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.
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
