The Cookbook Collector

6

George was courting a collection. He wasn’t sure how many books there were. One hundred? One thousand? He had seen only two. The seller was secretive. She said she had inherited a collection of rare books from her uncle, and George assumed the volumes had sentimental value. The two she brought George were intriguing. The first, an 1861 Mrs. Beeton, was not rare by any means, but it was in exceptionally good condition. Beeton’s Book of Household Management was so thick that most copies ended up in three pieces because their bindings didn’t hold. This copy was a good little brick with its red leather binding still intact. The second volume the seller brought was much older. The long title began: The whole duty of a woman, or a guide to the female sex from sixteen to sixty … and included a promise to provide choice receipts in physick and chirugery with the whole art of cookery, preserving, candying, beautifying, etc. The book had been published in London in 1735 and would have been valuable, except that it was so badly worn. The cover was falling off and the pages warped and spotted. The title page was torn.

The Beeton was the sort of book listed in catalogs as a “wonderful gift” for the everyday book lover. It would not tempt a serious collector. George could sell Mrs. Beeton for four or five hundred dollars. He was doubtful about The whole duty.

“This one’s in rough shape.” He showed the volume’s wear to the seller, even as he noted hers. She was about his age, but she looked shattered, as though she had never recovered from some early loss. Gray-eyed, sharp-featured, she was tall and pear-shaped. Her long gray hair fell straight past her narrow shoulders to her waist. She might have been a teacher once, or a social worker, but more likely she was a perpetual student, and a case study all her own. Her name was Sandra McClintock, and she wore faded clothes and cowboy boots, and she walked everywhere. She told George she’d only brought him two books because she didn’t want to carry any more. He did not believe her. “The cover is ripped,” he said. “The pages here are stained….” He turned the leaves deliberately.

Were there others like these? Better? And how were they acquired? He tried to look diffident as he wrote a check, one hundred dollars for the pair.

“Are they all cookbooks?” George asked the seller, but she didn’t want to discuss the matter. “Are you interested in an appraisal?”

“Maybe. I might be.” She didn’t object to the evaluation, but she looked disappointed as she took the check. Clearly she had hoped for more.

George fretted after she left that she would not come back. What if Sandra had something really valuable? He waited three days for her to call, and when she didn’t, he phoned, and asked to see her. She did not want him to come to her, and so he invited her to bring more books to the store. Had she contacted another dealer? He knew all the dealers in the area. He would have heard. Was she setting up an auction? He didn’t ask.

He wanted Jess to hurry up and fly home for Thanksgiving. He was afraid Sandra might arrive while he was out and leave books with Jess, or even allow Jess to open them and ooh and ahh and say, “Those must be worth a fortune!” This scenario seemed unlikely, given Sandra’s cautious approach, but Jess had a way of bounding in at the worst moments. She had asked once, in front of college students with a box of books to sell, why George paid so little for contemporary novels.

“Because they’re ephemera,” he said.

“All of them? Even Thomas Pynchon?” Jess held up a battered paperback copy of V. “Even Saul Bellow? Humboldt’s Gift for a dollar?”

After he’d bought a stack of novels and chucked the rest and said good-bye to the students, he clapped his hand on Jess’s shoulder. “Do you think I want a running commentary on prices? When I want your analysis of the book-buying business, I’ll ask you. In the meantime, let’s treat this as a store, not a seminar.”

She didn’t look in the least contrite. “I was talking about literature, not analyzing the book-buying business. And if I were, I wouldn’t confuse a seminar with a store. And I wouldn’t confuse a store with a folly.”

“A folly,” he echoed, incredulous, offended.

“A folly like an expensive hobby,” she said, assuming he didn’t know the term. “A folly like a little miniature ruined castle in a garden.”

“‘Little miniature’ is redundant,” he pointed out.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, well, I’d like my folly to be a little less expensive, which is why I want you to stop theorizing about my prices in front of customers.”

“All right, fine.”

Tuesdays and Thursdays were peaceful. George’s other assistant, Colm, was discreet, spectacled, a tenth-year graduate student writing on Victorian commonplace books and the art of quotation. Far better for Sandra to meet Colm. He was judgmental too, but indirect.

However, as George feared, Sandra dropped in on a Monday.

“Hello,” said Jess. “May I help you?”

Sandra hesitated. “I’m here with a book for George.”

“We don’t buy books on Mondays,” Jess informed her.

“Sandra,” cried George, rushing from the back room, “come with me.” There was no door between the store’s two rooms. Bookcases simply poured through the open passageway. “Watch your step,” George warned. The back room was a full step down.

“I was thinking,” Jess said, following them, “we should install a ramp here.”

George gestured her away.

“We could get one made of plywood, and then if we straightened out the front entrance, we’d be almost wheelchair and stroller accessible.”

“Jessamine,” said George, and she understood and backed off.

“I have one more book to show you,” Sandra told him. “But this is the last one.”

“The last one you have?”

“The last one I’ll show.”

Why is that? George thought with sudden dread. Is she saving the rest for someone else? But he said, “Let’s have a look.”

She unwrapped a pristine copy of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. “It’s the first British edition—with the recipe.” Sandra turned to the page with the title “Toklas’ Haschich Fudge.”

The original hashish brownies. Peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds, peanuts, … A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts … it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient….

“True,” said George.

“What do you think?” Sandra asked at last.

“It’s not perfect.” He pointed to the tiniest of tears on the dust jacket, the spots freckling the title page.

“You don’t want it?” She needed money.

“I want it.” The book was charming. It was very good. Of course he wanted it. But what he really wanted was to see the rest. What sort of trove was this? The whole duty and Alice B. Toklas cohabiting on the shelves? “I’d be happy to appraise your whole collection,” he said once again. “If the other books are in this kind of condition …”

Sandra looked grave.

“Even if they’re not …”

He heard the shop door. He felt a gust, a moment of traffic and chilly winter; heard Jess’s voice. “Hey!” A man’s voice, a rustling as the door closed again. Sandra and George stood together as before, examining the book, but subtly the climate in the store had changed. Jess was talking to a friend in the other room. He guessed Noah from Save the Trees. Jess had introduced the kid to George several weeks ago, calling him Director of Trees or VP of Tree-Saving, almost as though she were practicing for her parents, as if to say, This young man is not only idealistic, but management material as well. Yes, there he was leaning against a table stacked with books. Tall, wiry Noah with the frayed jeans, holes in the back pockets. He of the long arms and wide brown boyish eyes. Noah who was always touching everything. George tried not to notice. In fact, he refused to look.

“Really? You’re so lucky!” Jess trilled to Noah in the other room. “I want to go there.”

“You should come with us,” Noah said.

George couldn’t help imagining Jess sailing away with Noah. Surely they’d sail across the sea on Noah’s nonprofit ark. He hoped they would.

Even as he ushered Sandra out, he heard muffled laughter. He couldn’t see Jess and Noah anymore, but he sensed them in Medieval History. He knew the sounds of flirting in his store. The rustles and faint scufflings between the shelves, the creak of bookcases leaned upon, the squeak of the rolling step stool.

Jess, he chided silently, does he have to be one of those idiots who lie down in front of logging trucks? Really, now. But of course she had to find a leftie leafleter who shouted, “Would you like to save our forests today? Our trees go back to Biblical times!” to complete strangers on the street.

He had never seen Jess in action at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, but he could picture her. “Our trees predate Henry James. They gave their lives for him.”

“You’re not serious,” he heard Noah tell Jess.

“I am,” she said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

“I can’t believe you’d work for Save the Trees and never want to … experience them!”

“Can’t you experience them from the ground?”

Now he was whispering.

Silence.

“Jess,” George called.

No answer—as if to say, Oh, now you want me to come, when you brushed me off before.

He sat at his desk and glared in her general direction. In a moment she appeared in a V-necked sweater and a gauzy Indian skirt, the kind sold in stores called Save Tibet. She didn’t look embarrassed, or disheveled, or in the least undone. He couldn’t fault her, except that she looked far too happy for such a murky November day. There she stood, radiant. Her eyes were shining. All that from Noah? Had the shaggy tree hugger really cast that kind of spell?

“What is it?” Jess asked him.

“Get back to work, please.”

She smiled at him. He’d never asked her to do anything “please” before. She didn’t hear that he used the word only for emphasis. “Could I show Noah the Muir?”

“Is he interested?” George spoke in the third person even as Noah materialized behind Jess.

“Of course.” Then Jess saw that George meant “interested to buy,” and she looked a little disgusted. She liked to think of Yorick’s as some sort of rare-book room, a miniature Houghton or Beinecke.

He unlocked the glass case, and Jess took out The Mountains of California.

“Cool,” said Noah.

“When I first enjoyed this superb view, one glowing April day,” Jess read aloud, “from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, the Central Valley, but little trampled or plowed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light.”

Golden compositae, George thought. How easy it was to forget the mountains, just a drive away.

“And look at this.” Jess opened the book and showed Muir’s inscription on the flyleaf.

Noah traced Muir’s signature with his fingertip. “That’s incredible.”

“That’s fifteen hundred dollars.” George took John Muir away from Jess and locked him up again.

Later, after Noah had to run off to work, Jess approached George at his desk. “Could I ask you something?”

“You could.”

“If you love books, why don’t you like sharing them with other people?”

“I do like sharing them,” said George. “I like to exchange them for money, in a transaction economists call making a sale.”

“You can hardly stand it when other people look at them.”

“Looking is fine. I don’t enjoy watching people paw through a signed—”

“You touch your books all the time,” Jess protested.

“I wash my hands.” He had her there, and he saw her smile, despite herself.

“You’re very supercilious,” she told him.

You’re very pretty, he thought, but he said, “Anything else?”

“Do you like owning books more than reading them?”

He began to answer and then stopped. “You want me to admit that I like owning better, don’t you? Then you can tell me that books are about reading, and that words are free.”

