The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine

She glanced at the notebook, unopened in my hand. I hadn’t written a thing. It might have been nerves, or maybe Lily’s personal memories were like coins she had dropped to the ground by accident. Unlike her father, I could not pick them up while she was steps away from me. It would be stealing.

“Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?” she asked.

“What?”

“The quote.”

“Yes, that’s perfect.” I scribbled to catch up.

“I figured as much. Intimacy—it’s what we’re all looking for.”

She focused squarely on me again, this time homing in on my clothes. I had picked up the shirt several years earlier in Cambridge at a discount store and had ironed the shirt and pants myself that morning. The result was deep creasing that was worse than if I had let the dryer have its way with them.

“How does the paper allow its reporters to dress like they just came from a late night of too much drink?”

Lily wore all brown—sweater, knee-length skirt and two-inch pumps. But even in its singular color and simplicity the outfit bled money. The ensemble brought to mind a Parisian tailor on hands and knees with pins in her teeth. The only pizazz in the outfit was a substantial ivory necklace. I had only known Lily for a few minutes, but it already made sense. Diamonds could still be bought on the open market; elephant tusks could not.

Lily made a small adjustment to my collar, and her hands rested on my upper spine. It had been a long time since a woman had touched me, and I tightened.

As a reporter I was trained to see the tiniest of clues—those fragments and fingerprints others could only see under a microscope. There was, at that moment, a brief spark in Lily’s green eyes. And then, just as quickly as her eyes bloomed, they withered and went almost black.

I had thought that Lily had been the one to bare her soul in this interview, but instead she had set the course so I would be the subject who revealed too much.

“You’re a very handsome young man. Don’t let poor clothing choices get in the way of that,” she said, before calling out to the other room, “Ethan, come here.”

A few seconds later a slight man around my age entered through the French doors in the back.

“Yes, Ms. Goldman.” He spoke in little more than a whisper, and if his slim-fitting attire was off-the-rack it was off an expensive one.

“Thomas here is going to be attending dinner this evening. Please arrange with Kurt to pick him up.”

“Thank you for the invitation,” I interjected. “But I have a deadline, and I’m not exactly the fastest typist.”

“That’s one thing you’d think the nuns would have done right,” Lily said. “It’s a fabulous group—some of the guests worked with my father and are quite newsworthy in their own rights. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

In truth, I generally would have forgone a dinner party invitation, but if there was any opportunity for this dinner to beef up my story on Joel Goldman I knew I had to attend. I gave Ethan my address in Silver Lake, an area on the east side of Los Angeles known as a bastion for artists—all of them hipper than I. Ethan arranged for me to be picked up at seven o’clock sharp.

“Good. It’s decided, then,” Lily said. “Thomas, I’ll see you soon. Ethan, make sure everything goes smoothly.”

Lily would soon disappear behind the Asian screen, but just before she did, she turned around and set her eyes on me one more time.

“Once again, I’m sorry about your mother, Thomas. You must be terribly lonely.”

Before I could respond, Lily had vanished among the antiques.

Two (#ulink_7b35ae02-55fe-5012-8ebb-1ad8e926d036)

And so that was how it began. Simply, without the fanfare one comes to expect from an evening that turns life’s course from left to right. I called Phil Rubenstein to let him know I would be late with the story. Rubenstein hated slipped deadlines, but once I informed him that I would be joining Lily and a “newsworthy” cast for dinner, he let this one slide a few hours to accommodate the extra research. He then shocked me by changing the story from a one-column to two.

I had only one sport coat—a sales-rack special from a big-and-tall store in Milwaukee. I was tall and broad in the way Midwestern Germanic men are, but I was not big enough to fill out the coat properly, and its fit had always been loose. I was hoping Lily wouldn’t notice. I splashed on some aftershave I had got for college graduation, and I slid my notebook and tape recorder into my jacket’s interior pocket.

At precisely seven o’clock, my building’s downstairs buzzer rang. An Asian man of about fifty, with an expression stern as his handshake, stood at the door.

“I’m Kurt,” he said in the same manner one might use to greet a girl not attractive enough to sleep with.

“I’m Thomas, from the Times.” I added that last part as an afterthought, as if it somehow legitimized me.

Kurt opened the back door of a silver Mercedes sedan and I slid in. It smelled of new leather. I suspected Lily was the type of woman whose cars always smelled of new leather. An Evian water and, coincidentally or not, today’s Los Angeles Times rested in the seat pocket. I opened the paper to the Local section. My one-column article on the proposed 405 Freeway expansion was on page three.

I put the paper back in the seat pocket as we headed west down Sunset Boulevard, toward the sea, as Lily Goldman had called it. I had never been driven by a private driver before and I didn’t know if I was meant to make conversation or sit in silence. I decided to take Kurt’s cue. He didn’t address me once during the hour-long journey; he listened to classical music on the radio and never glanced into the rearview mirror unless it was to change lanes.

Finally, after our long sinuous trip across town, Kurt put on his blinker, preparing for a sharp right into a narrow road that traveled between colossal white walls. A filigree black-iron signpost announced where we were going. The words Bel-Air lit up the twilight in a curious shade of blue-white, the color of an ice-skating rink. The words were written in an old-fashioned glitzy font embellished with curlicues and arcs. It was a font from the days when more meant more.

