The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  Forty-five minutes after landing, the cab pulled over in front of a narrow town house a half block off Central Park in the East Eighties. The wind had picked up, and when the car door was opened for me I was greeted by a brisk autumn. It was not the pretend autumn Bel-Air had to offer—a stray red leaf, temperatures that swayed from fifty degrees to eighty-five, jack-o’-lanterns but no trick-or-treaters. Here, in New York, autumn was a real season.

  The five-storied brownstones on the tony block stood shoulder to shoulder. The street’s skinny maples were mostly leafless, and their dead leaves whirled on the pavement, crackling like fire. Dim streetlights barely illuminated the block. The chimneys puffed smoke, and the air smelled of burning wood.

  I stood at the door of Carole’s brownstone for one last minute, garnering up the courage to see Lily. Finally, I knocked, awash with fear.

  The door opened, and Lily was there, bundled up in fur and scarves, despite the eighty-degree air that blew out at me. She leaned in to kiss me on the cheek, but I got a mouthful of angora instead.

  “Thomas, you made it,” Lily said with typical enthusiasm.

  I waited for something else, some other reaction. But it didn’t come. I tried to detect a chill in those green eyes, but they were warm.

  “I did,” I said, unease still in my voice. “Better late than never, they say?”

  “I say better never than late. But I know you’re typically on time, so we’ll excuse you just this once,” Lily said, leading me through two doorways to a small lounge area. Its fireplace burned so brightly I was surprised the fire department wasn’t on high alert.

  I set my carry-on down and took a quick glance around me. The decor had Lily’s stamp on it, but it was more modern than Carole’s home in Bel-Air—it was glass, bronze and sleek. Furniture was low to the ground and upholstered in exotic skins—like Emma’s outfits. Much of it seemed to hail from the midcentury, and there was a streamlined look to it, all glamour and seduction.

  I thought back to Carole and Charles’s Bel-Air manor. If that was a wedding cake, then this was the affair that came after the honeymoon bliss had ended. It had an overt sexiness about it, as if it was the type of place most appreciated in various states of undress.

  Lily took a quick sweep of her geography. “If you’d like to be chivalrous, you can reach up there and adjust the cork on that bottle for me. I’ve been staring at it all evening. It’s an abomination.”

  There was a mirrored bar, and among its thirty or so bottles Lily had somehow spotted one with its cork slightly askew.

  “Of course.”

  I reached up and, I thought, properly plugged it. Lily beckoned me to give it to her, though, and then she plugged it all over again, as if my job had been haphazard. Now it was ready to go back.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t join us on the plane this morning,” Lily said, as I returned the bottle to its position, making sure it was straight. “I couldn’t believe it when David said you had opted to fly commercial. For the first time I questioned your decision making.”

  It confirmed what I had already known—David had deliberately left without me. I tried to read Lily for the tiniest of clues that she was aware of recent happenings, but there were none.

  “Thomas, is everything okay?” Lily asked.

  “Yes, I think I’m just tired.”

  “Twenty-six C will do that to you. I’m going to take a hot bath. You look like you could use a drink,” she said, pointing at the bar with her eyes. “I’m not a scotch drinker, but Charles tells me there’s a phenomenal bottle of twenty-one-year somewhere or another—no reason for it to go to waste or become twenty-two-year.”

  Lily wrapped herself more tightly in her layers of fur and expensive cashmere, and she walked to the elevator, putting a single crease in an accent pillow on the way.

  “Good night, dear. We have a very busy day tomorrow, so sleep tightly.”

  She disappeared into a century-old elevator that creaked its way up to the fourth floor.

  I took Lily’s advice and opened the bottle of scotch. I had two drinks then went to my bedroom, which was as plush as the finest hotel rooms in New York. I wondered if my time in luxury was limited. I couldn’t help thinking of everything that way now—perhaps it would be my last sip of expensive scotch, my last conversation with Lily, the last night I would spend in a house on one of the most rarified blocks in the world.

  It had been a traumatic day, and despite the posh accommodations, my nerves were so frayed I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned mercilessly, until finally at 2:00 a.m. I decided to go outside to have a cigarette, hoping it would calm me down.

  The air was chillingly cold, but it made me feel alive. I walked down the block, toward the Park. I wrapped my jacket closer to me and strolled down Fifth Avenue, glancing at the few windows that were still lit, wondering what was happening behind their closed curtains.

  I was reminded of a time when I went to visit Willa’s family. It was Thanksgiving break, and Willa had invited me to spend the four-day weekend at her parents’ apartment overlooking the Park. In fact, it could have been one of the buildings I was looking up at now. It was senior year, and I should have known then, after that weekend, that our relationship would eventually come apart at its seams. Willa’s parents hadn’t included me in conversation and, worse, they had constantly referenced this-guy-and-that-guy, all who sounded more pedigreed than I. After dinner I had thought of ending things, but Willa and I took a walk that night—this same walk down Fifth Avenue—and she assured me we could make it through, that we could come out the other side.

  We didn’t.

  I was cold and nostalgic when I finally returned to Carole’s street. I saw a light on inside the first floor of one of the brownstones, and it took me a moment to realize it was our own. I stepped closer and peered in the window.