“No, I’m really asking,” she said. “Which do you like better—having or reading?”

“I like reading books I own,” he said.

“Does owning improve them?”

“You mean why not go to the library? Look at this Gulliver’s Travels.” He unlocked the glass case again. “This is a 1735 printing. Do you see the ridges here?” He held up the page for her. “This is laid paper. See how beautiful it is?”

“What happened there?” She was looking at the white scar on the back of his right hand.

“Cooking accident,” he said.

She couldn’t help staring at where the scar disappeared into his shirt cuff. “That must have been some knife.”

“Look at this. Do you see the chapter headings?” He showed her the thick black type. “When I read Swift here, I’m reading him in this ink, on this paper, with this book in my hands—and I’m reading him as his contemporaries read him. You think there’s something materialistic about collecting books, but really collectors are the last romantics. We’re the only ones who still love books as objects.”

“That’s the question,” said Jess. “How do you love them if you’re always selling them?”

“I don’t sell everything,” he said. “You haven’t seen my own collection.”

“What do you have?”

“First editions. Yeats, Dickinson—all three volumes; Eliot, Pound, Millay …” He had noticed the books she read in the store. “Plath. I have Ariel—the English edition,” he added temptingly. “I also have Elizabeth Bishop.”

“I wish I could see them,” Jess said.

“You would have to come to my house.”

“Are you inviting me?” She must have known this was a loaded question, but she asked without flirtatiousness or self-consciousness, as if to say, I only want to know as a point of information.

Yes, he thought, I’m inviting you, but he did not say yes. He was her employer. She could act with a certain plucky independence, but he would always be the big bad wolf.

“I have a theory about rare books,” Jess said. “Here’s what I think. Rare books—any books—start to die without readers. The words grow paler and paler.”

“Not true,” George said. “Unread words don’t fade at all.”

“I meant metaphorically,” said Jess.

“You’d rather see them all in public libraries?”

“Ideally, yes,” said Jess.

“I’ve got a signed Harp-Weaver.”

“Really!”

He had to laugh. She was so eager.

She saw that he was in a good mood, and took the opportunity to ask, “Could I put up a poster outside the door?”

“No.”

“Wait. You haven’t seen it.” She hurried to the storeroom where she kept her backpack and brought out a poster, which she unrolled over his desk. Comically, with hands and elbows, she tried to hold down all the corners at once. Failing in the attempt, she weighted them with George’s books: Gulliver’s Travels, The Good Earth, an old thesaurus.

George saw a woodblock print redwood against a cloudless sky. One word in green:

BREATHE

“Sorry.” George pushed his books away. The poster rolled up instantly.

“It’s a limited edition,” Jess said.

“I don’t collect propaganda,” he told her.

“How is the word breathe propaganda? You can’t object to breathing.”

“I don’t object to breathing. I object to being told to breathe.”

“There is no agenda here,” she said.

“This is Save the Trees warning me that without redwoods I won’t breathe much longer. Therefore I should support the cause. I hope this is recycled paper, by the way.”

“Of course it is.”

“No posters anywhere near my store,” said George. “This is a poster- and leaflet-free zone.”

“Okay, okay,” she said.

“I’ll have to add that to my questionnaire: Are you now or have you ever been involved in an evangelical, Messianic, or environmental cult?”

“Save the Trees is a registered nonprofit,” said Jess.

“Oh, that’s all right then,” said George. “Yorick’s is a nonprofit too.”

“And ‘Breathe’ is actually the title of a poem.”

Breathe now.

Breathe soon.

Early and often.

Between times

Before it’s

Too late.

“Sorry.” George handed her the rolled-up poster. “No.”

“You don’t like new poetry?” said Jess.

“I don’t like bad poetry,” said George, and then with some horror, “You didn’t write that, did you?”

She shook her head.

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“I used to write poetry when I was younger,” Jess said. She had kept a notebook by her bed, in case some line or image came to her in her dreams, but she had always been a sound sleeper, and no Xanadus or nightingales woke her. She read Coleridge or Keats and felt that they had covered the great subjects so well that she had nothing to add about beauty, or immortality of the soul. “Now I just read.”

She spoke cheerfully, without a hint of wistfulness. She was indignant sometimes, but never wistful. Opinionated, but still hopeful in her opinions. Oh, Jess, George thought, no one has hurt you yet.

7

Jess saw that George detested Noah, but she thought nothing of it. George disliked Noah because he disapproved of Noah’s cause, and George hated causes, unless they were his own. He seemed to think that other people’s efforts to change the world were doomed.

Whenever the tree movement got bad press, George cut out the article for Jess. He was a regular clipping service, convinced that Save the Trees had ties to extremists who spiked redwoods with steel rods. He had no hard evidence, of course, but the news was full of loggers spooked and occasionally injured by some radical’s idea of altruism. “I suggest,” he told Jess on her last day before Thanksgiving break, “that you look at this discussion of possible links between Save the Trees and the incident in Humboldt County.”

“No one at Save the Trees would support spiking,” Jess exclaimed, as she glanced at the article from the San Francisco Chronicle. “I’ve been volunteering for three months and I’ve never heard of anyone in favor of spiking.”

“How about people in favor of bankrupting and maiming loggers?”

“The loggers are exploited by Pacific Lumber,” Jess said. “They’re being used.”

“So are you.”

Someone else would have taken offense, but Jess wondered how George had become so sour. She reasoned that it had to do with being rich, that George had accrued so much that his life became one long struggle to conserve his property. How strange to live that way, like a snail, inside your own wealth.

And yet she had a little money now and liked it. She owned one hundred shares of Veritech, the hottest stock ever. Jess often checked Veritech’s progress on her computer, where she loved to watch the stock price bob and float on the buoyant market. At first, watching made her feel guilty, but she quickly rationalized. The windfall wasn’t for herself, or her paltry bank account, or paying bills. She would give her stock to a great cause, or perhaps, if its value rose even higher, to several: the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and Greenpeace, as well as Save the Trees.

“Three months,” George said as he was locking up. “I didn’t realize Save the Trees had been around that long.”

“Are you, like, a neo-con?” Jess asked him.

“No!” George shot back, surprised.

“You’re so cynical,” said Jess.

George considered this as they stood outside the door. “I’ve been around the block.”

“You’re very disapproving,” she chided gently. “It’s not like I’ve done anything to you. It’s not like I’ve done anything you mentioned on your questionnaire.”

“Not yet.”

Six o’clock. A light rain fell, and a pile of blankets stirred in the doorway across the street. As the shops began to close, new salespeople emerged.

Jess didn’t seem to notice. “Good night,” she said, and tugged the bottom of her jacket.

George wanted to zip her up himself. “Where’s your bike?”

“It’s in the shop,” Jess said. “I’m getting a tune-up.”

“I’ll give you a ride,” he offered.

“No, that’s okay, I’m just going to catch the bus …”

“The bus?”

“It’s hardly even dark,” she protested as George took her arm and steered her across the street to the garage where he parked his Mercedes.

“You drive this big car all by yourself?” Jess asked, as he unlocked the door for her.

“Yes,” George said. “I drive unassisted. Where are we going?”

“Derby Street,” she said.

That surprised him. He hadn’t pictured her there. Then he realized that she was going to Noah’s place.

“A bunch of people live there.”

Ah, the Save the Trees Co-op. George glanced at her quickly. He wanted to ask, Do you have any idea who owns this property? Have you checked the nonprofit status of this organization? Have you considered that Save the Trees could be a shell for something else? But she was a grown woman, apparently.

He drove to Derby Street with its big old houses and tall fences and brambly gardens. “Thanks for the ride.” Jess dragged her backpack after her. “See you later.”

George considered the brown shingled co-op on the corner. A great shambling Californian manse, probably as old as his, maybe even a Maybeck with its picturesque peaked roof and diamond-paned windows. There was a garden too, possibly a double lot. Now he was a little jealous. He saw a cottage peeking out above the slatted fence. Jess turned and waved. She seemed to be waving him away, but he stayed until the door opened.

Jess had never been invited to a party at the Tree House before. Quickly she closed the door behind her. She didn’t want to introduce herself with a Mercedes idling in the background.

“Hi. I’m early,” Jess apologized to the tiny woman who stood before her.

“Hi. I’m Daisy.” The woman wore overalls and she had a buzz cut. She seemed both delicate and fierce and wore a T-shirt with HERE I STAND printed on it.

Jess wondered if Daisy was the woman’s real name, or one of those forest names old-timers took in the interest of anonymity and protection. Names like Butterfly or Gypsy or Shakespeare, evoking expeditions, dangers that had passed, inside jokes from long ago. “Is Noah here?” Jess received no answer as Daisy led her down some stairs and up others, through open fire doors and finally into the depths of the house, where Daisy disappeared to answer her phone.

She had never seen the Tree House at night. Vast and dark, lit with candles for the occasion, the rooms looked magical, the staircase a citadel, with its own strange inglenooks and deep dusty treads. In the fireplace, instead of wood, a great gong and mallet hung from a stand. The rooms were filled with couches and mismatched armchairs, and floor cushions, some with cats, and some without. Living ivy climbed to the ceiling and outlined every aperture. In the candlelight the ivy-framed bay window became a bower, the leafy doorways passages to secret gardens.

“Didn’t anyone give you a drink?”

Startled, Jess recognized the founder of Save the Trees. Leon was famous in his world, and famous for his look as well. He was over thirty, wire-thin, with black unruly hair, dark skin, and eyes startlingly blue. His jeans and faded T-shirt hung on his gaunt frame. She saw him on occasion leafleting, but she knew him from Brandeis, where he had been a graduate student briefly, her freshman year. Knew was probably too strong a word. She’d had a serious crush on him, but he had never spoken two words to her then, and he didn’t seem to recognize her now. She had heard the others talk about him, of course. He was a brilliant organizer, a heartbreaker, supposedly, and also somehow rich. He owned the house and rented it for nothing, a dollar a year, to Save the Trees, as headquarters and training camp and experiment in communal living.

