This Is How It Really Sounds Page 5

  He summarized the whole thing to Camille with the arid phrase: “It didn’t work out.”

  Camille wasn’t fooled. “Of course not. A wife is the life you have, not your Other Life. What about the ones after that?” She grasped his arm and pinched him gently. “Tell me! Tell me everything!”

  What he’d gravitated toward, after his marriage, was actresses and models. Their printed images conveyed impossible states of being: sexuality and innocence, coldness and availability, aloofness and hunger, and that was what intrigued him. In their portfolios, fugitive combinations of light and expression were shot a hundred times from a hundred angles to snatch that unreal instant of beauty and name it into existence, and it was that image that he wanted to possess.

  She laughed. “You’re very shallow, Peter.”

  “You wanted me to be honest, right? I know how shallow all this sounds, but how shallow is it, really? Glamour, fame: on one hand they’re shallow, and on the other, Who wouldn’t want a piece of them, if they could get them on their own terms? Wouldn’t you rather be riding in a taxi with the other Pete Harrington, the rock star, than me?” Her discomfort pleased him and he laughed. “You don’t have to make a choice here. I’d like to ride in a taxi with Pete Harrington, too. But I’m telling you the truth. I’m saying I chased that experience all the way to its furthest extreme, all the way to the photo shoots and the parties that you imagine when you look at the ads. I’ve had dinner with Calvin Klein. I sat on a yacht in Marseilles and had a drink with Allegra Versace. I mean, the fact that I’m even bragging about that, as opposed to bragging about having a drink with Paul Gutterman ten years ago in New York, and that you would find that more interesting, shows that it’s a real phenomenon. And it’s not that they’re not interesting people, and even quite nice people, but do they hold some mysterious knowledge, the way it appears in their photos and publicity? Is any model as beautiful as she appears in that one instant when she’s made up and it’s the perfect exposure and there’s no stupid remark or tiredness or sweat or any of those things that make up real life? I can tell you: no! I tried to go all the way into that experience to make it real, and, finally, the answer is no! So if that’s shallow, I’m shallow.”

  “But Nadia is a model.” She said it with just enough feeling that Peter sensed it was more than an abstract observation, and he felt a tiny, quiet pleasure, even though it flew in the face of what he’d just professed.

  “Nadia is a very nice woman who is kind and intelligent and also happens to be a model. And if I met someone else that I had more in common with, Nadia’s profession wouldn’t matter at all.” It seemed coldly disloyal hearing himself say it, but things had already shifted in the few hours since they’d met for dinner.

  Camille heard him out, then dismissed it. “Yes, she’s very nice.”

  At that moment the cabdriver turned his blunt crew-cut head toward her and asked her for directions. Harrington could see nothing familiar around them. They could be anywhere in China. Camille settled back into her seat for a moment without saying anything, then turned straight to him and looked in his eyes for a few seconds before she spoke. “Do you want to try something?”

  She dug into her purse, then opened her hand, which she held down below the level of the seat, where the cabdriver couldn’t see it. Two pills like aspirin tablets sat on her palm. Harrington became wary, but excited.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s Ecstasy,” she answered.

  He looked into her half smile. “You mean, the drug Ecstasy?”

  She nodded very slightly, without a word.

  He’d done X a few times in New York, so it didn’t scare him in and of itself. He liked the buzzy little errands it sent his mind on. But to do it now, in a foreign city with a young woman he barely knew, on the way to an unknown destination … He felt a little thrill. His driver was far away, he didn’t know what part of the immensity of Shanghai they were in. He had no control. Who knew where that rabbit hole came out? “I’ll do it if you do.”

  Her fingernails poked his skin like cat’s claws as she put one of the tablets on his palm, then she looked at him as she stuck the little white circle on her outstretched tongue and flicked it back into her mouth. He frowned and tipped his head at her, then ate his pill. They washed it down with the fiery bai-jiu.

  “There,” she said, “now you have done something illegal.”

  “But I swallowed the evidence.”

  She put her hand on his leg. “So do I, sometimes.” When she said it, his brain went thick, even though the drug hadn’t yet hit his stomach.

  “Go on,” she said, inquisitorial again. “You found that your other life was not in the women. What happened after that?”

  The Other Life. It felt close right now, as close as this woman and this confession. As close as the end of this taxi ride, or wherever she was taking him. He felt the urge to keep talking, to tell everything.

  As New York became unsatisfying, he’d begun to chase the mystery in a wider arc. He flew to Venice for the Bienniale and lingered in Italy for another month, driving through Tuscany with one of his model-girlfriends. He came back and talked about it until he was sick of it—the castle they’d stayed in, the rare wine. After three tellings, he was done with it. After that he went to Peru and toured the ruins of the Sacred Valley, half-amused at the novelty of being robbed at gunpoint in the sacred acropolis of Pisac. That made for a good story also, but he felt increasingly weightless, as if he were standing in a swimming pool up to his neck, and his feet didn’t press very hard on the bottom. He wanted to get away. Not just from New York, but from all his anecdotes and exploits and professed wisdom about the financial markets dispensed in luxurious interiors. People assumed that because he was young and rich, he knew some hidden secret, but, in fact, he hadn’t discovered anything.

