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.