The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  During the past few months, he’d been floating in the loftiest of departments, doing his vague, many-faceted, unimportant thing, whatever it was, in the executive offices of S & S, which she’d never yet entered. She’d seen Mr. Scott and Mrs. Sinclair from a distance and plagued Andy with questions about them, to which he only replied that they were “just plain pizza lovers only with more money.”

  Perhaps the reason he gave the impression of aimlessness, the reason he didn’t take floating more seriously, Maggie thought, was that his true destiny was to work as an expert, and floating was only a matter of being able to call himself employed until he moved into a position in Porcelain and Ceramics. But how long would he have to wait? Now that she came to think about it, she didn’t know Andy’s timetable for success any better than when she’d first met him.

  Tonight, since they hadn’t seen each other for several days, Andy had been so ravenously intent on making love that she hadn’t had a minute to tell him about her new job, Maggie realized, as she sat up in bed and watched him nap. If he didn’t wake up soon she’d have to get up and scramble eggs or perish of hunger. He’d been so anxious to fuck her that he hadn’t taken the time to feed her after work, or even to stop for a drink in their favorite bar. It was, she supposed, flattering, in its own way, but most certainly not her idea of a well-choreographed evening. Flattering, perhaps, polite, no. Lusty, yes, thoughtful no. She’d be damned if it would happen again.

  The depth of Andy’s sleep began to irritate her seriously. Why were men so exhausted by sex that they had to restore themselves with a trip to unconsciousness? She’d never felt more alive! But how could she generalize about men when Andy was the only man she’d ever known intimately?

  Maggie heaved a little sigh as she thought of the variety of love affairs she’d once planned for herself at college. Oh, how naive and innocent and full of herself she’d been, not even a year ago. Just look at her now, lying here quietly starving to death with one man; one man with whom she’d had an exclusive relationship for many months; at the moment a slightly snoring man. Yet Andy’s lovemaking was so inventive and ardent that, Maggie thought philosophically, she should not, in all fairness, feel deprived.

  But it was too damn domestic! And yet not domestic enough in certain ways. At Thanksgiving Andy had gone home for the weekend, explaining that if he took a girl with him his absurdly conventional and conservative parents would consider him engaged, and over the Christmas weekend he’d wangled a week off that included the New Year’s weekend, ten days in all, to go skiing with a bunch of pals from Harvard, an annual blast that he told her never included women.

  Andy’d never actually said he was in love with her, but then she’d never told him she was in love either, Maggie brooded. The truth was that she didn’t know if she was or not, her only yardstick for love was still Barney, and that was such a complicated, tormented, tangled web of emotion, that she couldn’t compare it to anything but itself. Andy was charming, funny, and whimsical, wonderful to look at, but … but … was she ready to really fall in love, whatever that meant? If you were ready, would you have to ask?

  Maggie lay back on the pillow, wondering if her black clothes were the right gear for a press officer. Twenty-five dollars extra wasn’t enough to branch out into anything but one more piece of black, she decided, poking Andy gently. He turned over, seeming to fall more deeply asleep. She buried herself under the covers and pulled his ears and blew on his eyes until she was satisfied that he was rising up out of the depth of sleep. She wasn’t going to wait another minute to tell him her news.

  “Andy, Andy, darling?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled, aggrieved. “What time is it?”

  “Dinner time. Listen, Andy, do you know who Lee Maine is?”

  “Lee … great gal … think Uncle Hamilton … always … had sorta letch for her,” he yawned, still three-quarters asleep, trying to bury his head between her breasts and plunge back into oblivion.

  Maggie pushed him away, recoiling almost before the words made sense to her.

  “ ‘Uncle Hamilton’!”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Shocked fully awake, Andy blinked at her. “Did I say that?”

  “You said that. Uncle Hamilton who, Andy?”

  “Well, obviously … oh, shit!”

  “If Hamilton Scott’s your uncle, Mrs. Sinclair’s your aunt! You’re some sort of Scott! How the hell could you not have told me?”

