The Cookbook Collector (32 page)

25

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he 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
.

Selfishness on my part, except for one thing, which is that I’m in love with you. I love you in the worst possible way, sleeplessly, desperately, jealously. I love you in the best way too. I want every good thing for you. I want you to work, and learn, and grow, and find your place in the world. Therefore I must let you
 …

Here George broke off. I will
not
, he thought. I will
not
let you go. Because he did not love Jess in two ways; he loved her one way: passionately, protectively, selfishly, disinterestedly, all mixed together, and he had to be with her. His collections did nothing for him. His cookbooks meant nothing to him without their imaginative interpreter. Writing reasoned paragraphs did not calm him at all, but angered him. The stillness of his house infuriated him. How long, he thought, will I sit here in my kitchen sipping coffee instead of finding her? How long will I wait before telling her?

He logged on to the computer in his office and found the Save the Trees Web site with its photos of redwoods on death row and the plea:
Help us save Galadriel
. Don’t be an idiot, he told himself, but he printed out directions to the Wood Rose Glen Tree-Sit anyway. Don’t be a fool. He walked out onto his deck, and then downstairs to his garden shrouded in mist. He packed his car, feeling his way through the thick morning fog. A long-eared fawn startled and ran across the street as George turned his big Mercedes gently, easing down the hill.

He drove north, and the sun burned off the morning mist. He made his ascent up the Golden Gate with its gleaming cables, a bridge rigged like a tall ship, so full of life and wind, and as he sped down again into green Marin, he opened his windows and the wind whipped at his face and stung his eyes. What if she wasn’t there? What if she had hiked off site, farther into the forest? How would he find her then? And if he did find her, would she listen, even for a moment?

He drove past tawny hills and then through dark mountains forested with oak and pine. The road narrowed, and trucks crowded him on either side. He lost the signal for NPR and turned off his radio. Raindrops fell, surprisingly cold and heavy. He closed his window and drove into the storm.

Rain was falling in Wood Rose Glen, but the redwoods were always damp, and at first Jess didn’t notice. She was crouching on a plywood platform 150 feet up in the branches of Galadriel, the majestic cause célèbre, object of so much love and so much hate, the redwood painted by Pacific Lumber with a blue
X
for execution, a two-thousand-year-old tree occupied in shifts for the past three months by Tree Savers.

When the wind picked up, Galadriel began to creak and sway, but the redwood was always in motion, and Jess had grown accustomed to its rolling movements. A blue plastic tarp sheltered her, and massive branches embraced her. After two days, she could almost pretend she was a bird in a nest, or an explorer on a floating island with its own rich soil, and ferns and huckleberry bushes. To lose Galadriel would mean to lose this floating world as well, a miniature forest with its moss and lichen, its birds and flying squirrels close to the clouds. Therefore, Jess would defend the tree. She would stand guard on high, and for the greater good she would withstand the wind, and the increasing damp, and the dark temptation, almost a death wish, to look down. Leon and the other Tree Savers slept far below at base camp as she fulfilled her vow, serving the arboreal cause, living in the redworld she had known before only as an earthbound spectator.

“I see what you mean,” she told Leon the first night on her radio. “It’s so beautiful.”

“We’ll come for you in the morning.”

“I want to stay the week,” she told him.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She zipped her parka and curled up under the tarp and closed her eyes and listened to the wind in the trees, Galadriel and the other giants farther off, their limbs entwined. Arwen and Legolas, Elrond, Haldir, Celeborn. Each spreading a vast canopy like a second rustling sky.

She was alone and she could think. She had outclimbed fear and outrun Emily and Mrs. Gibbs, and even George. She scarcely thought of him. She kept telling herself that.
I’m hardly thinking of him!
Even as she staved off hunger with granola, peanuts, dried fruit. She sipped the water she collected in the folds of her blue tarp, and nested in her sleeping bag with
Walden: One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants … contending with one another
…. And she said to herself, This is what people look like from a redwood’s point of view. This is what history looks like to a two-thousand-year-old tree. Conflicts seem so petty here.

