The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine

They were the first words David had said to me all night.

A valet attendant in his midtwenties dressed in starched whites opened David’s door for him.

“Welcome home, Mr. Duplaine,” he said.

Before I could say thank-you or good-night, the valet had already closed David’s door behind him. Kurt turned off the radio. I watched through the tinted glass as David was briskly escorted through the front door by a butler. Soon after, the upstairs light went dark.

Three (#ulink_0d46a759-0a96-5164-9ec0-d6a047881648)

It was one of those magical nights I didn’t want to end. So when Lily invited me over for a nightcap I accepted.

Once we left David’s manor, it was a turn, a turn and another quick turn before we arrived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Kurt pointed a clicker at a gate covered by flowers. We drove up the cobblestone driveway slowly, arriving at a large stucco manor with ivy crawling up its walls so densely the windows were mostly covered with leaves. Like Lily, the refined and glamorous place seemed as if it belonged more in the South of France than in Los Angeles. I guessed the property to be an acre or so—smaller than the Blooms’ and tiny compared to David’s. But it was lusher than both; the house was nested in the most stunning flowers and trees I had ever seen.

Kurt opened the thick antique front door and we walked into a small foyer that was too diminutive for a house of this magnitude. Moments later I understood: the foyer was meant to set expectations low, to make the fifty-foot-long living room appear even grander.

The house was furnished in the same manner as Lily’s shop. Heavy antiques rested beside modern chalk art; bookcases were filled to the brim with rare books that were wrapped in cellophane to fight off dust. Almost miraculously, ivy grew along the leaded glass doors and crawled up the interior walls to the ceiling.

“What are you drinking?” Lily asked, as she walked to a smaller version of the Blooms’ bar.

“Water’s great. Thanks.”

Lily poured Evian water into a glass made of tortoise shell.

“The ivy—how does it live?” I asked.

“It doesn’t,” Lily said. “With no sunlight or fresh air it dies.” Lily pointed to the ceiling, to ivy that was brown and petrified.

Lily picked up a lemon but then couldn’t find a paring knife. Her eyes briefly searched for Kurt, before she abandoned the idea of sliced lemon altogether and gave me my room-temperature water as is.

It struck me as odd how Lily and her friends employed housefuls of servants but then did random things for themselves. For example, Lily had referenced “the staff” in her shop, but she had busied herself moving antiques. Likewise, Emma had personally answered the door and prepared my gimlet, but the staff-to-dinner-party-guest ratio in that household appeared around two to one. And David: in the span of a three-hour dinner, had his driver really fallen too ill to drive one block?

Lily sat on the couch, her bare feet curled beneath her. She unclasped her cuffs, and she placed them on the table beside her as if they were handcuffs she had been eager to unshackle. She then shivered, though two wood-burning fireplaces taller than me flanked the room, with fire reaching to their brims. Kurt must have stoked the embers for hours before Lily had returned home.

Kurt walked in with a cup of hot tea on a silver tray.

“Did you have a nice time?” Lily asked.

“Yes, thank you so much for the invitation.”

“It can be a bit difficult being the seventh. Some say it’s unlucky, but I think you handled it very well. And it was delightful to have someone under the age of thirty around. I so rarely rub shoulders with youth anymore.”

Lily smiled approvingly, and I again noticed how attractive she was. It wasn’t that in-your-face kind of beauty Carole possessed. Lily’s father had been rich, so her mother had probably been pretty. That was how the world worked.

As if reading my mind, Lily leaned to her left and picked up a silver-framed black-and-white photo.

“If you haven’t decided on a photo for your story yet, this would be a delightful choice. My father adored my mother, absolutely adored her, and it would paint a much fuller picture of him than some snapshot of him at his desk running the studio.”

