The Cookbook Collector (29 page)

“Yum.”

“Yum?”

“It’s good,” she said.

“Do you taste citrus?” he asked her. “Mineral?”

“No,” she admitted cheerfully. The wine was light and tickling, not heavy or too sweet like others she had tried. Sun poured through the kitchen’s tall windows and played across the floor so that the room felt warmer. George himself seemed different, slimmer than she remembered, and more fluid in his movements. A fish in water, she thought, as he took out pans and tongs and a cutting board.

“All right, this is what I have. Dungeness crab. Fresh salmon—by which I mean, caught yesterday. And asparagus.”

“I guess I could have that,” she said.

“Crab and salmon and asparagus?”

“The asparagus.”

“Good, we’ll have asparagus—with salmon on the side.” He set a pan on the stove for the fish, and began washing and trimming the asparagus. He spread the stalks in a roasting pan, drizzled them with olive oil, and popped the pan in the oven. Then he unwrapped the pink salmon. “This is so fresh, you can almost eat it just like this. Sashimi.” He smiled to see Jess back away. “We’ll melt butter in the pan and sear the fish and then we’ll eat it with a squeeze of lemon—or at least I will. Did you finish that already?” He poured her more.

She’d drunk two glasses by the time they sat down at the kitchen table, and she felt springy, a little bouncy in her chair as she nibbled her emerald-green asparagus, and he served himself the salmon.

“I like this way of roasting,” she said.

“Just remember to sprinkle kosher salt when you take them out of the oven.”

“Salt sings,”
said Jess. The collector had copied that from Neruda. “Have you seen McClintock’s asparagus drawings?”

“Show me.”

“Not while we’re eating!”

“Right.” He poured out the last of the wine.

“Have you noticed his thing for asparagus?”

“And cabbages,” said George.

“Yes! He’s got heads of cabbage and cross sections and there’s a drawing of this veined cabbage leaf. I think it must have been his botanical training.” Jess was talking faster than usual, but then, she never had a chance to discuss the cookbooks, and she was brimming with impressions. “He draws asparagus and cabbages, but he’s obsessed with artichokes. He draws them more than any other vegetable. Why artichokes?”

George drained his glass. “The artichoke is a sexy beast. Thorns to cut you, leaves to peel, lighter and lighter as you strip away the outer layers, until you reach the soft heart’s core.”

Jess laughed and finished her third glass.

“Try this.” George offered her a bit of salmon on his fork.

The laughter stopped. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t eat other creatures.”

“This creature is already dead. You’re not hurting him. Let’s say he died for me. I’ll take the blame. I bought him so I killed him. Now you can have a taste.”

She shook her head.

“But it’s so good.” George offered her the flaky pink fish on his fork. “It tastes so good.”

“I’m not eating that poor forked animal.”

“Just try,” George cajoled, scooting his chair around the corner to her side of the table. “Just one bite.” He held the fork almost to her lips.

“George,” she said, “don’t you have certain things you would never do—on principle?”

“Arbitrary rules?”

“Any rules. Not necessarily arbitrary ones.”

“I have beliefs,” he said. “I have values. I think rules are overrated.”

“Is that, like, a sixties thing?” She looked at him questioningly, as though she were gazing back at him through the mists of time.

“Someday you’ll get asked about the Reagan years,” he said.

“You should try rules,” she pressed. “Then your beliefs would have practical applications, and you wouldn’t have to drift from one meal to the next. Instead of being so ad hoc, you could rely on a consistent system. Instead of making up your life as you go along, you’d have a set path. You wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. I think actually structure might be the key to oneness.”

“I think you’re a little drunk,” said George.

“I think you’re trying to impeach me.”

He laughed even as he protested. “That’s not true.”

“Well, I’m not drunk at all,” she warned him.

“And I’m not trying at all,” he retorted playfully.

“Hmm.” Her expression was both tender and reproachful. Her delicate hands rested on the table.

“Are you worried?” With his index finger George drew a question mark on her palm.

Almost imperceptibly she shook her head.

The light was shifting, the sky in the windows no longer bright, but watery, sea blue. They were close now, but the change was like nightfall. Neither knew exactly when it happened. They had been sitting apart, and now they found themselves in chairs pushed together. They had been talking, and now they touched instead, fingertips to wrists, and George could feel Jess’s quick pulse, and she could feel his.

“Are you in love with him?” George said.

She didn’t answer.

“Are you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“For the obvious reason.”

“Which is?”

“That I want to know.”

