This Is How It Really Sounds

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  At the institute, though, life was magnificent. She had a talent for language, and within a year she had won a scholarship to one of the best institutes in Suzhou. The New York Language Institute had a nice waiting room, with couches and a hot-water dispenser. It prided itself on being the most current institute, claiming to educate its pupils in culture as well as language. At this school, every class was taught by a foreigner, usually an American or Canadian of about twenty-five years who seemed to have, by Chinese standards, very little direction in their lives. If they were Chinese, they would be regarded as drifters, incipient failures, but as foreigners they still seemed high-class, and a good deal less ugly than when she was a young girl. Everyone knew that at any time they could go back to their countries and easily become rich. Some of the older students flirted with them, and more, because they knew that if one managed to strike up a relationship, to even get married, then they, too, could go away to the easy life, and make money, and come and go to China and the rest of the world as they pleased. The families of those girls were lucky, as the good fortune of America nearly always washed all who were around them.

  She decided to try one out when she was only sixteen. He was a fleshy, slightly awkward foreigner named Thomas, with brown hair and a shy manner. She sensed he was someone attainable. He was soft-spoken and a bit withdrawn: she felt like the elder even though he was ten years her senior. Chinese girls were taught to be submissive: when the older girls gossiped about it, they always said that that was the quality that foreign men especially liked about Chinese girls, because their own women were so strident and large, with their big shoulders and hips. Chinese women, like herself, were more delicate, and in getting Thomas’s interest she was as sweet and humble as the fresh jasmine blossom she sometimes wore around her neck as perfume. She asked him questions about idiomatic American expressions. She flirted and she retreated. She put herself in his presence and then pretended that she was very busy. He had finally, clumsily, clutched her to him, and she’d had to fight down the panic of the sudden intimacy. They’d kissed in his office, he’d rubbed her breasts, and though it wasn’t so pleasant in itself, the triumph of knowing that she’d been able to get this far with him was exciting. She made what she thought were the appropriate sounds, sounds people made in movies, and she reached down and put her hand into his pants, because that’s what some of the girls said was the thing to do. When her hand had suddenly gotten gooey, she gave an involuntary little cry of surprise, and he’d laughed, then given her some tissues to clean up. As soon as she’d gotten free she rushed to the bathroom and washed her hands for a long time, then came out faintly ashamed. Later she’d gone over to where he lived, a sparse, slightly shabby three-room flat he shared with another teacher, and they’d ended up having sex in his bare-walled room. It was strange because he was a foreigner and much older than her. Strange because it was her first time. What had really shocked her, though, was the bareness of the apartment, the sense of shabbiness, so different from what she expected a foreigner’s apartment to look like. Where were the bookcases and the movie posters? By the time she left, she was already wondering what she was getting from this whole thing. And within a week it had ended, Thomas pretending to break it off with a gallant and overly formal speech about her age and his responsibilities as a teacher. The next semester he was gone, and, without him around to remind her of how awkward it had all been, she could revel in her first seduction of a foreigner. She was a worldly woman now. Next time, she would set her sights higher.

  By seventeen, she had slept with two other men, and if she had been a traditional Suzhou girl, she might have worried about the loss of her purity. But in the eyes of her parents, she was still as pure as they had created her. And in the eyes of the imaginary Shanghai woman that she hoped to become, she was far too pure altogether. The vice director of the culture institute began to get her work playing the pipa for foreigners, as her mother had, and giving tours in her excellent English. She would dress in her mother’s fine, embroidered robes and make a fortune in tips. She began to save her money for the move to Shanghai.

  Things had begun to go better for her father; he was getting work providing costumes for the big dynastic dramas that had become popular in the movies and on television. He would travel to Shanghai and Beijing to meet clients. Her mother, though, became ever less mobile. They could do little to arrest her disease, and the drugs they gave her bloated her body, even as her muscles became less responsive. Her face had lost its beauty and become wide and slack, and her limbs, always so graceful, became leaden. Where it had first been difficult for her mother to walk, it now became difficult to breathe, and Mei Lin spent agonizing weeks with her as she struggled. In the end, she was content simply to sit there for hours practicing the pipa as her mother silently watched her.

  She was almost happy when her mother passed away. Her mother was free now, and she herself was no longer weighed down with the fear of her mother’s death. She had long ago stopped asking why her mother had to die at the age of forty-one, why she turned from a butterfly into a slug. Here in the Red Dust, that was simply how things went.

  That fall she was admitted to the Suzhou Uni to study classical performing arts. She continued her pipa and began learning the guzheng, the giant zither, and the erhu, the two-stringed violin. She studied Costume and mastered the elaborate hairstyles of the Qing, the Ming, and the Song. She realized at last that that was what she was preparing to become: a Song Dynasty courtesan, elegant and clever and worldly.

