The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  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.

  As a guy, it was my job to find an open window when a girl closed a door. I found a slight crack here—in her unsure inflection, her avoidance of eye contact, her choice of syntax.

  So I climbed through the proverbial window. Five rackets wrapped in cellophane sat on a bench beside the court. I unwrapped one, took off my shoes and walked to the other side of the net.

  I had played tennis in high school and, despite some rustiness, would have considered myself a good player. I rocketed in a pretty decent first serve, but before I had time to admire it she had nailed a backhand return that hit the place where the baseline met the sideline.

  “Wow, good shot.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  My next serve was a nasty topspin down the middle, and once again her return skidded off the baseline.

  Twenty minutes later the first set was over. I had won a mere five points.

  I walked up to the net, and she followed suit. She put out her hand proudly to shake mine.

  “I’m now 1–0,” she said, glowing.

  “1–0?”

  “Yes, one win and zero losses. Still undefeated for life.”

  “You’re meaning to tell me this is the first match you’ve ever played?”

  “Correct.”

  “Your entire life?”

  “The whole of it. I only practice,” she said, her victory still covering her face.

  “How often?”

  “Three hours a day.” She paused, contemplating what was to come next. “Do you like cookies?” she asked as she headed toward the tennis pavilion.

  * * *

  The tennis pavilion was more elaborate than most houses. Ivy crept up the walls and partially hid glass casement windows. Reclaimed wood covered everything. I had the feeling this wood had been to France and China and back—all before the eighteenth century. A seventy-five-inch television screened a muted Gregory Peck film. An old stone mantel stood six feet high, covering a brightly burning fireplace below, surely crafted before the advent of central heating systems. Silver pitchers of lemonade and water sat beside crystal glasses. Six varieties of cookies were symmetrically lined up on trays, and towels floated in steaming hot water. Every provision was taken care of.

  “Lemonade?” the girl asked.

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She poured me a glass of lemonade to the brim and then put on a short satiny jacket that must have been the companion piece to her dress because the frills matched. Beads of sweat rested in the nape of her neck like seed pearls. She didn’t wipe them off.

  A bowl of pineapple sat in a crystal bowl. The fruit was diced into equally cubed pieces, small and dimpled like playing dice. The girl plucked out a piece of pineapple with a fork, holding it up so the fruit dazzled under the soft light in the pavilion.

  “Can I interest you in a piece of pineapple?” she asked.

  “Yes, please. Pineapple’s my favorite fruit.”

  “Mine, too,” she exclaimed with great enthusiasm, as if she’d just discovered that we had the same birthday or the same mother.

  She slowly placed the fork in my mouth, and I tasted a few drops of its delicious juice before the entire cube of fruit went in. It was sweet, perfectly ripe. I pictured the farmer in Hawaii leaning over fields of pineapples, picking just this one, for just this girl.

  She stared at me long after the pineapple had made its way down my throat. I was accustomed to being the observer, but in this case I was clearly the observed. Surprisingly, it felt nice.

  The girl sat down and motioned me toward an antique leather chair beside hers. On the wall between us hung a modern painting of a lawn full of sprinklers. It was an image I recognized from art history books as a David Hockney. I assumed the painting was an original.

  “I can’t believe you beat me 6–0. I didn’t give a good first impression,” I said. “Do you know what a 6–0 set is called?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “A bagel. Because the zero is round like a bagel.”

  She smiled grandly, and I noticed she had great teeth. They were a bit crooked, but in a good way.

  “I’m Thomas, by the way.” I made a long-overdue introduction. “I should have probably said that earlier, right?”

  She didn’t introduce herself in turn. She took a long sip of lemonade with mint leaves.

  “You should really think about playing in some tournaments. I think you’d do really well,” I said.

  “You do?” she asked, leaning closer.

  “Yes. You seem the competitive type.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “I like girls with chops, so yes.”

  “With chops?”

  “Yeah, with chops.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but I hope it’s a good thing. And I’ll think about it—the tournaments, I mean. I don’t think I’d be very good at losing. Are you good at losing?”

  “No one is,” I said, taking a sip of my lemonade. “I’m surprised your coach doesn’t encourage you to play matches.”

  She stared into the distance, where David’s grand white house loomed. We could only see its six chimneys—but it was there, in the background, bigger than us.

  “My coach would like me to, but it’s complicated.”

  She looked toward her yard, as if a missing puzzle piece lay somewhere in that rolling acreage. But wait, was this even her yard? I was so mesmerized that I hadn’t considered this question. Even in a city obsessed with dating young she was too young to be David’s lover. And if she were, wouldn’t she have been at the political event?

  The girl focused her gaze on me—first on my hair, then my forehead, then my nose and then my mouth. She moved lower, studying my body obviously and examining the barrel chest of my torso and the calves that I had spent my boyhood covering up because they were too brawny for the rest of me. She eventually settled on my jaw.

