His spring party, therefore, was mostly in Jess’s honor, although he did not advertise this. He presented the gathering as a viewing of the McClintock cookbooks, which he had installed in special cases in his great room.
The glass-fronted bookcases were quartersawn oak and built quite low, underneath his west windows. Atop the bookcases he had built illuminated glass display cases—the kind he had seen at the Huntington Library—so that on occasion he could show off certain volumes. For the party he had set up a little display of women’s cookbooks: the Brandenburg, the Salzburg, The Compleat Housewife. American Cookery. A New Present for A Servant-Maid, the expanded 1771 edition of Eliza Haywood’s 1743 handbook.
The cabinetry was exquisite, book-matched for George’s precious books. He did not fault his architect and carpenter for assuming the party was to celebrate their months of work. Sandra was coming, of course, along with her daughter, and George expected Nick and Julia, and antiquarian colleagues and Microsoft friends. Gracious in defeat, and hinting impishly at a purchase of his own, Raj accepted George’s invitation. Colm would be there. Colm had unpacked and installed the cookbooks. By the time the bookcases were ready, Jess had been traveling up north to chain herself to trees, to demonstrate in scenes George tried not to think about. Colm had done the work, but Jess was the one George thought about. She was the one he planned for. She had never been to the house, and he walked through the rooms, trying to imagine her impressions. He thought of her when he chose his champagne. He imagined her nibbling the strawberries he bought at the Farmers’ Market. She did eat strawberries, didn’t she? He prepared platters of cheese and biscuits, grapes, fresh figs, poached quince. He hired a pastry chef to bake lighter, smaller versions of the old recipes: bite-sized tarts, tiny crème brûlées. George’s housekeeper, Concepcion, climbed a painter’s ladder to dust the great beams, and then descended to polish the vintage typewriters. George hoped Jess understood that this party was for her. He imagined lifting his glass to thank her—if he could manage without sounding like a complete idiot.
“Bring friends—bring your sister if you like,” he had told her on the phone.
“I think her boyfriend is going to be in town,” said Jess.
“Bring your boyfriend then,” he said. “I mean her boyfriend.” He felt strangely tongue-tied. He had been extremely nervous, and he knew it showed, but he tried not to think about that. He tried to concentrate on what he could control: the party, the glass display cases lit with LEDs. Over six months he had built a proper home for McClintock’s collection. These rare volumes would never see the inside of a cupboard, cutlery drawer, or oven again.
He had planned the party for early evening, and as his guests drifted in, the last sunlight sifted through the windows and danced across the floor. The musicians had already arrived with guitar and flute, and they were playing “Greensleeves” sweetly, a little too sweetly.
Concepcion grinned. “You getting married, George?”
“How about something livelier?” George told the guitarist, who obliged with Leo Brouwer.
So to the strains of Cuban music, George welcomed his guests and graciously accepted their congratulations on the collection, the cabinets, the house, the champagne, the sunset, and all the while he kept his eyes on the front door.
Sandra arrived in a long Guatemalan patchwork skirt. She wore a black shirt and silver jewelry, and she was almost beautiful with her long gray hair down her back. Nothing like her small tattooed daughter in a wife-beater tank top. What was that inked between her shoulder blades? A bar code, or a word? And if it was a word, partly exposed, what was it? Redemption? Or Reinvention? Raj came in with them, and George realized that the three had driven up together.
“Yes, I drove,” Raj said cheerfully as the two women admired the display cases. “That was the least I could do.”
“Still courting?” George asked. You never knew with Raj.
“I’ve bought the engravings,” Raj whispered. “I bought all McClintock’s framed engravings right off the walls for a hundred dollars apiece.”
“Which engravings?”
“The lichens over the couch. They’re originals from Flora Danica—pre-1800, hand-colored.”
If only the cat hadn’t bitten George, just as he’d leaned in for a closer look!
“They’re from the botanical atlas that was supposed to include plates of every plant in Denmark. These are the engravings Prince Frederick ordered copied on china for Catherine the Great. Every piece was supposed to bear an exact copy of a different plant from the collection. I’m getting them reframed….”
