The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  As I watched the cars from under the canopy of a large date palm, the realization was sharp as a blade: Bel-Air was a place that had never been mine. It was merely a holiday in my life, like a family vacation to Disney World. I remembered my dream of Matilda and me living in her father’s pool house with our smiling strawberry blond children. It had been a worst-case scenario in my mind, but in fact it was quite the opposite. It was a fantasy that would never come to pass.

  As Lily had said, we were all just renters, and Bel-Air was never mine to own.

  I walked away from the gates and I returned to the Times office downtown. I waited nervously until the photographer returned with the pictures. He was still high from being in that tornado of power, and I wanted to shake him, to tell him that it wasn’t real, that I had been where he was, too. I asked to be alone with the photos, because I didn’t know how I would react if I saw her. The familiar faces were there, in familiar expression and familiar attire. Lily in refined black silk and an ivory-and-diamond necklace, Charles with a drink in his right hand and a sullen expression on his face, Emma in plumes, and Carole with her cherry-red lips and regal purple dress. George and David chatted in a corner of the croquet lawn—George wore his saber-toothed grin, and David seemed bored at his own party.

  But there was no Matilda.

  “Where are you?” I said aloud, as if the photos were available to answer my question.

  But of course I knew where she was. She was back in her life behind iron gates because the real world had broken her heart expeditiously, within weeks. It had made promises of a future, and then it had taken it all away.

  It didn’t matter if she was upstairs in her room listening to Jim Morrison and watching the party through filmy drapes, or if she was practicing serves on the tennis court hoping to snatch that extra mile per hour. It didn’t matter if Matilda was lounging in the screening room watching old movies and munching on Red Vines or knocking strikes by herself in the bowling alley. All that mattered was the world had betrayed her.

  And so had I.

  Thirty-One

  Carole had been right about everything that night in the aviary. I had never been good at endings.

  I never forgot about Matilda. I didn’t know if I wanted to shake her loose or hold her tight, and I found myself in that terrible gray place I had been in after Willa. I did not sleep; I did not eat. The highlight of my day was five o’clock, an hour I convinced myself was an acceptable time to have the evening’s first drink.

  Almost two months after that dreadful morning when I’d found Matilda with my story in her hands, I was on a plane to San Francisco to interview an actress about her Academy Award nomination. Once in the air I realized I had forgotten to bring music or a book to keep me occupied, so I combed through the seat pocket to find another distraction. Buried deep was a copy of the Wall Street Journal, a paper I didn’t typically read for obvious reasons.

  I absently fanned through the Marketplace and Money & Investing sections, recognizing names in the bylines as colleagues from my past, and then stumbled upon the Real Estate section. I paged through ski chalets in Switzerland and vineyards in France before spotting a one-column story accompanied by a grainy photo. I looked closer to see it better, and my equilibrium faltered.

  It was an aerial shot of Joel Goldman’s vacation home in Hawaii. I could see the pool, the low-slung roofline, the webbed lawn furniture, the date palms.

  The house had sold for land value, the article said. A gentleman who worked in the world of hedge funds had purchased it, and speculation was it would be torn down to make way for a bigger and more modern estate.

  The news was like a wrecking ball. I had promised Matilda I would take her back there, to that crumbling house that had been our sanctuary. Even in her absence, I still believed somehow we would reunite, and I had found comfort in knowing that the house was still vacant, waiting for our return. I hadn’t even given Lily’s key back, because I wanted to feel as if that door was open to me, even if it wasn’t.

  I landed in San Francisco, and I drove to Hillsborough, a tony, hilly suburb of turn-of-the-century mansions that were once inhabited by kings of industry and now by kings of technology. I did my best to stay focused and engaged during the interview, for I was careful this time, after what had happened at the Journal.

  After the meeting, I drove to San Francisco and retreated to my hotel room in Union Square. It was a big hotel full of tourists, a place that may have been chic when it was built in the early twentieth century but was now dingy and old, with worn carpets and pipes that hummed. I had stopped by a liquor store and bought a bottle of scotch, and I ripped open the paper bag, sat on my bed and drank straight from the bottle. But it did the opposite of what it was supposed to do. It sharpened the pain instead of dulled it.

  In the months without Matilda I had never called her. I had dialed seven or eight digits of her number, but I always stopped short. This time, from an unrecognizable hotel number in San Francisco, I dialed the full ten digits, hoping she would pick up, and I could tell her that I would bring her back to Hawaii one last time before our house was torn down, that I was a man who would never break a promise.

  Instead, I could say nothing. The number had been disconnected.

  * * *

  The idea that Joel Goldman’s house was to be torn down haunted me. Matilda never strayed from my thoughts for more than a minute or two, but this news, in particular, felt as if it was demanding I do more. As I sat on the plane on a runway in San Francisco, surrounded by water and precipitous hills, I realized that I had let Matilda go too easily. Willa Asher hadn’t been worth fighting for, but I would fight for Matilda Duplaine.

  So when I landed in Los Angeles I decided to reach out to Matilda, to tell her how I felt. I arrived at my apartment, more excited and determined than I had been in a long time. I pulled out a pen, and I began to write.

