The story begins with a dinner party invitation…

When young journalist Thomas Cleary is sent to dig up quotes for the obituary of a legendary film producer, the man’s eccentric daughter offers him entrée into the exclusive upper echelons of Hollywood society. A small-town boy with working-class roots, Thomas is a stranger in this opulent world of private jets and sprawling mansions.

Then he meets Matilda Duplaine.

Matilda is a beautiful and mysterious young woman who has never left the lush Bel-Air estate where she was raised. Thomas is immediately entranced by the enigmatic girl, and the two begin a secret love affair. But what starts as an enchanted romance soon unravels a web of secrets and lies that could destroy their lives—and the lives of everyone around them—forever.

A modern-day Gatsby tale filled with unforgettable characters and charm, The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine is a sparkling love letter to Los Angeles and a captivating journey beyond the golden gates of its most glamorous estates. Timeless, romantic and utterly absorbing, it is a mesmerizing tale of privilege, identity and the difficult choices we make in the pursuit of power.

ALEX BRUNKHORST is a novelist and a real estate agent specialising in multimillion-dollar estates for Los Angeles’s wealthiest professionals. She is also the founder of the popular luxury life-style website Bungalux.com. The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine was inspired by Alex’s glimpse into the world of extreme wealth and privilege. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @alexbrunkhorst1, or visit her website at www.alexbrunkhorst.com

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To John

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Acknowledgments

Endpages

Copyright

One

The tinkle of an antique servant bell announced my arrival.

The shop was so cluttered with priceless art and centuries-old furniture that maneuvering among them was impossible. I stood in place, hoping someone would come to my rescue. Sixty seconds later, she did. I did not hear the opening or closing of a door, and there was nothing to indicate how she had entered the room. Had she been watching me from behind the ceiling-height Asian room divider she would have seen me grasping for distractions—my cell phone, my reporter’s notebook, a feigned interest in a chalk drawing that hung on the wall.

Nothing I had read could do Lily Goldman justice. She was in her midfifties, but she could have passed for forty-five. Her eyebrows were tweezed in an arched manner, and her blond hair was expertly coiffed in a tame bouffant that looked as if she had come from a salon. Her face was small and refined save for a prominent nose that belonged on a woman twice her size. It was her most striking feature, one that a less self-confident woman of means would have done away with years ago through plastic surgery.

“May I help you?” Lily asked. Her voice was surprisingly low, and it had a hint of a lady who smoked too much—though I was certain Lily had never picked up a cigarette in her life. Her breeding was too fine for that.

I discreetly rubbed my right hand on my pant leg, hoping to dry it. I reached over an antique oak writing desk, where my proffered hand hung in the air. She looked at it blankly.

“Yes, I’m Thomas Cleary. I’m a reporter, for the Times.”

For the first time she made eye contact, and I thought I detected a slightly favorable response, but then:

“I hate reporters. I never speak to the press,” she said.

“You must be Ms. Goldman.” Phil Rubenstein, my editor, had warned me about Lily Goldman’s disdain for journalists before sending me on this mission. I got the distinct impression he thought it would be fruitless.

She looked away, focusing on a bronze candlestick in the shape of a bird. She rotated the bird one hundred eighty degrees.

“Birds don’t migrate north, they migrate south. It is autumn, after all. This place is such a mess. I need to speak to the staff. Where did you go to school, Mr. Cleary?”

“You can call me Thomas. I went to Harvard.”

“At Harvard I bet they taught you that birds migrate south for the winter, north for the summer.”

“I recall picking up that tidbit at St. Mary’s, my grade school in Milwaukee.”

“A Catholic boy,” she said with a wry smile.

She waited for me to respond, but I didn’t. I was nervous because I was on what I hoped was my big-break assignment. It was my first and only story on the entertainment beat—a short retrospective on Joel Goldman, who had just passed away.

Despite the fact that we were only steps away from one of Los Angeles’s most bustling intersections, it was strangely quiet in Lily’s shop. I had come here straight from the paper, which was alive with phones ringing, keyboards clicking and frantic deadlines being met. Here, there hadn’t been a single phone call, not a single customer. No car had passed. There was a formal English garden in front, but its chaises were bare, and its birdbath and trees were devoid of birds.

“Were you taught by nuns in Milwaukee? I hear they can be terrible on the self-confidence,” Lily said.

“I was,” I said, nervously shifting my position. The reclaimed wood beneath me creaked. “It was Harvard that wiped away the self-confidence, though. The nuns weren’t so bad in comparison.”

“Milwaukee to Harvard. Quite the journey. Let’s just hope it was a one-way ticket out.”

“That’s still uncertain,” I replied—a gross understatement.

“And Los Angeles? Is this another layover or your final destination?”

“Yet to be determined, as well.”

Lily fixed her eyes directly on me. They were deep set and an extraordinary shade of green.

“Do your parents miss you?”

“My mother passed away a year ago.” The memory was still fresh and I forced down the lump that formed in my throat. “And, yes, my dad misses me. I’m an only child. He wants me to come home and work for the local paper. But a hundred thousand in student loans later I can’t bear to take a U-turn like that.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your mother...and the student loans.”

I detected no judgment in Lily Goldman’s words, but I suddenly felt embarrassed by the fact that I had referenced the death of my mother and my student loans in the same sentence.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-six.”

“She died young, then?”

“She was forty-eight. Pancreatic cancer.”

“It must have been devastating.”

Few people had taken this level of interest in my life since my mom had died, and I almost forgot why I was there to see her. I wanted to sit down in the distressed leather chair to my right, light a cigarette and tell Lily Goldman everything—about my mother, who shriveled into a skeleton while I toiled on inconsequential stories thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, a city I hated; about my grade school piano teacher, Sister Cecilia, who whacked my knuckles with an iron ruler; about the kids who used to pick me last for Red Rover.

And I wanted to tell her about Manhattan. What had happened there.

Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number One: Never let your subject change the subject.

“Enough about my situation. I apologize for taking so much of your time,” I said. Even as a young boy I had always shunned attention, particularly from strangers, and here I was escorting Lily into the dark corners of my life rather than visiting hers. “I’m very sorry to hear of your father’s passing. We’re doing a piece on him, and I was hoping you could give me a quote or an anecdote, something that will make the reader know him better—something to remember him by.”

“Ah, yes, my father.”

At first that was all she said. I didn’t blame her, because he was that kind of man. Joel Goldman’s story was as legendary and epic as the movies he had brought to the screen. He had grown up in Nazi-occupied Poland, escaped the gas chamber, passed through Ellis Island as a boy with only a nickel in his pocket and within ten years catapulted his way from reading scripts in RKO’s story department to creating one of the big movie studios.

According to Joel Goldman’s former business associates, Joel had been known for his micromanagement, and that was putting it kindly. When he stepped on set—which he did almost daily—he practiced lines with his leading ladies, he whispered in his directors’ ears, he berated craft services for everything from dry strudel to weak coffee. In the age of typewriters, Joel had been known to tear up entire first acts and shred them to the floor while horrified scriptwriters looked on. He scoured expenses to the penny and had been a ruthless negotiator. As a former studio chairman had anonymously told me over the phone that afternoon, “If Joel Goldman sat across from you and you dropped a penny on the floor, he would pick it up and put it in his own pocket and consider himself the luckier for it.”

My strongest trait as a journalist was not in asking, but in listening. So I waited.

“A hell of a man, my father,” Lily finally said. “The first man to produce a movie that made a hundred million dollars. Can you believe it? He started a movie studio when he was only twenty-eight years old. That’s unimaginable. Nowadays boys your age are pushing mail carts at talent agencies, not winning Academy Awards. That was the golden age of the cinema, of Hollywood. Bogie and Bacall used to come to our house in Cap d’Antibes for tea.”

She smiled at the memory, and then I lost her behind the Asian screen. “Have you been to Antibes?” she called.

“I can’t say I have.”

Lily reemerged. She stared at an imaginary point in the distance through heavily leaded antique glass that distorted the outside garden. “We used to sit on the veranda, watch the boats and sip tea with rum. I know it sounds awful, but it’s the most delightful drink. It was there that Bette Davis auditioned for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The sea there is incredible, so green—so different than the sea in Los Angeles.”

“It sounds wonderful,” I said.

“The most exciting time of my life. I often think—well, it sounds silly—but I often think that if we go to Heaven we’ll be allowed to live our lives again, fast-forwarding through the bad times, of course.” She looked away, as if she might have revealed too much to a stranger. “I would go back there. To those times with my father in the South of France. I have no use for Hollywood. I only care for what it bought us.”

She glanced at the notebook, unopened in my hand. I hadn’t written a thing. It might have been nerves, or maybe Lily’s personal memories were like coins she had dropped to the ground by accident. Unlike her father, I could not pick them up while she was steps away from me. It would be stealing.

“Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?” she asked.

“What?”

“The quote.”

“Yes, that’s perfect.” I scribbled to catch up.

“I figured as much. Intimacy—it’s what we’re all looking for.”

She focused squarely on me again, this time homing in on my clothes. I had picked up the shirt several years earlier in Cambridge at a discount store and had ironed the shirt and pants myself that morning. The result was deep creasing that was worse than if I had let the dryer have its way with them.

“How does the paper allow its reporters to dress like they just came from a late night of too much drink?”

Lily wore all brown—sweater, knee-length skirt and two-inch pumps. But even in its singular color and simplicity the outfit bled money. The ensemble brought to mind a Parisian tailor on hands and knees with pins in her teeth. The only pizazz in the outfit was a substantial ivory necklace. I had only known Lily for a few minutes, but it already made sense. Diamonds could still be bought on the open market; elephant tusks could not.

Lily made a small adjustment to my collar, and her hands rested on my upper spine. It had been a long time since a woman had touched me, and I tightened.

As a reporter I was trained to see the tiniest of clues—those fragments and fingerprints others could only see under a microscope. There was, at that moment, a brief spark in Lily’s green eyes. And then, just as quickly as her eyes bloomed, they withered and went almost black.

I had thought that Lily had been the one to bare her soul in this interview, but instead she had set the course so I would be the subject who revealed too much.

