The Cookbook Collector

23

Emily sensed that Jess was keeping something from her. She could tell by the way her sister hid behind her hair.

“Is your cell still working?” Emily asked her.

“I think so.”

“Then why don’t you use it?”

“I do. Sometimes.” Her hair fell like a curtain over her face.

They were sitting in Emily’s white condo, in the living room, and they were sharing a vegan chocolate cake Jess had brought for Emily’s thirtieth birthday. The big celebration was going to be with Jonathan that weekend at Lake Tahoe, but Jess had come for the actual day, August 8, and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the collection of Gillian’s birthday letters, hers and Emily’s together, in her lap.

For your eleventh birthday … For your twelfth birthday … For your twentieth birthday … I would like to see you at twenty. I think that you’ll be tall, and I want to know if I am right.

“What you should do,” said Jess, “is print these out on archival stock and make a scrapbook. This isn’t good paper, and this ink”—she pointed to the dot matrix printing—“see, it’s already fading.”

I do miss knowing you at twenty, Emily. Sometimes I’m quite sad about it, and then at other times I think I should be grateful for knowing you as long as I have. I’m greedy, like everybody else. I want to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. It’s never enough, is it? It’s not enough to have children. We want to see birthdays, and weddings, and grandchildren as well. I’d like to see them all. Of course there are other children I might have had, or other lives I might have lived, but I don’t dwell on those. Why, then, should I mourn this one? Because this is the life I know, and you and your sister are the daughters I love. All the rest slips into the background—the realm of the unborn. That’s another way to look at death, isn’t it? Simply the part of life that’s unexpressed. The might-haves and could-have-beens …

“Jess,” said Emily, “what’s going on with you?”

Jess looked up, startled. “Nothing,” she lied.

“You seem …”

“What?”

“Evasive.”

“Who, me?”

“Why are you so quiet?”

“Because I’m reading,” said Jess.

“You never liked to read her letters before.”

Jess thought about this for a moment. “But they’re more interesting now.”

She was spending the night at Emily’s place, and long after her sister went to sleep, Jess stayed up reading and rereading her mother’s letters. What was it about them? What was it she had overlooked before? Their secrecy. The obliqueness of the language drew her in, where before it had confused and bored her. I might have been someone else, her mother wrote. I might have married someone else. I might have lived a different way, but I chose this life, and I chose you.

The might-haves and could-have-beens, undescribed and unexplained. How had Jess missed them? She had been curious enough at twelve to read Gillian’s letters all at once, devouring those messages to her older self, but she had always looked for information. Her mother was guarded about her illness, and her feelings, and her past, all the things that Jess wanted to find out, and after reading the letters one after another, Jess had turned away in disappointment. It was Gillian’s reserve that made the letters interesting now. Those sentences Jess had always read as generalities looked different. I might have lived a different way. What did Gillian mean? I might have married someone else. Who would that have been? Perhaps after weeks with the cookbooks, Jess was overly sensitive. After so many hours pondering the collector’s notes, she saw subtexts and secrets everywhere. Even so, she began to read her mother’s words as coded messages. Dear Emily, at sweet sixteen. Never been kissed? Wished you’d been kissed? Wonder if you might have been? I didn’t wonder about kissing when I was your age, although I would later. I didn’t like to think about the future when I had one, and now that my future is running out, I think about it all the time.

“Gillian!” Jess whispered in surprise. She stared at the picture her mother had enclosed, a color photo of a laughing freckled woman in a sundress and a floppy yellow hat. An outdoor picture, a lawn chair in the background, her mother holding out a piece of chocolate cake. And as she looked, it occurred to her that she had never seen an earlier image of her mother. There were no black-and-white photos in the albums in her father’s house. No baby pictures or childhood-recital photos. Hadn’t Gillian performed in piano recitals for her teacher? And didn’t anybody take pictures? There were none. There was only the story Richard told, which was that Gillian never got along with her parents in London. That they had been so angry when she’d married a non-Jew that they cut her off completely. Therefore, Jess and Emily had never met their Jewish grandparents, or anyone from that side of the family. Gillian’s parents never spoke to her again, and she never spoke of them—or wrote about them either. And yet she said in her letters to Emily, I know from my own experience that some memories are indelible. This comforts me, because, of course, I should like to be indelible for you.

But what were these indelible memories? Gillian didn’t say. They lived between the lines, and underneath the letters, in that realm of secrets Jess could not ferret out. And Jess wondered, poetically, whether there had been some great love in her mother’s life—some other man she might have married (for she could not imagine her own father as a figure of romance). And she wondered whether there had been a secret hurt, a sad end to all of Gillian’s might-have-beens. Perhaps her parents forbade her to become a concert pianist, and this was why Gillian played Chopin Waltzes, in requiem. Late at night, in her pajamas, Jess was open to every dramatic possibility, for she had never felt a kinship with her mother before. She had never thought of Gillian as yearning or secretive. Her mother had died young, but now Jess saw that her mother had been young, and that was a different matter altogether. Her letters were no longer prescriptive, but searching, far more powerful now that Jess had a secret of her own.

She lived in the Tree House as before, and did her chores—cooking, cleaning, leafleting, supplying the tree-sitters in the Grove. She attended Rabbi Helfgott’s mysticism classes with Mrs. Gibbs, and typed the minutes for Tree House meetings, where she was official scribe. She slept in Leon’s bed, but he was away in Humboldt County, climbing, demonstrating, organizing, and who knew what else. He did call and ask her when she would come, but he did not call often, nor did he return to get Jess, and the longer Leon stayed away, the easier it became to slip into the collector’s world.

On weekday afternoons, she sat with the cookbooks at George’s table, and she lost herself in recipes for marzipan, illustrations of assorted ices, lists of berries for plucking in each season. She read the cookbooks along with their collector, noting where he paused to draw or quote or simply copy some delicious detail. Take your Angelica when young and tender, which will be about the beginning of May…. She worked with Tom McClintock’s ghost, and where he sighed, she sighed, and where he seemed to smile—Syrup of Maiden-hair!!—she smiled. And she examined each line drawing of the woman he adored, a lady with wide-set eyes, long wavy hair, small feet, and pointed toes. Jess was beginning to dream about this woman; she felt she knew her; she thought she almost knew her name.

She glided through the house, and ate the plums George left. She cut melons in the kitchen, and ate the dripping slices, cold and sweet. Be careful with this knife, he wrote on one of her note cards. Carefully, she slid George’s steel knife into round cantaloupe and honeydew and galia melons. And if she waited long enough, he came home. She listened for him now, and met him at the door. She stood on his feet so she could reach, and wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, and if he came from running, she licked his salt skin, and they kissed until he took her hand and led her upstairs. But they didn’t plan to see each other. They talked of everything else and kept their time a secret even from themselves; the food they shared, the wine they drank, the Bach he played for her, music rough and smooth.

He took her to Point Reyes, and they drove through fields of tall grass and wildflowers. Along the coast they smelled a mix of salt and eucalyptus, and as they sped down Sir Francis Drake Highway, they passed a tavern called the Golden Hind, but they did not stop there. They ate a picnic dinner at a beach called Heart’s Desire. At dusk when it was time to go, they lingered, and Jess took off her sandals and walked barefoot in the cove on Tomales Bay. The bay was round, green-gray under the round clear sky. Slick under her feet, sea grass tangled in her toes. She called to George, “It’s warm. Come in with me.”

He said, “No, it’s late. We should drive back.”

“Come on,” she said. “Just get your feet wet.”

She stretched out her arms to him until he unlaced his shoes and took off his socks to come and kiss her in the shallow water.

He took her to Santa Cruz, and to Santa Rosa, and to Half Moon Bay. He took her walking with him deep in Tilden Park, but only where he knew that they would be alone.

They were living in a bubble of their own, and when one of them began to speak of it, the other murmured, “No.” They were improbable, and at the same time all too predictable. He did not tell Nick or Raj. She did not confess to Leon, or so much as hint to Emily. They scarcely admitted to each other what they were doing. Even a single word could break the spell, and so they kissed instead of speaking, and drank instead of thinking. They heard the mermaids singing. When human voices woke them, they would drown.

Each had moments of lucidity. You have to stop, Jess told herself. You need to see Leon. You need to go away and think.

Slow down, George told himself. This is intoxicating.

But they did not stop. They only delayed a little. He walked through the door and she said, “I have to show you this,” and she pulled him into the dining room to unveil that day’s discovery. A recipe for pecokys, which schul ben pyarboyld and lardyd and etyn with gyngenyr. And then she showed him instructions for broiling larks, and then McClintock’s handwritten quotations from Gertrude Stein.

“Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea,” she read aloud as George stood behind her. Arms around her waist, he was unbuttoning her shirt. “When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.”

She sat on the table with the slip of paper in her hand. “Doesn’t silver seller make you think of salt?”

