The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine

by Alex Brunkhorst

  “Let’s dance,” I said, despite the fact the lounge was hardly the type of place anyone would dance. In fact, it wasn’t the type of place anyone would even be, as evidenced by the fact that an hour had elapsed and we were the only ones there.

  I leaned in closer and felt Matilda’s cheek on mine. Her hands slowly ran down my back. “Did you ever think we’d be here?”

  She paused. “I never wanted to allow myself to think about it, in case it didn’t happen.”

  “I remember that night in the bowling alley so well,” I said, after the song had ended.

  Matilda laughed. “You bowled four gutter balls in a row. That had to be a record of some kind.”

  “And you threw four consecutive strikes. You always beat me, Matilda Duplaine.”

  We swayed back and forth long after the song had ended, to the sound of strikes and gutter balls, laughter, and frustration. At the estate, Matilda had worn a nice dress and high heels to go bowling, but here she wore jeans and a T-shirt and no makeup. Her hair was in a messy ponytail, coarse from that magical elixir of salt water, sun and sand. She was, simply, gorgeous.

  “Thomas,” she whispered against my neck, electrifying me. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” I said. “I wanted this as much as you did.”

  “But wanting and doing are two very different things,” Matilda replied. “For all those years there were probably people who wanted me to escape—tutors or members of the staff—and maybe they even thought of helping me themselves. But they were too scared of my father, of his power, of what he might do to them. You were the only one who took the risk—and it was a big risk, I know that. I’ll owe you the rest of my life for what you did for me.”

  “Matilda,” I whispered into her ear. “I want you to know you don’t owe me anything. Ever. No matter what happens to us when we return. If we go back and I’ve been fired from my job, if they won’t let me into Los Angeles because your father has had me banned from the whole city. Remember, whatever the scenario, that there is no debt between us. I’m not a guy who believes in debts.”

  Matilda brushed my cheek with hers, and I’ll always remember it as her first real grown-up moment. She was dressed as a normal twenty-year-old girl, slightly drunk on cheap beer, dancing in a seedy lounge that had probably given birth to hundreds of one-night stands. I moved so close to her I could see the slight sunburn on her cheeks from our afternoon walk and a smattering of freckles under her eyes.

  I had spent the year since my mother died looking for her in familiar ways—songs on the radio, her favorite flower, on my childhood baseball field or in our church—but it was only now, in this remote place, that I found her. My mother had never been to Hawaii, but for the first time I felt she was with me, swaying back and forth beside me, enjoying my redemption.

  Twenty-Two

  The next morning Matilda and I drove to the beach for her first day of surfing school. I parked the car and gathered Matilda’s towel, sunscreen and hat in a beach bag. Beside us, teenagers, coppery tan like pennies, walked past holding longboards. It was a scene from a postcard—a scene that, as a boy in Milwaukee, I would have never really believed existed in real life.

  We walked toward the surfing school, a tent so rickety I was concerned it would be blown down the beach in a manner of moments. Surfboards, a large bucket of water and a haphazard pile of ratty beach towels sat on the sand, and hanging rash guards swayed to and fro in the wind. A group of about ten students had already arrived, and they stood in close proximity to each other, making small talk. When we reached the rest of the group Matilda stood in the outskirts nervously, shifting in the sand and glancing back at me. I was reminded of early grade school, that game of ring-around-the-rosy where someone was always left out.

  “You must be Matilda.” A Hawaiian girl of about Matilda’s age approached. She was for whom the term cute was coined—long dark hair, eager brown doe eyes. It was clear she was accustomed to this role—the task of prodding people into their first day in the surf.

  “Yes, that’s me,” Matilda said with a level of nervousness I had never seen, even when she confronted her father before we left the estate. “And this is my boyfriend, Thomas.” Matilda motioned in my direction.

  “I’m Lorelei,” the girl said to both of us, before focusing on Matilda. “What a cool name—Matilda. It’s so old-fashioned.”

