The Piano Teacher

July 5, 1953

“AND NOW, ” Claire said. “What of us?”

She and Will had sat in silence for long minutes, looking out at the water, the boats streaming silently through the harbor, passing one another smoothly, like toy boats in a child’s bathtub. It started to sprinkle slightly. It had taken great effort to ask and she could not bring herself to look at him. She put her hands in her lap and cupped them together primly.

“You don’t need me,” he said slowly. “I’ve said it before and it’s truer than ever. I’m a liability now.”

Her first reaction: automatic withdrawal. Then she realized, with Will’s new release came uncertainty: he had lived too long with his secrets and now that they had been poured out, he was likely feeling empty.

“I don’t need you,” she echoed his words. How porous he seemed, how he always slipped through her grasp. Even in their most intimate moments, in bed, his face hovering over hers, intense with passion, he was never fully there. Now she understood why: he had always been with another.

Another unbidden memory: Will, lifting the strands of her hair as she lay beneath him, letting the fine gold slip through his fingers, his face oddly distant. “Gold,” he had said. “I love hair the color of metals: gold, bronze, even silver. The gold and bronze will turn silver eventually, yes?” The closest he ever got to saying the word love to her. It stung, suddenly. She had turned away, buried her face in the pillow. In bed, she was always shy around him, afraid that she would say something she would regret later.

“You deserve better, you know,” she said, trying to save what, she didn’t know. “You can live your life without always regretting.”

“You are trying to be kind but you don’t understand,” he said.

“It’s not kindness,” she said.

He didn’t reply.

“You always tell me to be strong, but you’re never strong yourself. When we first met, you told me I should take the opportunity to become something else, to transcend what I had been given. You can’t do that yourself. You are mired in the past and determined to be unhappy.” She had never seen so clearly before. Anger swept through her-unexpected-clarifying even more. “You cannot let go, and you are sinking. And you pretended to be so strong!” A feeling as if she had been duped, taken under false pretenses. The man she had loved was a mere shell. And she felt something more, unwelcome: a feeling of pity, fatal to passion.

“And I told you to go, don’t bother with me,” he said, also angry now. He just wanted to be left alone. But she wouldn’t leave him without trying to salvage something.

“Why did you come to me?” she asked. “You changed my life. You didn’t like me, you said. What was it? Were you bored?” She shot the last word at him, an accusatory arrow.

“You were pure,” he said, trying to explain. “You weren’t like the others. You had your prejudices and silly ideas, but you were open, willing to change. And I hadn’t minded being alone. But you came along…”

“And you were the great opener of my eyes, the wise and…”

“That’s not fair,” he said. “That is beneath you. I never looked at another woman until you came along. But it felt wrong, as if I were betraying Trudy, who I had betrayed in so many ways already.”

“You are wasting your life,” she said. Rain had wet his hair so it hung in jagged spikes down his forehead. He made no effort to wipe away the water running down his face. He looked so defeated.

She was cruel, finally. “You are a coward.”

How was this the man she had changed her life for? It seemed inconceivable.

“And you are simple,” he said fiercely. “And naïve. To think that you can just leave the past behind, like shutting a door.”

“You won’t even look at me!” she cried. “You won’t give me even that. You’ve always been mean with your attention, so measured.” She looked down at herself. She had dressed with care this morning, mindful of the impression she wanted to give: quiet, not reproachful, confident. This had translated into a knee-length navy cotton-voile dress with covered buttons all down the front, a few decorative pleats: tailored, not fussy, freshly washed hair held back with a navy satin headband. She tamped down the word that kept rising to the surface of her consciousness: fool, fool.

“I am telling you that it doesn’t need to be like this,” she said. Her mother’s voice suddenly in her head: “Chasing a man, are you? Shame!” Her face turned scarlet despite herself. She waved her hand in the air, almost unconsciously, to dismiss her mother’s presence.

“Do you know?” he asked, fiercely. “Do you know what it’s like to have your life unravel because of something you failed to do?” He stood up. “It haunts you like nothing else.”

“So you give up,” she said in a low voice.

“Sometimes,” he said, “you don’t have a choice in how you lead your life. Please stop before I say more things that I will regret later.”

“You should know about regret,” she said. “It is what you have made your life about.”

They sat, furious now, their anger running clear through them like a solvent. It washed away their short past and allowed them to wipe it clean.

He got up and walked away. She didn’t call after him.