Alex Brunkhorst

The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine


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cell phone vibrated, indicating a text message. He pulled out his phone and glanced at it. Carole watched discreetly, and then she made eye contact with him.

      “Is everything okay?” Carole asked, voice low but concerned.

      “Work thing,” David responded. “Never sleeps.”

      “How was your dinner, Thomas?” Charles asked, changing the subject.

      “Delicious. You’re a wonderful cook, Emma.”

      “I can’t take credit for it. But I can take credit for hiring the chef. Cordon Bleu, Paris. I went there personally and dipped my spoon into all of their kettles. I liked Francois’s the best.”

      Charles raised his glass in toast and everyone went back to their side conversations. The dessert wine went on for another half hour or so, and I found myself staring through a large picture window at a majestic date palm covered in blue lights. That tree had to be a hundred years old. I looked at the lights intently until they blurred together into a filmy blue that saturated the air. To my right, I noticed Carole gazed at the same blue air. She seemed lost in it. When she finally tore her eyes away, she stood up from the table. She took her drink with her and never returned to the room.

      * * *

      Twenty minutes later the group congregated for a postdinner brandy in what Emma called “the card room.” I had never been to a house with a room dedicated to cards before, but it made sense since Emma had specifically said that she loved “anything old-fashioned,” and cards would have certainly fallen into that category.

      The glass room was lined in lattice more suitable for the outdoors than an interior space, and its plants had been allowed to run wild. Two oversize square tables were illuminated by massive pagoda-shaped chandeliers, their crystals generously casting off light.

      Admittedly, I had never been a card guy—in fact, I didn’t even know how to play simple games like bridge or poker—so I excused myself to make a phone call, but instead slipped outside to have a stealth cigarette, a habit I had picked up a few years earlier and never quit. I settled into a lounge chair next to a grass-bordered body of water that resembled a swamp. Its water was green and murky and my eye caught an occasional minnow swimming beneath its lily pads. Were it not for the diving board at the northwest end, I wouldn’t have even known it was a swimmable pool.

      I lit a match and put it to the tip of my cigarette. What a night it had been. I was here in Bel-Air with some of the most important people in a city full of important people. I was so high I never wanted to come down. I knew Lily’s motive for the invitation, and it had nothing to do with feeding a sweet Midwestern kid a home-cooked meal. Over crème brûlée, Lily had insisted everyone at the table give me quotes about her father. She was no fool, and she knew that favorable quotes from some of the most important people in the industry carried heavy weight.

      But then I reflected on a scene from that afternoon—of Lily’s fingers on my neck. I wondered if there had been some other reason for Lily’s invitation.

      I took a puff of my cigarette. I watched its golden tip light the clear, starry Bel-Air sky. We were in the middle of the city, but the quiet sky belonged in a countryside somewhere. It made me feel vaguely existential, as if above and beyond us there was nothing—nothing to hope for, no afterlife, nothing to make us choose one course of action over another.

      The leopard cat jumped onto my lap and snapped me out of my reverie. Just then I heard a slight rustle from a dark spot in the corner of the property.

      I saw a single shadow, but then it divided in half—into two separate shadows. The gestures of their hands and their body contact indicated a familiarity, and I was certain they were two of the dinner guests who had slipped outside for a side conversation. But despite my journalist’s curiosity, I instinctually turned away. I had always felt uncomfortable intruding on others’ privacy, so I looked at the swimming pool instead. An orange minnow slithered against the pool’s muddy edge, and the leopard cat’s eyes grew large, but he didn’t pounce.

      Then, as quickly as they had appeared, the shadows were gone.

      I finished my cigarette and headed back into the house.

      “Wanna come in, big guy?” I asked the leopard cat, whose eyes shone like green lights. I held the door open for him, but he darted away into the deep black night.

      I found the card room on my second try. I opened the huge wooden doors, expecting to find two of the dinner guests absent. They were all there, though, engaged in a six-person game of poker. I shouldn’t have finished the cigarette.

      “Thomas, where did you disappear to?” Lily said.

      “I fold.” Carole threw in her cards.

      “I fold,” George repeated.

      “The swimming pool,” I said.

      “Would you like to borrow a bathing suit?” Emma asked. “We usually swim in the buff, but we have extras in the pool house.”

      “No, thank you. I went outside for a cigarette.”

      “I fold,” David said.

      “You’re so silly, Thomas.” Emma presented me with a gold ashtray in the shape of a lion. “I bought this at the Duquette sale and I have been absolutely dying to use it. Besides, smoke makes the house feel lived-in. That was my goal with all this—” She spread her arms out wide. “Can’t you tell?”

      I almost started to laugh, but then caught the seriousness in her eyes.

      “Well, you’ve done a good job of it,” I said, lifting a brandy—a drink I hated—in toast.

      Emma smiled before returning to her card game. There was nothing about this mansion that would indicate Emma Bloom’s desire to make it feel lived-in—not the cold stone floors that echoed conversation, not the swampy swimming pool, nor the stiff-backed zebra-covered chairs in the drawing room.

      I sat on the outskirts of the game, watching as Emma shuffled with the expertise of a Vegas casino dealer. I thought again of the shadows outside, of Carole and David’s exchange at dinner. Sure, I was here to pull some quotes on the recently departed Joel Goldman. But something told me the real story was much bigger and more far-reaching than that.

       Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Two: The dead are only interesting in the context of the lives they left behind.

      * * *

      “I hope you don’t mind—we’re going to drop David off. His driver fell ill unexpectedly, poor thing,” Lily said, as Kurt helped her into her champagne mink shrug, which seemed too warm for the weather. “He only lives around the corner. It won’t be much out of our way.”

      “Of course,” I said.

      Kurt opened the car doors for us. David sat in the front, Lily and I in the back.

      While Kurt had listened to classical music on our long drive, now the station was tuned to the radio affiliate of David’s cable news network.

      It was only a block away, and we drove it in silence. The radio commentator was the only one who spoke. He pontificated, with left-wing conviction, about the upcoming presidential election. In the Midwest this one block would have been a nice after-dinner walk, but there were no pedestrians in Bel-Air. The streets were too narrow and the people too rich for that.

      We took one turn before stopping in front of an impressive barricade of palatial gray iron gates. They were simple and unadorned, and they opened like magic.

      We passed through the gates into the grandest estate I had ever seen. We had just come from a property so magnificent it took my breath away, but compared to David’s estate, Emma and George’s felt humble. The long driveway meandered through acres of gently rolling hills sparsely dotted with trees. At the end of the driveway was a grand old Palladian manse. The first floor was glowing. Upstairs, only one room was lit, its curtain closed.

      My first reaction was to notice