The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  Nevertheless, I crawled onward until I reached the back side of what appeared to be an arrangement of bowling pins. Crouched down, I waited there as instructed.

  I heard the door open and close and two sets of footsteps.

  “Hector, can you please prepare the bowling alley?” I heard Matilda say.

  “Of course, Miss Duplaine.”

  Miss Duplaine. By this point I certainly had figured out she lived here, but hearing her last name confirmed that she was David’s daughter—or at least a relative. It was a solid clue, except for the fact that as far as my research was concerned, such a girl didn’t exist.

  Hector came dangerously close to me when he realized one of the pins was positioned a bit to the left of its proper spot. I hugged my knees closer, shrinking myself. Once the pins were set with exactitude, he called to Matilda.

  “The pins are ready,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Matilda replied with trained politeness.

  “Would you like me to keep score?” Hector asked.

  “No, thank you. I’m going to spend some time by myself this evening.”

  “Very well. Would you like some music?” Hector hesitated.

  “Yes.” There was a pause. “I think Air Supply would be nice. Do you?”

  “I think that’s an excellent choice,” Hector said reassuringly.

  I heard the beginnings of “Making Love Out of Nothing At All.”

  “Are you going to bowl in that fine attire?” I heard Hector ask. My heart sank. He sounded suspicious.

  “Yes,” Matilda said. “It’s getting late, and I’m far too lazy to change.”

  “If that’s what you prefer,” Hector said, and then a door closed, heavy like a vault.

  There was a moment of silence. I wondered if she was as nervous as I was.

  “Thomas?” Matilda asked. “Are you in there?”

  I clumsily crawled down the alley, slipping on the wax. Matilda laughed her bold and idiosyncratic laugh, and I would always remember it as the first time I ever saw her really happy.

  I would grow to love the musty wooden smell of the bowling alley, the clankety-clank of the balls as they crashed against pins, the four seconds of suspense as a well-thrown ball awaited its destiny. For now, though, I was struck by its quietness.

  “I don’t have any bowling shoes for you,” Matilda said, as she put on hers.

  “No worries. I can bowl in my socks.”

  “Good. I hope you like bowling.”

  “Love it,” I said, which was a stretch of the truth.

  While Matilda tied her shoelaces, I looked around. A single bowling ball sat by itself on a long rack and the scorecard for this evening’s game had the penciled initials MD. A large refrigerator with a glass door held tin cans of Dole pineapple juice and single-serving bottles of Arrowhead water.

  “I hope you can fit your fingers in the ball,” Matilda said, passing it to me. It was bright and shiny as if it had been waxed that afternoon. “It was custom-made for me.”

  Matilda placed her hand and mine palm to palm, so the tips of our fingers touched.

  “Oh no, it’s quite possible your fingers won’t fit.” She handed me the ball carefully. “Try it.”

  My fingers didn’t fit—but I could jam my fingertips in enough to hold it.

  “A little tight, but definitely workable,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” Matilda asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Positive.”

  “Okay, then. How about the temperature in here? Is it okay for you? I have it at seventy-two.”

  “It’s all perfect.”

  Matilda picked up a stubby yellow pencil, the type golfers keep in their carts. A chalkboard on the wall featured the top-scoring games: Miss Duplaine 231, Miss Duplaine 229, Miss Duplaine 214.

  “I think you’re going to beat me. The last time I bowled was when I was sixteen and I bowled about an eighty,” I said.

  Matilda laughed. “What are your initials, so I can add you to the game?”

  “TC,” I said.

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Cleary.”

  “That’s a good last name,” Matilda said. “It means you can see things exactly as they are. Go first.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe you should bowl a warm-up game? I’ll watch.”

  “No, you’re my guest—my first guest ever, in fact—so you go first. I insist—absolutely and completely insist. I can bowl anytime I want.”

  I lined up and tossed the ball down the right side, thinking it was odd I was her first guest ever. If I had an alley like this I would have had friends over all the time. The ball skimmed the gutter before hooking left at the last second, leaving only one pin. It was a beginner’s-luck shot.

  “That’s excellent! You’re well positioned for a spare.” Matilda wrote the number 9 beside my initials on the scorecard.

  “I wouldn’t consider ‘well positioned’ to be the correct term,” I said as, sure enough, I tossed the ball into the gutter.

  “Oh no,” she said in a deflated manner. “I know you’ll get it next time.”

  “Your turn,” I said.

  Matilda rotated her dress slightly, so the waist was properly set. She placed a curl behind her ear, and she took a deep breath. And then, with one deft and uninterrupted movement, she tossed a hook that swayed theatrically before knocking down all the pins.

  Matilda returned to her seat and wrote an X in the box beside the initials MD. “That was pure luck,” she said modestly.

  We bowled three games, and on the third I managed to break a hundred. Meanwhile, Matilda hooked and sliced her way into the two-hundred range.

