The Jewels of Tessa Kent (58 page)

Was it like a harem or opening night at La Scala or a gypsy encampment or the Carnival in Rio without music? All of them put together, she decided, since the thought of any one of those particular events made her feel nervous. The only thing that calmed her was her paddle, which gave her an entitlement she felt she otherwise lacked.

On the other hand, Polly thought, sitting up straighter, her capricious, spicy smile brightening her face, just who here
knew
as much as she? Who here could put the entire picture together, who here knew
why
this auction was happening, who here had
made
this auction happen? Unknown to anyone in this crowd, tonight,
she was the Auction Goddess
.

Tessa and Maggie knew, of course, but they were only two parts of a whole that she had been inspired to create. Sam Conway? She didn’t know if he knew, nor did she know if Barney knew. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask somebody, Polly told herself, with the complacent delight of a confirmed secret keeper. Either you knew and didn’t say anything, or you simply didn’t know there was anything
to
know. A tiny, self-satisfied expression settled on her face, and her charming face was illuminated as she looked benevolently over the room.

“Excuse me, may I ask you a question?” Polly’s neighbor in the row, an older woman with gray hair, wearing a noble amount of rubies with her silver brocade suit, turned toward her.

“Oh!” Polly said, startled out of her reverie. “Certainly.”

“That miniature you’re wearing fascinates me. I wonder if I could possibly look at it more closely?”

“Here, I’ll take it off so you can get a really good look,” Polly said, unknotting the velvet ribbon from around her neck. She was particularly proud of the tiny object, which had been fit into an oval of old gold. It was a portrait of Jane against a dramatic, solid blue background, wearing an old-fashioned man’s white linen shirt trimmed with lace, under a soft black leather vest, of which just one silver button was undone.

“Oh, how extraordinary! My goodness gracious, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so utterly lovely. The details, my dear, the details! I feel as if he must have been exactly like that, down to the last hair on his head.”

“Yes, she is. It’s rather a good likeness,” Polly said demurely.

“You mean, the model’s alive? A woman? I thought it was a man because of the clothes. But you can’t mean this is contemporary?”

“I finished painting it last week,” Polly purred.

“Good grief! I thought it must be seventeenth century! Isaac Oliver probably.”

“Thank you. I executed it in Oliver’s style; in fact the background is the same blue he used in the portrait of John Donne in Queen Elizabeth’s collection.”

“Oh, I’m all chills! I can’t believe it! I saw that collection just last year. The Donne was dated sixteen sixteen. Uncanny! Uncanny. My dear, you don’t, by any chance, accept commissions?”

“I only work on commission,” Polly answered, her nose quivering with the pride of craftsmanship.

“How perfect! I’ve been thinking about next year’s Christmas presents, such a problem when you have four daughters and they all have little ones, so I start early. Now, do you think you could possibly find the time to squeeze in miniatures of each of their children? That would take care of all the girls and be
such
a load off my mind. I always give them very special gifts, but obviously
the prices here tonight are going to be ridiculous. Miniatures of my grandchildren would be much more sentimental and meaningful than anything of Tessa Kent’s, mad as my girls are about her.”

“It all depends,” Polly said, her brain working madly. “How many children are there?”

“Eleven, so far, counting the babies, and I couldn’t leave them out, could I?”

“Eleven. Hmm. That’s a lot of children.”

“Oh, dear, are there too many? You’d have until next December. That’s almost nine months. You could leave out the babies if it were absolutely necessary.”

“Well, I suppose I might, just, be able to manage, if I put all my other commissions on hold, and worked like a demon,” Polly said with a thoughtful frown. “But the problem is that it would mean disappointing a lot of people. However … since children are only young once … yes, I could certainly
consider
it, but only because of the sentimental value.”

“Oh, my dear, if only you’d agree, I’d be the happiest woman in the world! How much are they, by the way?”

“They’re not inexpensive,” Polly warned.

“I should think not,” her neighbor said indignantly.

“I ask five thousand dollars each, no matter the age of the sitter. Babies are particularly difficult. They haven’t developed the optimum amount of facial detail, so it’s a triumph to do them justice.”

“How exceedingly well put. Indeed, I’d never realized that. Oh, could you please say yes and book your dance card solid for the rest of the year? You can work from photos, can’t you? Otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“I’ve often done that, particularly with children. They do wriggle.”

“Perfect. Now, here’s my card. If you’ll write down your name and address, I’ll have my accountant make all the necessary financial arrangements tomorrow. You tell him what you want. A certified check, or whatever
you require to give up your other commissions. Oh, but you haven’t agreed yet. Do say yes! Yes? Oh, what a relief! Now I can sit back and enjoy this auction without even thinking if I should bid or not.”

“I’m not going to worry about it either,” Polly agreed heartily.

“There’s only one thing …”

“ Yes …?”

“Well, you see, many of my friends will want to come to you too, once they see the miniatures. Not just for children, either. It’ll become a rage, I’m afraid, so I’d appreciate it deeply if you called me before accepting their commissions … I don’t want to be copied left and right by just anybody until my girls have had at least a year to be original.”

“A whole year?” Polly shook her head dubiously.

“Oh, well, if you insist, make it six months. Would that be too much to ask?”

“I suppose it’s only fair,” Polly nodded slowly. She’d just multiplied her price ten times and ensured work for years to come. Yes, it seemed fair enough. There was a reason for the Auction Goddess to ride forth from her West Side dominions once in a great while, after all, she told herself, in high good humor, as she tied the portrait of Jane back around her neck. You met a richer class of people.

S
am 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?”