The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Read online

  “It’s not baseball season. There must be something else going on there.”

  “When can we go to a baseball game?”

  “In April. I’ll give you a rain check.”

  “A rain check.” Matilda looked contemplatively at the lights. The fluorescence reminded me of the evening on the tennis court, when I had first met her. “You know this past month was the best month of my life. You may not think that’s saying much, because my life was so dull before I met you, but it’s the truth.”

  She leaned over and kissed me, sweetly and passionately. She wore a summer dress and it smelled of Hawaii—of the ocean, sun, teriburgers and plumeria. I squeezed her dress in my hand, wanting to be back there.

  “Remember when we only had Fridays?” Matilda whispered. “Life in between Fridays was like the wire between lanterns, and Fridays were the parts that glowed.”

  “But now we have every days,” I said. “Every day we have each other.”

  She smiled, and we stood side by side, overlooking the decrepit swimming pool and the sliver of mountains beyond. In the distance, the lights of the baseball stadium illuminated the sky, and I thought of everything we had to look forward to. It was as if our pockets were full of rain checks, and all we had to do was cash them in.

  Twenty-Nine

  I returned to work the next morning to find my cubicle had been emptied.

  Panic set in initially, but then I remembered that a perk of my new assistant editor position had been an office, and to say mine had been prepared for me in my absence was a gross understatement.

  Gone was the cheap metal desk that had probably been purchased from a wholesale office supply store. In its place were a hand-carved antique walnut desk worthy of David Duplaine, two guest chairs upholstered in luxurious fabric, a bronze desk lamp that looked as if it had been won at auction at Christie’s, and a small bar with crystal glasses and bottles of top-shelf alcohol. Above the bar, across from my desk, hung a drawing I recognized from Lily’s shop. It was a modern chalk art that featured the face of a woman with a large halo of kinky hair.

  My computer had been left on, as if waiting for me to type in my password. An orchid adorned the desk—pure white, perky and seductive.

  It took me a moment to register that this office was mine, and another to reconcile the fact that Lily Goldman had spent the month I was away designing it just for me.

  A linen envelope leaned against the computer monitor. I opened it to find a note in Lily’s well-bred penmanship.

  Congratulations on your new position, Thomas. Your mom would have been very proud. The desk belonged to my father. I trust it will bring you the same success it brought him.

  Love, Lily.

  “Good morning, Cleary.” I knew the voice instantly, and I looked up to find Rubenstein filling the door frame.

  “Phil,” I said, “thanks for—”

  “Nice tan,” he interrupted. “I trust you got your project done for Lily?”

  “I did. Thank you.”

  “Stop with the thank-yous. They embarrass me,” Rubenstein said. He glanced at his oversize gold watch in a meaningful manner. “I’ll let you get settled in, and then you’re needed in the conference room for a nine-thirty meeting. The entertainment industry doesn’t sleep while you’re on holiday.”

  He turned to leave, then hesitated. “And, Cleary?”

  “Yup?” I was waiting for a quip about my expensive office furniture, which he was examining with a bit of a smirk.

  “It’s good to have you back,” he said.

  “It’s good to be here,” I replied, because it was.

  * * *

  It was a day of meetings and getting caught up. Darkness rolled in around five o’clock, and I had avoided calling Lily all day, partly because a total office design required more than a phone call to express gratitude, and partly because I didn’t know how I felt about it. A thirty-day sabbatical at her father’s vacation house was extravagant, but the office—and especially her father’s desk—somehow felt more intrusive and, well, presumptuous. Not only had Lily chosen my furnishings, but she also must have paid for them, and I couldn’t afford to reimburse her. And, of more importance, I felt like an intruder in her family’s secrets. Lily had invited me into her world, and I had proceeded to dissect it and open it up, leaving its guts on the table. I didn’t know what I should tell her or what I should keep to myself.

  I decided I would pay Lily a personal visit over the next couple days, after I had sorted out exactly how I felt about things.

