The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  “So how are you getting settled?” Kate asked.

  She felt like a fraud for asking this question, which other women were always asking her. The question implied that the asker was already settled, that maybe she could offer advice, or help. Kate wasn’t, and couldn’t.

  “Okay, I guess,” Julia said. “But I don’t know how to do anything here.”

  Kate nodded.

  “Do you know how to get done the things you need to get done?”

  “No.” Kate shook her head. “But what I’m an expert in—what I really know how to do—is assemble crap from Ikea. There are no closets here.”

  “None!” Julia said. “You’re right. These old buildings were built before closets.”

  “So I’ve spent the past month putting together bureaus and wardrobes. And lamps, too. Why is the electricity different from America’s? Does that make any sense?”

  “None. Doesn’t your husband do that type of thing? Assembling furniture?”

  “Never. What my husband does is work. All the time.”

  “Mine too.”

  They both stared into their wineglasses. The waiter arrived, and took their orders.

  “So,” Julia started again, “how long have you been here?”

  “Four weeks.”

  “That’s not very long.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  This was sort of hellish. Kate wanted to excuse herself, get up and walk away, disappear. This was one of the many aspects of expat life that she found herself ill-equipped for: making pointless small talk with strangers.

  “I hear,” Julia said, “you’re from Washington? That must be exciting!”

  And this? How tedious.

  But Kate was determined to try. She needed friends, and a life, and this is how you acquired those things: by talking to strangers. Everyone was a stranger, all on equal footing in strangerhood. The defining signifiers in the place you were from—family, school, experiences—those things didn’t matter here. Everyone started from the same scratch, and this was it. Sitting with a stranger, making small talk.

  “Actually, I’m not from D.C.,” Kate said. “I lived there for fifteen years. Where I’m from is Bridgeport, Connecticut. And you? Where are you from?”

  The waiter delivered their first-course salads.

  “Chicago. Have you ever been?”

  “No,” Kate admitted, mildly ashamed. This was something that Dexter had teased her about, and she’d played along, and it had become one of their inside-marriage jokes: that Kate hated Chicago so much she wouldn’t step foot there. She even refused to be friends with anyone from Chicago.

  “Pity,” Julia said, glancing up from the task of dividing her goat-cheese toast in half—in fact, portioning her whole salade composée in half. “It’s a nice city.”

  The truth was that Kate didn’t hate Chicago, not at all. She’d simply never had an opportunity to go there.

  “Maybe you’ll visit when you move back,” Julia said. “When are you planning to go home? ”

  “We’re here open-ended.”

  “Us too.”

  “What does your husband do?” Kate asked.

  “Something in finance I don’t understand.” Julia was staring at Kate. “And yours?”

  “Ditto.”

  “They all do something in finance we don’t understand, don’t they?”

  “It certainly seems that way.”

  This was what Luxembourg was for: making money, avoiding taxes.

  “I sort of vaguely know what mine does,” Julia admitted. “He trades currencies. But what the hell that actually means, I couldn’t tell you. What about yours?”

  “He’s a systems security expert, specializing in transactional software for financial institutions.” This is the line she’d internalized.

  “Wow! That’s very, um, specific. What does that mean he actually does?”

  Kate shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t have much of an idea.”

  What she knew was the single broad stroke that Dexter’s job was to make it impossible—or as impossible as possible—for hackers to steal money during electronic transfers. This is what had somehow become Dexter’s specialty, over the past decade, moving from Internet service provider to a bank to another bank, until about a year ago he’d struck out on his own as an independent consultant. Then Luxembourg.

  “Where does he work?” Julia asked.

  “He has office space on the boulevard Royal, but he’s freelance.”

  “Who are his clients?”

  Kate blushed. “I have no clue.”

  Julia giggled. Then Kate returned the laugh, which became hilarious to both of them, until Julia suddenly grimaced. “Oh my God,” Julia said, flapping her hands as if attempting flight. “I just laughed wine through my nose. Ahhhhh!”

  When their laughter subsided, Julia picked up, “And you? Are you working here?”

  “Not in a paying job, no. I’m taking care of the kids, and the house.” This was another sentence that Kate had uttered dozens of times. It still wasn’t sitting well; she averted her eyes as she said it. “What about you?”

  “I’m an interior designer. I was an interior designer. I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that here. Any of it.”

  Kate had never imagined she’d be going on blind lunch dates with women with ex-careers like decorators. “Why not?”

  “You need to know lots of society people—those are your clients. Plus you need to know all the tradespeople—everyone who would do the work you need done—and all the shops, all the resources. I don’t know anyone here, or anything. I can’t be an interior designer in Luxembourg.”

  Kate closely examined this new American. Shoulder-length blond hair—almost certainly dyed, but a high-quality job—curled and feathered, conditioned and blown-out; this woman made a big effort. Blue eyes, a touch of mascara and shadow, but subtle, not too much of it. Pretty but not beautiful; attractive in a non-intimidating way. A shade taller than Kate, maybe five-nine, and skinny, narrow everywhere, the type of body that comes with no children. She was thirty-five. At least.

