The Cookbook Collector

15

This was a strange time, a fairy-tale time. Mel and Barbara moved into a dream house on Pleasant Street, a mansion developers had built on spec just as Richard Bach had feared, right behind his old Colonial. The Millsteins lived there in twenty-one rooms, and they had central air and central vacuuming and bay windows and marble baths. Barbara tiptoed through her new country kitchen, and Mel drove a black Lexus to see Bobby Bruce, the Alexander teacher, who showed Mel where his posture was indeed misaligned. In all his years, Mel had never known he was off-center, and now with strange synchronicity, he discovered the problem just when he could afford to treat it. By the same token, Dave’s temperamental Bentley gave out just as the ISIS lockup ended, and he treated himself to a powder-blue Jaguar.

As it turned out, a windfall came in handy. Aldwin’s parents were celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary, so he rented a villa in the south of France for a family reunion. Sorel’s landlord raised the rent, so she moved out and bought a decrepit worker’s cottage in East Cambridge that she planned to paint purple and restore as a house cum studio. Orion bought his first car, a silver BMW. Jonathan found Emily a ring.

He took Emily shopping on Newbury Street. They spun through Shreve, Crump & Low with its sapphires and china, Cartier with its square-cut gems and gleaming watches. Brodney Antiques & Jewelry was piled with detritus from every decade: old lamps and dusty tea sets, rows of opera glasses and ugly broaches—gold bees with diamond wings, little frogs with ruby eyes. Emily could not find anything she liked. She looked and looked, and Jonathan got hungry waiting, and they went to lunch at L’Espalier where they sat wedged into a corner table in a room adorned with antique mirrors and crystal chandeliers, and they ate a dandelion salad and the smallest sirloin steak Jonathan had ever seen, along with matchstick potatoes.

“These,” Jonathan told Emily, “are exactly the way I always thought matchsticks would taste. Except real matchsticks have sulfur tips, so they’re probably better.”

Emily laughed. “I think they’re good.”

He took her hand in his. “I think you need a ring.”

“We’ll find one eventually.”

She spoke in such a patient voice, and the restaurant with its pillows and silk curtains felt like such an overpriced tea party that he rebelled, jumping to his feet. “Wait here. Have some dessert.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back. Get yourself some coffee.”

And he returned to Shreve, Crump & Low, and told the first saleswoman he saw, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Prathima,” she said in a soft voice.

“So, Prathima, what’s the best diamond you have in stock?”

She was really a very small saleslady, delicate and easily affronted in her navy suit. She sat down with Jonathan at a table, as a loan officer might sit down with a client at the bank, and she showed him a chart, and a color portfolio with “Diamonds Are Forever” printed on it, and her voice grew ever softer as she explained the four Cs of diamonds. She pointed to various photographs. “This is our signature series,” she whispered, as if she were in church. “Each diamond is inscribed with a—”

He cut her off. “You do sell real diamonds here, right?”

“Of course.” Prathima looked offended.

“Okay, could you just bring out the most highly rated diamond you have?”

“In which category?” she asked.

“In all categories.” He demonstrated his newfound knowledge, reciting: “Cut, color, carat, clarity.”

“Well …”

“My fiancée is waiting at L’Espalier,” he announced, as another sales associate joined them, and a third called a guard to open the safe. “I don’t want any loose gems. I need something ready to go.”

When he returned to Emily, she was waiting with a cup of coffee and a crème brûlée. “I saved some for you.”

“Mmm.”

“It’s very sweet,” she said, dying of curiosity and at the same time conscious of the other people in the restaurant.

“No, it’s not too sweet.” He spooned up the dessert. “It’s just right.” He knew he was keeping her in suspense. His eyes were shining, but he kept a straight face. “It’s good.”

“Jonathan!”

“Yes, Emily?”

“Did you …”

“Did I what?”

She burst out laughing, even as he pulled a velvet box from his pocket. Then the laughter stopped as he opened the box to reveal a ring that cost more than a suburban house in most parts of the country, platinum set with three diamonds, small, flawless, dazzling white. “Oh, they’re so beautiful,” she whispered.

For a moment he didn’t know what to say and hesitated, and she loved his hesitation more than his reply. The hesitation was all him. His reply was heartfelt but conventional. “Not as beautiful as you.”

Their visits were brief, their hours islands in a sea of time apart. They wanted to wake up together and spend all day together and fall asleep wrapped in each other’s arms. When the markets rose all this seemed possible, but within months the Nasdaq fell back again, and they couldn’t leave their posts. By the end of October, Veritech had lost more than half its value. ISIS, which had soared to $133, dipped below sixty and then hovered at thirty. Dave put his private plane on hold. Orion garaged his car on Green Street and continued biking to work from his ratty apartment. There would be time enough for spending when the markets revived. No one wanted to cash out before the next zephyr, the expected gust of buoyant air.

Everyone was waiting, except Mel, who panicked days after he moved into his palatial house. He sold all his stock at thirty-three, a move that angered Jonathan.

“I couldn’t sleep at night,” Mel confessed. Already he regretted selling as the share price rose again.

“Man,” Jonathan said disdainfully. “You’re old.”

Jess was out of the game as well, but for a different reason. She had donated her shares to Save the Trees. She did not mention this to Emily. Her sister did not approve of Leon.

“You have a way of losing yourself in other people,” Emily warned Jess on the phone.

“Don’t you think,” Jess countered, “that maybe sometimes they lose themselves in me?”

“No,” Emily said decidedly. “You’re the one at risk. You’re the one behaving dangerously.”

“You always say that.” Jess sat up in Leon’s bed, sans Leon, who was in Oregon.

“You’re moving in with a guy ten years older than you, and you plan to do—what? Live with him in this amorphous environmental group, which you yourself admit includes other women that he’s dated? Where do you think this is going?”

“Stop,” Jess said.

“Someone has to ask,” said Emily.

“You can ask as much as you like,” said Jess.

“And you can’t answer.”

“And you can’t be my mother.”

“Just go back and read her letters. Look at what she says about this kind of situation.”

“She never wrote about real situations,” said Jess.

“Oh, really? Let me show you. Let me bring it up for you….” Emily kept all her birthday letters on her laptop.

“You should know the difference between loving and being in love,” Emily read aloud. “Loving is calm and good, and being in love is so much better and so much worse. You might—”

“Do you know the difference?” Jess challenged Emily. “Do you?”

She hung up and buried her face in Leon’s pillow. How did he get by with so little rest? He made her feel lazy and impractical. Her father had tried to make her feel that way. Emily attempted to jolt her awake, but Leon succeeded where they could not. His energy awed and attracted and piqued her as well, because living with him, hiking with him, making love half the night with him, exhausted her. She felt sleepy in contrast to Leon, but she was also sleepy because of him. Jess pulled the sheet over her bare body and sat up in bed to contemplate her dirty clothes. She sighed and wrapped herself in a blanket to pad down the hall to the communal bathroom.

When she was with Leon she belonged, but when he was gone, she felt like a stowaway. Strangely, the more time she spent with him, the closer they became, the more difficult her position in the house. Now that she’d moved in, she was no longer a regular leafleter. She was Leon’s girlfriend, with all the resentment that entailed. When would he return? When would she see him again? She could forget the others when she was studying the brown flecks in Leon’s eyes, his words, soft with surprise, his whisper—You’re beautiful—his body, not diffident at all when they were alone, not cool, but heated, trembling.

When she biked to campus, a car swerved and almost hit her. For a moment she caught herself up, and pulled over to the side of the street. Breathing fast, she tried to calm down. Be more careful! she told herself. Wake up! Eat! But she was already late for Aristotle, and she had no time to shop for food. Later, she did pause briefly at the Student Union, but the produce there was coated with some kind of fruit polish. How could she eat another shiny apple? Or a hard little plum? Or those bright-hued, jet-lagged cherry tomatoes? She didn’t drink milk. She wouldn’t eat a box of Froot Loops. Briefly the plastic bins of candy tempted her. Swedish fish and gummy bears and sour gummy worms—but she knew those treats were full of boiled calf bones: gelatin.

Outside the Union at the bike racks someone called her name. “Jessamine!” a voice sang out, and she turned to see Rabbi Helfgott bearing down on her with fistfuls of brochures. Her heart jumped in surprise and dismay. He was wondering, of course, about his loan. He was about to ask, as he had every right, where his money had gone.

“Good to see you. Good to see you,” said Helfgott.

“Rabbi! I’m sorry!” she began.

“Why is that?”

“I have to pay you back.”

“I know you will,” he told her, and she thought, That makes one of us. She had planned to repay him, but a cash shortfall at Save the Trees had endangered summer operations. Seizing the opportunity, Jess had donated her shares, reserving just a few to repay the rabbi’s loan. The trouble was that she had donated the shares at $302. The very week she made the transfer, Veritech released its earnings, just a penny lower than analyst expectations, and the share price plummeted to $150. The six shares she had kept to pay back Rabbi Helfgott had sunk in value, and they would not rise again so she could sell and repay him.

Perhaps Helfgott knew this, because whenever she’d called about paying him he always assured her that he was in no rush. He never pestered, except to invite her to events at his center. A tree planting, a Torah class. She made excuses every time.

Now she stood before him, guilty, swinging her bike helmet by the straps. What kind of person was she to take a rabbi’s money and hold on to it as she had? By rights he should be charging interest. “I made a donation,” she confessed. “I donated my stock to Save the Trees.”

She was amazed at his response. He smiled. “This is a wonderful thing.”

“Really? You aren’t angry?”

“I myself am very fond of trees,” he told her. “I myself have an interest in the ecosystem. Without this system, where would we be? I have spoken many times about this in classes and also festivals. You have perhaps heard of Water Awareness Month? I gave a benediction for this month in Redwood City. We have an expression in Hebrew: Mayim Hayim. ‘Water is life.’ With water, with sunshine, with the spirit of the Creator comes life and also trees. We have another phrase. Etz Hayim. ‘The Tree of Life.’ Perhaps you have heard of it? In our tradition the Torah is the Tree of Life. It is very understandable that when you find a tree, particularly one of the majestic redwoods, you would wish to donate your money to that tree. This is your way of saying: I see the Tree of Life, and I will hold on to it.”

Jess swallowed hard, moved by the rabbi’s words. “I’m going to pay you back as soon as possible.”

“Don’t pay me. Pay the Bialystok Center of Berkeley,” he said. “Then you can write off the donation on your taxes.”

“I’ll pay you and I’ll pay you interest,” she resolved.

“No interest,” said the rabbi, spreading his hands. “No monetary interest.”

“What other kind of interest is there?”

“Ah.” The rabbi smiled at her. “I am thinking of a more substantial interest.”

“And what’s that?”

“I am interested in you.”

“Me?” Jess asked.

“You have heard the expression ‘Time is money,’” said Helfgott. “Some people prefer payment in money. I prefer payment in time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come to us for Shabbes,” he told her. “Or come to class, and when you’re done coming, then”—he drew out the word in a singsong voice—“thehen repay the loan.”

She was late to work. Half an hour late, forty-five minutes late. George sat at his desk at Yorick’s and called Jess’s home number, but no one answered. He began to call the Tree House and then hung up.

His old black telephone sat silent on his desk. The boxes he had stacked near European History remained unpacked. She’d quit. That was the most likely scenario. She had decided to leave but hadn’t bothered to give notice. That was usually the way with students. She had run off with her boyfriend, an amphibious creature George had met just once in passing at the Farmers’ Market, where Jess hailed George from a booth selling root vegetables.

“I want you to meet someone!” she called out in her friendly way. Then she drew Leon from the shadows, as one might draw a dark slug off a lettuce leaf. The boyfriend was a tall Russian, or Armenian perhaps, with slippery black hair and olive skin, and eyes of an unusually pale, druggy shade of blue. The better to see you with, my dear, thought George. “This is Leon,” Jess said.

“Hey,” said Leon as George extended his hand.

“This is my boss, George,” Jess told Leon.

Leon sized up George. “You’re the bookseller.”

“I am.”

“Good for you,” said Leon as though George were a child or a student or a dog performing some stupid trick. “What’s selling these days?”

George frowned. “Nothing you’d like.”

How quickly Jess had traded slacker Noah for sinister Leon. She was now over an hour late, later than she had ever been. Maybe she had not run off with Leon. Maybe she was dead.

