I don’t know what these particular roses are called – there are hundreds of different species in the world, after all. But roses they are, for certain. Under the cloudy June sky, I see the buds on the new green stems that stretch out left and right, some still small and tight and some about to bloom, and I sometimes wonder what it is that makes them so obviously roses. Is it the thorns, the petals, or something else? Somewhere in the world, there must be roses that have shapes and colours and clusters that I could never imagine, and if I were to encounter them unexpectedly, perhaps on a journey – in Edinburgh or maybe Macedonia – what then? Yet, even if I had never laid eyes on them before, I would know … right. As I water my flowers with an insanely long hose that leaks at the nozzle – it must be torn or rotten or something – I let my thoughts wander this morning, the way they do every morning.
There is one decent flower shop in the arcade near the train station. By decent, I mean you can pop in, give them a price and count on them to make a nice bouquet. That day, I saw they had some with white flowers and tiny dark green leaves, and, wanting to, in a way, celebrate the beautiful weather, I said to the shopkeeper, Could I have three of those rose bushes please?
As I was paying, I added, I’ve never bought flowers that weren’t pre-cut, and the overly plump girl said with an overly large smile, This one here, it’ll bloom all year long if you take good care of it. Buoyed by her swelling presence, I returned the girl’s smile and said with a wave, I’ll take good care of it.
The big earthquake1 hit two months after we bought a house near the river, and for a while I felt depressed and out of sorts. My husband has always maintained that there’s nothing to worry about in Tokyo – who knows if he really believes that or if he’s just fooling himself? A month after the earthquake, though, my tension and anxiety were starting to wear off, and then before I knew it spring had passed by in a daze. That’s how I ended up buying the roses. I recall the flower shop that day was crowded with local housewives and mothers. One practically shoved her face into the bushy pots of ivy and olive, pointed to the colourful flowers in the back of the cool glass case and said, Could I have more of those? Others said things like, You’ll call me when new ones come in, won’t you? or, Actually, I’ll have some of these too. They bustled back and forth in the narrow shop with armloads of plants as if in some kind of competition. I remember thinking how tasteless one woman’s oversized purse was with its pimply grey ostrich leather.
That evening, I asked my husband when he came home from work, Do you think people buy flowers and things because it makes them feel safer to pretend that everything is back to normal?
Yeah, there’s probably something to that.
So much for that topic.
Oh, that reminds me of a story I heard – or maybe read somewhere. You know some mixed couples, they apparently fight over whether to leave Japan or not. They get caught between the Japanese partner saying they shouldn’t leave no matter what and the foreign partner saying they’d be crazy not to leave in such an emergency. They have so much trouble putting those feelings into words, a lot of them have ended up divorcing. That’s what I read.
Hmm, well it’s true that people are dealing with a lot these days, my husband said before slipping from my sight as usual.
But I had been hoping to say more. At the very least we’re both Japanese, you and me – I don’t know, who knows what will happen, maybe there’ll be a big explosion and we’ll all die – but still don’t you think we’re better off than they are? Because we’re inherently the same, even if that means we’re just resigned to our fate. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing? That was what I wanted to say.
My husband comes home late. Usually I try not to think about how I fill my days when I’m alone, and when I do, it depresses me. I don’t work. I’m not pregnant. Housework for two, washing and cleaning, takes two hours at most, even now that we live in a proper house. I don’t watch TV. I don’t read books. Come to think of it, I don’t do anything. I don’t take lessons, and I don’t have the skills or the patience to cook a fancy meal. I really don’t do anything at all. Stretched out on the sofa, I would hear a piano trilling away somewhere every day. It sounded so good I thought it was a recording at first, but sometimes it would break off or repeat a passage so I knew it was someone practising. Or maybe that was part of the interpretation? In any case, it would start at random hours. Sometimes at nine in the morning, sometimes in the evening, sometimes as late as ten o’clock at night. So someone is playing a piano somewhere, but that someone is not me. Whenever I start thinking about how I do absolutely nothing at all, these pairs of white doors slide open behind my forehead, one after another, and once I dozed off and had a really pointless dream. I want to avoid things like that. But I can’t help thinking about it sometimes, so the other day I sat down at the dining table and wrote the Chinese character for what. It felt like a totally useless exercise, until I discovered that the character for what looks exactly like my face when you examine it closely.
