The Jewels of Tessa Kent (36 page)

Paperwork was piled up on everyone’s desk and often on the floor around the desk, and sometimes stacked up against the walls as well. Scott & Scott, although considerably smaller than Sotheby’s or Christie’s, was a global auction house with thirty-nine offices in twenty countries. It held several hundred auctions a year, and only a larger and more computer-savvy staff could have managed to keep up with the workload, Maggie noticed as she raced around, hailed by dozens of harried people who needed her help
immediately
. She liked S & S and the people who worked there, and now that fall was nearly here she felt like building herself a nest in the shelter of a job with some familiarity, even if it was on the bottom of the office food chain, where only the cleaning staff was lower than a temp.

Still, a temp is only a temp until people know your name, she told herself, and the constant calls of “Maggie, I need you over here” gave her a feeling of identity that helped to combat the adjustment she was slowly making to living on her own and being completely responsible for herself.

It helped enormously that she wasn’t living in some dreary furnished room; it helped that Polly, bless her, so often invited her to share the savory stews she cooked so well, keeping her from feeling utterly alone.

It helped to know that Barney was nearby if she needed him, but she couldn’t seek his company in the familiar framework of their former palship, because the discovery of their mutual passion had blocked them from being alone together, and Maggie knew that privacy would, sooner or later, lead to consummation, and that way lay certain disaster. Either they’d deepen their
feelings and get into a really major mess, or they’d end up disillusioned with each other, their long friendship destroyed. Barney was like a wonderfully warm fur coat that had to be kept in cold storage, winter or no winter.

She took comfort where she could find it, however. It helped, even more than she’d hoped, that she had acquired the outward persona of a New Yorker. She’d strolled along Madison Avenue for several Saturday afternoons in her excellent but totally unexciting suit, taking mental notes. She soon realized that if she dressed in black from head to toe she could blend into the local look at any level. More afternoons patiently, relentlessly chasing bargains in the bazaars of the Lower East Side had yielded two black miniskirts, one wool, the other leather; black sweaters; an ankle-length black wool coat; a wide black belt; tall, black, low-heeled boots; and opaque black panty hose, all for less than a hundred dollars. For another ten dollars Maggie had bought herself long, vivid mufflers in bitter orange, sulfur yellow, and screaming green and parted reluctantly with twenty dollars for a pair of small, sterling silver hoop earrings that went with everything and could be polished with toothpaste.

Too much hair, she’d decided, looking at herself in the mirror, not New York hair, and she’d taken herself off to a cheap drop-in barber shop and had it cut so definitively, defiantly short that it looked deliberately futuristic and violently chic. Maggie’s only makeup was black mascara and bright red lipstick, both discount drugstore close-outs, her only beauty aid Pond’s Cold Cream. When she had finished putting herself together, the aggressive flag of a knotted muffler flying behind her as she dodged traffic, Maggie became a very primer of a New York career girl, the crackling blue of her eyes and the vivid pink and white of her complexion so enhanced by their crisp black frame that she looked like a piece of walking pop art.

Still and all, she was lonely, Maggie admitted to herself. She was as truly lonely as the lyrics of the most
heartbroken country-western singer. She did not, could not, would not, even allow herself to think about Tessa. That was a closed subject, not subject to speculation, further hurt feelings, or fruitless fury, and in any case, what had Tessa ever been to her but a few postcards and an occasional visit to an unreal world? She was better off without her. No, Maggie decided, the reason for her loneliness must be that she regretted, more than she wanted to realize, the plans she had made for college.

Being a temp, even at a world-famous auction house, was a far cry from being a freshman at a great university, but what the hell, you could stretch a mile and consider it an education in itself, at least an education in objects, she thought as she went to the sink to wash out the coffee machine. To her irritation she saw that there was a very tall man blocking the sink, standing still, in contemplation of the faucets. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and baggy gray flannel trousers.

Maggie planted herself behind him, tapping her nails on her empty coffeemaker, hoping that the noise would alert him to the fact that the sink was not a place for meditation. He had, she saw, dismantled another coffeemaker and spread its pieces over all the available surface.

