The Jewels of Tessa Kent (43 page)

“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.”

“Let me get this absolutely straight, so I don’t take advantage of your theory. You propose that we make love, in cold blood, so we won’t moon around about each other anymore?”

“Exactly,” she answered, her eyes shining with conviction. “No more mooning, it’s childish.”

“When and where?” he asked quickly.

“Tonight. The sooner the better. We could go to my place or your place, it won’t matter.”

“You know you’re nuts, don’t you? Completely, absolutely nuts.”

“I’ve never been saner in my life,” she said urgently.

“Let’s go to your place. Then I’ll be the one who has to get up and go home afterward, not you.”

“Fine.”

“Now?”

“Now,” Maggie said, with resolution, even though her mouth was dry and her feet were cold and she longed for him with her palms and her fingertips and she ached for him in the pit of her stomach and the back of her neck, it must be now because once it was over, once it was real, she wouldn’t feel this unendurable need again.

Maggie woke up in the middle of the night, woke up completely, as if it were broad daylight, and knew, without
a single doubt, that she had never had a happier minute since she’d been born. Everything in her life had led to the harbor of this bed in which Barney lay quietly sleeping on his back, an arm flung across one of her breasts. She felt as open and fertile as a field in spring, ravished, teeming with possibility, lying, rich and receptive, under the light of noon. She eased herself away cautiously so that she could turn around, lean on her elbow, and gaze at him in the dim beam of the street-lamp that filtered through her curtains.

He was the stuff of dreams, this man of hers, he was the pink-silver of a spring dawn, the honey of a summer afternoon, the moth-dreaming indigo of twilight, oh, he was the cat’s pajamas, all right. And if she hadn’t been brilliant enough to prove that to herself, once and forever, she might have missed understanding that he was the love of her life, and always had been, Maggie thought, suddenly terrified at her close call.

Admittedly, she’d followed a roundabout path to find out the truth, and her logic had been faulty, but oh, so beautifully faulty, a full 180 degrees faulty, so perfectly wrong that in the end, wasn’t she all but forced to understand that she’d been right? What was her insanity but a higher form of sanity? What was being so certain of her own thought process but a subtle form of readiness to be convinced that she was wrong? And wasn’t she the wickedly clever one, Maggie admitted, in a sudden giggle of honesty, to find a highfalutin way to get Barney into bed without even letting
herself
know what she was doing? Much less him?

The whole of the crowded island of Manhattan centered on this one rumpled bed, on this trance of adoration with which she contemplated Barney’s profile. She felt as if she’d never had anything to do with another man, and in fact, she never had … well, that was, as it were, to be specific, not really, not truly, because she’d never experienced emotional fulfillment before, never felt a part of someone else, never allowed herself to let
go of her borders and be bound to another, in bonds of unquestioning love.

How many women had Barney conquered to make him into such a magnificent lover? she wondered. She suppressed a pang of jealousy. Neither of them should ever ask each other any questions about what they’d done while they were waiting for each other. The past no longer existed.

“Have we reached the part where we stop mooning about each other yet?” Barney asked sleepily, his eyes still closed.

“Oh, no, no, no, not yet.”

“Not ever? Promise?”

“Never, my love,
never
”