This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  The street seemed typical of nonforeigner Shanghai, small-scale shops selling hardware or food or inexpensive furniture, no logos in sight. The façades were brown brick or concrete, dulled by decades of pollution and resonant with the million small transactions of lower-tier lives. A strange place for a party. The line of buildings ceased and was replaced by a low white wall, which they followed for a long time before Camille stopped in front of a brown wooden door. She took out a set of keys and unlocked it, then pushed it open for him.

  The space inside was dark, as if the light from the street couldn’t enter. The only illumination in the murky little courtyard was a paper lantern glowing above them in red and white, and when he saw it there against the dark it seemed suddenly intensely important, like the original red and white lantern of the entire universe. As his eyes adjusted he could make out shrubs and rockeries. They stood in a tiny white-walled courtyard the size of a small living room.

  “What is this place?”

  “This is the Nan Lin garden,” Camille answered. “This was the estate of a very rich man during the Qing Dynasty. Like a hedge-fund manager. Like you. If you lived at that time, this would have been your life.”

  The courtyard was bounded by pale white walls, and she led him through an opening shaped like a crescent moon, into another courtyard lined with jumbles of oddly shaped rocks rising as high as his chest. Their shapes suggested birds or strange animals. They made him uneasy and claustrophobic.

  “Camille, what are we doing here?”

  “Shhh … You wanted the Other Life.”

  They passed through an opening in the wall like a giant teapot, a narrow passageway, and then another door shaped like a vase. They were deep in the garden, among the teeming rocks and the fronds of bamboo and shrubbery that rose over their heads. He could hear, strangely, the sound of jazz, and he wasn’t sure if he was really hearing it or if it was in his head.

  “Do you know where you’re going?”

  Camille looked at him and her mouth twisted out of shape and her eyes narrowed. “This will be new for you,” she said, and she took him straight toward a high barrow of rock whose center collapsed into a vague black emptiness. A stab of dread went through him. He had a feeling that she was leading him to his death.

  She felt him resisting. “Oh, are you afraid of the dark? Poor little boy! Hold on to me.” She grasped his hand and he entered into her shroud of jasmine fragrance as they plunged into the darkness. She seemed to curve to the left, and in seconds they had both disappeared. The smell was of moist earth and dead leaves, as if they were deep inside a cavern, or a grave. She stopped and stood there silently in the pitch darkness. Soft bursts of color and swaths of light swarmed across his vision. “Where are we?” he asked. He just wanted to hear her voice.

  “Are you frightened?”

  He didn’t know how long he hesitated before answering, tumbling headlong through her question. It might have been one second or it might have been a minute. In the dark cave, there was no way to measure anything. “No. I trust you.”

  “Good.”

  She started moving again and took a turn to the right. He thought he could make out a change in the quality of the darkness, and with every step it seemed to become less uniform, to break into different shades of black, then charcoal, and then, to his surprise, they turned left again and were facing an opening whose large expanses and yellow luminosity seemed, after the cave, to be the most brilliant vision he’d ever beheld.

  They were at the edge of a pond, and on the other side, rising from its own reflection, was a pavilion adrift in glowing light. Dots of red and white lanterns curved off to the sides, mimicking the upswept roofs that rose into the darkness. A confetti of gay voices wavered from across the water, the sound of jazz that he’d heard before, nicked by a shred of laughter, or an expression of surprise. Amid the glow were elegant men in ties and women with their shoulders wrapped in silk or cashmere shawls. It seemed less a party than a dream that he was entertaining.

  “How do you like it?” Camille asked him, still holding his hand.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  They walked around the small lake and into the middle of the gathering. A jazz sextet with a black saxophonist and a white pianist played with their Chinese cohorts, all of them in white dinner jackets and black ties. He could see fragmentary pieces of a huge buffet along one side of the room, and servers weaving through the dancing crowd with silver trays of champagne. The strange sight of it, and the brief caress of Camille’s fingers on his hand as she released him, made him lose track of where he was and who he was and go tumbling through the night garden.

  He felt a swiftly moving stream of electrons coursing from the nape of his neck and through his brain, and a giddy sense of excitement. He was so ripped! He wished Kell was here. Kell, I am so ripped! I don’t even know what year this is! He was at a party in a Chinese garden with a woman he barely knew, and his whole life felt incomparably grand and wondrous. As they ascended the steps of the pavilion he became acutely aware of all the expressions in the room: the sudden laughter and the polite smiles. He sensed the somber alienation of the people at the edges, the earnest incomprehensible arguments made and received in avid conversations. He ricocheted through a dozen tiny fragments of other people’s lives. The middle-aged woman over there, in the olive-colored blouse and black skirt: pondering something. The young man speaking too eagerly into the face of a pretty young woman, who listened and subtly withdrew at the same time, as if looking for more distance.

  A waiter came by and Harrington pulled a glass of red wine from his tray. The wine had a chalky, cheap taste. He sensed this was some sort of art event. He spotted a bar in one corner of the room, where a white-jacketed bartender was mixing cocktails. “Can I go get a drink?”

  “Of course,” Camille said. “You are the guest of honor.”

