The Expatriates

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  He doesn’t know, of course.

  “Where is the office?” she asks. “One where there’s someone on staff all night?”

  He tells her.

  “You stay here,” she says. “You look drunk. It won’t work with you there.”

  She goes and charms the young, bored security guard into giving her the access code with a story of how she has left her phone by the pool. He offers to escort her, but she manages to push him off, saying he has to keep doing a good job guarding the building.

  Charlie is sitting on the floor with his back against the wall when she comes back, checking his BlackBerry. She inputs the code, and they go in and turn on the lights. Their sounds echo around the walls, the humid air redolent of chlorine.

  “How did you get the code?” he asks.

  “Years of experience in bad behavior,” she says.

  She can see him thinking about what they will swim in, so she strips down to her bra and panties. She looks down. Her stomach is still flat.

  “Now you,” she says.

  He tries not to look at her. This makes her like him a little bit more.

  “Okay.” He shuffles off his pants, unbuttons his shirt. Soon he is in his boxers. At least he is in boxers. She had thought of him as a tighty-whitie guy.

  The water is bracing, perfect. It moves against her skin like cool velvet. She forgets how wonderful it can be to be in water, weightless. She comes up like a seal, hair plastered to her skull, to find Charlie watching her.

  “You are very beautiful,” he says.

  She melts a tiny bit more. All his annoying traits—his lack of irony and sophistication, his tendency to overstate his accomplishments—seem dissolved into the cool water. Unclothed, he is a tabula rasa, without his annoying FOB tics or telltale sartorial mistakes. He has a lean body, with muscles that ripple just under the skin. The handsomest of Chinese boys are—she hates to say it, but it’s true—almost feminine, with big, moist eyes and dark, thick hair. Charlie is handsome unclothed, almost beautiful. He needed this, to be without any identifiers.

  Later he will ruin it by buttoning his shirt up too high, by wearing jeans and white sneakers when they go out for brunch on a Sunday, but right now, in the pool next to her, glistening and wet and practically naked, he is Adonis, sculpted out of a smooth alabaster flesh that feels almost perfect. Here she can take him as he is, as he was when he entered the world, without complexes, without issues, without all that hard-won knowledge to hinder him.

  This is why she urges him to unclothe completely, why she slips out of her bra and underwear.

  “I’ve never skinnied before,” he says.

  “Skinny-dipped,” she corrects.

  And they take off their last remaining slips of clothes, feel the water envelop them totally. It is intoxicating and sobering at the same time (certainly for him). The erotic charge of being naked with water’s shifting cover is so strong, Mercy feels her body prickle with anxiety, with anticipation. She closes her eyes and dives to the bottom, just to hover, weightless, as if she is going back to some primordial, preexisting state. When she surfaces, there is Charlie, waiting.

  When they sleep together later, she will be surprised. He is skillful, assured. People are different in different realms. The boy who sat across from her in class and questioned the TA with a knowing erudition; whom she would see later at a college mixer, leaning against the wall, social anxiety palpable, stripped of all confidence in this different arena. Even as they are intertwined, all skin on skin and exposed nerve, she imagines him practicing on bespectacled girls, eager to shed their virginity, their innocence, to enter the adult world.

  What is this new creature, this boy/man who transforms into something else every time he turns in the light, every time he emerges in a new world? Is this someone who is for her? Is this how someone becomes yours?

  She doesn’t know, so after he has fallen asleep, she wriggles out carefully from under his arm, all the time looking at his face, lit in the bent light from the living room, so at peace, his scent already a little familiar. She goes home at 2:00 a.m. to her mother, sleeping in her bed, her insides clanging with confusion and, yes, this, her baby.

  Margaret

  SHE GOES to the hotel, and luckily, the room is available, although it’s only 7:00 a.m. They remember her from before, and the hotel manager escorts her to her room, only barely stifling his curiosity about why she is back in Seoul. The room is cold, and she turns up the thermostat before pulling back the bedcovers and huddling under the comforter.

  The black-eye is so draining she actually falls asleep for an hour and wakes to find that it is already eight thirty. She calls the police station, dialing the number from memory. Mr. Park is not there. She hesitates, then calls his cell phone. When he answers, she can tell from the announcements and ambient noise that he is just emerging from the subway. He is also exasperated.

  “Mrs. Reade,” he says. “I told you it was not certain. It will still take some time. You should have waited for me to call you.”

  “I couldn’t wait,” she says. “You should know.”

  He sighs.

  “Okay, I will call you when I get to the station.”

  She gives him her room number at the hotel, lies down on the bed again, and turns on the television. There is a Korean morning show on, the kind with impossibly good-looking hosts and people doing funny tricks for their fifteen minutes. The sound of the show helps, the tinny music, the relentless upbeat voices. Her brain is distracted. It reminds her of when she went to a dentist and he wiggled her lip while he administered the novocaine, and it helped a lot with the discomfort.

