The Jewels of Tessa Kent

by Judith Krantz

  At the Oscars, Fiona was so accustomed by now to the status of the placement of her seat, just a few rows behind the nominated stars and far forward of the nominated technical people, that she took it for granted. Her last five independent productions had all been solid box-office hits, and for a woman in Hollywood that was powerful medicine. But the mob on Oscar night, black-tie though it was, seemed pitifully small-town and inbred, she observed, compared to this luxurious and fevered assembly of the chirping, squealing, waving, kissing, and preening international ultra-rich who were now crowding excitedly into the high, wood-paneled auction rooms. Fiona craned her neck in every direction, grateful to Tessa for inviting them and producing these seats.

  “I feel like an utter hick,” she whispered to Roddy.

  “Me too,” he responded. “I don’t think there’s ever been anything like this … of course I wasn’t at the Duchess of Windsor’s sale, but that was held in Geneva, out-of-town is out-of-town, darling, no matter what. This auction’s electrified New York. That’s all people were talking about wherever I went today, even the taxi drivers.”

  “I didn’t dare tell anybody I had a reserved seat, I knew they would have torn me apart in sheer envy.”

  “Especially since you’re not in the market for any of the jewels.”

  “And you are, Roddy?”

  “At these prices? But I couldn’t resist getting a paddle anymore than you could. It looks as if I’m here to pick up a little something for you, love. How many of these women do you think are going to be bidding for themselves? Almost none, I bet. It’ll be the men who’ll actually bid, egged on by the women, and it’s the men who’ll pay.”

  “Have you realized that it’s eleven whole years since that night when Tessa, looking like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented the Best Picture award?”

  “Eleven years! Jesus, Fiona, you’re right. It was eighty-two. Missing won, didn’t it, or was it E.T.? I never can remember.”

  “Gandhi, and how you can forget is beyond me.”

  “My inner feminist says it should have been Tootsie. Were movies better then or were we younger?”

  “Both,” Fiona responded fervently, “both.”

  “I still don’t understand at all why Tessa’s having this auction,” Roddy mused. “It isn’t as if she couldn’t afford to keep her jewels in their vaults, quietly letting them appreciate in value. No matter how dowdy and academic her life’s going to be with Sam, she’s still going to have years and years of major movie star appearances at which to wear them.”

  “I think the real reason is no more mysterious than what she wrote in the Owner’s Note’ in the beginning of the catalog, where she said that she felt the resources tied up in the jewels would be better spent now in creating a foundation for cancer research. As simple as that.”

  “Is our Tessa bucking for sainthood? That’s never been her style,” Roddy said thoughtfully. “Her jewels are so much a part of her that selling them is as if she’s saying good-bye to her past. And that doesn’t make sense. It makes me feel sad—and old.… I suppose I simply don’t like to think of them belonging to other women. ”

  “Maybe this is some sort of sign that the eighties are really over.”

  “What a terrible thought! Fiona, never, ever say that again! Don’t even think it!” Roddy said, aghast.

  “Sorry, darling. The eighties will last till the year three thousand, never fear.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive,” Fiona said wryly. She’d just had alterations made on all the shoulder pads in her large and expensive wardrobe of power suits, yet not one of the jackets looked quite right anymore. There was no way out, she’d have to spring for totally new Armani, the whole nine yards, or forget about the industry lunch. There was no such thing as investment dressing, and the people who edited fashion magazines were touts. Whatever was changing, and something damn well was, she didn’t have the handle on it yet. Nevertheless, with her job, she needed to stay well ahead of the curve.

  “Where’s the private box Tessa’s sitting in?” Roddy asked.

  “Up there, behind you,” Fiona said, turning and pointing to the upper level of the huge room. “See those windows that are almost hidden by the paneling? There’s a viewing room up there from which the owners or heirs can witness the auction without being stared at.”

  “What if …”

  “What if what?”

  “Well, suppose Tessa suddenly changed her mind about a certain piece, couldn’t she just bid on it, like everybody else? Maybe through a special telephone?”

  “It seems that’s illegal, once it’s been consigned.”

  “How do you know so much, when this is your first auction?” Roddy asked suspiciously.

  “Tessa told me when we had lunch yesterday.”

  “And how come I wasn’t invited?”

  “Girl talk, Tootsie.”

  Andy McCloud, who had returned home early to be present at the auction of the jewels of Tessa Kent, stood at his privileged place under the raised podium at which his uncle was about to begin the auction, and marveled at the scene. Every seat they had been able to cram into both auction rooms was filled with bidders from all over the world, many of them people who had never come to S & S before, reserving their custom for Sotheby’s or Christie’s.

  Throughout the Western Hemisphere, in Beverly Hills, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Miami, San Francisco, and Palm Beach, as well as in Toronto, Montreal, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio, and Buenos Aires, S & S offices had rented hotel ballrooms that had a direct audio feed to Hamilton Scott’s podium, so that the people sitting in those cities could hear the auction as it took place. In each of those ballrooms, as here at S & S, the individual jewel being auctioned was shown, in a vastly enlarged photograph, on a giant screen that hung several feet above the auctioneer’s head, while an electronic board, just under the photograph of each jewel, would display the current bid in all major currencies.

