But George was lost in the thicket of McClintock’s words—poetry cross-referenced with recipes: I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow (iii crabbes and oysters) / And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts, / Show thee a jay’s nest and instruct thee how / To snare the nimble marmoset; / I’ll bring thee to clustering filberts (xiii iellyes, puddings, other made-Dishes) …
“He taught at Cal for almost forty years,” Sandra said.
George had found another paper, covered with hand-printed lines—part love poem, part recipe, part threat: … snare you, dress you, cut you with the bone still in. Mince you small with suit and marrow, take sweet Creame, yolkes of Eggs, a few Razins of the Sun … An ink drawing illustrated these lines. A nude woman lying on a tablecloth. She lay on her side, all line and tapered leg, head resting on her hand. The drawing was expressive, despite its small scale. The subtlest marks indicated the arch of her foot, her brow, her full breasts.
“What have we here?” George asked, even as Sandra snatched the paper from his hands and folded it again.
“My uncle was a very scholarly, modest …,” Sandra began.
“And what was he doing with these books?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered in reply.
And George wanted the collection then. He wanted it, notes and all, to read and puzzle over. He wanted days and weeks with these rare books and their strange apparatus, the notes and drawings of their collector. He would satisfy his curiosity. But first, “I’ll need to bring in an antiquarian. I have a friend—”
The front door rattled and Sandra jumped, hand on her heart.
“What was that?”
“Only the mailman,” she said. “He frightened me.”
George looked warily at her. She was far too nervous, far too gray—ashen-faced, really—wide-eyed, shaken.
“I’m afraid,” Sandra said.
Oh, God, thought George, but he asked, “What are you afraid of?”
She mulled the question. “I’m afraid in general.”
“Afraid of selling?”
“I need to sell, but I’m afraid of him.”
“Your uncle’s gone,” George reminded her.
“Yes, I know,” said Sandra, but her voice trembled. “He’s dead, and I’m going to betray him.”
Red-letter day! He had heard from other dealers about triumphs at swap meets, or, as his friend Raj dubbed such adventures, Victories at Flea. He had heard of Alcott family papers in a New England barn, and a hand-drawn map of Arabia by T. E. Lawrence tucked underneath the endpapers of Lawrence’s eighteenth-century Josephus. These were tales of the trade, but he had never contributed a legend of his own.
Sandra was a strange one. She had her apprehensions and her guilt, but George had never seen conscience-stricken sellers turn from good hard cash. He would make an offer to light up her gray eyes and make her feel almost young again. He felt euphoric. He would open his 1974 Martha’s Vineyard that night. Best of all his cabernets, the one he had been saving. He jingled his keys as he returned to Yorick’s. He could almost taste the deep red, lush Heitz.
He saw that his Post-it had disappeared. Turning the key, he found the glass door unlocked, and stepped inside to find Jess, reading at his desk. Her hair was falling in her eyes, and she wore a wrinkled linen dress too big for her; she wore all her clothes that way—loose, voluminous—and then while working, she would push up her sleeves, revealing her forearms.
“Long time, no see,” George sang out, taking his 1892 Leaves of Grass from Jess’s hands. “You found my note?”
“I did.” She snatched up the utility knife.
“You haven’t even opened the boxes.”
“I was just about to!”
“As soon as you finished ‘Song of Myself’? That’s all right, don’t bother.”
“Don’t bother? What do you mean?” She looked up at him as she often did, all innocence, bright-eyed, polite—until she could determine if he was really angry with her or only bluffing. “Why are you so happy?” She squinted, examining him closely, and then smiled, triumphant. “You bought something!”
He thought of telling her about the books. For just a moment he considered confiding in her, but he was superstitious until he closed a deal. “I didn’t buy anything.”
“Really?” She leaned back in his desk chair.
“Careful.”
She sat up straight, all business with four chair legs on the floor. “I’ll shelve the books. Just let me take care of it.”
“Jess,” he said, “you had all afternoon to take care of it. It’s four o’clock, I’m closing early, and now you’ve missed your chance.”
Four o’clock. Her day had been so long that she couldn’t remember its beginning. She had been running since she woke up, and she was exhausted, the afternoon a blur of missed lunch, talking to the rabbi, sitting with Professor Sakamaki for almost two hours to discuss her Kant paper with its problems “in argumentation, structure, and style.” She had made a huge effort to get to the store.
Now George shooed her away with his hands. “Go home.”
“Don’t you want to know why I’m late?”
He was honest. “No, not really.”
“My professor wants me to take an Incomplete. He says my Kant paper is really two different papers and I have to separate them. And I already have an Incomplete in Philosophy of Language, and I have another … thing.”
“A … thing?” George couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not. “What do you mean?”
“It’s just a thing,” Jess said.
Instantly George thought of Leon. Instinctively, he suspected her self-absorbed, voracious lover. George was old enough to read a whole story in Leon’s face—the charismatic opportunist alighting in Berkeley, the pseudo-intellectual, the rebel with an environmental cause, masking his appetites with altruism. But of course Jess could not interpret Leon as George did. She couldn’t even read George. She had no idea how George delighted in her funny ways, or watched her through the window as she stood outside, finishing an apple or nibbling sunflower seeds. She did not register his glances, his quick inventory of her clothes, his pleasure in her face and wrists. She did not know his heart.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked playfully, and then he changed his mind about her, as he often did, and decided that in fact she read him pretty well, and knew more than she let on.
“I was just trying to assess the nature of the problem,” George said. “Legal trouble?”
“No.”
“Mortal danger?”
“No, of course not.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?” she echoed
“Well, what would you like me to say?”
“Generally speaking,” she told him, “if you hear someone is not in mortal danger, you should say ‘good.’”
He laughed. “Get out of here. Go home. I have people coming for dinner.”
“You can go. I’ll lock up.”
Then he understood. She wanted to finish reading his very-good-condition-with-only-slight-foxing Whitman. “You want to sit here alone with Leaves of Grass, don’t you? Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!” he read aloud. “Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! I’d like to see a liquid tree.”
“If we keep on the way we’re going, you aren’t going to see any kind of trees,” Jess said.
Despite his good mood—perhaps because of it—George refused to let this comment pass. “You know,” he said, “you worry too much about forests.”
“You can’t worry too much,” Jess replied immediately.
George snapped Whitman shut. “You go out there on weekends, confronting angry loggers, and risk your life for redwoods, but are you, personally, going to save them? Do you think that by saving a few trees here, you’ll have the slightest effect on the global environmental problem?”