“I’m sorry I’m so early,” Jess said, as Leon got her a rum and Coke. “I’m Jess. Noah’s friend.”

“Oh, good, I’m Noah’s friend too,” said Leon coolly. “Did he give you the tour?”

“I’m not sure where he is.”

“Come take a look.”

“This woodwork is incredible,” she said as she followed him up the stairs.

“This is all old growth,” said Leon. “A lot of trees gave their lives in 1905.”

“How did you find this place?”

“Real estate agent,” Leon said.

“You just asked for listings of fairy-tale houses?”

Leon smiled.

The second floor had a sweet musty smell of old wood and dust. The air was heavy, almost felted with smoke and dust motes. Hushed.

“This landing here is so big we made it into another room with curtains. It doesn’t have a door, but it’s got a great view of the garden.” Leon pulled open a heavy drape spread over a brass rod and revealed a little room with a window seat the size of a twin bed. Noah and a couple of other guys sat there passing a joint.

“Oh, there you are,” said Jess, and everybody laughed except for Leon, who watched her quietly. Forgive me, but he wasn’t worth it, Leon seemed to tell her with his eyes. Or was she imagining his response?

Noah stood to greet her, but instinctively Jess stepped back. “I’ll be downstairs,” she said lightly.

“Don’t go.” Noah followed her.

The living room was louder on reentry, pulsing with music.

“Let me get you a drink,” shouted Noah.

“I have one.” Jess raised her glass to show him.

“Okay.” He looked slightly nervous standing there, as though unsure if she was really angry. Something was dawning on him, the very thought she’d had upstairs: that they’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks; that their friendship was rather tenuous; that they hadn’t spent much time together.

“Do I even know you?” Jess asked suddenly. The question might have been devastating in a quieter room, but Noah couldn’t hear.

Comically, he cupped his hand behind his ear.

“You look like an old man asking ‘What’s that, dear?’” Jess told him.

He couldn’t hear that either.

“I’m leaving,” Jess mouthed at him.

He tried to take her hand, but she was tired of him and slipped away, escaping to the back of the house, wandering into an old-fashioned kitchen crowded with cooks and hangers-on drinking beer.

“He’s got this humanist, class-warfare streak,” one of the guys was saying. “It always comes down to ‘other species are lesser.’”

A dozen pie shells covered a long scarred table. A small buff woman with a tattoo of the god Shiva on her bicep was pouring quiche filling into each. Jess recognized her from leafleting. Her name was Arminda, and as she poured, she talked to another leafleter, a blond, blue-eyed girl from Idaho who went by Cat.

Arminda was telling Cat, “I had one more conversation with Aisha where I said there are things that are so structural I didn’t know if we could repair them.”

“And that was it?” asked Cat.

“Well, not exactly. We’d have this post–breakup sex where it was supposed to be the last time, and then the next time was going to be the last time, but I was kind of into the idea of being single, and I thought I might have a straight moment, you know?”

Cat giggled.

“Because there was this guy who was kind of eying me. But then—you know Johanna, right? I had this thing with her, but afterward I felt so bad because she was such a sweetheart. She’s so sensitive! How do you tell someone you were just going through this crazy thing and you aren’t really interested in that person herself? I was behaving really badly. But that’s how I got the stomach flu—probably from Johanna. It was this really, really contagious, really virulent …”

Jess eyed the quiches on the table.

“I was trying to break up with Aisha and I was behaving so badly with Johanna, but I had to get everything out of my system,” Arminda continued as Jess walked out, feeling strange, and also invisible.

No one acknowledged her as she walked down the hall. She saw couples in the bathroom, but no one looked at her. She didn’t recognize anybody. Were the other guests all strangers? That couldn’t be, but at the moment she couldn’t tell any of them apart. She felt light-headed in the hazy, mazy house. The smell of beer mixed with the cloying smoke upstairs and made her queasy. She stepped out the back door and descended creaky steps for air.

How overgrown the garden was. Picking her way through ferns and banana trees, she almost stepped into a pocket-sized pond choked with lily pads. The Save the Trees office looked like a witch’s house in the dark, its peaked roof and walls overhung with ivy. Behind the witch’s house, a massive oak filled the sky. No stars pricked this tree’s canopy, no moonlight sifted through these leaves, but a swing hung down on ropes so long that, in the dark, Jess scarcely saw where they began. She tugged at one; the rope held, and the wood swing bumped her hip. Shivering, she sat down and tucked her skirt under her legs.

Suddenly Leon appeared behind her. She jumped up.

“You forgot your jacket.”

“How did you know it was mine?”

“Wallet in the pocket,” he said. “Probably not a great place for it, by the way.” He looked amused when she tried to take the jacket from him. It took her a moment to realize that he was holding it for her so that she could slip her arms inside. “Too many friends of friends in there.”

“Well, that’s what I am,” she pointed out. “Or was.”

“You and Noah?” Leon asked.

“Is that what he told you?”

Leon hesitated a moment, but only a moment, before he nodded.

“I barely know him.” Jess sat down again and pushed off with her feet to start the swing, but the ropes were so long she only swayed a little. She kicked off again.

“Do you want a push?”

“Sure.” She hoped that sounded diffident enough, as if to say, Since you’re just standing there, you might as well, but she wasn’t diffident at all. She lifted off as he pushed gently, hand between her shoulder blades. When she returned to him, he pushed lower on her back. A strange sensation, the brief contact, and then the long downstroke of anticipation. “My sister used to push me,” she told him.

“I have sisters.”

“Really?”

“Are you surprised?”

She stretched her legs and leaned back to swing higher. Her hair blew over her shoulders. Her skirt came loose and billowed over her knees. He was watching her, and as she rose and fell, she felt his gaze as radiant warmth. Of course she knew all about the male gaze, and she resented being gazed upon, but she was young enough that her resentment was purely theoretical. She was a paper feminist, just as Emily was a paper millionaire.

“You don’t look like the kind of person who has sisters,” she said.

“What do I look like?”

She thought for a moment as she swung forward. When she returned to him, she said, “An only child.”

“Too selfish for siblings?” She was almost horizontal now, leaning back as she held the ropes.

“Way too selfish.”

He pushed hard with both hands, and she shot forward, laughing. It felt so good to plunge feetfirst into the night. She felt a rush of air as she vaulted up into the dark branches. Too quickly she sank down again, the ground rose up, and the blood rushed to her head and dizzied her. She dragged her feet to slow herself, but she couldn’t stop all at once. Twice, then three times, she braked with her feet, until Leon caught the ropes from behind. He was close enough for her to feel his breath against her hair. “Are you all right?”

“Just tree-sick.”

He held her by the shoulders, as if to steady her, but she still felt the garden rushing toward her, and the sickening rush of air.

He touched her collarbone with his fingertips. “I remember you from Brandeis.”

“Really? You remember me! Why didn’t you say something?”

“I thought I’d wait,” he said.

“How do you remember me?”

“I remember you as … lovely,” he said.

She slipped off the swing to face him, laughing in disbelief—not just that he’d find her lovely, but that he would use such a delicate word.

“I asked people about you.”

She shook her head at him and he couldn’t help smiling. She was so innocent. Delicious. “Why didn’t you ask me about me?”

“I was shy,” he said, and that was true enough, although his shyness had been situational. He’d been unhappily involved.

“Shy?” She remembered him as arrogant, eloquent, and also tough. She’d heard him at a press conference, denouncing violence against the logging industry. He never hesitated at the microphone.

He couldn’t resist asking, “Did you start volunteering because you remembered me?”

“Not only shy, but vain!”

The swing hung between them, but he grasped the ropes above her head.

“I was interested in halting systematic deforestation of the planet and petitioning for the ballot proposal to ban clear-cutting in Northern California,” she said, “… and I did remember you.”

“Oh, you did.”

“Well, vaguely.”

“Only vaguely?”

“Very, very vaguely. Just that you were busy, and you never even looked at me. When I got to Save the Trees you stayed true to type.”

“Now I’m a type.”

“Well …”

They were standing so close their noses almost touched. She looked up at him and wondered how his eyes were so blue and his skin so dark, and how he could be shy and also confident, and most of all, what he was thinking, but she didn’t dare ask. And he saw her wondering, and he gazed at her delicate upturned face and felt a sudden tenderness for her, a little pang of responsibility. I’ll never never hurt you, he promised silently, even as he imagined taking her into the office and locking the door. He spoke with a cautious sincerity he didn’t feel. “I know you’re dating Noah and I won’t interfere with that.”

“Dating is a relative term.”

“Relative to what?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Really?” His lips brushed hers.

“I didn’t take offense that you ignored me,” she explained, “because what interests me is what you do.”

“That’s good to know.”

“I meant your work.” Her mouth grazed his. “I wasn’t talking about … right now.”

At first they kissed so lightly, there was no decision. They kissed the way they might trail their fingers in the water. I’m not really standing here with him, Jess thought, and she kissed him more deeply, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She touched the corner of his mouth with the tip of her tongue; she sucked his lower lip and tasted wine, and he was surprised, and also charmed, because he saw that she’d surprised herself. She was so curious. She trembled with curiosity.

They flew apart as two wailing fire engines careened down the street. Flashing lights illuminated the yard.

“That must have been the smoke alarm.” Leon stood for a moment, watching as the firemen approached in full regalia—boots, jackets, hats. “Wait here,” he told Jess. “Stay by the tree, and I’ll send someone to take you home.”

“Shouldn’t I …?”

“No, I don’t want you to come in. Stay here.”

