Sex and Vanity

by Kevin Kwan

  Lucie let out a quick sigh. Thank God she didn’t make a fool of herself with him, at least. She wondered if what she was feeling was relief or regret. Then she remembered the Neruda poem. Just as she was about to ask if he had slipped the poem under her door, a pretty blond girl in her thirties sat down in the chair to George’s right.

  “Hallo! I am Petra [Munich International School / London School of Economics / Barbara Brennan School of Healing / Omega Institute / Esalen],” she said with a German accent.

  “Hi, Petra, I’m George.”

  “Are you from Australia?”

  “I’m from Hong Kong, but I went to school in Australia.”

  “Ja, I could hear the Aussie in your voice!”

  “Where are you from?” George asked politely.

  “Originally Munich, but I am really just a nomad. I’ve lived in Bali, Ibiza, Fort Lauderdale, Rhinebeck, Big Sur—wherever the spirit guides me.”

  Lucie wanted to roll her eyes. This girl was obviously one of the trustafarian, New Agey friends Issie had met since moving to LA. Not wanting George to get hijacked for the rest of the dinner, she impulsively did something she knew her grandmother would never approve of. She leaned over George, stuck out her hand, and said, “Hi, Petra, I’m Lucie!”

  “Hallo, Lucie! Are you from Malibu?”

  Lucie laughed. “No. I’m from New York.”

  “Ah, I thought I met you once at a drum circle in Topanga. I know Issie and Dolfi from Malibu.”

  “Of course you do,” Lucie said with a smile.

  Turning back to George, Petra continued. “I looove Australia, especially Byron Bay! I go there a lot because there is this really great hoshindo sensei there. Have you ever done hoshindo?”

  “I haven’t. Is it like ayahuasca?”

  “No, no, no, nothing like that. Ayahuasca is so last year! Hoshindo is Japanese for ‘bee-venom therapy.’ It’s like acupuncture in some ways, but it predates acupuncture by one thousand years. It was invented before the Bronze Age, in the time before they had needles, you see, so they used bee venom to treat the meridians and heal your body.”

  “Bee venom? Are they live bees?” Lucie jumped in.

  “No, unfortunately the bees have to sacrifice themselves for your healing. And you don’t get stung—they remove the stingers from the bees and just brush them lightly against your skin, to stimulate an immune response. That’s all it takes. I always do a ceremony for the bees after I have a session. I think that’s very important to honor their gift. I’m an empath, you see. I do energy healing work, so I am very sensitive to all animals, to the land, to places. Like this villa, for example. It has terrible energy.”

  “Really, you can sense it?” Lucie asked, genuinely curious.

  “Absolutely. Look at my arms! All these goose bumps! If it weren’t for you nice people distracting me right now, I would be miserable here. I would have cramps and be in the toilet making nonstop diarrhea.”

  “Oh my. I’m glad we’re here for you,” Lucie said, trying her hardest not to giggle.

  “What is it about this house that creates the bad energy for you? Is it because of how it’s sited on the land?” George probed.

  Petra stared at George and Lucie in surprise. “Ja, the feng shui is very unfortunate, but that’s not the only reason. You don’t know the story? The owner died here. Jacques Fersen. I can sense his spirit in the house, even among us right now, and he is very restless.”

  Lucie looked at her dubiously. “Really?”

  Petra took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment. “Ja, Fersen was a French baron.*3 He was very handsome and rich, but he got kicked out of Paris because he was having affairs with all the scions of the French aristocracy. It was a big scandal, because these were the sons of top politicians and noblemen. So they wanted to throw him in jail, but instead he fled to Rome. There he fell in love with another schoolboy, Nino, and he brought Nino here to this island, where they built this villa and threw the most amazing drug parties. If you go downstairs, there’s a sunken opium den where Fersen and Nino would get high and have orgies with the most famous artists and writers of their day.”

  “Really?” George remarked.

  “Ja, this place was like the Studio 54 of Capri in its day.”

