The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Page 7

  While at work, I crawled through David’s life virtually on hands and knees, searching for a pinhead of a clue. I scanned microfiche, birth certificates, city hall records and school attendance lists at all the top private schools, but every search was coming up empty. As I had suspected, David had no children. His romantic life was nonexistent. He hadn’t been photographed beside a lover in years, and there hadn’t been any mention of anyone in the ample press he received.

  On nothing more than a whim, I then did the same searching for Lily. I found pictures as far back as her childhood. There was Lily at five years old, flanked by her parents at the premiere of one of her father’s movies. Then Lily winning her science fair with the invention of the lightbulb at John Thomas Dye. Then there was a thirteen-year-old Lily, in jodhpurs and a crisp white shirt, racing a beauty of a Thoroughbred in Hidden Hills at what must have been the Goldmans’ equestrian estate—a stone mansion draped in ivy with shutters.

  After eighteen, Lily disappeared from Los Angeles. I had learned in bits and pieces through our dinner-party conversation that Lily had eventually “escaped to the Rhode Island School of Design,” and then she had gone even farther away to work for an editor at Paris Vogue, to “learn French and sleep with the French”—a quote Lily had tossed out over a dessert wine. In her midtwenties Lily made an abrupt U-turn and returned to the city of her birth and good breeding and started her antiques shop as a hobby. Years later she had created a quiet empire of furniture, fabrics and real estate holdings.

  I was ready to put my search to rest when I stumbled upon a photo in the Los Angeles Times, which I would have missed if the shuffling microfiche hadn’t decided to stop on that specific page. I enlarged the page tenfold, trading crisp for fuzzy.

  The caption read, “Movie mogul Joel Goldman, his daughter, Lily, and friends play tennis at Mr. Goldman’s vacation house.” I looked closer, shocked to discover that one of the friends was none other than a very young Carole Partridge.

  The four stood on a clay tennis court. Joel commandeered the photo—as he always seemed to—holding a racket in his left hand, a drink in his right, and wearing a wide victorious grin on his face. Lily seemed to be in her midthirties at the time, and she wore a demure dress and a ponytail and carried a bottle of Orangina. Behind her, almost off camera, was another man of indeterminate age. I tried to focus the microfiche on him, but he turned grainier rather than clearer. What I could tell was this: he was tall, broad and focused on Lily.

  Carole was the youngest of the group, and she stood in front. My guess was she was about seventeen compared to Joel’s sixty, and he rested his drink on her shoulder in a protective manner. She donned a barely there white tennis dress and posed with her hand on her hip, as if she were emulating an older, more experienced woman she had seen strike the same pose. She was all legs, and her breasts seemed too big for her, as if they were things that needed to be grown into. Her hair was pinned up in a beehive—an odd hairstyle for tennis—and her charcoal-lined eyes teased the camera.

  My gut told me that the photo meant something, something more than the rest of my research combined. I looked at it again, focusing on that mysterious man in the background. Lily had never married—unusual for a woman of her social standing—and judging by the photos and news clippings there hadn’t been a significant other throughout the years. It was possible this guy was a lover. If so, that begged the further question of what had happened.

  There was something about the photo that seared through me.

  I couldn’t figure it out. I printed the photo, and I pressed it between the pages of my notebook like a rose from a long-lost love. A reminder of something important—something not to be forgotten.

  * * *

  Ironically, it was in this period of distractedness that my star was finally rising at the Times. I learned quickly that once Los Angeles decides to sprinkle you with its stardust, it shakes so generously you glitter.

  I say this because after those first few stories my sky twinkled brightly. There was the story on Joel, followed by the David Duplaine shake-up, the Millstone coverage and then the interview with the governor. I would never know how I had won Phil Rubenstein’s favor after what had happened at the Journal, but what I came to understand was that Los Angeles, above anything else, was a city of forgiveness and second chances.

