The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  “There’s a capital. It’s also called Luxembourg. Eighty thousand people live there.”

  “Eighty thousand? That’s not a city. That’s—I don’t know—that’s a college town.”

  “But it’s a beautiful college town. In the middle of Europe. Where someone will be paying me a lot of money. So it’s not a normal Amherst-style college town. And it’s a college town where you won’t need to have a job.”

  Katherine froze mid-mince, at the twist in the road of this plan that she’d anticipated ten minutes ago, as soon as he’d uttered the question “What would you think of moving to Luxembourg?” The twist that meant she’d have to quit her job, permanently. In that first flash of recognition, deep relief had washed over her, the relief of an unexpected solution to an intractable problem. She would have to quit. It was not her decision; she had no choice.

  She had never admitted to her husband—had barely admitted to herself—that she wanted to quit. And now she would never have to admit it.

  “So what would I do?” she asked. “In Luxembourg? Which by the way I’m still not convinced is real.”

  He smiled.

  “You have to admit,” she said, “it sounds made-up.”

  “You’ll live the life of leisure.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am serious. You’ll learn to play tennis. Plan our travels. Set up a new house. Study languages. Blog.”

  “And when I get bored?”

  “If you get bored? You can get a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Washington isn’t the only place in the world where people write position papers.”

  Katherine returned her eyes to her mangled onion, and resumed chopping, trying to sublimate the elephant that had just wandered into the conversation. “Touché.”

  “In fact,” Dexter continued, “Luxembourg is one of the three capitals of the European Union, along with Brussels and Strasbourg.” He was now an infomercial for the goddamned place. “I imagine there are lots of NGOs that could use a savvy American on their well-funded payrolls.” Combined with a recruiting agent. One of those unfailingly cheery HR types with creases down the front of his khakis, shiny pennies in his loafers.

  “So when would this happen?” Katherine pushed the deliberations away from herself, her prospects, her future. Hiding herself.

  “Well.” He sighed, too heavily, a bad actor who overestimated his abilities. “There’s the catch.”

  He didn’t continue. This was one of Dexter’s few awful habits: making her ask him questions, instead of just providing the answers he knew she wanted. “Well?”

  “As soon as possible,” he admitted, as if under duress, cementing the bad reviews, the rotten-fruit throwing.

  “Meaning what?”

  “We’d be living there by the end of the month. And I’d probably need to go there once or twice by myself, sooner. Like Monday.”

  Katherine’s mouth fell open. Not only was this coming out of nowhere, it was coming at top speed. Her mind was racing, trying to gauge how she could possibly quit on such a short timetable. It would be difficult. It would arouse suspicion.

  “I know,” Dexter said, “it’s awfully quick. But money like this? It comes with sacrifices. And this sacrifice? It’s not such a bad one: it’s that we need to move to Europe asap. And look.” He reached into his jacket pocket and unfolded a sheet of legal-sized paper, flattening it onto the counter. It appeared to be a spreadsheet, the title LUXEMBOURG BUDGET across the top.

  “And the timing is actually good,” Dexter continued, defensively, still not explaining why there was such a big rush. Katherine wouldn’t understand the rush until much, much later. “Because it’ll still be summer break, and we can make it to Luxembourg in time for the kids to start a new school at the beginning of the term.”

  “And the school would be …?”

  “English-language private school.” Dexter had a quick, ready answer to everything. He’d made a spreadsheet, for crying out loud. What a romantic. “Paid for by the client.”

  “It’s a good school?”

  “I have to assume that the private-banking capital of the world, with the highest income on the planet, is going to have a decent school. Or two.”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic about it. I’m just asking some marginal questions about the education of our children, and where we’d live. You know, small matters.”

  “Sorry.”

  Katherine let Dexter suffer her anger for a few seconds before picking up again. “We would live in Luxembourg for how long?”

  “The contract would be for one year. Renewable for another, at an increase.”

