This Is How It Really Sounds (34 page)

“Great! Maybe Paul Gutterman and I could be footnotes on the same project.”

“You've got a talent for putting things in the most negative way possible, you know that?” He added, more softly, “Actually, I thought about it, and you ought to consider incorporating something with Paul. I could help you, and that would solve a couple of problems at once.”

“Christ! Did you really just say that?” The lawyer didn't answer. “So let me get this straight: it's not really about Crossroads, because that information was already out there. It's not that I allegedly conned investors for hundreds of millions of dollars. It's because I was ambushed by a has-been rock star. Because I lost face.”

Kell answered evenly. “This is Asia. Face is very important.”

“So if I'd blocked his punch, or hit him back, or if Ma had stopped him, none of this would be happening!”

Kell thought about it, then raised his eyebrows. “Probably not.” He shrugged. “If you'd decked him, the phone would be ringing off the hook.”

“This is fucking unbelievable!” Unbelievable though it might be, he knew that Kell's points were indisputable. Harrington stood up and went over to the window to look out onto the Shanghai skyline across the river from them. The Metropolitan office was an expensive one, and it afforded an excellent view of the Bund. He could see perfectly the spot where Pete Harrington had accosted him. “How badly do I need this?” He let loose a long stream of tired air. “Not badly. Not at all, really. It's not like I need more money. I was doing this because, well…” He turned to his partner. “Why the hell was I doing this?”

They looked at each other.

Kell finally said, “If you can't answer that question, maybe you should be doing something else.” Harrington didn't answer, so his friend continued. “C'mon! You never had your heart in this! You were going through the motions. Why don't you just relax until this is all sorted out. I'll sell the investors. We'll discreetly work you back in down the line. You can concentrate on Camille. Take her to Europe or something!”

“I thought you said Camille was a gold digger.”

“What do I know? I've been married three times in fifteen years! You want to take relationship advice from me? Here's my advice: follow your heart.”

“As long as I follow it somewhere far away, right?”

“Buddy! It's not happening as long as you're on the prospectus! Let me carry things forward and you can jump back in when all this dies down. I promise you. And remember what I said about Paul.”

Harrington stopped and became silent for ten seconds. He was thinking of the mocking, desperate Paul Gutterman, the loser: his prospective partner. An ugly possibility stretched across his thoughts: maybe Paul Gutterman had been his other life all along. “You know what, Kell? Just cash me out for my part of the capitalization. I'm out. Completely.”

Kell opened his mouth. “Peter … That's forty million dollars. Don't you want—”

“Just do it, Kell!”

“Okay!”

There was an uncomfortable moment. Kell's voice changed to one without bombast or guile. “I'm really sorry about this, Peter.”

He looked at the man he'd considered one of his closest friends for the last five years. “I know, Kell. You're as sorry as you ever can be.”

“Look at the big picture: you've had a pretty impressive run. Eight hundred million dollars. When it's all said and done, you crushed it.”

“Yes, Kell.” He walked over to the desk and picked up his leather portfolio. “Except it's not all said and done.”

He stepped out into the waiting room and came up short. Sitting on the couch was Gutterman, his jacket slung over his arm and a look of surprise on his face. He came to his feet as his face took on a foxy grin. “It's the rock star!”

Harrington knew immediately that Gutterman had seen the video. “Hello, Paul,” he said stiffly, and he stepped around him.

“Peter!”

He turned to face him and saw Gutterman's expression widen into a smile of complete triumph. “Next time you make a movie, hire a stunt double. I mean, a man with your money…”

“Did you spend a long time thinking that up, Paul? I can't wait to see what you'll come up with after a couple of years in a jail cell.”

Gutterman seemed to collapse slightly, and then a raw, painful anger burst forth across his features. “You got just what you deserved!” he hissed. “The whole world's going to laugh at you. Especially your wife and son! Who you
abandoned
!”

The curse fell over Harrington with a force more devastating than Pete Harrington's blow to his face, and he felt himself flushing. He stood dumbly trying to mount some reply, knowing that he had none and that everything Paul Gutterman had said from the moment he came to Shanghai was true. After years of rivalry and without even trying, Gutterman had finally vanquished him.

