The Cookbook Collector (24 page)

“I misread you,” Jess said. “I thought you were upset.”

“I am upset.” Sandra’s voice caught. “I’m upset about my daughter. I’m upset about my uncle. I’m upset about the situation.”

Jess might have escaped then into the other room. Perhaps she should have, but she could hear the desperation in Sandra’s voice.

She knelt down level with Sandra. “What is the situation?”

“I promised my uncle I wouldn’t sell.”

“Do you think maybe he would understand?”

Sandra thought about this. “No,” she said. “He was in the hospital. He weighed nothing. He had no children. He was ninety-three years old. He was very clear. He said, ‘Sandra, you’re my only niece. I’m leaving you the house. Do anything you want with it, but don’t sell the books.’”

“Wow,” said Jess.

Sandra nodded grimly, appreciating Jess’s awestruck response. “He said, ‘Promise me that you’ll take care of them.’”

“But did you have any idea?”

“No!”

“Didn’t you come over to the house to see them? Didn’t you ever see them in the kitchen?”

“I lived in Oakland. He lived here, and he was reclusive. We weren’t close. I came twice, and both times he offered me iced tea. He never invited me inside his kitchen. He wouldn’t even let me clear away my glass.”

“When he said don’t sell the books, you thought he meant this stuff?” Jess pointed to the study bookcases.

“Of course.”

“How can you make a promise when you don’t know exactly what you’re promising?”

Sandra closed her eyes. “That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I keep telling myself. I’m afraid of him.”

Jess nodded. Instinctively, she understood what George did not. That as far as Sandra was concerned, Tom McClintock still hovered in the house.

“I believe in past lives,” Sandra explained, and she opened her gray eyes. “I lived before.”

Like a girl in a labyrinth, Jess tried to follow. “Really?”

“I believe we’ve all lived before, and will again.”

Someone else might have laughed, or cringed, or backed away. Jess asked, “What were you?”

“A Russian princess,” Sandra said quite seriously. “In the days of the Tsars.”

Which Tsar? Jess wondered, but thought it best not to inquire. She knew the kind of Russian princess Sandra meant: the kind who wore silk and velvet and danced in palaces and rode in sleighs through fairy-tale snows in the early pages of Tolstoy’s novels, until narrowly escaping execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. “What will you be next?”

“That’s what frightens me,” said Sandra. “Every life hinges on the one before. And what I do now will shape …”

“I understand,” said Jess. Emily would have asked: Why is it that those of us who were serfs in some past life never remember the experience? But Jess thought: How dreadful to feel that guilt accrues like debt from this world to the next.

“Do you think your uncle is living a new life?”

Sandra nodded.

Jess looked at the photograph on the desk. Unsmiling, weak-chinned, the lichenologist seemed to peer out at the world from behind his glasses. “And do you think he’s sort of—watching you?”

She closed her eyes again.

“And you’ll join him there—and then maybe he’ll punish you?”

She closed her eyes tighter.

“You had no idea what he was giving you,” Jess said. “How could you have any idea what these books are worth?”

Sandra’s eyes popped open. “How much
are
they worth?” she asked, and Jess felt a prick of fear; she felt the difficulty of her position, for Sandra was no longer keening and mystical.

“We’ll have to finish the appraisal,” Jess said cautiously, “and then George will make the offer.”

“I don’t like him,” Sandra said in a low voice. “I don’t think I can trust him.”

“You can,” Jess assured her. “He may come off as impatient or arrogant at times, but he’s a good man.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve worked for him more than a year.”

“And what do you know about him?” Sandra asked.

Jess considered the question. “He’s old-fashioned,” she said at last. “He has a sense of history. If he had a past life, he would have been a gentleman—even though he acts so adversarial. He loves books more than anything in the world.”

“But will he keep the collection intact?”

“I think so.”

“Will he promise?”

Jess thought about the books George flipped regularly, the Whitman he had sold within days of acquisition, the small collection of early twentieth-century poets he had bought from a dealer in Marin and quickly dispersed. “You’ll have to talk to him,” Jess said.

