She was as direct as any man when it came to sex. If there was a real attraction she not only didn’t expect courtship, she didn’t want it. Courtship took up precious time. She came to the table to play, not to look around, and she made it a rule not to accept an invitation from anyone, not even for a drink, if she didn’t have a strong suspicion that there was a good chance that she’d want to go to bed with him.
Sometimes, Maggie thought, the rapid development of her many affairs, and the unsentimental way she dropped lovers in whom she’d lost interest, even managed to shock Polly, and that took some doing.
“You’re so frisky,” Polly had commented recently. “Meaning what?” she’d asked. “You’re like a puppy, chasing its tail. Why don’t you settle down with one guy for six months and see how it feels?”
“Like you and Miss Jane Robinson?” Maggie had asked, laughing. “Remember, that snowstorm brought you together, so I was the inadvertent matchmaker.”
“Laugh, laugh, I don’t care, I’m a happy woman,” Polly had replied. Well, “happy” for Polly now meant steady domesticity, and that was the last thing Maggie wanted. She was simply having too much fun. She had no intention of getting married to anyone, and when men got serious about her, as, unfortunately, so often seemed to happen, she let them down firmly. It was kinder that way than to keep them dangling with false hope. She hadn’t missed all the pleasures of a college education after all, now that she came to think about it.
Of course, even with her mild disapproval of Maggie’s frenetic sex life, Polly was no longer fully privy to the details of Maggie’s private life since she’d stopped being a boarder. As she’d advanced in the press department, she’d earned more money. It still wasn’t much, public relations never paid well, but she managed to make her salary cover her brutal haircuts that were never in or out but were essential to her look, expensive Wolford panty hose that wore like iron and were a true economy, shoes she tended so carefully that they lasted forever, and a very occasional replacement to her consistently all-black wardrobe. By being fanatically careful about expenses, Maggie’d managed to rent an amazingly cheap two-room apartment one flight down from Polly. It gave her the advantage of the increased privacy she now wanted for her busy love life, and the reason to start slowly buying at auction for herself.
Maggie had never realized that she had a deep need to own her own things, always living in other people’s houses as she had, but once she learned enough about furniture, art, and objects from the friendly experts at S & S, all of them eager to educate her on the chance that she’d shine extra publicity on their departments, she’d been able to pick up a few true bargains at various sales. There were invariably days when, by sheer luck, there was little interest in a piece on which she had her eye. She’d been able to snatch up some wonderful antique textiles for Polly as well, by way of repayment for the amounts of Polly’s food she’d consumed. Nothing could repay the permanent, deeply affectionate welcome she always found at her friend’s studio.
Her own tiny apartment was, Maggie thought dotingly, as eclectic as you could get. It was still fairly empty, but everything in it mattered to her. No matter how many shelter magazines she pored over or how many decorating editors she huddled with for her work, she’d never chosen to make a single “design statement,” which, as Polly said, was damn lucky, considering what an incredible mishmash she was creating with her magpie eye. But it was the home she’d never had and always longed for.
She didn’t entertain there and probably never would. Lunch almost always took place at a fashionable restaurant as, sometimes with Lee and sometimes alone, Maggie became friends with the many journalists a press officer needed to know: the ladies and gents of the art and antiques magazines, the fashion magazines, the general-interest magazines, and the specialized magazines for collectors. There were two magazines for teddy bear collectors alone, Maggie thought, still surprised after all these years, and small fortunes were spent on old Steiff bears in good condition. Life had done a big piece on their last teddy bear auction and was waiting eagerly for the antique doll sale that was coming up.
“May I offer you a little more champagne?” the flight attendant asked.
“Please,” Maggie said, holding out her glass. This stuff wasn’t getting to her, she was still too high on the last two weeks to be touched by wine.
What a fantastically international business she was in, Maggie reflected. No matter where an auction was held—New York, Munich, Lugano, London, or Kuala Lumpur or anywhere else—the bidders came from every country where people had money. If they weren’t there in person, they’d bid by mail or by phone.