He walked to the shop window, which Jess had set up with a display for Shakespeare’s birthday. Used paperbacks of the Histories and Comedies framed a leather-bound Complete Works, and a Tales from Shakespeare in two volumes, very fine condition, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. She had opened one volume to display a color plate of barefoot Miranda dancing with fairies on her father’s island, but George had vetoed that idea, closing the book to save its spine and protect its colors from the sun.

No one outside even stopped to look. The fine fall weather kept people out of dark little bookstores. He told himself this, although on rainy winter days, he tended toward the other opinion, concluding that few would venture out to browse when they could stay home and order books online or reread books they already possessed. Vanity, vanity. Instantly accessible, infinitely searchable, the Internet precluded physical transactions, so that there was little point to keeping a bookshop, even in Berkeley. Moments of discovery in the store were sweet but all too rare: the reunion of a customer with the long-sought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the discovery of Linus Pauling’s copy of On the Origin of Species. Why live for such occasions? He only felt lonelier afterward.

He pushed away those melancholy thoughts and looked ahead to dinner. He had invited Nick, and his friend Raj as well. He had his own dissolute companions—or by the end of the night he’d make them so. There would be no wives or girlfriends, only good food and drink, George’s favorite kind of evening. Why, then, was Jess late today? She was holding him up. He had planned to leave early so that he could pick up dessert (he didn’t bake) and begin cooking.

The bell rang, and as the shop door opened, George backed away from the window lest he seem anxious. Surprised, he recognized the woman who walked in: not Jess, but Sandra.

“Welcome,” he said, noting her cloth bag. She had come just twice over the past nine months, and each time she had brought an ordinary book. A first-edition Fannie Farmer, and an old Mastering the Art of French Cooking. He had offered only ten dollars for the last, and she had left Yorick’s in a huff. Then he concluded that, when it came to her uncle’s estate, Sandra had already sold him the crown jewels, such as they were. “Another cookbook for me?”

“No.” She pushed her long hair back over her shoulders, a gesture surprisingly young for a woman so gray.

“May I help you find something?”

“No.” She stood quite still before him. “What I would like,” she said, and she spoke with precision, “is to take you to the house.”

“To your house!”

“My uncle’s house,” she amended. “The house he left me. I’m interested in an appraisal.”

Why now? he thought. And why him? Did she want a second opinion? Or was he the first? Just how desperate was she?

“Some of the books are valuable.”

Let me be the judge of that, he thought.

“Some are unique.”

“How many are there?”

“Currently,” she said, “eight hundred and seventy-three.”

The number startled him, because it was bigger than he expected, and more exact.

“Sorting out that many will take time.”

“That’s just it; time is of the essence,” she told him. “Would it be possible for you to come this afternoon?”

With some humor, he considered his empty store. “Sure.”

“I’ll show you.”

“I’d have to lock up,” he said. Jess should have been there to cover for him.

He stuck a Post-it on the glass shop door. “Back in an hour.”

Then he dashed off instructions for Jess, who had a key. He took his fountain pen and covered a note card quickly with his small tight cursive:

J.—I assume you’re writing a new theory of moral sentiments or testifying against Pacific Lumber. In either case, the books have not been shelved. Take care of that and break down the boxes!—G.

They took George’s car, because Sandra didn’t drive, and they drove through Elmwood with its beetle-browed old bungalows. Towering hedges of eugenia nearly obscured Sandra’s home from Russell Street. Her uncle must have bought the place for about a dollar, thought George, as he picked his way through a jungle of ornamental plum, live oak, and Australian tea trees, trailing their branches luxuriantly. There were figs and lemons, roses and giant rhododendrons, all overrun with thorny blackberry canes.

“Watch out for the cat,” Sandra told George as he followed her up peeling steps to the front porch.

She gestured for George to step in close behind her as she unlocked the door. Like a furry missile, the black-and-gray cat launched himself, trying to escape outdoors. George blocked him with his legs. Sandra scooped him up in her arms. “Down, Geoffrey,” she ordered, as if chastising a dog, and she dumped the animal onto a couch draped in dark green slipcovers. Geoffrey jumped onto the back of this well-protected piece of furniture and glared at her with furrowed brow and narrowed eyes.

The living room was stuffed with armchairs, end tables and bookcases, stacks of magazines and yellowed newspapers. Empty antique birdcages filled the front bay window. Abandoned pagodas. Flanking the dining table, open cabinets displayed bowls and goblets of dusty ruby-colored cut glass. A phalanx of botanical engravings adorned the walls. No bright tulips or orchids here. The engravings were all pale green and gray, portraying and anatomizing moss and lichens. Odd choices, George thought. Geoffrey purred, and instinctively, as he leaned over the green couch for a closer look, George touched the cat’s soft fur.

“He bites,” said Sandra.

Too late. George gasped as the cat nipped his finger.

“I warned you.” Sandra’s voice rose.

The wound looked like two pinpricks, the puncture marks of a tiny vampire.

“I told you. I said watch out for the cat. He’s a very …”

She disappeared into the next room, and George followed her into a kitchen that smelled of bananas and wheat germ and rotting plums. The paint on the cabinets was chipped, the countertops stacked with dishes and small New Age appliances: rice cooker, yogurt maker, fruit dehydrator. Little cacti lined the windowsills. Prickly cacti, hairy cacti; spiky, round, bulbous, hostile little plants of every kind.

“He was my uncle’s cat,” Sandra explained. “He was abused when he was younger. My uncle found him and took him in, and then when my uncle passed …”

Ignoring this sob story, George marched to the sink.

“He felt abandoned,” Sandra said.

George turned on the tap and a cloud of fruit flies rose from the drain. Disgusted, he held his finger under the running water.

“Let me get you some iodine,” said Sandra. “Let me …” Her voice trailed off again. “You do still want to see the books?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

She had turned her back to open the kitchen cabinets. For a moment he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size. The cabinets were stacked with books. Not a dish or cup in sight. Only books. Sandra bent and opened the lower cabinets. Not a single pot or pan. Just books. She stood on a chair to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. Books there as well.

George stepped away from the sink without noticing that he had left the water running. Injury forgotten, he gazed in awe. He leaned against the counter and stared at bindings of hooped leather, red morocco, black and gold. Sandra opened a drawer, and there lay Le Livre de Cuisine. She opened the drawer below and he took out The Accomplisht Cook: or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery. He opened the book at random: Section XIII: The First Section for dressing of fish, Shewing divers ways, and the most excellent, for dressing Carps, either Boiled, Stewed, Broiled, Roasted, or Baked, &c. He had never tried to roast a carp. Take a live carp, draw and wash it, and take away the gall, and milt, or spawn; then make a pudding with some grated manchet, some almond-paste, cream, currans, grated nutmeg, raw yolks of eggs, sugar, caraway-seed candied, or any peel, some lemon and salt, then make a stiff pudding and … The cook in him wanted to read on, but the collector was distracted by the array in cabinets beneath, above, below.

Where should he begin? How could he approach, let alone assess a trove like this? Books like these would take a specialist, a Lowenstein or Wheaton. The sheer numbers were overwhelming. The antiquity. And the strangeness of it all, the perversity of substituting cookbooks for utensils, domestic treatises for pots and pans, words for cups, recipes for spoons and spatulas and cutlery. Still cradling The Accomplisht Cook, George tried to comprehend the open cabinets and drawers before him. He did not make a sound until Sandra opened the oven. Then a cry escaped. Books piled even here, arrayed in boxes on cookie sheets! The collector had converted oven racks to stacks.

“Where did he find these?” George murmured to Sandra.

She shook her head. “After the War,” she said, “when he was young. But he kept them in boxes until he retired, and then slowly he unpacked them, and shelved them here. He didn’t cook.”

George knelt before the open oven. He slid the top rack out partway and took a flat box in his two hands, keeping it level, as one might support a cake. “Oh, my God,” he murmured. Inside the box lay La Cuisine Classique, volume two, bound in worn red morocco.

He opened the book, and scraps of paper fluttered to the floor.

“What’s this?”

The book was stuffed with folded notebook paper, even index cards, the precious volume interleaved with notes. George looked up at Sandra in alarm. “These aren’t acid-free. You see this?” He held up a note card covered with black writing. “The acid in this card will eat your book alive. This has to go.”

Notes and even newspaper clippings. The nineteenth-century volume was stuffed with what looked like shopping lists and pages torn from address books, thin typing paper brittle with age. Black ink leached onto the title page.

“You don’t keep folios like this,” he told Sandra. “Not in ovens! Look at this.” The collector’s block printing stained recipes for aspic, and smudged an engraved illustration of eight desserts, including pralinées aux fruit and abricots à la Portugaise. What had the man been thinking? Notes in permanent black ink pressed between these pages? He pulled out a folded article from The New York Times. An obituary for Samuel Chamberlain.

“He asked me to keep everything,” Sandra said.

George wasn’t listening. “Do you see this? A paper clip!” The silver wire clipped several scraps of paper to a recipe for petites meringues à l’ananas. George pulled it off, and showed Sandra the rusty impression left behind. “This is criminal.”

The paper clip upset him most of all. And there were others. A rare cookbook with lavish illustrations required lavish care. What George saw here were pages stained and crimped. “Have you opened these?” George demanded.

She shook her head.

“Have you seen their condition?”

“I try not to … I don’t want to crack the bindings,” she said.

He did not believe her. Who could resist cracking books like these? He wanted to open them right now, one after another on the kitchen table. He wanted to shuck these books like oysters in their shells.

“He asked me to keep the collection together,” she said.

George caressed a quarto bound in brown leather, hooped at the spine, secured with a gold clasp curiously wrought with scalloped, spiraling designs, engraved initials CWM, and the date 1735. Inside the book a title page printed in prickly gothic letters: Das Brandenburgiche Koch-Buch. Oh, glorious. The frontispiece depicted men and maidservants dressing fowl, and roasting meat over a roaring fire. Through a stone archway the lady of the house watched over all, raising her right index finger to instruct the staff. She held a great key in her other hand. The key to the house? To the spices? To cookery itself? In a reverie, George turned the page—and discovered folded typing paper.

He exploded. “You cannot stuff a book like this. Do you understand?”

“These are my uncle’s notes.”

“He was not a scholar,” George said, for he could not imagine a scholar imposing his notes on books like these.

“Yes, he was. He was a lichenologist.” She watched as George unfolded the brittle piece of typing paper. “He was very well known—in his field,” she added anxiously. “His name was Tom McClintock. He held the Bancroft Chair in …”

But George was lost in the thicket of McClintock’s words—poetry cross-referenced with recipes: I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow (iii crabbes and oysters) / And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts, / Show thee a jay’s nest and instruct thee how / To snare the nimble marmoset; / I’ll bring thee to clustering filberts (xiii iellyes, puddings, other made-Dishes) …

“He taught at Cal for almost forty years,” Sandra said.

George had found another paper, covered with hand-printed lines—part love poem, part recipe, part threat: … snare you, dress you, cut you with the bone still in. Mince you small with suit and marrow, take sweet Creame, yolkes of Eggs, a few Razins of the Sun … An ink drawing illustrated these lines. A nude woman lying on a tablecloth. She lay on her side, all line and tapered leg, head resting on her hand. The drawing was expressive, despite its small scale. The subtlest marks indicated the arch of her foot, her brow, her full breasts.

“What have we here?” George asked, even as Sandra snatched the paper from his hands and folded it again.

“My uncle was a very scholarly, modest …,” Sandra began.

“And what was he doing with these books?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered in reply.

And George wanted the collection then. He wanted it, notes and all, to read and puzzle over. He wanted days and weeks with these rare books and their strange apparatus, the notes and drawings of their collector. He would satisfy his curiosity. But first, “I’ll need to bring in an antiquarian. I have a friend—”

The front door rattled and Sandra jumped, hand on her heart.

“What was that?”

“Only the mailman,” she said. “He frightened me.”

George looked warily at her. She was far too nervous, far too gray—ashen-faced, really—wide-eyed, shaken.

“I’m afraid,” Sandra said.

Oh, God, thought George, but he asked, “What are you afraid of?”

She mulled the question. “I’m afraid in general.”

“Afraid of selling?”

“I need to sell, but I’m afraid of him.”

“Your uncle’s gone,” George reminded her.

“Yes, I know,” said Sandra, but her voice trembled. “He’s dead, and I’m going to betray him.”

