41
Sam sat next to Tessa in the comfortable chairs that were arranged in the upstairs owners’ lounge. Tonight they were alone with the panoramic view of the heads of everyone in the room, and binoculars were provided so that Hamilton Scott, at the podium, seemed only feet away. Although they couldn’t see the numbers on the bidders’ paddles, they could hear perfectly through the loudspeaker in the lounge. It was, thought Sam, something like those special skyboxes at sports events whose distant, elite placement took a lot of the sweat and reality out of the game.
People were still being seated as Sam restlessly readjusted his pair of binoculars. He and Tessa had been sitting here for almost an hour, with floaters popping in every now and then to ask if they wanted anything to eat or drink. They’d been smuggled in early through the employees’ entrance so that Tessa wouldn’t have to run the gamut of the huge crowd outside of S & S, attracted by the arriving parade of the invited society figures and celebrities. The mob outside was further enlarged by the presence of mobile television trucks from all three networks and CNN, who would be reporting on the auction as soon as it was over, when they could finally interview executives from S & S as well as the departing bidders.
Would this hellish auction ever start? Christ, he couldn’t wait for it to be over, couldn’t wait until Tessa could finally put an end to the infernal round of travel interviews, photographs, and more travel. He knew that if she had said, at any point in the past month, “enough,” she could have returned to private life and let the auction take place under its own steam. No one at S & S would have complained or thought that she was giving less than she should have.
But somehow, once she’d started on the publicity, Tessa hadn’t been able to cut it short by one minute. It used up a merciless, profligate, reckless amount of time, time Tessa didn’t have, although that wasn’t his judgment to make.
But what would he have done if he’d had the same diagnosis? Sam asked himself. Wouldn’t he have continued to teach and write, no matter that his new book would never be finished, even if his courses didn’t make any lasting mark on the world?
Did some people who were faced with Tessa’s knowledge suddenly embark on an entirely different way of life? he wondered. Were there people who sailed a small boat from one tropical island to another, spent every penny they had left on drink and drugs, moved to Paris, bought an island off the coast of Maine and took up lobster fishing, divorced their spouses and ran off with someone else’s wife, embarked on a cruise ship and never got off? Pulled a Paul Gauguin?
No, damn it, there probably weren’t. People didn’t, as a rule, start something new without an initial period of difficulty and resistance. It took training to sail small boats; a certain aptitude and an indifference to hangovers to go to hell with yourself; and as for divorce, who would want to spend the end of a life in a wrangle with lawyers? Lobster fishing was cold, hard, back-breaking work; living in Paris was dank under any circumstances and lonely if you didn’t speak French. The essence of a cruise was that it ended. Even becoming a ski bum took the ability to ski or fake it. Gauguin was all very well, but he’d run away to exercise his already formed genius, with most of his life ahead of him.
Tessa had accomplished the one great single shining thing she had set out to do: become a mother to Maggie. It had meant spending more time than he had imagined possible when she first told him about her plans, but every minute that she worked and traveled with Maggie was a minute of motherhood reclaimed from all the years that had been lost.
Even if he had known about her cancer, when she’d first told him about the auction, he wouldn’t have said a word to influence her against the idea. He didn’t have the right, nor did anyone else, Sam thought, watching Tessa scanning the room, exclaiming excitedly when she caught sight of someone she knew, laughing at the sight of Fiona and Roddy deep in conversation, her binoculars constantly returning to Maggie, unable to repress her pride as she watched her most noticeably pregnant daughter move slowly through the ranks of journalists, stopping here and there to distribute chosen morsels of information.
“Darling,” Tessa said, turning to Sam. “Immediately after the auction, Maggie’s going to join us here and lead us out the way we came in. She’s coming back to the Carlyle with us. There’s something special I want to ask her. Would you mind if she and I had a drink at the bar and talked while you go on upstairs?”
