“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
First course:
Second:
Third:
Fourth:
Fifth:
Sixth:
“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
