The Jewels of Tessa Kent (46 page)

T
hree hours after she had left Susan Hill’s office, Tessa snapped out of a time period she would never rediscover in detail again, and found herself sitting in the Madison Avenue office of an unknown travel agent, about to sign an agreement to take one of the four Crystal Penthouses on the
Crystal Harmony
for a ninety-six-day world cruise that started in January in Los Angeles and crossed the Pacific going toward Hawaii and points west, following the sun.

“I’m sorry,” she babbled to the travel agent, trying to hide her confusion. “I’ve just realized that I really can’t take off ninety-six days. Oh my God, I must have been quite mad to think I could. I’m so terribly, terribly sorry to have wasted your time, please forgive me, I’m so very sorry.”

“But Miss Kent, you insisted … I pulled every string to get the accommodations …”

“I’m so sorry, I’d really love to go, but it just isn’t possible. Do forgive me, I’m sorry,” she blurted and fled, carrying with her a full burden of shopping bags. She’d raided Bergdorf’s, Tessa noticed as she dumped the contents of the bags on her bed back at the Carlyle.
She’d bought cruise clothes of every sort: a dozen pairs of fashionably flimsy high-heeled sandals, five bikinis, each with its own robe, a heap of imported lace underwear, seven tubes of designer lipstick, and a pile of sparkly, frilly summer dresses with little wraps to pull on over her shoulders.

Everything could be sent back to the store tomorrow, Tessa realized, and with that, she began to weep, slowly at first and then more and more violently, howling without words, wailing, high and shrill without any thoughts, lamenting ruinously without any end but the sheer brute need to weep her heart out. She was shaken by hugely mounting sobs, wrenching, painful sobs, wave upon wave of them, until she slowly stopped only because she had wept as much as her raw, aching eyes and throat could endure.

When she was able to look at her watch, Tessa realized that she must have been lying on her bed, her pillow over her head, pounding the mattress, for hours. If Sam had been home he’d have asked questions, and insisted on answers, she thought, and that was the one thing she was determined not to have happen. Her eyes were burning and felt enormous, stretched like the skin of some rotten fruit about to burst; she had a murderous headache and a hungry pain at the pit of her stomach.

How could she possibly be hungry? Tessa thought as she phoned room service for a double order of scrambled eggs and toast. She stood under a hot shower for a long time, and then, wrapped in her toweling bathrobe, took off the metal covers that had kept the eggs and toast warm, spread the toast with the entire contents of a pot of jam, and wolfed down everything, just to fill her stomach. She went to the bar and made a compress of ice wrapped in a napkin. She locked the door to the apartment, lay down on her sofa, put a big tumbler filled with iced vodka within reach, and adjusted a heap of pillows under her, intending to move the compress from place to place to try to make her eyes feel better.
She was exhausted, she told herself, she needed to rest, she needed, in the comfy English phrase, to put her feet up.

In a few seconds Tessa was shaken by a rage so destructive that it made it impossible for her to remain motionless on the sofa. Gulping the vodka, and pouring more, she paced back and forth, muttering to herself in an incoherent monologue composed of the vilest words she’d ever heard. She’d like to kill somebody, yes, more than anything, she’d like to hit and hit and hurt and hurt until somebody died. If she had the power she’d order a hundred executions, she’d hurl thunderbolts, she’d wipe out cities, she would, she meant it, she yearned to do it, she thought in a concentrated passion of fury that lasted for hours until, weak and drunk, she fell on her bed and slept dreamlessly, without moving.

She woke up at three
A.M
., disoriented at finding herself in her robe, lying on top of her quilt, her feet freezing. For a minute she remembered nothing of the previous day, and then it all came rushing back in a blast of realization so horrifying that she didn’t think she could survive. Finally, forcing herself to think, she painfully began to reconstruct the entire conversation with Susan Hill, detail by detail.