  “I didn’t want it to influence you,” he replied, looking badly caught out.

  “In what way?” Maggie demanded, hopping out of bed, pulling a robe around her and standing wrathfully against a wall as far as she could get from him.

  “It was damn stupid but I thought it could have made you like me more, or less, depending—you could have thought I had unfair pull or … well …”

  “I could have played up to you because of your connections? Don’t you know me better than that?”

  “Of course I do! Shit, Maggie, that’s the last thing you’d do, you’re the most emotionally honest person I know, but by the time I got to know you, I’d let it go so long I didn’t know how to tell you, there never seemed to be an exactly right time.” He struggled out of bed with as much dignity as he could muster, wrapping a blanket around his waist.

  “Thanksgiving, tell me about that, Andy. Tell me about your conventional parents and why you couldn’t invite me.”

  “I felt like a bastard about that, Maggie, oh, darling, really, you’ve got to believe me, I hated leaving you alone in the city, but my mom, Minnie, is Uncle Hamilton’s and Aunt Liz’s younger sister. Years ago she appointed herself the family Thanksgiving dinner giver, so most of the family was there, the McClouds, the Scotts, and the Sinclairs. I’ve never brought a girl home for Thanksgiving, they’d have been buzzing and wondering … you can see the problem, can’t you?”

  “I’m very good at seeing exactly that sort of problem.”

  “There are only a few people at S and S who know who I am: Lee and some of the department heads, and the head of the International Office … people I’ve known practically all my life. My floater job has been a way of training me …”

  “Going out for pizza is your way of working your way up the company ladder?”

  “Well, pizza was just a euphemism. I’ve actually been working my ass off learning the ropes. I need the practical experience of seeing how everything runs, from top to bottom, from the day a consignment arrives until it’s sold and paid for. Eventually, unless I screw up big-time, I’ll become head of S and S. It won’t happen for many years, of course, but none of the other kids in the family wants to go into the business. Aunt Liz has two married daughters in California, with their own busy lives; both of Uncle Hamilton’s sons are doctors; and my sister doesn’t care about anything but the ballet; so that leaves me.”

  “The Porcelain and Ceramic Expert,” Maggie said flatly.

  “That’s perfectly true. There’s no reason why an executive can’t be an expert too. That’s why I went to business school, so I’d have both kinds of training. Oh, come back over here, sweet, beautiful Maggie, don’t look at me as if I were a monster.”

  “Is this apartment really rent-stabilized?” she asked, not moving.

  “Yes, thank God. But I don’t live on a floater’s salary, I have what is known as a small but adequate private income.”

  “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “Don’t you think you’d better tell me?”

  “Hellfire and damnation! Next month I’m going to Geneva.”

  “For a sale?”

  “No … for a year. Oh, Maggie, I can’t help it, Uncle Hamilton made the decision. I’m going to be working directly under the head of the Geneva office, for upper-level training, and then I’m going to the London office for more of the same, another year or so, maybe more.”

  “That’s two things,” Maggie said. “Maybe even three.”

  “You can see
that I intended to tell you everything, how could I leave for all that time without explaining why?”

  “No, that would have been too much to lie about, even for you,” Maggie said, from behind the closet door where she was quickly getting dressed.

  “I wasn’t lying, Maggie! I just wasn’t being straight with you, there’s a difference!”

  “You’re playing with words.” She emerged, ready to leave, her sulfur-yellow muffler wrapped tightly around her neck, her eyes narrowed in disgust. “You’ve lied every night we’ve spent together since you knew me enough to trust me; you would have kept on lying tonight if you’d been even half-awake. A lie of omission, steady omission of the truth, is as much a lie as any other kind, Andy, didn’t you ever learn that at Harvard?”

  “But Maggie, you can’t leave, I’m crazy about you!”

  “Were you planning on taking me to Geneva?”

  “How could I? But I thought—”

  “That it would be much easier to wait till the last minute and then just drop the bomb.”

