Free This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen Page B

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.
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œI own the Phoenix Gallery. Xu Ruoshi is one of my artists.”
    â€œLucky you!” He had meant it to be sincere, but he suddenly wondered if he sounded flip or sarcastic. “Congratulations…” African Chinese woman …
    â€œHe 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.”
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œThis 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:
    â€œâ€˜ The mountain is massive. The mountain is mist.’ Han Shan.”
    â€œYour 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