“Not really,” he murmured, kneeling on the chair, kissing her bare skin.

“Her poetry wasn’t abstract at all.” She felt his breath and his rough tongue. “Don’t you think Tender Buttons is really about …?”

“Yes.”

Working in the August afternoons, she wondered what he would bring home for dinner, what strange fruit, what curious greens, or salty sea beans. He brought her plums, and Asian pears, and almonds, and she showed him her discoveries.

“Look at this,” she told George, dancing into his arms.

The volume was so slight that they had missed it in their first assessment. In fact, she found it tucked inside a larger book. Scottish, dated 1736, it was one of those palm-sized cookbooks, a handbook that fit literally in the hand. Its recipes were terse, not terribly poetic, nor was the book illustrated, except for some decoration on the first page, a little head of Bacchus, tame enough to be a house pet, surrounded by a couple of clumsy birds and vines. Why then was this book so stuffed with notes?

He laughed when he saw the title. Mrs. McLintock’s Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work. “You think Tom McClintock felt a kinship?”

“It’s rare,” she said.

“How rare?”

“It’s the first Scottish cookbook by a woman. I e-mailed the University of Aberdeen. There are only two known copies in the world, and they’re both in Glasgow.”

This was serious. Silently he began to calculate how much a book like this would be worth to the Schlesinger, to the Getty, to those private collectors who would bid for it.

“No one knows about this one,” she told him. “This is now the third!”

“Jess,” he said.

“We should call reporters,” she declared. “We should write an article.”

“You should write the article,” he said.

“But first I have to understand it better.”

“What do you mean?”

She couldn’t quite explain. She wanted to know the cookbook’s secret life. For days she studied it. She gazed at Mrs. McLintock’s name so long that in her mind the letters rearranged themselves: lock, lint, clint, clit, cock, clock … McClintock. McLintock. She imagined the two fit together, but she found no clues about McClintock in McLintock, and the collector’s love remained a mystery.

“George,” she said one evening as she lay in his arms.

“Jessamine.” His eyes were soft, his face unguarded, almost boyish in the low light.

“I have to ask you something.”

“I have to ask you something too.” He was wearing his wristwatch, a vintage Patek Philippe he’d forgotten to take off. She didn’t wear a watch, and so she wore nothing at all.

“Okay.” She had been lying with her head on his chest, and now she propped her chin up on her arms, a gesture both adorable and suffocating.

“No, you ask first,” he said, “because I can’t breathe.”

“I’m sorry!” She rolled off and she lay on her side, facing him. “I wanted to ask you about the cookbook. I doubt McClintock knew how rare it was. I don’t think he understood how much the books were worth, but he had a thing for women cookbook writers, and obviously he fixated on McLintock because of her name. So do you think there was a Mrs. McClintock in his life whom Sandra doesn’t know about? Do you think maybe he was married at some point when he was young, when he was buying all these books after the War?”

“No, sweetheart,” said George.

“Really?” she asked yearningly, and he couldn’t tell whether she was questioning the no or the word sweetheart, which he had never used before.

He caressed her waist and the curve of her hip with his hand. “He never married her. He never got anywhere with her.”

“You always say that, but what evidence do you have?”

“The whole collection, every note he wrote.”

“People thought Troy was a myth too,” Jess reminded George, “and now those ruins have been found. Don’t laugh! I think he knew her. She wasn’t somebody that he saw once. He drew her as if he saw her every day.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“Yes, we will. I’m going to find out,” said Jess, clear-eyed, pure. She was so lovely. Not just her face, but her faith that there was such a thing as truth, her conviction that there were immutable answers if you took the trouble to find them out.

“Stay here tonight,” George whispered.

“That’s what you were going to ask?”

“Will you?”

He had said one of the things they did not say. “I thought we weren’t doing that.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Sleeping together is one thing, but …”

She buried her head in his pillow.

“Talking about it is another.”

He didn’t want to talk about it either. He wanted to remain in this dream state as long as possible. The outside world was all obstacles and complications. Leon. The Tree Savers. Their missions up to Humboldt County. George could say Leon was dangerous. He could tell Jess that she was wrong to get involved with him. What was he offering in return? A sinecure. A dependency. To be crass, his bed. He could say he loved her. Would he mean it? They enjoyed each other. They were friends, and he desired her. He knew himself well enough to doubt that such feelings would last. He was fully capable of breaking Jess’s heart.

As for Jess—she was mixed-up about George. She was at home with him. Calm and happy. She could think aloud. She never felt that way at the Tree House, and yet the people there shared her beliefs about the world. Philosophically, ideologically, she and Leon were a pair. She and George agreed on nothing politically. He had no interest in the environment. He recycled like everybody else, but he cared little for other species, and maligned Tree Savers as eco-terrorists. He was old that way, ill-informed and cynical, preferring books to social change, studying antique maps instead of current battlegrounds of deforestation. Living in the past, he turned his back on the future, and this was a position she deplored.

Then there was his money. She remembered Leon’s warning: You’ll end up in his collection too. She could see it happening. She was entranced by his house, his wine, his cookbooks, his quick smile. Recipe for disaster. She was falling in love with George, and she worked for him too. What would that make her? The young girlfriend. The mistress, the kept woman. She hated the thought.

Abashed, she read Haywood’s instructions to maidservants, advice on chastity preceding recipes for pickles, directions for choosing meat, best methods for making all kinds of English wines.

If you follow the advice I have already given you, concerning going as frequently as you can to hear sermons, and reading the holy scriptures and other good books, I need not be at the pains to inform you how great the sin is of yielding to any unlawful solicitations: but if you even look no farther than this world—oh, practical Eliza, thought Jess—you will find enough to deter you from giving the least encouragement to any address of that nature, though accompanied with the most soothing and flaterring pretenses.

Jess sighed. She knew, in the long term, she and George were philosophically unsuited, financially unequal, generationally mismatched. Only in the short term did they agree. Only when it came to fingertips, and tongues and wrists. When he touched her and then slipped his wet fingers in her mouth and said, “This is how you taste.” In their laughter and the food he brought her, the freshest and most delicate of vegetables: watercress, fennel, dandelion greens dressed with champagne vinegar. They shared a private language in the cookbooks, and whispered inside jokes. Even their jokes were gentle. Tender buttons. He was tender with her.

She craved his company. The edges of her life were ragged, her feelings conflicted, her behavior incoherent, probably immoral, and at the same time, she was deeply happy, consuming nectarines, and Asian pears, sliced thin, and the pinot he poured for her.

“Try the wine now,” George instructed. Then, a little later, “Try it again,” and she tasted a new liquid altogether. Wine that had been tight and taciturn became mellifluous.

“It’s like finding a door,” she told George as they sat together in his kitchen. “It’s like stepping into a new room you never knew existed.”

“The pinot?”

“No,” she told him. “Everything.”

For she was becoming a researcher, tracing gorgeous threads, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the McClintock Collection, corresponding with scholars and librarians at the Schlesinger and the Huntington and at universities around the world. She had begun to study sweets—the sparing use of sugar in early cookbooks, and its ubiquity in eighteenth-century recipes. She checked out books from Bancroft. Deerr’s History of Sugar. Galway’s The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914. Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz. She spent days writing notes for an article she was planning on the cookbook as cultural emblem and bellwether for abundance and scarcity. Without an affiliation, outside any academic program, she began to imagine weaving together ecology and economics and material culture, embarking on a new career. Should she go back to school? Find herself a program and an advisor? Oh, but it was delicious to work unsupervised. Who had total access to books like these? And when it came to advisors, how could she do better than Tom McClintock, sensualist and lichenologist, artist, lover, ghost?

On a Friday, at the end of August, just before her twenty-fifth birthday, Jess sat alone in George’s dining room and unfolded a menu she had not seen before, one of the collector’s fantasies on graph paper. The menu was tucked inside Le Livre de Cuisine, but titled “McLintock,” and the dishes listed were all in English.

McLINTOCK

July-flower wine

Angelica

Nutmeg cream

Eel-pye

Neats Tongue

A strange, unappetizing bill of fare, wine and dessert, followed by eel pie and sheep’s tongue. It’s not like you, Jess thought, addressing the collector, to put together such an awkward menu. Elsewhere, McClintock sought out the most exotic and delectable combinations. Kisses to begin, new peas, or muskmelon, followed by some tender young thing, lamb or fawn, turtledoves to whet the appetite, and then fish, and a succulent main course like loin of veal. Fruit and cream to finish. Quaking Pudding. Candied violets, rose petals, tansies, curran wine …

Why, then, these awkward dishes out of order, and no vegetable or fish or salad course? She read the menu twice and then a third time, and then she wondered if the words could rearrange themselves into something better. July-Angelica-Nutmeg-Cream … and as her eyes played with the words, she saw a pattern in the first letters, an acrostic reading down:

J uly-flower wine

A ngelica

N utmeg cream

E el-pye

Neats Tongue

A name: Jane. Jane McClintock! Was this Mrs. McClintock? Was she the one? But what to do about Neats Tongue? A comment on Mrs. McClintock’s tongue? Or did she have a middle initial N? Jane N. McClintock? Or was it the T the collector referred to in his culinary code? Jane T? Janet!

