The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  * * *

  I returned to the brownstone late. I had told Lily after the auction that I needed to meet some friends from Harvard, but in actuality I had gone to one of my favorite bars and had a few drinks alone.

  The brownstone was quiet. A single lamp illuminated the living room.

  I was ready to retreat to my bedroom when I remembered the picture.

  The wall was covered in black-and-white photos. I scanned the photos one by one. Most were of Carole. There was one picture of her shaking hands with the president at an orphanage fund-raiser, another with her smiling demurely and hugging an Academy Award against her chest, and one of her walking down a rainy Manhattan street with a newspaper over her head beside an unfamiliar man. Charles was in exactly three of the photos, and in each case he was in the background, out of focus even. I reflected, for not the first time, on their odd marriage. It seemed loveless—almost a marriage of convenience. Yet Carole Partridge hardly seemed like the type to have to do anything for convenience. I suspected quite the opposite in fact: she paid others around her to make her life effortless.

  I continued through the trove of photos, eventually homing in on one with a familiar man on a movie set. It took me a moment to figure out how I recognized the face. It was Joel Goldman—Lily’s father—on the set of one of his movies. It was a grand scene from an epic film, with actresses in heavy makeup, set designers carrying elaborate art, people scurrying about. I smiled nostalgically, because it was a scene from the motion-picture business of yesteryear—before computers did the heavy lifting. Movies in those days were productions, and men like Joel Goldman true producers.

  I studied the photo one more time, wondering what about it compelled me so, and then continued onward.

  Finally, in the upper right corner of the photo collage, I found what I was looking for.

  Lily had returned it to its place, but I knew it was the one as soon as I saw it. It was a photo of a handsome guy around eighteen years old with his hand resting on a beauty of a Thoroughbred. He stood in front of the stone manor I had seen in the background of Lily’s dressage photos—her family’s equestrian estate, I presumed—and he was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. A wickedly mischievous smile covered his face, as if he had just done something wrong, or was about to. He was a guy from another era—the type of man to lasso cattle, to promise loyalty and mean it.

  He wasn’t alone. Beside him stood Carole Partridge. She was around eight and wore jodhpurs and boots that covered her knees. She looked up at him adoringly, laughingly. Their resemblance was uncanny; I could see it in their heavy eyelids and off-kilter smiles. It was remarkably clear:

  The person who had broken Lily Goldman’s heart was Carole Partridge’s older brother.

  Eighteen

  When I woke up the next morning, Lily was already gone. She had left a note requesting I meet her for drinks at the Four Seasons that evening around ten. I considered phoning her to ask what this mysterious late-drinks meeting was about, but then remembered her habit of not accepting calls, so I figured it was futile.

  I spent the day in work meetings. I went to the art auction houses to do some research, and while I was in town Rubenstein had arranged for me to interview a film actress who had just wrapped up a stint on Broadway.

  I went back to the town house and showered before hailing a cab to take me downtown. I waited outside and in my periphery I thought I caught a man in a nondescript car watching me. When I looked his way he drove away, and I realized I was turning paranoid. David knew I was sneaking onto his estate, but there was a leap between knowing I was visiting his daughter and having me followed in New York. Besides, I told myself, I was only having dinner with an old friend. There was certainly no harm in that.

  Nevertheless, as the taxi drove through streets stuffed with rush-hour traffic, I found myself glancing over my shoulder.

  Willa had picked a restaurant in Tribeca, a glass, steel and brick eatery that served Italian food in low light, bad acoustics and small portions. We agreed to meet there at seven, but in typical fashion I had arrived early, so I sat at a bar with a mirror that ran all the way to the ceiling. The gimlet was Willa’s drink, so ordering that was not an option. I needed something that felt grown-up and masculine, as if I had graduated from her.

  “An Old-Fashioned,” I said to the bartender, usurping David’s drink of choice.

  I discreetly examined my reflection in the mirror between liquor bottles. I had aged better than Willa—the advantage of being a man and, I supposed, of having a wide frame and formidable jaw. While at Harvard I had a round, boyish face, but now my jaw seemed more squarely cut and my cheeks more angular. Gone was the messy shag, reminiscent of a Milwaukee kid on a baseball diamond—or track, as the case may be. My reddish-blond hair was cut closer to the scalp, and I still had a full head of it. I wore the checked shirt and gray wool pants Lily had brought me from Boston as a present for house-sitting.

  I had met Willa during our junior year at Harvard. It was fall, and I had chosen to go to the banks of the Charles to study for a midterm. It was a postcard of an afternoon. The fog hadn’t lifted, and the air smelled of wet leaves and heavy smoke. It screamed so intensely of fall that for years that afternoon defined autumn for me.

  I lay on my side on a blanket, damp from the grass. I was working on a term paper on Faulkner, scribbling commentary on As I Lay Dying in a notebook.

  “Is that a notebook you’re writing in?” Willa had asked, bundling her plaid scarf closer to her neck and blowing at a wisp of hair that crept into her eye. She had appeared from nowhere, as if she had been conjured up just for me.

