The Cookbook Collector (22 page)

She had met Leon one day when she came to visit Jess at the Tree House, and her response had been about what Jess expected. “Totally inappropriate! What is he—forty?
Who
is he? Do you even know?” And she had taken the extraordinary step of assuming Jess’s share of the rent at her old apartment on Durant, simply because she could not bear the thought of Jess living in the Tree House.

“It’s a waste of money, keeping that empty room for me,” Jess told Emily.

“You need a home away from him,” her sister said. “You need somewhere to go.”

Jess had begun to dread these conversations. Generally, Emily’s Outings, as Jess began calling them, coincided with weekends Jonathan had canceled a visit, and Jess was not above pointing this out. “You only want to see me when you can’t see him,” she complained on the phone one January night.

“That’s not fair,” Emily said.

“You mean that’s not nice of me to say.”

“That too.”

Undaunted, Emily asked, “Do you want to go to the city on Sunday?”

“I have to work.” Jess sat cross-legged on the floor with her Logic text in front of her. George needed extra hours. Classes were beginning on Wednesday, and she still had Incompletes in Hegel, and Logic, and last year’s Incomplete in Philosophy of Language. She was in danger of losing her meager fellowship.

“We could go to Muir Woods.”

Jess hesitated. “I would,” she said, “but all you want to do is lecture me.”

“I don’t.”

“Right, you don’t want to, but you think you have to,” Jess said.

“We could drive the new car.”

Jess felt a pang of guilt about the old one.

“I’d like to go,” said Emily.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been to Muir Woods before,” said Jess.

“Never with you.”

“You have to promise you won’t have an agenda.”

“No agenda,” said Emily.

“And no hectoring!”

“How is hectoring different from lecturing?”

“It’s louder.”

Jess carried a volume of Robert Frost when Emily picked her up.

“What’s that for?” Emily drove her new Audi along the coast, and the ocean rose and dipped in the sun.

“To read. To meditate!” Jess said blithely, and she thought, To avoid hectoring if necessary.

“Okay,” Emily said, bemused and, sensing Jess’s unsaid reason, a little hurt.

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,”
Jess intoned as they took the path down from the parking lot. She had imagined finding a spot to read and meditate, leaving Emily to walk alone for half an hour, but the trees were so tall, and the light filtering down so green that she forgot her stratagem, and her troubles as well. The saplings here were three hundred years old, their bark still purple, their branches supple, foliage feathery in the gloaming. They rose up together with their ancestors, millennia-old redwoods outlasting storms, regenerating after lightning, sending forth new spires from blasted crowns. What did Hegel matter when it came to old-growth? Who cared about world-historical individuals? Not the salamanders or the moss. Not the redwoods, which were prehistoric. Potentially posthistoric too.

Jess closed her eyes to inhale the forest with its scents of earth and pine. “Couldn’t the Veritech Foundation be for forests?” Jess asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because our mission is math education.”

“But without trees there would be no math,” Jess said. “Let alone math education. Without trees we’d suffocate—literally and figuratively.”

“How do you suffocate figuratively?”

“You box yourself into received ideas, so you can’t breathe. You can’t even see where you are and you just … die from lack of perspective. Did you know that tribal peoples aren’t even nearsighted? Nearsightedness is a result of reading and staring at computer screens.”

Emily took off her glasses and gazed up at the blurry canopy. When she slipped her glasses on again, she much preferred the finer view. She saw the fertile detail all around her, the spores speckling the underside of ferns, the pinecones extending from every branch, pine needles drifting down and carpeting the mossy ground. Fecund, furrowed, teeming with new life—even the fallen trees blossomed forth with lichen and rich moss and ferns. Every rock and stump turned moist and rich, every broken place gave birth. Each crevice a fresh opening, each plant a possibility, putting forth its little hook or eye.

“You see?” said Jess. “And this place is tame. Up north you feel like an ant looking up at a blade of grass.”

“I’m not sure I’d want to feel like an ant.”

“Why not? Don’t you like to feel small sometimes?”

“No,” Emily said honestly.

“I do. I like it. I prefer feeling insignificant,” said Jess.

“I don’t believe that.”

“I didn’t say
worthless
, I said
insignificant
, as in the grand scheme of things.”

“But why?”

“Because humans have such a complex. We’re so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is.”

And Jess was right. Numbers didn’t matter here. Money didn’t count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore down reputations had no meaning in this place. The air was moist. Fallen leaves, spreading branches, and crisscrossing roots wicked water, so that the trees seemed to drink the misty air.

