The Piano Teacher (23 page)

“Mmmmm . . . I wouldn’t say a trump card because he’s rather mercurial. He does favors and then regrets them. He gives and wants to take away. And he has to be persuaded rather strongly not to. Not a generous man. Powerful men usually aren’t. Here we are.” She opens a door into a room that is a veritable palace compared with his quarters back at Stanley. A suite with large windows overlooking the blue sea dotted with boats, plush carpet, thick silk draperies, and fans that swing lazily around and around.

“Welcome to the Pen!” Trudy curtsies.

“Look at this,” he says, sitting on the bed. “A bed made up with actual linens! Curtains to draw against the sun! And I wager there’s even toilet paper in the bathroom.”

“You would be right. And now, do you want to thank me, you ingrate? It’s been complaint and suspicion ever since I cooked this up. Thank me.”

The reunion is sweet, the late afternoon sun slanting through the window, the flat horizon of the sea and the boats floating in the harbor, and Trudy, right here, right next to him. He has thought of her for so long, missed the feel of her skin and the smell of her breath, that he moves as if he’s in a dream. She is quiet, more than usual, and seems skittish. They are both too sapped, too thirsty, to ever be quenched by something as mundane as the physical.

 

“Tell me the truth,” she says, sitting up afterward, clutching the sheet, “is there a hussy you have in Stanley? Some American vixen who’s stolen your heart? Surely you can’t have been celibate all this time, someone as voracious as you. What else do you have to amuse you in that dreary camp?”

“I’m only voracious around you, you know.” He doesn’t ask her the same question, feels any answer would be unbearable. If he can keep some small part of her for himself, it might be all right. “Don’t mind about those things, and I won’t either.” He extends this olive branch so that their time together might be enjoyed.

She relaxes and curls into him.

“It’s been horrible,” Trudy says. “The Japanese are rounding up Chinese who are sympathetic, shall we say, or pretend that they are, for business purposes, and holding these absurd dinners where their policies are toasted with champagne and they’re lionized as if they’ve made enormous contributions to society. All quite surreal. Victor Chen is hot and heavy with the Japanese, of course, and trying to do business with them every which way. I’m worried about Dommie. Victor is just using him.

“We went to one of these dinners, and an old family friend of ours, David Ho, stood up and offered a toast to Pan-Asian superiority. Now, mind you, he was married to an Australian woman, and devoted to her, but she died a few years back, and he remarried, lucky for him, to a Chinese. He’s such a coward. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. He has children in school in Australia. Don’t know how he’ll be able to look them in the eye now. They are the funniest dinners. They have them in the ballroom of the Gloucester and try to make them fancy but they are just the worst functions you’ve ever seen. Propaganda films, bad alcohol, and hypocrites. Nothing worse.”

“So why do you go to these things?”

She gets out of bed, her body a long rebuke.

“I had forgotten what it was like to have my conscience with me always. Sometimes, Will, you have to do things you don’t want to. We can’t all live in perfect harmony with our integrity.”

He hears her turn on the water. She has always loved baths and used to spend so much time in them she would emerge with her glossy skin pruny and her face glowing with the absorbed heat.

“How’s the water here?” he calls out, by way of apology. Their time is too short to be beset by old complaints.

“Not bad, as these things go. Nothing worse than a lukewarm bath, don’t you think? Do you want to join me?”

She pours in Badedas, bubbling the water hot and steamy. The green, limy smell rises in the heat. Together, they slip and slide, washing each other while careful not to prod too deeply, keeping everything on the surface, their mood as fragile as the bubbles in the bath.

 

Outside is strange—an odd approximation of free society. Pinched faces, suspicious shoulders, everyone trying to blend in and look inconspicuous. The opposite of normal—Americans speaking softly, British acting humble, Chinese acting shy. Everything is hushed, except for Trudy and Dominick, who’s joining them for lunch. He meets them in the lobby of the hotel and kisses Trudy on both cheeks and nods slightly to Will.