Already partiers were streaming out, gathering in the front yard and on the sidewalk. There were hundreds, more than Jess would have thought possible, even in that rambling house. Two police cars pulled up. The hordes spilled onto the sidewalk. Jess stayed in shadow, sheltered by the oak.

Two officers entered and instantly a hush fell over the assembled. Jess could actually hear a pall fall over the blazing Bacchanalian house. It took her a second to realize that what she heard was the plug pulled on the sound system. The cops had stopped the music.

One officer stood on the landing, talking to Leon. “We’ve got noise ordinances, and we’ve got more than one complaint.” She couldn’t hear Leon’s reply, but she saw that he was perfectly calm and quiet. “Generally speaking, if we have a smoke alarm on top of a noise situation …,” the officer continued loudly and laboriously. “When alcohol is served …” She couldn’t catch all the words, but did hear inebriation mentioned and underage.

Leon interrupted here, objecting.

“Let’s put it this way: There are students on and off campus; there have been incidents on and off campus. You think you’ve got a friendly gathering…. In the morning you may find yourself with a situation. By situation, I mean someone dead. This has happened in the past. I don’t like to spell it out for you, but that’s my job—to spell it out for you.”

Through the lit windows of the house, Jess glimpsed the firemen tramping through the rooms. What would they find there? She didn’t see Noah in the crowd.

“Okay, let’s go,” someone ordered Jess. Her breath caught. Irrationally, she thought, They’ve come looking for me too. Then she recognized Daisy, small, fierce, humorless. “I’m taking you home. You have everything you need?”

Jess fumbled in her jacket pocket for her wallet and her keys. She felt like a child as she followed Daisy out the back gate. Did Leon think she was a child?

Chafing at the errand, Daisy didn’t speak as they walked to the car, nor did she move the stacks of leaflets from the passenger seat. Jess heaved the bundles into the backseat. “Does this happen a lot?” she ventured.

Daisy glanced at her for a moment, and for a moment she looked amused. “Yes,” she said, “this happens all the time.”

8

Jess did not tell Emily that she spent the next day playing with Leon instead of packing, wandering in Muir Woods instead of catching up on laundry. Nor could she say exactly why she almost missed the early-morning flight to Boston. That she had stayed up all night talking to Leon at the Tree House, that they had sat on the window seat, looking out at the garden and talking trees and politics, redwoods at risk and those protected, and some in secret groves, unknown to all but a few climbers and scientists. Trees like living castles in the mist. Leon told Jess, “When you see them you …”

“You what?” Jess asked him.

“You feel blessed.”

They talked about actions against Pacific Lumber Company. Tree sitting, roadblocking, human chains, using webcams and blogs and Listservs for publicity. “Old technology destroyed the environment,” said Leon. “Wouldn’t it be cool if new technology restored it?”

And Jess leaned against him, imagining a wireless world, a place without telephone poles, those poor denuded trees turned into sticks, a world where you could see the loggers make their kills online, and click to donate and do something about it. A world of webs and nets instead of boxes, logs, and … no, she couldn’t quite give up on books.

“I don’t think I could stop using paper,” she told Leon.

He rubbed her shoulders and his hands slipped underneath her shirt. “People gave up on clay tablets,” he pointed out. “They gave up typesetting, and eventually, they’ll give up paper too.”

“I like to turn the pages,” she said.

He laughed softly. “It’s all I can do not to turn you.”

“All you can do? Really?” She turned to face him, and all at once she saw his delight and his surprise and the sun rising through the window. “Oh, God, I have to get to the airport!”

Leon rushed her home to the apartment for her suitcase, and they sped to the airport in his imported hybrid car, so that she dashed to the gate with just minutes to spare.

“I was worried about you!” Emily exclaimed as they boarded their plane. “I couldn’t reach you! I thought something had happened to you! You’re getting a cell phone.”

“Okay, okay.” Jess sank into her window seat. “You could have boarded without me.”

Her sister had been struggling with just this possibility, torn between concern for Jess and her longing to see Jonathan. “What kept you so long? Do you really hate seeing Dad that much?” Emily stowed shopping bags of gifts in the overhead compartment and pushed her briefcase neatly under the seat in front of her. “Is that what this is about?”

“No! No, of course not.”

“I think it is.”

“I promise you,” said Jess, “Dad could not have been farther from my mind.” She took Hume from her backpack to read in self-defense. The plane began taxiing to the runway, and Jess read the same sentences again and again. There are mysteries which mere natural and unassisted reason is very unfit to handle…. Happy if she be thence sensible of her temerity … and … return, with suitable modesty, to her true and proper province, the examination of common life…. What did this mean? Hume seemed to spell the end of philosophy and the beginning of … what? Jess sneezed.

Emily offered her a granola bar.

“No, thanks,” said Jess.

“Did you eat any breakfast?”

Jess returned to Hume, without answering. She didn’t want to talk. She was afraid Emily would notice something different about her. When it came to confidences, Jess would rather hear Emily’s secrets than tell her own. This seemed fair, and this seemed right. Jess was the more forgiving of the two.

“You catch colds a lot, don’t you?”

Jess started. She’d heard her sister say, “You fall in love a lot, don’t you?”

Not so often, not so much for someone my age, Jess protested silently to the page in front of her. How would Hume put it? Though experience should be our guide—yes, he always started that way—and we see mistakes are common at the age of twenty-three, it must be acknowledged that not every youthful feeling begins unworthily and ends in error. If this were the case, mankind would have perished long ago.

Jess slept and woke, and tried to sleep again, tucking her knees to her chest, straining to rest her head, turning in her seat like a cork in a bottle. The day was over by the time they landed with a thump at Logan, and as the sisters stumbled out, loaded with gifts for Lily and Maya, they saw that they had traded a sunny California afternoon for a misty, messy Boston night. Their father had been circling in his Volvo station wagon, “for twenty minutes,” he said, even as he embraced them.

“So good to see you,” he murmured to Jess, but after kissing Emily, he stood back and shook his head in amazement at his spectacularly successful daughter—a stance Jess recognized as “My, how you’ve grown.”

Emily sat in front, and Jess struggled to unstrap and move two child-safety seats, so she could squeeze in back. The car was overheated, and the windows were locked. She rested her forehead on the glass and stared out at the crumbling brick buildings advertising steakhouses and bars in chipped paint. Growing up, she hadn’t noticed how old and dirty everything looked, but she saw it now. The decrepitude back east!

“Why is there so much traffic?” Jess asked. “Is it the Big Dig?”

“The traffic is entirely random,” Richard replied. Tall, gray-haired, clean-shaven, he had a quiet face, a recessive chin, eyes the color of a cloudy sky. He had attended MIT for college and for graduate school, and stayed to teach. On his right hand he wore an MIT insignia ring engraved with a beaver symbolizing industry. “Dad!” Jess burst out once when she was in high school and Richard had told her the drama club was a total waste of time, “of course you think that. You wear a brass rat.”

But Richard wore his ring with pride. He considered MIT one of the great places on earth, and he was immensely proud that Emily had attended. As for Jess—what fights they’d had. Richard insisting Jess apply, even though she had no chance, and no interest. Bad enough that he’d forced her to take AP Calculus. That had been humiliating, but her MIT interview had been a joke.

“So,” said the kindly Institute alumnus who had volunteered to meet with Jess. “When you were a kid, did you ever blow up chemistry experiments in the basement?”

“No,” Jess answered truthfully.

“Chart clouds in the skies?”

“No.”

“Take apart the family computer?”

“Never once,” said Jess.

Her father used to storm at her, “You have a perfectly good aptitude for math, but you won’t apply yourself.”

“I’m not good at it!” she’d insisted.

“You’re not interested,” he’d shot back.

“That too!”

This was after Emily left home, and before Heidi. Sweet-natured and playful when Jess was younger, Richard became a fretful, controlling single parent. Outgoing and confident as a little girl, Jess took to her room to read Yeats and count the days until her high-school graduation. Looking back, she realized that Richard had been counting too. They had both been waiting. For what? For life, for love, for liberty. They’d lived for the future and dreaded it as well, and when they’d battled, they’d fought desperately because they only had each other. They’d known they were the last members of their family.

“What’s new?” Emily asked her father.

“Nothing as exciting as your news,” Richard said. “I had a grant rejected. Mrs. Weldon died. Her place is on the market.”

“The house behind you?” asked Emily.

“It’s a double lot. A developer is looking at it.”

“Is that bad?” Jess piped up from the backseat.

“It’s bad if they build five houses and start a subdivision. There’s supposedly a nonprofit looking at the place as well, to start a religious child-care center.”

“You could send the girls,” Jess said.

Richard didn’t answer. He hated anything religious, particularly involving children. A single bumper sticker adorned his car: WHAT SCHOOLS NEED IS A MOMENT OF SCIENCE.

“Just kidding,” Jess said

It took almost an hour to reach downtown Canaan, which consisted of a real-estate agency, an ice-cream shop, a dry cleaner’s, and a traffic light. South of Main Street, Canaan’s winding roads and cul-de-sacs were named for Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau. North of Main, Richard’s Colonial stood on Highland. The land here did rise slightly, and for this reason Richard rarely had to use the sump pump in the basement. He had done his homework, and he knew to avoid low-lying Hawthorne, Peabody, and especially Alcott. The town’s Transcendentalists traversed a floodplain.

Heidi welcomed the travelers with her finger to her lips, and Jess and Emily tiptoed inside, trying not to slam the screen door and wake the girls.

“Come into the kitchen,” Heidi whispered. Meticulous, earnest, Heidi had cut her hair to shoulder length and donned large eyeglasses. There was a solidity about her now that she’d become a mother. She wore black jeans and talked about language acquisition. She collected the children’s finger paintings in large artist portfolios.

