The Expats

by Chris Pavone

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.

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.

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.

The drugstores in Luxembourg apparently sold only drugs.

“Oh I do not know anything about his handsomeness or lack thereof, I can tell you that for certain.” Kate was impressed with how many words this woman used to communicate her ideas.

in the end, she had to admit that shapely legs were probably the most practical choice among the bizarre body forms that men found attractive. Big boobs were clearly a pain in the ass, whereas the ass itself, if not small, had a tendency to droop into something absolutely dreadful in women her age who exercised as infrequently as she, and didn’t categorically deny themselves ice cream.

Kate marvels at how many layers of disingenuousness are passing between them.

“It’s pointless? To be honest with your spouse?” “No, sweetheart. It’s pointless to tell you something whose sole meaning will be that you have to keep it a secret. From everyone. That’s a pretty big downside. With no upside.”

She marveled at her inability to resist accusing Dexter of her own transgressions.

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.

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.

Her French grammar was open to a page humiliatingly near the front cover.

“And over the years,” she said, “I’ve discovered that men find me much more interesting when I’m naked.”

ashamed to have bought the children crappy plastic products licensed from American corporations and manufactured in Southeast Asia.

Two women were dancing playfully around one man, who was standing still, letting his head bounce from side to side. Minimalist dancing.

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.

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.

Wearing gladiator helmets, which the boys called gladier helmicks. Kate didn’t have the heart to correct them. If she allowed these childish mispronunciations, maybe they’d stay younger, longer. Then so would she.

Three hours, and no one would know what she was doing, or where she was doing it, or for the love of God why.

This was a bizarre moment: this crossing-over from a hypothetical plan to a concrete caper,

Kate was increasingly convinced that she was never going to be a happy stay-at-home mom. If there was such a thing.

If Dexter were around more, if he were more attentive in every way—in any way: if he said thank you more, or called once in a while to do something other than say he wasn’t coming home, or fucked her more frequently or more passionately or more creatively, or if he would just fold a single goddamned load of laundry—then maybe she wouldn’t be walking down this street, fantasizing about getting into that bed with the gun strapped to the bottom.

This was all nonsense, she knew. Transference of her own guilt onto an innocent party, an excuse to be angry at someone who wasn’t herself. She told herself to focus.

“Time flies.” Although Hayden had no children of his own, he recognized that many people, at a certain point in their lives, begin to measure time not by their own forward progress but by the ages of their children.

But all people have secrets. Part of being human is having secrets, and being curious about other people’s secrets. Dirty fetishes and debilitating fascinations and shameful defeats and ill-begotten triumphs, humiliating selfishness and repulsive inhumanity. The horrible things that people have thought and done, the lowest points in their lives.

She’d put that aside, sealed in an envelope deep inside her, to be opened only if required. She didn’t want to know, unless she absolutely had to, her husband’s secrets.

Kate had managed to convince herself that there was no upside to being snidely suspicious. What she had to be was upbeat suspicious.

“What is it?” “A robot!” As if it couldn’t be more obvious.

It was inconceivable to treat it as a game; it was impossible to pretend that it wasn’t real life.

KATE KEPT RETURNING to the phrase benefit of the doubt. She should give it to Dexter; he should give it to her. This should be in wedding vows. More important than richer or poorer, sickness and health, have and hold, parting at death. Benefit of the doubt.

He laughed again, red-faced and moist-looking, at another unfunny comment. He was either drunk or an idiot. Possibly both.

This party was dominated by the sizable contingent who’d circled around themselves as Americans, exclusionary, flag-pin-wearing. Behaving as if they hadn’t chosen to live in Europe, but had been moved against their wills, and were putting up a brave resistance. Freedom fighters.

Or was his infidelity a crime of opportunity? Had he been seduced, unfairly? Plied with liquor and teased and eventually propositioned, an offer he couldn’t refuse?

some type of white fluffiness.

He was getting desperate. His desperation was making him increasingly unviable, which in turn was making him increasingly desperate. A vicious cycle.

He’d never burned himself cooking. He didn’t cook enough to make kitchen mistakes. He’d never peeled his thumb with a peeler, nicked his fingertip with a paring knife, scalded his arms in boiling water, burned bubbles on the back of his hand with splattering fat.

A pale man in the depths of a sunless winter.

Kate was never going to understand the extent to which men were stupid.

“It was impossible to understand how brief it is. It seemed like youth would last so long; it would last forever. But it’s just a blink.”

with unlined foreheads and impossibly slender shoulders.

This is exactly how the children sound and look when they’re testing theories about pirates or dinosaurs or space-travel options.