That’s when she notices that her husband is still not home. And then she remembers that her mother is arriving today at 11:00 a.m.
She texts Sam the flight details and tells him to pick up her mother at the airport. Then types out an e-mail to her mom, explaining that she’s sick and won’t be able to go to the airport to pick her up. Then she realizes that Sam and her mother have very little chance of recognizing each other and, groaning, gets up and finds a piece of paper that Sam can use as a sign and writes MRS. MARJORIE KRALL. She’s writing with a regular pen, and it’s not dark enough. Cursing, she goes downstairs to find a Sharpie. Then she rewrites MRS. MARJORIE KRALL in thick black strokes and hands it to Puri to give to Sam when he gets in.
“I’m sick,” she says, in case Puri has missed this fact. “I’m going to sleep. Please answer the phone and the door and don’t get me. And please bring me up a pitcher of water and a glass.”
She goes upstairs and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When she wakes up, she is surprised at how quiet the house is. Usually Puri is wrestling with the vacuum in some corner of the house or listening to tinny music through earphones. It’s past ten, and she feels much better, the Advils having kicked in. She gulps down a glass of water and wonders whether David has made his way home and gone out again while she was sleeping. There are no clothes strewn on the floor. She feels his toothbrush. It’s dry. So he never came home. This is new.
She calls him. There’s no answer, so she texts and e-mails him: “Where are you?” An even tone: no reproach yet, leaving the door open for fury. She’ll decide the tenor of her response when she sees him, based on the level of his dishevelment, drunkenness, remorse. Such are the negotiations of marriage.
She walks into the kitchen to see Puri at the stove making chicken soup and is filled with gratitude.
“Thank you, Puri!” she says.
“Yes, ma’am,” Puri says without turning around. “You are sick.”
When she is spooning up soup and sweating, she looks at the clock and sees it’s just past eleven. She dials her mother, who should be in the car.
“Did you get in okay and the pickup was okay?”
“Yes, all fine. How are you doing, dear?”
“I have a fever, but I took Advil, so I’m okay right now.” As she goes through the expected questions and responses, she wonders if she should tell her mother that her husband went out last night and didn’t come back. If she doesn’t, of course, her mother will find out, and it’ll be worse than if she had told her. Then again, if she tells her now, it will cast a pall on the beginning of her mother’s visit. She decides to stall.
“Okay, I’m here. Can’t wait to see you.”
She has an hour or so until her mother arrives, so she goes upstairs to her room and gets into bed and logs on to her laptop.
She found this other, online world by accident when she was looking for a way to get rid of some old furniture she was throwing out. A website for expatriates in Asia: www.expatlocat.com. The name was a bit confusing, but the site was marginally helpful. She posted a message on “Odds and Ends” saying that people could come and take pieces that she described: an old coffee table, three lamps, an ottoman. She was taken aback by the aggressive responses. People demanded photos, demanded to know where she lived, asked if she would deliver the items to their homes. She wanted to respond, “These are free!” but instead she never replied to any of the messages. She told Sam to get rid of the furniture instead, and it all disappeared without a fuss.
Poking around the site, she found advertisements and a tab labeled Message Boards. When she clicked on it, a list of topics popped up: “Dating,” “Friendship,” “Moving to Hong Kong.”
She is not at all current, but current enough to know that online forums, in the age of all that is possible online, are almost laughably antique. Still, that is why she likes them. This website has something quaint and old-fashioned about it, in the context of all this Internet insanity. The graphics are nonexistent, just lines of text, some underlined, some indented, some bold, and that’s as complicated as it gets.
She posts on two communities: expatlocat.com and citypeople.com, which is based in Los Angeles and is more lively, because people all over America post on it. There they talk about popular TV shows and current events, household income, and BMI. The tone is more ironic; people are feistier, less provincial. People often post their height, weight, and HHI and ask, “Do you hate me?” But the Hong Kong one is more relevant, and she’s there most often.
She is always astonished by how loose people’s networks are, how they are so trusting and willing to meet strangers based on a few electronic exchanges. People who have just moved to Hong Kong post on these boards and arrange social get-togethers. They seem to have no compunction about the fact that the only connection they have with these people is through the Internet. She knows that her mother would be horrified; in her world, it’s families, schools, workplaces. She also knows that no one in her world would ever be caught dead on an online forum. So it’s perfect.
She pores over the forums and has become familiar with people who post frequently, whose handles are JamesBond and taiwanmum. People complain about their help, or wonder whether to leave their boyfriends, or ask where to buy an air-filtering machine. No question is too personal or inane or random for this place. Anonymity is so comforting.
When she registered, she filled the blanks with fake information. Her online name is HappyGal, something that would set her teeth on edge in real life, but online, she figures, she could, she should, be a different person. In her bedroom, with her laptop on her bed, she signed up to become someone else, a gray, amorphous collection of 0s and 1s traveling through space to join a virtual community that has become a large part of her day.
HappyGal is younger than Hilary, twenty-seven, and she is originally from Oregon, although they used to live in California. Her husband works at an accounting firm. She likes to run and hike the country trails, which she’s had fun discovering. She is blond. This is important. Hilary has always wanted to be blond.