She picked up George’s phone and called Sandra, but no one answered. She ran out and drove to Sandra’s house. She rang the bell, and rapped on the window, but no one came to the door. Should she leave a note? Try again tomorrow? No, her question wouldn’t keep.

She sat on Sandra’s porch in a raggedy wicker chair. Curled up in the window, Geoffrey seemed to recognize her, and wish her ill.

An hour passed before Sandra arrived carrying her groceries. Jess jumped up. “Hi!”

“Jessamine,” said Sandra, after a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Jess said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Could I help you carry those?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sandra told her.

“I’ve been working on the collection,” Jess said. “I’ve been working almost six months. The books are fabulous.”

“I’m glad.” Sandra pulled at her keys, which she wore on a plastic bracelet around her wrist.

“I’ve found some interesting material.” Jess followed Sandra to the door.

“Good.” Sandra stood on the porch, keys in hand, groceries at her feet, but she did not seem at all inclined to invite Jess inside. “I can’t let the cat out,” she reminded Jess as she gathered all her bags together to rush the door. “You can come in, but you have to be quick.”

“Oh, I understand.” Body-blocking Geoffrey, Sandra darted inside, and Jess followed.

“Would you like a glass of juice?” Sandra asked. “Would you like to take a seat? Not that one.” She warned Jess away from Geoffrey’s dark green couch, and Jess settled on a velvet chair instead.

“Who was Mrs. McClintock?” Jess blurted out.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you sure your uncle never married?”

“He never married.”

“Are you sure he didn’t marry a Janet McClintock?” Jess asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Sandra. “Janet McClintock was my mother.”

George did not know where Jess had gone. She had left her books out. McLintock lay open on the book cradle. The laptop stood open as well, as though Jess intended to return, but it was past five and she did not come back. He called her on her cell, but she didn’t answer.

He poured himself a glass of wine and began to think of all the things he might have said or done to offend her. He remembered that the day before they’d had a little spat about her article. They were sitting in the living room on his couch, a massive low-slung piece with great wood slabs for arms. He said that she should write something quick and accessible with gorgeous illustrations for Gastronomica. She insisted that this was selling out, that she was developing an argument far more scholarly, with serious notes and tables. She said she had fifty-one pages already, and he’d laughed and warned her not to get lost in all that material.

Then she’d demanded, “Do I look like someone who gets lost easily?”

“Yes,” he’d teased, but she hadn’t been in the mood, and had snatched a heavy throw pillow, upholstered green, and smacked him upside the head.

They had laughed at the time, but perhaps she was still angry. Or perhaps Leon had suddenly returned, and Jess had decided she would not see George again. Was there some change of heart? Or some emergency? Should he try to reach her sister?

By the time Jess arrived, he had been waiting almost two hours, and he was in such an anxious state that he was almost in no mood to see her. But there she was, out of breath and streaked with sweat from racing up the stairs. “I’ve solved it,” she cried. “I know who she was.”

And she showed George how she had picked out Janet from the menu, and told him how she had rushed to tell Sandra. “He was in love with Janet when he was young. I think Janet was McClintock’s Laura and his Beatrice, and that’s why he drew her over and over and he read her into all his cookbooks.”

“What did Sandra say?”

“She was very offended!” Jess exclaimed. “She said her uncle didn’t even like to eat. She said that he was extremely thin. She told me her mother was happily married for sixty-two years, and she was perfectly sensible and lucid until the day she died at eighty-three.”

George smiled.

But Jess was indignant. “I thought she’d thank me!”

“For inventing an embarrassing story about her mother?”

“I didn’t invent it,” Jess said. “I know I’m right. Maybe it was an unrequited love, but she was the one.”

You’re the one, thought George.

“You’d think she’d enjoy knowing,” Jess said. “She’s convinced she was a Russian princess in a past life. Why can’t Janet and Tom have had a past life too? Why is that so shocking?”

“Let me take you out to dinner.”

“George,” said Jess. “Look at me.”

“I am looking at you.”

“I’m covered with cat hair.”

“Come take a bath.”

“I don’t have fresh clothes.”

“We’ll stop at your place and you can change.”

Jess ignored this. “Charles Dickens was obsessed with his sister-in-law. He never got over her.”

“Yes, and I’m sure the family loved to hear about it.”

Jess folded her arms across her chest. “And Tolstoy didn’t really model Natasha on his wife.”

“You’re upset,” George murmured.

“It’s just so anticlimactic—to put together the pieces of the puzzle and then to be …”

“Shh.” He kissed her.

“Exactly. To be shushed like that. As though I were arriving on her doorstep to blackmail her or something. As though I had something on her. She says she’s upset about her grandchildren. Her daughter still can’t get custody.”

“That explains it,” said George, frowning. “Don’t you think she’d be preoccupied?”

“I thought she might be …”

“She’s not going to be grateful to you for suggesting that her mother had some kind of affair with her husband’s brother. You got carried away, Jess.”

She didn’t answer.

“Come here.”

She didn’t come.

He took her hand. “You have to be careful not to fall in love with your material.”

She relented a little. “Maybe.”

“I thought she’d be more imaginative,” Jess told George as he ran the water in the bath. She perched on the edge of the tub, which was claw-footed, fathoms deep, and she pulled off one grubby sock and George pulled off the other.

“About her own family?”

Jess wriggled out of her jeans. “Don’t fill it all the way.” She peeled off her T-shirt and bra. “It’s a waste of …”

“Get in,” George said.

She sat in the water, tucking her knees up to her chest. “If someone told me something about my mother, I wouldn’t be defensive like that. To me that kind of information would be golden.”

“Why?” George climbed in after her.

“Why? Because it’s … it’s contact. It means if you know how to read them, underneath the words there’s life.”

He sat behind her, soaping her shoulders, her arms, her breasts. “You’re going to be a historian,” he said.

“I am.” With a little splash, she turned over in the water and looked into his dark eyes, and she saw that he wasn’t laughing at her. He didn’t look bemused, or skeptical. She kissed him. She slipped into his arms, and they were closer than before.

When they stepped inside Greens that night and stood together before the great piece of driftwood at the entrance, when they took their table at the wall-high windows and looked out at the Pacific, they were like travelers arriving in a new city. They were like newlyweds in fancy clothes. His sports jacket, her sleeveless dress; his tie, her mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. He ate fish and she ate polenta and they drank a bottle of ’97 Chateau Montelena. “Best year since ’94,” George told Jess, and they toasted the McClintocks, Tom, and Janet, and Mrs. McLintock too. They sat at the great windows and they watched the seagulls diving between waves and sky, and thought but didn’t say how strange it was to go out like other couples.

Jess said, “Do you think marmalet of apples actually tasted like something?”

And George said, “You never talk about your father.”

“It couldn’t have been bitter like real marmalade,” Jess said.

“You don’t get along with him, do you?” George said.

“No,” Jess confessed. “Not really.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t like me very much.”

George trapped her legs between his underneath the table. “That can’t be true.”

“Well,” said Jess, “he’s all computers. He’s all math, and I’m humanities. He’s all for financial independence—and I am too! But I’m not … really independent yet. He has no time for religion, philosophy, or poetry. Fortunately, he’s got Emily.”

“You must take after your mother,” George said.

“Maybe.”

“And he loved her.”

“I think so,” Jess said. “But who knows? It was such a long time ago.”

“When he reads your essay, he’ll understand what you can do,” George said.

“I don’t care whether he reads my essay or not.” Jess drained her glass and he saw that her face was flushed. “You understand what I can do.”

“That’s a complicated thing to say.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I can’t take his place,” George said warily.

Jess slipped off her shoes and rubbed her bare feet against George’s ankles until he couldn’t help smiling. “I never asked you to.”

Giddy with each other and the wine, they strolled outside through the Presidio, the old fort now housing restaurants and galleries. Jess explained that she wanted to devise a matrix for scarcity and abundance, frugality and profligacy. She thought that sweetness represented, and in some periods misrepresented, a sense of surplus and shared pleasure. “I don’t think taste is purely biological,” she said. “I think it’s economically, historically, and culturally constructed as well. Sweetness means different things depending on availability, custom, farming, trade….”

She was shivering, and George took off his jacket. “Here, sweetness.” He helped her into it and laughed at the way her hands disappeared inside the sleeves.

“Context is key—so the question is, What carries over? What can we still know about sweet and sour? Bitterness. What persists from generation to generation? Do we taste the same things?”

He kissed her, sucking her lower lip and then her tongue. “I think so,” he said. “Yes.”

“Wait, I’m not finished.”