  After a year, she became bored with the Uni and moved to Shanghai. Not to a luxurious hotel filled with foreigners, but into a worn one-bedroom flat with narrow gray hallways and cold, drippy plumbing. The city felt infinite and impersonal, as if she was staring up at the underside of a massive floating object. She was another girl in the streets, passing other girls like herself every minute, some prettier, some better-dressed, some obviously privileged and already on track to succeed. It didn’t matter. At last she was in Shanghai, and she could still sense the connection between herself and that other woman of her imagination who dipped into the furor of the city like a swallow and glided out again, gracefully and nimbly. That Shanghai woman.

  * * *

  Her father found her a job with a television producer that he often worked with, Mr. Zhang, and her job was to help on the shoots and do the English translations for the videos. She liked Mr. Zhang. He was a slight man about her father’s age who wore a brown leather jacket and treated her as a daughter, rather than with other overtones. Mr. Zhang produced videos for Chinese companies, and she went on many tiresome shoots of electronics factories and offices. These outings always involved a long lunch, often with some of the executives of the factory to discuss the message they hoped to convey. It was during one of these banquets that she met the director of the East China Domestic Electronics and Tools Corporation. He was about Mr. Zhang’s age, had a slack, fleshy face with large pouchy lips. He treated her with a mildly paternal indulgence, inquiring about where she was from and why she had come to Shanghai. She was surprised when Mr. Zhang told her that the man wanted to invite her to dinner. Her boss looked uncomfortable but asked her to go, since the director was an important client of his.

  The director ordered the most expensive dish at a very expensive restaurant. It was the top grade of shark-fin soup: she could live for a month on the cost of two small bowls. Along with that, he ordered at least a dozen more plates, like lobster and hairy crab and a special Japanese beef, so that of the last eight dishes she could only take a single bite each, then leave the rest to grow cold. And meanwhile, he talked. He talked about his business dealings and his trips to Germany and Thailand. He had gone to Rome, he said, and he showed a picture on his cell phone of himself standing at the Colosseum. Had she been to the exterior? She should go—the foreigners loved pretty Chinese girls. He asked about her family and her schooling. He didn’t realize that she did English translations. Maybe she could give him English lesson
s …

  She knew that it wasn’t English he wanted lessons in. She debated what to say. He was a tiresome man, but he was also an important client for Mr. Zhang. She gave him a bright smile. She would be happy to teach him! She could come to his office three times per week, and she would only charge the equivalent of one bowl of top-grade shark-fin soup.

  From this man, she learned how to be a tutor. Not simply a tutor, but a tutor of wealthy older men who hoped, by paying her, to possess her. Sometimes they didn’t even want to keep up the appearance of a lesson: they just wanted to talk about their business or their wives or their longing for something that kept escaping them. They were men who owned factories and had relationships with high officials. They would give her expensive perfumes, bring her shopping, take her to costly clubs and restaurants to meet their business friends. They always introduced her as a tutor but let their friends think that she was their mistress. They invented nicknames for her, always circling closer, letting her feel that their golden fortunes were within her reach. The trick, she realized, was to not care about their money. When you became attached to what they could buy you, they could control you with that attachment. If you didn’t care, you were free.

  In time, she began to meet foreigners. She found them much easier to manage, since they were already slightly off-balance in Shanghai. Sometimes they simply wanted to learn Chinese. There were young businessmen who would still go after her, and once or twice she had slept with them, but always with no concern for the future, and it was they who ended up wanting to be attached.

  Peter Harrington was a bit like all these men, but he was also different. How much alike and how different was still to be seen. Today he would reveal what had happened to him on the Bund, or else he would try to maintain the silly face of the rich, strong man who is always clever and can never be beaten. Today she would find out who he really was.

  When he arrived, she came out to the curb and locked the garden door behind her. He seemed disappointed when she didn’t invite him inside the garden, but he greeted her with a light kiss on the cheek and held her just a moment longer than normal. She could sense an awkwardness about him. At first glance he had nothing wrong with him, only a very slight roundness at the top of his nose, which might have been there before. There were other signs, though.

  “Where is Mr. Ma?”

  He hesitated. “It was time for a change,” he said. “This is Mr. Hu.” He ushered her into the car and got in on the other side. “I’m dying to know where you’re taking me.”

  “A place you would never guess. Now I must talk with Mr. Hu.” She explained the situation to Mr. Hu in Chinese, and he smiled, charmed by her. Peter didn’t understand a word of it.

  “What did you tell him?” he asked.

  “You must study your Chinese harder, Peter. You will find out when we arrive.”

  The twilight had come down, and the rush-hour traffic was wall-like, choking, impossible, as always. Peter asked about her week, and she laughed. “You know my life: very boring. I played two concerts. I taught my clients.”

  “Yes, I know how boring your life is, Camille. Living in a Chinese garden, going to elegant parties with artists and gallery owners.”

  “You’re right,” she answered. “Perhaps not a hundred-percent boring. Maybe only eighty percent.”

  “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.”