The Cookbook Collector (28 page)

Jess knew some French, but little German and no Dutch. Those works were more mysterious, and also less distracting to catalog. The English cookbooks with their joints and forced meat, their
Bacon stuck with Cloves
, read like Jacobean tragedies. Jess devoured them, scarcely looking up, until Concepcion’s vacuum startled her. Then she realized the afternoon was gone, the sky was deepening, and she was hungry once again.

She began to bring more food, a second snack for the end of the day. Rice cakes and a thermos full of miso soup. She ate snap peas and bags of almonds on George’s sunny kitchen deck, and bent to sniff the herbs his gardener cultivated in pots. She closed her eyes and smelled basil, thyme and rosemary, spearmint, peppermint, chocolate mint, dill, parsley, lemon grass. Thus fortified, she shouldered her backpack and drove home to the Tree House, where she lived her other life.

In July Leon came to the Tree House for several days to work and re-provision. He assumed that she would drive north with him, and when she told him she needed more time with the books he said, “Jess!” almost like Emily.

“What?” she asked him.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m working,” she said once again. “I know you think cookbooks are trivial.”

He nodded. “Completely.”

“You think rare books are frivolous—but actually when you sit down with them …”

“When you sit down with them or when you sit down with him?”

“Don’t be rude!” she said, half-laughing. He was already dressed. She had just come from the shower.

“This job is a total setup.”

Bending over, drying her thick hair, she told him about the Brandenburg cookbook. “It’s got a clasp like a locket. It’s a jewel,” she told him. “And wait, when you open it and you look at the frontispiece—can I tell you …?”

“Can I tell you about Wood Rose Glen?” he countered. “We’ve got rangers up there every day, and loggers with megaphones harassing everyone who tries to defend.”

She dressed in silence, chastened. “I’ll come up in two weeks.”

“Come because you want to come. Come because you need to come,” said Leon. “Don’t do me any favors.”

“I do want to. It’s just …”

“Just what?”

How could she explain to him what she could scarcely articulate to herself? The cookbooks weren’t trivial at all. They were, in and of themselves, an entirely new world. She had never felt this way. She dreamed about the books at night. Their collector haunted her. She lived in suspense, speculating about his life, his love, his strange dark handwriting. Sometimes she could hardly bear it—the edge of discovery. “To have a chance to work with a collection like this—” she began.

Leon cut her off. “Watch out or you’ll end up in the collection too.”

“You’re jealous!”

“No,” Leon told her coolly. “You can have him.”

“Have who? Have George? But I don’t
want
him.”

“Maybe you don’t, but he wants you.”

Jess thought of the exquisite, empty house. “He’s never even there.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Leon’s anger was never desperate or uncontrolled, but he was angry. Cold as liquid nitrogen, he burned.

They heard footsteps overhead, and talking in the hall. When they fought, the other Tree Savers could overhear. She kept her voice down. “You have no right to speak to me that way, when you always leave me here alone.”

“I don’t leave you here. You choose to stay.”

“I want to climb with you,” she said, “but I can’t.”

“That’s bullshit, Jess, and you know it. You told me six months ago you were going to climb—and every time, you decide at the last minute that you can’t. The truth is that you can, Jess. You can. But you won’t. You have an irrational—”

“I know it’s irrational. I know it’s an irrational fear.”

“Well, if you know it’s irrational, then why don’t you do something about it?”

“Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” Jess said.

“Call it whatever you want, it’s childish.”

“Why are you so nasty?” Jess asked him.

He didn’t answer.

“You’re nasty, and accusatory, and paranoid.”

“I’m not paranoid,” Leon said.

“Oh, so you admit to nasty and accusatory.” She almost laughed, but he did not.

“Irrational or not, it’s your choice, so don’t whine about getting left behind.”

Whenever she defended herself, or called him on something, Leon said don’t be stupid, or accused her of whining. She took a breath. “I’m pointing out that my job is real too.”

