The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine. Alex Brunkhorst
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,