The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  For not the first time over the past days, I tried to reconcile the girl I had fallen in love with and the one who had accompanied me to this seedy club. But I couldn’t. I wondered if this relationship could be salvaged; and, if it couldn’t, what would happen when I returned to Los Angeles without her—literally or figuratively. It wouldn’t be decided tonight, I said to myself, emerging from the stall. I splashed water on my face and inhaled deeply, convincing myself I could get through the next few hours.

  As I opened the bathroom door, a wave of laughter washed over me. I braced myself for a return to the table.

  “We were getting worried about you. Isaac was about to follow you into the bathroom to make sure you were okay.”

  It was Lorelei who said it, not Matilda. Matilda looked at me as if I was a parent who had come home too soon and broken up the party.

  “Phone call,” I said, holding up my phone as proof.

  Lorelei turned to me. “Your girlfriend is amazing. She knows more about music than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  Matilda blushed again at the compliment, and I realized that, besides me, Matilda had never been praised by someone who hadn’t been well compensated to admire her.

  “I know,” I said. “She’s an encyclopedia. On our first date we listened to everything from Air Supply to Interpol.”

  “Air Supply, my God, I haven’t heard them forever.” Isaac laughed, and Matilda glared at me. In this short time, she had come to realize that Air Supply wasn’t cool.

  “Neither had Matilda, actually. Air Supply was my choice. Interpol hers.”

  Matilda smiled at me. I think it was her way of thanking me for taking the fall.

  “How did you guys meet?” Lorelei asked.

  We were both quiet.

  “At the tennis courts,” I finally replied, though it was a stretch of the truth.

  “How old-fashioned and romantic,” Lorelei said.

  “It was, actually. Matilda’s too modest to say it, but she’s an incredible tennis player. I’ve never beaten her.”

  “So, was it love at first sight?” Isaac chimed in.

  “Well, I can’t speak for Matilda, but for me it was. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Still can’t.” I tossed Matilda an affectionate smile, but she seemed more besotted with her passion-fruit mojito, gulping it through a straw.

  “That’s so sweet. And, Matilda, what about for you?” Lorelei asked.

  “What?” she asked, swirling a brightly colored umbrella in her drink.

  “Was it love at first sight?”

  “I think so, but I had nothing to compare it to,” Matilda replied.

  She didn’t say it maliciously, and she had finished half of her mojito at this point, so it was entirely possible by the glint in her eye that she was drunk. But Lorelei and Isaac glanced at each other surreptitiously, aware her response was odd, if not rude. I considered excusing myself to make another phone call, but then realized it had only been five minutes since my last trip to the bathroom.

  The rest of dinner passed uneventfully. Lorelei and Matilda sat hip to hip like Siamese twins and gossiped about a guy at the beach and the girl I quickly gathered was the outcast of their group. Isaac, for his part, peppered me with questions about Harvard, a place he had only seen in the movies.

  As we finished our after-dinner cocktails, however, their questions turned dangerously personal. “Matilda, where did you go to school? What are you studying? Thomas, why did you leave your job to come to Honolulu?” My answers were slow and clumsy, and I was entangling myself in a web of lies.

  “We should probably get going,” I said around midnight. Matilda’s eyes were bloodshot from alcohol, and she seemed to sway in her seat.

  “I hope you guys don’t have a long drive,” Lorelei said.

  “We don’t,” I lied, yet again.

  “Where do you live?” Lorelei asked. Matilda had obviously refrained from mentioning to her friends that our stay was a vacation, not life.

  “In the hills,” I said vaguely.

  “Are you renting?” Isaac asked.

  “Sort of.” I thought back to Lily, to that night at Carole’s when she had said we were all just renters. “We’re all just renters of life if you think about it.”

  Lorelei and Isaac exchanged side glances.

  The waitress left the check on the table between us and I tried to get a cue from Matilda to see if she wanted me to pay.

  “Let’s split it, man,” Isaac said, making a poor attempt to reach for his wallet.

  “I’ll get it this time. You guys can get it next time,” I said, grabbing the check.

  Matilda finally became aware that I had paid for dinner, but I couldn’t read her expression, if she was upset or pleased. Her eyes were cloudy and unfocused, and she looked as if she might get sick.

  “Where did you park?” Lorelei asked, as we walked outside. The fresh ocean air felt good. Lorelei and Isaac headed toward their car, an old model with a broken taillight.

  “I missed the lot, so we’re right around the corner. Besides, I read somewhere that if you park three blocks away from your destination, you lose an extra pound over five years,” I said, making light of the situation.

  Everyone laughed except Matilda.

  “Do you want to grab a nightcap?” Lorelei asked. “There’s a great bar around the corner.”

  “Why don’t we take a rain check?” I suggested. “I’m beat, and I have a story due tomorrow. One of my reporters had a death in the family, so I’m doing him a favor.”

  As the night was coming to a close, the lies were coming easier.

  Isaac and Lorelei got into their car and angry music erupted from the stereo, as if it was waiting, all this time, to scream its rage. We watched the broken taillight disappear over a mountain, and then we walked the three blocks to our car in silence.

