“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.
But this was all wrong. I was engaged, twenty years old, a businesswoman, and I should never feel this way about a foreigner. I must have had too much of the Cobra’s Kiss. Tomorrow when I awoke I would feel different, and I wouldn’t even remember who Ernest Reismann was. And with Shanghai being so vast, we would perhaps never cross paths again.
But I would like to see him again.
I could hire him, now that Sassoon had declined him. And I could find him easily. The location of Sassoon’s Embankment Building, where Ernest stayed, was near my family printing press before it was forced to relocate. But Ernest was a foreigner, that in and of itself should be an important warning to stay away. I would be asking for trouble, for it was unconventional for a Chinese woman to keep foreigners as staff, and the patrons of my club, the locals, had a tendency of viewing the foreigners as enemies.
But I wanted to hire him. Ernest—the best pianist I had ever met—could play the stride piano, which my instinct told me would be a sensation in my club and revitalize my business. If Ernest caused trouble, if it didn’t work out, I would let him go. It was business, after all.