  After the third game, Matilda and I sat down and ate pretzels and drank pineapple juice. I had been disappointed to abandon the more glamorous evening I had planned, but now I didn’t want to be anywhere but trapped in that turn-of-the-century basement. The rest of the world suddenly seemed ordinary compared with the extraordinary world that was Matilda Duplaine’s. She was unlike any girl I had ever met.

  “Thomas?” Matilda asked. Pretzel bits were stuck to her glossy lips, but she didn’t pick them off. Maybe she didn’t know or didn’t realize that it was something to be self-conscious of. “What are real bowling alleys like?”

  “You’ve never been to one?” I asked, surprised.

  Matilda shook her head.

  “They’re automated. Computers score for you so there’s no cheating, and there are big monitors that show funny animated cartoons when you get a strike or spare or gutter ball. They’re noisy and crowded. Sometimes you have to wait an hour just to get a lane. They’re different than this, but not necessarily better. We can go whenever you want.”

  It was that time in a relationship when all you wanted was the next time. You wanted the event to come in a hurry, and you imagined it would be so dazzling it would glow in the dark. The world was full of possibility.

  I looked over at Matilda. I wondered if she was imagining bowling alleys bustling with leagues and birthday parties, where scorecards were covered with initials and where there were many high scorers, not just her.

  “Why are you keeping me a secret?” I whispered so Matilda would have to come closer. When she didn’t answer, I continued, “Am I not supposed to be here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Would you get in trouble if they knew?”

  “Probably, but so would you, I suspect.”

  My stomach felt hard as lead.

  “What’s the worst that could happen? They’d ground you?” I asked sarcastically, not wanting to think of what could happen to me.

  “I think I’ve been grounded for a while,” she said enigmatically.

  “What I’m asking is ‘Can we do
this again?’”

  “I would do it all over again tonight if I could.”

  I think it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.

  “Me, too,” I said. “Do you have plans for the weekend? Should I call you tomorrow?”

  “I don’t use the phone.”

  “You’re kidding. What do you mean you don’t use the phone?”

  “I have no friends,” she said candidly. “Except for you. And, well, my tennis coach and Hector—if you could call them my friends but they’re much older than I.”

  It was an odd admission. This girl was a maze; she grew more complicated the more I tried to navigate her.

  “I overheard Hector say that everyone’s going to be away next Friday. Can we get together then? Let’s say eight o’clock?” Matilda said.

  “Next Friday seems awfully far away.”

  “Oh, I know. Too far. What will you do in between Fridays?” Matilda asked.

  “Work, I guess,” I said, already envisioning how I would stuff the hours full so they would go quickly. “How about you?”

  “Tennis, bowling, school and perhaps play a few rounds of golf.”

  Golf was the first pastime Matilda had mentioned that required her to be off the estate. I perked up.

  “Where do you play golf?” I asked.

  “Why, here of course.”

  Just then the door to the basement opened and Hector shouted down the stairs, “Miss Duplaine?”

  Matilda put her index finger over my lips, to quiet us. It was surprisingly sensual.

  “Yes, Hector?”

  “I think you should prepare for bed.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Matilda called to him.

  The door closed. Matilda waited a moment until she seemed certain that Hector was out of earshot.

  “So,” she said then.

  “So.”

  “I guess this is the end.” She looked at me with eyes that said she hoped it wasn’t.

  It was that pause at the end of the evening when you savor every morsel of time, every crumb of it. I didn’t want to leave, so I made a bold move. I leaned closer to Matilda, touching my lips gently in that place where her face met her ear. Her shoulder blades tightened together and the wisps of blond hair on her arms stood straight up. It wasn’t necessarily a kiss, but I would remember it as our first. When leaving became inevitable, I escaped through the tunnel from where I had entered and ran through the night, the only tangible memory of the evening the scorecard in my hand.

  Twelve

  Days between seeing Matilda stretched out like taffy at a fair, and the next Friday seemed to arrive months later.

  During my week without Matilda I occupied myself with work, which had been exploding as though my career was a bright, bursting fireworks show, with the grand finale still to come. I was beginning to learn how Los Angeles worked. There were only a small handful of movie studios, record labels and A-list talent worthy of the written word. As a reporter, once you were accepted into that small clique, you had exclusive access to anything and anyone worth writing about.

  Matilda was vivid in my mind during our days apart, and I would wonder what she was doing at any given moment. At this point I was getting the strong impression she didn’t leave her house a lot, which led to further questions. For example, why wasn’t she in college? Why would such a sweet and affable girl have no friends? To that same point, who doesn’t use the phone? Matilda wanted to keep me a secret, but why would David care if Matilda had a friend visiting her? Then there were the odd social skills. The fancy dress for bowling, the uncomfortable silences, the awkward word choices all seemed incongruous for a girl who had grown up the daughter of one of the most sophisticated men in the city. And, of paramount importance, there was the fact that according to birth records Matilda Duplaine didn’t exist at all.

  There were always more questions than answers.

  I was at work, ready to head out to see Matilda, when my name was called twice across the pit, from two different angles. I opted for the front desk first.