Lightly her fingertip glided over the back of his hand, tracing his scar up his arm.

“You’re tickling me.” He took her hand again.

“Did it hurt?” she asked him.

“Yes, it hurt,” he said.

“Who did that to you?”

“An old girlfriend.”

“You must have been nasty to her.”

“Why do you assume it was my fault?” he asked gently. “Even if it was—who goes after her lover with a paring knife? She was completely unbalanced. She did teach me how to cook.”

“Maybe you were such a slow learner she got frustrated.”

“I wasn’t a slow learner.”

“No?” she teased. Her eyes were much darker in the evening light.

“I’m a quick study,” he informed her. “I’m an excellent cook, but you’ll never know, because you don’t eat anything.”

“I eat lots of things,” she said.

“Judging from the peach, I’d say you eat a few things very well.”

“You were watching me?”

“Yes.”

“Why were you?”

His thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. “Because I wanted to.”

“That’s the only reason?”

“And because I never see you,” he added.

“You can see me whenever you like,” she told him. “You stay away.”

“Did you wish I would come home?”

She didn’t answer.

“Did you ever look around the house? Did you go upstairs?”

“No,” she said, although she had thought about it. Concepcion’s presence had prevented her. “I would never wander through your house without an invitation.”

“Come.” He took her hand.

She remembered climbing the stairs at the Tree House for the first time. “I think I
am
a little drunk.”

“We’ll go slow,” he promised as he led her up the stairs. “These are my nautical charts and surveyors’ plans.” He turned on the lights in the stairwell, and she saw the antique charts, the hand-drawn schemes of San Francisco Bay. “You can see I have plenty of maps. This is original stained glass here on the landing. You can’t tell at night, but I had it cleaned and restored. This place was a mess when I bought it. We copied these stair treads and spindles. This is my office.” He showed her a spacious room with a great desk in the center, and a computer and a photocopier. “These are guest rooms.” He opened one door after another.

“How many do you have?”

“Three. This is my room.” He switched on the lights, and when she blinked in the sudden glare, he turned them down again. His room was huge, with great windows above the bed, stacks of books on the smooth floor, a low music stand and chair, a cello in an open case.

Find someone musical
, Jess thought. “Will you play for me?”

“Of course.” He sat down in his chair, but he did not reach for his cello. He held out his arms for Jess instead.

She sat on his lap and tucked up her legs, and he felt her weight, and her warmth, and he held still; he nearly held his breath, as she relaxed into his arms.

“My mother wrote about music,” Jess said.

“Was she a critic?”

“I can hear your heartbeat,” she whispered, resting her head on his chest.

“Was she a musician?” he asked her, as he stroked her hair.

“I think she might have been, if she’d had the chance,” Jess said. “Or maybe not. She was an amazing baker too. That’s what everybody says.”

“You only know from hearsay? Don’t tell me you were vegan even then.”

“I wasn’t vegan. I was too young to remember.”

George’s hand stopped for a moment, resting lightly on her head.

“When will you play for me?” she asked him.

“Soon.”

“Did you learn as a child?”

“Mm-hmm.” His lips brushed her ear.

“I wish I’d kept playing the piano. Everybody says that, but of course you imagine you’d play well. You don’t imagine …”

“Do you miss her?”

“No.” She looked up at him quickly, as if to gauge his response. “I’ll tell you something terrible,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t even think about her. I’m sure Emily thinks about her all the time, but I don’t. I just …”

“Just what?”

“Don’t have her,” said Jess, muffled, burying her head again.

He continued stroking her long hair. She kept her head down, and listened to his steady heart.

“Jess?” he said at last.

“What?”

“Are you crying?”

“No.” She looked up at him and her eyes were bright, but no tears stained her face. “Don’t worry. I’m very cheerful.” She sat up straight to make the point. “I’m not a weepy person. I wouldn’t cry, even after too much wine.”

“You can cry. I don’t have rules. You can do anything you want.”

“Anything?”

“Almost anything.”

“So you have
some
rules.”

“I said ‘almost’ so you’d think I was less of an ancient libertine,” he said.

“Libertine? You mean old hippie.”

“I was never a hippie.”

“Right. You’re just a libertine from the ancien régime.”

He couldn’t help laughing at the playful way she turned on him.

“Am I so funny?” she asked, laughing with him. She rubbed her nose against his. “Am I?”

“Come here, you.” He pulled her closer.

“I’m here now,” she said, and her voice was so warm and low that for a moment he closed his eyes. “I’m here already.”