I studied the photo. Joel Goldman and his wife were walking down steps from a jet. Lily’s mother was so beautiful she could have been one of Joel’s starlets. She wore a raincoat and gloves, and a loose printed scarf knotted below her chin covered her head so only a bit of her blond hair showed. Oversize earrings dangled three inches below her ears. They were incongruous with the rest of the outfit, as if her jewels were a form of rebellion.

And her husband, he was big all over—big face, big blond hair, big eyes, big crooked nose, big presence and two hundred pounds of stone for a body. The only things wiry about Joel Goldman were his glasses. Despite his wife’s beauty, it was Joel who was the center of the photo.

In the background, behind the couple, was a guy I recognized as a much younger David Duplaine.

“When was this photo taken?” I asked.

“Eighteen years ago—give or take a year. When you’re my age they all blur. I only remember the really good or really bad ones—and sometimes not even those.”

“Is that David?” I asked, pointing at the figure in the background. David seemed to be onstage, but positioning himself just beyond the spotlight.

“Yes.” Lily smiled.

“You’ve known him a long time, then.”

“Over a quarter of a century. David was a hustler. He grew up in Queens and lied his way into a talent agency. He told them he graduated from college but he didn’t. In fact, David never much believed in the value of school. Education—that he believed in. David is the most educated man I know, but not through formal schooling.” Lily sipped her tea. “The agency found out, and he would have been fired had my father not made a phone call. David would have done well anyways, but he always thought that phone call saved his life. He can be so melodramatic—David.”

In fact, in a city that thrived on the theatrical, David was never portrayed as the dramatic sort. One of his films could bomb, a newspaper could win a Pulitzer, a television show could sweep the Emmys, and David would handle all three scenarios with the same stoicism.

For the first time I wondered if Lily was what we in journalism would call a reliable source. Or, conversely, perhaps Lily was right. Maybe David and the rest of them were always smiling for the cameras, but their real lives—the ones that took place in the dressing rooms of very expensive real estate—had nothing to do with their public personas.

To avoid Lily’s eyes I looked at the ivy. It was spotlighted, and its shadows played on the ceiling.

Lily, for her part, studied her tea. Its exotic scent combined with the smell of burned wood made me think of the Orient.

Lily took a sip of her tea before continuing, “David worked at the talent agency for a few years, and then my father gave him two million dollars to start his own production company. He had the magic touch, as they say in the movies, and a few years later the company was rolled into the studio—and David made the transition to running it. And the rest is history.”

“That was quite the gamble. For your father, I mean.”

“All great businessmen are gamblers in one way or another. My father was no exception. Many of his leading ladies had never been in a picture before. He’d take a chance on a girl if she had je ne sais quoi. He optioned a screenplay from his driver that became one of his highest-grossing films.” Lily’s green eyes traveled far away. “In fact, my father loved to gamble, but his vice wasn’t the stock market or the horses. It was people.”

“It doesn’t sound like a vice if he won.”

“Generally, but not always. Sometimes the house wins,” Lily said distantly. “And how about you, Thomas Cleary, are you a gambler?”

I hadn’t thought of it before. But now I considered Harvard—how I had got there. And Los Angeles—how I had crawled out of the rubble of my life to end up at one of the most prestigious papers in the country. And then there was Willa. By pedigree I should have been a member of her staff, but instead I had spent years with her heart resting—precariously, it would turn out—in my palm.

“Yes, I guess you could say I am—a gambler.”

“I could tell, the moment I met you. Midwesterners are typically horribly risk averse, but I pegged you for the type to throw your chips down,” Lily said with what might have been a glint in her eye. “What was your biggest bet?”

“I gambled on a girl.” I thought again of Willa, who even years later never traveled far from my thoughts. I pictured her vividly the afternoon we had first met in Boston, propped on her elbow on a blanket beside the Charles River.

“And you lost, I’m assuming.” Lily raised an eyebrow while blatantly looking at my ring finger and bringing me back to the present.

“You could say that.”

“Was she a Harvard girl?”

“Yes, originally from Manhattan.”