Lies and Weddings(98)

“Didn’t your father fly you to Thailand to get you devirginated at some fancy brothel the minute you got hair on your balls?” the middle-aged guy wearing the Lakers cap said.

“It was Macau. He flew me to this super-VIP brothel in the penthouse of a casino, and he insisted on watching,” Luis Felipe replied. “So here I am, going at it on top of this whore, and my father suddenly says, ‘Stop! Get off her! She’s much too loose. Let’s find one that’s a better fit for you!’?”

“Cheers to Daddy!” the guy said, lifting his beer up high.

Eden glanced at her father in horror and whispered, “Who are these people?”

“I believe that’s Luis Felipe’s entertainment lawyer,” Thomas whispered back.

The film producer from lunch at La Cienega Villas spoke next. “The story I love about your dad is when he got so mad because he couldn’t find the right plane with the maximum range to fly him from Manila to LA without having to stop over somewhere. His G4 couldn’t do it, so he bought a G5, and when the G5 couldn’t do it, he got the G550. Didn’t he end up buying three different jets?”

“Five. I got the hand-me-downs, and I still fuckin’ can’t fly to Manila without having to refuel in Tokyo,” Luis Felipe grunted.

A guy wearing a white puffer vest said in a thick Spanish accent, “Luis, remember the time your dad made you fly commercial from Geneva to Manila? To punish you after you got kicked out of TASIS? You got so depressed being on that plane you said you almost wanted to pull the handle on the exit row door and jump out, hahaha.”

“I seriously thought about killing myself on that flight. I had never ever flown an airline in my life, and the bastard fuckin’ put me in Swiss Air Lines business class. Have you any idea what hell that was? How is anyone supposed to fly for fourteen hours straight without a proper bedroom? I can’t even go six hours without sashimi,” Luis Felipe moaned.

“You were obviously suffering from PTWD,” the supermodel who was at La Cienega Villas chimed in.

“What’s that?” the lawyer wearing the Lakers cap asked.

“Post-traumatic wealth disorder. It’s a real thing. My children had it when we had to move into a temporary house in Brentwood after the Malibu fire destroyed our compound. They just could not cope with the shame of being in Brentwood. And everything about that house depressed them—the pool, the tennis court, the giant outdoor trampoline. That’s when my daughter tried to get a face tattoo and my son started cutting himself.”

“Would you like a Kobe beef slider?” Eden heard a voice beside her say. She turned to see a woman holding up a platter of overstuffed mini-hamburgers that were still oozing blood.

“No thank you,” Eden replied, not having the slightest bit of appetite. She had come to Cloudline to pay her respects at Rene’s wake, but this surreal event held in the massive screening room of Luis Felipe’s house with its bizarre cast of characters wasn’t like any other wake she’d ever attended—it felt more like the VIP area at Coachella. She wondered how soon she could get out of here without seeming rude, even though she didn’t think Luis Felipe would even notice or care. She had approached him to offer her condolences when she had first arrived at the house.

“I’m so sorry,” Eden said simply.

“It’s okay.”

“And I must apologize for how I spoke to you last night.”

“Why? You were right. He did die,” Luis Felipe replied, looking her straight in the eye.

Eden pursed her lips, not sure what else to say. Their awkward exchange was mercifully interrupted by Jenna, the actress who had been at Daddy Mustang, who rushed in with a hug. “Louie baby, I’m sooooooo sorry!”

“Hey, babe,” Luis Felipe mumbled.

“Lexi had to do a self-tape, she’ll be here soon. Here, I brought you this book. You gotta read it. It’ll, like, change your life,” she said, thrusting a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking into his hands.

Not sure about that, Eden thought to herself, wondering if Jenna had actually read the book.

As more guests arrived and the supermodel continued to drone on about post-traumatic wealth disorder and its terrible effects on her children, Eden leaned in to her father’s ear again to ask, “Where’s Luis Felipe’s mother?”

“She lives in Beijing these days, I believe.”

“Is she coming to LA?”

“I’d be surprised if she came.”

“Really? But her son’s father just died…”

“Yes, but they don’t have a relationship at all.”

“Really? Didn’t she raise him?”

“No. Luis Felipe was raised by a series of Filipino nannies and she had no involvement.”

“That’s rather odd, don’t you think?”

“She was never really a mother…more a surrogate. You see, Rene specifically chose her for her genes. He wanted to engineer the perfect son, and she was a tall, stunning lady from Northern China. She gave him a child, but then she went on to marry a top politician in China and has a whole other family with the man.”

Eden said nothing, but she suddenly felt more sorry than ever for Luis Felipe.

“I told you, Rene was a very…complicated man. You were lucky to have met him when you did—in his final days he was much more…subdued.”