  Scarcely three weeks after my first meeting with Lily Goldman, life moved from slow motion to the speed at which a race-car driver accelerates at the drop of the green flag. The invitations poured in—not to the second-rate parties that had always been my lot, but to first-rate premieres and galas. I attended a few, met new people and was invited to more. Studio publicists lunched me and Rubenstein slipped me the choicest articles.

  I was working at the paper early one morning—no later than 7:00 a.m.—when my phone rang from a private number. It was Lily.

  I barely had a chance to say hello.

  “Thomas, darling, I only have a moment, but I’m calling to insist you join me this evening at Carole’s. She and Charles are having a small dinner, and I haven’t seen you in months.”

  This was a slight exaggeration. “I’d love to come,” I said stoically, for I believed that emotion was a badge of weakness in this group. “Please extend a thank-you to Carole. Is there something she’d like me to bring?”

  “Absolutely not. The last I heard you are not a member of Carole’s staff,” Lily said. “Kurt will pick you up at six thirty.”

  * * *

  As promised, Kurt picked me up at six thirty. This time we fetched Lily on our way to our destination, and after Lily’s house we drove a few blocks before reaching a pair of stone columns, each crowned with a vintage gas lamp. A tall wooden gate stared at us, and a personal security car waited beside one of the columns.

  Lily waved in the general direction of the security guard in a familiar manner and the gates opened.

  We wound our way up a steep driveway that must have been a quarter of a mile long. Once we arrived we were rewarded with an incredible view of Los Angeles. It was a view that shouldn’t have been available for private purchase. Below us, sprinklers watered the fairways of the Bel-Air Country Club with perfectly arched trajectories, and uniformly dressed groundskeepers raked the country club’s sand traps. Beyond, Los Angeles was just beginning to wake up and glitter for the night as the sun was setting over a sliver of ocean that sparkled like a mirror.

  I wished I could bottle that view. I looked over to Lily. She seemed indifferent to the blanket of lights that lay before us. She straightened out my new shirt and pants.

  “The city feels so small from up here,” I said.

  “It’s trickery,” Lily said. “It makes us feel like we’re the powerful ones, even though nothing could be further from the truth.”

  I glanced at her incredulously.

  “It’s true. We’re all just renters, Thomas. Someday our leases will be up. Carole’s, mine, yours... Look, my father’s just ended. An eighty-one-year lease on life—that was all he got.”

  The city buzzed dully in the distance. Lily squinted at an imaginary point, and I wondered what she was thinking about. It was strange; her father had passed away around a month ago, but Lily hadn’t seemed deeply affected by it. I wondered if it was a veneer as fastidiously crafted as her shop and her house.

  I turned around to give Lily a moment, and for the first time I noticed the house. The white brick mansion was perched adjacent to the egg-shaped cobblestone motor court. It was a wedding cake of a house—with a second story slightly smaller than the first, and a few curlicue frills for decoration. It was a grander, whiter, more sprawling version of the traditional house surrounded by the picket fence that suburban girls dream of. I imagined it was built in the late 1930s or early ’40s, post-Depression for a manufacturing or real estate tycoon. The mansion appeared purposely situated to get the maximum vistas,
but it was plotted in such a way that you might almost miss it when you drove up—the real estate equivalent of Lily Goldman’s false modesty.

  There was no need for doorbells at houses like these. Instead, a butler in a black coat and white gloves held the door open for us and led us into the foyer. He greeted Lily by name and Lily introduced me as “Thomas Cleary, the finest reporter in Los Angeles.”

  A large antique iron birdcage hung from the entry’s ceiling in lieu of a chandelier. It had a whimsical effect, as if the house’s owners were trying not to take themselves too seriously. A sweeping stairway made for brides or goodbyes crawled up the wall, and sconces cast a soft glow over us.