  Lucie wasn’t sure whether to believe this woman, but she was fascinated all the same. “So how did Fersen die?”

  “They say it was suicide, that he drank a lethal cocktail of champagne and cocaine in his opium den. But you know, I don’t believe that. His spirit is telling me that he wouldn’t kill himself like that.”

  Lucie and George contemplated her words for a moment, and when George looked up, he saw his mother waving at him from a few tables down, trying to get his attention. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, getting up from the table.

  Lucie smiled at Petra, deciding that she liked this girl in spite of her strange stories and all her talk of spirits. Petra returned Lucie’s smile and said, “You know there’s a full moon tonight. Anything can happen. I’m so glad I changed the place cards for us.”

  Lucie’s jaw dropped. “You changed the place cards?”

  “Yes. I was staring at the seating chart up at Villa Jovis, and the name card beside us said ‘Joshua,’ and I thought, No, no, that’s not right. There isn’t supposed to be a Joshua sitting between me and you. The energy is all wrong. So I looked around and something made me pick up George’s card. And when I placed the card next to us, I could feel the flow. I thought, Lucie and George and Petra. We three were meant to be together tonight.”

  Lucie looked at her with a mixture of surprise and confusion.

  Petra caught her look and gave a throaty laugh. “I hope you didn’t think I meant a three-way! No, thank you, I’m not into three-ways. I did it for you and George.”

  “I’m not sure why,” Lucie said stiffly.

  “Oh, come on. The chemistry between you two is crazy. All my chakras are opening just thinking of you two!”

  “But I don’t really know him.”

  Petra laughed again and shook her head. “You two have known each other over many lifetimes. You just don’t realize it yet.”

  * * *

  …

  You two have known each other over many lifetimes. The words echoed in Lucie’s mind all through the five-course dinner, the toasts made by various Chius and De Vecchis, the cutting of the wedding cake, the handing out of bomboniere, and Isabel’s first dance with Dolfi while some guy named Eros*4 serenaded them and all the Italians went nuts, and even now, as she wandered the grounds of Villa Jovis, Lucie couldn’t shake off Petra’s words no matter how hard she tried.

  Isabel and Dolfi had invited their closest friends to the wedding after-party back up at Villa Jovis, where the palace’s ruins had been luxuriously outfitted with velvet ottomans and sofas, fur throws, and painted silk lanterns. This being Italy, everyone lingering about the villa’s grand chamber seemed to be smoking either cigarettes or joints, and Lucie opted to get some fresh air instead. Besides, George hadn’t paid her any attention since dinner, and now he seemed all too happy to be curled up in the corner, deep in conversation with Daniella and Sophie.

  Taking the lit pathway around the side of the palace’s outer wall, Lucie walked by Tiberius’s Leap again and spotted a glowing stairway that she hadn’t noticed earlier in the day. Curious, she went down the steps and through a heavy rusted metal door and discovered a narrow candlelit chamber. The chamber was built into the cliffside, its ceiling eroded away by time and open to the stars. A seating area had been carved out of the rocks, and at the far end, a small window faced the sea.

  Lucie went up and peered out at the view. The waters looked almost phosphorescent tonight under the gigantic moon, and Lucie wished she could go swimming in the moonlight. She wondered what it must be like inside the fabled Blue Grotto durin
g a full moon, and she decided that no matter what happened, she had to see the grotto tomorrow. It would be their last day on Capri.

  She suddenly realized how silly she had been, nursing this strange fascination with George, when after tomorrow she would in all likelihood never see him again. Petra was dead wrong—George had no interest in her; he had made it abundantly clear all week long. She was the one who fainted in the square, she was the one who slobbered like a little girl on his shoulder, she was the one who had thrown herself at him in Positano.

  While he had been polite to a fault, he had for all intents and purposes ignored her after that. He had ignored her at the monastery, he had ignored her on the yacht, and he was ignoring her right now. Why did she even entertain the notion that someone like him could possibly be interested in her, when up at the villa there was a bevy of beautiful, sophisticated women clinging to his every word. She must have been swept up in wedding fever, in the waxing moon, in the romance of Capri.

