But what were these indelible memories? Gillian didn’t say. They lived between the lines, and underneath the letters, in that realm of secrets Jess could not ferret out. And Jess wondered, poetically, whether there had been some great love in her mother’s life—some other man she might have married (for she could not imagine her own father as a figure of romance). And she wondered whether there had been a secret hurt, a sad end to all of Gillian’s might-have-beens. Perhaps her parents forbade her to become a concert pianist, and this was why Gillian played Chopin Waltzes, in requiem. Late at night, in her pajamas, Jess was open to every dramatic possibility, for she had never felt a kinship with her mother before. She had never thought of Gillian as yearning or secretive. Her mother had died young, but now Jess saw that her mother had been young, and that was a different matter altogether. Her letters were no longer prescriptive, but searching, far more powerful now that Jess had a secret of her own.
She lived in the Tree House as before, and did her chores—cooking, cleaning, leafleting, supplying the tree-sitters in the Grove. She attended Rabbi Helfgott’s mysticism classes with Mrs. Gibbs, and typed the minutes for Tree House meetings, where she was official scribe. She slept in Leon’s bed, but he was away in Humboldt County, climbing, demonstrating, organizing, and who knew what else. He did call and ask her when she would come, but he did not call often, nor did he return to get Jess, and the longer Leon stayed away, the easier it became to slip into the collector’s world.
On weekday afternoons, she sat with the cookbooks at George’s table, and she lost herself in recipes for marzipan, illustrations of assorted ices, lists of berries for plucking in each season. She read the cookbooks along with their collector, noting where he paused to draw or quote or simply copy some delicious detail. Take your Angelica when young and tender, which will be about the beginning of May…. She worked with Tom McClintock’s ghost, and where he sighed, she sighed, and where he seemed to smile—Syrup of Maiden-hair!!—she smiled. And she examined each line drawing of the woman he adored, a lady with wide-set eyes, long wavy hair, small feet, and pointed toes. Jess was beginning to dream about this woman; she felt she knew her; she thought she almost knew her name.
She glided through the house, and ate the plums George left. She cut melons in the kitchen, and ate the dripping slices, cold and sweet. Be careful with this knife, he wrote on one of her note cards. Carefully, she slid George’s steel knife into round cantaloupe and honeydew and galia melons. And if she waited long enough, he came home. She listened for him now, and met him at the door. She stood on his feet so she could reach, and wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, and if he came from running, she licked his salt skin, and they kissed until he took her hand and led her upstairs. But they didn’t plan to see each other. They talked of everything else and kept their time a secret even from themselves; the food they shared, the wine they drank, the Bach he played for her, music rough and smooth.
He took her to Point Reyes, and they drove through fields of tall grass and wildflowers. Along the coast they smelled a mix of salt and eucalyptus, and as they sped down Sir Francis Drake Highway, they passed a tavern called the Golden Hind, but they did not stop there. They ate a picnic dinner at a beach called Heart’s Desire. At dusk when it was time to go, they lingered, and Jess took off her sandals and walked barefoot in the cove on Tomales Bay. The bay was round, green-gray under the round clear sky. Slick under her feet, sea grass tangled in her toes. She called to George, “It’s warm. Come in with me.”
He said, “No, it’s late. We should drive back.”
“Come on,” she said. “Just get your feet wet.”
She stretched out her arms to him until he unlaced his shoes and took off his socks to come and kiss her in the shallow water.
He took her to Santa Cruz, and to Santa Rosa, and to Half Moon Bay. He took her walking with him deep in Tilden Park, but only where he knew that they would be alone.
They were living in a bubble of their own, and when one of them began to speak of it, the other murmured, “No.” They were improbable, and at the same time all too predictable. He did not tell Nick or Raj. She did not confess to Leon, or so much as hint to Emily. They scarcely admitted to each other what they were doing. Even a single word could break the spell, and so they kissed instead of speaking, and drank instead of thinking. They heard the mermaids singing. When human voices woke them, they would drown.
Each had moments of lucidity. You have to stop, Jess told herself. You need to see Leon. You need to go away and think.
Slow down, George told himself. This is intoxicating.
But they did not stop. They only delayed a little. He walked through the door and she said, “I have to show you this,” and she pulled him into the dining room to unveil that day’s discovery. A recipe for pecokys, which schul ben pyarboyld and lardyd and etyn with gyngenyr. And then she showed him instructions for broiling larks, and then McClintock’s handwritten quotations from Gertrude Stein.
“Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea,” she read aloud as George stood behind her. Arms around her waist, he was unbuttoning her shirt. “When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.”
She sat on the table with the slip of paper in her hand. “Doesn’t silver seller make you think of salt?”
“Not really,” he murmured, kneeling on the chair, kissing her bare skin.
“Her poetry wasn’t abstract at all.” She felt his breath and his rough tongue. “Don’t you think Tender Buttons is really about …?”
“Yes.”
Working in the August afternoons, she wondered what he would bring home for dinner, what strange fruit, what curious greens, or salty sea beans. He brought her plums, and Asian pears, and almonds, and she showed him her discoveries.
“Look at this,” she told George, dancing into his arms.