  “It is?”

  I could sense Matilda’s self-consciousness.

  “You have a cool name, too,” Matilda remarked. “It slides off the tongue, like a lyric of a song.”

  “What a sweet thing to say,” Lorelei said. “Now, let’s get you your rash guard. You’re so tall and you look like you belong in a swimsuit magazine. I’m insanely jealous.”

  Matilda giggled and her cheeks went red. Just then a shaggy-haired guy approached and introduced himself as Isaac, Lorelei’s boyfriend and the surfing teacher. Isaac was good-looking in the way men who spend their lives being tossed around in the surf are. His face was already weathered and lined, and his blond mop had a greenish tint from the mixture of sun and seawater. I envied him, though, for his “right now,” carefree attitude. Within minutes of meeting Isaac I could tell he was the guy I never allowed myself to be. There were exams to take, races to worry about, parents to please, scholarships to maintain.

  Matilda slipped her flowered beach dress over her head and beneath was a one-piece bathing suit. I could tell by her scrunched-up nose that she was aware that the other girls, including Lorelei, wore bikinis and that maybe her swimwear choice was inappropriate. I thought I caught her glance in my direction, in a slightly accusatory manner, as if I should have informed her that one-piece bathing suits were—like her name—old-fashioned.

  Isaac called the group together and began his speech on water safety, pointing to an instructional card with pictures of stingrays and jellyfish, explaining what to do in a chance encounter. Lorelei then provided the students with their foam-topped surfboards, and Matilda practiced her pop-ups. With those long and gangly limbs she wasn’t the most graceful, and I watched her as she surreptitiously observed the other members of the class, gauging how she stacked up.

  Finally, after about half an hour, they were ready to go into the water. The rest of the group walked toward the surf together, and I noticed cliques already forming. There were three single people in the group—two guys and a girl—and they walked close together. The three couples had become fast friends, and Lorelei and Isaac carried the gear.

  That left Matilda alone, trailing behind the group.

  Matilda glanced behind her, in my direction. “Are you sure you don’t want to come, Thomas?” She asked it an almost-pleading manner, as if it wasn’t so much a question as a favor.

  In truth, I hadn’t been one for surfing—all that effort to get twenty seconds or so of wobbly bliss—but, more important, after seeing Matilda with her newfound group, I thought it was important that she go without me. There was the rest of life to think about—the world after Hawaii.

  “You go ahead,” I said, resisting the urge to kiss her on the forehead because it felt too fatherly. “Have fun.”

  Matilda headed toward the water, and I grabbed a towel from the pile and claimed a spot on the beach from where I could observe. Matilda fastened the surfboard’s leash around her left ankle and then paddled out on her stomach toward the waves. The waves were gentle, and she navigated through the water, pushing through the waves beside Lorelei.

  It seemed somehow significant, but I didn’t yet know how.

  Her first few attempts to get up were futile, but with Lorelei’s demonstration and a strong push from Isaac, Matilda finally got up. She excitedly looked toward me, and I gave her a wave of encouragement.

  By the lesson’s end, Matilda was getting up with regularity. When she finally joined me, she raved about the thr
ill of the surf, about the bursts of warm air and the cold. As she spoke I leaned in for a brief kiss, tasting the salt water on her lips.

  “Lorelei’s so nice,” Matilda said. “She has the best hair. Beyond shiny. So bright it glitters.”

  “Your hair is so bright it glitters, too,” I said, as I put my fingers through it.

  “My hair is terrible compared to Lorelei’s. I wish I had black hair.” Matilda took my hand and stopped it from coursing through her hair. “And she’s so skinny. I wish I looked like her.” She glanced at her curves with frustration.

  “That’s silly. You have a far better body than Lorelei,” I said. “Even Lorelei said you look like you belong in a swimsuit magazine.”

  “I don’t know what a swimsuit magazine is,” Matilda began. “But it’s not true. We’re surfing tomorrow, too.”

