The Cookbook Collector

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’ll be with experienced people.”

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

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

“September fourth through September eleventh,” said Emily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is going on with you?”

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

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

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

“That ridiculous thing you said in Muir Woods?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t want me here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t start lecturing me.”

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

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

“How long are you going for?”

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

“Weeks!”

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

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

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

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

“Doing nothing is also dangerous.”

“People get killed up there.”

“People get killed on the ground too.”

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

“Don’t go,” he said.

“Don’t go? Is that an order?”

“A request.”

“What are you thinking?”

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

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

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

Tears started in Jess’s eyes. “What’s childish is pretending we live in our own little world, when the truth is that I’m involved with someone else, and I have a life away from here. And you have your friends and your dealers