The Train to Lo Wu by Jess Row Page B

were at a loss to justify themselves. I’ll be more quiet! she said. Not even any telephone calls! Finally Lewis threatened to call her agency and complain, and she went to the elevator crying and wailing in Tagalog. All along the hallway he heard doors opening and closing, the neighbors talking in low tones.
    Afterward Melinda couldn’t sleep for days. She might have been sent back to the Philippines, she said. That’s what she was afraid of. Anytime they’re out of work they risk losing their visas. Maybe we could have kept her on.
    What did you want me to do? Not work?
    No, she said. I know. But I don’t know how we can live with ourselves.
    It isn’t our fault, Lewis said. Who thought that an American couple would be comfortable having a live-in housekeeper in a tiny apartment? Couldn’t they at least have asked?
    Everybody else has one.
    Well, I’m not interested in having a servant, Lewis said impatiently. I don’t want some kind of colonial fantasy life.
    I want
my
life, he wanted to add,
our
life, the one we promised each other, the one we had in Boston. He remembered what she’d said to him in the airport, when they were standing in line at the gate, clutching their tickets and carry-on bags and staring out the window at the tarmac, as if seeing America for the last time: she’d turned to him, wide-eyed, and said,
no matter what
happens, we’ll still be the same, right?
    That was how it began,
he thinks, staring at the ceiling, on the nights when the throbbing in his knees keeps him awake. The things they couldn’t have predicted, and couldn’t be faulted for. In the first month he visited the offices of a dozen magazines and journals, after sending slides and a portfolio in advance, and found himself talking to assistants and deputy editors who seemed not to have heard of
Outside, Condé Nast Traveler,
or
Architectural Digest,
and who regretted to inform him that there was a glut of photographers in Hong Kong at the moment. For the first time in six years he was officially out of work. On the bus, in the subway, in restaurants, he had moments of irrational rage, hating everything and everyone around him: the women who brayed into their mobile phones; the insolent teenagers with dyed-blond hair and purple sunglasses; the old men in stained T-shirts who stared at him balefully when he paid with the wrong coins. Cantonese was an impossible language: even people who’d lived in Hong Kong twenty years couldn’t speak it. He couldn’t master the tones well enough to say
thank you.
    But I’m not the only one who changed.
    Melinda’s cello, which had cost them a thousand dollars to ship, sat in its case in the corner of their bedroom, unopened, growing a faint green tinge of mildew. Her address book hadn’t moved from its slot on the shelf above her desk in months. When he called their friends on the East Coast, waking them up after eleven at night, they asked,
what the hell’s happened to her?
It wasn’t just the seventy-hour weeks; it wasn’t the new secretaries she had to train every month, or the global trades that could happen at any hour of the day, in Tokyo, or Bombay, or Frankfurt, so that she often had to be on call overnight. She’d always worked hard, and complained about it, and fought Coopers for every bit of time off she was entitled to. Now they never discussed her schedule at all. If he asked her about vacation time, or free weekends, or made a casual remark about never seeing her enough, she would say,
that’s the last thing I want to think about.
Her face had taken on a kind of slackness, a faint, constant unhappiness, as if no disaster could surprise her. She slept with her knees tucked up to her chest; she was constantly turning off the air conditioner, even when the apartment was stifling, complaining she was cold. Despite the subtropical sun, her skin was becoming paler; she had to throw away all her makeup and start over with lighter shades. And in three months she had gone