Picking Bones from Ash (12 page)

Professor Montmartin’s method to induce proper emotion from me was to shout. At unexpected moments he slammed down the piano lid and I had to quickly withdraw my hands from the keys or risk a broken finger. Sometimes he would throw my books on the floor and insist I pick them up. Other times he was eerily, dangerously sweet, coming so close to my face I could smell traces of coffee and, on some days, wine. Once he even kissed my cheek and I screamed and refused to play for the rest of the day. We Japanese do not invade anyone’s space like this. To this day I am frustrated with the inability of a Western person to notice how much space he occupies on a crowded subway or bus.

I did what anyone would have done under these circumstances. I started smoking.

Outside of my lessons when I was shaking from having been so humiliated, I took to wearing a pair of large sunglasses and stabbing at the air with a cigarette in my hand. I visualized the day when I would light a cigarette in our sessions together and casually pass the burning stub over
his right hand and grind it down. Instead, I affected a look that I thought would convey I was far from unfeeling. I’d clench my jaw and show him I was strong. I refused to cry before him, saving any tears for my bath at night. Alone in my room, I drew little caricatures, Mineko style, fashioning the temperamental professor as a lone volcano crushing a field of daisies.

I was homesick and lonely. At first, Shinobu sent me letters, and I looked forward to the thin blue aerogrammes that arrived from her every few weeks. But abruptly, she stopped writing to me and my pleas to her for more correspondence went unanswered. I wondered what I had done. My mother wrote to me, but letters cannot indefinitely sustain a person in the physical world. I took to counting out a few coins every day to buy myself a cup of coffee at a café, La Coupole, sipping it so slowly it always grew cold while I alternated between staring at the pedestrians and trying to do my music theory homework in a language I barely understood.

Fortunately, I became friendly with a singer from the Netherlands who was also taking music theory classes. His name was Theo and he was Indonesian, but his family had been living in Amsterdam for a good decade or so and he spoke decent French. Theo took pity on me. I wasn’t embarrassed to speak in front of him, and in his presence my language abilities blossomed, for we spoke both in English and in French. When I became tired of one language, he switched to another and I began to gain a little confidence. Even the arrogant Montmartin children noticed at dinner one night that I was no longer mute in their native tongue.
“Qu’est-ce qui c’est passé?”
they asked, as though I had managed the impossible.

It was through Theo that I met Timothy again. Theo had become friendly with a group of expats whose most recent venture consisted of a trilingual production of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
. Theo was to play Ariel, the spirit messenger.

“Classical music is dead.” Theo yawned. “I never realized that until I came here. All those arias. Symphonies. They are nothing but museum pieces.”

“Great art is universal,” I replied.

“Well, fine.” He shrugged in a most un-Asian manner, which reminded me of the difference in our respective upbringings. “But I’d rather be part of the great art that’s going on
now
. It’s easy to participate in things from the past, when all the critical choices have already been made. It takes a genius to be part of the art movements that will be famous in the future.”

I was invited to a cast party.

“You must come,” Theo begged. “It’ll be good for you.”

The party was to be held in a home half an hour outside Paris. The owner was an Eastern European noble who had fled to Paris just as the iron curtain had fallen across Europe. The family had sunk all their savings into an old château that had once belonged to the keeper of Louis XIII’s hunt. Much of the building could not be heated because there wasn’t enough money.

I sat with Theo and his boyfriend in the back of a small car as we sped across the dark night road to this mythical castle, which had grown turrets and a moat in my imagination. But as the car began to slow, I saw a rather plain-looking two-story building, manned by a small family living in a gatehouse, their faces just barely concealing a look of suspicion as our headlights flashed on the garden grounds. A white deer, a white horse, and a white dog trotted by.

“The count,” Theo explained to me, “loves white animals.”

The first thing I remember seeing inside was a staircase leading up to the bedrooms, and over this, a large framed and hand-drawn family tree, with little photographs inserted whenever someone of importance sprouted up along the branches. There were pictures of bishops, kings, and princes. Another version of the family tree, written in black cursive, was propped up on an old wooden music stand in the entry.