  I put down the top, thinking both of us would do better with fresh air—for different reasons. My frustration with Matilda was bubbling at the surface, ready to erupt.

  I floored the gas and turned on the radio. It was an angst-ridden song, which seemed to suit the mood.

  “Can you drive a little more slowly?” Matilda asked as we pulled onto the highway. “Everything’s a little blurry.”

  I didn’t answer, I didn’t slow down and I didn’t speak to Matilda for the entire ride home.

  Instead, as we drove through the hills, I couldn’t help but think about that dangerous time in a relationship when it teeters on the precipice of disaster. I felt like a bystander on a sidewalk watching two cars about to collide, a coach seeing an interception before his tight end did. I knew things were about to go very wrong, but I was standing on the sidelines, helpless to stop it.

  Twenty-Five

  Matilda was still asleep when I sneaked out of the house the next morning.

  First, I drove to the gas station. I had noticed on our ride home from the club that Matilda had left the car on empty, despite the fact that she was the one who had spent the past five days driving. It might have been my fault, as I had never taught her to pump gas, but it upset me nevertheless.

  After getting gas, I drove to the park and took a walk through the grounds, watching an old man feed pigeons and kids shoot soccer balls at a net. My life had become a giant question mark. I had risked everything to emancipate Matilda, and it took merely days for her to forget it. I was not an unreasonable person, but Matilda’s growing detachment and her self-entitled behavior were infuriating me. For days Matilda had left me alone—with no car, no invitation to join her at the surf and no interest in how I spent my days without her. I knew the minutiae of Matilda’s life, but Matilda barely knew anything about mine. And worse: it didn’t seem to bother her.

  Later that morning, I returned home to find Matilda, hair do
ne in curls shaped like s’s, sitting on a lounge chair in a skimpy black bikini I hadn’t seen before. I figured she had bought it with Lorelei.

  She was painting her toenails, and black polish was everywhere—the chaise, the stone, her fingers. The only place it didn’t seem to be was on her toenails.

  “Where were you?” Matilda asked, without looking up from her toes. “I missed my surfing lesson. Isaac was upset.”

  It was only then that I realized Isaac wasn’t much different than Matilda’s instructors at the estate. He was someone remunerated to be nice to her.

  “If Isaac missed you, he should have come by and picked you up,” I said.

  Matilda said nothing, because we both knew why she didn’t want Isaac coming to the house.

  “Where were you anyways?” she asked again, her eyes trained on her toes.

  “You left the car on empty.”

  “On empty?”

  “You left the car with no gas. It was running on fumes. If you drive, you need to fill it up,” I said.

  Matilda attempted to paint her little toenail, but it was futile. Exasperated, she dropped the bottle on the stone. She finally looked up from her toenails, just now bothering to make eye contact with me.

  “Next time you’re going to take the car, please ask,” she said.

  “I could say the same for you,” I said.

  “If you needed the car, you could have told me,” Matilda said. “I didn’t get the impression you needed to leave the house for anything. What exactly is it you need to leave for, Thomas?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Don’t get upset with me,” Matilda said under her breath. “You’re the one who’s chosen to sit around the house all day.”

  “With all due respect,” I said. “I don’t think you’re one to talk about sitting around the house all day. Wasn’t that how you spent the last twenty years?”

  Matilda’s face paled.

  “How dare you?” she said.

  “I’ve risked everything for you.” I raised my voice. “My career, my livelihood. Los Angeles is my shot—my last shot. I abandoned a boss who rescued me from failure, and betrayed your father, who happens to be the most powerful man in the city. Either one of them could press a button and destroy my life in less than a second. And this is how you thank me?”

  Matilda looked away, toward the ocean. Her green eyes were starting to turn glassy with tears.

  “You don’t know what I’m going through.” Matilda’s voice was so low it was almost a whisper.

  “Actually, Matilda, I spent the past three months understanding you, but have you ever once asked what it’s like to be me? Have you ever tried to understand me? I can answer that for you. No. You don’t even know me.”

  “That’s the worst thing that you’ve ever said to me. I love you. Are you implying I love someone I don’t even know?”

  “Have you ever asked me why I ended up in Los Angeles in the first place? Are you even aware that I live in a shitty apartment in Silver Lake? Wait, probably not. Because you’ve never heard of Silver Lake. Because you can’t imagine what a shitty apartment even looks like.”

  Matilda hadn’t removed all of her makeup from the night before, and the black eyeliner began to run down her cheeks like a pen that had leaked.

  “How about my mother? She died only a year ago. Do you know what she died of? I know everything about your dad. Do you know anything about mine? He’s at home alone right now with no family and a couple thousand dollars in his bank account. My dad doesn’t run a movie studio or newspapers or television networks. He works in a lumberyard. He sits at home at night icing his back watching Milwaukee Brewers games on TV because he can’t afford to go in person.”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. I was not a man who cried, because Midwestern men did nothing of the sort. We did not wear our hearts on our sleeves. We kept them in our chests, where they belonged. Even in those terrible months in Manhattan when my life fell apart, I did not shed a tear.