“You’re a very handsome young man. Don’t let poor clothing choices get in the way of that,” she said, before calling out to the other room, “Ethan, come here.”

A few seconds later a slight man around my age entered through the French doors in the back.

“Yes, Ms. Goldman.” He spoke in little more than a whisper, and if his slim-fitting attire was off-the-rack it was off an expensive one.

“Thomas here is going to be attending dinner this evening. Please arrange with Kurt to pick him up.”

“Thank you for the invitation,” I interjected. “But I have a deadline, and I’m not exactly the fastest typist.”

“That’s one thing you’d think the nuns would have done right,” Lily said. “It’s a fabulous group—some of the guests worked with my father and are quite newsworthy in their own rights. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

In truth, I generally would have forgone a dinner party invitation, but if there was any opportunity for this dinner to beef up my story on Joel Goldman I knew I had to attend. I gave Ethan my address in Silver Lake, an area on the east side of Los Angeles known as a bastion for artists—all of them hipper than I. Ethan arranged for me to be picked up at seven o’clock sharp.

“Good. It’s decided, then,” Lily said. “Thomas, I’ll see you soon. Ethan, make sure everything goes smoothly.”

Lily would soon disappear behind the Asian screen, but just before she did, she turned around and set her eyes on me one more time.

“Once again, I’m sorry about your mother, Thomas. You must be terribly lonely.”

Before I could respond, Lily had vanished among the antiques.

Two

And so that was how it began. Simply, without the fanfare one comes to expect from an evening that turns life’s course from left to right. I called Phil Rubenstein to let him know I would be late with the story. Rubenstein hated slipped deadlines, but once I informed him that I would be joining Lily and a “newsworthy” cast for dinner, he let this one slide a few hours to accommodate the extra research. He then shocked me by changing the story from a one-column to two.

I had only one sport coat—a sales-rack special from a big-and-tall store in Milwaukee. I was tall and broad in the way Midwestern Germanic men are, but I was not big enough to fill out the coat properly, and its fit had always been loose. I was hoping Lily wouldn’t notice. I splashed on some aftershave I had got for college graduation, and I slid my notebook and tape recorder into my jacket’s interior pocket.

At precisely seven o’clock, my building’s downstairs buzzer rang. An Asian man of about fifty, with an expression stern as his handshake, stood at the door.

“I’m Kurt,” he said in the same manner one might use to greet a girl not attractive enough to sleep with.

“I’m Thomas, from the Times.” I added that last part as an afterthought, as if it somehow legitimized me.

Kurt opened the back door of a silver Mercedes sedan and I slid in. It smelled of new leather. I suspected Lily was the type of woman whose cars always smelled of new leather. An Evian water and, coincidentally or not, today’s Los Angeles Times rested in the seat pocket. I opened the paper to the Local section. My one-column article on the proposed 405 Freeway expansion was on page three.

I put the paper back in the seat pocket as we headed west down Sunset Boulevard, toward the sea, as Lily Goldman had called it. I had never been driven by a private driver before and I didn’t know if I was meant to make conversation or sit in silence. I decided to take Kurt’s cue. He didn’t address me once during the hour-long journey; he listened to classical music on the radio and never glanced into the rearview mirror unless it was to change lanes.

Finally, after our long sinuous trip across town, Kurt put on his blinker, preparing for a sharp right into a narrow road that traveled between colossal white walls. A filigree black-iron signpost announced where we were going. The words Bel-Air lit up the twilight in a curious shade of blue-white, the color of an ice-skating rink. The words were written in an old-fashioned glitzy font embellished with curlicues and arcs. It was a font from the days when more meant more.

Bel-Air wasn’t gated, as some Los Angeles communities were. Instead, it was simply known as a place that commoners like me didn’t visit.

We took a soft left and then a sharp right, and then we drove through the winding hills. I opened the tinted window halfway. We were a mere thirteen miles away from my apartment, but the air felt as if it had rolled in from another lifetime. It was foggy and cool, and it smelled of smoke from real chimneys, of lawns freshly cut, of hedges just pruned and of autumn-blooming flowers. Silver Lake reeked of the pavement and the people who slept on it.

The few street signs I made out from the window had regal names, and if you were looking from the street you would think there were no houses here, only thirty-foot hedges, iron gates and video cameras. The tight streets, two-acre parcels and light traffic had the makings of a neighborhood, but there were no sidewalks. From what I could tell, people here didn’t borrow sugar—they sent their drivers to the store for it.

Flowers hung from heavy vines and wept into the narrow streets, squeezing them even tighter. We didn’t have foliage like this in the rest of Los Angeles, and I wondered if the flowers were indigenous to only these six square miles. Perhaps the rain here was different, or maybe even the sun preferred Bel-Air. I reached out my window, and I plucked one of the dew-swept flowers off its vine, allowing it to wither between my thumb and index finger before placing it in my interior jacket pocket beside my tape recorder.

Even as a little boy I had always been fascinated by wealth. I grew up in a working-class family, and while my teenage friends were content playing in the streets in Milwaukee’s rough inner city, I chose my running path along Lake Michigan, where behemoth mansions reminded one of another era, an era when the industry of the Midwest made millionaires. I dreamed of living in those manors with owners who didn’t have a care in the world. At fifteen, when it came time for employment, I eschewed fast food or gas stations. Instead, I worked for an older, wealthy gentleman by the name of Mr. Wayne. I had always been mechanically inclined, so in the evenings my head would be bent over the guts of his expensive hot-rod collection bringing dead cars back to life. In summers, I was a golf caddy at Milwaukee’s most expensive country club, even though it required multiple bus transfers to get to work. And then at Harvard, I was surrounded by wealth unimaginable for a boy from the working class of the heartland. For the first time in my life, money seemed accessible, something I could get. All I had to do was work in the world of investments, as most of my college buddies had done. When it came down to it, though, I had chosen a different path—one that would keep me firmly in the lot of the middle class for the rest of my life.

Old iron gates opened. We hadn’t announced ourselves, but tiny video cameras blinked red in the eyes of the stone lions.

The steep, narrow driveway ended at a cobblestone motor court with an ornate fountain depicting sea nymphs at play. Prehistoric-looking foliage surrounded an old stone Spanish-style mansion. The cacti were ten feet tall and blue lights illuminated trees with spiky leaves and exotic flowers.

I tapped the front door’s heavy knocker. I heard the clackety-clack of heels on a tile floor and the door opened. A house cat with spots like a leopard sprinted across the foyer.

The woman was in her late thirties and dressed for a rococo costume party, not an intimate dinner. Her outfit featured a tortoise-and-feather headpiece, white fur shawl, snakeskin pants so tight they might have been painted on and six-inch ostrich heels. I thought of Lily’s ivory necklace. I wondered if wearing endangered species was a status symbol in all of Los Angeles’s social stratosphere or just this specific circle of it.

“You must be Thomas. Come in. You’re pale. It looks like you could use a drink. And a trip to Tahiti. But we can take care of that later.”

We stood in a two-story entry the size of a ballroom. Red wax candles served as wall sconces and the only man-made light came from an overhead chandelier adorned with dragons and crystals. Juliet balconies above us were empty, but I got the sense that during grander parties violinists played there and during more intimate ones men and women did.

“Everyone, this is Thomas, Lily’s friend,” the woman who answered the door said, leading me from the foyer to a smaller room.

She did not bother introducing herself, but her manner was as theatrical as her attire and her words echoed on the stone. The four other people in the room hushed on cue, and I was embarrassed by their silence, their undeserved stares. In order to divert my eyes, I took in the room’s zebra chairs, antlered sconces and mirrored ceilings, wondering if I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

“Thomas, darling, what are you drinking?” the oddly dressed woman asked.

I scanned the group with the corners of my eyes. There was no Lily. My heart quickened, and I was so nervous I briefly and irrationally thought that I had shown up to the wrong party.

“Sweetheart. Is everything okay?” the woman pressed me, after her question had gone unanswered.

She stood beside the type of formal mirrored bar you would’ve found in a 1920s Art Deco speakeasy in Manhattan. There were no off-the-shelf bottles; liquor was kept in heavy crystal decanters. Sterling silver–framed snapshots surrounded the crystal on all sides. It was then that I realized Lily Goldman had invited me to a dinner party at someone else’s house.

I paused for a moment. I needed to choose a drink that was both elegant and available in one of those anonymous bottles. I thought of my ex-girlfriend—she had been a girl who would have known what to order in a scene like this. A gimlet. That had been her drink of choice.

“Yes. Sorry. A gimlet, please. On the rocks.”

“A gimlet—how old-fashioned and moneyed of you. I’ll have to remember that,” she said. “I love anything old-fashioned. Right, George?”

“And moneyed, which is the only reason you fell in love with me,” George said with a glint in his eye, as if he knew it was true but was also flattered by it.

“Fell in love maybe, but stayed in love no. California’s a community property state. Even half your money would’ve kept me in couture and a G5,” she said as she squeezed three slices of lime into the drink she had prepared.

George walked over and preemptively sandwiched my hand in both of his. His squeeze was more appropriate for a long-lost high school chum than a random dinner-party crasher, and I immediately liked him for it.

“George Bloom. My wife, Emma, has many wonderful traits—I love her dearly—but introductions aren’t one of them. Welcome to our humble abode.”

So this was why Rubenstein had so easily moved my deadline.

Everyone knew George Bloom as the most powerful man in the music business. He grinned, and his large-toothed smile was as wide as his jaw was formidable. It was easy to imagine him bestowing that same charming grin on musicians he wanted to sign to his record label—with great success. Unlike his wife, whose outfit must have been the result of vintage binge shopping and weeks of planning, George wore a golf shirt and khakis more appropriate for a round of links than a dinner party. I was sure his casual attire was neither picked nor approved by Emma, so George’s message was clear: he was boss of this castle.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Thanks for having me.”

“It’s our pleasure, truly. Lily’s on her way. In the meantime, come in. Meet the rest of the group.”

George placed his hand on my back, nudging me deeper into the drawing room.

