The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  If someone had gone through the trouble of hiding the key, it felt as if it was somehow significant.

  I still had a few hours before I had to leave to pick up Matilda, so I decided to search the house to see if I could find the lock that fit the key.

  I made my way through each room, notebook in hand. I searched for the mysterious keyhole, but while I did I also inventoried the house to see if I could find another clue to Lily Goldman’s relationship to Matilda Duplaine.

  I could find nothing remarkable about the kitchen, nor the open area that served as both living room and dining area. Joel’s office was almost totally bare, which I took as a clue in its own right. There wasn’t much left: an empty oversize wooden desk, two tufted chairs and a bookshelf devoid of any books. The bedrooms were next. Joel Goldman’s house had six bedrooms. Four were completely empty, save for a bed. Matilda and I had moved into the room I presumed belonged to Lily’s parents. I was familiar with its contents and there was nothing of interest.

  As I walked through the chambers, I carefully wrote down even the smallest and seemingly benign details, always looking for a drawer or safe but finding nothing.

  After a couple hours of combing the house, I paused to regroup. It was possible the key wasn’t a safe key or a drawer key. What else could it have opened? Then I remembered: the mailbox.

  I walked outside. It was a humid day and by the time I got to the end of the driveway, sweat had settled in the crease in my neck. I thought of Matilda, in the waves, and found myself the slightest bit agitated that she hadn’t invited me to join her.

  When I reached the mailbox I inserted the key into the small lock, certain it would fit. I jimmied it, wondering if I would garner a secret through years of Joel Goldman’s mail.

  But the key didn’t work. I tried it again and then again. Still no luck.

  As I walked through the heavy air back to the house, I rubbed the tiny metal key between my fingers, feeling its sharp edges and dull face. Every key has to open something; it was merely a matter of finding where that something was.

  * * *

  I arrived to pick up Matilda early and was preparing to walk down to the surf and watch her, but then stopped myself. She had clearly indicated she didn’t want me hovering around, so I waited in the car.

  Surfing class ended at three, and by three thirty there was still no Matilda. I was beginning to get impatient, but then I calmed myself. Surely there was an explanation for her lateness.

  When Matilda finally got to the car, just before four, she seemed different somehow. Her gait seemed surer and the sway of her hips more pronounced, like that of an actress on the red carpet. She ran her hands through her hair, disciplining those gorgeous blond strands—another newly acquired habit. Matilda had always worn one-piece swimsuits, but now she wore a bikini that showed off her curvy breasts and hips. Sand stuck to her wet legs and hair, even her eyelashes, and she had a palpable air of lightness. She reminded me of those popular girls in college who sashayed through the Yard, all ego and little substance.

  “I got up every single time. And not only that, I surfed all the way into the shore,” she bragged when she reached me. There was an unfamiliar arrogance in her tone.

  “You did?” I said, a bit taken aback by her boastfulness. “And you also got a new bikini.”

  “On the beach—at a little bikini shack. Do you like it?”

  “It’s very sexy.” It was an understatement, and I found myself inexplicably jealous. “And you were also late. I did say I was coming to pick you up at three, right?”

  “Lorelei and I grabbed a lemonade after class,” Matilda said unapologetically. “She’s so funny—she was telling me this incredibly sweet story about when she met Isaac, and I must’ve lost track of time.”

  Matilda giggled at a story she kept to herself like a secret. Her laugh was more restrained now. It was as if someone had told her to reel it in, because that was how ladies were supposed to laugh. I wondered if Lorelei or someone else had made a comment about it.

  I pulled Matilda closer, pressing my lips on hers. She kissed me back, but it felt disingenuous, as if her mind were somewhere else.

  As Matilda and I drove to the house, she spoke disparagingly of another girl in her class, and I almost commented that she wasn’t being very nice but figured it would be futile. As soon as I parked the car, Matilda ran inside to the kitchen and sliced open a papaya—surfing famishes you, she had said emphatically—and then she retreated to the bathroom to take a shower, because Lorelei had insisted the key to keeping shiny hair was to wash it of sand, sea and sun immediately after surfing. We had always showered together, but she seemed to forget that.

