The Cookbook Collector

and your store and Colm and all your projects, and it’s not like we have a future together, and it’s not like we have much of a past….”

“Do you really think you have a future with Leon?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You’re angry,” he said.

“Don’t tell me I’m angry,” Jess exploded. “I hate it when you say ‘You’re angry,’ or ‘You’re upset.’ I know that I’m angry. I’ll tell you when I’m angry. And I’ll tell you what makes me angry. What makes me angry is that you expect me to stay with you at your pleasure.”

“Wait—” George interrupted.

“No, you wait. You want me here when it’s good for you, and gone when it’s inconvenient for you. You want me when it’s fun for you, and then when you get bored—not when I get bored—but when you get tired of me, you’ll say you’ve had enough.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Or maybe you’ll say it’s not working out, or we don’t belong together long-term. Which is true. We don’t. But if I point this out now, then you’re defensive, because you aren’t done yet. That makes me angry. And I’ll tell you something else that makes me angry. I used to have a life. Maybe not what you call a life. Maybe you couldn’t see it, but I used to wake up and say, ‘What will I do today?’ Now I wake up and I know what I’ll do. I’ll work with your books and count the hours until I see you. I don’t talk to anyone else. I don’t see anyone else. I’m virtually hiding from my sister—”

“Would you stop and let me say something?” George broke in. “I have never done anything to you. I never imprisoned you here in my house.”

“That’s true,” said Jess. “And that’s what makes it so bad. I want to work with the collection; I want to eat with you. I want to sleep with you. You’re like a drug. I can’t stop thinking about you, and it’s exhausting. It’s …”

“So you don’t want to see Leon. You want to get away from me,” said George.

“I do want to see him,” Jess said stubbornly. “And I want my life to be about something besides you.” And she walked into the dining room and began stuffing papers, the notes for her essay, into her backpack.

“Jess,” said George, “listen. Don’t do something you’ll regret. I—”

“Don’t say something you’ll regret,” Jess countered. “Don’t say something that isn’t true.”

25

She left him there, just like that, and all night he hoped that she would call. All the next day, he hoped she would return, but she did not call, and she did not return. Surely, he thought, she would come back to finish her essay, if not to catalog the collection. She would not abandon her project, even if she was abandoning him. But the days passed, a week passed, and he heard nothing from her.

He went about his business, running with Nick, buying, trading, selling books at Yorick’s. He held his little dinner party, and Jess wasn’t there, and he told his friends that his cataloger had run off to Humboldt County, as they all did eventually, and now he had to find someone new. But, of course, he had no interest in finding anyone else. No one could replace Jess. He didn’t even look at the cookbooks when she was gone.

“You liked her,” Nick intuited as they stretched at Inspiration Point.

George said nothing.

“You talked about her all the time.”

“How was I talking about her all the time?” George shot back. “I hardly talked about her at all.”

“What was her name? Jessica?”

“Jessamine.”

“You had a fight.”

“It’s complicated,” George said.

“Really?” Nick teased gently. “It doesn’t sound so complicated to me.”

“She’s in Arcata with her boyfriend. I think she’ll probably stay there.”

“You think?”

“Well, she wants to stay there.”

“Is that what she told you?” asked Nick. They stood together looking at the electrical towers ruining the view of tawny hills. “She’s with someone else?” Nick pressed.

“She needs someone her own age. She can’t work for me and be with me at the same time. She can’t be my employee and my lover. I would be supporting her and I’d have all the power in the relationship. That doesn’t work, if she’s going to have a life. I’d be exploiting her. I was exploiting her all along.”

“Do you love her?”

George didn’t answer.

“Do you want to be with her?”

“A relationship like that never lasts,” said George.

“It might last—” said Nick.

“It’s just too fraught.”

“What’s the matter with you, man? You’re overthinking everything, as usual.”

“I’m thinking. I’m not overthinking. I’m reflecting on the situation. Now that it’s too late, I keep thinking about what I could have done differently. How I could have dealt with the inequities …”

Nick pushed his old friend’s shoulder, hard. “It’s called marriage, George. In most of the world, that’s how it’s done.”

He tried to work. He tried to sleep. He returned from running and sat at his kitchen table with the San Francisco Chronicle. When his phone rang, he jumped, but it was Raj calling about a rare copy of Ulysses he had acquired. “I’m telling you first, in case you want to make a preemptive offer.”

“No,” George said. “I don’t like Joyce.”

“George,” said Raj, “you’re the last Victorian.”

“Not true,” George said. “Not true at all. I’m just not in a buying mood.”

He didn’t want to talk to Raj. He didn’t want anyone but Jess, and he had no way to reach her.

He poured himself a cup of coffee, and began writing a letter. He wrote with his fountain pen, covering small sheets of paper with blue-black ink.

Dear Jessamine,

I spoke disrespectfully to you. You are not a child. I understand why you were angry. I had no right to ask you to go and then a moment later tell you to stay.

You came freely to work at Yorick’s, and you are free to leave as well. Forgive me if I seemed to forget. My concern for your safety is real, and I’m sorry it seemed like a jealous attempt to control you.

My own sister was just a little younger than you when she died. She died at twenty-two. As you say, people get killed on the ground.

I don’t pretend to be wiser than you are, but I am older, Jess. I’ve lived longer, and I have more experience in certain areas—among them, communal living, activism, drugs. If you told me you would give up the Tree House and return to school on condition that I never see you again, I would accept your terms. I am thinking about you, not about myself.

I realize that you don’t belong to me. I wish that we belonged to each other. I wish I had met you when I was young, but I did not, and I realize that you have to be young on your own. We stole some time together, and we should leave it at that. Live and let live. Yes, that’s a sixties thing to say. Or maybe it’s just one of the lies we tell ourselves to get what we want. I wanted you—I admit it. I behaved badly. See above.