Chapter 5: They Sold Intention (Continued)

The directness of it stopped him. She wasn't flirting—he understood enough about flirtation to know this wasn't that. She was making an observation, the way a scientist might, except she was talking about herself as the variable. You came here to understand me, and that's causing your crisis. Your categories don't work anymore.

He was beginning to realize that was exactly correct.

They wandered for another hour. Wren introduced him to vendors. She bought a small jar of something called "sleep ease" blend (chamomile, lavender, passionflower, dried rose hips—she showed him each component as she described it). She haggled in a friendly way with a man who sold dried flowers. She held up dried calendula petals to the light and explained how they were used in salves because of their anti-inflammatory properties, which he could verify in the literature, which made him feel slightly more secure in his general understanding of reality.

But most of the time, he was watching her. Not taking notes. Just watching.

She pointed out a vendor she hadn't visited in three years, and when she asked why, the vendor said, "Your taste changed. You quit using yarrow." Wren had to think about this for a moment, and Marcus watched her face as she considered how thoroughly she was known here, how much attention had been paid to the specifics of her practice. The vendor knew her choices. That kind of attention was either obsessive or intimate, and Marcus wasn't sure which.

"You know everyone," he said as they walked toward the market's edge.

"I buy from everyone. That's different from knowing everyone. Though I suppose it's a type of knowing. You know someone by their work. By what they produce and how they stand behind it." She paused at a flower vendor and bought a small bundle of white roses, wrapped in brown paper. "My mother knew everyone when she was doing this. People trusted her because she was consistent. She paid attention."

"Did you want to be her?"

"No. I wanted to understand why she paid attention to something that doesn't make logical sense. I'm still working on that."

The question came out before he could frame it into data: "Did you understand it?"

"Not yet," Wren said. "But I understand that I understand less than I thought I did. Which is progress."

They left the market around one in the afternoon. Marcus's notebook was barely marked up—a few notes on the rosemary comparison, a couple of vendor names, nothing substantial. He had three hours of observation and almost nothing recorded. By every measure of scientific rigor, the morning had been a waste of data.

By every other measure, it had been the first time he understood something he'd been trying to understand before he even knew he was trying.

They walked back toward the brownstone, and Wren talked about her mother, who had died five years ago and had left her a house full of dried herbs and a practice with no manual. Marcus mostly listened, and it occurred to him that he was good at listening. It was a thing he did professionally, but usually in the service of extracting data. This was different. He was listening to understand not what the data meant, but what the woman meant.

That night, alone in his apartment, Marcus opened his notebook to a fresh page and wrote:

Confounding variable — proximity effect — requires further study.

He stared at it for a very long time. Then he wrote:

The proximity to the subject is interfering with the objectivity of observation. Recommend reevaluation of methodology. Or recommend accepting that methodology is no longer applicable.

He closed the notebook. He didn't write again.

In the kitchen, the rosemary jar sat on the counter next to his cooking spices, a small green thing that smelled real and particular and nothing like the grocery store version. He picked it up and held it, the way Wren held stones, as if it were speaking to him.

He set it back down. He was still thinking about what she'd said at the stone vendor's table—the rock isn't causing the crisis, I am—stated with the calm precision of someone who had known, probably from the beginning, exactly what the morning would do to him. The question he couldn't stop turning over was whether she had intended it.