  I dialed Matilda instead. Her cell phone had a Hawaii area code, and it made me wistful. It was nice to be back at work, but I longed to be back there, drinking freshly pressed pineapple juice on the veranda and making love to Matilda on the beach.

  “Oh, Thomas, it’s you. It’s delightful to hear your voice. I love the telephone,” Matilda declared, without even saying “hello.” She still wasn’t accustomed to phone etiquette. “I hear the sounds of frenetic typing in the background. Are you creating the news?”

  “Or writing about it. Creating makes it sound so important.”

  “You are important, and I miss you so. I’ve become a glutton for you—a terrible fate,” she said, giggling to make it sound not so terrible.

  I smiled. It had been so long since I had been loved like this. If I was honest, I had never been loved like this.

  “Well, if that’s the case, I’m calling with good news. I’m leaving now. So I’ll see you soon—what is it you say? ‘Way too soon to miss me soon’?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly it. And I still don’t want to hang up, because having you on the phone feels like I have a real part of you. Even the crumbs of you I like.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said, looking out at Los Angeles, lit for the night. The sky was crisp and clear.

  I returned to the apartment to find Matilda at the door, dressed in blue jeans and a gray T-shirt. Her hair was done in the messy after-bed look girls of Los Angeles preferred, and she wore a touch of makeup. It was the first time I found myself eager to come home to my shabby apartment. The route hadn’t been quick enough. There had been too many stoplights and they all seemed to be red.

  And then I had a sharp realization: perhaps Bel-Air was only glorious because it was the place I had fallen in love with Matilda. Maybe it had nothing to do with the sheared lawns, the exotic birds, the vast walled estates with swimming pools and croquet lawns.

  “Hello, stranger,” Matilda said, whisking me back to the present. “Penny for your thoughts?”

  “Dollar and we have a deal.”

  “Oh dear, I’m unemployed,” Matilda said, smiling. “But I’ll owe you for it? I’m good on my word.”

  “You seem like a woman of your word, so deal. Did you miss me?” I asked, kissing the side of her neck, smelling her perfume.

  “Ridiculously so. I’ll tell you all about missing you over dinner. I’m starving,” Matilda declared, as she wrapped one of my sweaters around her.

  I had made a reservation at an Italian restaurant in Hollywood. It was a quaint neighborhood joint with red vinyl booths and checked tablecloths. We sat down in a dark corner with a red votive candle to light our table, and Matilda cupped it, warming her hands.

  When we were in Honolulu, I had feared returning to Los Angeles. I didn’t know if Matilda would assimilate into the real world. Yet at dinner I realized, among the young Hollywood set, Matilda was just another one of the girls. She had come from a castle in the hills of Bel-Air, where she had been kept captive her whole life, but biology is a powerful thing. A person has to adapt for survival.

  After dinner, we took a walk down Hollywood Boulevard. The street was paved with the stars of Matilda’s favorite actors: Audrey Hepburn and Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne. She traced their names wit
h her pink fingernails, and she recited the history on each.

  We walked past the Mann’s Chinese Theater, big and bold and colorful and swarmed by tourists. There was a movie playing there Matilda wanted to see, and we made plans to go Friday after work. After, Matilda made me promise to take her to the Griffith Park Observatory and its planetarium, a giant domed structure that loomed above us on the crest of the mountains. I was already excited for Friday, and it reminded me of those early days, when Fridays were all I had to be excited for.

  I put my arm around Matilda, pulling her tightly into my side. The dizzying lights of Hollywood Boulevard projected onto Matilda’s face, and she smiled widely and crookedly and joyously. We ducked into a souvenir shop, picking out a postcard for my dad, and I pointed out the Capitol Records building—round like a turntable—which Matilda had only seen in movies. We laughed at jokes that seemed tailor-made for only us, and as Matilda and I walked down the famous street, I realized I loved Los Angeles, that glorious city of second chances. It had given me another shot at a career, at love. I had been newly orphaned, broke and disgraced when I had first landed here, but Los Angeles hadn’t cared. It had made every one of my dreams come true.

