After famously and unabashedly flunking every one of her A levels (how could that girl concentrate on her studies when she was jet-setting all the time?), Astrid was shipped off to a preparatory college in London for revision courses. Everyone knew the story of how eighteen-year-old Charlie Wu — the eldest son of the tech billionaire Wu Hao Lian — bade a tearful goodbye to her at Changi Airport and promptly chartered his own jet, ordering the pilot to race her plane to Heathrow. When Astrid arrived, she was astonished to find a besotted Charlie awaiting her at the arrival gate with three hundred red roses. They were inseparable for the next few years, and Charlie’s parents purchased a flat for him in Knightsbridge (for the sake of appearances), even though the cognoscenti suspected Charlie and Astrid were probably “living in sin” at her private quarters in the Calthorpe Hotel.
At age twenty-two, Charlie proposed on a ski lift in Verbier, and though Astrid accepted, she supposedly refused the thirty-nine-carat diamond solitaire he presented as far too vulgar, flinging it onto the slopes (Charlie did not even attempt to search for the ring). Social Singapore was atwitter over the impending nuptials, while her parents were aghast at the prospect of becoming connected to a family of no particular lineage and such shameless new money. But it all came to a shocking end nine days before the most lavish wedding Asia had ever seen when Astrid and Charlie were sighted having a screaming match in broad daylight. Astrid, it was famously said, “chucked him like she chucked that diamond outside Wendy’s on Orchard Road, throwing a Frosty in his face,” and took off for Paris the next day.
Her parents supported the idea of Astrid having a “cooling-off period” away, but try as she might to maintain a low profile, Astrid effortlessly enchanted le tout Paris with her smoldering beauty. Back in Singapore, the wagging tongues resumed: Astrid was making a spectacle of herself. She was supposedly spotted in the front row at the Valentino show, seated between Joan Collins and Princess Rosario of Bulgaria. She was said to be having long, intimate lunches at Le Voltaire with a married philosopher playboy. And perhaps most sensational, rumor had it that she had become involved with one of the sons of the Aga Khan and was preparing to convert to Islam so that they could marry. (The Bishop of Singapore was said to have flown to Paris on a moment’s notice to intervene.)
All these rumors came to naught when Astrid surprised everyone again by announcing her engagement to Michael Teo. The first question on everyone’s lips was “Michael who?” He was a complete unknown, the son of schoolteachers from the then middle-class neighborhood of Toa Payoh. At first her parents were aghast and mystified by how she could have come into contact with someone from “that kind of background,” but in the end they realized that Astrid had made something of a catch — she had chosen a fiercely handsome Armed Forces Elite Commando who was a National Merit Scholar and a Caltech-trained computer systems specialist. It could have been much worse.
The couple married in a very private, very small ceremony (only three hundred guests at her grandmother’s house) that garnered a pictureless fifty-one-word announcement in the Straits Times, even though there were anonymous reports that Sir Paul McCartney flew in to serenade the bride at a ceremony that was “exquisite beyond belief.” Within a year, Michael left his military post to start his own tech firm and the couple had their first child, a boy they named Cassian. In this cocoon of domestic bliss one might have thought that all the stories involving Astrid would simmer down. But the stories were not about to end.
A little after nine, Michael arrived home, and Astrid rushed to the door, greeting him with a long embrace. They had been married for more than four years now, but the sight of him still sent an electric spark through her, especially after they had been apart for a while. He was just so startlingly attractive, especially today with his stubble and the rumpled shirt that she wanted to bury her face in — secretly, she loved the way he smelled after a long day.
They had a light supper of steamed whole pomfret in a ginger-wine sauce and clay-pot rice, and stretched out on the sofa afterward, buzzed from the two bottles of wine they had polished off. Astrid continued to recount her adventures in Paris while Michael stared zombielike at the sports channel on mute.
“Did you buy many of those thousand-dollar dresses this time?” Michael inquired.
“No … just one or two,” Astrid said breezily, wondering what would happen if he ever realized that two hundred thousand per dress was more like it.
“You’re such a bad liar,” Michael grunted. Astrid nestled her head on his chest, slowly stroking his right leg. She brushed the tips of her fingers in one continuous line, tracing his calf, up the curve of his knee, and along the front of his thigh. She felt him get hard against the nape of her neck, and she kept stroking his leg in a gentle continuous rhythm, moving closer and closer toward the soft part of his inner thigh. When Michael could stand it no longer, he scooped her up in one abrupt motion and carried her into the bedroom.
After a frenzied session of lovemaking, Michael got out of bed and headed for the shower. Astrid lay on his side of the bed, deliriously spent. Reunion sex was always the best. Her iPhone let out a soft ping. Who could be texting her at this hour? She reached for the phone, squinting at the bright glare of the text message. It read:
MISS U NSIDE ME.
Makes no sense at all. Who sent me this? Astrid wondered, gazing in half amusement at the unfamiliar number. It looked like a Hong Kong number — was this one of Eddie’s pranks? She peered at the text message again, realizing all of a sudden that she was holding her husband’s phone.
10
Edison Cheng
SHANGHAI
It was the mirror in the closet that did it. The closet in Leo Ming’s brand-new triplex penthouse in the Huangpu district really put Eddie over the edge. Ever since Shanghai became Asia’s party capital, Leo had been spending more time here with his latest mistress, a Beijing-born starlet whose contract he had to “buy over” from a Chinese film company at the cost of nineteen million (one million for every year of her life). Leo and Eddie had flown up for the day to inspect Leo’s new super-luxe apartment, and they were standing in a hangarlike two-thousand-square-foot closet that boasted an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, Macassar ebony cupboards, and banks of mirrored doors that parted automatically to reveal cedar-lined suit racks.
“It’s all climate controlled,” Leo noted. “The closets on this end are maintained at fifty-five degrees specifically for my Italian cashmere, houndstooth, and fur. But the shoe-display cabinets are kept at seventy degrees, which is optimal for leather, and the humidity is regulated to a constant thirty-five percent, so my Berlutis and Corthays never break a sweat. You gotta treat those babies right, hei mai?”[18]