alphabetically from Aquinas to Wittgenstein. She cut up cardboard boxes and crafted dividers to separate Aristotle from Bacon, Kant from Kierkegaard, and taped up little signs printed with a laundry marker: ACHTUNG!
“Oh, I didn’t see you.”
“Sorry.” She scrambled to her feet. “I was trying to figure out whether to shelve this in Religion or Music.”
“I wonder if it’s worth having sections for just two or three books,” said George, as he passed into the other room.
She took this as criticism and called after him, “Maybe some of the sections are small now, but they could grow.”
Later, she appeared at his desk and said, “I know the sections help.”
“The main ones are useful.”
“Well, if you think they’re useful, you could thank me.” He said nothing and she added, “Gratitude is important.”
“I agree.” He turned back to the package he was opening.
He liked provoking her, just a little. Caught between polite dignity and anger, Jess was very cute. This was despicable on his part; she should probably sue him. He was male and he was straight; two strikes against him right there. And he was unmarried, although not for lack of trying. Admittedly, all the trying had been on the part of his girlfriends. George had always wanted to get married—but not to them! Until quite recently he’d begun each relationship hoping that at last he’d found the one that he was looking for. He had heard the other narrative—the one women told—about the story of a man who moves on restlessly, seeking pleasure, shutting his eyes to the life he might have shared, but George knew differently. In his mind he tried again and again to marry; he kept looking, but all he found was neurosis and neediness. He had lived for two years with a woman named Andrea who suffered from depression. Later he’d been involved with an anthropologist who threatened suicide when he broke up with her. And then there was Margaret. Generally he avoided thinking about her. He almost never spoke of her, even to himself. Frayed by long experience with the angry other sex, George preferred to keep his distance, especially if he liked a woman. He knew that everything he said or did could be used against him.
She hurried in one day, out of breath. “Sorry I’m late. I just finished reading
“Is it such a page-turner?”
“Actually, yes, once you get into it….”
“I’ve always thought that Hume is overrated.”
She stared at him in astonishment and then realized that he was making fun of her. “When I told that lady I thought Henry James was overrated, I just meant his later work.”
“Good to know,” said George.
Jess stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, then turned on her heels and disappeared into Fiction.
He could see that she had something on her mind, because at the end of the day she began hovering again. She had a way of turning up behind his desk, as if she wanted to see what he was reading. He found it irritating when she appeared suddenly like that, even though he did the same to her. He buried his book under papers and auction catalogs and spun his old swivel chair around.
“Yes, Jessamine?”
“I was wondering something.”
“Does it have to do with money?”
His directness startled her. “My sister’s company is going public, and I can buy one hundred shares at eighteen dollars each, so I need eighteen hundred dollars.” Jess said it all in a rush. “I was wondering if you could kind of give me my future paychecks in advance. And then I’d pay you back.”
“Do I know you’d still be working for me?”
Jess nodded solemnly.
“Really? Then you’d be my longest-lasting employee.”
“Oh, I could pay you back right away because the shares are going way up.”
“What’s the company?”
“It’s Veritech.”
“Veritech! That’s your sister?”
“Yeah, she’s the CEO.”
“She could just give you the money herself.”
“She wants me to stop thinking like a student.”
He suppressed a smile and said nothing.
“So will you?”
“No,” George said slowly. “I think your parents would be a better bet.”
She shook her head.
“Well, you don’t want to ask, but they’re the ones to do it.”
“Eighteen hundred is less than the complete Ruskin,” Jess blurted out. “You want two thousand for that.”
“The Ruskin is thirty-seven volumes in morocco,” George said.
“So?”
“Just ask your mom and dad.” She frowned.
“Here, I’ll show you.” George unlocked his glass-fronted bookcase and took down the first volume and handed it to her.
Her fingers couldn’t help caressing the red leather, as he knew they would. Unconsciously, she lifted the book to her face and brushed it against her cheek.
“Ruskin’s worth two thousand, don’t you think?”
“No,” said Jess. “I don’t like him,” and she returned the book.
“I think I’m going to make Yorick’s by appointment only,” George told his friend Nick Eberhart that Sunday at Nick’s house, a Craftsman Style extravaganza. Nick was younger than George, and taller. When he started to lose his hair he had shaved his head so that he had a sleek and streamlined look. He had left Microsoft some years after George and amused himself with designing and selling screen savers: fish that appeared to swim across the computer monitor, shooting stars, flying toasters with tiny wings. After the flying toasters became the subject of a contentious lawsuit with another screen-saver company, Nick gave up the business and began dabbling as a private investor. He built his house a few blocks away from George’s place and became a model citizen, serving on the neighborhood council. A couple of times a week, he and George went running in Tilden Park.
“It’s cute the way you call it running,” said Nick’s wife, Julia, and she laughed as she went searching for Nick’s knee braces. Julia was a curiosity to George. Ten years younger than Nick, she was blond, athletic, green- eyed. A Jewish girl from Malibu.
George remembered the housewives of his youth. His own mother, Shirley, for example. She and her friends had raised the children and looked after their husbands. They’d volunteered in the schools, maintained the social fabric of the neighborhood. Remembered birthdays, planned parties, kept track of what belonged to whom and who belonged to which. Long before George heard of feminism, his mother had taught him the plight of women. Shirley had been unusually direct, Midwestern.