Red-letter day! He had heard from other dealers about triumphs at swap meets, or, as his friend Raj dubbed such adventures, Victories at Flea. He had heard of Alcott family papers in a New England barn, and a hand-drawn map of Arabia by T. E. Lawrence tucked underneath the endpapers of Lawrence’s eighteenth-century Josephus. These were tales of the trade, but he had never contributed a legend of his own.

Sandra was a strange one. She had her apprehensions and her guilt, but George had never seen conscience-stricken sellers turn from good hard cash. He would make an offer to light up her gray eyes and make her feel almost young again. He felt euphoric. He would open his 1974 Martha’s Vineyard that night. Best of all his cabernets, the one he had been saving. He jingled his keys as he returned to Yorick’s. He could almost taste the deep red, lush Heitz.

He saw that his Post-it had disappeared. Turning the key, he found the glass door unlocked, and stepped inside to find Jess, reading at his desk. Her hair was falling in her eyes, and she wore a wrinkled linen dress too big for her; she wore all her clothes that way—loose, voluminous—and then while working, she would push up her sleeves, revealing her forearms.

“Long time, no see,” George sang out, taking his 1892 Leaves of Grass from Jess’s hands. “You found my note?”

“I did.” She snatched up the utility knife.

“You haven’t even opened the boxes.”

“I was just about to!”

“As soon as you finished ‘Song of Myself’? That’s all right, don’t bother.”

“Don’t bother? What do you mean?” She looked up at him as she often did, all innocence, bright-eyed, polite—until she could determine if he was really angry with her or only bluffing. “Why are you so happy?” She squinted, examining him closely, and then smiled, triumphant. “You bought something!”

He thought of telling her about the books. For just a moment he considered confiding in her, but he was superstitious until he closed a deal. “I didn’t buy anything.”

“Really?” She leaned back in his desk chair.

“Careful.”

She sat up straight, all business with four chair legs on the floor. “I’ll shelve the books. Just let me take care of it.”

“Jess,” he said, “you had all afternoon to take care of it. It’s four o’clock, I’m closing early, and now you’ve missed your chance.”

Four o’clock. Her day had been so long that she couldn’t remember its beginning. She had been running since she woke up, and she was exhausted, the afternoon a blur of missed lunch, talking to the rabbi, sitting with Professor Sakamaki for almost two hours to discuss her Kant paper with its problems “in argumentation, structure, and style.” She had made a huge effort to get to the store.

Now George shooed her away with his hands. “Go home.”

“Don’t you want to know why I’m late?”

He was honest. “No, not really.”

“My professor wants me to take an Incomplete. He says my Kant paper is really two different papers and I have to separate them. And I already have an Incomplete in Philosophy of Language, and I have another … thing.”

“A … thing?” George couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just a thing,” Jess said.

Instantly George thought of Leon. Instinctively, he suspected her self-absorbed, voracious lover. George was old enough to read a whole story in Leon’s face—the charismatic opportunist alighting in Berkeley, the pseudo-intellectual, the rebel with an environmental cause, masking his appetites with altruism. But of course Jess could not interpret Leon as George did. She couldn’t even read George. She had no idea how George delighted in her funny ways, or watched her through the window as she stood outside, finishing an apple or nibbling sunflower seeds. She did not register his glances, his quick inventory of her clothes, his pleasure in her face and wrists. She did not know his heart.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked playfully, and then he changed his mind about her, as he often did, and decided that in fact she read him pretty well, and knew more than she let on.

“I was just trying to assess the nature of the problem,” George said. “Legal trouble?”

“No.”

“Mortal danger?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” she echoed

“Well, what would you like me to say?”

“Generally speaking,” she told him, “if you hear someone is not in mortal danger, you should say ‘good.’”

He laughed. “Get out of here. Go home. I have people coming for dinner.”

“You can go. I’ll lock up.”

Then he understood. She wanted to finish reading his very-good-condition-with-only-slight-foxing Whitman. “You want to sit here alone with Leaves of Grass, don’t you? Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!” he read aloud. “Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! I’d like to see a liquid tree.”

“If we keep on the way we’re going, you aren’t going to see any kind of trees,” Jess said.

Despite his good mood—perhaps because of it—George refused to let this comment pass. “You know,” he said, “you worry too much about forests.”

“You can’t worry too much,” Jess replied immediately.

George snapped Whitman shut. “You go out there on weekends, confronting angry loggers, and risk your life for redwoods, but are you, personally, going to save them? Do you think that by saving a few trees here, you’ll have the slightest effect on the global environmental problem?”

“Yes,” said Jess, “because of what we’ll prove to everyone.”

George smiled. “Who’s everyone? Just other comfortably well-off tree savers like you.”

“How am I comfortably well-off?” Jess asked.

“This environmental theater of yours has limited impact.”

She looked miserable for a moment, but George did not let up. “Look, I’m older than you are, and I know a few things about …” He was going to say, Types like Leon, but he said, “Organizations like Save the Trees. These are businesses-slash-cults started by refugees from the East Coast who come out here to graft their radical-chic plan onto some unsuspecting western species like the spotted owl, or the coastal redwood, or the Berkeley grad student. Ultimately their goals are self-serving. The money they collect supports their lifestyle. The signatures they gather justify a pyramid scheme. I sign on and then I get five friends to sign, and soon I’ve got a thousand friends supporting my incursions in the old-growth forests, where I do what? Hope someone will photograph me shouting down some logger? What’s the plan? And where are all the donations and the signatures going? Save the Trees is a self-sustaining public-relations firm. It’s not substantive or effective. It’s not real.”

“As opposed to your rare-book store?” Jess countered. “What’s yours is real, and what’s mine must be imaginary?”

“How is Save the Trees yours?” George asked her, and now he was quite serious. “In what way does it belong to you? You belong to it. Those people are taking advantage of you.”

“You know nothing about Save the Trees. If you want to know about it, come visit, and I’ll show you around myself.”

“No, thank you,” he said without a moment’s hesitation.

“You have to admit, then, that you prefer your prejudices to actual knowledge. You don’t really know anything.”

“I know you’re sitting in my chair,” George said.

That startled her. She had forgotten. When she sprang to her feet, he knew he’d hurt her. She took the utility knife and silently began slitting open boxes.

That night cooking, he regretted his words and his proprietary tone, his lecture on environmental politics. Again and again as he sautéed portobello mushrooms, he remembered how Jess looked at him when she jumped out of his desk chair. A glance both angry and reproachful. All the light in the room had drained away, her joy yielding to his pedantry. I’m sorry, he told Jess. Forgive me. And he imagined her forgiving him. He dreamed of that even as he stood there at the stove and watched the mushrooms softening. To be honest he had always dreamed of Jess—a girl so open and unself-conscious, so free. He had always imagined her. He lifted the pan and covered the Aga burner with its special lid.

Enameled deepest, darkest green, a Craftsman color to match the tile backsplashes, the Aga oven was one of George’s few concessions to modernity, along with a dishwasher hidden inside a lower cabinet and a Sub-Zero refrigerator concealed behind a wall. Preservationist that he was, George had studied old photographs to re-create his kitchen’s 1933 layout with two open cupboards for dishes, scant counter space, and just one sink. No downdraft grill, no appliance hutches, no microwave, no island, only an oak table. George’s kitchen was all air and light, with arched windows soaring almost sixteen feet to a peaked roof supported by trussed beams. Californian and medieval, the room was chapel-like, its woods ranging from gold to claret, its floorboards aged, its honed soapstone counters silky to the touch, luscious black when wet.

He opened the first bottle of the evening, a crisp Soave by way of appetizer, and as he sipped, he parboiled new potatoes, blanched green beans, reduced the sauce for the béarnaise. He had learned his way in the kitchen from an old girlfriend, flame-haired, dark-eyed Margaret. She had been thirty, he’d been twenty-nine. She’d worked at Chez Panisse, and she taught George the mysteries of meat and fish, how to fillet a trout, and the best way to braise lamb and steam artichokes. She had explained the varieties of mushrooms and their uses, demonstrated the gentle stirring of risotto, how to select a perfect ripe tomato, and when to buy a peach. Margaret had taught him about wine as well. She had a discerning palate and a way with words, so that she could articulate the most elusive undertones. “Tobacco,” she would say, and that was it exactly. “Dried cherries.” And she was always right. She had prepared fantastic meals, feasts for all their friends in a student apartment with just two working burners. At the end of the night, exhausted and exhilarated, she and George would fall asleep with the scent of cinnamon or lemongrass or cardamom clinging to their hair and clothes. Yes, Margaret had been beautiful, talented, and wild as well. Fair to say that George had been scarred by the relationship. Like the vein on a leaf, his scar traveled from his right thumb all the way up his forearm, where Margaret had scored him in a fury with her paring knife.

“You’re too selfish to marry anyone,” Margaret told George when she left. And, of course, as soon as she said these words, she was exactly right.

He had tried to prove her wrong. He had always imagined sharing this kitchen and this view out over the Bay and through the Golden Gate. The lights below like tiny jewels, the sky past sunset, more silver than gray, clouds like a pearl silk dress in a ter Borch painting. Endlessly he had searched for his love, and when he couldn’t find her, he looked for signs, traces of her beauty in books and maps. He surrounded himself with talismans and reliquaries, but he never stopped desiring the one he couldn’t find. Superstitious heart: He began to see her reflected in impossibilities—the Rackham illustration of Miranda dancing, Jess’s delighted laughter. The one he couldn’t find became the one he couldn’t have.

“Close your eyes,” he told Jess in his dream, and he would lead her to these windows and stand behind her, hands on her shoulders. Unconsciously, he closed his own eyes as he stood there at the stove.

The doorbell. A surprise and a relief. “It’s unlocked!” he called, and Nick appeared in fresh pressed clothes, a plum-colored shirt, Italian shoes.

“You look good.” George poured him a glass.

“What do you mean?”

He meant that Nick looked entirely different away from Julia, free from the kid. “You look yourself,” George said.

Nick sat at the kitchen table, and George set before him dishes of olives and pickled eggplants the size of grapes, a platter of French bread, a saucer of sea salt. “How is everybody? How go the renovations?”

“Behind schedule.”

“Your kitchen couldn’t take as long as mine,” George said, by way of encouragement.

“Yes, well, you weren’t trying to live in the house with a small child.”

“True,” George said. “I planned that well.” He liked to flaunt his freedom once in a while, even as Nick flaunted his domestic bliss. They were each a little jealous, and like brothers they provoked each other.

“I noticed someone stole your hood ornament again,” Nick said.

This was a sore point. “It’s happening while I’m at Yorick’s. I pay to park in a garage, and they’re supposed to have security cameras.”

“Must be an inside job,” said Nick. “You should buy a screw top you can take with you.”

“Either that or I should start biking again and give up driving altogether.” By biking, George meant motorcycles, and he knew full well that when it came to motorbikes, Nick was not allowed.

“You’re too old,” Nick said. “But how about—” he disappeared into the front hallway where he had left his backpack and returned with a bottle wrapped in white rice paper—“this.” It was a 1970 Chateau Latour.

“Nick!”

“You’re welcome.”

“We’ll drink your Latour along with my Heitz.”

“Oh, good,” said Raj as soon as he walked in and saw Nick’s bottle. Perfect, George thought. Raj was carrying a 1975 Chateau Petrus, peer and rival to the Latour.

Small, dark, and handsome, Raj wore shades of black and gray. His glasses were gold-rimmed, his hair parted on the side. His body was slight, and his eyes unusually large and beautiful. He had been an academic once, and then a lawyer, but at the moment he spent most of his time wrangling with an unreliable Bentley, two Westies, and a rich ex-boyfriend. He lived in a cottage in Palo Alto, the pocket-sized guesthouse of a larger estate where, as he put it, he worked at home, buying, trading, and selling rare books.

“We’re going to have a competition,” George explained from the stove where he was searing tournedos of beef. “Nick’s Latour versus your Petrus. And both against my Heitz.”

When George decanted the Latour, the friends watched with some solemnity, each anticipating the taste to come. The two French wines which promised greatness. The luscious Californian, from a year they knew to be exceptional.

“A toast,” Raj insisted.

“Well,” George began, “the markets are down….”

“For the moment,” Nick said.

“Bush and Gore are neck and neck.”

“Not an attractive image,” said Raj.

“I don’t think we can toast necks.” George fingered his glass. He knew what he would be toasting secretly. His great new find.