  So part of her mind listens as a woman comes on in ajumma clothes, clothes for a middle-aged housewife. Then music starts, and a pole descends from the ceiling. She starts to strip off her dowdy clothing, to reveal an impressive body in a gold bikini. This being Korea, the bikini is still quite modest. She starts a routine on the pole that is reminiscent of Olympic gymnastics, spinning around horizontally, with her arms splayed straight. It is very impressive. The presenters talk all through her performance, oohing and aahing.

  She looks at the clock: 8:50. If time passed any slower, she feels, it would be going backward.

  He doesn’t call until nine thirty. She jumps when the phone rings.

  “Mrs. Reade,” he says. “There is no news to report. The boy is still answering questions.”

  “Aren’t there photos?” she asks. “Or can I go there?”

  There is a pause. She always feel brash and impolite in Korea, as if she’s always asking for more.

  “I will call you back,” he says.

  Clarke has e-mailed, saying he will arrive around two. She starts to feel stirrings of hunger but doesn’t want to leave the room in case Mr. Park calls, and she’s not sure her cell phone will work properly, so she orders coffee and some pancakes from room service.

  The phone rings again while the food is being delivered.

  “Mrs. Reade,” Mr. Park says. His voice is gentle. “There has been mistake,” he says. “I am so sorry.”

  Her heart plummets so fast, so deep, that she feels dizzy from the altitude change within her.

  “What?” she manages to say.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “The child has another family that has claimed him. It happened very fast. They are the correct family.”

  In one corner of her mind, she can still hear the tinny sounds of the television. In another, she is aware of a black hole that she must avoid at all costs. She is teetering on the edge of it, peering down, wondering how she will prevent herself from falling. She does this by feeling a sudden surge of virulent anger toward Mr. Park.

  “But WHY?” she cries. “WHY did you call me and tell me there was a chance? Why did you get my hopes up?” She begins to sob, wildly and openly.

  “WHY?” She bang
s the phone down.

  She screams, screams again. It feels good, so she keeps doing it. The phone rings, and she ignores it. Her throat is raw and her voice giving out, so then she crawls under the blankets and climbs into a little ball at the bottom of the bed.

  She cannot live; she cannot not live. The child, the children. She almost forgets how to breathe. The stifling air inside the blankets makes it even more difficult. She embraces the difficulty, the suffocating feeling, the frantic scrabble for oxygen. She almost passes out and then has to throw off the blankets before she does.

  She lies there quietly, breathing deeply, the cold air.

  There is a knock on the door.

  “Mrs. Reade,” says a female voice. “Mrs. Reade. Is everything all right?”

  She almost giggles at the question but succeeds in choking the laugh down.

  “Sorry,” she calls. “Everything is okay now.”

  A pause. Then the knock again.

  “So sorry, Mrs. Reade. Can you open the door? I just need to check.”

  She lies for a minute, and then gives in to the inevitable, what she has to do if she decides to stay in the room, stay in a world where people do normal things and, thus, have a chance to get to normal herself. She gets up and opens the door to a pretty young Korean girl in her twenties.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Sorry about the disturbance.”

  The girl bows. “So sorry to disturb you. But our other guests were worried. I will leave you now, unless you need something.”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  She closes the door and goes back to the bed and lies down, in the fetal position.

  What had Dr. Stein said to her back in those first days? “Your pain is so raw and intense. It’s like nerves that have been sheared off, and you are feeling wild, vibrant pain with no painkiller. I know it is unbearable. I know you cannot accept this new reality. I promise you: You can survive this, you must survive this, and time will make it bearable. You will be able to live. Time will help you.”

  She remembers this. And how to cope. When you feel the grief about to hit you like a tidal wave, you breathe deeply. You decide whether you’re going to let yourself go there, or whether you’re going to get up and write a grocery list instead. You go through the motions of life and wonder that you are able. When you want to kill yourself from the pain, you write down everything you are grateful for. You go for a walk. You look at the children you still have. You hum, so the silence doesn’t overwhelm you.

  So it wasn’t G. The main thing.

  She must call Clarke, she remembers. Another thing. So he won’t get on the plane. But when she dials, he has already turned off his phone, is on the plane already. She hates this window of inaccessibility, so unusual in this day and age. The children are at school. They didn’t tell them anything, not wanting to get their hopes up. They think she is here to do legal paperwork. So she is here, in this hotel room, by herself, with nothing to do until Clarke gets here. Then they can fly back together.

  People go back to work after tragedy; people need something to do. If she hadn’t had Daisy and Philip, what would she have done? They had given her a lifeline with which to tether herself. And she wonders, as she has before, if she has selfishly had her children to give her joy, to give her life a facile meaning she never has to question. Who would question someone who spends her life taking care of her children? Isn’t that the very meaning of life? She remembers reading a story in the paper about single women in Vietnam having children as they got older. One of them told the reporter it was so that she would have someone to take care of her in her old age. The bald practicality of the statement had taken her breath away. But wasn’t that what everyone did, they just dressed it up in prettier words?

  There is a burst of applause from the television. It startles her back into the moment. She checks her watch. Ten thirty.