“Continue,” he said. “Please.”

Testing herself, pushing back against her fear of heights, she climbed atop the thick two-foot wall edging the Presidio’s park, and walked above him, while he held her hand, steadying her from below.

“You see, I’m fine walking on this wall,” she declared, even as she gripped his fingers. “You see? I’ve been practicing, and I can climb very well.”

George looked up at her. “You like to tower over me, don’t you?”

She did. At that moment she wasn’t in the least afraid of towering. She was invincible. And she explained her theory about cloves, and she told him how the word sweet meant “unsalted” in English cookbooks. Sweet meant “fresh,” not “sugared” as one might think. She spoke of candying and conserves, and those mysterious syrups in McLintock. Syrup of Violets, Syrup of Clove Gelly-Flowers, Syrup of Red Poppies, Syrup of Pale Roses. How did pale roses taste?

They reached the end of the wall and she kept talking. She grew more and more scholarly, investigative, joyful. Absorbed in her lecture, he didn’t expect her to jump down just when she did.

“Give me a little warning!” he exclaimed as he caught her in his arms, but he didn’t want a warning, he wanted her, and he wrapped her in his arms, his chin brushing the rough weave of his own jacket.

“What’s to become of us?” She laughed.

“I don’t know.”

“Just as long as we don’t really … you know …” She meant fall in love.

“Too late,” George said.

24

Love was all very well, but in the world outside, survival mattered most. Veritech was strapped for cash, ISIS on the brink. Emily felt she had no time to breathe, and Jonathan grew warlike, confident as ever, but edgy from lack of sleep.

“Mel!” Jonathan sang out when Mel returned from lunch. “Exactly the person I wanted to see.”

Mel stood at the elevator, and his lower back tightened with the familiar mix of dread and pleasure to be singled out.

“Job fair in L.A. September eleventh.”

“I didn’t think we were hiring,” Mel replied.

“I want the ISIS booth there anyway,” said Jonathan. “I want to make our presence known.”

People were gathering, waiting for the elevators. Movers wheeled boxes out on handcarts. ISIS was decamping to cheaper, East Cambridge real estate.

“Maybe we should discuss this in your office,” Mel suggested.

Jonathan ignored him. “We’re going out there.”

“I’m not sure what we have to offer at a job fair when we’re not hiring.”

“This isn’t about now,” said Jonathan. “It’s about six months from now. I want the booth, the literature, the whole nine yards to extend to any programmers out there.”

“But realistically,” Mel said, “what do we tell these kids?”

“What do we tell them? We tell them who we are.”

“Show the flag?”

“Exactly. I need you to show the flag. I have a meeting in San Diego that week, so I might come out too.”

“All right.” Mel sighed. “I’ll see if I can get someone to—”

“No,” Jonathan said, “you.”

“Me?” Only Mel’s associate directors flew west. That was long established. Mel’s back could barely withstand the Boston–New York–D.C. shuttle.

“You,” said Jonathan.

“I’ll prepare everything on this end,” Mel said. “I’ll prep Keith and Ashley, and they can go together.”

“Sorry, man,” said Jonathan. “I had to let them go this morning.”

“You did what?”

“Yeah, we’re making some cuts.”

“But you never—”

“It’s a top–down thing,” said Jonathan. “But it’s all good. Feel free to upgrade to business class. Just a second.” Jonathan’s phone was ringing. “Hey!” he told Emily. “Could you hold on? I’m just finishing a meeting.”

Some meeting, Mel thought, standing in the lobby. “Jonathan, I don’t think I can physically—I don’t know if I can manage that flight and still function in L.A.”

“Mel, you underestimate yourself,” said Jonathan. “You always do.”

“What if I trained Juliet?”

Now Jonathan grew impatient. “Juliet is your secretary, Mel. You’re the HR director. You’re the one they need to see.” He put his phone to his ear and began walking to the stairs. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and even as he listened, he turned and pointed straight at Mel. Like a latter-day Uncle Sam, he mouthed, You.

“It’s Jess,” said Emily. “She’s driving up to Arcata. She says a bunch of them are going up together….”

“She’s been there before,” said Jonathan.

“But this time she’s going to climb. She says that she’s been practicing.”

“Good for her.” Jonathan took the stairs two at a time.

“No, you don’t understand. It’s really dangerous for her.”

“How is it more dangerous for her than for anybody else?”

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing and she’s afraid of—”

“She’ll be with experienced people.”

“Do you think it’s rational to try to climb a two-hundred-foot redwood when you’re afraid of heights?” Emily demanded.

“I don’t know—it sounds like fun. When is she going?”

“September fourth through September eleventh,” said Emily.

“That’s when I’m coming out for Tech World,” said Jonathan. “You can meet me in L.A.”

He didn’t understand that Jess could hurt herself, and sometimes Emily thought he didn’t care. He had never liked her sister. From his point of view, she was always in trouble of one kind or another. Impatient, he did not hear Emily’s fear that this time was worse.

“Why do you have to go?” Emily asked Jess on the phone.

Jess said, “I can’t be a coward all my life.”

Emily sat in her office with her picture of Jonathan on the screen saver in front of her. “You aren’t a coward. Why do you say that?”

“I can’t keep floating from one thing to the next.”

“What is going on with you?”

“I have to grow up sometime,” Jess said.

“Growing up is not something you do on a tree-climbing expedition,” Emily protested. “Tree climbing is the opposite of growing up!”

“You remember when I made my vow,” Jess said.

“That ridiculous thing you said in Muir Woods?”

“It was not ridiculous. It was serious. And I said that in January. That was almost nine months ago. The year is almost up, and I haven’t followed through. It’s now or never.”

“What are you talking about?” Emily demanded. “Are you trying to prove something to Leon? Is that it?”

“No,” said Jess. “I’m proving this to myself. It’s not about Leon.” She added silently, Or George.

In truth, she was frightened. Her time with George was so intense. Not just the time with him, but the time away from him. She heard his voice. She saw him in her dreams. She had had a dream that she was flying with him through the trees in winter. They were flying slowly, drifting through the air, and she was wearing a long silk skirt that caught in bare branches. Don’t worry, said George as he floated down to untangle her. But she did worry. She thought about him constantly. She was sleeping over now, and spending mornings with him, as well as evenings. When he left, she missed him. While she worked, thoughts of George distracted her. She was no longer contemplating rose water. She contemplated him. She was no longer simply archiving the collector’s notes. She had become the collector, dreaming, doodling. She was altogether infatuated. And she wondered: How did this happen to me? How did I fall in love like this when I’m with someone else? And sometimes she and George seemed overdetermined, destined from the start. At other times, the relationship, if that’s what it now was, terrified her, because it wasn’t just George, but his things that entranced her, and she could not separate him from his possessions. His gorgeous home, his fresh sheets, his garden, his collections.

At the Tree House, Jess pitched in, like everybody else. The Tree Savers cooked and cleaned together, creating their own sanctuary. At George’s house Concepcion took care of everything. Sheets and towels reappeared magically, clean and white. Dishes returned sparkling to their shelves. At the Tree House, Jess was part of a team, but at George’s house she worked alone, reading, writing, gorging herself on McClintock’s fantasies.

To be with George was pure luxury, and she mourned, Oh, I am more materialistic than I thought. Oh, I am no idealist at all. I just want to be stroked and fed. And she was disgusted with herself. The affair was so obvious and degrading. She had nothing, and he was rich. She slept with him and read his books and drank his wine as though she were a little scholar-geisha, when she should be with Leon at the front, fighting against the Pacific Lumber Company. She was an aesthete, just when she should have been an ascetic and a revolutionary. The fact that she loved talking to George, and kissing him and falling asleep in his arms and waking up with him in the morning made the situation a thousand times worse.

So she resolved to fall out of love, and every day she planned to tell George, but that day passed and then another, until at last, as they ate risotto in the kitchen, George gave her an opening. He said, “Jess, I’m having some friends for dinner on Labor Day.” That was all, but she knew instantly what he meant.

“You don’t want me here.”

“Well …,” he hedged, and his hesitation was worse than the exclusion. “Don’t be offended.”

“I’m not offended. I’m glad,” she told him. “I’m relieved.” And she really was relieved, as well as hurt. “I’m driving up to Arcata that weekend.”

“What do you mean, ‘driving up to Arcata’?”

“I’m going to meet Leon and the tree-sitters in Wood Rose Glen.”

“You aren’t really going to start tree-sitting.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Jess demanded. But what she meant was, “How dare you tell me what to do when I can’t exist for you in the real world in front of your friends?”

“Don’t you think tree-sitting in a twenty-story redwood is risky? And just a little adolescent?”

“Don’t start lecturing me.”

“I wasn’t lecturing,” he said. “I was asking.”

“That was a rhetorical question,” Jess said. “So you weren’t asking at all.”

“How long are you going for?”

