Janice Lee - The Expatriates

He doesn’t know, of course.

“Where is the office?” she asks. “One where there’s someone on staff all night?”

He tells her.

“You stay here,” she says. “You look drunk. It won’t work with you there.”

She goes and charms the young, bored security guard into giving her the access code with a story of how she has left her phone by the pool. He offers to escort her, but she manages to push him off, saying he has to keep doing a good job guarding the building.

Charlie is sitting on the floor with his back against the wall when she comes back, checking his BlackBerry. She inputs the code, and they go in and turn on the lights. Their sounds echo around the walls, the humid air redolent of chlorine.

“How did you get the code?” he asks.

“Years of experience in bad behavior,” she says.

She can see him thinking about what they will swim in, so she strips down to her bra and panties. She looks down. Her stomach is still flat.

“Now you,” she says.

He tries not to look at her. This makes her like him a little bit more.

“Okay.” He shuffles off his pants, unbuttons his shirt. Soon he is in his boxers. At least he is in boxers. She had thought of him as a tighty-whitie guy.

The water is bracing, perfect. It moves against her skin like cool velvet. She forgets how wonderful it can be to be in water, weightless. She comes up like a seal, hair plastered to her skull, to find Charlie watching her.

“You are very beautiful,” he says.

She melts a tiny bit more. All his annoying traits — his lack of irony and sophistication, his tendency to overstate his accomplishments — seem dissolved into the cool water. Unclothed, he is a tabula rasa, without his annoying FOB tics or telltale sartorial mistakes. He has a lean body, with muscles that ripple just under the skin. The handsomest of Chinese boys are — she hates to say it, but it’s true — almost feminine, with big, moist eyes and dark, thick hair. Charlie is handsome unclothed, almost beautiful. He needed this, to be without any identifiers.

Later he will ruin it by buttoning his shirt up too high, by wearing jeans and white sneakers when they go out for brunch on a Sunday, but right now, in the pool next to her, glistening and wet and practically naked, he is Adonis, sculpted out of a smooth alabaster flesh that feels almost perfect. Here she can take him as he is, as he was when he entered the world, without complexes, without issues, without all that hard-won knowledge to hinder him.

This is why she urges him to unclothe completely, why she slips out of her bra and underwear.

“I’ve never skinnied before,” he says.

“Skinny-dipped,” she corrects.

And they take off their last remaining slips of clothes, feel the water envelop them totally. It is intoxicating and sobering at the same time (certainly for him). The erotic charge of being naked with water’s shifting cover is so strong, Mercy feels her body prickle with anxiety, with anticipation. She closes her eyes and dives to the bottom, just to hover, weightless, as if she is going back to some primordial, preexisting state. When she surfaces, there is Charlie, waiting.

When they sleep together later, she will be surprised. He is skillful, assured. People are different in different realms. The boy who sat across from her in class and questioned the TA with a knowing erudition; whom she would see later at a college mixer, leaning against the wall, social anxiety palpable, stripped of all confidence in this different arena. Even as they are intertwined, all skin on skin and exposed nerve, she imagines him practicing on bespectacled girls, eager to shed their virginity, their innocence, to enter the adult world.

What is this new creature, this boy/man who transforms into something else every time he turns in the light, every time he emerges in a new world? Is this someone who is for her? Is this how someone becomes yours?

She doesn’t know, so after he has fallen asleep, she wriggles out carefully from under his arm, all the time looking at his face, lit in the bent light from the living room, so at peace, his scent already a little familiar. She goes home at 2:00 a.m. to her mother, sleeping in her bed, her insides clanging with confusion and, yes, this, her baby.

SHE GOES to the hotel, and luckily, the room is available, although it’s only 7:00 a.m. They remember her from before, and the hotel manager escorts her to her room, only barely stifling his curiosity about why she is back in Seoul. The room is cold, and she turns up the thermostat before pulling back the bedcovers and huddling under the comforter.

The black-eye is so draining she actually falls asleep for an hour and wakes to find that it is already eight thirty. She calls the police station, dialing the number from memory. Mr. Park is not there. She hesitates, then calls his cell phone. When he answers, she can tell from the announcements and ambient noise that he is just emerging from the subway. He is also exasperated.

“Mrs. Reade,” he says. “I told you it was not certain. It will still take some time. You should have waited for me to call you.”

“I couldn’t wait,” she says. “You should know.”

He sighs.

“Okay, I will call you when I get to the station.”

She gives him her room number at the hotel, lies down on the bed again, and turns on the television. There is a Korean morning show on, the kind with impossibly good-looking hosts and people doing funny tricks for their fifteen minutes. The sound of the show helps, the tinny music, the relentless upbeat voices. Her brain is distracted. It reminds her of when she went to a dentist and he wiggled her lip while he administered the novocaine, and it helped a lot with the discomfort.

So part of her mind listens as a woman comes on in ajumma clothes, clothes for a middle-aged housewife. Then music starts, and a pole descends from the ceiling. She starts to strip off her dowdy clothing, to reveal an impressive body in a gold bikini. This being Korea, the bikini is still quite modest. She starts a routine on the pole that is reminiscent of Olympic gymnastics, spinning around horizontally, with her arms splayed straight. It is very impressive. The presenters talk all through her performance, oohing and aahing.

She looks at the clock: 8:50. If time passed any slower, she feels, it would be going backward.

He doesn’t call until nine thirty. She jumps when the phone rings.

“Mrs. Reade,” he says. “There is no news to report. The boy is still answering questions.”

“Aren’t there photos?” she asks. “Or can I go there?”

There is a pause. She always feel brash and impolite in Korea, as if she’s always asking for more.

“I will call you back,” he says.

Clarke has e-mailed, saying he will arrive around two. She starts to feel stirrings of hunger but doesn’t want to leave the room in case Mr. Park calls, and she’s not sure her cell phone will work properly, so she orders coffee and some pancakes from room service.

The phone rings again while the food is being delivered.

“Mrs. Reade,” Mr. Park says. His voice is gentle. “There has been mistake,” he says. “I am so sorry.”

Her heart plummets so fast, so deep, that she feels dizzy from the altitude change within her.

“What?” she manages to say.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “The child has another family that has claimed him. It happened very fast. They are the correct family.”

In one corner of her mind, she can still hear the tinny sounds of the television. In another, she is aware of a black hole that she must avoid at all costs. She is teetering on the edge of it, peering down, wondering how she will prevent herself from falling. She does this by feeling a sudden surge of virulent anger toward Mr. Park.