The Last Rose of Shanghai(10)

People were clapping. I itched to go up to talk to the pianist, but I had already thanked him. It didn’t make sense to socialize with a foreigner if there were no financial benefits.

“Well, darling, here’s your Chopin. Perhaps he’ll leave us alone now.” Sassoon frowned, still grumpy.

“Just one moment. Would you mind?” I said without thinking, then, weaving between the octagonal tables and smoking men, I walked to the pianist, his fingers still gliding over the keys in a wave of fluid motion.

“You played well. That was worth a cocktail. Thank you. I rather enjoyed it.”

“I’m glad. What else can I play for you?” He did a crossover on a higher octave. His scarred hand seemed to distract him, his crooked pinkie marring the purity of the arpeggios. But the wonder of the piano. There was nothing like that.

“You played it for me?”

“Of course. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I’ll play anything for you.”

“Anything?” I teased him. People flirted with me all the time, and I had gone along unfazed. This felt different.

“Absolutely.”

“I like jazz.”

“The American music? I love it too. What’s your favorite song?”

No one had ever asked me about my favorite song before, not the band I hired, not Cheng or my brothers, who believed jazz would corrupt my soul. Good girls listen to Mother; bad girls listen to jazz, Sinmay, my brother, had said. I couldn’t contain myself. “‘The Last Rose of Shanghai.’ It’s Shanghai jazz, a blend of American jazz and Chinese folk song. The gramophone was playing that. You want to hear it? It goes like this.” I hummed, swinging to the beat. “‘There is a kind of love that strikes like a thunderbolt; it blinds you, yet opens your eyes to see the world anew.’ There, there. That’s my favorite line.”

“Like this?”

His shoulders swayed; his fingers danced over the keys. The syncopation, the energy, and the flowing appassionato. He understood my favorite song; he understood how it made me feel. I forgot myself, tapping along, swinging my hips, humming, roped by the rhythm. And all the while I saw his eyes on me, his indulgence, his undiluted affection. My heart raced and my cheeks warmed. I had never felt like this: giddy, silly, like a young teenager.

“Ernest, right? I’m Shao Aiyi. Call me Aiyi.” Most people called me Miss Shao; only my family had the right to call me by my given name, but I didn’t care.

“Ayi?”

“No. It’s Ai-yee, down tone and then up tone. It means love and perseverance. It’s okay if you can’t pronounce it. I also answer to Ali, Haylee, Mali, and Darling.”

He laughed, but then he repeated my name with concentration and determination that made me stare at him with happiness. And he was playing something else—George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” But the technique Ernest used!

“You know the stride piano?”

The new jazz. I had heard it at this exact spot, performed by an American band, before the war. It was incredibly rhythmic, richly provocative, with the pianist’s left hand playing a four-beat pulse while the band played the melody.

“I’m a pianist, Aiyi.”

“Ah.” I wished I had a pianist like him in my club. I had always wanted to introduce the stride piano to my customers, which I believed would be immensely popular. But the war had ruined everything. The few Chinese pianists had fled the city, and pianos were seized by the Japanese along with many homes. I couldn’t even find one on the market for my club.

Sassoon was saying something; Ernest glanced up. Quietly, he closed up the fallboard and stood. “Thank you, Aiyi. Thank you, sir. It has been a pleasure.”

I watched him put on his glove and leave the bar. All the light of passion, the effervescence, dimmed on his face, and it struck me—the depth of his disappointment. As a foreign refugee, he had no place in this city, where many people, including the locals, struggled to make a living.

When I sat at Sassoon’s table again, I asked him if he would reconsider hiring Ernest. Sassoon shook his head adamantly, saying his American band, taking a vacation for the moment, was popular in the bar. But he agreed to sell me twenty cases of gin and whiskey, and again, he reminded me to reserve the suite.

I raised my glass to toast. Twenty cases of alcohol would sustain my business for at least three months—four, if I were creative. This trip had been worth taking after all.



Later in my car, my cheeks hot with absinthe, I looked out the window. My Nash glided through avenues and lanes crosshatched with shadows and lights; the engine hummed and purred. In the distance came the faint music from bars and clubs, the sharp rattle of trains from a railway, and the sporadic gunshots from the Japanese military base in the district up north. It had been hours since I’d heard Ernest’s piano playing, but the sound of the music, that face of his, the dancing of his fingers, swirled in my head. I felt different, as though some part of me had been changed and my heart had been turned into a throbbing instrument.

Outside, the wind whispered in a dialect of decadence familiar to me, and the city waltzed in a circuit of winds and shadows. It was as if the city were telling me something wonderful, something most daring: it was mine, all mine—the streets, the wind, the night, the pulsating jazz, and the want, the fresh want of dangerous dreams and delirium.