“Of course not. I’ll be knocked out. That’s what watching people spend tons of money in public does to me. The only time I went to Las Vegas I fell asleep under the blackjack table.”
“Ah, but tonight it’s in a good cause.” Tessa smiled at him, a strangely mysterious smile on her passionately formed lips, with such a loving look glowing in her eyes that he had to clench his fists not to cry out. Had she ever looked so vividly alive? Had her face ever been so deeply expressive? She looked as if she were waiting, with gentle patience, for a deep-throated bell to sound.
Sam knew that today, for the first time, she’d used a pain patch on her torso. He’d felt it under her blouse when he’d held her in his arms before leaving for class. She’d told him that it was called Narto-Duragesic and that it lasted for three days.
“It’s pain relief for someone who isn’t watching the clock,” she’d explained, almost gleeful at the advances of medicine. “Beats anything you can get over the counter.”
“What does the pain feel like?” he’d asked, his need to know outweighing any other consideration.
“It’s so hard to describe … it’s not sharp, not something that comes in waves, it’s sort of like a stomachache that goes through to my backbone, but just a mild stomachache, sweetheart, nothing to get alarmed about, I promise.”
“How long have you had it?”
“Only for a few days. Funny, I felt a real need to live with it for a while, to get to know it, to recognize it, before I used the patch. I’m not sure why. Now that I’ve put the patch on, I feel it going away.”
“Will you promise me to eat a good lunch?”
“I won’t have a choice, I’m eating with Maggie and she watches me consume every bite. Yesterday she invented the most caloric, most expensive lunch in the city, two avocado halves, slightly hollowed out and piled high with Beluga.”
“Don’t tell me she ordered that too?”
“Of course not, way too much salt and too much fat for her. She ordered broiled fish and cheered me on. I couldn’t finish it all, nobody could have, so she polished it off. I guess you can only gorge when you shouldn’t—when you should, you don’t want to. That seems to be some sort of universal law … I loathe every bloody universal law. I’ve never heard of a single one I liked. Don’t you agree?”
“You know I do.” That oblique remark was as far as she’d ventured, Sam reflected, in discussing her condition, since that first night when she’d told him. She’d never gone for that second opinion and he’d never mentioned it again, he thought, rubbing the bone he’d broken in his hand that was still not completely healed. Mutely they’d reached an understanding that they had time, plenty of time, for whatever Tessa wanted to talk about, whenever she felt like it. Or if not, not. It was up to her.
All Sam knew was that he was on board for the whole trip, he’d be there for her, unequivocally, every step of the way. He loved her more extravagantly each day and they both knew that. All he could do was to hide, as well as he could, the bleak, blank intuition of a future without her that drilled him through and through by day and by night.
The loud crack of Hamilton Scott’s hammer brought the buzz below to an abrupt halt. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced in his rich, extravagance-inspiring voice. “Welcome to the Scott and Scott Building, and to our historic sale of magnificent jewelry from the collection of Miss Tessa Kent.”
As Tessa and Maggie entered the Café Carlyle, to the sound of Bobby Short singing “A Foggy Day in London Town,” a burst of cheering and applause broke out as Tessa was recognized. The ne
ws of the results of the auction had traveled all over the world the instant it finished, and in Manhattan, radio, television, and word of mouth had spread the story in less time than it had taken them to drive back from S & S to the hotel.
One hundred sixty-two million dollars had been attained, more than three times as much as the largest single-owner sale of all time, that of the Duchess of Windsor in 1987. Not a single jewel had gone for less than five or six times its high estimate, and every record ever made for every catagory of gem had been broken.
Tessa waved and smiled to the startled, congratulatory crowd as the headwaiter led them to the secluded table she’d reserved earlier in the day. The champagne she’d ordered was poured immediately and she relaxed against the banquette, sighing with relief and trying not to hum along.
“Let’s not try that auction caper again,” Tessa said, laughing, after the set was finished, Bobby Short had left the room, and conversation resumed all around them, creating an intimate place in which they could talk.
