The Expats (2 page)

She didn’t say anything.

“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.”

“And what makes it a grand duchy?”

“It’s ruled by a grand duke.”

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—and thereby pushing the kitchen over the brink from acceptably shabby to unacceptably crappy plus unhygienic and outright dangerous, finally forcing their hand on 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. That was two months ago. In the meantime, these clumsily positioned clamps had caused Katherine to shatter a wineglass and, a week later, while slicing a mango, to bang her hand into a clamp, 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 that day in the Waldorf, when she should’ve looked away, but didn’t.

“And what’s a grand duke?” She wiped the onion-tears from her eye.

“The guy in charge of a grand duchy.”

“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.” And there it was, the full, unrestrained smile. “Just like we always dreamed.” The open look of a man who harbored no secrets, and didn’t admit the possibility that other people did. This was what Katherine valued above all else in her husband.

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

“Yes.”

“How?”

“They have a shortage of great-looking men. So they’re going to pay me a bucket-load for being incredibly handsome and staggeringly sexy.”

This was their joke; had been their joke for a decade. Dexter was neither notably good-looking nor particularly sexy. He was a classic
computer nerd, gangly and awkward. He was not in reality bad-looking; his features were plain, an unremarkable amalgam of sandy hair and pointy chin and apple cheeks and hazel eyes. With the aid of a decent haircut and media training and possibly psychotherapy, he could become downright handsome. But he projected earnestness and intelligence, not physicality or sexuality.

This was what had originally appealed to Katherine: a man who was completely un-ironic, un-arch, un-bored, un-cool, un-studied. Dexter was straightforward, readable, dependable, and nice. The men in her professional world were manipulative, vain, ruthless, and selfish. Dexter was her antidote. A steady, unself-assuming, unfailingly honest, and plain-looking man.

He had long ago resigned himself to his generic looks and paucity of cool. So he emphasized his nerdiness, in the standard fashion: plastic glasses, frumpy and seemingly unchosen rumpled clothes, bed-heady hair. And he joked about his looks. “I’ll stand around in public places,” he continued. “Sometimes, when I get tired, I think I might sit. And just, y’know,
be
handsome.” He chortled, appreciating his own wit. “Luxembourg is the private-banking capital of the world.”

“And?”

“I just got offered a lucrative contract from one of those private banks.”

“How lucrative?”

“Three hundred thousand euros per year. Nearly a half-million dollars, at today’s exchange. Plus living expenses. Plus bonuses. The total could end up as high as maybe three-quarters of a million dollars.”

This was certainly a lot of money. More than she’d imagined Dexter would ever earn. Although he had been involved with the web since pretty much the beginning, he’d never had the drive or vision to get rich. He’d sat idly by, for the most part, while his friends and colleagues raised capital and took risks, went bankrupt or had IPOs, ended up flying around on private jets. But not Dexter.

“And down the line,” he continued, “who knows?
Plus
”—holding out his hands, telegraphing his coup de grâce—“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. And most of what remained was to work less.

Or so she’d thought. Now apparently he also aspired to get rich. In Europe.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I know the size of the operation, its complexity, the type of transactions. Their security needs are not as intense as what I deal with now. Plus they’re Europeans. Everyone knows Europeans don’t work that hard.”

Dexter had never gotten rich, but he made decent money. And Katherine herself had risen steadily up the pay grades. Together they’d earned a quarter-million dollars last year. But with the mortgage, and the never-ending large-scale repairs to the small old house on the so-called emerging fringes of the supposedly rejuvenated Columbia Heights, and the private school—downtown D.C. was dicey, public-school-wise—and the two cars, they never had any money. What they had were golden handcuffs. But no, not golden: their handcuffs were bronze, at best; maybe aluminum. And their kitchen was falling apart.

“So we’ll be loaded,” Katherine said, “and we’ll be able to travel everywhere, and you’ll be with me and the boys? Or will you be away all the time?”

Over the previous two months Dexter had done an abnormal amount of travel; he was missing a lot of the family’s life. So at that moment, his business travel was a sore point. He’d just returned from a few days in Spain, a last-minute trip that had required her to cancel social plans, which were few and far between, not to be canceled trivially. She didn’t have much of a social life, nor an abundance of friends. But it was more than none.

At one time, it had been Katherine’s business travel that was a serious issue. But soon after Jake was born, she had cut out her own travel almost entirely, and scaled back her hours drastically. Even under this newish regimen, she still rarely managed to get home before seven. The real time with her children was on weekends, wedged between food shopping and housecleaning and tumbling classes and everything else.

“Not much,” he said, inconclusively, nonspecifically. The evasion wasn’t lost on her.

“To where?”

“London. Zurich. Maybe the Balkans. Probably once a month. Twice.”

“The Balkans?”

“Sarajevo, maybe. Belgrade.”

Katherine knew that Serbia was one of the last places Dexter would want to visit.

“The bank has interests there.” He produced a half-shrug. “Anyway, travel won’t be a defining part of the job. But living in Europe will be.”

“Do you
like
Luxembourg?” she asked.

“I’ve been there only a couple times. I don’t have that great a sense of the place.”

“Do you have
any
sense? Because I obviously could’ve been wrong about what continent it’s on.” Once Katherine had begun this lie, she knew 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.

“I know it’s rich,” Dexter said. “The highest per capita GDP in the world, some years.”

“That can’t be true,” she said, even though she knew it was. “That has to be an oil-producing country. Maybe the Emirates, or Qatar, or Kuwait. Not someplace that I thought, until five minutes ago, was a state in Germany.”

He shrugged.

“Okay. What else?”

“It’s … um … it’s
small
.”

“How small?”

“A half-million people live in the entire country. The size is Rhode Island–ish. But Rhode Island is, I think, bigger. A little.”

“And the city? There’s a city, isn’t there?”

“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.