From the beginning, he had expensive taste. A copy of The Whale, later known as Moby-Dick, inscribed by Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first self-published poetry that Robert Frost pressed into his sweetheart’s hand. An 1831 Audubon with its black-eyed birds poised to fly, beating their plumed wings against the page. He dealt with ordinary books, of course, but only rarities excited him. Pushing forty, George was hard to please, and difficult to surprise. He had established bulwarks of skepticism against disappointment. And yet he hungered for the beautiful, and the authentic—those volumes and experiences impossible to duplicate. How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.

3

Although Jess was antimaterialistic, she thought about money all the time. Independent-minded, she was insolvent. There was her graduate stipend, of course—enough to keep her in brown rice and sprouts—and, fortunately, the job at Yorick’s, but none of this sufficed.

Not this time, she told herself. Not this time, as if she were still a child. And she put off calling her father from one day to the next. She lay awake at night trying to figure out how to raise the Friends and Family funds without falling back upon the patriarchy.

Even when she didn’t ask for help, conversations with her computer-scientist father were difficult. Jess had not followed Emily to MIT, but matriculated at Brandeis instead. Nor had she studied applied math like her sister, but declared philosophy her major. If she had pursued analytic philosophy, logic, even linguistics, her father might have understood, but Jess avoided these areas, and spent college contemplating Plato’s dialogs, Renaissance humanism, and the philosophes, abandoning the future, as her father saw it, and consigning herself to the dead languages and footnotes of the past.

If Richard disapproved of philosophy as a major, he liked it even less as a doctoral program, and often asked Jess what she intended to do with her degree, and where she thought she would find a job. These questions offended Jess and also bored her; they were so transparent. Her father had a new family, and he would be paying for college yet again when he was old. “Have you considered how you will support yourself?” he inquired, but what Jess heard was, “My resources are not infinite.” She was not about to ask for an extra eighteen hundred dollars and listen to him carry on about her “theoretical phase.”

She wished Emily hadn’t told her about the Friends and Family offering. Money had never interested her before, and now she wanted it. If she had the Veritech money she wouldn’t have to worry about the overdraft on her bank account or wonder how she would make ends meet over the summer between TAships. She did think like a student. That’s what she was.

Of course Jess had never wanted wealth, but the idea of a little money entranced her. Suppose her hundred shares at eighteen dollars became one hundred shares at one hundred dollars. She would have ten grand. As she drifted off to sleep, she dreamed her eighteen hundred shares were growing like Jack’s beanstalk outside her window. Ten thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars—enough to live on and to give away! In her dreams the money climbed from seed to vine. Emily’s company would work its magic. All Jess needed was a handful of beans.

She tried to borrow from her roommates, but Theresa was broke and Roland skeptical. He read the Veritech prospectus and pointed out, “It says here the company doesn’t make a profit.”

“I don’t think that matters,” Jess said. “Hardly any companies make profits these days.”

“Really?”

“I mean, not yet.”

“And it says this is a high-risk investment.”

“But it’s Emily’s company. It’s not high-risk,” said Jess.

Roland shook his head. “Call me old-fashioned.” He returned the prospectus.

“I’d pay you right back.”

“But you can’t be sure the stock will go up.”

“Why do you have to be my roommate?” Jess demanded, half-laughing. “Why do I get the only person in the entire country who doubts Veritech is going way up?”

“I don’t doubt,” said Roland loftily, “I suspend judgment. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative, baby.”

Jess’s ten days were almost over. Still, she didn’t mention the Friends and Family offering when she spoke to her father on the phone.

“Everything’s okay?” Richard asked.

“Yup, how are you?”

“We’re all fine. Heidi had a paper deadline this week. Lily had an ear infection.”

“Oh, poor Lily.”

“She’s fine,” said Richard, after which Jess spoke to the three-year-old on the phone.

“One potato, two potato, three potato four, five potato, six potato, eleven potato more, five potato, six potato, seven potato eight …”

After several minutes, Jess asked, “Could I talk to Dad?”

