Janice Lee - The Expatriates

Her mother asked, gingerly. She usually never did, but one late night, as they nursed coffees after Thai food, she asked how that all was going.

“I mean, I know, now, it might be different. But what was the status before all this nonsense?”

Hilary had thought that trying to have children would kill her, but this new wound, on top of the old one, was so painful she squinted as she tried to explain to her mother.

“We have been trying, and also, you know, with Julian, who you know about.”

“You have to do right by Julian,” her mother said. “But the situation is obviously different now.” She was never a supporter of the entire exercise to begin with, and now it lay in tatters. When Hilary asked if she wanted to meet Julian, she shook her head. “Only when you decide everything.”

“I know.” Hilary didn’t know how she was going to begin to explain it to Julian and the administrators. Obviously, she wouldn’t, for a while, and he would continue coming.

“You still don’t want to do fertility?” her mom asked. “You know, just if you want to have a baby, regardless of what happens with David. Melissa Bissinger’s daughter has these beautiful twin girls, and we know the doctor in San Francisco.”

“No,” Hilary said. “I don’t know why I don’t, didn’t, want to. I just feel like it should happen on its own.”

Her mother looked askance at her. “And it didn’t.” A pause. “And it’s not.” They both don’t know which tense to use.

“I know.”

“And you’re thirty-eight now.”

“I know.”

Her mother stirred her coffee.

“It’s funny, you know, Hilary. Life happens, and sometimes it happens so slowly that you have the time to get used to it. That’s the mercy of it. You may wake up one day and be older and be fine with not having children. There’s no reason why you absolutely have to have them.”

“Thank you, Mother,” she said, with no inflection, although she had not meant to sound ungrateful. It was so hard to speak when you didn’t know what you were trying to convey, let alone what you were feeling.

“You were and are one of the great joys of my life,” her mother said.

Hilary flushed. In the annals of her reserved family, this was tantamount to her mother throwing off her clothes and shouting her love for her child on the streets.

“Thank you, Mother,” she said again.

And that was how that holiday went.

She has been seeing more and more of Julian, going to visit him as much as she can. She is lucky. The woman in charge of his group home is kind, wishes for him to be adopted, so turns the other way when Hilary shows up again and again. Hilary knows not to push it too much, but she is growing attached, longing to see his face, hear his accented English. Sometimes she goes like a stalker just to watch him get off the bus, carouse with his friends in Cantonese. Boys are like puppies, she realizes, climbing on one another, poking, scrambling around one another.

He is here today, and after his lesson, she asks him if he’d like to go out for ice cream, even though it’s a cold spring day. They get in the car, and she tells Sam to go to Times Square, the vast mall in Causeway Bay. There’s an ice cream shop there.

Once they arrive, and she’s walking through, holding Julian’s hand, she realizes she’s made a mistake.

There is so much stuff. There is so much to look at, so much to buy — all the accouterments of a privileged life. There’s a luxury-handbag store with purses that cost a year’s pay for Puri; there are sneaker stores with hundreds of styles, electronics shops with phones and iPods and computers. Julian is seven, old enough to covet. He stares, wide-eyed, at all he doesn’t have.

They order ice cream. He just wants chocolate, shies away from all the bewildering choices, and has to be pressed to order toppings or to get two flavors. Hilary has seen three-year-olds order complicated mixed concoctions — half bubble gum, half mint chip, with marshmallows and rainbow sprinkles — with the confidence that comes from being loved and cossetted, their desires listened to and often granted. Watching Julian eat his chocolate ice cream with the rainbow sprinkles she insisted on, she feels awful for him. She must, she must, make a decision, even without David.

He is quiet, as always, and she talks to him in a constant, soothing torrent of inanities: “Piano is so great for you, you have such an ear, are you enjoying the ice cream?” He listens, is aware, but doesn’t try to respond.

Later, when she drops him off at his group home, he is clutching a bag with a new pair of sneakers, which she is sure will bring her a reprimand from Miss Chiu, the woman in charge, about how she should not buy Julian gifts, that they are confusing to him and unfair to the other children. But this fifty-dollar bribe, this small token, how can she not give this offering up to the universe, if not to absolve her, then to lessen her burden of guilt?

“THAT WASN’T FLYING. That was falling with style.”

The phrase is knocking around her head, surfacing at odd moments in the day: when she’s making her bed in the morning, waiting in line for a coffee. It’s a line from Toy Story , the movie, when Woody is denigrating Buzz Lightyear. She caught it on a lazy Sunday at home a week ago.

She doesn’t know why that phrase keeps coming up, but it has some resonance. Because she’s feeling kind of good. She feels good, and she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is she flying, or is she falling?

David comes by once or twice a week, on weekends, when he’s off work and has some time. She doesn’t think there’s anyone else. He seems to work an awful lot, and when he does go out, it seems to be with colleagues and mostly men.

He’ll text, the buzzer will ring, and she’ll let him up. He comes with a bottle of wine, and they’ll spend time at her place before going out and walking along Hollywood Road until they get to a restaurant. They’ll sit and have a meal, the two of them, looking out at the passersby.

And when they do, she can’t help it, she thinks: Everyone out there thinks I’m normal. They think we’re a couple. They think that this is all mine. It is thrilling and dangerous, and she allows herself to think it in small doses of outrageous happiness.

She wonders if she was just the girl in the bar, the girl to start the ball rolling. If she could have been just any girl. She knows enough — barely — not to ask, but it is consuming her a little bit, as it would. She wants this to work, doesn’t want to self-sabotage, but she is who she is, right? Who would she be, what would the world be, if Mercy Cho didn’t screw things up by saying and doing the wrong thing?

If some other girl had been sitting there, in the lobby lounge of the Conrad hotel, on that December Thursday, would she be sitting here with David now?

But there is this now, this little window, where things are suspended in a magical way, where she is not the mess that everyone thinks she is and she has a life and a boyfriend. And when she’s with him, she’s okay! She’s funny and charming and not a nightmare. She feels as if she is juggling all of this, her new selves, and waiting for it all to fall apart.

“How are you supporting yourself?” he asks tonight as they’re finishing off a piece of mud pie. She is magically able to eat again, not feeding the emptiness inside her by fasting. She must have gained five pounds already. This morning, she had a cheeseburger for breakfast.

“I get jobs here and there,” she says. “I do a lot of different things.”