The Cookbook Collector (25 page)

But he kissed her instead. Arms inside her unbuttoned coat, he found the gap between her skirt and soft wool sweater. She was so long and slender—sleek like the girl-women in his father’s poems, her breasts like buds under his fingers. She didn’t push him away. He felt the hollow inside her hip bone, and her shoulder blades were like folded wings.

“Don’t you want me to?” he whispered.

“No,” she said longingly, “not at all.”

“Not at all! Don’t overstate your case.”

“It’s a good case,” said Sorel. “It’s a strong case.”

“A Lockbox?”

“Right. Except that you can’t hack your way inside.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, but even as he released her, even as he watched her unlock her door, he longed to solve this puzzle, and find a way to her encrypted heart.

20

W
hen the market sank, Bruno sent an e-mail about riding out the storm. Emily kept working without complaint, but a little furrow appeared between her eyes, a subtle wrinkle, not a worry line, but a mark of concentration. The stock price fell to forty on Tuesday, then to thirty-three on Wednesday, and finally hit a new low of sixteen on Thursday, and everyone was shocked, because there was no good reason for the steep decline, and yet the price was falling all the same.

On the upswing, every Veritech employee felt masterful. Now those masters felt like leaves tossed in unexpected storms. Laura read
Winnie-the-Pooh
at bedtime to her children in her unfinished house, and as she read about Pooh’s tumble through the branches of the oak tree, she held the baby, Katie, in her lap, and she thought: This is exactly what it’s like to lose half your net worth in three days.

“Oh, help!” said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet onto the branch below him
.

“If only I hadn’t—” he said, as he bounced twenty feet on to the next branch
.

“You see what I meant to do …”

“Of course it was rather—” he admitted as he slithered very quickly through the next six branches
….

“More!” demanded Meghan from the bottom bunk.

And Justin sat up in the top bunk and said, “Why are you stopping, Mommy?”

And Katie pulled Laura’s hair.

But Laura could not help pausing to consider how well A. A. Milne described the falling sensation, the surprise and sudden thumps as one lost economic altitude, and began to wonder whether renovating in Los Altos was such a good idea, and then, whether private school made sense, and finally, whether leasing a car might be more prudent than paying cash.

Kevin told Laura, “We can’t panic. It would be terrible to sell all the stock we have left.”

“What do you mean, ‘the stock we have left’?” Laura asked him.

“We lost some,” he admitted as he helped her hook up the rolling dishwasher to the sink in their temporary kitchen.

“How do you lose stock?” Laura asked him.

He didn’t answer immediately.

“Kevin?”

“I borrowed on margin to pay the contractor,” he said.

“You what?”

“I didn’t want to sell, because I knew Veritech was going back up.”

She turned on him. “Can you hear what’s wrong with that?” she demanded. “Can you even hear?”

“I guessed wrong,” Kevin said.

“No, that’s not what I meant, Kevin James Miller. What’s wrong is that you didn’t ask
me
. What were you thinking, borrowing against my stock?”

“It was our stock. And I’m sorry, Laura.”

“I earned it,” she declared. “It was mine, and, yes, I made it ours. But it was never
yours
to do what you wanted. It was never yours to decide about without consulting me.”

“You never showed any interest in handling the money,” Kevin pointed out.

She had never been so angry. “You never
asked.”

“Do you think you could have given me better advice? Whenever I asked about investments in the past, you trusted my judgment.”

Laura stood before him in their plywood makeshift kitchen, and she said, “Maybe I have a little more sense than you do. Or if I don’t, then maybe we’d make our mistakes together.”

“We’ve still got stock,” he soothed her. “Up ’til now, we’ve been very, very lucky.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you ever gamble with my hard-earned luck again.”

“I said I was sorry!”

“Because if you do, I’ll leave you,” she warned him, and she was half serious. “I’ll take the children and start a company of my own.”

He wasn’t sure quite how to take this. She had a sweet, soft voice; a patient, forgiving nature. She played the flute. “I always said you could start a bakery.” He tried to steer the conversation back to calmer waters. “You could sell your lemon—”

“I could sell truth serum,” she told him.

“Laura! I keep telling you—I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I’d
care?”

She cared enormously. Everybody did, but like all watched pots, the market would not boil.

