Rich People Problems (23 page)

“My dad and stepmom are on a safari in Kenya at the moment,” Colin answered, as a Filipino maid appeared from the corridor.

“Is Aloysius here?”

“No, but there's a package for you, Sir Colin,” the woman replied. She went into the kitchen and returned moments later with a large padded envelope that didn't bear the markings of any courier service.

“Who dropped this off?” Colin asked.

“Sir, Mr. Pang, sir.”

He ripped open the envelope, and inside was a smaller manila envelope that was stamped
PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL
. There was a Post-it affixed to the front of it. Colin looked up at Nick in surprise. “This package isn't for me—it's for you!”

“Really?” Taking the package, Nick saw that the Post-it note read:

Please give this letter
by hand
to your friend Nicholas Young.

It is imperative that he receives it by tonight.

“Well this is convenient! I guess whoever sent this knows I'm crashing at your place,” Nick said as he began tearing into the sealed envelope.

“Wait! Wait! Are you sure you want to do that?” Colin said.

“Why not?”

Colin glanced suspiciously at the package. “I dunno…what if there's anthrax or something in there?”

“I don't think my life is as exciting as that. But here, why don't you open it?”

“Fuck no.”

Nick laughed as he continued to open the envelope. “Has anyone told you that you have an overactive imagination?”

“Dude, I'm not the one getting mysterious packages delivered to my best friend's house!” Colin said, taking a few steps back.

*
Cantonese for “shit-eating bastard.”

28 CLUNY PARK ROAD, SINGAPORE

Nigel Barker had photographed some of the most famous and beautiful women in the world, from Iman to Taylor Swift. But he'd never had a subject fly him halfway around the world in their personal Boeing 747-81 VIP before, and he had never gotten a lymphatic drainage massage and a seaweed exfoliating body wrap in a private spa on a private jet. Naturally, when he arrived at Kitty Bing's gracious heritage bungalow on 28 Cluny Park Road with his team of four photo assistants, there was yet another never-before-witnessed drama unfolding.

A Chinese man wearing a deconstructed black Moroccan djellaba was standing on the front driveway, screaming, “
CHUAAAAA­AAAAA­N!
Where the fuck did you put the Oscar de la Renta? If you didn't pack it, I'm going to fucking skin you alive!
CHUAAAAAAAAAN!
” As he yelled, he bounced several inches off the ground, looking like a deranged Jedi.

Twenty feet from the main house, a huge tent had been set up, and Nigel could see dozens of fashion assistants in white lab coats rushing from the house to the tent with various bits of clothing, while another set of assistants within the tent were going through the rolling racks filled with hundreds of ball gowns straight from the Paris catwalks. A guy in a white denim zip-up jumpsuit came running out of the tent. “We're still steaming it! It just arrived from New York thirty minutes ago!”

“
Ka ni nah!
I need the dress now, you good-for-nothing
goondu
!”
^*

Nigel approached the ranting Jedi warily. “I'm assuming this is the location for the
Tattle
photo shoot?”

“
Wah laooooo!
” The man gasped, putting his hands to his mouth. He suddenly stood ramrod straight, his face went from manic to Zen in a nanosecond, and his speech took on a pseudo-English-meets-Eurotrash accent. “Nigel Barker, it's really you!
Merde!
You are even more dashing in person! How is that possible? I'm
Patric
, the couture consultant. I'm styling the shoot today.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Nigel replied in a real English accent.

Patric kept staring Nigel up and down. “It's an honor to be working with you! I've worked with Mert and Marcus, Ines and Vinoodh, Bruce and Nan, Alexis and Tico, I've worked with them all! Now come with me. We're having a minicrisis at the moment, but I think your presence will help calm things down!”

They entered the house, which was filled with more staffers rushing around frantically at full speed. “As you know, Mrs. Bing has spared no expense on this shoot. Oliver T'sien flew in the top hairstylist from New York, the top makeup artist from London, and the top set designers from Italy for this shoot. Everyone's a top, and we're having to compete for space with all these tops. It's not how I usually like to work,” Patric said with an arched eyebrow. Climbing up the beautiful Arts and Crafts–style wooden staircase, he led Nigel to the door of the library.

“Brace yourself,” Patric warned as he cracked open the door slowly.

Inside, Nigel could see a woman seated in a hairdresser's chair in front of a bank of lighted mirrors, her face streaked in tears, surrounded by half a dozen stylists.

“Kitty…Kitty…I have a little treat for you…” Patric cooed.

Kitty looked in the mirror and saw them approaching. “Nigel! Nigel Barker! Oh no, this isn't how I wanted you to meet me for the first time. Look at my hair! Look what they've done! It looks terrible, doesn't it?”

