Janice Lee - The Expatriates

HER HUSBAND’S GONE AWOL. And her mother is here. Could there be a more awkward set of circumstances? Phone calls to his cell go unanswered — she’s been trying for an hour. She’s also been checking expatlocat.com to see if anyone else posts to “Should anyone be able to adopt?” and refreshing her e-mail box. She is thinking about calling the police — there has been a spate of crimes where bar hostesses spike drinks and clean out ATMs — when an e-mail from David blinks up on her computer screen.

“I need some time to think things through,” he writes. “Will be in touch.” Then, as an afterthought, “Not sure I will make it to Bangkok.”

After she gets this e-mail, like a bomb, like a bad joke, in her inbox, she sits at her desk, tapping her forefinger on the matte metal of her laptop like a nervous metronome. Her mother is taking a shower — she can hear the water running — but she’ll be out soon, and Hilary’s going to have to say something.

It occurs to her that it’s odd she’s more worried about what she’s going to say to her mother than about what has happened with her husband.

It’s not as if they have had the most loving relationship lately. More… cordial. Definitely platonic, except when she tells him the time is favorable, and they dutifully have intercourse. She has felt his waning interest in her as a person, but coming as it did with her own diminishing engagement with his life, she hadn’t really minded.

But this is bold! He has written an e-mail, with words that cannot be taken back, words that are a proclamation! She hovers, her hands over her keyboard, waiting. But of course, nothing happens. She does not reply.

The feeling she has is most unexpected. The oddest thing. She feels no distress or worry. Instead, she senses a dim, faint feeling that rises from some unknown place in her heart, rising slowly and blossoming into something that she might call relief.

The shower stops running. She hears the door open and close. Her mother will be in her doorway soon, asking what the plan is, what they will do. What will she say? What will she do?

IN THE SPRING, the odors come. The outdoor tiles are wet in the morning with accumulated moisture, and when you sniff, there is a sharp, moldy tinge to the air. It means the heat is coming. The early hours are cool and wet; the sun burns through by midday, and you can practically see the steam rising from the sidewalks. And through it all, a pungent, damp smell of rich, rotting soil, the plants growing at a furious rate, the insects crick ing and mating loudly, the very atoms in the air whizzing about, suffused with new heat energy after being dormant all winter.

Hilary had thought she had spring down to a science. On a certain day in March or April, she would sniff the air, feel the towels in the bathroom, then say the words: “Spring prep.” Puri would know to bring out the dehumidifier units, pack the woolens in crinkly tissue and cedar, and switch the HVAC units to cool, a procedure that takes all day and is not easily reversible. The assault against the elements begins.

But this year, there are moths — dozens, maybe hundreds of them, a new and disturbing development that Hilary has never experienced before. “They might as well be locusts,” she tells Olivia over the phone. “That would just make this year perfect. My annus horribilis.”

The first one rolls out of one of her sweaters as she is pulling it out on an unseasonably cool day, causing her to shriek loudly, although no one else is in the room with her. It is large and very much dead, with a body that is fat and inelegant, so unlike a butterfly’s. She panics. So much cashmere, so much wool at stake! But as she pulls them out, Puri’s meticulous work undone in a matter of minutes, her sweaters are, oddly, unscathed. It reminds her of that scene in The Great Gatsby where Daisy is covered in Jay’s shirts and she starts weeping because they are so beautiful. Instead, Hilary sits in her humidity-controlled walk-in closet, surrounded by expensive knits, and wishes she felt like crying instead of the constant dry pricking behind her eyeballs that feels like torture.

Soon she grows used to the moths, or as used to them as she ever will. They just blunder around, blind in their mindless fecundity, reproducing like mad, feeding on what, she doesn’t know. She finds them on the carpets, in the bathrooms, in the kitchen cupboards. Puri sweeps them up without emotion and deposits them in the trash can in the kitchen, so when Hilary goes to throw away her used coffee filter or an empty carton of juice, she steps on the pedal and is given a small heart attack when the lid opens and she sees the layer of dead insects on the bottom.

She has, of course, called the exterminators, but unless she is willing to move out for a week, all they can do is recommend mothballs and giant planks of cedar, which she buys from them in great quantities, and now her house smells like a chemical factory and she has a headache when she wakes up every morning.

This is the salient fact: She is alone. She is alone in a king-size bed in an enormous house, with no husband and no children and, instead, a domestic helper and a driver.

David is still off on what she likes to think of as his petit midlife crisis, although there’s nothing petit about it. It’s been more than three months. Why she thinks of it as petit or grand mal, with the attendant link to seizures, she doesn’t know, but whenever it balloons up in her consciousness, which it does actually less and less frequently these days, it comes in those words, sometimes italicized: petit midlife crisis . Will it evolve into grand mal ? Will this be permanent, will their lives be forever changed? Would she be willing to take him back?

More important, does she get to have her own midlife crisis? she wonders. When does she get to go completely off the rails? But the thing is, he’s beaten her to the punch. If she does it now, who will be the one left behind, to witness, to suffer? There’s no one — a tree falling in the woods with no sound. For this, for making it impossible for her to do what he has done, she hates him.

And yet, all this has brought David into sharp relief, made him into a real person, full of jagged edges and surprises. She had thought of him as someone or, if she’s honest, something, a husband, who would always be there, and the fact that he has changed what she had thought of as an immutable fact brings her, sometimes, an ineffable, odd and painful pleasure. Good for you, she thinks, before it cuts into her again, the knowledge that her life is changed in some irreversible way. You were the brave one, she thinks, the one to make the bold, life-changing move. You rejected the life we had, the tepid approximation of happiness. You thought you deserved more. You did something. She is envious of that.

Her mother was a surprise. She took the news with aplomb, did exactly the right things. She didn’t try to comfort her with anodyne words or hug her or tell her everything would be all right. Instead, she moved forward with a brisk practicality that was perfect.

They went ahead to Bangkok, without David, and they decided to share a room and upgrade to the Joseph Conrad Suite in the old wing of the Oriental. They had stiff drinks by the Chao Phraya River, watching the fat catfish surface, looking for bread crumbs. They meandered through Chatuchak Market and bought rattan baskets and brass tableware, fingered dusty ruby beads, and otherwise pretended that life was normal. Hilary managed to breathe through it, survive the trip, and come back to a cold, empty house. Her mother left the day after they returned to Hong Kong, although she had offered to stay longer. Hilary knows that leaving her father for long periods of time makes her mother nervous. She pities her mother now, having to take care of her husband, worry about her daughter, worry about the fact that she might never have grandchildren.