The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine Page 9

  Ten

  It had just got dark, and raindrops dripped off the hedges. I drove up to the gates of David’s estate and rang the buzzer, suddenly self-conscious of my old jalopy of a car.

  “Yes?” A man’s voice that sounded slightly British traveled through the intercom.

  “It’s Thomas Cleary. I’m house-sitting for Lily Goldman, and she suggested I come by if I need anything.”

  The gates opened in a slow “come in if you dare” manner. As I drove through the gates up the serpentine gravel driveway, I thought about the fact that I was betraying David Duplaine, which in Los Angeles was the equivalent of double-crossing a mobster. Eventually you were going to die; it was just a matter of when and how.

  I passed the sunken tennis court. The lights were off, and the gates around it were so ivy-drenched the common observer wouldn’t have known it was there. There was something furtive about the estate. At Emma and George’s you got the sense there was always a breeze of people rolling through—musicians and executives, actors and general wannabes—day after night, carousing with expensive liquor in hand and the latest in designer substances under tongue. David’s estate, on the other hand, was still and quiet. It felt like an architectural trophy created for one.

  The valet approached as I pulled into the motor court. He opened my car door.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said.

  “Good evening.”

  David’s butler stood in the entryway. The valet didn’t close the car door behind me as I walked to the front door.

  “May I help you?” the butler asked, and now, on second hearing, the accent sounded foreign, but not British—maybe South African. I wasn’t good at estimating age, but I guessed he was on the unfortunate side of seventy.

  “I hope so. My name is Thomas Cleary. I’m a friend of Lily Goldman’s. As I mentioned, I’m house-sitting for her, just down the street. I think I left her front-door key at my office,” I said. Here I was lying again. “I thought you might have a spare. My guess is a locksmith would completely ruin the eighteenth-century hardware—and you know Lily.”

  “Miss Goldman did inform me you would be caring for the house, which is very kind of you, indeed. You’re fortunate—we do have a spare. I’ll go fetch it. Please wait here. Outside.” The butler looked upward, toward something that I assumed was a video camera. I wondered if it was a warning.

  He left the door ajar just enough for me to peek in. I wanted to push my way inside and race through the estate to find the girl. But instead, I stayed put.

  A few seconds later, the butler returned with an oversize vintage key in hand.

  “This should work,” he said, noting I hadn’t stepped over the threshold. I felt like Malcolm, Carole’s dog, obediently waiting on the outside, looking in.

  “Thank you,” I said, wanting to steal a moment at the estate. “You know Lily,” I repeated. “I can’t imagine her arriving home to find a brand-new shiny lock on her front door.”

  “You’re right—that would not be good. You’re welcome, Mr. Cleary. Now, good night.”

  He closed the door gently, but just before he did I saw a flash of blond hair dart behind a modern sculpture in the foyer.

  She was here. So she hadn’t traveled to Europe with David. I didn’t know what this meant, but I noted it. My heart fluttered and I ambled to my car, hoping she would call my name and stop me from leaving. Instead, the valet ushered me into my car and closed the door behind me, a little sharply.

  I made my way around the bend. The house disappeared behind me, and I was worried it would fade into my past for good this time. The girl had come to life again. I didn’t want to leave.

  I was so lost in the thought of her that I almost saw the real her too late. I veered to the right and screeched my car to a stop, narrowly missing a tree.

  I lowered my window and realized that my memories of her had been a lie; she was more beautiful than all of them put together.

  “It’s dark out,” I said. “You jumped in front of a car going twenty miles an hour. You could have been hurt.”

  “At twenty miles per hour? You’re grossly underestimating me. It’s the car that would have sustained the damage,” she said with a sly smile. “Now park in the street and use this key to get in the side door.”

  I did as she instructed, pulling into the edge of the bushes and opening a hidden ivy-covered gate. I found myself in a little patch of a garden with a small trickling fountain. She stood against one of the walls, with one foot propped perpendicular on it. She was wearing a long white Juliet-style nightgown. I was not exactly a ladies’ man, but I had been with enough women to know that these weren’t garments women wore to bed anymore.

  “You took a long time to come back,” she said. “Twenty-two days, in fact.”

  “I came back way before you told me to.”

  “You mean never?”

  “Exactly.”

  She smiled shyly.

  “From what I understand, rejection can be very enticing for a man,” she said.

  “Where did you learn that?” I asked.

  “The movies, Davis and Garbo. They were always four steps ahead of the men who loved them.”

  “So was the whole thing a ploy?”

  “No, not a ploy at all. I was honest. Being here is going to cause you grief later,” she warned. “What are you trying to find out?”

  “Nothing,” I said candidly.

  “Are you trying to discover something about me?”

  She had Lily’s ability to put people on the defensive.

  “Believe it or not I wasn’t trying to find out anything. I went to your house for a fund-raiser—the wrong house, it would turn out—and I saw you playing tennis.”

  “And now? Why are you back?”

  “I wanted to see you again.”

  “I wanted to see you again, too.”

  The succulents dripped rain, and for some reason I suddenly felt as if I was setting myself a table of heartbreak. I pulled out a cigarette. It was a nervous habit. I never intended to light it.