A gimlet magically appeared in my hand, and I studied it, not knowing if I was supposed to wait for a toast. George saw my hesitation. His eyes said, “Go ahead, drink, young man.”

I took a hurried sip of my drink. In the corner, I caught a glimpse of David Duplaine, undisputedly Hollywood’s most powerful man. He leaned back in his chair, tips of his fingers together so his hands formed a pyramid, his legs crossed. I diverted my eyes from his and focused on the sofa.

“Carole, Charles, David...everyone, this is Thomas. Thomas is a close friend of Lily’s.”

Carole Partridge was one of the most famous actresses in the world, and here she was, within ten feet of me, lounging on a purple velvet sofa, stroking the leopard cat. She balanced herself on a bony elbow and a curvy hip, and her pale bare feet were the equivalent of George’s golf shirt—proof she was important enough to do whatever she damn well pleased.

Reality and fantasy briefly merged and I felt as if I was looking at Carole on-screen from the first row in a movie theater. Her retro-hourglass figure was the stuff of Playboy. Her arms and legs were lean and muscular. Her hazel eyes were sleepy in a seductive way, and her flawless, milky-white skin seemed as if it belonged in a black-and-white film—Technicolor, or real life, made it appear almost fake.

“Would you like me to get up?” Carole asked in a bored manner, as if after three minutes in the room my presence was already growing old.

“Not necessary,” I declared.

Carole’s husband, Charles, stood up in her stead.

“Thomas, nice to meet you,” Charles said. “Sit down, join us. We were thrilled when Lily said she invited you. We need some new blood around here.”

Charles had the general aura of someone for whom work had always been optional. His speech was tinted with a rarified East Coast accent that was most likely cultivated with lacrosse buddies at Choate or a place like it. At Harvard I knew plenty of guys who were born into a lifetime of financial security, and they, like Charles, always seemed to have a general calm about them, as if their money was a superpower.

“Thanks,” I said, settling into a chair and taking a long sip of my gimlet.

“Lily tells us you’re a reporter,” George said.

“That’s correct.” I focused intensely on my drink, experiencing a bit of stage fright. At the mention of the word reporter the tape recorder felt heavier in my interior pocket, reminding me of my second-class and gauche life.

“A friend of mine—may he rest in peace—always said that the difference between journalists and reporters is that journalists lie, reporters just make shit up,” George said.

“In that case I’m a journalist. I’ve never had a good imagination. If I did I would have been a novelist or written for the movies,” I replied.

“Charles just wrote a screenplay DreamWorks bought for seven figures,” George said genially. There was a ring of pride in his voice.

Something about George reminded me of Mr. Wayne, the gentleman with the hot-rod collection I had worked for in high school. They both oozed charm and seemed inclined to grab your hand, squeeze it and escort you to that glorious and splendid place where they had ended up.

Charles smiled good-naturedly. “The stock market was flat so I was bored. I copied one of Spielberg’s movies scene by scene, inserting different names and monsters.”

There was a hearty round of laughs from the group.

Though I had only just met Charles, I could already imagine him alone in a plush home office, sitting at an old-fashioned typewriter, a heavy glass of Macallan 21 beside him, and the rest of the bottle close enough to be in eyesight but too far for a refill. The television on the wall would be paused on a scene from Close Encounters 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 minutes later the group congregated for a postdinner brandy in what Emma called “the card room.” I had never been to a house with a room dedicated to cards before, but it made sense since Emma had specifically said that she loved “anything old-fashioned,” and cards would have certainly fallen into that category.

The glass room was lined in lattice more suitable for the outdoors than an interior space, and its plants had been allowed to run wild. Two oversize square tables were illuminated by massive pagoda-shaped chandeliers, their crystals generously casting off light.

Admittedly, I had never been a card guy—in fact, I didn’t even know how to play simple games like bridge or poker—so I excused myself to make a phone call, but instead slipped outside to have a stealth cigarette, a habit I had picked up a few years earlier and never quit. I settled into a lounge chair next to a grass-bordered body of water that resembled a swamp. Its water was green and murky and my eye caught an occasional minnow swimming beneath its lily pads. Were it not for the diving board at the northwest end, I wouldn’t have even known it was a swimmable pool.

I lit a match and put it to the tip of my cigarette. What a night it had been. I was here in Bel-Air with some of the most important people in a city full of important people. I was so high I never wanted to come down. I knew Lily’s motive for the invitation, and it had nothing to do with feeding a sweet Midwestern kid a home-cooked meal. Over crème brûlée, Lily had insisted everyone at the table give me quotes about her father. She was no fool, and she knew that favorable quotes from some of the most important people in the industry carried heavy weight.

But then I reflected on a scene from that afternoon—of Lily’s fingers on my neck. I wondered if there had been some other reason for Lily’s invitation.

I took a puff of my cigarette. I watched its golden tip light the clear, starry Bel-Air sky. We were in the middle of the city, but the quiet sky belonged in a countryside somewhere. It made me feel vaguely existential, as if above and beyond us there was nothing—nothing to hope for, no afterlife, nothing to make us choose one course of action over another.

The leopard cat jumped onto my lap and snapped me out of my reverie. Just then I heard a slight rustle from a dark spot in the corner of the property.

I saw a single shadow, but then it divided in half—into two separate shadows. The gestures of their hands and their body contact indicated a familiarity, and I was certain they were two of the dinner guests who had slipped outside for a side conversation. But despite my journalist’s curiosity, I instinctually turned away. I had always felt uncomfortable intruding on others’ privacy, so I looked at the swimming pool instead. An orange minnow slithered against the pool’s muddy edge, and the leopard cat’s eyes grew large, but he didn’t pounce.

Then, as quickly as they had appeared, the shadows were gone.

I finished my cigarette and headed back into the house.

“Wanna come in, big guy?” I asked the leopard cat, whose eyes shone like green lights. I held the door open for him, but he darted away into the deep black night.

I found the card room on my second try. I opened the huge wooden doors, expecting to find two of the dinner guests absent. They were all there, though, engaged in a six-person game of poker. I shouldn’t have finished the cigarette.

“Thomas, where did you disappear to?” Lily said.

“I fold.” Carole threw in her cards.

“I fold,” George repeated.

“The swimming pool,” I said.

“Would you like to borrow a bathing suit?” Emma asked. “We usually swim in the buff, but we have extras in the pool house.”

“No, thank you. I went outside for a cigarette.”

“I fold,” David said.

“You’re so silly, Thomas.” Emma presented me with a gold ashtray in the shape of a lion. “I bought this at the Duquette sale and I have been absolutely dying to use it. Besides, smoke makes the house feel lived-in. That was my goal with all this—” She spread her arms out wide. “Can’t you tell?”

I almost started to laugh, but then caught the seriousness in her eyes.

“Well, you’ve done a good job of it,” I said, lifting a brandy—a drink I hated—in toast.

Emma smiled before returning to her card game. There was nothing about this mansion that would indicate Emma Bloom’s desire to make it feel lived-in—not the cold stone floors that echoed conversation, not the swampy swimming pool, nor the stiff-backed zebra-covered chairs in the drawing room.

I sat on the outskirts of the game, watching as Emma shuffled with the expertise of a Vegas casino dealer. I thought again of the shadows outside, of Carole and David’s exchange at dinner. Sure, I was here to pull some quotes on the recently departed Joel Goldman. But something told me the real story was much bigger and more far-reaching than that.

Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Two: The dead are only interesting in the context of the lives they left behind.

* * *

“I hope you don’t mind—we’re going to drop David off. His driver fell ill unexpectedly, poor thing,” Lily said, as Kurt helped her into her champagne mink shrug, which seemed too warm for the weather. “He only lives around the corner. It won’t be much out of our way.”

“Of course,” I said.

Kurt opened the car doors for us. David sat in the front, Lily and I in the back.

While Kurt had listened to classical music on our long drive, now the station was tuned to the radio affiliate of David’s cable news network.

It was only a block away, and we drove it in silence. The radio commentator was the only one who spoke. He pontificated, with left-wing conviction, about the upcoming presidential election. In the Midwest this one block would have been a nice after-dinner walk, but there were no pedestrians in Bel-Air. The streets were too narrow and the people too rich for that.

We took one turn before stopping in front of an impressive barricade of palatial gray iron gates. They were simple and unadorned, and they opened like magic.

We passed through the gates into the grandest estate I had ever seen. We had just come from a property so magnificent it took my breath away, but compared to David’s estate, Emma and George’s felt humble. The long driveway meandered through acres of gently rolling hills sparsely dotted with trees. At the end of the driveway was a grand old Palladian manse. The first floor was glowing. Upstairs, only one room was lit, its curtain closed.

My first reaction was to notice how impersonal David’s estate seemed. The regal house was surrounded by carefully pruned formal gardens and thirty-foot hedges.

We stopped in the octagonal motor court.

“Thanks for the ride, Kurt,” David said. “Lily, I’ll call you in the morning.” He looked at me intensely, with that incongruous combination of bored eyes and lively eyebrows. I was captivated. “And, Thomas—” David let the name sit by itself for a moment. “I look forward to reading the article on Joel. And I wish you the best of luck at the Times.”

They were the first words David had said to me all night.

A valet attendant in his midtwenties dressed in starched whites opened David’s door for him.

“Welcome home, Mr. Duplaine,” he said.

Before I could say thank-you or good-night, the valet had already closed David’s door behind him. Kurt turned off the radio. I watched through the tinted glass as David was briskly escorted through the front door by a butler. Soon after, the upstairs light went dark.

Three

It was one of those magical nights I didn’t want to end. So when Lily invited me over for a nightcap I accepted.

Once we left David’s manor, it was a turn, a turn and another quick turn before we arrived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Kurt pointed a clicker at a gate covered by flowers. We drove up the cobblestone driveway slowly, arriving at a large stucco manor with ivy crawling up its walls so densely the windows were mostly covered with leaves. Like Lily, the refined and glamorous place seemed as if it belonged more in the South of France than in Los Angeles. I guessed the property to be an acre or so—smaller than the Blooms’ and tiny compared to David’s. But it was lusher than both; the house was nested in the most stunning flowers and trees I had ever seen.