“I don’t like talking to him,” said Sandra. “I don’t want to sell these books. Do you understand? They’re private. They are my uncle’s past life.”

“Then maybe he doesn’t need them anymore?” Jess ventured.

Sandra bristled, and instantly Jess saw her mistake. In Sandra’s mind everything was necessary. Every artifact counted in some grand celestial tally.

“I don’t want to sell them. I would never sell them for myself. My daughter needs money.”

For a moment Jess wondered whether this daughter was real. Perhaps she was imaginary too? A past daughter? But she followed Sandra down this passageway as well. She chose to believe her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s happened to her?”

“She’s losing her children,” Sandra said.

“What do you mean? Divorce?”

“Leslie raised them, but her partner is the biological mother.”

So Leslie is the one Raj meant to honor, Jess thought.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” said Sandra.

“I don’t,” Jess admitted humbly.

“Leslie was the one who cared for them. She was the one who woke with them and fed them, and pushed them in the stroller to the playground every day. She was the stay-at-home mother. She dedicated her life to those boys. They’re all she’s got, and her ex took them to New Jersey.”

That’s why she needs money. Legal fees, Jess thought.

“I’m worried,” Sandra said. “I can’t sleep at night. My daughter hasn’t seen her children in over a year. And I’m afraid …” Here, her voice broke entirely. “They’re only five and three. I’m sure they don’t remember her.”

Jess answered gently. “You never know what children can remember. I lost my mother when I was five, but I still remember her. I think I remember her sewing, and I remember standing on a chair and baking with her. And also …” Jess searched for another memory she could put into words, some event she might produce, although most of her memories were flickers: light and shadow, hedges along the sidewalk, her mother’s white hands pulling her away when she tried to lick—what was it?—a fence? She loved the tang of metal. The ladder to the slide?

“You’re missing the point,” said Sandra.

Again Jess felt that this was a test, and it was no ordinary exam: not a test of what Jess knew, but of what Sandra believed. “Your situation is more complicated than your uncle could have imagined,” said Jess. “You wouldn’t be selling for a profit. You’d sell to pay your lawyers. In that case, don’t you think that he’d approve?”

Sandra searched Jess’s face.

“I don’t know Raj. I don’t know what Raj would do with these books, but George appreciates them. He’ll study them—and so will I, and so will Colm. We’re not just collectors. We’re readers.”

Sandra nodded.

Emboldened, Jess continued, “And wherever your uncle is, he’ll understand, because the point is, children shouldn’t have to remember their mother.”

Then tears started in Sandra’s eyes. All the tension seemed to leave her body, and she sighed, a drawn-out sigh. “Yes,” she said, and then, almost a sob, “Yes. That’s true.”

When Sandra opened the study door, George and Colm started up. Colm raised his eyebrows questioningly; George searched her face, anxious for the verdict. Jess didn’t say a word in front of Sandra. She couldn’t gloat. She pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. Oh, she’d done well—and George and Colm didn’t even know it yet. There they were, waiting in suspense. She bit her lip, determined to keep a poker face, but her cheeks began to dimple anyway. She’d passed the test: She’d got Sandra’s Sphinxian riddle right. Princess in the morning. Bitter in the afternoon. Grandma in the evening. What am I? Lonely.

Eager, mystified, George looked at Jess, and she met his gaze. Who knew that Jess, who was such a terrible salesman, would be a brilliant buyer? Jess hadn’t known herself—but here she was, victorious. Didn’t you think that I’d win her over? Jess asked George with her eyes. Didn’t you think that I could win these books for you?

PART FIVE

Free Fall

March through August 2001

19

T
he markets swooned. Like a beautiful diver, the Nasdaq bounced three times into the air and flipped, somersaulting on the way down. Tech stocks once priced at two hundred, and then seventy-three, and then twenty-one, now sold for less than two dollars a share. Companies valued in the billions were worth just millions, and with a blood rush, investors thought, So this is gravity, this is free fall. This is what the end feels like, ripping through water. But the end was not the end. There were still more ends to come.

