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.”
>
“I’m thinking. I’m not overthinking. I’m reflecting on the situation. Now that it’s too late, I keep thinking about what I could have done differently. How I could have dealt with the inequities …”
Nick pushed his old friend’s shoulder, hard. “It’s called marriage, George. In most of the world, that’s how it’s done.”
He tried to work. He tried to sleep. He returned from running and sat at his kitchen table with the San Francisco Chronicle. When his phone rang, he jumped, but it was Raj calling about a rare copy of Ulysses he had acquired. “I’m telling you first, in case you want to make a preemptive offer.”
“No,” George said. “I don’t like Joyce.”
“George,” said Raj, “you’re the last Victorian.”
“Not true,” George said. “Not true at all. I’m just not in a buying mood.”
He didn’t want to talk to Raj. He didn’t want anyone but Jess, and he had no way to reach her.
He poured himself a cup of coffee, and began writing a letter. He wrote with his fountain pen, covering small sheets of paper with blue-black ink.
Dear Jessamine,
I spoke disrespectfully to you. You are not a child. I understand why you were angry. I had no right to ask you to go and then a moment later tell you to stay.
You came freely to work at Yorick’s, and you are free to leave as well. Forgive me if I seemed to forget. My concern for your safety is real, and I’m sorry it seemed like a jealous attempt to control you.
My own sister was just a little younger than you when she died. She died at twenty-two. As you say, people get killed on the ground.
I don’t pretend to be wiser than you are, but I am older, Jess. I’ve lived longer, and I have more experience in certain areas—among them, communal living, activism, drugs. If you told me you would give up the Tree House and return to school on condition that I never see you again, I would accept your terms. I am thinking about you, not about myself.
I realize that you don’t belong to me. I wish that we belonged to each other. I wish I had met you when I was young, but I did not, and I realize that you have to be young on your own. We stole some time together, and we should leave it at that. Live and let live. Yes, that’s a sixties thing to say. Or maybe it’s just one of the lies we tell ourselves to get what we want. I wanted you—I admit it. I behaved badly. See above.
Selfishness on my part, except for one thing, which is that I’m in love with you. I love you in the worst possible way, sleeplessly, desperately, jealously. I love you in the best way too. I want every good thing for you. I want you to work, and learn, and grow, and find your place in the world. Therefore I must let you …
Here George broke off. I will not, he thought. I will not let you go. Because he did not love Jess in two ways; he loved her one way: passionately, protectively, selfishly, disinterestedly, all mixed together, and he had to be with her. His collections did nothing for him. His cookbooks meant nothing to him without their imaginative interpreter. Writing reasoned paragraphs did not calm him at all, but angered him. The stillness of his house infuriated him. How long, he thought, will I sit here in my kitchen sipping coffee instead of finding her? How long will I wait before telling her?
He logged on to the computer in his office and found the Save the Trees Web site with its photos of redwoods on death row and the plea: Help us save Galadriel. Don’t be an idiot, he told himself, but he printed out directions to the Wood Rose Glen Tree-Sit anyway. Don’t be a fool. He walked out onto his deck, and then downstairs to his garden shrouded in mist. He packed his car, feeling his way through the thick morning fog. A long-eared fawn startled and ran across the street as George turned his big Mercedes gently, easing down the hill.
He drove north, and the sun burned off the morning mist. He made his ascent up the Golden Gate with its gleaming cables, a bridge rigged like a tall ship, so full of life and wind, and as he sped down again into green Marin, he opened his windows and the wind whipped at his face and stung his eyes. What if she wasn’t there? What if she had hiked off site, farther into the forest? How would he find her then? And if he did find her, would she listen, even for a moment?
He drove past tawny hills and then through dark mountains forested with oak and pine. The road narrowed, and trucks crowded him on either side. He lost the signal for NPR and turned off his radio. Raindrops fell, surprisingly cold and heavy. He closed his window and drove into the storm.
Rain was falling in Wood Rose Glen, but the redwoods were always damp, and at first Jess didn’t notice. She was crouching on a plywood platform 150 feet up in the branches of Galadriel, the majestic cause célèbre, object of so much love and so much hate, the redwood painted by Pacific Lumber with a blue X for execution, a two-thousand-year-old tree occupied in shifts for the past three months by Tree Savers.
