The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  “Now, about this matter of your breasts,” Luke said several nights later, as he pushed the straps of her nightgown down and weighed them in his hands.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re fuller than they’ve ever been, and warmer, like two just-baked loaves of bread. Heavenly bread. And your nipples are getting slightly bigger and just a touch darker.”

  “Goodness! The things you notice, honestly, you have your nerve …” she protested feebly.

  “Darling, when did you plan to tell me?”

  “When I was … sure.”

  “What would it take to make you sure?”

  “Another few days, maybe a week.…”

  “And if I said I was sure, would that do it?”

  “If you said you were happy, that would make me positively sure,” she said in a small voice.

  “ ‘Happy’? That isn’t a big enough word for how I feel. God, Tessa, I love you so much … how long do I have to wait for our baby?”

  “Seven months, or a little less.” She laughed for joy. “I’m not really certain.”

  “Aren’t you a little behind schedule?”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought we’d agreed at thirty. I’ve been waiting for nearly a year, and doing my bit to help, as you might have noticed.”

  “You remembered!”

  “I never forget a promise.”

  “So you won’t mind sharing me?”

  “I’m only human—from time to time, I probably will. But I’ve had you to myself for more than ten years, the best years of your life some people might say, certainly the best of mine.”

  “What if the best years are ahead?”

  “But they are, darling,” Luke assured her, trying not to remember that he’d just past his fifty-sixth birthday and she was still only thirty. Thirty, my God, he’d been a kid at thirty. Nothing but a kid. “You know I almost never agree with what people say.”

  Tessa stood outside the cheese shop on the shopping street of Èze-Village. Normally she loved to go in and pick out each of the five cheeses they always bought, four of which they requested, the fifth a surprise, chosen with glee by the proprietor herself. The French, whatever the government’s policies, would never run out of new varieties of cheese, but today the thought of the pungent interior of the shop was suddenly repulsive and she’d told Luke to go in by himself.

  “We don’t need cheese that much,” he assured her. “It can wait.”

  “No, don’t be silly, darling. I’d rather stay outside, but that doesn’t mean you have to deprive yourself. I’m fine, honestly,” she’d responded, all but pushing him into the always-crowded store.

  But was she fine, Tessa asked herself? She still hadn’t had a minute of morning sickness, but the feeling of well-being she’d enjoyed only a week earlier had departed, leaving her nervous and jumpy, instead of deliciously languid. It was impossible to know whether she had been pregnant for two months or several weeks longer, but now, as she waited, she resolved to drive down to Monte Carlo this very afternoon and see a gynecologist.

  She’d probably waited this long because she hated French doctors, with their offices in their homes, furnished like living rooms, and their casual way of telling a woman patient to remove all her clothes before an examination, without providing a screen or a robe, for the sake of decent modesty. It was exactly like doing a striptease. There was never a nurse present, yet she’d never met a Frenchwoman who thought it was at all odd. They even bought especially beautiful lingerie expressly for visits to the doctor. She’d bring her own cotton robe, Tessa decided grimly, and wear it back to front.

  What was taking Luke so long, she wondered? Suddenly the gentle sun seemed far too hot, the light breeze far too strong, the quiet street much too noisy. Was it the first sign of a mistral? Most likely. And that would account for her nerves. She took a step forward to rap impatiently on the window of the cheese shop and almost stumbled, grasping the trunk of a chestnut tree. As Tessa stood holding on to the tree, she felt a severe cramp beginning in her abdomen. She pressed herself tightly against the tree, trying to stop the pain, to crush it before it could grow, but it mounted rapidly upward, gaining in intensity. Unable to remain upright, she bent over, doubled up, still grasping the tree, and saw in horror that blood was dripping from the bottom of her slacks, pooling darkly between her sneakers and dripping onto the cobblestones of the street. Jesus, she prayed, Jesus, no, no, but by the time Luke had gathered her up and carried her to the car, driving down to Monte Carlo as quickly as possible on the dangerously twisting road, she understood that she was having a miscarriage. She didn’t need a French doctor’s opinion to tell her why the bleeding, the terrible bleeding, hadn’t stopped.

