Scruples (83 page)

Billy had no such last-minute panic. Dolly had called her first thing that morning, unable to hold back the good news, and told her the whole mad yarn. But Billy hadn’t wanted to tell Vito because she suspected that he might feel that in some way it diminished his Oscar to have had the envelope opened by two sets of people before the actual presentation. Just as she wouldn’t tell him about the baby until tomorrow, when the glory of this night was less fresh. The news, for bambino-loving Vito, would upstage whatever industry recognition he could ever be given. And, as she felt Vito’s hand tense more firmly than ever over her own, she told herself to be honest. Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini did not have the faintest intention of sharing that particular spotlight with any little gold-plated statuette that the Academy, in its infinite wisdom, might ever bestow.

“Will anyone ever find your earring?” Vito suddenly whispered in her ear as the presenters started to read the list of five pictures and their producers.

“Forget my earring,” said Billy, kissing him full on the lips. “We’ve got better things to think about.”

For Steve
With all my love
Always

Look for Judith Krantz’s

THE JEWELS OF TESSA KENT

Available now in paperback

From the bestselling author who brought us SCRUPLES, DAZZLE, and PRINCESS DAISY comes a deeply moving mother-daughter tale set amid the elegance of a famed New York Ruction house and the glamour of Hollywood.

Here is a peek at this novel.

Books by Judith Krantz

Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

SCRUPLES

SCRUPLES TWO

PRINCESS DAISY

MISTRALS DAUGHTER

I’LL TAKE MANHATTAN

TILL WE MEET AGAIN

DAZZLE

LOVERS

SPRING COLLECTION

And the spellbinding novel

THE JEWELS OF TESSA KENT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Since the publication of her first novel,
Scruples
, J
UDITH
K
RANTZ
has been one of the world’s best-selling novelists. Born and raised in New York City and a graduate of Wellesley College, she and her husband, Steve Krantz, live in Bel Air and Newport Beach, California. They have two sons and two grandchildren.

Prologue

Q
uickly, Tessa Kent stepped out of the bank and crossed the strip of New York pavement. The door of her parked limo was held open by the driver. She slid inside, grateful that she’d left a coat on the seat when she’d entered the bank much earlier in the day. It had been a morning of indecisive weather, early fall weather, but now the afternoon sun had disappeared behind clouds that promised rain before nightfall on this mid-September day in 1993.

“Where to, Miss Kent?” Ralph, the driver, asked.

“Wait right here for a while, Ralph, there’s something I want to see,” she answered impulsively, surprising herself, and pulled the coat over her shoulders.

All through the endless afternoon at the bank, she’d kept going by promising herself that the instant she was able to leave, she’d return as quickly as possible to her apartment at the Carlyle, take a long, lavishly perfumed bath, put on her oldest, softest, most familiar peignoir, have a great fruitwood fire—the first of the year—lit in the generous fireplace of her bedroom, and stretch out on the pile of pillows flung down on the carpet. She intended to put the past three days firmly behind her, sipping a distinctly alcoholic drink and looking straight into the flames until she was so dazzled by them that her mind would unclench and a pleasant emptiness would take over.

Yet, as soon as she entered the limo, Tessa Kent abruptly understood that it was still too soon to escape into that peaceful moment. Something was missing, a sight that would put an absolute punctuation to the process she had just completed, the witnessing of a three-day inventory of every last one of her jewels except the few she was wearing.

She needed to see her jewels actually leave the protection of the bank, Tessa realized. She needed to watch them being brought out onto the street and whisked away in three taxis and three ordinary cars by six couriers and a twelve-man armed security team that would carry tens of millions of dollars worth of jewels in the scruffy briefcases and sturdy shopping bags that had been selected to attract no attention.

If she didn’t see that final scene of the drama, she’d still be able to imagine that her jewels slept in the darkness of their velvet cases, piled high in their vaults, ready for her to come and pick out those she would wear to an opening night at the theater or a black-tie party or dinner in a favorite restaurant. Something deep in Tessa’s psyche demanded that she recognize, with her own eyes, the fact that her jewels no longer belonged to her, that now they were gone. Gone for good.

Since her marriage, eighteen years earlier, Tessa Kent, the most internationally adored of American movie stars, had never been seen in public unadorned by magnificent jewels. Even in a bikini she wore ropes of seashells inset with gems. Jewels, on Tessa Kent, were never out of place, no matter the year or the hour or the style of the moment. They had become part of her persona, in private as well as in public, a signature as utterly specific to her as the sound of her voice, the shape of her mouth, the color of her eyes.

Suddenly Tessa saw the first of the couriers, carrying three shopping bags, appear at the entrance to the bank. On either side of him, seemingly busy in conversation, were two of the armed guards, clad in banker’s gray. One of the taxis that had been circling the block for hours pulled up beside Tessa’s limo, paused briefly as the three men got in, and then continued up Madison Avenue.

She hadn’t watched the process of transfer on any of the two previous days. She hadn’t felt any need to view it until today, when the last box had been entered into the inventory and sealed. Now, as she watched more couriers and guards walk out of the busy bank and disappear into their carefully choreographed transportation, she felt such a complex mixture of feelings that she couldn’t sort them out: loss, excitement, relief, anticipation, disbelief, and nostalgia, all jumbled together. Dominating every emotion was hope.

“You can take me back to the hotel, please, Ralph,” Tessa told the driver as soon as she realized that all of the couriers had left the bank. Traffic was heavy and the limo had barely covered two blocks when a heavy rain began to fall.

