The Piano Teacher

May 28, 1953

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON SUN, Will grunted and moved in bed, his sleep disturbed. His head was damp, perspiring in the midday heat. Claire clapped her hands, to see if she could rouse him, but Will just shifted again, whimpered.

She looked at his face, damp with sweat, his mouth moving almost imperceptibly in his sleep, and felt pity for him, for the first time.

“TOUCH ME, ” she says. Her voice is desperate. “I want to feel real again.”

He embraces her, holding her as tightly as he can.

“You don’t know what he made me do,” she says, muffled, into his shoulder. “You don’t know.”

“It’s all right,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

“It’s not all right!” she cries. “It’s not. You don’t know. If you knew, you’d never want to see me again, never touch me again. You could never look at me straight in the face.” She draws back and looks at him, searches his face.

He is quiet. She winces.

“I knew it,” she says. “I knew it. What did I expect?”

“I don’t know what you need from me,” he says.

“This is why I loved you so much,” she says. “Not only because you were so good and you didn’t need anyone and I thought I might be able to make you need me, but because…” and she’s crying, this Trudy he’s never seen, this Trudy who’s as fragile as gossamer and doesn’t care who sees it. “Because no one has ever loved me. They loved my money or the way I looked, or even the way I talked, because it made them think I was a certain way. Or my father, he loved me because he had to. My mother loved me but then she left. No one loved me for me, or thought I was more than a good distraction at a party. It’s the tritest thing in the world, isn’t it? But you loved me. You liked the person I was. I really felt that. And it was a revelation to me. But then, after Otsubo and after I asked you to get me the information, I saw that you changed. Or that your feelings changed. You didn’t love me in the same way anymore. I was changed in your eyes. I wasn’t that person you loved no matter what.” She wipes her eyes. They are red and swollen.

“Oh, I must look like a troll,” she says suddenly, the old Trudy surfacing for a moment. “So when that happened”-she takes a deep breath-“when that happened, Will, it all snapped into place.

“I had been playing at being this person I am when I’m with you, and all it took was a few weeks’ separation from you…”

“And a war,” he says. He doesn’t know where the words are coming from, where this mechanically speaking person has sprung from.

“Yes, a few weeks’ separation and a few well-equipped, menacing Japanese, and poof, I was back to being the old Trudy, who cared only about herself and her very malleable morals. And it felt right. It felt awful, but it felt right. I’m not who you think I am. I told you that before you left to go to the parade ground, and I wanted you to understand what I was saying. Did you? Did you?”

“I can’t be the one to absolve you, Trudy.”

She slaps him.

His hand goes up to his cheek, like a woman.

“I want to kill you, sometimes,” she says slowly. “You and your so-called morals.”

She turns around and tries to leave. He catches her elbow. “Even that,” she says, “is so false. It’s not worthy of you. Be a man and show what you really feel for me.” She stares at him. He cannot move. “I thought so.”

She turns back to the door.

“Thank you, Will,” she says quietly, with the back of her head to him. “I know where I stand. Thank you for releasing me.”

She has always been too strong for him.

The way we hurt the ones we love.

THE NIGHTMARES. The visions.

Men with their tongues burned, knees crushed, eyes gouged out, piled in heaps on the side of the road to Stanley, mothers covering their children’s eyes.

Girls in rooms with blank faces, torn dresses, bloody chunks of hair torn from their scalps, bruised legs slick with men’s fluids.

A door opened, a girl found tied to a desk, almost mute.

A body, sewn in Hessian, arms crossed, tipped into the sea, making barely a splash as it sinks down into the dark.

Ah Lok brushing Trudy’s hair in front of her dressing table. Methodical strokes, the glossy strands, the sound of bombs outside. Trudy applying lipstick. Her jasmine scent.

Dominick’s refined head, in front of Otsubo’s legs. His eyes meeting Will’s, opening wide in panic, then deadening to gray. He didn’t stop, he just closed his eyes. Will, leaping back instinctively, yet knowing not to slam the door, having the presence of mind to conceal his intrusion.

A baby, born in the middle of the night, given away to an indifferent nurse, never seen by its sedated mother.

A young woman, just back from California, still puffy from childbirth, with empty eyes, arms filled with another’s child.