The Cookbook Collector (13 page)

And yet … and yet, Mel had never been part of something magical before. He had never inhaled the fumes of such success, and although every fiber of his body rebelled against the insane pressure of his job, his soul rejoiced. Thirty years toiling in support services at MIT, but Mel had not been so ordinary after all. He was part of the world other people read about in newspapers. He had been one of those people, reading
The Boston Globe
each morning on the train, and now he was in the
Globe
himself—not mentioned by name, of course, but by association. He had ascended to a realm where companies were named for gods: ISIS, Inktomi, Janus, LOKI. ISIS was already the stuff of legend. “One of the most highly anticipated IPOs of the year” was just twelve days away, and Mel felt like Marco Polo, seeing firsthand what others might have written off as myth.

In the past year, he’d watched in awe as his young bosses auditioned VCs twice their age. One morning Mel arrived at work to find Jonathan scribbling the names of venture capitalists on his whiteboard under the headings “Bozos,” “Morons,” “Losers,” “Sharks.” Was this the same kid who had borrowed quarters for the vending machines at the department? There were no vending machines at ISIS. All snacks and drinks were free.

Alas, the faster ISIS grew, the more troublesome Mel’s fifty-seven-year-old body became. Nausea, insomnia, diarrhea. At first he blamed the lunches Barbara packed for him. Then he blamed the Middle Eastern food truck that pulled up each day behind the building, but everybody ate there and no one else got sick. He went for tests, and the doctor found nothing. Reluctantly Mel admitted the cause of indigestion was anxiety. As soon as he arrived at this conclusion his stomachaches subsided, and his back went out.

“What did you do to it?” his young coworkers asked him wonderingly.

“Nothing. I did nothing!” he replied.

Of course he remembered the day, the hour, the very second he threw out his back. Tuesday, October 12, 1999. Three forty-five in the afternoon. Sitting at his fifth-floor desk, he had been discussing health plans with a new hire on the phone. Carpenters were snapping cubicles together. Cardboard boxes containing workstations stood stacked against the walls, and all was quiet—except for the whoosh of programmers batting a birdie with badminton rackets.

Mel was finishing the routine medical-benefits conversation when he glanced up and saw an electrician grinning at him from a square hole in the ceiling where he’d popped out the acoustic tile.

“Yoo-hoo,” the electrician said.

Mel bristled. Carpenters didn’t bother him, nor did the badminton or the unpacking. He almost enjoyed the drag and pop of box cutters slicing cardboard—the long rips crisp and promising, like autumn and fresh school supplies—but he couldn’t conduct business with electricians wisecracking from above. “You can’t go wrong—they’re both terrific,” he explained to the new hire, as he gestured at the cable-dangling electrician to disappear. “And we do offer dental.” He stood, pulling the receiver with him, but the cord wasn’t long enough and his phone slid off the desk. Too quickly, he turned to scoop it up. A prickle, like an electric shock, raked his left side, an agonizing spasm. Pain held him in its vice.

That had been six weeks ago. Now Mel had bad days and worse days. There were mornings he stood on the train, all the way from Canaan to South Station, because sitting was too painful. He took the Red Line to Kendall Square and counted stops. Just get me to Charles / MGH, just get me aboveground, he pleaded silently, trying to bargain with his back. All he had to do was make it until the train emerged from its tunnel to rattle over the bridge. Then he could look out at the icy river and dark trees, the boathouses rosy in the brief winter light. When the train descended again, he held the metal pole and told himself, Only one more stop and then the music, and he would try to hold on until Kendall Square Station where long levers in the wall were wired to chimes hanging between the inbound and outbound tracks. Like a parent trying to appease a child, he would treat himself to a gentle pull of a lever, and listen for the soft chime like temple bells in the midst of rushing trains and chattering students and the buskers playing amplified guitars.

The commute was bad enough. One morning he could not get out of bed. If he lay perfectly still, he felt no pain, but the moment he shifted his weight, his muscles seized up again.

“Barbara,” he called out, “I can’t move.”

She rushed in from the living room.

“You’ll have to call and tell them….”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Oh, good. Thank God.” The reprieve relaxed him just a little. He could breathe, and even turn slightly.

“Don’t try to get up,” Barbara warned.

“I’m not. I can’t,” he said. He closed his eyes, and she brought his Motrin and a glass of water with a straw.

“Don’t move. Relax,” she ordered, in what the children used to call her nurse voice. She reverted to crisp professionalism when anyone was hurt or sick. Mel used to tease her that she enjoyed their children’s illnesses. “I do not!” she had protested, but he knew she loved a damp, hot, docile child.

He didn’t blame her. He’d loved the children that way too, and he missed them. Nostalgia overcame him as he lay pinned, and he longed to see Annie and Sam, not as they were now, but as they had been years ago, before their potential had hardened into the ordinary shell of adulthood.

He had always hoped his children would be extraordinary. Wasn’t it nine-year-old Sam who had announced he would be an entomologist? How had he become a government major at Amherst? Annie was out in the Bay Area at the epicenter of the high-tech revolution. She had been so good at math. Why was she teaching kindergarten? Absurd that in late middle age Mel was about to make a fortune. Where were his kids? Couldn’t they see that the future belonged to their generation? True to the accelerated business cycle, Mel lay in bed and worried, even while his ISIS shares were still a gleam in his broker’s eyes, that his children lacked the initiative to achieve as he had done.

Everyone gave Mel advice. Dave recommended a chiropractor. Jonathan suggested that he hit the gym.