  Maggie reread the postcard from Tessa she’d received several weeks earlier, before adding it to the cache of cards she’d kept in a special drawer in her desk ever since she came to live with the Websters. There must be dozens of them, she thought, dozens of postcards from all over the world that had arrived in the course of the past eleven years, and although she was sixteen and grown up, the contents of the postcards she received didn’t seem very different from those she’d been sent when she was six or seven.

  “Luke and I are in South America or the Arctic Circle or on the planet Jupiter,” Maggie thought, “Luke’s working hard”—when didn’t he?—“and I’m keeping him company and entertaining the people he does business with”—when didn’t she? Or else they’d be sent from Hollywood or a film location, with news of the progress of one movie or another. Boring, boring postcards. Just enough to “keep in touch,” never enough to really know what Tessa was thinking or feeling.

  Maggie had written long letters to Tessa month after month in the past few years, but she’d never sent them. Busy Tessa, always traveling, always the wife, always the movie star, wouldn’t want to be bothered with the absurd problems of a silly adolescent, she thought, when she reread her letters. Better to pour it out on paper and then tear it up than make her sister feel guilty for even a minute because she was going through one petty, unimportant misery after another.

  Now, from the point of view of sixteen, she was glad she’d kept it all to herself, because all that tortured self-pity about the way she looked had turned out to be wasted. Somehow, almost overnight, in some miracle of growth and change, she’d turned out to be passable, even fairly attractive, if she did say so herself, Maggie thought, closing the postcard drawer firmly and returning to the endlessly fascinating subject of her new assets.

  She had grown and grown and then stopped, at a not-too-tall, not-too-terrible five feet, eight inches. Her skin had cleared up, without a pimple to be seen anywhere on its surface; her braces had finally come off, leaving perfect teeth—Madison, she had to admit, knew a lot about orthodontists—and even her hair had decided to behave decently. She’d overheard Madison describing her coloring as “Black Irish,” but if that was an insult she didn’t understand it, Maggie decided, admiring the as-good-as-blusher-pink and white of her cheeks, the snappy blackness of her hair, and the blue, blueness of her eyes. Hello, gorgeous!

  She would do! Yes, indeed. As for her breasts, the ones she’d hated so much when she was so fat, now that she was, if not skinny, marvelously voluptuous, her breasts were just absolutely the greatest! She had the biggest, sexiest breasts in the sophomore class at Elm, everyone on the field hockey team had agreed about that. Even though she got straight A’s, everyone at school agreed that sexy tits were the best thing that could happen to a girl in this lifetime, Maggie thought dotingly, as she pushed them high and kissed them to see how they’d feel to some man, if some man ever came her way. She’d never even had a date, not a real one.

  She couldn’t manage to reach her nipples with the tip of her tongue, try as she would, but kissing the soft skin of her breasts soon felt so good she had to stop. The house was bursting with strangers busy with the arrangements for Candice’s wedding, and she couldn’t be sure that some flower person or
caterer’s assistant wouldn’t come bumbling in by accident and see what she was doing. Thank heaven for the haven of her bathroom, Maggie thought, locking the door behind her and stretching out on the thick rug. She was so excited that, as she had to do several times every day, she quickly rubbed her fingers over her panties, coming to a swift and blissful orgasm.

  Better, much better. Maggie panted in relief. The worst was when there was no place to do it, that drove her wild. But between certain stalls in the johns at school, where she could do it standing up, between classes, and her bathroom here, she usually managed. The bonus was that she wasn’t afraid of horses anymore, now that she got so aroused riding. Could it be that those animals could tell how their motion made her feel and that was why they behaved for her now? Was she having sex with a saddle? Or had she finally absorbed all those lessons she’d been forced to take? No matter, there were plenty of hidden places off the bridle path, in the woods, and the horses never noticed what she’d stopped to do.