So that’s how I go about my days, doing nothing, but since buying the roses I started picking up some potted plants when I was in the mood, and now I have quite a collection. We don’t have a garden, so they’re all laid out around the edge of the front porch. I set a pot of ivy on top of the lamp post attached to the mailbox and let the leaves dangle like hair. I put a potted olive tree next to it, and underneath a row of maidenhair ferns, violets, eucalyptus and those robust little blue flowers that I can never remember the name of. And some chocolate cosmos too, so they looked just so, like the entrance of a café. I transplanted those first roses into larger pots, and to my surprise, they expanded so shamelessly that their size almost doubled. The buds kept multiplying like rabbits. I visited online forums to learn how to plant different varieties in a single pot, and while I was there bought all sorts of things, like a shovel, fertilizer and those little pebbles that you line the bottom of pots with. I bought special scissors and started snipping off the yellow and black leaves that were no longer healthy. That made me feel good, like I was giving someone a haircut.
The more I got into it, the more I started to wonder about other people’s gardens and flower beds, and so I began going for walks every morning. You could easily tell which plants were being well taken care of and which were not. Seeing neglected flowers or trees always reminded me of my childhood. I saw countless camellias – one of the few flowers I could identify – growing straight and sober. They seemed to be popular around here. Their thick, oily petals had always struck me as artificial, and I wondered why so many people planted these walls of camellias around their houses. Well, apparently camellias prevent fire, and come to think of it they really do look impervious to flames, so I guess it’s a good thing.
I sometimes fantasize about our house being broken into. Of course it wouldn’t be an ordinary burglary. It would be really gory and ghoulish – I’d be torn to shreds and whatnot – and then reporters with nothing better to do would swarm like flies to our house from all over and interview the neighbours, pointing mics at them and asking the usual, What was the victim like? And they would probably answer, Well, yes, we never talked or anything, but I got the impression that she was very fond of gardening. I’d see her taking really good care of her plants in the morning and afternoon, and even at night. These thoughts made me feel a little better as I unravelled the ever-expanding ivy tangles.
One afternoon, I was trimming the overgrown roots of my wild strawberries when I heard the garage door rumble up lazily next door and a Mercedes stuck its nose out. A big car, round and dull. A woman with her arms crossed came out to see the car speed off, though the driver remained in the shadows from where I stood. Noticing me, the woman gave me a very friendly smile and said, Hello there, your flowers always look so lovely, then smiled again.
Oh, not at all, I just buy them and stick them here. I smiled back, just as friendly.
Her face suggested that she was in her early sixties, but the rest of her said seventy. Her hair was almost entirely white, as if the thought of dyeing it had never occurred to her. Her face was no longer firm; devoid of make-up, it had an eerily transparent quality. It reminded me of an old woman I once saw in a sauna or at a hot-springs resort, whose nipples had completely lost their pigment and looked like a child’s.
When we first moved here, I had paid courtesy calls around the neighbourhood with boxes of sweets. Since her house had remained silent no matter how many times I rang the doorbell, this was the first time I had had a chance to speak to her.
You have such an eye for flowers. I always enjoy looking at them.
Thank you for saying that. By the way, is there someone who plays the piano in your home? Someone who plays extremely well?
Oh my! That’s me – I’m the one playing.
Really! How wonderful. I enjoy listening to it so much. You’re a terrific pianist.
Not at all. I played for about ten years when I was growing up, then stopped. I’m embarrassed to say that I only started fooling around with it again in my old age.
That’s so nice. I don’t know … I really envy that you can play for yourself. I think it’s wonderful.
The car that left just now, he’s the piano tuner. I asked him to sit down and listen to me play, but oh my, I couldn’t play at all. When I’m all alone, I somehow manage to play a piece through till the end, but with someone listening I always make mistakes.
But I really thought it was a CD at first.
I wonder which piece that was?
I couldn’t say, but I’m sure it’s famous since even I recognized it. It goes duum, da, dum in the beginning and then repeats the same notes.
Oh, that’s Liszt. Liszt’s Liebestraum. Dream of Love.
Yes, that sounds right. The melody does sound like it might have a title like that. It’s such a pretty piece.
Why don’t you come over one of these days? My piano is nothing to listen to, but I could offer you a cup of tea at the very least.
So the day after the day after next, I bought a pile of colourful macarons at the macaron shop in the arcade, stopped at the Takashimaya department store nearby to pick up the second most expensive box of cherries, and rang her doorbell. It was two o’clock in the afternoon – that most vacant time of the day when the laundry is done and the vacuum put away, but it’s still too early to go food shopping. The time when you feel most keenly that you are useless and the world is silently laughing at you from afar. No matter how hard you try to inflate your fantasies, mobilizing all the memories, imaginings and gossip you can muster, you just can’t seem to fill up the space. It was right then, when one is stupidly waiting for anything to happen, that I rang the doorbell and soon heard her voice over the intercom. Why hello!
