Tammy, who had been an alpha-expatriate woman, a sort of middle-aged mean girl in tennis whites, heading up school parent committees and chairing charity balls, did not know what to say to this woman who was walking around the house inspecting all her things, but when the woman started going through her closet to see her jewelry, she wrapped her arms around her and tried to restrain her. Thrilled, Gina—who had never seen such drama, even back home in the Philippines—screamed as the two came wrestling out of the master bedroom and did the one sensible thing she could think of: She called the driver, who was downstairs washing the car. He came up and saw three shrieking women scratching and pulling one another’s hair and, terrified, called his employer, Garth, who was having a coffee at Cova in Prince’s Building with a colleague. Garth took a taxi home.
Apparently—this had entered into expatriate lore—he separated the two women (who must have been tired by that point) and sat them both down on the sofa. Tammy demanded that her high school boyfriend turned husband, whom she had known for more than thirty years, kick this woman out of their house and out of their lives. For God’s sake, this is where she and their children lived, and this woman had trespassed on their private property. He looked at her and said, anguished, “I can’t.”
She started screaming then, started screaming and wailing: Hadn’t she followed him here to this godforsaken place where you couldn’t get a proper iced coffee to save your life? Hadn’t she never complained about all the travel he had to do, all the work, during which apparently he was fucking around with this whore? And hadn’t she kept herself up, looking good, and what the fuck? What the fuck? She was going to tell his kids what a shit they had for a father, what a terrible person he was, and he was never going to see them again, and she was going to take all his money. Garth sat there, taking it all, and the woman—he called her Lily—also sat quietly, perhaps afraid and understanding, finally, what she had started.
“There are children involved,” he said, meaning his children in China. And that set Tammy off again.
“Your children are Mark and Melissa! The ones who are at school right now, with no idea what you’ve done to our family. They are going to hate you forever. You are never going to see them again.”
Finally, “Tell that whore to get out of my house,” she said. You could only rage for so long before you physically gave out. And this Garth did, he asked Lily to leave. But he walked her downstairs, and he gave her some money and asked their driver to take her to the train station. Tammy did not know this. The two may have even awkwardly touched hands. The driver told the helper who told her friends and so on. And Lily tried to speak to the driver on the way there, perhaps to get more information, or to gain an ally, but his English wasn’t good and neither was hers, so they couldn’t communicate well.
What happened after was good for nobody.
Garth had four children with these two women, and he couldn’t give any of them up. Some of Tammy’s closest friends swore up and down that if he had come back to her, begging forgiveness, promising to never see the other family again but only support the kids financially, she would have taken him back, but he couldn’t leave two children, even if he was willing to leave the woman, which was unclear. So Garth was in a giant mess (“What was he thinking?” was the thrilled whisper heard around the American Club that spring). Tammy wrote an explosive e-mail, in which she luridly detailed all his transgressions with bizarre misspellings and breaks in logic, that she then forwarded to his boss, colleagues, and employees. As a result, he was told he should move to the Shenzhen office so he would not be a distraction to other employees of the toy-manufacturing-outsourcing company of which he was a vice president, and then one must assume that Lily got at least part of what she wanted—she got Garth all to herself—but in China, and not the Hong Kong apartment or residency or schooling she had so yearned for. Tammy had a nervous breakdown after the e-mail went viral, and she dropped out of sight for a few weeks. People said she went to rehab or an ashram or a yoga retreat, but no one really knew, and her best friend wasn’t talking. The kids were in high school and middle school, and Tammy’s mother came to take care of them for a while. Melissa, a tenth grader, started going out to bars in Wan Chai, and when people ran into her, she was with older men and reeked of smoke and worse. Mark’s grades went off a cliff and never recovered. Collateral damage, the housewives said, all because of one man’s penis.
When Tammy returned, she handled the divorce quickly and cleanly and then proceeded to get extremely fit. She ran like a maniac, did yoga almost daily, played tennis with even more vigor and enthusiasm, and lunched and dined with her friends frequently and publicly, as if she was showing the world that she would not be cowed by what had happened. She looked fantastic. Garth was no longer in Hong Kong, so people didn’t have to make the choice between them, which was convenient. She lived her life as normally as she could until one day, in the middle of a match, she got frustrated when an opponent contested one too many points, and she threw her racket down on the court, got her gear, and disappeared for the second time.
Later she surfaced in Lantau. Perhaps the ashram’s lessons had kicked in a little late, but they kicked in. Hong Kong was too small to ever disappear for long. Lantau was an island a ferry ride away, filled with expats who eschewed the materialistic, shiny world of the main island. It was grotty and small, and people kept beehives and made their own jam. And there she was, at IFC, on a trip to the mainland, as it were, smiling at Hilary and all but unrecognizable.
She was perfectly normal, asking how David was, saying that Melissa had just graduated from the University of Vermont and that Mark was operating a food truck in Portland. She seemed happy and asked after other women who had been on the tennis team with them. Hilary just couldn’t get over how different she looked. They parted, professing intentions to e-mail, to call, to have lunch, both comfortable in the knowledge that none of those things would come to pass.
