It was a pounding. Someone knocking at the door.
Who would come here? Quickly he pulled on his trousers, and snapped the suspenders up over his bare shoulders. Where was his shirt? He tilted up the shutters.
Song! He yanked the door open.
She jumped in, out of the rain, her cotton qipao plastered to her legs and body.
“How long were you standing there?”
“Since the rain started. I ran here almost all the way, but when I heard you, I was listening.”
“Is something wrong?” He took her shoulders, lightly, and feeling how wet they were, reached for a towel and unfolded it over her back. “Why are you alone, with all this?”
“My maid was with me, but she left. She wants to go home. I could not stop her.” She drew the rough-nubbed cotton close to her while the rain drummed on the shutters.
“Leaving Shanghai, now? Shouldn’t we go look for her?” There was so much ren qing in his face, and it slipped its warm and simple arms around her though they stood several feet apart.
She caught her breath. It was that same safe feeling she’d had before, in the teahouse with him. Before her mother died, she had felt this way all the time, protected as if by the laws of nature, but never since, with any other person. “No,” she said heavily. “But I thank you. She is gone. To find her is impossible.”
“I’ll go with you, if you want. We can try.”
She shook her head. “It was her choice, Thomas.” She softened the words by touching his arm, wanting to let him know how much his kindness meant to her at that moment.
He guided her to the single chair and sat opposite her, on the piano bench, while she took down her hair and then expertly, unconsciously, re-twisted it behind her neck. “I came for Lin,” she said, “though no one can ever connect this with him. Swear.”
“No one will.”
“He says you must not go today. I say the same. No doubt you came to the same conclusion. Perhaps you said yes just to throw him off? But this chance Lin and I can’t take. We decided one of us had to come.”
“Don’t worry. I would not dream of going. And he won’t go either. I mean,” he added quickly, “not in these conditions.” He glanced out at the storm with its bass notes rumbling underneath the random percussion of explosions from the city’s north side. “Come.” And he stood and held a hand out.
The single room held the bed, a chair, a bureau, the piano, and a screened-off corner for the washbasin, but he led her into the little square of floor between the bed and the shuttered windows.
On top of the bureau the gramophone waited, lid raised. Thomas wound the crank, pushed the lever, and dropped the needle. The song was “Saddest Tale,” Duke Ellington’s big-band blues; it started with a cry from the clarinet that rose like a breaking wave to start off a slow, heart-thudding rhythm. “Do you want to dance?”
She looked anxious. “I do not dance.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “I am always at the piano, remember? Try.” He opened his arms to her, the gesture marking the slow, stepping rhythm, and guided her into position. “That’s it,” he said. “Now just follow.”
The rhythm was languid, yet the song was anything but simple. Every chorus kicked off a new set of chord changes-one reason he had been listening to it, that and the deep, tinny sadness of the bass-scored trombones. Now he was just glad of the pulled-out beat that let him draw the length of her close to him.
Duke’s mournful voice came through, so soft it was almost a bubble from the depths, speaking the song’s few lyrics: Saddest tale told on land or sea is the tale they told when they told the truth on me. She stumbled and he caught her easily. “Step on my feet. That’s right, just like that. You’re so light.” And he got her moving with him, finally. He could feel her reticence beneath his hands, the little quiver under her skin, so he kept his arms strong but loose around her. He would wait for her.
They stepped apart when the song ended, both a little scared. She busied herself looking through the music on the piano. “What’s this?”
“Charts and scores for the band’s songs.”
“And this?”
“Something I made up.”
“What’s meaning, made up?”
“Wrote. Invented.”
“Play it,” she said.
So after resting a microsecond on the low D-flat, he let go of the rippling, repeating pattern in the left hand he had used before, modeled at first on Liszt, now mutated into something new. His right hand sang with his melody, simple and unexpected in its counterpoint against the complexity of the left.
Then with no warning his right hand started something new, a melody he had not tried before, which came from nowhere and belonged to that moment, making it as much hers as his. As he followed it, the melody became everything he had wanted to show her, his little family of Mother and his grandparents and his father, who had died, and then his mother going too, leaving him. That was pain, and it circled around the melody in every kind of way, crying of loss and sadness. And then, as if following the movements of a sonata, he broke into the passage that answered those cries with resolve and harmony. Here was his odyssey across America, the land for which his father died. He traversed the sweet, tangled woods of Maryland and Ohio, the velvet-block fields of the Midwest, the sheets of sunlight over alpine meadows atop the Rockies, then Seattle, Shanghai. When he came to the last phrase and the final, tonic D-flat chord, home again, it sounded the deep bump of their lighter against the wharf, the magic moment they disembarked, he and Lin, the beginning and the end. He let the note hang and then rested his hands in his lap until the drumming of rain once again filled the room, nothing else. He had played as well as ever before.
And improvised. It was a simple feeling, clear as a bar of light on the wood floor, and it had something to do with her being there.
Standing behind him, Song sensed it too; she had never heard him play quite like this. She felt the charge, almost saw it in the air between them.
Everything seemed possible. He was open to her. But she also felt the chill of fear. She was no maiden, yet no man had seen her naked body, and she had little sense of what men and women actually did together. She knew how it ended, of course, because Du had done that, stabbing her distractedly as if relieving an itch. But there was more, surely. Certainly.
Part of her still believed, had never stopped, and from that private place she reached down and slid his suspenders off his bare shoulders. He turned, joy and surprise in his face, searching her eyes, seeking a yes, a sure yes, and then catching her hands in his and drawing her down to his lap.
The wind had dropped back slightly and the rain settled to a steady spit by the time they were quiet atop the sheets, arms and legs tangled in a way that Thomas knew would somehow link them forever, no matter where they went after today.
“Do you know,” she said, her hand moving through his hair, “this is the first time I did this of my own desire. If you had rejected me, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Never. I dreamed of this.” It was true in more ways than he knew how to count. Every girl he had known, even the nice girls back in Baltimore who had been out of reach for him on account of his poverty, had been imperfect. There was always something off, some qualifying streak to mar their appeal. Not her. She was all his hopes, idealized.