Kurt opened the thick antique front door and we walked into a small foyer that was too diminutive for a house of this magnitude. Moments later I understood: the foyer was meant to set expectations low, to make the fifty-foot-long living room appear even grander.

The house was furnished in the same manner as Lily’s shop. Heavy antiques rested beside modern chalk art; bookcases were filled to the brim with rare books that were wrapped in cellophane to fight off dust. Almost miraculously, ivy grew along the leaded glass doors and crawled up the interior walls to the ceiling.

“What are you drinking?” Lily asked, as she walked to a smaller version of the Blooms’ bar.

“Water’s great. Thanks.”

Lily poured Evian water into a glass made of tortoise shell.

“The ivy—how does it live?” I asked.

“It doesn’t,” Lily said. “With no sunlight or fresh air it dies.” Lily pointed to the ceiling, to ivy that was brown and petrified.

Lily picked up a lemon but then couldn’t find a paring knife. Her eyes briefly searched for Kurt, before she abandoned the idea of sliced lemon altogether and gave me my room-temperature water as is.

It struck me as odd how Lily and her friends employed housefuls of servants but then did random things for themselves. For example, Lily had referenced “the staff” in her shop, but she had busied herself moving antiques. Likewise, Emma had personally answered the door and prepared my gimlet, but the staff-to-dinner-party-guest ratio in that household appeared around two to one. And David: in the span of a three-hour dinner, had his driver really fallen too ill to drive one block?

Lily sat on the couch, her bare feet curled beneath her. She unclasped her cuffs, and she placed them on the table beside her as if they were handcuffs she had been eager to unshackle. She then shivered, though two wood-burning fireplaces taller than me flanked the room, with fire reaching to their brims. Kurt must have stoked the embers for hours before Lily had returned home.

Kurt walked in with a cup of hot tea on a silver tray.

“Did you have a nice time?” Lily asked.

“Yes, thank you so much for the invitation.”

“It can be a bit difficult being the seventh. Some say it’s unlucky, but I think you handled it very well. And it was delightful to have someone under the age of thirty around. I so rarely rub shoulders with youth anymore.”

Lily smiled approvingly, and I again noticed how attractive she was. It wasn’t that in-your-face kind of beauty Carole possessed. Lily’s father had been rich, so her mother had probably been pretty. That was how the world worked.

As if reading my mind, Lily leaned to her left and picked up a silver-framed black-and-white photo.

“If you haven’t decided on a photo for your story yet, this would be a delightful choice. My father adored my mother, absolutely adored her, and it would paint a much fuller picture of him than some snapshot of him at his desk running the studio.”

I studied the photo. Joel Goldman and his wife were walking down steps from a jet. Lily’s mother was so beautiful she could have been one of Joel’s starlets. She wore a raincoat and gloves, and a loose printed scarf knotted below her chin covered her head so only a bit of her blond hair showed. Oversize earrings dangled three inches below her ears. They were incongruous with the rest of the outfit, as if her jewels were a form of rebellion.

And her husband, he was big all over—big face, big blond hair, big eyes, big crooked nose, big presence and two hundred pounds of stone for a body. The only things wiry about Joel Goldman were his glasses. Despite his wife’s beauty, it was Joel who was the center of the photo.

In the background, behind the couple, was a guy I recognized as a much younger David Duplaine.

“When was this photo taken?” I asked.

“Eighteen years ago—give or take a year. When you’re my age they all blur. I only remember the really good or really bad ones—and sometimes not even those.”

“Is that David?” I asked, pointing at the figure in the background. David seemed to be onstage, but positioning himself just beyond the spotlight.

“Yes.” Lily smiled.

“You’ve known him a long time, then.”

“Over a quarter of a century. David was a hustler. He grew up in Queens and lied his way into a talent agency. He told them he graduated from college but he didn’t. In fact, David never much believed in the value of school. Education—that he believed in. David is the most educated man I know, but not through formal schooling.” Lily sipped her tea. “The agency found out, and he would have been fired had my father not made a phone call. David would have done well anyways, but he always thought that phone call saved his life. He can be so melodramatic—David.”

In fact, in a city that thrived on the theatrical, David was never portrayed as the dramatic sort. One of his films could bomb, a newspaper could win a Pulitzer, a television show could sweep the Emmys, and David would handle all three scenarios with the same stoicism.

For the first time I wondered if Lily was what we in journalism would call a reliable source. Or, conversely, perhaps Lily was right. Maybe David and the rest of them were always smiling for the cameras, but their real lives—the ones that took place in the dressing rooms of very expensive real estate—had nothing to do with their public personas.

To avoid Lily’s eyes I looked at the ivy. It was spotlighted, and its shadows played on the ceiling.

Lily, for her part, studied her tea. Its exotic scent combined with the smell of burned wood made me think of the Orient.

Lily took a sip of her tea before continuing, “David worked at the talent agency for a few years, and then my father gave him two million dollars to start his own production company. He had the magic touch, as they say in the movies, and a few years later the company was rolled into the studio—and David made the transition to running it. And the rest is history.”

“That was quite the gamble. For your father, I mean.”

“All great businessmen are gamblers in one way or another. My father was no exception. Many of his leading ladies had never been in a picture before. He’d take a chance on a girl if she had je ne sais quoi. He optioned a screenplay from his driver that became one of his highest-grossing films.” Lily’s green eyes traveled far away. “In fact, my father loved to gamble, but his vice wasn’t the stock market or the horses. It was people.”

“It doesn’t sound like a vice if he won.”

“Generally, but not always. Sometimes the house wins,” Lily said distantly. “And how about you, Thomas Cleary, are you a gambler?”

I hadn’t thought of it before. But now I considered Harvard—how I had got there. And Los Angeles—how I had crawled out of the rubble of my life to end up at one of the most prestigious papers in the country. And then there was Willa. By pedigree I should have been a member of her staff, but instead I had spent years with her heart resting—precariously, it would turn out—in my palm.

“Yes, I guess you could say I am—a gambler.”

“I could tell, the moment I met you. Midwesterners are typically horribly risk averse, but I pegged you for the type to throw your chips down,” Lily said with what might have been a glint in her eye. “What was your biggest bet?”

“I gambled on a girl.” I thought again of Willa, who even years later never traveled far from my thoughts. I pictured her vividly the afternoon we had first met in Boston, propped on her elbow on a blanket beside the Charles River.

“And you lost, I’m assuming.” Lily raised an eyebrow while blatantly looking at my ring finger and bringing me back to the present.

“You could say that.”

“Was she a Harvard girl?”

“Yes, originally from Manhattan.”

“Which part?”

“Fifth Avenue.”

Lily smiled wryly. “Girls like that are trained from a very young age to break the hearts of sweet men like you.”

“You should have told me earlier. It was an expensive lesson,” I said. “It drained my emotional bank account.”

“At least your financial bank account is still intact. It could be worse.”

“I’m a reporter. My emotional bank account will always be more plentiful than my financial one, and if it’s not, then I have a problem.”

Lily smiled. “Don’t take it personally, love. You’re a tremendous catch, but even the biggest bass isn’t a prize for a girl who has a taste for caviar. And who knows? Perhaps someday you may discover your loss was a win in disguise.”

Lily’s eyes traveled to a spindly plant. She stood up and picked a dead leaf out of its pot. She placed the leaf on a side table.

“You must be exhausted,” Lily said, before returning to her chair.

“I am, actually,” I said. My adrenaline level was still so high it could have been 10:00 a.m. but I just now remembered my deadline, and I couldn’t count on Rubenstein to extend it another minute. “And I have a story to write.”

Lily walked me to the front door. When she opened it, the purr of the Mercedes greeted us. Kurt held the rear passenger door open. I wondered how long he had been standing there.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Lily said, excitedly. “Wait here.” She disappeared and then returned with a large wrapped box. “This is for you.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” I began.

“You could possibly,” she said. “My only request is that you open it when you get home because I get embarrassed when people open gifts in front of me.”

The look on Lily’s face said there was no arguing, so I accepted it.

“Thank you for everything. What an evening,” I said.

“You’re welcome. Good luck with your story. My father was a luminary in this town, and I would like him to be remembered as such.”

By the time I got home it was past midnight, and I had to crank out my article by seven to get it to editorial. My one-bedroom apartment had always seemed humble, but now, after where I had just been, I realized it was downright pathetic. It was smaller than Lily’s living room, and the dirt was embedded so deep that not even a few coats of paint could do the trick. Appliances were decades old, the furniture was mine from boyhood, and the ceiling was covered with asbestos rather than ivy.

I was an adult, but my apartment was a college kid’s. Bel-Air was too grand for a man like me.

I wrote my article on Joel as quickly as possible and emailed it to the office along with a scanned copy of the photo Lily had given me. I was about to slip into a catnap before work when I remembered the package.

I unwrapped it to find a box from one of Los Angeles’s most expensive boutiques. Inside were two perfectly creased shirts and trousers folded in tissue paper. There was no note.

Four

Phil Rubenstein looked as if he had crawled his way out of the pages of a hard-boiled detective novel. He was what you’d call a guy’s guy. There was a beefiness about him, and he had a ubiquitous five-o’clock shadow at any time of day. Although I never had the privilege of going to lunch with him, everyone who did came back with bloodred drinker’s eyes and speech that sloshed around in their mouths. For Rubenstein the two-martini lunch was a restrained one.

It was Phil Rubenstein who had hired me as a reporter at the Times a few years earlier. To say I was at the lowest point of my life back then didn’t do the situation justice. I had been unceremoniously fired from the Wall Street Journal for an act of plagiarism I didn’t intend to commit. That came after my girlfriend of two years had left me—equally as unceremoniously, with barely a phone call. I was broke, jobless and alone in Manhattan.

My job search went poorly. I was told time and time again I was unemployable—not only in the field of journalism, but in any field. After months of futilely applying for jobs, big and small, a college buddy’s father called his chum Rubenstein on my behalf. There were favors owed somewhere or another, and Rubenstein had taken a liking to me, so I ended up at the Los Angeles Times.

