This Is How It Really Sounds (36 page)

“Well, I hope you don't consider me part of that eighty percent.”

Peter brought up the matter of Xu Ruoshi, the artist from the other night, and his photograph. “I love that photo. Do you think I should buy it?”

Wen was pushing her hard to get Peter to buy it, at three times the price she had been asking two weeks ago. She'd even promised her a larger commission, because a big sale to a foreigner would elevate the price of Xu Ruoshi's other works when they came up for auction next month. The money was inconsequential to Peter, but still, at three times the price, it wasn't fair. “It is a very strange and beautiful piece,” she said. “And Xu Ruoshi is a rising artist. He is getting attention in New York now. Do you know what price she has put on it?”

“No. Maybe you can help me with that.”

She nodded without committing to anything. She needed to consider this.

It took them a half hour to reach their destination. Peter never mentioned what had happened, but she could feel it between them. When they pulled in sight of the huge building, he laughed. “You're kidding me!”

“You said you like to ski!”

The driver stopped before a huge blue and white building. On its side it said, “Yinqixing Indoor Skiing Site.”

“I've heard of this place,” Harrington said, “but I always thought it was too ridiculous to exist.”

“Not at all! Now you can show me what a great skier you are.”

The building was divided in two, lengthwise, one side a strange fantasy and the other an even stranger fantasy. The outer strip, running alongside the ski hill, was where skis and snowboards were rented. The theme was alpine, with huge blow-up photographs of Europeans slashing down steep fields of snow. There was a ski shop and a “mountainside” restaurant that looked out over the huge refrigerated room where people skied. The slope itself was gentle, over a thousand feet long and covered with a foot of “snow” that seemed more like shaved ice. It was covered with young Chinese people in rented parkas falling their way down the hill and taking a long rubber moving sidewalk back to the top. She had come here to take lessons before she had allowed one of her tutoring clients to bring her skiing.

“Can you ski?” he asked her.

“I am an expert skier.”

He rented them skis, boots, and parkas, and they took the escalator and stepped onto the top of the slope that ran down the massive, cold room. She could tell that he thought the entire place was very funny. All around them Chinese people were skiing badly and falling with little shrieks. A few more accomplished athletes descended with expressions of bored superiority.

They stood at the top, putting their hands through the loops on the poles.

“So you really know how to ski?” he asked her. “How did you learn?”

“I have skied in Heilongjiang some years ago, and in the Alps.”

She could see the questions on his face. Skiing was an expensive sport, and so was a ticket to Europe.

“Who did you go with?”

“I went with a friend,” she answered blandly, then smiled and pushed off. She went down the hill in quick, graceful turns, as she'd been taught, as regular as the teeth of a zipper. He chased along beside her. “Really! The Alps! Why didn't you mention that the other night?”

“Oh! I am sorry, Peter.” She smiled at him. “I was enjoying
your
story about skiing. My stories are quite boring.”

He laughed as he rode along beside her. He turned around and skied backward for a while, facing her, then turned frontward again. He did seem to ski well, but he had nowhere to go on this long, flat hill. They did a few more runs and then the joke was worn out.

It seemed to spread into his mood. He became more silent, mentioning that he missed skiing, and by the time they'd gotten to the restaurant, he seemed slightly remote, burying himself in the menu. He'd chosen a Swiss restaurant in the International Quarter to have fondue, suggesting it to be funny, just as she had taken him to the silly indoor ski slope. The restaurant had that same tinge of falseness, with its rough, dark beams and alpenhorns mounted on the walls.

At last she prompted him. “You look sad.”

“That skiing got me stirred up. I haven't been skiing since Crossroads crashed.”

“And that made you sad?”

“It made me think of an experience I had in Aspen. It was that last winter, the one I told you about. A man I met. It was very strange. I still think about it.”

From his expression she realized that he wasn't just telling an offhand story to amuse her, but that he had been considering it since they had left the ski hill.

