The Cookbook Collector (18 page)

“Is that Jonathan over there?” Molly asked Orion.

It was hard to see anything in the dark cavernous space. The great illuminated fish tanks cast watery shadows on the walls.

Don’t let the bad bugs bite
 …, sang Sorel, and her Amazonian bandmates rocked behind her.

“Wait for me,” Orion called to Molly. He wasn’t sure what Jonathan would say to her if she approached him all alone. She did not know about Orion’s latest run-in with Jonathan. He didn’t want to worry her, and then again, the situation was complex. Far easier to suggest that there were tensions at ISIS than to describe them.

He caught up with Molly just in time, and saw that Jonathan was smiling. “Hey,” Jonathan said by way of greeting, and he looked past Orion to scan the crowd.

“There you are,” said Jonathan, as Emily approached carrying a plate of sushi.

“Hello!” She kissed Orion and Molly. “It’s been too long.”

She stood at Jonathan’s side, slender, elegant in black tailored trousers and a pale silk shirt. Had Orion really introduced these two? They made no sense, unless Orion imagined the old Jonathan, the rambunctious, fun-loving, lay-down-his-life, wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night, drive-anywhere-for-his-friends Jonathan. Only Emily and the old Jonathan made sense. Orion had loved him too.

Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bad bugs bite
. Sorel sang with increasing urgency.
But if they do
 … Drums throbbed underneath Sorel’s husky voice.
Take off your shoe! Take off your shoe!
Bam, bam, bam the drums pounded as Sorel screamed in crescendo.
And beat them! Beat them! Beat them!
 …

Suddenly the penguins in their arctic habitat began barking to one another. Orion rushed to the concrete barrier and saw that the birds, usually so stoic, had begun diving into the water. Molly came along to look, and while Jonathan didn’t bother, Emily joined them, balancing her plate of sushi on the wall.

’Til they’re black and BLUE!
Sorel howled, releasing her inner Dylan.

“The song is actually scaring the penguins off their rocks.” Emily laughed a little, imagining what Jess would say, and how she would worry about the birds’ eardrums.

“Maybe if we walk up the ramp it’ll be quieter,” Molly suggested.

“Okay. Soon,” said Orion.

“Meet me up there. I’ll try to get us some food.” Carefully, Molly began ascending the crowded ramp in her high heels.

“Are you all right?” Emily called out to Orion.

He shook his head.

“What is it?”

Sweet Emily, his dear old friend, first crush, first love—what could he say? The time and place were so absurd, with all those bug-eyed fish swimming past, and the oily penguins swimming below. “Nothing.”

But Emily would not take that for an answer, and led him away from the band, past the sushi bar, and raw bar, and the tables serving tapas, to a quieter cove with dark tanks lit by purple phosphorescent fish. “What’s going on?”

He hesitated. “I think you know.”

“I don’t,” she told him.

“Yes, you do.”

“Not from your perspective.”

So of course she did know. That confirmed it. She was only trawling for information. “Do you think it’s fair to ask?”

“Wait,” she said. “Explain.”

She took off her glasses and looked much younger, almost the girl he had once kissed. “Is it true you’re leaving ISIS?”

“Is that what Jonathan told you?”

“Were you considering it?” she pressed, and he knew she wanted to know why.

“I’m not leaving.”

“Good.” She smiled. “I know Jonathan values your opinion.”

Orion murmured, “You know he doesn’t. He values his own opinion.”

“You got along before.”

“I’m like everybody else,” said Orion. “I get along with Jonathan until I cross him.”

“Why do you say that? He likes debate. He likes discussion.”

“Why are you the one talking to me then?” He was upsetting her, but he didn’t care. “Why are you talking to me instead of him?”

“Because I want to understand….”

“What is there to understand, Emily? Jonathan and I aren’t getting along.”

“Why not?”

“That’s not a fair question, and you know it.”

“You look worried.”

“What are
you
worried about?” he countered. “Why don’t you talk to him?”

She tilted her head slightly, a pensive move that he remembered, along with a slight narrowing of her eyes, as though the world were slightly askew and needed further study. And at that moment Orion realized that she had talked to Jonathan. She had made her inquiries, and whatever he’d said had not satisfied her. Orion wanted to hug her around her shoulders. He wanted to say: I’m worried that Jonathan is a liar. I think he’s willing to sacrifice people for products, and trade quality for profits. And above all, he wanted to say: What about you, Emily? How is he treating you? But he couldn’t ask her this. Some diffidence or shyness or guilt prevented him, and he only said, “I’m sorry.”