“Hello, darling,” he says to Trudy, handing her a large envelope filled with papers. “This is from Victor. He sends his love.” Trudy blanches.

“Love, is it? ”

As they leave the hotel, Trudy and Dominick walk down the street as if they own it, laughing loudly and wearing flamboyant, obviously expensive clothes.

“If you act as if you’re bulletproof, most people will assume you are, darling,” Trudy assures Will. “Believe me, I’ve tested this theory extensively.” She pulls out a worn blue booklet covered in stamps. “And this helps enormously, of course. It’s from Otsubo and it tells whatever foot soldier stops me that he better treat me with kid gloves or there’ll be hell to pay. Usually, when they see his stamp, they sort of freeze, then shove it back toward me as if it’s on fire, and they bow and scrape to an embarrassing extent. I’m quite addicted to it.”

“And Dommie?”

“He has one with his patron’s stamp. All the best people have one, you know.” Her laughter is brittle.

“And what does Otsubo think of you springing me from the camp? Does he know? ”

“Well, he arranged it for me. I don’t think he’s the jealous type, to be honest. I don’t think you will be spending much time together. Do you want Cantonese food? I’m in the mood for noodles, actually.”

“Chinese?”

“Yes, the other food is unbearable these days since there’s no one proper to cook it.”

“Have you ever missed a meal?”

“Darling, if you miss a meal, the light quite goes out of the day. All Chinese know that. I wouldn’t unless things were absolutely desperate. Dommie knows this little place where they serve the most amazing rice noodles with broth they steep all day long. Of course, it’s better at two in the morning since it’s been cooking all day, but nowadays you’re viewed suspiciously if you’re out late without one of our great leaders.”

“How is the Grill? Still operating?”

“Oh, we still go. It’s pretty jolly, actually. And not all Japanese. There are groups of Americans and British on the outside, and it’s not done to ask why, and the Japanese don’t seem to bother them, and all sorts of other people, you know, Swiss Red Cross, the occasional German. I tell you, Hong Kong right now is the most
interesting
mix of people. The war just shook out all the people and what remained behind in the sieve is diverse, should we say. There’s this woman, Jinx Beckett, who’s an American, and I can’t quite figure out what her story is and why she’s not in Stanley with you as I’m sure she’s not an important banker or government official. I’m sure you’ll meet her. She is absolutely everywhere, and poky too, nosing around in all sorts of things. And there are still parties. We still go to the Gripps for dancing but they’ll stop the music every once in a while and project these hilarious propaganda films onto the ballroom walls. It’s all about Pan-Asiatic superiority, don’t you know? They don’t seem to understand that they’re screening for a bunch of non-Asiatics. Screaming irony.”

Will sees a newsstand, for him a startling sight.

“I’d love a newspaper. How is the English broadsheet these days?”

“Run by a Swede under the careful watch of the Japanese,” says Dominick. “Result as you would expect. Piffle. I expect you’d like one.”

“I would,” Will says and takes the
Standard
and the
News.
Trudy pays.

“It is propaganda,” whispers Trudy. “They print whatever they’re told to.”

“Subtlety, my darling,” Dominick says, shushing her. Suddenly he relaxes and turns to Will. “So, how is it being on the outside?” They have exchanged only the barest of civil greetings. “And is it as atrocious on the inside as they say? Of course, the paper claims that you are being treated as if you were honored guests at the Ritz.”

“Certainly not ideal. But it seems rather fraught out here as well. Everyone tiptoeing around.”

“Is it true that Asbury is in there, doing his own wash like a common rickshaw boy?” A famously haughty banker, whom Will has indeed seen poking around in the dirt, trying to establish a garden, and hanging up his undershirts to dry, as his wife is abed most days.

“He is, but he’s holding his own. Surprising, the dignity that still holds in any circumstance.”

