The Expats (13 page)

DEXTER WAS IN London when the move-out-move-in happened: the rental company showed up at eight in the morning, with a little crane, and retrieved all their furnishings—the couches and beds, linens and dishware, toilet brushes and vacuum cleaner. Chairs, bureaus, a desk, a dining table. All out the window, by ten in the morning. Papers signed, truck closed and driven away, gone.

It was another dark and rainy autumn day. The window had been open all morning. The apartment was cold and empty. Kate was alone, again.

Alone and waiting for the shipping container to arrive after three weeks pending customs clearance. The same orange container that had departed her curbside in D.C. two months ago, where she’d stood alone in that other empty house, papers signed attesting that everything was packed and loaded and attached to a black cab gaudily decorated with neon outlines of impossibly busty women, bound for the port of Baltimore to be loaded onto the freighter
Osaka
to cross the Atlantic in eleven
days to Antwerp, then to be attached to a cab owned by a Dutch freight company, an undecorated white cab that was pulling around the corner right now, here, in front of this empty apartment, and she was alone again while her husband was working at the same job on a different continent, and her children were in school learning the same things, and the stuff in the container was the same, and the big differences being where she was, and who she was. In the middle of Europe, the new Kate.

“DEXTER SEEMS LIKE a great husband. Is he?”

Conversations with Julia often become much more personal than Kate wanted. Julia wore her need for intimacy on her sleeve, practically begging Kate to open up to her. Despite Julia’s bluff of outgoing confidence, she was tremendously insecure. She’d been unlucky in love, unconfident in relationships, and uncomfortable in intimacy. She’d been lonely her whole life, much like Kate, until she’d chanced into Bill. But she was still operating on lonely-person principles, still worried that her happiness could be wrenched away at any moment, for reasons out of her control.

Kate didn’t know how to answer Julia’s question—even a private answer, to herself. Her relationship with Dexter had improved right after they’d moved—Dexter had been unusually attentive, and they’d been closer, cozier. The change had done them good; the move was good for their marriage. Though not yet good for Kate, as an individual.

But then Dexter had become increasingly absent, traveling who knows where. She barely had the energy to listen to his itineraries. Also more and more evasive, distant, and distracted when he was home.

Kate couldn’t decide whether she needed to break the promise she’d made herself to not be suspicious of her husband. And if she gave in to the urge, and let herself be suspicious, of what? Cheating? Having some type of psychological crisis? Was his job falling apart, and he wasn’t telling her? Was he angry at her about something?

She couldn’t guess the realm where the problem dwelt. Or even if there was one. And although she felt the vague need to talk about it, she felt a stronger compulsion to keep her concerns secret. She’d always been comfortable with the unsaid; secrets are what she did.

Kate looked Julia in the eye, through this door to another level of their relationship, and decided not to walk through it. As she’d been doing her entire life.

“Yes,” Kate said, “he’s a great husband.”

KATE SETTLED INTO a routine.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, after drop-off, she did her French homework, then went to class. Kate’s instructor, a disturbingly young and good-natured French-Somali woman, was impressed with Kate’s rapid progress and natural-sounding accent. French wasn’t difficult for Kate, after all those years speaking Spanish, mastering the nuances among dialects, Cuban and Nicaraguan, northern Mexican and eastern Mexican.

Two or three days a week, she went to the gym. She’d accepted the recommendation of Amber—always exercising, yet never fit—and joined a bizarre institution that offered ham sandwiches and cappuccinos but neither towels nor early-morning fitness classes; the doors didn’t even open until nine.

Kate drove around, looking for things. She drove thirty minutes to a big toy store in a shopping plaza in Foetz, pronounced
futz
. She was searching for an item that was proving to be elusive, a Robin action figure. Not a big surprise, because who wants Robin instead of the readily available Batman? Ben, that’s who.

She went to Metz, forty-five minutes away, looking for an immersion blender.

She drove the main byways of Luxembourg—route d’Arlon, route de Thionville, route de Longwy—poking in and out of shopping plazas and malls, eating steam-table buffet lunches at Indian restaurants, bland tikka masala, greasy naan.

She sat at the computer, researching weekend destinations, hotels and attractions, flights and highway routes, restaurants and zoos.

She got the car washed, at a variety of locations. In one, she got stuck for a half-hour. A solicitous jumpsuited employee kept checking on her every few minutes. At one point, he mentioned that she was welcome to call the police.

She had her hair cut. There was a lot of bad hair in Luxembourg, and she couldn’t quite avoid becoming a victim, just on the cusp of being able to communicate that she did not want the features—mullets and bangs and spikes—that the hairdressers specialized in.

She bought window shades and area rugs, place mats and shower caddies.

She purchased and installed an extra towel bar in the master bathroom. Which entailed buying an electric drill. Then returning to the hardware superstore to buy the bits that had not been included with
the drill. Then returning again for the diamond-tipped masonry bits that she’d need to push holes through whatever was behind the plaster coating of her walls. Each round-trip to the store took an hour.

She met other women for coffee, or lunch. Mostly it was Julia, but sometimes Amber, or Claire, or anyone; there was no one who she wasn’t willing to give a try. Dutch and Swedes, Germans and Canadians. She was her own ambassador.

