The Expats

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 Mexico City after a bus from Morelia, or air transfers from Quito or Guatemala City. She’d seen them in Managua and Port-au-Prince, Caracas and Bogotá. Everywhere in the world she’d gone, she’d seen them.

Now she is one of them.

Now this is her, curbside at the airport in Frankfurt-am-Main. Behind her is 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: someone who needs to pack absolutely everything, all at once.

Strewn around her mountain of ugly person-size suitcases are 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 Ziploc 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 is her, clutching her family’s blue passports, distinct from the Germans’ burgundy, standing out not just because of the vinyl colors, but because locals don’t sit around on piles of hideous luggage, clutching passports.

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

This is her: an immigrant, immigrating.

She’d begun by taking Dexter’s family name. She’d acknowledged that she no longer needed her maiden name, her professional name. 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, and the name was merely incremental.

So she is someone she’s never before been: Katherine Moore. She’ll call herself Kate. Friendly, easygoing Kate. Instead of severe, serious Katherine. Kate Moore sounds like someone who knows how to have a good time in Europe. For a few days she’d auditioned Katie, in her mind, but concluded that Katie Moore sounded like a children’s book character, or a cheerleader.

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

She managed to extract herself from her job. It had not been easy, nor quick. But when the exit interviews and bureaucratic hurdles were cleared, she endured a farewell round of drinks at her boss’s Capitol Hill house, which Kate was both relieved and disappointed to discover was not noticeably larger, nor in much better condition, than her own.

This, she tells 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 when she shipped off to her freshman year at college, and never left. She’d stayed in Washington, in her career, because one thing led to another. She hadn’t made her life happen; it had happened to her.

The German driver turns up the music, synthesizer-heavy pop from the eighties. “New Wave!” he exclaims. “I love it!” He’s drumming his fingers violently against the wheel, tapping his foot on the clutch, blinking madly, at nine a.m. Amphetamines.
Kate turns away from this maniac, and watches the pastoral 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.
 
# # #
 
“Luxembourg?”

“Yes.”

“Luxembourg?”

“That’s right.”

Katherine didn’t know how to react. So she decided on the default, deflection via ignorance. “Where is Luxembourg?” Even as she was asking this disingenuous question, she regretted it.

“It’s in Western Europe.”

“I mean, is it in Germany?” She turned her eyes away from Dexter, from the shame at the hole she was digging for herself. “Switzerland?”

Dexter looked at her blankly, clearly trying—hard—to not say something wrong. “It’s its own country. It’s a grand duchy,” he added, irrelevantly.

“A grand duchy. You’re kidding.”

“It’s the only grand duchy in the world. It’s bordered by France, Belgium, and Germany,” Dexter continued, unbidden. “They surround it.”

“No.” Shaking her head. “There’s no such country. You’re talking about—I don’t know—Alsace. Or Lorraine. You’re talking about Alsace-Lorraine.”

“Those places are in France. Luxembourg is a different, um, nation.”

She redirected her attention to the cutting board, the onion in mid-mince, sitting atop the counter that was threatening to separate entirely from the warped cabinetry beneath it, pulled apart by some primordial force—water, or gravity, or both—pushing the kitchen over the brink from acceptably shabby to unacceptably crappy plus unhygienic and outright dangerous, finally forcing the full kitchen renovation that, even after editing out every unnecessary upgrade and aesthetic indulgence, would still cost forty thousand dollars that they didn’t have.

As a stopgap, Dexter had secured C-clamps to the corners of the counter, to prevent the slab of wood from sliding off the cabinetry. These clumsily positioned clamps had caused Katherine to bang her hand, causing her knife to slip, the blade sliding silently into the meat of her left palm, bathing the mango and cutting board in blood. She’d stood at the sink, a dishrag pressed to her wound, blood dripping onto the ratty floor mat, spreading through the cotton fibers in the same pattern as the rug that day in the New York hotel, when she should’ve looked away, but didn’t.

“And what makes it a grand duchy?” She wiped the onion-tears from her eye.

“It’s ruled by a grand duke.”

“You’re making this up.”

“I’m not.” Dexter was wearing a very small smile, as if he might indeed be pulling her leg. But no, this smile was too small for that; this was the smile of Dexter pretending to pull a leg, while being dead-serious. A feint of a fake smile.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll bite: why would we move to Luxembourg?”

“To make a lot of money, and travel around Europe all the time.”

“You’re going to make a lot of money? In Luxembourg? How?”

“It’s the private-banking capital of the world. And I just got offered a lucrative contract from one of those private banks. Plus I won’t even need to work that much.” Both of them had at one time been ambitious. But after ten years together and five with children, only Dexter sustained any modicum of ambition. Most of what remained was to work less. Or so Katherine had thought. Now apparently he also aspired to get rich. In Europe.

 “Can you tell me about the place? Because I obviously could’ve been wrong about what continent it’s on.” Once Katherine had begun this lie, she’d have to play along with it fully. That was the secret to maintaining lies: not trying to hide them. It had always been disturbingly easy to lie to her husband.

“It’s rich,” Dexter said. “The highest per capita GDP in the world. Also, it’s . . . um
 . . . it’s small. A half-million people. The size is Rhode Island–ish. But Rhode Island is, I think, bigger. A little. The capital is 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.”

“Yes. 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 her husband had 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 resign. It was not her decision.

“So what would I do?” she asked. “In Luxembourg? Which I’m still not convinced is real. You have to admit, it sounds made-up.”

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

“You’ll live the life of leisure. Learn tennis. Plan our travels. Study languages.”

“And when I get bored?”

“If you get bored? You can get a job. 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 H.R. types with creases down the front of his khakis, shiny pennies in his loafers.

He reached into his pocket, and unfolded a sheet of legal-size paper. A spreadsheet, the title luxembourg budget across the top.  Katherine found the bottom line, a net savings of nearly two hundred thousand a year—euros? dollars? Whatever. She’d long ago reconciled herself to being broke, forever. But it was looking like forever was, after all, finite.

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

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

They had discussed this seriously, late at night, after wine. Or as seriously as they could, late, tipsy. They had no idea whether it would be difficult to arrive in another country, but it would definitely be easy to leave Washington. They still yearned for adventures they thought they’d missed; still thought it was possible. Or never allowed that it was impossible.

“But Luxembourg?” she asked. The foreign lands they’d imagined were places like Provence or 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.

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