The Piano Teacher

by Janice Y. K. Lee

  “No,” he said. “I don’t, and I’m glad of it.”

  “Must be awful to live with secrets like that.”

  “It must be,” he said. “I imagine you’d want to die sometimes.” He paused. “I say, I don’t know if you would agree but I need to go to Macau to take care of a few matters. Would you think about going with me? Do you think you could make up an excuse to get out for a night?”

  This Will, suddenly shy, touched her. It was so rare he asked something of her. He was usually not very kind to her.

  Claire couldn’t rest the night before the trip to Macau. She had coasted on the edge of sleep for most of the night, and when she finally got out of bed, she felt light-headed and silvery with exhaustion. She had told Martin the Ladies’ Auxiliary was going bird-watching in the New Territories and making a trip out of it at a member’s weekend house out in Sai Kung.

  When she met Will at the terminus, she felt him look at her and imagined he found her sallow. When he wasn’t looking, she pinched her cheeks and bit her lips to bring the color back.

  They walked to the pier where the ferry would take them to Macau. There was a crowd forming around the entrance. Policemen were standing around, preventing people from entering. Will went to ask what was going on. He came back while Claire waited by the ticket office, nervous that she would see someone she knew.

  “Very unfortunate. A man has jumped off the pier. Apparently he had just lost his job as a cook. He’s being taken to the hospital now, but he’s dead.”

  “How awful.”

  “Yes. It’s all getting cleared up now, and they’ll be resuming the service.”

  The sea was green and brackish. When she stepped onto the gangplank, she could see rubbish floating on the water below. Someone died there today, she thought, and could not reconcile the momentous thought with the dirty surface that had paper wrappers and orange peel floating on it.

  Once on the boat, her motion sickness and nervous apprehension merged and made her unable to speak. She sat, trying to focus on one spot on the faraway horizon. Two weathered men in singlets and grimy trousers clambered around the deck, winding and unwinding the thick sea rope around various posts, and pushed the boat off the dock, chattering loudly all the while. Their skin had the texture of brown leather and their teeth were yellow and cracked as they spoke.

  Around them were locals, a couple with a baby, the woman exhausted-looking, the baby wailing. Claire’s stomach flipped and she looked away. The baby cried on and on, sickened by the waves. A man dressed in an undershirt read a newspaper. The front page carried a photo of two English sappers who had been lately much in the news for murdering a local woman. They had been sentenced to death yesterday, the first Europeans since the war to get such a punishment.

  “Their faces are so young,” she said to Will.

  “They’re getting what they deserve,” he said. “Too much the old attitude. They think they can treat the locals like animals. It’s a different world now.”

  “The woman was an amah at the barracks.” Claire was not sure if she meant it as innocently as she said it. She had been around Will enough to know it was throwing something down.

  “And?” Will said. It was the first time he had been sharp with her.

  Later, he told her a story. A family had had their amah follow them while they were being interned during the war. She was to bring them extra food and supplies whenever she could to Stanley camp, which she did, in a large picnic basket. She had been with them for sixteen years, from when she was a young girl, and the family had been very kind to her, so, when they were interned she was determined to show them her loyalty. The amah brought food faithfully, every week, until one week she had not appeared. The day after she was to have come, the family received the same picnic basket. Inside was a small hand, wrapped in dirty towels. “They thought it a funny joke. Of course,” he said, “the truly sadistic Japanese were the exception, but they were all we could think about and all we ever remember. We never knew what happened, whether she had offended someone or done something wrong or was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The story was his apology. She knew he didn’t owe her one. This was how she knew his affection.

  At Macau Station there was a portrait of the governor, Commodore Esparteiro, with mustache and white hat, waiting to greet the visitors.

  “He looks very distinguished,” Claire said.

  They stepped outside passport control to instant chaos. Clamoring men pressed up against the steel fences, waving their hands, shouting.

  “Taxi, taxi.” “Car, car, drive you.”

  Will went off to the side and negotiated with one quickly in Cantonese. When he spoke the language of the locals, the unfamiliar sounds coming from his familiar mouth, she felt her insides tighten, something more than desire. The driver looked at her, understood instantly. He leered, showing brown, chipped teeth. She looked away and let Will put his arm over her, he instinctively knowing what had just transpired.

  “Let’s go now,” she said, grateful for his protection.

  “Almost done,” he said, and finished up the bargaining.

  In the taxi, the air was thick and it was unbearably hot. Will rolled down the windows. As the car picked up speed, the wind was filled with particles that hit her face, but it seemed churlish to complain at this, the beginning of their romantic escapade.

  Here I am, she thought, a woman on an illicit holiday in the Far East with her lover. She looked out at the people on the street. They didn’t know. Her secret was safe with them, their blank Oriental faces, their busy lives unencumbered with her transgressions.

  They got out of the taxi at the Hotel Lusitania, off the Largo do Senado.

  “This is the center of town,” Will said. “And that over there is Sao Paolo, the white stone façade of an old Jesuit church. It’s just the front that’s left.”