  He booked a condo for three months in Aspen and went skiing every day. He’d been skiing for fifteen years, usually in Vermont, but that winter he got good enough to feel free. He could choose his line and go almost anywhere he wanted, and it was refreshing to be someplace where the only thing known about him was that he was a guy from back east who skied okay but could never land the drops. The only friends he had were other skiers he met on the slopes, and most of those were transients there for a week or else part of the local world of waiters and rental-shop workers who were living their twenties and thirties in a shared limbo of snow and easy good times. These were the people who knew the good spots the tourists never found: which roped-off areas were filled with hidden powder stashes and which would send you over a sixty-foot cliff. They were a clannish bunch, subtly ranking each other in a meritocracy of skiing ability and backcountry savvy. A juvenile scene, in some ways, but also one that valued physical toughness and bravery, like tales of the Yukon gold rush he’d read as a boy. He had no reason to want to be part of it, but he did, and sometimes, when one or two of them might take him to a forbidden area of the mountain and show him a route with a warning like “Whatever you do, stay away from that roll-over on the right.” What’s there? And what was there, on the right, was disaster, death on a ragged spike of rock far below, in terrain that one out of a hundred thousand skiers could negotiate. He could whip past right next to it and look down and feel the Other Life there, or see it high overhead in the smoky slopes that crouched beyond the ski lifts, the ones that you needed special gear to get to, leaving in the dark of the night with a headlamp and climbing for hours to a highland of cliff bands and moving snow where everyone descended on his own, singly, so that an avalanche would only kill one of them. It was there in the mist, far away, a place he could only imagine. He wanted to go there more than anything he’d wanted in a long time.

  He bought the gear, all brand-new and top-of-the-line, getting advice from his friends on climbing skins and randonnée bindings. He bought an avalanche transceiver and a special backpack to keep him on the surface if things cut loose under him. Then he spent a week skiing his new gear inbounds
and wearing his beacon strapped to his torso like it was the shiniest piece of bling in the universe. His friends wouldn’t take him until he’d practiced with the beacon, and he became adept at reading the numbers on the display and following the arrows to the target that simulated a buried skier, though it was impossible not to imagine that buried skier as himself and to marvel at how long it took to find someone, let alone dig them out.

  He did a shakedown run with Dave, one of the locals he’d befriended. They climbed for two hours to a nearby peak and skied it carefully, and a few days later they climbed a steeper one. He learned how to use an ice ax and practiced self-arrests by hurling himself backward down steep slopes. He did well enough that Dave invited him to join a trip to a much higher peak. It was a three-hour climb from the road, and in flat light or low visibility could be, in Dave’s words, “sketchy.” They’d go with two other young men that Harrington had heard about and seen but never met, big dogs on the local extreme-skiing circuit. Harrington drove his rental car to the closest viewpoint, but it wasn’t something you could see from the road. He mentioned it to another friend at the bar who knew how he skied and the fellow had looked at him with raised eyebrows. Along with its thousands of feet of untouched powder, the peak was well-known as an unstable south-facing area filled with narrow chutes that sucked you in and then cliffed-out disastrously when there was no longer any chance of retreat. “You’re going there?” he said, then gave a single piece of advice: “Don’t go first.” Harrington felt his heart speed up.

  He never made the climb. A storm came in, and the snowpack became too fragile. They waited a few days for it to consolidate, but one of the men caught strep throat, and then it snowed again, and while they were waiting for that new dump to consolidate, a slide of another sort had begun.

  He had spotted the possibility of Crossroads’s collapse several months before, not as something that would necessarily happen, but as something that could happen given a confluence of various unlikely events. Despite its gigantic paper assets and its worshipful mentions in the financial press, Crossroads owned nothing and produced nothing: it derived its value from the arcane relationships it created between hypothetical streams of income that were cut and repackaged and repackaged again like a shipment of cocaine at a dockside warehouse. Vast flows of future money were claimed and in turn promised to others, minus a tiny percentage, while those others in turn shunted the flow in another direction, taking their cut along the way. It was a trillion-dollar balancing act, so highly leveraged and brittle that a few taps of precisely placed doubt could shatter its immaculate structure. And in that case, no one would escape alive.

  A journalist at one of the lesser financial papers called to interview him for a story on the fund, and Harrington dismissed the man’s assertions with a show of good cheer that had the reporter apologizing for his mistaken assumptions. Fifteen minutes after he hung up, Harrington quietly called his sister and mother and told them to sell their stakes. They rushed for the exit the next day, but most of the big entities, the ones that mattered, that could bring down the whole financial system, were locked into a kind of suicide pact with counterparties on the other side, and to them he preferred to say nothing. Sounding the alarm would itself precipitate the end, but as much as that, it simply embarrassed him. How could he admit to his investors and all the people who had lauded him for his brilliance that the whole foundation of their profits was, from another view, a gigantic greed machine? The fund was perfectly designed to prey on certain people’s presumption that they should be able to flow millions of dollars their way, not because they had done something useful, but because they could, in turn, prey on people equally presumptuous further down the line. So he kept quiet, and waited for the avalanche.