I followed Theo to the living room. He was nursing his throat with a cashmere scarf while he was waving one hand to indicate that, yes, he would like a glass of wine. Dusty red velvet curtains that would have looked more at home in a theater separated the entry from the formal foyer. Later I learned that the man everyone referred to as “the count” was an opera devotee and that he had befriended a set designer who had procured the drapes for him wholesale and hung them in lieu of doors. The drawing room, in fact, looked like an opera set. Arms of ferns tangled around old marble columns and windowsills. There were paintings of subjects I’d seen in the Louvre: women with windswept hair standing on battlefields, portraits of important men in dark suits, and landscapes in moody green. All the paintings were dirty from the smoke of candles and incense the count kept on various brass holders. The count apparently had no housekeeper, for the dirty house was filled with dust that gave the air a magical, silvery glow.

Here and there little groups of partygoers stood or sat draped over baronial chairs and chaises whose silk covers had long ago started to fray. Blink once and the walls looked pleasant and decorative, covered with the usual wallpaper design of flowers and birds. Blink again and all I saw were more dead animals, the obsession of the bloodthirsty French, eaters of meat. The château had once belonged to the keeper of the hunt, and the wallpaper—actually a hand-painted pattern—depicted geese on platters, boars rooting around in the woods, and dogs chasing foxes.

A fireplace roared away. The count had asked that his guests bring something personal to burn. I had chosen one of my sonata books, which just that day Professor Montmartin had hurled across the room when I had failed to employ staccato adequately. Theo was throwing away an old cashmere scarf from a former lover. The two of us dumped our unwanted things at the same time. Someone else had brought a more useful gift—firewood—and this sat in a bucket on the floor, waiting to be put to use.

I immediately spotted the count standing in the center of the room with two young women and two men. He was pale and puffy and wore a black velvet suit. He had the longest natural eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man or a woman, and when he blinked, his entire body bobbed, so he gave the impression of floating on water.

“I’ll introduce you,” Theo said.

“No, no.” I was too shy.

After pleading with me a bit, Theo went to speak to the count alone. I nibbled on a canapé and wondered what to do next. Theo was good at parties. He circulated among the Europeans, exhibiting his most Ariel-like persona, dancing and whirling as though at any minute he might fly away, and they applauded and admired him for this lightness of being. I, as usual, was silent. I was shy and uncomfortable in French and English; the few times I tried to say something funny, I was met with blank stares.

“If only people knew,” Theo sighed, “how silly you really are.”

I wandered out to the courtyard, which looked like a medieval abbey, what with a tower of a dozen fused candles oozing wax onto the cobblestone patio. I saw a group of men and one woman wearing a long red shawl. They were smoking. I threw my stub to the ground and lit a new cigarette. I heard a rumble, and the white horse with another woman on its back came barreling toward us out of the darkness. This woman murmured something in the horse’s ear, and the beast slowed to a stop and
she hopped off. Almost immediately, one of the men put out his cigarette, patted the horse on the neck, then jumped on and rode off. The galloping sound faded. Then I knew that the gardens were very large.

“It’s the nobles,” someone said in English.

I looked up. A white man was talking to me.

“They all learned to ride when they were kids. When their parents thought they were still going to inherit the earth. Now they’re poor but they still have all those upper-class habits. Bet they still take tea every day, only they have to make it themselves.”

I stared. The man had a relentless, rich smile that showered me like a beam of light.

“I know you,” the man said to me.

“Yes,” I breathed.

“Where are you from?”

“Japan.”

“Ah.” He nodded and seemed to think, slowly sipping his wine. “That little dive in northern Japan.”

“My name is Satomi.”

“I’m …”

“Timothy Snowden,” I said.