HappyGal has a helper they just hired, whom they pay HK$2,000 over the minimum wage, and the helper works only five days because they value their couple privacy. She and her husband live in the Mid-Levels. It’s like a smaller, scaled-down version of Hilary. Someone she might have been, in a different life, or maybe even this one, if she had made some different decisions.
Hilary has read a lot of the archives, so she knows the history of a lot of her fellow posters, and she has become one of the regulars. Taiwanmum is shrewish but clever. Texas4Eva is one of those irritating, newly arrived Americans who take umbrage at everything that is not shiny and happy, as she thinks everything ought to be. She complains about the injustices in Hong Kong—how helpers are underpaid, how the minimum wage is outrageously low, how pollution is ever-present. Her outrage is not shiny and happy, though, which many other posters have pointed out to her. Hilary wonders if she knows Texas4Eva in real life, if she’s had lunch next to her at the American Club. Still, they have formed a sort of community, a society of people who recognize one another and know one another’s personalities and quirks. They are merciless to newcomers but chummy with one another.
The etiquette of the online forum has to be learned through weeks, probably months, of lurking. Also, the tone. Hilary read thousands of messages before attempting to post one of her own. People were very extreme, punctuating their sentences with exclamation points and bobbing yellow smiley faces that winked or stuck out their tongue. It was like on Facebook, which Hilary goes on sometimes, and whenever someone posts a photo of themselves, all their friends post profuse compliments, say utterly ordinary women are “gorgeous!!!!” or “stunning!” On the flip side, people become enraged easily and insult one another with a vehemence that would never exist in a face-to-face encounter. There are dozens of posts where people try to explai
n why they are right and the other is wrong. Whenever Hilary sees this type of exchange, she wonders at the futility and hopefulness of these people, that they actually think they can change someone else’s mind, that others will acknowledge their correctness. They must be young. She was that way too when she was young. If only it is explained enough, they think, surely everyone will understand, everyone will come around to their way of thinking. It is exhausting, being so hopeful. She remembers.
She signs in. HappyGal, password: honkers, all lowercase.
She enters the forum “Misc in Hong Kong,” her usual haunt, where a dozen or so people post regularly.
Taiwanmum is online, posting about a new dim sum place in Kowloon: “Very good food and reasonable price. The chef from Four Seasons.”
“That seems unlikely,” Hilary types. “And how do you even get there?”
“Ah, HappyGal, welcome,” blinks back the response. “There’s this thing called public transport. Not everyone sits around in their air-conditioned mansion in Repulse Bay and refuse to go to Kowloon.”
Hilary is surprised. She has always written that she lives in Mid-Levels.
“I live in Mid-Levels,” she types.
“OK, your mansion in Mid-Levels,” Taiwanmum pings back.
Hilary has been getting more paranoid lately about being found out.
“How long have you lived here again?” comes a question from Asiaphile, an intermittent poster, known for peppery remarks and not suffering fools.
“A year and a half,” she writes.
“All sorted out?” Asiaphile writes, not unkindly.
“Are you a man or woman?” she responds.
“Touche.”
“I’m home sick today, be nice,” she types. She clicks off to another thread.
And then she sees it. Her story. Right there on the forum for the other thirty or so regular readers to see.
“I know a woman,” it begins. “She is so rich and has a huge house. She can’t have kids and is maybe trying to adopt and has a kid she is ‘trying out,’ like a ball gown she can return.” The user ID on the message is HappyValley, a neighborhood in Hong Kong.
The casual cruelty takes her breath away.
She scrolls through. The subject line is “Should anyone be able to adopt?” Off-topic, yes, but not unusually so.
“Is this a friend of yours?” someone asks.
“More of an acquaintance. She runs in different circles.”
“Sounds horrible!” exclaims Christy3.
“Well, they have different rules for rich people, don’t they?”
“I’m sure the HK government wouldn’t allow this. They have such strict rules,” writes MadHatter.
“Yes, my friend wanted to adopt and had such a difficult time. She ended up getting a child from Russia.”
They are in this peculiar situation in Hong Kong, of living there but not being local, and being privy to the regulations of their own countries and of Hong Kong, and sometimes of China. Hong Kong orphanages give preference to local Chinese families and also prefer to place Chinese children with Chinese families. If there is a half-Indian or half-Filipino child, they will go to families with similar backgrounds, and once there was even a white child, and she went to a white family. It is their policy, and they adhere to it with much vigilance. It is surprising that Julian is with her, given his half-Indian, half-Chinese background, except that mixed-race children are much harder to place in Hong Kong. She’s been assured that this, in conjunction with his relatively advanced age, will make it much easier for her to adopt him.
She reads the thread. The last post was from an hour ago. Her heart pounds in her chest. Who could have written such a thing? Enough people knew about Julian, although she and David tried to be discreet. But who would write about her situation so meanly?
