Picking Bones from Ash (11 page)

“Don’t get into trouble,” Shinobu said sensibly.

“Why don’t you come with me?”

She shook her head. “He says we’re going to have a baby, which means my children will be half Japanese. It’s an opportunity for me.”

“But you’re a better pianist than I am!”

“Maybe I was once, Satomi. But not since you’ve studied with Sanada-sensei. And also,” she sighed. “It’s just not as important to me as it is to you. I realize this now.”

About a week before I left to go to Paris, I saw Masayoshi once more. I was home packing when I heard the front door slide open and felt the walls tremble with pressure. We had visitors. I stiffened, waiting for the moment when my mother would call me to come out of my small room and to help prepare tea and sweets, but the call never came. I just sat there in my room, looking at the plastic-wrapped packages my mother had moved into my room. Clearly she was intent on turning my room into a storage area once I had permanently left the house.

I heard low murmurs through the wall and then laughter. The cadence was familiar and I decided that it must be Mineko here again for a visit with her two small brats. I lay down on my bed and began to read a magazine I’d picked up from the grocery store. Its pages were filled with glossy photos of ordinary Americans having fun at something called a diner and at the beach, and I wondered at the way their polished cheeks seemed to glow even through paper, how the men looked at the girls with such protective kindness in their eyes.

My musician’s ears heard the low rumble of a serious voice making a comment in the other room. It wasn’t the voice of Mineko’s husband, but someone else’s.

I slid out of my room, trying to be quiet so I could escape back to solitude if necessary. I walked across the floor, picking the beams that did not squeak and whose positions I’d memorized since childhood. Then I knelt and looked through a hole in the
shoji
door separating the main room
from the hallway. It was Masayoshi sitting at a table with his back to me. He’d shaved his head, but I would have recognized him anywhere, what with the straight shoulders and the gentle swoop of his neck, a private place, like an inner room in a house that few people ever see.

“Satomi?” My mother’s gaze shifted to the far side of the room where I was hiding.

I tried to enter the room as noiselessly as possible to give the impression that I hadn’t been hiding all that time, but that I had been on my way in to see them. “Mother,” I purred. “Would you and your guests like a fresh change of tea leaves?” I made sure my eyes did not once brush his face.

My manners surprised my mother. “Thank you.”

I threw out the old leaves into a strainer that rested on top of a bucket by the back door. I boiled water on the stove, then set about carefully measuring fresh tea leaves into the teapot. The tea was from Uji, famous for its manicured hedges, rich soil, and the ladies dressed in indigo-colored clothing and straw hats, who had picked the young leaves to make this
sen-cha
, the first crop of the year. It was my mother’s favorite kind of tea.

I heard a noise. Masayoshi had excused himself from the front room and was carrying in several plates. I knew he was doing this just as an excuse to see me; we’d need plates again when my mother decided to serve her guests something else to eat. But by bringing the dishes into the kitchen he was giving the impression of being a helpful guest while coming up with an excuse to see me alone. No one followed him and I knew that they knew exactly what he intended.

“Well.” I tried to sound lighthearted. “I leave you alone for a couple of years and you lose your hair.”

He blushed and ran his hand over his scalp. “Actually, this is considered kind of long. I have to get it shaved again soon.”

The teakettle was whistling and I turned off the gas and let the water sit for a few seconds to make sure it was the perfect temperature for tea. Then I began to pour the steaming water over the leaves. They unfurled at the touch of the hot liquid, like little fists relaxing at last. In a few minutes, the tea would be ready. If I waited too long, my mother would complain that I had made the tea too strong. So, quickly, I said, “If you wanted to get married you could have just asked me.”

He didn’t seem to know quite how to respond, which infuriated me.

“Ah. Is that so?” he said.

I frowned. “You can’t come in here looking for an excuse to talk to me, and when I finally bring up what you want to talk about, just stutter like that.”

“Excuse me.”

I waited.

