The Expats (29 page)

NO ONE REALLY ate. People picked and nibbled, but there was never a sit-down, never a required-dining moment, so for the most part the forks went untouched. All solid sustenance was delivered with the fingers. But mostly what the partygoers consumed was liquid.

Kate wasn’t sure whether she’d had five glasses of wine, or six. The easy-jazz piano had been replaced by a light-FM assortment of classic rock, low volume. Then someone raised the volume on the easy-listening. Hotel California; you can never leave.

She stood in the center of the small sitting room, swaying slightly. A certain measure of clarity was cutting through the alcoholic fog, bringing into focus what might very well be an alternate reality, in which none of these people were who they claimed to be. Just as Kate knew that she herself had not been, for a very long time, who she claimed to be.

It was looking increasingly likely that Dexter was not who he claimed to be. What the hell was all that material in his office? What was he up to?

Kate looked around, and found Julia cornered by one of the fathers
from school who everyone agreed was closeted-gay. She couldn’t see Bill anywhere. Nor Plain Jane, for that matter.

Kate grabbed a fresh superfluous flute from a tight grouping on the bar, inverted bowling pins. She wandered with purposeful aimlessness back through the small sitting room, letting her forefinger play against the tops of the tactile knickknacks, various varieties of cold and smooth, glass and brass and sterling silver. As she came around the corner to the hall, she pulled her phone out of her purse and pressed a button to ignite the screen. “Yes,” she said to a private Snuffleupagus, “is everything okay?” The dark-suited functionary guarding the door glanced at her, and she threw him an apologetic smile. “No, darling,” she fake-protested into the phone. “It’s not a bother, tell me what the problem is.” She wanted the guard to feel he was intruding, standing there where he was supposed to, listening to her listen to a problem, an intimate problem being explained by Darling. The guard pursed his lips, turned, and took a few steps out of the center hall, toward the kitchen, or office, or some type of service room, giving a woman some privacy. Social engineering indeed.

“Of course,” Kate said, her voice dripping with concern and sympathy; Darling was ill. She started walking up the stairs, out of sight and soundless on the plush red carpet. The upstairs hall extended in both directions, dim in one, dark in the other. She took the dark path. The doors were all open, but no lights were on, no slivers of illumination angling into the hall. Kate walked slowly, cautiously, into the first room. A small, nearly empty bedroom. The curtains were closed, the darkness nearly total. She left.

A door at the far end of the dim hall swung open, bright light spilling out. She saw a leg emerging, stockings and heels; Kate jumped backward into the bedroom.

“Oh don’t give me that crap,” the woman hissed. “It’s the goddamned Christmas party, Lou. You should be here.” The phone conversation receded down the stairs.

Back into the hall, to the next room, bigger, an office with a desk and couch and coffee table. A study. Open curtains, light filtering in from the street, through the bare branches of trees, illuminating one wall, the light chopped by a tree, a wood-cut pattern. There was a door against this semi-lit wall, open partway.

Kate heard breathing.

She peered through the slightly open closet door, to the floor, where
the light fell brightest, and saw pants crumpled at the top of shoes, and above that a stockinged calf held in the air, and above that a quick glimpse of the thick dark between open legs being split, curved and veined and glistening, sliding slowly all the way out before slipping back in, and above that the pushed-up skirt, and above that the blouse yanked askew and a nipple and the arched neck and open mouth and flaring nostrils and tightly clamped eyes, lids jammed together.

“Ungh,”
the woman grunted. The man quickly raised his hand to her mouth and covered it. He let his thumb slide between her lips, and the woman took it between her teeth, enamel glinting.

Kate was frozen. She couldn’t stop watching, listening. She could even smell it.

The woman moaned.

The woman’s eyes were clamped even more tightly shut, head further back. Kate couldn’t pull herself away.

“Oh. God.” The woman was convulsing, her head lolling in and out of the weak light. Barely enough light to confirm that it was Plain Jane. And the man, of course, was Bill.

Kate crept away, back toward the door, ever so slowly, quietly, carefully … almost there … one more step—

“Shit!”
Bill spat out.

Kate turned the door’s corner, into the hall, just in time to hear Plain Jane ask “What?” in a hoarse whisper. And then again,
“What?”

Kate scampered down the dark hall. Down the well-lit stairs, feet sliding on the plush rug, gliding. The guard looked up at her, his mouth open in protest, but he never managed to decide what to say. She breezed past him, into a hall. She would hide in the restroom for a minute. She pushed down on the door’s lever, but it didn’t budge. Locked.

At the end of the hall, a brass panel was inset into what must be a swinging door. The kitchen. Kate took a step forward, but then the door began to open, and she froze.

It opened wider, and she heard laughing from a man, giggling from a woman, both sounds—both voices—familiar, very familiar, and then the door was wide open, the man coming out first, followed by the woman.

Dexter. With Julia.

“KATE,” JULIA EXCLAIMED, all cheer. It seemed false, like the cover that a woman would lay when pretending that she wasn’t doing something wrong.

Dexter was flushed.

Kate felt the need to explain her presence, but it was these two who needed to explain themselves. She stifled herself.

“Hi,” Dexter said, short and unconvincing, non-incriminating.

Kate looked from one to the other, her husband to her fictional friend, back again. This wasn’t coming out of nowhere, but it was also not expected. At least, not what she expected out of Dexter.

They all stood there in the hall, these three, each second an eternity. Julia said nothing more, neither did Dexter. Every millisecond of silence made them seem more and more guilty.

“What’re you two up to?” Kate finally asked.

They glanced at each other, Julia and Dexter. Julia giggled again. These two suddenly seemed like brother and sister, or two old friends, not a pair of adulterers.