  She wished she’d learned all about this heavenly delight sooner. Her childhood would have been one hell of a lot happier, Maggie thought, smiling at her flushed cheeks in the mirror above the sink, admiring the way the natural pearl necklace of great quality that Tessa had sent her for her sixteenth birthday hung between the sumptuous globes of her certifiably fabulous tits.

  Thank heaven she’d lost her faith when she was fourteen. Imagine having to confess this! Father, I’ve engaged in impure deeds. What kind of impure deeds? Sins against Holy Purity. What kind of sins? Touching myself, Father. How often have you desecrated your Temple of the Holy Ghost? Twenty-five times since my last confession. And how long ago was that? One week, Father.

  The poor man would certainly think she was going straight to Hell. Losing her faith was the best thing that had happened to her, even though she’d felt awful about it for almost a month, especially when she’d had to tell Madison she didn’t want to go to mass anymore. Madison had been surprisingly decent about that, Maggie remembered, in fact quite understanding. In fact, now that she came to think about it, positively relieved. Well, it must have been inconvenient to have a little papist cluttering up her house.

  Poor old Madison. When she’d mentioned the desirability of her joining the Junior League as soon as possible, Maggie had said she’d rather join the Communist Party. When Madison had hinted that it wasn’t too early to start planning Maggie’s coming-out party, she’d replied that she’d rather drop acid. It was easy to handle Madison, now that she knew how. Madison was afraid of her. She didn’t know why, but she was sure she was right. Madison had never felt the slightest drop of warmth toward her, and, do what she could, that hurt her as much as it always had, but she’d lived with the coldness and lack of interest so long that it had become part of the climate of her life, Maggie told herself. And, thank God, it was still her secret.

  20

  During the next year, Tessa had another miscarriage in the middle of her third month. Her doctors, the best in Los Angeles, insisted that they could find no reason for this inability to maintain a pregnancy. Two miscarriages in a row were absolutely not a sign that she would never have a child, they assured the Blakes. Tessa was only thirty-one and although, strictly speaking, she was not at the peak of fertility, she was well within her prime. Luke was as vigorous as a man half his age. After six months had passed, they advised them to “try” again.

  Holy Mother, how she loathed that word “try,” Tessa thought. Each time Luke made love to her, she imagined that half the superb medical community of Cedars-Sinai Hospital was in bed with them, a jovial, largely Harvard- and UCLA-educated cheering section, exhorting them to “try, try again!”

  At least that wouldn’t be the case for the next six months, during which the doctors had prescribed a holiday from even thinking about conception, ordering her to give her womb a rest and putting her back on the Pill. Stress, tension, and anxiety, they emphasized, were to be avoided. Oh, sure, Tessa thought, turn off your mind, little lady, there’s nothing to it. Doctors!

  Luke was fifty-seven now. On his birthday Tessa saw a man who had barely changed since the day she’d first laid eyes on him. Yes, there was gray in his thick, dark red hair, but only at the temples. His features, those powerful, weathered features she had loved at first sight, were certainly more deeply lined around his mouth and eyes, but otherwise he was indestructible. Indestructible. Only his gaze, when he looked at her, betrayed, in certain unguarded moments, his sorrow at her two miscarriages, a sorrow deeper for her than for himself, for she was the one who had to go through the physical ordeal, while he could only suffer quietly, and with a measure of guilt. What if she’d tried to have a child sooner? What if he hadn’t wanted her to himself for so long? He asked himself those questions so often that he had to banish them from his mind. You can’t rewrite history, Luke told himself, and in any case, she’d agreed to wait, she’d wanted to wait as much as he did.

