The Jewels of Tessa Kent (39 page)

“Thirty-three.”

“Look, Maggie, you’ve been treated so badly I don’t know what to say, there are no words to express how I feel. It’s been a tragedy for you and all the sympathy I have won’t help, not if I talked all night, which I’m afraid I just might do. But right now you’ve got to be practical, you don’t want an angry lawyer showing up looking for you at S and S and causing a lot of talk. Now that they know where you live, you’re going to have to open the letter and see what it is and deal with it.”

“I know, I’ve known all along that it wouldn’t just go away. You’re right, damn it.” Maggie ripped open the envelope and read the pages it contained. “Well, it’s what I guessed it would be. They’re finally finishing the settlement of Luke’s estate—the husband who died—
and they need me to sign as one of the people he left money to. If I sign, I get the money when I’m thirty-five, meanwhile it’ll be in trust and I’ll get the income.”

“Are you absolutely sure you don’t want it, Maggie?”

“Absolutely, a hundred percent. I’m going to write out a strong statement to that effect and send it back with this letter. A person has a right to refuse a bequest, don’t they?”

“I don’t really know, legally, but realistically, how can they force you to take something you don’t want?”

“They can’t,” Maggie said grimly. “I intend to stay independent, no matter what.”

“I’d take it myself, in a wink, no matter what. It would be something, anyway, that you’d get out of all of this. A private income never did anyone any harm.”

“It’s not what I needed all of my life, it’s not what I want, now, or ever wanted.”

“Too little, too late, you mean?”

“No, Polly, too much, much too much, and much too late.”

W
here’s a temp? I have to have one desperately! Somebody, find me a temp!” Maggie looked up from the Xerox machine to see a woman she knew only as Lee Maine, the head of the press office, standing in front of the elevator doors with a wild look on her distinguished, lovely face.

“I’m a temp,” she said, leaving her machine. “What can I do for you?”

“Man the battle stations! This is ridiculous! I have to go to Philadelphia in ten minutes to work on the blasted American Primitives sale and there’s nobody, not one solitary soul, in my blasted department! My second-in-command had a premature baby over the weekend, I still haven’t replaced the little traitor who defected to Sotheby’s last week, and my last remaining assistant just called in sick with flu! Damn all three of them! Now listen closely. I want you to sit in my office and answer phones, take messages, tell one and all I’ll be back tomorrow. If anybody in this place tries to get you to do something else, anything at all, tell them Lee Maine said she’d strangle you with her bare hands if you so much as left the desk except to pee.”

Maggie grinned down at the beautiful, dark-eyed woman with a long curve of straight silver hair that fit her elegant head perfectly. She had small bones and was probably four inches shorter than Maggie.

“I warn you, I’d probably put up a fight,” she heard herself say.

“I don’t have a sense of humor, whoever you are, but I insist on a minimum, a bare minimum of competence.”

“I won’t even pee,” Maggie said hastily.

“That’s better. And while you’re at it, take a look at the piles of work on the other desks. Maybe you’ll find some little thing you can try to do between calls, but don’t leave the office, on pain of death. That phone must be answered! We live by the phone!”

“Got it, don’t worry. Do you want me to call you with messages during the day?”

“Good God, no, don’t tie up the phone lines. I’ll be back tomorrow. And you’d damn well better be there,” she warned. Lee Maine belted herself into a long red coat, jammed a Cossack’s black astrakhan hat on her head, and, pulling on her long gloves, took off without another word, leaving Maggie to find the press office for herself.

Within five minutes she’d settled herself at one of the three assistants’ desks and started eagerly going through the various auction catalogs she found lying there. She soon realized that many of the sales coming up, according to the dates on the catalogs, were unaccompanied by any sort of press release. Memos, all begging for releases, were tucked into many of the catalogs, along with the forms for such releases.

Perhaps they’d already been written, Maggie thought, and the memos were out of date, but an interoffice phone check of the departments involved revealed only that they were waiting impatiently for the press releases to arrive so that they could send them to their usual media sources.

Did Lee Maine have any idea what an unholy mess
her department was? Maggie wondered, as she bent over a computer. She’d said that she insisted on a bare minimum of competence, but it didn’t look to her as if she’d been getting even that from her staff. If some of these releases weren’t written at once, they risked appearing only a week or so before the sales involved, and it was self-evident that the longer people knew about a sale in advance, the more popular it would be.

In her days running the school paper at Elm Country Day, Maggie had been accustomed to putting out the paper almost single-handedly, writing everything from humorous columns to thoughtful editorials. She found a file of old press releases and quickly realized that there was no mystery to them. The process obviously should start with studying each sale’s catalog to pick out the most newsworthy items, and translating that into a lively press release, short enough to be read quickly but long enough to tantalize the imagination of possible collectors. She could write as well as or better than the sample releases, she thought, grinning to herself. Most of them were too long and didn’t grab her attention.

In spite of frequent phone interruptions, by lunchtime she’d finished the work on one desk and started on the second, finding a floater to bring her a sandwich and a secretary to sit by the phone while she made a hurried visit to the ladies’ room. It was one thing to promise not to pee, another to carry it out. By nine at night, Maggie, working as if the devil were riding behind her, had finished every press release that had been left undone on all three assistants’ desks, printed them out on the laser printer, and stacked them in a neat pile on Lee Maine’s desk, each attached to the relevant catalog. Next to them she put the neatly written pile of dozens of phone messages that had arrived during the day.

The next morning she was sitting primly at one of the desks outside of Lee Maine’s office when the press office head arrived, in a flurry of questions. “Who called? Any emergencies? Did you find anything you could manage to do?”

