The Cookbook Collector (17 page)

14

H
arvard Square glowed with artificial candlelight. Damp air misted the glass doors of Brattle Street Florist with its potted azaleas and glossy-leaved gardenias. Cardullo’s stocked Dutch licorice and Belgian chocolate, Bendicks mints, Walkers shortbread, Turkish delight. Every shop tempted with earrings and antiquities, evergreens and crimson KitchenAids. But the millennium’s end was not altogether jolly. The hungry still hungered, addicts scratched and stole. The season had its somber rites, exams and funerals. Hushed students filed into Houghton Library to view the manuscript of “Ode to Autumn” and puzzle at its wailful choir of loss and consolation.

The market dipped and rose, and rose again, and some speculated that the new economy had limits. It was popular to say, even without believing, that this time might never come again, that it was late in the day. Some said the markets had already peaked, and Wall Street wizards agreed that timing was everything. Therefore, ISIS celebrated its December IPO with equal parts relief and trepidation.

Orion noticed that where there had been banter about boats and cars, bikes and ultralights, now the talk was strictly options and derivatives, wills and trusts. Dave instituted wealth seminars. Lawyers arrived from Hale and Dorr, and consultants visited to discuss charitable giving.
Shelter
became the byword, replacing
speed
.

Programmers ridiculed the seminars, but they attended anyway in small groups, gathering in the glass-walled conference room to hear account managers from Goldman Sachs hold forth in suits of navy so dark the color could not exist in nature, except possibly in the deepest ocean, where giant squid inked out their predators. These reps from Goldman were all named Josh and Ethan, and they arrived bright-eyed, cuff-linked, trussed in ties of burgundy, and they were thrilled to answer every question, psyched to help out in any way possible, and honestly happy to talk whenever, because most of all they were about having fun and learning and teamwork and making dreams happen—not just short term, but long term, which was very much what they perceived ISIS to be about. They loved innovation, said Ethan. They lived for flexibility, said Josh. When the lockup ended, they couldn’t wait to innovate with everybody in the company. They worked with your lawyer and your accountant and your bank, but when it came to strategy, they said, Picture, if you will, myself and my colleagues as the quarterbacks of your team. This above all: They loved to communicate. Communication was the key, as in life, because at the end of the day, it was relationships that mattered. It was all about trust—just knowing that your team was there. Bottom line, that’s who they were in private-wealth management—your team, when you were worth ten million or more.

In one of these seminars, especially for the Lockbox group, Orion glanced at Sorel and saw that she was scribbling studiously, or maybe sketching. He leaned past Clarence to look, and she saw him and smiled.

Gradually, without discussions or apologies, the awkwardness between them had subsided. Their night together, or rather their all-nighter, seemed less embarrassing in retrospect, and slowly, over weeks and months, Orion had begun to cultivate Sorel’s friendship. At first he tried the smallest gestures, a glance, a word. The briefest exchanges.

“Nice snowstorm.”

“Lovely, if you like that kind of thing.”

He sent her lines of particularly bad code from the new Lockbox system:

Did you see
? Orion typed.

Worst ever
, Sorel replied.

Trying to solve from back to front
.

Might not be possible
.

Fundamental flaws?

Yeah
.

Cracks in foundation?

Worse than that
.

Shaky ground?

ORIGINAL SIN
.

A rationing of interactions until they spoke easily again. That was Orion’s major goal these days at ISIS. He had refused an executive position, and he had no project to administer.

“Can I see?” he asked her after Josh and Ethan had distributed their heavy white business cards, and taken their leave.

“It’s nothing.” She showed him the sketch.

“They look like gangsters.” He drew his swivel chair a little closer.

“You think?” She’d turned her notebook so that the faint green lines on the page ran vertical, like pinstripes, and then she’d drawn the pair of financial advisors as suits with dollar signs for eyes.

“You could add guns.”

She looked skeptically at her drawing. “Could do. But I like to keep my sketches subtle. Either dollar signs
or
guns
or
the Angel of Death.” She began to giggle.

“Cancel the guns,” Orion said.

“Good. No guns on your financial team.
We’re all about listening”
—she imitated Ethan’s voice perfectly—
“how do you feel about risk?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Orion said.

“Are you still planning to buy the house for your dad?”

Orion shrugged. “He doesn’t want a house.”

“It’s hard to know what people want,” Sorel mused. “It isn’t always obvious.”

“That’s a good thing,” Orion said.

He was dreaming about her. He dreamed of touching her, but just as he brushed her slender arms, she slipped away. He listened to her practice her guitar at night when they worked on Lockbox 2.0. “ISIS is my day job,” Sorel reasoned. “So if it’s night I can compose.” And she sat atop the table in the conference room, and experimented with complicated chords.

ISIS, which had been so bleak to him and gray, became the place he might see Sorel. He stayed late and arrived early, locking his bike and running up the stairs as his heart beat hard in anticipation. He sat at his desk and thought of her. Even as he worked, he hoped to see her. He was programming in some kind of infinite recursion, dreaming at ISIS, which was itself a dreamscape, strange, wondrous, and frightening, the tiny company growing into an earthshaking colossus, his friends now executives impatient with him, his girlfriend hurt and angry because he had not yet set a wedding date, her parents rising up in sudden outrage, and on top of all this, his own imagination now transformed and turned about, so that he worked at ISIS but thought constantly of leaving, and slept with Molly but imagined someone else. Her husky voice, her laughter, her red-gold hair, her long legs running up the stairs.

