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.
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,
