Janice Lee - The Expatriates

She started screaming then, started screaming and wailing: Hadn’t she followed him here to this godforsaken place where you couldn’t get a proper iced coffee to save your life? Hadn’t she never complained about all the travel he had to do, all the work, during which apparently he was fucking around with this whore? And hadn’t she kept herself up, looking good, and what the fuck? What the fuck? She was going to tell his kids what a shit they had for a father, what a terrible person he was, and he was never going to see them again, and she was going to take all his money. Garth sat there, taking it all, and the woman — he called her Lily — also sat quietly, perhaps afraid and understanding, finally, what she had started.

“There are children involved,” he said, meaning his children in China. And that set Tammy off again.

“Your children are Mark and Melissa! The ones who are at school right now, with no idea what you’ve done to our family. They are going to hate you forever. You are never going to see them again.”

Finally, “Tell that whore to get out of my house,” she said. You could only rage for so long before you physically gave out. And this Garth did, he asked Lily to leave. But he walked her downstairs, and he gave her some money and asked their driver to take her to the train station. Tammy did not know this. The two may have even awkwardly touched hands. The driver told the helper who told her friends and so on. And Lily tried to speak to the driver on the way there, perhaps to get more information, or to gain an ally, but his English wasn’t good and neither was hers, so they couldn’t communicate well.

What happened after was good for nobody.

Garth had four children with these two women, and he couldn’t give any of them up. Some of Tammy’s closest friends swore up and down that if he had come back to her, begging forgiveness, promising to never see the other family again but only support the kids financially, she would have taken him back, but he couldn’t leave two children, even if he was willing to leave the woman, which was unclear. So Garth was in a giant mess (“What was he thinking?” was the thrilled whisper heard around the American Club that spring). Tammy wrote an explosive e-mail, in which she luridly detailed all his transgressions with bizarre misspellings and breaks in logic, that she then forwarded to his boss, colleagues, and employees. As a result, he was told he should move to the Shenzhen office so he would not be a distraction to other employees of the toy-manufacturing-outsourcing company of which he was a vice president, and then one must assume that Lily got at least part of what she wanted — she got Garth all to herself — but in China, and not the Hong Kong apartment or residency or schooling she had so yearned for. Tammy had a nervous breakdown after the e-mail went viral, and she dropped out of sight for a few weeks. People said she went to rehab or an ashram or a yoga retreat, but no one really knew, and her best friend wasn’t talking. The kids were in high school and middle school, and Tammy’s mother came to take care of them for a while. Melissa, a tenth grader, started going out to bars in Wan Chai, and when people ran into her, she was with older men and reeked of smoke and worse. Mark’s grades went off a cliff and never recovered. Collateral damage, the housewives said, all because of one man’s penis.

When Tammy returned, she handled the divorce quickly and cleanly and then proceeded to get extremely fit. She ran like a maniac, did yoga almost daily, played tennis with even more vigor and enthusiasm, and lunched and dined with her friends frequently and publicly, as if she was showing the world that she would not be cowed by what had happened. She looked fantastic. Garth was no longer in Hong Kong, so people didn’t have to make the choice between them, which was convenient. She lived her life as normally as she could until one day, in the middle of a match, she got frustrated when an opponent contested one too many points, and she threw her racket down on the court, got her gear, and disappeared for the second time.

Later she surfaced in Lantau. Perhaps the ashram’s lessons had kicked in a little late, but they kicked in. Hong Kong was too small to ever disappear for long. Lantau was an island a ferry ride away, filled with expats who eschewed the materialistic, shiny world of the main island. It was grotty and small, and people kept beehives and made their own jam. And there she was, at IFC, on a trip to the mainland, as it were, smiling at Hilary and all but unrecognizable.

She was perfectly normal, asking how David was, saying that Melissa had just graduated from the University of Vermont and that Mark was operating a food truck in Portland. She seemed happy and asked after other women who had been on the tennis team with them. Hilary just couldn’t get over how different she looked. They parted, professing intentions to e-mail, to call, to have lunch, both comfortable in the knowledge that none of those things would come to pass.

Hilary is a little bit older now, and she thinks that Tammy may have finally got it right. Who gives a damn? Just make yourself happy. She was a miserable person before all that happened, she really was, excluding people from committees and throwing cocktail parties to which a few people were never invited, and now she seemed happy. She didn’t seem to work but lived simply. But who knows. She might be miserable and spend her evenings plotting revenge, but to Hilary’s eye, she had made the best out of an impossible situation. Could you spend the rest of your life being angry? She supposed you could, but it was never good for you in the end. When everything you thought was yours was taken away, and the foundation of your life shifted so you have to start from zero, you might find out who you really are. You might come up against that dark, immovable wall of truth. And that is probably the most frightening thought of all.

Hilary shifts in her bed, takes a last gulp of her drink, looks over at the absent spot beside her, and thinks, where on earth is her husband?

THIS IS WHAT she smells when she comes out of the bathroom from her shower: a thousand stale exhales, humid with alcohol and cigarette smoke. This is what she sees: the man in her bed, his bottom half covered by the sheet, snoring. She sits down in her chair, wrapped in her towel, wondering what to do next.

It happened so quickly. She went home from the hotel and showered and took a nap. When she woke, at ten, she wanted to go out for something to eat, and something had pulled her to Il Dolce, the mere utterance of the name several hours ago suggestion enough. Maybe something might happen. She was talking to Richard, the bartender, on her second glass of sauvignon blanc when he walked in, the man from the afternoon at the hotel bar. David. The night accelerated into strobe lights and chaos. From bar to restaurant to club, he shouted his life story at her: a wife, no child, an orphan (she couldn’t remember whether he was an orphan or there was one in his life), disappointment, no solace at home. Then to her house. Messy coupling, not finished, dizziness, spinning ceiling. She looks at the sleeping man: this new and different animal, older, married, complicated. Different from the pale, anomic twenty-somethings who usually inhabit that space.

Her phone buzzes. Her mother is texting her: “What r u doing?”

“Getting ready for work,” she writes back quickly. “Text later, already late.” It’s Saturday, but her mother doesn’t know her work schedule, or even what she does exactly. The best thing about texting is that it makes phone calls obsolete. She doesn’t need to worry about her voice quavering or her eyes tearing up on Skype. She hasn’t had to talk to her mother in months — all communication is through texts.