  He examined her ironic, narrowed eyes. “Thank you. Can I get you something?” He left her there and wandered toward the bar. The hall was warm in the autumn air and many of the women had bare shoulders, slender carvings of smooth skin rising toward their black hair. He could discern now that some of the people were younger, less wealthy looking but often with earrings or creatively colored hair. He supposed they were the artists, nonconformists in a country that had only lately adopted the Western tradition of admiring the rebel.

  He reached the bar and ordered two gin and tonics, then leaned his elbow on the white cloth and looked through the crowd. Necktie knots glided past, shoulder straps, a gold earring, the smell of nicotine, crisscrossed bits of Chinese conversation. He’d lost sight of Camille. She wasn’t standing where he’d left her. A little shudder of fear went through him. Would she bring him all the way to the center of this dark garden just to ditch him?

  His eyes came to rest on a giant photograph, easily ten feet long, mounted on the wall behind him. The cardboard placard beside it held some Chinese characters and the words “Buried City #46: Hero in the Island of Forgetting.” Next to that was another placard in both Chinese and English, telling about the artist, Xu Ruoshi. It seemed the artist came from one of the cities that was flooded by the Three Gorges Dam and had dedicated himself to photographing his city in its death throes. In this picture, that city had already been almost completely abandoned, but a few old people still refused to leave, and little signs of life appeared among the empty buildings. Laundry on a line. A tiny dumpling stand with one steaming pot. The artist had colored the photos in washes of blue-green, so even though the city had not yet been flooded, it seemed to be underwater already. It was beautiful, and Harrington found himself lost in it, imagining that its life continued to go on magically at the bottom of the dammed-up river. He could be that dumpling vendor, standing there before the abandoned movie theater. The show would be over, the people gone, and him left standing there remembering a crowd that would never return. Harrington stared for a long time thinking of the man, his tiny home, his son far away from him in a distant c
ity, beyond his help. He felt a deep sadness. The Ecstasy …

  Two drinks sat fizzing on the bar and he lifted one to his cheek, could hear the radio-static sound of the carbonation. He felt the sour bubbles bursting through the sweetness on his tongue. A woman’s sudden laugh, a tray of rice noodles stuffed with shrimp, a flat note from the saxophone, a shawl draped across a shoulder. Far down, in the drowned city, laundry was hanging on a line.

  “Do you like it?”

  Camille was next to him again.

  “It’s very moving.”

  She pointed across the crowd toward a thin young man with long hair wearing a black suit cut so strangely that it seemed almost like a caricature of a suit. “That’s Xu Ruoshi,” she said. “He is the artist. He just won a very important prize, and this party is to honor him. If you like, one day I can take you to the gallery where his works are on display.”

  The prospect of having her as his guide again made little sparklers start to sizzle softly in his brain. “I’d like that.”

  Suddenly another woman appeared beside them. She seemed around forty, alluring as a spider in her tight black dress and feather-covered vest. Her hair was braided stylishly against her head like an African. She could be someone in the background of an Italian fashion exposition. She greeted Camille with a kiss, and they exchanged a few words in Chinese, at the end of which the woman raised her hands with surprise and turned to Peter.

  “So you are Peter Harrington! It’s a pleasure to meet you! My name is Diana.”

  So she knew him. He struggled to retrieve that silly Peter Harrington who was a financier and had a history. “And what do you do?” he asked her.

  “I own the Phoenix Gallery. Xu Ruoshi is one of my artists.”

  “Lucky you!” He had meant it to be sincere, but he suddenly wondered if he sounded flip or sarcastic. “Congratulations…” African Chinese woman …

  “He is very talented.”

  Camille laughed and said something in Chinese, and Diana answered her in a tone of mock indignation, then held out her hand. “So very nice to meet you, Mr. Harrington. Camille is afraid I will kidnap you and make you come to my gallery.”

  “Don’t worry, I will take him,” Camille said. “But now we must go. Good-bye!” She took his hand and began pulling him through the crowd. He noticed with surprise that he’d almost finished his drink, and he left it on a tray as they exited the pavilion.

  She led him out into the dark. Sets of people like softly waving flags swayed in the buttery halo that surrounded the windows of the party, and farther away, where the light began to fail, he could see dark couples sitting on the railings by the water. He imagined he could hear their voices in soft, cricketlike murmurings. The moment felt vast and mysterious, expanding infinitely out into the world without need of a past or future. Only this moment existed, rushing off to the ends of the earth and into every room in the universe, out past the moon and sun, into distant galaxies, clustered around him and Camille and this garden and the blooming of the creamy white flowers that spewed a dizzying phosphorescent softness into the dark. Just this moment.

  She led him through the garden, over tiny arched bridges and along the sides of miniature lakes that gleamed like slabs of onyx. They never seemed to cross the same space twice, as if everything was multiplied not by mirrors, which create identical images, but by a single idea in countless variations. They passed through another wall, and then she stopped in another of an infinity of courtyards, again with its gnarled trees and rockeries. Before him was the three-part entryway of a building, beautiful, like the others, with its upswept roofs and its intricately cut latticework windows. Camille unlocked one of the doors as Peter stood behind her. Small flashes like fireworks blossomed and exploded soundlessly against the charcoaled interior, but he knew they were just in his eyes. She picked up a small fluorescent lantern inside the door and switched it on.