“What, then? Or whom?” Raj asked pointedly.

“I don’t have a whom,” George said.

“I’m relieved to hear that.”

“Why?”

“Because you get so boring, darling,” Raj confided. “Love does not become you.”

“To old friends, then.” Nick raised his glass.

The wines were great, and better by the minute, even as the drinkers softened. Just as wines opened at the table, so the friends’ thirst changed. Their tongues were not so keen, but curled, delighted, as the wines deepened. Nick’s Latour was a classic Bordeaux, perfumed with black currant and cedar, perfectly balanced, never overpowering, too genteel to call attention to itself, but too splendid to ignore. Raj’s Petrus, like Raj himself, more flamboyant, flashier, riper, ravishing the tongue. And then the Californian, which was in some ways richest, and in others most ethereal. George was sure the scent was eucalyptus in this Heitz, the flavor creamy with just a touch of mint, so that he could imagine the groves of silvery trees. The Heitz was smooth and silky, meltingly soft, perhaps best suited to George’s tournedos, seared outside, succulent and pink within, juices running, mixing with the young potatoes and tangy green beans crisp enough to snap.

They finished dinner with lemon sorbet garnished with fresh mint, and carried their glasses and their bottles into the enormous living room where they sat on George’s monumental chairs, built like heartwood thrones. George lit a fire, and as the three friends watched the flames in the great fireplace, Nick became dreamier, Raj more argumentative, and as for George, he found himself discoursing on every subject—from books to cars to the economy to the school shootings in Columbine.

“Kids are numb,” George said. “They live in a simulated world, a gaming cyber world, and they lose the distinction between the virtual and the real. They want to feel. This is a fin de siècle problem.”

“I disagree,” said Raj. “It’s a First World problem. Americans, Japanese, Koreans live a virtual life because they can afford a violent simulated world. In other countries the real is quite real. All too real. If you walk through Calcutta, the real will find you, and chase you down the street and try to kill you or steal from you or both.”

“Granted,” George said, a little miffed. Generally an unrepentant aesthete, Raj turned political and brought up India when you least expected it. “But I’m making a different point. Violence isn’t just a matter of impaired judgment. It comes from sensory deprivation.”

“This is First World deprivation that you’re talking about,” said Raj. “Boredom, anomie, et cetera. Other people can only aspire to that sort of spiritual bankruptcy.” He smiled rakishly. “I know I do.”

“Even now?” asked Nick.

“Of course. Having achieved a certain level of comfort, I look for more, whenever possible.” Raj took a long sip of the Latour.

“Then you’re never content,” said Nick.

“If I have the luxury to choose, then I prefer the chase; I like pursuit better than so-called fulfillment. Everybody does.”

Nick shook his head. “Not true.”

“You’re no exception,” Raj insisted. “You love risk. It’s an erotic pleasure.”

“It is not.”

“Look at your positions in Veritech and Inktomi. Look at you playing with Angelfire. It’s just gambling, and gambling is just like risky sex.”

“You forget,” Nick told Raj, “that I’m actually interested in new technology. I’m not a thrill seeker. I’m investing in the information revolution.”

Raj held out his glass for George to refill. “Violence is luxury, and in America the revolution comes with a prospectus and a public offering.”

“Do you really think we’re all so decadent?” asked George.

Raj cast his eyes over the enormous room with its bookcases like upended treasure chests, its massive beams, its woods glowing in the firelight and resonating with the crackling logs so that the whole house seemed cello-like. “We’ve got an acquisitive gene. We want and want, and there’s no way around it.”

“I think you’re discounting the nature of discovery,” George said. “You forget that some aesthetic experiences satisfy. This wine, for example.” He held up his glass. “This Petrus is an end in itself. I want nothing more than to taste this wine.” He grasped the thick edge of his armrest. “This chair. This oak is solid. There are objects sufficient in themselves, and experiences which are complete. There is such a thing as excellence, and I do know it when I see it, and when I find it I am fulfilled. I don’t want to keep on hunting endlessly. If I’m restless, that’s not because I want to be or because I can’t help it. I’m not chronically dissatisfied; I’ve been disappointed. There’s a difference. When I discover something beautiful and right and rare, I’m happy. I’m content. I am …”

“What did you discover that’s so beautiful and right and rare?” asked clever Raj.

“You’ll be jealous,” George demurred, savoring his secret. “Consumed with jealousy.”

“Try me.”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” asked Nick.

George thought of the recipes for trout and leeks, the descriptions of sea salt. “All of the above.” How he delighted in puzzling his friends. How he loved secrecy. Childishly, tipsily, he enjoyed his secret so much that he could not keep it any longer. “I’ve discovered a cookbook collection. A great one. You can come with me to the owner’s house and look. You can touch them if you like, but you can’t have them. I made her promise.”

“Who is she?” Nick asked. “Is she a whom?”

“She is not a whom; she is a witch, and she lives in a little house crammed with crap, and a cat named Geoffrey.”

At which Raj began to sing in a light tenor: “For I will consider my cat Jeoffry. / For he is the servant of the living God duly and daily serving him …”

“These are the most important books I’ve ever found directly,” George told Nick. “I have never unearthed anything like this on my own. It’s like opening an ancient Egyptian tomb and stumbling upon a gold sarcophagus….”

“… at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way,” Raj continued, for he had been a choral singer at Cambridge. “For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness….”

“I said I’d keep the books together. She wants a private sale.”

Raj broke off singing. “The books are good. They’re wonderful. Strange about the oven, but nothing’s burnt.”

“You saw them!”

“Yes, of course.” Raj’s eyes sparkled. He was so pleased with himself. “I saw them several weeks ago.”

Now George set down his glass of wine, and his evanescent joy burst and dissipated all at once. “Sandra showed them to you first.”

“Why wouldn’t she?” Raj asked.

“She never told me that.”

Raj shrugged.

“And you never told me either.”

“That wouldn’t have been like me,” Raj pointed out.

“Did you offer?”

“I’m considering,” Raj said.

“She promised me,” George repeated.

“What, exactly, did she promise? Did she say she would accept your unknown offer?”

“Did she accept yours?”

“She said she would consider it.”

This was maddening. George should have written Sandra a check right there. But for what amount? What was the collection worth? More than he could spend lightly. More than Raj could afford without selling off some volumes. What was the value of those books? A complicated question. Value to whom? To the dead collector who had valued privacy? To Sandra, who needed cash? To some aesthetic ideal of excellence and rarity? Honor, fear, shame, jealousy, all those factors came into play, even as George told himself that value was simply what the market would bear. “I am seriously interested,” said George, “and I believe she is seriously interested in selling to me.”

“We’ll see,” Raj replied.

“What do you mean, ‘we’ll see’?”

“As I said,” Raj told Nick. “He’s boring when he falls in love.”

It was late, past one, when Nick and Raj departed, and George began to clear the table and wash the wineglasses one by one, turning them under the running water, rubbing his fingers inside their rims. Oh, he regretted showing his hand. He rued sounding so excited before his friend and rival. Raj would never make a mistake like that, but then Raj had been a dealer longer. Sly and witty, Raj needed money, and he was brilliant, while George, who had much deeper pockets, still thought like an amateur.

The trick was not to fall in love at all. Better to pursue unfeelingly, play the market, and enjoy the chase. Better to look dispassionately at these city lights.

He poured out the last drop of the Petrus and wished earnestly that he were less earnest. He hated his sincerity, and resolved to give it up. As Raj said, it did not become him. Yes, George could be heartless on occasion. He could bargain with the best of them. Sarcasm, light banter, a cynical veneer—he could manage that, but Raj and Nick saw through him. Selfishness was one thing, but George was sentimental too. That was unforgivable. Scratch the surface and he was all enthusiasm, like the Heitz, strongest at the beginning against the French, but lacking structure in the end.

Sentimentally, he thought of Jess. Irrationally, he imagined her. Sadly, he despaired of having her. But this was not a question of pursuit. Raj would laugh at him, and Nick would look askance. His fantasies were nurturing, not predatory. If he could have Jess, he would feed her. Laughable, antique, confusingly paternal, he longed to nourish her with clementines, and pears in season, fresh whole-wheat bread and butter, wild strawberries, comté cheese, fresh figs and oily Marcona almonds, tender yellow beets. He would sear red meat, if she would let him, and grill spring lamb. Cut the thorns off artichokes and dip the leaves in fresh aioli, poach her fish—thick Dover sole in wine and shallots—julienne potatoes, and roast a whole chicken with lemon slices under the skin. He would serve a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and just-picked basil. Serve her and watch her savor dinner, pour for her, and watch her drink. That would be enough for him. To find her plums in season, and perfect nectarines, velvet apricots, dark succulent duck. To bring her all these things and watch her eat.

16

“Jess,” said George as she taped clear plastic covers on a complete set of P. G. Wodehouse, “can I trust you?”

She looked up from the work table, an old metal desk in the back room. “What kind of question is that?”

“I mean, can I trust you to keep a poker face if I bring you into someone’s house?”

“Whose house? Is it Sandra?” she asked immediately. “Does she really have a collection to show you?”

“You wouldn’t talk about how amazing it was, would you? You wouldn’t gush?”

“I would never gush!” Jess protested.

“I might need your help when I go to the house, but only if you’re quiet. It’s a difficult situation. She’s skittish.”

Jess nodded.

“She keeps postponing the date. We’ve got a competitor as well. At least one. It’s going to be tricky to evaluate her books, and we’ll have limited time. What do you think? Could you come to her house for three days straight, if necessary?”

“What are the books like?”

“The most amazing I have ever seen in a private home,” George said.

Her eyes widened.

“But that’s not to be repeated.”

“I know, I know.”

“Would you be available at short notice?”

“Of course.” Jess had never before heard George speak this way. She liked the urgency in his voice.

Working at the store, she had become a connoisseur of sorts, someone who knew the difference between a first printing and a latter-day edition. She had come to appreciate white rag paper and color plates with tissue over them and marbled endpapers and gilt titles. Once, she had insisted that content was all that mattered. Now form began to matter too, and her eye delighted in elegant type, and her hand loved thick creamy pages. She treasured what was old and handmade, and began to enjoy early editions more than new. George had influenced her this way, not so much by what he said, but by example. His passion and his knowledge inspired her. When he acquired a new book, he called her over. “Jess, come quick!” Sensing her interest, he explained what made the volume scarce and fine. At those moments, she wished she could work longer hours at Yorick’s. The trouble was that she had so little time.

She knew that she was overextended, but she couldn’t help herself. Student, tree lover, citizen of the Earth, she was busier than ever as she raced through Berkeley on her bicycle, and stood on street corners with petitions. She was a blithe spirit, and increasingly a hungry one. Vegan, but not always strict. She never ate meat or tuna fish or honey harvested from indentured bees, but sometimes she craved eggs, and cheese, and even butter, and she bought herself a croissant or ate a slice of whole-wheat pizza, or a whole box of saltine crackers which she ate in bed, one by one, so that they dissolved on her tongue like the heavenly host. She felt bad afterward, and her guilt mixed with missing Leon.

A year ago, she and Leon had been inseparable. They had driven north to Humboldt County, and camped near ancient roots where he held her in his arms and whispered he would make a climber of her, show her the ropes. He promised he would rappel with her into redwood crowns that swayed and creaked like floating islands in the sky, rich ecosystems unto themselves, of lichen and lungwort and insects, and even miniature trees, bursting forth like Athenas full grown from the Creator’s brow. If only Jess had overcome her fear of heights to join Leon up there. If only she were not afraid, she might have been with him, and lived in the trees—not merely for them, or under them. Alas, the very thought of climbing made her ill. Her heart and mind longed to glide into the air, but she could not overcome her fear. Leon had tired of cajoling her to try on a harness and practice on the old oak in the Tree House yard. Impatient, he reminded her that even children could climb trees this size. Then Jess steeled herself. She said she would, but at the last minute, her stolid feet refused to leave the ground.

On weekends Leon began driving north to tree-sit in Wood Rose Glen. He scaled a redwood the Savers called Galadriel, and spent nights in her lovely branches. Jess envied that beautiful redwood, and all the people in it, although she pretended that she didn’t, and went to dinner at the Bialystok house, and sometimes attended mysticism class where she sat with Mrs. Gibbs and listened to Rabbi Helfgott hold forth on God’s laws, which were numerous, and His designs, which were intricate. She enjoyed the company on a Friday night. Fellow students, Israelis, tourists, Russians, sad-eyed runaways, a panoply of souls.