Hello, a friend gave me a big box of cherries – I thought you might like some.
Hold on just a moment, I’ll open the door.
Her house seemed much more spacious than mine. It was spotlessly clean and the furniture went together perfectly. Every single piece seemed expensive, every curve had its own particular sheen. There was that distinctive smell that always lingers in other people’s homes, which I found pleasing. The large, superbly soft leather couch felt cold on my thighs, but after a few seconds it warmed up. I placed the boxes of macarons and cherries on the coffee table with a polite bow. Thanking me with a smile, she took the two boxes to the kitchen and soon returned with some coffee and the macarons neatly arranged on a plate. I had half expected to see a maid walk in. I sipped the coffee and took a tiny bite of a macaron. It’s such a peculiar feeling, buying macarons. You feel like a complete idiot, and yet that very absurdity makes it somehow satisfying. They’re unbearably sweet, and the outer shell never fails to stick to the roof of your mouth, and besides the name is so silly. It’s infuriating how overpriced they are, only because people think they’re something special. They only remind you that you’ve never once thought they tasted good.
I’ll have the pink one, if you don’t mind.
Please. This yellow one is quite exquisite too.
After a while, she began to tell me the history of her relationship with the piano. Her first teacher, her first recital. Bach’s Inventions and the effects of age on one’s hands and one’s ear, etc., etc. I was more curious about what her husband did for a living, or her family members, or about so-and-so in the neighbourhood, or whether property values had really fallen in our area because of the earthquake, or anything that would pass the time – frivolous topics perfect for occasions such as this – but she seemed uninterested in small talk and never asked me about such things either. As I listened to her, remembering to nod from time to time, I began to recognize something familiar hidden in the tone of her voice, or maybe in her way of speaking. I didn’t know what it was exactly. It felt as if a piece of fabric was fluttering at the edge of my vision. I couldn’t tell its colour or size. All I could catch was the fluttering movement. And as I sat listening to this unfamiliar woman tell unfamiliar stories while sitting on an unfamiliar sofa in an unfamiliar house, I felt something loosen up somewhere between my throat and my belly button. It was a kind of aimless, gentle feeling, like someone holding my hand and tracing my palm with their fingers, reminding me of the unsurprising fact that I too was a complete stranger to someone else. But it wasn’t the sort of gentle feeling that I could simply surrender myself to. It also reminded me of all the anxieties, jealousies, impulses and passions that had once made me, and those around me, suffer so irrationally – stupid as it sounds as I write about it now – and of the fact that those things have left without a trace, and that what I see now, what I can touch and smell from here onwards, are only remnants of all that once was.
Having talked and nodded and let a certain amount of time go by, we both realized we had nothing more to offer one another, and probably had nothing to begin with. I should be going soon, I said, I had such a wonderful time. As I smiled and gestured to leave, she asked, hesitantly, if I wouldn’t mind listening to her play just one piece on the piano. Of course, I replied with a reassuring smile, following her into the room with the piano.
The piano was in her bedroom, a spacious room of about fifteen tatami mats; here too, expensive furniture lined the walls with the heavy forthrightness of a coffin for a bear that had lived an admirably ascetic life. Sitting down on the ottoman, I said, What a lovely bedroom. Tell me, Ms … I realized that I couldn’t remember her name. What was it? What was the name of this woman standing before me? No matter how many times I wiped my imaginary mind with an imaginary cloth, nothing revealed itself. I could have just let it go, but, flustered by the fact that I had completely blanked on her name, I blurted out the question, What should I call you?
Terry, if you will.
Looking me straight in the eye, she said once again: Terry, if you will.
Terry?
Yes, I’d like to be called Terry.
I wondered for a moment whether her real name was Teruko or Teruyo, but I refrained from asking. I should call you Terry, just like that? Yes, I’d like that. Okay. I managed to answer with a smile, but an awkward silence ensued. It occurred to me that I should follow this exchange by saying with a straight face, So Terry, play me something – but I obviously lacked the nerve to do so. All I could muster was an awkward smile, gesturing with my hands to urge her to go ahead.
She looked at me intently and asked, with a smile, What should I call you?
Me? All I had to do was remember my own name, but for some reason, I couldn’t answer right away. She waited for me patiently, while I sat silent. I began to feel desperate, trying to grasp any name that came to mind, but naturally, I hesitated choosing a name that wasn’t mine. It didn’t matter what I chose, yet it did matter somehow. Every name that popped into my head sounded wrong. Not that there was right or wrong in any of this.