  Andy fell into a silence of admission while Maggie studied his face. No, she’d never been in love with him, how could she have ever wondered if she was? There was a strong physical attraction between them, nothing more. The hurt was in being lied to, but that particular hurt would always be the most painful, the most unforgivable one for her because of her past. Andy had behaved the way many men would when they want to keep a girl without making a commitment to her, and, in all fairness, she’d never asked for more, not so much as hinted. She’d been as content with the status quo as he’d been.

  “Andy, don’t do this again to another girl. It stinks, it’s beneath you, it isn’t fair,” she said gently. “But I owe you, so I forgive you.”

  “Owe me? What are you talking about?”

  “I owe you for a glorious, five-star, incredibly thorough and imaginative erotic education. It’s going to be marvelously useful in the future. After all, Andy, remember, you were my first. I certainly never planned for you to be my one and only.”

  “Oh, Maggie! Don’t go!”

  “Good-bye, Andy. I have to go out for pizza.”

  27

  When she reached thirty-six, in August 1991, Tessa formed her own production company. There had been no noticeable lessening in the number of scripts offered to Aaron for her attention, but she’d seen too many major actresses suddenly wake up one day and discover that there were fewer and fewer roles for them as they approached forty, to assume that the same thing wouldn’t happen to her.

  It was as sure to happen as the effects of gravity on the human face, she thought, and although Tessa, in the most demanding, thorough, and severely professional inspection of her looks, still couldn’t find any damage to her skin, her features, her hair, or her body, she knew that through some change behind her eyes, through some difference in her expression, she had changed vastly from the girl who’d started playing Jo March to someone who could and should be playing nothing but a woman. A young woman, of course, but one who had done her full share of living and loving and maturing. She’d been in front of the cameras for twenty years, she’d grown up in front of those cameras, and it showed in a million ways that no moviegoer could pin down but each one would recognize.

  Fiona Bridges had been willing to join Tessa in the new production company in exchange for Tessa’s commitment to do one film a year for the entity, leaving her free to make pictures elsewhere. To have this call on the services of a star as internationally adored as Tessa, was vitally important to Fiona. As partner in Kent-Bridges Productions, she had taken two or three giant steps. Aaron Zucker had been retained to be business manager for the company, as well as continuing to serve as Tessa’s agent.

  “No full-frontal nudity,” Tessa stipulated, as they celebrated the formation of the new company.

  “That the only no-no?” Aaron asked. “How about hookers, addicts, abused women, serial murderers—that sort of thing?”

  “That’s Oscar nomination material for any actress of my age,” Tessa giggled. “If you can find a script in which, at some point or another, I’m committed to an institution, preferably maximum-security, where I don’t wear makeup, have no costume changes, and never get my hair washed, it’s almost a sure thing. However, there’s got to be a white phone in my cell.”

  “And Fred Astaire takes you out dancing once a week,” Fiona murmured, “and they let you wear your jewelry.”

  “Fiona, darling, you’ve always understood me,” Tessa remarked lightly, wondering what Fiona would say if she knew that since Luke’s death she’d continued to buy herself extraordinary jewels on many of the special occasions he had observed, spending princely amounts of her enormous wealth on what had become a necessary part of the content, the very rhythm of her life. She owned so many treasures that there wasn’t an important jeweler who didn’t notify her when a truly exceptional gem came into their hands. In the small, tight world of important gemstones, she had progressed from a woman who merely wore the jewelry a man gave her, to the status of a major, serious private collector.

  “Understand you? That’s more than I can say,” Aaron muttered into his champagne.

  Kent-Bridges’s first success had been a film in which Tessa played a lawyer defending a character played by Bruce Willis on murder charges. The picture owed fully as much credit to Willis’s splendid performance and the chemistry between them as it did to her own performance, but his monster salary had chewed deeply into their profits.

  Now, a year later, in the fall of 1992, not long after Tessa turned thirty-seven, she had set her heart on making a film in which the meatiest part belonged to her.

  “Aaron, have you finished the biography of Lady Cassandra Lennox?” she asked impatiently.

