reading about the surrogate village in India—a friend forwarded the article—and the thought makes her feel faint.

So instead she waits. She thinks sporadically about going to a doctor, but then that thought is always drowned out by the thought that surely if it is to be, it will happen naturally. She is frightened by the thought of pregnancy, by the thought of her body changing. The body she knows so well and knows how to control so well. It is not the idea of being pregnant that moves her. She would like a child. She would like to be a mother.

David follows her lead, is amenable to what she wants. Their relationship has cooled in the meantime, cooled into politeness and well wishes, but she pushes that thought away, because how many difficult thoughts can one handle in one sunny afternoon? Perhaps a baby, a pregnancy, will save them from this gradual decline. But how to get there? She pushes the thought away again. She sits instead, wills her mind to go blank, sips at her iced tea, feels the smooth passage of it down her throat. She waits for her friend.

Hilary is from San Francisco, but not the San Francisco where everyone seems to be hiking or biking while chugging sports drinks,
or doing some other sort of physical outdoor activity, and then talking about it endlessly. When people find out she is from the Bay Area, their eyes light up and they talk about this hike or that park, and she says, “Oh, I don't know from that.” Or they talk about Napa Valley and the vineyards, and the cheese! “I like it,” she says. She is not effusive, the way people seem to want everyone to be, full of excitement and vim. She grew up just outside San Francisco, where her parents live still, and she moved to the city when she got her first job in PR.

She spent her early twenties working and then met David at a friend's wedding. Everything according to plan. They married when she was twenty-eight, ten years ago. He was an associate at a law firm with offices all over the world, and he had always wanted to travel and live abroad. She said she would go with him anywhere.

After moving, there was a new vocabulary to learn: “lifts” instead of “elevators,” “flats” instead of “apartments”—vestiges of the British colony Hong Kong used to be. Also, instead of a housekeeper, the province of only the rich in America, everyone in her new world had a live-in domestic helper from the Philippines or Indonesia, who took care of all the housework and babysitting for the astounding sum of US$500 a month. They live in a particularly homogeneous enclave of expatdom, Repulse Bay, where half the people they see are white, and more than that are not locals, be they Chinese American or Japanese or Filipino. In this particular corner of Hong Kong, newly arrived Americans bump into one another at the supermarket and talk of their sea containers, arriving soon with their belongings, how to find a travel agent, how to get a driver's license. The husbands get up in the morning, put on their suits, and take taxi-shares or minibuses or are driven to work in the tall, shiny office buildings in Central, while the women putter around the house before getting ready for their tennis match or going in to volunteer at the library, since they mostly had to give up their jobs when they moved. It all feels a bit like
The Truman Show
.

Still, even within this sphere, Hilary soon came to see the very fine distinctions.

There were the new expats, who signed up for courses on Chinese cooking at the MacDonnell Road YWCA, took the train to Shenzhen to buy fake DVDs and cheap dinnerware, went to the Art Village to have paintings copied cheaply for their apartments (“A funny Lichtenstein for the bathroom is so cute, don't you think?”), and did first vacations in Phuket. Then there were the intermediate expats, who went to Bhutan to trek and Tokyo to eat and eschewed the touristy. They had favorite hikes. They threw out the IKEA furniture and bought real antiques. They had some local friends, a Mandarin nanny, and preferred to eat at restaurants secreted away in office towers. They started small businesses, like children's clothing or jewelry design, all made in China, and sold their wares at the holiday gift fairs that sprouted up in hotel ballrooms around December. And then there were the old Hong Kong hands, who had racked up ten, twenty years in the colony. They were mostly in Hong Kong for good, sometimes had given up citizenship in their former countries. They owned their homes, always bought on a dip in the property market, didn't talk to newcomers, and smiled blankly when people brought up newbie topics like schooling and medical care, as if they had mentioned something as unspeakable as their bathroom habits.

Of course, there were the international lines as well. The Japanese were a discrete group and rarely mingled, playing baseball and soccer together every weekend at the municipal athletic fields, with their neatly packed bento lunches and peculiarly named sports drinks. The French and Koreans were a bit more porous, the English perhaps a bit more, and the Americans most of all, although, after a few years of socializing strenuously with everybody, people tended to slip back into their national identities. It was just so exhausting to have to explain what a state school was, or how football and soccer were different. After a few years, even the most well-meaning Americans found themselves calling only other Americans and doing Super Bowl breakfasts (due to the time difference) and Thanksgivings at the club with other families. You found yourself somehow more American than ever.

Hilary has become firmly ensconced in her new life, one she slipped into frighteningly easily, as David's career flourished in Asia over the past eight years. He is now one of the most senior attorneys at his firm. Hilary has servants—a domestic helper and a driver—a membership to a country club, where she plays tennis with other sun-visored ladies, and afterward, showered and dried and clad in cool summer shifts, they order Greek salads and salted French fries and sip pinot grigio as the sun sets and their husbands work and they gossip and complain and otherwise act as if life has always been this way.