  For a man born with a talent for words, I struggled through the first paragraph—the lead, as we say in reporting. I wrote and rewrote, littering the floor of my apartment with pages of futility. Finally, I got it right. I told Matilda everything, from the beginning: how I had fallen for her on that enchanting evening on the tennis court, how I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her, and that the rest of my life would be empty without her in it. I told her how I had longed to see her, that I had never stopped loving her. I asked her for one last chance to prove that love, for I had given her a chance—this girl who had never once seen the world. She had been a gamble, I told her, and she was worth every chip I had laid down. I told Matilda that if she had ever loved me even a fraction as much as I had loved her, she needed to let me explain. I asked her to meet me at the planetarium the following Tuesday night.

  I knew Matilda was the one to retrieve the mail every day—she would walk to the end of the driveway and peek out the mail slot at the world right beyond her grasp—so my hope was she would receive the letter. I put the note in a linen envelope—the type of letter dressing that seemed suitable for the world in which Matilda lived. I wrote the name Miss Matilda Duplaine in my nicest penmanship, and I closed my eyes as I put it in the postbox, hoping she would open it and give me a second chance.

  * * *

  I woke up the following Tuesday morning with a flutter of excitement in my stomach, and the air was crisper and clearer than it had been in weeks. I dressed carefully, in a blue checked shirt that had been Matilda’s favorite and a dark pair of blue jeans. I had shaved, so my face, for the moment, was smooth, the way she preferred it. I went without cologne, because Matilda had always said she liked the smell of me.

  I showed up to the planetarium early for the 8:00 p.m. show. I stood near the entrance and combed the crowd eagerly, hoping she would come. Matilda was always five minutes early to everything, so I knew she wouldn’t arrive late. But even after the lobby had cleared out and everyone took th
eir seats for the show, I still fooled my mind into believing she would meet me.

  I sat through the show alone, spotting Orion’s Belt from beneath a dome of stars. I had convinced myself that Matilda had hit traffic, that somehow she would still show up. The planetarium was a long way from Bel-Air, I told myself, so she would come eventually.

  But she never did.

  I returned home late, again after too much to drink, and fell asleep on my floor, hoping the past two and a half months of my life had been a nightmare. Hoping I would wake up in Hawaii and my life would once again be good.

  I went to work the next day, muddling through my day, trying to grasp the fact that Matilda was gone. I had a lunch scheduled with Rubenstein, and as we sipped—or in Rubenstein’s case, gulped—martinis, I inexplicably had a false sense of delusion. For no reason at all, I suddenly believed—or tried to convince myself, whichever the case may be—that Matilda hadn’t received the letter at all. David had intercepted it or the postman hadn’t delivered it because he’d never heard of a Miss Matilda Duplaine. Or maybe, just maybe, Matilda had received the letter and had desperately tried to leave the estate, her plan thwarted by David.

  I was sure she wanted to see me, but a force beyond her control had ruined her every best effort.

  So I decided that the next day I would make the long, sinuous journey to Bel-Air.

  * * *

  I drove through the pillars and took the familiar turns, hazy with delusion as if I was under some sort of spell. I drove past Emma and George’s house, remembering the dinner party that had first led me here. I made the single turn, and my heart raced when I saw the grand entry to the estate.

  I turned right into the driveway, facing the tall, impenetrable gates. They loomed above me. I buzzed and waited patiently for an answer.

  “May I help you?” a male voice asked after a pause that seemed to stretch on for minutes.

  “I’m here to see Matilda Duplaine,” I said.

  There was a brief silence, and then the gates opened.

  It was the fifteenth of March, a glorious early-spring day. As I drove up the long driveway, the giant specimen trees wept green leaves that fell to the ground with a gust of wind, gracefully and slowly, like snowflakes. Invisible sprinklers watered the grounds, creating an eerie mist that looked like fog over a lake. There was something mysterious about it.

  I arrived at the motor court, and the valet opened my car door and took my key. He ushered me toward the front door, and I was greeted at the entry by a good-looking gentleman in his forties dressed in a crisp suit. I thought, regretfully, of Hector, who was the last person to greet me here.

  “I’m Thomas Cleary,” I said, reaching out my hand to his. “A friend of Matilda’s.”

  “I’m told to have you wait in the parlor.” The butler led me to the waiting area and motioned me toward a chair with the flip of his right hand. “Would you like a bottle of water?”

  “No, thank you.”

  I had prepared for the worst but she hadn’t turned me away. Instead, here I was, in the parlor. I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t have waited a single extra moment to see her.

  I paced beside the two Jasper Johns paintings, and I glanced at my watch. It was two forty-five. I wondered if Matilda was surprised by my visit, if she was hastily brushing her hair and slipping on a dress she knew I liked, excited I had finally come to get her as I should have done so long ago.

  “Come, this way,” the butler said a few minutes later, leading me down a long hallway with wooden panels covering the walls.