  “How long you been married, Julia? ”

  “Four years.”

  Kate nodded.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Julia continued. “Married four years, mid-thirties … where are the kids? So to get it out of the way, I’ll tell you now: I can’t.”

  “Oh.” American women, Kate had come to realize, were awfully forthcoming about their reproductive health. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. But that’s life, isn’t it? Throwing lemons at your skull.”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyway, our lemonade is we’re planning to adopt. Since the biological clock isn’t an issue, we decided we’d wait until forty came and went. So we could devote this decade of our lives to having fun, while Bill makes a fortune. Then settle down, have kids.”

  Kate was taken aback by this excessive garrulousness. People who were too outgoing made her suspicious. She couldn’t help but presume that all the loud noise was created to hide quiet lies. And the more distinct a surface personality appeared, the more Kate was convinced that it was a veneer.

  This Julia was setting off all Kate’s alarm bells. Nevertheless, Kate had to admit there was something likeable about her. “Sounds like a great plan.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Julia took another sip of her wine. “So what did you do back home?”

  “Research for the government. Position papers. On international trade, development, that type of thing.”

  “That must’ve been interesting.”

  “Sometimes,” Kate said. “Sometimes it just sucked.”

  They both laughed again, sipped again, realized their glasses were nearly empty.

  “Monsieur,” Julia called to a passing waiter. “Encore du vin, s’il vous plaît?” Her French accent was abysmal. It was questionable to even call it French.

  The waiter looked confused. Kate could see he was trying to puzzle out Jul
ia’s sentence through her wildly misshapen vowels. Then he finally understood. “Oui madame.”

  He returned with the bottle of Riesling.

  “And you?” Julia asked. “More for you?”

  “I shouldn’t. Our main courses haven’t even arrived yet.” Julia had eaten exactly half her salad, then put down her fork. Kate was impressed with the everyday discipline of it.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Pour elle aussi,” Julia said to the waiter.

  When he was safely out of earshot, Kate said, “Your French is great.”

  “Thank you for lying, but no,” Julia said, “it’s not. I have a horrible accent. The curse of the Midwesterner.” She didn’t sound particularly Midwestern. But then again, the whole of America was having its accents leveled. In twenty years, everyone, everywhere, would sound the same. “But I’ve studied up on my vocabulary.” Julia picked up her glass, aimed it at Kate. “A ta santé,” Julia said, and they clinked glasses. “And à nouvelles amies.”

  Kate looked at this woman, her eyes twinkling from the wine, her skin flushed.

  “To new friends,” Kate agreed.

  KATE SQUINTED THROUGH the bright low sunshine at the sight of her husband, shuffling up the gravel path.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  The family hadn’t seen much of Dexter over the past week. And what little they’d seen was a distracted, distant man. Kate was glad he was here now. Practically thrilled, at such an unthrilling event.

  “It’s a slow day,” Dexter said, leaning down to peck her on the lips. Kate had long struggled with the pointlessness of the perfunctory peck, but she could never bring herself to tell Dexter to cut it out. She knew she’d have a hard time articulating her antipathy, and was afraid she’d come off as unloving, despite her admittedly contrarian opinion that it was the perfunctory peck itself that was unloving. So she didn’t say anything, and pecked right back.

  “I figured I’d see what you and the kids do, after school.”

  He looked around the playground, which was anchored by a large pirate ship and a tall enclosed slide, similar to a water slide, without the water. Jake was somewhere inside that structure; Ben was sneaking around the side of the pirate ship, almost completely unhidden, failing to control his giggles.

  A half-hour earlier, the boys had culminated a few days’ worth of relentless bickering with Jake punching Ben, followed by Ben pulling Jake’s hair, causing both boys to scream and cry. They needed time-outs, here in public. Kate had banished them to sitting against tree trunks, cross-legged on fallen leaves, out of sight of each other. They looked terrified there in the woods, and Kate felt awful about it, but it had been a successful time-out. They emerged truly repentant.

  “This is pretty typical,” Kate said. She was sitting at a metal café table with a cup of coffee and a bottle of water for when the children inevitably arrived announcing “I’m thirsty.” Her French grammar was open to a page humiliatingly near the front cover.

  Dexter watched the children stealthily moving, silent. “What are they doing?”

  Kate tried not to wince as she mumbled, “Playing spies.” She didn’t want to explain this game she’d invented.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Spies,” she said, louder. “They’re playing spies. It’s a game I made up.”

  He seemed to tense up, oddly. Then he forced a smile and asked, “How does it work?”

  “Do you see the napkins sticking out of their back pockets?” She’d found another use for the flimsy tri-folds. She was going to write a book, 101 Uses for Flimsy Napkins. “You get a point by snatching the napkin out of the other’s pocket, which you have to do by sneaking up behind your opponent. You have to be patient, and careful, and deliberate.”

  Dexter looked around, smiling. “This doesn’t seem so bad.”

  The sun was low in the southern sky, in what seemed like a winter angle, even though it was still September. A relatively warm day, the children running around in shirtsleeves. But that low sun augured something different. By sunset, Kate knew, the weather would change for the worse; it always did.