  She scanned the spreadsheet, found the bottom line, a net savings of nearly two hundred thousand a year—euros? Dollars? Whatever. “Then what?” she asked, warming to that bottom line. She’d long ago reconciled herself to being broke, forever. But now it was looking like forever was, after all, finite.

  “Who knows.”

  “That’s a pretty lame answer.”

  He walked around the deteriorating kitchen counter and put his arms around her, from behind, changing the whole tenor of the conversation. “This is it, Kat,” he said, his breath hot against her skin. “It’s different from how we’d imagined it, but this is it.”

  This was, in fact, exactly what they’d dreamt: starting a new life abroad. They both felt like they’d missed out on important experiences, both encumbered by circumstances that were exclusive with carefree youth. Now in their late thirties, they still yearned for what they’d missed; still thought it was possible. Or never allowed that it was impossible.

  “We can do this,” he said softly, into her neck.

  She lay down her knife. A farewell to arms. Not her first.

  They’d discussed this seriously, late at night, after wine. Or as seriously as they could, late, tipsy. They’d agreed that although they had no idea if it would be difficult to arrive in another country, it would definitely be easy to leave Washington.

  “But Luxembourg?” she asked. The foreign lands they’d imagined were places like Provence or Umbria, London or Paris, maybe Prague or Budapest or even Istanbul. Romantic places; places where they—places where everyone—wanted to go. Luxembourg was not on this list, not on anyone’s list. Nobody dreams of living in Luxembourg.

  “Do you happen to know,” she asked, “what language they speak in Luxembourg?”

  “It’s called Luxembourgeois. It’s a Germanic dialect, with French tossed in.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  He kissed her neck. “It is. But they also speak regular German, plus French, and English. It’s a very international place. No one’s going to have to learn Luxembourgeois.”

  “Spanish is my language. I took one year of French. But I speak Spanish.”

  “Don’t worry. Language won’t be a problem.”

  He kissed her again, running his hand down her stomach, down below the waistline of her skirt, which he began to gather up in fistfuls. The children were on a play date.

  “Trust me.”

  2

  Katherine had seen them many times, at international airports, with their mountains of cheap luggage, their faces merging worry with bewilderment with exhaustion, their children slumped, fathers clutching handfuls of red or green passports that set them apart from blue-passported Americans.

  They were immigrants, immigrating.

  She’d seen them departing from the Mexico City airport after a bus from Morelia or Puebla, or air transfers from Quito or Guatemala City. She’d seen them in Paris, coming up from Dakar and Cairo and Kinshasa. She’d seen them in Managua and Port-au-Prince, Caracas and Bogotá. Everywhere in the world she’d gone, she’d seen them, departing.

  And she’d seen them arriving, in New York and Los Angeles and Atlanta and Washington, at the other ends of their long-haul travels, exhausted, yet not even close to finished with their epic journeys.

  Now she was one of them.


  Now this was her, curbside at the airport in Frankfurt-am-Main. Behind her was a pile of eight oversized mismatched suitcases. She’d seen such gigantic suitcases before in her life, and had thought, Who in their right mind would ever buy such unmanageable, hideous luggage? Now she knows the answer: someone who needs to pack absolutely everything, all at once.

  Strewn around her eight ugly person-sized suitcases were four carry-on bags and a purse and two computer bags and two little-child knapsacks, and, on low-lying outcroppings, jackets and teddy bears and a ziplock filled with granola bars and fruit, both fresh and dried, plus brown M&M’s; all the more popular colors had been eaten before Nova Scotia.

  This was her, clutching her family’s blue passports, distinct from the Germans’ burgundy, standing out not just because of the vinyl colors, but also because locals don’t sit around on piles of hideous luggage, clutching passports.

  This was her, not understanding what anyone was saying, the language incomprehensible. After a seven-hour flight that allowed two hours of sleep, baggy-eyed and spent and hungry and nauseated and excited and fearful.

  This was her: an immigrant, immigrating.