Because of that, I always held a soft spot in my heart for Rubenstein. In fact, whether by exaggeration or not, I considered the man my savior. Never mind the fact that immediately after hiring me he seemed to forget I existed. The newspaper business in Los Angeles was like the film business—it was about who you knew, and that column was blank for me. The well-connected guys got invited to the premieres, club openings and parties, and got all of the scoops that went with them while I had got the smallest local stories.

“Cleary, get in here,” Rubenstein shouted across the pit.

Phil Rubenstein never called me into his office, and the other reporters made eye contact in the way grade school students do when they sense one of their peers may be in trouble.

I temporarily abandoned the story I had been researching on the heated council race in District 10 and made my way across the sea of accusatory eyes before arriving at Rubenstein’s corner office.

The office was the low-rent generic kind that newspapers with shrinking budgets and insolvent balance sheets tended to have, but Rubenstein had personalized it. Photos of Rubenstein with various studio heads and actors dressed up a stock credenza. Framed movie posters with handwritten notes covered the white walls. He had a plastic statue that looked like a fake Oscar award that said #1 Boss. Rubenstein was a newspaper editor, but judging by his office he seemed to think he ran Twentieth Century Fox. This was not by accident.

“How you feeling this morning, Cleary?”

The truth: I had a headache that threatened to become a full-blown hangover if you blew on it wrong, and I could still taste the stale Grey Goose and lime juice on my tongue.

But it was an extraordinary night that had caused this crappy state to begin with, and the headache made me feel as if the night before was somehow still alive.

“I feel good,” I said, opting not to go into detail, satisfied with the fact that my story on Joel Goldman had run on the first page of the Calendar section. There was only one front page of Calendar and it was a daily jostle to get there. The death of one of the most famous titans of the entertainment business was certainly significant in its own right, and I had frosted the story with quotes from David Duplaine, George Bloom and Carole Partridge—three of the industry’s hottest commodities.

Rubenstein gazed out his office window. “Your story was good, Cleary. And the quotes were all nice touches. Overkill, but nice. The only time I’ve seen all those names in one place was at the Oscars.”

“Glad you liked it.”

“That thing with the Journal aside, you’re a very good writer. One of our most talented.”

“Thanks,” I said, wincing at the mention of the Wall Street Journal as one might cringe at a chance encounter with an ex-lover on the sidewalk. I felt a bead of sweat race down the back of my neck.

“I need something from you,” Rubenstein demanded. “I hear there’s going to be a major shake-up at Duplaine’s studio. I need you to call Lily Goldman and get the story. I want it to break here, at the Times, instead of one of those shitty internet sites or, God forbid, the Reporter.”

If Phil Rubenstein had asked for my firstborn, I would have handed him over with a year’s supply of diapers. That said, I had no connection with Lily Goldman. Lily had invited me into her circle for a few hours solely for the purpose of putting her father back on the front page, which I’m sure she felt was his right. The shirts and pants were a thank-you gift, significant to me but probably paid for through Lily’s petty-cash account.

At the thought of the word pants I looked down at my lap. An iron crease cut my thigh in half, lengthwise. I flattened the pants out with my palms as if Lily were peering over my shoulder.

“I don’t think we have that kind of connection. Lily and me,” I added, when Rubenstein let the silence linger.

“We’re getting trumped on everything—all of it,” Rubenstein finally said, more to himself than to me. Out the window, a combination of heavy fog and smog was rolling in. The tops of the buildings had disappeared. “Do you know how many Pulitzers the Times has won?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know, either, but a lot,” Rubenstein said. “Otis is rolling in his grave watching this state of affairs, banging on the cover of his coffin, begging to come out before we go the way of the dinosaur.”

His remarks on Otis Chandler, the paterfamilias of the Los Angeles Times, might have been an exaggeration, but the dinosaur bit was true. It wasn’t just us—it was all printed newspapers.

“You know Lily better than I do,” I said. “Why don’t you just call her?”

Rubenstein turned around. “She invited you to a dinner party at George Bloom’s—within minutes of meeting you.”

“Because she wanted quotes for her father’s story. She wasn’t exactly looking for a new buddy to have beers with.”

“I really want this one, Cleary.”

I looked at Rubenstein and saw something vulnerable in him. This was the man who had saved me from Milwaukee, where I probably would have been working beside my father in the lumber department at Menards.

“I’ll call her,” I said.

* * *

I cleaned my desk, filed a pile of old documents, scrubbed my spam folder, made my twice-weekly call to my dad a day early and did almost everything except call Lily.

There were myriad reasons for this procrastination, but top on my list was that the night was still untainted. Once I called Lily and she refused to help me out, I would go back to covering freeway expansion plans and a dull life in a modest apartment.

The only way I knew to reach Lily was through her shop, and once the clock had struck four I knew time was running its course. I had savored the night, and now there was work to do.

Ethan answered the phone on the fourth ring. I imagined him staring at the phone beside him, waiting a moment to pick up because Lily had probably instructed him not to appear too eager. I was told Lily wasn’t available. When Ethan inquired if Lily would know the purpose of the call I answered in the affirmative, and then I hung up quickly, before he had time to ask anything else.

* * *

Three days passed and Lily didn’t call. I couldn’t say I was particularly surprised, but I would be a liar if I didn’t admit the slightest bit of disappointment. Interestingly, the Duplaine story didn’t break—at the Times or elsewhere—and all was quiet from Rubenstein’s office.

As for the evening, it was like anything else in life; the farther one gets away from it the smaller it appears. What had initially seemed like a life-changing event became less consequential as days passed. The first night, I fell asleep hard on my back, and I dreamed of the leopard cat, tame under Carole’s palm and wild in the outdoors. The second day after, which I now remember as a day of waiting for my phone to ring like a schoolgirl waits for a call from a crush, I found myself thirsty for gimlets on ice and I longed to dive into the Blooms’ swampy swimming pool and swim with the minnows. By the third day I realized that the night that meant so much to me meant nothing to them. I was a mere reporter.

The upside of the dinner, however, lingered. Based on my Goldman story and the possibility of the Duplaine scoop, Phil Rubenstein had given me a decent assignment on the weekend box office, and I was typing it up when the phone rang.

“Cleary here.”

“Thomas, love. It’s Lily.”

My heart beat a bit faster, and I found myself straightening my spine.

“Lily, what a surprise.”

“Oh, I know. I do apologize. I meant to phone you back sooner, but work caught up with me. I had to fly to Aspen unexpectedly to pick out some wallpaper for a house and the jet lag has just about killed me.” I was about to remind Lily that Colorado was only one hour ahead of Pacific Standard Time, but then let it pass. “I must say, I absolutely loved your little story on my father. It’s been so long since he got press. He adored reading about himself in the papers.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

I heard the antique servant bell announce a visitor in the background.

“Oh dear, that’s a customer—and a dreadful one at that. Let me cut to the chase. I spoke with David this morning and he mentioned he’s making some personnel changes at the studio. I convinced David he should give the exclusive to you instead of that absolutely horrible Blaine Wyatt at the Reporter.”

Professor Grandy’s Journalism Rule Number Three: If a story’s handed to you on a silver platter, it’s either not worth eating or will cause food poisoning later on.

“I’ll be right there, Ethan,” Lily called into her store. “David’s assistant’s name is—” She paused. “Oh, I can’t remember now. I’m terrible with assistants. I know you’re busy, but take a minute to call David’s office and get the information. I think you’ll find it worth your while. They’re expecting you.”

“Thank you,” I said, trying to restrain my excitement.

“You’re welcome. Oh, and how rude of me. I haven’t stopped talking, have I? Did you need something the other day? When you phoned?”

I smiled. “I just phoned to say thank-you for the incredible evening and the overly extravagant gifts.”

“Midwestern manners. I should have expected nothing less. You’re more than welcome. It was lovely to have you. Now do call David’s office and let me know how it goes. Au revoir.”

There was a fumbling of the phone, and then the line went dead.

It took a few calls to get to the story, but once I did I was rewarded not just with personnel changes, as Lily had underestimated, but with the untimely firing of the president of the studio, who had been misappropriating corporate funds on private jets, award show after-parties, dresses for his wife and suits for his lover. I got to work, writing well into the night, pausing only to steal a quick cigarette on my balcony.

It was 1:00 a.m. I took a long drag of my cigarette and craned my head toward the hills. That sliver of a view of the mountains was the only reason I had gotten this crappy apartment in Silver Lake in the first place. I couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten here anymore, except for the vague fact that around three years ago I headed out to Los Angeles from Manhattan. It was supposed to be a temporary apartment—a stop on the way to greatness, someplace I would eventually point to and say, “Can you believe it? I started out there.” It didn’t happen that way. I would have left but for the fact I had no place to go.

I looked around me. It wasn’t close to being Christmas, but icicle lights hung on my neighbor’s balcony, and pot smoke wafted from his apartment day and night. Tall date palms stood high and mighty in the distance, but the foliage in our complex was the indigenous sort that required little water or sun. The U-shaped building was centered on a dilapidated courtyard. There was a sadness to it, because in the 1950s when the building was built someone had tried to make something pretty, but now the courtyard was neglected. Chairs with webbing too thin to sit on were sprinkled haphazardly around a swimming pool. The pool needed a new heater, and the hot tub was drained. Peeling plaster gave the water a cloudy and gray appearance.

I surveyed the surroundings one last time before crushing the remnants of my cigarette into the stone balcony. I had a deadline to meet.

Five

The story, in various incarnations, stayed on the front page for the next four days and then got mileage in Calendar and Business. We had scooped the Reporter, ditto for the online sites that were breathing down Rubenstein’s back. The story was covered by nearly every national publication—the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle—and I gathered them up and savored the words “The Los Angeles Times reported...” because the Los Angeles Times meant me. I knew the story and the scoop had nothing to do with me. Any community college journalism student who happened to have landed at the right place at the right time could have written the same article, but I was proud nevertheless.