“I know he has a temper,” Emily told him, “but he feels he’s given you a lot.”

“Given me!”

She nodded.

Had Jonathan warped Emily as well? Could she care for an ambitious creature like that to the point of admiration? To the vanishing point?

She said, “I’m speaking as your friend.”

“No, I don’t think so. You’re speaking as his friend. And it’s beneath you, Emily. It really is. It’s wrong of you.”

PART FOUR

Best Offer

October 2000–January 2001

15

T
his was a strange time, a fairy-tale time. Mel and Barbara moved into a dream house on Pleasant Street, a mansion developers had built on spec just as Richard Bach had feared, right behind his old Colonial. The Millsteins lived there in twenty-one rooms, and they had central air and central vacuuming and bay windows and marble baths. Barbara tiptoed through her new country kitchen, and Mel drove a black Lexus to see Bobby Bruce, the Alexander teacher, who showed Mel where his posture was indeed misaligned. In all his years, Mel had never known he was off-center, and now with strange synchronicity, he discovered the problem just when he could afford to treat it. By the same token, Dave’s temperamental Bentley gave out just as the ISIS lockup ended, and he treated himself to a powder-blue Jaguar.

As it turned out, a windfall came in handy. Aldwin’s parents were celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary, so he rented a villa in the south of France for a family reunion. Sorel’s landlord raised the rent, so she moved out and bought a decrepit worker’s cottage in East Cambridge that she planned to paint purple and restore as a house cum studio. Orion bought his first car, a silver BMW. Jonathan found Emily a ring.

He took Emily shopping on Newbury Street. They spun through Shreve, Crump & Low with its sapphires and china, Cartier with its square-cut gems and gleaming watches. Brodney Antiques & Jewelry was piled with detritus from every decade: old lamps and dusty tea sets, rows of opera glasses and ugly broaches—gold bees with diamond wings, little frogs with ruby eyes. Emily could not find anything she liked. She looked and looked, and Jonathan got hungry waiting, and they went to lunch at L’Espalier where they sat wedged into a corner table in a room adorned with antique mirrors and crystal chandeliers, and they ate a dandelion salad and the smallest sirloin steak Jonathan had ever seen, along with matchstick potatoes.

“These,” Jonathan told Emily, “are exactly the way I always thought matchsticks would taste. Except real matchsticks have sulfur tips, so they’re probably better.”

Emily laughed. “I think they’re good.”

He took her hand in his. “I think you need a ring.”

“We’ll find one eventually.”

She spoke in such a patient voice, and the restaurant with its pillows and silk curtains felt like such an overpriced tea party that he rebelled, jumping to his feet. “Wait here. Have some dessert.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back. Get yourself some coffee.”

And he returned to Shreve, Crump & Low, and told the first saleswoman he saw, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Prathima,” she said in a soft voice.

“So, Prathima, what’s the best diamond you have in stock?”

She was really a very small saleslady, delicate and easily affronted in her navy suit. She sat down with Jonathan at a table, as a loan officer might sit down with a client at the bank, and she showed him a chart, and a color portfolio with “Diamonds Are Forever” printed on it, and her voice grew ever softer as she explained the four Cs of diamonds. She pointed to various photographs. “This is our signature series,” she whispered, as if she were in church. “Each diamond is inscribed with a—”

He cut her off. “You do sell real diamonds here, right?”

“Of course.” Prathima looked offended.

“Okay, could you just bring out the most highly rated diamond you have?”

“In which category?” she asked.

“In all categories.” He demonstrated his newfound knowledge, reciting: “Cut, color, carat, clarity.”

“Well …”

“My fiancée is waiting at L’Espalier,” he announced, as another sales associate joined them, and a third called a guard to open the safe. “I don’t want any loose gems. I need something ready to go.”

When he returned to Emily, she was waiting with a cup of coffee and a crème brûlée. “I saved some for you.”

“Mmm.”

“It’s very sweet,” she said, dying of curiosity and at the same time conscious of the other people in the restaurant.

“No, it’s not too sweet.” He spooned up the dessert. “It’s just right.” He knew he was keeping her in suspense. His eyes were shining, but he kept a straight face. “It’s good.”