“Everything’s on your desk,” Maggie said, biting her lip in nervousness. Had she presumed? Was her method the right one for writing press releases? Lee Maine disappeared into her office, closed the door behind, and stayed there for at least a half hour without buzzing. Suddenly she rushed out.

“What’s your name?”

“Maggie Horvath.”

“Do you insist on being a temp?”

“Good God, no! My ambition is to be a galley slave.”

“Perfect. You’re hired. Only don’t work this hard or they’ll cut my staff down to just you and you’ll burn out at this pace. Also, you’d better write the next batch of releases quite a bit longer to give the editor something to cut, editors always have to find a reason to cut, remember that, or they’d be out of their own jobs.”

“What—what do I call myself if anybody asks?” Maggie ventured, electrified with excitement.

“Press officer for Scott and Scott.”

“Press officer? Oh, Miss Maine, thank you!”

“Thank me? I’m the lucky one. And call me Lee, everyone else does, unless they really know me and then they call me Lee, darling. When did you get here? At S and S I mean, not this morning, because you must have slept in the office last night.”

“I started last fall, in September.”

“Good grief! It’s almost March—you’ve been a temp for more than five months. What’s wrong with the people here?”

“Nobody ever asked me to see what else I could do. Xeroxing has been my chief mode of self-expression. Sending a fax made my day.”

“Madness, sheer madness,” Lee Maine said in wonder. “All right, Maggie, take these around to where they’re needed and report back here. I have a bunch of notes from Philadelphia for you to start working on with Fred Cashmere in the catalog department, he’ll explain what to do. I’ve got to rush down to the sales
rooms. There’s a Contemporary Print sale on exhibition and I have to do some serious media hand-kissing. Wait a sec, that still leaves nobody to answer the phones … well, find a temp somewhere, grab her, and make sure she stays here till one of us gets back. ”

“Will do. What should I tell the personnel department?”

“That you’ve been promoted—no, make that hijacked, full time—that you’re working for me now, exclusively, and they’d better find another temp to take your place.”

“Miss Maine … salary?”

“Whatever you’ve been making, plus twenty-five dollars a week and lots of free lunches. PR is about free lunches, among other things, including keeping this auction house going almost single-handedly.” Lee Maine disappeared with a wave.

Press officer, Maggie said to herself, PRESS OFFICER! Oh, yes! Polly would be thrilled for her, “press officer” sounded so wonderfully butch. And Andy … Maggie, in her daze of delight, suddenly remembered Andy, still a floater. How would he feel?

She probably wasn’t going to have a terrible problem with Andy’s reaction to her new eminence, she decided, on reflection. He seemed quite content with his humble position, showing a lack of ambition that puzzled Maggie.

On the other hand, she had to admit that his job, which so lacked any status, was ten times more interesting than that of a temp. Since she’d known him, he’d floated to Toronto to help out at an important sale of English furniture; he’d floated to Mexico City with a group of experts who were cataloging the entire contents of a Mexican collector’s huge estate; and he’d floated to L.A. with the chief of the Department of Impressionist Paintings, because the widow of a studio head had decided to divest herself of her husband’s world-renowned collection so that she could find a renewed social life in buying the work of contemporary
artists. “They always need somebody to go out for pizza,” was Andy’s standard comment when Maggie enviously asked him the details of his travels.

During the past few months, he’d been floating in the loftiest of departments, doing his vague, many-faceted, unimportant thing, whatever it was, in the executive offices of S & S, which she’d never yet entered. She’d seen Mr. Scott and Mrs. Sinclair from a distance and plagued Andy with questions about them, to which he only replied that they were “just plain pizza lovers only with more money.”

Perhaps the reason he gave the impression of aimlessness, the reason he didn’t take floating more seriously, Maggie thought, was that his true destiny was to work as an expert, and floating was only a matter of being able to call himself employed until he moved into a position in Porcelain and Ceramics. But how long would he have to wait? Now that she came to think about it, she didn’t know Andy’s timetable for success any better than when she’d first met him.

Tonight, since they hadn’t seen each other for several days, Andy had been so ravenously intent on making love that she hadn’t had a minute to tell him about her new job, Maggie realized, as she sat up in bed and watched him nap. If he didn’t wake up soon she’d have to get up and scramble eggs or perish of hunger. He’d been so anxious to fuck her that he hadn’t taken the time to feed her after work, or even to stop for a drink in their favorite bar. It was, she supposed, flattering, in its own way, but most certainly not her idea of a well-choreographed evening. Flattering, perhaps, polite, no. Lusty, yes, thoughtful no. She’d be damned if it would happen again.

The depth of Andy’s sleep began to irritate her seriously. Why were men so exhausted by sex that they had to restore themselves with a trip to unconsciousness? She’d never felt more alive! But how could she generalize
about men when Andy was the only man she’d ever known intimately?

Maggie heaved a little sigh as she thought of the variety of love affairs she’d once planned for herself at college. Oh, how naive and innocent and full of herself she’d been, not even a year ago. Just look at her now, lying here quietly starving to death with one man; one man with whom she’d had an exclusive relationship for many months; at the moment a slightly snoring man. Yet Andy’s lovemaking was so inventive and ardent that, Maggie thought philosophically, she should not, in all fairness, feel deprived.

But it was too damn domestic! And yet not domestic enough in certain ways. At Thanksgiving Andy had gone home for the weekend, explaining that if he took a girl with him his absurdly conventional and conservative parents would consider him engaged, and over the Christmas weekend he’d wangled a week off that included the New Year’s weekend, ten days in all, to go skiing with a bunch of pals from Harvard, an annual blast that he told her never included women.