I grew up in Milwaukee, the land of gratitude and manners. So I knew a token thank-you to Lily was in order. Choosing a present that I thought Lily would like was difficult on a reporter’s salary, so I did the best I could. I went to the most expensive department store in the city and chose the least expensive item there: a candle.

As I made my way over to the shop I thought of how quickly my prospects had changed. It had been just over a week since I had first met Lily.

The bell announced my arrival. The store was as cluttered as on my first visit, and it took a moment for Lily to emerge from behind the large Asian screen.

“Thomas! How are you, love?”

“Fine. I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“You could never be an interruption. What’s this?”

I looked around and became conscious of the candle I was carrying. Suddenly it seemed like a totally inappropriate gift. In my weeklong sabbatical I had forgotten how exotic and remote the world of Lily Goldman was.

“Nothing—”

“A candle,” Lily said, unwrapping it lustfully. “I absolutely love candles. It’s the most exquisite color of vanilla, isn’t it, Carole?”

It was only now that I noticed Carole lounging on a sofa, surrounded by pillows in various textiles and prints. She lay on her back, barefoot and beautiful as she had been the night of our first meeting. She looked as if she belonged in Marrakech or Casablanca, not in an antiques shop in Los Angeles.

“Truly a one of a kind” was her response. Her delivery was as polite as the sentiment was sarcastic.

“Carole’s here looking for pillows for her aviary,” Lily said. “This candle is absolutely spectacular, Thomas. You are so sweet. Isn’t he sweet, Carole?”

“Did you find anything?” I addressed both of them. I had no idea why one would need pillows for an aviary, or why one would have an aviary in their home in the first place, but I needed to quickly steer the subject away from the embarrassingly cheap gift.

“My first indication was to use this peacock fabric—” Lily pointed to an ornate fabric with stenciled peacocks, seemingly a perfect fit “—but now I feel it’s too predictable. I deplore predictable.”

Carole glanced at the peacock fabric with indifference, as if there was nothing about it that compelled her either way, and then she focused on her lap, at a script that lay open to a page somewhere around sixty.

“Your article on the terrible man who worked for David was brilliant,” Lily said, addressing me. “You are a fantastic writer, Thomas. Isn’t he, Carole?”

“He handled a tricky situation with aplomb,” Carole replied, flipping the screenplay’s page.

It was true. I hadn’t lambasted David as some of our competitors had. Instead I was deliberately gentle, exonerating David of blame while still maintaining my journalistic integrity. It was a strategic move on my part of course. I had to protect my position in their world, and it still felt very precarious.

Lily disappeared into rows of hanging fabrics, and I was left alone with Carole. I opened my mouth to say something, but words failed me. Carole, on the other hand, appeared to almost revel in my discomfort. We sat like this for a minute or so, and then I turned my back, pretending to stoke a newfound interest in Belgian linen.

Lily returned a few seconds later, her face registering the stony silence that hung in the air. “Nothing appropriate. Maybe I’ll paint something later.”

Carole stood up and slipped on her shoes, throwing the screenplay into a large purse. Then she kissed Lily on the cheek.

“Don’t go,” Lily begged.

“Are you forgetting I’m cohosting a dinner for seventy tomorrow? I wish I could go off shopping all day, but help requires such micromanagement. And so does David.” Carole sighed.

Lily turned to me. “David and Carole are cohosting a little event for the governor at David’s. Thomas, I have a glorious idea. Why don’t you come?” she said enthusiastically.

I wished Carole would step in and second the invitation, but she didn’t. Instead she preoccupied herself with a screen that featured oxen in repose in a meadow, rubbing her fingers over its surface. Her fingernails were painted a shade of olive, and I wondered if the odd, almost grotesque, color was chosen for a horror-movie role or if olive was the new red.

“I couldn’t,” I said, as transparently as possible.

“Of course you could. Carole, do tell Thomas he should come. Insist he should come. It would be good for you at the paper, Thomas.”

“Lily’s right. You should come, Thomas. I’ll have Adrian add a seventh to our table.” Carole said it blandly, and I knew that Carole’s word choice was deliberate. Seven not only had an unlucky connotation, as Lily had pointed out, but it also called for a lopsided table arrangement. I could already imagine Adrian, whoever he was, silently cursing me, the nettlesome seventh.

Carole’s invitation was disingenuous, and I should have turned it down. Instead I allowed it to hang there. I wanted to jump into their lives again—why, I didn’t know.

“Well, it’s decided, then,” Carole said. “We’ll see you tomorrow evening, eight o’clock sharp.”

Carole put on a large floppy hat and oversize sunglasses that rested low, almost on the tip of her nose. Outside, a black SUV waited for her, and a driver opened the rear passenger door expeditiously. In ten seconds the car was gone, and a minute later the paparazzi were too late.

Six

I knew I wanted to go to Harvard when I was ten years old. Harvard was a quixotic dream for someone raised in Milwaukee’s gritty public school system, but that dream became my driving force.

When I was twelve I figured out that it was speed that was going to get me there. My talent for the five-thousand meter blossomed suddenly, without warning. Early in the morning, before the sun came up, I could be found running beside my father’s stopwatch. My dad had barely received his high school diploma but he would come to share my dream.

This singular intensity propelled me to shatter every state and Harvard running record. It was that same stubborn determination that made me ignore the small fact that Carole didn’t want me to attend the fund-raiser. I had got a taste of wealth and power, a mere whetting of the tongue, but I wanted more.

Had I turned down Carole’s noninvitation I would have been at the paper, working on a plum story handed to me by Rubenstein, much to the chagrin of the senior writers. Instead, the following afternoon when my phone rang I found myself at a mini-mall in Westwood renting a tuxedo for what promised to be the fund-raiser event of the season.

“Cleary here.”

“Millstone was found dead in his loft in SoHo.” It was Rubenstein, and he was referring to a young, up-and-coming A-list actor. “I know you’re going to the fund-raiser tonight, but you need to crank out a quick web piece.”

“But—”

Rubenstein hung up.

I headed back to the paper, aware that it was nearly impossible for me to get out a story and make the dinner on time. I considered calling Lily and canceling but opted against it.

* * *

Five thirty.

I went back to the office to find Rubenstein had lent me an intern to pull together research for the story on Millstone. I paged through his notes. Interns were known to be overzealous: in this case, the guy had pulled quotes from Millstone’s eighth-grade teacher in Australia, his tattoo artist in Brooklyn and the sandwich maker at the deli he frequented, but he neglected to get quotes from the costars or producers of his new film.

By six o’clock I had edited most of the research and typed my lead. I had called in a favor to George’s office to get an additional quote from the producer of Millstone’s new film. In turn, the producer—with the understanding that I was a chum of George’s—gave me the private cell phone number of Millstone’s publicist, who gave me the first on-the-record quote about the tragedy.

Around six thirty, I finished my story and emailed it to editorial. I was in such a hurry I started shedding my clothing in the hallway, and I finished changing into my tuxedo in the restroom a few seconds later. I glanced at myself in the mirror. Even in the harsh fluorescent light I seemed presentable enough. The governor. A grin broke through my stoicism.

On my way out I looked up at the wall clock in editorial. It was set to precision for deadline’s sake, and it was precisely six forty-five.

I descended the concrete steps two at a time and sprinted to my car. Sunset Boulevard was jammed, and when I finally saw the words Bel-Air lit up in that eye-blinding shade of ice blue, I exhaled. It was only seven-forty. I had twenty minutes on my side. I drove leisurely through the road between Bel-Air’s pillars and mimicked Kurt’s serpentine drive to the Blooms’ before taking the final hairpin turn that led to David’s estate.

I immediately knew something was wrong. There were no signs of a political party—or any party for that matter. There was no security detail, no guards, no music, no catering trucks. The estate was quiet.

I rang the bell on the towering gates protecting the property, but there was dull silence. I heard only the branches of a sycamore tree shimmying in the unseasonably cold fall winds. Lily had definitely said the party was at David’s. Kurt had also double-confirmed that the party was this evening. I pulled my phone from my pocket, but I had no cell service.

I had two choices: drive to Sunset Boulevard to call Lily or use the phone at David’s estate. I rang the bell again before eyeing a ficus hedge that had to have been five times as tall as me.

Panic started to set in. Lily Goldman was a shiny lucky penny in my pocket, the first talisman in a long time I had managed to pick up and secure in my palm, if only briefly. I imagined her this very second, fielding questions as to my whereabouts from the other five guests while she fingered a ruby ring or ivory necklace. I also thought of Carole, eyes heavy with exasperation, instructing the staff to remove the seventh chair that had been so craftily squeezed into the table for six and exchanging an “I told you so” glance with David, his thick eyebrows coming together in agreement.

Tonight was supposed to be a glittering star of a night. Not only was I going to meet the governor, but I was more determined than ever to make a career comeback. Suddenly, with the Goldman story and the Duplaine piece, I had begun to feel as if the future was once again full of possibility. I had always intended to return to Manhattan in glory, to triumph over what had happened there. Possibly it was a pipe dream—it had only been two big articles after all—but I was hoping the trail of plum stories was leading me east.

“Fuck,” I said out loud, still not comprehending where I could have gone wrong.

I backed my car out from David’s impenetrable gates and parked it on a patch of gravel on the side of the narrow road. I rolled down my window, and that was when I heard it.

In the distance was the faint, familiar sound of a tennis ball. There was an oddly regular rhythm to it: pong, pong, pong, quick pong, slow pong, pong, pong, pong, quick pong, slow pong.

I got out of the car and walked over to the side of David’s property, where I saw a shot of fluorescent white light through the trees. I remembered that during our long drive toward the estate we had passed a gate covered in ivy. Behind it must have been a tennis court.

I crept closer, facing a stone wall that could have fortified a federal penitentiary.

“Hello,” I shouted, but the word got caught in the wall. “Is anyone home?”

There was no answer, though there was definitely someone home.

It was then that I noticed an oak tree weeping over David Duplaine’s wall, and I glanced at the lowest branch. It would have been a reach for most men, but I was tall and I had had plenty of practice climbing trees during those muggy mosquito-filled summer days of my childhood in Wisconsin. Even in dress shoes, navigating the tree wasn’t particularly difficult; I conquered one branch after the next, giving me a feeling of satisfaction I hadn’t felt in years.