Looking back, analysts could predict the crash. They spoke of weak fundamentals, softening in the tech sector, reckless speculation. But who can measure appetite, or predict the limits of desire? Who can chart love’s parabola, from acquaintance to infatuation to estrangement? Multiply by millions buying and selling. Small exits accrued into a great migration, darkening the sun. So many hearts beat rapidly together, so many investors rose up calling to one another as they took flight, that it seemed there were no buyers left, except the day traders screaming obscenities on message boards, scavenging and wheeling like gulls.

Rabbi Helfgott was one such day trader, although he did not post on message boards. Waking before dawn to log in as the markets opened in New York, he made a few dollars, even as the crash wiped out his portfolio. He blinked sometimes and shook his head, as his investments melted away. Veritech at two, Janus at a dollar fifty, ISIS at seventy-five cents. Nevertheless, he remained hopeful. He had a sanguine nature, prayed three times a day, and believed the Messianic age was imminent. Therefore, he was better prepared than most for market turbulence.

He himself had read some economics. In fact he had read
The Wealth of Nations
, a book Jessamine had recommended, and he saw in Adam Smith a very Jewish form of Providence. What was the invisible hand Smith always spoke about, but the hand of God? What was a correction, but the Creator’s recalibration of the world? Had he studied physics in college, Helfgott might have learned that what goes up comes down. But the rabbi had not attended college, only seminary, where he learned that what comes down, must rise again. Applying this principle, he believed that what the markets destroyed they would, God willing, speedily restore, and this belief sustained him, as did the knowledge that he owned the Bialystok Center of Berkeley free and clear. Many years before, he had saved the life of a young man, an addict in the ashram occupying the building, and the boy’s grateful father had purchased the property and then sold it to the rabbi for a dollar. Now the young man was married, living in New Jersey, and a father himself! Such was the marvelous circularity of exchanges. Such, with God’s help, was the world’s hopeful trend, difficult in the short term, but in the long run beautiful.

Others were not so philosophical. When ISIS hit a new low of seventy—not seventy dollars, but seventy
cents
—Jonathan took the debasement personally. His high-flying company was about to be delisted, too small to register on the Nasdaq stock exchange. He knew that ISIS would come roaring back. He knew because he would make it happen. In the meantime—well, he hated meantimes.

Sleepless, he paced his Somerville apartment. His roommates had moved on, but Jonathan still lived there and he hated that too. He hated the stasis, the stalemate developing between him and Emily. Although he and Emily had set the date for their October wedding, they had not bought a house, nor had she left Veritech. She was rolling out a new product. She was setting up a research group for Alex—an unfathomable idea—rewarding Alex for his bad behavior. Twice, three times, she postponed her move east, and then she pushed the wedding off as well.

She said she missed him. At the end of every visit her eyes filled with tears—but she returned to California anyway, and somehow she remained patient. Where did this excessive patience come from? Did she still have reservations? She had told him in her sweet teacherly way that now she was ready—
they
were ready—to be engaged, but he had no idea what she meant by readiness.
Waiting, taking time, becoming ready
—this was the vocabulary women used to divert attention from what they wanted. And what did women want? The same thing men did—only slower.

What would it be like to live without this level of intense anticipation? Like ancient nobles he and Emily waged wars and signed treaties, convening privy councils in their separate conference rooms. What would it be like when Emily abdicated to live with him full-time? Would she? Could she?

Hard times. He kicked an empty soda can across the bare floor. Thirty million invested at Goldman Sachs seemed a paltry sum, a pittance, next to the hundreds of millions he had once possessed on paper. What Jonathan had was nothing next to what he wanted. Prisoner of his enormous expectations, he paced the floor, plotting to reclaim what might have been.

