“I don’t think that. I think you’re a wonderful mother, but you’re just having a bad night.”
“I am NOT having a bad night! I am having a fantabulous evening! I am a charity fund-raiser par extraordinaire, and I am trying to help our children.” Isabel began to sing in a slow, soulful voice: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and leeeeeet them lead the way…”
“Izzie, it’s three in the morning. Can we stop with the Whitney Houston?” Charlie said wearily.
“I’ll never stop! Those bastards crushed Whitney’s spirit, but they will never crush mine, do you hear me?”
“Izzie, I’m going to sleep now. I will see you tomorrow morning first thing. I’ll bring the girls home before school so they can change into their uniforms.”
“Don’t you dare hang up on me, Charlie Wu!” Isabel demanded. But it was too late. Charlie had hung up. He had hung up on her in the way that he never used to. Isabel’s mind went into a roller-coaster dip as she stared out the window onto the crashing waves of the ocean. Unbeknownst to Charlie, she had been sitting in the bedroom of his new house in Shek O during the entire call. Foiling her security crew, she had swapped outfits with Ute Lemper after her second encore and slipped unnoticed out of her own party in a deep red velvet dress. She had taken the first car in the valet line and driven in a manic rage all the way to Charlie’s house. She had punched in the code she remembered: 110011. And now she was wandering through the empty Tom Kundig–designed house, spiraling into greater and greater rage.
So this is what it’s going to be like now. This is how it is now that you have your new life in this perfect glass house by the sea. This boring bourgeois Architectural Digest fantasy, with all your boring mid-century furniture and that boring little decorative object you wake up next to every morning. Because that’s what she is. That Astrid Leong and her sham aesthetics. Just because she wears Alexis Mabille to lunch she thinks she’s hot shit, she thinks she’s an original. She’s nothing but a perfectly bred decorative doll with no substance and no grit. Everyone thinks she’s soooo exquisite and soooo elegant, but I know the truth. I know what kind of woman she really is.
Isabel leaned against the dining table, took out her cell phone, and swiped around the screen furiously until she found what she was looking for. It was a video clip she had saved in a locked folder. It was the video of Charlie and Astrid making love, and as she played the video, the sound of their moans echoed through the vast, empty house. Look at her. She’s no better than a whore. Look at the way she straddles him, commanding his invading prick like she’s riding one of her Thoroughbreds. This isn’t a woman who will just settle for being “friends” with Chloe and Delphine. This is a woman who wants it all. And because of all her money she thinks she can buy whatever she wants. She bought Charlie and now she wants to buy my children and buy their love and turn them into little carbon copies of herself, with long ballerina necks and perfect couture outfits. She wants to sit in this perfect house and look out at the perfect view of the sea with my daughters and stroke their hair in the golden sunlight and twirl them around the garden like they are all in some goddamn Terrence Malick movie and convince them that this is the only life they should ever want. “You’ll always be welcome here,” she says. Like hell I will. The day after her wedding she’s going to shut me out forever. I just know it. She thinks she’s going to erase me from their lives, but I will never let this happen. Never never never! With trembling fingers, Isabel jammed out a message on the gossip columnist Honey Chai’s WeChat message board:
Astrid Leong has stolen my life. She is a cheating, husband-stealing whore. Just look at her whoring herself in this video. She is nothing but a vapid rich girl, an heiress to an evil fortune that destroys our planet. I curse her! I curse Charlie Wu! I curse this house built on deceit and sin! For the rest of eternity, there will never ever be any peace in this house!
Isabel attached the video clip and hit “post,” as the video streamed out to millions of WeChat users all over the world. Then she climbed up on the wooden Nakashima dining table as if it was a giant surfboard, took off her long velvet gown, rolled it into a tight long rope and threw one end around the Lindsey Adelman chandelier. She fastened the other end taut over the white, tender part of her neck and inched to the edge of the table slowly, step by step, gazing out the window at the moonlit sea. And then she jumped.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TYERSALL PARK, SINGAPORE
“It was an epic fail, a disaster of titanic proportions,” Carlton sighed over the phone to his sister as he recounted his date with Scheherazade.
“I’m so sorry, Carlton—it sounds traumatic,” Rachel said. “So what happened after Colette dropped her bombshell?”
“Well, it basically killed the dinner for everyone. Scheherazade didn’t eat a thing after that, and I bolted right after dessert was served. It became apparent to me that Scheherazade’s parents were going to file a restraining order against me if I stuck around one minute longer.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”
“No, actually, it probably got worse. Everyone went into the drawing room for drinks and coffee, and I just know Colette was itching to get into all the details of exactly what happened in London. I’m sure she went on a no-holds-barred campaign to tell the Shangs what a murderous monster I am. Scheherazade walked me down to my car, and I tried to tell her the whole story but it just all came out wrong. I was rushing and nervous, and I think she was too in shock to process anything.”
“It’s a lot of story for a first date, Carlton. Give her a little time to recover,” Rachel said gently.
“She’ll have all the time in the world—I heard she left for Paris first thing this morning. Game over.”
“It’s not game over. Maybe her leaving had nothing to do with you.”
“Uh-uh, I don’t think so. She hasn’t responded to any of my texts in the past twenty-four hours.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Jesus, you millennials! If you really want to win her back, fly to Paris, send her a thousand roses, take her to dinner at some romantic rooftop in the Marais, just do something other than text her!”
“It’s not so simple. She’s surrounded by bodyguards 24/7. If she’s not going to respond to my texts, I don’t want to be some creepy stalker who shows up at her doorstep.”
“Carlton, even if you tried, you would never come across as a creepy stalker. Scheherazade’s obviously freaked out because she’s been fed a line of bullshit from Colette. So you need to show her who you really are. She’s waiting for you to do that, don’t you see?”
“I think she’s back in Paris living her life, probably dating some French count with three-week-old stubble by now.”
Rachel sighed. “You know what it is, Carlton? You’re just spoiled. You had the fortune, or maybe the misfortune, of being born good-looking, and girls have been throwing themselves at you all your life. You’ve never had to lift a finger. Scheherazade is the first girl who’s challenging you, who’s making you work for it. You’ve met your match. So are you gonna step up?”
Carlton was quiet for a moment. “So what’s my next move, Rachel?”
“You need to figure that out. I’m not going to give you a cheat sheet! You need to win her back with a wildly romantic gesture. Look, I need to go. There’s a potential buyer coming to tour Tyersall Park this morning, and you don’t want to know who it is.”
“Why not?” Carlton asked.
“Because it’s Jack Bing.”