It could not, it could not
possibly
be as bad as all that, she thought, with sudden, clear conviction, pulling on heavy socks. It couldn’t be a death sentence, not because she had bad cramps. Helen Lawrence, Dr. Wing, Dr. Susan Hill, what did they know? Tomorrow she’d go to see some good doctors, better doctors, doctors who would tell her that the needle biopsy had been a mistake, that she had fallen into a nest of the worst, most unprofessional medical frauds you could find in the City of New York. Look how they all knew each other and passed her from one to another. She shook with hatred as she thought of them, people who hung a dozen diplomas on their walls and then lied and lied and lied for no reason at all except to frighten her.

Lied for no reason at all.

Fuck!
If she could only manage to believe that. If
she could only prove it
. But they were all first-class physicians, each one of them, and she knew it, Tessa admitted, any other idea was absurd. She stared in utter confusion at her image in her mirror. She didn’t look like a woman with no more than two years to live. If she was lucky, two years and a few months. If she wasn’t, a year and a half. She’d only just turned thirty-eight. In two years she’d just reach forty.
Forty was nothing!
She looked like someone who’d spent a night with some brutal stranger she should never have gone home with, badly bruised around the eyelids, nostrils raw, cheeks mashed, her whole face disheveled and glazed but unquestionably very alive.

But she’d never reach forty. She’d never celebrate the birthday that foolish, lucky women complained about in make-believe misery, even lied about. Why did people lie about their age? Why wasn’t every birthday a brilliant triumph to be toasted and celebrated, another year you could boast about because you’d survived? Were people utterly crazy, not to realize that survival was a gift of the gods, to take it for granted, to actually feel bad about getting older?
About having lived more life?
What were wrinkles, what were forty extra pounds or weakened muscles or gray hair, except signs of the best of good luck?

It was too much to bear
. It was too unfair. It was the most unfair thing she’d ever heard of happening to anybody, nothing that had ever happened was unfair compared to this, not even Luke’s death. It was the ultimate unfairness and no one to blame but some cells gone mad. She felt knocked to her knees by the unfairness, yanked and punished and dragged like a wet mop across the floor, skinned alive, gashed all over her body, gutted like a fish, yes, even nailed to a cross—
that
unfair,
exactly
that unfair, not a bit less, and not for any reason, any deed, any thing she’d ever done or said or thought. At least Christ had convictions He knew were worth dying for.

She wished, for the first time, that she hadn’t lost her faith after Luke had died. Maybe then someone could try to convince her that this unfairness was for a purpose, but she knew it was random, she knew it was impersonal. Yet Tessa felt as if she’d been targeted, as if it were focused, as if some malevolent force loathed her, specifically her, with a direct, evil calculation that had already measured out the dose of poison that would kill her twice over. Random and targeted at the same time … that shouldn’t make sense but it did.

She’d go back to the church and never miss an early morning mass or a Holy Day of Obligation or a single weekly confession if she could reach forty-five. All she asked was to be middle-aged … that unattainable heaven that other actresses dreaded. She’d never make love to Sam again if she could reach forty-five, or eat another good thing or drink another drink or buy another flower, if she could reach forty-five: she’d give up her work and give up Sam and slave in a homeless shelter eighty hours—a hundred and twenty hours—a week, she’d do anything … become a nun … if she could reach forty-five. Become a nun? As if they’d take her. Tessa had to smile bitterly at her own craziness. A nun indeed.

Tessa realized suddenly that she must have been steadily ripping apart a gauzy, sequined white dancing dress she’d bought earlier. It lay all around her in shreds and strips. She hadn’t known she was doing it, she hadn’t known she had that much strength in her hands. Was that what people meant when they talked about a frenzy of grief? Had she been rending her fucking garments? Well, she damn well wasn’t going to do any more of that, she thought, angrily throwing the entire heap of clothes onto the floor of the nearest closet.

She knew only one thing with any certainty. She wasn’t going to have any treatment. No chemo, no radiation. She wasn’t interested in spending one second in a hospital or a doctor’s office to see her nonexistent granddaughter get married. She’d never have another
wedding anniversary or see anyone she loved graduate or celebrate a new decade of life. There would be no future of simple, daily joys with Sam, no more major markers in her life’s history, no “remember-whens” to be talked about with Fiona when they were both wise enough to get out of the industry. She’d never face the need to think about a face-lift, she’d never know the regret of being over the hill, she’d never decide to take character roles—oh, she’d give anything to be too old to play another romantic part,
too old
to play a character part, the right age to play a crone,
a withered crone
, without makeup and have it believable!