“Not unless you’ve been holding out on me and that was only some of what you’ve got stashed away.”
“The only things left are the pearls and my ring, and a few cameos I keep upstairs. I don’t care if I never see another jewel again. Enough! It feels as good as cleaning out your closets and getting rid of everything you haven’t worn in two years.”
“I’ve heard that theory,” Maggie said. “But I wear everything I have until it falls apart and if I threw out one of Barney’s four shirts, he’d have a fit. But you know, there actually is one of them he never wears.”
“Don’t touch it, take it from me. He needs it. I know more about men than you ever will, little girl.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, but never mind the gory details,” Maggie replied. “Why do I have the feeling that I’m here for a reason known only to you? Why am I suspicious because Sam insisted that he was too sleepy to join us? He looked deeply thirsty to me, and wide awake.”
“He developed a bad case of auction fever.” Tessa laughed. “I’ve never heard a man get so excited, it was ten times worse than when he watched the Super Bowl. What he needs is to take a tranquilizer and go to bed.”
“Was he surprised that you had so many jewels?”
“He’d seen the catalog, just flipped through it once or twice to admire the Penn photos and whistle at the pictures of me, but he never bothered to read any of the descriptions, so I don’t think it sank in until tonight. Then, when the action began and he actually saw and heard an emerald necklace being sold in a few brisk minutes for eleven million dollars … he was knocked for a loop. Even I was stunned.”
That was the only time during the auction that she’d had to fight back tears, Tessa thought. The memory of that magical night in Èze with Luke, the perfume of the lavender, the warm wind of Provence, that marvelous white Dior dress she’d worn for the first time … oh, had it really happened a million years ago and was it possible that there’d never be another night like that again for her? Never, ever? No, never. Never. Nevermore. But then would she ever be twenty again or on her honeymoon, even if she were guaranteed to live to be a hundred? What’s more, there wasn’t a woman in the room who didn’t have some similiar memory, she’d told herself, and she’d stopped the silly tears before they spilled from her eyes.
“So was I, and I’m used to auctions,” Maggie admitted. “I’d worked myself into a state where all the publicity we did was a self-sustaining fantasy, publicity for the sake of publicity, but tonight the fantasy turned into a huge, very real sum of money. Those people went crazy! They just had to have a piece of you at any price. You or your legend; I guess they’re indivisible. It’s hard to wrap my mind around it.”
“I bet Liz and Hamilton aren’t having any trouble getting their minds around their ten percent commission.”
“It’s an easier sum to swallow. Almost bite-size. Now, Tessa, tell me why I’m here and you’re not upstairs with Sam.”
“You don’t miss much.”
“I try not to.”
“Actually, darling, I’d like to offer you a job.”
“What?” Maggie exclaimed, almost choking on the Sprite she’d ordered instead of champagne. “I’ve just finished the biggest piece of work in my life and you want to offer me a job? What exquisite timing. Ma, don’t you think I need a vacation? Don’t you think I deserve one?”
“ ‘Ma’?”
“Yes, I’ve decided that suits you. Only when we’re alone, of course.”
“I love it. I feel like a Ma. Now, Maggie, pay attention. The new foundation will start out funded by the hammer price of everything sold tonight and the profits on a half-million catalogs. That’s a lot of money. I started to make my will today and I left most of Luke’s money to the foundation as well.”
And more than enough to Maggie, Tessa thought, so that she and her children would never be dependent on any man, no matter how much she loved him; but she’d find that out later, when she couldn’t protest. And her Tiffany cultured pearls and earrings, which Maggie would actually wear; as well as the glorious three-strand necklace of perfectly matched natural pearls, which she’d probably only wear when she’d grown into them; and the heart-shaped diamond and any amount of odds and ends, including the farmhouse outside of Èze-Village she’d never been able to bring herself to sell. What’s more, Maggie would even rediscover a large Irish family, all the great aunts and uncles and cousins Agnes Horvath had fled from, for each of them had been tracked down and left bequests. There was time enough for her to know all about that. Later. Much, much later.