Jess didn’t eat, but she loved to listen to the Friday-night blessings over candles, wine, and bread, and the singing, especially the wordless tunes called niggunim, which Mrs. Gibbs hummed and Jess sang in chorus with the others at the table. While she did not believe in mystic Judaism, she enjoyed its tropes and songs and angels. The Tree House felt chilly without Leon. At the Bialystok house, the rabbi and his wife, Freyda, welcomed her as an honored guest.

One wet December night, Freyda Helfgott sat with Jess at dinner and introduced her to her sister Chaya Zylberfenig, who was visiting from Canaan.

“This is Jess!” Freyda told Chaya. “She is one of our best singers. And she is a philosopher.”

“Really?” said Chaya, and she looked at Jess with her shrewd dark eyes.

“Well, I’m not really a philosopher yet,” Jess demurred.

“You look like a Gould,” said Chaya.

Freyda cocked her head and looked Jess up and down. “Do you think so?”

“What’s a Gould?” Jess asked, thinking that perhaps Chaya was talking about some mystic sect.

“Freyda and I are Goulds,” Chaya said warmly. “A Gould is one of us.”

Jess knew the Tree Savers did not feel quite the same about her, although she tried to pull her weight. While Leon was away, no one looked overjoyed to see her, or saved a place for her at the kitchen table. No one moved a car to help her park in the communal driveway when Jess returned that night, driving her sister’s car. Emily was back east for the holidays, and she had left her new Audi for Jess to use.

After Friday night dinner, Jess had to drive several blocks before she found a space. Just her luck. As soon as she parked, it began to rain. She ran to the Tree House in a downpour.

Once inside, she pulled off her shoes, left them on the rubber mat, and ran all the way upstairs in her wet socks. She was hoping Leon had come home, but when she opened the door, the room was just as she had left it, bed unmade, desk strewn with unfinished problem sets for logic class, and a badly tangled Hegel paper in notes and drafts. Chilled, she took off her dripping clothes and hunted in the closet for dry sweatpants and a warm sweater.

She picked up her Fichte reader and her Hegel and her reading notes, and turned once more to her term paper on “being for self.” She was staying in Berkeley for winter break so that she could take care of her Incompletes. But the work was lonely, and she paced the room and thought of Leon. Sometimes late at night he slipped into bed with her, and she turned and wrapped her arms around him, and he pulled off her T-shirt and slid on top of her to take his first rough kiss. And then sometimes she woke and realized that she had been dreaming, and she was still alone. She did not expect to be with her boyfriend all the time. She had always known he was a traveler and a politico, and she admired him for it, but she missed him, even as she wondered why she needed companionship so much.

This is a mistake, she thought as she took Phenomenology of Spirit into bed. The book made her sleepy at her desk. Under the covers she didn’t have a chance.

What was it about Hegel that got her down? His sentences bristling with bony definitions? His arguments disguised as systems of the universe? He was everything Jess had come to loathe in her philosophy classes: stentorian about the world, but somehow alien from it. She had come to philosophy reading Plato’s dialogs, and now she found herself waist-deep in inner monologs about the Self. Was there a future for her in this marshy field? Or did she like forests too much? And leafleting? And living? She propped her head on the pillow and alternately read and dozed, and dreamed that Emily asked her in Hegelian fashion: What is now?

Now is night, Jess answered.

What is this? Emily inquired, pointing to a lonesome pine.

This is a tree, said Jess.

If I turn around the tree vanishes, said Emily.

Now is still now, said Jess. This is still this. Here is still here.

How do you know?

Cautiously Jess said, Because I’m still me.

Really? Emily pressed. Are you sure?

When Jess opened her eyes and saw the blue morning light, she wasn’t sure at all. She could not remember what Hegel said about consciousness; she could not even remember her own dream. All she knew was that she had to drive to San Francisco to pick up Emily from the airport.

Later she recalled forebodings, an inner certainty that something bad had happened, but in fact she felt no inkling until she discovered that Emily’s car was not where she had parked it. She was sure she’d left it on the right side of Derby. Anxious, she walked up and down. Then, more anxious still, she crossed the street and walked up and down again, calling softly under her breath, “Car, car, where are you?” as though she were out looking for a cat. Had she really been so stupid? Had she really lost Emily’s new car?

She ran back to the Tree House and burst into the kitchen where a bunch of Tree Savers were eating oatmeal. “Where do you call if you think your car was towed?”

Daisy looked up from her bowl. “Maybe it wasn’t towed. Maybe somebody stole it.”

“No!” Jess gasped. “But it’s Emily’s Audi!”

“Not anymore,” said Daisy.

“Take a breath,” a Tree Saver named Siddhartha suggested.

“Have some oatmeal,” Noah offered, and he tried to serve her from the pot on the stove.

“I can’t! I can’t have oatmeal. I have to pick her up from the airport!” Jess rushed outside and hopped on her bike for the BART station. On the platform a flautist in patchwork pants was playing a husky, breathy “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” but Jess scarcely noticed.

Emily, I have bad news. Emily, something bad happened. Emily, I’m sorry. Jess rehearsed all the way to the airport on the rattling train, until the woman sitting next to her changed seats.

“I’m sorry I’m late.” Jess ran toward Emily at the baggage claim. “I’m sorry…. I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?”

“Well …,” Jess began, and suddenly she thought it would be better to tell the news outside, and she started walking.

“Are you all right?” Emily followed her through the automatic glass doors.

“I’m fine,” said Jess. “Except …”

“Jess!” Emily stopped suddenly on the walkway and her rolling suitcase stopped with her, like a well-trained dog. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’m fine.”

Emily sighed with relief. “Okay. Let’s see.” She studied the signs. “Ground transportation. Central parking. Short-term parking.”

“Um, we won’t need to … We don’t have to go in there,” Jess said.

“Where did you park?” Emily asked.

“Well—I didn’t, because—I’m so sorry. I’m pretty sure someone stole your car.”

“Really?”

Jess nodded miserably. “Right off Derby Street.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Oh, God, I didn’t think of that! I was afraid I wouldn’t get here in time, so I just rushed to catch the train.”

Emily shook her head at Jess.

That did it. The gesture of disbelief, with its suggestion of great forbearance. Jess burst into tears right there in front of the United Airlines terminal. “I had a feeling when I woke up this morning,” she sobbed. “I just had a feeling something was wrong, and then …”

“Jess”—Emily unzipped the outer pocket of her rolling bag and produced a travel package of tissues—“come with me.” Emily wheeled her obedient suitcase back into the airport.

“Where are you going?”

“To rent a car,” said Emily.

“But what will you …? How will you …?”

“Please stop crying,” Emily begged her sister. “I have insurance. It’s just a car. It doesn’t matter. I’ll buy a new one.” And Jess recalled that her sister was worth more than $100 million. Emily never acted spoiled or materialistic—not in the ways you would expect, but at times like these the money showed.

“Who are you calling?” Jess asked.

“Laura.”

“On Saturday morning?”

“Hi, Laura. How are you? Really?” She smiled. “Listen, could you call the police and also Commerce Insurance about my car? We think it was stolen last night in Berkeley. I know!”

“I need an assistant,” Jess said after Emily got off the phone.

“Why?” said Emily. “You have me.”

Do I? Jess thought. Emily could give her money, but Jess’s asking would have meant explaining how she’d donated her stock to Save the Trees. Emily could give advice as well about school, and Leon, and life in general, but none of the advice was what she wanted to hear.

She felt like an item on Emily’s to-do list: (1) fly to Banff with Jonathan; (2) establish Veritech Foundation to promote math education in underserved communities; (3) ask Jess what she’s doing with her life.

More like a fabulous old aunt than a sister, Emily began to pick up Jess every couple of weeks and take her to brunch at Greens, where she plied Jess with French toast, and Jess abstained and ordered blueberries with nothing on them. Then they would walk along the Presidio walls, with the wind whipping their hair, and they would gaze out at the ocean, and Emily would ask earnestly, “Are you sure you really want to be with Leon?”

Or Jess would sleep over at Emily’s condo, and they would drive together to the White Lotus in San Jose for vegan Southeast Asian food. Coconut soup, summer rolls with peanut sauce, mock squid lo mein, mushroom hot pot, and no-dairy flan for dessert. And Emily would say, “Are you sure you want to be in grad school if you’ve taken so many Incompletes?”

She had met Leon one day when she came to visit Jess at the Tree House, and her response had been about what Jess expected. “Totally inappropriate! What is he—forty? Who is he? Do you even know?” And she had taken the extraordinary step of assuming Jess’s share of the rent at her old apartment on Durant, simply because she could not bear the thought of Jess living in the Tree House.

“It’s a waste of money, keeping that empty room for me,” Jess told Emily.

“You need a home away from him,” her sister said. “You need somewhere to go.”

Jess had begun to dread these conversations. Generally, Emily’s Outings, as Jess began calling them, coincided with weekends Jonathan had canceled a visit, and Jess was not above pointing this out. “You only want to see me when you can’t see him,” she complained on the phone one January night.

“That’s not fair,” Emily said.

“You mean that’s not nice of me to say.”

“That too.”

Undaunted, Emily asked, “Do you want to go to the city on Sunday?”

“I have to work.” Jess sat cross-legged on the floor with her Logic text in front of her. George needed extra hours. Classes were beginning on Wednesday, and she still had Incompletes in Hegel, and Logic, and last year’s Incomplete in Philosophy of Language. She was in danger of losing her meager fellowship.

“We could go to Muir Woods.”

Jess hesitated. “I would,” she said, “but all you want to do is lecture me.”

“I don’t.”

“Right, you don’t want to, but you think you have to,” Jess said.

“We could drive the new car.”

Jess felt a pang of guilt about the old one.

“I’d like to go,” said Emily.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been to Muir Woods before,” said Jess.

“Never with you.”

“You have to promise you won’t have an agenda.”

“No agenda,” said Emily.

“And no hectoring!”

“How is hectoring different from lecturing?”

“It’s louder.”

Jess carried a volume of Robert Frost when Emily picked her up.

“What’s that for?” Emily drove her new Audi along the coast, and the ocean rose and dipped in the sun.

“To read. To meditate!” Jess said blithely, and she thought, To avoid hectoring if necessary.

“Okay,” Emily said, bemused and, sensing Jess’s unsaid reason, a little hurt.

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” Jess intoned as they took the path down from the parking lot. She had imagined finding a spot to read and meditate, leaving Emily to walk alone for half an hour, but the trees were so tall, and the light filtering down so green that she forgot her stratagem, and her troubles as well. The saplings here were three hundred years old, their bark still purple, their branches supple, foliage feathery in the gloaming. They rose up together with their ancestors, millennia-old redwoods outlasting storms, regenerating after lightning, sending forth new spires from blasted crowns. What did Hegel matter when it came to old-growth? Who cared about world-historical individuals? Not the salamanders or the moss. Not the redwoods, which were prehistoric. Potentially posthistoric too.

Jess closed her eyes to inhale the forest with its scents of earth and pine. “Couldn’t the Veritech Foundation be for forests?” Jess asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because our mission is math education.”

“But without trees there would be no math,” Jess said. “Let alone math education. Without trees we’d suffocate—literally and figuratively.”

“How do you suffocate figuratively?”

“You box yourself into received ideas, so you can’t breathe. You can’t even see where you are and you just … die from lack of perspective. Did you know that tribal peoples aren’t even nearsighted? Nearsightedness is a result of reading and staring at computer screens.”

Emily took off her glasses and gazed up at the blurry canopy. When she slipped her glasses on again, she much preferred the finer view. She saw the fertile detail all around her, the spores speckling the underside of ferns, the pinecones extending from every branch, pine needles drifting down and carpeting the mossy ground. Fecund, furrowed, teeming with new life—even the fallen trees blossomed forth with lichen and rich moss and ferns. Every rock and stump turned moist and rich, every broken place gave birth. Each crevice a fresh opening, each plant a possibility, putting forth its little hook or eye.

“You see?” said Jess. “And this place is tame. Up north you feel like an ant looking up at a blade of grass.”

“I’m not sure I’d want to feel like an ant.”

“Why not? Don’t you like to feel small sometimes?”

“No,” Emily said honestly.

