This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  “Grandpa is a very interesting man. He was telling me about Shanghai right after the war.” He suddenly became possessive of the old man and didn’t want to say more. “But that’s another story. What did I miss?”

  “Paul was telling us about your Pete Harrington obsession. Buddy, I had no idea.”

  The financier glanced over at Gutterman, trying to hide his irritation. “I was never obsessed.”

  “With whom?” Camille asked.

  “The rock star, Pete Harrington,” Gutterman said. “Peter was completely obsessed.”

  “I was not obsessed!”

  “Come on!” Gutterman turned to the others. “I shared an office with him. He had all his albums and he went to see him two consecutive nights when he played New York. I’d call that a minor obsession.”

  Harrington choked down his irritation and smiled. “What’s your point here, Paul?”

  “Nothing, really. I just thought it was kind of funny.”

  In truth, Pete Harrington had loomed large for a while. They shared a name and were roughly the same age, but Harrington had become world-famous for making shallow, irresistible music and pinballing through a succession of starlets, strippers, and lawsuits whose reportage always included a picture of him grinning, even when being led to jail. Whatever happened, he just didn’t seem to give a damn! And people loved him for it.

  To this he had compared his own life. Measured and measuring. Risk-averse. Calculating. By all appearances a midlevel banker with a perfectly orderly life. But to himself, inside, he was the other Pete Harrington. He just needed a way to prove it to the world.

  “Peter,” Camille interjected, “it’s so nice to meet your friends, but I actually have to go. I promised a friend that I would come to her party.”

  All the electricity seemed to depart from the roof. He’d meant to get her away from Kell and Gutterman, but he realized now that to her eyes he was just like them. Fair enough. She’d mentioned something about a party when he’d asked her out, and he couldn’t blame her for using her escape hatch. He tried not to sigh. “I understand. I’ll walk you downstairs.”

  They pushed through the crowd to the elevator, and as they got in she said, in Chinese, “elevator,” and he repeated it: elevator. She gave an embarrassed little smile and said “down,” and he mimicked her: down. When he stepped out of the building, several women moved hesitantly closer to him, then backed off when she emerged. “More prostitutes,” she said. Prostitutes, he echoed, numbly. Pointless, he thought. It’s all so pointless. The whole farce of learning Chinese, of trying to be at home in Shanghai, when the only point in being here was to not be someplace else.

  He looked at his watch, hiding behind his business persona. “It’s eight thirty now, and we started at six, so that’s two and a half hours I owe you.”

  She leveled a look at him. “Don’t be silly. I won’t accept any money for the night. We are friends. Besides, you can come with me. Unless you want to stay with your companions.”

  “Oh!” He felt his chest swell. “I’ll call my driver.”

  “No,” she said. “We will go by taxi.”

  “Why?” He was already taking out his cell phone. “I’m sure he’s close.”

  “Because he’s your driver. Your car. Your life. It’s too easy for you. This way it’s our night.” She said it in Chinese, and he repeated it: our night.

  A cab was already idling at the curb, and they climbed in. Camille said something to the driver and he grunted and they rolled out onto the Zhongshan Lu, past the opulent lights of the Bund. Peter glanced at Camille’s profile. Everything he wanted was contained in this motion and the opacity of the evening in front of them. Life was a song about a beautiful woman in a cab in Shanghai on the way to a party. What else did he need to know?

  He had a subtle sense of things changing, accelerating. Camille produced a tiny silver flask from her purse and offered it to him, a move that was untypical for Chinese women, but somehow very elegant. Flappers, the 1920s. Shanghai, 1947. He took a drink. It was bai-jiu: Chinese white lightning. It burned down his gullet, then burned back up again, like a mushroom cloud in his chest. He gave it back to her and watched her put the bottle to her lips. They were on an adventure together.

  “Your friends are really crazy,” she said.

  “They are crazy. I think Kell just has too much money. If that’s possible. I don’t know what the story is with Paul. I always thought of him as sort of a loser. I haven’t seen him for years, and then he pops up here, in the middle of a divorce. Something’s up.”

