“Hackneyed!”
“You’re just an overbearing, old-school, hegemonical …”
“Forgive me for caring whether you live or die. Forgive me for caring about you at all, because obviously that’s suspect.”
She faced him on the redwood bridge. “Why can’t you leave me alone?” she demanded. “Why is it so hard?”
“Because I’m falling in love with you, that’s why!”
Her breath caught. “Still falling? Even now?”
“Yes. Are you?”
She looked down at the rushing water. “When will it end?”
“When we’re together.”
“Didn’t we try that?”
“Not yet.”
“We don’t agree on anything,” Jess reminded him.
“No, you see, you always say that, but that’s where we differ. We agree on vegetables—asparagus, for example. We agree on wine. I’m prepared to agree with you about the redwoods.”
“You don’t understand why they’re important.”
“Probably not. But it’s wonderful to touch something living that’s so old, and to feel …”
“To feel what?”
He looked at her exhausted face. “That life is long.”
“It’s not long for everyone.”
“Don’t be sad,” George murmured. “You’re so young.”
“Oh, I’m tired of being young. Being young gets old.”
“Be old with me, then,” George told her. “Stay with me. Come home with me. Share my books with me. Cook with me. Marry me.”
“You’d let me cook with you?”
He pulled her closer. “That’s just like you to evade the question.”
“How was that a question?” she challenged lightly. “I’m the only one who asked a question.”
“It would be your kitchen too.”
“What about your friends?”
“I was wrong before. I didn’t know…. Forgive me.”
“I thought you’d rather be alone.”
“No,” he said. “I’d rather be alone if not for you. Please, Jess.”
“Please?”
“I’ll teach you how to cut onions properly.”
“Oh, in that case …,” Jess said.
“And devote my life to you.”
Jess shook her head. “Don’t.”
“Let me.”
“We have to be equal, or it doesn’t work.”
“Then we’ll be equal. We’ll share everything.”
“And what if I say I don’t want everything, I’d rather give all your stuff away?”
He hesitated and then he said, “We’d fight.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, we’d fight? Or yes, you’ll marry me?”
“What do you think?”
“I know we’d fight. We do fight,” George said. “But not so often.”
“Give us time.”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “We need more time.”
“We’ve had time.”
He looked away. “More time together. Not more time waiting.”
“How long were you waiting?” she asked gently. “Ten days?”
“Forty-one years.”
“You kept busy,” she reminded him. “You were out there getting rich and learning to cook and breaking hearts. You fell in love lots of times before me.”
Her hair was curlier under the damp trees. He pulled a lock to watch it spring back. “It wasn’t lots of times —just for the record.”
“Just once or twice?”
“Don’t hold it against me that I didn’t meet you before.”
“I don’t,” Jess protested. “Not exactly.”
“At least I didn’t make you watch.” He was thinking of Noah and Leon.
“I never made you do anything,” Jess said.
“You made me love you.”
“Not on purpose.”
“That’s how you did it. Not on purpose. You just walked in. You filled out the questionnaire, and you said I was the kind of guy who reads
“You were lonely,” she pointed out.
George sat on the log, and helped her down as well. “You’re missing the point.”
“How many times
“Marry me.”
“Five times? Six times?”
“Eleven,” George said. “Marry me.”
She didn’t answer.
“Please. Jess. Don’t be upset. Listen to me. The things I have, the money I made, the house, the collections, the cookbooks, they’re all proxies. The life I’ve led has been”—he struggled for the word—“acquisitive. I was always chasing quartos, folios, maps….”
“I’m not a quarto or a folio.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe a map.”
“You know what I mean. You’re the one I gave up looking for. I’d live for you and live with you. Say yes. Will you?”
The afternoon was fading. A cool breeze riffled through the ferns below.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Really?” He clasped her hands in his.
“Ow!”
“Sorry!” He kissed her fingertips. “Jess—”
She interrupted. “You made up eleven, didn’t you? You just picked any number.”
“Ah, you caught me,” George said.
Then Jess said, “I love you too.”
It was dark when they approached the ranger’s cabin near the parking lot, and left fifteen dollars for a permit to spend the night.
Jess went to the campground restrooms, and she showered, and washed and combed her hair. Since she didn’t have dry clothes, she wore George’s sweats, his T-shirt, his black fleece. They carried the cooler and the tent down to the campsite, a dark hollow, a solemn, mystic place, a conference of redwoods called the Philosophers’ Grove.
“Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,” George named the three tallest trees.
“No, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza,” Jess said dreamily. “And that one there …” She pointed to a deformed,
