The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Read online

  “Work thing,” David responded. “Never sleeps.”

  “How was your dinner, Thomas?” Charles asked, changing the subject.

  “Delicious. You’re a wonderful cook, Emma.”

  “I can’t take credit for it. But I can take credit for hiring the chef. Cordon Bleu, Paris. I went there personally and dipped my spoon into all of their kettles. I liked Francois’s the best.”

  Charles raised his glass in toast and everyone went back to their side conversations. The dessert wine went on for another half hour or so, and I found myself staring through a large picture window at a majestic date palm covered in blue lights. That tree had to be a hundred years old. I looked at the lights intently until they blurred together into a filmy blue that saturated the air. To my right, I noticed Carole gazed at the same blue air. She seemed lost in it. When she finally tore her eyes away, she stood up from the table. She took her drink with her and never returned to the room.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later the group congregated for a postdinner brandy in what Emma called “the card room.” I had never been to a house with a room dedicated to cards before, but it made sense since Emma had specifically said that she loved “anything old-fashioned,” and cards would have certainly fallen into that category.

  The glass room was lined in lattice more suitable for the outdoors than an interior space, and its plants had been allowed to run wild. Two oversize square tables were illuminated by massive pagoda-shaped chandeliers, their crystals generously casting off light.

  Admittedly, I had never been a card guy—in fact, I didn’t even know how to play simple games like bridge or poker—so I excused myself to make a phone call, but instead slipped outside to have a stealth cigarette, a habit I had picked up a few years earlier and never quit. I settled into a lounge chair next to a grass-bordered body of water that resembled a swamp. Its water was green and murky and my eye caught an occasional minnow swimming beneath its lily pads. Were it not for the diving board at the northwest end, I wouldn’t have even known it was a swimmable pool.

  I lit a match and put it to the tip of my cigarette. What a night it had been. I was here in Bel-Air with some of the most important people in a city full of important people. I was so high I never wanted to come down. I knew Lily’s motive for the invitation, and it had nothing to do with feeding a sweet Midwestern kid a home-cooked meal. Over crème brûlée, Lily had insisted everyone at the table give me quotes about her father. She was no fool, and she knew that favorable quotes from some of the most important people in the industry carried heavy weight.

  But then I reflected on a scene from that afternoon—of Lily’s fingers on my neck. I wondered if there had been some other reason for Lily’s invitation.

  I took a puff of my cigarette. I watched its golden tip light the clear, starry Bel-Air sky. We were in the middle of the city, but the quiet sky belonged in a countryside somewhere. It made me feel vaguely existential, as if above and beyond us there was nothing—nothing to hope for, no afterlife, nothing to make us choose one course of action over another.

  The leopard cat jumped onto my lap and snapped me out of my reverie. Just then I heard a slight rustle from a dark spot in the corner of the property.

  I saw a single shadow, but then it divided in half—into two separate shadows. The gestures of their hands and their body contact indicated a familiarity, and I was certain they were two of the dinner guests who had slipped outside for a side conversation. But despite my journalist’s curiosity, I instinctually turned away. I had always felt uncomfortable intruding on others’ privacy, so I looked at the swimming pool instead. An orange minnow slithered against the pool’s muddy edge, and the leopard cat’s eyes grew large, but he didn’t pounce.

  Then, as quickly as they had appeared, the shadows were gone.

  I finished my cigarette and headed back into the house.

  “Wanna come in, big guy?” I asked the leopard cat, whose eyes shone like green lights. I held the door open for him, but he darted away into the deep black night.

  I found the card room on my second try. I opened the huge wooden doors, expecting to find two of the dinner guests absent. They were all there, though, engaged in a six-person game of poker. I shouldn’t have finished the cigarette.

  “Thomas, where did you disappear to?” Lily said.

  “I fold.” Carole threw in her cards.

  “I fold,” George repeated.

  “The swimming pool,” I said.

  “Would you like to borrow a bathing suit?” Emma asked. “We usually swim in the buff, but we have extras in the pool house.”

  “No, thank you. I went outside for a cigarette.”

  “I fold,” David said.

  “You’re so silly, Thomas.” Emma presented me with a gold ashtray in the shape of a lion. “I bought this at the Duquette sale and I have been absolutely dying to use it. Besides, smoke makes the house feel lived-in. That was my goal with all this—” She spread her arms out wide. “Can’t you tell?”

  I almost started to laugh, but then caught the seriousness in her eyes.

  “Well, you’ve done a good job of it,” I said, lifting a brandy—a drink I hated—in toast.

  Emma smiled before returning to her card game. There was nothing about this mansion that would indicate Emma Bloom’s desire to make it feel lived-in—not the cold stone floors that echoed conversation, not the swampy swimming pool, nor the stiff-backed zebra-covered chairs in the drawing room.

  I sat on the outskirts of the game, watching as Emma shuffled with the expertise of a Vegas casino dealer. I thought again of the shadows outside, of Carole and David’s exchange at dinner. Sure, I was here to pull some quotes on the recently departed Joel Goldman. But something told me the real story was much bigger and more far-reaching than that.

  Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Two: The dead are only interesting in the context of the lives they left behind.

  * * *

  “I hope you don’t mind—we’re going to drop David off. His driver fell ill unexpectedly, poor thing,” Lily said, as Kurt helped her into her champagne mink shrug, which seemed too warm for the weather. “He only lives around the corner. It won’t be much out of our way.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Kurt opened the car doors for us. David sat in the front, Lily and I in the back.

  While Kurt had listened to classical music on our long drive, now the station was tuned to the radio affiliate of David’s cable news network.

  It was only a block away, and we drove it in silence. The radio commentator was the only one who spoke. He pontificated, with left-wing conviction, about the upcoming presidential election. In the Midwest this one block would have been a nice after-dinner walk, but there were no pedestrians in Bel-Air. The streets were too narrow and the people too rich for that.

  We took one turn before stopping in front of an impressive barricade of palatial gray iron gates. They were simple and unadorned, and they opened like magic.

  We passed through the gates into the grandest estate I had ever seen. We had just come from a property so magnificent it took my breath away, but compared to David’s estate, Emma and George’s felt humble. The long driveway meandered through acres of gently rolling hills sparsely dotted with trees. At the end of the driveway was a grand old Palladian manse. The first floor was glowing. Upstairs, only one room was lit, its curtain closed.

  My first reaction was to notice how impersonal David’s estate seemed. The regal house was surrounded by carefully pruned formal gardens and thirty-foot hedges.

  We stopped in the octagonal motor court.

  “Thanks for the ride, Kurt,” David said. “Lily, I’ll call you in the morning.” He looked at me intensely, with that incongruous combination of bored eyes and lively eyebrows. I was captivated. “And, Thomas�
�” David let the name sit by itself for a moment. “I look forward to reading the article on Joel. And I wish you the best of luck at the Times.”

  They were the first words David had said to me all night.

  A valet attendant in his midtwenties dressed in starched whites opened David’s door for him.

  “Welcome home, Mr. Duplaine,” he said.

  Before I could say thank-you or good-night, the valet had already closed David’s door behind him. Kurt turned off the radio. I watched through the tinted glass as David was briskly escorted through the front door by a butler. Soon after, the upstairs light went dark.

  Three

  It was one of those magical nights I didn’t want to end. So when Lily invited me over for a nightcap I accepted.

  Once we left David’s manor, it was a turn, a turn and another quick turn before we arrived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Kurt pointed a clicker at a gate covered by flowers. We drove up the cobblestone driveway slowly, arriving at a large stucco manor with ivy crawling up its walls so densely the windows were mostly covered with leaves. Like Lily, the refined and glamorous place seemed as if it belonged more in the South of France than in Los Angeles. I guessed the property to be an acre or so—smaller than the Blooms’ and tiny compared to David’s. But it was lusher than both; the house was nested in the most stunning flowers and trees I had ever seen.

  Kurt opened the thick antique front door and we walked into a small foyer that was too diminutive for a house of this magnitude. Moments later I understood: the foyer was meant to set expectations low, to make the fifty-foot-long living room appear even grander.

  The house was furnished in the same manner as Lily’s shop. Heavy antiques rested beside modern chalk art; bookcases were filled to the brim with rare books that were wrapped in cellophane to fight off dust. Almost miraculously, ivy grew along the leaded glass doors and crawled up the interior walls to the ceiling.

  “What are you drinking?” Lily asked, as she walked to a smaller version of the Blooms’ bar.

  “Water’s great. Thanks.”

  Lily poured Evian water into a glass made of tortoise shell.

  “The ivy—how does it live?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t,” Lily said. “With no sunlight or fresh air it dies.” Lily pointed to the ceiling, to ivy that was brown and petrified.

  Lily picked up a lemon but then couldn’t find a paring knife. Her eyes briefly searched for Kurt, before she abandoned the idea of sliced lemon altogether and gave me my room-temperature water as is.

  It struck me as odd how Lily and her friends employed housefuls of servants but then did random things for themselves. For example, Lily had referenced “the staff” in her shop, but she had busied herself moving antiques. Likewise, Emma had personally answered the door and prepared my gimlet, but the staff-to-dinner-party-guest ratio in that household appeared around two to one. And David: in the span of a three-hour dinner, had his driver really fallen too ill to drive one block?

  Lily sat on the couch, her bare feet curled beneath her. She unclasped her cuffs, and she placed them on the table beside her as if they were handcuffs she had been eager to unshackle. She then shivered, though two wood-burning fireplaces taller than me flanked the room, with fire reaching to their brims. Kurt must have stoked the embers for hours before Lily had returned home.

  Kurt walked in with a cup of hot tea on a silver tray.

  “Did you have a nice time?” Lily asked.

  “Yes, thank you so much for the invitation.”

  “It can be a bit difficult being the seventh. Some say it’s unlucky, but I think you handled it very well. And it was delightful to have someone under the age of thirty around. I so rarely rub shoulders with youth anymore.”

  Lily smiled approvingly, and I again noticed how attractive she was. It wasn’t that in-your-face kind of beauty Carole possessed. Lily’s father had been rich, so her mother had probably been pretty. That was how the world worked.