  SHE’D BEGUN BY reconciling herself to taking Dexter’s family name. She’d acknowledged that she no longer needed her maiden name, her professional name. So she’d marched over to the District of Columbia’s municipal office and filled out the forms and handed over the money order. She’d ordered a new driver’s license and rush-service passport.

  She’d told herself that it would be easier to navigate bureaucracies, to live in a Catholic country, if the husband and wife shared the same name. She was already giving up the rest of her identity—the web of outward appearances that veiled the more complex truths beneath—and a name was, she reasoned, merely incremental.

  So she was already someone she’d never before been: Katherine Moore. She would call herself Kate. Friendly, easygoing Kate. Instead of severe, serious Katherine. This name had a nice ring to it; Kate Moore was someone who knew how to have a good time in Europe.

  For a few days she’d auditioned Katie Moore, in her mind, but concluded that Katie Moore sounded like a children’s book character, or a cheerleader.

  Kate Moore had orchestrated the move. She had frozen or canceled or address-changed dozens of accounts. She had bought the ugly luggage. She had sorted their belongings into the requisite three categories—checked baggage, air-freight, sea-freight. She had filled out shipping forms, insurance forms, formality forms.

  And she had managed to extract herself from her job. It had not been easy, nor quick. But when the exit interviews and bureaucratic hurdles had finally been cleared, she’d endured a farewell round of drinks at her boss’s house on Capitol Hill. Although she’d never quit a job in her adult life, she’d been to a few other send-offs over the years. At first, she’d been disappointed that it hadn’t occurred at some Irish pub, with everyone drinking excessively around a bar-sized pool table, like in the movies. But of course the people from her office couldn’t congregate in a bar, drinking. So they’d sipped bottles of beer on the ground floor of Joe’s brick town house, which Kate was partially relieved and partially disappointed to discover was not noticeably larger, nor in much better condition, than her own.

  She raised her glass with her colleagues, and two days later left the continent.

  This, she told herself again, is my chance to reinvent myself. As someone who’s not making a half-assed effort at an ill-considered career; not making an unenergetic, ad hoc stab at parenting; not living in an uncomfortably dilapidated house in a crappy, unneighborly neighborhood within a bitter, competitive city—a place she chose, for all intents and purposes, when she shipped off to her freshman year at college, and never left. She’d stayed in Washington, stayed in her career, because one thing led to another. She hadn’t made her life happen; it had happened to her.

  The German driver turned up the music, synthesizer-heavy pop from the eighties. “New Wave!” he exclaimed. “I love it!” He was drumming his fingers violently against the wheel, tapping his foot on the clutch, blinking madly, at nine A.M. Amphetamines?

  Kate turned away from this maniac and watched the pastoral German countryside roll past, gentle hills and dense forests and tight little clusters of stone houses, huddled together, as if against the cold, arranged into tiny villages surrounded by vast cow fields.

  She will reboot herself. Relaunch. She will become, at last, a woman who is not constantly lying to her husband about what she really does, and who she really is.

  “HI,” KATE HAD said, walking into Joe’s office first thing in the morning. This one syllable was the full extent of her preamble. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that I’m resigning.”

  Joe looked up from a report, grayish pages output from a dot-matrix printer that probably sat on a Soviet-made metal desk somewhere down in Central America.

  “My husband got a job offer in Europe. In Luxembourg.”

  Joe raised an eyebrow.

  “And I thought, we might as well.” This explanation was a gross simplification, but it had the benefit of being honest. Kate was resolved to complete honesty, in this process. Except for one subject, should it arise. She was pretty sure it would, eventually.

  Joe shut the folder, a heavy blue cover adorned with a variety of stamps and signatures and initials. There was a metal clasp at the side. He closed it. “What type of job?”

  “Dexter does electronic security, for banks.”

  Joe nodded.

  “There are a lot of banks in Luxembourg,” she added.

  Joe gave a half-smile.