  We had dinner, and Matilda spoke incessantly of her newfound friends and her day. She never asked me about mine, what I did or how I had occupied my hours. In fact, as we ate dinner, I felt as if she was the popular girl, and I had sat at the wrong lunch table in the cafeteria.

  We crawled into bed around ten. It was the first day of our vacation I hadn’t enjoyed. Nevertheless, I leaned in to kiss Matilda on the back of her neck, hoping the evening could be salvaged. She had already fallen asleep, though, still smelling of the surf.

  I tossed and turned, contemplating the events of the past two days and the mysterious key I had found. I didn’t want to wake Matilda, so I quietly got out of bed and went into the living room.

  Matilda, usually meticulous, had tossed her wet beach towel so it hung limply on the back of an armchair. It was an oversight, only one act of frivolousness, I told myself, as I blotted the damp armchair with a dry towel.

  I didn’t go back to our bedroom. Instead, I again pulled out the key.

  I walked around the house again, even more slowly this time, looking for a compartment or drawer ripe for the unlocking. I started in Joel’s office. There was one drawer with a lock, but it was slightly ajar and empty. There were no file cabinets, nothing else in the office that required a key. I went into the kitchen, but there were no locked drawers there; ditto with the living room and the bedrooms. Most of the art had been removed at auction, but there was one piece that remained—presumably not valuable enough for auction. I pulled the painting off the wall, hoping to find a safe behind it. There was none. I stealthily pulled up rugs and furniture but still came up empty-handed. It was unlikely Joel Goldman would have been storing valuables in a vacation house, so the lack of a safe wasn’t surprising. But that still left the question of the key.

  I returned to the living room, and I sat in an armchair, resting in that mysterious and hazy space between consciousness and slumber, feeling as though there was something in the house that was significant.

  The air was feeling musty and stale, so I opened the windows and the drapes billowed in the wind. The house certainly seemed like a tropical paradise, but there was something about it that felt not right. Haunted may have been too strong a word, but from the moment we had arrived, I had felt uneasy.

  I wasn’t sure what it was, but I still believed there was a clue in this sprawling Hawaiian villa—a clue that would solve the mystery Bel-Air could not.

  Twenty-Three

  By the time I awoke after my poor evening of sleep, Matilda was already in the kitchen. She was wearing her new bikini under a rash guard and standing over the stove, preparing eggs and toast. Two glasses of pineapple juice sat on the kitchen counter next to open papaya halves sprinkled with blueberries and a jar of orange marmalade jam.

  “Good morning, sleepy bird,” she said to me, kissing me sweetly on the cheek. I wondered if I had imagined her detachment of the day before. “I was just about to wake you to tell you that breakfast was ready.”

  “Do you need help?” I asked.

  “Yes, I need you to sit down in front of that plate,” Matilda said.

  I did as told, and the plate was soon full of sunny-side
eggs and sourdough toast, almost burned, just the way I liked it. Matilda sat beside me, thigh on mine, and we talked about surfing, work, a book she was reading.

  Conversation was pleasant, the banter of old.

  I was making yesterday up, I told myself. Matilda is still Matilda.

  After breakfast, while Matilda and I did the dishes, she asked what I intended to do for the day.

  “Just some work.” I thought again about the key I had found, wondering what it could open.

  “At the house?” she asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “Honolulu’s not exactly the hub of the entertainment business.”

  “That’s fantastic. Because I was thinking I might take the car today and drive myself to my surf lesson,” Matilda said. “If it’s okay with you, of course.”

  I was taken aback by the request because it seemed yet another uncharacteristic act of independence on her part. Matilda had a driver’s license but her skills had been honed on the driveway that wove through the estate. She had never driven in Hawaii alone before.