Hilary is a little bit older now, and she thinks that Tammy may have finally got it right. Who gives a damn? Just make yourself happy. She was a miserable person before all that happened, she really was, excluding people from committees and throwing cocktail parties to which a few people were never invited, and now she seemed happy. She didn’t seem to work but lived simply. But who knows. She might be miserable and spend her evenings plotting revenge, but to Hilary’s eye, she had made the best out of an impossible situation. Could you spend the rest of your life being angry? She supposed you could, but it was never good for you in the end. When everything you thought was yours was taken away, and the foundation of your life shifted so you have to start from zero, you might find out who you really are. You might come up against that dark, immovable wall of truth. And that is probably the most frightening thought of all.
Hilary shifts in her bed, takes a last gulp of her drink, looks over at the absent spot beside her, and thinks, where on earth is her husband?
Mercy
THIS IS WHAT she smells when she comes out of the bathroom from her shower: a thousand stale exhales, humid with alcohol and cigarette smoke. This is what she sees: the man in her bed, his bottom half covered by the sheet, snoring. She sits down in her chair, wrapped in her towel, wondering what to do next.
It happened so quickly. She went home from the hotel and showered and took a nap. When she woke, at ten, she wanted to go out for something to eat, and something had pulled her to Il Dolce, the mere utterance of the name several hours ago suggestion enough. Maybe something might happen. She was talking to Richard, the bartender, on her second glass of sauvignon blanc when he walked in, the man from the afternoon at the hotel bar. David. The night accelerated into strobe lights and chaos. From bar to restaurant to club, he shouted his life story at her: a wife, no child, an orphan (she couldn’t remember whether he was an orphan or there was one in his life), disappointment, no solace at home. Then to her house. Messy coupling, not finished, dizziness, spinning c
eiling. She looks at the sleeping man: this new and different animal, older, married, complicated. Different from the pale, anomic twenty-somethings who usually inhabit that space.
Her phone buzzes. Her mother is texting her: “What r u doing?”
“Getting ready for work,” she writes back quickly. “Text later, already late.” It’s Saturday, but her mother doesn’t know her work schedule, or even what she does exactly. The best thing about texting is that it makes phone calls obsolete. She doesn’t need to worry about her voice quavering or her eyes tearing up on Skype. She hasn’t had to talk to her mother in months—all communication is through texts.
Her mother doesn’t know about what happened, about the incident. Her mother doesn’t know, and her father is a bastard. She wishes she could tell her mother what happened. But she is afraid of making the fortune come true. By acknowledging what happened, by articulating it to the universe, sounds, words that can never be called back, it will become reality. She is indeed the unluckiest girl in the world. How will her mother react, to find that what she feared most has manifested itself? She can imagine the sharp intake of breath, the quick silence afterward while her mother tries to conceive of how she might best help her child. Because that’s what mothers do—they protect their children, no matter what. Mercy knows that in the matter of mothers, she has been blessed. Her mother, unhappy, still loves her daughter.
Of course, Mercy might be surprised. Her mother has always told her that Koreans are a hardy people, that what she and her family survived, with the war in Korea and then immigrating to a country where they didn’t speak the language, Mercy would never understand. “You think your life difficult,” she says. “You don’t know. In Korea, our lives so hard.” But this is not a high school misunderstanding or a lack of a job. There has been a disappearance, a crime, probably a death. There was fault.
Mercy hadn’t known those Reade kids very long, but they had liked her, and she had liked them. When she had gone out to where they lived, she had been amazed. They lived on the South Side, an area you got to by going through the Aberdeen tunnel, through a mountain basically. When you emerged, it was all sea and sky and rich suburb. She had passed by there before, on trips to Stanley or to Shek O Beach, but she had never gone into a high-rise with glossy marble floors and doormen and lobbies and gyms with gleaming new equipment. They had playrooms with colorful padded walls and what seemed like hundreds of toys, as well as a sparkling blue swimming pool outside with fancy deck chairs. Mercy grew up in a tiny two-room apartment in Queens, and she still remembered the day in elementary school when she realized that sometimes a family lived in an entire house. That not everyone lived in a room with a hot plate and Korean blankets on the floor.
Still, the Reade children were lovely. Not spoiled or entitled at all. She had an easy rapport with them. Daisy looked up to her. (She was too young to know otherwise, the way you idolize your high school teachers when you’re young and sometimes, when you come back for reunions, you realize a few are drunks or so very sad.) Philip liked how she was amenable to everything he wanted to do, and G, well, G was just the most scrumptious boy, a little love of a child. She was never one of those people who adored kids—she had babysat at Korean church gatherings and viewed children as cattle to be herded, mostly—but G was so sweet, slipping his hand unexpectedly into hers a mere five minutes after she arrived at their house the first time. There was no guile or fear in him. He expected to be loved, because that was all he had ever known.