At this moment George chose to buy. He bought Cisco at bargain-basement prices. He purchased IBM and Apple. And he paid cash for Tom McClintock’s cookbooks. He wrote a check for just under half a million dollars, exactly the money Sandra needed for her daughter’s legal fight.

Clever George. He knew the books were worth much more, and he unpacked them with guilt and pleasure, turning pages with sumptuous color plates, unfolding the collector’s notes, strange and brittle as pressed flowers. What rare and secret treasures, historical and also private. Not just a collection, but a reliquary. George had pulled off a bibliophile’s Louisiana Purchase, or rather, Jess had pulled off the deal for him.

His spring party, therefore, was mostly in Jess’s honor, although he did not advertise this. He presented the gathering as a viewing of the McClintock cookbooks, which he had installed in special cases in his great room.

The glass-fronted bookcases were quartersawn oak and built quite low, underneath his west windows. Atop the bookcases he had built illuminated glass display cases—the kind he had seen at the Huntington Library—so that on occasion he could show off certain volumes. For the party he had set up a little display of women’s cookbooks: the Brandenburg, the Salzburg,
The Compleat Housewife. American Cookery. A New Present for A Servant-Maid
, the expanded 1771 edition of Eliza Haywood’s 1743 handbook.

The cabinetry was exquisite, book-matched for George’s precious books. He did not fault his architect and carpenter for assuming the party was to celebrate their months of work. Sandra was coming, of course, along with her daughter, and George expected Nick and Julia, and antiquarian colleagues and Microsoft friends. Gracious in defeat, and hinting impishly at a purchase of his own, Raj accepted George’s invitation. Colm would be there. Colm had unpacked and installed the cookbooks. By the time the bookcases were ready, Jess had been traveling up north to chain herself to trees, to demonstrate in scenes George tried not to think about. Colm had done the work, but Jess was the one George thought about. She was the one he planned for. She had never been to the house, and he walked through the rooms, trying to imagine her impressions. He thought of her when he chose his champagne. He imagined her nibbling the strawberries he bought at the Farmers’ Market. She did eat strawberries, didn’t she? He prepared platters of cheese and biscuits, grapes, fresh figs, poached quince. He hired a pastry chef to bake lighter, smaller versions of the old recipes: bite-sized tarts, tiny crème brûlées. George’s housekeeper, Concepcion, climbed a painter’s ladder to dust the great beams, and then descended to polish the vintage typewriters. George hoped Jess understood that this party was for her. He imagined lifting his glass to thank her—if he could manage without sounding like a complete idiot.

“Bring friends—bring your sister if you like,” he had told her on the phone.

“I think her boyfriend is going to be in town,” said Jess.

“Bring your boyfriend then,” he said. “I mean her boyfriend.” He felt strangely tongue-tied. He had been extremely nervous, and he knew it showed, but he tried not to think about that. He tried to concentrate on what he could control: the party, the glass display cases lit with LEDs. Over six months he had built a proper home for McClintock’s collection. These rare volumes would never see the inside of a cupboard, cutlery drawer, or oven again.

He had planned the party for early evening, and as his guests drifted in, the last sunlight sifted through the windows and danced across the floor. The musicians had already arrived with guitar and flute, and they were playing “Greensleeves” sweetly, a little too sweetly.

Concepcion grinned. “You getting married, George?”

“How about something livelier?” George told the guitarist, who obliged with Leo Brouwer.

So to the strains of Cuban music, George welcomed his guests and graciously accepted their congratulations on the collection, the cabinets, the house, the champagne, the sunset, and all the while he kept his eyes on the front door.

Sandra arrived in a long Guatemalan patchwork skirt. She wore a black shirt and silver jewelry, and she was almost beautiful with her long gray hair down her back. Nothing like her small tattooed daughter in a wife-beater tank top. What was that inked between her shoulder blades? A bar code, or a word? And if it was a word, partly exposed, what was it?
Redemption?
Or
Reinvention?
Raj came in with them, and George realized that the three had driven up together.

“Yes, I drove,” Raj said cheerfully as the two women admired the display cases. “That was the least I could do.”

“Still courting?” George asked. You never knew with Raj.

“I’ve bought the engravings,” Raj whispered. “I bought all McClintock’s framed engravings right off the walls for a hundred dollars apiece.”

“Which engravings?”

“The lichens over the couch. They’re originals from
Flora Danica—
pre-1800, hand-colored.”