“Jonathan!”

“Yes, Emily?”

“Did you …”

“Did I what?”

She burst out laughing, even as he pulled a velvet box from his pocket. Then the laughter stopped as he opened the box to reveal a ring that cost more than a suburban house in most parts of the country, platinum set with three diamonds, small, flawless, dazzling white. “Oh, they’re so beautiful,” she whispered.

For a moment he didn’t know what to say and hesitated, and she loved his hesitation more than his reply. The hesitation was all him. His reply was heartfelt but conventional. “Not as beautiful as you.”

Their visits were brief, their hours islands in a sea of time apart. They wanted to wake up together and spend all day together and fall asleep wrapped in each other’s arms. When the markets rose all this seemed possible, but within months the Nasdaq fell back again, and they couldn’t leave their posts. By the end of October, Veritech had lost more than half its value. ISIS, which had soared to $133, dipped below sixty and then hovered at thirty. Dave put his private plane on hold. Orion garaged his car on Green Street and continued biking to work from his ratty apartment. There would be time enough for spending when the markets revived. No one wanted to cash out before the next zephyr, the expected gust of buoyant air.

Everyone was waiting, except Mel, who panicked days after he moved into his palatial house. He sold all his stock at thirty-three, a move that angered Jonathan.

“I couldn’t sleep at night,” Mel confessed. Already he regretted selling as the share price rose again.

“Man,”
Jonathan said disdainfully. “You’re old.”

Jess was out of the game as well, but for a different reason. She had donated her shares to Save the Trees. She did not mention this to Emily. Her sister did not approve of Leon.

“You have a way of losing yourself in other people,” Emily warned Jess on the phone.

“Don’t you think,” Jess countered, “that maybe sometimes they lose themselves in me?”

“No,” Emily said decidedly. “You’re the one at risk. You’re the one behaving dangerously.”

“You always say that.” Jess sat up in Leon’s bed, sans Leon, who was in Oregon.

“You’re moving in with a guy ten years older than you, and you plan to do—what? Live with him in this amorphous environmental group, which you yourself admit includes other women that he’s dated? Where do you think this is going?”

“Stop,” Jess said.

“Someone has to ask,” said Emily.

“You can ask as much as you like,” said Jess.

“And you can’t answer.”

“And you can’t be my mother.”

“Just go back and read her letters. Look at what she says about this kind of situation.”

“She never wrote about real situations,” said Jess.

“Oh, really? Let me show you. Let me bring it up for you….” Emily kept all her birthday letters on her laptop.

“You should know the difference between loving and being in love,”
Emily read aloud.
“Loving is calm and good, and being in love is so much better and so much worse. You might—
”

“Do
you
know the difference?” Jess challenged Emily. “Do you?”

She hung up and buried her face in Leon’s pillow. How did he get by with so little rest? He made her feel lazy and impractical. Her father had tried to make her feel that way. Emily attempted to jolt her awake, but Leon succeeded where they could not. His energy awed and attracted and piqued her as well, because living with him, hiking with him, making love half the night with him, exhausted her. She felt sleepy in contrast to Leon, but she was also sleepy
because
of him. Jess pulled the sheet over her bare body and sat up in bed to contemplate her dirty clothes. She sighed and wrapped herself in a blanket to pad down the hall to the communal bathroom.

When she was with Leon she belonged, but when he was gone, she felt like a stowaway. Strangely, the more time she spent with him, the closer they became, the more difficult her position in the house. Now that she’d moved in, she was no longer a regular leafleter. She was Leon’s girlfriend, with all the resentment that entailed. When would he return? When would she see him again? She could forget the others when she was studying the brown flecks in Leon’s eyes, his words, soft with surprise, his whisper—You’re beautiful—his body, not diffident at all when they were alone, not cool, but heated, trembling.

When she biked to campus, a car swerved and almost hit her. For a moment she caught herself up, and pulled over to the side of the street. Breathing fast, she tried to calm down. Be more careful! she told herself. Wake up! Eat! But she was already late for Aristotle, and she had no time to shop for food. Later, she did pause briefly at the Student Union, but the produce there was coated with some kind of fruit polish. How could she eat another shiny apple? Or a hard little plum? Or those bright-hued, jet-lagged cherry tomatoes? She didn’t drink milk. She wouldn’t eat a box of Froot Loops. Briefly the plastic bins of candy tempted her. Swedish fish and gummy bears and sour gummy worms—but she knew those treats were full of boiled calf bones: gelatin.

