The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst

Author:Alex Brunkhorst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

When I woke up the next morning, Lily was already gone. She had left a note requesting I meet her for drinks at the Four Seasons that evening around ten. I considered phoning her to ask what this mysterious late-drinks meeting was about, but then remembered her habit of not accepting calls, so I figured it was futile.

I spent the day in work meetings. I went to the art auction houses to do some research, and while I was in town Rubenstein had arranged for me to interview a film actress who had just wrapped up a stint on Broadway.

I went back to the town house and showered before hailing a cab to take me downtown. I waited outside and in my periphery I thought I caught a man in a nondescript car watching me. When I looked his way he drove away, and I realized I was turning paranoid. David knew I was sneaking onto his estate, but there was a leap between knowing I was visiting his daughter and having me followed in New York. Besides, I told myself, I was only having dinner with an old friend. There was certainly no harm in that.

Nevertheless, as the taxi drove through streets stuffed with rush-hour traffic, I found myself glancing over my shoulder.

Willa had picked a restaurant in Tribeca, a glass, steel and brick eatery that served Italian food in low light, bad acoustics and small portions. We agreed to meet there at seven, but in typical fashion I had arrived early, so I sat at a bar with a mirror that ran all the way to the ceiling. The gimlet was Willa’s drink, so ordering that was not an option. I needed something that felt grown-up and masculine, as if I had graduated from her.

“An Old-Fashioned,” I said to the bartender, usurping David’s drink of choice.

I discreetly examined my reflection in the mirror between liquor bottles. I had aged better than Willa—the advantage of being a man and, I supposed, of having a wide frame and formidable jaw. While at Harvard I had a round, boyish face, but now my jaw seemed more squarely cut and my cheeks more angular. Gone was the messy shag, reminiscent of a Milwaukee kid on a baseball diamond—or track, as the case may be. My reddish-blond hair was cut closer to the scalp, and I still had a full head of it. I wore the checked shirt and gray wool pants Lily had brought me from Boston as a present for house-sitting.

I had met Willa during our junior year at Harvard. It was fall, and I had chosen to go to the banks of the Charles to study for a midterm. It was a postcard of an afternoon. The fog hadn’t lifted, and the air smelled of wet leaves and heavy smoke. It screamed so intensely of fall that for years that afternoon defined autumn for me.

I lay on my side on a blanket, damp from the grass. I was working on a term paper on Faulkner, scribbling commentary on As I Lay Dying in a notebook.

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