The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Page 19

  I set our suitcases down beside the bed while Matilda turned on a single lamp and opened the doors to a porch. The surf crashed loudly and powerfully.

  She turned toward me, looking at me shyly.

  I walked toward her and cupped her neck in my hands. We kissed more passionately than we ever had, as if once we had left the estate we were finally given permission slips to be adults.

  “For so many years, I dreamed of leaving the estate, of what the world would be like. So many people and places, the possibilities were endless. But this is beyond even the realm of my imagination.”

  Matilda touched my jaw. It was still her favorite part of me.

  “It’s prickly,” she said, repeating what she had said that first evening on the tennis court. Matilda rubbed its reddish stubble with her pink fingernails. “Such a man’s jaw. I feel like you will always protect me, Thomas Cleary.”

  Then she pulled her hand away, awkwardly smoothing out the fabric of her skirt. I realized she was just as nervous as I was.

  Matilda leaned in and spoke softly. “I’ve wanted this for so long.”

  “So have I,” I whispered. I paused, fumbling at what to do next. This was a girl who had utterly enchanted me for two months, a girl I deeply loved. I had thought about this moment more times than I could count, and yet I somehow felt paralyzed by my own nerves.

  I took a breath, and I started at her right index finger, kissing it slowly, from knuckle to painted pink nail. I did the same with each finger on her right hand, then her left.

  I leaned in and kissed the back of her neck—that little crease at the base of her skull, the part where her blond hairs sprouted. I felt her hands grab for me, and she kissed me on the lips. She was still inexperienced, but it was different from those nights on the estate when she would explore me innocently and naively, without understanding what she was moving toward. In the past, before this, our kisses had been end games, acts of affection meant to punctuate an evening rather than extend it. Her kiss was now an opening act.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Yes, more than okay.”

  I took her hand and led it to the bottom of my shirt, and she pulled it over my head. She had seen my chest before, at the estate swimming pool, but now she allowed herself to focus on it intensely. Her eyes lingered on the area under my stomach where a patch of reddish-blond hair disappeared into the top of my shorts. She touched the hair lightly, before fumbling with the button on my shorts nervously. She couldn’t get it undone.

  “Sorry. Do you want to do it?” she asked, a bit of uncertainty in her voice.

  “No, you do it,” I said gently.

  She slipped my shorts down, sliding her hands down my hips as she did.

  Then it was my turn. I slowly unbuttoned Matilda’s dress, slipped it over her head and put it on the bed beside us. She was wearing a white cotton bra and underwear, and her instinct was to put her arms across her chest, to cover herself up.

  I took her wrists in my hands, delicately, and I placed her arms at her sides, looking at her while I did. I unclasped her bra. I had thought of her every minute since I had first met her, but her body was beyond even what I had imagined. The curves of her, her length—they were all somehow too beguiling for her innocence.

  “Do I look okay?” Matilda asked, tilting her head downward in a shy manner.

  “You’re absolutely flawless.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “I’m a journalist. Only facts here.”

  Matilda smiled, and I laid her on the bed, sliding her underwear off her hips. She pulled my boxers off, and for the first time we were unclothed with each other. She looked at me intrigued.

  I kissed her belly and hugged her hips in my arms. I stared at her body beneath mine—her soft stomach pale as a porcelain doll’s, the arc of her hips, the muscles in her legs.

  “That tickles,” she said quietly, under her breath, when I touched a crease behind the back of her knee.

  I kissed her inner thighs, inch by inch. I took care to be gentle, as if every bit of her was breakable.

  “Are you okay?” I asked again.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes. More than okay,” I said with a smile.

  I was inside of her then, and she took a deep breath like a hiccup.

  I whispered in her ear, “You are so perfect. I feel as if everything beautiful about life is in you.”

  She squeezed my hands tightly, and when it ended, much later, Matilda studied me tenderly, as if she was seeing me for the very first time. She traced my eyelashes with her fingertips. I kissed the back of her neck, and I smelled her perfume, more pungent with her sweat.

  “You smell so pretty.”

  “Thank you,” Matilda said. “My father bought it for me. It’s my mother’s scent.”

  Matilda turned toward the outdoors, in my arms. We lay on our sides, and in the distance the lights of Honolulu sparkled on the ocean. Above us stars filled the clear night sky.

  “Look, the Big Dipper,” Matilda said, pointing through the floor-to-ceiling glass at the sky. “Can you see this constellation all over the world?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Let’s pretend you can’t,” Matilda whispered. “Like nobody else can see it, that it’s ours and only ours—our secret.”

  The Big Dipper was brighter and bigger than we were. It was silly to think that we could hoard it, that those pins of light that shone so brilliantly from miles away could be our secret, but for a brief second I believed it.

  Twenty-One

  Is being in love any way to spend a day? It is, for all I did was love Matilda Duplaine. Our first days in Hawaii were joyous ones. It was a time that I believed in possibility—the most glorious word in the English vocabulary—and that the bliss would never end.