  Lily sat on the sleek ostrich lounge chair by the fire, drink beside her, lovingly holding a picture frame. I had known Lily for over two months now, but I had never seen her look at anyone or anything in the manner she looked at that photograph. I thought back to those years after Willa had left me. Lily looked at the picture with the same sense of longing.

  I was stuck. I waited for ten minutes, then fifteen. There was only one entrance into the house, so skirting Lily was impossible. But it was thirty degrees out and I had been dressed for a walk around the block, not for hours outside.

  Finally I opened the door.

  Lily must have heard the front and inside doors open and close, but she didn’t look up.

  “Lily? Is everything okay?” I asked, repeating a question she had asked of me only hours earlier.

  “No,” Lily said, as she gazed at the picture. “But there’s nothing that can be done about it now.”

  I scanned the bar and noticed an empty space where one of the bottles should have been. Lily had always been one for self-control, so this indiscretion was out of character.

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Thomas?”

  She said it in an omniscient way, and I wondered if she already knew the answer.

  I paused. “Yes, I think so.”

  Lily squinted her eyes suspiciously. “You think so? What does that mean?”

  “It’s a bit of an unusual situation,” I said, putting it mildly.

  “Is she beautiful?” she asked.

  “She looks like a movie star,” I declared, thinking of Matilda in the bowling alley and in her rosette bathing suit at the swimming pool.

  “That’s the gold standard in Los Angeles, isn’t it? Elsewhere it’s about so much more, but every man in Los Angeles wants to marry a girl with stardust on her.”

  “I didn’t fall in love with her because she’s pretty,” I said.

  “You’re defending yourself against something I didn’t accuse you of.”

 
It was silent for a moment. Outside a gust of wind rolled down the street.

  “Why did you fall in love with her, then,” Lily asked, “if it wasn’t, as you say, because she’s pretty?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I think in hindsight I fell in love with her the first time I met her. She’s different than other girls,” I said in a dramatic understatement.

  “Different isn’t always good,” Lily said. “It can be complicated. And in my experience men don’t like ‘complicated.’”

  “You’re right, and different isn’t always good with her, either. But I like her.” I found myself thinking of her so vividly she could have been beside me. Sadness rolled over me. I wondered if I would ever see her again. “And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing she’s pretty.” I smiled, to disarm Lily for what was coming next. “And you—why did you never marry?”

  I asked it because Lily appeared vulnerable, and as a journalist it was my job to prey on weak moments like these.

  “I was supposed to—once,” Lily said, looking down at the black-and-white photo. “But then he decided he didn’t want me anymore. And it broke my heart for the rest of my life.”

  “And why did you love him? Was he beautiful? Did he have stardust on him?”

  “I loved the way he looked at a horse,” she said simply, after a pause as brief as a blink.

  That was all I was going to get. A tiny explanation for a life derailed. There must have been other men who looked at horses like that but that wasn’t the point, was it?

  I was going to press further, but I didn’t. Instead, I said good-night, again, for the second time that night.

  Lily tore her eyes away from the photo. “Sleep tight, love.”

  I took the elevator up to my bedroom. I had left my bed a tangled mess of blankets, but someone had remade the bed and the sheets were opened for me in the shape of a half V, like an envelope waiting for a letter. A new pair of slippers sat on the floor next to my side of the bed, a fresh glass of water waited on the night table and the lights had been dimmed one click away from dark. I turned them off and, within seconds, fell asleep.

  Seventeen

  I had first learned about bon vivants and their playgrounds while at Harvard. Their choices in sandboxes varied soul to soul, taste to taste, but generally the playbook went something like this: the Hamptons in July, Saint-Tropez in August, Aspen and Gstaad for ski, the Sundance Film Festival for hobnobbing with young starlets, St. Bart’s at some point during the winter months for a suntan, the Kentucky Derby for bourbon and a gamble, a sporting event or two, maybe a Fashion Week somewhere, and then, the following year, the same or some variation of it.

  For those who liked art, there was only one place to be during the second week of November, and that was New York, at the Impressionist and Modern art auctions. This year, Sotheby’s was auctioning the art of Joel Goldman, which made for a frenetic occasion for Lily and David.

  Lily and I walked in early, before the auctions began. It was quiet in those hours, the exact definition of the “calm before the storm,” and Lily and I were surrounded on all sides by fluorescence and priceless works of contemporary art. Lily paid attention to each painting in her father’s collection and discussed with me their history, when her father had acquired it and in some cases exactly where it had hung—in which estate, in which room. Much to the chagrin of the security guards, Lily tilted the paintings one or two degrees if she felt they were off their axes. Oddly, Lily hadn’t previously seemed affected by her father’s death, but this evening in New York, she seemed deeply melancholic. She needed to be torn away from each painting, and she had a wistfulness about the art that she didn’t seem to have about the man who had owned it.

  I took notes quickly and furiously, aware I was here for a purpose. I kept a careful leash on my eyes, lest they roam too far and find David.

  My head was buried in my notebook when I heard Lily exclaim:

  “David! You’re here. Where on earth have you been?”