Her fear of falling did not disappear, but settled deep inside her, losing its sharp edge, rising in great nauseating waves and then subsiding. She kept to her solid platform, and as long as the weather held, she watched light shifting through the green canopy, applauded the trapezing squirrels, touched lichen covering the tree like lace. Had McClintock climbed to study these? Or had he relied on earthbound samples? She wrote these questions in her notebook and felt lively, almost scientific. But as the weather changed, she missed George relentlessly, rhythmically, like the slow, steady rain. She fought against loneliness. No, she told herself, I live without him very well. What I need and what he wants are completely different.

The rain fell harder; her tarp sagged under the weight of water, and she was afraid that if she tried retying, she would lose her blue roof altogether. The temperature dropped, and wet seeped through her clothes. She wrung out her knit hat like a dishrag, and all the while, Galadriel’s branches swayed and groaned. Jess’s supply bags streamed with water, and she lost radio contact with Leon on the ground.

Then Jess no longer felt like Huck Finn rafting in the trees; she was Ishmael clinging to a fragment of the
Pequod
in the storm. Branches thrashed in the dark above her, and she wondered if they might break and fall.

She had seen fallen redwoods, their massive trunks, their shallow roots upended. The giant trees were not anchored deeply in the soil. When redwoods fell, they took down every tree below. Their weight, their height … She knew this tree was healthy. Leon said Galadriel was solid to the core, but when night came, she heard a boom. Thunder? Trees toppling? Huddled in her sleeping bag, she clipped on her battery-powered book light and tried to read.
At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house
.

She was exhausted, but she could not sleep. Adrenaline kept her alert, although there was nothing she could do to save herself. She could not climb down in this darkness and this weather, nor could she shield herself from lightning.

She tried to concentrate on Thoreau’s calm book, his little cabin at Walden Pond—but what did Thoreau know? He’d never been to California. She thought of Leon and his pride in her for climbing, his pleasure that at last she was experiencing what he loved most. But Leon couldn’t help her now, and remembering his pleasure made her feel a little sick. No, no, I didn’t come here for him, she reminded herself, but that was only partly true.

Common sense rebelled. What were you thinking? she asked herself, as Galadriel groaned and cracked and the branches above her turned to deadly missiles in the wind. She had been thinking she would try to love Leon better. That she would turn her back on rare books and commit herself to something greater. She had not been wrong in this. She had not been wrong to defend the trees. So why was George the one she wished for? His was the face she longed to see. His were the arms that she imagined as she closed her eyes. His, the voice she missed.

It was still raining when she woke, but the wind had died. Her radio buzzed in her hand.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she told Leon. “I’m wet.”

“We’re bringing food.”

Half an hour later, he radioed from the bottom of the tree, and Tree Savers began hooking the supply bags to the ropes. That was when she heard the crack above her.

“Headache!” she called into her radio, but even as she said the word, the branch whistled past, a weight like a falling car, plunging fifteen stories. She heard the crash, the screams below. “Leon!”

She crept to the edge of the platform and saw a cluster of tiny figures, the Tree Savers in their green sweatshirts. Like a missile, the massive branch pierced the earth. She began to tremble. Her hands shook, and her teeth chattered.

“I’m here,” Leon told her on his radio. “Nobody’s hurt.” He spoke in his cool, calm voice, only slightly broken up with static. “We’re ready.” He meant ready to send up the supplies.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“What?”

She felt that at any moment she would plummet. Like the tree branch, she would whistle through the air, cratering the forest floor. Just as she began to fall, the world would rise to meet her. She would detonate on impact, her brain would splatter. She gasped for air. Strange, she knew that she was having a panic attack. She knew exactly what was happening, but she could not stop it. She couldn’t breathe. The earth kept rising up to meet her.