  When it came, it was nearly instantaneous. On Monday Crossroads was a trillion-dollar fund. By Friday the doors had been padlocked. With a swiftness that Pete Harrington the rock star might have envied, Peter Harrington the financier suddenly became famous. Not e-famous: infamous.

  “Why?” Camille asked. “Simply because you guessed wrong?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I think the bigger issue was that I hedged.”

  After he’d cashed in the first time, he explained, he’d wanted to protect his remaining investment. “Don’t forget; I still had a lot of money invested in Crossroads.” And so, knowing better than anyone the exact composition of his bond fund and its weaknesses, he began to take out insurance against its failure. Not a lot, at first, not something that could be called “betting against it,” but finally, as things began to change in the world and his partnership with Kell became closer, the hedging became a business venture of its own. When word came out that he was leading the charge against his own creation, Crossroads collapsed with a violence that shook financial markets all over the world, and he made more money on its failure than he had made on its success.

  In the space of a few days, he became one of the most reviled figures in the country. The day his picture appeared on the front page of the New York Post, a busboy dumped a tray of dirty dishes into his lap, and within twenty-four hours he had changed all his phone numbers and hired a bodyguard. An army of accusers confronted him in every public place he showed himself. He learned the telltale signs: the change of expression as they recognized him, the angry conference with a nearby friend, the moment of hesitation, the determined crossing of the room. Even his bodyguard’s cold glare wasn’t always sufficient; he couldn’t very well hammerlock a sixty-year-old sales clerk or a middle-aged woman who’d lost her retirement. He stopped going out publicly, relying on an assistant to do his shopping for him and cruising from his loft to each appointment in the safety of his limousine. The charitable organizations were still happy to have him around, but the dinner invitations became fewer, and the dinners more contentious. There was always the offhanded joke or the unexpected insult when he met someone new. At first he tried to defend himself, pointing out that he had merely hedged his remaining Crossroads holdings, just as any prudent investor would. It was useless: in some people’s eyes, the fact that he still had a fortune was a mark of disgrace, rather than achievement. Month after month, a relentless assault was waged across the Internet and the financial pages. On late-night comedy shows, his name became a bitter one-liner about bottomless greed.

  “Then you felt ashamed?” she asked him.

  “No! I felt angry. I played the game according to the rules. They shouldn’t blame me if the rules were inadequate.”

  So when Kell relocated to Shanghai, and invited him to join him in his new venture three months ago, he’d jumped on it. Shanghai fascinated him. It reminded him of New York in its mixture of exquisite manners and rude hustle. The Chinese businesspeople he met were friendly and sophisticated—either they hadn’t heard of him or they were too polite to mention it. The culture was strange and fascinating; the feel was fresh. The Chinese had never taken the advice of Wall Street’s eminent pitchmen, so the global financial collapse was a distant shudder in Shanghai. He had over eight hundred million dollars, and few were worried about how he’d made it.

  “So that’s my whole shallow story,” he said.

  “You don’t hear stories like that all the time,” she said, nodding. “Thank you for telling me.”

  He was starting to feel the Ecstasy now, a subtle rushing between his temples. He looked over at Camille, who sat in her white dress, watching him. He wasn’t sure exactly how long it had been since either of them had said anything. “Where is the Other Life now?” she finally asked.

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “The mountain is massive. The mountain is mist.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She leaned over and squeezed his arm, and her touch seemed to travel up to his head and make it vibrate for a moment, like a xylophone bar being struck. “It’s just a poem. From Han Shan.”

  She smiled at him. They were coconspirators now. He had no idea who Han Shan was, or who she really
was, and he didn’t want to know at the moment. The city had rearranged itself behind its façade of street scenes and traffic and become a secret world that they coursed through together, full of electric and alluring pleasures. He had a sense of distant hilarity, unattached to anything in particular. This girl, this taxi, these ringing, bending, liquid lights: this other life.

  The Ecstasy was creeping up to his head now, giving everything a burnished feel. Ernie’s black-and-white Shanghai of 1946. Whatever you wanted, you could get it: women … opium … a passport. Camille was that woman, and the cabdriver, with his big, crew-cut head, was actually a rickshaw driver, yes, from the last century, transmigrated into this car and this Shanghai. Peter had no idea which Shanghai that was anymore. Once he left the three or four neighborhoods and highways he frequented, every section of the endless city was interchangeable with any other. The driver dropped them at a street closed off by food vendors who had begun to pack up their stalls for the night. Steam was billowing from pots of boiling water, luminous in the lights that hung above the carts. The secret panting of a beast disguised as lumpy old women waving ladles through their bubbling cauldrons. He could have looked at the steam for hours, but he felt a tugging on his arm as Camille plunged them into the narrow file between the cauldrons and grills, past the skewers of barbecued pigeons, past the rows of glistening candied crab apples on sticks. The dumplings … and they were beyond it all, floating down the sidewalk within the clicking of her high heels.