If only the cat hadn’t bitten George, just as he’d leaned in for a closer look!

“They’re from the botanical atlas that was supposed to include plates of every plant in Denmark. These are the engravings Prince Frederick ordered copied on china for Catherine the Great. Every piece was supposed to bear an exact copy of a different plant from the collection. I’m getting them reframed….”

“The least you could do,” George said wryly. Once bitten, twice shy. He had not ventured near McClintock’s odd art again, although now, of course, he wished he had. The cookbooks were the real prize, and he knew it was churlish to begrudge Raj his find, but the competitor in him sulked. It took three glasses of champagne and two major compliments from his antiquarian friends to shake his pique.

The first compliment began to mollify him: “I have never heard of a private collection like this in Berkeley.”

The second delighted him: “There may be cookbooks here that no one has seen.”

All the dealers admired and envied George’s acquisition, and that potent mix set the party buzzing, just as tiny stinging bubbles enlivened the champagne. No toast, George decided. No need to congratulate himself. He spoke to Sandra and showed her the humidity sensors he had installed in the bookcases, and he spoke to Nick and Julia, just as Julia’s cell phone began ringing.

“It’s Henry,” she told Nick. “He says he doesn’t want his babysitter anymore. He wants to know when we’re coming home.” She turned back to her phone. “Why don’t you use the other bathroom, sweetie?”

And George kept circulating, and watched Raj flirt with Colm, who looked flustered and spoke rapidly about his dissertation. “The excerpt,” said Colm, “becomes a genre of its own.”

Raj smiled. “Yes, but is that genre at all interesting—on its own?”

Colm looked offended.

The sun was low, the sunset draining away, and George thought, This is the moment in Virginia Woolf where somebody lights the lamps. The golden light slipping into the Bay, the guests absorbed in conversation. George walked among them and he adjusted the lights, and while he turned the dimmers, he saw a tall woman enter the room with a square-shouldered blond athlete—and he realized that this was Emily and her boyfriend, both dressed in open blazers, as though they were going to a yacht club, and then he saw Leon with his long glossy black hair and his jeans and untucked white dress shirt. Had Jess told him to wear that? She was the last inside the door and seemed to look everywhere at once. Unconsciously she clasped her hands behind her, as though stepping into a museum. She wore a sleeveless shift, less a dress than a slip of gray silk so wrinkled it must have been the style. Approaching his bookshelves, she examined the titles, one after another. The famous Millay and the Plath, all the cloth-bound poetry.

“You can open them if you like,” he said.

That would have been enough for him, watching Jess open his books. Meeting her accomplished sister.

“Your house is lovely,” Emily said.

“Amazing!” exclaimed Jonathan. “Who’s your architect?”

“Bernard Maybeck,” George said.

“You should hire him for Veritech, when you guys move,” Jonathan told Emily. “Seriously.”

George couldn’t help smiling. The desserts were superb, the champagne subtly teasing, like a word on the tip of the tongue
—methodological, perspicacious
—the word that comes to you, playfully, when you think you have forgotten.
Palimpsest. Irreversibility. Inamorata
.

He would have been perfectly happy, if not for Leon. Why was it that the youngest, most innocent-looking women consorted with the creepiest men? Their boyfriends were not boys or friends at all, but shadowy familiars: bears, wolfhounds, panthers.

Leon cast an appraising eye over George’s collections, and bent down to look inside the display cabinets.

“Be careful,” Jess warned. She had indeed asked Leon to wear the white shirt, and she was a little nervous about bringing him to George’s house—not so much that he would break something, but that he would be bored, and therefore rude. She knew instinctively that Leon and George would bring out the worst in each other. Here it was, happening already.

“Elbows off the glass,” George said.

Leon did not apologize, but straightened up, smiled, and shrugged carelessly as if to say, What are you, a fag?

And George looked at Leon, and he thought, Have you really been with Jess a year and a half? And he imagined smashing Leon’s toothy mouth. But he tried, instead, to act the gracious host, and asked with only the slightest hint of mockery in his voice, “How are the trees?”

“The trees are well,” Leon answered, matching George’s satirical tone perfectly.

“You’ve been up north?”

“We’ve been everywhere,” said Leon.

“Success?” asked George.

“We’ve had good discussions,” Leon said smoothly. “Success is up to Sacramento.”