  A cardboard box sat beside the receptionist, and my first instinct was to look around to see if there were other boxes piled up. There weren’t. The box wasn’t particularly big, but it was so weighty it must have been filled with rocks. It was labeled with my name in calligraphy, and its return address was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

  I opened the box to find what, oddly, appeared to be a miniature marble bench engraved with the words: Use What Is Dominant in a Culture to Change It Quickly.

  It took me a moment to realize that this marble bench was actually an invitation in its most decadent form: it requested my attendance at a costume ball in honor of a new wing of the museum donated by David Duplaine. As I shuffled through parking instructions, maps and the invitation—all separated by vellum—I found a handwritten note that said: “Thomas, I do hope you can come. Lily.”

  I glanced around the office, double-checking to see if I was the only one who got the invitation. It appeared so, as a couple of other reporters were hunchbacked over their computers, tossing side glances my way to see what the commotion was about. I quickly shoved the invitation under the desk.

  I then walked over to Rubenstein’s office, where he spent ten minutes wrapping up a phone call. There was a general cast of smoke to the room, the lingering effect of a few cigars most likely smoked earlier in the day.

  “I have good news and good news for you, Cleary,” Rubenstein said, after he had hung up. He leaned back deep into his chair.

  “Well, that’s good news.” I fidgeted a bit, now concerned I’d get to Matilda’s a few minutes behind schedule. I had a feeling she didn’t understand the concept of being late. And there was the no-phone thing, which made contacting her impossible.

  “Which do you want first?” Rubenstein asked.

  “How about the good news?”

  “You’re being made associate editor of the Los Angeles Times.”

  I was so stunned I was initially rendered speechless.

  “Wow, I don’t know what to say,” I eventually said when my vocabulary returned. As Rubenstein outlined a slight raise in my pay package and mentioned a new office was in the works, it registered: I had redeemed myself, finally, in Los Angeles.

  “And the good news...” Rubenstein introduced the second good news with such theatrics I was expecting a drumroll. “I’m sending you to New York to cover the art auctions. It’s a trip I usually take—my favorite of the year—but you’ve been working hard and they’re auctioning off the art from Joel Goldman’s estate. Lily called and suggested you were the ideal person to cover it, and I agree.”

  In fact, that last bit was not good news at all. First, it meant not seeing Matilda for an indeterminate amount of time. And second, such a high-profile art auction was bound to attract reporters from the Journal, and it was the ideal spot for Willa’s social frolicking.

  I forced a smile because I understood the size of the gift I was being given.

  “Thank you,” I said with as much earnestness as possible and a warm handshake to seal the deal. “I’m sure it’ll be a fantastic trip.”

  “You’re welcome.” Rubenstein was already shifting his focus to his cell phone, moving on to his next story.

  I lingered for a second longer.

  “How well do you know Lily Goldman?” I asked with forced casualness, as if it was an afterthought.

  “I’ve known Lily for almost thirty years,” Rubenstein answered. “She was always a bit of a strange one. But I gave her a pass. Growing up as the daughter of Joel Goldman couldn’t have been easy. That money didn’t make up for it. Well, maybe it did.”

  Rubenstein laughed, because in this world money made up for almost anything.

  “I’m sure not,” I said, tryin
g to continue the conversation, hoping it might yield something interesting. “Joel seemed like an interesting guy.”

  “Yeah, Joel and Lily had an odd relationship.”

  “It was contentious, you mean?”

  “At times.”

  “And Lily’s mother—what was she like?”

  “Different than the other wives of prominent people in this town. She was prettier than a movie star—a prim Southern girl from Tennessee or Georgia, someplace like that,” Rubenstein said dismissively, as if the places were all the same. “Cressida fell in love with Joel when he had nothing and everyone always believed it was out of rebelliousness. She was a wealthy debutante and he was a scrappy Jewish kid. Once Joel succeeded it was almost like she lost interest.” Rubenstein chuckled. “The opposite of every other woman in this town who waits for that exact thing to happen.”

  “Lily never married?”

  “Nope.”

  I was bolder than I had been just a few months earlier. Power did that, I had learned.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Are you interviewing me, Thomas Cleary?”

  “Off-the-record. Yes.”

  Rubenstein paused, as if filtering exactly what he should or shouldn’t say.

  “Lily was a carbon copy of Cressida. She could have had any man in the city and she chose their family’s stable hand. He was a good-looking guy—about a decade younger than her and as different from her dad as a cat from a dog. They were supposed to get married, but it didn’t happen. He ran off to someplace far away—Hawaii, I think it was—and never came back.”

  As eccentric and unusual as Lily was, this news had surprised me most of all. Refined Lily—Lily of the jewels, of the mansion, of the sedans with new leather—set to marry the guy who took care of her horses.

  “You seem surprised,” Rubenstein said, reading my mind. “Has LA jaded you so quickly that you think marriage for love is impossible?”

  “I’ve always believed marriage for love is possible—it’s generally others that don’t share that opinion.” I thought of Willa. “Who was he?” I asked. Suddenly this answer seemed integral to the mystery that had been puzzling me for weeks.