“It couldn’t have been bitter like real marmalade,” Jess said.
“You don’t get along with him, do you?” George said.
“No,” Jess confessed. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t like me very much.”
George trapped her legs between his underneath the table. “That can’t be true.”
“Well,” said Jess, “he’s all computers. He’s all math, and I’m humanities. He’s all for financial independence—and I am too! But I’m not … really independent yet. He has no time for religion, philosophy, or poetry. Fortunately, he’s got Emily.”
“You must take after your mother,” George said.
“Maybe.”
“And he loved her.”
“I think so,” Jess said. “But who knows? It was such a long time ago.”
“When he reads your essay, he’ll understand what you can do,” George said.
“I don’t care whether he reads my essay or not.” Jess drained her glass and he saw that her face was flushed. “You understand what I can do.”
“That’s a complicated thing to say.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I can’t take his place,” George said warily.
Jess slipped off her shoes and rubbed her bare feet against George’s ankles until he couldn’t help smiling. “I never asked you to.”
Giddy with each other and the wine, they strolled outside through the Presidio, the old fort now housing restaurants and galleries. Jess explained that she wanted to devise a matrix for scarcity and abundance, frugality and profligacy. She thought that sweetness represented, and in some periods misrepresented, a sense of surplus and shared pleasure. “I don’t think taste is purely biological,” she said. “I think it’s economically, historically, and culturally constructed as well. Sweetness means different things depending on availability, custom, farming, trade….”
She was shivering, and George took off his jacket. “Here, sweetness.” He helped her into it and laughed at the way her hands disappeared inside the sleeves.
“Context is key—so the question is, What carries over? What can we still know about sweet and sour? Bitterness. What persists from generation to generation? Do we taste the same things?”
He kissed her, sucking her lower lip and then her tongue. “I think so,” he said. “Yes.”
“Wait, I’m not finished.”
“Continue,” he said. “Please.”
Testing herself, pushing back against her fear of heights, she climbed atop the thick two-foot wall edging the Presidio’s park, and walked above him, while he held her hand, steadying her from below.
“You see, I’m fine walking on this wall,” she declared, even as she gripped his fingers. “You see? I’ve been practicing, and I can climb very well.”
George looked up at her. “You like to tower over me, don’t you?”
She did. At that moment she wasn’t in the least afraid of towering. She was invincible. And she explained her theory about cloves, and she told him how the word
They reached the end of the wall and she kept talking. She grew more and more scholarly, investigative, joyful. Absorbed in her lecture, he didn’t expect her to jump down just when she did.
“Give me a little warning!” he exclaimed as he caught her in his arms, but he didn’t want a warning, he wanted her, and he wrapped her in his arms, his chin brushing the rough weave of his own jacket.
“What’s to become of us?” She laughed.
“I don’t know.”
“Just as long as we don’t really … you know …” She meant fall in love.
“Too late,” George said.
24
Love was all very well, but in the world outside, survival mattered most. Veritech was strapped for cash, ISIS on the brink. Emily felt she had no time to breathe, and Jonathan grew warlike, confident as ever, but edgy from lack of sleep.
“Mel!” Jonathan sang out when Mel returned from lunch. “Exactly the person I wanted to see.”
Mel stood at the elevator, and his lower back tightened with the familiar mix of dread and pleasure to be singled out.
“Job fair in L.A. September eleventh.”
“I didn’t think we were hiring,” Mel replied.
“I want the ISIS booth there anyway,” said Jonathan. “I want to make our presence known.”
People were gathering, waiting for the elevators. Movers wheeled boxes out on handcarts. ISIS was decamping to cheaper, East Cambridge real estate.
“Maybe we should discuss this in your office,” Mel suggested.
Jonathan ignored him. “We’re going out there.”
“I’m not sure what we have to offer at a job fair when we’re not hiring.”
“This isn’t about now,” said Jonathan. “It’s about six months from now. I want the booth, the literature, the whole nine yards to extend to any programmers out there.”
“But realistically,” Mel said, “what do we tell these kids?”
“What do we tell them? We tell them who we are.”
“Show the flag?”
“Exactly. I need you to show the flag. I have a meeting in San Diego that week, so I might come out too.”
“All right.” Mel sighed. “I’ll see if I can get someone to—”
“No,” Jonathan said, “you.”
“You,” said Jonathan.
“I’ll prepare everything on this end,” Mel said. “I’ll prep Keith and Ashley, and they can go together.”
“Sorry, man,” said Jonathan. “I had to let them go this morning.”
“You did what?”
“Yeah, we’re making some cuts.”
“But you never—”
“It’s a top–down thing,” said Jonathan. “But it’s all good. Feel free to upgrade to business class. Just a second.” Jonathan’s phone was ringing. “Hey!” he told Emily. “Could you hold on? I’m just finishing a meeting.”
Some meeting, Mel thought, standing in the lobby. “Jonathan, I don’t think I can physically—I don’t know if I can manage that flight and still function in L.A.”
“Mel, you underestimate yourself,” said Jonathan. “You always do.”
“What if I trained Juliet?”
Now Jonathan grew impatient. “Juliet is your secretary, Mel. You’re the HR director. You’re the one they need to see.” He put his phone to his ear and began walking to the stairs. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and even as he listened, he turned and pointed straight at Mel. Like a latter-day Uncle Sam, he mouthed,
“It’s Jess,” said Emily. “She’s driving up to Arcata. She says a bunch of them are going up together….”
