Janice Lee - The Expatriates

The menu: Three canapés: sesame salmon tartare in phyllo tarts, Peking Duck spring rolls, mini cheese quiches for the vegetarians — vegans had an obligation to declare themselves in advance. Then a chicory salad with roasted garlic and goat cheese tumbles, and the main course: Chilean sea bass with an olive tapenade and mashed turnip, cappellini primavera for the vegetarians. For dessert, warm caramel tart with burnt-sugar ice cream and coffee or tea. A nice Italian pinot grigio and a red cabernet from Australia. Leafing through menus at her desk, she often floats above herself and sees the woman she’s become, eerily similar to her own mother, someone she thought she would never be. She knows that canapés have to be easily eaten in one bite, knows how much and what kind of wine to order for different crowds, has different sets of china and linens to set different moods.

The money has always come from the women in the family. Real estate, so quaint an industry in new-age San Francisco, but all those tech titans needed office space and places to live. It seemed quite natural to have David sign a prenup. “It’s the family custom,” she said at the time, nervous. It was true. Her father had signed one as well. Of course, her father had gone on to make his own fortune in real estate, then technology investments. “You should be so lucky,” her mother said. She had sized up David pretty well when they first met for lunch at a pier-side restaurant. “He knows how to eat an oyster, at least,” she said after he’d gone to the bathroom. She had always been a snob.

David was as good about her family and the money as he could be expected to be. But it was always there, especially when they talked about buying a house or a car. David was a lawyer and earned a good living, but they lived as well as his boss and had a nicer car. She supplemented their housing allowance to get a bigger place, and they bought a Mercedes, new, in Hong Kong, where cars cost twice as much as they do in the United States.

Hilary doesn’t care about money all that much, but that’s probably because she’s never been without it.

Her mother was once a great beauty, but all of a sudden her face caved in, her body ballooned out, her hair frizzed, as if beauty were an all too temporary gift, perhaps from a witch or a fairy, to be cruelly taken away somewhere between your sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. Or maybe you just stopped caring. Not her mother. Hilary cannot reconcile her mother now with the one in the photos and in her memories. Lissom, shiny waves of mahogany hair, large brown eyes, always in a fitted sheath or silk blouse, immaculately pressed pants with a thin leather belt. Slim, slim, slim. This is the chant she grew up with. Of course. When she sees her mother after a long period, like at the airport — she still picks her up, dutiful daughter that she is — she is always shocked for a moment at the stranger who is waving at her, that stoutish matron who looks wrinkled and untidy, tired from the long flight.

How uncharitable, she knows, but what can you do to suppress your thoughts about your mother? Her mother mentions it sometimes, as she pushes away from the dinner table: “The metabolism goes, you’ll see,” and “I never thought I’d look this way.” Once, when they were standing together in a restaurant bathroom in front of the mirror, her mother said, “When you get older, Hilary, there will come a day when you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror. You will feel like the same sixteen-year-old girl, or twenty-five-year-old, or thirty, but an old woman is staring back at you.” Hilary was uncomfortable with the confidence, but she nodded and quickly dried her hands.

Her mother comes once or twice a year, usually at Christmas. She is due to arrive in a few days, and they will spend three days in Hong Kong and a week in Bangkok, where her mother loves the Chatuchak Market and the food. Her father is ill, with dementia, and this is the only time her mother leaves him.

If she had a child, maybe she would understand her mother better.

She finishes her drink, goes down to find CK already setting up the ice bucket and the highball and wine glasses. CK is a freelance waiter and bartender, a Chinese man who has found a living working the expatriate dinner party circuit. He has been at her house so often he doesn’t need any direction, just comes in and starts placing the glasses and folding the napkins. She sees him at every third event she is at, at other people’s houses, always in his impeccable white shirt and sporting a steady smile. Once, leaving a party very late, she saw a man waiting at the bus stop and, startled, realized it was CK, in a black tank top and baggy pants. His deference was gone, and he seemed decades younger as he talked in Cantonese on his mobile phone and gesticulated with his other hand. His voice carried over as he talked easily, loudly. Where was the exaggerated bow, the ingratiating smile? Her heart sank as she thought of how he put on his face for his job, but was it really any different from a disgruntled accountant complaining loudly to his wife over dinner, then smiling and making a sycophantic comment to his boss in the elevator the next day? Wasn’t everyone just trying to make a living?

“Hello, CK,” she says. His name was Cheng Kiang or something like that, but of course he told all his Western clients to call him CK. Whatever was easier for them.

“Hello, Mrs. Starr,” he says, smiling.

CK and Puri have a funny relationship. Now they are friends, but they had it out the first few times about whose responsibility it was to clean the glasses. Puri, no fool, said it was his job. He said his job was outside the kitchen. Now they have come to a compromise: He brings the glasses into the kitchen and puts them neatly in the sink for Puri to wash. Everyone saves face.

The cook and his assistant have arrived and are clearing space on the tiny counter. The kitchens in Hong Kong are small and uninviting, as the mistress of the house is never expected to be in one.

“Hello, do you have everything you need?” Hilary asks. She stumbles over a box of pre-prepped entrees.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Starr?” asks the cook. He is of an indeterminate race — Tibetan? half-Indian? half-Chinese? — but speaks perfect English. He has been here once before, but she doesn’t remember his name.

“Fine, it’s nothing.” She waves him away. She is more deliberate after a drink.

She dials David, gets his voice mail. “Tell me your ETA, please,” she says, and hangs up.

“I’ll have a glass of the white,” she tells CK. He pours with a flourish and hands it to her. She sits down on the couch and crosses her legs, cool in the flurry of activity around her. Another Saturday night. Another dinner party.

She remembers one of the first ones she was invited to in Hong Kong. A woman, unpopular, it later turned out, leaned over to her and said, “Out here, you’re not a real woman unless you have four kids.” She left, back to New Jersey, a year or two after Hilary arrived, but she thought of her sometimes and her casual, unthinking cruelty.

She hears David arrive downstairs and gets up to greet him.

“You look nice,” he says. She looks down at her black dress with filmy chiffon sleeves to cover the upper arms she is sensitive about. “Thank you,” she says.

“Everything set?” he asks. He smells like alcohol, or maybe it’s her.

“It always is,” she says. When did her marriage shift so that the simplest comments come to seem like snipes? She doesn’t remember, but it has, indisputably, shifted. She remembers Olivia’s face hovering over the glass of hot tea.

“Okay,” he says. “Great. I’m going upstairs to freshen up.”

She looks at the retreating back of her husband as he goes up the stairs, a slim, handsome back in a gray suit. She spirals up, out of her body, so that she is looking down at the house, at the husband and wife, having a dinner party, like paper dolls, or those Sims characters in that computer game that used to be popular. Sometimes she feels so old.