This Is How It Really Sounds (6 page)

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.

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.