Nigel glanced at the floor quickly and saw that they had lopped off about ninety percent of her hair. Kitty now had a pixie hairstyle that actually looked incredibly chic. “Kitty, it's a pleasure to meet you, and I think you look wonderful.”

“See? We wanted a radical change, and this is a terrific look for you. It's very gamine,” Oliver tried to reassure her in a calm voice.

“You look like Emma Watson. Wait till we do the color,” Jo the hairstylist said.

“No, no, I'm not desirable anymore. I look like…
a mother
! Nigel, what do you think? Would you ever want to make love to me looking like this?” Kitty swiveled her chair around dramatically and gave him a piercing stare.

Nigel hesitated for a moment.

“Now, don't make things awkward for Nigel! He's a married man,” said a blond woman with a British accent.

“Hello, Charlotte, I didn't know you'd be here,” Nigel said, giving the makeup artist a quick hug.

Patric continued to reassure her. “Kitty, by the time Jo Blackwell-Preston is done with your hair color, Charlotte Tilbury is done with your makeup, I'm done pouring you into an amazing gown, and Nigel works his magic, you will look like the very definition of MILF! All the husbands and teenage boys who see you in these photos will want to take the magazine into the bathroom with them, trust me.”

“Kitty, remember what we discussed,” Oliver said. “The entire point of this photo shoot is to reposition your image. You're not supposed to look like a high-fashion temptress anymore. You're going to look like a supremely elegant hostess who's not trying too hard to impress. A cultural force and a rising civic leader. Charlotte, think of those photos by Skrebneski of Jacqueline de Ribes in her Paris apartment. Or C. Z. Guest bending down to pet her poodle. Or Marina Rust on her wedding day. We want young, regal, comme il faut.”

“Ollie, we're going to comme-il-faut the hell out of her! Kitty, dry your tears. We need to give your face one of my emergency hyaluronic acid boosters right now, before it gets too puffy,” Charlotte commanded.

“And then we're going to add the subtlest sun-kissed highlights to your hair. You'll look like you just came back from a summer in the Seychelles!” Jo proclaimed.

Two hours later, Kitty was posed on a Regency settee in front of
The Palace of Eighteen Perfections
, the magnificent Chinese scroll painting she had purchased two years ago for a record-breaking $195 million. She was dressed in a pale pink Oscar de la Renta off-the-shoulder ball gown, the billowing duchesse satin skirt pooling gloriously around her, and on her head was a delicate Edwardian pearl headband.

Gisele, in an adorable Mischka Aoki cornflower blue dress with feathers and cascading ruffles was positioned lying on the settee, one leg dangling and her head resting on her mother's lap. Harvard stood on the other side of his mother with his arms around her neck, looking precious in a white sailor suit with navy blue piping from Bonpoint and white socks that went up to his knees. At the foot of the settee lay a gleaming pair of Irish setters.

Nigel had imagined Kitty's cover shot as a sort of modern-day re-creation of a Watteau portrait, and to achieve this he had brought all the way from New York the enormous Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. There were only six of these unique handmade cameras in the entire world, and so precious were the prints that every frame Nigel shot would cost $500. But the camera was somehow able to achieve an indescribable alchemy, creating images that were remarkably crisp and yet otherworldly. To go along with this concept, Nigel had confected an extraordinary blend of natural light fused with massive studio lights to create the sort of dappled, late-afternoon northern light straight out of an eighteenth-century atelier.

“Gisele, you have the prettiest smile,” Nigel remarked as he stared into his viewfinder. Harvard was distracted by the dogs and kept reaching down to try to pet them. “Harvard, give your mommy a kiss!” Nigel encouraged, and then at the precise moment, just as Gisele was relaxing into her smile, Harvard was planting kisses on his mother's cheek, and the sunlight was hitting the painting at just the right angle, Nigel asked, “Kitty, what are you thinking?” Her expression suddenly took on a faraway look, and Nigel clicked the shutter, knowing he had just captured the defining shot.

Minutes later, the giant Polaroid was ready, and Toby, the first assistant, carefully placed the print on a special easel at the back of the room for all to see.

“Oh that's the shot! It looks like a Sir Joshua Reynolds come to life! Isn't this the most perfect tableau you've ever seen?” Oliver said to Patric.

“If only Nigel could join them in the photo. And take his shirt off. Then it would be perfect,” Patric whispered back.

“I'm speechless! It's sooooo gorgeous I can hardly believe it. Nigel, this is going to be our best cover ever!” gushed Violet Poon, the editor in chief of
Singapore Tattle
. “Oliver, I'll admit I thought you were out of your mind when you said you wanted to cut all her hair off. But it was a stroke of genius! Kitty looks so soigné! Like Emma Stone! She's positively regal now. I can already see the headline on the cover:
Princess Kitty!
I'm going to take a picture of this glorious print for my friend Yolanda, since she so kindly allowed us to borrow her Irish setters for the shoot!”