  Matilda sensed my pause. “Oh, do you need the car?” she asked sweetly. “If it’s a terrible imposition, let me know. It’s just that I need to learn to drive myself places. I’ve just now realized what a child I’ve been. I was the only one at surfing school yesterday who was dropped off. Everyone else drove by themselves.”

  “No, not an imposition at all,” I said. “I can bike anywhere I need to go.”

  “Are you certain?” Matilda asked.

  “More than certain.”

  I walked her to the car and we stood in front of it for a moment, as if we both recognized the symbolic nature of her leaving for the first time without me. I found myself playing with the door handle to avoid her eyes.

  Matilda fiddled with the keys, nervously I thought, and they clanked together. She smiled, and she kissed me long and hard on the lips. She tasted of orange marmalade jam.

  “I’ll be home soon,” Matilda said. “You won’t even have time to miss me soon.”

  Matilda got into the car and revved its engine a bit too strongly. She looked at me, embarrassed. She took a try at it again, properly this time, and the car rattled in place. She sputtered off jerkily and uneasily, and finally the car sped up as she gained confidence. I watched the car as it turned different shades of red in the changing light—a fiery red, the red of molten lava, the red of dried earth—and then finally disappeared, leaving a quiet street, canopied in Hawaii’s greens and blues.

  Matilda told me she would be home before I missed her, but I found myself missing her the minute her car had disappeared. Six or seven hours loomed ahead of me, empty and lonely, with nothing to do.

  I walked into our bedroom to put on a bathing suit, but instead spotted my running shoes in the closet. I hadn’t run in months and wasn’t even particularly compelled to do so now, but I decided it would invigorate me or, if nothing else, get me out of the house for an hour.

  I put on my running shoes and shorts, and I left for the hills.

  The first few strides were the toughest. The concrete found its way directly to my shins and hips, and my back tightened under the force. When I was younger, I’d feel the first bead of sweat around the thousandth meter. Now I felt it in the first few blocks.

  I almost turned back, but then I thought of my father, how he used to follow next to me in his car, prodding me along with a stopwatch.

  Come on, son, he’d say. Keep it going.

  The weather reminded me of those August days in the Midwest, the late-summer days of my youth. It was neither raining nor sunny, neither cold nor warm, but the air sweated with humidity. There were filmy clouds, but they moved so slowly they appeared to just sit there. It was as if they were glued to the sky.

  My stride hit, and then my breath hit, and then my legs followed. Out there on the Hawaiian road, clarity had finally returned.

  In the past couple days, Matilda had shown signs of detaching into her newfound independence. I had no idea of who Matilda would be when she inevitably transitioned into the real world. She was no ordinary girl, and my life felt exceedingly ordinary, even dull, by comparison. I thought of my apartment in Silver Lake, the reporter’s salary that barely enabled me to support myself, let alone a woman who had grown up in a hundred-million-dollar estate in Bel-Air. I cringed at the thought of having to be dependent on David Duplaine for anything.

  When I returned to the house, I took a seat beside the pool to wind down. The water was swampy, but the wind created ripples on the pool’s surface, and the movement reminded me of a piece of art I had seen at the estate, in the vast living room. It was a painting of a man standing over a diving board, water rippled with squiggly abstract lines. I thought of the metaphor. I felt like that man, ready to dive in, but I didn’t know what I was diving into.

  My thoughts widened to David’s art collection—and Joel’s. The sun-streaked walls in the Hawaiian house were empty, but darker rectangular spots indicated twenty or so paintings had been removed. There was only that one that remained. The evening prior, when I had searched for the safe, I hadn’t focused on the painting itself. I had assumed it was the least valuable, but perhaps that was an incorrect assumption. Was it possible that the painting that remained had some other significance?

  I went inside. Oddly, the remaining painting hung in Lily’s bedroom—another reason I had been led to believe it wasn’t worthy of the auction. Most people, I assumed, hung their most valuable art in their living areas.