  Matilda and I were biased of course, but as we sipped pineapple juice and listened to the rumbling of the sea, we would say that Joel Goldman’s Hawaiian estate was even more magnificent than David’s in Bel-Air. There was no horseshoe pit, no sculpture garden, no croquet lawn or bowling alley, but none of those things mattered anymore.

  In fact, there couldn’t have been two more different worlds than David Duplaine’s estate in Bel-Air and Joel Goldman’s in Hawaii. While Bel-Air was still, stately and impassionate, Hawaii was untamed, beastly and roaring. In Bel-Air every moment was programmed—golf instructors and tutors arrived neither a minute too early nor a minute too late and dinner was served at six sharp. Our time in Hawaii was free and unscheduled—meals were skipped, timetables ignored.

  In the mornings, I would pull the sheets off Matilda while she slept and kiss the shoulder blades that had gone erect with the morning chill. She would squirm, and I would kiss the back of her neck. A muffled giggle would come next, and then I would bury my face in her hair, the backs of her knees, the hollows of her elbows. We would then make love—we didn’t revel in it, for we had a day to conquer—and then take showers outside in the morning sunlight.

  Matilda wanted to pack the hours as tightly as possible, so as not to waste a minute of her new life. We walked down the jetty and cast fishing rods, and we visited the aquarium and watched the fish slither through treasure chests. We took day trips to different shores and went for long walks, listening to the electric sound of the sun and wails of the seagulls. We spent hours in the bookstore—Matilda loved its smell of paper, the fact that you could turn a book’s pages without commitment. We drove on Hawaii’s back roads and sped through the streets in the Dino, Matilda with a scarf in her hair, like Grace Kelly. We cooked, toured volcanoes and looked at the stars through a telescope. As I had promised, I took Matilda sailing and we moved so fast we felt as if we might defy gravity and end up on the moon.

  Matilda devoured it all. She mar
veled at the simplest of things: the order of the shelves at the grocery store—“Why are pickles kept next to ketchup,” she wondered—the ka-ching sound of a cash register, the buoyant cacophony of children laughing on the playground. Every one of Matilda’s senses was alive. She could spend minutes examining a single rock, a grain of sand or a specimen of tree she had never seen before. The smell of the ocean, the humidity of the air before a storm still intrigued her. And she heard sounds I had long ago forgotten to listen to—the croaking of pelicans, the tapping of a foot, a guitar strummed in a lonely park at night.

  Late one afternoon, Matilda and I sat on a jetty overlooking the ocean. Matilda wanted to learn to surf, and we signed her up for a class set to begin the next morning. We watched as the surfers balanced precariously on their longboards, learning the map of the ocean for the first time—whether waves were rights or lefts and the precise timing of a pop-up.

  When the sun was beginning its slow descent toward the horizon, Matilda and I pulled ourselves away from the ocean and its intoxicating waves, and we walked across the street for a stroll through our favorite park.

  Hawaiian grade-schoolers kicked soccer balls back and forth. Teenage girls in mod outfits gossiped about exams and boys. An older gentleman with weathered skin painted a scene at an easel and lovers walked hand in hand. Matilda watched all of them silently, still enrapt with the idea that the world was full of so many people.

  We stumbled upon a little burger place and Matilda ordered a teriyaki hamburger—aptly called a teriburger—something, I explained to her, we didn’t have in California.

  “How’s your teriburger?” I asked.

  “The best hamburger I’ve ever had,” she said. She ate a French fry and sipped a chocolate milk shake. “Everything is incredible—it really is. I feel as if I’m walking through a magnifying glass,” Matilda said contemplatively. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to seeing all these things you see all the time. And the people. There are so many of them.” She paused. “Is it true that God didn’t make the same person twice?”

  “That’s what they say, but I guess there’s no way to prove it,” I said.

  “It’s so hard for me to believe—in all those billions of people there’s never been the same combination,” Matilda said. “You know, Thomas, being here in the world—it’s the people who still most fascinate me. I had only met a handful before.” Matilda’s fingers were dripping in mustard—her preferred sauce for her fries—and she counted on them. “Maybe thirty people, in all those years at the estate.”

  “No wonder you liked me.” I grinned wryly. “Not a lot to choose from. The percentages were definitely in my favor.”

  Matilda laughed. “If I had met a million people it still would have been you.”

  “Well, I have met thousands of people, and it was still you.”

  Matilda leaned over the table and she kissed me. She put her fingers up to my face to cup it and then giggled when she realized she had almost painted me with brown mustard.

  As Matilda finished her teriburger and fries, she sat for a moment. That was the other thing about Matilda: whereas I would run from this destination to that one, she would take time to experience everything. I thought of David, the consummate multitasker, and again considered how different Matilda was from him.

  “Do you miss your father?” I asked Matilda tentatively.

  “I do—terribly sometimes, but other times—” Matilda paused. “Well, I guess love’s difficult when it’s far away. It’s so much easier when someone’s there, in person. Do you miss your father?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And more than everything—even more than the missing—I feel like I should be around for him. And sometimes, particularly over the past couple of months, I feel guilty—like I don’t deserve to be happy when he’s still so sad.”

  “About your mom?”

  I nodded.