“Holy Mother!”
“Exactly. There will be, eventually, a great deal more … several billion dollars for the foundation to work with, with additional funds coming in every year. This foundation needs someone I trust to run it. I don’t want to have to count on strangers. I’d like you to consider becoming the head of the foundation.”
“Billions! My God, Tessa, I don’t know anything about running a billion-dollar foundation!”
“Of course you don’t. But you’re a quick study, you’re smart, you’re enormously well organized, Maggie mine, and accustomed to working with all sorts of people, and getting them to work with each other. That’s the uniquely important thing. For the rest, you’d be able to hire professionals to teach you how a foundation works and pay consulting fees to the best oncologists in the world to guide you in the right directions. It boils down to the basic question of whether you’d rather be doing that or something else.”
“But what about the baby, Ma, your grandchild-to-be?”
“That’s the chief thing on my mind. Were you planning to go back to S and S after the baby was born?”
“No, I don’t want a full-time job and they expect time-and-a-half minimum from their wage slaves. I want to stay home for two or three years and find something I can do part-time. Barney’s doing amazingly well—there’re ten bikers born every minute—we can easily afford a housekeeper and I can take care of the baby and do other work besides.”
“You could run the foundation from home,” Tessa said quietly.
“How could I possibly? A foundation that size?”
“It’s not like running a billion-dollar business. Of course someone could turn it into a full-time job, with a large office at a fancy address, a top-heavy board of bigname directors and staff all over the place. That would be a serious temptation to almost anybody I could hire, and who would fire that person? Foundations tend to dig in and spend a lot of money on themselves. I’m wary of the kind of person who’d want to run it just for the prestige it would necessarily bring.”
“No staff?” Maggie asked with a sniff.
“Of course staff. As much staff as you need. And very good salaries, for you and for them. And an office, to put the staff in, to have a place to meet with the professionals you hire and consult with. But you don’t actually have to go to an office to learn and think and ask questions and gradually arrive at the point of ma
king decisions, these days, do you? As far as the money is concerned, it would be administered by the same people who administer Luke’s estate for me now, so you wouldn’t have to worry about that. And it’s not as if you’d have to snap right into it. That money wouldn’t go anywhere until you felt sure of what you were doing. You’d take little steps and then bigger steps, you probably wouldn’t be ready to take giant steps until the baby was in kindergarten—”
“Would I be pregnant again by then?”
“How would I know?” Tessa asked, astonished.
“You know I’m going to run the foundation, I thought you might know that too.”
“Oh, Maggie! Really? Truly? You’ll really do it? You can’t have any idea how marvelously happy that makes me. Oh, darling!”
“How could I resist? The more you talked about it, the more I realized I’d resent having anybody else do it. It’s your foundation, Ma, the Tessa Kent Foundation, and who else has a better right to make sure it’s run on a shipshape basis than your daughter?”
“That’s the other thing …”
“Tessa? What other thing! Do you have more plans for me that I don’t know about?”
“Not plans exactly … a question. Now, when I go back to my lawyer to finish drawing my will, do you want me to say that the foundation is going to be run by my daughter—or my sister?”
“Oh, hell, hell, hell. That’s a big one and I never thought of it. Hell!” Maggie sat absolutely still for minutes, chewing her lip. Finally, she started to speak.
“You can’t set up such a huge foundation without making news. It’s literally impossible to keep the details out of the press. If you say your ‘daughter,’ it becomes a major news story and it will never die. Even when the regular press is finished with it, the tabloids will be bringing it up for years … remember, they’re still convinced that Elvis lives. If you say your ‘sister,’ that’s just a truth that’s been around for a long time … every girl who went to school with me knows it, all your Hollywood friends, anyone who goes back to when I was born. It’s not news, it’s normal.”
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 44
