The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  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 gesticulat
ing 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.”

  “NOUS SOMMES DES amis de Pierre,” Bill said to the doorman.

  They were standing on the wide sidewalk of the broad, quiet boulevard, just the other side of the Pont d’Alma.

  “Est-il chez lui ce soir?”

  The man behind the velvet rope was big and black and bald. “Votre nom?”

  “Bill Maclean. Je suis americain.”

  The man grinned at this piece of obviousness, and inclined his head at a willowy girl in a silver sheath dress who was standing a few yards away, smoking; she herself looked a bit like a cigarette. The girl flicked aside her butt and sauntered inside.

  Kate and Dexter and Julia and Bill waited, amid a dozen people who were perhaps waiting for the same type of thing. Maybe the same exact thing, from the same person. Other supposed friends of Pierre.

  This was not something Dexter and Kate had ever done in D.C. Or anywhere else. He took her hand, fingertips cold in the brisk autumn air, and tickled her palm with the tip of his forefinger. Kate stifled a giggle at the tingle, at her husband’s secret signal for sex.

  The cigarette-girl reappeared, nodded at the bouncer, then lit a new smoke, and resumed looking bored.

  “Bienvenue, Beel,” the bouncer said.

  A different big and black man, this one with a short afro and beside the rope, not behind it, opened the brass hinge and held aside the thick, braided strand.

  Bill ushered his wife forward, through the gap in the rope. Then he repeated the gesture for Kate, his fingers lightly pressing the fabric of her jacket, his fingertips barely but unmistakably felt through the silk and wool. Kate knew with a jolt that this touch was wrong. Bill hadn’t touched Julia this way.

  “Merci beaucoup.” Bill shook the bouncer’s hand.

  The hallway was dim and red, low light reflected off walls that were both glossy and matte. Kate reached out her hand, and let her fingers trail across the fleur-de-lis flocked in plush velvet against a satin background. The hall widened, and opened, and they were beside a short bar, ordering a bottle of Champagne, Bill laying a credit card on the gleaming wood, swept up by the bartender and stowed next to the register, an open tab.

  Beyond the bar, low tables and couches surrounded a diminutive dance floor. Two women were dancing playfully around one man, who was standing still, letting his head bounce from side to side. Minimalist dancing.

  Bill leaned in to Kate’s ear. “It’s early,” he explained. “There will be more people.”

  “Early? It’s midnight.”

  “This place doesn’t open until eleven. And nobody would show up at eleven.”

  They arrived at the table of a slender olive-skinned man, reeking of cigarettes, his ears littered with rings, his arms with tattoos, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down to his crotch. He and Bill exchanged cheek kisses. Bill introduced him as Pierre, first to Kate, then to Dexter, and finally to “ma femme, Julia.” Pierre seemed surprised that Bill had a wife.

  The Americans took a table beside Pierre’s, populated by a similar-looking man and a pair of modely-looking young women in jeans and slinky blouses and not a single extra ounce of body fat.

  Kate took another sip of wine.

  IT WAS DARK, and loud, and the dance floor and lights and music tugged at everyone’s concentration, pulling toward this light and that body, this beat and that voice, and all these distractions, this sensory overload, created a sort of privacy, an energy shield behind which Kate felt like she could finally take a moment and study Bill, this husband of a woman who had quickly become her best friend on the continent.

  Bill’s arm was thrown over the back of the banquette, and his jacket was off, and his shirt was undone two buttons. His wavy dark hair had gone a bit wild, and he was sporting the easy smile of someone who’d been drinking for six hours. He looked completely in his element here, at this Right Bank club privé. He leaned his head back to listen to Pierre, then let out a full and loose laugh. He could be a fashion designer, or a filmmaker. But what he didn’t look like was a currency trader.

  The humor of Pierre’s joke receded, taking with it the better part of Bill’s smile. He turned back to his American companions, his table, and his eyes found Kate’s, and rested there a few beats, saying nothing and asking nothing, just looking. She wondered what he was looking for, and who the hell he was.

  Bill’s being, his presence, dominated his surroundings. Making his wife seem small and quiet, even when she was standing tall, loudly. They were a strange match; Bill was kind of out of Julia’s league.

  “Hey guys,” Kate said to her husband, and to Bill, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “How about a picture?” They both looked reticent, but not enough to argue.

  Kate had come across a lot of Bills: alpha males, trying to out-alpha one another. It had been her job to deal with them. In private life, it had been her habit to avoid them.

  “And Julia?” she asked. “Could you lean in also? ”

  The trio smiled, and Kate snapped the picture.

  She looked at these men across the low littered table, her own man and this new one. One whose entire being was suffused with confidence, flowing up from some deep well that originated Lord knows where—maybe he’d been spectacularly good at some sport, or he had a photographic memory, or was impressively well-endowed—and oozing out into a sleekness, a fluidity, as if all his gears were well-oiled, perpetually lubricated and running efficiently, manifested in smooth physical movements and playful smiles and an undeniably animal sexuality. This man didn’t run his hand through his hair, or adjust his shirt collar, or dart his eyes around the room, or run his mouth meaninglessly; he didn’t fidget in any way.

  And the other man, bereft of this confidence. His supply compromised, a plugged well or a broken pipe, just a trickle flowing up, not enough to even out the rough edges of nervousness and insecurity, of herky-jerky body language with creaks and squeaks and uncomfortable angles. This was her man, the one who didn’t just want her but needed her, and not just passingly but desperately. This was the legacy of her upbringing, the result of her own finite supply of self-confidence, her own valuation of herself in the world: Kate needed, badly, to be needed. She’d gravitated toward men who tended to need her more than want her. She’d married the one who’d needed her the most.

  The new man was again staring at her, staring at him, challenging her, knowing that she was considering him, wanting her to know that he was considering her.

  She couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be with a man who absolutely didn’t need her, but merely wanted her.

  KATE DIDN’
T NOTICE anyone order or deliver or pick up the third bottle of Champagne, but there was no way this was still the second. She was hot, and thirsty, and she took a long sip, and then another, before Julia tugged her back into the throbbing crowd on the dance floor, everyone in the same motion and to the same beat, everyone sweaty, the strobe sweeping slowly across the room, the mirror-ball twinkling.

  Dexter was engrossed in conversation with a staggeringly beautiful woman who read headlines for a news station. She wanted to move to Washington, this French newscaster, to cover politics; she was pumping Dexter for information he didn’t really have. Kate didn’t begrudge him his obvious thrill, basking in the glow of attention from an unattainably gorgeous woman.

  They were all plastered.

  Julia had undone yet another button on her blouse, crossing the neckline between sexy and exhibitionist. But half the women in the club were the same degree of naked.

  Kate looked away from Julia, through the obstacles of lights and forms, her eye drawn toward the far wall, where Bill was slouched next to an attractive woman, who turned her head into the side of his, and may or may not have licked his ear.

  Kate glanced at Julia, her eyelids resting heavy against her cheeks, oblivious.

  Kate again scanned the roiling sea of flesh. Now it was Bill who was turning into the young woman’s neck. She smiled, and nodded. Bill took her by the wrist and led her away.

  Julia’s eyes were now open, but she was looking nowhere near her husband.

  Kate watched Bill recede with the girl down one of those halls in clubs and bars that lead to privacy, to restrooms and broom closets and storage rooms, to back doors that empty into alleyways. To places where people go, late at night, groping and squeezing, unzipping trousers and pushing aside panties, breathless and urgent.