The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  As I neared the house, I noticed a figure at the front door. I had been living in a world of ghosts, and the figure was an apparition at first.

  Matilda stood with her suitcase resting on the pavement beside her. The door was open a crack, as if she had gone in but then opted to wait for me on the covered front porch. My mom used to do that with my dad—wait for him outside. It was as if she couldn’t stand to be without him, even for the minute it took for him to walk into the house.

  We just looked at each other, as if we were strangers meeting for the first time, not quite sure what to make of each other.

  Matilda’s blond hair was straight and her face free of makeup. Gone was the black nail polish; in its place was a pale pink. She wore a conservative one-piece bathing suit beneath a long floral cover-up.

  I had spent days writing about her, but I had forgotten how beautiful she was. Forgetting must be a defense mechanism to lessen the hurt of losing someone.

  I caught my breath, still quickened from the run. Sweat had seeped into my eyes and they burned.

  “Hi, Thomas,” Matilda said softly, unsure.

  I didn’t say anything. The suitcase sat on the ground beside us, reminding us what had happened. That she had left.

  “Did you go for a run?” she asked carefully.

  “Eight miles on these creaky legs.” She smiled that wide crooked smile. It was her mother’s smile, her uncle’s.

  An uncomfortable silence fell between us. Matilda looked at me repentantly.

  “What do you do after a fight? Just make up?” she asked.

  “Most of the time,” I responded.

  “And the other part of the time?”

  I didn’t want to think about the alternative, so I didn’t respond.

  “What happens in the other part of the time?” Matilda pressed.

  “The other part happens when people aren’t sorry.”

  Matilda stared into the distance. There was a slight breeze and the trees swayed gently as it swept through their branches. It was still drizzling, but it felt as if heavier rain was coming.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel as if I’ve been terrible to you. I have been terrible to you. And I wouldn’t have blamed you for leaving me here to fend for myself. I was worried I would come back and you would be gone.”

  “I’m not that type of man—you know that.”

  “I know, but I haven’t been thinking clearly,” Matilda said reflectively. “This isn’t going to make sense, but I’ll say it anyways—I was so happy that people liked me. Not because they were being paid a king’s ransom, but because they really liked me. And it made me question a lot about my life. I finally started to feel resentment. I wanted to hate my father for keeping me imprisoned for all those years, and my mother for leaving me. I know it’s not fair, but I took it all out on you.”

  I thought about my unjustified anger toward Matilda when I learned of her lineage, how I had at first blamed her for it, as if it was somehow her fault. We were both placing blame on the wrong people.

  “But when I was away I realized I missed you—horribly missed you,” she continued. “The world is a terrible place if I can’t share it with you. I dreamt of the world for so long, but I realized it’s only worthwhile with you in it. “

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I’ve thought about it as well, and I think I took you off the estate for my own selfish reasons. I knew we couldn’t really be in love there. I mean, we could be, but it wasn’t real.”

  “I wanted to leave. Desperately. Do you think I would have been better staying there? You can’t think that. If that’s what you’re apologizing for, then your apology is not accepted.”

  Matilda reached up and took the back of my head in her hands. I was self-conscious because my hair was drenched in sweat while she was so pristine, but she didn’t seem to care.

  “You were my salvation, Thomas Cleary, and I’m sorry it took leaving you for me to remember that. But sometimes it takes distance to make things clear. You’ve given me the whole world, and look what I did in return. I wouldn’t blame you if you never accepted my apology.”

  She kissed my forehead tenderly.

  “You taste salty—” Matilda licked her lips “—like pretzels.”

  It was an intimate gesture. I brushed her lips with mine, and it brought me back to that magical night at the estate bowling alley when I treaded carefully with my lips.

  “You taste sweet,” I said. “Like sugar.”

  “Like guava.” Matilda grinned playfully.

  “I missed you.” It came out before I could think about it.

  “I missed you squared, times seven, plus four,” Matilda replied.

  It reminded me of something Matilda would have said at the estate—childish in a way. She was a completely different woman than the girl I had met on the tennis court, yet in some ways still the same. I needed to love the woman she was becoming, not just the girl she had been.

  The breeze rippled through the trees, and Matilda scanned the sky. “I think a storm’s rolling in.”

  We walked around the back and sat on the veranda, looking out at the ocean as the storm arrived with a flourish. Gray clouds filled the air and the winds swept in from the west. The ocean roared and the flapping palm fronds fooled the ears into thinking it had already started raining, when rain was still only a threat.

  We ate lunch under the overhang, watching the raindrops bounce off the swimming pool and the lightning rods strike the ocean. We didn’t get thunderstorms like this in Los Angeles, and Matilda was still fascinated by them. It was warm and muggy, and there was a film of perspiration on her skin. She smelled of baby powder and rain.

  I kissed the back of her neck. She turned around and put my arm around her protectively. She studied my fingers.

  “I love you so much. Every part of you,” Matilda said, pulling me close to her. “There’s no inch of you I don’t like—down to your knuckles.”

