Jess sighed. She knew, in the long term, she and George were philosophically unsuited, financially unequal, generationally mismatched. Only in the short term did they agree. Only when it came to fingertips, and tongues and wrists. When he touched her and then slipped his wet fingers in her mouth and said, “This is how you taste.” In their laughter and the food he brought her, the freshest and most delicate of vegetables: watercress, fennel, dandelion greens dressed with champagne vinegar. They shared a private language in the cookbooks, and whispered inside jokes. Even their jokes were gentle. Tender buttons. He was tender with her.
She craved his company. The edges of her life were ragged, her feelings conflicted, her behavior incoherent, probably immoral, and at the same time, she was deeply happy, consuming nectarines, and Asian pears, sliced thin, and the pinot he poured for her.
“Try the wine now,” George instructed. Then, a little later, “Try it again,” and she tasted a new liquid altogether. Wine that had been tight and taciturn became mellifluous.
“It’s like finding a door,” she told George as they sat together in his kitchen. “It’s like stepping into a new room you never knew existed.”
“The pinot?”
“No,” she told him. “Everything.”
For she was becoming a researcher, tracing gorgeous threads, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the McClintock Collection, corresponding with scholars and librarians at the Schlesinger and the Huntington and at universities around the world. She had begun to study sweets—the sparing use of sugar in early cookbooks, and its ubiquity in eighteenth-century recipes. She checked out books from Bancroft. Deerr’s History of Sugar. Galway’s The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914. Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz. She spent days writing notes for an article she was planning on the cookbook as cultural emblem and bellwether for abundance and scarcity. Without an affiliation, outside any academic program, she began to imagine weaving together ecology and economics and material culture, embarking on a new career. Should she go back to school? Find herself a program and an advisor? Oh, but it was delicious to work unsupervised. Who had total access to books like these? And when it came to advisors, how could she do better than Tom McClintock, sensualist and lichenologist, artist, lover, ghost?
On a Friday, at the end of August, just before her twenty-fifth birthday, Jess sat alone in George’s dining room and unfolded a menu she had not seen before, one of the collector’s fantasies on graph paper. The menu was tucked inside Le Livre de Cuisine, but titled “McLintock,” and the dishes listed were all in English.
McLINTOCK
July-flower wine
Angelica
Nutmeg cream
Eel-pye
Neats Tongue
A strange, unappetizing bill of fare, wine and dessert, followed by eel pie and sheep’s tongue. It’s not like you, Jess thought, addressing the collector, to put together such an awkward menu. Elsewhere, McClintock sought out the most exotic and delectable combinations. Kisses to begin, new peas, or muskmelon, followed by some tender young thing, lamb or fawn, turtledoves to whet the appetite, and then fish, and a succulent main course like loin of veal. Fruit and cream to finish. Quaking Pudding. Candied violets, rose petals, tansies, curran wine …
Why, then, these awkward dishes out of order, and no vegetable or fish or salad course? She read the menu twice and then a third time, and then she wondered if the words could rearrange themselves into something better. July-Angelica-Nutmeg-Cream … and as her eyes played with the words, she saw a pattern in the first letters, an acrostic reading down:
J uly-flower wine
A ngelica
N utmeg cream
E el-pye
Neats Tongue
A name: Jane. Jane McClintock! Was this Mrs. McClintock? Was she the one? But what to do about Neats Tongue? A comment on Mrs. McClintock’s tongue? Or did she have a middle initial N? Jane N. McClintock? Or was it the T the collector referred to in his culinary code? Jane T? Janet!
She picked up George’s phone and called Sandra, but no one answered. She ran out and drove to Sandra’s house. She rang the bell, and rapped on the window, but no one came to the door. Should she leave a note? Try again tomorrow? No, her question wouldn’t keep.
She sat on Sandra’s porch in a raggedy wicker chair. Curled up in the window, Geoffrey seemed to recognize her, and wish her ill.
An hour passed before Sandra arrived carrying her groceries. Jess jumped up. “Hi!”
“Jessamine,” said Sandra, after a moment.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Could I help you carry those?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Sandra told her.
“I’ve been working on the collection,” Jess said. “I’ve been working almost six months. The books are fabulous.”
“I’m glad.” Sandra pulled at her keys, which she wore on a plastic bracelet around her wrist.
“I’ve found some interesting material.” Jess followed Sandra to the door.
“Good.” Sandra stood on the porch, keys in hand, groceries at her feet, but she did not seem at all inclined to invite Jess inside. “I can’t let the cat out,” she reminded Jess as she gathered all her bags together to rush the door. “You can come in, but you have to be quick.”
“Oh, I understand.” Body-blocking Geoffrey, Sandra darted inside, and Jess followed.
“Would you like a glass of juice?” Sandra asked. “Would you like to take a seat? Not that one.” She warned Jess away from Geoffrey’s dark green couch, and Jess settled on a velvet chair instead.
“Who was Mrs. McClintock?” Jess blurted out.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you sure your uncle never married?”
“He never married.”
“Are you sure he didn’t marry a Janet McClintock?” Jess asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” said Sandra. “Janet McClintock was my mother.”
George did not know where Jess had gone. She had left her books out. McLintock lay open on the book cradle. The laptop stood open as well, as though Jess intended to return, but it was past five and she did not come back. He called her on her cell, but she didn’t answer.
He poured himself a glass of wine and began to think of all the things he might have said or done to offend her. He remembered that the day before they’d had a little spat about her article. They were sitting in the living room on his couch, a massive low-slung piece with great wood slabs for arms. He said that she should write something quick and accessible with gorgeous illustrations for Gastronomica. She insisted that this was selling out, that she was developing an argument far more scholarly, with serious notes and tables. She said she had fifty-one pages already, and he’d laughed and warned her not to get lost in all that material.
Then she’d demanded, “Do I look like someone who gets lost easily?”
“Yes,” he’d teased, but she hadn’t been in the mood, and had snatched a heavy throw pillow, upholstered green, and smacked him upside the head.
They had laughed at the time, but perhaps she was still angry. Or perhaps Leon had suddenly returned, and Jess had decided she would not see George again. Was there some change of heart? Or some emergency? Should he try to reach her sister?
By the time Jess arrived, he had been waiting almost two hours, and he was in such an anxious state that he was almost in no mood to see her. But there she was, out of breath and streaked with sweat from racing up the stairs. “I’ve solved it,” she cried. “I know who she was.”