  “What was it like to have your mom die?” Matilda asked with slight uncertainty, as if she might be prying.

  “It’s the flip side of falling in love. Remember when we met? And you told me once that I remained in your air long after I had left?”

  Matilda smiled and nodded.

  “Death is the opposite of that. When you fall in love, the air feels different, like there’s more oxygen or carbon dioxide or whatever it is because you feel lighter. When someone close to you dies, the air feels heavier. The world doesn’t quite seem the same, but in a bad way.” I paused. It felt nice to talk about it, because I had held it inside for so long. “And your thinking is muddled. At first, I thought she was still alive. For months I would look for my mom in crowds, and at times I would think I found her, that the cancer hadn’t gotten to her after all. And then, once I accepted that she was gone, I would think that she was reaching out to me from Heaven, to tell me she was still with me. I would see her favorite flower and think she made it bloom just for me, or I would hear a song on the radio and believe she somehow influenced the DJ to play that very song at that very minute. But then, well, I guess reality sank in. My mom had nothing to do with any of those things—they were just random coincidences.”

  “Do you know they were random coincidences?” Matilda asked.

  “I guess I don’t know either way,” I said.

  “But do you believe they were random coincidences?” Matilda pressed.

  “Yes. I think that’s what I believe,” I said sadly.

  “I don’t know which is worse,” Matilda said, “a world that was never whole to begin with or one that was.”

  I was inclined to think that it was worse to have a mom who died, rather than have no one to lose. But then, again, I didn’t know.

  “Come on,” I said, needing to lighten the mood. “Let’s take a walk.”

  We walked back through the park, and I noticed, in the distance, an A-frame structure that looked as if it was built in the 1960s. A few clunky cars were parked in the lot, and a kitschy sign in a pointy midcentury font read Kalekulani Lanes.

  It was as if it had materialized just for us: a bowling alley.

  I put my hands over Matilda’s eyes, blindfolding her. She giggled, and I whispered in her ear, “I have a surprise for you.”

  “A surprise? I love surprises. Tell me what it is.”

  “I thought you just said you loved surprises. If I tell you what it is, it’s no longer a surprise.”

  I guided Matilda across the parking lot, and as I opened the glass doors we were greeted with the thunder of bowling balls, children screaming in delight and music. Matilda threw my hands off her eyes.

  “Oh, Thomas,” she said, “a bowling alley!”

  She rented shoes that didn’t fit as snugly as they should have and chose a ball that was loose around the thumb but too tight for her ring finger. Our lane was overwaxed and shiny and wasn’t prepared according to Hector’s strict specifications. But none of it mattered.

  Matilda’s first frame was a spare. A cartoon appeared on the television screen and Matilda laughed raucously.

  We bowled for two hours, and every bit of it delighted Matilda. Matilda helped a group of teenage boys on the lane beside us with their techniques—“Flip the wrist—like so”—and they were as enamored with her as I was. We bowled until Matilda’s fingers were chapped and her feet were blistered from the ill-fitting shoes.

  After we returned the balls to their racks and the shoes to the rental counter, we started to walk toward the door.

  “I don’t want to go home,” Matilda said.

  It was a surreal moment, because I briefly forgot where “home” was.

  “Well, there’s always the lounge,” I said, pointing toward a vacant room that held a circular-shaped bar and a few vinyl booths. The walls were decorated with strings of garishly colored blinking Christmas lights.

  Matilda grabbed my hand and
pulled me toward the bar.

  “Two of those please,” I said to the bartender, as I pointed at a lighted Pabst Blue Ribbon sign.

  The bartender delivered two plastic mugs of beer, and Matilda studied the carbonation and foam.

  “Cheers,” I said, lifting my beer up in toast.

  Matilda smiled widely.

  “This is my first ‘Cheers,’” she said. “And it’s so appropriate because there’s just so much to be cheerful about.”

  “Don’t forget the eye contact,” I said, as she raised her glass.

  “The eye contact?”

  “Yes, you have to make eye contact—for luck.”

  Matilda locked her eyes on mine and clinked my mug with hers with great enthusiasm.

  I took a gulp of beer, relishing its alcohol as it slid down my throat. Matilda, on the other hand, coughed the moment the beer hit her tongue.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’ve never had beer before. It’s terrible.”

  “It’s an acquired taste. They brew this stuff in Milwaukee, where I’m from, so I’m used to it.”

  Matilda licked the foam with the tip of her tongue.

  “I guess I can get used to the foam part—the rest, I’m not so sure.”

  Matilda forced down a second sip and then a third.

  “Tolerable?” I asked.

  “Barely.”

  “You better watch it or you’ll get drunk.”

  “I’ve never been drunk,” she said. “What is it like?”

  “You’ll see.” I had done a reckless thing, stealing Matilda and taking her to Hawaii and now getting her drunk in the Kalekulani Lanes. But I had no regrets.

  “Bartender,” I called. “Two more, please.”

  “More? I haven’t even hit the bubbles yet,” Matilda said, more to the bartender than to me, and she winked at both of us.

  I noticed a jukebox in the corner. We flipped through the catalog of songs, eventually finding what we were looking for: Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All.”