“I met him on the lift: he was probably in his forties, and he looked a bit ragged. He had duct tape around the cuffs of his ski pants and this grimy red rain jacket—pretty worn stuff. Except he had really expensive skis, brand-new Rossignols, the best they make, with high-end boots and bindings: probably a two-thousand-dollar setup, and I knew that because they were the same as mine. It was incongruous.

“So we start talking about the skis, and then about him. He was from Alaska, and I asked him what he did there, and he said he ran a hardware store and did some construction on the side. And I thought, well, that's too bad, because, of course, I'd just made a lot of money and I thought I was pretty hot stuff, and he was just some guy who ran a hardware store. But it turned out that he was in Colorado because his son had just competed in a Big Mountain snowboarding competition. He'd come in fourth, and I thought that was cool, because even if he's fourth, it means he's an incredible snowboarder. And I congratulated him, and he said, ‘Oh, he doesn't listen to me! I'm his dad, so by definition I don't know anything.' Evidently the kid who won was his son's best friend, and they'd been neck and neck since middle school.”

“And you have a son, also.”

Here Peter looked down at the table before continuing. “Yeah, but, he doesn't snowboard.” He seemed to shake himself. “So we're talking as we're going up the lift. He's very low-key, not superchatty but friendly in his own way. I asked him about Alaska, and we talked about bears and salmon and that sort of thing. He lives on a mountain, and in the winter they close his street and it becomes the neighborhood sledding hill, so all the kids go and sled in front of his house. It sounded really nice. They have a ski area, and sometimes he does some heli-ski guiding because he's friends with the owner, and I'm thinking, this guy is actually pretty cool. I mean, you have to be pretty dialed in to be a heli-guide, because people's lives depend on you. So we get to the top, and I invite him to do a run, which is sort of a breach of protocol, but, you know, what the heck? And he says okay, he'll follow my line.”

Peter's language was changing now, to that of a different Peter.

“So I head down through the first, open part of the slope, fairly steep, you know, black diamond, and I'm swerving around the drops and absorbing the rollers with my knees, keeping it on the ground but trying to go as fast as I can, because I'm assuming this guy can ski, and, you know, I don't want him to think I'm a moron. So I get to the edge of the trees and stop, and I turn around. And he's this small black and red figure at the top of the slope. And he pushes off. And I think,
holy shit!
”

She laughed.

“I mean, seriously: he turned twice, and just from those two turns I could see that there was something really different about this guy. And then he faces straight down the slope and starts accelerating. Places where I swerved to avoid a ten-foot cliff, he'd go straight over it, and land it like nothing, and keep speeding up, and then hit the next one even faster. And I'm standing on the edge of this fairly tight stand of aspens, expecting him to stop, and instead he barely slows down, I just hear this swoosh of snow and he blows past me, right into the trees, and he starts weaving through them like a freaking cruise missile! I swear … I have
never
seen anything like it, and I've seen some amazing skiers: ski racers, ski instructors, people who skied in the Olympics. Never!

“So I pick my way through the trees, and I see him waiting down below me. And there's this one three-foot drop, and I think, well, I've got to bust something out here. I mean, he's been hitting ten-foot drops and making it look easy. So I hit it with a little speed, and right as I get airborne I freeze up, as I always do, and when I land I bury my tips and go somersaulting down the slope about fifteen feet and both my skis come off, and my goggles get filled with snow, my ears are filled with snow, and there he is, waiting for me, and he says, ‘Looks like you're having some trouble with the drops.'

“And I wipe the snow out of eyes, and I say, ‘You noticed! I always freeze up.'

“And then he says, and I remember this clearly, ‘That's because you're being two people. One of you is trying to land it, and the other one's looking at you from the outside. You can't be looking at your life from the outside. You want to land the drops, you've got to be all the way in it.'