  “You have such a nice jaw,” she said sweetly. “It’s a man’s jaw.”

  I smiled and found myself blushing.

  “Thank you. It’s my father’s jaw. I grew up hating it. It was too big for the rest of me.”

  “But now you love it I bet.”

  “I grew into it. Now I tolerate it.”

  She smiled. She then rubbed the back of her right hand on my reddish-blond stubble—at first tentatively, as if she wasn’t sure if it was off-limits, and then tenderly, in a gesture far too intimate for a first meeting.

  “It’s prickly.” She smiled with curiosity. “And coarse.”

  “By this time of night that’s what happens,” I said.

  I felt the back of her hand down to the tips of my toes. It didn’t feel like an experienced touch, one of a woman who knew exactly how to hit the right nerves, at the right time of night. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I pegged her as an amateur at the sport of seduction, but it was refreshing.

  She finally dropped her hand to her lap, and she left it there, as if not knowing what to do with it next. It was then that I made my first mistake of the night—well, second, if you count missing a party at David Duplaine’s beach house honor
ing the governor of California. I fleetingly glanced at the wall clock to check if we had time for another set. The girl’s eyes followed mine.

  “You have to leave,” she said. “They’ll be back soon. They can’t know you’ve been here.”

  “Who will be back? The party’s going to go late.”

  “You have to go.”

  “Can I see you again?” It sounded like begging. I didn’t know if it was her naïveté, off-kilter beauty, crooked smile or all three, but I was enchanted. “Can I get your name?” I asked, when she didn’t answer the first question.

  “I need you to promise me something,” she said. “Promise you’ll forget you ever met me. Please. Because if you remember, it’s likely to get both of us into trouble.”

  I didn’t answer because it was a promise I was unwilling to make.

  The girl clenched her fist and then uncurled her fingers quickly, as if they were fireworks or a blooming flower. Then she said:

  “Poof. See, you’ve forgotten me.”

  “We’ve gotta work on your magic tricks,” I said. “You’re still here.”

  She smiled despite herself, but then she set her eyes on me seriously.

  “I don’t want you to get involved with me, with all of it. No one can ever, ever know you’ve been here. And as lovely as our tennis game was, you may never come back.”

  I could tell that by nature she was a fanciful girl, which made the gravitas of her tone even more foreboding. She had presented me with an opening when she peered up at the tree, but now she had closed the door for good.

  I nodded, because there was little else to do but leave her as instructed. I climbed to the top of the canopy, hoisted myself up onto the wall and then swung my way into the oak tree.

  I watched from the oak as she eliminated all traces of me. She emptied my glass, clumsily washed and dried it, and put it in the kitchenette cabinet. She fluffed the pillow on my leather chair, slid the racket back in cellophane and swept my side of the court in the awkward manner of someone who was learning a skill for the first time.

  Once satisfied that she had effectively made me disappear, the girl abandoned the tennis court, leaving the gate to crash back and forth in the wind because she didn’t trouble herself to latch it. She walked up the lawn toward the manor, tightly squeezing her arms around her.

  Halfway along the well-lit path to the grand house she turned around and looked up at the oak tree. She extended her right arm as far as it would go and she spread her fingers out in the tree’s general direction, as if she were reaching for something on a high shelf, something so fragile it might break into pieces if she grabbed it.

  Seven

  I drove out of Bel-Air, crossed Sunset Boulevard and ended up in the parking lot of the mini-mall I had been at just hours earlier renting my tuxedo. It was empty, storefronts dimly lit from the interior with single lightbulbs. That was what was interesting about Los Angeles: its great glory and its gritty underbelly were often walking distance apart. I think the city planners created it that way on purpose. Los Angeles is a recycle bin for dreamers, and the dream needs to be always visible but just slightly out of grasp.

  I had stopped there to check my voice mails, of which there were many, and then call Lily, but I lit a cigarette instead of doing either. A street lamp above me flickered a few times with a buzzing sound. It made a go of it, but then went black.

  It felt like autumn in Cambridge. Or maybe it felt like Milwaukee. I couldn’t remember anymore, because those cities felt like lifetimes ago. I wondered sometimes if it was the same Thomas Cleary who had lived there or if it was a different man, one I had met in a bar and who had told me his story over a couple of pale ales.

  And as for Manhattan, well, that definitely couldn’t have been this lifetime.

  I stopped and realized it had been two hours since I had thought of Willa. I hadn’t thought of her once on that tennis court. Relief—or was it sadness?—crept into my heart.

  Sure, I had been on dates after Willa, but inevitably, sometime around the appetizer, the comparisons would creep in, and the date would end in a promise never kept.

  Willa.