“I think,” Barbara said cautiously, “you might want to talk to Rabbi Zylberfenig.”

“Zylberfenig! Because he knows so much about back pain?”

“He knows a lot,” said Barbara.

“How old is Rabbi Zylberfenig?” Mel demanded.

“He’s got six children.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s older than we were at his age.”

Everybody had a guru. Even Sorel Fisher, his newest hire, insisted, “I’ll give you the name of my Alexander teacher.”

“Alexander teacher? What did he teach you?” Mel asked, wary.

“Nothing,” Sorel said, bouncing slightly on the green exercise ball at her desk. She was a twenty-three-year-old programmer from London, a performance artist, and a chanteuse. “He was brilliant. He barely even touched me.”

Meanwhile, he had to keep advertising and interviewing and issuing ID cards. Everybody loved the new ones he had ordered. You clipped them to your belt and pulled the card out on an elastic string so that you could swipe and unlock doors or elevators after hours. The new fleeces were a big hit as well. Navy with
ISIS
embroidered in gold. Mel was good with merchandise. Proud, not loud. That was his motto. But the week after Thanksgiving when Dave asked to meet with him “to strategize,” Mel understood that this was it.

A small voice inside whispered: Let Dave set you free; your back is breaking from the stress. But no. Mel could not imagine leaving. Not now, before his shares were vested. He didn’t want to miss what he knew would be a meteoric flight.

On the day before his appointment with Dave, he took tiny steps to Jonathan’s office, traversing what seemed like miles of drab rust-red carpet, raveled at the edges. Mel stopped, clutching the top edge of a cubicle. The pain was worse. After three months, he had come to think of it as
the
pain—not his pain, but a larger, impersonal force. The pain—the way opera singers speak of their instrument, the voice.

“Mel Millstein,” chided Sorel as she passed by, “you need to go to Alexander class.”

I need to stay employed, thought Mel.

“The trouble with you,” said Sorel, “is you’re misaligned.”

Feet on the desk,
Star Wars
action figures lining the windowsill behind him, Jonathan was typing with his keyboard in his lap. “What’s happening?”

Mel hesitated. He had planned what to say, of course, but scripts didn’t work with Jonathan—none of the scripts Mel knew.

“I need help hiring,” Mel said. “I sense that HR needs restructuring, and I’d like to make that happen sooner rather than later.” Now, he added silently.

“Okay,” said Jonathan. “What do you want?”

My job, Mel thought. My life. Existence without pain. “Well, I have Zoë and Jessica right now …,” he began, “and I’m trying to get …”

Jonathan considered his hapless HR director. At the computer-science department, Mel had been the go-to guy, straightening out green cards and foreign visas, grappling with bureaucracy. When Jonathan was jockeying for attention from professors, Mel had actually taken the time to ask, “How are things going?” To say, “Let me check his schedule. Maybe I can get you in.” Jonathan did not forget old kindnesses, nor did he forget how little he liked MIT, where cryptography profs favored students more theoretical, more purely mathematical.

He had wanted only the best for Mel when he plucked him from his desk at the department. He’d never intended to kill the poor man.

“Mel,” said Jonathan, “you don’t need help. You need a better attitude. Put on a happy face! This is not a submarine. This is a big fun start-up with a severe shortage of programmers, and all you need to do is go out there and say, ‘Hey you guys, come on over.’ Is that hard?”

“There are a lot of other—” Mel began.

“But, no, there aren’t. You don’t think about them,” Jonathan cut him off. “We’re better. It’s all attitude, man. You’re smart and talented, you’re meticulous—and you’re going to have zillions of dollars next year. Did you forget that?”

Ah, yes. Mel remembered the conversation well. When Jonathan had offered him the job at ISIS, Mel had asked delicately about compensation. “Here’s the thing,” Jonathan replied, and he spoke in all seriousness. “We’re all going to be gazillionaires.”

“You know what you’re doing—you just have to show your stuff to the prospective hires,” Jonathan explained now. “Be cool. Be confident….”

“I don’t feel confident,” Mel confessed. “I feel that my position here is …”

“Is what?”

Mel couldn’t find the word. No, he knew the word, but couldn’t say it. He had to force himself. “Tenuous.”

“Tenuous!” Jonathan looked at him as though he’d begun speaking in another language. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Dave wants to meet with me.”

Jonathan looked at him almost tenderly. “No one’s firing you.”

“I’m not so … I don’t feel so …,” Mel spluttered.

Jonathan reassured him. “No one’s firing you right before our IPO. That would look terrible!”

“I think Dave has a plan,” said Mel.

“Yeah, he’s got lots of plans. Don’t worry about Dave. I’ll deal with him. You just do your job, okay?”

“Okay.” He realized that this was Jonathan’s way of reaching out. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Get out there and kick ass! I want twelve new programmers, and I want you to go out there and hire them with a smile on your face.”

“I will,” Mel answered, stunned. He tried to smile without moving any other part of his body. He was afraid to jolt his standing equilibrium.

“And I’ll tell you a secret,” Jonathan added, just as Mel was leaving. “We’re going to tell everybody at the end of the day, but I’ll tell you first. We’ve signed Yahoo! for premium ChainLinx protection.”

“Yahoo!” Now Mel really was smiling.

“Yeah!” Jonathan swung his feet up on the desk and resumed typing.

Mel returned to his cubicle full of hope. ISIS had Yahoo! in the stable, their biggest client to date. This was huge, and Mel knew first. There was no greater sign of favor.