Embassy Wife

by Katie Crouch

  “What’s this?” Meg asked, pointing to a huge mural of a half-naked woman in chains. It was more graphic than he remembered, with nipples fully realized and the rest of the curves painted with positively pornographic abandon. Shit, he thought.

  “Well … it’s supposed to represent … see … Okay. Do you know what apartheid is?”

  “Kind of.” She looked up at him. “Like, Taimi—before—would have gone to a different school than me.”

  “Yes.” Mark felt the warmth of pride at his daughter’s perception. “She would have had to live in a different place from you. She wouldn’t have been able to do certain jobs—”

  “Right, except Taimi’s super-rich. So she doesn’t need a job.”

  Mark nodded. “Well, that’s just it—I’m not sure she would have been rich then. Anyway. You two going to school together, yes, that would have been an impossibility. But Nelson Mandela changed all of that. Now people of color can go to good schools.”

  Meg wandered ahead, taking in a morbid murder scene in the next room. “Back home, people just pay for better schools.”

  “Well, sometimes, but—”

  “We paid.”

  “We did, that’s true…”

  Meg shrugged. “My school was almost all white at home. Except for Ling.”

  Mark scratched his neck, wondering how to get her off this subject. “It’s complicated. Our class system is … well, a little messed up. We’re working on it. Sort of. But let’s focus here.” He gestured at the wall. “See, Africa has a history of much more violence than we’ve ever dealt with. In this mural, the artist is showing that apartheid is like being chained like a slave.”

  Meg peered up at him through her shaggy bangs. “But in our country, we had slaves, right?”

  “Well, not us. But a lot of Southerners did, yes. A long time ago.”

  “Like Grandpa Albert.”

  “Oh … no, not Albert. He’s too young. Also, he was a civil rights supporter. I think.”

  “His grandfather, then?”

  “I mean, maybe. We can do research.”

  Meg nodded, then turned to amble down the hall. “So I’m descended from slave owners. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “What do they teach you at that school? Litigation?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re not descended from slave owners really, because Mom’s adopted anyway.”

  “Yeah, but what about your family?”

  This outing wasn’t going at all the way he’d intended. He pretended to check his phone, leaving Meg to scowl at the end of the mural’s progression—happy, strapping Namibians prospering in business suits—before wandering to the window to look out again at the spilled milk of a town that was Windhoek.

  “So your work’s going okay?” Meg asked, coming to stand next to him.

  “Oh sure—my work’s going great, actually,” he said, suddenly defensive. “Why?”

  “’Cause Mom says we can leave once you finish your book.”

  “Oh.” Mark thought guiltily of the eight hundred words he had written. “I’m actually doing a new kind of work,” he said. “And if that does well, Daddy might not even have to write books anymore.”

  Shit. What was he doing?

  “Why are you calling yourself Daddy, like you’re not here? That’s, like, weird.” She had wandered back to a part of the mural where another naked woman was carrying a huge basket of stones on her head. “You don’t like writing books?”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, honestly, I’ve been thinking that academia may not really be for me.”

  “And you like this new thing better?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s like Ling,” Meg said knowingly. “I thought she was my best friend, but now Taimi is. I mean, I like Ling, too, but Taimi’s right here, you know?”

  “It’s sort of like that, yes.”

  Meg narrowed her eyes. “But we’re still going back to California, right?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Okay,” Meg said. “Can we go home and play Scrabble now?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  But they didn’t play Scrabble. Instead they did what they always did, which was retreat to opposite sides of the house. Tonight his daughter was on the landline, conspiring with Taimi, while he sat in the garden and brooded over his laptop. Amanda was out somewhere, so he was free to stare online at the particulars of their joint savings account.

  The Evanses had stretched themselves to come to Namibia. Selling the house, it turned out, hadn’t been a great idea. Having bought the place only three years before, they’d been nowhere even close to paying off the mortgage. And the taxes had eaten most of what little profit they had made.

