The Expats (10 page)

“And over the years,” she said, “I’ve discovered that men find me
much
more interesting when I’m naked.” Kate could tell that Julia wasn’t joking.

They pulled into the packed parking lot in front of the gargantuan store Cactus. The women sprinted through the punishing rain, then caught their breath under the overhang.

“Darn.” Julia was rummaging around in her purse. “I must’ve left my phone in your car,” Julia said. “May I go get it?”

“I’ll come with you,” Kate said.

“Oh no. This rain is too horrible. You go inside. I’ll run back.”

Kate picked her car keys out of her bag. “Be my guest.”

“Thanks.”

Kate glanced out over the parking lot, the main road, the wet grimness of the suburb, the hulking mass of concrete filled with stores filled with shelves filled with crap that she shouldn’t want, or buy. This outing was a mistake. They should have done something else. Coffee somewhere, or sightseeing in Germany, or lunch in France. Mini-travel.

Travel was becoming Kate’s avocation. She had started researching the family’s next trips as soon as they’d returned from Copenhagen, which had been their first long weekend away. This upcoming weekend would be a drive to Paris.

“Thanks,” Julia said, shaking water from her umbrella. She handed over Kate’s keys with a small inscrutable smile.

TODAY,
11:02
A.M.

Kate makes it to the corner and around it, into the rue de Seine, out of sight from the rue Jacob and anyone there who might be watching her, before she allows herself to pause, to stop walking, to release the breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding, sinking deeper into thought, into contingencies. Into panic.

They’d been living in Paris for a year, unremarkably, unostentatiously, attracting no attention, no suspicion. They should be in the clear.

So why would this woman be here, now?

The mounting anxiety forces Kate to stop moving, distracted, in the archway of a pair of immense wooden doors. One of the doors creaks open, pushed by a tiny, decrepit woman wearing an impeccable bouclé suit and carrying a cane. She stares at Kate in that bold way that old French women seem to have invented.

“Bonjour!”
the old broad suddenly screams, and Kate almost falls over.

“Bonjour,”
Kate answers. She can see past the woman, to the bright, leafy courtyard at the other end of the dark breezeway whose walls are filled with mailboxes and electrical junctions and rubbish bins and loose wires and chained-up bicycles. Her own building has a similar passage; there are thousands of them in Paris. All competing for the best-place-to-kill-someone award.

Kate resumes walking, lost in thought. She stops again at the large windows of an art gallery. Contemporary photography. She watches the reflections of the passersby in the windows, mostly women who are dressed like her, and the men who form matched sets. Also a gaggle of German tourists in their sandals and socks, a trio of American youth in their backpacks and tattoos.

There’s one man walking on her side of the sidewalk too slowly, wearing an ill-fitting suit and the wrong shoes, rubber-soled lace-ups that are too casual, too ugly. She watches him pass, continue up the street, out of view.

Kate continues to stare through the windows, now looking inside, not at the reflections. A half-dozen people are milling around large, airy rooms that spill one into another. The front door is wedged open with a plastic shim, letting in the fresh autumn breeze. It will be loud in there. Loud enough for Kate to have an unremarkable phone conversation that won’t be overly noted by anyone.

“Bonjour,”
she says to the chic girl at the front desk, interchangeable with all the other pretty young things at the cash registers and hostess stands, installed
to attract the money that’s always roaming around the streets of the central
arrondisements
.

“Bonjour, madame.”

Kate can feel the young woman assessing, evaluating Kate’s shoes and handbag and jewelry and haircut, sizing up the whole package in a glance. If there’s one thing these Parisian shopgirls know how to do, it’s to quickly figure out who’s a legitimate customer versus who’s just browsing, or at best walking out with the cheapest thing in the joint. Kate knows she passes the test.

Kate looks around the large-format prints in the front room, semi-abstract landscapes: rigid rows of agricultural fields, repetitive facades of modernist office buildings, undulating ripples in bodies of water. They could be anywhere in the world, these landscapes.

She dutifully looks at each photo for a few seconds before moving on, into the next room, this one filled with beaches. There’s a young couple in here, talking at full volume in Spanish, with a Madrid accent.

Kate takes out her phone.

She had managed to pretend that she’d never see this woman again. But Kate was never really convinced. In fact, she has always known, in the back of her mind, the opposite: she’d see this woman again, exactly like she just did.

Is this Dexter’s past, catching up with him?

She hits a speed-dial button.

Or her own?

7

Kate spent her Paris liberty in the Marais. Dexter agreed that she was entitled to see some of the cities on her own. Travel wasn’t fun if you didn’t get to see or do what you wanted; it was merely a different type of work, in a different place.

In Copenhagen two weekends ago, Kate had spent her allotted hours wandering through downtown boutiques. Now in the Village St-Paul she bought a set of old tea towels, an engraved silver ice bucket, and an enameled saltbox; housewifely, antique-y French things. She also purchased a pair of sturdy rubber-soled canvas shoes, to pad her soles against the stone streets of Luxembourg, of Paris. Of cobblestony old Europe.

The sky was bright blue overlaid with tall puffy clouds, Indian summer, seventy degrees. Or twenty-one degrees, is how she should be thinking of it.

Kate was still getting used to the idea of strolling around a foreign city with absolutely no concern that someone might, for any of a variety of reasons, want to kill her.

She zigzagged back toward the river, to rendezvous with her husband, her children, on the Ile St-Louis. After four hours without them, she missed them; she couldn’t stop picturing their faces, their smiling eyes, their wiry little arms. She spent so much of her new life wanting to get a break from the kids, then the rest of her time impatient to get back to them.