Jess said, “All your worries fade away, because …”

Emily finished her thought. “The trees put everything in perspective.”

“Right. It’s like your soul achieves its focal distance.”

The word
soul
startled Emily from her reverie. She turned on Jess. “You’re dropping out of school, aren’t you?”

“No—I never said that! I might take the semester off, just so I can catch up. And we’ve got a major appraisal coming up at Yorick’s….”

“Jess …”

“I was actually making a serious point.”

“And I was asking a serious question.”

“I’m not talking about graduate school. I’m talking about how you can come out here and know your place in the universe.”

“And what would that be?”

“Very small. Very tangential,” Jess said cheerfully.

“You’re so bright,” said Emily.

“I thought we said no hectoring.”

“It’s not hectoring—it’s my … I just want you to do well.”

“I would rather be well than do well,” Jess said beatifically, and laughed at her sister’s yelp of frustration.

“You actually seek out platitudes.”

“I only do it to annoy.”

“But you believe that stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s the disturbing part, isn’t it?” Jess said wickedly.

Emily folded her arms across her chest.
“When are you going to embark on a career?”

“Don’t you think,” Jess asked, with just the slightest edge in her voice, “that you have enough career for both of us?”

“I worry about you.”

“Well, I worry about
you,”
Jess countered. “You’re in this crazy industry where people eat each other alive. No, wait”—she stopped Emily from interrupting—“it’s in all the newspapers and the chat groups. Microsoft taking out Netscape. Veritech suing Janus.”

“You heard about that?” Frankly, Emily was surprised to hear that Jess followed any news at all.

“Yeah, I read this whole article—did you see it?
Anything you can do I can do better: Janus takes on the storage sector. Veritech fights back
. It’s online, on
The Motley Fool.”

“You read
The Motley Fool?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Jess asked. “Actually,” she confessed, “Dad sent me the link. Are you really suing Janus for eighty million dollars? Isn’t that, like, an expensive thing to do?”

“It’s just part of doing business,” said Emily, affecting a calm she didn’t feel. Lawsuits, particularly the big one against Janus, were a huge drag on Veritech’s finances and corporate energy. “We can afford the legal fees, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not what I mean. There you are, getting and spending, and you’re with this guy who’s in the thick of it—but you’re not really with him, because he’s so careerist he won’t come out here to be with you.”

Emily started walking, brisk and purposeful, as though they had to complete the trail loop. “I don’t think you should bring boyfriends into this. I don’t think you should talk about Jonathan—who actually works—when you’re with someone with no visible source of income or direction….”

“Direction! Leon travels for his beliefs. Jonathan travels for his share price. There’s a difference, don’t you think? Leon has a cause. Jonathan is just another greedy, techno-freak gazillionaire.”

They waited on a wooden bridge for a Japanese family taking pictures. A couple sauntered along, with hands in each other’s back pockets. A small girl, only three or four years old, sprinted past in a green hooded sweater, and her little feet beat against the wood planks as she raced away, to hide, to fly. Her parents called after her nervously, “Wait for us, honey. Not so fast!” Now Emily stood perfectly still, and she said nothing, and Jess knew by her silence that she was truly angry.

“You worry about me,” Jess ventured nervously, “so why can’t I worry about you?”

Emily said nothing.

“You know Mom would have hated both of them,” Jess cajoled.

“She would have hated Leon,” Emily said, with feeling. “She would have despised him.”

“She’d have hated Jonathan too.”

“How do you know that? You don’t know that.”

“Find someone musical,”
Jess quoted, for she was not above citing Gillian’s letters in a pinch, and she knew Jonathan could not carry a tune.
“Find someone giving. Find someone who will sacrifice for you.”

“You do look at the letters,” Emily said.

“Every once in a while.”

“And what do you think?”

Jess watched a thick, yellow banana slug squirm at her feet. “I think, probably, we aren’t turning out the way that she intended.”

“You could change that.”

“I
could? How about you?”

“I’m going to marry him.”

“You keep saying that.” Jess glanced at Emily’s sparkling ring. “Do you have a date?”

Emily shook her head. “I can’t—”

“Good for you!”

“Shh!”

Jess couldn’t help smiling at the way Emily shushed her, even in front of trees.

“I meant we can’t set a date right now.” Neither she nor Jonathan could move cross-country yet. Not at this moment in their companies’ young lives. “We’re not ready.”

“This is true,” said Jess. “This is more than true. Jonathan will never be ready for you.”

“You don’t know him.”

“I know enough. I’ve known him for three years! And I told you—I read about him in the papers, taking down Green Knight….”