“You always were very blunt. I used to wonder if maybe you didn’t grow up in Japan. If maybe your father was a foreigner,” he said.

“Could have been. No one knows who my father was. I’m not even sure anymore that my mother does.”

“Well, either way. I’ll bet you will do very well overseas. I hear that the foreigners are much more direct than we are.”

“Let’s hope so,” I muttered.

“Satomi …,” he began.

I waited a few seconds then turned to take the tea back into the front room. It wouldn’t have made much difference if I’d continued standing there. I know how men’s minds work. Masayoshi probably told himself that if I’d been able to give him just a few more seconds, he would have come up with the words to ask me to forgive him. He took my quickness as evidence that he had been right after all to just let our friendship go. But this is silly. It is very easy to convince yourself that you have done something correctly if you never really pay attention to what else you might have done in the first place. What kind of person, I asked myself as I slid open the
shoji
door to the front room with one hand while carrying the tea carefully into the
tatami
-lined room with the other, doesn’t speak up for himself? I saw my mother give me a probing look, the pressure of her gaze feeling a little bit like the weight of her hand stroking my forehead when I had been a child and had a fever. But I didn’t look at her. I simply knelt down and held the teapot over the table, giving it a few swirls before I offered our guests an additional cupful to drink.

Then I excused myself and went out to the entrance of the house. I put on my shoes and went for a long walk, all the way down to the water. When I came back, several hours later, the guests had gone. And if I half hoped that there would be a letter for me, some little scribbled note asking for my forgiveness, I was disappointed. No such missive was waiting for me. There was only my mother sewing a button on one of her golf shirts and listening to the broadcast of a live symphony orchestra coming from Tokyo and dreaming, no doubt, that I would be piped to her in similar fashion one day.

I sat by myself in my room and looked at all the objects I had collected over the years. There were scale books and étude books and photos and old certificates from music contests. In the closet were my old recital dresses and skirts whose hems my mother had let out numerous times as I had grown. I looked over my record collection and chose an old album, Rubinstein playing études by Chopin, and I listened to the delicate, impressionistic notes stream into my room. I thought how wonderful it was for Chopin to have created such lovely music that we were still listening to and of the many girls who had gone through Geidai University struggling to play these same notes. It was a cool evening and I opened my window. Leaves stirred just beyond the glass and I smelled the ocean air riding up the street and past my window. I thought of how fine it would be to do something grand, to create something that others would listen to and care for long after I had gone. The thought made me sad and determined all at once. I was certain at that moment that I could do something important in the world if only I were to focus and if only I were given the chance.

There is one more thing. That same day I went for a walk, venturing down to an old noodle shop by the fish market. Masayoshi and I had gone there on our first evening out together when we had met so many years ago on the train. I ordered some noodles and slurped them up, listening to old fishermen talking. I’d finished eating and was just thinking about leaving when I saw a
gaijin
, a stranger, wander in.

He looked just like someone I would see inside the pages of a magazine. In fact, he could have been one of the models selling chocolates or have been James Dean himself. My eye wasn’t yet trained to see the difference between various Caucasian faces.

The man ordered a beer and fumbled through a few phrases of Japanese.
“Udon kudasai?”

The counter staff explained that there was no
udon
available, and when the
gaijin
didn’t understand what was happening, the waiter spoke at an even louder decibel. Finally, the foreigner pointed to my nearly empty bowl.
“Udon,”
he insisted.

“Soba da yo!”
the waiter countered.

“Excuse me?”
Ex-ecue-zu-me
. My heart was beating very rapidly, but I managed to get the words out. “This is
soba
. It is brown. It is not white.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, as if I were a mute statue suddenly brought to life and now chatting.

“Ah.
Soba
then,” the
gaijin
said and nodded to me with gratitude. I exchanged a few words with the waiter. Perhaps it was best to give the foreigner some
tempura-soba
. I’d heard that foreigners liked fried food and he might balk at something like fish cake that didn’t exist in America. Plus, why waste the delicious fish cake on someone who would not appreciate it? The waiter agreed.