“The least you could do,” George said wryly. Once bitten, twice shy. He had not ventured near McClintock’s odd art again, although now, of course, he wished he had. The cookbooks were the real prize, and he knew it was churlish to begrudge Raj his find, but the competitor in him sulked. It took three glasses of champagne and two major compliments from his antiquarian friends to shake his pique.
The first compliment began to mollify him: “I have never heard of a private collection like this in Berkeley.”
The second delighted him: “There may be cookbooks here that no one has seen.”
All the dealers admired and envied George’s acquisition, and that potent mix set the party buzzing, just as tiny stinging bubbles enlivened the champagne. No toast, George decided. No need to congratulate himself. He spoke to Sandra and showed her the humidity sensors he had installed in the bookcases, and he spoke to Nick and Julia, just as Julia’s cell phone began ringing.
“It’s Henry,” she told Nick. “He says he doesn’t want his babysitter anymore. He wants to know when we’re coming home.” She turned back to her phone. “Why don’t you use the other bathroom, sweetie?”
And George kept circulating, and watched Raj flirt with Colm, who looked flustered and spoke rapidly about his dissertation. “The excerpt,” said Colm, “becomes a genre of its own.”
Raj smiled. “Yes, but is that genre at all interesting—on its own?”
Colm looked offended.
The sun was low, the sunset draining away, and George thought, This is the moment in Virginia Woolf where somebody lights the lamps. The golden light slipping into the Bay, the guests absorbed in conversation. George walked among them and he adjusted the lights, and while he turned the dimmers, he saw a tall woman enter the room with a square-shouldered blond athlete—and he realized that this was Emily and her boyfriend, both dressed in open blazers, as though they were going to a yacht club, and then he saw Leon with his long glossy black hair and his jeans and untucked white dress shirt. Had Jess told him to wear that? She was the last inside the door and seemed to look everywhere at once. Unconsciously she clasped her hands behind her, as though stepping into a museum. She wore a sleeveless shift, less a dress than a slip of gray silk so wrinkled it must have been the style. Approaching his bookshelves, she examined the titles, one after another. The famous Millay and the Plath, all the cloth-bound poetry.
“You can open them if you like,” he said.
That would have been enough for him, watching Jess open his books. Meeting her accomplished sister.
“Your house is lovely,” Emily said.
“Amazing!” exclaimed Jonathan. “Who’s your architect?”
“Bernard Maybeck,” George said.
“You should hire him for Veritech, when you guys move,” Jonathan told Emily. “Seriously.”
George couldn’t help smiling. The desserts were superb, the champagne subtly teasing, like a word on the tip of the tongue—methodological, perspicacious—the word that comes to you, playfully, when you think you have forgotten. Palimpsest. Irreversibility. Inamorata.
He would have been perfectly happy, if not for Leon. Why was it that the youngest, most innocent-looking women consorted with the creepiest men? Their boyfriends were not boys or friends at all, but shadowy familiars: bears, wolfhounds, panthers.
Leon cast an appraising eye over George’s collections, and bent down to look insid
e the display cabinets.
“Be careful,” Jess warned. She had indeed asked Leon to wear the white shirt, and she was a little nervous about bringing him to George’s house—not so much that he would break something, but that he would be bored, and therefore rude. She knew instinctively that Leon and George would bring out the worst in each other. Here it was, happening already.
“Elbows off the glass,” George said.
Leon did not apologize, but straightened up, smiled, and shrugged carelessly as if to say, What are you, a fag?
And George looked at Leon, and he thought, Have you really been with Jess a year and a half? And he imagined smashing Leon’s toothy mouth. But he tried, instead, to act the gracious host, and asked with only the slightest hint of mockery in his voice, “How are the trees?”
“The trees are well,” Leon answered, matching George’s satirical tone perfectly.
“You’ve been up north?”
“We’ve been everywhere,” said Leon.
“Success?” asked George.
“We’ve had good discussions,” Leon said smoothly. “Success is up to Sacramento.”