I scaled half the oak tree and then paused to catch my breath.

My first sight of her was from the back. She stood at the baseline of a red-clay tennis court surrounded by trellises thickly covered with ivy. Her long limbs were tanned golden-brown; but they were coltish, as if she didn’t quite know how to work them yet. It could have been my distorted perspective from above, but she appeared around six feet tall. Her blond ponytail reached the middle of her back and was tied together with a white satin ribbon. Indeed, she wasn’t dressed for practicing serves at all, but for a match at Wimbledon. Her white dress had a bunch of froufrou on it—frills, lace—and it was so short her ruffled tennis panties peeked out from beneath it. The Nike shoes she wore looked brand-new, save for the stain of clay near their soles.

Her ritual was exact: first she chose a bright yellow tennis ball from a hopper, searching carefully for just the right one. Then she situated her shoe at the corner of the baseline tape and the center mark. Finally, she bounced the ball three times, tossed it in the air to the exact one-o’clock position, and served it with a motion so fluid it was the stuff of physics textbooks and tennis academies.

All this exactitude resulted in a beauty of a serve that rivaled those on the professional tour and sent a ball with laser precision into one of the orange cones that sat in the corners of the service box as targets.

This ritual repeated itself eight times until the hopper was drained of balls.

I had grown up around the sport of tennis, so the sight of a girl in a tennis dress embarking on service practice was in itself not particularly interesting. But the scene was captivating in the way that a movie may hold your attention so intensely your real life vanishes.

I could not avert my eyes.

The girl walked over to a viewing pavilion, a plush mini Palladian palace. Silver pitchers, a silver ice bucket and crystal glasses sat on a silver tray on an antique table. She plucked ice out with silver tongs and placed it in one of the glasses, and then she poured water from the pitcher into the glass until it reached the glass’s equator.

She then took a few sips of the water, surveyed the littered balls and made her way back out onto the chilly court. She picked up the hopper and started collecting the bright yellow tennis balls, but she struggled to line the hopper up to push the balls through its rails. For a girl who could serve a hundred miles an hour, it was odd she moved so slowly on this remedial task.

The girl started toward my side of the net, and I took my opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I called down from the oak tree.

The girl stepped backward quickly and looked around, trying to discover where the voice was coming from.

“It’s okay. I won’t hurt you. I’m up here, in the tree.”

She looked up, startled, and for the first time I could see her face. She was a woman, but there was a childlike quality to her. It was difficult to peg her age, but I would have bet she was around twenty. There was something very “heartlike” about her—the wide shape of her face, the cheekbones so high and full they went almost to her eyes and the delicate nose reminiscent of an arrow. It’s hard for me to say now if I would have called her classically beautiful, but she was that star in the sky that you can’t take your eyes off, even if it’s surrounded by brighter ones.

She continued to study me, perplexed. I didn’t know what was stranger, a girl dressed for Wimbledon practicing serves alone at night or a guy dressed in a tuxedo sitting in an oak tree.

“Why, what are you doing up there?” she asked.

“This may sound strange, but I thought I was going to a fund-raiser this evening at Mr. Duplaine’s house,” I said. “I’m a friend of Lily Goldman’s. I tried phoning the gate, but no one answered. And—” I paused. “And. Well, is anyone here?” I finally asked.

“No, there’s no one home,” the girl said. Her voice was soft and melodic.

“Is there supposed to be a party here?” I asked.

“It’s at the other house—the one on the beach.”

“Do you have an address?”

“I’ve never been there, myself, so no, I have no address. It’s in Malibu, I believe, but unfortunately there’s no one I can even ask. You must think I’m incredibly unhelpful but I’m not meaning to be.”

Malibu was about forty-five minutes away with favorable traffic conditions. So at this point I still had time to climb down the oak tree and call Lily for the address. I could have made it in time to meet the governor, to sip a gimlet while overlooking the gentle, rolling waves of the Pacific. But instead I said:

“You have quite the serve.”

“Thank you. My coach says the same thing. One hundred fourteen miles an hour. I got a radar gun for my birthday.” She said it with gushing pride and pointed to a black contraption set up in the corner of the court. On the screen, 109 MPH registered in red, digital numbers.

“When’s your birthday?” I asked.

“The twentieth of April.”

“A Taurus.”

“A what?” she asked.

“Astrology. Do you follow it?”

“Not only do I not follow it, I’ve never even heard of it.”

I paused, wondering if the girl was kidding, but I didn’t detect a note of sarcasm in her voice.

“I’m from Milwaukee—we don’t believe things like that there, either. It’s all hocus-pocus if you ask me.”

“Milwaukee’s in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s capital is Madison. Its state bird is the robin and it’s known as the Dairy State because it produces more cheese and milk than any other state,” she said, as if reading from a teleprompter. “This thing called astrology—what is it exactly?”

“That’s a good question,” I said. “It has something to do with the stars. I’ve never really understood it, either.”

“You mean astronomy, then?”

“No, they’re two different things—astrology and astronomy.”

“So what are you in astrology terms?”

“A Scorpio.”

“A scorpion. In other words, you’re an eight-legged, venomous creature to be wary of?”

Her tone was deadpan.

“No poison here, just a nice guy from Milwaukee.”

She let out a big, jovial laugh.

She was a curious creature, and I was intrigued. Her manner of speech was officious and old-fashioned. She was interested and reserved, insecure and confident, coy and bold. She was unlike anyone I had ever met.

I looked down at her again and realized she was gazing at me with wide-eyed curiosity, too. The tennis court lights made her eyes glitter.

I wanted to see her up close.

“I play tennis—well, used to play tennis. I haven’t in years. Do you want to— Maybe, would you like to play sometime?” I said with the insecurity of a fourteen-year-old asking a girl to a Friday-night dance.

She paused.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said sadly, as she traced the W on the tennis ball. “Thank you, though, for the offer. It was kind of you.”

It’s difficult to judge oneself with objectivity, but my whole life I had been told I was a good-looking guy. Sure, I didn’t have that well-oiled slickness the other guys at Harvard had. They had Wall Street money, last names with a familiar ring to them and country houses. They were gentlemen who knew what wine to order, gentlemen who winked more than they smiled and gentlemen who could sell you something you didn’t even want. Women loved them for all of it.

My appearance was more of the homegrown variety: I had inherited my father’s height, broad chest, strong jaw and blue eyes, and I had my mother’s oversize smile and blond hair that looked a touch red when the sun hit it right. I looked like the kind of guy who would run his wife’s errands and coach his kids’ baseball team, all while hoisting this year’s corn crop to the farmer’s market. In high school, girls had liked me; in college they had called me “cute,” but I wasn’t husband material. Marriage for those girls was a game of Monopoly. They wanted the most valuable real estate, and anything less than Central Park West wouldn’t do.

But in all of those years, with all of those women, I had never been shot down so directly before.

A story, a date, a friendship, whatever I thought I wanted, whatever she thought she had turned down, it didn’t matter. I made the boldest move since I had moved to Los Angeles: I climbed down the oak tree to the stone wall, slid onto the viewing area canopy, then hopped down to the court, with leaves in my hair and a tear in my tux from the canopy spear.

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 honoring 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. The 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.

While at work, I crawled through David’s life virtually on hands and knees, searching for a pinhead of a clue. I scanned microfiche, birth certificates, city hall records and school attendance lists at all the top private schools, but every search was coming up empty. As I had suspected, David had no children. His romantic life was nonexistent. He hadn’t been photographed beside a lover in years, and there hadn’t been any mention of anyone in the ample press he received.

On nothing more than a whim, I then did the same searching for Lily. I found pictures as far back as her childhood. There was Lily at five years old, flanked by her parents at the premiere of one of her father’s movies. Then Lily winning her science fair with the invention of the lightbulb at John Thomas Dye. Then there was a thirteen-year-old Lily, in jodhpurs and a crisp white shirt, racing a beauty of a Thoroughbred in Hidden Hills at what must have been the Goldmans’ equestrian estate—a stone mansion draped in ivy with shutters.

After eighteen, Lily disappeared from Los Angeles. I had learned in bits and pieces through our dinner-party conversation that Lily had eventually “escaped to the Rhode Island School of Design,” and then she had gone even farther away to work for an editor at Paris Vogue, to “learn French and sleep with the French”—a quote Lily had tossed out over a dessert wine. In her midtwenties Lily made an abrupt U-turn and returned to the city of her birth and good breeding and started her antiques shop as a hobby. Years later she had created a quiet empire of furniture, fabrics and real estate holdings.

I was ready to put my search to rest when I stumbled upon a photo in the Los Angeles Times, which I would have missed if the shuffling microfiche hadn’t decided to stop on that specific page. I enlarged the page tenfold, trading crisp for fuzzy.

The caption read, “Movie mogul Joel Goldman, his daughter, Lily, and friends play tennis at Mr. Goldman’s vacation house.” I looked closer, shocked to discover that one of the friends was none other than a very young Carole Partridge.

The four stood on a clay tennis court. Joel commandeered the photo—as he always seemed to—holding a racket in his left hand, a drink in his right, and wearing a wide victorious grin on his face. Lily seemed to be in her midthirties at the time, and she wore a demure dress and a ponytail and carried a bottle of Orangina. Behind her, almost off camera, was another man of indeterminate age. I tried to focus the microfiche on him, but he turned grainier rather than clearer. What I could tell was this: he was tall, broad and focused on Lily.

Carole was the youngest of the group, and she stood in front. My guess was she was about seventeen compared to Joel’s sixty, and he rested his drink on her shoulder in a protective manner. She donned a barely there white tennis dress and posed with her hand on her hip, as if she were emulating an older, more experienced woman she had seen strike the same pose. She was all legs, and her breasts seemed too big for her, as if they were things that needed to be grown into. Her hair was pinned up in a beehive—an odd hairstyle for tennis—and her charcoal-lined eyes teased the camera.