“Oh, perfect!” Tessa exclaimed. “Stop wherever you can.” As her driver knew, rain was her friend. With a big black umbrella skillfully deployed, she could roam the streets of New York without being recognized. This liberty was impossible in good weather; even wearing sunglasses and a scarf over her hair seemed, perversely, to attract the most attention of all from eager autograph seekers.

Today, after spending so many hours in an air-conditioned strong room, deep underground, Tessa yearned for a hard, private, cleansing walk more than for a bath or a drink.

Blessing the foul weather, she pulled a beret down until it reached her eyebrows, kicked off her shoes, and put on the boots that lay waiting in the back of the limo. She shrugged into the light raincoat, buttoned up the collar, and burrowed into it so that it hid her chin, and then picked up the umbrella that lay under her coat.

“Let me out at the corner, Ralph. I’ll walk all the way back.”

As soon as the limo came to a stop, Tessa hopped out, opened her umbrella, and strode rapidly across the street in the direction of Fifth Avenue. At any time of the year she loved walking up along Central Park, particularly now, as the lights of the city grew brighter against the darkening afternoon.

She found herself at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street and she struck out uptown at a fast pace, breathing deeply and freely. It was wonderful to know that no one could possibly care about her in this humid confusion of burdened shoppers and people leaving their offices and seeking transportation home.

Enjoying herself in a way so frequently denied her, Tessa continued up Fifth Avenue past St. Patrick’s Cathedral and was three good blocks beyond it when she abruptly stopped, and changed direction. At the age of thirty-eight, she hadn’t been inside a church in years. She didn’t want to calculate how many it had been, but today … something about today … drew her back to the great bulk of the cathedral, drew her up the steps to the doors of the cathedral, drew her inside. She closed her umbrella. Old habit took over as she dipped her fingertips in the font of holy water, crossed herself, and genuflected before slipping into one of the pews at the back.

She would just sit here for a few seconds and then flee, back out to the delicious freedom of the busy, dripping streets, Tessa thought. Sit and bask in the vast singing hum of busy silence that had a color and a texture and a scent uniquely its own, so that if she had been set down here blindfolded she would have known instantly where she was.

Without willing it, Tessa found herself on her knees, her head bent. She was praying, she who no longer believed in prayer, praying as ardently as when she’d been a girl, but praying without words, praying purely for the sake of prayer.

And then, homework done, at least twice a week they’d “engage in an adult experience,” as Mimi called it. The Petersons’ bar was crammed with bottles of everything any liquor store could supply.

Teresa and Mimi, sharing Mimi’s bathroom glass, would pour three jiggers full of whatever drink took their fancy, replacing what they took with water, and carry the glass up to Mimi’s room. They’d lock the door and sip slowly, taking turns, giggling like maniacs as each reported the fascinating alterations they felt in themselves.

They hadn’t yet used the same bottle more than once and they’d never dared make a second trip downstairs for more, just in case they couldn’t handle more than one generous drink each. They were always careful to brush their teeth and use mouthwash before Mimi’s mother was expected home.

The Petersons were a couple in their mid-thirties who, Mimi reported proudly, still loved a good time. On their exploration of her parents’ bedroom they easily found a large collection of
Penthouse
and a smaller-sized publication called
Variations
, which contained erotic short stories and wild letters to the editor. Two drawers of Mrs. Peterson’s dresser were filled with underwear that it was impossible to imagine her wearing for anything but sex. Mimi and Teresa would select several pieces at a time—tiny, lacy panties; garter belts that attached to slinky black stockings; dainty push-up bras; or transparent chiffon teddies—and carry their loot swiftly back to Mimi’s room, where they’d try on everything, using old pairs of her mother’s high-heeled shoes to see themselves at best advantage.

Of course, even Mimi had to admit that, although the two of them were as tall as most women, at twelve, they were still too young and too undeveloped to look right in sexy underwear. But if you squinted your eyes and lifted your nipples in cupped hands, and stuck out your ass, you could get a pretty good idea of how you’d look in a couple of years.

As for
Penthouse
and
Variations
, they pored over one issue at a time, discovering that some of the subject matter was heart-pounding and passionately fascinating. Teresa couldn’t keep from thinking about all the forbidden, unutterably exciting things a man and a woman could do together—except when she was brooding on the certainty that she was going to go to Hell after she died.

It was amazing, Teresa thought grimly, that she was able to lie with such calm to the priest at confession, producing a normal series of venial sins as she tried not to breathe the stale air in the red velvet, padded phone booth of the confessional that the old church still used in spite of Vatican II. But she knew the truth. She was unquestionably guilty of at least four of what her catechism class had been taught were the seven deadly or mortal sins. She was guilty of lust, the sin of impurity, and of gluttony, the sin of drinking too much. When she and Mimi dressed up and admired themselves she was guilty of the sin of pride … their sessions certainly didn’t conform to the “normal pride in a neat appearance” the nuns talked of.

Every single week of her life, as she left any of these three mortal sins unconfessed, by name and number of times it had happened, she was committing yet
another
mortal sin by not confessing, so her sins were not forgiven but lay on her heavily and painfully, almost too much to endure. Yet, to rid herself of them would have been worse. If she’d ever been tempted to make a full confession, she’d be kneeling in front of a pew doing penance for hours—for days!—before she could receive absolution and the sacrament of penance. Since her mother waited to drive her home from church, praying quietly in a pew not far from the confessional, any such penance would cause an inquisition.