Night in Shanghai (11 page)

He had been conceived just like this, in a room not far from here, in a brothel. Lin always made a prideful point of insisting that he was nothing like his father, but here he was the same, and he knew it. He felt for Pearl just as his father had felt for his mother, though unlike his father, he knew he would feel that way always. With her, all his cares, even the fact that he had just broken ranks to warn Little Greene, melted away.

“What is it?” she said, turning.

“Nothing.” He put her head back down, loving her. “Sleep a while.”

That night, while Lin Ming lay twined with Zhuli, Admiral Morioka crisscrossed Frenchtown in the back seat of his curtained chauffeured car, looking for music. In his previous China postings, Peking and Tianjin, he had always been able to find some club where a jazz group, Japanese, Chinese, sometimes even American, was playing. And neither of those cities could compare to Shanghai.

Yet in his short time here, it already seemed to Morioka that the Chinese government tolerated Shanghai like a man tolerates a boil on his skin. Night in Shanghai made money, and so was allowed to exist, but what the Chinese government really wanted was to ban foreign music, not just jazz but all of it. Hopeless. A more useless goal for China’s future Morioka could hardly imagine. It proved once again that the Chinese were not mature, strategic thinkers. Ban music? What next, forbid moving pictures? Yet this notion, of the toxicity of foreign culture, was promoted by both Nationalists and Communists alike. Amazing.

Morioka never ceased to marvel at China’s two parties and the way they squabbled and fought each other, especially as Japan carved their country away from them bit by bit.
Clearly, they need us
.

He had his driver roll slowly past the Ambassador, the Canidrome, the Casanova, and the Palais, all the nearby places where jazz could be heard. His secretary had made a list for him, but so far, he had not ventured into any Shanghai ballroom. Tonight was the night that would change.

He consulted his list one last time. “Driver,” he said, deciding. “Take me to the Saint Anna.”

Song Yuhua walked down Nanjing Road, the most famous shopping street in Asia and a patchwork of Shanghai’s international influences: Parisian bakeries, Balkan dairy shops, and Austrian-style cafés competing with shops dispensing nuts and dried fruits from central Asia. Her eyes always lingered on the international places, not the Chinese establishments like the Wing On and Sincere department stores. The foreign names were music in her mind as she read them off against the clicking of her spool heels on the sidewalk.

As a lonely child in a rural household, learning English from her tutor, she had sustained herself with fantasies fed by foreign books. She imagined herself a woman, grown, beautiful, traveling the world, speaking foreign languages. She had believed in love, in the kind of connection she had never observed in her clan compound in Anhui, and the language of this hope was always English. Now that she believed in the cause, she spoke English only when commanded, and otherwise kept it to herself. She did not really know what to do with her feelings about things foreign.

She stopped at the edge of the Bund, next to the Cathay Hotel with its green copper pyramid roof, and in front of her, along China’s most celebrated boulevard, rolled a convoy of trucks filled with weapons and supplies, marked with the red sun of Japan. Her fists bunched and her eyes stung, not at this blatant show of fattening up the Japanese Army warehouses, but at the expressions on the soldiers’ faces, placid, impervious, already sure of their victory.

Turtle eggs. Of course we ought to distrust all foreigners
. She left the Bund and hurried up Sichuan Road to Avenue Édouard VII, the boundary street between Frenchtown and the International Settlement, with a number-three redhead Sikh on the pedestal in the center of the intersection, directing traffic. She watched him send motorcars, pedicabs, and buses through the intersection with his hand signals, and when a lull in the traffic cleared the avenue, she was startled to see the new American piano player from the Royal. He stood on the corner looking east, toward the river, which gave her time to study him. Though his renown in the city had already put ten thousand pairs of eyes on him, as people liked to say, he did not seem to stand out. His face was reserved, and did not announce him.

When the Sikh gave a burst on his whistle and signaled with stiff-stretched arms, she started across with the knot of pedestrians who had accumulated around her. She was within a few feet of him and was opening her mouth to speak when he turned and saw her.

“I almost walked into you,” she said.