“The stuff in the papers isn’t true.”

“Couldn’t you just meet someone else?” Jess asked winsomely.

“You know, Jess,” Emily exploded, “I’m supposed to sit by while you drop out of school and move in with your tree lover, and it seems to me that, for someone who demands so much unconditional support, you are strangely judgmental. You stand here talking about the natural world, and how humanity is insignificant, and then you have the nerve to tell me what to do. How do
you
intend to change your life? Just what exactly is your plan?”

Jess thought for a moment. “All right,” she said. “You be my witness.”

With a sinking feeling Emily watched her sister place her right hand on Robert Frost. “This year,” Jess vowed, “I swear I will overcome my fear of climbing.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. I swear on …” Jess opened her book at random and looked inside. “I swear on a dimpled spider, fat and white, that I will climb this year.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“This year,” Jess said, “I’m going to climb Galadriel.”

“You need a job,” Emily told her.

“I have a job.”

“You need a regular income. And health insurance! What if something happens to you? What if, for example, you fall out of a redwood?”

“I’d just die,” said Jess dramatically, “so I wouldn’t need medical care.” When she saw the look on Emily’s face she amended. “Sorry.”

“Please don’t face your fears.”

“I want to.” Jess looked up at the forest canopy.

“Jess, I’m serious. You’re making a huge mistake. You’re afraid of heights for a reason. You of all people should not be climbing in Wood Rose Glen. And don’t think you’re going to impress Leon.”

“This has nothing to do with him!” Jess retorted. “This is just for me.”

“Oh, God.”

“It might sound New Ageist, but I don’t want to live like a coward on the ground.”

“I don’t want you to crack your head open.”

“Since when are you so risk averse?” Jess asked. “Wasn’t coming out to California a risk? Wasn’t founding Veritech a risk?”

“I never risked my life,” said Emily.

“Okay, granted, technically you risk other people’s money, but you put your life into the company, right? You invest yourself. Isn’t that true? In Veritech, in the stock market, in Jonathan.”

Emily looked at Jess as if to say: Where do you come from? Her analogies were so fanciful. “Yes, I’m sure every choice involves some kind of risk—but tree climbing is life-and-death.”

Jess stood on the wood bridge and saw birds flying in the forest light. She saw herself flying upward, ascending to the treetops in the clouds.

But Emily interrupted, “You fall from a tree like this, that’s it. You don’t get another chance.”

“And don’t you think you can die too?” Jess countered. “Don’t you think your decisions are life-and-death too?”

17

E
mily did not treat business decisions as life-and-death. If she was nervous, she didn’t let it show. She worked with cool confidence and inspired everyone around her. Her success inspired her employees to start dot-coms of their own. Even Charlie, the company chef, launched his own restaurant, and flush with stock, Laura’s husband dropped out of his accounting program.

Laura was a little anxious when Kevin left school, and jittery as well about purchasing a two-million-dollar fixer-upper in Los Altos.

“We always said that you would teach accounting,” Laura reminded her husband at their wood-grain kitchen table in Escondido Village. “That’s why we came here.”

“I don’t like accounting,” Kevin confessed.

Laura set down her mug of herbal tea. “You never said that before.”

“I couldn’t afford to say it before.”

Laura knit her brow. She had a gentle manner, and her sweet voice belied her reservations. “I’m just not sure we should change all our plans so quickly.”

“What plans? Our plans were to have a family and be happy,” Kevin said. “We have the family, and now we have a chance to build a house and spend time with the kids. We’re going to have a swimming pool, teach the kids to swim. You’ll have a dream kitchen!”

“I don’t need a fancy kitchen.” She glanced at her cluttered counters.

“Don’t you want more space?”

“I’d be happy with a regular kitchen with more space, not a—”

“But you deserve one. You’re amazing, Laura. Just think what you could do with counter space and pull-out pantries, and you could have a whole baking station with a marble inset….”

Laura smiled ruefully. “Stop watching those kitchen shows.”

“We’ve had this amazing luck,” said Kevin. “Don’t be afraid to do something with it.”

“But it just seems …” She couldn’t help feeling that their ship had come in rather suddenly. Laura had taken the job at Veritech only to pay the bills while Kevin was in school, but working for Emily had proved more interesting than Laura had ever dreamed. How mysterious life was. Laura and Kevin still looked like the couple in their wedding pictures, those young sweethearts who could not afford floral arrangements and decorated the tables at their reception with autumn leaves, but now, they were interviewing architects. Kevin clipped pictures from magazines and talked about a kitchen opening out onto the garden, an airy light-filled space with double ovens and a breakfast bar. “It just seems like this will cost a fortune,” Laura said.