  “Goldman is being investigated.” She saw his surprise. “I have a friend here who works in their Shanghai office. Everyone knows about it.”

  Harrington laughed. “Let me tell you how this plays out: they ‘investigate’ it, the government issues some press releases and makes some speeches, then Goldman agrees to pay a fine with no admission of wrongdoing. A couple of guys get fired; everybody else gets promoted.”

  She pulled out her phone. “Should we check your friend’s name and see if he is one of those to get fired?”

  “I’m enjoying the evening too much to do that.”

  “He envies you. It is clear. He is in trouble, and you are famous.”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “Yes, you are. I searched your name on the Internet. Crossroads Partners.”

  So she knew about Crossroads. That always happened sooner or later. “Well, I’m flattered that you searched me on the Internet.”

  “Some people are very angry at you.”

  “Let them be angry. Everyone knew the risks and everyone played the game. I didn’t do anything illegal. Does it change your opinion of me?”

  She looked at him across the width of the backseat. “No,” she said breezily. “Just don’t ask me to invest any money with you.”

  He shook his head at her. “You are something!”

  “Yes, people tell me I am too honest. Were you really obsessed with Pete Harrington?”

  He tried to minimize it. “I liked his music. I actually met him once, believe it or not.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” The awkwardness of that brush with fame felt quaint now that he was famous in his own right. “It was probably about 1996, and I was at a club called CBGB in New York and he came in. He was sitting at a table with some friends, and I couldn’t resist going up to him and saying hello. I think I said something stupid like, ‘I really like your music!’”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Thanks, man!’”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. And I just stood there. I’d just gotten the news that I’d made vice president, and I’d had a few drinks, so I was feeling pretty pumped, kind of like, hey, we’re all rock stars here.”

  The idea amused Camille and he could see her smiling in the car’s shadowy light. “Tell me more. Who was he sitting with?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of girls, a guy in a suit. Duffy, who was the lead guitar player in his band. And I’m standing there, I’ve already blown my big, brilliant line, which was, I really like your music! I mean, seriously, that was my best line! And suddenly everything was just sucked out of me. Like he had all the gravity and I was just the satellite, orbiting around him. And I felt like if I walked away, I’d go spinning out into the nothingness of my own little life. So I just stood there, as if he was going to invite me to sit down and have a drink with him. In English they call that being starstruck.”

  Her mouth opened into a silent laugh and she covered her teeth with her hand. “I’m sorry.” She reached over and touched his sleeve. “What did he do?”

  “You know, I gotta give him credit: he was incredibly gracious. He’d probably had this experience hundreds of times. After this incredibly long—no, not long: timeless pause, which to other people was probably ten seconds, he turned back to me and said, ‘Hey, man, what’s your name?’ and I told him, and of course since we have the same name h
e probably thought I was completely crazy, but then he said, ‘Listen, Peter, we’re kind of in the middle of something, so I can’t hang out with you right now. But I’m glad you came over to say hi.’ Then he shook my hand, and I could walk away and not feel like a complete zero. He was actually very decent.”

  “Maybe I would be the same way as you. He’s very famous here, you know.”

  “I’ve noticed that. Why?”

  “He was one of the first foreign bands to come over for a tour after the Tiananmen incident. At his show in Shanghai, he said, ‘This is for the heroes of Tiananmen,’ in Chinese, and in a few minutes they had closed his show and canceled all his concerts. Now he is known for that.”

  The former banker remembered hearing about that. Nobody knew why he’d shouted it or who had put him up to it—he sang about getting drunk and getting laid, not politics—but ever since then he defined to some degree what a real rock star was for the Chinese. His rock star face had worked its way into their art like a Warhol image: the intersection of the superficial and the desperately important. At least, that’s how one of the gallery owners at Moganshan 50 had put it.

  But he was tired of Pete Harrington. “Tell me about yourself. You’ve been tutoring me for two months and I still know almost nothing about you.”

  “My life is so boring!” Camille said. “I grew up in Suzhou. Very boring. I went to Suzhou University. Also boring.”