 

5

The Dream of the Red Chamber

Mei Lin loved
the garden. Even coming in late at night, alone, with little animals rustling in the shrubs and tiny bamboo groves, when other people might fear ghosts as they walked past the antique furniture and the narrow pitch-black hallways, she felt that she was in her home. She had been living here nearly three years, since Mr. Xin, at the Ministry of Culture, had seen fit to give her the caretaker's job. Before her there had been an old woman, an elderly aunt of the previous Minister of Culture in Shanghai, who had persisted into Mr. Xin's term. Then inquiries were made, and the old woman was given twenty thousand yuan and a train ticket back to Wuxi, where she would live with her sister. No one was entitled to swim in the dream life forever. Even her own stay here was only temporary. One day someone else's niece or mistress or brother-in-law would be living in this cloud of branches and stones and white plaster. That was how things were down here in the Red Dust.

There were several real caretakers, of course—some carpenters and two old gardeners—but they came in the morning and left in the evening. Sometimes she joined them for tea in one of the empty old family buildings, where they had set up a hot-water maker and a wooden table. If they had any suspicions about how she had gotten her place there, they didn't voice them, and she didn't care anyway. For now, it felt as if she'd always been here. That was how things were in the Red Dust, too.

She picked up her
pipa
and began to strum it. She was to play music that afternoon. A trade delegation from Europe was coming for a private banquet, and she was to entertain them with traditional music and show them the garden. She was expected to eat with them afterward, though they were usually boring, asking her the same questions every time. They were typically politicians or bureaucrats who had managed to get themselves a trip to Shanghai at the expense of their citizens. So tonight she would play and join them for twenty minutes and then leave.

Her little pink phone chirped with Peter Harrington's ringtone, and she decided to answer it. After their night out, he had canceled his next two lessons, and she hadn't seen him in nearly a week. He had said that he'd had an accident playing squash and wanted to recuperate.

“Hello, Camille. It's Peter.”

“Peter! How good to hear your voice. How is your injury?”

“Oh! Much better, thanks.”

“So we will have our usual lesson on Friday?”

“That would be great. I … I wanted to thank you for bringing me to that party, and the garden, and … everything else.”

“It's my pleasure, Peter.”

“I've been,
um,
trying to process everything.”

“Process what?”

He sounded discouraged. “Well, you know. The other night.”

She smiled into the phone but didn't answer. To process things, he had said. It was a bit funny. He really meant, to decide if he might change women—perhaps break with the lovely Nadia. That was what processing was to him. For her, no processing was necessary. Maybe she would only be his tutor. Maybe they would get married. She had no plan.

Now he sounded uncertain. “Yes, so, we're on for Friday. Great. Actually, though, I wondered if you might have some time tonight. There's some things on my mind, and I thought you would be a good person to talk to.”

She knew that he had reason to sound as he did. A few days after he'd canceled because of his “squash accident,” her friend Wen, who owned the Phoenix Gallery, had called her about the video and sent her a link. It had been shocking. Peter had seemed so innocent when the man walked up to him. And then, on the ground, he had looked so hurt and childish. So defeated. She felt sorry for him. Within a few days, there were already several blogs up explaining the situation. None of them were kind to Peter Harrington.

So perhaps she should be kind. “I have an idea, Peter. I want to take you someplace. A surprising place. Would that be acceptable?”

She could feel his relief through her telephone. “That would be wonderful!” He sounded so grateful.

She texted him her address, then slipped the phone back into her purse. She liked Peter Harrington. He wasn't crude, like some of the businessmen she knew, or like his friend Kell. He was not one of those who had settled into a deep, boring sense of satisfaction with themselves and the world as they had made it. She had seen so many of those, especially Chinese men, who assumed that they could buy her for the price of a flat and expensive perfumes and that she was desperate to marry a rich man, even if he were much older than her and not handsome. With one look, they thought they knew her family and her prospects. They measured her, and she laughed at them.