The volume was so slight that they had missed it in their first assessment. In fact, she found it tucked inside a larger book. Scottish, dated 1736, it was one of those palm-sized cookbooks, a handbook that fit literally in the hand. Its recipes were terse, not terribly poetic, nor was the book illustrated, except for some decoration on the first page, a little head of Bacchus, tame enough to be a house pet, surrounded by a couple of clumsy birds and vines. Why then was this book so stuffed with notes?
He laughed when he saw the title. Mrs. McLintock’s Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work. “You think Tom McClintock felt a kinship?”
“It’s rare,” she said.
“How rare?”
“It’s the first Scottish cookbook by a woman. I e-mailed the University of Aberdeen. There are only two known copies in the world, and they’re both in Glasgow.”
This was serious. Silently he began to calculate how much a book like this would be worth to the Schlesinger, to the Getty, to those private collectors who would bid for it.
“No one knows about this one,” she told him. “This is now the third!”
“Jess,” he said.
“We should call reporters,” she declared. “We should write an article.”
“You should write the article,” he said.
“But first I have to understand it better.”
“What do you mean?”
She couldn’t quite explain. She wanted to know the cookbook’s secret life. For days she studied it. She gazed at Mrs. McLintock’s name so long that in her mind the letters rearranged themselves: lock, lint, clint, clit, cock, clock … McClintock. McLintock. She imagined the two fit together, but she found no clues about McClintock in McLintock, and the collector’s love remained a mystery.
“George,” she said one evening as she lay in his arms.
“Jessamine.” His eyes were soft, his face unguarded, almost boyish in the low light.
“I have to ask you something.”
“I have to ask you something too.” He was wearing his wristwatch, a vintage Patek Philippe he’d forgotten to take off. She didn’t wear a watch, and so she wore noth
ing at all.
“Okay.” She had been lying with her head on his chest, and now she propped her chin up on her arms, a gesture both adorable and suffocating.
“No, you ask first,” he said, “because I can’t breathe.”
“I’m sorry!” She rolled off and she lay on her side, facing him. “I wanted to ask you about the cookbook. I doubt McClintock knew how rare it was. I don’t think he understood how much the books were worth, but he had a thing for women cookbook writers, and obviously he fixated on McLintock because of her name. So do you think there was a Mrs. McClintock in his life whom Sandra doesn’t know about? Do you think maybe he was married at some point when he was young, when he was buying all these books after the War?”
“No, sweetheart,” said George.
“Really?” she asked yearningly, and he couldn’t tell whether she was questioning the no or the word sweetheart, which he had never used before.
He caressed her waist and the curve of her hip with his hand. “He never married her. He never got anywhere with her.”
“You always say that, but what evidence do you have?”
“The whole collection, every note he wrote.”
“People thought Troy was a myth too,” Jess reminded George, “and now those ruins have been found. Don’t laugh! I think he knew her. She wasn’t somebody that he saw once. He drew her as if he saw her every day.”
“We’ll never know, will we?”
“Yes, we will. I’m going to find out,” said Jess, clear-eyed, pure. She was so lovely. Not just her face, but her faith that there was such a thing as truth, her conviction that there were immutable answers if you took the trouble to find them out.
“Stay here tonight,” George whispered.
“That’s what you were going to ask?”
“Will you?”
He had said one of the things they did not say. “I thought we weren’t doing that.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Sleeping together is one thing, but …”
She buried her head in his pillow.
“Talking about it is another.”
He didn’t want to talk about it either. He wanted to remain in this dream state as long as possible. The outside world was all obstacles and complications. Leon. The Tree Savers. Their missions up to Humboldt County. George could say Leon was dangerous. He could tell Jess that she was wrong to get involved with him. What was he offering in return? A sinecure. A dependency. To be crass, his bed. He could say he loved her. Would he mean it? They enjoyed each other. They were friends, and he desired her. He knew himself well enough to doubt that such feelings would last. He was fully capable of breaking Jess’s heart.
As for Jess—she was mixed-up about George. She was at home with him. Calm and happy. She could think aloud. She never felt that way at the Tree House, and yet the people there shared her beliefs about the world. Philosophically, ideologically, she and Leon were a pair. She and George agreed on nothing politically. He had no interest in the environment. He recycled like everybody else, but he cared little for other species, and maligned Tree Savers as eco-terrorists. He was old that way, ill-informed and cynical, preferring books to social change, studying antique maps instead of current battlegrounds of deforestation. Living in the past, he turned his back on the future, and this was a position she deplored.
Then there was his money. She remembered Leon’s warning: You’ll end up in his collection too. She could see it happening. She was entranced by his house, his wine, his cookbooks, his quick smile. Recipe for disaster. She was falling in love with George, and she worked for him too. What would that make her? The young girlfriend. The mistress, the kept woman. She hated the thought.
Abashed, she read Haywood’s instructions to maidservants, advice on chastity preceding recipes for pickles, directions for choosing meat, best methods for making all kinds of English wines.