  She decides to go to the department store so she is surrounded by people and light. She puts on her shoes and hesitates over her coat until she remembers she can get there through one of those underground tunnels.

  At the store, she goes to the basement, where they have dozens of food stalls and stands. She buys a cup of coffee and a brioche and sits down to eat. It’s still quiet, being a weekday, and just a few people are sitting around her.

  Remember this, she thinks. The hot, fragrant coffee. The buttery, flaky bread. Feel these. Taste these. Stay here.

  Later she goes up to the top floor, where they have children’s clothes. She buys a coat for Daisy, a pair of pants for Philip, and goes back to the hotel.

  People are different in hotels. She always has to get into a bathrobe and climb into bed when she’s alone in one. It’s because the bed is the focus of the entire room. There’s rarely room for a couch or somewhere to sit, so the logical thing seems to be to get into bed. She lies to one side, by habit—she has become used to Clarke and various children sharing her bed, something the children had done while young, which had been resurrected full force after the incident. Before, when they were infants and toddlers, she remembers waking in the middle of the night to find one, two, sometimes three children in there with them, with their stuttered, nighttime movements, often sitting bolt upright in sleep and then falling down again, their shallow, quick breaths while dreaming. Sometimes she would stay awake to watch them, lying there with their small, solid bodies, sprawled insensate, completely vulnerable, and kiss their temples, their sweaty scalps, smell their sweet breath. Then she would steal away to one of their beds so she could get some sleep.

  She drifts into sleep and is woken by the sound of the door being opened. Clarke comes in. He smiles when he sees her, full of hope. Her stomach drops all over again. When he sees her expression, his face falls.

  “So?” he asks.

  “No,” she says.

  He sits down on the foot of the bed and holds his head in his hands.

  She puts her hands, palms flat, on his back, delicately, as if they might hurt him.

  Her husband is a good man, and this whole thing has affected him in a way that is so vastly different from the way it has affected her that it has almost destroyed their marriage. They have taken turns comforting each other, but he has been the one to keep the family together, to try to make it whole, to encourage her to move forward. That is the way it usually is, it has been explained to her, but it is still unsettling to see how he tries to pretend that everything will be okay. She cannot imagine it, even as she sees how it has to be that way for Daisy and Philip. In some of her more interior moments, she even admits that she is being the selfish one, while he is the one with the harder job.

  He turns. His eyes are rimmed with tears. “I just . . . ,” he starts.

  “I know,” she says.

  He reaches for her. There is still this. This has remained. So far in the back of her head she has never articulated it out loud. But a faint whisper. Maybe another will come. Maybe.

  Mercy

  HER APPETITE has returned with a vengeance, a cacophonous hunger that surprises even her with its ferocity. Pregnancy is hollowing her out with cravings. Her days of eating lettuce slicked with oil and vinegar, just to fill the hours, are but a distant memory.

  She and Charlie are at a new, hot restaurant she has chosen, a week into whatever it is they have going.

  “This salmon has been harmoniously raised,” Mercy says, reading off the menu, raising an eyebrow.

  “What?” Charlie says.

  She tries to suppress her irritation and fails. She pops a piece of bread in her mouth.

  “It’s funny,” she says. “It’s funny that it says that the salmon is harmoniously raised.” I’m being didactic, she thinks, and then thinks, Charlie doesn’t know what that word means.

  He looks at her, shrugs his shoulders.

  “You wanted to come here,” he says, but he’s not bothered.
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  “Because it’s ridiculous, you know? Like when they say the tuna is line-caught? Do you know what that is about?”

  “No,” he says, buttering a roll.

  “Because all these people are crazy, and they want to know where their food came from, or how it was raised, in what kind of environment. Like when they say the tuna is line-caught, it means that they didn’t fish with nets, because dolphins get caught in the nets and die, and people don’t want to think that there is collateral damage or side effects from when they eat their seared yellowfin with cilantro mustard.”

  He never picks up the thought and runs with it.

  “Like Portlandia. Have you ever seen it? The whole locavore, crazy liberal thing? And this salmon. It’s such bullshit. Have you ever heard of the salmon farms and the color wheels? The people who raise salmon have special feed that will dye the flesh, and the supermarkets and buyers can choose the color they want on a color wheel, and the fish farmers tweak the feed. It’s like our idea of what color salmon should be, that orange with white stripes, or the idea that tuna should be that dark red. It’s like a giant conspiracy of our own stupidity.”

  She might as well be speaking Greek.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

  “Because you don’t read the New Yorker, or the blogs that I do,” she says. “You are not interested at all in the same things. How can you not know anything about this stuff?”

  She hates hearing herself even as she speaks.

  “I do have a job,” he says.

  Here is a man who is buying her dinner at an expensive restaurant she chose, who is kind to her, who is good in bed. And yet she is the one who feels annoyed. Oh, and here is a man who has no idea she is carrying another man’s baby.

  When that thought comes to her, she folds the menu and puts it down. She was starving, but now her appetite collapses.

  “You know, you are so American,” he says. It is a neutral statement, she thinks, but he says it in such a way that she doesn’t know what he is talking about.