It went without saying (they never said it) that Heidi was accomplished. Her work in databases was “very interesting” according to Richard, and he would know. Heidi had been his graduate student. There was external evidence as well. Heidi taught at Brown. Her position there had prompted the move to Canaan, halfway between Cambridge and Providence.

“How was your flight?” Heidi asked.

“Fine,” said Emily.

“Awful,” said Jess.

“She’s sick,” Emily explained.

Jess thought she caught the aggravation in Heidi’s eyes—Oh, great, now we’ll all catch this bug—before the concerned questions, “Would you like a cup of tea? Do you need cold medicine?”

Richard carried in a load of bags. “You left the car door open,” he told Jess.

“I did not. I closed my door.” Already, Jess had reverted to her sixteen-year-old self. Amazing.

“Only you were sitting in the backseat,” Richard corrected her. “Therefore you left the door open.”

“Richard,” said Heidi. “What’s the difference? It’s a door. It doesn’t matter.”

Late that night Emily lay awake in the guest room. She hadn’t seen Jonathan in almost three weeks, and while everyone agreed that she should visit Canaan first, the last night apart was almost unbearable. She could not stop thinking about being with him again. She imagined his hands on her shoulders. “Look how tight you got.” He would rub until she relaxed, until her whole body relaxed into his arms. They would kiss playfully at first….

“Emily, are you asleep?” Jess whispered from the other bed.

“Almost.”

“Why is it so cold in here?”

“It’s not cold at all. It’s so warm. It’s stuffy.”

“I’m shivering,” said Jess.

Emily kicked off her covers and got out of bed. “You must have a fever.” She felt Jess’s forehead. “You’re burning! Where do you think Dad keeps the thermometer?”

“It’s just a cold,” Jess said.

“Wait a second.” Emily padded out to the bathroom and returned with medicine and water. “Take these.” Jess struggled up in bed to swallow the pills. “Okay, now rest.” Emily tucked the blankets around her and sat on the edge of the bed.

Their mother had told Emily quite seriously to watch her sister. She had told Emily in the hospital. Jess wasn’t allowed in the room at that point, and Emily was only just old enough. “Look after her,” Gillian said. “Do not let her jump in the street. You have to watch her. She doesn’t pay attention. And remember she can’t swim yet, even though she thinks she can. Remind your father about lessons.”

“I’m fine,” Jess said drowsily. “Go back to bed.”

“I will,” said Emily, but she stayed. Long after Jess drifted off, Emily sat up thinking on her sister’s bed. What would her mother say now, if she had lived to see this year? This wonderful year. I have embarked, she told her mother softly. I have embarked on my career. I have someone, she told her mother. I’m in love with Jonathan. And she wished for some sign that Gillian was listening. She longed for some sense, even the faintest echo, of her mother in the house. But there were no photographs of Gillian on the walls and none of her possessions in the closets. Richard had sold Gillian’s piano. He’d offered to ship it out to California, but neither Jess nor Emily played. Emily had quit her lessons at “Streets of Laredo” and Jess only got as far as “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” They had Gillian’s jewelry, but she hadn’t collected much. She had never liked necklaces or earrings. In fact, she’d never pierced her ears. She’d preferred a rosebush or two for her birthday, or a standing mixer.

“This is very sticky dough,” she would tell Emily as she rolled it out. “It’s very difficult to work with this dough, because it’s so short. You see?” She dusted the rolling pin and board with more flour and rolled briskly, as if to tame the stiff pastry, which she then cut into circles with an overturned teacup, or filled with honeyed poppy seeds, or spread into a glass pan to bake a cake of luscious prunes, their sweetness undercut with lemon. Nothing too sweet. That was the secret. Gillian said as much to Emily in her “Sixteenth Birthday” letter. Don’t doctor recipes. More is less, and sugar will only get you so far.

Jess awoke Thanksgiving morning to find Lily holding Blue Bear by the side of her bed.

“Where’s my presents?”

“Emily has them.” Jess was so woozy with jet lag and cold medicine that she could scarcely open her eyes.

“Can I nail-polish you?”

“What?”

“Can I nail-polish you?”

“No.”

“Can I pretend-nail-polish you?”

“Fine.” Jess buried her head in her pillow and thrust out both hands for Lily.

“Wait, I have to …” Lily scampered off and Jess drifted to sleep again.

A moment later, Jess felt something cool and slippery on her fingernails. Lily was coloring each nail with marker. Jess hoped that this would take a while.

At least Emily had Jonathan. He would swoop down from Cambridge and take Emily away, while Jess was stuck in Canaan for the long weekend. In one of Jess’s birthday letters, Gillian had written, I hope that you’ll share whatever comes your way. It was funny to imagine Gillian writing this so many years ago, thinking about sharing toys and candy, and cutting Black-and-White cookies straight across, so that each half had some chocolate and some vanilla. Jess had no desire to split Jonathan down the middle, except when she was angry with him, but she did envy Emily the excuse to get away.

Downstairs, Emily was already dressed and toasting frozen waffles. Heidi was checking her e-mail at the kitchen table. Richard had gone running.

“Would you like a plate?” Emily asked when Jess plucked a pair of waffles from the toaster.

The house was crammed with toys, particularly plastic toys in a certain shade of pink, a bright bubblegum tint like a contagion in every room. Pink plastic chairs and pink doll strollers, pink easels, and a pink and white miniature kitchen. As Jess nibbled her waffles, she made one of her never-in-a-million-years vows. If and when she had a baby, never in a million years would her daughter touch plastic or play with baby dolls. Jess would not allow pink in her someday house, nor would her little girl wear that color. No! Overalls instead, and green checked shirts. Toy trucks, or, better yet, tiny solar-powered cars.

“Let’s go outside,” Jess told her little sisters. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

For the next hour, Jess spotted the girls on their cedar climbing structure, and caught Maya at the bottom of the slide. She hoisted the girls into a pair of baby swings, and struggled to stuff their snowsuited legs through the holes.

“Higher!” squealed Lily, as Jess pushed the girls, one with each hand.

Maya shrieked. Lily’s hood flew back, and she threw her head back as well and laughed. The chains were short, and they squeaked. Still, if Jess closed her eyes for a moment, she could remember the long arc of the rope swing, Leon’s hand on her back, her own flight into the air.

“Underdog!” screamed Lily.

Jess ducked under the swing to the other side.

The yard faced south, and a thousand twittering sparrows sunned themselves in the boxwood hedge that separated the property from the Weldon place. The huge garden there looked desolate, striped with winter shadows. But that was not a shadow. No, that was a man in a dark suit. The developer? He wore a round-brimmed black hat, a white shirt, a black frock coat. Shiny black dress shoes. The little man was trying to look casual, as if he’d just happened by.

“Me! Me!” shrieked Maya.

Jess kept her eyes on the trespasser next door. He knew that she was watching him. He decided to make the best of it and walked right up to the hedge, where he smiled and called, “Good morning!” The sparrows seemed divided about him. Some fluttered up in alarm, and others stayed in the hedge, chirping, as he called out, “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” said Jess, examining his face. His eyes were the rare pure blue found in the very young or very old. He had a russet beard and rosy cheeks and wore no gloves. He blew on his hands.

“Hello, let me introduce myself,” the man said in a welcoming way, just as if he were standing on his own land. “My name is Rabbi Shimon Zylberfenig, and I am the director of the Bialystok Center of Canaan.”

“Good to meet you. I’m Jess.”

“And these are your children?”

“My sisters,” said Jess. “I’m just visiting.”

“Very nice. Where are you from?”

“Berkeley.”

“I have family in Berkeley!”

Oh, this was too strange. Jess remembered Rabbi Helfgott. My brother-in-law lives in Canaan! My wife’s sister’s husband.

“Do you know Rabbi Helfgott? My brother-in-law,” said Rabbi Zylberfenig with some pride. “A very famous rabbi on the West Coast. You have perhaps heard of him?”

“I met him recently,” said Jess.

Rabbi Zylberfenig beamed at her.

“It’s a funny coincidence,” said Jess.

“There are no coincidences,” said Rabbi Zylberfenig quite seriously. “I hope you’ll come by us for Shabbes at our center here in Canaan. We are not yet so big and well established, but we are a very warm community, very welcoming. You’ll come for dinner?”

Rhythmically, Jess pushed her sisters on the squeaking swings. “I think I’ll probably need to stay here.”

“Bring the family,” Zylberfenig urged her. “We always have room for more. In fact, we are always interested in making room.”

“Is that why you’re looking at the property there?” Jess asked.

“Only browsing,” Zylberfenig said, as though he were standing at a magazine stand and not a boxwood hedge.

The girls were fussing. “Up!” Maya cried, by which she meant “down.”

“There are many possibilities,” the rabbi said.

Rabbi Zylberfenig’s wife was waiting on the other side of the old Weldon place. The rabbi had parked on Pleasant Street, and Chaya was sitting in their van.

“Two acres at least. Beautiful,” Shimon said as soon as he returned to Chaya. They sat together and looked out at the white house with its peeling paint. Their little ones slept in car seats in the back. The other four were home.

“I met a very interesting woman from Berkeley,” Shimon continued. “She knows Nachum.”

“Really?” Chaya was slender, bright-eyed, English. “Is she staying? Did you invite her for Shabbes?”

“Of course.”

“She’s coming?”

Shimon smiled. “Who knows? I hope. She’s visiting her family.”

“Invite them too.”

“I did. I told her please bring the family.” Shimon’s eyes were still fixed on the two acres. A pair of giant oaks stood in the front yard. “Just four hundred thousand,” he said.

Chaya tsked under her breath. She wondered if the place was overpriced, and if they’d get a variance, and if these neighbors would object to a Bialystok Center. Some did and some did not, and you could never predict. But the big question was, Where would they find the money?

“We would have room for expansion.” Shimon started the van and released the emergency brake.

“Renovating that house …,” Chaya began.