“Yes, we’re not our own men anymore, are we? ” Dominick looks around. “But some are more so than others.”

Will says nothing.

“It’s better to be a free person, though, isn’t it? ” asks Trudy. “We have to mind our manners out here but there’s no one telling us what to do or when to eat. Services are all getting back. Food prices were going up and down but they seem to have stabilized. We can withdraw small amounts of money. Public transport is working, as is the mail, in a way, and people are starting to settle, although it’s still a hard life. You do still run across the occasional corpse in the street, which is unpleasant. And the Japanese do work the coolies quite hard, harder than any Chinese I’ve seen, and they are having a hard time of it. They’re sending them back to China in droves as well. I think they aim to reduce the population by half.”

“Nothing is easy these days, is it? ” Dominick says. “Aaah, here’s the noodle shop.”

 

After lunch, Dominick goes to work, “such as it is,” he remarks, languid as always, and Trudy and Will go shopping. Trudy frequents the markets in search of treasures.

“I’ve seen things that I recognize from friends’ houses!”she says, rifling through a table of pilfered goods. “The ormolu clock from the Hos’, and that extraordinary dagger that was hanging above the mantel at the Chens’. I wanted to buy them but didn’t have enough money. Those,” her voice drops, “filthy rats just took away everything they could carry, and then the locals came after, and picked every house clean. Enough to make you weep, seeing those ships set out for Japan filled to the brim with all the lovely things our friends had collected. Cars and furniture and jewelry! Many a soldier’s wife is playing tea party with someone else’s Wedgwood these days.”

“Is there food we can buy so I could bring it back to camp?”

“Depends on the day and what they’ve been able to find. Sometimes there’s powdered milk, sometimes there’s crates of mustard. We’ll see.” She pauses. “It’s sort of freeing, this paring down to the necessities. It seems so frivolous to have thought about dresses and picnics.”

“You and Dominick seem to have your meals and lodging pretty well figured out.” He says this striving for a tone without judgment.

“Yes, we do,” she replies carelessly. “But it could all be taken away tomorrow so we must enjoy it while we can, no?”

She cuts down Pottinger Street and into a small alley.

“There’s a small shop here where you can get some amazing things.”

“What’s in demand?”

“Food, mostly. Some people have started speculating in gold and such. We’ll go to the market after this.”

A bell jingles as Trudy pushes open the door. Inside, it is dark and pungent with the smell of teakwood and the waxy oil used to polish it. A curio shop, with scratched, smudgy glass counters filled with Oriental peculiarities. Trudy speaks in Cantonese to the woman behind the counter, who scurries to the back, cloth slippers swishing on the floor.

“What are we looking for here? ”

“Oh, I’m just doing an errand for my master. You know.”

“How mysterious,” he says.

The woman comes back with a man, small, with a bent back, dressed in black silk. He seems irritated. Trudy speaks rapidly again, her small hands outlining a large rectangle in the air. The man shrugs and shakes his head. Trudy’s voice turns shrill. She ends with a sharp outburst and turns to leave.

Outside, the sun is shining, an abrupt change from the dark gloom of the shop.

“So, food?” he asks. She will tell him when she’s ready.

“Yes, food,” she says, taking his arm, an implicit gesture of thanks. “Sometimes, I think you could be Chinese too.”

The wet market seems the same as ever—wizened old ladies with wide-brimmed coolie hats, dressed in black smocks, bent over their wares, calling out to potential customers. Here, a basket of greens; there, soybean curds resting in a container of milky water, with yellow sprouts. He remembers the smell, the green, slightly brackish scent of dirt and water still clinging to the vegetables. He used to come with Trudy on weekends, her mother having told her that she was never to become too grand to go to the market for her own food. “At least, every once in a while,” she says. “Not all the time, of course. And you won’t catch anyone we know here. But I don’t mind. It’s kind of elemental, isn’t it? Deciding which exact onion you want, or what fish you’re going to eat and have them clean it for you.”