by Kevin Kwan
“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.”
“Hahahehe mile-high spa you’re too funny oh my goodness Kitty I know we are going to be dear dear friends.”
As the Amanjiwos continued to greet the arriving guests, Kitty broke into a big smile as she spotted Wandi Meggaharto Widjawa arriving.
“Kitty!” Wandi screamed from across the room, as the two ladies ran to hug as though they hadn’t just seen each other yesterday.
“What are you doing here?” Kitty asked excitedly.
“Joey’s my cousin. I always get invited to these dinners because Yolanda needs me to sit beside him to keep him awake. Look at you! I love the new hairstyle. You look like Emma Thompson! How did the shoot go today?”
“It was fantastic. I couldn’t be happier.”
“Well I’m so happy to see you here! We’re going to have such a good time! You know, Joan Roca i Fontané is the celebrity chef tonight. He has the top restaurant in the world right now—El Celler de Can Roca. It’s so hard to get a reservation, you have to murder someone to get on the list. I wonder who else Yolanda invited? Oh look who’s here—it’s the First Lady of Singapore!”
Kitty looked over and saw Oliver greeting the First Lady as if they were both embarrassed to be seeing each other at the party.
“You are among the crème de la crème of Singapore now, Kitty. These parties are so exclusive that no photographers are ever allowed,” Wandi said, just as a roving photographer dressed in a black tuxedo flashed his camera at them.
“That’s Yolanda’s personal documentarian. It’s not for the public,” Wandi quickly explained. “Oh look, here come the footmen—this means we are adjourning to the dining room!”
A set of grand double doors were opened, and as Kitty walked through the arched doors, her eyes widened in wonder. She felt as if she had been transported back to a royal banquet in eighteenth-century France. The room was a mirrored chamber decorated with baroque gold boiseries, gilt bronze mirrors stretching from floor to ceiling, and dozens of candlelit crystal chandeliers. An immense dining table that seated thirty stretched along the middle of the room, heaving with Meissen china, gilt silverware, and towering gold birdcage centerpieces filled with white doves. The room sparkled under the light of thousands of candles, and footmen with powdered white wigs and dressed in black-and-gold livery stood behind every Amiens tapestry-covered chair.
“Hashtag madamedefuckingpompadour!” Oliver muttered under his breath.
“Yolanda had this dining room rescued from an old crumbling palace in Hungary and transported here piece by piece. It took three years to restore it to its former glory,” Wandi proudly announced.
“Can we do this at my house? Find an old palace and transport the dining room over?” Kitty whispered to Oliver.
Oliver cast Kitty a disapproving look. “Absolutely not! Alexis de Redé would be projectile vomiting in his grave if he saw this travesty.”
Kitty didn’t have a clue what he meant, but she was only too thrilled to be shown to her seat by a handsome footman, where her place card was a small antique gilt mirror with her name etched in glass. As she was about to sit down, the man beside her grabbed her arm. “Madame, not yet. We don’t sit until the First Lady has been seated. Yolanda follows the official court protocols here,” he said in a Scandinavian accent.
“Oh, sorry, I had no idea,” Kitty said. She stood by her seat, watching everyone stand at their places. Finally, the butler standing by the double doors announced, “The Honorable First Lady of the Republic of Singapore!”
The First Lady entered and was shown to her seat. Kitty’s five-inch Gianvito Rossi heels were beginning to kill her and she couldn’t wait to sit down, but the First Lady perplexingly remained standing by her seat near the head of the table. Why the fuck was everyone still standing?
The butler entered the room again and called out in a booming voice, “The Earl and Countess of Palliser!”
Kitty’s eyes widened in shock as a tall blond man entered the room, dressed casually in a button-down shirt, khaki chinos, and a rumpled navy blazer. By his side was Colette, dressed in a long white cotton eyelet dress with her hair pulled into a casual ponytail. She didn’t appear to be wearing any m
akeup, and her only jewelry was a pair of pearl-and-coral drop earrings.
After reacting to the shock of seeing her nemesis in Singapore, Kitty wanted to laugh out loud at how inappropriately Colette was dressed. This stepdaughter of hers was a complete disgrace. Did Colette even know where she was?
And then, to Kitty’s horror, the First Lady of Singapore performed a deep curtsy. Yolanda Amanjiwo and all the other guests in the room quickly followed suit—the men bowing low and the women dropping curtsies as the Earl and Countess of Palliser were led to the place of honor.
* * *
* Don’t quote me on this, but I believe a goondu is the Malay cousin of a goondusamy (India), which is in turn distantly related to a goombah (Jersey Shore and certain suburbs of Long Island).
CHAPTER TWELVE
BOTANIC GARDENS, SINGAPORE
It was still dark when Colin and Nick entered the grounds of the Botanic Gardens.*1 They followed to a tee the instructions in the mysterious letter that Nick had received—parking in the Gleneagles Hospital parking lot and crossing Cluny Road to enter the gardens through a little-known side gate. Just as the letter had said, the gate had been left unlocked.
As they walked down the tree-lined pathway, monkeys could be heard chattering and leaping through the bushes, no doubt alarmed by the sudden presence of humans in this secluded part of the garden. “God, it’s been years since I’ve been here,” Nick commented.
“Why would you come here? You had your own private botanic gardens right next door!” Colin said.
“Sometimes my dad and I would go on walks here, just for a change, and I only wanted to go to the lake with the two islands in the middle. I called it my ‘secret island.’ Wait a minute, let’s check the instructions again,” Nick said, unfolding the map that had been placed inside the envelope. Colin held his iPhone up to provide some lighting, while Nick peered at the map intently.