You could put all the auction houses in the world on an island—something the size of Bermuda, for instance—and as long as there were good hotels, enough sales rooms, and plenty of free meals for journalists, you could declare it the auction capital of the world. No force known to man, not even a legion of furious golfers, could keep the collectors and dealers away.
You’d need marvelous mail service for the catalogs, and an international airport, but in the end the results would be the same. Some people wanted to sell and others wanted to buy; if you had a fine enough silver service you could march off into the middle of the Sahara and knock it down for eight million dollars. You could slip a Fabergé Imperial Easter egg into your pocket, climb a mountain, and pull in three million in change.
God but she loved doing something really well, and she was getting better at it all the time. She loved her two crazy little rooms; she liked each of her lovers; she loved her friends: Polly, Lee, Jane, Hamilton, Liz.… And then there was her oldest friend, Barney, who was always there for her, Barney about whom she could never think without a deep pang in her heart, a muddled turmoil in her brain, and a peculiar longing that seemed to come from her wrists and radiate up her arms to … Never mind Barney, she was the luckiest girl in the world, Maggie decided.
An empress of China had once collected apple-green jade and tucked it away in 3,000 ivory cabinets. Where had it all disappeared to? How much per bead were 107 jade beads—or jadeite, to give it its proper name—into 1.7 million dollars? she wondered. The human desire to own was a marvel. How much per round, green, carved little rock? Maggie tried to figure it out in her head, but the amounts she arrived at kept changing as she drifted off to sleep.
On the first Saturday night in September 1993, just as business hours were ending, Maggie met Barney at Chopper Dude’s, the custom motorcycle shop he’d opened with a well-financed partner several years earlier. Soon after his arrival in New York his alliance to his Harley had melted into total immersion in the world of handmade swingarms, skyscraper sissy bars, stretched headlights, and hand-hewn fenders; a world in which one company alone made 250 different kinds of motorcycle seats, a world in which a seventy-year-old CEO might spend four years working on his Springer, gold-plating the chrome on the shoulders, the front fork, the brake and clutch levers, the screen behind the carburetor faceplate, and the band behind the nitrous bottle.
Maggie and Barney had reached an agreement never to talk shop. Even the brand names of the bikes competing in the Daytona 500 remained as foreign to her as the very existence of a Philadelphia Chippendale tea table remained to him.
“Take me out of this testosterone-as-a-lifestyle pit,” she demanded. “I have something to talk over with you.”
“Where the hell have you been? I haven’t seen you for it seems like months,” Barney complained as they walked down Ninth Avenue.
“Working,” Maggie said briefly, mindful of their agreement.
“Working too hard to give me a quick call?” he asked, hurt.
“In Hong Kong,” she said tersely. It wasn’t true, but how could she tell him that something about the light of summer evenings in the city made her long for him too much to permit her to see him safely? She’d rationed herself to this casual drink tonight.
“Okay, I understand, enough said. Don’t tell me why.”
“I wasn�
�t going to, you hard-core, real-deal chopper dude, darling.”
“Want that drink, beautiful?”
“Need that drink,” Maggie replied, turning off the noisy street into a little bar with pretensions to Barcelona chic. They sat silently, waiting for their drinks, happy just to be together. Barney looked so much older than he was, Maggie thought, scanning his beautifully muscled body, his perpetual squint that came from working on pieces of evil machines, his perpetual tan that came from test-driving the grotesque monsters. There was something pagan about him, something barbaric, monolithic, almost … regal … with the confidence of a young prince. A man now, a man to be reckoned with.
But it didn’t matter one whit how safe he said his beloved bikes were, she distrusted them all, not for anyone else, but only for him. How many women felt the same way? she wondered. And what good did it do them once the bike virus bit? She’d never understand the relationship of men and speed, she’d realized long ago. It must be some sort of useless extra gene. But oh, he still smelled so powerfully good; clean sweat, motor oil, and that special Barney smell she’d always known, like a perfect apple hanging on a branch on a sunny afternoon.
