“Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea,” she read aloud as George stood behind her. Arms around her waist, he was unbuttoning her shirt. “When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.”
She sat on the table with the slip of paper in her hand. “Doesn’t silver seller make you think of salt?”
“Not really,” he murmured, kneeling on the chair, kissing her bare skin.
“Her poetry wasn’t abstract at all.” She felt his breath and his rough tongue. “Don’t you think Tender Buttons is really about …?”
“Yes.”
Working in the August afternoons, she wondered what he would bring home for dinner, what strange fruit, what curious greens, or salty sea beans. He brought her plums, and Asian pears, and almonds, and she showed him her discoveries.
“Look at this,” she told George, dancing into his arms.
The volume was so slight that they had missed it in their first assessment. In fact, she found it tucked inside a larger book. Scottish, dated 1736, it was one of those palm-sized cookbooks, a handbook that fit literally in the hand. Its recipes were terse, not terribly poetic, nor was the book illustrated, except for some decoration on the first page, a little head of Bacchus, tame enough to be a house pet, surrounded by a couple of clumsy birds and vines. Why then was this book so stuffed with notes?
He laughed when he saw the title. Mrs. McLintock’s Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work. “You think Tom McClintock felt a kinship?”
“It’s rare,” she said.
“How rare?”
“It’s the first Scottish cookbook by a woman. I e-mailed the University of Aberdeen. There are only two known copies in the world, and they’re both in Glasgow.”
This was serious. Silently he began to calculate how much a book like this would be worth to the Schlesinger, to the Getty, to those private collectors who would bid for it.
“No one knows about this one,” she told him. “This is now the third!”
“Jess,” he said.
“We should call reporters,” she declared. “We should write an article.”
“You should write the article,” he said.
“But first I have to understand it better.”
“What do you mean?”
She couldn’t quite explain. She wanted to know the cookbook’s secret life. For days she studied it. She gazed at Mrs. McLintock’s name so long that in her mind the letters rearranged themselves: lock, lint, clint, clit, cock, clock … McClintock. McLintock. She imagined the two fit together, but she found no clues about McClintock in McLintock, and the collector’s love remained a mystery.
“George,” she said one evening as she lay in his arms.
“Jessamine.” His eyes were soft, his face unguarded, almost boyish in the low light.
“I have to ask you something.”
“I have to ask you something too.” He was wearing his wristwatch, a vintage Patek Philippe he’d forgotten to take off. She didn’t wear a watch, and so she wore nothing at all.
“Okay.” She had been lying with her head on his chest, and now she propped her chin up on her arms, a gesture both adorable and suffocating.
“No, you ask first,” he said, “because I can’t breathe.”
“I’m sorry!” She rolled off and she lay on her side, facing him. “I wanted to ask you about the cookbook. I doubt McClintock knew how rare it was. I don’t think he understood how much the books were worth, but he had a thing for women cookbook writers, and obviously he fixated on McLintock because of her name. So do you think there was a Mrs. McClintock in his life whom Sandra doesn’t know about? Do you think maybe he was married at some point when he was young, when he was buying all these books after the War?”
“No, sweetheart,” said George.
“Really?” she asked yearningly, and he couldn’t tell whether she was questioning the no or the word sweetheart, which he had never used before.
He caressed her waist and the curve of her hip with his hand. “He never married her. He never got anywhere with her.”
“You always say that, but what evidence do you have?”
“The whole collection, every note he wrote.”
“People thought Troy was a myth too,” Jess reminded George, “and now those ruins have been found. Don’t laugh! I think he knew her. She wasn’t somebody that he saw once. He drew her as if he saw her every day.”
“We’ll never know, will we?”
“Yes, we will. I’m going to find out,” said Jess, clear-eyed, pure. She was so lovely. Not just her face, but her faith that there was such a thing as truth, her conviction that there were immutable answers if you took the trouble to find them out.
“Stay here tonight,” George whispered.
“That’s what you were going to ask?”
“Will you?”
He had said one of the things they did not say. “I thought we weren’t doing that.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Sleeping together is one thing, but …”
She buried her head in his pillow.
“Talking about it is another.”
He didn’t want to talk about it either. He wanted to remain in this dream state as long as possible. The outside world was all obstacles and complications. Leon. The Tree Savers. Their missions up to Humboldt County. George could say Leon was dangerous. He could tell Jess that she was wrong to get involved with him. What was he offering in return? A sinecure. A dependency. To be crass, his bed. He could say he loved her. Would he mean it? They enjoyed each other. They were friends, and he desired her. He knew himself well enough to doubt that such feelings would last. He was fully capable of breaking Jess’s heart.
As for Jess—she was mixed-up about George. She was at home with him. Calm and happy. She could think aloud. She never felt that way at the Tree House, and yet the people there shared her beliefs about the world. Philosophically, ideologically, she and Leon were a pair. She and George agreed on nothing politically. He had no interest in the environment. He recycled like everybody else, but he cared little for other species, and maligned Tree Savers as eco-terrorists. He was old that way, ill-informed and cynical, preferring books to social change, studying antique maps instead of current battlegrounds of deforestation. Living in the past, he turned his back on the future, and this was a position she deplored.
Then there was his money. She remembered Leon’s warning: You’ll end up in his collection too. She could see it happening. She was entranced by his house, his wine, his cookbooks, his quick smile. Recipe for disaster. She was falling in love with George, and she worked for him too. What would that make her? The young girlfriend. The mistress, the kept woman. She hated the thought.
Abashed, she read Haywood’s instructions to maidservants, advice on chastity preceding recipes for pickles, directions for choosing meat, best methods for making all kinds of English wines.
If you follow the advice I have already given you, concerning going as frequently as you can to hear sermons, and reading the holy scriptures and other good books, I need not be at the pains to inform you how great the sin is of yielding to any unlawful solicitations: but if you even look no farther than this world—oh, practical Eliza, thought Jess—you will find enough to deter you from giving the least encouragement to any address of that nature, though accompanied with the most soothing and flaterring pretenses.