“What?” His mouth went slack. “You speak English!”

“Song Yuhua.” She touched the tip of her nose with her forefinger in the Chinese style rather than extending her hand.

“Thomas Greene,” he answered, looking at her through a daze. “Would you call me Thomas?”

She stared at him on the sidewalk, while people streamed around them, gamblers, office workers, painted-up prostitutes with their stout old amahs hurrying behind them, bald Buddhist nuns in ash-colored robes. “All right. And I am Song.”

“May I ask where you learned such good English?”

“Tutors, at home.” She could not unlock from his eyes, which were round and fringed and very dark in his milk-tea-colored face.

“All families in China do that?”

“Only wealthy people,” she said, and in this unexpected moment, face-to-face with the American, she felt the protective shell of forgetting she usually kept around herself dissolve, and she saw her old life, the existence she had taken apart in her mind and stored away. There it was again, her home, the cistern quickening with its fantailed goldfish, the wall of fragrant wisteria, the plum tree court with rattan recliners. In the warm weather her mother used to lie back in her silk pajamas beneath the branches, and recite Tang dynasty poems. That was the last time she had felt truly understood by another, during those soft nights, answering those great classic lines with quick smiles of understanding; after that, her mother had died. And her father had started to gamble.

Thomas Greene held her gaze in his, as if he wanted to see all the way through, straight into her. “You’re far away,” he said. “Back home?”

“Yes.” Her eyes lifted in surprise.

“I lost my home too. My mother passed away, and I had to strike out on my own.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “I wish you’d tell me how you came to be here, in Shanghai.”

She noticed he was rocking from foot to foot, unsettled, forgetting himself. Maybe he felt something too.

But she was not free to feel anything. Du had thousands of men in Shanghai who would kill anyone who crossed him, including her, at his slightest signal.
We call this growing water lilies
. She was not even free to stand here with this American, two rocks in the human stream, face-to-face, visible to all. Even that was dangerous. “It is bad for us to be speaking like this, on the street.”

“Somewhere else, then,” he said. “I’ll meet you.”

“No,” she answered. “Impossible. I am sorry.” And she turned away quickly, so he would not see how much it hurt her to do it.

Thomas found himself endlessly checking the archway into the lobby that night, hoping she might appear behind Du Yuesheng. But the box remained dark. He had no idea when he might see her again, if ever. He told himself when he kept his eyes on the door that he was watching for the Japanese Admiral Lin had warned him about, but that was untrue.

On the third night he finally caught a movement of skirts in the lobby, and his heart almost jumped up his throat. He lost his way in the music, recovered. Errol and Lester sent him looks, always the first to notice his mistakes. He looked up again: Anya. It was Anya.

It had been more than a week since their dinner. She had not returned to the club, and though he had gone by her rooming house once and left his visiting card beneath her door, he had heard nothing. After his brief meeting with Song, Anya had frankly drifted from his mind, but Song was someone he might never see again, and Anya was here, beautiful in a floor-length white silk dress, smiling. Quickly he motioned to one of the waiters, a skinny fellow named Wing Bean, and in the toe-tapping space between two songs, he slipped him some money to go out for a gardenia.

When the band took a break, she came right over. “A joy to see you,” he said, tenderly fastening the flower in her hair. “Our evening together was unforgettable.”

Her face clouded. “Oh, dear. I don’t remember anything—did I disgrace myself?”

“That would not be possible,” he said.

“Why?” Her cashmere brows drew together.

“Because anything you did would be all right.”

She smiled at this and said, “I received your card. I was out of town.”

“Then welcome back.” He caught her arm. “Stay,” he said tenderly. “Stay until we finish.”

She did, and as soon as the last set ended, they left the theater and rode a rickshaw directly to her lodging.

The place was smaller than he had imagined, only one room, cramped by a bed, dresser, and chair, with one tiny gabled window. It also lay at the top of four long flights, but that he barely noticed; he would have climbed mountains to get to her, to have love in his arms for a night.