Also her own babysitter. She lay on the floor with the boys, building things out of Lego or wooden blocks, pushing around the cardboard cutouts of thirty-six-piece jigsaw puzzles. She read aloud book after book after book.

On occasion, she met her husband for a meal. But not often. Dexter worked a long day every day, and most evenings.

She looked forward to date night—ostensibly once a week but frequently canceled due to work, or travel. Date night in Washington hadn’t been important; it was optional. But now it was something she felt herself needing, the opportunity to share the detritus of housewifedom, to elicit and receive sympathy, validation.

So much of it seemed devoid of value. She walked around the apartment, picking up toys and clothing, straightening piles, filing papers. She washed the boys’ hair and soaped their armpits and supervised them on the fine arts of wiping their butts and brushing every tooth and peeing directly into the bowl, not just in its general direction.

She went grocery shopping and lugged bags. She prepared breakfast and packed lunches and cooked dinner and washed dishes. She vacuumed and mopped and dusted. She sorted laundry, dried it, folded it, put it into drawers and on hangers and hooks.

When she finished the chores, it was time to start each and every one of them again.

And her husband had no idea. None of the husbands knew what their wives did every day, during the six hours when their children were in school—not just the endless chores but the pastimes, the cooking classes and language lessons, the tennis instruction and, in special circumstances, affairs with tennis instructors. Meeting everyone for coffee, all the time. Going to the gym. The mall. Sitting around playgrounds, getting wet in the rain. One playground had a gazebo, where they could get less wet.

Dexter didn’t know about any of this. Just as he hadn’t known how Kate had truly spent her days back in Washington, when she’d been doing something completely different from what she’d claimed.

Just as Kate didn’t know, now, exactly what he did all day.

TODAY,
11:09
A.M.

“Bonjour,”
Dexter answers.
“Comment ça va?”

Kate looks around the gallery, empty except for the Spanish couple, the man running a constant low-volume commentary. He fancies himself a connoisseur.

“Ça va bien,”
Kate answers.

They moved from Luxembourg to Paris a year ago, at the start of the new school year, in a new school in a new city in a new country. By New Year’s, Kate had concluded that neither of them was making sufficient progress toward fluency. So she convinced Dexter that they should speak only French on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today is a Thursday, nine months later. But for this conversation, they need to speak English; they need to communicate on a different level.

“I just ran into an old friend,” she says. “Julia.”

Dexter is silent for a second, and Kate doesn’t push. She knows he’s considering the meaning of this woman’s arrival.
“Quelle surprise,”
he says flatly. “It’s been so long.”

Neither Kate nor Dexter had seen Julia since her hasty but not unexpected departure from Luxembourg, the winter before last.

“Can we make it for drinks tonight? Bill too is in Paris.”

Dexter pauses another beat. “Okay. It’ll be fun to catch up.”

“Yes,” Kate says. But she isn’t thinking of the fun they’ll have. “So how about seven o’clock, at the café in the Carrefour de l’Odéon?”

“Sure,” Dexter says. “That’s perfect.”

The café is around the corner from their parking garage, and a half-block from a busy Métro station. It has tiny windowless bathrooms, no back rooms, no back entrance. There is nowhere for anyone to hide, no way for anyone to sneak up from behind. The tables on the
terrasse
offer unobstructed views of the entire intersection. It’s the perfect place for a drink. And the perfect place from which to escape quickly.

“I’ll call Louis and reserve a table,” Dexter says. “I’ll let you know if there’s a problem.”

Kate knows there won’t be a problem, not with Louis and a table. But she can imagine many other problems, most of them ending with the pink fifty-euro note and the bill pinned under the heavy glass ashtray at the café, the hurried steps around the corner, the quick buckling into the soft seats of the station wagon with
the kids already secured in the back, waving good-bye to Sylvie the nanny, the race to the Seine and across the Pont Neuf and onto the fast-moving roadway beneath the quais, streaming into l’autoroute de l’Est, light traffic and a wide highway east on the A4 and then north on the A31 and into a different nation and on different roads, eventually narrow and curvy and hilly, until finally, four hours after pulling out from the parking garage beneath the Left Bank, coming to a stop at the stone gates of the white-painted farmhouse on a tree-dotted plateau deep in the sparsely populated Ardennes Forest.

And in the downstairs washroom of the little stone house, behind the panel of the nonfunctioning heating register, a small steel box is affixed with strong magnets.

“Okay. And oh, Dexter? Julia told me to pass along a message.”

The hurried drive to the Ardennes is something they practiced. A test run.

“Yes?”

“The Colonel is dead.”

Dexter doesn’t respond.

“Dexter?”

“Yes,” he says. “I got it.”

“Okay then.
A bientôt
.”

And inside the box in the farmhouse’s bathroom, neat stacks of crisp bank notes, a million euros, untraceable cash. New-life cash.

The Spanish couple has left the gallery. Kate is alone, looking at the photographs, images of water and sand and sky, water and sand and sky, water and sand and sky. A relentless series of parallel lines in blues and tans, in shades of grays and whites. Hypnotizing lines, abstractions of place that are so abstract they’re no longer place, just line and color.

Maybe the beach, Kate thinks. Maybe a faraway beach is where we’ll live next. After we disappear from here.