  “Why did you move to Shanghai?”

  “I always wanted to live in Shanghai.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. She looked out the window at the passing river and then turned to him. “From the time I was girl, Shanghai seemed so exciting, and so filled with interesting things. I imagined wrapping Shanghai all around me, like a beautiful coat.” She cocked her head and smiled. “And now I am wearing it.”

  She offered him the flask again, and he poured more of the raw liquid down his throat, then shook his head like a dog. She laughed at him, then took a delicate sip before screwing on the cap.

  “Your description of Shanghai reminds me of why I went to New York. But I always thought of it as the Other Life.”

  “The Other Life.”

  “I didn’t know what else to name it. This will sound stupid, but I think everything I’ve done in the last thirty years is based around that idea.”

  He’d never explained it to anyone but Kell, who had ridiculed him. The Other Life was something he’d discovered when he went to New York from Pennsylvania. At first he associated it with the clubs: the famous ones like CBGB and the Palladium. They had a line outside and a rude doorman looking like he wanted to give you a shove, and you stood in the line and watched people try to break in front of you, or just walk up to the bouncer and glide past him, and the only reason he could think that so many people would subject themselves to such brutal selection was that there was some sort of hidden world inside, people who knew something you didn’t, girls who would fuck you in some special way, like in movies, except they’d be the person in the movie, and make you that person, too. And invariably the places were hot and loud, filled with people who were just like him or despised him for his ordinariness because he was, at that time, just a Wall Street flunkie, and after five hours of drinking and shouting over the music until his ears rang, he always walked out and he wasn’t a rock star or a person in a movie, he was still himself.

  Which didn’t stop him from chasing his other life all over New York. It stopped residing in the hip clubs and glimmered anew at the restaurants that had once been too expensive for him, and in the executive dining room, and on the fifty-seventh floor, where the senior executives had their offices. It glowed darkly among the grandiose ambitions of his imagined bond fund and the idea of making vast amounts of money, far more than he would ever have thought he needed to be happy. It swelled and became more exclusive, something shared by people who flew private, who had waterfront mansions in East Hampton and apartments in Paris. It was the big money, the completely unreasonable money, where restaurant menus and airfares and automobiles and all the expenses that most people reckoned carefully against their income became so insignificant that they were no longer even noticeable. It was like traveling in a country where the currency had been devalued beyond all sense, and one of your dollars was worth a thousand of theirs. He wanted to make the whole world that country, and Crossroads would be his passport. He left Goldman and struck out on his own.

  There were countless meetings, a thousand nights spent calculating risk and profit depending on a hundred variables. The first few backers were the most difficult, but by the end, when he was already well-known within the smallish circle of Wall Street players, people came to him and couldn’t wait to invest their money. For ten years he’d been utterly absorbed in chasing the Other Life, chasing it in polished cars and private jets, chasing it to a diner in rural Pennsylvania, to dinners in the Hamptons, to the runway at Paris Fashion Week, in and out of a marriage, to Aspen, to his father’s deathbed, where he received the first intimation that the Other Life was bigger than he’d guessed. Finally, he walked up to the vast wood table of the world’s second-largest financial firm and signed a pile of documents, and when he turned away from the table three hundred million dollars richer, he felt at last that the Other Life was finally his. He stumbled home in a daze, alone, with nothing to do but enjoy the fat-headed barbiturate of pure satisfaction.

  For a short time, he’d had it. He was making more in interest each day doing nothing than most people earned working all year, and if that wasn’t a win, what was? He could charter jets and read admiring profiles of his success in magazines. He could see awe in people’s faces when they were introduced to him. But having it, he didn’t know what to do with it.

  He lived in a loft in Tribeca, the entire top floor of what had once been a factory. His day revolved around going to the gym and puttering around with various museum boards, or eating out with friends, or going to the office he still kept at Crossroads, since he still held a large interest in it. Dinner parties kept him busy, too. New York City was an aquarium of interesting personalities, and he filled his time with a parade of new acquaintances. This person who wrote for The New York Times, another who was a Rockefeller, the famous artist, the Russian banker, the fashion impresario, the Internet billionaire, the gorgeous waitress, the Columbia professor … New friends, new galleries, new restaurants, new bands, always new things in buildings, until the occasional feeling began to steal over him that it was all just more of a uniform commodity called “newness.”