“Hello, this is Blue Bear. Hello. Come to my house.” Blue Bear’s voice sounded like a balloon running out of air. “A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, elemenopee,” Blue Bear chanted faster and faster. Lily began giggling. “QRSTUVWXYandZ. ABCDEFGQRSTelemenopee.”

“Could I talk to your daddy?” Jess asked again, but Blue Bear hung up, and Richard didn’t call her back.


“I can’t believe you haven’t taken care of it,” Emily scolded on the phone. “What are you waiting for?”

“Well …” She could hear Emily typing in the background, multitasking as usual.

“It’s not very difficult,” Emily said.

“I don’t have eighteen hundred dollars.”

“Didn’t you call Dad? All you have to do is ask him nicely.”

Now Jess saw what Emily wanted. She wanted Jess to talk sweetly to her father, after which he would help her, and they would get along again. Emily was a firm believer in getting along, no matter what, and seemed to think if you behaved considerately, real feeling followed. But how could affection bloom in rocky soil? What were words without love? Only dust. Jess could not live in such a xeriscape.

“You did call him,” Emily said.

“Of course.”

“And did you ask him?”

“Well … not yet.”

If only George had written her a check. He was so rich; he must be to own a store like Yorick’s. And he had heard of Veritech. He understood about technology and knew she’d pay him back immediately. But he had to say no. He loved saying no.

He was strange and self-absorbed. He asked questions and then wandered away before he heard the answers. Then when Jess asked a question of her own or tried to start a conversation, he interrupted.

“I’ve read some Trollope—” she would begin.

“And you were offended by the foxhunting?” George broke in.

“I see no reason,” she mused, “that books are more expensive because of who owned them. It’s—”

“The way things work,” George cut her off.

He was attractive and he knew it, but he pretended he had no idea. Therefore he was both vain and disingenuous. Tall, or so he seemed to Jess, he looked Italian with his dark skin and dark eyes. Very old—again, from Jess’s point of view—where anyone past thirty harked back to another era altogether. Despite his years, George had a powerful body, a broad chest, a face of light and shade, a glint of humor even in his frown. When he wasn’t lobbing his sarcastic comments, he seemed scholarly and peaceful, like a Renaissance St. Jerome at work in his cave of books. All he needed was a skull on his desk and a lion at his sandaled feet. He wore T-shirts, jeans, rimless reading glasses, sometimes tweed jackets. He had the deep didactic voice of a man who had smoked for years and then suddenly quit and now hated smokers everywhere. He never watched television, and he never tired of telling people so. But the most pretentious thing about him was his long hair. With his chestnut locks threaded gray, he was a fly caught in amber, the product and exemplar of a lost world.

“I’m working on the money,” Jess told her sister. “Could I just explain?”

“There’s nothing to explain.” Emily’s voice was tense. “You know what you have to do. Take care of it.”

Later, waiting for her laundry in the basement, Jess weighed her choices: angering Emily, or asking Richard. Take care of it. Easy for Emily to say. Financially independent Emily got along beautifully with Richard. Ah, Marx was right about so many things—especially the moral superiority money afforded.

Perched atop a churning washing machine, she heard the clank of metal. Had she left her keys in her jeans pocket? A handful of coins? She wished her grandfather were still alive and she could call him. She had been close to her father’s father.

Mrs. Gibbs wheeled in her laundry. She pushed it in a little cart with her detergent on top.

“Good evening.” Mrs. Gibbs produced a change purse segmented with compartments for each kind of coin. Extracting quarters, she began lining them up in the slots of the machine opposite Jess. “How are you?” Mrs. Gibbs inquired as she loaded her whites.

“I’m okay,” said Jess.

Mrs. Gibbs shot Jess a penetrating look.

“I’m fine.”

“Fine sitting down here all alone?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Fine isn’t good,” said Mrs. Gibbs. “Fine isn’t right.”

“I’m okay. My sister is annoyed with me. I said I’d do something and I can’t.”

“Breaking a promise,” Mrs. Gibbs intoned.

“No!”

“Mmm,” said Mrs. Gibbs and suddenly all the machines around Jess seemed to hum with disapproval.