  He knew he should tell Amanda about his new business. But, of course, then he’d have to explain all those trips he’d taken that hadn’t actually been research. Trips that had been taken with another woman, too—innocent or not—and that had involved no writing at all.

  So far, the gems had netted him $22,000. Pretty good, but nothing to live on. Jaime was right. He needed to invest more if he was going to make more. And so, taking a deep breath, with the click of a few keys, he liquidated $100,000 of the GiaTech stock in their joint account.

  What was it Jaime had said, exactly, about playing and winning?

  This had to be a win, didn’t it?

  / 24 /

  Every school, everywhere in the world, had one: the annual fundraising event. It didn’t matter if the money was for scholarships or books or soccer uniforms or a new gym floor; it always amounted to something painful, be it a car wash or dress-up ball or auction dinner, the planning of which transformed ninety percent of the mothers and fathers involved into complete lunatics. (The other ten percent just got drunk.)

  Thus far during Meg’s school career, Amanda had managed to avoid these functions, claiming “work,” and sent Mark instead. (He was always part of the drinking crowd.) But this year she had no other activity that might excuse her beyond posting Instagram photos. So here she was, on the morning before the event, toiling like a carnival worker.

  International Day had to have been the most ambitious school event Amanda had witnessed. Back home, PTAs mostly held parties at night that could be corralled into a few hours in the evening. WIS, however, threw a party that stretched on from 10:00 a.m. into the evening. Every grade had to represent a country, and the fuck-you-I’m-better aspect of this particular fundraiser was varying degrees of booth extravagance. So far, Brazil seemed to be winning, as one of the mothers had arranged for a truck of sand to be dumped on the ground to make a miniature Ipanema, and workers were bringing in actual palm trees. Cuba was selling authentic Cuban cigars, while Japan was hiring a real sushi chef. (Though sushi in the desert, in Amanda’s opinion, was a tall if not hazardous order.)

  China, set up by the Chinese Embassy, as no one would dare assign China to a grade, was building a real pagoda, but since none of the other countries wanted to be affiliated with China during the poaching crisis, the largest country in the world was marooned at the end of the field, under the goalpost. As for the U.S., it wasn’t even represented. Trump’s America, it was decided, wasn’t appropriate for children.

  Half of the families, in a tradition from Mila’s reign, had sent their housekeepers and gardeners to work their appointed shifts for them. Persephone had discouraged the practice, but in the end she threw up her hands, deciding that help was help. Although, as Amanda couldn’t help noticing, out of the range of their employers’ eyes, most of the housekeepers and handymen sent to WIS for the day performed their work with all the enthusiasm of a ninety-year-old cancer patient with access to the morphine drip. Then again, since that was about Amanda’s own level of excitement about this project and she had a kid at this school, she really couldn’t blame them.

  Actually, the only person with any drive at all in the setup area, Amanda observed, was Persephone, who was running around like a coked-up sororit
y girl before Pledge Night.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Persephone called to Kayla’s gardener, who was sprawled on the ground. “Do you think you can be in charge of erecting that canopy?”

  The man smiled affably, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

  “Amanda!” Persephone said, running up to her in ladylike bunny steps. “Didn’t see you here behind all of these crates.”

  “I may have been hiding.”

  “Are you waiting for the beverage truck? I hope so! Someone needs to do that.”

  “I am now.”

  “Ah, thank you,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag and pulling out a walkie-talkie. “Kayla, Kayla, come in, Kayla.”

  A crackle of static erupted by way of an answer.

  “You there? Listen, we have to rearrange. Brazil cannot be anywhere near Ghana, okay? I’m talking the kindergarten booth and year four. Copy?”

  Crackle. “Yeah, Brazil’s already put down their sand.” Crackle.

  “Then move Ghana, or else there will be a body count, I swear to you. Not kidding. Thank you.” She rolled her eyes at Amanda. “The kindergarten teaching assistant slept with the year-four teacher’s husband. Now these ladies are threatening to kill each other, and since they’re cooking, they’ll both have knives. Not to mention alcohol. God save us.” She shook her head. “This is hell.”