  “Was it the war?”

  “No, a fire in the 1800s. We’ll go there later. You can still see all the reliefs and carvings. Quite beautiful.”

  The lobby was shabby but grand. Will seemed to know his way around.

  “Have you been here often?”

  “I used to come a fair amount,” he said. “But not in the recent past.” They were shown up to their room by a Chinese bellboy, and when the door closed behind him, they looked at each other, shy once again.

  “You look different here,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  In the waning light of the day, sun streaking through the dusty window, they reacquainted themselves with each other, their displaced bodies somehow new, somehow more thrilling.

  Afterward he said, “It’s almost like we’re an old married couple, coming away to a new place together.”

  “It’s nice,” she said. His tenderness was new and it unnerved her.

  “It is.”

  “What is it you have to do here?” she asked.

  “I have to pay my respects to someone,” he said.

  “Am I to come?”

  “If you wish.” He twirled her hair around his fingers. “It doesn’t matter.”

  They took a taxi to a cemetery. Will paid the driver and got out. Paint peeled off a dilapidated, vacant guardhouse. A large tin sign with garish red Chinese characters teetered precariously above it.

  “A cemetery!” she said. “You know how to treat a girl on holiday.”

  “Do you know anything about how the Chinese bury their dead? ” he said, ignoring her.

  “No,” she said. “Is it very different from our way?”

  “Yes.” He consulted a map on the wall and traced his finger along a route. “Here we go.”

  The air seemed thicker here. Claire didn’t want to breathe in, for fear that the essences of the dead would enter into her. She had grown more superstitious despite herself during her time in Hong Kong. In the cemetery, there were tombstones—smallish gray stones with English and Chinese characters interspersed—and paths intricately intercut a
mong the graves, with rough stone steps leading up a hill.

  She read the tombstones as they passed.

  “ ‘Here lies William Walpole, brother of Henry.’ No other family, I suppose. He died in 1936 at the age of forty-three. And this one, ‘Margaret Potter, beloved.’ I like that one. I think I would want something simple on my tombstone, don’t you?”

  Will spoke as if she had not said anything.

  “It was very difficult after the war, you know, to catalog the dead. For the most part, they did mass graves. But it was very hard on the families. Not having the body of their loved ones to bury.”

  “The ceremony is what comforts, a little, at least, I would think.”

  “Yes, these rituals came about for a reason. People need something to focus on, to focus their grief on, and to keep busy. All over the world, rituals are part of death. It makes you hopeful for humans, that they have something in common.”

  “In civilized times,” Claire said. “People are different when lives are at stake, not death.”

  Will looked up, surprised.

  “Yes,” he said. “In civilized times. At other times, all bets are off.”

  He grinned.

  “My savage mistress,” he said. “You are magnificent today.”

  “Can I ask what we’re looking for?”

  “An old friend,” he said.

  They stopped at the top.

  “Chinese like their graveyards to be built on hills. They think it’s more auspicious, and being the class-conscious society they are, they are consistent even in death: the top of the heap is still the top of the heap, as it were.”

  The gravestones had given way to small structures, some quite elaborate, with turrets and gates and carved doors, resembling small residences or temples. Some had porcelain urns underneath.

  “Do those contain ashes or bones?” she asked.

  “Bones,” Will said. “The skull is laid on top.”

  He was looking carefully at each little house as he passed. Suddenly he stopped.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  It was whitewashed stucco, with a wooden door that had an iron knocker in the shape of a dragon. Above the door was a sign with gold Chinese characters.

  “We didn’t bring anything,” Claire said.

  “We’re not here to give,” Will said. “We’re here to take.”

  He pushed the door open and stood outside. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  “Will!” Claire said, scandalized. “You’re disturbing the dead!”

  “I’m quieting them,” he said, and went inside.

  May 12, 1953

  WHAT SHE REMEMBERED later of Macau was vague. The heat, of course, a good Portuguese restaurant with wooden benches and crumbling plaster walls, hot, crusty bread, carafes of red wine, something called African chicken, and the dan taat, the glossy yellow egg tarts. “You say pataca, I say potato,” he sang to her, changed in this little colony. The cemetery, coming back to the hotel, and Will on edge throughout. The interior of the little shrine had been cool and dark, but with the pungent odor of incense. They had knocked up flurries of dust when they entered.

  “This is where Dominick is,” he had said.

  “Who is Dominick?”

  “A man who was, I think, misunderstood. Not least of all by me. At least, that’s what I think when I am being my most charitable self. But a sad story. In the end, his family didn’t want anything to do with him, and so he is buried here by himself, not with his family in Hong Kong. He wasn’t from Macau but this is where he ended up. An unwilling exile.”

  “Did he die during the war?”

  “Something like that. Maybe because of the war?” Will raised his voice in a question. “Who knows. It wasn’t that simple.” He ran his fingers along the dusty altar.

  “In the end, it doesn’t matter though, does it. Here he lies, and all he’s done and all he did is forgotten by most.”

  Then he spat on the coffin.

