“No. Yours were better than mine, anyway.”
“You read mine?”
“They were more interesting,” Jess confessed cheerfully.
“Jess.”
“Well, you were older, so she knew you better.”
“I’m sorry,” said Emily.
“Sorry that you’re older?” Jess hit her sister with a pillow. “Why are you so sad tonight?”
“I’m not sad,” Emily retorted, but she was; she was. Birthdays saddened her. She missed their mother, and she did miss Jonathan, although she wouldn’t talk about it. He had his own start-up on the East Coast and they didn’t see each other enough. Of course Jess knew that. She knew what Emily kept hidden, and so their time together was difficult, and also sweet.
Jess found what she was looking for on the floor, a photo of Lily and Maya in red and green plaid nightgowns. “Look at this.”
Emily examined the picture. “Have you noticed how Heidi likes Christmas colors?” she asked Jess. “It’s like she celebrates Christmas all year round.”
“Mmm.” Jess loved her sister most when she was catty. Emily was so disciplined, as a rule. Jess waited for those occasions when Emily said an unkind word. There was nothing cozier than talking about their father and his house in Canaan, Mass.—the house where they had not grown up. Nothing sweeter than wondering how Heidi got their father to go running—about which they felt the same way—pleased and also secretly a little angry, because he had never felt the need to exercise before. They discussed the cuteness of their half sisters, aged three and one; they never forgot to speak of this, but they reverted quickly to Heidi and how she didn’t cook. On the one hand, they were supposed to fly east for Thanksgiving, and on the other hand, they would be eating at a restaurant.
“It’s the worst of both worlds,” said Emily. “Guilt without home cooking.”
“I think I’d be afraid of Heidi in the kitchen,” said Jess, and Emily could not stop laughing. It was as if all their talk before, about the IPO and the birthday letters and the suit had been a prelude to this—the real conversation about their father and the family, all new people: Heidi and the little girls. Jacinta, the live-out nanny, who kept house and took care of dinner, but unfortunately took off weekends. Elmo, the new goldfish, who had arrived without the children’s knowledge after the first Elmo went belly-up. Richard was new too, someone who changed diapers.
They talked until almost midnight. Then Emily said she should be going, but the rain fell outside and thrummed the streets, and it was so warm in Jess’s room that she stayed a little longer, and longer still, until she began to forget about driving back across the Bay to Mountain View. The rain poured down, and she and Jess kept whispering until sleepily, half-dreaming, they began to talk about the old days, the vanished time when their mother was alive. Emily remembered better than Jess, but when Jess was with Emily, she remembered too. Their mother had white hands, long tapered fingers, and when she kneaded dough, her wedding ring clinked against the bowl. She was always singing softly as she played the piano with her white hands. She accompanied Emily’s dance recitals and she could play anything, but Chopin was the one that Gillian loved. She played Chopin every night, and when she turned the pages, she wasn’t really looking at the music. She knew the saddest Waltzes by heart. The saddest were the ones that she knew best, and she would play at bedtime, so falling asleep was like drifting off in autumn forests filled with golden leaves.
2
Yorick’s Used and Rare Books had a small storefront on Channing but a deep interior shaded by tall bookcases crammed with history, poetry, theology, antiquated anthologies. There was no open wall space to hang the framed prints for sale, so Hogarth’s scenes of lust, pride, and debauchery leaned rakishly against piles of novels, folk tales, and literary theory. In the back room these piles were so tall and dusty that they took on a geological air, rising like stalagmites. Jess often felt her workplace was a secret mine or quarry where she could pry crystals from crevices and sweep precious jewels straight off the floor.
As she tended crowded shelves, she opened one volume and then another, turning pages on the history of gardens, perusing Edna St. Vincent Millay: We were very tired, we were very merry, / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry … dipping into Gibbon: The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay … and old translations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: They walked the whole day over meadows, fields, and stony places. And when it rained, the little sister said, “Heaven and our hearts are weeping together….”?
During her first days at Yorick’s, the bell had startled Jess when a customer arrived, and she’d been reluctant to stop reading. Then the shop owner, George Friedman, had reminded Jess that he paid her to help others, not simply to help herself to books. He didn’t have to tell Jess twice. Now she engaged every customer she had the pleasure to meet. She greeted and advised, volunteering opinions literary, philosophical, or poetic. George rued the day.
Jess had a look about her—an unsettling blend of innocence and pedantry. She fixed her gray-green eyes upon the customers and said, “You like Henry James? Really?” as if she couldn’t quite believe it. Or she’d warn the purchaser of a multivolume history of domestic life in Victorian England, “You know, this is a history of women’s work based almost exclusively on male sources.”
“It’s a free country,” George called out from the back room. Or sometimes, sotto voce, behind the counter, “Just ring up the damn books.”
She came in three afternoons a week, and while he’d hoped those would be times he could absent himself, George didn’t like leaving Jess alone to chase away the odd shopper who came in off the street. True, Yorick’s was more of a project than a business, but he planned to break even one of these years. Jess had to be watched. She was well read, opinionated, unconcerned with profit. Also George liked watching her.