  I entered Lily’s room and examined the painting carefully. The painting was colored in pastels and wildly abstract. I was hardly an art aficionado, and I couldn’t tell if the piece was priceless or worthy only of a charity drop-off. I studied it closely, looking for some clue. It appeared to be a series of haphazard paint strokes, but upon careful scrutiny I realized it was a painting of a person—an amorphous woman with fleshy thighs who I was looking at from a side angle. Around her was a tornado of greens, pinks and yellows. And, upon even closer examination, I realized the painting was vaguely familiar. It took me a second to remember where I had seen it: a similar painting hung in Carole and Charles’s foyer. If memory served correctly—which it generally did—I would have bet it was the same artist.

  If that was the case, my guess was this piece of art should have been auctioned. Carole’s estate was full of multimillion-dollar pieces, so this one most likely would have been equally valuable.

  The only two clues I had garnered—the key and the painting—had both come from Lily’s room. So I decided to comb through the room one last time. I went through the closet again and the dresser. I even pulled the sheets up on her bed. There was nothing else of interest.

  I was about to leave when I walked over to the crystal bottle on the dresser. I turned it over and pressed it against my middle finger. I put the scent to my nose. The scent was familiar: it smelled like Matilda.

  It’s my mother’s scent, Matilda had said.

  Just as I was no art expert, I was also no women’s perfume expert. That said, I knew enough to know that there were an infinite number of scents, and the chance that Matilda would wear the same scent as Lily highly improbable. But, then again, perhaps it was a coincidence, I told myself. Or maybe—just maybe—this was Matilda’s mother’s room.

  I had to tread carefully. Right now all I had was a complicated theorem without a proof.

  One of my assumptions was that Matilda Duplaine had been born in the United States. I was befuddled by the absence of a birth certificate. But it was possible Matilda had been born abroad—more specifically, in France, to Lily Goldman.

  I knew just the man who could help. I dialed my friend Jacob, my friend from college whose father had introduced me to Rubenstein. Jacob worked for the longtime ambassador to France, and I asked him for “a favor for me...and Rubenstein”—to look into
Lily Goldman’s whereabouts, to investigate if by chance she was in France in April of 1988. And, while he was at it, I asked him to look through birth records to see if a Matilda Duplaine had been born anywhere in France that same year.

  When Jacob asked about the famous last name Duplaine, I said it was a coincidence.

  I hung up and contemplated my next call.

  I hadn’t phoned Lily since we had left Los Angeles, but I was now compelled to do so. My time in Hawaii was leading to questions, but no answers. One of my strengths as a journalist had been opening the figurative doors for my subjects. I would invite them into my room with kindness and my gee-whiz Midwestern smile and hope once they were there they divulged their secrets. Even if Lily wouldn’t divulge secrets, at the very least, she would have answers about the painting in her bedroom.

  I dialed Lily’s cell phone. It went to voice mail without ringing.

  “If it’s good news, leave a message; if not, hang up.”

  I didn’t know if my news was good or bad, so I ended the call without leaving a message.

  * * *

  Four o’clock. There was no sign of Matilda. Surf school had ended at three, and it was a mere ten-minute drive home. I found myself consulting my watch every thirty seconds. I had no car to drive to the beach. Matilda had no phone.

  Four thirty. Still no Matilda. I vacillated between worry, resentment and anger. Matilda’s life suddenly seemed to be moving forward while mine was stagnant. We were switching places, stepping into the shoes of each other’s lives. I had given up so much for Matilda, and on the littlest hint of freedom she had run off, leaving me alone.

  At five o’clock I saw the flash of red coming up the hill. Matilda drove up too quickly before stopping the car dangerously close to the garage. She silenced its engine.

  “Where were you?” I asked, trying not to betray my anger.

  “Surfing class,” Matilda said, with the slightest hint of sarcasm. Sarcasm wasn’t something Matilda had used before because her father was too frank for it and her staff would have never used it around her. She must have picked it up on the beach, from one of her new friends.