“Missing something?” she finally asked, as he showed no sign of doing anything but stare helplessly.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m missing any notion of what to do with this damn thing.”

“I’ll do it,” she said impatiently. “Couldn’t you find a temp and ask her? Men aren’t expected to know how to make coffee in this office, it’s not a feminist-oriented workplace.”

“I’m a floater, I’m not supposed to bother a temp,” he answered, turning gratefully and peering down at her through his glasses. He knew immediately that he’d give a lot to take a bite—not metaphorically speaking—out of this particular girl. She was as appetizing, as fresh, as tasty-looking as a nectarine at its moment of perfect ripeness.

“A ‘floater’?” Maggie asked, bending over the sink. “You mean there’s something lower than a temp?”

“A temp, they told me, has to have real skills; a floater … floats, drifts, levitates … to wherever there’s assistance needed, selling catalogs, moving stuff, cleaning stuff, making coffee, God knows what else, but silently, without making the slightest wave or creating undesirable noise.”

He nattered on deliberately, his object to engage her attention for as long as possible. “My brief, as I understand it, is to act swiftly, silently, helpfully, unquestioningly, above all,
floatingly
.… I’d be more, a great deal more specific but this is my first day here.”

“So you didn’t go to college either?”

“I have a master’s in Fine Arts from Harvard, a degree from Business School, also Harvard, and a year studying at the V and A in London,” he admitted ruefully.

Stunned, Maggie looked up at this overeducated moron.

“The V and A?” she asked curiously, as she took inventory of the tall young man with a lot of fine red-brown hair that badly needed cutting, big hazel eyes that were really interested in her for some reason, a two-day growth of reddish beard that needed shaving, a long but handsome nose, horn-rimmed glasses that were mended with what looked like a small Band-Aid, and a large, well-shaped mouth. All in all, a sort of hairy, academic hunk.

“The Victoria and Albert Museum. They have a program that’s almost a necessity for people like me.…”

“People like you?”

“Ceramic and porcelain people.”

“You sound fragile,” she laughed, giving him the reassembled, refilled coffeemaker. “You must be a glass person too.”

“Oh, good Lord no, another department entirely, not my neck of the woods, although not outside of my ken, if you see what I mean, and obviously you must, with
your skills. Glass and paperweights go together, like Ari Nouveau and Art Deco, or Books and Manuscripts.”

“But still,” Maggie said stubbornly, “if you were coming to an auction to buy plates, mightn’t you also need glasses, or pick them up on impulse?”

“Absolutely, but thinking like a department store is not encouraged by Scott and Scott,” he informed her with a smile.

“Not when you’re a lowly temp,” she said, tossing her head, forgetting that she now had untossable hair, “or an even more lowly floater. My name’s Maggie Horvath.”

“I’m Andy McCloud,” he said, offering her a large, warm hand.

“Andy!” A secretary scurried up behind them. “For Pete’s sake, will you bring that damn coffee! A whole meeting on Musical Instruments just walked into my boss’s office.”

“Got to go. If I take you to dinner will you show me how to make coffee?”

“Dinner?” Maggie asked, surprised at this abrupt invitation from a stranger.

“Tonight, meet you after work.” He dashed off, almost dropping the full coffeemaker in his hurry.

She had a date, Maggie thought excitedly. Her first real date! Andy McCloud, wordy, messy, incompetent, and surprisingly attractive floater, had asked her for dinner, and they’d have to go to a restaurant because of all the things she didn’t know about him, the least likely was that he knew how to cook. On the other hand, coffeepot or not, he was a fast worker. But it stood to reason that a ceramic and porcelain person was probably gay. Still, it would be wonderful to make a new friend.

Hamilton Angus McDevitt Scott and his sister, Elizabeth Stewart Scott Sinclair, as well as a younger sister who didn’t work in the business, owned Scott & Scott, an auction house that had been run by the Scott family
since its founding in 1810. Hamilton and Liz shared offices in the penthouse suite of the relatively new building on the plot of land their great-grandfather had bought before the turn of the century, so far uptown that it was considered to be in the wilderness.