He was old money, a Microsoft millionaire now returned to Berkeley where he’d gone to college in the seventies, majoring in physics with a minor in psychotropics. He had worked in the Excel group when a long-haired physicist was not so uncommon, and Bill Gates still lived in a conventionally pretty house with a computer on the kitchen counter. Microsoft had been feisty in George’s day, competing for market share. By the time he left, the place was expanding geometrically, so that construction crews and moving trucks and summer interns swarmed the Redmond campus. Podlike buildings multiplied around the shallow pool known as Lake Bill. Theme cafeterias sprang up with different cuisines in each. The company picnic began to look like a county fair, except that the band playing was Chicago, flown in for the occasion.
As share prices soared, George’s friends had bought cars. They began with sports cars, and then they bought vintage cars, and finally, they bought kits and built custom cars from scratch. Then George’s friends bought houses on Lake Washington. They bought small houses, and then bigger houses, and then they renovated those houses and commissioned furniture: sculptural dining tables and beds and rocking chairs in bird’s-eye maple. They collected glass, and bought Chihulys by the dozen. They retired and purchased boats and traveled, and some started little companies and foundations of their own, and others flew to cooking classes in Tuscany and hosted fund-raisers for Bill Clinton. Along the way, they married and divorced, raised children, and came out, not necessarily in that order.
Like his friends, George retired, traveled, and donated to worthy causes. But he was eccentric as well. He was a reader, an autodidact with such a love for Great Books that he scarcely passed anymore for a Berkeley liberal. Strange to say, but at this time in his life George would have had a happier conversation with Berkeley, the philosopher, than with most of his old Berkeley friends.
He bought a Maybeck house in the hills and looked down upon the city he’d once loved. Previously antiwar, at thirty-nine his new concern was privacy. He grew suspicious—his friends said paranoid—of technology, and refused
to use e-mail or cell phones. He feared government control of information and identity, and loathed the colonizing forces of big business as well. He became a benefactor of the Free Software Foundation, boycotted the very products with which he’d made his fortune, and called Microsoft the Evil Empire, although he still owned stock. In the eye of the Internet storm, George sought the treasures of the predigital age. He wanted pages he could turn, and records he could spin. Eschewing virtual reality, he collected old typewriters and dictionaries and hand-drawn maps. He began acquiring rare books and opened Yorick’s.
The store was really an excuse to buy, but George ran it like a business. He was a shrewd, competitive dealer, and rarely fell in love with his own stock. He never sold or traded from his personal library, which was small, select, and static, but when it came to Yorick’s, George was a glutton and a libertine. Once he claimed ownership and the first flush of happiness faded, he would part with just about anything for the right price. A first edition of Thomas Bewick’s 1797 History of British Birds flew into Yorick’s and then out again in weeks. George treasured a copy of My Bondage and My Freedom inscribed by Frederick Douglass to the woman who bought his freedom, but he sold the volume to a small bright-eyed Stanford professor. He might have considered donating some of his acquisitions to deserving libraries, but he preferred playing the open market, and spurned research institutions. More than once at auctions, he broke librarians’ hearts, only to flip his purchases to other private dealers.
Perhaps George was too attuned to profit. Or perhaps he was just fickle, and could not give himself fully to possessing lovely things. Presumably if he had gone into therapy he’d have learned the answer to these and other questions. Old girlfriends seemed to find the notion irresistible, but he was the independent, rumpled sort, and refused ironing out. Some found his refusal irresistible as well.
Yorick’s was not always the kind of adventure George wanted. Good help proved elusive. Graduate students, budding novelists, future screenwriters, manic-depressive book thieves—he’d seen them all. With a kind of gallows humor he had printed up a questionnaire that he distributed to those seeking employment. When Jess had turned up, inquiring about a part-time job, he showed her the dark crammed store, the thicket of history, philosophy, and literary criticism in the center, fiction all along the walls and trailing into the back room where random stacks cluttered the floor. Then he returned to his desk and handed her his printed list of questions.
“Could I borrow a pen?” Jess asked, after digging in her backpack and turning up a handful of change and a warped chocolate bar. She was young. She had the clear-eyed beauty of a girl who still believed that, as they used to say, she could be anything she wanted to be. Of course she would not consider herself a girl. The word was offensive, but she had a girl’s body, delicate shoulders, and fine arms, and like a girl, she had no idea how fresh she looked.
George handed Jess a black ballpoint, and she took the questionnaire and filled it out right on the other side of his desk. He tried not to stare, although she was leaning over. Casting his eyes down, he resisted the impulse to turn up the sleeve covering her writing hand.
When Jess finished, she returned the questionnaire and waited, expecting George to read her answers right away. He ignored her. When she hovered longer he said, “Give me a couple of days and I’ll call you.”
But he read the completed questionnaire as soon as she left.
Full name: Jessamine Elizabeth Bach
Are you a convicted felon? No
Are you an unconvicted felon? Not to my knowledge
Are you currently taking or dealing illegal drugs? No
Are you sure? Pretty sure
Circle one. A bookstore is: a meeting place, a mating place, a research room, a library, or a STORE, as the name suggests. Store for convicted felons?