“Where are you from?” I asked the man slowly.

“America.” He beamed.

“Next week,” I informed him, “I will go to Paris.” America. Paris. They didn’t seem as though they could be that far apart.

“Ah!” He nodded. “To travel?”

“For school.” I told him, haltingly, the name of my school. He babbled back to me, but this discussion was now far beyond a simple one involving the correct ordering of food and establishing which countries we were from. So I smiled at him as he spoke. He had a bright and active energy around him, though there was something in his speech that made it sound as though, at times, he were talking about himself, then making fun of himself for talking about himself before returning to whatever it was he wanted to tell me in the first place. He often paused to smile and, as I could feel that this was what he expected from me, I smiled back, sometimes clapping my hand over my mouth when I felt he believed he had said something funny.

At last he said to me, “What is your name?”

“Satomi,” I said. “Satomi Horie.” I collected myself. “What is your name?”

“Timothy. Timothy Snowden.”

We shook hands, an unusual and uncomfortable sensation for me, but this was what people from that part of the world did. The noodle chef and the patrons in the restaurant watched, quiet and even a little shocked. I smiled, as though I were accustomed to greeting people in this way. But I didn’t want the men to get the wrong impression of me altogether, so I hurried out of the shop and went home. That evening, I tried my hand at drawing a caricature of the man in the noodle shop. At first I made his nose too long and his ears too large. Then I crossed out the cartoon and tried to draw again, this time sketching the face of Timothy Snowden, the most handsome man I had ever met.

Satomi

Paris, 1966

I lived in the 14th arrondissement at the very top of a curlicued prewar building with a view of the Eiffel Tower. My room, and all the others on my floor, had once been inhabited by servants and I occasionally consoled my lonely self by imagining that I was a character in
La Bohème
. To reach my room, I either climbed six flights of stairs from the lobby or took the elevator to a family apartment on the third floor where a set of stairs led from the kitchen to the top level. The father of the family, Professor Montmartin, taught at the École Normale and was an aquaintance of one of Sanada-sensei’s friends. Professor Montmartin was also my main instructor and gave me additional lessons in the apartment. Initially, this had seemed like an additional piece of good luck.

In the morning, the Montmartin family was out of the house and I practiced the piano in the living room. In the afternoons, I went to class. At noon the entire family came home for lunch and I ate with them. In the beginning, I couldn’t understand anything they said. I just sat in the dining room and tried to finish all the unfamiliar dishes with nothing to drink but a glass of wine. Professor Montmartin had a quintessentially handsome Parisian face: straight nose and lips that fell in a pucker when they were at rest. His wife was slim, with bright blue eyes and dark hair, and she smiled so much it was impossible to tell when she was really
happy or if her mouth were merely frozen in this position. They had two children, a boy, Patrice, and a girl, Madeleine, ages sixteen and fourteen, respectively.

Whenever I tried to say anything in French, the girl and the boy were quick to correct me, while the mother gave me a half smile before turning her attention back to her children. They both took piano lessons from their father, but they were clearly without talent and were completely insensitive to the emotional stories told in the sonatas and partitas they practiced.

And so, apparently, was I.

In our very first meeting, the professor said to me,
“Mais, où est la passion?”

I played my most recent pieces: Beethoven and Debussy. But these earnest efforts brought little more than a tolerant smirk to his lips.

“Vous n’avez pas d’émotion?”
He looked at me accusingly.

I was, in his eyes, a player without any heart, a girl whose blood was asleep. Now and then he would shake his head and mutter,
“Les asiennes.”
This came as something of a shock to me, the pianist whom everyone at Geidai had considered so emotional as to be frightening. In Paris, I couldn’t communicate what I was feeling at all. It is the job of the artist to stimulate the audience, however large, however small, he would say. But nothing I did, not even my very appearance, moved him. It was as Sanada-sensei had said it would be: I played with an accent.