  The butler escorted us toward the stairway, under which a secret door led us into a formal dining room wrapped in hand-painted wallpaper depicting an ancient Asian landscape complete with geishas, canoes, swans, hummingbirds, pergolas and flowers. The Asian chandelier overhead seemed plucked from the wallpaper into real life.

  The group was sipping before-dinner cocktails. I decided that there must have been a tribal theme to the evening: Emma wore a feathered headdress, Carole donned heavy silver-and-turquoise jewelry that contrasted with her red-apple lips, and the menus that rested on our plates indicated we were to be served buffalo as our main course.

  Charles approached us eagerly. He kissed Lily’s cheek and shook my hand.

  “Thomas, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve been reading your bylines. You sure have a knack for the written word.”

  “Thank you,” I said, because Charles was the type of man who would say something like that and genuinely mean it. “How’s the screenplay coming?”

  “Fantastic, chap.” Charles swept David into conversation with his right arm. “David, you remember Thomas?” He always seemed to veer the subject away from himself, as if he wasn’t worthy of discussion.

  “Of course.” David’s expression was even. “We missed you at the governor’s party, but I trust your reason for absence was a good-looking one.”

  My stomach dropped. I glanced to my left, to where Lily had just been, but she was no longer there. Instead, she stood alone on the other side of the room, adjusting a painting that had tipped slightly off its proper axis.

  The girl had made it clear that no one could find out about our tennis game. I wondered if David had known I was there. The estate was peppered with video security. I had seen the cameras outside when I was waiting at the gate for someone to answer the buzzer, but surprisingly I didn’t see cameras around the tennis court.

  Just then, Charles squeezed my arm and presented me with a gimlet stuffed with ice.

  “We have a gimlet prepared, just the way you like it.”

  I took a deep well-needed sip. Charles and I stood at the doors, looking outside at a carpet of green.

  “How are your birds?” I asked. “I heard something about homing pigeons.”

  “Yes. Interesting sport, if you can call it that. I picked it up in my youth.” Charles smiled to himself, and there was something sad and longing about it. “We lived in Manhattan during the week and Tuxedo Park on the weekends. The pigeons would follow us between the two.”

  “How did they find you?”

  “Scientists don’t know for sure. It’s one of life’s mysteries.”

  Just then a gray pigeon, all barrel chest and beak, waddled toward us. His leg was tagged.

  “Not to bring up a sore subject, but did you ever find the one you lost?” I said.

  “No. That’s the only one, believe it or not. Even as a kid, I never lost a single bird.”

  “I’m sorry. You don’t know what happened?” I pressed.

  Charles looked wistful. The pigeon in the yard waddled away.

  “Thanks for coming tonight, chap.” Charles changed the subject. “Next time, let’s go to the Malibu house. The aviary there is unbelievable—and so is the bourbon.”

  “Dinner is served,” a staff member said quietly, a welcome interruption in conversation.

  We sat down at the long dining table. The centerpieces overflowed with roses the size of cabbages that still sparkled with dew, and the glasses were made of honed French crystal.

  Unlike the last dinner party, where the group had quickly divided into factions, this time the six remained cohesive, focused on a heated conversation about technology’s influence on the music industry. Ever the reporter, always the observer, I stayed on the sidelines of conversation, which was just fine by me.

  I hadn’t noticed it at the previous dinner, but this evening Charles attended to his wife’s every comfort, more like a personal valet than a husband. He asked Carole twice if she wanted more Brussels sprouts and checked her wineglass carefully to be sure it never dipped below half-full. If and when it did, a server was immediately summoned to top off the glass. At one point Carole’s heavy clip-on earring slipped low on her left earlobe and was in danger of falling off into her soup when she leaned into conversation. Charles reached out to pinch it between his thumb and index finger, positioning it back into place. Carole did not acknowledge the intimate gesture. In fact she seemed to stiffen under his touch.

  When the group left the dining room for dessert wine in the conservatory, I excused myself to the bathroom. I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. I needed a cigarette.

