Janice Lee - The Expatriates

“So I haven’t,” Hilary concurred. “Because, yes, what would I possibly say?”

“Awkward,” Olivia observes.

“Yes.”

“So that’s that,” Olivia says. “Onward!”

They walk on, talking about idle gossip. Olivia tells her what’s going on in the local Chinese scene, where a scion of a wealthy family has been found having an affair with a pretty karaoke girl and he claims he’s really in love and wants to leave his wife and two daughters. “He bought the mistress Van Cleef,” Olivia says, “and the wife got Chow Tai Fook!” Chow Tai Fook is the less expensive local jeweler. And that was the outrageous thing, not the fact that he was having an affair.

Hilary has always marveled at how locals talk so unromantically and practically about affairs, how the women tell one another that Angie Chan got an apartment for her fortieth birthday, that property was better than jewelry; that Melissa Wong made a million dollars last year day-trading. Olivia is one of them, but she is rare in that she goes outside their circle to be friends with someone like Hilary.

When they reach the end of the walk, Olivia gives her dogs water and hugs Hilary.

“I love you,” she says. “You’re a good person, an amazing person.”

“Thank you,” Hilary says. “I wish it were true.”

“I’m worried about you,” Olivia says. “I’m taking you out to dinner tonight. You need to get out, and not just in the daytime. No good you moping over a solitary bowl of soup.”

She demurs, but Olivia is insistent.

Hilary goes home to take a shower, turn on her computer, watch over the message boards as if the answer to her life were there. The problem is, she doesn’t know what the question is.

She and Olivia go out to a trendy Japanese izakaya restaurant filled with twenty-somethings, and over the course of the meal, it comes to light that Olivia’s husband saw David at the airport this afternoon and he’s going to be in Tokyo for a few days on business, and now Olivia, after several cups of sake, thinks they should go and check out his apartment.

“They won’t let me in,” Hilary says.

“Of course they will,” Olivia insists, and Hilary knows she’s probably right. Polite receptionists will always succumb to loud, obnoxious foreigners.

“But why?” she asks.

“Oh, come on,” Olivia says. “You have to be curious?”

“Yes, but not enough to break into his apartment.”

“We’re doing it,” Olivia says decisively, and waves for the bill.

In the apartment lobby, they pause.

“Should I do the talking?” Hilary asks.

“Yes. I’ll go to Cantonese if we need it.”

They walk over to the reception desk.

Hilary explains to the smiling woman in uniform that she needs to get into David’s apartment.

“You are Mrs. Starr?” the woman asks.

“Yes,” Hilary says.

“Do you have any identification?”

Hilary shows her Hong Kong ID card.

“But you have not been living in the apartment…,” the woman says delicately.

“No,” she says. “I live in the U.S. I’m moving over soon, but David came over first. I’m here to look for apartments. David was going to leave me a key, but I know he had a last-minute business trip.” She knows this is a common enough situation, when a man comes to work in Hong Kong first and the wife comes later. She also knows she is talking too much, explaining too much. What is it that people say about lying: Say as little as possible?

Still, a key is handed to her. It’s that simple.

In the elevator, she gets a fit of the giggles. “Wasn’t that ridiculously easy?” she says. “Too much, right?”

“You look trustworthy,” Olivia says. “She knows you’re not going to rob the place. Ah, privilege of the white middle class.”

“That woman doesn’t know about enraged, estranged wives, then.”

The elevator doors ding open. The carpeted hallway is quiet and dimly lit. They find their way to the apartment, 1501.

She opens the door. “Breaking and entering,” she whispers.

“We’re just entering,” says Olivia, ever practical.

Hilary hits a light switch. A neat, anonymous living room greets them, stuffy from lack of air circulation. They venture into the middle of the living room, letting the door close behind them.

“What if he comes back?” Olivia says, giggling.

“No, he’s in Tokyo for two days, he said.”

“We could sleep here!”

“I think we’re going to find more going on in the bedroom and bathroom, right?”

“And the kitchen.”

Olivia goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. She gestures for Hilary to join her in looking inside.

“Typical,” she sniffs. “Revolting.” There’s a stained pizza box and a few cans of beer, some Pellegrino.

On the counter there’s a half-drunk bottle of Glenlivet. He always liked a Scotch when he got home. Hilary opens the cupboards — unused pots and pans and spotless dishes. No one is nesting here, that’s for sure.

She goes into the bathroom, now unabashed. A razor, a contact lens case, a toothbrush, and a tube of Sensodyne lie next to the sink. She sniffs his toothbrush, feels it for dampness. Opening the medicine cabinet, she finds nothing but Q-tips and a bottle of Advil. Where is the girl? No tampons, no hairspray or brush. If he has a girl, she’s treading lightly on his life.

I came so hard I’m still jelly.

He wrote that to a ghostly girl whose presence haunts her.

She shuts the medicine cabinet and goes into the bedroom. Olivia joins her there. They look at the neatly made bed, the spotless sheets.

“The desk?” Olivia asks.

Hilary sits down and opens drawers. Empty. There are a few papers from work on the desk. She opens the closet door, sees a few suits hanging, shirts still in plastic from the dry cleaner. She runs her hand along the sleeves of the suits.

“It’s so depressing,” she says. “Is this enough for him? Is this what he wants? What is he trying to build?” And then she is weeping, quietly, shoulders rocking back and forth as she sobs.

Olivia comes over and puts her arms around her. “Clearly he has no idea,” she says. “And it’s not anything that you want to be part of.”

They leave quietly, a bit abashed now, riding the elevator down in silence, not looking at each other. They take taxis and go home, disappearing into the night.

MERCY AND DAVID are at the beach on a cool, temperate day. They took a taxi to Repulse Bay, a popular tourist beach on the south side of the island. They have walked the concrete promenade to Deep Water Bay and back, smelled the potent combination of seawater and dog urine, watched the joggers and the dog-walking helpers. Now they settle on the sand, a few feet from a lifeguard station.

Behind them, hordes of mainland-Chinese tourists swarm the few shops, the dilapidated temple at the end of the beach. Guides holding flags raise them aloft to herd their charges.

“Awful,” David says, speaking of the crowds.

“It’s changed a lot,” Mercy says. “There didn’t used to be so many.”

Silence, but not uncomfortable.

“The beach is man-made, you know,” Mercy says, having gleaned this fact from some guidebook when she was writing a piece on Hong Kong beaches for the magazine. “And they widened it a while ago because it was so crowded.”

He scoops up some sand, pebbly and coarse. “It’s pretty terrible sand,” he says. “They could have brought in better.”

She peeks at him from under her cowboy hat, worn to give her a jaunty, devil-may-care attitude. They are sitting on a woven straw mat, the kind that folds up into its own bag. She has brought a six-pack of beer and some potato chips in a supermarket bag, and when he asks for water, she doesn’t have any. She looks around and sees that the other people have coolers and Tupperware containers full of food, and she feels inadequate. Or maybe just young. He doesn’t seem to mind, just pops open a beer and lies down on the uncomfortable mat, propping his head up with the towels they have brought.