  “It’s a wonderful invention—the notebook,” I declared, mesmerized by her the way I would be years later by Matilda. She was different than the girls in Milwaukee—a higher level of sophistication, a more angular bone structure, a greater aloofness. “It’s going to overtake that thing called a computer. Just you wait and see.”

  Willa sat down beside me on the blanket. She chose a spot close to me, as if we had known each other for years rather than minutes. She wore a big diamond on her right hand, and it was the first time I had been approached by a girl rich enough to wear a diamond that hadn’t been given to her by her husband.

  “When it does—overtake the computer—I’ll remember that the boy who first introduced me to this thing called ‘the notebook’ was...”

  “Thomas. Thomas Cleary. And who am I enlightening?”

  She giggled then, like a schoolgirl who just returned to her friends after a dance with a crush. “Willa Asher.” She gave me her last name with a flourish, with the implication that it was a gift of a last name. She crept closer then, so close I smelled her grapefruit scent, and she peeked at my pages. “You have exquisite handwriting, Thomas Cleary. So straight—the handwriting of an architect.”

  That was how it began. We sat beside each other for hours, discussing everything from Faulkner to the Revolutionary War. We took in coffee later in the afternoon at a Cambridge café and rendezvoused for a cocktail the following evening. She had been at the Charles looking for someone, or so she later said, but we had never revisited that moment so I could ask if she had ever found who she was looking for. If she had, my whole life would have been different.

  Had we met at a Harvard event we surely wouldn’t have fallen in love. I would have looked at her like the shirts and pants I was now wearing, as something nice but unaffordable, and she wouldn’t have noticed me at all. Instead, that patchwork of fog was our candlelight—in its glow we saw each other as flawless.

  Our love lasted longer than it probably should have; it endured through semester after semester, much of the time seeming to run on the fumes of an incredible chemistry. Our friends—her high-society ones and mine, who work-studied and borrowed their way through Harvard—watched from the sidelines the way people watch a house of cards k
nowing someday the winds would change and the streets would be littered with queens of spades and jacks of hearts.

  The winds did change. We moved to Manhattan—she to work for a fashion magazine, I to work at my dream job covering tech finance at the Wall Street Journal. She wanted to move in together, but I insisted I make it on my own before we took such a big step. So I lived the humble life of a reporter in a walk-up on York Avenue, while Willa moved into a loft downtown, in a building that was owned by her father. She played the Manhattan social-climbing game—a ladder to nowhere in my opinion—and I worked a grueling schedule that involved short deadlines and trips cross-country to Silicon Valley. It fell apart quickly and irreparably. Willa left me in September. I always suspected she had left me for someone else—she was never one to leave something without a backup—but the official reason was “too many differences between us.” I was left devastated and broken.

  “Don’t you look pensive, Thomas Cleary.”

  I saw her reflection in the mirror and turned around. She had a terrible habit of being late, a habit I had excused repeatedly because she had trained me to believe that due to upbringing and social standing her time was of greater value than mine. Tonight she was on time, to the minute.

  The first thing I noticed about her was that she wore the emerald earrings I had given her as a gift for her twenty-first birthday. Even in her dainty earlobes they were undersized, the size of earrings for a child.

  I had saved for months to buy those earrings. I had chosen them because there was something about emeralds that sounded rich, like Willa.

  “I don’t deserve these,” she had said that night, glancing at the earrings for only a second before stuffing them back into the crumpled-up paper in which I had so carefully wrapped them. It was a terrible phrase that really meant “You don’t deserve me.”

  But she had kept them, all these years.

  “Hi,” I said, standing up because that was what David did when Lily joined him at a table. “Can I get you a drink?”

  She studied me obviously—first my hair, then the checked shirt, the wool pants, the shoes and finally the Old-Fashioned. She seemed impressed and there was a smugness to her, as if she was taking credit for some of it.

  “A gimlet, please. Rocks,” she said to the bartender.

  Now it was my turn. It was neither arrogant nor presumptive to say that Willa had dressed specifically for me. Gone was the gothic black eyeliner, the clunky rings and the lipstick the color of fire. Here was the girl next door: a touch of mascara, clear lip gloss, bare fingers punctuated with clear nails, a prim coat cinched at the waist with a belt and slightly red cheeks, which made her look as if she had just come in from a cold day of sledding.

  “What are you drinking?” she asked to make conversation. Before I had been the one to fill uncomfortable silences, but now Willa was the eager one. She leaned in and studied my drink.

  “An Old-Fashioned. Do you want to go to our table?”

  “Couldn’t we both use a drink first?”

  She tapped my glass with hers, making direct eye contact with me as she did.

  There was a rowdy group of Wall Street guys beside us who dropped the names of commodities and stock tickers. They shouted to each other about the nets of their trades—thirty grand here, forty there—and it was hard to hear my own thoughts.

  Willa leaned in close. “I’m sorry about everything, Thomas.” Maybe she thought I hadn’t heard her apology the evening before.

  “Yeah, I got that. All’s good.”

  “No, really, I feel like I have to get that out of the way and make you understand,” she implored.