  “He’s going to work for one.” Kate was surprised at the amount of regret she was feeling. With each passing second she was becoming increasingly convinced that she’d made the wrong decision, but was now honor-bound to follow it through.

  “It’s my time, Joe. I’ve been doing this for … I don’t know …”

  “A long time.”

  The regret was accompanied by shame, a convoluted type of shame at her own pride, her inability to reconsider a bad decision, once made.

  “Yes. A long time. And honestly I’m bored. I’ve been kind of bored, for a while. And this is a great opportunity for Dexter. For us. To have an adventure.”

  “You haven’t had enough adventure in your life?”

  “As a family. A family adventure.”

  He nodded curtly.

  “But really, this isn’t about me. Almost not at all. This is about Dexter. About his career, and maybe making a little money, finally. And about us living a different type of life.”

  Joe opened his mouth slightly, small grayish teeth peeking out from under a bushy gray mustache that looked like it had been pasted onto his ashen face. For consistency, Joe also tended to wear gray suits. “Can you be talked out of this?”

  For the preceding few days, while Dexter had been gathering more practical details, the answer would probably have been yes. Or at least maybe, possibly. Then in the middle of last night Kate had committed herself to making a final decision, had sat in bed and wrung her hands, bolt-upright at four A.M., agonizing. Trying to figure out what she wanted. She’d spent so much of her life—all of it, really—considering another question: what was it that she needed? But figuring out what she wanted was an entirely different challenge.

  She came to the conclusion that what she wanted, now, began with quitting. Walking out of this office forever. Abandoning this career permanently. Starting an entirely new chapter—a whole new book—of her life, in which she was a different character. She didn’t necessarily want to be a woman without any job, without any professional purpose; but she no longer wanted to be a woman with this job, this purpose.

  So in the overcast light of a muggy August morning, the answer was “No, Joe. I’m sorry.”

  Joe smiled again, smaller and tighter; less of a smile, more of a grimace. His whole demeanor shifted, away from the midlevel bureaucrat he usually appeared to be, toward the pitil
ess warrior she knew he was. “Well then.” He moved aside the blue folder, and replaced it with his laptop. “You understand there will be a lot of interviews?”

  She nodded. Although quitting wasn’t something people discussed, she was vaguely aware that it wouldn’t be fast or simple. And she knew she’d never again set foot in her eight-by-eight office, never again walk into this building. Her personal material would all be messengered to her.

  “And they’ll start right now.” Joe opened his computer. “Please”—he gestured with a flick of his hand, demanding and dismissive at once, his jaw tensed and his brow furrowed—“shut the door.”

  THEY SET OFF from the hotel through the warren of narrow cobble-stoned streets of the central district, dipping up and down along the natural contours of the medieval fortress-city. They walked past the monarch’s palace, cafés with outdoor tables, a broad square with a farmers’ market overflowing with produce and flowers.

  Through the thin rubber soles of her shoes, Kate felt all the ridges and valleys of the hard stones underfoot. She had once spent a lot of her life walking uneven streets in the rough neighborhoods of unfamiliar cities; she’d once had the footwear for it. She’d even spent time walking these very same cobblestones, more than fifteen years earlier. She recognized the arcade that connected the two main squares, at the southern end of which she’d once paused, wondering if what she was walking into could be a dangerous trap. She’d been trailing that Algerian kid who, as it turned out, was on his way to do nothing more nefarious than buy a crepe.

  That had been long ago, when she’d had younger feet. Now she’d be needing an entirely new collection of shoes, to go with her new everything else.

  The children were marching dutifully in front of their parents, engrossed in a typically esoteric little-boy conversation, about Lego hair. Dexter took Kate’s hand, here in the middle of town, in the liveliness of a European main square, people drinking and smoking, laughing and flirting. He tickled her palm with the tip of his forefinger, a clandestine invitation—a surreptitious promise—to something later, alone. Kate felt herself blush.