The Gilded Life Of Matilda Duplaine. Alex Brunkhorst
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of the Third Kind.
I cast a sideways glance at Carole. Her fingertips were so deeply burrowed in the leopard cat’s neck folds they disappeared to the knuckle. She hadn’t joined the group in laughter, hadn’t cracked a smile.
“How did you meet Lily, Thomas?” Carole was thirty-eight, but her voice was forty-eight and smooth as cognac. It was more of a purr than a voice.
“I’m doing a story on her father.”
The question didn’t seem like small talk, and I hoped I answered correctly. I had never been in the close presence of someone so famous, and I had yet to find that gray area between feigned ignorance and asking for an autograph.
“A great man, Joel Goldman,” Emma said, as she adjusted a feather in her hair and gave a peripheral glance to her husband. “George did the music for many of Joel’s films. Right, love?”
“David and I both worked for him. Were it not for Joel we wouldn’t be sitting here, or it would have had to happen some other way.”
An imaginary breeze rolled in. David Duplaine was still sitting, silently, in the corner, and now the group shifted their attention his way. Even the leopard cat gave a lazy glance in David’s direction before settling back under Carole’s palm.
David Duplaine was the chairman of a movie studio—the pinnacle of off-camera stardom in Los Angeles. But that wasn’t all. In addition to producing many of the world’s top-grossing movies, David had grown the studio’s subsidiary television network from infancy to its presently dominant state. He was now in the process of gobbling up major market newspapers and technology companies to create a media empire across all platforms. David was the most powerful media titan in the world.
My job at the Times wasn’t as much writing as it was reading—people. And I knew from the moment I saw him that David Duplaine would be a difficult man to read.
I avoided eye contact at first, homing in on his sneakers, which in any other city would be too young for a man of fifty. He wore a white T-shirt that might have been Hanes or Gucci but whatever the case fit perfectly. He was small of stature and build, and his head was shaved in the manner fashionable for men who are balding. His brown eyes were heavily lidded and bored looking, his eyebrows lively and interested and his strong nose as crooked as if it had survived a few street fights along the way. Yet the combination came together to form someone who was quite interesting looking and, in fact, he was always included in eligible-bachelor lists throughout the globe.
David hadn’t bothered to acknowledge me in any manner, but I felt his presence the way a gazelle feels a cheetah in the depths of night on the plains—he was there, waiting, and whatever my next move was it wouldn’t matter.
“Hello, everyone,” announced a woman’s voice.
I felt an extraordinary sense of relief when I saw Lily in the doorway. She was draped in black silk and her ivory necklace was gone in favor of wide cuffs that covered half her forearms in gold webs of pearls and emeralds.
“Lily!” Emma stood up and handed Lily a drink. “How are you, sweetheart? Those cuffs... I hate you for them.”
“Oh these—they’re terribly old and I never think to wear them. You can have them, in fact. I’ll messenger them to you tomorrow.” Lily smiled at me. “Most important, has everyone met Thomas?”
“Yes, yes. He’s lovely, absolutely lovely. And so good-looking,” Emma said, as if I weren’t in earshot. “Now let’s eat. I’m bloody famished.”
* * *
We passed through an arch to a saffron-colored formal dining room prepped to comfortably seat seven, though it could do the same for forty if larger-scale entertaining were in order. The first thing I noticed were the flowers—gothic, untamed arrangements of twigs, branches, berries and deeply colored, oversize, drooping roses.
The rectangular table was set with heavy gold plates, glass goblets and a tall candelabra that held so many candles the room seemed on fire. Emma was not one for fine china and dainty centerpieces.
I almost made the mistake of sitting down before seeing the place card with my name written in a medieval font.
“Thomas, you’re sitting next to me. I never seat couples beside each other. I figure we have enough time together as it is. Not that I don’t love my husband, because I do. Ridiculously so.” Emma blew George an air-kiss as she sat down at the head of the table.
Emma sat to my left, Carole my right. While the first course was served, my presence was still new and exciting. Lily and Emma shelled me with rapid-fire questions—“Do tell. What was it like to grow up in a town like Milwaukee?”—and Charles and George interjected here and there. They dropped plenty of names—movie stars, studio heads, political figures. Just hearing those names gave me a rush. I felt as if I was a part of it. Had I chosen to whip out my notebook or betray confidences, I would have had enough fodder for ten juicy stories. Instead I kept quiet, hoping an off-the-record meal would create more on-the-record content later.
The novelty of a stranger at the table had grown thin by the time we reached the entrée, and as I ate my Alaskan salmon theatrically drizzled with an exotic sauce and accompanied by a vegetable I didn’t recognize, I was generally ignored.
I didn’t mind being left out—situations like this were exactly why I had become a reporter in the first place. Although I could’ve chosen more lucrative occupations to be sure, my fascination with people had led me to the world of journalism. It was my job to observe behavior and collect information. For example, over the span of entrée to dessert wine, I noticed that Emma picked up a call from someone she later called her “stylist” and I saw George shoot his wife a “Don’t be rude” look when she did so. It was obvious that Lily didn’t care for Emma’s choice of heavy goblets by the way she lifted her glass a quarter inch off the table and then immediately put it back down, as if the sip of wine wasn’t worth the exertion. Charles and George seemed to be best friends—this was clear by the way they knew the minutiae of each other’s lives. Charles, for example, asked about the weekly Billboard numbers for one of George’s albums, and George in turn expressed concern for Charles’s pet pigeon that had mysteriously disappeared three mornings earlier.
Despite the odd pigeon comment, if I were to home in on the two most interesting characters at the table it would have been Carole and David. I say this because introverted people intrigue me. I always think they have something to hide or, at the very least, want people to believe they do. It was too early for me to say if this was the case here, but there was something about these two that made me want to know more.
I watched each of them closely, searching for clues. In the span of an entire dinner there was only one: just after our main course, David’s 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