One night, as he and Molly walked through Harvard Square, he saw a tall figure standing on a pedestal in front of Jasmine Sola. An angel dressed in white and painted white from head to toe. Feathery wings rose up behind her and white robes draped her body down to her white feet. Orion had seen these living statues before: angels, brides, cavaliers, standing on their pedestals, never moving, scarcely breathing until passersby dropped money at their feet. Like coin-operated automatons the statues bowed or curtseyed, doffed hats or winked. He had seen them all before, but he stopped in front of this one.

“Come on,” Molly said, eager to get to their movie, but Orion couldn’t help staring at the angel with her outspread wings.

“Sorel?” he murmured. The ghostly figure did not move. “Is that you?”

Molly was puzzled. “Is that who …?”

“It’s someone from work.”

“From ISIS? Are you sure?”

He wasn’t sure. The figure stood so still and seemed so solid, her face layered with thick white greasepaint, her figure heavy in its draperies. Maybe he was just imagining Sorel. He saw her everywhere. Then he caught a red-gold gleam, one loose hair. “It
is
you!” he called up to her.

But Sorel was a Method angel and would not break character. She continued, calm, majestic, unblinking even as children tried to touch her feet, and other buskers covered Simon & Garfunkel in shop doorways.
Hello, darkness, my old friend
…. Orion allowed Molly to hurry him away.

“That was you!” he told Sorel on Monday, as soon as she walked in.

“That was art,” she said, sliding her guitar underneath her desk.

“Admit it,” he said. “You saw me in the Square!”

She laughed. “I admit nothing.”

“Why do you do that? Why do you stand out there in the cold? You don’t need the money.”

She conceded, “I give it away.”

“Why do you stand out there so late at night?”

“It’s personal. It’s intimate.”

“It’s intimate to disguise yourself and stand out there in a crowd of strangers?”

“Yes. Compared to this place.”

He leaned against the gray wall of her cubicle. “What if some guy starts hitting on you? What do you do then?”

A smile played on her lips. “Turn him to stone.”

“What if …?”

Sorel gestured toward the neighboring cubicles where Umesh and Clarence were already typing. “Let’s get to work, shall we? God knows this poor benighted excuse for a Lockbox needs it.”

Were Orion and Sorel the only ones who understood that at any moment Lockbox could come crashing down? Orion was convinced that latent sleeper bugs lurked waiting to hatch inside the code. Of course nothing would happen with normal use, but one day some hacker would pick Lockbox and bring it down—and every company that used the system, every transaction and piece of data would fly out into the world. Orion was sure of this, but Jonathan wouldn’t hear it.

“I’ll tell you why you’re under the impression I don’t listen to you,” Jonathan had told him the day of the IPO. “You’re under that impression because it’s true. We’re building a company and you’re off in your own world. You would rather cling to your theories of the way things should be than put your head down and work.”

“What about feasibility?” Orion shot back. “What about truth in advertising?”

“What about loyalty?”

This was after all the cheers and speeches, after ISIS rose to $133 a share and Dave confessed he was getting a little emotional via speaker phone from New York. Orion had buttonholed Jonathan at a table of brownies and precut cantaloupe and sprigs of seedless grapes.

“We need to close down Lockbox and start over.”

“You’re bringing this up
today?”
Jonathan was amazed.

“When am I supposed to bring it up?”

Then very quietly, with so many people standing all around them, Jonathan said, “Get out of my face.”

“I will when I get a straight answer,” said Orion. “I think when I raise an issue over days and weeks I deserve some kind of response.”

Jonathan shook his head. “No. You don’t deserve anything from me. You made a choice. You stepped out of the critical path a year ago. When you leave the team, you don’t get to be the referee.”

“Who says I left the team? Who says I’m leaving?” Orion demanded. The idea was wonderful when he was alone, but sounded like defeat when he stood facing Jonathan.

“Be very careful,” Jonathan told him.

The end of the century, which was also the end of the millennium, ISIS held a New Year’s Eve blowout with a caterer, a corporate party planner, and an elaborate conceit: 2000 Leagues Under the Sea @ The New England Aquarium. The waiters dressed in antique diving gear with helmets of copper, nickel, and glass. Secretaries wore slinky dresses, while the programmers donned black sweaters with their jeans. Dave wore black from head to toe: a black suit with a black dress shirt, no tie, like an East Coast Larry Ellison. Only the fish came as themselves: the prickly puffer fish and blue-striped wrasse, the lumpy grouper and billowy eel. As the party ascended a spiral ramp around their giant tank, armored sea turtles rose from the depths along with undulating rays. Disdainful sharks circled with mouths agape, all needle teeth and pinprick eyes.

On the mezzanine overlooking the open penguin habitat, Sorel’s girl band, The Chloroforms, were performing, Sorel out front, all legs and boots, wearing what looked like a cardigan sweater for a dress.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Sorel sang.
Do technoids scream ’bout mission creep?

Good night
….

Sleep tight
….