  They stood in a traditional Chinese reception room of two hundred years ago, with its stiff cushion-less wooden chairs arrayed before a wide, thronelike wooden couch. In the colorless luster of the lamp, the room seemed like an ancient photograph.

  “This is where you would have received visitors,” Camille explained. “Your other rich friends, or some government officials. This is Cold Mountain Hall.”

  The Ecstasy directed his attention briefly and fiercely toward one object after another, each crackling with its history and its potential. An inkwell and brush. A large ceramic vase on a stand. Behind the couch hung a large slab of marble whose gray and white swirls formed a series of indistinct peaks and valleys, lost in clouds. Camille approached it with the lantern and read the four gilded characters below it in Chinese, then translated them:

  “‘The mountain is massive. The mountain is mist.’ Han Shan.”

  “Your poem,” he said, staring into the undulations of the stone. He thought of standing there, in his skis, ready to push off into a luminous fog. Then he felt her take his hand, and he was being swept past the screen and deeper into “his” house, through another open space and then down an uncomfortably narrow corridor whose white plaster walls swallowed up the meager effort of the lamp. In a moment they were outside again, walking in a latticed gallery beside a courtyard. He could hear the jazz again, faintly. Bushes and jagged rockeries teemed around him, and beyond them he knew there were other unknown courtyards and corridors and caverns multiplying through the garden.

  “This is the Courtyard of Sighing Winds,” she said. “This is where you might greet your daughter or your son.”

  Again, the dreadful overtone. He refused to hear it. “You sound like a tour guide.”

  “I am a tour guide.” She squeezed his hand. “Or perhaps I am a ghost.”

  She pushed open another door. “In Qing times, the master’s children lived in this house.” The lantern’s chalky glow spread over the room. There were several desks, each with the classic ceramic ink tray and brushes. A shelf held volumes of paperbound books, like those he’d seen in the Shanghai Museum. An eerie sense of other people’s lives came over him.

  “This is where your son would study. The four classics: he must memorize them for the Imperial Exams, so you hired a Confucian gentleman to teach him.”

  Without meaning to, he pictured his own son here, sitting at a desk. Himself in an old-fashioned robe, putting his hand on Conrad’s shoulder: the proud father. Protecting and preparing his son. If only it could be like that. “Is this a museum? Are we allowed to be here?”

  He could see her smile in the soft light. She put her finger to her lips to hush him. “Quiet. This is my other life.”

  She took his hand again and walked him through the room into a slender corridor, then to a tiny steep stairway, almost a ladder. He watched her ascend to the ceiling on a chorus of wooden creaking. He followed her up, his stomach fluttering, as if he could feel the spirits of the building’s old inhabitants behind him in the hallway.

  The gallery upstairs looked over the courtyards below them and the tops of the trees. Off to the side he could see the lights of the party and hear the piano like something borrowed from a different time. He felt her brush up against his side, like a cat.

  “There’s more.”

  He followed her white dress through the shadowy spaces, to a large room with furniture in it. He recognized a traditional Chinese bed, its four posters draped with cloth that was pulled aside at the front. He could make out the dark outlines of a mattress and a down comforter. A small sink was bolted to one wall beside a small table. Next to the sink was a night table with some toiletries and a clock. Beneath it, a ceramic chamber pot. A wardrobe stood half-open, filled with hanging clothes that were monochromatic gray in the dim light.

  “Who lives here?”

  “I do.” She smiled at him.

  “You live here?”

  “Of course!”

  He put hand to his head, amazed. “I can’t believe this. It’s a dream.”

  She laughed softly. “Of course it�
�s a dream. Why would you think it was anything else? Sit down on the bed.”

  She motioned him over to the bed, and his heart started to pound. Was he supposed to kiss her? He didn’t feel any sexual desire for her, just a desire to understand this moment, to encompass all of it. He was in her room, but also lodged in the lingering afterlives of dozens of people who had inhabited this house over hundreds of years. She turned away from him and took a long embroidered turquoise coat out of the wardrobe. The rustle of the silk as she slipped into it sounded like static electricity. She turned her back to him and took a strangely shaped object from a case, then pulled over a small stool. She sat down, and he could see she was holding a Chinese lute. She turned off the lantern and the bright turquoise of the robe went colorless, like everything else in the room. The jazz band must have finished, because there was only silence now.

  She started to strum the lute, tuning it, and then the idle strumming took shape in a rhythmic, pulsing beat. Strange music, its beautiful harmonies always rubbing against flats and sharps. She began to sing over it in a thin high-toned voice he didn’t recognize, loosing long opaque verses that swooped away from and back to the soothing ground of the lute strings. Sometimes she would stop playing and insert a few spoken words against the silence in the same sharp voice; then the lute would begin its scratchy melody again, and she would continue to sing. He didn’t know how long she went on: he thought it was only one song. When she stopped playing it took a few seconds for the sound of the strings to lapse into a silence that seemed alive with the memory of her playing.