“I do. I like it. I prefer feeling insignificant,” said Jess.

“I don’t believe that.”

“I didn’t say worthless, I said insignificant, as in the grand scheme of things.”

“But why?”

“Because humans have such a complex. We’re so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is.”

And Jess was right. Numbers didn’t matter here. Money didn’t count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore down reputations had no meaning in this place. The air was moist. Fallen leaves, spreading branches, and crisscrossing roots wicked water, so that the trees seemed to drink the misty air.

Jess said, “All your worries fade away, because …”

Emily finished her thought. “The trees put everything in perspective.”

“Right. It’s like your soul achieves its focal distance.”

The word soul startled Emily from her reverie. She turned on Jess. “You’re dropping out of school, aren’t you?”

“No—I never said that! I might take the semester off, just so I can catch up. And we’ve got a major appraisal coming up at Yorick’s….”

“Jess …”

“I was actually making a serious point.”

“And I was asking a serious question.”

“I’m not talking about graduate school. I’m talking about how you can come out here and know your place in the universe.”

“And what would that be?”

“Very small. Very tangential,” Jess said cheerfully.

“You’re so bright,” said Emily.

“I thought we said no hectoring.”

“It’s not hectoring—it’s my … I just want you to do well.”

“I would rather be well than do well,” Jess said beatifically, and laughed at her sister’s yelp of frustration.

“You actually seek out platitudes.”

“I only do it to annoy.”

“But you believe that stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s the disturbing part, isn’t it?” Jess said wickedly.

Emily folded her arms across her chest. “When are you going to embark on a career?”

“Don’t you think,” Jess asked, with just the slightest edge in her voice, “that you have enough career for both of us?”

“I worry about you.”

“Well, I worry about you,” Jess countered. “You’re in this crazy industry where people eat each other alive. No, wait”—she stopped Emily from interrupting—“it’s in all the newspapers and the chat groups. Microsoft taking out Netscape. Veritech suing Janus.”

“You heard about that?” Frankly, Emily was surprised to hear that Jess followed any news at all.

“Yeah, I read this whole article—did you see it? Anything you can do I can do better: Janus takes on the storage sector. Veritech fights back. It’s online, on The Motley Fool.”

“You read The Motley Fool?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Jess asked. “Actually,” she confessed, “Dad sent me the link. Are you really suing Janus for eighty million dollars? Isn’t that, like, an expensive thing to do?”

“It’s just part of doing business,” said Emily, affecting a calm she didn’t feel. Lawsuits, particularly the big one against Janus, were a huge drag on Veritech’s finances and corporate energy. “We can afford the legal fees, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not what I mean. There you are, getting and spending, and you’re with this guy who’s in the thick of it—but you’re not really with him, because he’s so careerist he won’t come out here to be with you.”

Emily started walking, brisk and purposeful, as though they had to complete the trail loop. “I don’t think you should bring boyfriends into this. I don’t think you should talk about Jonathan—who actually works—when you’re with someone with no visible source of income or direction….”

“Direction! Leon travels for his beliefs. Jonathan travels for his share price. There’s a difference, don’t you think? Leon has a cause. Jonathan is just another greedy, techno-freak gazillionaire.”

They waited on a wooden bridge for a Japanese family taking pictures. A couple sauntered along, with hands in each other’s back pockets. A small girl, only three or four years old, sprinted past in a green hooded sweater, and her little feet beat against the wood planks as she raced away, to hide, to fly. Her parents called after her nervously, “Wait for us, honey. Not so fast!” Now Emily stood perfectly still, and she said nothing, and Jess knew by her silence that she was truly angry.

“You worry about me,” Jess ventured nervously, “so why can’t I worry about you?”

Emily said nothing.

“You know Mom would have hated both of them,” Jess cajoled.

“She would have hated Leon,” Emily said, with feeling. “She would have despised him.”

“She’d have hated Jonathan too.”

“How do you know that? You don’t know that.”

“Find someone musical,” Jess quoted, for she was not above citing Gillian’s letters in a pinch, and she knew Jonathan could not carry a tune. “Find someone giving. Find someone who will sacrifice for you.”

“You do look at the letters,” Emily said.

“Every once in a while.”

“And what do you think?”

Jess watched a thick, yellow banana slug squirm at her feet. “I think, probably, we aren’t turning out the way that she intended.”

“You could change that.”

“I could? How about you?”

“I’m going to marry him.”

“You keep saying that.” Jess glanced at Emily’s sparkling ring. “Do you have a date?”

Emily shook her head. “I can’t—”

“Good for you!”

“Shh!”

Jess couldn’t help smiling at the way Emily shushed her, even in front of trees.

“I meant we can’t set a date right now.” Neither she nor Jonathan could move cross-country yet. Not at this moment in their companies’ young lives. “We’re not ready.”

“This is true,” said Jess. “This is more than true. Jonathan will never be ready for you.”

“You don’t know him.”

“I know enough. I’ve known him for three years! And I told you—I read about him in the papers, taking down Green Knight….”

“The stuff in the papers isn’t true.”

“Couldn’t you just meet someone else?” Jess asked winsomely.

“You know, Jess,” Emily exploded, “I’m supposed to sit by while you drop out of school and move in with your tree lover, and it seems to me that, for someone who demands so much unconditional support, you are strangely judgmental. You stand here talking about the natural world, and how humanity is insignificant, and then you have the nerve to tell me what to do. How do you intend to change your life? Just what exactly is your plan?”

Jess thought for a moment. “All right,” she said. “You be my witness.”

With a sinking feeling Emily watched her sister place her right hand on Robert Frost. “This year,” Jess vowed, “I swear I will overcome my fear of climbing.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. I swear on …” Jess opened her book at random and looked inside. “I swear on a dimpled spider, fat and white, that I will climb this year.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“This year,” Jess said, “I’m going to climb Galadriel.”

“You need a job,” Emily told her.

“I have a job.”

“You need a regular income. And health insurance! What if something happens to you? What if, for example, you fall out of a redwood?”

“I’d just die,” said Jess dramatically, “so I wouldn’t need medical care.” When she saw the look on Emily’s face she amended. “Sorry.”

“Please don’t face your fears.”

“I want to.” Jess looked up at the forest canopy.

“Jess, I’m serious. You’re making a huge mistake. You’re afraid of heights for a reason. You of all people should not be climbing in Wood Rose Glen. And don’t think you’re going to impress Leon.”

“This has nothing to do with him!” Jess retorted. “This is just for me.”

“Oh, God.”

“It might sound New Ageist, but I don’t want to live like a coward on the ground.”

“I don’t want you to crack your head open.”

“Since when are you so risk averse?” Jess asked. “Wasn’t coming out to California a risk? Wasn’t founding Veritech a risk?”

“I never risked my life,” said Emily.

“Okay, granted, technically you risk other people’s money, but you put your life into the company, right? You invest yourself. Isn’t that true? In Veritech, in the stock market, in Jonathan.”

Emily looked at Jess as if to say: Where do you come from? Her analogies were so fanciful. “Yes, I’m sure every choice involves some kind of risk—but tree climbing is life-and-death.”

Jess stood on the wood bridge and saw birds flying in the forest light. She saw herself flying upward, ascending to the treetops in the clouds.

But Emily interrupted, “You fall from a tree like this, that’s it. You don’t get another chance.”

“And don’t you think you can die too?” Jess countered. “Don’t you think your decisions are life-and-death too?”

17

Emily did not treat business decisions as life-and-death. If she was nervous, she didn’t let it show. She worked with cool confidence and inspired everyone around her. Her success inspired her employees to start dot-coms of their own. Even Charlie, the company chef, launched his own restaurant, and flush with stock, Laura’s husband dropped out of his accounting program.

Laura was a little anxious when Kevin left school, and jittery as well about purchasing a two-million-dollar fixer-upper in Los Altos.

“We always said that you would teach accounting,” Laura reminded her husband at their wood-grain kitchen table in Escondido Village. “That’s why we came here.”

“I don’t like accounting,” Kevin confessed.

Laura set down her mug of herbal tea. “You never said that before.”

“I couldn’t afford to say it before.”

Laura knit her brow. She had a gentle manner, and her sweet voice belied her reservations. “I’m just not sure we should change all our plans so quickly.”

“What plans? Our plans were to have a family and be happy,” Kevin said. “We have the family, and now we have a chance to build a house and spend time with the kids. We’re going to have a swimming pool, teach the kids to swim. You’ll have a dream kitchen!”

“I don’t need a fancy kitchen.” She glanced at her cluttered counters.

“Don’t you want more space?”

“I’d be happy with a regular kitchen with more space, not a—”

“But you deserve one. You’re amazing, Laura. Just think what you could do with counter space and pull-out pantries, and you could have a whole baking station with a marble inset….”

Laura smiled ruefully. “Stop watching those kitchen shows.”

“We’ve had this amazing luck,” said Kevin. “Don’t be afraid to do something with it.”

“But it just seems …” She couldn’t help feeling that their ship had come in rather suddenly. Laura had taken the job at Veritech only to pay the bills while Kevin was in school, but working for Emily had proved more interesting than Laura had ever dreamed. How mysterious life was. Laura and Kevin still looked like the couple in their wedding pictures, those young sweethearts who could not afford floral arrangements and decorated the tables at their reception with autumn leaves, but now, they were interviewing architects. Kevin clipped pictures from magazines and talked about a kitchen opening out onto the garden, an airy light-filled space with double ovens and a breakfast bar. “It just seems like this will cost a fortune,” Laura said.

“But we have a fortune,” he reminded her.

“I’m afraid …”

“Afraid of what?”

“I’m worried about spoiling the children,” Laura said. “I want them to do chores.”

“Definitely. Everybody pitches in,” said Kevin.

“I would like a better kitchen,” Laura admitted, “but I want everything else to stay the same.”

Laura’s kind of constancy was Emily’s goal at Veritech. Level-headed optimism. Veritech’s products were essential, its culture young and happy, liberal in all the right ways—open, green, fun-loving, civic-minded; its people were building a corporation not only great, but good. Idealistic, and entirely invested in her creation, Emily believed this. After all, she had named Veritech to soar above the rest—to merge technology with truth.

Her concerns for Jess were real, but she went to work in high spirits, thrilled with Veritech’s price, its promise, its purchase on the future. She loved her job; she loved her colleagues. Even Alex had calmed down, working in his intense and solitary way on his own project.

When Alex presented his new work on fingerprinting to the board, Emily had settled into her cushioned chair, expecting the full flowering of her password-authentication idea. No one was more surprised than she when Alex unveiled his unadulterated electronic-surveillance plans.

He had spent six months on his prototype, a surveillance tool designed to record every time a user touched a cache of data, and to follow the user’s movements through the cache without his or her knowledge. A “lookup” function identified the user, a “markup” function linked the user’s searches and retrievals to those of others, and the whole system was so devious and paranoid that Emily interrupted him in the boardroom. “What happened to Verify? What happened to the password applications?”

And Milton chimed in, “Have you considered privacy at all?”

“Remember,” said Bruno, “we are like a strongbox, a safety-deposit box. We want to be as private as a Swiss bank account for our customers. We don’t want to sell the keys.”

Alex stood before them with the last slide of his PowerPoint presentation hovering on the wall, and nervously he clicked his laser pointer on and off, pointing the red light at the floor. “Look, a parking garage has security cameras. What if every car inside had its own security camera too, and when I took out my car I knew who had parked next to me, and who tried to hot-wire me, and who maybe dented me?”

“You’re talking about spyware, aren’t you?” said Emily. “You’re talking about bundling our storage services with spyware. That’s not what we discussed. That’s not—”

“That’s not what you wanted?” Alex shot back, and she felt his anger and his disdain. Who did she think she was? He was the artist here.

“You are suggesting we live with little cameras everywhere,” said Bruno.

Tight-lipped, Alex looked at Emily. He seemed to her at once bashful and arrogant. “It’s fair to everyone,” he said, “if everyone is watching.”

“It can’t be legal,” Emily told him. “And if it is legal, then it shouldn’t be.”

“That’s what Martin’s for,” said Alex, referring to the company’s in-house counsel.

“No,” murmured Emily, furious. “No. We won’t pursue this.”

“We won’t pursue this?” Alex cried in disbelief. His Russian accent flared, along with his temper. “Just like that? You liked the idea before. You were the one suggesting I develop it.” He snapped his laptop shut.