Bel-Air wasn’t gated, as some Los Angeles communities were. Instead, it was simply known as a place that commoners like me didn’t visit.

We took a soft left and then a sharp right, and then we drove through the winding hills. I opened the tinted window halfway. We were a mere thirteen miles away from my apartment, but the air felt as if it had rolled in from another lifetime. It was foggy and cool, and it smelled of smoke from real chimneys, of lawns freshly cut, of hedges just pruned and of autumn-blooming flowers. Silver Lake reeked of the pavement and the people who slept on it.

The few street signs I made out from the window had regal names, and if you were looking from the street you would think there were no houses here, only thirty-foot hedges, iron gates and video cameras. The tight streets, two-acre parcels and light traffic had the makings of a neighborhood, but there were no sidewalks. From what I could tell, people here didn’t borrow sugar—they sent their drivers to the store for it.

Flowers hung from heavy vines and wept into the narrow streets, squeezing them even tighter. We didn’t have foliage like this in the rest of Los Angeles, and I wondered if the flowers were indigenous to only these six square miles. Perhaps the rain here was different, or maybe even the sun preferred Bel-Air. I reached out my window, and I plucked one of the dew-swept flowers off its vine, allowing it to wither between my thumb and index finger before placing it in my interior jacket pocket beside my tape recorder.

Even as a little boy I had always been fascinated by wealth. I grew up in a working-class family, and while my teenage friends were content playing in the streets in Milwaukee’s rough inner city, I chose my running path along Lake Michigan, where behemoth mansions reminded one of another era, an era when the industry of the Midwest made millionaires. I dreamed of living in those manors with owners who didn’t have a care in the world. At fifteen, when it came time for employment, I eschewed fast food or gas stations. Instead, I worked for an older, wealthy gentleman by the name of Mr. Wayne. I had always been mechanically inclined, so in the evenings my head would be bent over the guts of his expensive hot-rod collection bringing dead cars back to life. In summers, I was a golf caddy at Milwaukee’s most expensive country club, even though it required multiple bus transfers to get to work. And then at Harvard, I was surrounded by wealth unimaginable for a boy from the working class of the heartland. For the first time in my life, money seemed accessible, something I could get. All I had to do was work in the world of investments, as most of my college buddies had done. When it came down to it, though, I had chosen a different path—one that would keep me firmly in the lot of the middle class for the rest of my life.

Old iron gates opened. We hadn’t announced ourselves, but tiny video cameras blinked red in the eyes of the stone lions.

The steep, narrow driveway ended at a cobblestone motor court with an ornate fountain depicting sea nymphs at play. Prehistoric-looking foliage surrounded an old stone Spanish-style mansion. The cacti were ten feet tall and blue lights illuminated trees with spiky leaves and exotic flowers.

I tapped the front door’s heavy knocker. I heard the clackety-clack of heels on a tile floor and the door opened. A house cat with spots like a leopard sprinted across the foyer.

The woman was in her late thirties and dressed for a rococo costume party, not an intimate dinner. Her outfit featured a tortoise-and-feather headpiece, white fur shawl, snakeskin pants so tight they might have been painted on and six-inch ostrich heels. I thought of Lily’s ivory necklace. I wondered if wearing endangered species was a status symbol in all of Los Angeles’s social stratosphere or just this specific circle of it.

“You must be Thomas. Come in. You’re pale. It looks like you could use a drink. And a trip to Tahiti. But we can take care of that later.”

We stood in a two-story entry the size of a ballroom. Red wax candles served as wall sconces and the only man-made light came from an overhead chandelier adorned with dragons and crystals. Juliet balconies above us were empty, but I got the sense that during grander parties violinists played there and during more intimate ones men and women did.

“Everyone, this is Thomas, Lily’s friend,” the woman who answered the door said, leading me from the foyer to a smaller room.

She did not bother introducing herself, but her manner was as theatrical as her attire and her words echoed on the stone. The four other people in the room hushed on cue, and I was embarrassed by their silence, their undeserved stares. In order to divert my eyes, I took in the room’s zebra chairs, antlered sconces and mirrored ceilings, wondering if I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

“Thomas, darling, what are you drinking?” the oddly dressed woman asked.

I scanned the group with the corners of my eyes. There was no Lily. My heart quickened, and I was so nervous I briefly and irrationally thought that I had shown up to the wrong party.

“Sweetheart. Is everything okay?” the woman pressed me, after her question had gone unanswered.

She stood beside the type of formal mirrored bar you would’ve found in a 1920s Art Deco speakeasy in Manhattan. There were no off-the-shelf bottles; liquor was kept in heavy crystal decanters. Sterling silver–framed snapshots surrounded the crystal on all sides. It was then that I realized Lily Goldman had invited me to a dinner party at someone else’s house.

I paused for a moment. I needed to choose a drink that was both elegant and available in one of those anonymous bottles. I thought of my ex-girlfriend—she had been a girl who would have known what to order in a scene like this. A gimlet. That had been her drink of choice.