My gut told me that the photo meant something, something more than the rest of my research combined. I looked at it again, focusing on that mysterious man in the background. Lily had never married—unusual for a woman of her social standing—and judging by the photos and news clippings there hadn’t been a significant other throughout the years. It was possible this guy was a lover. If so, that begged the further question of what had happened.

There was something about the photo that seared through me.

I couldn’t figure it out. I printed the photo, and I pressed it between the pages of my notebook like a rose from a long-lost love. A reminder of something important—something not to be forgotten.

* * *

Ironically, it was in this period of distractedness that my star was finally rising at the Times. I learned quickly that once Los Angeles decides to sprinkle you with its stardust, it shakes so generously you glitter.

I say this because after those first few stories my sky twinkled brightly. There was the story on Joel, followed by the David Duplaine shake-up, the Millstone coverage and then the interview with the governor. I would never know how I had won Phil Rubenstein’s favor after what had happened at the Journal, but what I came to understand was that Los Angeles, above anything else, was a city of forgiveness and second chances.

Scarcely three weeks after my first meeting with Lily Goldman, life moved from slow motion to the speed at which a race-car driver accelerates at the drop of the green flag. The invitations poured in—not to the second-rate parties that had always been my lot, but to first-rate premieres and galas. I attended a few, met new people and was invited to more. Studio publicists lunched me and Rubenstein slipped me the choicest articles.

I was working at the paper early one morning—no later than 7:00 a.m.—when my phone rang from a private number. It was Lily.

I barely had a chance to say hello.

“Thomas, darling, I only have a moment, but I’m calling to insist you join me this evening at Carole’s. She and Charles are having a small dinner, and I haven’t seen you in months.”

This was a slight exaggeration. “I’d love to come,” I said stoically, for I believed that emotion was a badge of weakness in this group. “Please extend a thank-you to Carole. Is there something she’d like me to bring?”

“Absolutely not. The last I heard you are not a member of Carole’s staff,” Lily said. “Kurt will pick you up at six thirty.”

* * *

As promised, Kurt picked me up at six thirty. This time we fetched Lily on our way to our destination, and after Lily’s house we drove a few blocks before reaching a pair of stone columns, each crowned with a vintage gas lamp. A tall wooden gate stared at us, and a personal security car waited beside one of the columns.

Lily waved in the general direction of the security guard in a familiar manner and the gates opened.

We wound our way up a steep driveway that must have been a quarter of a mile long. Once we arrived we were rewarded with an incredible view of Los Angeles. It was a view that shouldn’t have been available for private purchase. Below us, sprinklers watered the fairways of the Bel-Air Country Club with perfectly arched trajectories, and uniformly dressed groundskeepers raked the country club’s sand traps. Beyond, Los Angeles was just beginning to wake up and glitter for the night as the sun was setting over a sliver of ocean that sparkled like a mirror.

I wished I could bottle that view. I looked over to Lily. She seemed indifferent to the blanket of lights that lay before us. She straightened out my new shirt and pants.

“The city feels so small from up here,” I said.

“It’s trickery,” Lily said. “It makes us feel like we’re the powerful ones, even though nothing could be further from the truth.”

I glanced at her incredulously.

“It’s true. We’re all just renters, Thomas. Someday our leases will be up. Carole’s, mine, yours... Look, my father’s just ended. An eighty-one-year lease on life—that was all he got.”

The city buzzed dully in the distance. Lily squinted at an imaginary point, and I wondered what she was thinking about. It was strange; her father had passed away around a month ago, but Lily hadn’t seemed deeply affected by it. I wondered if it was a veneer as fastidiously crafted as her shop and her house.

I turned around to give Lily a moment, and for the first time I noticed the house. The white brick mansion was perched adjacent to the egg-shaped cobblestone motor court. It was a wedding cake of a house—with a second story slightly smaller than the first, and a few curlicue frills for decoration. It was a grander, whiter, more sprawling version of the traditional house surrounded by the picket fence that suburban girls dream of. I imagined it was built in the late 1930s or early ’40s, post-Depression for a manufacturing or real estate tycoon. The mansion appeared purposely situated to get the maximum vistas, but it was plotted in such a way that you might almost miss it when you drove up—the real estate equivalent of Lily Goldman’s false modesty.

There was no need for doorbells at houses like these. Instead, a butler in a black coat and white gloves held the door open for us and led us into the foyer. He greeted Lily by name and Lily introduced me as “Thomas Cleary, the finest reporter in Los Angeles.”

A large antique iron birdcage hung from the entry’s ceiling in lieu of a chandelier. It had a whimsical effect, as if the house’s owners were trying not to take themselves too seriously. A sweeping stairway made for brides or goodbyes crawled up the wall, and sconces cast a soft glow over us.

The butler escorted us toward the stairway, under which a secret door led us into a formal dining room wrapped in hand-painted wallpaper depicting an ancient Asian landscape complete with geishas, canoes, swans, hummingbirds, pergolas and flowers. The Asian chandelier overhead seemed plucked from the wallpaper into real life.

The group was sipping before-dinner cocktails. I decided that there must have been a tribal theme to the evening: Emma wore a feathered headdress, Carole donned heavy silver-and-turquoise jewelry that contrasted with her red-apple lips, and the menus that rested on our plates indicated we were to be served buffalo as our main course.

Charles approached us eagerly. He kissed Lily’s cheek and shook my hand.

“Thomas, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve been reading your bylines. You sure have a knack for the written word.”

“Thank you,” I said, because Charles was the type of man who would say something like that and genuinely mean it. “How’s the screenplay coming?”

“Fantastic, chap.” Charles swept David into conversation with his right arm. “David, you remember Thomas?” He always seemed to veer the subject away from himself, as if he wasn’t worthy of discussion.

“Of course.” David’s expression was even. “We missed you at the governor’s party, but I trust your reason for absence was a good-looking one.”

My stomach dropped. I glanced to my left, to where Lily had just been, but she was no longer there. Instead, she stood alone on the other side of the room, adjusting a painting that had tipped slightly off its proper axis.

The girl had made it clear that no one could find out about our tennis game. I wondered if David had known I was there. The estate was peppered with video security. I had seen the cameras outside when I was waiting at the gate for someone to answer the buzzer, but surprisingly I didn’t see cameras around the tennis court.

Just then, Charles squeezed my arm and presented me with a gimlet stuffed with ice.

“We have a gimlet prepared, just the way you like it.”

I took a deep well-needed sip. Charles and I stood at the doors, looking outside at a carpet of green.

“How are your birds?” I asked. “I heard something about homing pigeons.”

“Yes. Interesting sport, if you can call it that. I picked it up in my youth.” Charles smiled to himself, and there was something sad and longing about it. “We lived in Manhattan during the week and Tuxedo Park on the weekends. The pigeons would follow us between the two.”

“How did they find you?”

“Scientists don’t know for sure. It’s one of life’s mysteries.”

Just then a gray pigeon, all barrel chest and beak, waddled toward us. His leg was tagged.

“Not to bring up a sore subject, but did you ever find the one you lost?” I said.

“No. That’s the only one, believe it or not. Even as a kid, I never lost a single bird.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t know what happened?” I pressed.

Charles looked wistful. The pigeon in the yard waddled away.

“Thanks for coming tonight, chap.” Charles changed the subject. “Next time, let’s go to the Malibu house. The aviary there is unbelievable—and so is the bourbon.”

“Dinner is served,” a staff member said quietly, a welcome interruption in conversation.

We sat down at the long dining table. The centerpieces overflowed with roses the size of cabbages that still sparkled with dew, and the glasses were made of honed French crystal.

Unlike the last dinner party, where the group had quickly divided into factions, this time the six remained cohesive, focused on a heated conversation about technology’s influence on the music industry. Ever the reporter, always the observer, I stayed on the sidelines of conversation, which was just fine by me.

I hadn’t noticed it at the previous dinner, but this evening Charles attended to his wife’s every comfort, more like a personal valet than a husband. He asked Carole twice if she wanted more Brussels sprouts and checked her wineglass carefully to be sure it never dipped below half-full. If and when it did, a server was immediately summoned to top off the glass. At one point Carole’s heavy clip-on earring slipped low on her left earlobe and was in danger of falling off into her soup when she leaned into conversation. Charles reached out to pinch it between his thumb and index finger, positioning it back into place. Carole did not acknowledge the intimate gesture. In fact she seemed to stiffen under his touch.

When the group left the dining room for dessert wine in the conservatory, I excused myself to the bathroom. I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. I needed a cigarette.

I opened the door to find Carole standing in the hallway. Her porcelain face was flawless.

“I thought perhaps you’d gone for a cigarette,” Carole said, and I was flattered that she had remembered my vice.

“I’ve been trying to quit,” I lied.

“I never quit anything I enjoy,” she said matter-of-factly. “Charles insisted I show you the aviary. Follow me.”

I followed Carole down the hallway and then through a tall French door outside. I heard the sound of paws on grass, wet and saturated with weeks of rain, and then a German shepherd as big as a wolf appeared.

“Malcolm, this is Thomas. Thomas, Malcolm,” Carole said.

Carole leaned over and stroked Malcolm’s neck. He was a beast of a dog, with streaks of pecan brown and white through his fur. Carole tucked a pin curl behind her own ear and then adjusted Malcolm’s collar so his tag was in its proper spot tucked beneath his chin. There was no chance of Malcolm leaving this fortress, so I wondered why he had a tag at all.

In front of us lay a lawn so vast I expected to find polo ponies roaming about or men in white playing cricket. On either side of the expanse, box hedges and plants were sheared to tight, geometric lines. There was not a single errant leaf.

Carole and Malcolm led the way. There were paths, but they opted to walk on the middle of the grass instead. I walked two steps behind.

We passed a swimming pool—refined and rectangular, in contrast to Emma’s fishy swamp—and then a tennis court with a small viewing area. Not every tennis court should have reminded me of her, but this one did. I must have slowed a step or two, not realizing it, because Carole turned around.

“Do you play?” Carole asked, glancing at the court with her sleepy eyes. I got the first glimpse of a glass structure in the distance. It must have been the aviary.

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