“We discussed how you would develop it,” said Emily. “We agreed that you would have free rein. You ignored everything I said, and you went off and did exactly what you wanted.”

“I don’t work for you, Emily,” Alex declared as Milton and Bruno looked on.

“Yes, but I thought that you were working with me!”

“You don’t design my projects,” Alex said.

“You lied to me! You agreed to do something that—”

“I never lied to you.”

“You told me you were working on a plan you had no intention of following. And it’s a dangerous plan. It’s a bad plan. It’s not where we want to go.”

“Why is that?” Alex demanded. “Because you’re prejudiced! You think the storage business should be warm and friendly, right? We should sell people what they want to hear.” His eyelashes were so long that they brushed against the lenses of his glasses. He was twenty-three years old. “This product doesn’t make you feel good—is that what you’re telling me?”

“Let’s take some time,” Bruno told them, and in the heat of battle they turned on him together, surprised at the interruption.

The war waged all that day and the next. Alex told Emily that she did not understand his project’s potential and thought she could dilute his ideas into some trivial password application. He said she did not care about innovation. He said that she masked her subjective opinions in ethical language, but she only did it to get her way. Finally, he stood in the parking lot next to his glossy black BMW, and he accused her of trying to manipulate him.

He stood close to her, too close. “You like my ideas when you think you can control them. When I express myself, you reject my projects out of hand.”

“I thought we were on the same page,” Emily said.

“You mean your page?”

“You said everything was going so well.”

“It was going well. Now you want to pull the plug on nine months’ work!”

“Could you stop blaming me for just a moment?” she retorted. “Could you just step back and consider what I’m saying?”

But he would not step back. “What you’re saying is totally defensive,” he told her. “You want to protect what Veritech has, and you won’t try anything new. Meanwhile the market is changing and you lag behind. We’re leaders now. Do you think that will last? Not if you’re afraid of innovation.”

“I’m not afraid of innovation,” she told him. “But we have to think about our direction.”

His face reddened. “Our direction means we’re going somewhere.”

“I don’t understand why you won’t listen to me,” she said.

“What? Do as you say? Obey you? Did you think you could manage me? Was that your idea? Why don’t you listen to me, for once? Or do you think I’m too young?”

Emily spoke quietly, although she didn’t feel quiet. “I thought I’d found a framework for you to pursue your work in keeping with Veritech’s goals.”

“I’m not interested in your frameworks, or your goals.” Alex clicked his BMW keys, and she saw the lights flash on and the driver’s seat adjust and the convertible top fold back like origami.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m leaving.” Alex got in the car and slammed the door.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m leaving Veritech.”

“Wait—”

“I’m tired of waiting.” He gunned his engine.

“Contractually, the work you do here stays here,” she reminded him. “Remember that.”

Like an angry teenager—no backward look, no seat belt, Alex roared away. If Emily could not contain him, he would take his brilliant, conspiratorial ideas elsewhere.

That was the frightening part—his dark imagination. Alex was so smart and irresponsible. It was obvious to Emily that bundling spyware with storage services was morally wrong. Why was that not obvious to him? It was obvious to her that she had encouraged his research, but never endorsed electronic fingerprinting as a product. Why then did he accuse her of leading him on? He was always projecting past the simple truth, sending her flowers, for example, after a Veritech party, where she made the mistake of dancing with him. But he’d behaved better the past few months. He had not e-mailed her excessively, or waited for her in the halls. She’d thought he was over his infatuation. Now, she sensed the situation was much worse. His voice, his stance, his eyes were threatening. What if he drove back again and found her? He had never hurt her, but for the first time, she began to feel that he might. The parking lot was well lit, and full of cars, but what had she been doing, fighting with him there, alone? She retreated to her Audi, and locked the doors.

She checked the time and dialed Jonathan on her cell. It was just after ten at night back east. “Hi,” she said, “it’s me.”

“Hold on,” he said. “Let me get inside my office.”

“I told Alex we weren’t going forward with fingerprinting.”

He didn’t answer for a moment.

“Are you there? Jonathan?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said.

“I feel terrible,” she said.

“Why? What did he do to you?” Jonathan asked sharply.

“He didn’t do anything specifically to me. He said he’s leaving.”

“Good.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you ‘don’t know’?”

“I don’t know if I can let him go. It would be such a loss,” she said. “A tremendous loss.”

“What—the fingerprinting stuff?”

“No. I mean Alex. The surveillance project is all wrong for us.”

“Okay.” Jonathan wasn’t just relieved. He was delighted, liberated from the weight of Emily’s proprietary secret. He had been so careful for so long, and now he felt that electronic fingerprinting was practically in the public domain. “Forget fingerprinting, and tell Alex to fuck off and die.”

She laughed a little. “Oh,” she said, “I wish it were that easy.”

“It can be,” Jonathan told her.

“I wouldn’t let him have his way,” said Emily.

“Of course not.”

“And he absolutely could not accept my point of view.”

“Sweetie, he’s a shark. He’s not going to change course, ever. Why are you surprised?”

She was surprised because she was Emily, and she did not share Jonathan’s frank assessment of coworkers as losers, whiners, bozos, sharks. No, she imagined people were rational and courteous, as she was, and when they proved otherwise, she assumed that she could influence them to become that way. Dangerous thinking. When she was truthful, she expected to hear the truth. Reasonable, she expected reasonable behavior in return. She was young, inventive, fantastically successful. She trusted in the world, believing in poetic justice—that good ideas blossomed and bore fruit, while dangerous schemes were meant to wither on the vine. She had passions and petty jealousies like everybody else, but she was possessed of a serene rationality. At three, she had listened while her mother sang “Greensleeves” in the dark, and she’d asked: “Why are you singing ‘Greensleeves’ when my nightgown is blue?” Then Gillian had changed the song to “Bluesleeves,” and Emily had drifted off. Those songs were over now, Gillian long gone. Despite this loss—because of it—Emily was still that girl, seeking consonance and symmetry, logic, light.

18

“What’s that noise?” George asked.

“I have no idea.” Jess strained her ears to hear an odd trilling in the distance.

“Is that a cell phone?”

“Oh, it must be mine.” Jess jumped up. “Sorry.” She tripped over Sandra’s cat, and he snarled in outrage as she ran to the entryway where she and George and Colm had left their coats and bags. The outside pocket of her backpack glowed. “Hello? Hello? Hi, Emily. No, I didn’t lose it. I forgot I had it.” She held the phone too tightly and it beeped. “Could I call you later? I’m working…. Yes. It’s a huge project and we’re on deadline! Why are you laughing? Do you think I’m joking?” Jess looked back at the pair of camping tables George had set up in the living room. The tables were piled with folios and quartos arranged by language and by century. Colm was carrying in more books from the kitchen. “Seriously, I can’t talk,” Jess said. “I’ll call you later.”

They had just two more days to appraise the cookbooks. Colm and Jess were carrying and sorting, and George was typing in titles on his laptop. Conditions were difficult. Sandra hovered. Colm was allergic to the cat. They couldn’t wear shoes in the house, so they padded around in thick socks. In January Sandra seemed to skimp on heat. Colm wore a vest over his button-down shirt, and a tweed jacket on top of that. George wore a thick black pullover, and Jess a giant brown cardigan with a red knit hat pulled down over her ears. George had to suppress a smile the first time he saw the hat.

“What?” Jess demanded.

“Nothing.” George tried not to look at her.

They worked long hours like a sequestered jury, deliberating at the tables with copious evidence before them. There were eighteenth-century German cookbooks with fold-out diagrams of table settings, plates and platters arrayed like planets, little dishes orbiting larger courses. There were cookbooks small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, and others gargantuan, so that George used special foam book cradles to hold them open and protect their bindings. To assess these volumes was to consider tastes both delicate and omnivorous, to view exquisite illustrations like the French engravings of dessert spoons, or grotesque—like the plate in Le Livre Cuisinaire of tête de veau en tortue, a savory tart garnished with red crustaceans, a still life with claws and tentacles and beady eyes. The task would have been daunting even without the collector’s bookmarks, notes, and clippings; his menus on scrap paper, where he drew up imaginary feasts with inky thumbnails of partridges and steaming puddings: Pudding boiled, pudding of cream, pudding quaking, pudding shaking … Often as the collector wrote, his firm hand grew tremulous. His print would wobble, and his notes burst into erotopoetic menus, as recitative lifts into song:

First course:

Rabbits

Second:

Cockles

Third:

Loin of Veal

Fourth:

Quails

Fifth:

Sparrows

Sixth:

Jellies

When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

And therewithal so sweetly did me kiss,

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

“He knew his Wyatt.” Colm leaned back in his chair, pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up, ran his hand through his thick brown hair. Young fogey that he was, nearly British after his long studies of English literary history, he flushed red in patches on his Shropshire-lad cheeks, and fanned himself with one of George’s auction catalogs.

“Did you see this?” Jess plucked a small sheaf of notes from The Accomplisht Cook. The papers bookmarked a passage titled “To dress Tortoise.” Cast off the head, feet, and tail, and boil it in water, wine, and salt, being boil’d pull the shell asunder, and pick the meat from the skins, and the gall from the liver, save the eggs whole if a female, and stew the eggs, meat and liver in a dish with some grated nutmeg, a little sweet herbs minced small, and some sweet butter … “He went to town with this one.” Jess read the collector’s notes under her breath. “To begin with, Turtle soup, / to sail with, Turtle soup … / to dine on mince, and slices of quince, / to eat with a runcible spoon … What is a runcible spoon anyway?” She unfolded the collector’s notes to see his drawing. “That’s not a spoon! That’s more of a … hmm …”

“Focus,” George admonished as he examined Anna Wecker’s tiny 1679 Neu, Köstlich, und nutzliches Koch-buch. Worms had drilled through the later chapters, and the title page was much worn, but George marveled at the gorgeous typeface, so feminine, capitals all curves.

They had to hurry, but the longer they looked, the more convinced they became that they were holding treasures in their hands, and the more convinced they became, the harder it was to evaluate the books. The recipes entranced, and the collector’s notes distracted. They could not stop peeking at McClintock’s black-ink menus and thumbnail sketches.

“Jess!” George told her. “Put that back.”

She took a last look at the turtle-soup drawings, replaced them, and turned to another treasure, a fragile American quarto titled The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by “A Lady.” The book fell open in her hands to “Chap. XV.: Of Making Cakes &c.” To Ice a great Cake, Jess read, Take the whites of twenty-four eggs … and even as she read, new sketches fluttered onto her lap. A woman’s arm, a torso, three different drawings of a pair of legs. Legs crossed, legs spread, legs pressed close together—each study small, but revealing—tendrils of pubic hair, pointed toes—all drafted with a naturalist’s attention.

“I wonder who she was.”

“That’s Hannah Glasse,” George said after a quick search online. “And watch the binding please.”

“I didn’t mean the author.” Jess folded the little nudes away again.

“Oh, my God,” George gasped. “This is a signed Mrs. Fisher.”

Jess leaned over the table to view the book he held open in his hands. The book was slender, the pages smooth and unspotted, with clear simple type. Recipes for Sweet Pickle Pears, Sweet Pickle Prunes, Sweet Watermelon Rind Pickle, Onion Pickles.

Colm shook his head. “I think you’ve got to bring somebody in.”

For once they could speak freely. Sandra was tending the front yard—at least for the moment. She never stepped outside for long, and when she did, hacking back the blackberry canes, she didn’t venture far. Through the window they could see her in her old straw hat.

George told Colm, “If we bring in a specialist, we risk another rival.” He’d informed Sandra that he knew Raj was looking at the books, and he’d tried to find out who else she had invited in, but she only turned away.

“You could get a scholar and pay him up front as a consultant and he doesn’t get to bid,” said Colm.

“It wouldn’t work that way.”

Colm whipped out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I think you’d get a more accurate estimate—maybe lower than what we would come up with.”

“Maybe higher.” George turned back to the reference books and catalogs in front of him. “I just don’t know what Raj is offering,” he murmured. “If I had a …”

His voice faded as Jess returned to the kitchen for another stack. How strange the disemboweled room looked with its cabinets open, emptied of their treasures. A skin-deep kitchen, cupboards bare, while the countertops remained cluttered with cheap cookware, spotted bananas, coupons, receipts, bills. A calligraphed card lay open next to the toaster.