  There was a bank of twenty-five telephones, both here and in the other rooms, each one of which had its own line and its specially trained operator, who would take phone bids from people who either found it inconvenient to travel to the auction or, in many cases, choose to remain at home, in order to maintain their privacy.

  Right now, Andy thought, his excitement mounting, there were people everywhere, in every time zone, in both hemispheres, up all night, sitting by their phones, eyes trained on their catalogs, waiting for the call from their particular operator that would notify them when the lots on which they had requested telephone bids were about to come up. The operator would repeat the latest price as quickly as the auctioneer said it, allowing this global network of invisible bidders to participate fully in each sale. The hammer would not fall on a single jewel as long as somewhere in the world there was someone still willing to raise the bid, one anonymous phone bidder prepared to duel with another anonymous phone bidder until one of them carried the day.

  And no one in the world, Andy told himself, would know who had won, except for the three people who would go over the auction in detail tomorrow: Uncle Hamilton, Aunt Liz, and finally, after all these years, himself. Even then, many of the most important purchases would be made by someone bidding for someone else, whose identity even they would never know. Jewels were, as they had always been, the most reliable form of international currency, a traditional hedge for the very rich against everything but total destruction of the earth and its population.

  What a fabulous business! As much as he was captivated by his porcelains and his ceramics, he had to admit that nothing except a great painting auction could equal the fascination and violent excitement of a great jewel auction. He could positively feel the ebb and flow of the financial structure of the world, as if it were an underground river that tonight had chosen to flow just below the floorboards of S & S.

  He had no official job here, unlike anyone else who worked for S & S. “Just observe closely,” Aunt Liz had said, “and remember
everything.” Did she mean to include the sight of Maggie Horvath Webster, Andy wondered, Maggie who looked—and it seemed impossible—even more sexy, even more irresistible pregnant than she had as a virgin? It was, Andy found to his surprise, rather more bitter than sweet to realize that he was the only person in the room who was entitled to make that precise judgment. After all, his wife, Lady Clarissa, had her own much-appreciated charms, all of them delicately blond, delicately boned, delicately bosomed, delicately smiling, delicately—just plain delicate, damn it. How could Maggie, who was all boldness and blossom, all belly laughs and noticeable belly, seem somehow, bewitchingly … more … feminine? Absurd.

  He watched her closely as she was busy greeting and seating the dozens of journalists of every description who were important enough to be invited tonight, so that tomorrow the auction would live a vast second life in the press. Cameras weren’t allowed inside the auction rooms; no one wanted to risk being photographed in the act of buying millions of dollars worth of jewels, but certain journalists were welcome, and those rare bidders who didn’t object to publicity could discreetly arrange for their names to be released through Maggie or one of her corps of press officers, all of whom had adopted Maggie’s maternity uniform of a long, widely flaring black turtleneck tunic over very slim black pants and ballet slippers. Or were they all pregnant, Andy asked himself. Perhaps she’d started a new fad?

  God knows, it would be understandable after the job she’d done on this auction. She and Tessa Kent. Odd, decidedly odd that Maggie had never seen fit to mention that she was Tessa Kent’s sister, back when they were together. Could it be that she hadn’t trusted him? Hardly likely, he reflected, all things considered. There must have been another reason. After all, a woman tells her first lover everything—at least she should. Clarissa had, revealing all of her delicate, innocent, girlish little secrets, like a scattering of tiny, unopened buds.

  However, be that as it may, he had to admit that there had never been such a formidable team in the history of preauction publicity as Tessa and Maggie, airlifted in the past months from one center of wealth to another. How, he wondered, did that fellow, Webster, feel about having his wife jaunting about, from Tokyo to Lugano, in her present condition? And who was the guy, anyway? A devastating biker chap, according to Aunt Liz, who’d been at the wedding. Rode a Ducati, apparently. Must be some sort of playboy. Well, whoever he was, he hadn’t waited long to get his wife pregnant, had he? Not even until the nuptials. Face it, old chap, Andy told himself, as he forced himself to turn his yearning eyes away from Maggie, she’d been a pushover.

  Polly Guildenstern, dressed in her one concession to the 1990s, a dark green, high-necked velvet dress that was starkly modern in cut, sat breathlessly attentive, waiting for the auction to start, one row in front of Fiona and Roddy.

  She was in a fluster, Polly realized. She hated the East Side of Manhattan, garish, loud, and horribly nouveau. She chose to spend her time alone in her high, peaceful studio, cooking and working on the few commissions for miniatures that came her way, just enough to provide a frugal but decent living. In her free time, hand in hand with Jane, she enjoyed occasionally dipping into the predictable confines of their own, discerningly chosen, bars and discos. But this place! She hardly knew what to make of this overwhelming mass of exuberantly perfumed, gossiping, kiss-blowing, overdressed femaleness, punctuated by the dark blue and dark gray suits of their escorts.

  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 d
ollars 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.