And she showed George how she had picked out Janet from the menu, and told him how she had rushed to tell Sandra. “He was in love with Janet when he was young. I think Janet was McClintock’s Laura and his Beatrice, and that’s why he drew her over and over and he read her into all his cookbooks.”
“What did Sandra say?”
“She was very offended!” Jess exclaimed. “She said her uncle didn’t even like to eat. She said that he was extremely thin. She told me her mother was happily married for sixty-two years, and she was perfectly sensible and lucid until the day she died at eighty-three.”
George smiled.
But Jess was indignant. “I thought she’d thank me!”
“For inventing an embarrassing story about her mother?”
“I didn’t invent it,” Jess said. “I know I’m right. Maybe it was an unrequited love, but she was the one.”
You’re the one, thought George.
“You’d think she’d enjoy knowing,” Jess said. “She’s convinced she was a Russian princess in a past life. Why can’t Janet and Tom have had a past life too? Why is that so shocking?”
“Let me take you out to dinner.”
“George,” said Jess. “Look at me.”
“I am looking at you.”
“I’m covered with cat hair.”
“Come take a bath.”
“I don’t have fresh clothes.”
“We’ll stop at your place and you can change.”
Jess ignored this. “Charles Dickens was obsessed with his sister-in-law. He never got over her.”
“Yes, and I’m sure the family loved to hear about it.”
Jess folded her arms across her chest. “And Tolstoy didn’t really model Natasha on his wife.”
“You’re upset,” George murmured.
“It’s just so anticlimactic—to put together the pieces of the puzzle and then to be …”
“Shh.” He kissed her.
“Exactly. To be shushed like that. As though I were arriving on her doorstep to blackmail her or something. As though I had something on her. She says she’s upset about her grandchildren. Her daughter still can’t get custody.”
“That explains it,” said George, frowning. “Don’t you think she’d be preoccupied?”
“I thought she might be …”
“She’s not going to be grateful to you for suggesting that her mother had some kind of affair with her husband’s brother. You got carried away, Jess.”
She didn’t answer.
“Come here.”
She didn’t come.
He took her hand. “You have to be careful not to fall in love with your material.”
She relented a little. “Maybe.”
“I thought she’d be more imaginative,” Jess told George as he ran the water in the bath. She perched on the edge of the tub, which was claw-footed, fathoms deep, and she pulled off one grubby sock and George pulled off the other.
“About her own family?”
Jess wriggled out of her jeans. “Don’t fill it all the way.” She peeled off her T-shirt and bra. “It’s a waste of …”
“Get in,” George said.
She sat in the water, tucking her knees up to her chest. “If someone told me something about my mother, I wouldn’t be defensive like that. To me that kind of information would be golden.”
“Why?” George climbed in after her.
“Why? Because it’s … it’s contact. It means if you know how to read them, underneath the words there’s life.”
He sat behind her, soaping her shoulders, her arms, her breasts. “You’re going to be a historian,” he said.
“I am.” With a little splash, she turned over in the water and looked into his dark eyes, and she saw that he wasn’t laughing at her. He didn’t look bemused, or skeptical. She kissed him. She slipped into his arms, and they were closer than before.
When they stepped inside Greens that night and stood together before the great piece of driftwood at the entrance, when they took their table at the wall-high windows and looked out at the Pacific, they were like travelers arriving in a new city. They were like newlyweds in fancy clothes. His sports jacket, her sleeveless dress; his tie, her mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. He ate fish and she ate polenta and they drank a bottle of ’97 Chateau Montelena. “Best year since ’94,” George told Jess, and they toasted the McClintocks, Tom, and Janet, and Mrs. McLintock too. They sat at the great windows and they watched the seagulls diving between waves and sky, and thought but didn’t say how strange it was to go out like other couples.
Jess said, “Do you think marmalet of apples actually tasted like something?”
And George said, “You never talk about your father.”
“It couldn’t have been bitter like real marmalade,” Jess said.
“You don’t get along with him, do you?” George said.
“No,” Jess confessed. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t like me very much.”
George trapped her legs between his underneath the table. “That can’t be true.”
“Well,” said Jess, “he’s all computers. He’s all math, and I’m humanities. He’s all for financial independence—and I am too! But I’m not … really independent yet. He has no time for religion, philosophy, or poetry. Fortunately, he’s got Emily.”
“You must take after your mother,” George said.
“Maybe.”
“And he loved her.”
“I think so,” Jess said. “But who knows? It was such a long time ago.”
“When he reads your essay, he’ll understand what you can do,” George said.
“I don’t care whether he reads my essay or not.” Jess drained her glass and he saw that her face was flushed. “You understand what I can do.”
“That’s a complicated thing to say.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I can’t take his place,” George said warily.
Jess slipped off her shoes and rubbed her bare feet against George’s ankles until he couldn’t help smiling. “I never asked you to.”
Giddy with each other and the wine, they strolled outside through the Presidio, the old fort now housing restaurants and galleries. Jess explained that she wanted to devise a matrix for scarcity and abundance, frugality and profligacy. She thought that sweetness represented, and in some periods misrepresented, a sense of surplus and shared pleasure. “I don’t think taste is purely biological,” she said. “I think it’s economically, historically, and culturally constructed as well. Sweetness means different things depending on availability, custom, farming, trade….”
She was shivering, and George took off his jacket. “Here, sweetness.” He helped her into it and laughed at the way her hands disappeared inside the sleeves.
“Context is key—so the question is, What carries over? What can we still know about sweet and sour? Bitterness. What persists from generation to generation? Do we taste the same things?”
He kissed her, sucking her lower lip and then her tongue. “I think so,” he said. “Yes.”
“Wait, I’m not finished.”
“Continue,” he said. “Please.”
Testing herself, pushing back against her fear of heights, she climbed atop the thick two-foot wall edging the Presidio’s park, and walked above him, while he held her hand, steadying her from below.
“You see, I’m fine walking on this wall,” she declared, even as she gripped his fingers. “You see? I’ve been practicing, and I can climb very well.”
George looked up at her. “You like to tower over me, don’t you?”
She did. At that moment she wasn’t in the least afraid of towering. She was invincible. And she explained her theory about cloves, and she told him how the word sweet meant “unsalted” in English cookbooks. Sweet meant “fresh,” not “sugared” as one might think. She spoke of candying and conserves, and those mysterious syrups in McLintock. Syrup of Violets, Syrup of Clove Gelly-Flowers, Syrup of Red Poppies, Syrup of Pale Roses. How did pale roses taste?