Scott & Scott had moved with the times. Although they had preserved as much as possible of the paneling and atmosphere of the actual auction rooms, their offices were established in a building that had been rebuilt on the old site in the late 1930s. The two of them were, as always, alone for their biweekly discussion of the state of their eight-hundred-million-dollar-a-year business, ritualistically drinking tea from a set of particularly fine Chinese Export porcelain that Elizabeth had picked up at Sotheby’s shortly after her marriage to John Sinclair forty years earlier.

“Damn that freak Andy Warhol and damn his freaking cookie jars,” Hamilton Scott said furiously as he put more sugar in his tea. “Cookie jars! Can you believe it?” His handsome, ruddy face quivered in outrage.

“We sell cookie jars in Collectibles all the time, as you well know. H, you’d give your left nut for the Warhol auction, cursing isn’t going to change anything,” his sister said with maddening calm. She possessed her older brother’s handsome features in a charming womanly version and had the most elegant head of silver hair in Manhattan. There were envious women who said she must spend all her profits from S & S on clothes and jewelry, but they were very far from understanding the extent of the commissions on sales the business brought in.

“I find your language increasingly vulgar as you totter lingeringly, indecently reluctantly, on the verge of your golden years,” he replied.

“And as your golden years mount up, I find your patience regrettably diminished,” she replied, smiling at him with profound affection.

The ownership of a huge business was a source of constant rage for her poor brother, Liz Sinclair thought.
Instead of being reasonably content with the one-third of the profits he possessed, H had never managed to get over the competition he was destined never to win with Sotheby’s and Christie’s. And yet those two giant auction houses, which dominated the world, doing over a billion dollars a year each, were publicly traded companies owned by their stockholders, while she and H, who owned what was arguably the third largest auction house in the world, had nobody to account to but themselves and their sister Minnie at the end of their fiscal year in April.

H, a former world-class polo player and yachtsman, had deep connections with the serious rich and aristocratic all over the world, many of whom preferred to do business with S & S rather than with the larger companies, particularly since H was one of the star auctioneers of all time. Minnie had married a major multimillionaire, whose extensive family had collected old and new masters for generations. The couple lived for art and served on the boards of many of the important museums of the country, giving S & S entry into the art world when the time came for other collectors to buy or sell.

Liz herself was involved in a dozen of the pet charities of the very rich and social, further enlarging that vital pool of intimate personal connections that every auction house cherishes and cultivates while it waits for death, divorce, and disaster to bring about the need for the sale of property. Liz was responsible for most of the personnel decisions made at S & S. She had a sure but delicate human touch her brother lacked.

“I’ve got to go light a fire under the heads of the American, English, and European furniture departments,” Hamilton grumbled. “They haven’t been aggressive enough in actively seeking consignments. As usual. You, Liz?”

“I’m off to lunch with Bitsy Furness. She’s determined to sell the huge place in Locust Valley now that Eddie’s run off with that girl from his office, and I hope we can get the contents of the whole house. Bitsy has
truly fabulous things, museum quality, and of course he’ll have to give her practically everything before she agrees to a divorce. Nobody knows about her decision yet and she’s anxious to get the matter settled without shopping around and spreading the news.”

“Good hunting, old thing. I wish we had more department heads like you. It seems to me that all they do is sit and wait until things drop into their laps.”

“But H, they didn’t go to school with at least half the Bitsys of this world.”

“Worse luck.”

“Well, here’s the choice. We can go back to my place and you can show me how to make coffee over drinks, or we can have drinks and dinner first, and then have the coffee lesson,” Andy McCloud said, after he and Maggie met at the employees’ entrance to S & S.

“If I didn’t know that you really can’t make coffee, I’d say that was the best way of getting a girl up to your place that I’ve ever heard of.”

“I suppose a girl like you has good reason to be suspicious of every man she meets.”

“And what kind of a girl is that?”

“A sophisticated New Yorker who gets hit on—I believe that’s the correct phrase, is it not, or is it dated?—by every man who sees her.”