The Cookbook Collector (20 page)

“I don’t know,” she whispered in reply.

And George wanted the collection then. He wanted it, notes and all, to read and puzzle over. He wanted days and weeks with these rare books and their strange apparatus, the notes and drawings of their collector. He would satisfy his curiosity. But first, “I’ll need to bring in an antiquarian. I have a friend—”

The front door rattled and Sandra jumped, hand on her heart.

“What was that?”

“Only the mailman,” she said. “He frightened me.”

George looked warily at her. She was far too nervous, far too gray—ashen-faced, really—wide-eyed, shaken.

“I’m afraid,” Sandra said.

Oh, God, thought George, but he asked, “What are you afraid of?”

She mulled the question. “I’m afraid in general.”

“Afraid of selling?”

“I need to sell, but I’m afraid of him.”

“Your uncle’s gone,” George reminded her.

“Yes, I know,” said Sandra, but her voice trembled. “He’s dead, and I’m going to betray him.”

Red-letter day! He had heard from other dealers about triumphs at swap meets, or, as his friend Raj dubbed such adventures, Victories at Flea. He had heard of Alcott family papers in a New England barn, and a hand-drawn map of Arabia by T. E. Lawrence tucked underneath the endpapers of Lawrence’s eighteenth-century Josephus. These were tales of the trade, but he had never contributed a legend of his own.

Sandra was a strange one. She had her apprehensions and her guilt, but George had never seen conscience-stricken sellers turn from good hard cash. He would make an offer to light up her gray eyes and make her feel almost young again. He felt euphoric. He would open his 1974 Martha’s Vineyard that night. Best of all his cabernets, the one he had been saving. He jingled his keys as he returned to Yorick’s. He could almost taste the deep red, lush Heitz.

He saw that his Post-it had disappeared. Turning the key, he found the glass door unlocked, and stepped inside to find Jess, reading at his desk. Her hair was falling in her eyes, and she wore a wrinkled linen dress too big for her; she wore all her clothes that way—loose, voluminous—and then while working, she would push up her sleeves, revealing her forearms.

“Long time, no see,” George sang out, taking his 1892
Leaves of Grass
from Jess’s hands. “You found my note?”

“I did.” She snatched up the utility knife.

“You haven’t even opened the boxes.”

“I was just about to!”

“As soon as you finished ‘Song of Myself’? That’s all right, don’t bother.”

“Don’t bother? What do you mean?” She looked up at him as she often did, all innocence, bright-eyed, polite—until she could determine if he was really angry with her or only bluffing. “Why are you so happy?” She squinted, examining him closely, and then smiled, triumphant. “You bought something!”

He thought of telling her about the books. For just a moment he considered confiding in her, but he was superstitious until he closed a deal. “I didn’t buy anything.”

“Really?” She leaned back in his desk chair.

“Careful.”

She sat up straight, all business with four chair legs on the floor. “I’ll shelve the books. Just let me take care of it.”

“Jess,” he said, “you had all afternoon to take care of it. It’s four o’clock, I’m closing early, and now you’ve missed your chance.”

Four o’clock. Her day had been so long that she couldn’t remember its beginning. She had been running since she woke up, and she was exhausted, the afternoon a blur of missed lunch, talking to the rabbi, sitting with Professor Sakamaki for almost two hours to discuss her Kant paper with its problems “in argumentation, structure, and style.” She had made a huge effort to get to the store.

Now George shooed her away with his hands. “Go home.”

“Don’t you want to know why I’m late?”

He was honest. “No, not really.”

“My professor wants me to take an Incomplete. He says my Kant paper is really two different papers and I have to separate them. And I already have an Incomplete in Philosophy of Language, and I have another … thing.”

“A … thing?” George couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just a thing,” Jess said.

Instantly George thought of Leon. Instinctively, he suspected her self-absorbed, voracious lover. George was old enough to read a whole story in Leon’s face—the charismatic opportunist alighting in Berkeley, the pseudo-intellectual, the rebel with an environmental cause, masking his appetites with altruism. But of course Jess could not interpret Leon as George did. She couldn’t even read George. She had no idea how George delighted in her funny ways, or watched her through the window as she stood outside, finishing an apple or nibbling sunflower seeds. She did not register his glances, his quick inventory of her clothes, his pleasure in her face and wrists. She did not know his heart.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked playfully, and then he changed his mind about her, as he often did, and decided that in fact she read him pretty well, and knew more than she let on.

