So she resolved to fall out of love, and every day she planned to tell George, but that day passed and then another, until at last, as they ate risotto in the kitchen, George gave her an opening. He said, “Jess, I’m having some friends for dinner on Labor Day.” That was all, but she knew instantly what he meant.
“You don’t want me here.”
“Well …,” he hedged, and his hesitation was worse than the exclusion. “Don’t be offended.”
“I’m not offended. I’m glad,” she told him. “I’m relieved.” And she really was relieved, as well as hurt. “I’m driving up to Arcata that weekend.”
“What do you mean, ‘driving up to Arcata’?”
“I’m going to meet Leon and the tree-sitters in Wood Rose Glen.”
“You aren’t really going to start tree-sitting.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Jess demanded. But what she meant was, “How dare you tell me what to do when I can’t exist for you in the real world in front of your friends?”
“Don’t you think tree-sitting in a twenty-story redwood is risky? And just a little adolescent?”
“Don’t start lecturing me.”
“I wasn’t lecturing,” he said. “I was asking.”
“That was a rhetorical question,” Jess said. “So you weren’t asking at all.”
“How long are you going for?”
“I don’t know,” Jess answered dangerously. “As long as I want. Obviously you don’t have to pay me for the weeks that I’m away.”
“Weeks!”
“I’ll go for as long as they need me. Leon says they might stay the month.”
“And how are you going to live up there?” George asked her.
“The same way everybody else does. We have supplies. We have food. It’s not like I haven’t been before. I was there almost two months in the spring.”
He turned away, an expression she recognized, disappointment mixed with anger. “You know it’s dangerous.”
“Doing nothing is also dangerous.”
“People get killed up there.”
“People get killed on the ground too.”
He stood up to clear the risotto bowls, but walked around behind her instead and placed his hands upon her shoulders, a gesture suddenly irritating. She shook him off and sprang up from the table.
“Don’t go,” he said.
“Don’t go? Is that an order?”
“A request.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about your safety,” he said. “What if something happens to you?”
“Something has happened to me,” said Jess. “I’ve become your little pet. I’ve become your latest toy, your newest typewriter, and it’s not good, and you know it. You can’t introduce me to your friends, and there’s a reason for that. The reason is they’ll see exactly what you’ve done. They won’t approve, and they’ll be right. They’ll say, ‘George, how much did she cost?’”
“That’s spiteful,” said George. “And childish.”
Tears started in Jess’s eyes. “What’s childish is pretending we live in our own little world, when the truth is that I’m involved with someone else, and I have a life away from here. And you have your friends and your dealers and your store and Colm and all your projects, and it’s not like we have a future together, and it’s not like we have much of a past….”
“Do you really think you have a future with Leon?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“You’re angry,” he said.
“Don’t tell me I’m angry,” Jess exploded. “I hate it when you say ‘You’re angry,’ or ‘You’re upset.’ I know that I’m angry. I’ll tell you when I’m angry. And I’ll tell you what makes me angry. What makes me angry is that you expect me to stay with you at your pleasure.”
“Wait—” George interrupted.
“No, you wait. You want me here when it’s good for you, and gone when it’s inconvenient for you. You want me when it’s fun for you, and then when you get bored—not when I get bored—but when you get tired of me, you’ll say you’ve had enough.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“Or maybe you’ll say it’s not working out, or we don’t belong together long-term. Which is true. We don’t. But if I point this out now, then you’re defensive, because you aren’t done yet. That makes me angry. And I’ll tell you something else that makes me angry. I used to have a life. Maybe not what you call a life. Maybe you couldn’t see it, but I used to wake up and say, ‘What will I do today?’ Now I wake up and I know what I’ll do. I’ll work with your books and count the hours until I see you. I don’t talk to anyone else. I don’t see anyone else. I’m virtually hiding from my sister—”
“Would you stop and let me say something?” George broke in. “I have never done anything to you. I never imprisoned you here in my house.”
“That’s true,” said Jess. “And that’s what makes it so bad. I want to work with the collection; I want to eat with you. I want to sleep with you. You’re like a drug. I can’t stop thinking about you, and it’s exhausting. It’s …”
“So you don’t want to see Leon. You want to get away from me,” said George.
“I do want to see him,” Jess said stubbornly. “And I want my life to be about something besides you.” And she walked into the dining room and began stuffing papers, the notes for her essay, into her backpack.
“Jess,” said George, “listen. Don’t do something you’ll regret. I—”
“Don’t say something you’ll regret,” Jess countered. “Don’t say something that isn’t true.”
25
She left him there, just like that, and all night he hoped that she would call. All the next day, he hoped she would return, but she did not call, and she did not return. Surely, he thought, she would come back to finish her essay, if not to catalog the collection. She would not abandon her project, even if she was abandoning him. But the days passed, a week passed, and he heard nothing from her.
He went about his business, running with Nick, buying, trading, selling books at Yorick’s. He held his little dinner party, and Jess wasn’t there, and he told his friends that his cataloger had run off to Humboldt County, as they all did eventually, and now he had to find someone new. But, of course, he had no interest in finding anyone else. No one could replace Jess. He didn’t even look at the cookbooks when she was gone.
“You liked her,” Nick intuited as they stretched at Inspiration Point.
George said nothing.
“You talked about her all the time.”
“How was I talking about her all the time?” George shot back. “I hardly talked about her at all.”
“What was her name? Jessica?”
“Jessamine.”
“You had a fight.”
“It’s complicated,” George said.
“Really?” Nick teased gently. “It doesn’t sound so complicated to me.”
“She’s in Arcata with her boyfriend. I think she’ll probably stay there.”
“You think?”
“Well, she wants to stay there.”
“Is that what she told you?” asked Nick. They stood together looking at the electrical towers ruining the view of tawny hills. “She’s with someone else?” Nick pressed.
“She needs someone her own age. She can’t work for me and be with me at the same time. She can’t be my employee and my lover. I would be supporting her and I’d have all the power in the relationship. That doesn’t work, if she’s going to have a life. I’d be exploiting her. I was exploiting her all along.”
“Do you love her?”
George didn’t answer.
“Do you want to be with her?”
“A relationship like that never lasts,” said George.
“It might last—” said Nick.
“It’s just too fraught.”
“What’s the matter with you, man? You’re overthinking everything, as usual.”