She arrived at the brasserie, ducked inside, didn’t see her family. She took a seat outside, squinted into the sun. She saw them coming over from the Ile de la Cité, with Notre Dame towering behind, gargoyles and flying buttresses, the boys running on the pedestrian-only bridge that
separated one island from the other, weaving in and out of people and bicycles and leash-free Jack Russell terriers.

Kate stood, called out, waved. They ran to meet her, hug her, kiss her.

“Mommy, look!” Jake thrust out an action figure, a black-clad plastic Batman.

“Yah!” Ben yelled, too excited to contain himself. “Look!” He had a Spider-Man.

“We found a comics store,” Dexter admitted. “We couldn’t resist.” He sounded apologetic, ashamed to have bought the children crappy plastic products licensed from American corporations and manufactured in Southeast Asia.

Kate shrugged; she was past criticizing how anyone got through a day with children.

“But we also went to a bookstore, right, boys?”

“Yeah,” Jake agreed. “Daddy got us
The Small Prince
.”

“Little.”

“Right. It’s quite a little book, Mommy.” Quite the little authority.

“No. The book is called
The Little Prince
. At Shakespeare and Company.”

“Yeah,” Jake agreed, again. He was agreeable. “When can we read it? Now?”

“Not quite now, sweetie,” she said. “Maybe later.”

Jake sighed, the immense disappointment that a little boy can feel, hundreds of times a day, over anything, everything, nothing.

“Monsieur?”
The waiter was beside Dexter, who ordered a beer. The waiter stepped aside to allow a middle-aged Russian couple to vacate their table, loudly and rudely. The woman was laden with shopping bags from the exorbitant boutiques on the rue St-Honoré, more than a mile away. These people had come too far, to the wrong place.

“Et pour les enfants?”
the waiter asked, ignoring the Russians.
“Quelque chose à boire?”

“Oui. Deux Fanta, orange, s’il vous plaît. Et la carte.”

“Bien sûr, madame.”
The waiter picked up a pair of leather-bound menus, then shuffled aside again, as a different couple began to install themselves at the next table.

Even discounting last night’s oyster appetizer—“a giant gray booger swimming in snot” is how Jake described it—the meal had not been a success with the children. So Kate was hoping—praying—that this brasserie would have something kid-friendly. She was scanning the menu, eyes darting frantically.

The man at the next table ordered a drink and the woman added,
“La même chose,”
the voice familiar. Kate looked up to see a devastatingly handsome man sitting across from her, while the woman was across from Dexter; both women were wearing sunglasses. Because of this configuration and the glasses, and Kate’s preoccupation with the menu—she was leaning toward the braised pork knuckle, served with the always-welcome applesauce—it took a full minute before the two women, seated side by side, realized who each was sitting next to.

“OH MY GOD!”

“Julia!” Kate said. “What a surprise.”

“Ah,” Dexter said, grinning at Kate. “You’re the Chicago woman.” Needling.

Kate kicked him under the table.

They all had a round of drinks, and the foursome decided to dine together, later. Bill suggested that the hotel probably offered babysitting, and it turned out he was correct. Kate was quickly learning that Bill was the type of guy who was always correct.

So they fed the children, and returned to the hotel. The concierge promised that the babysitter would arrive by 22:00. Kate and Dexter put the boys to bed, with hopefully the full understanding in their young brains that if they woke in the night for a drink of water, or a pee, or a nightmare, there’d be a stranger in the room, and she probably wouldn’t speak any English.

The four tipsy adults spilled into the streets at ten thirty, headed for some fashionable new restaurant that Bill chose. It was on a quiet, seemingly deserted street, but inside was warm and lively and tight, knees bumping table edges, chairs wedged against walls, waiters a fluid jumble of soaring and falling arms and hands with plates and bowls, the clinking of glasses, the clanging of forks against knives.

Their waiter shoved his nose deep into the balloon glass, his brow furrowed, critically assessing the wine he was about to serve. He raised his eyebrows, a facial shrug.
“Pas mal,”
he said. “It is not bad.” He had to slide and dance and spin to get around the table to pour the wine correctly, sidestepping other patrons and other staff, the wayward limbs of gesticulating guests.

Kate looked out the window, over the half-curtains—bistro curtains, she remembered they were called, and now she realized why—and across the avenue, to an ornate Art Nouveau railing on the shallow
balcony in front of extraordinarily tall windows that were glowing with candlelight behind sheer billowing curtains, through which Kate could see the movements of a party in progress inside, shifting shapes and flickering lights, and a woman parted the drapes to blow cigarette smoke through the barely opened French doors—aha! French! doors!—out over the wide avenue.

The men fell into a conversation about skiing. Bill was regaling Dexter with tales of Zermatt, Courchevel, Kitzbühel. Bill was one of those experts in everything, a guy who had a favorite Alp resort and Caribbean island and Bordeaux vintage; he’d researched ski bindings and tennis strings, had a preferred British rugby team and cult sixties TV show.

Dexter was in awe of him.

Bill picked up the bottle and poured everyone an equal portion of the last drops. Then he shot his cuff to look at his watch, one of those big fat money-guy watches with a metal bracelet. Dexter wore a drugstore Timex.

“Nearly midnight,” Bill announced.

“Should we have another bottle?” Julia asked, looking around for demurs, confirmations, noncommitments.

“Well, we could.” Bill leaned in to the rest of his foursome, conspiratorially. “Or we could go to this place I know.”