And now he is somewhere she cannot imagine. That is, if he is not dead in a ditch somewhere. The fact that it was both her and Margaret watching the kids gives her a little bit of comfort. Except that Margaret went to the bathroom, implicitly giving her all the responsibility in that situation. And she was watching all of them—really she was! G was out of sight for five seconds, maybe ten, when Margaret came out, wiping her hands on her pants and asking where her child was.
She tries not to think about that day, she really does. She doesn’t see how it will help her. It is, indisputably, her fault. That much is clear. But it’s also indisputably just shit bad luck. She remembers trying to disappear, not knowing where to go. She couldn’t help, couldn’t speak Korean, couldn’t do anything except be the villain. At the police station, each new officer arriving to speak with her had a rebuke on his face, not only for her crime but for the fact that she couldn’t speak Korean—a useless girl. She was a disgrace to her country, and a careless girl who brought disaster to those around her. She answered all the questions for the report, and when it became clear that she could go home, she didn’t know what to do. Out of the question to return with the Reades—a more terrible situation she could not imagine. So she got a taxi to the hotel, getting there ahead of the Reades, stuffed all her clothes in her bag, and then asked the concierge for a recommendation for a cheap hotel. She was directed down the street to a yogwan, a local inn, where for fifty dollars she got a room not much bigger than the length of her and a bundle of thick, colorful blankets to be spread on the floor as a bed. Every Korean family had a set of these blankets, and after she spread them out, she lay there, cold, feeling a scratchy, unclean blanket over her, wondering what on earth she was going to do now. Every time she blinked, she prayed that she would wake up from the nightmare she was in, and every time she opened her eyes, the horror remained the same. The homeliness of the room seemed just right. A person like her should never enjoy anything nice again. The enormity of her guilt and her pain and the awfulness loomed so large it blocked out everything in her mind, so that all she could do was think about breathing another breath.
There was an old vacuum flask in the room, so she went downstairs and filled it from the hot water pot in the lobby, just to have something to do, just to feel something. She was grateful for the simple gesture the woman in the lobby made, helping her to work the lever. This is a person, she thought, who doesn’t know what I’ve just done. The woman’s nod and smile were like a salve to Mercy, who didn’t expect kindness from anyone ever again after what had happened. She sipped the hot water, felt its warmth trickle down her throat, shivered, and wondered if she’d ever feel warm again.
Somehow, at some point that night, she fell asleep. When she woke, she felt fine for a few seconds, and then the memory of the day before came roaring back. She washed up and tried to figure out what to do next. If she returned to Hong Kong, would it seem as if she were running away, and a fugitive? She had to stay. She also had to let the Reades know where she was in case they needed something else from her. Finally, she went downstairs, borrowed paper from the desk clerk, and wrote a note saying that she was at the yogwan and for them to call her if they needed anything. Then she walked to the hotel and dropped it off at the front desk.
She never heard from them, and she spent three days waiting before she paid her bill and took the bus to the airport. She left them another note, saying she was leaving, and sat, dry-eyed, for the entire three-and-a-half-hour flight home. She still hadn’t cried. She hadn’t been able to eat for three days, drinking only the hot water from that flask, and she felt empty. She soon became used to that feeling.
That was about a year ago, give or take. She was never able to tell her mother, and her friends found out through reading about the incident in the paper and putting two and two together. They e-mailed or called and came to sit with her. Most were ham-handed, only muttering inanities like “That’s so intense” or “Wow” until she wanted to beat at them with her fists. A few thoughtful ones brought food so she could eat. From these friends, she felt only their acute sense of relief that such a thing had not happened to them, that they were only the cars cruising by and seeing the pileup on the highway. She imagined what they said to one another afterward, how they talked about her, until she couldn’t bear it and stopped answering people’s e-mails. Then she started combing through magazines and the Internet for stories like hers, and what happened to the person who didn’t commit
the crime—that wasn’t her—but was somehow responsible for it happening. To wit: the drunk-driver man, the chimp owner. These shadowy persons, she came to find, were never there. They were erased from the story as if they had never existed. They were inconvenient and culpable, and no one wanted to hear about them.
So it’s come to this moment, when she’s sitting here in her chair, damp from the shower, looking at a man in her bed, a married man she first laid eyes on a mere twenty-four hours ago. And there’s this feeling she has, this good, tingly feeling, that this is her first step out of this netherworld, that this might be forward motion. She doesn’t know how or why, but it’s the first good feeling she’s had in months, so she’s going to hold on to it.
The man on the bed stirs.
Let it not be like a bad movie, she prays, where the man groans and rubs his head and asks where he is and is ashamed and wants to leave and it’s so awkward.
Instead, he lies very still after his initial entry into consciousness, like a cornered animal, thinking what to do next while being watched by his predator. Then, wonderfully, magically, he sits up without embarrassment, naked, shaking off any vulnerability he might have had when he first woke, and looks straight at the young girl, sitting on the one other piece of furniture that can be squeezed into the room, arms wrapped around her legs, staring at him.
“Good morning,” he says genially. “What’s for breakfast?”
Margaret
The Expatriates Page 11