  “I would’ve never taken you away if I had known it would be like this.”

  It was the worst thing I could have said to her, and I immediately regretted it.

  “You could have just told me,” she said quietly. “If you needed—or wanted—to talk about these things. I didn’t know. And I didn’t know you were feeling that way—about our trip. I’ve been a terrible burden on you.”

  “Matilda—” I began.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “About your father.”

  It implied she wasn’t sorry for the rest of it, or that was how I construed it. I collected myself and raised my chin stoically.

  Matilda headed inside, but before she did she approached me and ran her hand along my shoulder blade, as if expecting me to say something. But there was nothing left to say.

  * * *

  An hour later, Matilda emerged from the house. She wore a low-cut black dress over her bikini and a brightly colored silk scarf knotted loosely over her hair. She had bought it at Hermès in town, two weeks earlier, when everything had still been good. She had put it on my credit card, not realizing that I couldn’t afford five-hundred-dollar scarves.

  Matilda carried her small designer duffel bag at her side. “I’m going away with Lorelei and Isaac,” she said, readjusting her scarf so it was just so. It was a rich lady’s accessory—something Carole and Lily would wear—and its elegance now seemed out of place with the rest of her.

  “Where are you going?” I said, her betrayal washing over me.

  “To the North Shore, surfing for a few days.”

  “Define ‘a few.’”

  “I’ll be back on Thursday.”

  That was four days away.

  “How are you getting there?” I asked.

  “I’m going to the beach to meet Isaac and Lorelei. Isaac’s driving.”

  Just then, I heard a car pull up and a honk.

  “I called a cab so you wouldn’t have to drive me,” Matilda said.

  The cab driver honked again, twice this time.

  “I keep trying to feel that glorious thing that we had in the beginning,” Matilda said, looking up at the date palms. “But it’s disappeared, and I don’t know where it’s gone. And what’s worse is I don’t know how to get it back.”

  It was as if she’d tossed a grenade at my heart. I had thought I was the one tiring of her, but here she was, thinking the same thing. She had used the surf as an excuse to avoid me.

  Matilda walked toward the door and then at the last minute turned around.

  “Cancer,” she said. “That’s what you said your mother died of.”

  She looked at me for another moment, and I made myself look at her, too. I wondered what I would have thought of her had I met her now, in that outfit, with that skimpy bikini top and eyeliner too dark for her skin. I couldn’t think of it, though, because I could only remember her as I had first met her that night on the tennis court.

  To me, that would always be my Matilda. This girl was a stranger.

  I wondered if I was a stranger to her, too.

  * * *

  For the first few hours Matilda was gone, I thought she would change her mind and come home. I turned up my ringer in case she called. I checked my messages hourly. Finally, at dusk, I poured myself a scotch in one of Joel Goldman’s crystal highball glasses, and I stood on the front porch, thinking that if I stood there she would magically come back.

  She didn’t.

  I was still on the porch, on my third drink, when my phone rang. I fumbled for it, picking it up without looking at the name on the screen, hoping and believing it would be Matilda.

  Instead it was Jacob, my buddy who had been investigating Lily’s time in France.

  “What did you find out?” I asked, trying not t
o sound too eager.

  “I suspect not what you wanted me to find out,” he said. “According to passport records, you were right. Lily Goldman did spend quite a bit of time in France, but she wasn’t there in April of ’88. You sure you have the right dates?”

  I paused for a moment, wondering if Matilda could have thought her birthday was different than it was. The web was getting thicker, but I believed she was twenty. There was no reason for David to lie to her about that.

  “Pretty darn sure.”

  “The reason I’m asking is Lily Goldman was in France, but she left Nice on March 2, 1988. By April 20, your magic date, she was gone.”

  This wasn’t the answer I expected. “Do you have any idea where she went?” I asked, as I traced the indentations on the crystal glass on my lap.

  “Back to the US, according to passport records,” Jacob said. “Lily Goldman landed in Los Angeles. I have a photocopy of the stamp from LAX to prove it should you not believe me.”

  “I believe you. And Matilda Duplaine?” I asked, wincing as if I had reached a dead end I hadn’t even hit yet.

  “Doesn’t exist according to the illustrious country of France.”

  I had been so certain my hypothesis was correct, but this seemed to quash it altogether. Lily wouldn’t have been flying overseas while eight months pregnant, and even if she had, Matilda would have been born in the States, so there would be some record of her. Even the rich and powerful couldn’t make a birth certificate disappear.

  We ended the call, and for the first time I firmly eliminated the possibility of Lily Goldman as Matilda’s mother. I realized how I had subconsciously believed it all along: it was those eyes and Lily’s preternatural closeness with David and now the shared scent. But the glue to hold that hypothesis together had always been watery.

  I stared in the distance at the dark road where a stray pair of headlights came and went.

  I thought of venturing to the Irish pub, to ask further questions about the mysterious girl who had taken care of Joel Goldman’s house in his absence, but instead I sat on the front porch until midnight, not wanting to miss Matilda in case she came home.