“So he points to this roll-over about a hundred feet further down, and he says, ‘I hit that one a couple of days ago—it's about five feet. I'll go first and post up down below. Then you hit it, and this time focus completely on tucking and expanding. You ski like somebody who's had lessons, so I figure you know already. But this time, just focus on what you're doing. Nothing else.'

“And then he takes off, hits it—and he's gone. I wait a few seconds, and I hear him calling something, but I can't make out what, and I think, Okay. This is it. This is the moment. If I'm ever going to do this, it's now.

“So I head down, do a couple of hard turns to check my speed, then get about seven feet about the edge and straighten my skis out for the takeoff, and then, boom, I'm in it. Except, it wasn't five feet! It was, like, an
abyss,
and I'd just
launched
it! And this is the point where I'd usually panic, but this time, the fear sort of flickered across my mind, and then it was gone. And everything suddenly slowed down. I was just floating there in this silence. And I thought: Cool! I have all the time in the world. I'm moving so slowly. This is so easy. And I floated there awhile, and when I got close to the ground, I started expanding. And as soon as my skis touched the snow, everything sped up into fast motion again.” His face had a look of astonishment. “And it was just … immaculate! The most perfect two seconds of my life. I have to say that I have never felt better. When I got to the bottom his comment was, ‘You know, I was wrong about that one. It's more like ten or twelve feet. I was trying to warn you.' And then he says, ‘But you landed it.'”

And I was thinking,
Yes
, you're god damn right! I freaking slowed down time and I
landed
it! I told him what had happened, how amazing it was about that moment just going on and on, and his only comment was ‘Yeah. It does that.'”

Peter laughed at the memory. “Like, ‘Yeah, transcendent moments happen to me all the time!”

“So we skied back down to the lift, and then he had to go meet his son. Of course, I knew better than to try to keep up with them. So we shake hands, and he looks me in the eye and he says, ‘You impressed me up there.' Then he told me his name was Harry, and if I ever got to Juneau, he managed the True Value hardware store there. He said, ‘I'm easy to find. Just go to the downtown True Value and ask for Harry. Come in the winter. We'll do some runs.'”

Peter paused and collected his thoughts. “And you know, Camille … I had just cashed out for three hundred million dollars. I'd been profiled in
The Wall Street Journal
and
The New York Times.
And it didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd landed the biggest drop of my life and that I'd … had this incredible moment. All because of this guy that runs a hardware store in Juneau, Alaska. And it was all so … mysterious. You know? His whole life was this mystery that I'll never get to the bottom of.

“And all that day I kept thinking of what it would be like to be that man, to be fortysomething or fifty and ski like that, with that freedom, and have children you were proud of and who looked up to you, to run a hardware store, and just not really care about all of the things that were so important to me—status and keeping score and being a player. And that really stayed with me. I still find myself reconstructing this guy's life from whatever pieces I can scrape together. The way people do, you know: a log cabin with a cast-iron stove that I probably saw in a movie. Some mountains from … I don't know, probably a photo in a magazine. A blond wife in some sort of 1950s snowflake sweater. His son, who probably looks like him, a daughter who looks like his wife. The whole thing, just like you would picture it. The snow. The fire. The house.”

Something inside of Peter seemed to move, and he gave a deep sigh. His voice changed from wonder to profound sadness. “My son tried to commit suicide a few months ago. He's thirteen.”

She involuntarily raised her hand to her mouth. “I'm so sorry.”

Peter went on. “He's okay now. He went through rehab.” His tone was flat and injured. “I went to New York to see him, and after an hour he told me to go back to China. That he wasn't a tourist attraction. He's extremely angry at me. And he's not the only one.” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Something happened to me last week.”

She was relieved he had finally brought it up. “You were attacked on the Bund.”

“You know about that?”

She shrugged sadly. “I have known about it since several days ago,” she said. “A friend sent me a link. I'm very sorry.”

“So you knew already. I must look like a complete ass.”

“You look like a man who is embarrassed. That's normal.”