  Everything pleased him but nothing inspired him. All the stories of his life—where he’d grown up, how he’d made his fortune—began to feel stale. How many times had he deflected questions about himself in the exact same pseudo-modest way? How many times had he refused comment on the market, as if he was far beyond it? He read Ecclesiastes and then got sick of hearing himself talk about it. Then came the dissatisfaction about insignificant things. The coffee at a hundred-fifty-dollar lunch was lukewarm. The service at the hotel was lackluster. The window of the limo had a tiny chip right at eye level, and his gaze was always drawn to it.

  Camille listened to this story without interrupting. Now she tilted her head to the side in a show of mock sympathy. “It must be sad to be so rich.”

  He laughed, and then she laughed with him. “I know,” he said. “The man who has everything but isn’t satisfied—it’s not very original.”

  “That’s so Western, to worry about being original. In China, we don’t worry about original. It’s not important to be original. Kongzi, Lao-tzu, Han Shan—they didn’t care about original, they cared about the Way, or about the Mountain. So, here in China, don’t worry about original.” She leaned back into her corner of the seat. “You haven’t told me about the women.”

  “What women?”

  His deception amused her. “Of course, Peter! Do you think I’m a baby? If you look for your other life in a nightclub or in a private
jet, of course you were going to look for it in women!” She was holding him expectantly with her eyes. “You wanted to tell me about your other life—okay! But you have to tell everything about it, not just the parts that you want to tell.” She laughed. “I’m sorry: did you think that this was your car and your driver?”

  Harrington felt shame at being caught out, because in fact the women had been an integral part of what he’d thought was the Other Life. He smiled down at his lap, then to her. “You are something!”

  “Yes, yes: you already told me that. Let’s hear it!”

  He liked being toyed with. It felt the same as when she demanded he pronounce a phrase a dozen times until it sounded right. It amazed him that he was talking about these things with her. He’d been seeing Nadia for four months, and had never mentioned any of it. Nadia was more slow and receptive, like a beautiful sculpture.

  “Okay. As you can see by looking at me, I’m not the most handsome man in the world…” He couldn’t help waiting a fraction of a second for her to jump in and politely disagree with him, but she merely watched him in the shifting lights of the car’s interior. “But suddenly, I had several hundred million dollars and I was fairly well-known. Not like a rock star, of course, but with profiles in the major print media in New York, The Times and all that, and when you put that together in an Internet search, it gives you a certain e-fame—”

  “And you had three hundred million dollars.”

  “Actually,” he corrected her, “that was the liquid part. When you count the stake I still held in Crossroads, it was more like six hundred million. Which is not as neat as the word ‘billionaire,’ but when your date can google you and find your net worth—”

  “Six hundred million dollars!”

  He laughed. “Okay. Point taken.”

  “My car and my driver. Now”—she crossed her arms—“what kind of women did you like?”

  “Well,” he offered, knowing Camille would get there anyway, “there was my wife, I suppose.”

  The former art student turned waitress. That was before the six hundred million. By all measures, she was a good woman. Pretty, but not exotic. Extremely kind, though, with an earthy gift for mothering that transcended the urban environment of Manhattan. Seeing her with Conrad was magical, like being in the presence of a Renaissance Madonna. But as Crossroads began to reveal the lineaments of his new life, it became clear that she didn’t fit. She wasn’t charming with clients and she didn’t like leaving the baby with a sitter. Even if she’d kept up her artwork, she didn’t have the ambition to compete for agents or gallery space. She seemed to want him to just stay home every night with her and the baby. If they’d been living upstate, where she was from, or he’d been a small-town banker in Indiana, she would have been ideal; they could have done the old farmhouse, the pony for the kids—all of that. But not this life. Not the one he wanted. In this one, she felt like Paul Gutterman’s wife.