“But we have a fortune,” he reminded her.

“I’m afraid …”

“Afraid of what?”

“I’m worried about spoiling the children,” Laura said. “I want them to do chores.”

“Definitely. Everybody pitches in,” said Kevin.

“I would like a better kitchen,” Laura admitted, “but I want everything else to stay the same.”

Laura’s kind of constancy was Emily’s goal at Veritech. Level-headed optimism. Veritech’s products were essential, its culture young and happy, liberal in all the right ways—open, green, fun-loving, civic-minded; its people were building a corporation not only great, but good. Idealistic, and entirely invested in her creation, Emily believed this. After all, she had named Veritech to soar above the rest—to merge technology with truth.

Her concerns for Jess were real, but she went to work in high spirits, thrilled with Veritech’s price, its promise, its purchase on the future. She loved her job; she loved her colleagues. Even Alex had calmed down, working in his intense and solitary way on his own project.

When Alex presented his new work on fingerprinting to the board, Emily had settled into her cushioned chair, expecting the full flowering of her password-authentication idea. No one was more surprised than she when Alex unveiled his unadulterated electronic-surveillance plans.

He had spent six months on his prototype, a surveillance tool designed to record every time a user touched a cache of data, and to follow the user’s movements through the cache without his or her knowledge. A “lookup” function identified the user, a “markup” function linked the user’s searches and retrievals to those of others, and the whole system was so devious and paranoid that Emily interrupted him in the boardroom. “What happened to Verify? What happened to the password applications?”

And Milton chimed in, “Have you considered privacy at all?”

“Remember,” said Bruno, “we are like a strongbox, a safety-deposit box. We want to be as private as a Swiss bank account for our customers. We don’t want to sell the keys.”

Alex stood before them with the last slide of his PowerPoint presentation hovering on the wall, and nervously he clicked his laser pointer on and off, pointing the red light at the floor. “Look, a parking garage has security cameras. What if every car inside had its own security camera too, and when I took out my car I knew who had parked next to me, and who tried to hot-wire me, and who maybe dented me?”

“You’re talking about spyware, aren’t you?” said Emily. “You’re talking about bundling our storage services with spyware. That’s not what we discussed. That’s not—”

“That’s not what you wanted?” Alex shot back, and she felt his anger and his disdain. Who did she think she was? He was the artist here.

“You are suggesting we live with little cameras everywhere,” said Bruno.

Tight-lipped, Alex looked at Emily. He seemed to her at once bashful and arrogant. “It’s fair to everyone,” he said, “if everyone is watching.”

“It can’t be legal,” Emily told him. “And if it is legal, then it shouldn’t be.”

“That’s what Martin’s for,” said Alex, referring to the company’s in-house counsel.

“No,” murmured Emily, furious. “No. We won’t pursue this.”

“We won’t pursue this?” Alex cried in disbelief. His Russian accent flared, along with his temper. “Just like that? You liked the idea before. You were the one suggesting I develop it.” He snapped his laptop shut.

“We discussed how you would develop it,” said Emily. “We agreed that you would have free rein. You ignored everything I said, and you went off and did exactly what you wanted.”

“I don’t work for you, Emily,” Alex declared as Milton and Bruno looked on.

“Yes, but I thought that you were working with me!”

“You don’t design my projects,” Alex said.

“You lied to me! You agreed to do something that—”

“I never lied to you.”

“You told me you were working on a plan you had no intention of following. And it’s a dangerous plan. It’s a bad plan. It’s not where we want to go.”

“Why is that?” Alex demanded. “Because you’re prejudiced! You think the storage business should be warm and friendly, right? We should sell people what they want to hear.” His eyelashes were so long that they brushed against the lenses of his glasses. He was twenty-three years old. “This product doesn’t make you feel good—is that what you’re telling me?”

“Let’s take some time,” Bruno told them, and in the heat of battle they turned on him together, surprised at the interruption.

The war waged all that day and the next. Alex told Emily that she did not understand his project’s potential and thought she could dilute his ideas into some trivial password application. He said she did not care about innovation. He said that she masked her subjective opinions in ethical language, but she only did it to get her way. Finally, he stood in the parking lot next to his glossy black BMW, and he accused her of trying to manipulate him.

He stood close to her, too close. “You like my ideas when you think you can control them. When I express myself, you reject my projects out of hand.”

“I thought we were on the same page,” Emily said.

“You mean your page?”

“You said everything was going so well.”

