The Pianist At The Hotel Bar

In my twenties I passed through Hong Kong almost monthly. There was a hotel I stayed at, not fashionable, the kind that had been fashionable in the late seventies and had since settled into a comfortable obsolescence. The carpets were dark green. The concierge wore a uniform from another decade. I stayed there because the rates were reasonable for a young man pretending to be a businessman, and because the bar on the second floor had a pianist.

He played from seven until eleven. A Chinese man in his sixties, white hair combed back, the same black suit every night. A small upright in the corner of a room that held perhaps fifteen tables and was never more than half full. He played jazz standards and a handful of Mandarin songs I assumed predated me. He never spoke. He never announced anything. He arrived at five to seven and began at seven exactly.

I made a habit of taking a whisky at the bar between meetings, doing the small administrative work of a man whose life was beginning to take a shape he had been waiting for it to take. I tipped him once. He nodded without looking up, in time with the music he was already playing, and I returned to my seat with the strange sense of having performed an action that was, in some way I could not articulate, slightly beside the point. I did not tip him again.

The years did what years do. My routes changed. I stayed in newer hotels with rooftop bars. I did not return.

Almost ten years later I found myself in Hong Kong with an evening to fill, and walked, without quite deciding to, toward the old neighbourhood. The hotel was still there. The bar was almost exactly as I remembered it. The same upright in the same corner. The same half-fullness, which seemed less a condition of the bar than a condition of its existence.

The piano was empty.

I sat at the counter and waited. Seven came and went. By nine I asked the bartender, a woman I did not recognise, where the pianist had gone. She said he had retired the year before. I asked how long he had played there. She paused in the way one pauses before saying something larger than it sounds in one’s own mouth. Thirty-one years, she said. He had played there from 1992 until last spring. He had never taken a request. There was a small card he kept on the piano. People had stopped asking, eventually.

I walked out into the Hong Kong night.

I have thought about him often since. I had spent more hours in his presence, across those years, than in the presence of most of the people I considered my friends. I had not known his name. I had not known he would be there for another decade after I stopped coming, that he would retire without a farewell, that the bar would continue in the silence that was always going to follow him.

We move through certain seasons of our lives believing ourselves the principal figures in them. We are the young man at the bar, building the life. The pianist is scenery. The bartender is scenery. The concierge in the old uniform is scenery. We are the figure in the foreground.

This is almost entirely the wrong way round.

The architecture was the thing. The architecture is always the thing. The young man will move on to other bars and forget most of what he believed himself to be doing. The pianist will sit at the piano for thirty-one years. He will hold the room in its half-full equilibrium, evening after evening, while a thousand young men pass through believing themselves the protagonists of something he is merely accompanying.

He was not accompanying us. We were passing through him.