“We won’t renovate. Im yirtzeh Hashem, we’ll crush it down.” As Shimon eased down the hill, a loose apple rolled along the floor of the van.

“This is a small community,” Chaya said.

“Even a small community can do great mitzvahs. It is very interesting what a small community may do.” He spoke softly, so as not to wake the children. “You’ll see.”

The Rebbe had sent the Zylberfenigs from Brooklyn as newlyweds to bring Yiddishkeit to Canaan, returning lapsed Jews to their own religion. Now, eleven years and six children later (although they did not count children, because it was bad luck), they had not succeeded as well as their peers in other towns. Chaya’s own sister in Berkeley, for example, presided over a large establishment with her husband. This was partly because Berkeley was a city, while Canaan was a town of fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants (although it was better not to count populations either). Berkeley was more affluent than Canaan and overflowing with young college students, many of them Jews, ready and waiting, ripe on the vine. Canaan’s Jews were older and well settled and often mistrustful of their own religion.

It was also true that Bialystok emissaries had to fend for themselves. Parents might support shleichim, but not Headquarters. Each Bialystok Center had to raise its own money. In his wisdom, the Rebbe adhered to the famous dictum “Every tub on its own bottom.” Chaya had married with a little dowry, but that money was gone. He was not a saver, Shimon. He was a spender, and a buyer, and always, every day, expected miracles. “We have students,” Shimon reminded her. “We have supporters. We may even someday have angels.” He was a pious man, but when he said “angels” he meant in the financial sense. Angels who would buy property for them someday. Shimon was always hopeful, always learning, always thinking, and Chaya respected this, but she found her husband aggravating as well, probably because she was a woman, and had to concern herself with laundry, groceries, and cooking. She was constantly sorting out her children’s shoes, performing the countless details of mother and rebbetzin, even though the Messiah was due at any moment.

9

On Thanksgiving Day, with the markets closed, the whole world seemed to sigh with satisfaction. Emily was worth half a billion dollars. Jess was a happy thousandaire. They drove to Providence with Richard, Heidi, and the girls to eat dinner at a new restaurant called Sonoma Grille.

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird to fly back east to eat faux Californian cuisine?” Jess whispered to Emily when they arrived.

“Shh!” Emily glanced toward her father as they sat down at the table. They were six without Jonathan, who had to cancel at the last minute.

“Servers went down this morning,” Emily explained, and she tried to sound serene, and she tried to feel patient, but she was neither. All she wanted was to take her father’s car and drive to Cambridge. “He has to be there.”

“An ISIS crisis.” Jess poked Maya with a breadstick.

“It’s not a big deal,” Emily said. “It’s just a little …”

She trailed off, sensing Jess watching, waiting for her to admit how she really felt.

“We’ll have Thanksgiving tomorrow,” Jonathan had promised Emily on the phone.

“I’m sorry about the crash,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter.” His voice was light. He was in great spirits, thrilled that Emily had come, and certain that, within weeks, he would be as rich as she.

Everybody knew prosperity would come, that wealth was imminent. Profits followed prospects. Cash kept rolling in. Chaya accused Shimon on Thanksgiving of thinking money grew on trees, and he told her, “But it does!” Chaya was fretting about children’s winter coats, but her husband had a deeper understanding of the age. His own student Barbara, a regular at all his classes, was married to Mel Millstein, the director of Human Resources at ISIS. His own Barbara, who came to services each week, had expressed her wish to share whatever wealth the Internet would bring.

Even now, Barbara was serving Thanksgiving dinner in her little house on Fuller Circle. The tablecloth was harvest gold. The salt and pepper shakers, Pilgrims. Barbara served turkey, sage and onion stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and corn bread to her grown children, Sam and Annie, and her husband, Mel, the angel who didn’t know it. Poor Mel, stubborn Mel, who didn’t like to listen to Barbara’s stories of the Bialystoker rebbes.

“The third Bialystoker Rebbe is known as the Dreamer,” Barbara explained to her family. “When he was a young student, his learning was so brilliant that he levitated above the ground As his knowledge grew, he began floating higher, so that, in time, whenever he opened his mouth, he began to fly upward, lighter than air. His teachers had to keep the windows shut. They were afraid the young man would fly away….”

“Your mother is taking a class in Jewish mysticism,” said Mel.

“Cool,” Sam said politely.

“What happened to going back to school?” asked Annie.

“Oh, I don’t think I have time,” Barbara murmured.

“Why not?” Annie had always been ambitious on her mother’s behalf.

“Well, there’s the house. There’s the garden,” Barbara said vaguely.

“Mom, it’s November,” Annie said. “How are you gardening in the winter? And what do you need to do in the house?”

“Quite a lot!” Barbara retorted, thinking of the wet basement.

“You need to get a life.” Annie meant this lovingly. She was just thinking aloud.

Barbara plunged the serving spoon deep into the cranberry sauce. “I have a life.”

Barbara seemed at times like a woman having an affair. Mel knew, of course, that she was not sneaking off to sleep with God, or any of his messengers, but sometimes it felt that way. She hummed. She was always humming without noticing, and she had never been a hummer. She glowed when she talked about services or classes at the Bialystok Center. A sudden youthfulness suffused her skin. Maybe it was love after all, but if so, Barbara was in love with the whole Zylberfenig family—the rabbi, his wife, and all their children, down to the baby. Especially the baby. She was irrational about these people. They held her in their thrall.

Mel was Jewish, named for his grandfather Mendel. With his dark eyes, strong nose, and melancholy little mouth shaded by a moustache, he looked as Jewish as they come. But he was from the nonbelieving branch of the religion. Superstition scared him. In fact, superstition made him superstitious. These were strange times. The world seemed on the cusp of some revelation—or some disaster. The Y2K bug lurked inside the world’s computers like a worm eating the world tree. According to the CIA, terrorists were out to get everyone on New Year’s Eve. Even as Barbara began praying and nailing mezuzahs to door frames throughout the house, Mel felt that something terrible might befall him. Each mezuzah case was no larger than Mel’s index finger and concealed a scroll inside, so that no scripture was visible, except for one Hebrew letter, the shape of a three-tined fork. They were small, these mezuzahs, but they were everywhere, each like a chrysalis, a tiny portent. Lately he lived in dread. What would become of him? What new belief would open up its wings and flutter through the house today? Barbara had begun praying morning, noon, and night. Turning toward the east, she clutched her prayer book and mumbled words in Hebrew. And she wrote checks. Little checks. Nothing too crazy, but donations all the same, to the Zylberfenigs, those mystic Bialystokers of hers.

As he cleared and Barbara washed the Thanksgiving dishes, she said, “I’m sorry I snapped at Annie. I’m happy.”

“I know.” His voice was bleak.

“I’m thankful, actually, because we’re all together.”

He nodded, although he and Barbara were alone in the house. The kids had driven off to see their friends.

“We’re blessed,” said Barbara. She turned off the water in the sink and turned to face him. She was glowing again. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes bright with the sky. She looked as though she’d just come in from walking on a perfect fall day. “Just think what we can do when we sell our stock.”

“Our stock? Who’s selling stock?”

“We could give,” said Barbara.

Suddenly, Mel knew the desire in Barbara’s infatuated heart. He took a full step back in shock. Donate stock! Mel had assumed that after twenty-eight years of marriage he and his wife had discovered every little quirk and source of irritation—but now this! An entirely new category, like a previously uncharted island or a new species in the rain forest. That was how her suggestion revealed itself to him, a new mammal, a giant three-toed rat, just when naturalists thought they’d seen it all.

“Oh, no. No. That’s not going to happen. If and when ISIS goes public—if and when I’m clear to sell my shares—there’s no way in hell I’m giving them to those Hasidic lunatics of yours.”

“Mel,” said Barbara, hurt by his language.

Anger swelled within him. “I am not giving a penny of my money to those holy rollers and their evangelical, superstitious, brainwashing cult. Over my dead body.”

“I never said anything!” Barbara protested.

“You don’t have to. I know. Don’t you think I know what they want out of you? And what you want to do?” And he did know, because after all, he had been married to Barbara half his life. He had met her at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he had worked in payroll and she was just a sweet young nurse. He knew exactly how his wife looked when she hoped for something, or when she wanted something, or when she dreamed. He knew her yearning liquid eyes, her tender mouth. He could read her face, even as she became a stranger to him.

10

By Friday morning, Jess was so homesick for California that she begged Emily, “When Jonathan comes to pick you up, could you take me too?”

Emily looked guilty.

“I’m just kidding!” Jess assured her.

Waiting must have been torture, but Emily hardly let it show. She kept busy, playing Candy Land with the girls, and then helping Heidi sort through boxes in the guest room. Jess avoided these activities. Through the kitchen window, as she washed an apple, Jess saw someone in the garden next door. The rabbi again, in his black coat and hat.

“Dad,” she called her father.

“Hold on.” His voice was muffled through the door of his home office off the living room.

“He’s back.” Jess stood outside the door.

“Who?”

“The rabbi looking at the Weldon place.”

Now the door opened. “Where?”

They hurried to the window.

There he was. They could see the top half of Rabbi Zylberfenig over the hedge. He was gazing contemplatively at the winter ruins of an overgrown rhododendron, surely thinking something mystical about the dormancy and rebirth of plants.

Richard’s eyes narrowed. “He must be the nonprofit with the day-care scheme.”

“He didn’t seem like a psychopath or anything,” Jess ventured.

“Except that he’d like to convert every Jew in sight to flat earth ancestor worship,” Richard countered.

Jess couldn’t help giggling at that last.

“You think it’s funny,” Richard said.

“No,” she protested.

“These people are opportunists,” her father declared. “I know what they did in Sharon, and in Bethel. They infiltrate wherever they can, because you know what they want?”

“The Messiah?”

“Money.”