Outside the Union at the bike racks someone called her name. “Jessamine!” a voice sang out, and she turned to see Rabbi Helfgott bearing down on her with fistfuls of brochures. Her heart jumped in surprise and dismay. He was wondering, of course, about his loan. He was about to ask, as he had every right, where his money had gone.

“Good to see you. Good to see you,” said Helfgott.

“Rabbi! I’m sorry!” she began.

“Why is that?”

“I have to pay you back.”

“I know you will,” he told her, and she thought, That makes one of us. She had planned to repay him, but a cash shortfall at Save the Trees had endangered summer operations. Seizing the opportunity, Jess had donated her shares, reserving just a few to repay the rabbi’s loan. The trouble was that she had donated the shares at $302. The very week she made the transfer, Veritech released its earnings, just a penny lower than analyst expectations, and the share price plummeted to $150. The six shares she had kept to pay back Rabbi Helfgott had sunk in value, and they would not rise again so she could sell and repay him.

Perhaps Helfgott knew this, because whenever she’d called about paying him he always assured her that he was in no rush. He never pestered, except to invite her to events at his center. A tree planting, a Torah class. She made excuses every time.

Now she stood before him, guilty, swinging her bike helmet by the straps. What kind of person was she to take a rabbi’s money and hold on to it as she had? By rights he should be charging interest. “I made a donation,” she confessed. “I donated my stock to Save the Trees.”

She was amazed at his response. He smiled. “This is a wonderful thing.”

“Really? You aren’t angry?”

“I myself am very fond of trees,” he told her. “I myself have an interest in the ecosystem. Without this system, where would we be? I have spoken many times about this in classes and also festivals. You have perhaps heard of Water Awareness Month? I gave a benediction for this month in Redwood City. We have an expression in Hebrew: Mayim Hayim. ‘Water is life.’ With water, with sunshine, with the spirit of the Creator comes life and also trees. We have another phrase. Etz Hayim. ‘The Tree of Life.’ Perhaps you have heard of it? In our tradition the Torah is the Tree of Life. It is very understandable that when you find a tree, particularly one of the majestic redwoods, you would wish to donate your money to that tree. This is your way of saying: I see the Tree of Life, and I will hold on to it.”

Jess swallowed hard, moved by the rabbi’s words. “I’m going to pay you back as soon as possible.”

“Don’t pay me. Pay the Bialystok Center of Berkeley,” he said. “Then you can write off the donation on your taxes.”

“I’ll pay you and I’ll pay you interest,” she resolved.

“No interest,” said the rabbi, spreading his hands. “No monetary interest.”

“What other kind of interest is there?”

“Ah.” The rabbi smiled at her. “I am thinking of a more substantial interest.”

“And what’s that?”

“I am interested in
you.”

“Me?” Jess asked.

“You have heard the expression ‘Time is money,’” said Helfgott. “Some people prefer payment in money. I prefer payment in time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come to us for Shabbes,” he told her. “Or come to class, and when you’re done coming,
then”
—he drew out the word in a singsong voice—“
thehen
repay the loan.”

She was late to work. Half an hour late, forty-five minutes late. George sat at his desk at Yorick’s and called Jess’s home number, but no one answered. He began to call the Tree House and then hung up.

His old black telephone sat silent on his desk. The boxes he had stacked near European History remained unpacked. She’d quit. That was the most likely scenario. She had decided to leave but hadn’t bothered to give notice. That was usually the way with students. She had run off with her boyfriend, an amphibious creature George had met just once in passing at the Farmers’ Market, where Jess hailed George from a booth selling root vegetables.

“I want you to meet someone!” she called out in her friendly way. Then she drew Leon from the shadows, as one might draw a dark slug off a lettuce leaf. The boyfriend was a tall Russian, or Armenian perhaps, with slippery black hair and olive skin, and eyes of an unusually pale, druggy shade of blue. The better to see you with, my dear, thought George. “This is Leon,” Jess said.

“Hey,” said Leon as George extended his hand.

“This is my boss, George,” Jess told Leon.

Leon sized up George. “You’re the bookseller.”

“I am.”

“Good for you,” said Leon as though George were a child or a student or a dog performing some stupid trick. “What’s selling these days?”

George frowned. “Nothing you’d like.”