  “I really hate it when people say this to me,” Amanda said. “But … I told you so.”

  “Yes. I literally asked for this, didn’t I? Am I using that word correctly? Literally? As in, the words came out of my mouth. I want to be in charge of International Day, I think I said.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well. I sort of thought Mila might be here to just give me a tip or two. I mean, can you believe how AWOL she is?”

  “I haven’t talked to her,” Amanda said.

  “Really?” Persephone said, feigning indifference. Amanda hadn’t told Persephone about Mila freezing her out, but Amanda could see her friend had noticed and was taking stock of the development. She braced herself for more prodding, but Persephone’s radio crackled again.

  “Persephone! The pork is here.” Amanda couldn’t be sure if it was just the radio interference, but Kayla’s voice sounded hysterical.

  “Right, we’ve reserved the tuckshop refrigerator—”

  “No. Oh my God.” Crackle. “The supplier misunderstood. They’ve dropped off warthogs, Perse. Live ones.”

  Amanda and Persephone lifted their eyes to the field entrance far on the other end, where, sure enough, there was a truck full of wriggling warthogs in the back.

  “Oh my Lord. Look, I’ll see you later,” Persephone said to Amanda. “Do not leave your post. The only way we’ll save this day is with alcohol. Anyway, see you…”

  Persephone’s voice trailed off as she sprinted toward the hogs. Amanda began ambling toward the beverages. Really, what she wanted to do was sneak off and disentangle herself completely from this shitshow. But she supposed she couldn’t let down her friend—especially when that friend was obsessed with shows of loyalty, however large or small.

  Just then, Amanda’s phone vibrated angrily. An international call—Amanda knew she had to answer. She took refuge in a quiet shady spot in an empty tent and picked up.

  “Amanda? Hello. It’s Rita del Porto.”

  Rita was the financial advisor Amanda had hired when it became clear she and Mark were unable to handle their money. Amanda, who had grown up with, if not lots of money, enough of it, had never considered hiring a financial planner until two years ago when she began to take home four times as much as Mark.

  Los Gatos was an expensive place to live. (“Listen closely. You can hear the invisible vacuums coming for your wallet,” Mark used to say as he walked into the grocery store.) Mark detested Los Gatos, but Amanda adored it. It was clean and charming, and the school was stellar (even though they indulged in private), and the place was so utterly different from Charleston. But it was an incredible strain on their finances. One day she went to the ATM to get some cash, and she found the balance at zero. An impossibility, it seemed, as every two weeks GiaTech automatically deposited thousands into the joint account. Yet when she’d looked up the debits online, it was true. The Evans family’s Los Gatos lifestyle had them hemorrhaging money. Daily trips to Whole Foods, private riding and swimming for Meg, any clothes anyone in the family felt like buying at any time.

  Amanda, thoroughly alarmed, had called her father for advice. For some people, not being able to budget was a mark of shame. Well, Amanda was long over shame—she had given that up when she waited around for Mark Evans for two years in college.

  “You have enough money to hire someone to manage it for you,” Albert had said. “A financial person. Someone to protect you from yourselves and even budget for you. And yet…”

  “Yes?”

  “You and Mark must be on equal footing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Equal access to accounts. No matter who makes the money. That’s what a marriage is.”

  “Of course,” Amanda had said. She knew that she and Mark could always tell each other everything. They had never had secrets. Until, that is, Mark had set up a life for them in Africa and not said a word to her about it.

  “Rita,” she said now, “what’s up?”

  Rita was Italian and gleefully thrifty, so Amanda was more than a little surprised that Rita was making an international phone call. She was the sort of person who got a physical high from saving money. “Don’t you love this chair?” she’d crow. “Yard sale. Three dollars!” “See this dress? My dead aunt’s. You can barely make out the oil stain on the chest. A little lemon juice, and—boom!—brand-new-to-me St. John’s knit!”