Friday when the markets closed, ISIS had climbed a penny to seventy-one cents. Then Jonathan called a company meeting in the newly renovated lobby. Over one hundred Cambridge employees sat on the gray carpet, while oldsters like Dave sat in swivel chairs, and Jonathan, Orion, Aldwin, and Jake stood together in the center, all four of them in town at once, like a rock band reuniting without instruments, four accustomed to mosh pits of celebration, now gazing out at anxious upturned faces.

Shakespeare’s Henry rallied his troops at Agincourt:
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow / To do our country loss, and if to live, / the fewer men, the greater share of honour
. At a later date, George Washington tried to mollify his mutinous men:
 … let me entreat you, Gentlemen, … to rely on the plighted faith of your Country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the
intentions of Congress
. Now Jonathan took the floor. “Okay, guys, listen up. There’s share price and there’s reality. Prices go up and they go down. There is a certain amount of randomness built into the system, a certain amount of envy and media shit, a certain amount of stuff happening in the market as a whole that for better or worse reflects on us. But the reality is our products, our services, and our customers. That’s what you have to wake up and think about every single day. Excellence, accountability, and the bottom line. We did not establish ISIS as some fly-by-night dot-com.”

“Yeah!” the programmers cheered.

“We established ISIS for the long haul, and we will be here for the long haul.”

“YEAH!” they cheered louder.

“You guys are not involved in a low-rent operation.”

“No kidding,” Aldwin said under his breath. The lease on the Kendall Square building cost almost two million a month, and he was looking for cheaper space.

“Stand up,” Jonathan ordered his people. “Everybody stand up.” Programmers and secretaries, marketing team and legal counsel all scrambled to their feet and scrummed together around their bold, ruddy-faced captain. “You guys are not geeks for hire,” Jonathan announced. “You didn’t come looking for a quick buck. You came to
build
something. You came to change the way the world does
business
. You guys are the best.”

“Whoooo!”

“You kick ass!” Jonathan shouted.

“Yesss!”

“You guys are
animals!”
This last unleashed such a frenzy that Jonathan couldn’t see Sorel pushing through the crowd. She had been on shift in the control center. And because everyone else was at the meeting, she alone, gazing at the bank of monitors, had seen the first signs of trouble in the ISIS security network. A single white dot representing a data center in Shanghai turned emergency red.

“Security breach!” Sorel cried, but even as she spoke, another dot turned red as well, and then all the dots around it until, like a plague, hundreds of white points all across the digital Earth broke out in red, a contagion spreading through thousands of ISIS data centers from Beijing to Baltimore.

She worked her way through the crowd, but she could not get close to the front. Only Orion saw her. He caught her eye and mouthed, “What’s wrong?”

She shouted, “Lockbox is down. Lockbox is broken.” But the screams and cheers continued, drowning her out, resolving into call and response.

“Who’s the best?” Jonathan shouted.

“We’re the best!”

“Who’s the rest?”

“Fuck the rest!”

Orion pushed his way to Jonathan. He told Jonathan softly, underneath the rising noise of the crowd, “Lockbox is broken.”

Jonathan didn’t hear him.

Orion cupped his hands and repeated directly into Jonathan’s ear, “Lockbox is broken.”

The blood drained from Jonathan’s face. His jaw tightened. He held up his hand for quiet and the roar died down. “All right!” he said. His voice was grim, but only Orion and Sorel knew why. The others heard grim satisfaction as he bellowed, “Back to work!”

What new hell was this? Hackers had targeted Lockbox and found the tiny chinks Orion had identified long ago. Those chinks were now fissures compromising the security system. Alarms were sounding all through ISIS as programmers, product testers, and Customer Care struggled to make Lockbox safe again. Clients were panicking, and every hour, the public-relations crisis grew.

For two days and two nights, the ISIS team struggled to make Lockbox right. Projects went on hold. Travel plans were canceled. A programmer sat at every computer, a Customer Care counselor manned every phone. The tide of empty soda cans was rising.