  “I don’t think people are allowed to smoke here,” she said.

  “Got it,” I said, dropping the cigarette on the wet sand of the garden floor and stomping it out as if I had actually got around to lighting it.

  She leaned over, picked the cigarette out of the sand and examined it. The full moon reflected on the crown of her head. Her blond hair was uncombed and parted in a messy zigzag pattern. She was breathtaking.

  “What’s smoking like?” she asked.

  “Do you want one?” I said, plucking the last one from the pack.

  “I just said there’s no smoking on the estate.”

  “Rules are meant to be broken,” I said lightly.

  “I never break rules,” she said, though she had just sneaked me in.

  Despite myself I smiled, as a reel of my past—what had happened at the Journal, going through Joel’s coat and now this latest indiscretion—flipped through my head. “I didn’t break rules for a long time, but once you start it’s a slippery slope.”

  “Slippery slope? What’s that?”

  I paused, again wondering if she was kidding. The girl seemed astutely intelligent, yet she didn’t understand basic terms like slippery slope and astrology. It seemed odd.

  She waited, wide-eyed, for the definition.

  “Slippery slope means a relatively small action can lead to a chain of related events culminating in some significant effect, much like a ball given a small push over the edge of a hill will roll all the way to the bottom, gaining velocity.”

  “That’s a nice phrase,” she said. “Slippery slope,” she repeated.

  Strategically placed spotlights illuminated the garden, and when she moved in front of one I could see the
outline of her body through her filmy nightgown. She was curvy and womanlike, but her aura exuded innocence.

  In the past twenty-two days I had convinced myself that I was wrong, that it was curiosity or my quest for a story that fanned those sparks that had been dead in me for so long. But now, here, I knew it was a primal attraction I hadn’t felt since Willa—the sleepless nights with her, the sleepless nights without her.

  She didn’t appear to notice. Instead, she sat down on a moss-covered bench. I sat beside her, one inch away, and she scooched closer, so the sides of our thighs touched.

  A car drove past, and the sounds of “Boots of Spanish Leather”—a melancholic Dylan tune about a guy whose girl leaves him to sail around Spain—floated in from its stereo.

  “Bob Dylan,” she said, smiling sorrowfully. “I feel when I listen to his songs that he knows me. Do you like music?” She looked at me with doelike eyes, and it felt as though my answer was the only one in the world that mattered.

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Music’s saved my life a million times,” she said. “And there’s not much else to do here. I’m bored a lot.”

  “I’m bored, too. At twenty-six I shouldn’t be, right? That’s supposed to happen later.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “What could you possibly be bored of? If things out there are boring, too, that’s not very encouraging.”

  I almost asked what she meant by “out there,” but then didn’t. I avoided answering the question. I studied the garden. It was covered in moss, but that didn’t seem accidental. In fact, I imagined gardeners cultivating green moss to exact specifications in a greenhouse on the perimeter of the grounds, and then transporting it here and applying it carefully.

  “Thomas? What’s boring about the world?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It’s not the world’s fault. It’s mine. I feel stagnant.”

  “Stagnancy and boredom are two different things. I would know, because at twenty I’ve experienced my fair share of both.”

  “So why are you bored?” I said, thinking of wealth, something that I had always assumed bought the ultimate freedom and the most exotic adventures.

  There was a long silence then, heavy as the air that was soaked from days of rain.

  “Maybe this was a mistake,” the girl eventually said, but it was the same way she had rebuked me at the tennis court—with uncertainty. “I should have let you leave.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake.” The winds shifted and I begged. “The night on the tennis court—there was something between us. I haven’t been able to stop thinking of you. Was I imagining it?”

  “I have to go. Hector will wonder where I am.”

  “Who’s Hector?” I asked, suddenly afraid she had a boyfriend waiting for her inside.

  “Our butler.”

  “I want to see you again,” I said. “Even if you say no I’ll come back. I’ll keep coming back.”

  She paused, and what came next was the exact definition of a slippery slope.

  “I overheard Hector say there’s an award ceremony next Friday. How about seven o’clock?” she asked.

  “Yes. Seven. Seven’s great. Can you tell me your name?” I asked. “So I know it for next Friday at seven?”

  “Matilda,” she said, as she unlocked the garden door. “But that’s off-the-record.”

  I stepped into the street, hesitating because I wanted one last second of her. And then, a moment later, just as quickly as she had appeared in front of my headlights, Matilda closed the door behind her and was gone.

  Eleven

  Lily returned.

  We stood in the foyer, and I handed her the keys to the estate as she told me about her trip. The Vineyard house was coming along “extraordinarily well” and would be ready in time for summer. Her step seemed lighter. She had found the perfect fabric for the dining room chairs and scoured the world to locate an antique fireplace in France that was being loaded on a cargo ship as we spoke.

  I was almost out the door, dreading my drive back to my decrepit apartment, when Lily said:

  “I am so terribly rude. All I’ve done is talk about my silly little summer house, which is so insignificant in the grander scheme of things—or any scheme of things for that matter. Did you have a nice week, heart?”