“Come,” Dexter said, taking Kate’s hand.

The kitchen was large and professional, a big work island, multiple ranges, hoods, open cabinets and hanging pots, speed bars, bottles with pour tops, big battered pots.

Julia headed to a drawer, pulled it open, and removed something. “Here,” she said.

Kate was confused. She looked down at the offering, then back up at Julia.

Dexter made his way to the far end of the room, a big steel-doored appliance, refrigerator or freezer. He too was removing something, shutting the door, turning to Kate.

She looked at her husband’s offering, and her friend’s. Ice cream, and a spoon.

Kate couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d caught them at something illicit, something hidden. Not the ice cream, nor the obvious thing. Something else.

TODAY,
12:41
P.M.

Kate wanders the streets of St-Germain-des-Prés, lost in thought, trying to unravel the meaning of her discovery, an explanation for the incontrovertible evidence in the yearbook. The evidence that Dexter and the woman who now called herself Julia did not meet two years ago, in Luxembourg. They met two decades ago, in college.

The morning rain has given way to high patchy clouds that rush across the sky, leaving in their wake bursts of harshly bright sunshine, a blustery wind roiling the clumps of fallen leaves.

She walks through the
terrasse
of the Flore, where the whole family took a break after the boys’ school interview, and before they rashly chose their apartment, last year. A famous café, its white-and-green china easily recognizable. This is guidebook Paris, Picasso’s Paris. Kate’s home.

This is not a life she ever expected.

The past year in Paris was a vast improvement on the prior year in Luxembourg. And this coming year, she knows, will be even better, by degrees. She likes the new friends she and Dexter made last year; she expects she’ll like them even more this year. Plus there will be new people. She has realized that she likes new people.

She turns into the rue Apollinaire in front of the jaunty stripes of Le Bonaparte.

Kate likes tennis too. She took up the game a year ago, first in an exhausting flurry of thrice-weekly lessons, to make rapid progress so she could join the round robin of moms from school who play in the Jardins du Luxembourg. By the end of the year, she’d become one of the best players in the group. But she’s neither young nor tall nor fast, and she’s never going to be any of those things, so she’s also never going to be a great player. Just good enough. And she can play with Dexter.

Now that he doesn’t work so much, and doesn’t need to travel at all, they have ample time—and plenty of money—to do enjoyable things together, constantly. They are permanent tourists, in Paris. Their life is a certain type of dream come true.

But Kate can’t deny that she still wants something more. Or something else. She’s never going to be one of those women who opens a children’s shoe store or a home-decor boutique, importing stylish plastic from Stockholm and Copenhagen. She isn’t going to immerse herself in studies of the Old Masters or the
Existentialists. She’s not going to wander around with a Bristol pad and a box of pastels; nor with a laptop, pecking away at a pointless novel. She can’t imagine leading walking tours for small groups of retirees, progressing from the best bakeries to the best cheese shops, uncovering the covered markets, shaking hands with the falsely friendly proprietors.

There are a lot of things Kate knows she does
not
want to do.

Although hers is by any standard a good life, Kate can’t deny that she’s bored, again. She’s been through this before; she has more self-awareness this time. Which is leading to her conviction that there’s only one solution to that problem. And this afternoon she’s conscious that the solution might now be within her grasp, courtesy of the revelation in the yearbook, and how she’ll be able to use this new information.

It isn’t surprising to Kate that she was lied to by the undercover agent. She was never much aggrieved by that tautology. But her husband’s betrayal is another matter. There has never been any doubt in Kate’s mind that Dexter loves her, and their children. She isn’t concerned about his fundamental nature: he is a good man. Her good man. Whatever the explanation of the enormity of Dexter’s and Julia’s duplicity, it must accommodate the undebatable reality that he’s good, not bad.

Kate has already thought through a half-dozen scenarios, and dismissed them all. She picks up afresh with Julia’s message, a few hours ago: the Colonel is dead.

She turns at the chamfered corner of Le Petit Zinc’s elegant door, oozing Art Nouveau out onto the sidewalk, the warm afternoon light setting aglow the sand-colored stones of the buildings in the rue St-Benoit.

This is an elegant spot, an elegant corner. An elegant turn …

Kate stops stock-still in the street, eyes frozen in front, mind racing in a circle to come all the way around to the beginning, to the certainty, to confirmation, to the brilliance of it.

She knows what happened.

20

Kate pulled her hat low, shelter against a gust of wind blowing cold down from Mont Blanc looming in the distance, the white-peaked Alps folding over themselves, Alp over Alp, all the way down to Geneva skirting the shores of Lac Léman.

The ice cream was a plausible explanation. They’d had too much to drink, most of the food in the dining room was gone, they didn’t want any more ham. No one wanted any more ham. Everywhere everyone went, there were ham sandwiches. In bakeries and butchers, supermarkets and cafés. At the kiosks in malls, in the vending machines in offices, under glass domes on the counters at gyms, on airplanes. Goddamned ham sandwiches, everywhere.

So they’d gone to the kitchen, looking for something nonham to eat. Questionable judgment, wandering through the private spaces of the embassy. A drunken semi-caper. Completely believable.

Kate walked through Paquis, near the train station, North Africans and Arabs, couscous restaurants and souvenir shops, chunky Turkish prostitutes smoking cigarettes in the doorways of cinder-block buildings, skinny men in baggy jeans lurking in shadows. This would be a good place to buy a gun; this was the type of neighborhood where she’d done that before. Kate was halfway thinking she should have a weapon.

She crossed the Rhône at the Pont du Mont Blanc, ducked into the Jardin Anglais, wintered over, unpeopled, the wind here frigid and biting, tears springing from her eyes.