“I don’t know,” Jess answered dangerously. “As long as I want. Obviously you don’t have to pay me for the weeks that I’m away.”

“Weeks!”

“I’ll go for as long as they need me. Leon says they might stay the month.”

“And how are you going to live up there?” George asked her.

“The same way everybody else does. We have supplies. We have food. It’s not like I haven’t been before. I was there almost two months in the spring.”

He turned away, an expression she recognized, disappointment mixed with anger. “You know it’s dangerous.”

“Doing nothing is also dangerous.”

“People get killed up there.”

“People get killed on the ground too.”

He stood up to clear the risotto bowls, but walked around behind her instead and placed his hands upon her shoulders, a gesture suddenly irritating. She shook him off and sprang up from the table.

“Don’t go,” he said.

“Don’t go? Is that an order?”

“A request.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking about your safety,” he said. “What if something happens to you?”

“Something has happened to me,” said Jess. “I’ve become your little pet. I’ve become your latest toy, your newest typewriter, and it’s not good, and you know it. You can’t introduce me to your friends, and there’s a reason for that. The reason is they’ll see exactly what you’ve done. They won’t approve, and they’ll be right. They’ll say, ‘George, how much did she cost?’”

“That’s spiteful,” said George. “And childish.”

Tears started in Jess’s eyes. “What’s childish is pretending we live in our own little world, when the truth is that I’m involved with someone else, and I have a life away from here. And you have your friends and your dealers and your store and Colm and all your projects, and it’s not like we have a future together, and it’s not like we have much of a past….”

“Do you really think you have a future with Leon?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You’re angry,” he said.

“Don’t tell me I’m angry,” Jess exploded. “I hate it when you say ‘You’re angry,’ or ‘You’re upset.’ I know that I’m angry. I’ll tell you when I’m angry. And I’ll tell you what makes me angry. What makes me angry is that you expect me to stay with you at your pleasure.”

“Wait—” George interrupted.

“No, you wait. You want me here when it’s good for you, and gone when it’s inconvenient for you. You want me when it’s fun for you, and then when you get bored—not when I get bored—but when you get tired of me, you’ll say you’ve had enough.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Or maybe you’ll say it’s not working out, or we don’t belong together long-term. Which is true. We don’t. But if I point this out now, then you’re defensive, because you aren’t done yet. That makes me angry. And I’ll tell you something else that makes me angry. I used to have a life. Maybe not what you call a life. Maybe you couldn’t see it, but I used to wake up and say, ‘What will I do today?’ Now I wake up and I know what I’ll do. I’ll work with your books and count the hours until I see you. I don’t talk to anyone else. I don’t see anyone else. I’m virtually hiding from my sister—”

“Would you stop and let me say something?” George broke in. “I have never done anything to you. I never imprisoned you here in my house.”

“That’s true,” said Jess. “And that’s what makes it so bad. I want to work with the collection; I want to eat with you. I want to sleep with you. You’re like a drug. I can’t stop thinking about you, and it’s exhausting. It’s …”

“So you don’t want to see Leon. You want to get away from me,” said George.

“I do want to see him,” Jess said stubbornly. “And I want my life to be about something besides you.” And she walked into the dining room and began stuffing papers, the notes for her essay, into her backpack.

“Jess,” said George, “listen. Don’t do something you’ll regret. I—”

“Don’t say something you’ll regret,” Jess countered. “Don’t say something that isn’t true.”

25

She left him there, just like that, and all night he hoped that she would call. All the next day, he hoped she would return, but she did not call, and she did not return. Surely, he thought, she would come back to finish her essay, if not to catalog the collection. She would not abandon her project, even if she was abandoning him. But the days passed, a week passed, and he heard nothing from her.

He went about his business, running with Nick, buying, trading, selling books at Yorick’s. He held his little dinner party, and Jess wasn’t there, and he told his friends that his cataloger had run off to Humboldt County, as they all did eventually, and now he had to find someone new. But, of course, he had no interest in finding anyone else. No one could replace Jess. He didn’t even look at the cookbooks when she was gone.

“You liked her,” Nick intuited as they stretched at Inspiration Point.

George said nothing.

“You talked about her all the time.”

“How was I talking about her all the time?” George shot back. “I hardly talked about her at all.”

“What was her name? Jessica?”

“Jessamine.”

“You had a fight.”

“It’s complicated,” George said.

“Really?” Nick teased gently. “It doesn’t sound so complicated to me.”

“She’s in Arcata with her boyfriend. I think she’ll probably stay there.”

“You think?”

“Well, she wants to stay there.”

“Is that what she told you?” asked Nick. They stood together looking at the electrical towers ruining the view of tawny hills. “She’s with someone else?” Nick pressed.

“She needs someone her own age. She can’t work for me and be with me at the same time. She can’t be my employee and my lover. I would be supporting her and I’d have all the power in the relationship. That doesn’t work, if she’s going to have a life. I’d be exploiting her. I was exploiting her all along.”

“Do you love her?”

George didn’t answer.

“Do you want to be with her?”

“A relationship like that never lasts,” said George.

“It might last—” said Nick.

“It’s just too fraught.”

“What’s the matter with you, man? You’re overthinking everything, as usual.”

“I’m thinking. I’m not overthinking. I’m reflecting on the situation. Now that it’s too late, I keep thinking about what I could have done differently. How I could have dealt with the inequities …”

Nick pushed his old friend’s shoulder, hard. “It’s called marriage, George. In most of the world, that’s how it’s done.”

He tried to work. He tried to sleep. He returned from running and sat at his kitchen table with the San Francisco Chronicle. When his phone rang, he jumped, but it was Raj calling about a rare copy of Ulysses he had acquired. “I’m telling you first, in case you want to make a preemptive offer.”

“No,” George said. “I don’t like Joyce.”

“George,” said Raj, “you’re the last Victorian.”

“Not true,” George said. “Not true at all. I’m just not in a buying mood.”

He didn’t want to talk to Raj. He didn’t want anyone but Jess, and he had no way to reach her.

He poured himself a cup of coffee, and began writing a letter. He wrote with his fountain pen, covering small sheets of paper with blue-black ink.

Dear Jessamine,

I spoke disrespectfully to you. You are not a child. I understand why you were angry. I had no right to ask you to go and then a moment later tell you to stay.

You came freely to work at Yorick’s, and you are free to leave as well. Forgive me if I seemed to forget. My concern for your safety is real, and I’m sorry it seemed like a jealous attempt to control you.

My own sister was just a little younger than you when she died. She died at twenty-two. As you say, people get killed on the ground.

I don’t pretend to be wiser than you are, but I am older, Jess. I’ve lived longer, and I have more experience in certain areas—among them, communal living, activism, drugs. If you told me you would give up the Tree House and return to school on condition that I never see you again, I would accept your terms. I am thinking about you, not about myself.

I realize that you don’t belong to me. I wish that we belonged to each other. I wish I had met you when I was young, but I did not, and I realize that you have to be young on your own. We stole some time together, and we should leave it at that. Live and let live. Yes, that’s a sixties thing to say. Or maybe it’s just one of the lies we tell ourselves to get what we want. I wanted you—I admit it. I behaved badly. See above.

Selfishness on my part, except for one thing, which is that I’m in love with you. I love you in the worst possible way, sleeplessly, desperately, jealously. I love you in the best way too. I want every good thing for you. I want you to work, and learn, and grow, and find your place in the world. Therefore I must let you…

Here George broke off. I will not, he thought. I will not let you go. Because he did not love Jess in two ways; he loved her one way: passionately, protectively, selfishly, disinterestedly, all mixed together, and he had to be with her. His collections did nothing for him. His cookbooks meant nothing to him without their imaginative interpreter. Writing reasoned paragraphs did not calm him at all, but angered him. The stillness of his house infuriated him. How long, he thought, will I sit here in my kitchen sipping coffee instead of finding her? How long will I wait before telling her?

He logged on to the computer in his office and found the Save the Trees Web site with its photos of redwoods on death row and the plea: Help us save Galadriel. Don’t be an idiot, he told himself, but he printed out directions to the Wood Rose Glen Tree-Sit anyway. Don’t be a fool. He walked out onto his deck, and then downstairs to his garden shrouded in mist. He packed his car, feeling his way through the thick morning fog. A long-eared fawn startled and ran across the street as George turned his big Mercedes gently, easing down the hill.

He drove north, and the sun burned off the morning mist. He made his ascent up the Golden Gate with its gleaming cables, a bridge rigged like a tall ship, so full of life and wind, and as he sped down again into green Marin, he opened his windows and the wind whipped at his face and stung his eyes. What if she wasn’t there? What if she had hiked off site, farther into the forest? How would he find her then? And if he did find her, would she listen, even for a moment?

He drove past tawny hills and then through dark mountains forested with oak and pine. The road narrowed, and trucks crowded him on either side. He lost the signal for NPR and turned off his radio. Raindrops fell, surprisingly cold and heavy. He closed his window and drove into the storm.