“And your so-called job is to work for your patron in his house.”

“You have patrons! You have that guy from Juniper Systems, and that woman, that actress with the house in the city. You just wish that George were funding you.”

“Right, if he were funding us that would be different.”

“You’re jealous. You really are.”

He turned away slightly.

“Don’t you think for once you might possibly be wrong?”

“Wrong about your rich friend? I’m not wrong about him,” said Leon.

“You don’t know him,” said Jess.

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Jess said.

Leon answered, “Just tell me what happens when he comes home.”

That afternoon, while working in George’s dining room, she felt something new, a strange apprehension. She jumped to hear the house settle, and started at Concepcion’s key in the lock, but George did not burst in on her that day, nor did he visit her the next. He never came home early. While Jess talked to him on occasion, when she stopped in at Yorick’s, she never saw him at the house. She left him notes.
Still working on the Salzburg
. Also,
McClintock lists three recipes for swan
.

He rarely wrote in reply, or if he did, he simply scribbled,
Good
. Or
Back up the index as you go
. He could follow her progress on the laptop, where she was creating the annotated bibliography. She knew that he was reading it, because he used the Track Changes tool, and sometimes added to her descriptions of the books, inserting details in red. Occasionally he left books out for her in their foam cradles. Weighted strings held them open to reveal a beautiful engraving, or some particular recipe he had noticed.

Once he left the Haywood out for her with a page number on a scrap of paper, and she opened the book to recipes for “Distillation.” Jess laughed at the page George had found for her. There, between instructions to make rose water and clove water, were instructions
to make jessamine water: Take eight ounces of the jessamine flowers, clean picked from their stalks, three quarts of spirit of wine, and two quarts of water: put the whole into an alembic, and draw off three quarts. Then take a pound of sugar
dissolved in two quarts of water, and mix it with the distilled liquor
. George left no comment on the recipe, but she read, and read it over, aware that he was thinking of her.

Still, he did not come home, and as weeks passed she relaxed again, for despite Leon’s warning, she saw only the housekeeper cleaning the already-clean rooms, rubbing the glowing wood furniture, more, Jess imagined, to warm the chairs, than to polish them. Concepcion kept the house as one might wind a watch, or tune and play stringed instruments to prevent them from cracking with disuse.

The place was lightly lived in. Jess was sure she was the only one who used the first-floor bathroom with its cool stone tiles, and the kitchen looked almost entirely unused as well, although she assumed George ate at home occasionally like everybody else. He kept a wicker basket of onions under one counter, and another basket of potatoes, a can of olive oil near the stove, a braid of garlic heads hanging from a hook, along with a bunch of dried red chili peppers. But she never found a dish left out. Not so much as a coffee mug.

Therefore, she was doubly surprised, the first day of August, to see a piece of fruit lying on the pristine kitchen table. A peach, slightly unbalanced, so that it listed to one side, its hue the color of an early sunrise. Had George remembered their conversation at the party and left the peach for her to eat? Strange. For a moment she thought it might be a trompe l’oeil work of art, some fantastic piece of glass. She leaned over and sniffed. The blooming perfume was unmistakable. She touched it with the tip of her finger. The peach was not quite ripe, but it was real.

The next day, she checked the kitchen as soon as she arrived. The peach lay there still, blushing deeper in the window light. She bent to smell, and the perfume was headier than before, a scent of meadows and summers home from school. Still unripe. Was George waiting to eat this beauty? On a note card she penciled:
Is this a proprietary peach?
She placed the card on the table, but changed her mind immediately, folding her stiff query into quarters and then eighths and finally sixteenths, and then stuffing it into her backpack in the dining room. There she returned to her apportioned books.

This is just to say
, she wrote in her notebook,
I’ve been eying the peach
you left on the table and were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. It looks delicious
…. She gave up on her Williams imitation and continued:
If you did leave it for me, that was
 … She tore out the page, crumpled, and tossed it in the recycling bin without writing the next word:
sweet
.