  As she was about to leave the chamber, she heard the sound of someone coming down the steps, and a moment later George appeared at the threshold.

  For some reason, she knew it was going to be him.

  “Are you stalking me?” she joked, trying to sound nonchalant, although she could hear her voice quivering.

  “Yes, actually.”

  “Really. Why?”

  “Because I need to give you this,” George said, as he suddenly leaned forward and kissed her. Taken by surprise, she lurched backward for a moment, before reaching around, grabbing his head, pulling him closer, and kissing him hungrily.

  “Isabel told everyone last night that you were her little angel, you were off-limits. That’s why I went home,” George whispered as he kissed the area right below her ear.

  “Fuck Isabel. I was off-limits to everyone but you,” Lucie muttered, surprised by her own words as she realized at that moment how much she wanted him, from the first moment she had set eyes on him in the lunchroom of the hotel to the vision of him as a godlike Apollo diving off the rock at Da Luigi, she had wanted him so desperately she could hardly breathe, gasping deeply while he shoved the heavy door closed with his foot, pressed her body against the ancient stone wall, kissing her throat, her neck, letting his mouth linger, as she reached for him urgently. They lay on the bench and he kissed her for what seemed like an eternity, but Lucie didn’t want it to ever stop, and as his fingers and lips found her breasts and tortured her so exquisitely, she found herself pushing his head down, down, down, until her diaphanous skirt pooled around his head and she could feel his stubble graze her inner thigh, his searing tongue on her skin, hearing him murmur, “Are you sure it’s okay?” as she answered with a moan, opening herself to him, closing her eyes as time collapsed and she submitted in a way she never had before, letting herself get lost in a pleasure so intense she thought she was going to pass out, holding her breath, biting her lip trying not to scream as his warm sweat beaded down her legs, her heart pounding in her chest, pounding as if it would explode, pounding louder and louder until a scream filled her ears and she realized it wasn’t coming from her and wasn’t coming from George, but from Charlotte.

  Charlotte was pounding on the door, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it, you two! The drone! The drone can see you! The damn drone is filming everything!”

  Lucie opened her eyes and saw a drone hovering above them, a tiny point of light flashing, flashing. Flashing red.

  *1 The private yacht club in the Hamptons that Lucie’s family belongs to.

  *2 After selling his business to Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy in 1988 and retiring in 1995, Hubert de Givenchy spent most of his time at Le Jonchet, his beautiful Renaissance castle from the early seventeenth century. #goals

  *3 His full name was Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, the Swedish French heir to a huge steel fortune. Interestingly, he was related to Axel von Fersen, rumored to be Marie Antoinette’s lover. (In the exquisite Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette, the character of Axel von Fersen is played by Jamie Dornan, aka Christian Grey.)

  *4 That would be Eros Ramazzotti, who might have been unknown to Lucie but in Italy is pretty much as famous as one gets, having sold more than sixty million records in a career that’s spanned three decades.

  XV

  Hotel Bertolucci

  CAPRI, ITALY

  Lucie sat in the bathtub, knees curled up to her chin, the shower turned on to its highest, trying to drown out her headache. Even with the full force of the water beating down on her, her head felt like it had been put into a vise that was tightening by the second. Any moment now it would explode, and nothing would be left but a big, messy splatter against the blue-and-white painted tiles. Her one contribution to this planet: a Jackson Pollock in the bathtub. And not a good one at that. Too much red, the critics would say. What a waste, her mother would say. What would her mother actually say? She couldn’t bear to even think of it.

  She had fucked up, she knew it. She had tried to be someone she wasn’t. She tried to do something daring, unpredictable, and carefree, and look what happened. Isabel was right. She was far too innocent, far too much of an angel, to try playing in the deep end. How would she ever face it? The embarrassment. The utter humiliation of being caught with George Zao, of all the boys in the world. Caught and exposed like that. All her life she had been so responsible, so virtuous, so perfect, and the one time she had tried pretending to be the sophisticate, the bad girl, it had all gone up in flames.

