The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine

The girl walked over to a viewing pavilion, a plush mini Palladian palace. Silver pitchers, a silver ice bucket and crystal glasses sat on a silver tray on an antique table. She plucked ice out with silver tongs and placed it in one of the glasses, and then she poured water from the pitcher into the glass until it reached the glass’s equator.

She then took a few sips of the water, surveyed the littered balls and made her way back out onto the chilly court. She picked up the hopper and started collecting the bright yellow tennis balls, but she struggled to line the hopper up to push the balls through its rails. For a girl who could serve a hundred miles an hour, it was odd she moved so slowly on this remedial task.

The girl started toward my side of the net, and I took my opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I called down from the oak tree.

The girl stepped backward quickly and looked around, trying to discover where the voice was coming from.

“It’s okay. I won’t hurt you. I’m up here, in the tree.”

She looked up, startled, and for the first time I could see her face. She was a woman, but there was a childlike quality to her. It was difficult to peg her age, but I would have bet she was around twenty. There was something very “heartlike” about her—the wide shape of her face, the cheekbones so high and full they went almost to her eyes and the delicate nose reminiscent of an arrow. It’s hard for me to say now if I would have called her classically beautiful, but she was that star in the sky that you can’t take your eyes off, even if it’s surrounded by brighter ones.

She continued to study me, perplexed. I didn’t know what was stranger, a girl dressed for Wimbledon practicing serves alone at night or a guy dressed in a tuxedo sitting in an oak tree.

“Why, what are you doing up there?” she asked.

“This may sound strange, but I thought I was going to a fund-raiser this evening at Mr. Duplaine’s house,” I said. “I’m a friend of Lily Goldman’s. I tried phoning the gate, but no one answered. And—” I paused. “And. Well, is anyone here?” I finally asked.

“No, there’s no one home,” the girl said. Her voice was soft and melodic.

“Is there supposed to be a party here?” I asked.

“It’s at the other house—the one on the beach.”

“Do you have an address?”

“I’ve never been there, myself, so no, I have no address. It’s in Malibu, I believe, but unfortunately there’s no one I can even ask. You must think I’m incredibly unhelpful but I’m not meaning to be.”

Malibu was about forty-five minutes away with favorable traffic conditions. So at this point I still had time to climb down the oak tree and call Lily for the address. I could have made it in time to meet the governor, to sip a gimlet while overlooking the gentle, rolling waves of the Pacific. But instead I said:

“You have quite the serve.”

“Thank you. My coach says the same thing. One hundred fourteen miles an hour. I got a radar gun for my birthday.” She said it with gushing pride and pointed to a black contraption set up in the corner of the court. On the screen, 109 MPH registered in red, digital numbers.

“When’s your birthday?” I asked.

“The twentieth of April.”

“A Taurus.”

“A what?” she asked.

“Astrology. Do you follow it?”

“Not only do I not follow it, I’ve never even heard of it.”

I paused, wondering if the girl was kidding, but I didn’t detect a note of sarcasm in her voice.

“I’m from Milwaukee—we don’t believe things like that there, either. It’s all hocus-pocus if you ask me.”

“Milwaukee’s in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s capital is Madison. Its state bird is the robin and it’s known as the Dairy State because it produces more cheese and milk than any other state,” she said, as if reading from a teleprompter. “This thing called astrology—what is it exactly?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. “It has something to do with the stars. I’ve never really understood it, either.”

“You mean astronomy, then?”

“No, they’re two different things—astrology and astronomy.”

“So what are you in astrology terms?”

“A Scorpio.”

“A scorpion. In other words, you’re an eight-legged, venomous creature to be wary of?”

Her tone was deadpan.

“No poison here, just a nice guy from Milwaukee.”

She let out a big, jovial laugh.

She was a curious creature, and I was intrigued. Her manner of speech was officious and old-fashioned. She was interested and reserved, insecure and confident, coy and bold. She was unlike anyone I had ever met.

I looked down at her again and realized she was gazing at me with wide-eyed curiosity, too. The tennis court lights made her eyes glitter.

I wanted to see her up close.

“I play tennis—well, used to play tennis. I haven’t in years. Do you want to— Maybe, would you like to play sometime?” I said with the insecurity of a fourteen-year-old asking a girl to a Friday-night dance.

She paused.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said sadly, as she traced the W on the tennis ball. “Thank you, though, for the offer. It was kind of you.”

It’s difficult to judge oneself with objectivity, but my whole life I had been told I was a good-looking guy. Sure, I didn’t have that well-oiled slickness the other guys at Harvard had. They had Wall Street money, last names with a familiar ring to them and country houses. They were gentlemen who knew what wine to order, gentlemen who winked more than they smiled and gentlemen who could sell you something you didn’t even want. Women loved them for all of it.

My appearance was more of the homegrown variety: I had inherited my father’s height, broad chest, strong jaw and blue eyes, and I had my mother’s oversize smile and blond hair that looked a touch red when the sun hit it right. I looked like the kind of guy who would run his wife’s errands and coach his kids’ baseball team, all while hoisting this year’s corn crop to the farmer’s market. In high school, girls had liked me; in college they had called me “cute,” but I wasn’t husband material. Marriage for those girls was a game of Monopoly. They wanted the most valuable real estate, and anything less than Central Park West wouldn’t do.

But in all of those years, with all of those women, I had never been shot down so directly before.

A story, a date, a friendship, whatever I thought I wanted, whatever she thought she had turned down, it didn’t matter. I made the boldest move since I had moved to Los Angeles: I climbed down the oak tree to the stone wall, slid onto the viewing area canopy, then hopped down to the court, with leaves in my hair and a tear in my tux from the canopy spear.

We almost touched. In such close proximity I saw that sun freckles sprinkled her nose and her eyes reminded me of Emma and George’s leopard cat’s. They were green with black speckles, as if someone had spilled ink on them by mistake. She wore a tennis bracelet with diamonds that I knew enough to guess were two carats each. Plump diamond earrings covered her tiny earlobes. Jewels like this were generally kept between armed guards, not worn for tennis practice.

We stared at each other. I wasn’t going to Malibu.

“Why don’t we play for a few minutes?” I said. “It would feel good to hit the ball around.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” she replied.