On the third day, she smelled the fruit as soon as she came in. She followed the scent to the kitchen, and the peach was radiant, dusky rose and gold, its skin so plush she thought her fingertip might bruise it. This was the day, the very hour to eat—and she had come prepared, but she didn’t want Concepcion to see her. She waited until the housekeeper shouldered her leather-handled canvas bag and left.

Then Jess unwrapped the organic peach she’d bought that morning. Slightly smaller, slightly harder, but decently rosy, the peach listed left—just the right direction—when she set it on the table.

Leaving this changeling for George, she washed his ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then flesh dissolved in a rush of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist. She had forgotten, if she’d ever known, that what was sweet could also be so complicated, that fruit could have a nap, like fabric, soft one way, sleek the other. She licked the juice dripping down her arm.

“Jess.”

When had he arrived? How had she not heard him? “What are you doing here?” she blurted out.

“Well, I live here,” George said, standing in the kitchen doorway.

“True,” she said.

He looked, bemused, from the peach in her hand to the peach on the table. “You brought me a replacement? Jessamine,” he chided, picking up the substitute. “This is rock hard.”

“Well …,” she began.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

She gave up and laughed at herself, even as she stood, holding the beautifully ripe fruit.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Finish it.”

She tried to bite, and then she turned the peach and tried again. “You’re making me nervous.”

Suppressing a smile, he walked into the living room, and she quickly devoured what was left.

Eaten in haste, the fruit tasted different, juicy, but not quite so luscious, cut-velvet, but no longer so luxurious. Unsure whether George composted, she set the peach pit on the counter, washed her hands and wrist and arm, and called out, “Do you have a kitchen towel?”

He returned and took a striped towel from a drawer. As she dried herself, she asked, “Why did you come home so early?”

“It’s not so early,” he told her. “You stayed late.”

“Oh, so you weren’t planning to run into me.”

“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”

He was at least three steps away, but he looked at her so intently that he seemed much nearer. He’d cut his long hair so that it was not quite shoulder length, and he wasn’t wearing glasses, as he did in the store. “Was it good?”

“The most delicious meal I have ever eaten,” she told him honestly.

“A peach is not a meal.” He couldn’t help glancing at his oven and his knife drawer. Thinking of his grill on the deck and how he might roast chicken or lamb or even fish, along with pearl onions and vine-ripened tomatoes.

“It tasted like a meal.”

“That was hunger.”

“It’s the cookbooks,” she confessed.

“Occupational hazard.” He leaned back against the edge of the kitchen table. Her eyes were greener than he’d ever seen them. Her shirt button was broken, third from the top. “Are you still hungry?”

She thought of Leon.
Tell me what happens when he comes home
. “Not really,” she lied.

“Let me cook you dinner.”

She shook her head.

“No?” George asked softly, as he took the kitchen towel from her hands.

He was wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, and she saw the scar traveling from the back of his hand up the inside of his forearm. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

“Someone tried to fillet me.”

Forestalling her next question, he opened what she had assumed to be a bank of cabinets.

“Ohh.” She gazed inside a pristine refrigerator with glassy shelves and perfectly arranged vegetables, packages wrapped in white paper, fresh lemons lined up in a row.

“What can’t you eat?”

For just a moment, she could not remember. Then he closed the door.

“No meat, of course,” she began earnestly. “No poultry, no fish, no living creature of any kind, and no product of any living creature, so no milk, no cheese, no butter, no eggs, nothing dairy, and no refined sugar, no white flour, no white rice—nothing white …”

“How about white wine?”

He went to his butler’s pantry and brought back two glasses and a bottle, ever so slightly chilled. “This is a Kistler Chardonnay. See that?” He poured out what looked like liquid gold. “It’s known for its color.” He handed her a glass half full and watched her take the tiniest of sips. He could see she didn’t drink, and even the Chard was strong for her, and curious to her tongue. But she liked it, and quickly sipped again.