  He had taken something from the little mausoleum, something he put in his pocket so casually she dared not ask what it was. But after that, they did nothing else unusual: they ate good meals, napped after tiffin, had champagne at the hotel bar, walked around and looked at Macau, so she assumed that was what he had come for. He reverted to his old sarcastic self. They came back to Hong Kong and he did not mention what had happened at the cemetery again.

  May 13, 1953

  SHE WENT to the Chens’ the next week and found Locket missing.

  “She gone somewhere!” cried one of the servants. “Don’t know!” But the girl didn’t seem very concerned.

  She sat in the room for half an hour before going to the powder room. As she washed her hands, she saw Melody Chen through the sheer curtain. She was sitting outside in the garden, writing a letter and weeping. Quietly, Claire gathered her things and left.

  The next week, Yu Ling brought the newspaper to the breakfast table. The main story of the day was the queen’s list. Victor Tsing Yee Chen.

  “Look, Martin,” she said. “Victor Chen’s got himself an OBE.”

  “Really?” Martin said, impressed. “They’re not handing those out by the boatload.”

  “Yes, and it has his history.” She scanned the column. “Did you know his grandfather was instrumental in opening up trade between China and the world?”

  “Well, you’ll have to give him my congratulations when you go to their house. Is today your lesson day?”

  “It is but I rarely see him,” she said. “There’s usually no one in the house except the child and the servants.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s a proud day for him.”

  “I never knew they gave such things to foreigners,” she said.

  But when she went to the Chens’, she ended up losing her temper with Locket. It had been a terrible lesson.

  “Locket, if you don’t practice, you will never improve,” she said as she stood up and put on her jacket. Her head was throbbing from the atonal pounding Locket had produced. There had been long silences as Locket strained to read the notes she had clearly not looked at since the last lesson.

  “Yes, Mrs. Pendleton,” Locket said as she pushed back from the piano.

  “And it’s a waste of my time and yours for you to have a lesson and then not touch the piano until the next lesson.”

  Locket giggled and covered her mouth. She had the irritating Oriental habit of laughing nervously when in uncomfortable situations.

  “I don’t know if it’s worth it to teach you.” Claire was getting more and more agitated. The girl had stumbled over the simplest exercises and had no instinctive ability to read music. And she with a Steinway!

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pendleton.” Locket was already by the door.

  “And it’s extremely rude for you to stand by the door as if you are waiting for me to leave.”

  Victor Chen poked his head in.

  “What’s going on here?” His voice was not friendly.

  “I haven’t been practicing, Baba,” said Locket. “And Mrs. Pendleton was telling me I should.”

  “But what was the talk about manners?”

  Claire’s mouth opened but nothing came out.

  “Mrs. Pendleton said it is rude for me to stand by the door,” Locket said.

  “She did, did she?” He looked at Claire. “You think it’s rude for Locket to stand by the door?”

  “I do,” she said finally. “I feel as if I’m being rushed out the door.”

  “Locket, you can go to your room now. I’m sure you have studying to do,” he said without looking at the girl. She ducked out gratefully.

  “Did you enjoy yourself at dinner the other night?” he said from the doorway, apropos of nothing. “The company was good?”

  She nodded. Then she remembered.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “On the OBE. Your family must be very proud.”

  Victor Chen walked right into the room and up next to Claire as if he hadn’t heard her. He p
ut his head close to Claire’s, as if he were about to tell her a secret. She flinched even before he spoke.

  “I hear you’re spending time with Truesdale,” he whispered. He put his hand behind her head and drew it closer, gently, intimately. “Is it love?”

  The violence in his voice was palpable. She started back, stumbling a little on the edge of the carpet, and then grabbed blindly at her bag.

  “Do give him my regards,” Victor called, as she backed out of the room. “And be sure to ask him if he’s going to come back to work anytime soon. We haven’t seen him lately.”

  She ran out of the room and out the door, into the sudden heat.

  “And ask him about Trudy!” Victor Chen’s voice filled the hallways of his house. “I’m sure you should know about that.” He laughed, a loud, bitter gasp.

  She walked quickly down the path, past her bus stop, past the other buildings, in a panic. Her head was filled with a hot, white sound that slowly diminished as she got farther away. Almost imperceptibly, the sounds of the day, cars passing by, the occasional bird cry, began to filter through again and she slowed her pace. She was drenched in perspiration and her blouse was stuck to her back. She pulled it loose and tried to air out her body. The heat roared up her back and exploded in her head.

  “Claire?”

  The voice came from a distance.

  “Claire?”

  “Will?” she said, struggling through the dark.

  “It’s Martin,” said her husband. “Who’s Will?”

  “Martin,” she said. “Where am I?” It was now too bright to see. Her head throbbed from the sudden change from black to white.

  “You’re home now. The Chens’ amah found you on the street and brought you home. Yu Ling called me at the office. You woke up, had some water, and went back to sleep.”

  “Did I faint?”

  “Must have. How do you feel? You’re white as a ghost.”