  Before school pickup, she’d spent the day alone, attending to chores: laundry and its hanging from the drying rack, food shopping, bathroom cleaning. The bathrooms and kitchen were thoroughly streaked from minerals in the heavy water, which made the place reminiscent of an abandoned Antarctic station. She needed decalcifying solution, or bleach, maybe both. So she’d gone to the hypermarché—a store so much larger than a regular supermarket that it was called a hypermarket—only to realize that all the labels were in French or German, and this was exactly the type of vocabulary she hadn’t learned in her pre-move immersion lessons, and would never learn here at her twice-weekly Berlitz class.

  Kate went home to collect her pocket dictionary, and returned to the market, via a traffic jam caused by a few dozen tractors parked in the middle of the street: milk farmers, protesting something or other. Mad at the cows; mad cows. Or mad at taxes; that was more likely. Everyone everywhere was mad at taxes. Taxes needed publicists.

  Start to finish, it took her two hours to buy a four-euro cleaning product.

  She couldn’t explain all that; couldn’t complain. She was not in a position to complain about this life, not yet. Probably not ever. She’d wanted this, had expressed to her husband every confidence that she’d enjoy this. She couldn’t whine.

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s not so bad.”

  KATE HAD BEEN an obvious candidate: she’d chosen to go to a D.C. college, which correlated with an interest in public service. She was studying not only political science but also Spanish, at a time when the most significant foreign threats were in Latin America, and the most crucial intelligence was from south of the border. Both her parents were dead, and she maintained no close relationships with other family members, or indeed with anyone. She even knew how to handle a gun: her father had been a hunter, and she’d fired her first bolt-action Remington when she was eleven.

  She fit the profile perfectly. Her only drawback was that she wasn’t especially patriotic. She’d felt betrayed by her country’s abandonment of her parents, who were essentially left to die because they were poor. Capitalism was heartless. America’s social safety net was woefully insufficient, and the results were inhumane, barbaric. After a dozen years of Republican hegemony, society was becoming more stratified, not less. Bill Clinton hadn’t accomplished anything yet beyond battering the world with the word hope.

  But it was easy to keep her misgivings to herself, just as she’d always kept everything to herself. She’d never written an angry letter to her senator, nor a vitriolic term paper. She’d never carried a picket sign in solidarity with a striking union, never marched in any protest. It was the early nineties. There wasn’t much political activism to get sucked into against better—or at least cooler—judgment.

  The spring of her junior year, Kate was invited to sherry with a professor of international relations, a lifelong academic who Kate eventually learned was also a spotter—a side gig of identifying students who might make good officers. A week later they had coffee in a campus cafeteria, and the professor asked her to a meeting in his office. A governmental outfit was recruiting interns, he’d claimed. They preferred graduate students, but they sometimes considered well-qualified undergrads.

  Kate appeared to be perfect material to these recruiters, because she was. And in turn the CIA was perfect for Kate. There had been nothing in her life except vast stretches of disappointment interspersed with brief glimmers of potential. She needed something large to fill her immense emptiness, to corral her potential and focus it, somehow, into something. She was seduced by the romance of it; she was energized by the possibilities.

  So she swallowed—with fingers crossed behind her back, lightly—the indoctrination. She accepted that she was playing an important role in a crucial mission against mortal enemies. It was certainly true that America, imperfect as it was, didn’t suffer by comparison to
Cuba or Nicaragua or Chile, much less to the tattered remnants of the Soviet Union or the lumbering behemoth of China or even the stagnating, ineffectual social democracies of Western Europe. The United States was the sole remaining superpower, and everyone wants to play for the Yankees. Or nearly everyone.

  Kate was welcomed into the new family of the Directorate of Operations, tightly bound and all-encompassing, populated with people like her, smart driven people with questionable capacities for intimacy. She enjoyed her work, even though some aspects woke her in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. She flourished in the Clandestine Service.

  Then she somehow managed to make room for Dexter. And before long for children. As Kate’s life filled with this new family—this real family—the secrets did become a problem, a nagging discomfort, an arthritis of the psyche. She had to push aside her old life, her manufactured one, the one bound by sentiments that were not love. She needed the Company less and less. She needed her husband and her children more and more.

  She began to sacrifice that old identity to live in her new one. It was the new life, after all, that everyone wanted.

  6

  “It’s like freshman year of college, isn’t it?”

  Dexter spit out a mouthful of toothpaste froth. “What do you mean?”

  Kate looked at her husband in the three-paneled mirror, each panel angled in a different direction, collecting scattered reflections and creating a fractured composite. Bathroom Cubism.

  “You’re meeting all these new people, trying to figure out who’s going to be your friend, who’s going to be your enemy, who’s going to be the loser you run away from at parties.” The toothbrush was dangling from the side of her mouth, and she shifted it. “Imagining where you’ll hang out, where you’ll buy coffee, where you’ll do whatever. And everybody’s in the same situation, basically: we’re all finding our separate ways, together.”