  As if reading my mind, Lily leaned to her left and picked up a silver-framed black-and-white photo.

  “If you haven’t decided on a photo for your story yet, this would be a delightful choice. My father adored my mother, absolutely adored her, and it would paint a much fuller picture of him than some snapshot of him at his desk running the studio.”

  I studied the photo. Joel Goldman and his wife were walking down steps from a jet. Lily’s mother was so beautiful she could have been one of Joel’s starlets. She wore a raincoat and gloves, and a loose printed scarf knotted below her chin covered her head so only a bit of her blond hair showed. Oversize earrings dangled three inches below her ears. They were incongruous with the rest of the outfit, as if her jewels were a form of rebellion.

  And her husband, he was big all over—big face, big blond hair, big eyes, big crooked nose, big presence and two hundred pounds of stone for a body. The only things wiry about Joel Goldman were his glasses. Despite his wife’s beauty, it was Joel who was the center of the photo.

  In the background, behind the couple, was a guy I recognized as a much younger David Duplaine.

  “When was this photo taken?” I asked.

  “Eighteen years ago—give or take a year. When you’re my age they all blur. I only remember the really good or really bad ones—and sometimes not even those.”

  “Is that David?” I asked, pointing at the figure in the background. David seemed to be onstage, but positioning himself just beyond the spotlight.

  “Yes.” Lily smiled.

  “You’ve known him a long time, then.”

  “Over a quarter of a century. David was a hustler. He grew up in Queens and lied his way into a talent agency. He told them he graduated from college but he didn’t. In fact, David never much believed in the value of school. Education—that he believed in. David is the most educated man I know, but not through formal schooling.” Lily sipped her tea. “The agency found out, and he would have been fired had my father not made a phone call. David would have done well anyways, but he always thought that phone call saved his life. He can be so melodramatic—David.”

  In fact, in a city that thrived on the theatrical, David was never portrayed as the dramatic sort. One of his films could bomb, a newspaper could win a Pulitzer, a television show could sweep the Emmys, and David would handle all three scenarios with the same stoicism.

  For the first time I wondered if Lily was what we in journalism would call a reliable source. Or, conversely, perhaps Lily was right. Maybe David and the rest of them were always smiling for the cameras, but their real lives—the ones that took place in the dressing rooms of very expensive real estate—had nothing to do with their public personas.

  To avoid Lily’s eyes I looked at the ivy. It was spotlighted, and its shadows played on the ceiling.

  Lily, for her part, studied her tea. Its exotic scent combined with the smell of burned wood made me think of the Orient.

  Lily took a sip of her tea before continuing, “David worked at the talent agency for a few years, and then my father gave him two million dollars to start his own production company. He had the magic touch, as they say in the movies, and a few years later the company was rolled into the studio—and David made the transition to running it. And the rest is history.”

  “That was quite the gamble. For your father, I mean.”

  “All great businessmen are gamblers in one way or another. My father was no exception. Many of his leading ladies had never been in a picture before. He’d take a chance on a girl if she had je ne sais quoi. He optioned a screenplay from his driver that became one of his highest-grossing films.” Lily’s green eyes traveled far away. “In fact, my father loved to gamble, but his vice wasn’t the stock market or the horses. It was people.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a vice if he won.”

  “Generally, but not
always. Sometimes the house wins,” Lily said distantly. “And how about you, Thomas Cleary, are you a gambler?”

  I hadn’t thought of it before. But now I considered Harvard—how I had got there. And Los Angeles—how I had crawled out of the rubble of my life to end up at one of the most prestigious papers in the country. And then there was Willa. By pedigree I should have been a member of her staff, but instead I had spent years with her heart resting—precariously, it would turn out—in my palm.

  “Yes, I guess you could say I am—a gambler.”

  “I could tell, the moment I met you. Midwesterners are typically horribly risk averse, but I pegged you for the type to throw your chips down,” Lily said with what might have been a glint in her eye. “What was your biggest bet?”

  “I gambled on a girl.” I thought again of Willa, who even years later never traveled far from my thoughts. I pictured her vividly the afternoon we had first met in Boston, propped on her elbow on a blanket beside the Charles River.

  “And you lost, I’m assuming.” Lily raised an eyebrow while blatantly looking at my ring finger and bringing me back to the present.

  “You could say that.”

  “Was she a Harvard girl?”

  “Yes, originally from Manhattan.”

  “Which part?”

  “Fifth Avenue.”

  Lily smiled wryly. “Girls like that are trained from a very young age to break the hearts of sweet men like you.”

  “You should have told me earlier. It was an expensive lesson,” I said. “It drained my emotional bank account.”

  “At least your financial bank account is still intact. It could be worse.”

  “I’m a reporter. My emotional bank account will always be more plentiful than my financial one, and if it’s not, then I have a problem.”

  Lily smiled. “Don’t take it personally, love. You’re a tremendous catch, but even the biggest bass isn’t a prize for a girl who has a taste for caviar. And who knows? Perhaps someday you may discover your loss was a win in disguise.”