When the wind picked up, Galadriel began to creak and sway, but the redwood was always in motion, and Jess had grown accustomed to its rolling movements. A blue plastic tarp sheltered her, and massive branches embraced her. After two days, she could almost pretend she was a bird in a nest, or an explorer on a floating island with its own rich soil, and ferns and huckleberry bushes. To lose Galadriel would mean to lose this floating world as well, a miniature forest with its moss and lichen, its birds and flying squirrels close to the clouds. Therefore, Jess would defend the tree. She would stand guard on high, and for the greater good she would withstand the wind, and the increasing damp, and the dark temptation, almost a death wish, to look down. Leon and the other Tree Savers slept far below at base camp as she fulfilled her vow, serving the arboreal cause, living in the redworld she had known before only as an earthbound spectator.
“I see what you mean,” she told Leon the first night on her radio. “It’s so beautiful.”
“We’ll come for you in the morning.”
“I want to stay the week,” she told him.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She zipped her parka and curled up under the tarp and closed her eyes and listened to the wind in the trees, Galadriel and the other giants farther off, their limbs entwined. Arwen and Legolas, Elrond, Haldir, Celeborn. Each spreading a vast canopy like a second rustling sky.
She was alone and she could think. She had outclimbed fear and outrun Emily and Mrs. Gibbs, and even George. She scarcely thought of him. She kept telling herself that. I’m hardly thinking of him! Even as she staved off hunger with granola, peanuts, dried fruit. She sipped the water she collected in the folds of her blue tarp, and nested in her sleeping bag with Walden: One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants … contending with one another…. And she said to herself, This is what people look like from a redwood’s point of view. This is what history looks like to a two-thousand-year-old tree. Conflicts seem so petty here.
Her fear of falling did not disappear, but settled deep inside her, losing its sharp edge, rising in great nauseating waves and then subsiding. She kept to her solid platform, and as long as the weather held, she watched light shifting through the green canopy, applauded the trapezing squirrels, touched lichen covering the tree like lace. Had McClintock climbed to study these? Or had he relied on earthbound samples? She wrote these questions in her notebook and felt lively, almost scientific. But as the weather changed, she missed George relentlessly, rhythmically, like the slow, steady rain. She fought against loneliness. No, she told herself, I live without him very well. What I need and what he wants are completely different.
The rain fell harder; her tarp sagged under the weight of water, and she was afraid that if she tried retying, she would lose her blue roof altogether. The temperature dropped, and wet seeped through her clothes. She wrung out her knit hat like a dishrag, and all the while, Galadriel’s branches swayed and groaned. Jess’s supply bags streamed with water, and she lost radio contact with Leon on the ground.
Then Jess no longer felt like Huck Finn rafting in the trees; she was Is
hmael clinging to a fragment of the Pequod in the storm. Branches thrashed in the dark above her, and she wondered if they might break and fall.
She had seen fallen redwoods, their massive trunks, their shallow roots upended. The giant trees were not anchored deeply in the soil. When redwoods fell, they took down every tree below. Their weight, their height … She knew this tree was healthy. Leon said Galadriel was solid to the core, but when night came, she heard a boom. Thunder? Trees toppling? Huddled in her sleeping bag, she clipped on her battery-powered book light and tried to read. At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.
She was exhausted, but she could not sleep. Adrenaline kept her alert, although there was nothing she could do to save herself. She could not climb down in this darkness and this weather, nor could she shield herself from lightning.
She tried to concentrate on Thoreau’s calm book, his little cabin at Walden Pond—but what did Thoreau know? He’d never been to California. She thought of Leon and his pride in her for climbing, his pleasure that at last she was experiencing what he loved most. But Leon couldn’t help her now, and remembering his pleasure made her feel a little sick. No, no, I didn’t come here for him, she reminded herself, but that was only partly true.
Common sense rebelled. What were you thinking? she asked herself, as Galadriel groaned and cracked and the branches above her turned to deadly missiles in the wind. She had been thinking she would try to love Leon better. That she would turn her back on rare books and commit herself to something greater. She had not been wrong in this. She had not been wrong to defend the trees. So why was George the one she wished for? His was the face she longed to see. His were the arms that she imagined as she closed her eyes. His, the voice she missed.