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?”*
Eddie nodded, thinking that it was time to redo his own closet.
“Now let me show you the pièce de résistance,” Leo said, pronouncing “pièce” like “peace.” With a flourish, he glided his thumb over a mirrored panel and its surface instantly transformed into a high-definition screen that projected the life-size image of a male model in a double-breasted suit. Above his right shoulder hovered the brand names of each item of clothing, followed by the dates and locations where the outfit was previously worn. Leo waved a finger in front of the screen as if he were flicking a page, and the man now appeared in corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater. “There’s a camera embedded in this mirror that takes a picture of you and stores it, so you can see every single thing you’ve ever worn, organized by date and place. This way you’ll never repeat an outfit!”
Eddie stared at the mirror in amazement. “Oh, I’ve seen that before,” he said rather unconvincingly as the envy began to coarse through his veins. He felt the sudden urge to shove his friend’s bloated face into the pristine mirrored wall. Once again, Leo was showing off another shiny new toy he did fuck-all to deserve. It had been like this since they were little. When Leo turned seven, his father gave him a titanium bicycle custom-designed for his pudgy frame by former NASA engineers (it was stolen within three days). At sixteen, when Leo aspired to become a Canto hip-hop singer, his father built him a state-of-the-art recording studio and bankrolled his first album (the CD can still be found on eBay). Then in 1999, he funded Leo’s Internet start-up, which managed to lose more than ninety million dollars and go belly-up at the height of the Internet boom. And now this—the latest in a countless collection of homes around the globe showered upon him