Anya filled a small cup with water from the old-fashioned basin and pitcher atop the dresser, detached the flower from her hair, and with thrifty care settled it in the cup. He had a strange sense of being back in Baltimore, in a narrow row house where vents were closed off to save all the heat for one room, and a child’s clothing, when torn, was always taken apart to be stitched into something else. He had seen his mother linger for long minutes at the strawberry man’s mule-drawn cart, finding what was bruised and crushed and talking the man into letting her have it for a few cents less.

He watched as Anya placed the flower by the bed and then peeled her dress from her milky shoulders. She turned her back with a natural ease for him to unhook her. He put his hands on her skin, different, satin to his velvet, and the pale feel of it was exciting to him. As he picked her up and laid her on the bed and undressed her, the greatest difficulty was holding himself back, and their first time was over all too soon.

But he awoke before dawn the next morning and they did it again, slowly now, and at leisure, until both were still and content.

He thought she might protest when he said he had to go, but she was sweet, acquiescent. “There’s a clean washcloth on the dresser, and a towel. Beside the basin.”

He washed and stepped into his clothes before he kissed her. “Thank you.”

“No, no, all thanks is for you.” She wound her arms around him and kissed him back, stopping just before she drew him down again.

It was getting light when he came to the house. He let himself in quietly, slipped up to his room, and stretched out between his sheets. Now he had what he wanted, a real woman. He folded a pillow behind his head and closed his eyes to enjoy the first early voices from the lane, the tinkle of cart bells, the crank-up cough of an automobile. He was replete with love, so every sound was music to him, every noise an echo of beauty, doors opening and closing, wheels creaking, the burbled cooing of the spotted dove outside his window. But just before he surrendered to sleep, when the real world started to clank apart and disassociate itself into the other, it was Song’s face he saw, not Anya’s.

A
NYA WAS HIS
girl through that spring of 1937, and she came to the club most weekends. He loved having her sit up tall and lovely at his table, his for all to see. Song and Du still had not come in, and while at first he had watched in hopes of seeing her, now he was glad they had not returned. Anya was a lovely bird whose plumage was always on display.

She lifted his spirits, which he needed, because the war was chipping away at his Kings. Now Eddie Riordan, the drummer, had stopped going out and was eating at noodle stalls in order to finish saving his passage home. The trumpet player, Cecil Pratt, was starting to talk about the same thing. Cecil had a Japanese girlfriend, and he went up to Zhabei most nights to stay with her, in a sector that had become almost entirely filled with soldiers and civilians from Japan. Much as he hated to leave her, Cecil said the sight of so many men in uniform unnerved him.

On the nights Anya came to the club, Thomas went back to her room with her, always leaving before dawn so he could sleep at home. He liked it that way, separate. When Alonzo and Keiko invited them all over for lunch, he never mentioned it to Anya. Keiko was different, part of their lives, almost Alonzo’s wife, though they all knew he had a real wife back home and children in college, to whom he sent most of his money. But here in Shanghai, Keiko was his woman and everyone’s older sister, cooking Japanese food, homey in her scuff slippers and apron, shiny black hair tufting from her neck-knot. While Alonzo sat back in his chair like a potentate, she plied Thomas and Charles and Ernest with grilled fish, vegetables cooked in soy and wine and vinegar, and steaming mounds of rice. Those were happy afternoons, which he enjoyed without Anya.

But on his nights off, the two of them went out together, and he let her take him into other worlds, to be with dancers and drug addicts and gamblers, philosophers and utopians, and assorted secret plotters who hoped to take over China. In her company he met actors, artists, and poets, drinkers and pleasure seekers.

“And yet none of them are Communists,” he said to her one night.

“Of course some of them are,” she retorted. “We’ve discussed this. One third of Shanghai is—”

“I know,” he said, “but who? I never seem to meet any.”

“No one wants to
admit
it,” she said. “They
kill
Communists.”

“It’s a conundrum. I cannot be sure they really exist.”

“Listen.” She leaned in and dropped her voice. “I know all kinds of people—people who know Shanghai’s secrets. And you know what they told me? Very hush-hush? That the Foreign Language School at number six New Yuyang Lu is a Communist front.”