Janice Lee - The Expatriates

“Not at all.”

“Want another drink?” he asks.

“Better not,” she says. “Drinking at four in the afternoon. You must be a dissolute kind of guy.”

There’s a pause. All this sparring is going to lead to something, or not.

“Well,” he says, “if you’re not going to have another drink with me, I do have a dinner party to get to.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” she says.

He gets up to go but lingers.

“I guess I’ll see you around?”

“Maybe.” She’s not that desperate.

He considers, says it. “Where do you hang out?”

A better man would have asked for her number or e-mail, but she’s not used to better men.

“I know the bartender at Il Dolce, so I’m there for drinks sometimes.” A little crumb laid for a trail to follow.

“Okay.” He leans in for a kiss on the cheek. “Lovely to meet you, Mercy.” He smells of the cigarette they shared outside and the Macallan he’s been drinking.

She sits at the bar, with a lovely fizzy feeling in her stomach. Maybe this man is the way out, maybe this is the sparkly path to the future. She knows it’s the alcohol talking, mostly, but that’s okay. She’s had her fill of the past. She wants to break out of the mold everyone thinks she should be in. Everyone thinks for her too much, has their nose in her business, tells her what they think she should be doing. On rare occasions, something good happens to her, like two years ago, between jobs, when she found out she had enough miles for a free ticket and booked a flight to Italy just to get the hell out of the hole she was in, and people thought she was extravagant or foolhardy. One friend, Tracy, who everyone said came into a $10 million trust fund when she turned twenty-one, sat her down and told her she had to think about her career. “You can’t just go to Italy whenever you want,” she said, this from a girl who had gone to Italy twice in the past three years, plus India and Thailand and Australia.

“Why not?” Mercy asked, wondering why Tracy cared.

“It’s irresponsible. You don’t know where your next job is coming from. And…” It was unseemly, was what Tracy wanted to say but couldn’t. But she couldn’t understand how difficult it was for Mercy to sit in her tiny apartment day after day and do nothing.

“You can’t just get job after job,” Tracy said. “You need a plan.” As if plans were so easy to come by. Or careers. “You’re getting older,” she said. As if Mercy didn’t notice that all around her, people were getting promotions and getting important, or getting married, or having kids, or moving to other places. As if she were unaware. As if.

“You went to Italy,” Mercy pointed out. “Last summer.”

Tracy paused. “It’s different,” she said. She wasn’t embarrassed in the least.

Tracy is different from Mercy. It is just a fact to her. This is the dissonance. Mercy thinks she is like her friends, and they think she is different. It was not so apparent in college, but now in postcollege life, in real life, it is obvious that they think she is different. If she believes that too, that she is different, it seems like giving up, and then where does she go from there?

The trip to Italy didn’t pan out. She couldn’t find a cheap enough hotel and had to factor in traveling money and realized she couldn’t swing it, and then when she tried to get the miles back, it cost so much to put them back in her account that she hesitated, and when she called back two weeks later to do it, it was too close to the date and she lost all those miles. Of course. But, she thinks. But. It was almost worth it to have had that giddy day of possibility when she booked the trip, imagining the wonderful things she might do, the small, tiny espressos she might drink standing up at small cafés, and the old stones and fountains she would wander around and look at. It was almost worth it.

Mercy walks home, pleasantly drunk in the crisp December air, swaying a little, dreaming of a higher authority — one that sees all the injustices meted out to her, that sees all the good things she tries to do, no matter if they don’t work out or no one notices — and that she will be found to be correct: Everyone will see that she has suffered more, been given less. How unfair, they will say. There will, finally, be justice.

SHE IS OUT of the bath now, skin moist and flushed, wrapped in a Portman Ritz-Carlton bathrobe from an old trip to Shanghai. A trip from another life. She has wrapped her hair in a turban, so it can dry slowly and comfortably, the heat from her head trapped and steamy inside. The small space heater in the corner is sputtering out some warmth, and she is making a cream-cheese-and-olive sandwich. She takes out the cream cheese from the small box refrigerator she bought a few weeks ago, which reminds her of college days. The cream cheese is thick and white and comforting as she slides her knife out of the container. She spreads it across the thick multigrain bread. She slices the olives and studs the cream cheese with the bits, fingers slippery with oil. Her mouth is watering. What a marvelous combination, the smooth creaminess and the salty oil, paired with the heartiness of the bread. Food is good. She has to remember the good things, the small good things.

And tonight, a dinner party. She has to get home, to make sure the kids are packed for vacation and to get ready. It’s at Hilary and David Starr’s. She knew Hilary as a child back in California. Their mothers were friendly. Hilary was very chubby, one of those flaxen-haired girls with porcelain cheeks, a rotund Dutch doll of a girl. Then suddenly one fall, maybe sixth grade, she came back to school with her cheeks caved in in a funny way, her arms and legs still largish but her waist tiny. Margaret remembers going to Hilary’s house one day, maybe in fifth grade, and seeing a schedule pinned up above the desk. In tidy, round letters, it spelled out a stringent schedule:

3:30 Arrive home

3:45 Snack and unpack

4:00 Homework

5:00 Outdoor time

6:00 Dinner

7:00 Finish unfinished homework

8:15 Shower

8:30 Reading in bed

9:00 Lights out

Margaret came away with a deep sense of wonder that someone her age could be so methodical and disciplined. She didn’t admire it — already she knew the beauty in ease, the greater cachet in sprezzatura —but the disconcerting sense never left her that Hilary was a deeply formidable person, one who would win over her genetics (she would have liked to see that diet and exercise plan) and whatever else stood in her way and never look back. There was something unnatural about the way she looked, like a fat person turned skinny, never natural, but she had won. She was no longer the chubby girl.

Hilary went on to do well at school, but she never was able to shake that plodding image, that of a workaday bee. She and Margaret were never good friends, just nodding acquaintances who were polite to each other.

Margaret hadn’t seen her in years, maybe decades, until they ran into each other at the airport. They had both been going to Thailand, and they ended up at the same resort as well. Their mothers had lost touch, so they hadn’t known the other also lived in Hong Kong.

She had been amazed at how quickly she could summon memories, pictures of them together, once they recognized each other. It reminds her of when she was going to her high school reunion and looking through the names of the attendees, and thought bubbles sprang up unbidden — old reputations, the gossip about someone: “pretty blonde, short legs, though,” “brainy, chess club, Stanford,” “opportunist,” or “comes too quickly,” the last the malicious gossip about a handsome football player who had killed himself when he was thirty. Could everyone be summed up in a few words like that? Hilary was “fat girl turned thin, type A.” She supposed she was something like “pretty, easygoing, lucky,” or had been.