The doorbell rings. Her head is a mass of white noise from what she’s just seen. But her mother has arrived. Her mother has arrived. She hears a sudden burst of activity downstairs. Puri is probably taking her mother’s luggage, bringing her a cup of tea, and asking her about her flight, all the things that Hilary is supposed to be doing but can’t right now, can’t because she is sick and feverish, can’t because a website splayed her life out on the screen, and can’t, simply can’t, because, because, her husband is simply nowhere to be found.
Mercy
CAN YOU SUDDENLY be summoned into adulthood? Mercy wonders. Is it the same as being promoted and suddenly having to pretend you know how to be a boss, or getting your period or having sex and suddenly being on the other side, knowing what it’s all about? She is suddenly an adult. She is sitting here with a man who has a wife, and he is on the precipice. This is what they must mean by being an adult.
He is sick of it, he says over fried eggs at the Flying Pan. He is sick of the wife and the nagging and the baby talk and just all of it. He doesn’t have the life he wants. He wants to change. He wants to evolve. He has the manic, unbridled energy of someone who has just made a foolish decision. Who better to do it with than me? thinks Mercy.
He tells her, this is the first time he’s done this. He’s never cheated on his wife, except he says it more delicately, says, he’s never “been with” anyone else since his marriage. She wonders if anyone calls what they’re doing cheating, or if they always make it into something more noble in their mind. She also knows to wonder whether it’s true. She’s not that stupid.
She listens, is the vessel into which he can pour all his frustrations and fantasies.
“So,” she says finally, “you’re having a kind of a Jerry Maguire moment, huh, where you’re taking a stand and going off on a new path?”
He laughs.
“Don’t you need to go home?” she asks.
“You know, my mother-in-law is coming today,” he says, ignoring her question and looking at his watch. “In fact, she’s probably already here. And she and my wife, they’re going to hang out here, and then we’re all going to Bangkok, which we do every fucking year, because the mother-in-law likes that weekend market and she buys all this crap and ships it back to the United States, like she doesn’t already have enough shit.”
“Listen,” Mercy says, “I understand you’re going through some serious stuff right now, but you need to back off a little bit and calm down. You are being way too intense.” How interesting to be the sane one.
“I’m not a bad guy,” he says. “And actually, Hilary is not a bad person. We’ve just really grown apart, and I’m angry because I haven’t had the relationship that I want for a while.”
Are all older men this conversant in Oprah language? Mercy finds herself thinking. She can’t imagine any of her contemporaries talking like this.
“And I work all the time, and all she does is sit around and mope. You know, her family’s rich, and she thinks that entitles her to bitch and be sad all day. And she’s gotten us in this situation with this boy, and this poor kid, he doesn’t know which end is up. He doesn’t know what we want from him, or what to do. It’s totally crazy.”
It turns out that the Starrs have a pet child they take out and walk and water every once in a while. What is wrong with these people?
“Are you serious?” she asks. “Isn’t that against the law or something? I thought that the government didn’t even let you look at a child until they decide to give it to you.”
“The rules don’t apply to certain people, babe,” he says. “You are so naïve.”
She pauses. “First,” she says, “don’t ever call me babe. And second, are you still drunk?”
“Is that why you think I’m still here?”
“I guess,” she says. “I would think that you would have to go home at some point.”
“You would be thinking wrong,” he says, wagging a finger at her. He sops up some runny egg with a torn-off piece of toast. “You don’t eat, do you?”
She has not eaten any of the pancakes he ordered for her. She feels light inside, clean.
“And what of you?” he says.
“What of me?” He asked, she thinks—he’s not a terrible person. Perhaps there’s more to this than a man coming off the rails.
“You know,” he says, “don’t be coy. I’ve just laid out my life in front of you, and you haven’t told me anything.”
“I didn’t know we were sharing so much.”
“Come on,” he says. “Throw me a bone.”
“I’m not your escape hatch,” she says. It’s the only smart thing she’s said all morning. “Your bad behavior doesn’t mean that you get to blame it on me later.”
He looks up, startled. Maybe he’s seeing her for the first time. “I’m not doing that,” he says.
“Good,” she says. “Then we can have a conversation.”
She reaches over and covers his hand with hers. “Are you ready?”
Margaret
AT THE LUNCH BUFFET, picking up melon and prosciutto with silver tongs, Margaret hears a familiar voice. She looks up to see Frannie Peck, whose kids go to TASOHK as well. They greet each other, and Frannie asks if they want to get dinner at the seaside restaurant tonight. There is no gracious way to demur, so Margaret agrees, and they both go back to their tables.
After a few hours by the pool, Margaret goes back to their room, where Clarke has booked her a massage in their private garden. There, amid frangipani and bougainvillea, an embarrassment of tropical lushness, a quiet, dark-haired woman spends ninety minutes moving Margaret’s muscles around, in an air temperature that miraculously seems to be the same as her own body’s.
It is so indulgent and gorgeous and the masseuse so docile, so servile (she won’t even look at Margaret as she sets up the table), that Margaret spends the entire time—lying on soft terry cloth, her face looking down through the hole cut out of the table onto a thoughtfully placed bowl with a floating lotus flower—feeling absolutely awful.
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