By this point my English had improved sufficiently that I could understand him much better than at our initial meeting. He said he’d come to France on business, then he laughed at himself as though he’d said something funny. Instinctively I felt at ease and knew immediately that he would never laugh at me. Timothy said that he was originally from California but had since dropped out of college. He was “seeing the world.” He had met a man through mutual friends at a party in San Francisco who said he was collecting porcelain from Japan and China, and one thing led to another and Timothy had become a courier. He’d just taken a shipment to San Francisco and decided to spend his money on a visit to an ex-girlfriend in Paris.

Had I heard of her? Priscilla from Italy? She usually hung with this crowd. Most expats in Europe had heard of her. Other Californians were busy celebrating the beauty of blonds, but he had a penchant for girls with dark hair and olive skin. In fact—he squinted—there was something vaguely Mediterranean about me. That must be why he’d remembered me in the first place. I’d stood out. “I kept asking myself for a few days after meeting you: ‘What’s her story?’ ”

I told him that my music professor considered me so shy and retiring that I was incapable of playing Western music with emotion. I told him that my professor suspected I wasn’t even capable of feeling things the way a human being was supposed to.

“Let me get this straight.” Timothy frowned. “According to this professor, you don’t feel things, and that makes it okay for him to insult you. I think it’s the other way around. He’s the one with bad social skills,” he finished kindly, eyes twinkling.

The attention unnerved me and I tried to change the direction of the conversation, asking how Timothy had liked Japan. He followed my lead easily. He had fallen in love with my country, he declared. Everything we did was a little act of art, from the way women neatly hung up laundry to dry on carefully designed circular hangers, to the plastic and wax food replicas in restaurant windows, to the tremendous care given to our rice paddies. What the professor considered a lack of emotion, he saw as a concern to get things just right. The world would be better off, he declared loftily, if everyone were dedicated to caring so much. On the other hand, it must sometimes be exhausting living under that pressure to make things so perfect. Once again, I didn’t know how to respond to this unsolicited gesture of sympathy.

“Do you think you will ever want to return to Japan?” I asked.

“Oh, definitely.” He wanted to go back to look for more antiques, but the language barrier had been difficult. He needed to either find a partner or start studying himself. The answer to what to do and how to do it would come to him. He was still young, only thirty, and in this new age, youth could be prolonged. He was sure that I with my worldliness and artist’s sensitivity would understand what he was talking about.

I pretended that I did.

I asked him about his travels and he told me stories of sleeping in a tent in a ruined Scottish castle while it rained, of visiting the Keukenhof gardens in the Netherlands when the first tulips began to bloom, of submitting himself to a massage in Constantinople, of renting a car and driving through Yugoslavia, and then taking a ferry boat to Libya, where he had seen the most gorgeous Roman ruins I could ever imagine. Forget Italy, he said. Libya was the place to be. He’d stayed in people’s houses, winking at them that he was a Canadian and not an American and they’d winked back.

As he talked, I could not help but wonder what it would be like to drift
from country to country, as though following a map and the promise of an adventure were in and of themselves sufficient goals for living. The very idea was at once intriguing because of the storyteller it had turned Timothy into, and also unsettling. What, I wondered, would my mother make of a person so without ambition for himself and for his family, and yet who was clearly intelligent and capable of accomplishing so much?

At the end of the party he told me that he would be in Paris for a few more days and that, if I was interested, he wouldn’t mind spending some more time with me. The beautiful Priscilla had fled to her homeland with a young Italian, heir to a textile mill, and he would be by himself drifting from museum to café.

“We should hang out,” he said. “You probably know Paris much better than I do.”

“I have a lot of work,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I was conflicted about men in those days. Outwardly I liked to appear as though I didn’t care about them at all. At the same time, I secretly thought of their attention as something important to gain. Women, those herdlike creatures, were so easy to win over. Just be thoughtlessly nice like my childhood friend Tomoko and women loved you. Men were much harder to please. Men were always seeking a woman who was smart and engaging and capable. What greater reward than to be seen as interesting in their eyes? To be interesting, I believed, was a quality women could not understand.