She felt a blanket of the blackest depression, bleak, dismal, and hopeless, start to sneak over her, smothering and all-but-irresistible, and Tessa knew that if she didn’t think of something else quickly, the two years she still had left could be spent, would be spent, in a hell of self-pity. She had used up years of her life mourning Luke. After he’d died, she’d actually believed she had no reason to live. How stupid she’d been! How wasteful! All those priceless days thrown away on grief. There was no time left, not a day, not a minute, to mourn for herself. It was a luxury she couldn’t afford.

What did she have left? she asked herself, trying to focus. Sam? But how long could she keep this from him … how long could they love each other without the shadow of the future spoiling every minute? Her work? She couldn’t play Cassie, she couldn’t count on having the time to finish the film; they’d never get insurance on her now anyway. So, at best, she could assist Fiona in some way, and watch Streep play Cassandra Lennox, or if not Streep, another actress. All her friends in California and New York? Friends, Sam, work. Wasn’t that more than a lot of people ever had? It was, she tried to tell herself, it really was. She’d had decades of stardom to look back on … Luke, she’d had her life with Luke. She’d had her year with Sam. How many women could say as much? Wasn’t that enough? No, it wasn’t. It was
not
enough.

She was going to be denied most of the experiences of a mature woman, there was no getting away from that. She would have no forties, no fifties, no sixties, no three score and ten. She would never accept it, she could never forgive it, but she knew it was a fact she had to bite into with all the power left to her.

Tessa saw her life stretching forward, a narrow ribbon, a short strip, with a sharp snip cutting it off not far from her feet, the ribbon curling back on itself. But narrow ribbon or not, she vowed, she would make it so full of reality that it would count as much as a longer stretch of time. For a moment she let herself make believe that nothing had happened, that she could release herself into the casual, unthinking dailiness of life, but she couldn’t sustain the idea. The ribbon kept snapping and curling backward.

But … but … there existed one
essential
transaction she must make, a way to control her short future, one single thing she could do, one thing she still had time for, one experience no one could refuse her, one way to still create, to leave something behind that would show that she had lived a life outside of her films, some bit of her that would survive and make a difference.

She could make her peace with Maggie. She could know her daughter again. She could try to heal the rift between them.

There was time, Tessa thought, plenty of time for that. Her life had been cut short, but it hadn’t been abruptly terminated, like her parents’ lives, like Luke’s life. There was still time, time for Maggie.

Maggie
. She had a daughter and her daughter would have a daughter or a son some day. No cancer could take that chance away from her. A daughter who had inherited half of whatever she was would eventually, inevitably, have children of her own, descendants … her descendants, who would know that Tessa Kent had lived.…

Her excited thoughts slowed down. It had been
roughly five years since Maggie had refused to accept the millions Luke had left her. Maggie would have had a yearly income of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Had she even stopped to think of what she was turning down in her haste to have nothing to do with anything that linked her to her mother? Probably not in such detail. She was too young to understand the financial consequences of what she had done, but the gesture said clearly that she was not too young to have made up her mind, once and for all, that her mother was cast out of her life.

But that could not be allowed to stand
. She would not permit it! She had her rights, damn it, cancer or not, and Maggie would have to admit them, whether she wanted to or not.

In five years, Tessa calculated, on fire with her idea, Maggie must have changed, must have mellowed. Five years were forever, she knew that now. Maggie was an adult, she’d passed her twenty-third birthday months ago. Tomorrow, yes tomorrow, she’d go to see her, go straight up to that apartment she was living in, that apartment Tessa had never ceased to have quietly checked out by a private investigator every six months, and confront Maggie, yes, have that confrontation she’d never dared to risk before because she believed that Maggie would shut the door in her face and that had seemed too much to endure. What a vile coward she’d been, to let so much time go by. She’d tell Maggie that she only had a short time to live, force her,
force her
, to listen, just to
listen
. That’s all she asked.