“I was just trying to assess the nature of the problem,” George said. “Legal trouble?”

“No.”

“Mortal danger?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” she echoed

“Well, what would you like me to say?”

“Generally speaking,” she told him, “if you hear someone is not in mortal danger, you should say ‘good.’”

He laughed. “Get out of here. Go home. I have people coming for dinner.”

“You can go. I’ll lock up.”

Then he understood. She wanted to finish reading his very-good-condition-with-only-slight-foxing Whitman. “You want to sit here alone with
Leaves of Grass
, don’t you?
Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!”
he read aloud.
“Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
I’d like to see a liquid tree.”

“If we keep on the way we’re going, you aren’t going to see any kind of trees,” Jess said.

Despite his good mood—perhaps because of it—George refused to let this comment pass. “You know,” he said, “you worry too much about forests.”

“You can’t worry too much,” Jess replied immediately.

George snapped Whitman shut. “You go out there on weekends, confronting angry loggers, and risk your life for redwoods, but are you, personally, going to save them? Do you think that by saving a few trees here, you’ll have the slightest effect on the global environmental problem?”

“Yes,” said Jess, “because of what we’ll prove to everyone.”

George smiled. “Who’s everyone? Just other comfortably well-off tree savers like you.”

“How am I comfortably well-off?” Jess asked.

“This environmental theater of yours has limited impact.”

She looked miserable for a moment, but George did not let up. “Look, I’m older than you are, and I know a few things about …” He was going to say, Types like Leon, but he said, “Organizations like Save the Trees. These are businesses-slash-cults started by refugees from the East Coast who come out here to graft their radical-chic plan onto some unsuspecting western species like the spotted owl, or the coastal redwood, or the Berkeley grad student. Ultimately their goals are self-serving. The money they collect supports their lifestyle. The signatures they gather justify a pyramid scheme. I sign on and then I get five friends to sign, and soon I’ve got a thousand friends supporting my incursions in the old-growth forests, where I do what? Hope someone will photograph me shouting down some logger? What’s the plan? And where are all the donations and the signatures going? Save the Trees is a self-sustaining public-relations firm. It’s not substantive or effective. It’s not real.”

“As opposed to your rare-book store?” Jess countered. “What’s yours is real, and what’s mine must be imaginary?”

“How is Save the Trees yours?” George asked her, and now he was quite serious. “In what way does it belong to you? You belong to it. Those people are taking advantage of you.”

“You know nothing about Save the Trees. If you want to know about it, come visit, and I’ll show you around myself.”

“No, thank you,” he said without a moment’s hesitation.

“You have to admit, then, that you prefer your prejudices to actual knowledge. You don’t really know anything.”

“I know you’re sitting in my chair,” George said.

That startled her. She had forgotten. When she sprang to her feet, he knew he’d hurt her. She took the utility knife and silently began slitting open boxes.

That night cooking, he regretted his words and his proprietary tone, his lecture on environmental politics. Again and again as he sautéed portobello mushrooms, he remembered how Jess looked at him when she jumped out of his desk chair. A glance both angry and reproachful. All the light in the room had drained away, her joy yielding to his pedantry. I’m sorry, he told Jess. Forgive me. And he imagined her forgiving him. He dreamed of that even as he stood there at the stove and watched the mushrooms softening. To be honest he had always dreamed of Jess—a girl so open and unself-conscious, so free. He had always imagined her. He lifted the pan and covered the Aga burner with its special lid.

Enameled deepest, darkest green, a Craftsman color to match the tile backsplashes, the Aga oven was one of George’s few concessions to modernity, along with a dishwasher hidden inside a lower cabinet and a Sub-Zero refrigerator concealed behind a wall. Preservationist that he was, George had studied old photographs to re-create his kitchen’s 1933 layout with two open cupboards for dishes, scant counter space, and just one sink. No downdraft grill, no appliance hutches, no microwave, no island, only an oak table. George’s kitchen was all air and light, with arched windows soaring almost sixteen feet to a peaked roof supported by trussed beams. Californian and medieval, the room was chapel-like, its woods ranging from gold to claret, its floorboards aged, its honed soapstone counters silky to the touch, luscious black when wet.