Rain was falling in Wood Rose Glen, but the redwoods were always damp, and at first Jess didn’t notice. She was crouching on a plywood platform 150 feet up in the branches of Galadriel, the majestic cause célèbre, object of so much love and so much hate, the redwood painted by Pacific Lumber with a blue X for execution, a two-thousand-year-old tree occupied in shifts for the past three months by Tree Savers.

When the wind picked up, Galadriel began to creak and sway, but the redwood was always in motion, and Jess had grown accustomed to its rolling movements. A blue plastic tarp sheltered her, and massive branches embraced her. After two days, she could almost pretend she was a bird in a nest, or an explorer on a floating island with its own rich soil, and ferns and huckleberry bushes. To lose Galadriel would mean to lose this floating world as well, a miniature forest with its moss and lichen, its birds and flying squirrels close to the clouds. Therefore, Jess would defend the tree. She would stand guard on high, and for the greater good she would withstand the wind, and the increasing damp, and the dark temptation, almost a death wish, to look down. Leon and the other Tree Savers slept far below at base camp as she fulfilled her vow, serving the arboreal cause, living in the redworld she had known before only as an earthbound spectator.

“I see what you mean,” she told Leon the first night on her radio. “It’s so beautiful.”

“We’ll come for you in the morning.”

“I want to stay the week,” she told him.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She zipped her parka and curled up under the tarp and closed her eyes and listened to the wind in the trees, Galadriel and the other giants farther off, their limbs entwined. Arwen and Legolas, Elrond, Haldir, Celeborn. Each spreading a vast canopy like a second rustling sky.

She was alone and she could think. She had outclimbed fear and outrun Emily and Mrs. Gibbs, and even George. She scarcely thought of him. She kept telling herself that. I’m hardly thinking of him! Even as she staved off hunger with granola, peanuts, dried fruit. She sipped the water she collected in the folds of her blue tarp, and nested in her sleeping bag with Walden: One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants … contending with one another…. And she said to herself, This is what people look like from a redwood’s point of view. This is what history looks like to a two-thousand-year-old tree. Conflicts seem so petty here.

Her fear of falling did not disappear, but settled deep inside her, losing its sharp edge, rising in great nauseating waves and then subsiding. She kept to her solid platform, and as long as the weather held, she watched light shifting through the green canopy, applauded the trapezing squirrels, touched lichen covering the tree like lace. Had McClintock climbed to study these? Or had he relied on earthbound samples? She wrote these questions in her notebook and felt lively, almost scientific. But as the weather changed, she missed George relentlessly, rhythmically, like the slow, steady rain. She fought against loneliness. No, she told herself, I live without him very well. What I need and what he wants are completely different.

The rain fell harder; her tarp sagged under the weight of water, and she was afraid that if she tried retying, she would lose her blue roof altogether. The temperature dropped, and wet seeped through her clothes. She wrung out her knit hat like a dishrag, and all the while, Galadriel’s branches swayed and groaned. Jess’s supply bags streamed with water, and she lost radio contact with Leon on the ground.

Then Jess no longer felt like Huck Finn rafting in the trees; she was Ishmael clinging to a fragment of the Pequod in the storm. Branches thrashed in the dark above her, and she wondered if they might break and fall.

She had seen fallen redwoods, their massive trunks, their shallow roots upended. The giant trees were not anchored deeply in the soil. When redwoods fell, they took down every tree below. Their weight, their height … She knew this tree was healthy. Leon said Galadriel was solid to the core, but when night came, she heard a boom. Thunder? Trees toppling? Huddled in her sleeping bag, she clipped on her battery-powered book light and tried to read. At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.

She was exhausted, but she could not sleep. Adrenaline kept her alert, although there was nothing she could do to save herself. She could not climb down in this darkness and this weather, nor could she shield herself from lightning.

She tried to concentrate on Thoreau’s calm book, his little cabin at Walden Pond—but what did Thoreau know? He’d never been to California. She thought of Leon and his pride in her for climbing, his pleasure that at last she was experiencing what he loved most. But Leon couldn’t help her now, and remembering his pleasure made her feel a little sick. No, no, I didn’t come here for him, she reminded herself, but that was only partly true.

Common sense rebelled. What were you thinking? she asked herself, as Galadriel groaned and cracked and the branches above her turned to deadly missiles in the wind. She had been thinking she would try to love Leon better. That she would turn her back on rare books and commit herself to something greater. She had not been wrong in this. She had not been wrong to defend the trees. So why was George the one she wished for? His was the face she longed to see. His were the arms that she imagined as she closed her eyes. His, the voice she missed.

It was still raining when she woke, but the wind had died. Her radio buzzed in her hand.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she told Leon. “I’m wet.”

“We’re bringing food.”

Half an hour later, he radioed from the bottom of the tree, and Tree Savers began hooking the supply bags to the ropes. That was when she heard the crack above her.

“Headache!” she called into her radio, but even as she said the word, the branch whistled past, a weight like a falling car, plunging fifteen stories. She heard the crash, the screams below. “Leon!”

She crept to the edge of the platform and saw a cluster of tiny figures, the Tree Savers in their green sweatshirts. Like a missile, the massive branch pierced the earth. She began to tremble. Her hands shook, and her teeth chattered.

“I’m here,” Leon told her on his radio. “Nobody’s hurt.” He spoke in his cool, calm voice, only slightly broken up with static. “We’re ready.” He meant ready to send up the supplies.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“What?”

She felt that at any moment she would plummet. Like the tree branch, she would whistle through the air, cratering the forest floor. Just as she began to fall, the world would rise to meet her. She would detonate on impact, her brain would splatter. She gasped for air. Strange, she knew that she was having a panic attack. She knew exactly what was happening, but she could not stop it. She couldn’t breathe. The earth kept rising up to meet her.

“I can’t,” she gasped into her radio.

“Your friend is here,” Leon said.

“What?” She could barely process this.

“Jess,” Leon warned. “You committed to a week. If you bail, someone has to take your place.”

“I have to come down.”

A long pause on the other end. “Come down then.”

But Jess could not take the climbing line in her two hands and make that descent. Fear swallowed her up. She tried to draw strength from the redwood. The storm was over; the winds were gone. She would sit and contemplate the ants, so small and strong and organized, always moving forward, up and over every obstacle. She would marvel at the secret gardens of moss and brambles and new trees in the redwood’s crown. She told herself all this, but the crack of falling timber echoed in her ears. “Please, please, please, come get me.”

When Leon appeared, climbing nimbly, balanced beautifully on his rope, he found Jess crouching with her head between her knees. He saw exactly how frightened she was, and he looked at her with a mixture of pity and anger. Jess had insisted she could handle climbing, pronounced herself cured, insisted on a full-week shift. Now she cowered like a cat up a tree, a total liability.

He examined her with his clear blue eyes, and looking up at him, she felt his distance. She felt, despairingly, that she had failed a test, and she hated herself for failing, but she hated him more for testing her at all.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have encouraged you. You didn’t want to be here,” he murmured.

“I did,” she said.

“You just wanted to prove to me that you could last.”

“No, I wanted to prove it to myself,” she said.

“Really? That was …” His radio crackled. “It was wrong of me to let you.” He gestured for her to stand.

“Why?” She held fast to the boards of the platform.

“Because you weren’t prepared.”

He remembered a day, a soft, windless day when they’d lain together undressed under the trees. A single pine needle had drifted down. He’d watched it fall on her white skin. “Get up. Come on.” As he helped Jess to her feet, he pushed that memory away. “Your friend is waiting for you.”

“Oh, God.”

“He came up yesterday, lecturing everybody, demanding to see you.” The next words were almost taunting. “Now he’ll get his wish.”

That was the hardest moment. That was when she wanted most to stay up in Galadriel, but her body rebelled. Her heart raced. The crash of the tree limb resounded in her ears. She could not calm herself. She had to find her way down.

Miserable, she stood before Leon as he checked her ropes, her clips, her harness, and she knew what he thought of her. She knew what he suspected, and she saw that he wasn’t angry. This was worse than anger. He viewed her coolly, absolving her even as he disengaged from her.

He clipped the steel link of her harness to the secondary rope he’d rigged from the ground. “I’m coming down with you. I won’t let anything happen, but you have to listen. Do you understand?”

Her hands were stiff with fear, inflexible. She held the rope too tightly, and her palms began to bleed. She saw the blood but could not feel.

Her ascent to the platform had been giddy, joyful. Clear sky and celebration, a picnic under the trees the night before. Sweet cool air, a calming joint, smoke mingling with the fragrant forest, pine and mulch and bay laurel. Climbing had been an otherworldly magic-carpet ride. The descent was like rappelling into the circles of hell. She saw the Tree Savers standing in their green sweatshirts. Standing silent. Waiting for her. And then she saw George watching for her as well. George, who didn’t acknowledge Jess to his friends, had no problem materializing in front of hers.