  * * *

  After we returned home from our walk down Hollywood Boulevard, Matilda and I fell asleep on the sofa. I carried her into bed around two and immediately fell into a deep dream. It was still dark out when I awoke for no apparent reason except that I knew something was wrong. I turned on my side toward Matilda, but I found only an imprint in the pillow where her head had been. She was gone.

  I walked into the living room and found her sitting on the floor in her purple nightgown, the twelve pages of my story lined up in front of her, in three symmetrical rows of four. Beside it was the photo of Joel Goldman and Carole Partridge in the South of France I had brought back from Hawaii.

  She kept her eyes on the pages and the photo.

  “I didn’t mean to open the drawer,” Matilda said repentantly. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I would help by cleaning up a bit. There was a layer of dust over everything.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “There were also a few dishes in the sink, as well. And I kept thinking before we went to sleep that you had given up your life for me—that you hadn’t even had time to do your dishes because you had been busy taking care of me.”

  Matilda bit her lip. She stopped speaking.

  I had fallen in love with Matilda for so many reasons, but the biggest of them all was because she was so pure and good—so full of hope. Even in the darkest days of her captivity, Matilda had somehow managed to be hopeful. Now, in an instant, that part of her was gone.

  “Matilda, it’s not what you think. I was never going to publish it. I promise you. I promise, I would never do that to you,” I said. “I wrote it when we were apart from each other in Hawaii. I did it to make you seem real, when I thought you had left me.”

  Matilda traced the words on the pages in front of her. “I had sometimes wondered if Ms. Partridge was my mother. She would look at me in a way that felt too affectionate for just a tennis coach, and I couldn’t help but think there were parts of us that looked alike. Dad was rarely around during my lessons with her—he was always working—but when their paths did cross, the way he looked at her, I thought maybe he loved her. I didn’t know what that look meant until I met you. Those nights, alone in my bedroom, I’d imagine Daddy, Ms. Partridge and me as a family.

  “But then I would scold myself because I thought it was the grandest and most delusional form of wishful thinking. I studied genetics and I knew it was impossible that I would end up with light green eyes from hazel and brown. I have such blond hair, but both my parents would have had dark. ‘Oh, Matilda,’ I would say to myself, ‘you’re such a desperate girl. She couldn’t possibly be your mother.’ I was grasping for something that wasn’t there. I wanted love so desperately—and to be loved—that I believed it was somewhere it wasn’t.”

  There were tears in Matilda’s eyes now.

  “You’re probably writing this down,” Matilda said. “You’ve probably written all of it down. I think about all of the things I said, and it’s enough for a whole book. I should stop talking now. My father says the best businessmen stop talking a full sixty seconds before they think they should.”

  I walked over to Matilda and I knelt beside her. I put my hand on her arm. She brushed it off.

  “Matilda, I know you’re not going to believe me, but I promise you—”

  “The funny thing is,” Matilda said, interrupting me, “I should be angry at my father, but I’m not. I should be angry with Ms. Partridge, but I’m not. The only person I’m angry with is you.”

  It took Matilda a moment to untangle her long limbs, and then she stood up. She collected the pages and put them back on the desk, in the order in which she’d found them.

  “Matilda—” I begged.

  She ignored me. She walked to the bedroom and collected her things. She got dressed in the bathroom, and through the door I heard her call a cab.

  She walked toward the door without a word, suitcase in hand.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I’m going home. Which is probably the only place in the world where I belong.”

  Matilda put her hand on the doorknob. She rotated it a quarter of a turn and then faced me.

  “There were so many moments,” she began. She was crying now. “The bowling alley, the swimming pool, that week on the estate when we would lie on our backs in the grass and look at the stars. And Hawaii—when we made love for the first time. I’m afraid of the answer, but I need to know the truth. Were all of those moments make-believe? Was there a single minute—even just a smidgen of time as brief as a blink of an eye—that you ever liked me, too?”