  “I did. As you can tell, your winter house is very much in one piece.”

  “Oh, I knew it would be. You seem like the type to take care of things,” Lily said. “I hope there was a little respite from that god-awful rain. Did you get a lot of writing done—for the paper?”

  “Yes,” I said honestly, thinking of the article on George’s pop star, an article that had been very well-received. “And I took a dip in your pool.”

  “Oh dear. I’m terribly embarrassed. It’s so neglected. Was it in a terrible state? I can’t bear to get rid of that jewel of a hornet’s nest, but it’s made for a dangerous mess up there I’m afraid.”

  “It was lovely,” I said, stealing a word from Lily’s vocabulary. “All of it.”

  I paused then, because on the proverbial tip of my tongue was the question I had been wanting to ask for weeks now: Who was the girl on David’s estate?

  But then I thought of the clandestine nature of things, of the meeting in the purgatory garden. She seemed a secret I was meant to keep.

  “Good night, Lily,” I finally said, awkwardly. “Thank you again for the nice stay.”

  I got into my car and before driving down the long cobblestone driveway, I looked up at the guest bedroom window. Through the leaded glass I saw the flame of the jasmine candle I had left burning on the writing desk. A second later the flame fluttered, as if someone had blown it. Then it went dark.

  * * *

  The following Friday evening, I drove down Sunset and parked a few blocks away from David’s estate. I left my car and walked toward the Blooms’ property, choosing a spot to wait just outside the sweep of the security cameras.

  I couldn’t see much of the Blooms’ house from here, but I caught a glimpse of the red-clay tile roof, the turreted breakfast room, the highest reaches of the old trees on its perimeter. It was October, and Emma had illuminated the wild foliage and tall hedges with orange lights. Eight elaborately carved jack-o’-lanterns guarded the front gates.

  Six thirty, six fifty, seven o’clock sharp. Just when I thought David was going to be late for the event, I heard the slow creak of the gate and saw a sedan drive through. Once the car had safely disappeared around one corner and then another, I walked to the garden door, savoring the anticipation.

  When I entered, Matilda was sitting on the stone bench. Her attire was not appropriate for the plans I had made—dinner at a somewhat-nice restaurant and a movie—and I found myself briefly panicked and recalculating. She wore a pink and demure dress that was blousy to cover her curves and cinched narrowly at the waist. Her patent leather high heels elevated her to well over six feet tall. Teardrop diamond earrings weighted her tiny earlobes, and her hair was set in tight curls. Her dewy makeup appeared professionally applied.

  The effect was breathtaking, particularly in the glowing light of the garden, but she appeared dressed for a coronation or cotillion, not for a first date.

  Was this a date? She was an impossible read, but for the first time, I thought maybe she really liked me.

  “Hi,” I finally said, all breath. “You look pretty.”

  “Thank you,” she responded formally, tilting her head down to the left and blushing. “I got this dress a year ago and I’ve been dying for an occasion to wear it. I decided this was as good as any. Does it look okay?”

  “Okay is one way of putting it.”

  We both smiled coyly.

  “Well, should we go?” I asked.

  “Go?”

  “I mad
e a reservation. I hope you like Italian.”

  “I love Italian. It’s my favorite. The chef makes an incredible lasagna—with extra cheese and Italian sausage sent from Italy,” Matilda said. “But as for restaurants, you see, my life isn’t like that. I was thinking we could do something here—at the house. If that’s okay?” She added the last part with insecurity.

  I had planned the evening fastidiously. I had chosen an Italian restaurant so hot I had to call in a favor to get the coveted seven-thirty reservation, and then I had procured prerelease tickets to a movie recommended by the Times film reviewer—a movie that wasn’t even in theaters yet, so our viewing was on a studio lot. I’d been looking forward to the date all week.

  Matilda sensed my hesitation.

  “That’s okay for you, right?” Matilda asked. “That we do something here?”

  I got the sense there was no changing her mind, that there was no alternative.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Phew. Good. Travel along the outskirts of the grounds,” she said quietly but quickly, so I wouldn’t change my mind. “You’ll see a basement door in the back of the house. It will lead you to a tunnel. Wait inside until I tell you to come out. Go quickly and look down so the cameras don’t see you. I’m going to distract Hector.”

  She then left the garden swiftly, and I wondered, for the thousandth time, what this girl was hiding or, conversely, what was she hiding from. I had known she wanted our relationship to remain a secret, but until that moment I hadn’t realized exactly how secretive she wanted it to be.

  She wobbled up the lawn in her high heels. She got stuck in the grass several times and eventually took her shoes off and walked barefoot. I watched her until she was as tiny as an ant.

  Satisfied that enough time had elapsed, I followed her path up the lawn and around the back.

  There were two subterranean bronze doors. Matilda had forgotten to tell me which one I was to open—north or south. I tried the northern one first, but it was securely locked. The second door opened with a strong tug, and below me was a narrow stairway.

  I made my way down the stairs and found myself in a tight crawl space, which must have been the tunnel to which Matilda was referring. I thought of our initial plan for the evening and I wondered how I had ended up here, on my hands and knees.