Circle one. It’s acceptable to wear earphones or use cell phones or notebook computers at work: rarely, sometimes, if I am day-trading, NEVER. Own none of the above
Circle one. It’s acceptable to take money from the register: rarely, sometimes, if I really need to pay my dealer, NEVER. Wow, sounds like you’ve been burned. Sorry!
Short answer: No more than three sentences, please. Why do you want to work here? I want to work here because I really need the money for day-trading (just kidding). I love books and am well qualified to talk about them if you need someone knowledgeable. You have a great philosophy section, and as I mentioned, I am a grad student in philosophy.
Why in your opinion is this store named Yorick’s? Hmm. I think this is a trick question. You want us to say because of “Alas, poor Yorick” in “Hamlet,” but I can tell from looking at you that you are one of those guys who reads “Tristram Shandy” over and over again, so I’m guessing you named the store after Parson Yorick in the novel.
George read this last answer twice. The phrase one of those guys chafed. Was she saying he was simply an esoteric type? He fancied himself original, and he was miffed, or thought maybe he should be, for although he had a sense of humor, he exercised it primarily at others’ expense. He found Jess a little flip, but she seemed sane, an unlikely arsonist. She’d do.
She often came late, but when she set to work, Jess straightened out pile after pile of books, shelving them alphabetically from Aquinas to Wittgenstein. She cut up cardboard boxes and crafted dividers to separate Aristotle from Bacon, Kant from Kierkegaard, and taped up little signs printed with a laundry marker: ACHTUNG! If you are looking for philosophers of the Frankfurt School, please visit our Social Theory section. She shelved all histories of utopian communities together, volumes on Oneida and the Shakers and Fourierism, and she created a separate section titled “Polar Exploration” for books on Martin Frobisher, Admiral Byrd, and Shackleton. Sometimes she disappeared. He’d find her kneeling on the floor, poring over The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, or The Lives of the Lord Chancellors, or leafing through a tome on Japanese monetary policy. Once he nearly tripped over her. She’d crouched down with a history of Byzantine hymnology balanced on a bottom shelf.
“Oh, I didn’t see you.”
“Sorry.” She scrambled to her feet. “I was trying to figure out whether to shelve this in Religion or Music.”
“I wonder if it’s worth having sections for just two or three books,” said George, as he passed into the other room.
She took this as criticism and called after him, “Maybe some of the sections are small now, but they could grow.”
Later, she appeared at his desk and said, “I know the sections help.”
“The main ones are useful.”
“Well, if you think they’re useful, you could thank me.” He said nothing and she added, “Gratitude is important.”
“I agree.” He turned back to the package he was opening.
He liked provoking her, just a little. Caught between polite dignity and anger, Jess was very cute. This was despicable on his part; she should probably sue him. He was male and he was straight; two strikes against him right there. And he was unmarried, although not for lack of trying. Admittedly, all the trying had been on the part of his girlfriends. George had always wanted to get married—but not to them! Until quite recently he’d begun each relationship hoping that at last he’d found the one that he was looking for. He had heard the other narrative—the one women told—about the story of a man who moves on restlessly, seeking pleasure, shutting his eyes to the life he might have shared, but George knew differently. In his mind he tried again and again to marry; he kept looking, but all he found was neurosis and neediness. He had lived for two years with a woman named Andrea who suffered from depression. Later he’d been involved with an anthropologist who threatened suicide when he broke up with her. And then there was Margaret. Generally he avoided thinking about her. He almost never spoke of her, even to himself. Frayed by long experience with the angry other sex, George preferred to keep his distance, especially if he liked a woman. He knew that everything he said or did could be used agains
t him.
She hurried in one day, out of breath. “Sorry I’m late. I just finished reading An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.”
“Is it such a page-turner?”
“Actually, yes, once you get into it….”
“I’ve always thought that Hume is overrated.”
She stared at him in astonishment and then realized that he was making fun of her. “When I told that lady I thought Henry James was overrated, I just meant his later work.”
“Good to know,” said George.
Jess stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, then turned on her heels and disappeared into Fiction.
He could see that she had something on her mind, because at the end of the day she began hovering again. She had a way of turning up behind his desk, as if she wanted to see what he was reading. He found it irritating when she appeared suddenly like that, even though he did the same to her. He buried his book under papers and auction catalogs and spun his old swivel chair around.
“Yes, Jessamine?”
“I was wondering something.”
“Does it have to do with money?”
His directness startled her. “My sister’s company is going public, and I can buy one hundred shares at eighteen dollars each, so I need eighteen hundred dollars.” Jess said it all in a rush. “I was wondering if you could kind of give me my future paychecks in advance. And then I’d pay you back.”
“Do I know you’d still be working for me?”
Jess nodded solemnly.
“Really? Then you’d be my longest-lasting employee.”
“Oh, I could pay you back right away because the shares are going way up.”
“What’s the company?”
“It’s Veritech.”
“Veritech! That’s your sister?”