  I nodded, not knowing what else to say. We both went back to our drinks. The bourbon tasted medicinal, and my mouth watered for Willa’s lime.

  Once at our table, there were three drinks, or maybe four. Then three plates of appetizers and another round of drinks.

  She sat beside me rather than across. Every drink seemed to give Willa the courage to inch closer to me, so that eventually our thighs were touching.

  Conversation started off as small talk between old friends who happened to bump into each other. Willa had changed jobs from one fashion magazine to another and now was working for a fashion website. She had upgraded her loft for one with more closets in the same building, and she had just returned home from Italy, where she had gone for a friend’s wedding.

  As for me, I told her generally about the Times, making it seem more of a gradual rise than the meteoric one it had been. When pressed for my accommodations I mentioned that I was staying at Carole Partridge’s brownstone.

  “Carole Partridge? The movie star Carole Partridge? You’re staying in her brownstone? Thomas, your life seems so glamorous.” She dragged out the last word in an alcohol-induced slur that sounded ugly or sarcastic, I wasn’t sure which, but certainly not glamorous.

  Willa leaned closer now and put her hand in my hair.

  I felt for the first time that night that I was doing something wrong, and I wanted to leave.

  I motioned for the check, and Willa noticed.

  “Everyone from LA wants to go to bed so early,” she said. The comment initially seemed innocuous, but then Willa rubbed the back of her hand on my cheek. It was a gesture from nights past—our precursor to more.

  I thought again how I had wanted this for so long. But something in me had changed, because now it felt like nothing.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know what time I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. “So I should get home and get it all worked out.”

  “I do wish you’d stay in New York a few days longer.” Willa’s tone was overtly coquettish. “Can’t you do what it is you do from New York?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  Willa tried another tactic now: she sipped her drink more slowly, petulantly, as if to say that we couldn’t possibly leave until there was nothing left of it.

  “Thomas,” Willa breathed into my ear. “What happened that winter? With the Journal?”

  My heart quickened and I found myself embarrassed for the Thomas of old, that poor chap.

  “Let’s not go into that. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “But it did,” she pled childishly. “I want to know what happened.”

  “It was a long time ago, Willa.”

  “Everyone was talking about it...” Willa paused, looking at her drink sadly. “I feel like I should know.”

  The check came in a highball glass. I reached for it, but Willa grabbed it first, putting it someplace on the other side of her. It was another act of petulance. I could leave before she drained her drink, but she knew I wouldn’t walk out on a check.

  The Wall Street crew was drunker now, and I heard them from four tables away talking about a girl they had met in the Hamptons whom at least a few of them had slept with.

  “Thomas—” Willa egged me on, as if begging for an encore. She played with one of her emerald earrings. It was so small I feared it would disappear into its hole.

  “It was a mistake, an honest mistake. I was lost when we ended things, and I could barely function at work. I had to write a story on a software launch—too complex to go into now and it doesn’t matter anyways—and I was supposed to go to Palo Alto to interview the company’s founder. I missed my flight. I overslept.” I paused. “Anyways, I called him for the interview—it turned out I didn’t even need to be there for it—and I wrote the story and it came out. Initially uneventfully.”

  Willa’s expression was rapt.

  “Two days passed, and I was in Palo Alto for real this time when I heard. I’ll never forget. I was eating a falafel pita in this little hummus joint on University called Oren’s, where all the software guys go, when my phone started to blow up with emails about how I plagiarized a story. I honestly had no idea what everyone was tal
king about.”

  Much to my surprise, I felt shame rising to my cheeks all over again.

  “Apparently, three sentences from my story had also been used in the Chronicle two years earlier about the same company. I didn’t copy it—I swear on my father’s life I didn’t. I would never do that for a thousand different reasons—but somewhere in the recesses of my mind I must have read it and retained it. So I was fired, and I spent the next three months getting rejected by every newspaper in the country. The LA Times was my last hope.”

  I glanced at Willa’s drink, hoping she was finished so I could pay the bill. It was still half-full, and I felt her gaze on me intensely.

  “That doesn’t seem enough to get fired,” Willa said. “Are you sure that was all?”

  “Am I sure? No, I’m forgetting a part of it,” I said sarcastically, feeling a strong anger coming on. “Tens of thousands of reporters line up to work at the Journal every day. The paper doesn’t have to keep one they think plagiarized a story.”

  I had blamed the Journal for throwing down too harsh a punishment, but in speaking it aloud it made sense.

  Willa rattled the ice in her drink, a habit of hers I had forgotten.

  “I’m sorry, Thomas,” she said disingenuously. “I’m sure it was that photographic memory of yours. It was always crazy, that memory.”

  Crazy didn’t sit well with me. Neither did the insincerity, nor the fact that she was hiding the check from me.

  “Do you have a girlfriend? Are you dating anyone?” she asked, changing a subject that shouldn’t have been changed so quickly.

  I knew it didn’t matter how I answered her questions. At this point it was clear I could have taken Willa home and had sex with her and never called her again. Instead, I simply said, “Yes.”

  Her face fell obviously.

  “Is she an LA girl?” she asked with repugnancy.