“So you don’t win your victories in the forest, but on the ground.”
Leon glanced at Jess as he said, “Nothing with trees happens on the ground.”
Jess traced the smooth edge of the display case with her finger. Despite her resolution in Muir Woods, despite her weeks up north with Leon, she had not overcome her fear of climbing.
“I’ll get you some champagne,” Leon offered Jess in a gentler voice.
“No, thank you.”
George searched Jess’s downcast face as Leon ambled to the bar. He wished he could talk to her alone; take her into a different room without seeming obvious.
“Are you all right?” George asked. That startled her, and he regretted the question. Too intimate. Too concerned. “Could I get you some strawberries?” he amended.
She shook her head and kept gazing at the rare cookbooks under glass.
“Please let me get you some.”
“Please?” She teased gently. “Have you started saying please to me?”
“A rare slip,” he said. “But I did buy the strawberries for you.”
“Why?”
Because I love you, he thought. “Because I owe you,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything,” she replied in her easy way.
“You know I do. You got me these books.” His voice was low. “You made the deal, Jess.”
“True,” she conceded with a smile.
“Would you like to work on them?”
“Work on them how?”
“We need a descriptive catalog, for one thing. We have to sort the notes and store them separately with records of the page numbers where they were found. Colm started, but I need him at the store, and he’s got his dissertation. I was wondering if you would like to try.”
He opened the glass display case and took out the palm-sized 1814 American Cookery. The binding had cracked, and he held the book as if it were a fledgling with a broken wing.
“Independence Cake,” Jess read over George’s shoulder. “Twenty pounds flour, fifteen pounds sugar, ten pounds butter, four dozen eggs, one quart wine, one quart brandy …” She laughed softly. “Was this for the Founding Fathers reunion?” She turned the next several pages and found a black-ink drawing on a slip of typing paper, a nude woman holding a round fruit to her mouth. Jess plucked it out and read the collector’s tiny caption: “Do I dare to eat a peach?”
“Will you?” George asked, closing the book and placing it atop the cabinet.
“Maybe,” Jess said lightly. “Do you have any?”
“No peaches.”
“Oh, well. I can’t ruin this dress, anyway.”
Words he took as permission to look openly at her. The fabric of her dress, gray and wrinkled at first glance, was really silver. No one else would wear fabric like that, rustling with every breath.
“It’s Emily’s,” she said, disproving his idea immediately. She had borrowed the dress from her sister, although Emily thought it was too long on her.
“Will you take the job? Please?”
“Hmm.” Pensive, with just a touch of humor, she said, “I don’t think I like that word from you.”
“I’d pay you more,” George told her. Only half-joking, he declared, “I’d make you curator.”
“Oh, a title,” said Jess.
Why are you hesitating now? he thought. What have you been doing for the past six weeks? He had scarcely seen her at the store. Across the room, George’s friends were clustering at the dessert table like bees. Raj and Colm were discussing William Blake, while Jonathan was holding forth to Nick about how the Nasdaq would rise again. Stealthily, Leon walked among them. George assumed he was casing the joint. George should check Leon’s pockets before he left. Search him and then show Jess the content of her boyfriend’s character. After which George could comfort Jess, and then … he didn’t know what happened next.
Jess said, “I want to know who she was.”
“What do you mean?” George asked.
“The collector’s lover.”
“Why do you assume he had a lover?”
“Well, because—because look.” Jess held up the nude. “You’ve got the evidence right here.”
“You’re missing the point,” George told her. “She wasn’t his lover. That was why he wrote all the notes and drew the pictures.” He took the drawing from her, and his fingers brushed hers. She looked up at him, clear-eyed. Perspicacious. She understands, he thought. She knows.
But in the next moment she drew back her hand. “Actually, I think I would like a drink.”
As he showed her the way to the bar, he finished his thought under his breath, murmuring, “He didn’t have her, so he drew her instead.”