  David didn’t answer. Instead, I felt his eyes on me. I scribbled nonsense so feverishly in my notebook my pen punctured the page.

  “Is everything okay, love?” Lily asked with genuine concern.

  I was forced to turn around at that point, and I courageously met David’s gaze. We were like soldiers on opposite sides of a battlefield.

  “Why were you so late?” Lily pressed. “It’s not like you.”

  “We have a little pest problem,” David said evenly. “At the house.”

  “Oh dear, what kind? I hope not fruit flies. They can be the worst to cure.”

  “No, nothing of the sort. Something bigger and peskier than that. But we’ll take care of it—we always do.”

  I felt David’s eyes on me again. And then, as if he was bored with me, he shifted his attention toward a sculpture. It was a Joel Shapiro, Lily had told me minutes earlier, but to my untrained eye, a million-dollar stick figure. It looked like a man running awkwardly, and I couldn’t help but think that soon that man could be me.

  They announced the auction was about to begin, and David, Lily and I sat in the front row—in that order. David’s hands cradled his phone on his lap, and I wondered if the subject of any of his communication was related to Matilda. I longed to extract the phone from his hands. Lily leaned in to say something to me, the art auctioneer rattled through numbers, a paddle went up, another went down. It was all jumbled, and the auction ended too quickly and yet not quickly enough. Just like that, Joel Goldman’s art—the priceless pieces he spent a lifetime acquiring—were dispersed for collectors across the globe. It seemed sad and significant.

  I glanced over at Lily to read her expression, to see if she was thinking the same thing. Instead, she seemed detached. She was animatedly speaking to David about a sculpture that had sold to a friend of theirs. And it was then that I felt her. Willa’s stare was on my upper back, and it burned the way her forgetting me once had.

  I turned around to find her eyes set squarely on mine, as if it was the first time we had met, during that autumn day at Harvard.

  Had I avoided her it would have made her think I still loved her, that there was something about her worth skirting. I would never give her that satisfaction. It was a few minutes before David, Lily and I left our seats, and when we did she intercepted my path, making it impossible to move around her.

  “Hello, Thomas,” she said.

  Apart from nascent wrinkles around her eyes, she was still attractive in the way well-bred girls who take care of themselves are. Her long brown hair was feathered in a bygone way but it must have been in vogue again, for Willa was always in vogue. Her red lipstick was a shade too bright for my taste, her eyes heavily made up, and her fingers were covered in gold rings, as if she hadn’t been able to choose which one to wear. I could tell she was nervous.

  “Hey, Willa,” I said with a deliberate aloofness, meant to convey I had other places to be. She leaned in, expecting something—a kiss, maybe, or a hug—but I stood firmly outside her radius and offered neither.

  “You’re here with David Duplaine?” she asked with forced casualness.

  I nodded, even though it was, in a sense, a lie.

  “And another friend.” I tossed my head in the general direction of the front row, which was now empty. “And you? Are you buying?” I asked, even though I knew she wasn’t.

  She chuckled conspiratorially, as if we were in on the same joke. “No. Just observing I guess.” There was a pause then. “I hear you’re doing well. In LA.”

  I didn’t know how she would have heard that, but I nodded. “I’m doing okay.”

  “You’re being modest, Thomas. Your parents did you a terrible disservice with all that,” she said. I briefly thought of mentioning that my mother was dead now, but I didn’t bother. “I heard you’re a superstar at the Ti
mes—or at least that’s what Jacob says,” she declared, referring to my friend whose father had introduced me to Rubenstein.

  In light of her modesty comment, I didn’t deny it. “And you? How are you?” I asked instead.

  “Oh, good, I guess. The same.” She said it in a sad way, as if I was the one who had ended things, and she had been home nursing that sick heart of hers ever since. “How long are you here for?”

  “A few days, I guess.”

  “Thomas, I need to tell you. I’ve felt awful about everything.”

  I opened my mouth to disagree and she put her finger on my lip, the way she used to before we fell asleep.

  “I know you don’t believe me, and I may be many terrible things and not as good a person as you, but one thing I’m not is a liar. I’ve thought of you so many times, more than you could ever believe.”

  “Then why didn’t you call?” I asked, thinking of the years of nights I fell asleep with the phone under my pillow, waiting for a ring that never came.

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “That’s the honest answer. There’s so much we need to talk about. If you’re here tomorrow, can we...could we have dinner? Please?”

  Men of greater willpower would have said no. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I had spent years missing her. I couldn’t because I was now in danger of never seeing Matilda again. I couldn’t because David Duplaine was about to flick my life away, like the ash from the tip of a cigarette.

  So I agreed.

  “Tomorrow, then,” she said, as she turned around to leave.

  Just before she did, I touched her wool coat lightly, somewhere around her hip and with such gentleness she might not have even known. I touched it because there had been all those years between then and now, years when she was imaginary. In those years I would have given anything to see her smile, to hear her laugh, to touch the wool of her coat, to smell the scent of grapefruit on the nape of her neck. My greatest fear all those nights, the fear that had blackened my soul at three o’clock in the morning, was that she was forgetting me, and here she was, once again, remembering.