Please call me Bianca.
Bianca. What a beautiful name.
I felt my face turn bright red. Bianca? I had no idea why that name of all names popped out of my mouth. Where did it come from? It was probably a character from some comic book I had read as a child, nothing more. But Bianca! As I called myself that in my mind, one part of me felt strangely liberated, while another part began to melt into a deep slumber.
Bianca, will you listen to me play?
Yes, of course.
Realizing she was waiting for me to say more, I quickly added, Terry. Terry smiled contentedly and began playing her usual duum, da, dum piece. But she stumbled almost right away, and kept stumbling over the same spot. Starting over again and again, Terry eventually shook her head and turned towards me, sighing deeply.
See, Bianca, I told you. I can’t play when I know someone is listening.
But it’s so beautiful. I’m completely drawn in by the sound – it’s as if the whole landscape changes with a single note. Isn’t it just a matter of getting used to? I mean … oh, I’m sorry, I really don’t know what I’m talking about.
No, you’re right. It’s probably just that. You know, it really made me happy the other day, Bianca, when you told me that you liked listening to me play the piano. It made me so happy to hear that you were touched. And today, you kindly came to my house. I have such bad memories attached to playing the piano, so for me, this is like a fresh new start. Liszt’s Liebestraum brings back such bittersweet … no … truly awful memories. So if I can play it all the way through without making a mistake in front of you, Bianca, I feel very strongly that … that I could be a whole new person.
I think I understand how you feel.
I had a sense, you know, when I talked to you the other day – a kind of intuition.
I know exactly what you mean.
Terry continued to play the Liebestraum for two hours straight – I know because I kept looking at the antique clock on the wall. I sat still and erect on the backless ottoman, letting my attention wander from Terry’s back to the shiny furniture, then to jumbled landscapes in my memory and to words exchanged with a certain someone somewhere. Whenever I remembered to focus on the melody, I would hear Terry stumbling. After playing for a full two hours, Terry finally got up, saying, That’s enough for today. I gave an enormous mental sigh of relief, larger than anything I’d ever seen or touched, and stood up, nodding vigorously. My hips were as stiff as if a metal plate had been inserted into them, and my eyes felt stuffed with cotton wool. We descended the stairs in silence, but as I put on my shoes in the entranceway, Terry said:
Bianca, won’t you come twice a week, whenever you’re free? Until I complete my Dream of Love?
How about Tuesdays and Thursdays?
And so it was decided that every Tuesday and Thursday, I would spend the afternoon listening to Terry play the piano.
Is it possible to be utterly unable to play a piece that one used to play smoothly, however many years ago? And after practising every single day? It must be. Maybe that’s how difficult and profound and complex playing an instrument is, but still it was bewildering how slowly Terry progressed. She would unfailingly stumble at the beginning, and just when I thought she had finally got into the flow, she would stop again at a familiar spot. It made me wonder if she was doing it on purpose. This piece, with its sugary title that made me want to squirm in my seat, Dream of Love, could not be much more than four minutes long, and yet Terry could never play those four minutes straight through. Whether the piece was for beginners or for really advanced players, who knows, but its overdramatic progression – the way it built up to a climax felt so over the top, going up or coming down or both – always made me queasy. Just when you thought the piece was ending, a series of hysterically high notes would soar up, only to trail off as if to excuse itself, Dear me, did that come off as hysterical? It’s just that I’m so terribly pleased with myself. Then the lower notes would follow with an oh-so-convincing air, pulling the listener back into the piece only to end abruptly, as if everything that had taken place had suddenly been abandoned. What was that about?
Terry, however, seemed to be emotionally attached to the music and continued to play it on Tuesdays and Thursdays for two hours straight without a break. Glancing at her in profile one time, I noticed that she was so consumed by her Dream of Love that sweat appeared to be dripping from every pore. It was all I could do to keep a straight face. When the time came for me to leave, Terry would always apologize. Bianca, I’m so sorry. Next time, next time for sure, I’ll knock it out of the park. It made me smile to hear the phrase ‘knock it out of the park’ from someone like Terry, whose body was inhabited by a sixty-year-old and a seventy-year-old.
I thought meeting regularly like that would lead to an exchange of personal stories or gossip, but no such thing occurred. Terry had no idea what my husband did for a living, and I had no idea what her husband did either. What’s your family like? Where were you born? How old are you? What do you do every day? How long have you lived here? Do you even have a husband? Do you have children? Do I have any intention of having children? What kind of life do you lead? Those questions never passed our lips.