  Before Tessa’s second miscarriage, they’d bought the family home she’d daydreamed about in Èze, choosing Los Angeles rather than Santa Barbara because there Tessa could be closer to her work. Luke no longer asked that she make only one film a year, since he understood that work was her best therapy now, in this difficult period, and he cut down deeply on his own travel to be with her during the six or seven months she spent making two films in 1986 and early 1987.

  They settled in Beverly Hills, high up in the winding roads north of Sunset, in a historic Wallace Neff house of old whitewashed brick, timbered in the style of a manor in Normandy, and covered with flowering purple trumpet vines. Four acres of land descended from terraced gardens down to a swimming pool and finally to a tennis court, which neither of them used. From the upper level of their gardens they couldn’t see another rooftop, so thick was the lush landscaping that surrounded their invisible, unheard neighbors. It was as peaceful here as at Èze, Luke said, and even the vegetation was uncannily similar, as long as you didn’t venture into the local equivalent of a village, where an Armani boutique held down one end of Rodeo Drive and Chanel and Fred Hayman the other.

  Now both Tessa and Luke found themselves much more a part of the Hollywood scene. They no longer had the excuse of constant travel to keep them from the dinner parties, the charity benefits, the private screenings, and the galas that were such an important part of the local social life for nine months a year, barely stopping during the summer months when most of the same people moved to their Malibu beach houses and entertained each other more casually.

  It suited them both, at this particular time, to welcome distraction, to accept a number of invitations; and, to Luke’s quiet pleasure, it gave Tessa many more chances to wear her most important jewels. Even now, at the peak of the lavish 1980s, when great jewelry was being worn by many women, Tessa’s vast collection of jewels was indisputably of the highest quality, the most extravagant, and the most original ever owned by any woman in one of the richest communities on earth.

  “What shall I wear with this tonight, darling?” Tessa asked, turning around to show him the white silk linen dinner suit she’d chosen for an intimate dinner party in a private room at Le Dôme, where Fiona was celebrating the completion of her first production. She waited for Luke’s answer, looking puzzled at the daunting number of possibilities available to her, since everything went with white. “Don’t you think, maybe rubies?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Luke said, smiling at her from the armless slipper chair in her dressing room, where he liked to sit and watch her finish dressing.

  “But which rubies?” she responded, vanishing into her closet where her built-in wall safe was open. “I don’t want to overdress, even if everyone else does these days, but somehow tonight all my rubies seem a bit over the top. Don’t you think so, Luke?” She raised her voice slightly, so he could hear her from inside her vast closet.

  “Remember, darling, I know you said I’d never cozy up to them but that’s only because they’re simply not cozy in and of themselves�
��but it doesn’t mean I don’t love them. Luke, come on in here and help me choose … no, never mind, I’ll bring out the trays and let you see everything,” Tessa said, as she emerged from the closet laden with six black velvet trays of jewels.

  Tessa screamed and dropped the trays. Luke was slumped sideways and forward, his left arm hanging to the floor, his head and shoulders following the line of his dangling arm.

  Tessa ran to him, using all her strength to push his upper body back into the chair. His head flopped forward, his chin rested on his breastbone.

  “Luke! Luke!” she begged, “what’s the matter? Open your eyes, for God’s sake, is it your heart?” He didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes, didn’t speak.

  In a panic that gave her superhuman strength, Tessa managed to pull the phone table toward her and dial 9-1-1 while still propping Luke up in the chair. He had fainted, she thought, she mustn’t let him fall. Tessa managed to give the emergency operator the address of the house and the fact that Luke had passed out before dropping the phone and attempting to take Luke’s pulse. As soon as she reached for his wrist he started to fall forward toward her. She abandoned the attempt, wrestling with his weight to keep him in the chair.

  Now Tessa tried to listen to his heart, putting her ear to his chest. She couldn’t feel a heartbeat in the heart whose exact location she knew as well as that of her own—but his jacket was in the way, that was all. She couldn’t find his heart because he was so heavy, so heavy, such a mass of firm muscle. Above all she mustn’t let him fall.