  I opened the door to find Carole standing in the hallway. Her porcelain face was flawless.

  “I thought perhaps you’d gone for a cigarette,” Carole said, and I was flattered that she had remembered my vice.

  “I’ve been trying to quit,” I lied.

  “I never quit anything I enjoy,” she said matter-of-factly. “Charles insisted I show you the aviary. Follow me.”

  I followed Carole down the hallway and then through a tall French door outside. I heard the sound of paws on grass, wet and saturated with weeks of rain, and then a German shepherd as big as a wolf appeared.

  “Malcolm, this is Thomas. Thomas, Malcolm,” Carole said.

  Carole leaned over and stroked Malcolm’s neck. He was a beast of a dog, with streaks of pecan brown and white through his fur. Carole tucked a pin curl behind her own ear and then adjusted Malcolm’s collar so his tag was in its proper spot tucked beneath his chin. There was no chance of Malcolm leaving this fortress, so I wondered why he had a tag at all.

  In front of us lay a lawn so vast I expected to find polo ponies roaming about or men in white playing cricket. On either side of the expanse, box hedges and plants were sheared to tight, geometric lines. There was not a single errant leaf.

  Carole and Malcolm led the way. There were paths, but they opted to walk on the middle of the grass instead. I walked two steps behind.

  We passed a swimming pool—refined and rectangular, in contrast to Emma’s fishy swamp—and then a tennis court with a small viewing area. Not every tennis court should have reminded me of her, but this one did. I must have slowed a step or two, not realizing it, because Carole turned around.

  “Do you play?” Carole asked, glancing at the court with her sleepy eyes. I got the first glimpse of a glass structure in the distance. It must have been the aviary.

  “I did—in high school. You?”

  “You’ll be surprised to learn I was a good player in my youth.”

  “That’s not surprising,” I said, thinking of the photograph and attempting not to look obviously at Carole’s body, but my eyes traveled there nevertheless.

  Carole must have been accustomed to it. She slowed her pace so we were closer to each other.

  “Next time you visit we should play,” Carole said in a tone I took to mean that if we played she would not only win, but crush me. Judging by the Academy Awards and Tony I had spotted earlier in the evening in the library, Carole Partridge didn’t like to lose.

  “That would be wonderful. I better hone my
skills.”

  “You better,” she said mischievously.

  As we reached the glass-enclosed aviary my mood was buoyant. I was starting to feel like a part of the group, not realizing it was their collective charms that created the mirage. I found myself fast-forwarding, in a delusional manner, to a day when I would be exchanging cross-court backhands with Carole on her court while the staff provided us with cool towels and lemonade.

  Carole, Malcolm and I stood in front of the aviary. It was hexagonal in shape and lit softly from the inside. Tucked away between formal gardens and fountains, the structure looked like something out of Grimm.

  Carole opened the metal door with an old-fashioned key. I followed her in and Malcolm sat at the door obediently.

  Once inside, I was surrounded by a burst of activity so varicolored and fanciful it made me forget I was in the refined, staid hills of Bel-Air. I had always thought greenhouses to be extraordinary places in their own rights: the condensed microcosm of flora and fauna all thriving in a glass environment. In this case, it was a greenhouse as large as most people’s homes, potted with the world’s most exotic plants, flowers, cacti and trees—mostly of species I had never seen before. There were dozens of birds nesting in those trees or flitting about, exploding in song.

  “It’s quite boring, actually—the aviary.” Carole’s eyes were trained on Malcolm, who sat regally. “The only reason everyone’s so fascinated by it is because no one else has one.”

  “It’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Nor will you. An incredible waste of time,” Carole said. “Charles spends hours a day here with his birds.”

  “What does he do?” I asked. It was a rude question, but curiosity trumped manners.

  “He comes from the East Coast,” Carole said, as if those who did weren’t required to hold employment. “Have you ever been in love, Thomas?”