Janice Lee - The Expatriates

HILARY 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.