  The moment Charlotte started banging on the door at Villa Jovis, everything entered this strange liminal space where it all seemed to happen in slow motion but somehow also sped up. They scrambled to untangle from each other. George opened the door to a shrieking Charlotte, bolted out of the chamber, and started chasing after the two guys who had been controlling the drone. The guys ran into the woods, and George disappeared after them. Lucie stumbled out and began running herself, but in the opposite direction. She couldn’t face Charlotte. Not now, maybe never.

  At some point, Lucie willed herself somehow to get out of the tub. The steam had helped, maybe. She threw on the plush white bathrobe and padded out into her bedroom, letting out a quick gasp when she found Charlotte sitting in her armchair.

  “You left the door half open. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  Lucie caught her breath, her fists still clenched. “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yesss!” Lucie hissed.

  “Okay, okay. I just wanted to be sure, that’s all. You don’t have to be so defensive. I’m on your side, Lucie,” Charlotte said, trying to sound calm, even though she was boiling with panic.

  “I’m sorry, I’m a little on edge,” Lucie said, sitting down on her bed.

  “I can only imagine.” Charlotte arched her eyebrows. She sat back in the armchair, crossed her arms, and all pretense of caring gave way to the old Charlotte that Lucie had been dreading. “Oh, Lucie, my poor Lucia. What were you thinking? I don’t mean to overreact, but this is bad. This is very, very bad.”

  “I know very well how bad it is. You can stop saying it.”

  Charlotte got up from the armchair and began pacing the room. “I think I’m still in shock. There I was, stumbling around Villa Jovis in the dark, getting a contact high from all that pot everyone was smoking, and then I saw those two drone operators huddled over a monitor, giggling like schoolboys. I went up to them and peered at the screen, and at first I thought they were watching some sort of porno. And then, when they zoomed in on the poor girl’s face, I thought I was hallucinating. I thought, Why does that girl look so much like Lucie? And what in God’s name is she letting that guy do to her under her—”

  “All right, all right, enough. Please stop!” Lucie jammed her hands up to her ears.

  “I just knew that drone operator was into you, that little pervert! I could tell just by the way h
e always had that damn drone hovering over you at every event throughout the week! Now, if George wasn’t able to intercept them and destroy the footage, we should go to plan B: we should go straight to Isabel.”

  “Come on, it’s her wedding night!” Lucie protested.

  “I don’t care! Your future is at stake, Lucie, and she needs to know exactly what happened with her staff. Her people can do all the damage control—that Gillian lady looks like she could direct a covert SEAL team assassination if she had to, doesn’t she? I want her to make sure all the footage gets locked up and destroyed, along with those creeps they hired!”

  Lucie’s heart sank. She couldn’t imagine the further embarrassment of having to tell Isabel about this.

  “Where is George? Don’t you think we should have heard from him by now?” Charlotte fretted as she kept going from the door to the window.

  “Can you please stop pacing? You’re giving me a headache!” Lucie moaned.

  “Well, pardon me if I’m giving you a headache. I’m sorry I have to worry that your reputation, your future, your whole life, is in his hands right now!”

  “My whole life?” Lucie stared at Charlotte dubiously.

  “Do you understand the ramifications of what could happen if that footage ever went public? Let’s start with grad schools—you can forget about getting into any of the Ivys. And then you’ll never be hired by a Fortune 100 company. You’ll never get into any of the good clubs. You’ll never marry into a good family. And let’s not forget, you’ll never be president!”

  “I hate to break it to you, Charlotte, but I’m not going to be president. It’s never been a goal of mine.”

  “You say that now, but you never know. I mean, do you think Michelle Obama ever dreamed she would be president one day?”

  “What are you talking about? Michelle Obama isn’t even running.”

  “Nonsense, she’ll run after Hillary runs, and she will surely win. We will have two kickass female presidents in a row beginning in 2016, just wait and see. But you—you might have jeopardized your chances forever. And do you want to know the most terrible thing of all?”