21
Jonathan was calm when ISIS rose to nine, and still confident when the shares retreated to five fifty. Those who whined and fretted only irritated him. Scared-straight venture capitalists did not impress him now any more than they had back in 1998 when they pleaded with Jonathan to take their cash. Where did they get their ideas about the new economy? From magazines? He did not bother reading publications like Fast Company, or Wired, or Forbes. So-called business cycles bored him. The news, whether paper or electronic, meant little as far as Jonathan was concerned. The news was already old. Weekly, daily, hourly, anything called news was already archival.
He understood that in this world there were news reporters and news makers, investors and innovators. Watchers and world beaters. In each case he took the active role. He did not know economic theory; he knew computers. He did not meditate on trends; he eyed the future. And so, at George’s party, when he talked to Nick, he spoke with perfect equanimity. “The strong survive, man,” he told Nick, and by strong he meant “Those with new technology.”
While Emily saw falling share price as a sad decay, a postlapsarian decline from larger, rounder numbers, Jonathan came to view the fall as opportunity. “Buy now,” he told anyone who asked, and he began to buy back shares himself, convinced of his company’s resilience.
In April when ISIS sank to four, Jonathan called a meeting. Dave, Aldwin, Oskar, and Jake gathered in Oskar’s office.
“Where’s Orion?” Jonathan asked.
“I’m not sure he came in today,” said Jake.
“No, I saw him,” said Aldwin, just as Orion walked through the door and took his seat in the corner.
“Okay,” said Jonathan, and then paused as Orion opened his cream soda. “Let me tell you what’s happening.”
“Cisco bought us,” Orion said, and for a second everybody froze in shock. “Just kidding.”
No one laughed.
“Anyone else want to take a guess?” Jonathan asked icily. Nobody spoke, so he continued. “It’s time for a paradigm shift. We are going to develop a new security product for electronic fingerprinting of every view and touch on a piece of data. We?
??re going to call this service Fast-Tracking, and we’ll sell it to every security client.”
“How would this work?” Dave asked.
“Look, with ChainLinx we encrypt transactions to safeguard the purchaser. Fast-Tracking is really a data-protection and surveillance tool for the vendor.” He stepped up to the board and began to draw the new scheme in green ink.
What did Eli Whitney feel when he arrived in America with plans for the cotton gin? What were Francis Cabot Lowell’s emotions when, from memory alone, he built a scale model of the Cartwright weaving machine? Elation? Mastery mixed with trepidation? Jonathan felt entirely himself as he played his card, the secret Emily had revealed to him eighteen months before. He was not copying detailed plans, but developing his own. Nor was he attempting to replicate an existing project at Veritech—for Emily had told him in no uncertain terms that electronic fingerprinting was a project that she would not pursue. Ever since that conversation, Jonathan had plotted his own course—a new product for ISIS, a new initiative for programmers, and, most important, a breakthrough to present to analysts and shareholders.
During the Industrial Revolution, memorizing machine parts might have been essential. In this Computational Era, the concept alone, the whispered idea, launched a thousand chips. Jonathan’s mind was quick and infinitely flexible, his timing uncanny, his presentation transformative as he made over electronic fingerprinting into new market share. He was not mathematically creative like Jake or Oskar, but he had an acquisitive intelligence, and when he appropriated an idea, he improved it, until his own version not only surpassed, but obliterated its source. Indeed, he no longer recalled electronic fingerprinting except with nostalgia, as he remembered other conversations with Emily, her head on his chest, her bare back under his hand, her thigh against his thigh. Her puzzling confidence became a gift. Her revelation shifted in his mind to inspiration. And Emily herself—he worshipped her. She was his muse. If he did not tell her about this meeting, if he neglected to mention his new plan for ISIS—Well, soon he planned to tell her this and everything.
Emily had promised to leave Veritech in June. She and Jonathan talked endlessly about finding an apartment in Cambridge, or simply buying a house. They had a real estate agent, and no price limit. Therefore Jonathan felt just right as he diagrammed his new Fast-Tracking system on the whiteboard. At last he was getting to the crux of the matter—the new technology that ISIS needed. He loved Emily, and he thanked her silently, although he did not mention her name in his visionary presentation. There was no need. There was no time. Oh, life was sweet.