Alex Brunkhorst - The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine

I looked around me. It wasn’t close to being Christmas, but icicle lights hung on my neighbor’s balcony, and pot smoke wafted from his apartment day and night. Tall date palms stood high and mighty in the distance, but the foliage in our complex was the indigenous sort that required little water or sun. The U-shaped building was centered on a dilapidated courtyard. There was a sadness to it, because in the 1950s when the building was built someone had tried to make something pretty, but now the courtyard was neglected. Chairs with webbing too thin to sit on were sprinkled haphazardly around a swimming pool. The pool needed a new heater, and the hot tub was drained. Peeling plaster gave the water a cloudy and gray appearance.

I surveyed the surroundings one last time before crushing the remnants of my cigarette into the stone balcony. I had a deadline to meet.

Five

The story, in various incarnations, stayed on the front page for the next four days and then got mileage in Calendar and Business. We had scooped the Reporter , ditto for the online sites that were breathing down Rubenstein’s back. The story was covered by nearly every national publication—the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle— and I gathered them up and savored the words “The Los Angeles Times reported...” because the Los Angeles Times meant me . I knew the story and the scoop had nothing to do with me. Any community college journalism student who happened to have landed at the right place at the right time could have written the same article, but I was proud nevertheless.

I grew up in Milwaukee, the land of gratitude and manners. So I knew a token thank-you to Lily was in order. Choosing a present that I thought Lily would like was difficult on a reporter’s salary, so I did the best I could. I went to the most expensive department store in the city and chose the least expensive item there: a candle.

As I made my way over to the shop I thought of how quickly my prospects had changed. It had been just over a week since I had first met Lily.

The bell announced my arrival. The store was as cluttered as on my first visit, and it took a moment for Lily to emerge from behind the large Asian screen.

“Thomas! How are you, love?”

“Fine. I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“You could never be an interruption. What’s this?”

I looked around and became conscious of the candle I was carrying. Suddenly it seemed like a totally inappropriate gift. In my weeklong sabbatical I had forgotten how exotic and remote the world of Lily Goldman was.

“Nothing—”

“A candle,” Lily said, unwrapping it lustfully. “I absolutely love candles. It’s the most exquisite color of vanilla, isn’t it, Carole?”

It was only now that I noticed Carole lounging on a sofa, surrounded by pillows in various textiles and prints. She lay on her back, barefoot and beautiful as she had been the night of our first meeting. She looked as if she belonged in Marrakech or Casablanca, not in an antiques shop in Los Angeles.

“Truly a one of a kind” was her response. Her delivery was as polite as the sentiment was sarcastic.

“Carole’s here looking for pillows for her aviary,” Lily said. “This candle is absolutely spectacular, Thomas. You are so sweet. Isn’t he sweet, Carole?”

“Did you find anything?” I addressed both of them. I had no idea why one would need pillows for an aviary, or why one would have an aviary in their home in the first place, but I needed to quickly steer the subject away from the embarrassingly cheap gift.

“My first indication was to use this peacock fabric—” Lily pointed to an ornate fabric with stenciled peacocks, seemingly a perfect fit “—but now I feel it’s too predictable. I deplore predictable.”

Carole glanced at the peacock fabric with indifference, as if there was nothing about it that compelled her either way, and then she focused on her lap, at a script that lay open to a page somewhere around sixty.

“Your article on the terrible man who worked for David was brilliant,” Lily said, addressing me. “You are a fantastic writer, Thomas. Isn’t he, Carole?”

“He handled a tricky situation with aplomb,” Carole replied, flipping the screenplay’s page.

It was true. I hadn’t lambasted David as some of our competitors had. Instead I was deliberately gentle, exonerating David of blame while still maintaining my journalistic integrity. It was a strategic move on my part of course. I had to protect my position in their world, and it still felt very precarious.

Lily disappeared into rows of hanging fabrics, and I was left alone with Carole. I opened my mouth to say something, but words failed me. Carole, on the other hand, appeared to almost revel in my discomfort. We sat like this for a minute or so, and then I turned my back, pretending to stoke a newfound interest in Belgian linen.

Lily returned a few seconds later, her face registering the stony silence that hung in the air. “Nothing appropriate. Maybe I’ll paint something later.”

Carole stood up and slipped on her shoes, throwing the screenplay into a large purse. Then she kissed Lily on the cheek.

“Don’t go,” Lily begged.

“Are you forgetting I’m cohosting a dinner for seventy tomorrow? I wish I could go off shopping all day, but help requires such micromanagement. And so does David.” Carole sighed.

Lily turned to me. “David and Carole are cohosting a little event for the governor at David’s. Thomas, I have a glorious idea. Why don’t you come?” she said enthusiastically.

I wished Carole would step in and second the invitation, but she didn’t. Instead she preoccupied herself with a screen that featured oxen in repose in a meadow, rubbing her fingers over its surface. Her fingernails were painted a shade of olive, and I wondered if the odd, almost grotesque, color was chosen for a horror-movie role or if olive was the new red.

“I couldn’t,” I said, as transparently as possible.

“Of course you could. Carole, do tell Thomas he should come. Insist he should come. It would be good for you at the paper, Thomas.”

“Lily’s right. You should come, Thomas. I’ll have Adrian add a seventh to our table.” Carole said it blandly, and I knew that Carole’s word choice was deliberate. Seven not only had an unlucky connotation, as Lily had pointed out, but it also called for a lopsided table arrangement. I could already imagine Adrian, whoever he was, silently cursing me, the nettlesome seventh.

Carole’s invitation was disingenuous, and I should have turned it down. Instead I allowed it to hang there. I wanted to jump into their lives again—why, I didn’t know.

“Well, it’s decided, then,” Carole said. “We’ll see you tomorrow evening, eight o’clock sharp.”

Carole put on a large floppy hat and oversize sunglasses that rested low, almost on the tip of her nose. Outside, a black SUV waited for her, and a driver opened the rear passenger door expeditiously. In ten seconds the car was gone, and a minute later the paparazzi were too late.

Six

I knew I wanted to go to Harvard when I was ten years old. Harvard was a quixotic dream for someone raised in Milwaukee’s gritty public school system, but that dream became my driving force.

When I was twelve I figured out that it was speed that was going to get me there. My talent for the five-thousand meter blossomed suddenly, without warning. Early in the morning, before the sun came up, I could be found running beside my father’s stopwatch. My dad had barely received his high school diploma but he would come to share my dream.

This singular intensity propelled me to shatter every state and Harvard running record. It was that same stubborn determination that made me ignore the small fact that Carole didn’t want me to attend the fund-raiser. I had got a taste of wealth and power, a mere whetting of the tongue, but I wanted more.