  I had lived with an imaginary lover for so long, and it was becoming almost impossible to believe that at this very minute she still existed, in a place so different and far from mine. In the first days without her she was as vivid and clear as a photograph, and I knew where she would be at any moment, or I could have guessed.

  In those first weeks without her it was the nights that were the worst. I lay in bed begging for sleep; and if not sleep, the morning, because at least the morning brought the sun. In those black nights I would feel her forgetting me, and somehow that was the worst part.

  I began to forget her eventually, too, and it was both my blessing and punishment. After two years her face finally started to blur, and soon after, the fruity smell of her shampoo and the scent of the jasmine behind her ears stopped haunting me. Her eyes became a vacant place, a blackness from which someone had once looked at me lovingly a long time ago. The same went for her arms and her toes, the lips I kissed past midnight, the slender long neck I whispered into in Central Park.

  I was lost in thought when my phone rang. The number was private.

  “Hello,” I said, tossing the stub of my cigarette to the ground.

  Lily skipped salutations. “My goodness, Thomas. We were worried sick about you. You never showed up to the fund-raiser.”

  “I went to the wrong house. I went to David’s house in Bel-Air by accident.”

  “Kurt did give you the address, didn’t he?” Lily asked. In fact, Kurt hadn’t specified an address. I barely knew Kurt, but I already didn’t much care for him. He always lurked around, like a prison warden searching for an excuse to use his club. And then there was that handshake. Never trust a man whose grip is too sure, my father had always preached.

  Could Lily have manipulated events to send me to the wrong house?

  I paused before answering. I could lie to Lily and tell her Kurt gave me the address, or betray Kurt and tell Lily he had called me to confirm but hadn’t told me that the party was in Malibu. I was under the early impression lies were passed around this group like hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party. But I suspected loyalty was deemed a valiant trait.

  “He did, but I forget to check my messages and only received it a minute ago. I apologize. It was a stupid oversight. How was the party?”

  “I hate political parties—they’re terribly boring. You didn’t miss a thing. Even the filet was tough.” Lily paused then asked offhandedly, “Was anyone at David’s?”

  I didn’t answer right away. The girl had made me promise to keep our meeting a surreptitious one. And, besides, it was such an enchanting evening that sharing it would feel like marring its perfection.

  “No. There was no one home.”

  “What a terrible coincidence,” Lily said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “David has more security than royalty. They must have all been at the governor’s party. This had to have been the only night of the year the house was vacant. Otherwise, someone could have driven you to Malibu or at least pointed you in the right direction.”

  “I’m sorry I missed the fund-raiser.”

  “I knew it had to be a mix-up, because Midwestern boys are so typically reliable. David said it would be possible to arrange a short interview for you tomorrow with the governor.”

  I skipped forward and imagined what Rubenstein would say when I told him I’d landed an interview with the governor. He had been my salvation after my fall from grace, and I still wanted to make him proud.

  “Would you like that?” Lily asked, when I didn’t answer.

  It was another one of Lily’s rhetorical questions. I accepted and then hung up. I lit another cigarette, and the world seemed to light up, too. Th
e governor. The world of Lily Goldman was full of presents, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there were strings attached to every last one of them.

  Eight

  The next morning the rain started.

  It began with a few stray drops, gentle and unassuming. But by afternoon, as I sat down with the governor in the library of a private club in downtown Los Angeles, the clouds had opened. Water puddles had turned to flash floods and roads across the city were closed.

  It rained for the next four days, and the young woman on the tennis court handcuffed my thoughts. When I think back on those days after our first meeting I only recall staring at the rain and thinking of her. Everyday tasks—work, errands and sleep—sparkled somehow, as if her enchanting spell hung over even the most mundane things. She was ubiquitous; no corner of the world could hide her. I thought of her bare shoulders, the way her long ponytail brushed against her dress when she ran for the ball, how her diamond bracelet got caught in her hair each time she put her hand through its blond tendrils. All other food tasted dull compared with the pineapple she had placed on my tongue, and no air tingled my skin like the cool air of that night on the tennis court, and no touch felt as electric as her fingers on my skin.

  Had the situation been different—if she was the friend-of-a-friend, a girl I met at a bar—I could have just asked about her. But that was not an option. Asking Lily would have been retracting my previous story, and I got the distinct sense from the girl that she didn’t want anyone to know about our secret tennis game.

  So, instead, I tried to learn more about her. The evening had left a bread-crumb trail of clues behind. The food and drink seemed tailored to the girl’s taste, and she had a ball-speed radar device, which wasn’t the sort of thing one would bring along for a visit to someone else’s house. I thought then of the evening of the Blooms’ dinner party, the single upper-floor light that had gone dark when we dropped David off at his estate. I supposed it could have been the staff, but I doubted a housekeeper would be upstairs at that hour. It had to have been her.