“It
was
going well. Now you want to pull the plug on nine months’ work!”

“Could you stop blaming me for just a moment?” she retorted. “Could you just step back and consider what I’m saying?”

But he would not step back. “What you’re saying is totally defensive,” he told her. “You want to protect what Veritech has, and you won’t try anything new. Meanwhile the market is changing and you lag behind. We’re leaders now. Do you think that will last? Not if you’re afraid of innovation.”

“I’m not afraid of innovation,” she told him. “But we have to think about our direction.”

His face reddened. “Our direction means we’re going somewhere.”

“I don’t understand why you won’t listen to me,” she said.

“What? Do as you say? Obey you? Did you think you could manage me? Was that your idea? Why don’t you listen to me, for once? Or do you think I’m too young?”

Emily spoke quietly, although she didn’t feel quiet. “I thought I’d found a framework for you to pursue your work in keeping with Veritech’s goals.”

“I’m not interested in your frameworks, or your goals.” Alex clicked his BMW keys, and she saw the lights flash on and the driver’s seat adjust and the convertible top fold back like origami.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m leaving.” Alex got in the car and slammed the door.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m leaving Veritech.”

“Wait—”

“I’m tired of waiting.” He gunned his engine.

“Contractually, the work you do here stays here,” she reminded him. “Remember that.”

Like an angry teenager—no backward look, no seat belt, Alex roared away. If Emily could not contain him, he would take his brilliant, conspiratorial ideas elsewhere.

That was the frightening part—his dark imagination. Alex was so smart and irresponsible. It was obvious to Emily that bundling spyware with storage services was morally wrong. Why was that not obvious to him? It was obvious to her that she had encouraged his research, but never endorsed electronic fingerprinting as a product. Why then did he accuse her of leading him on? He was always projecting past the simple truth, sending her flowers, for example, after a Veritech party, where she made the mistake of dancing with him. But he’d behaved better the past few months. He had not e-mailed her excessively, or waited for her in the halls. She’d thought he was over his infatuation. Now, she sensed the situation was much worse. His voice, his stance, his eyes were threatening. What if he drove back again and found her? He had never hurt her, but for the first time, she began to feel that he might. The parking lot was well lit, and full of cars, but what had she been doing, fighting with him there, alone? She retreated to her Audi, and locked the doors.

She checked the time and dialed Jonathan on her cell. It was just after ten at night back east. “Hi,” she said, “it’s me.”

“Hold on,” he said. “Let me get inside my office.”

“I told Alex we weren’t going forward with fingerprinting.”

He didn’t answer for a moment.

“Are you there? Jonathan?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said.

“I feel terrible,” she said.

“Why? What did he do to you?” Jonathan asked sharply.

“He didn’t do anything specifically to me. He said he’s leaving.”

“Good.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you ‘don’t know’?”

“I don’t know if I can let him go. It would be such a loss,” she said. “A tremendous loss.”

“What—the fingerprinting stuff?”

“No. I mean Alex. The surveillance project is all wrong for us.”

“Okay.” Jonathan wasn’t just relieved. He was delighted, liberated from the weight of Emily’s proprietary secret. He had been so careful for so long, and now he felt that electronic fingerprinting was practically in the public domain. “Forget fingerprinting, and tell Alex to fuck off and die.”

She laughed a little. “Oh,” she said, “I wish it were that easy.”

“It can be,” Jonathan told her.

“I wouldn’t let him have his way,” said Emily.

“Of course not.”

“And he absolutely could not accept my point of view.”

“Sweetie, he’s a shark. He’s not going to change course, ever. Why are you surprised?”

She was surprised because she was Emily, and she did not share Jonathan’s frank assessment of coworkers as losers, whiners, bozos, sharks. No, she imagined people were rational and courteous, as she was, and when they proved otherwise, she assumed that she could influence them to become that way. Dangerous thinking. When she was truthful, she expected to hear the truth. Reasonable, she expected reasonable behavior in return. She was young, inventive, fantastically successful. She trusted in the world, believing in poetic justice—that good ideas blossomed and bore fruit, while dangerous schemes were meant to wither on the vine. She had passions and petty jealousies like everybody else, but she was possessed of a serene rationality. At three, she had listened while her mother sang “Greensleeves” in the dark, and she’d asked: “Why are you singing ‘Greensleeves’ when my nightgown is blue?” Then Gillian had changed the song to “Bluesleeves,” and Emily had drifted off. Those songs were over now, Gillian long gone. Despite this loss—because of it—Emily was still that girl, seeking consonance and symmetry, logic, light.