  We listened as the rain crashed against the overhang and the thunder rumbled in the distance. The air smelled of wet plumeria blossoms and a few hours later the sun peeked out from behind the clouds.

  Later that evening, after we had made love, I walked outside under the parasols of the date palms, and I looked out in the distance, at the twinkling lights of Honolulu. Thirty days had seemed an infinite amount of time, but now it was almost over. I wondered what would be next for us in Los Angeles, and I wondered if Matilda was wondering the same thing, too.

  * * *

  I woke up the next morning to the glorious spray of sunlight after a storm. Matilda sat on the side of the bed, dressed in a frilly white tennis dress, hair pulled back in a ponytail with a bright white ribbon. She carried two glasses of freshly squeezed pineapple juice.

  “Good morning.” She handed me a cold glass, and I noticed she had her mother’s long, muscular arms. “I squeezed you pineapple juice. Fresh, pulpy—just like you like it.”

  I took a sip of the juice and brushed the soft fabric of her dress with the back of my fingers. “Am I going to beat you in tennis today?” I asked.

  “I’ve been dying for a game.” She set her gaze in the general direction of the court in the front of the house. “I thought we could play for old times’ sake.”

  She gave me that seventy-five-watt smile, the one that lit up everything around her.

  We made our way to the tennis court later in the morning. Matilda’s court in Bel-Air was clay and sheltered by an ivy fortress. Here, if not for the net, the grass court would have disappeared into the grass around it. There were no fences, no ivy, no viewing area.

  Matilda bounced a ball and it died. I had played on grass before and was prepared for the odd bounce, but Matilda was not. We hit back and forth, and the playing field was more level than the one in Bel-Air. With
out Matilda’s requisite three-hour daily practices, she was atypically errant, and she had trouble bending low enough for the ball.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of Matilda playing tennis with Carole—her mother. I imagined Carole proudly watching Matilda from her side of the net, using a grip or stroke adjustment as an excuse to be closer to her, to touch her daughter’s hand. It was at once sad and comforting.

  When the first set came to a close, we retreated to the cove down by the beach, the place where Matilda’s toes had first touched sand.

  The cove was its own paradise, shielded from the rest of world as if nature had created this special spot millions of years earlier for our sole enjoyment. Matilda and I sat facing each other, knees to the sky and feet to the sand, my hands around the backs of her calves.

  Sweat sparkled on our arms and legs and the napes of our necks and I couldn’t help but think of the first time we met, the droplets of sweat that hung off Matilda like seed pearls, and the electric moment when her fingers learned my jaw for the first time.

  She stood up and removed her tennis dress, tossing it onto the beach.

  It was miraculous how, in just a few short weeks, every part of her had changed. It wasn’t just her arms. Matilda’s shoulders had always been broad, but now the broadness continued down the top of her back. Her shoulder blades were lined in muscle, and her pre-antebellum waist appeared less tiny because her hips had lost most of their flesh. Her legs had been coltish before, but now they seemed very much in her control—as if they belonged on her.

  Matilda glanced over her left shoulder seductively, then waded into the water, stopping when it reached her ankles and then again at her knees. She finally dived forward in the water so I could only see the bottoms of her feet. She disappeared below the surface. Matilda was changing almost hourly. Admittedly, at first I had resisted the changes, but now it was exciting for me to wonder who Matilda would be. She was like a gift still waiting to be opened.

  When Matilda returned to the beach a few minutes later, she sat down beside me, wrapping a towel around her torso and looking out at the horizon. She squinted at the distance, at the unknown.

  “I know we’re due to go home in a few days.” There was sadness in Matilda’s voice when she said it. “Do you want to go home?”

  “I’ve loved being here with you,” I began. “Really. In a lot of ways it’s been the most memorable month of my life. But as much as I don’t want to, I have to get back to life—to real life. I’m nervous about my job and money. And I’m starting to feel isolated from the world—which maybe is the reason I started to feel isolated from you.” I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her in closer to me. “What about you? Are you excited to go back?”

  “I don’t think I have anywhere to go home to.”

  “I’m sure your father will allow you to come home,” I said, but I knew that plan didn’t include me.

  Matilda leaned her head on my shoulder.

  “Don’t you see, Thomas? It’s exactly what Daddy said to me. If someone doesn’t want you, you shouldn’t want them. I can’t go back there for that very reason. Let’s pretend for a moment I went home,” Matilda said. “What’s going to happen with us? My father’s most certainly not going to welcome you with open arms. And what if he doesn’t let me leave the estate again? What if everything just goes back to the way it was?”

  “You’ll come stay with me, then.” It was an impetuous thing to say.

  “I’d be an imposition,” she protested.

  “You could never be an imposition,” I insisted. But then I imagined how Matilda would react when she saw my apartment—a place as different from her estate as real life is from a fairy tale.

  “What am I going to do all day when you’re at work? What am I going to do about school? How am I going to make money?”

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Matilda. I don’t know the answers to any of it. We have to take it day by day. We’ve made it this far, right?”

