style="font-size:15px;"> 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