Violet snapped a picture on her phone and immediately sent it out in a text. Minutes later, she excitedly reported, “Yolanda is absolutely crazy about the photo!”

“Would this be Yolanda Amanjiwo you're referring to?” Oliver asked.

“The one and only!”

“This is the woman who's so pretentious, she put a Picasso in her powder room right above the toilet so everyone has no choice but to notice it while they pee?”

“She's really not like that, Oliver. Haven't the two of you met?”

“I'm not sure she'd ever deign to meet me, since I don't have a title or my own plane.”

“Oh come on, Oliver. You know Yolanda would love to meet you. She's throwing one of her famous dinners tonight. I'll see if you can come,” Violet said as she continued to text at warp speed. A few moments later, she looked up at Oliver. “Guess what? Yolanda wants to invite everyone to her dinner. You, Nigel, and especially Kitty.”

“No doubt she's heard about Kitty's three planes,” Oliver quipped.

“Oliver T'sien, don't be like that!” Violet scolded.

Oliver approached Kitty, who was now posing languidly Madame Récamier–style in a vintage emerald-green-and-white-striped Anouska Hempel ball gown as Nigel and his team rearranged the lighting for a more dramatic evening look. “Do you think this pose works?” Kitty asked.

“It's gorgeous. So, guess what they are going to put on the cover of
Tattle
as a headline to your photo? ‘Princess Kitty.' ”

Kitty's eyes widened. “Oh my God I love it!”

“Annnnd…guess who has just invited you to dinner tonight? Yolanda Amanjiwo.”

Kitty couldn't believe her ears. “This is that lady
Tattle
calls the Empress of Entertaining?”

“The very one,” Violet said excitedly. “I sent her a pic from your photo shoot and she's absolutely bonkers to meet you. See, your photo shoot isn't even out yet, and already you're the toast of the town, Princess Kitty! Please say you'll come tonight!”

“Of course. I'll change my plans,” Kitty said. She had planned a moonlight dinner cruise alone with Nigel, but this, she felt, was more important.

“Splendid! Eight o'clock sharp, white tie.”

“White tie? In
Singapore
?” Oliver frowned.

“Oh yes. You'll see. Yolanda does things on a grand scale. She entertains like no one else I know.”

Several hours later, Oliver, Nigel, and Kitty found themselves in Yolanda Amanjiwo's drawing room, a vast space with black travertine floors that felt more like the lobby of a resort hotel than a home. Half the room was comprised of a reflecting pool that extended outdoors into an even larger pool, and from the middle of the pool rose an immense Jeff Koons gold
Balloon Dog
.

Yolanda and her husband, Joey, stood at the far end of the room in front of a wide marble block that displayed a collection of ancient Apulian vases. As Kitty was led to the receiving line, she knew she had made the right choice by wearing a black off-the-shoulder vintage Givenchy gown with white satin gloves and her not overly flashy necklace of graduated diamonds ending in a teardrop canary diamond of forty carats. As she approached her hosts, flanked by her debonair escorts in their white-tie tuxedos, a butler announced in a high, nasal tone, “The Honorable Oliver T'sien, Mr. Nigel Barker, and Mrs. Jack Bing.”

Yolanda was a tall, thin woman with a gravity-defying bouffant hairdo, clad in a dramatic strapless scarlet column gown that Kitty recognized to be Christian Dior couture. She had obviously chosen her plastic surgeon with meticulous care, since she possessed one of those faces that looked perfectly taut and sculpted, but not a single muscle moved when she spoke. Which was a pity, since she spoke in an exceedingly warm, rapid-fire Indonesian accent. “Oliver T'sien we meet at last I am such an admirer of your family and of course your grandfather was such a great man so revered Nigel Barker how lovely to meet you my God what a beauuuuuuutiful set of pictures you took today can I commission you to please do a portrait of my Irish setters?”

“Actually, I did take some pictures of just the two of them. I'm having them printed as a gift to you.”

“Oh my goodness Joey did you hear that Nigel Barker did a portrait of Liam and Niall and we didn't even have to pay him a million bucks!” Yolanda prodded her husband frantically, who looked like he was in the midst of waking from a long coma.

“Ummm” was all the short, paunchy man said, his eyelids heavy.

“And you must be the divine Kitty Bing I have heard so much about you and my God what a divine dress it must be a classic Givenchy and that party you threw during Shanghai Fashion Week ooh la la I wish I had been there Karl Lagerfeld told me your new villa is to die for and your plane the big one has a spa in it my God what a genius idea I must visit I absolutely must!”

“Thank you. Of course you'll have to visit my spa—we call it the mile-high spa.”