  “Considering that it’s nine hundred and ninety-seven pages long, I’m proud to say I finished it last night. That’s over three hundred pages a day and my wife’s ready to leave me. Again. I’ve been reading till two in the morning.”

  “Well?”

  “Hey, I didn’t think women could get away with that sort of stuff back in Queen Victoria’s time. No wonder she was considered the most scandalous woman of her era. All those lovers, all those little bastards she popped out so easily, all that travel from one court of Europe to another, all that stealing other women’s husbands—who wouldn’t admire a dame like that?”

  “But did you find out about the rights?” Tessa asked impatiently.

  “I sent you a memo on it this morning. The guy who wrote it, Dr. Elliott S. Conway, flatly refuses to sell. To anybody. He’s had a heap of offers. Warner Brothers and Lorimar wanted it for Michelle Pfeiffer, Jaffe/Lansing for Glenn Close, Paula Weinstein for Susan Sarandon—only Woody Allen and Streisand haven’t been heard from, to hear his agent talk. Dr. Conway maintains that Hollywood would only sensationalize Lady Cassandra, turn her into something she wasn’t, leave out the important things she stood for. He spent seven years researching her life and he says there’s no way he’ll allow anyone to turn it into a two-hour movie. He wants people to read every page of the entire book and nothing less.”

  “That’s ridiculous. How could Cassandra be shown as more sensational than she really was? And how can he refuse a movie deal? Nobody refuses a movie deal,” Tessa said, more amazed than irritated.

  “He doesn’t appear to be aware of that. The guy’s a history professor at Columbia, with a major ivory-tower attitude.”

  “I bet he has a trust fund as big as his ego,” Fiona said, “or a very rich wife, probably both.”

  “I’ve got to meet him,” Tessa said resolutely. “I have to play Cassandra, it’s my part, not Susan’s or Glenn’s or Michelle’s or anyone else’s and that’s all there is to it. Aaron, can you arrange it through his agent? I’ll fly to New York any time and meet with this absurd professor.”

  “What if he won’t take a meeting?” Aaron asked.

  “Tell his agent I’m a devout fan and all I want to do is buy him a drink, tell h
im how brilliant and wonderful his book is, and get my very own copy autographed.”

  “What if he doesn’t fall for that line of sickening bullshit?”

  “Oh, Aaron, you’ve been around me so long you take me for granted,” Tessa sighed. “I tell you that if he’s any kind of man he’ll want to meet me, and if he’s gay he’ll want to meet me, and if he’s an alien he’ll definitely want to meet me and take me back to his planet for breeding purposes, good luck to him.”

  “Yeah, Aaron, she’s Tessa Kent, remember?” Fiona weighed in, wishing, as usual, that Aaron could be less pessimistic. Didn’t he realize how lucky he was to have kept Tessa’s loyalty? Every last nominee for an Oscar performance last year had been a CAA client, and Ovitz would grab Tessa in a Beverly Hills microsecond if he got the chance.

  “I’ll give it my best shot,” Aaron said, repressing a groan.

  Two weeks later Tessa waited in a unreconstructed neighborhood bar far uptown on the West Side near Columbia for Dr. Elliott S. Conway, who was, at this point, a half hour late. He’d declined to come downtown to have a drink at the Carlyle Bar, or in her suite, because, as he put it, he had severe limitations on his time. He could at least have the courtesy to be prompt, Tessa fumed, tired of pretending to be engrossed in a copy of The Life of Lady Cassandra Lennox while avoiding making any eye contact in a bar jammed with men who were staring openly at her.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in a bar by herself, Tessa thought. Had she ever done so? Hadn’t she, all her life, met strangers or friends on her own territory or in protected, privileged spaces, rather than this kind of down-at-the-heels, seedy hangout, which reeked of a hundred years of beer? As she’d left the shelter of her limo, parked discreetly around the corner, she’d twisted her wedding ring so that the huge green diamond lay on the palm of her hand, an automatic action whenever she walked on the streets of any city.