Orion and the Lockbox team were working as fast as they could, but the break was bad, and the news spread everywhere, from
The Wall Street Journal
to
The Motley Fool
. At the end of the second night, Dave broke precedent and made an executive decision. ISIS was recalling Lockbox. All Lockbox customers were being upgraded automatically for no charge to ChainLinx.

“No!” Jonathan cried out at the emergency board meeting. Even now he hated to admit that Lockbox was flawed.

“We’ve almost got it up again,” said Jake.

But Dave shook his head, as if to say, Boys, boys. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to look at the big picture. You have to think about our customers, our reputation, and our weakening position. We aren’t talking about saving Lockbox anymore. We’re talking about saving ISIS.”

Exhausted, Orion rested his head on his arms right there on the table. Bitterly, he thought of the old fights. If Jonathan had listened to him … If Jonathan had not been in such a rush … He looked up at Jonathan across the table. What were the chances that Jonathan would apologize? What were the chances he would show the slightest regret?

Nil. Jonathan didn’t even glance at Orion as he swept out of the glass-walled conference room.

But there was no point thinking about that now, when there was so much to do. There was the conversion of every Lockbox account to ChainLinx. There were phone calls. There were press releases. All through the hallways, up and down the stairwells, ISIS hummed with new activity. Even as the programmers gave up their nighttime vigil, the morning reinforcements arrived. Support staff trooped into the building with their cups of coffee, and Mel Millstein showed up at the quaint hour of nine. As Orion walked out into the hall and headed downstairs, he felt relief. The worst had happened, Lockbox was history. Now ISIS could rebuild. His resentment faded, and he felt pride instead, a strange pride at this resilient organism, this company of so many different parts and people—a society of its own, a world unto itself, a little planet against the hostile universe. He knew how Jonathan felt. Let the markets fall, let the siege begin, ISIS would outlast all comers, hackers, analysts, and doubters. Jonathan’s faith never wavered, and Orion began to feel partisan too.

——

“He’s very sure of himself, isn’t he?” Sorel said of Jonathan.

Orion was giving her a lift on his bicycle. She perched on the seat and he walked the bike, one hand on the frame, the other on the handlebars. Gently he wheeled her along, as a knight might lead a maiden on a palfrey.

“Well, he has a right to be,” Orion said.

“Are you defending his mistake?” The afternoon was sunny and might have been warm, if not for the brisk March wind that blew her skirt over her knees. She was wearing her long loose coat, and the black satin lining showed at the bottom, because her hem was down. She’d strapped on her guitar like a backpack. Her red-gold hair spilled over her shoulders. “He’s insufferable.”

“He gets results.”

“Not in this market.”

“If anyone can get the job done, it’s Jonathan,” Orion said.

“Oh, please! You sound like his henchman.”

“His henchman? No.”

She wondered, “Are you succumbing to some sort of Stockholm syndrome where you start identifying with your oppressor?”

“How is Jonathan my oppressor?” Orion protested. “He’s my colleague—and my old friend.”

She looked down on him for that. He could see the expression on her face, a kind of disdain coming over her. In her mind, Jonathan was the enemy.

“What’s wrong with working with people?” he asked defensively.

“Hmm. I liked you better before when you were more … disaffected. You were more original then.”

They were walking through Cambridgeport, where the streets were down to their last piles of ash-gray snow. The trees were bare, but the clapboard houses colorful, painted purple with teal trim, or ochre and bloodred, or lavender, or puce, and the yards were filled with art as well as cars—scrap-metal cats and penguins—ceramic pots bristling with fierce crocuses. They had been working day and night, troubleshooting ChainLinx to take on the massive new customer load.

“What day is it?” Orion asked as they arrived at her place.

“Monday,” she said. “No, I think Tuesday.”

Molly was on call. “I wish I could … come in.”

She shook her head. “Thanks for the lift.” She hopped off the bicycle in front of her ramshackle worker’s cottage. She’d done some work on it, but the house was still a work in progress. Wood supports propped up the porch. “Go home to bed.”