  Matilda played with a seashell and grew pensive. “Sometimes I miss things as they were before. It seemed so easy then.”

  “It’s only hard if we make it hard,” I said. “I’ve been through much more than this before, and I’ve made it out the other side.”

  “You’re right. There are so many things to look forward to. We have it all in front of us, don’t we?”

  “We do. There’s all of Los Angeles ahead of us, and the entire world. Look at that sky.”

  Matilda followed my gaze upward.

  “See all that blue—it’s not the limit. It’s only the beginning. There’s infinite sky above that, and infinite sky above that, too.” I brushed the top of Matilda’s ear with my lips, feeling the soft, delicate skin. “We have so much ahead of us, limitless opportunity. And I want you to know that I’ll take care of you. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Matilda smiled. “I know. From the moment I met you on the tennis court, I believed you would take care of me. Even when I told you you couldn’t come back, that night after our first tennis game, I believed you would. But you must promise me one thing. Promise me that whatever happens with our lives—if they’re infinitely glamorous or we’re broke and struggling, if it’s a honeymoon or a goodbye—someday you’ll bring me here again.”

  “We’ll come back here. I promise.”

  Matilda curled herself up in me and I buried my head in her damp, tangled hair. It was an easy promise, because I believed Matilda and I could make it through anything. I had an amazing job to go back to, I was returning to real life with the woman of my dreams. I didn’t believe the sky was the limit; my plans were much grander than that.

  Twenty-Eight

  The flight back to Los Angeles was uneventful, yet bittersweet. The car ride from the airport to my apartment was generally quiet, only punctuated with occasional small talk. Matilda scanned the radio from one station to another until she settled back in her seat contentedly, her eyes falling on the road ahead of us—both figuratively and literally.

  There was an accident on the freeway, so Matilda and I were forced to take Sunset Boulevard, and as we crept closer to Bel-Air, I found myself with a pit in my stomach that reminded me of those evenings in Manhattan after I’d lost my job at the Journal. I was suddenly afraid Matilda would change her mind, instruct me to take a left into Bel-Air’s gates.

  As we approached the grand pillars, Matilda set her eyes on the sign.

  “It looks like the E burnt out when we were away,” she declared.

  Sure enough, Bel-Air’s cursive E was black, and a gentleman scurried about, working to fix it. Another man stood beside him, carrying a lightbulb in his right hand.

  “B L-Air. Doesn’t sound nearly as romantic, does it?” Matilda said, smiling wryly.

  “It sounds like the name of an oil tycoon,” I said.

  Matilda laughed. “Or a bandit,” she added.

  “A stockbroker.”

  “A regional airline.”

  “Or someone heading to San Francisco for the Gold Rush.”

  Matilda giggled, and then Bel-Air was behind us.

  For the rest of the drive Matilda peppered me with questions about San Francisco—a place she had only read about in books. When we finally arrived at my apartment building, we walked up the grungy, narrow steps to my apartment and I pushed the key in nervously. I opened the door, concerned that Matilda would be disappointed with the meager accommodations a reporter’s salary afforded. Matilda had never been successful at hiding her emotions, and I tried to read her thoughts.

  The apartment was worse than I remembered it, if that was possible. I had left in a rush, so there were a few dishes with food remnants in the sink, and the bedroom was littered with clothes. The only plant in the place was nearly dead, its leaves wilted toward the floor. The balcony door was open a crack, and it
had blown piles of papers around, creating the look of a place just ransacked.

  Matilda stood frozen, taking in the mess.

  “That bad?” I asked with trepidation.

  “This is my new home?” Matilda asked.

  “It would appear that way,” I said, concerned she would demand I drive her back to Bel-Air, to the estate.

  “I love it—absolutely love it. It’s so—bohemian. Is that the right word?”

  “That’s the nicest possible way of putting it,” I said, making a futile attempt to pick up the papers and then deciding it would have to wait until the weekend. “You’re very kind. I’d offer you something to drink, but—”

  “We’ll go to the store tomorrow,” Matilda interjected, finishing my thought.

  Tomorrow, I thought. We had an eternity ahead of us.

  Matilda walked around the small space, examining every detail. She put her few belongings in a top drawer beside mine, and I loved the intimacy of our T-shirts side by side, my boxers beside her underwear. She picked out her side of the bed—the side away from the door because that was where she had heard girls were supposed to sleep—and she put her toothbrush beside mine in a glass. Even more than Hawaii, this felt grown-up, the beginning of our life together.

  Once she was settled in and unpacked, Matilda walked out to the balcony and leaned over its edge. I followed her. My neighbor’s holiday lights were finally appropriate. We were a few days away from Christmas.

  In the distance, Matilda spotted fluorescent lights that shot into the air in between the mountains.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing. I followed her finger out into the distance.

  “That’s Dodger Stadium,” I replied.

  “What’s a dodger stadium?”

  I laughed. “A baseball stadium. Where the Los Angeles Dodgers play.”

  “You mean people play baseball so close to you? Can we go? Now?”