  As I followed him I wondered where we were going. Perhaps Matilda would want to meet on the tennis court, the place where we had first made each other’s acquaintance, or maybe in the sculpture garden or the bowling alley. It didn’t matter where he was taking me, for all I wanted to do was see her.

  I was escorted to a closed door. The butler pulled it open and gestured for me to go inside. My heart swelled with anticipation, but the only person in the room was David Duplaine.

  He should have been at work, but instead he sat on an armchair in front of a low-lit fireplace. He focused his gaze intently on me and motioned me with a graceful fan of his fingers to take a seat in an empty chair that faced him.

  I felt deflated. All that hope quashed so expeditiously.

  I sat down across from David, in a chair situated neither too close nor too far. David’s office was paneled in walnut, with floor-to-ceiling French doors opening to the grounds. Its pale-wooded furniture was upholstered in light fabrics, and on the coffee table sat a small pot of freshly sheared moss, still wet with dew, and a single book on the history of the motion-picture business. The walls held bookshelves filled with volumes on art and film, and three Academy Awards glistened gold under pointed lighting. Above the fireplace was the painting I recognized from Carole’s bedroom in Hawaii—the abstract painting of the woman.

  I focused on it for a second too long, flashing back to that glorious month Matilda and I had spent together. Then I turned to face the man who sat across from me. He seemed more complicated than he had before, now that I knew the facts. David had never married, and he had been in love with a woman he couldn’t have. He had devoted his life to a girl who wasn’t even his child. I felt sorry for him, until I remembered that everything in his life had been funded with blood money.

  “I’m here to see Matilda,” I finally said, cutting the silence.

  “The irony,” David began, “is that if you had been up-front all along, man enough to ask my permission to see her, I may have allowed it. I don’t want Matilda to be deprived of love—that’s life’s ultimate tragedy. It was how you did it, sneaking behind my back. Lack of courage is a terrible weakness.”

  “And so you’re punishing Matilda for what I did? That hardly seems fair.”

  “You took that into your own hands, didn’t you, Thomas? By writing that story. As predicted, you created your own undoing. All I had to do was sit back and watch it happen.”

  “I would have never published it,” I said with candor. “I was so in love with Matilda I just wanted to know more about her, and once I started investigating, I couldn’t stop. If I wanted to publish it I would have done so already, especially now that I have nothing more to lose.”

  “I believe you,” David said. “That’s why I left you alone.”

  “That couldn’t have been the only reason. You’ve never struck me as a passive guy.”

  “In your time away I realized that you gave me something, too,” David said. “I didn’t have to show my daughter how hard reality is because you did that for me. You kept whispering in her ear that the world was so perfect, so grand. But it’s not. Matilda knows that now. In thirty-two short days you taught her how terrible life can be. You can say I’m the bad guy because I held her captive all these years, but imagine a life where you never have to worry about money, having your heart broken, betrayal, pain or even something as simple as a bad day. I gave Matilda a perfect world. So, now Matilda’s back here, of her own accord this time—with her parents, who love her.” David emphasized the word love as if I did nothing of the sort.

  “Parents?” I asked curiously.

  “Yes, Carole and I are going to marry,” David said. “Carole and I have been in love for a decade. But we couldn’t marry while Joel was still alive.”

  “You’re going to live here, then? The three of you?”

  David Duplaine had always been a stoic man, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of emotion pass through his eyes. I indulged myself and imagined it for a brief second: Carole, David and Matilda sitting beside the swimming pool, eating scones and drinking lemonade with mint.

  “What about Charles?” I questioned.

  “He was Joel’s financial advisor. It’s been more of a burden for him than anything. He loves Carole but...
”

  David’s voice faded as I diverted my eyes, again looking at the painting. In the glow of the lamp, I realized now the painting was of a mother and child, and suddenly it became clear: Joel must have left it for Carole. That was why it hadn’t been auctioned with the rest of the art.

  “I sent a letter to Matilda,” I said, returning my attention to David.

  “She never received it,” David responded matter-of-factly, and I had a brief flicker of hope, like the flame on a match. Matilda hadn’t seen the letter. It was still possible we could have our happily-ever-after.

  “Why not?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “Because it’s over, Thomas.”

  “That’s not your decision,” I said. “I need to see her.”

  “In life we seldom receive the same opportunity twice.” David leaned into me, propping his elbows on his thighs. “You had your opportunity, Thomas. You chose to squander it. There are no second chances here.”

  “Does she miss me?” I asked, hoping the answer was yes. Hoping I could convince David that we were destined to be together.

  “Matilda has never mentioned you. Not even once.”

  Not even once. She had forgotten me.

  Just like that, the flame died.

  “It’s fortuitous you decided to pay me a visit today,” David remarked, as if he hadn’t just destroyed something in me for good. “Just yesterday, I received a call from a friend of mine at the New York Times, and it turns out they’re looking for an entertainment editor. It’s a big job, and I recall you always had an affinity for Manhattan, so I told him I knew the perfect guy. I think we’ll both agree—all three of us would, I can speak on behalf of Matilda—that New York may be the best place for you. Don’t you think? Sometimes a fresh start is in order.”