“So what’s your problem?” Barney asked, finally. “It can’t be about your job so it’s got to be about a guy.”
“It’s not about a guy,” Maggie said slowly.
Relief washed over him. He’d dreaded the day she’d meet the right guy, dreaded it for years. No matter how good it might be for her and how inevitable he knew it was, how bound it was to happen in the course of her life, he honestly didn’t know how he’d live through it.
He’d tried fruitlessly not to worry about it, but he’d never managed to forget the possibility every time he thought about Maggie, and that was often. Christ, much, much too often, for all the good it did him! How did she dare to get more luscious? It infuriated him! She’d slimmed way down, not that he thought she needed to, without losing her fabulous tits, and she’d accomplished some evolving and mysterious alteration of her black uniform, so that she resembled every other chic, unmistakably New York woman from the neck down. But Maggie’s skin looked as if she spent her days in a rose garden near Connemara, wearing a sun bonnet. No woman in Ireland had eyes as blue, he was convinced, and certainly no one had ever managed to make hair so short into hair so sexy. Or have a laugh that gave every man in earshot a hard-on.
“If it’s not about your job and it’s not about a guy, you must want to buy a bike,” he said.
“Great guess, but just off the mark. No, Barney, believe it or not, it’s about my future. I’ve had a job offer from another auction house, a much bigger house, at more money, with more opportunity. ”
“Which one, Sotheby’s or Christie’s?”
“How’d you know their names?” Maggie was startled.
“Classic car and bike auctions.”
“And that’s dumb of me, because of course we have them, too, so I should have realized.”
“Well, which?”
“Sotheby’s.”
“Why don’t you want to take it?”
“I don’t?”
“If you did, you wouldn’t be asking me, you’d have done it already.”
“Hmmm, you’re smarter than you used to be.”
“Yeah, I think I escaped Dad’s share of the gene pool when it came to brains.”
“And you’re certainly not like your lovable mother in any way that I’ve ever noticed. ”
“Aren’t you full of compliments today?” He smiled down at her. “Either they adopted me, or else I was switched at birth. There’s no other explanation.”
“Do you see them?”
“You know I do, from time to time, now that they almost approve of me. Success has had a way of tempering their parental horror at my wicked ways. Stop changing the subject. Why don’t you want a better job? Especially at the best place?”
“I’ve thought and thought about it, and it keeps coming back to loyalty. Lee and Hamilton and Liz have just been so damn good to me. They’ve trained me, they’ve molded me, patiently and with kindness. I love all of them. And there isn’t one of the other assistants who could begin to do the job I do, and where would that leave Lee? Especially now that she’s getting married.”
“Married? Isn’t she in her fifties?”
“Barney, really! What’s wrong with you? Lee was working on a major Old Master sale—sorry, sorry!—and the chief consignor and she fell head over heels. She’s going to keep on working, but he’s a very rich man who takes frequent vacations and she’ll want to go with him.”
“More work for you, then.”
“Unquestionably. ”
“More money?”
“Probably, but not as much as I was offered.”
“I don’t think you should consider moving,” he said with complete conviction.
“Why not?”
“Because you said you loved all of them. That’s the best reason I’ve ever heard for staying put.”
“Hmm … I thought it was loyalty … but no, it is love … everyday love, basic love, just about the most important thing in the world.… I knew I should ask you—Barney, what’s that on your arm?”
“Nothing,” he said, hastily rolling down his sleeve.
“Show me,” Maggie demanded.
Sheepishly, he rolled his sleeve back, revealing the edge of a tattoo.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, not you too! Let me see that awful thing.”
“No. ”
“Yes,” Maggie insisted, using both hands to yank the fabric almost up to his shoulder. A good-size heart, pierced by an arrow, appeared on his bicep, adorned with an M on one side and a B on the other.
“Oh,” she said and lapsed into silence. After a minute she asked, “How many others do you have?”