Oh, if Richard had known what Jess had done—borrowing from one of them. Fortunately, her father could not read her mind. “The sole purpose of these centers is to raise money to open more centers,” he explained. “These things are viral, as is the religion, which is a cult based on their rabbi, whom they worship.”

“Oh, come on, Dad, how do you know what they believe?” asked Jess.

“I know more than you think,” her father said.

“Let’s say they do worship their rabbi. Aren’t they allowed freedom of religion? Or are you like those people theoretically supporting battered-women’s shelters—everywhere but your backyard?”

“Don’t lecture me about freedom, young lady,” said Richard. “These people intend to come in, bringing traffic to a residential neighborhood. They are planning a religious school and propaganda center next to my home. Don’t tell me their beliefs are sacrosanct when their practices threaten to impact me and my family.”

Who was this irate man standing in the kitchen? Who was his family? Not Jess and Emily. He spoke of his new wife and kids, of course. They were young and sweet, but Richard had aged, and his doubts had hardened, along with his beliefs. Jess had asked him once, when she was about ten, whether he’d stopped believing in God when Gillian died.

“No, sweetie,” he’d replied. “I wouldn’t give up believing because of some event that happened to me. Terrible things happen every day. It would be illogical to give up hope in God because of one death in our family. No. I never believed in the first place. Not before, not after.”

At the time, Jess had found his answer comforting. Richard’s rationality had always reassured her. If she woke in the night, afraid of thunderstorms, he would sit on the edge of her bed and talk to her about probability and statistics, explaining the low odds that she’d get hit by lightning. She didn’t worry about crossing the street, did she? Well, she was far more likely to die that way. He’d also explained that the chances of dying in a plane crash were infinitesimally small, and that Newton enjoyed the lowest crime rate in Massachusetts. Highly unlikely, then, for armed robbers to break into their home at night. Now, however, Jess looked at her father and wondered where his anger came from, and why he sounded so obsessed with people he dismissed, and so threatened by a religion he denied. She herself vacillated when it came to belief. She did not particularly believe in God. Or, rather, she didn’t believe in a particular God. Nevertheless, she kept an open mind. She was not a melancholy agnostic, but the optimistic kind. She liked to give God the benefit of the doubt.

“Why don’t you go out and talk to him?” Jess asked her father.

“I have nothing to say to that man,” Richard replied.

“That’s not true,” said Jess.

Her father returned to his study.

“I think you have a lot to say,” she called after him.

Upstairs, Emily sat on the floor with Heidi, contemplating the open box before her.

“What about your father’s National Geographics?” Heidi asked. “If we could move those boxes out …”

“I love those.” Jess stood in the doorway with her mouth full of apple. As soon as Heidi lifted them from the box, Jess recognized the cheerful yellow magazines—a complete set from 1915 to 1970. She’d pored over the maps and photographs, the little Afghan children in native dress, the photos of dunes and deserts, the sweep of sand in black and gray and white.

“If you want them, we can ship them all to you,” Heidi said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jess,” said Emily. “Pretty soon you’ll see them all online.” She looked at Heidi. “Give them to the library,” she advised. “Jess doesn’t have room.”

“I’ll make room,” Jess protested, but just then the doorbell rang and they heard Jonathan’s voice, and Richard’s welcoming him, happier than he’d been all afternoon. Of course, Jonathan was just the sort Richard loved: technical and bright and poised to conquer worlds.

Emily ran down to him. Boxes and magazines, even Rabbi Zylberfenig was forgotten. Jonathan was like the cavalry coming over the hill. You couldn’t help racing to meet him. Richard grinned. The little girls giggled, and Heidi grew girlish herself, laughing when he told her to send students his way.

“We’ll lose a generation of academics if everyone goes to work for you at ISIS,” she said.

Everyone laughed at Jonathan’s response: “Well, that’s okay.”

Even Jess, who liked him least, felt Jonathan’s extraordinary pull. You wanted to please him, or at least stand back and watch. What was it about him? His sheer energy. His masculinity. He was such a guy: square-shouldered, forthright. He had served in the Marines before college, and there was something military about him still, his hair cropped short, his feet-apart, stand-and-deliver attitude even in conversation. He had the devil in him too, a take-no-prisoners smile. He adored Emily, and when they were together his good looks were touched by humility, his blue eyes softened. When he took her hand, his thumb stroked hers yearningly.

At the barbecue where they’d met, his first words to Emily had been, “I have a huge crush on you.”

She’d burst out laughing. Surrounded by men at work, she was used to unspoken admiration, passive aggression, sometimes inappropriate advances. Not this mix of audacity and humor.

He’d added, “I like your company too.”

“Was that a pun, or did you mean Veritech?”

He’d shaken his head. “I’ve never made a pun in my life!”

“Not even unintentionally?”

“I guess that was my first. I was talking about Veritech.”

“What do you like about it?”

“Your new indexing system, your partners, your client list. You guys are so cool. You’re ubiquitous.” He said the word with reverence. “You’re doing everything I want to do.”

After an hour, which felt like three, and a snack of Goldfish crackers in the kitchen with the kids, she and Jonathan made their escape. For a moment in the driveway, Jonathan’s Datsun wouldn’t start, and Emily began to fret, and Jonathan laughed at her, and when the old car started at last, he drew her toward him and kissed her while the engine idled.

“Just wait,” said Jonathan as they drove off. By which he meant, “Wait ’til we get to my place. Wait ’til I have you all alone. Wait ’til this old wreck becomes a yellow Lamborghini.” Unlike Emily, Jonathan had no trouble envisioning the toys he’d buy, and the fun he’d have. He knew precisely the canary yellow of his future car, its huge motor and bulbous lights, its doors like wings.

In the meantime, the engine sounded hoarse, and traffic slowed down on the pike. When they finally got to Cambridge, there wasn’t time to stop at Jonathan’s apartment before dinner with their friends Orion and Molly.

“Let’s cancel,” Jonathan said.

“We can’t just stand them up.”

“Why not? I want to,” Jonathan protested, his expression frank and boyish, softening his words. “I see Orion every day.”

“But I don’t,” said Emily. “And we never see Molly.”

“Nobody does,” Jonathan said. Molly was an intern at Beth Israel Deaconess.

“Then this is a rare opportunity.” Emily was not above teasing him a little. “Not to be missed.”

After looping several times through one-way streets, they parked far from the restaurant, and ended up rushing through Harvard Square on foot. Emily always forgot how cold it got. Her shearling jacket wasn’t nearly warm enough, and she was shivering, while Jonathan didn’t need a coat, only a sweater, and he gave Emily his knit hat, a gesture both chivalrous and clumsy, as he pulled it down too hard, covering her eyes.

They met Orion and Molly on Brattle Street, and when the four of them entered Casablanca, the sudden warmth fogged Emily’s glasses. As she took them off and wiped them, she saw Molly do the same, and the two smiled in solidarity, acquaintances searching for something in common. Orion was the one Emily knew well. He had been Emily’s childhood friend when, for several summers, they attended CTY, the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins. At eleven, twelve, and thirteen, they took courses in physics and advanced geometry along with other children selected nationwide. Emily had studied Greek, and Orion took astronomy. Renaissance children, they lived in dorms with other earnest middle-schoolers blowing through problem sets, practicing violin, gathering several times a week for camp games designated by their counselors as “mandatory fun.”

At CTY, Orion had been Emily’s first sweetheart, the first boy she walked with hand in hand; and one summer night, her first kiss. They had been standing close, studying each other, a small blond Orion and a slightly taller Emily, each wondering what the other was thinking, and each afraid to ask. They both held still. The moment was delicious, almost unbearable. Emily knew she had to do something. She took off her glasses and held them open at her side. His lips touched hers. So this is kissing, she thought. She couldn’t taste anything. It wasn’t that kind of kiss. It was the kind that hung in the air, beautiful and abstract, like a theorem to contemplate. The moment afterward was lovely, much sweeter than the kiss itself. They could breathe again.

They corresponded during the school year, mailing handwritten letters—Orion’s scrawled on notebook paper, Emily’s printed on blue stationery patterned with white clouds. She must have written three letters to his one, and she remembered pointing this out on the phone. She’d been tearful, and he’d grown quiet, and finally he told her that his parents were splitting up. Then she understood, and the understanding was pure Emily—unselfish insight. She realized that corresponding was too much for him, and pining for each other was a little much as well. “Maybe we should stop,” she whispered. “We’re only thirteen.”

By high school, their romance was well behind them, and in college they settled into occasional e-mail exchanges. He went to graduate school at MIT, and one summer when Emily came east to see her father, Orion introduced her to Jonathan. So she had Orion to thank for that. Orion who was now so tall—much taller than she. He was lanky, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, and although Molly had dressed up in a black wool dress and high-heeled black boots, Orion wore jeans and a sweater with holes at the elbows. Molly was short and round-faced; she had an eager look about her, while Orion always had a faraway look in his gray eyes, as though he’d rather be fishing. He wore his hair long in a ponytail thick as a horse’s mane. He had something of the wild horse about him.

“Did you break your finger?” Emily asked Orion as they sat down, women on one side, men on the other.

He glanced down at the splint on his left hand. “Oh, I did that playing Ultimate.”

“You still play Frisbee?”

“Of course.”

“He’s in a league,” said Molly.

“I still remember your father’s poem about watching you,” said Emily.

“She’s read all Dad’s poetry,” Orion told Molly.

“Boy trumps dog …,” Emily quoted.

“God. Stop!” Orion laughed. “You don’t have to recite them.”

“I happen to like his work,” Emily protested, as Jonathan’s ankle rubbed her shin, his leg pressing against hers underneath the table.

They ordered elaborate salads with smoked duck, and pizzas with caramelized figs, small rich entrées. There was a wine list, but none of them knew what to make of it, until Jonathan decided on champagne so they could toast Veritech. He didn’t know which kind to get, so he ordered the most expensive bottle listed.