“Come in here! You have to see this.”

“Don’t tell me you found another Gouffé,” Colm called back.

“No, it’s really strange.”

“Could you just bring it out?” George didn’t want to stop typing.

But she was afraid to pick up the card. Dramatically, she thought: What if Sandra caught her prying? What if Jess’s fingerprints were on it? “No, you have to come here.”

Reluctantly, Colm came in. He stood with Jess and the two of them gazed at the card. “George …,” Colm called in a weary voice, “you’d better have a look.”

Evidently unworried about fingerprints, George picked up the card and read it twice.

A DONATION TO THE GAY AND LESBIAN LEGAL ALLIANCE

HAS BEEN MADE

IN HONOR OF SANDRA MCCLINTOCK

BY

RAJEEV CHANDRA

“Raj!” George was amazed at his ingenious friend.

“I didn’t know Sandra was gay,” Jess said.

The three of them stared at the card in George’s hand. “I don’t know what she is,” George said at last.

“Maybe we should find out,” Colm suggested.

“We aren’t even half done.”

“Why isn’t Raj sorting?” Jess asked.

“I’m sure he’s seen everything,” George said nervously.

“How do you know?”

Because that would be just like Raj, George thought, to assess everything in advance and on his own time and then make his own preemptive offer. “He’s very experienced,” George said. “And very clever.”

“He knows Sandra,” Jess said. Softly, Geoffrey slipped into the room. On little cat feet, he sprang onto the kitchen counter. Unconsciously, Jess lowered her voice in front of the cat. “What have we found out about her?”

“I know enough,” George said. “She needs money. She wants to play me against Raj for the best price. She claims she’s afraid to sell the books. She’s nuts.”

“That’s not the way to think about it,” Jess said. “You’ve got everything backward.”

“Oh, really?”

“This strategy of assessing books is wrong.”

“And what would you suggest, Jess?” George inquired.

“Hmm,” Jess said, delaying her answer just a moment, for the simple reason that she enjoyed seeing George exasperated. “I would suggest that instead of focusing on the collection, you think about the owner.”

“The lichenologist.”

“No, I mean Sandra. She’s the one you should assess. You need to figure out what she really wants.”

“Money,” said George.

“That would be easy,” Jess said. “I don’t think it’s purely money that she’s after. I think she wants to tell someone her story.”

“Oh, God,” said George.

“She wants to be heard.”

“Obviously, Raj has been listening.” Colm replaced the calligraphed card on the counter.

“But she’s looking for the best listener.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” said George, “because hearing this woman’s superstitious, delusional …”

“How do you know that she’s delusional?” Jess asked him.

“I don’t have patience,” George said.

“Don’t you want this collection?” Jess pressed. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

They heard Sandra at the door, and rushed back to their places.

Sandra did not say hello. Well aware they had been whispering, she set her hat atop the bookcase full of cut glass and marched upstairs into—her bedroom? Her study? They heard her shut the door.

Jess and Colm looked at each other. Jess mouthed to George, “Go talk to her.”

George shook his head and put his finger to his lips.

You’re making a mistake, she scribbled on a note card. They all looked at Sandra’s closed door. Something was up, Jess thought. One of them would have to speak to Sandra. One of them had to learn the thing Raj had already discovered: her history, her crisis, her fantasy.

George tried to keep working but he stopped, hands hovering above the keyboard.

Colm took off his glasses. He had to sneeze, but he could not. Then he had to sneeze again. He saw cat hair everywhere. “Send her,” he said, and he meant Jess. “Send her.”

It was one thing to theorize about Sandra, and quite another to climb the creaky blond wood stairs and face her closed door. “Sandra,” Jess called softly, but she heard no sound.

She descended the stairs halfway and looked back. Colm pantomimed his suggestion to knock again.

Up she went. “Sandra,” Jess called, knocking louder.

“It’s unlocked,” Sandra said, and Jess let herself in, shutting the door behind her.

The study was so tight that when Sandra turned around in her swivel chair, she almost ran over Jess’s toes. The room was slanted, tucked under the heavy angled roof of the house; its single window, large and low, looking out on the riotous garden; the desk, rough boards, built under the window. The walls were lined with scientific journals. The Lichenologist, International Journal of Mycology and Lichenology, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Moss and Liverwort. A framed black-and-white photo stood on one shelf. A serious and homely looking man in wire-rimmed glasses.

Sandra was wearing a long flowing batik dress, but her posture was schoolmarmish as she sat up paying bills, stamping and addressing envelopes; her mouth tight, puckered in concentration. Jess had a fleeting memory—or was it her imagination? The image of her mother sewing, with her mouth tight, full of pins.

“What is it?” Sandra asked, glancing up.

Jess took off her knit hat and held it in her hands. “Your cookbooks are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.”

“Have you seen a lot of cookbooks?”

“They’re the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen,” Jess amended. “I just want to assure you that we are treating them with respect. And we realize that they have sentimental value.”

“They don’t have sentimental value for me,” Sandra said, and she turned back to her bills.

“Oh!” Jess could not conceal her surprise. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“I misread you,” Jess said. “I thought you were upset.”

“I am upset.” Sandra’s voice caught. “I’m upset about my daughter. I’m upset about my uncle. I’m upset about the situation.”

Jess might have escaped then into the other room. Perhaps she should have, but she could hear the desperation in Sandra’s voice.

She knelt down level with Sandra. “What is the situation?”

“I promised my uncle I wouldn’t sell.”

“Do you think maybe he would understand?”

Sandra thought about this. “No,” she said. “He was in the hospital. He weighed nothing. He had no children. He was ninety-three years old. He was very clear. He said, ‘Sandra, you’re my only niece. I’m leaving you the house. Do anything you want with it, but don’t sell the books.’”

“Wow,” said Jess.

Sandra nodded grimly, appreciating Jess’s awestruck response. “He said, ‘Promise me that you’ll take care of them.’”

“But did you have any idea?”

“No!”

“Didn’t you come over to the house to see them? Didn’t you ever see them in the kitchen?”

“I lived in Oakland. He lived here, and he was reclusive. We weren’t close. I came twice, and both times he offered me iced tea. He never invited me inside his kitchen. He wouldn’t even let me clear away my glass.”

“When he said don’t sell the books, you thought he meant this stuff?” Jess pointed to the study bookcases.

“Of course.”

“How can you make a promise when you don’t know exactly what you’re promising?”

Sandra closed her eyes. “That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I keep telling myself. I’m afraid of him.”

Jess nodded. Instinctively, she understood what George did not. That as far as Sandra was concerned, Tom McClintock still hovered in the house.

“I believe in past lives,” Sandra explained, and she opened her gray eyes. “I lived before.”

Like a girl in a labyrinth, Jess tried to follow. “Really?”

“I believe we’ve all lived before, and will again.”

Someone else might have laughed, or cringed, or backed away. Jess asked, “What were you?”

“A Russian princess,” Sandra said quite seriously. “In the days of the Tsars.”

Which Tsar? Jess wondered, but thought it best not to inquire. She knew the kind of Russian princess Sandra meant: the kind who wore silk and velvet and danced in palaces and rode in sleighs through fairy-tale snows in the early pages of Tolstoy’s novels, until narrowly escaping execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. “What will you be next?”

“That’s what frightens me,” said Sandra. “Every life hinges on the one before. And what I do now will shape …”

“I understand,” said Jess. Emily would have asked: Why is it that those of us who were serfs in some past life never remember the experience? But Jess thought: How dreadful to feel that guilt accrues like debt from this world to the next.

“Do you think your uncle is living a new life?”

Sandra nodded.

Jess looked at the photograph on the desk. Unsmiling, weak-chinned, the lichenologist seemed to peer out at the world from behind his glasses. “And do you think he’s sort of—watching you?”

She closed her eyes again.

“And you’ll join him there—and then maybe he’ll punish you?”

She closed her eyes tighter.

“You had no idea what he was giving you,” Jess said. “How could you have any idea what these books are worth?”

Sandra’s eyes popped open. “How much are they worth?” she asked, and Jess felt a prick of fear; she felt the difficulty of her position, for Sandra was no longer keening and mystical.

“We’ll have to finish the appraisal,” Jess said cautiously, “and then George will make the offer.”

“I don’t like him,” Sandra said in a low voice. “I don’t think I can trust him.”

“You can,” Jess assured her. “He may come off as impatient or arrogant at times, but he’s a good man.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve worked for him more than a year.”

“And what do you know about him?” Sandra asked.

Jess considered the question. “He’s old-fashioned,” she said at last. “He has a sense of history. If he had a past life, he would have been a gentleman—even though he acts so adversarial. He loves books more than anything in the world.”

“But will he keep the collection intact?”

“I think so.”

“Will he promise?”

Jess thought about the books George flipped regularly, the Whitman he had sold within days of acquisition, the small collection of early twentieth-century poets he had bought from a dealer in Marin and quickly dispersed. “You’ll have to talk to him,” Jess said.

“I don’t like talking to him,” said Sandra. “I don’t want to sell these books. Do you understand? They’re private. They are my uncle’s past life.”

“Then maybe he doesn’t need them anymore?” Jess ventured.

Sandra bristled, and instantly Jess saw her mistake. In Sandra’s mind everything was necessary. Every artifact counted in some grand celestial tally.

“I don’t want to sell them. I would never sell them for myself. My daughter needs money.”

For a moment Jess wondered whether this daughter was real. Perhaps she was imaginary too? A past daughter? But she followed Sandra down this passageway as well. She chose to believe her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s happened to her?”

“She’s losing her children,” Sandra said.

“What do you mean? Divorce?”

“Leslie raised them, but her partner is the biological mother.”

So Leslie is the one Raj meant to honor, Jess thought.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” said Sandra.

“I don’t,” Jess admitted humbly.

“Leslie was the one who cared for them. She was the one who woke with them and fed them, and pushed them in the stroller to the playground every day. She was the stay-at-home mother. She dedicated her life to those boys. They’re all she’s got, and her ex took them to New Jersey.”

That’s why she needs money. Legal fees, Jess thought.

“I’m worried,” Sandra said. “I can’t sleep at night. My daughter hasn’t seen her children in over a year. And I’m afraid …” Here, her voice broke entirely. “They’re only five and three. I’m sure they don’t remember her.”

Jess answered gently. “You never know what children can remember. I lost my mother when I was five, but I still remember her. I think I remember her sewing, and I remember standing on a chair and baking with her. And also …” Jess searched for another memory she could put into words, some event she might produce, although most of her memories were flickers: light and shadow, hedges along the sidewalk, her mother’s white hands pulling her away when she tried to lick—what was it?—a fence? She loved the tang of metal. The ladder to the slide?

“You’re missing the point,” said Sandra.

Again Jess felt that this was a test, and it was no ordinary exam: not a test of what Jess knew, but of what Sandra believed. “Your situation is more complicated than your uncle could have imagined,” said Jess. “You wouldn’t be selling for a profit. You’d sell to pay your lawyers. In that case, don’t you think that he’d approve?”

Sandra searched Jess’s face.

“I don’t know Raj. I don’t know what Raj would do with these books, but George appreciates them. He’ll study them—and so will I, and so will Colm. We’re not just collectors. We’re readers.”

Sandra nodded.

Emboldened, Jess continued, “And wherever your uncle is, he’ll understand, because the point is, children shouldn’t have to remember their mother.”

Then tears started in Sandra’s eyes. All the tension seemed to leave her body, and she sighed, a drawn-out sigh. “Yes,” she said, and then, almost a sob, “Yes. That’s true.”

When Sandra opened the study door, George and Colm started up. Colm raised his eyebrows questioningly; George searched her face, anxious for the verdict. Jess didn’t say a word in front of Sandra. She couldn’t gloat. She pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. Oh, she’d done well—and George and Colm didn’t even know it yet. There they were, waiting in suspense. She bit her lip, determined to keep a poker face, but her cheeks began to dimple anyway. She’d passed the test: She’d got Sandra’s Sphinxian riddle right. Princess in the morning. Bitter in the afternoon. Grandma in the evening. What am I? Lonely.

Eager, mystified, George looked at Jess, and she met his gaze. Who knew that Jess, who was such a terrible salesman, would be a brilliant buyer? Jess hadn’t known herself—but here she was, victorious. Didn’t you think that I’d win her over? Jess asked George with her eyes. Didn’t you think that I could win these books for you?