He opened the first bottle of the evening, a crisp Soave by way of appetizer, and as he sipped, he parboiled new potatoes, blanched green beans, reduced the sauce for the béarnaise. He had learned his way in the kitchen from an old girlfriend, flame-haired, dark-eyed Margaret. She had been thirty, he’d been twenty-nine. She’d worked at Chez Panisse, and she taught George the mysteries of meat and fish, how to fillet a trout, and the best way to braise lamb and steam artichokes. She had explained the varieties of mushrooms and their uses, demonstrated the gentle stirring of risotto, how to select a perfect ripe tomato, and when to buy a peach. Margaret had taught him about wine as well. She had a discerning palate and a way with words, so that she could articulate the most elusive undertones. “Tobacco,” she would say, and that was it exactly. “Dried cherries.” And she was always right. She had prepared fantastic meals, feasts for all their friends in a student apartment with just two working burners. At the end of the night, exhausted and exhilarated, she and George would fall asleep with the scent of cinnamon or lemongrass or cardamom clinging to their hair and clothes. Yes, Margaret had been beautiful, talented, and wild as well. Fair to say that George had been scarred by the relationship. Like the vein on a leaf, his scar traveled from his right thumb all the way up his forearm, where Margaret had scored him in a fury with her paring knife.

“You’re too selfish to marry anyone,” Margaret told George when she left. And, of course, as soon as she said these words, she was exactly right.

He had tried to prove her wrong. He had always imagined sharing this kitchen and this view out over the Bay and through the Golden Gate. The lights below like tiny jewels, the sky past sunset, more silver than gray, clouds like a pearl silk dress in a ter Borch painting. Endlessly he had searched for his love, and when he couldn’t find her, he looked for signs, traces of her beauty in books and maps. He surrounded himself with talismans and reliquaries, but he never stopped desiring the one he couldn’t find. Superstitious heart: He began to see her reflected in impossibilities—the Rackham illustration of Miranda dancing, Jess’s delighted laughter. The one he couldn’t find became the one he couldn’t have.

“Close your eyes,” he told Jess in his dream, and he would lead her to these windows and stand behind her, hands on her shoulders. Unconsciously, he closed his own eyes as he stood there at the stove.

The doorbell. A surprise and a relief. “It’s unlocked!” he called, and Nick appeared in fresh pressed clothes, a plum-colored shirt, Italian shoes.

“You look good.” George poured him a glass.

“What do you mean?”

He meant that Nick looked entirely different away from Julia, free from the kid. “You look yourself,” George said.

Nick sat at the kitchen table, and George set before him dishes of olives and pickled eggplants the size of grapes, a platter of French bread, a saucer of sea salt. “How is everybody? How go the renovations?”

“Behind schedule.”

“Your kitchen couldn’t take as long as mine,” George said, by way of encouragement.

“Yes, well, you weren’t trying to live in the house with a small child.”

“True,” George said. “I planned that well.” He liked to flaunt his freedom once in a while, even as Nick flaunted his domestic bliss. They were each a little jealous, and like brothers they provoked each other.

“I noticed someone stole your hood ornament again,” Nick said.

This was a sore point. “It’s happening while I’m at Yorick’s. I pay to park in a garage, and they’re supposed to have security cameras.”

“Must be an inside job,” said Nick. “You should buy a screw top you can take with you.”

“Either that or I should start biking again and give up driving altogether.” By biking, George meant motorcycles, and he knew full well that when it came to motorbikes, Nick was not allowed.

“You’re too old,” Nick said. “But how about—” he disappeared into the front hallway where he had left his backpack and returned with a bottle wrapped in white rice paper—“this.” It was a 1970 Chateau Latour.

“Nick!”

“You’re welcome.”

“We’ll drink your Latour along with my Heitz.”