  I walked over to her, and I placed my hand over hers on the knob, stopping her from turning it any farther.

  “Matilda, I have loved you—absolutely loved you—from the second I saw you on the tennis court,” I said.

  Matilda didn’t say anything. The cab honked outside, and I suddenly felt the moment slipping away from me, as if it was already in the past, even though we were still in the present.

  “There wasn’t the smallest fraction of time when I ever second-guessed my love for you. Ever. You were never a story to me. I need you to believe me, Matilda. I can’t imagine going a minute without you, let alone the rest of my life. I couldn’t make those moments up—fabricate them from nothing. I’m not an actor who could play a part and pretend to be in love with you. I’m a good person, and I would never play a charade like that. Please stay, and give me a chance to prove to you that what I’m telling you is true.”

  Matilda didn’t react. I hoped she believed me because I always stood for the truth. But she didn’t know that. For all she knew I had lied once before at the Wall Street Journal when I had stolen someone’s story, and here I was doing it again.

  She stood at the door for a moment longer, then turned the knob and exited my life.

  Thirty

  She didn’t call.

  I showed up to the planetarium on the Friday of our planned rendezvous, and I gazed at the stars alone, staring at Orion’s Belt, wondering if she was looking at the same constellation from inside the leaded-glass windows of the estate. I went to the Mann’s Chinese, too, and I arrived early so I could see moviegoers as they walked down the velvet aisle. If I caught a glimpse of a blonde girl, my heart would flutter, but it would never be her.

  I would think of Matilda every moment, dissect my days according to her schedule. I imagined her waking up to her old-fashioned bedside alarm clock and selecting her outfit for the day before sitting down alone at the long dining room table and eating her preferred breakfast of pancakes and extra syrup. I’d see her walking across the grassy knolls of the estate
, small heels getting caught in the grass as she stumbled to the auditorium for biology class. At precisely three o’clock every day, I would think of her playing tennis on the ivy-drenched court where we met. She knew Carole was her mother now, and I wondered if she had told her.

  I would never know, because weeks went by and Matilda still didn’t call.

  Work progressed uneventfully. If Rubenstein had known anything, he didn’t let on. He still fed me stories and we lunched, weekly at a dimly lit private club, slurping down martinis and chatting about the most glamorous business in the world—the business of entertaining. No one had come to dismantle my office. The priceless Cy Twombly drawing of the woman with frizzy hair watched over me, and I still worked on the desk that had once belonged to Matilda’s biological father. The bar was drained of top-shelf alcohol at this point, but that was my doing.

  I avoided Bel-Air. On the rare occasion I had to drive in its vicinity I skipped it altogether, taking the circuitous route around Sunset Boulevard, the road that led there. The only time I allowed myself to pass through those pillars was in my dreams, and sometimes those dreams were so vivid it would take me minutes after I had woken up to realize I wasn’t actually there.

  Three weeks after Matilda left my life, I heard that David was having a party for the president of the United States. It was a ten-thousand-dollar-a-head affair, and, surprisingly, David was hosting the party at the estate, a place previously closed off to the rest of the world. This raised the obvious questions: Had Matilda told him what I had found out? Was he no longer worried about keeping the secret? And perhaps most important, was it possible Matilda would attend the party?

  Under the guise of covering the event for the paper, I finagled a ten-minute visit for the Times photographer. My instructions to him were clear. He was to return with a photo of each and every guest; not a single soul could be skipped.

  I couldn’t bear to be away. I parked as close as possible and stood across the street from Bel-Air’s East Gate. For security reasons, the entrance to Bel-Air was guarded with dark-suited gentlemen with clipboards cradled in their arms and wires in their ears, and it was closed to everyone except residents and partygoers. A line of luxury sedans and sport utility vehicles with tinted windows drove through the illustrious white pillars.