  I squeezed the beach towel beneath me, surprised by my sudden disappointment. I had found myself a glutton for Matilda—I was accustomed to having her every moment, all to myself.

  “Thomas, is that okay?” Matilda asked for grandfathered permission.

  “Of course,” I said, shaking off the jealously. “I’m glad you enjoyed the lesson.”

  Matilda and I stopped at the teriburger place on the way home, and as Matilda ate her fries with brown mustard and spoke adoringly about Lorelei, I thought about that time long ago in the conservatory when Matilda, dressed as Cleopatra, said her life had seismically shifted when she met me. It was Day Fifteen of our vacation, the midway point, and I somehow felt the same seismic shift. I couldn’t put my finger on how, but it was as if beneath us there were all these platelets rubbing together, and eventually that friction was going to move the earth, and it was never going to be the same.

  * * *

  Matilda and I drove to the surf the next day. I had come prepared this time—with a book and a few magazines to get me through the day. I parked, and I noticed that Matilda hesitated.

  “There’s no need for you to wait around, Thomas,” Matilda said, graciously, observing the other surfers, on their own. “Not that I wouldn’t love for you to stay, but yesterday you were the only one watching. And I felt, well, I felt a bit like a child. Everyone else is here by themselves—without anyone staying to watch. I’m not going to drown without you there.”

  “I didn’t think you were,” I said. “Going to drown.”

  “Oh, that came out wrong. It’s just—”

  “Of course,” I said, passing Matilda her beach bag. “I should do some work anyways.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to come,” Matilda said kindly. “I would love for you to watch, but—”

  “I know,” I said. “No offense taken here. Next time.”

  “Next time it is. It’s a date, then. For next time.”

  “For next time.”

  Matilda didn’t leave right away. Instead, she held her straw hat across her heart, then kissed me sweetly before opening the car door. She touched the sides of my hair, which were growing long.

  She got out of the car, and she walked across the wide beach. When she was about halfway to the shore, she turned around to see if I was still there. She waved, then turned away again before I lost her to the ocean.

  In fact, it had been a best-case scenario, as my fair skin had burned the day before, and truthfully I had been dreading sitting on a towel for the entire day with a book I wasn’t enjoying. But when I drove to the house, I found myself wondering how Matilda was faring without me, and wishing I was there beside her, watching her get up and waving to me on shore after she did. It was odd when I considered it: it was her first moment in the real world alone. And not only that, in my time with Matilda, I had been the one to leave her—for work, for events, for the art opening, for New York. Now, for merely one day, I had been the one confined to home, and I admit, selfishly, I felt left behind.

  It was eerily quiet at the house. The only sounds were the wind and the crashing of the waves. I walked outside, and I stared up at the wispy clouds that covered the blue sky like a coverlet of lace. I thought of Matilda, at the beach yesterday, riding the waves among her surf mates.

  It was here, in this first moment of quiet solitude I’d had since we arrived in Hawaii, that I began to think about the questions I’d left behind in LA.

  Who was Matilda really? I wondered. She had been held in virtual captivity—a science experiment of a girl who lived without social interaction for her whole life. And why had she been kept hidden for so long? As a reporter, the second question should have been the one I strove to answer, but I hadn’t.

  There was a story behind Matilda Duplaine. Of course there was. Here was a child who had been held captive by her media titan father on a vast estate in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the world. I thought back to the boy who had been a track star, to those subzero mornings in Wisconsin when I trained mercilessly toward my goal of being one of the fastest men in the five-thousand meter. That boy, the one who ran his way into Harvard, would have never let this story lie. But I had ignored it because I was in love with Matilda, and perhaps, subconsciously, I did not want to face the moral and ethical dilemma if I had discovered her lineage, why she had been kept in captivity for so long. It was a story that would expose Matilda to the world. Her privacy—the greatest luxury the estate offered her—would be effectively destroyed forever.

