The Piano Teacher

July 5, 1953

FROM A DISTANCE she saw him approaching, a spindly figure with a cane. Hard to imagine this man was the enigma who had ignited such desire in her a mere two weeks ago.

But then he came close, his pale, narrow face, his untidy hair, and he spoke, and she felt his pull all over again.

“Claire,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “Sit down.” Almost avuncular. She felt rebuffed. He always set the tone of their meetings.

They sat on a bench looking over the harbor. They were on the Peak, where they had arranged to meet, thinking they would not run into anyone they knew, for different reasons than before, and they had been right. They were alone in the twilight hour. The warm wind blew, not unpleasantly.

“I came here with Trudy sometimes,” he said. “That is the same iron rail that was here when I was here with her. I touched it then and I can touch it now, but the circumstances are so different. I’m so different. Do you ever think about that?”

He was a different man, as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. She could feel his lightness.

“Will,” she started.

“And what will you do?” he said as if she had not said anything.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been in touch with my parents but they don’t seem too eager to take me back in. Something about the cost and his pension. I don’t have a job, or any means of getting one, I think. So I don’t know.” She said this simply, without meaning to cause obligation.

“I see,” he said.

“And you?” she asked.

“I don’t know either,” he said. “It seems impossible to stay here, and it seems impossible to leave.”

“Yes,” she said.

“So here we are,” he said. “Two people without places to go.”

“Do you think I should continue with Locket?”

“They haven’t said anything?”

“No, we haven’t spoken since the party.”

“Well,” he considered. “If they haven’t told you to stop, I would go. But then”-he grinned-“I’m sort of perverse.”

“What was it you took from the grave in Macau?” She had been wondering.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Trudy had a deposit box at the bank and she had always told me that Dominick or I could access it. And I got a posthumous letter from her solicitors telling me I could pick up the key after the war when she had been declared legally deceased. She had told me about another key to the same box before the war but I had never tried to find it. And when I received it from the solicitors, I didn’t know where to put it. So I hid it in Dominick’s grave. Thought no one would ever go there. And it felt right. A little dramatic, but right. And I was always looking for what felt right.”

“What was in the box?”

“Some bank books, financial papers. But what she wanted me to have were the documents, the letters, the things that showed what she had done for Otsubo during the war, and what others had done.”

“Others including Victor Chen?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“And what did you do with the contents of the box?”

“I just had them sent to the right people. Anonymously.”

“But Victor knew it was you.”

“He knew I was the only one who might have access to that sort of information.”

“Are you in any trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I’ve been wrong before.”

They sat together, strangely comfortable.

“The thing is,” he said, “Victor Chen was not wrong in some way. The British government didn’t, doesn’t, have the right to own all those irreplaceable Chinese artifacts. They stole them from them in the first place, although they would dispute the verb. But the way he went about it…” He shook his head. “That man only knows one way to do things.

“And I didn’t abandon Trudy, not totally. Otsubo stopped signing the furloughs when he realized I wasn’t giving him anything. But there was never one time, or one big reason, that I couldn’t get out. I had a year of furloughs. Trudy would have got me out if I had wanted. That’s one of my deepest regrets. That it just kind of… fizzled. She deserved better than that. And I don’t know, really, what happened to her. I don’t know. I suppose I could find out. There are only too many people who would be delighted to tell me all about it. Including Victor.”

“But what could you have done?”

“Anything but what I did,” he said. “Anything but the nonsense I did in camp: form committees, campaign for hot water or more sheets!” His voice rose, grew violent. “I was a coward, a coward. And didn’t do anything to help her. The woman I loved. I did nothing. Hid behind what I pretended was honor.”

“Did Trudy ever…” Claire couldn’t finish the question.

“She never said anything. She never reproached me or challenged me. She was always who she said she was. She never pretended to be anything else. That was the beauty of her.”

He straightened his back.

“She behaved as if she believed me when I said I couldn’t help her. But she was so clever-she saw the real situation. But she didn’t say anything; she forgave me.”

He stood up, walked over to a tree, and absently snapped off a leaf. He split it in half, then half again, then scattered the pieces on the ground.

“ Hong Kong is always so damn green,” he said. “Don’t you wish for some absence of color sometimes? Some English gray, a little fog?”

Claire nodded. He was unraveling, slowly, and she wanted to give him some room.

He continued. “Sometimes, I hate her for that. That she didn’t call me out on it. That she let me be a coward. It was cruel, in the end.”

Trudy would despise a man who wept, he knew.

“I have this image,” he said slowly. “This image of Trudy running around outside, frantic, like a chicken with its head cut off, not knowing what to do, not having a center, just desperate. I feel like she was desperate. But she didn’t come to me for help. Not after the first time. When I said no, she never asked again.”

Claire reached for his hand, resting on top of his cane. He didn’t yield and she settled for placing her hand on top of his.

“And she wouldn’t have had anyone to confide in. She was totally alone. And I made her that way.”

The air was damp still with the ever-present Hong Kong humidity. A drop of perspiration slowly wended its way down Claire’s back.

She willed him to look at her, to acknowledge she was there, a part of this, but he stared out at the harbor, his eyes blank. Slowly, she realized: His new lightness was not just relief at the passing of his burden. There was emptiness there too.

HE SEES TRUDY, waving on the steps of the Toa, as he gets in the car that will drive him back to Stanley. She has a wistful look on her face, her amber hair lit from behind, the setting sun sinking into the Hong Kong horizon. Pregnant Madonna. She blows him a kiss, suddenly winks. He hates how she does that-always turns a serious moment into a joke. But this is how she lives, how she survives. This is the animal she is. She had never told him anything different. She had warned him.

Arbogast broke, she had told him during this furlough, and he had nodded. “Yes, I saw him afterward,” he said.

“But you know,” she said, her voice slightly panicked, “it wasn’t the correct information. Otsubo is furious. But there was evidence that it was there. An old storage building in Mong Kok. Someone else got to it first.”

“How did Otsubo know that Arbogast might know where it was?” he asked.

She hesitated.

“I think, Victor,” she said finally. “Although I have nothing to back that up. He has his finger in every pie, that man.”

“Be careful,” he said.

“I know.” She nodded. “Otsubo’s tired of me now, anyway. I think we’ve run our course.”

“What does that mean for you?” he asked, careful to mask his relief.

She laughed.

“Oh, nothing good, I’m afraid. Just means I’m under his thumb just as much as always but I no longer have the means to coddle him out of his bad moods.”

“Do you want to come into camp now?”

“Again, with the camp! You cannot cage this bird, my love. I’ve grown used to dark, dangerous freedom and all its attendant humiliations.”

“But you could…”

“I am in the process of lining up another… sponsor,” she said slowly. “Or one is being lined up for me. So don’t you worry.”

Tears sprang to his eyes, hot, unexpected. He felt as if he might die if she saw them.

“I should go,” he said.

“Yes.”

He turned to go. She caught his arm, studied his face.

“Every time I say good-bye to you, I wonder if it’s au revoir or adieu. You know what I mean?”

He nodded.

“You’ve too much power over me,” she said lightly. “I have to pretend like it doesn’t matter, like you don’t matter. How did that happen?”

He looks at her, his love, her face ruddy with pregnancy, birdlike ankles swollen, this woman, a survivor, six months pregnant with an unwanted child, and finds he cannot forgive her this last transgression. It is easier to brand her a villain and go back to camp, play the victim, lick his wounds. This is what he does. There is no glory in it, but there is survival. And he realizes that is what they are playing at now.