Terry would just play, saying nothing. During our brief teatime before each session, she would reflect on her mistakes from the last session and lay out her goals for that day, all sober and serious. I couldn’t tell whether Terry was an unhappy woman. I have a habit of imagining how unhappy a woman is every time I see one. Of course, nothing comes of it since I can’t ask a woman flat out, So are you unhappy or not? Terry was earnestness itself. But her eyes were timid when she looked at me. I would say every time, You’re going to be great today, I have a feeling … Terry, I would hastily add.
Really, Bianca? It makes me so happy to hear you say that.
And yet, Terry still couldn’t play the piece to the end without stumbling. Two weeks passed, then three weeks, like slowly walking down a long, empty corridor.
Sitting at home doing nothing, I could hear Terry practising her usual Liebestraum. I hummed along to the now utterly familiar melody, tracing the notes as I brought in the laundry and wiped the dishes. My husband, who happened to be at home, seemed surprised to hear me humming and asked me what the matter was. He seemed oblivious to the sound of Terry’s piano.
It’s nothing … hey, what do you think of the name Bianca?
Bianca? What’s that about?
Don’t you think Bianca is a great name?
I don’t know … is it Italian? I guess it’s not bad. But then, I don’t know what makes a name great either.
Sometimes, when I heard the faint sound of a piano – while watching a news item about the nuclear meltdown, for example – I would turn off the TV and softly approach the wall. If I noticed it while vacuuming, I would flip the switch and open the window. And sometimes I would sit at the dining table very straight and take a deep breath. Then I would place my hands on the table and move them at random along with Terry’s music. Even though I was just tapping away haphazardly – the last time I touched a piano was probably during a music lesson at primary school – when the music ended and my fingers stopped moving, an unfamiliar elation would fall upon me like golden rain, maybe from the back of my throat or somewhere high in the air. It would be so intense that my heart would ache. And I felt, vaguely, how wonderful it must be to be able to do something like that with one’s fingers and eyes and body. Then, a feeling of anxiety would rush over me. What exactly is ‘something like that’? Touching a piano? Reading, memorizing and managing to play a piece through? What is it? Or, is it related to all that, but something else entirely? The more I thought about it, the more confused I became. All I knew was that it wasn’t just about the satisfaction I gained by moving my fingers randomly to the sound of music that someone else had spent ages practising.
On my thirteenth visit, Terry finally succeeded in playing the entire Liebestraum without making a single mistake. It happened quite suddenly. By that time, I had given up wondering whether she would ever get through the piece. Terry’s performance was simply magnificent. With tremendous concentration, she played as if marking something unrepeatable on something irretrievable, tenderly drawing the keyboard down to some soft place buried within her heart, then abruptly pulling it upwards. Each breath enveloped her fingers, her arms – enveloped Terry herself. The notes were tied together by an invisible string, and yet they were so free. The glimmering tremolo in the middle of the piece made it feel as if the world itself was quivering under its inconceivable brilliance. I pressed my hand over my heart. Please never end – I almost spoke the words out loud.
When the echoes of the last note disappeared from the room, Terry turned to me quietly and whispered, I did it. Then, she said in a slightly louder voice, Bianca, I did it, Bianca. Were you listening?
Yes, Terry, I was listening. You did it, I said.
Terry flared her nostrils in excitement, her mouth closed. I stood up, raised my hands up to my face and clapped as hard as I could. I even raised my hands above my head and clapped. I clapped until my hands grew numb. Terry clapped too, as if competing with me. The room filled with our clapping, which made the two of us happy all over again. We kept on clapping for one another. To a stranger, we were nothing more than a white-haired old lady and a scrawny pale-faced woman in her forties – but at that moment, I was Bianca and she was Terry. And – I don’t know how it happened – we pressed our lips together, quite naturally. It was just that, a pressing of the lips, but we did it with all our heart.
I stopped going to Terry’s house after that. I stopped seeing her altogether, just as it had been before. That’s how it is, even among neighbours. I would sometimes hear the garage door open and watch from my kitchen window upstairs as a car left, but I could never see who was inside. I spent my days as aimlessly as before, watering the ivy pots, chocolate cosmos and violets that bordered the front porch, clipping the overgrown leaves, spraying insect repellent and adding fertilizer to the soil. The sound of the piano had ceased entirely, and before I knew it, it was August. All the roses had withered, the ones that during the rainy season I had feared might overtake the house with millions of blossoms. With their flowers gone, leaves were all that remained of the rosebushes. Yet, there were still some small white petals scattered beneath the deep green leaves. I put the petals in my palm, one by one. With no particular celebration or ceremony in mind, I placed the petals next to one another on the sunny windowsill.