They reached the end of the wall and she kept talking. She grew more and more scholarly, investigative, joyful. Absorbed in her lecture, he didn’t expect her to jump down just when she did.
“Give me a little warning!” he exclaimed as he caught her in his arms, but he didn’t want a warning, he wanted her, and he wrapped her in his arms, his chin brushing the rough weave of his own jacket.
“What’s to become of us?” She laughed.
“I don’t know.”
“Just as long as we don’t really … you know …” She meant fall in love.
“Too late,” George said.
24
Love was all very well, but in the world outside, survival mattered most. Veritech was strapped for cash, ISIS on the brink. Emily felt she had no time to breathe, and Jonathan grew warlike, confident as ever, but edgy from lack of sleep.
“Mel!” Jonathan sang out when Mel returned from lunch. “Exactly the person I wanted to see.”
Mel stood at the elevator, and his lower back tightened with the familiar mix of dread and pleasure to be singled out.
“Job fair in L.A. September eleventh.”
“I didn’t think we were hiring,” Mel replied.
“I want the ISIS booth there anyway,” said Jonathan. “I want to make our presence known.”
People were gathering, waiting for the elevators. Movers wheeled boxes out on handcarts. ISIS was decamping to cheaper, East Cambridge real estate.
“Maybe we should discuss this in your office,” Mel suggested.
Jonathan ignored him. “We’re going out there.”
“I’m not sure what we have to offer at a job fair when we’re not hiring.”
“This isn’t about now,” said Jonathan. “It’s about six months from now. I want the booth, the literature, the whole nine yards to extend to any programmers out there.”
“But realistically,” Mel said, “what do we tell these kids?”
“What do we tell them? We tell them who we are.”
“Show the flag?”
“Exactly. I need you to show the flag. I have a meeting in San Diego that week, so I might come out too.”
“All right.” Mel sighed. “I’ll see if I can get someone to—”
“No,” Jonathan said, “you.”
“Me?” Only Mel’s associate directors flew west. That was long established. Mel’s back could barely withstand the Boston–New York–D.C. shuttle.
“You,” said Jonathan.
“I’ll prepare everything on this end,” Mel said. “I’ll prep Keith and Ashley, and they can go together.”
“Sorry, man,” said Jonathan. “I had to let them go this morning.”
“You did what?”
“Yeah, we’re making some cuts.”
“But you never—”
“It’s a top–down thing,” said Jonathan. “But it’s all good. Feel free to upgrade to business class. Just a second.” Jonathan’s phone was ringing. “Hey!” he told Emily. “Could you hold on? I’m just finishing a meeting.”
Some meeting, Mel thought, standing in the lobby. “Jonathan, I don’t think I can physically—I don’t know if I can manage that flight and still function in L.A.”
“Mel, you underestimate yourself,” said Jonathan. “You always do.”
“What if I trained Juliet?”
Now Jonathan grew impatient. “Juliet is your secretary, Mel. You’re the HR director. You’re the one they need to see.” He put his phone to his ear and began walking to the stairs. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and even as he listened, he turned and pointed straight at Mel. Like a latter-day Uncle Sam, he mouthed, You.
“It’s Jess,” said Emily. “She’s driving up to Arcata. She says a bunch of them are going up together….”
“She’s been there before,” said Jonathan.
“But this time she’s going to climb. She says that she’s been practicing.”
“Good for her.” Jonathan took the stairs two at a time.
“No, you don’t understand. It’s really dangerous for her.”
“How is it more dangerous for her than for anybody else?”
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing and she’s afraid of—”
“She’ll be with experienced people.”
“Do you think it’s rational to try to climb a two-hundred-foot redwood when you’re afraid of heights?” Emily demanded.
“I don’t know—it sounds like fun. When is she going?”
“September fourth through September eleventh,” said Emily.
“That’s when I’m coming out for Tech World,” said Jonathan. “You can meet me in L.A.”
He didn’t understand that Jess could hurt herself, and sometimes Emily thought he didn’t care. He had never liked her sister. From his point of view, she was always in trouble of one kind or another. Impatient, he did not hear Emily’s fear that this time was worse.
“Why do you have to go?” Emily asked Jess on the phone.
Jess said, “I can’t be a coward all my life.”
Emily sat in her office with her picture of Jonathan on the screen saver in front of her. “You aren’t a coward. Why do you say that?”
“I can’t keep floating from one thing to the next.”
“What is going on with you?”
“I have to grow up sometime,” Jess said.
“Growing up is not something you do on a tree-climbing expedition,” Emily protested. “Tree climbing is the opposite of growing up!”
“You remember when I made my vow,” Jess said.
“That ridiculous thing you said in Muir Woods?”
“It was not ridiculous. It was serious. And I said that in January. That was almost nine months ago. The year is almost up, and I haven’t followed through. It’s now or never.”
“What are you talking about?” Emily demanded. “Are you trying to prove something to Leon? Is that it?”
“No,” said Jess. “I’m proving this to myself. It’s not about Leon.” She added silently, Or George.
In truth, she was frightened. Her time with George was so intense. Not just the time with him, but the time away from him. She heard his voice. She saw him in her dreams. She had had a dream that she was flying with him through the trees in winter. They were flying slowly, drifting through the air, and she was wearing a long silk skirt that caught in bare branches. Don’t worry, said George as he floated down to untangle her. But she did worry. She thought about him constantly. She was sleeping over now, and spending mornings with him, as well as evenings. When he left, she missed him. While she worked, thoughts of George distracted her. She was no longer contemplating rose water. She contemplated him. She was no longer simply archiving the collector’s notes. She had become the collector, dreaming, doodling. She was altogether infatuated. And she wondered: How did this happen to me? How did I fall in love like this when I’m with someone else? And sometimes she and George seemed overdetermined, destined from the start. At other times, the relationship, if that’s what it now was, terrified her, because it wasn’t just George, but his things that entranced her, and she could not separate him from his possessions. His gorgeous home, his fresh sheets, his garden, his collections.
At the Tree House, Jess pitched in, like everybody else. The Tree Savers cooked and cleaned together, creating their own sanctuary. At George’s house Concepcion took care of everything. Sheets and towels reappeared magically, clean and white. Dishes returned sparkling to their shelves. At the Tree House, Jess was part of a team, but at George’s house she worked alone, reading, writing, gorging herself on McClintock’s fantasies.
To be with George was pure luxury, and she mourned, Oh, I am more materialistic than I thought. Oh, I am no idealist at all. I just want to be stroked and fed. And she was disgusted with herself. The affair was so obvious and degrading. She had nothing, and he was rich. She slept with him and read his books and drank his wine as though she were a little scholar-geisha, when she should be with Leon at the front, fighting against the Pacific Lumber Company. She was an aesthete, just when she should have been an ascetic and a revolutionary. The fact that she loved talking to George, and kissing him and falling asleep in his arms and waking up with him in the morning made the situation a thousand times worse.