“Very good,” the waiter said with a half smile, and Jonathan laughed a little, after the waiter had gone. He had missed the waiter’s smirk, and thought him silly. Softly lit, decorated with murals of scenes from the movie Casablanca, the restaurant was just a bit precious for Jonathan. On one wall, a sad-eyed Humphrey Bogart watched over them, and tears glistened in Ingrid Bergman’s eyes.

“One hundred twenty-two dollars a share,” Jonathan boasted to Orion. “As of today—right, Emily?”

She nodded, ducking her head, a little embarrassed that she knew Veritech’s price the day after Thanksgiving.

“That’s amazing,” said Molly, and she looked at Orion as if to say, Really? And could that happen to us too, with ISIS? Orion played with the ragged edge of his sleeve.

“The shares split last week,” Jonathan told them, because he knew Emily wouldn’t boast.

“That’s just sick,” Orion said.

Indeed. If Emily could sell just a fraction of her stock, she would be beyond wealthy. Of course, if was the operative word. The lockup held until June. The price couldn’t rise forever, but when would it fall? How would she pick the right time to sell? A delicate question. She and Alex and Milton avoided the subject. They knew intellectually that they had to sell some stock in the summer, but selling felt like cannibalizing their own offspring. Jonathan was about to discover this, but he didn’t understand the feeling yet. It was hard to see over the edge of an IPO.

“Is this all right?” The waiter presented Jonathan with the champagne.

“I should hope so,” said Jonathan cheerfully. As the waiter poured him a glass, he added, “Pour for everyone.” Then came his toast: “To Veritech, and to the future.”

“To infinity and beyond,” Orion said.

“Hell, yeah.”

“But let’s get our products working,” Orion murmured.

“Orion, here, is still doing research,” Jonathan explained to Emily and Molly. “We’re building, and he’s busy breaking code.”

“I broke Lockbox,” Orion confessed.

“How?” Emily blurted out. Lockbox was supposed to be unbreakable, the code impervious. Thousands, millions of Internet shoppers depended on Lockbox to safeguard their transactions. If Lockbox broke—even in the safety of the office—that would be a major setback. A breakdown wouldn’t necessarily derail the ISIS IPO, but it might delay it, and a delay these days, even for a few months, was like derailment.

“Better to know now, right?” Orion said.

“It’s the new version, 2.0, not the one we’ve shipped,” Jonathan reassured Emily and Molly. “The original Lockbox that everyone is using out there is totally fine.”

“What did you do?” Emily asked Orion.

She felt Jonathan tense. He pulled his legs away from hers under the table.

“The new code is buggy,” Orion said.

But Jonathan contradicted. “It was ready until you broke it.”

“If it was breakable,” said Orion, “then obviously it wasn’t ready.”

“There’s testing code and there’s fucking with it.”

“There’s solid work and wishful thinking,” Orion said. “You can’t tell clients you’ve got stuff ready when you know it isn’t ready.”

“I tell them what we will have ready, if everybody does his job,” said Jonathan.

“I’m talking about reality,” said Orion, “not some myth of magical security solutions—”

“Oh, come on, you guys,” Emily interrupted.

“Yeah, really,” Molly said.

Emily chided, “This is the same debate we have all the time between programmers and marketing. Do you think you’re so unusual? We broke something just a couple of weeks ago, and now it’s crippled.”

“Broke what?” Curiosity trumped aggression. “You’re building something new. What are you building?”

“It’s not public yet,” Emily replied.

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Yes, you can,” Jonathan wheedled.

“Well, I won’t.”

“We have ways of making you talk,” he teased.

“She’ll never tell you.” Orion spoke lightly, but his words suggested his greater knowledge of Emily, and their older friendship—and once again he angered Jonathan.

“I’m tired of your predictions,” Jonathan said quietly.

“You don’t have to listen,” Orion pointed out. “Usually you don’t.”

Jonathan was toying with his half-filled champagne flute. The glass looked so delicate in his hand that Emily reached across the table and placed it safely next to hers.

“You didn’t have to fight with him,” Emily told Jonathan in the car.

“He started it,” said Jonathan.

“What difference does it make? You should know better.”

They drove up Mass. Ave. with its multicultural holiday lights: shooting stars and stylized dancers. “He’s irresponsible,” Jonathan declared.

“Why? Because he disagrees with you sometimes?”

“You wouldn’t defend him like that if he worked for you.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I know you.”

“Well, I don’t attack my friends in restaurants.”

“I didn’t attack him.”

“I thought you were going to break his glass and stab him with it.”

“Hire him at Veritech,” said Jonathan. “Seriously. We’ll pack him up in Bubble Wrap and ship him. We don’t want him.”

“But you might need him.”

“For what? Talking about our products?” Jonathan was indignant again. “Next thing I know, Green Knight comes up with a security system just like ours.”

He amazed her. He was all energy, and all competition. She was driven to succeed, but her idea of success was focused, pure, and self-defined. Jonathan’s idea was annihilating his rivals. Even now, he wove through traffic, muscling his way into one lane and then another, shaving seconds off the drive to Somerville.

“We’re very different,” she said.

He smiled. “No, we’re not. You just like to pretend we are.”

“Why would I pretend?”

“Because you’re a girl.”

“What do you mean I’m ‘a girl’? I talk like a girl? I throw like a girl?”

“Yeah. Exactly. You throw like a girl.”

“Take it back.”

“No.”

“Take it back.” She tickled him under his arm, and the car swerved. “Sorry! I’m sorry!”

“You could wait for a red light,” he pointed out, but waiting was difficult.

When they got to his apartment, Jonathan left the lights off. His roommates, Jake and Aldwin, were away for the long weekend, leaving their bikes in the living room, a shadowy obstacle course Jonathan didn’t bother navigating.

“Now take it back,” said Emily, even as he took her in his arms.

He pressed against her in the entryway. “No,” he said. “You want to win as much as I do.”

“It’s not a race.”

“You know it is. It’s a race to patent first, and ship first, and file first. You and Veritech are already winning, so you pretend you don’t compete.”

“If I do race at times,” she said, “I’m not part of some demolition derby, trying to win at all costs.”

She was so beautiful, lecturing in the dark. He unbuttoned her coat and slipped her sweater off. He stroked her slender arms, and lifted her silk camisole, even as she scolded. Her moralizing was sweet, irresistible as words whispered in a foreign language. Her voice caught as he kissed her neck, and his hands traveled down, caressing her breasts, spanning her waist.

“The question is what sort of race you want to run,” she said, “and what sort of standards you set for yourself.”

He liked the way she tried to finish her thought, even as he took her nipple in his mouth. When he knelt before her, and he pulled off her skirt, and rolled down her thick winter tights, she couldn’t talk at all, but sighed as his tongue, hard and wet, pressed into her. She was warm, and she wanted him—her fingers dug into his shoulders. He’d behaved badly at dinner, but she was hungry anyway.

“You’re no different from me,” he whispered.

Yes, I am, she thought, even then, even at the edge of pleasure. Didn’t she believe in him? Of course she did. She wanted to. She longed for him. She ached for him, and when they lay down together on his unmade bed, she wrapped her legs around him. If she laughed at his impatience, she was impatient too.

Later, much later, when they’d had almost enough, he lay on his side, looking at her with his head resting on his arm. He was a direct lover, but he could be tender too.

She turned toward him, and they lay so close that when she spoke, her breath was the same as his. “Here’s the difference between us,” she said. “I trust my friends.”

“Not true! You don’t even trust me.”

Emily knew he was thinking about Veritech. “That’s something else.”

“Why?”

She hesitated, and then she said, “Because other people are involved.”

“Other people?” he scoffed, and he was right. Where were those other people now? What did they matter? She and Jonathan were a world unto themselves. When he touched her and stroked her face, all the longing of the past weeks eased. Or did it? Even as they kissed, she missed the kiss before, and the one before that. How strange the way every moment contained and at the same time hollowed out the last. She thought she should be satisfied, but she wasn’t. Why? Because she could not dissolve herself. She wanted to forget herself with him, and give herself to him. No you don’t, she told herself. You don’t want to give yourself to any man. But she did. She wanted to belong to him—an antique notion, silvery as Ingrid Bergman’s fine features, sad as Bogart’s gravel voice.

She embraced him, pressed against him, but even as she throbbed again, Emily’s cooler self, observing her entanglement, looked down upon her limbs and his. Her reasonable soul broke in, interrupting at the worst possible, or rather, the best possible, moment to ask: Who is this man? And who are you? Do you love him? Does he love you? And how can you tell? What proof do you have? Only kisses melting into air. Touch forgotten in an instant. Don’t you have some better evidence than that?

Yes, she had evidence. She would prove herself to herself. Satisfy his curiosity and confide in him, share her work, her life, her most secret joy.

“I’ve got Alex working on password authentication,” she whispered. “It’s a new system called Verify, with a feature called electronic fingerprinting.” He held still as she told him. He seemed to hold his breath as she explained how the system recorded every user of every piece of data—a graphic history of each touch.

“Stop.”

“Did I say too much?”

“Of course not,” he said, but his voice was surprised. He’d never imagined she would confide so much in him. He was moved by the gesture. Overwhelmed.

She rested her head on his chest. “Tell me something too.”

She heard his heart beat faster. Why? Surprise? Chagrin? He was supposed to be the demanding one, the instigator.

“Tell me what’s really wrong with Lockbox.”

“What do you mean, ‘what’s really wrong’?” Jonathan asked softly, defensively.

Oh, she was proving his point. She was like him after all, competitive, even now. No, that wasn’t right. She only wanted parity, a fair trade of information. That wasn’t right either. All she wanted was to draw him in and hold him close. “What did Orion find?” she pressed. Curious, just like Jonathan. Alert, insatiable as he was. “Tell me.”