If you follow the advice I have already given you, concerning going as frequently as you can to hear sermons, and reading the holy scriptures and other good books, I need not be at the pains to inform you how great the sin is of yielding to any unlawful solicitations: but if you even look no farther than this world—oh, practical Eliza, thought Jess—you will find enough to deter you from giving the least encouragement to any address of that nature, though accompanied with the most soothing and flaterring pretenses.
Jess sighed. She knew, in the long term, she and George were philosophically unsuited, financially unequal, generationally mismatched. Only in the short term did they agree. Only when it came to fingertips, and tongues and wrists. When he touched her and then slipped his wet fingers in her mouth and said, “This is how you taste.” In their laughter and the food he brought her, the freshest and most delicate of vegetables: watercress, fennel, dandelion greens dressed with champagne vinegar. They shared a private language in the cookbooks, and whispered inside jokes. Even their jokes were gentle. Tender buttons. He was tender with her.
She craved his company. The edges of her life were ragged, her feelings conflicted, her behavior incoherent, probably immoral, and at the same time, she was deeply happy, consuming nectarines, and Asian pears, sliced thin, and the pinot he poured for her.
“Try the wine now,” George instructed. Then, a little later, “Try it again,” and she tasted a new liquid altogether. Wine that had been tight and taciturn became mellifluous.
“It’s like finding a door,” she told George as they sat together in his kitchen. “It’s like stepping into a new room you never knew existed.”
“The pinot?”
“No,” she told him. “Everything.”
For she was becoming a researcher, tracing gorgeous threads, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the McClintock Collection, corresponding with scholars and librarians at the Schlesinger and the Huntington and at universities around the world. She had begun to study sweets—the sparing use of sugar in early cookbooks, and its ubiquity in eighteenth-century recipes. She checked out books from Bancroft. Deerr’s History of Sugar. Galway’s The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914. Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz. She spent days writing notes for an article she was planning on the cookbook as cultural emblem and bellwether for abundance and scarcity. Without an affiliation, outside any academic program, she began to imagine weaving together ecology and economics and material culture, embarking on a new career. Should she go back to school? Find herself a program and an advisor? Oh, but it was delicious to work unsupervised. Who had total access to books like these? And when it came to advisors, how could she do better than Tom McClintock, sensualist and lichenologist, artist, lover, ghost?
On a Friday, at the end of August, just before her twenty-fifth birthday, Jess sat alone in George’s dining room and unfolded a menu she had not seen before, one of the collector’s fantasies on graph paper. The menu was tucked inside Le Livre de Cuisine, but titled “McLintock,” and the dishes listed were all in English.
McLINTOCK
July-flower wine
Angelica
Nutmeg cream
Eel-pye
Neats Tongue
A strange, unappetizing bill of fare, wine and dessert, followed by eel pie and sheep’s tongue. It’s not like you, Jess thought, addressing the collector, to put together such an awkward menu. Elsewhere, McClintock sought out the most exotic and delectable combinations. Kisses to begin, new peas, or muskmelon, followed by some tender young thing, lamb or fawn, turtledoves to whet the appetite, and then fish, and a succulent main course like loin of veal. Fruit and cream to finish. Quaking Pudding. Candied violets, rose petals, tansies, curran wine …
Why, then, these awkward dishes out of order, and no vegetable or fish or salad course? She read the menu twice and then a third time, and then she wondered if the words could rearrange themselves into something better. July-Angelica-Nutmeg-Cream … and as her eyes played with the words, she saw a pattern in the first letters, an acrostic reading down:
July-flowe
r wine
Angelica
Nutmeg cream
Eel-pye
Neats Tongue
A name: Jane. Jane McClintock! Was this Mrs. McClintock? Was she the one? But what to do about Neats Tongue? A comment on Mrs. McClintock’s tongue? Or did she have a middle initial N? Jane N. McClintock? Or was it the T the collector referred to in his culinary code? Jane T? Janet!
She picked up George’s phone and called Sandra, but no one answered. She ran out and drove to Sandra’s house. She rang the bell, and rapped on the window, but no one came to the door. Should she leave a note? Try again tomorrow? No, her question wouldn’t keep.
She sat on Sandra’s porch in a raggedy wicker chair. Curled up in the window, Geoffrey seemed to recognize her, and wish her ill.
An hour passed before Sandra arrived carrying her groceries. Jess jumped up. “Hi!”
“Jessamine,” said Sandra, after a moment.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Could I help you carry those?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Sandra told her.
“I’ve been working on the collection,” Jess said. “I’ve been working almost six months. The books are fabulous.”
“I’m glad.” Sandra pulled at her keys, which she wore on a plastic bracelet around her wrist.
“I’ve found some interesting material.” Jess followed Sandra to the door.
“Good.” Sandra stood on the porch, keys in hand, groceries at her feet, but she did not seem at all inclined to invite Jess inside. “I can’t let the cat out,” she reminded Jess as she gathered all her bags together to rush the door. “You can come in, but you have to be quick.”
“Oh, I understand.” Body-blocking Geoffrey, Sandra darted inside, and Jess followed.
“Would you like a glass of juice?” Sandra asked. “Would you like to take a seat? Not that one.” She warned Jess away from Geoffrey’s dark green couch, and Jess settled on a velvet chair instead.