  Outside, under the low-hung roof that sheltered me from the wind, I pulled out a notebook and began jotting notes. I didn’t know which facts were relevant, but I scribbled what I had: the note from Lily to Joel explaining he had made a “mess of things” in France; the fact that Lily had been once engaged to Carole’s brother, her family’s stable hand, but something had gone irreversibly wrong. And then there were the birth records, which seemed to show no evidence of David Duplaine having had a daughter, despite the fact he clearly had. I wondered again if there was anything to my presumption that David and Carole were having an affair. Carole would have been eighteen when Matilda had been born, and there was little chance David would be carrying on the affair twenty years later. He would have married her long ago, but instead she married Charles.

  And Lily: resemblance might have been too strong a word, but there was one definite similarity between Lily and Matilda. Both had eyes of an unusual shade of green that I had never seen on any other creature. And there was something else vaguely familiar about the two—something I couldn’t put my finger on.

  Part of me had always believed that Lily Goldman was Matilda’s mother, but another part believed it unlikely. Certainly Lily could have given birth to Matilda when she was in her midthirties—that wasn’t the issue. Judging from her relationship with Carole’s brother, Lily wasn’t opposed to younger men, so it was possible she would have fallen for David, who was five years or so her junior. And David and Lily would have known each other at that point through Lily’s father. But that was where it stopped making sense.

  If Lily and David had a child, why would Lily have abandoned her? Lily was not the type of person to choose to live alone while her daughter lived down the street in David’s care. And what was so scandalous about David and Lily having a child that would have caused them to hide her? And, finally, Lily and David were both relatively small, whereas Matilda was almost six feet tall. Besides the blond hair and green eyes, Matilda would have borne little resemblance to either of her parents.

  So something wasn’t right. Either a piece of the puzzle was missing or it was right in front of me, hidden underneath other pieces.

  Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Five: Assumptions are the mother of all fuck-ups.

  But there was a distinction between an assumption and a gut feeling. Professor Grandy insisted a reporter’s gut was always to be followed, because gut was generally right. And the moment I had arrived at Joel Goldman’s vacation home, I had a gut feeling that it
held answers.

  I walked to the room I presumed was Lily’s. Like her parents’, Lily’s bedroom faced the ocean; and like her parents’, it was decorated sparely. It had yellow bedding, a plain wooden headboard, a vanity and a white dresser. On the dresser was a single crystal bottle of stale perfume.

  The closet held a row of hangers and spare linens. The dresser was empty, except for the bottom drawer, which stored clothing that appeared to be a teenage girl’s. I went through the clothing, jotting down in a notebook exactly what I found: a dress, two tank tops, two one-piece bathing suits and a shirt. So Lily had most likely spent time here as a teenager.

  I paused for a moment, reflecting on the estates of Bel-Air. They had grass sheared tightly as a general’s haircut, the foliage was sculpted or deliberately allowed to grow wild and a wayward leaf was a calamity. Joel Goldman and his daughter both had notorious control issues. Lily’s world—from the jewels to the shop to her home—was maintained as fastidiously as an accountant’s checkbook. Yet despite its claim on one of the most stunning bluffs in the Western world, this house had been effectively left to rot. Why had the family allowed it to dilapidate? Likewise, Lily had mentioned her father’s house in the South of France on multiple occasions, but she had rarely alluded to Hawaii, to this sprawling vacation house that had also belonged to her father. I wondered if perhaps there was a reason for this oversight.

  I looked around Lily’s childhood room again, feeling as if I had missed something. I opened the closet again, rubbing my fingers over the metal hangers that hung in a row. They clinked together and made a soft, but haunting, melody.

  There was something about Lily’s room that kept me there, that made me want to explore more thoroughly. I opened the drawers one more time, and when I closed the top drawer I felt something uneven under the dresser’s lip. I craned my head and saw a small key taped to the bottom of the dresser. I removed it.

  It was a tiny-toothed key, the type used to open a safe or maybe a drawer.