“That’s the only one. You can search my body if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day, retroactively.”
“Thank you, Barney,” Maggie said gravely, more touched than she was willing to admit.
“I’ll never have another, you know that, don’t you? And I wasn’t drunk when I had it done … well, maybe just a little, but I’d wanted one for years.”
“I do know, I do, sweet Barney. You’re such a romantic, aren’t you? You’d ride off to war for me, you’d fight dragons for me, you’d jump into a pit full of snakes and cut their heads off for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Damn it, Maggie, you know I would,” he said passionately, fussing with frustration. “I’d do anything in the whole wide world for you, I’d go into outer space for you, with or without a spacesuit, but unfortunately, that doesn’t seem necessary right now. You’re riding high.”
“So are you,” she replied absently, thinking hard. She had to deal with this … thing … about Barney sooner or later. It had been going on for five years, it stood in the way of her ever caring about another man, or even, if it came to that, wanting to care. The basically heartless, bitchy way she treated men, the way she flittered and fled from one to another, was directly related to this schoolgirl obsession she’d never been able to let go because she’d nourished it by not living it out. And it wasn’t sensible or healthy for Barney, either. That new tattoo proved that he hadn’t forgotten, that he still cherished what he mistakenly thought were romantic feelings for her. Without them he’d have found other girls, available girls, and many of them, long ago. They’d both be happy if they weren’t stuck in their shared past. But were they both condemned to remain so attached to an idealized concept of each other, a myth of their teenage years, that they could never grow beyond it? Were they that helpless?
They’d never know, Maggie realized, her hair rising on her closely shorn nape, unless they did something about it. It was the only remedy, the hair of the dog as it were. As long as they remained inaccessible to each other, they’d remain slaves to their old fantasies. But a fantasy realized, a fantasy acted on, would be a fantasy no longer,
just mundane reality that could be easily judged for its true value, and discarded, leaving them free.
“Maggie, you’re a million miles away. Not still thinking about that job offer?”
“No, just … relaxing. It’s Saturday night, remember? Date night.”
“Except that this isn’t a real date, it’s just the two of us,” Barney drawled wryly. “Two old buddies, comrades in arms, pals for life, like a couple of leathery cowboys sharing a bottle for old times’ sake, just as if you didn’t know that I’m in love with you, more than ever. Fuck! I shouldn’t have said that. It slipped out, a bad habit. It won’t happen again.”
“Barney …?”
“What?”
“Oh, Barney, I don’t know …” she sighed.
“Maggie, you? You always know. You’re the one with all the answers about us. Right from the beginning. Not that I’m bitter, I just sound bitter, oh, hell, so maybe I am a little bitter, what the hell, I can live with it.”
“What if you didn’t have to?”
“I’d be a happy man, but don’t kid yourself, it’s not gonna happen just because it makes you feel more comfortable to think it might. It’s not your problem, Maggie,” he said brusquely, “it’s strictly mine, don’t worry about it.”
“But what if? … Barney, what if you could stop feeling bitter?” she persisted.
“You talking lobotomy? I don’t think they do that anymore.”
“No.” Maggie sat up straight and looked him directly in the eye. She knew she was blushing, but she didn’t care. This had to be said and said clearly. “I’m talking about making love, you and me, the way we never did, and getting it out of our systems, once and for all.”
“Is that … is that,” he asked carefully, “what you really think would happen?”
“I’m sure of it,” Maggie answered, overcome by the rightness of her thought process. “It’s logical and it makes perfect sense.”
“Hmmm. What if you got me out of your system but I didn’t get you out of my system? What then?”
“Barney, remember how right I was before, that day when you left home? Even you had to admit that we couldn’t make love then. Well, I’m right again. Now we can, now we’re old enough,” Maggie insisted, made more stubborn and impetuous by his unexpected resistance. “We both have fantasies about each other that have to be exposed to daylight, or they’ll persist, or even get worse.”
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 32
