On the television, a private eye spies on a woman taking off her clothes, and an older man grabs her breasts from behind. When the private eye takes a phone call, you can hear the couple mewling and grunting.
My mother and I don’t say a word. We don’t talk about sex. Thank God.
Later, I run upstairs, get into bed, and send Tash a text. Guess what! If there’s one person who would be utterly gobsmackingly happy for me, it would be Tash.
Colonel Mustard. In the library. Lead pipe.
No.
Definitely lead pipe.
I’m being serious here. I tell her with a text, receive emojis on emojis back. Hearts and unicorns and fish and balloons and cake and stars. I rub the bottom of my feet on my fuzzy blanket and text her a smile and a star back.
Mom keeps the heater on full blast on the way into the city. I’m glad we drove. This way we pass by all the cute little Italian and Japanese places to eat, places that look like whoever built them cared about beauty. If she saw the homeless people sitting against the wall at the BART station, and some of the dingy streets on the way, no amount of pleading would have gotten her onto Paul’s porch.
“Not too bad,” she says, looking approvingly at the stained-glass pieces set into the front door. “Not too bad,” in Filipino mom-speak, means it’s good.
She raises her hand to knock.
“No, don’t.” I seize her hand and point at the window. “That’s someone else having a lesson.”
The girl sounds formidable, just like before, but my mother doesn’t seem to notice. She rubs her hands — “It’s cold here!” — and wraps her cardigan tighter around her dress. Even when it’s cold, she wears dresses. She’s never gotten used to the feeling of pants on her legs.
“She’s really good,” I whisper. I feel edgy, listening to the girl, about to see Paul again. What if he realizes he’s made a mistake?
We look at our phones in companionable silence until eventually the girl pops out the door. I watch my mother from the corner of my eye as we go in. I can tell she’s awestruck by the girl’s face, and then struck again when she sees Paul, bending down a little to come to eye level and shake her hand. His fingers seem somehow even longer today, the way they wrap around her palm. His bulky tweed sweater emphasizes the sharpness of his shoulders, his flat torso. I’m so excited to see him, some of my nervousness is forgotten. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her, though I hadn’t mentioned she’d be coming.
“Hello! You must be Claire’s mother. It’s so nice to meet you.”
My mother’s face instantly melts into a smile. “Elizabeth,” she says in her best manner, her voice softer than it normally is. She looks dubiously at the carpet. “Should I take my shoes off?”
“No need,” Paul says. Inwardly I cringe. She’s embarrassing, in her big floral-print dress, which doesn’t look quite right here. Like she’s been costumed for a different play.
But Paul seems oblivious to her awkwardness. He asks if we got here okay, and if the parking was bad. “It was horrible! How do you drive here?” My eyes widen. Already she’s complaining.
He just laughs. “It’s like an extreme sport.” He moves to the back of the apartment. Cupboards close. A blast of the sink. My mother shoots me a meaningful look I can’t read.
“What?”
“I can see why you like it here.” And she flicks her eyes to the kitchen. “Ang guwapo niya.” He’s handsome.
“You think he’s cute?”
Paul strides back in. Mom turns red, flashes a stiff look at me as he lays down a tray of cookies and her tea. Mortified, I dig into my bag, grab my phone, and check that it’s on silent just so I can hide my face. I suppose he would be handsome to her.
“It’s lovely to watch people dip their cookies,” he says, his smile generous. He must have heard.
“That’s how you should do it,” she says. “Don’t you think?”
“I do, actually. They both taste better.”
I head toward the bathroom, lingering over the pencil drawings framed along the hallway, partly so that I can overhear them. I’m curious to hear what Paul might say about me to her.
“I hope you didn’t take time off of work to be here,” he says, his tone as soft as hers.
“No. My shift ended at three.”
“Ah! Well, I’m so glad she’s here. Does her talent come from you?”
My talent. That’s nice. I turn the water on, just a teeny bit, so I can still hear her. “Well, her father played the piano for our church, and his mother was a music teacher. So it was like that, you know.” I can picture her brushing something imaginary away, as if the talent in our family is no big deal.
“Lovely. And so he still plays?”
“He passed away.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
When I come back, she looks as uncomfortable as I was, slumped in her chair. Her look softens when she sees me. Paul winks a greeting and we settle in — me at the beautiful Steinway again, he to sit in a wooden chair, slightly behind me. He asks if I’d seen his e-mail — he’d sent me a few pieces to try and a few competitions to consider. I chart the movement of her eyes — from him, to me, to the shelves and the drawing of a woman’s profile on the wall.
“I do think the Chopin Étude opus ten, number — yes, number two — in A Minor would be good for you.”
He reaches over to play a few measures. The highest voice — the highest line of melody — sounds like a bell that rings with more depth the more it sings. His hands spring like angsty bugs touching down on random flowers, but his face is placid. This is effortless. I sense victory when the worried wrinkles around my mother’s lips soften, and her head moves in time to the music.
She puts her tea down on the table and turns slightly in her chair to watch us.
“What do you think?” he asks me.
“You make it look easy.”
“Well, it’s a good reach for you,” he says, looking upward and scratching his chin, “but not impossible. It’s got just enough going on to keep you from being bored.”
We move on to the Bach from last week. How to make two or three or four voices sing at once, to sing with the mood of the day with only two hands? I touch the keys carefully, trying to make each one sound clear. Definitive. Every note placed where it should be.
“Better,” he says, nodding. “I can see how hard you’ve worked on it.”
Paul is light with me, but I don’t relax. I keep waiting for a criticism that doesn’t come, partly, maybe, because my mom is sitting in the corner. I nod at his questions as if everything is fine, but it feels like everything is moving faster than I can. The rest of the lesson goes by in a blur. Besides the unboring Chopin, we settle on a Beethoven sonata for me to work on.
Paul turns to my mother. “She’s going to do fine, Mrs. Alalay.”
Words that relieve me as much as her. “Do you really think so?” she asks.
“Well, she can hear herself,” he says, looking at me studiously. “Which is rare. She’ll have to work for it, of course.”
“You’re going to work hard, right?” she asks, turning to me.