The funny thing about the businessmen was that they all imagined themselves as heroes. All of their exploits and their great accomplishments, and what did they really achieve? Han Shan, the poet of Cold Mountain, would have made jokes about them. He would have found Peter Harrington silly, not admirable. Han Shan had lived penniless in the mountains, sleeping on the bare floors of caves, eating roots and wild greens or a bit of rice he bought with whatever coins he could beg. The clouds were his pillow; the earth was his bed. He scrawled poems on doorways and rock faces without ever signing his name, and a thousand years later people were still reading them. He lay in the Red Dust and dreamed in heaven, but he knew that heaven wasn't something he could ever make.

Her phone rang again, and this time it was the Dutch businessman that she taught Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He worked for an electronics company, a very tall and bulky man with glasses, nondescript, as if he'd been stamped out on an assembly line in Changzhou. A nice man, but she had to be careful not to encourage him. He had divorced his wife, and he could only too easily imagine that the young Chinese woman would simply love to return to Holland with him. Though he would probably buy a painting. She would take him to the galleries at Moganshan 50, show him the work of Xu Ruoshi and others. Make her commission. She put the phone back in her bag, and it went silent.

She sat back against the lattice railing along the pond as she brushed the strings of the
pipa
. There was a passage in a new song she was learning, a part where the instrument went silent and she had to continue telling the story in a high falsetto voice that rose and dipped like a swallow.
In the high mountains, the winter snows fall without end. Falling, falling, in the pass that has no name. The memory of my youthful love. Without a name.

One of the old gardeners had been waiting just out of reach for her to finish and now came scuffling along the path with a rake and a hooked knife. “Better without a name, Miss Mei! Then your husband cannot get jealous later!” She chided him on his grandfatherly advice and told him that the goldfish were complaining because they hadn't been fed.

Actually, Peter Harrington would be a good choice. She liked him. He was kind, and very clever, for a foreigner, with that clumsy way they had of being clever. She could love him, in a practical way. Enough to say,
You are my husband, and we are on this journey together
.

Of course, he would tire of Shanghai one day and want to return to the United States. Or maybe they would live in Europe and go skiing in the Alps. They would have a big house, and he would want her to have babies. Little Chinese babies with American eyes, or little American babies with Chinese eyes. In five years he would be bald on the top of his head, and he would probably be plump. If she married Peter, it would be like that: steady, easy, with everything in reach.

She could not be too familiar with him yet; men like Peter needed to win prizes. But she had enjoyed astonishing him. She could practically feel his heart beating when they had stood in the cave. She had made him understand that in the garden, everything was a metaphor. The cave was actually the deepest darkness; the bamboo grove was really a grove in your imagination. Everything contained another secret waiting to be unlocked, because when you were standing in a little courtyard, it was also a clearing in a forest, and a place in an ancient folktale, and the moment when a Qing official had hugged his daughter two hundred years ago, and a colored bead on the string of one's own unlikely life. You yourself were just floating through those worlds, completely free, as you always were but so often forgot. And that was far more important than winning a prize. It was the prize that one received without winning.

She had known this about gardens from a very young age. She'd grown up in a cold, dark flat in Suzhou, a city famous for its ancient gardens. Her father made costumes for the Chinese opera. Her mother played
Pingtan,
the traditional folk music of the area, and performed several times each week in teahouses or hotels, dressed in ancient-style robes. She often played in the gardens, her hair swept up onto combs in the manner of the Song Dynasty or the Ming. She was so elegant, and the clusters of tourists from Taiwan or Hong Kong seemed so ordinary. Mei Lin would go and watch from the back as her mother strummed the
pipa,
and then she would go and explore the garden and sneak into the empty houses, imagining the lives that had transpired there, filling in the details with passages that her mother had read to her from
The Dream of the Red Chamber
. She could almost see the servants and the in-laws, the spoiled children and the domineering grandmother who stealthily destroyed so many of the lives around her. When she played the few songs her mother had taught her, sitting on a balustrade beside the black-green pool of fish, she felt, even then, that she wasn't simply herself, but different shades of many people: a maid pining for her missing love, a loyal wife, a courtesan. She was all of those things.