“Jess!” he called, even before her feet touched the ground. “Are you all right?”

Leon slid down and unclipped his harness and then unclipped hers.

George rushed to her and Jess stepped back.

“What were you doing?” George berated her. “Do you have any idea what might have—”

“Please, please, please, shut up,” Jess said. She couldn’t bear to talk to him in front of everybody else.

But the others were busy. Leon was helping Daisy with her harness. The Tree Savers gathered around her as she started her ascent. “Free the tree,” the Tree Savers chanted joyfully, as Daisy lifted off to take Jess’s place. “Free the tree. Free the tree. Free the tree.”

The Tree Savers were focused on Daisy. Only George was watching Jess as she knelt on the ground, clutching herself, breathing hard.

“Are you hurt? Are you okay?” George tried to help her to her feet, but she shook him off and stood up on her own.

“Let me see your hands.”

“No! Go away.”

“You can push me away as much as you want,” he said. “It won’t make any difference.”

Jess looked up at Daisy, suspended in the gloaming, small as a silkworm hanging from a slender thread.

“Tell me you won’t go up there again,” George said.

“You’re embarrassing me!”

“I don’t care.”

“Of course not!” She started walking, taking the trail to the parking lot.

“Wait, Jess.”

She didn’t answer.

“Where are you going?”

“None of your business!” she called back.

“I was worried about you.” He jogged a little to keep up.

She spoke without looking at him. “You’ve got quite a double standard driving up here.”

In the dirt lot, she found the Honda that George had loaned her. Her hands shook, and George called after her, carrying on that she wasn’t safe to drive. She didn’t listen. Her ripped hands still shook, and the old car shuddered when she turned the key, but she never hesitated as she drove away.

26

Her hands bled on the steering wheel as she wove from one lane to the next. She drove for miles, and her wet jeans felt like lead. There she’d been, guarding Galadriel, and what did she do? She gave up. No dimpled spider for her. No swinging birches. She drove on, and spots appeared before her eyes, tiny points of light, and visions of Daisy climbing, and George making a scene, crashing the Tree-Sit. What was he thinking? Why was everything about him? But most of all, she remembered Leon’s face. All their time together ending in his quick glance, his cold assessment, as commanders consider casualties. She was dead to him, and he wouldn’t leave Galadriel unguarded. How fast could he replace Jess once he got her to the ground? Earth’s the place for love. Earth’s the place for love. The words rushed like blood in her ears, even as she looked in the rearview mirror and saw George driving after her. Earth’s the place, she thought as she accelerated in her anger and her humiliation.

George followed in his Mercedes, keeping Jess in sight. She was right, of course, about the double standard. I wasn’t ready. We were too new. In a strange way he believed it. The collector in him believed it: His time with Jess was too new, too sweet to share. But that was selfish. That was unfair. She deserved more than that. She needed more, and he could give her more. He could do better—if she would let him.

But she drove for hours in the rattling old car, and all he could do was trail after her. When he lent Jess the Honda he had never intended her to drive so far. Certainly not at this speed. He thought she would tire and pull over, but she did not. She drove for an hour, two hours, almost three, until she seemed to calm herself, slowing down, keeping to one lane as she cut through ranch land and timbered mountains.

When at last Jess exited, George followed, assuming she needed gas, but she did not drive to a rest stop; she took a winding road lined with colossal trees to a place called Fern Hollow, where she parked in the dirt lot.

He waited, but she did not get out of her car. Cautiously he approached and saw her sitting, staring at the dark tree trunks ahead.

“Jessamine.”

She didn’t answer.

“Jess.” He tapped on the glass until she rolled down the window.

“What?”

“What are you doing to my poor old Accord?”

She didn’t answer.

George walked around to the passenger side and let himself in. He sat next to Jess and waited. He was sure that she would speak, but she did not. She kept staring straight ahead.

“Do you want me to apologize?” George asked at last. “I apologize.”

She didn’t answer.

“I was worried about you.”

She turned on him. “You embarrassed me!”

“You scared the hell out of me.”

“What are you? My father?”

“Why do you have to be Joan of Arc?”

“Why do you have to be such a cynic?”

“Why do you think that trees have rights?” He saw that she was about to interrupt, and didn’t let her. “Do you really think redwoods are sentient beings? If you believe that, then vegetables have rights, and you shouldn’t eat anything at all.”

“You don’t care what kind of Earth your children inherit.”

“I don’t have children.”

“Exactly. That’s your problem, among other things.”

“Which are?”

“That you prefer objects to people.”

“I do not …,” George protested.

“Oh, really? I think you do. I think you made all that money, and you had your great expectations, but you got hurt, and now you just hide behind your stuff, because you think your books and your maps and your typewriter collection will last. You think they’ll last forever and they’ll never leave you. So in your mind you think you’re Pip, but actually you’re Miss Havisham.”

“Miss Havisham?”

“With books instead of clothes.”

“You love the books,” he reminded her. “You’re working with the books.”

But she ignored this. “You don’t have anything left for trees or animals or the outside world, because you’ve shut yourself in. You’re a shut-in. You’re like the curator of your own heart.”

Wounded, but too proud to let it show, he spoke lightly. “I see why I resisted therapy all these years. I was waiting for you to explain me to myself. And now that you have, I can reach out to other species. Does Leon count?”

“Don’t talk about Leon.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t even know him.”

“Oh, I exchanged some words with him. I think I was getting to know him pretty well.”

“George, do you think this is some kind of joke?”

“That depends on what ‘this’ is.”

“Then you’re just being snide? You’re trying to offend me? What exactly are you trying to do?”

“Let me see.” He reached for her hands.

“It’s just rope burn,” she said. “I’ll clean them up myself.”

“Let’s get some water.”

She hesitated.

“Oh, come on, Jess.”

At last, she got out. She found the park restrooms, and then followed him to his car.

“Q.E.D.,” she said when he opened the trunk and she saw his duffel bag, a case of bottled water, a tent, a first-aid kit, a cooler full of food. “You’ve got all your stuff as usual.”

“Is that such a bad thing, under the circumstances?” George handed her a water bottle. “Drink.”

There were two other cars in the lot, but no hikers visible. They walked down to a picnic table under the trees, and she let him wash and bandage her hands. He knelt down and removed her soggy old climbing shoes and wet socks. With a clean towel he dried her feet, rubbing them up and down. That was when she began to cry.

“Jess,” he whispered. “Darling.”

“Darling?” She tried out the word through tears.

“I’m sorry I compared you to Joan of Arc.”

“I’m sorry I compared you to Miss Havisham.” She paused. “But actually …”

“Oh, you’re fond of that comparison, aren’t you?” George teased softly. “You think that was pretty good, and you don’t want to give it up. I know you.”

“Well …”

“Try these.” He slipped a pair of his clean socks on her feet, and then his extra pair of running shoes. The shoes were too big, but the socks were also too big, and they padded the shoes. When George laced them, they felt like ice skates. Experimentally, Jess walked this way and that, stretching, shaking out her cramped arms and legs. She gazed at the silent, forgiving redwoods.

“I’m going for a walk.” She slipped into the trees, and once again, George followed her.

The trail was well worn, soft and springy underfoot. Tiny creatures sifted through the leaves—glistening beetles, slick black slugs, quick-stepping centipedes.

“So this is the forest of Arden,” George said.

Jess breathed deep. The damp air smelled of cedar and of pine. It was so good to walk upon the ground.

The trail descended, turning gradually like a corkscrew, until they came upon the sheltered hollow for which the park was named. Ferns carpeted the ground, covering every open place between the trees in an undulating sea of green. A redwood lay there in ruins, a natural bridge across a lively stream.

“Watch out,” George warned as Jess climbed up. The tree was relatively slender, no more than ten feet in diameter, and George found the bark slippery as he climbed after her.

“Let’s walk across,” Jess said.

“You’re not used to those shoes.”

“Stop hovering.”

“I can’t,” he confessed. “I wish I could.”

“And stop saving me all the time. It’s hackneyed.”

“Hackneyed!”

“You’re just an overbearing, old-school, hegemonical …”

“Forgive me for caring whether you live or die. Forgive me for caring about you at all, because obviously that’s suspect.”

She faced him on the redwood bridge. “Why can’t you leave me alone?” she demanded. “Why is it so hard?”

“Because I’m falling in love with you, that’s why!”

Her breath caught. “Still falling? Even now?”

“Yes. Are you?”

She looked down at the rushing water. “When will it end?”

“When we’re together.”

“Didn’t we try that?”

“Not yet.”

“We don’t agree on anything,” Jess reminded him.

“No, you see, you always say that, but that’s where we differ. We agree on vegetables—asparagus, for example. We agree on wine. I’m prepared to agree with you about the redwoods.”