  She was also, in Amanda’s mind, a little too opinionated about Amanda’s marriage. “You need to watch out for yourself, girlfriend,” Rita had said. “Your retirement is in tatters. He has his university pension. What are you going to do if he leaves you for a succulent grad student?”

  “Succulent?” Mark had said. “Like a plant?”

  “Luscious.”

  “I don’t teach grad students.”

  “I don’t worry about the college kids, Rita,” Amanda had said. “They still have pacifiers. Anyway, I have a 401K.”

  Rita had thrown up her hands in feigned hopelessness. As if Amanda—an educated businesswoman with a salary her father would chortle over—were a hopeless wilting violet who let her husband walk all over her.

  Mark and Amanda had bonded over laughing at Rita, in the same way they’d gleefully picked apart their couples counselors. Her cheap furniture. Her (they imagined) angry, spinster-like existence filled with trolling for bargains at various outlets. Never mind that the only two times they’d spotted Rita outside of the office had been in opulent surroundings—once at a play opening at ACT, the other by the pool in Napa. She didn’t know their relationship. She had no right to pull the girlfriend-you-need-to-protect-yo’self! act.

  Yet here Amanda was, two years later, listening to Rita tell her the very worst.

  “Technically, I shouldn’t be talking only to you,” Rita said. “But you’re both hopelessly unreachable. Mark’s email actually bounced back. I thought he might be dead.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “That’s too bad for you. Because he’s withdrawn almost all of your savings.”

  Amanda tried to make sense of the way the leaves on the tree she was looking at were starting to swim.

  “Come again?”

  “Not your retirement, of course. And not Meg’s college account. I’ve protected those. It’s your GiaTech stock. The stuff I advised you to put into the mutual fund so it would be less liquid. But you wanted to see if the stock would rise.”

  Amanda stiffened. That was their rainy-day fund. They hadn’t agreed on what the fund would build yet … Mark wanted to buy an inn in Northern California. Amanda was thinking of an old, rambling house in whatever town Meg eventually c
hose to settle in. Uncertain as it was, this was their future. Their own personal Dream Act.

  “Did you know that he had taken the money out? A hundred thousand dollars?”

  Amanda didn’t reply immediately. It was one thing to lay her financial and marriage foibles in front of Albert. It was another to tell a gloating Rita she’d been right all along.

  “Of course I knew,” Amanda said. “I can’t tell you what we’re using it for, as it’s top secret…” Wait. That sounded like something out of a bad version of The Americans. “What I mean is, still in development. Everything is under control. Thank you so much for the call, Rita. And international, too.”

  “I’ll bill you for it,” Rita said, and hung up.

  Amanda held the phone in midair, still looking at it. The flaps of the tent began to beat wildly in the wind, which was picking up. The hogs grunted noisily. Someone was yelling in Brazil.

  All of the GiaTech stock?

  She tried to think what he could possibly be doing. Now that she thought about it, he had been looking uncharacteristically happy lately. He was tanner, thinner. He wasn’t drinking as much. Maybe he was having an affair? But if he was, was he really going to take all of their money with him?

  She rummaged in her pocket madly for her keys as she made her way to the parking lot.

  “Amanda! You’re not leaving me, are you?” Persephone called, sounding desperate.

  “I’ll be back … I gotta…” Her voice trailed off as she climbed into the oven-like heat of the car.

  It was still somewhat early, but the traffic was already beginning to snarl in the city center. Laying on her horn, pulling out aggressively through the choked intersections. She tried to calm down, but her pulse was doing that thing where it rocketed ahead, no matter how much she tried that fucking Californian tantric breathing. God, she was so stupid. He’d been going on trips every other week, staying over nights. Of course something was going on. And, honestly, why wouldn’t he look elsewhere for sex? Lately, she’d been as warm and welcoming as a sea vegetable.