“You don’t understand why they’re important.”

“Probably not. But it’s wonderful to touch something living that’s so old, and to feel …”

“To feel what?”

He looked at her exhausted face. “That life is long.”

“It’s not long for everyone.”

“Don’t be sad,” George murmured. “You’re so young.”

“Oh, I’m tired of being young. Being young gets old.”

“Be old with me, then,” George told her. “Stay with me. Come home with me. Share my books with me. Cook with me. Marry me.”

“You’d let me cook with you?”

He pulled her closer. “That’s just like you to evade the question.”

“How was that a question?” she challenged lightly. “I’m the only one who asked a question.”

“It would be your kitchen too.”

“What about your friends?”

“I was wrong before. I didn’t know…. Forgive me.”

“I thought you’d rather be alone.”

“No,” he said. “I’d rather be alone if not for you. Please, Jess.”

“Please?”

“I’ll teach you how to cut onions properly.”

“Oh, in that case …,” Jess said.

“And devote my life to you.”

Jess shook her head. “Don’t.”

“Let me.”

“We have to be equal, or it doesn’t work.”

“Then we’ll be equal. We’ll share everything.”

“And what if I say I don’t want everything, I’d rather give all your stuff away?”

He hesitated and then he said, “We’d fight.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, we’d fight? Or yes, you’ll marry me?”

“What do you think?”

“I know we’d fight. We do fight,” George said. “But not so often.”

“Give us time.”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “We need more time.”

“We’ve had time.”

He looked away. “More time together. Not more time waiting.”

“How long were you waiting?” she asked gently. “Ten days?”

“Forty-one years.”

“You kept busy,” she reminded him. “You were out there getting rich and learning to cook and breaking hearts. You fell in love lots of times before me.”

Her hair was curlier under the damp trees. He pulled a lock to watch it spring back. “It wasn’t lots of times—just for the record.”

“Just once or twice?”

“Don’t hold it against me that I didn’t meet you before.”

“I don’t,” Jess protested. “Not exactly.”

“At least I didn’t make you watch.” He was thinking of Noah and Leon.

“I never made you do anything,” Jess said.

“You made me love you.”

“Not on purpose.”

“That’s how you did it. Not on purpose. You just walked in. You filled out the questionnaire, and you said I was the kind of guy who reads Tristram Shandy over and over again.”

“You were lonely,” she pointed out.

George sat on the log, and helped her down as well. “You’re missing the point.”

“How many times have you read Tristram Shandy?” Jess asked him.

“Marry me.”

“Five times? Six times?”

“Eleven,” George said. “Marry me.”

She didn’t answer.

“Please. Jess. Don’t be upset. Listen to me. The things I have, the money I made, the house, the collections, the cookbooks, they’re all proxies. The life I’ve led has been”—he struggled for the word—“acquisitive. I was always chasing quartos, folios, maps….”

“I’m not a quarto or a folio.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe a map.”

“You know what I mean. You’re the one I gave up looking for. I’d live for you and live with you. Say yes. Will you?”

The afternoon was fading. A cool breeze riffled through the ferns below.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Really?” He clasped her hands in his.

“Ow!”

“Sorry!” He kissed her fingertips. “Jess—”

She interrupted. “You made up eleven, didn’t you? You just picked any number.”

“Ah, you caught me,” George said.

Then Jess said, “I love you too.”

It was dark when they approached the ranger’s cabin near the parking lot, and left fifteen dollars for a permit to spend the night.

Jess went to the campground restrooms, and she showered, and washed and combed her hair. Since she didn’t have dry clothes, she wore George’s sweats, his T-shirt, his black fleece. They carried the cooler and the tent down to the campsite, a dark hollow, a solemn, mystic place, a conference of redwoods called the Philosophers’ Grove.

“Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,” George named the three tallest trees.

“No, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza,” Jess said dreamily. “And that one there …” She pointed to a deformed, double-trunked pine. “That’s Hegel.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s convoluted and full of obfuscations and …”

“Eat,” George said. And he served her apples that he’d brought from home, and figs, and even some comté cheese, which she devoured despite her vegan prohibitions because she was so hungry.

He cleared sticks and branches to pitch his tent with its arching supports. He took a rock and hammered the tent stakes into the ground. When he was done, he spread a fly sheet for rain. He smoothed his open sleeping bag and then a heavy blanket on the nylon floor.

“Come in.”

She bent down to enter, and he followed.

“Is it true that they spin fleece from soda bottles?” she asked, as he unzipped her.

“I think so.”

“That’s alchemy then.”

“Are you warm enough?” He pulled off her T-shirt.

“That’s a funny thing to ask when you’re undressing me.”

“Are you warmer now?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Yes.”

They didn’t know under the trees what day it was, or how the market closed, or how the sun rose bright on the East Coast where Jess’s father woke early, to run and glower at the McMansion abutting his property. They didn’t know it was September 11, but no one else did either.

The McMansion’s three-car garage opened, and Mel drove away in his black Lexus, while Barbara stood as usual in her bay window, with her black prayer book in her hands. On Alcott Street, Rabbi Zylberfenig’s little boys were dressing, pulling out all the clothes from their shared bureau onto the floor.

In Cambridge, by the Charles, Jonathan went running, even as Orion and Sorel sat together on a bench on the riverbank and talked of Fast-Track. The team was combing every line of code before the October rollout.

“Last night was pretty smooth,” Orion said with pride.

And Sorel agreed. “Fast-Track is the Second Coming for this company!”

Breathing deep, Jonathan ran along the river, because he could not fly cross-country without exercise. He kept up his quick pace and thought of the day ahead at Tech World, the night he’d spend with Emily, the news he’d bring her, that ISIS was nearly ready to ship its new product, the surveillance system inspired by electronic fingerprinting. He had waited to tell her, but convinced himself that he was right to wait. He recognized that the conversation might be tricky, given his long silence, but he had to prepare her for the rollout. Emily, he told her in his mind, if we’re together, then we share success. What you do and what I do are almost the same. Emily, he rehearsed for her, if we have a life together, then your money and mine, your company and mine, your decisions and mine—we hold them all in common. Admittedly, he had not kept her secret. Admittedly, he had not confided in her about the flaws in Lockbox that winter night she’d asked. But that had been almost two years ago. Running on the riverbank, he envisioned a life with no barriers or limits. Marriage without borders. He saw the future, as he ran to the Eliot Bridge and back again, under the allée of sycamores with their silvery trunks and their green-gold leaves. Orion and Sorel could not have been farther from his mind. Nor did he consider Mel Millstein, who was driving in from Canaan to Logan Airport, bad back and all, to show the flag for ISIS, and to do his bidding. Jonathan thought about his day, not other peoples’. He meted his own stride.

Mel drove along the river to Logan, and he had no idea how close Jonathan was at that moment, nor did Sorel and Orion. They didn’t see Jonathan coming. No one ever did.

“I’m thinking of writing a dot-com opera,” Sorel said, leaning against Orion, head on his shoulder.

“How would that work?” he asked.

“It would be sort of Tommy meets Ring of the Nibelung.”

They heard Jonathan’s voice first. “What are you guys doing here?” And then they saw him, bright-eyed, sweaty, jogging in place.

Sorel sat up straight.

“Jonathan,” Orion said heartily. “How’s it going?”

Jonathan looked at the two of them with his dangerous smile. “Come here often?”

“Bird-watching,” Sorel said, gesturing toward the fat black geese waddling and honking on the bank.

“Not much to look at,” said Jonathan.

“I’m quite nearsighted,” Sorel explained, embracing the absurdity of the situation. “I can’t see the smaller species, so we come here for the … large-print birds.”

Humor helped. Jonathan’s smile softened, and he shook his head ever so slightly. Then Orion knew he wouldn’t tell. He was never sure which Jonathan he would meet, but this morning he lucked into his old friend, the joker and the rugby player; the boy, not the tycoon.

Under the redwoods, the early-dawn air was chilly, and George tucked the blanket around Jess. “You were tired, after all.”

Jess didn’t answer. She was still asleep, even as Leon and the Tree Savers camped in Wood Rose Glen, and Daisy shielded Galadriel, and Emily called Jess’s cell phone, which was now lost, forgotten in the tree along with her waterlogged Thoreau. Emily left messages. “You said you were coming home on September 11. I’m just wondering where you are, Jess.”

At ISIS, programmers drifted to work with cups of coffee. In Central Square, Molly was arriving home, postcall from Beth Israel Deaconess. She was winded, climbing the stairs. She had no time for the gym. She had no time for anything. She had eaten a blueberry muffin for dinner. Blinking in the bright sun, she thought of babies, because all night she had been assisting in deliveries. She had worked for a day and a night inside the hospital, and now it was morning again, and as she walked, she thought of tiny bodies, eyes opening in surprise, mouths opening to cry, forming perfect little Os.