She caressed his cheek, and touched the tender skin under his eyes. His lips brushed her chin, her nose, her forehead, and finally her soft mouth, as they began to kiss.

PART SIX

Risk

August 2001

23

E
mily sensed that Jess was keeping something from her. She could tell by the way her sister hid behind her hair.

“Is your cell still working?” Emily asked her.

“I think so.”

“Then why don’t you use it?”

“I do. Sometimes.” Her hair fell like a curtain over her face.

They were sitting in Emily’s white condo, in the living room, and they were sharing a vegan chocolate cake Jess had brought for Emily’s thirtieth birthday. The big celebration was going to be with Jonathan that weekend at Lake Tahoe, but Jess had come for the actual day, August 8, and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the collection of Gillian’s birthday letters, hers and Emily’s together, in her lap.

For your eleventh birthday … For your twelfth birthday … For your twentieth birthday … I would like to see you at twenty. I think that you’ll be tall, and I want to know if I am right
.

“What you should do,” said Jess, “is print these out on archival stock and make a scrapbook. This isn’t good paper, and this ink”—she pointed to the dot matrix printing—“see, it’s already fading.”

I do miss knowing you at twenty, Emily. Sometimes I’m quite sad about it, and then at other times I think I should be grateful for knowing you as long as
I have. I’m greedy, like everybody else. I want to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. It’s never enough, is it? It’s not enough to have children. We want to see birthdays, and weddings, and grandchildren as well. I’d like to see them all. Of course there are other children I might have had, or other lives I might have lived, but I don’t dwell on those. Why, then, should I mourn this one? Because this is the life I know, and you and your sister are the daughters I love. All the rest slips into the background—the realm of the unborn. That’s another way to look at death, isn’t it? Simply the part of life that’s unexpressed. The might-haves and could-have-beens
 …

“Jess,” said Emily, “what’s going on with you?”

Jess looked up, startled. “Nothing,” she lied.

“You seem …”

“What?”

“Evasive.”

“Who, me?”

“Why are you so quiet?”

“Because I’m reading,” said Jess.

“You never liked to read her letters before.”

Jess thought about this for a moment. “But they’re more interesting now.”

She was spending the night at Emily’s place, and long after her sister went to sleep, Jess stayed up reading and rereading her mother’s letters. What was it about them? What was it she had overlooked before? Their secrecy. The obliqueness of the language drew her in, where before it had confused and bored her.
I might have been someone else
, her mother wrote.
I might have married someone else. I might have lived a different way, but I chose this life, and I chose you
.

The might-haves and could-have-beens, undescribed and unexplained. How had Jess missed them? She had been curious enough at twelve to read Gillian’s letters all at once, devouring those messages to her older self, but she had always looked for information. Her mother was guarded about her illness, and her feelings, and her past, all the things that Jess wanted to find out, and after reading the letters one after another, Jess had turned away in disappointment. It was Gillian’s reserve that made the letters interesting now. Those sentences Jess had always read as generalities looked different.
I might have lived a different way
. What did Gillian mean?
I might have married someone else
. Who would that have been? Perhaps after weeks with the cookbooks, Jess was overly sensitive. After so many hours pondering the collector’s notes, she saw subtexts and secrets everywhere. Even so, she began to read her mother’s words as coded messages.
Dear Emily, at sweet sixteen. Never been kissed? Wished you’d been kissed? Wonder if you might have been? I didn’t wonder about kissing when I was your age, although I would later. I didn’t like to think about the future when I had one, and now that my future is running out, I think about it all the time
.

“Gillian!” Jess whispered in surprise. She stared at the picture her mother had enclosed, a color photo of a laughing freckled woman in a sundress and a floppy yellow hat. An outdoor picture, a lawn chair in the background, her mother holding out a piece of chocolate cake. And as she looked, it occurred to her that she had never seen an earlier image of her mother. There were no black-and-white photos in the albums in her father’s house. No baby pictures or childhood-recital photos. Hadn’t Gillian performed in piano recitals for her teacher? And didn’t anybody take pictures? There were none. There was only the story Richard told, which was that Gillian never got along with her parents in London. That they had been so angry when she’d married a non-Jew that they cut her off completely. Therefore, Jess and Emily had never met their Jewish grandparents, or anyone from that side of the family. Gillian’s parents never spoke to her again, and she never spoke of them—or wrote about them either. And yet she said in her letters to Emily,
I know from my own experience that some memories are indelible. This comforts me, because, of course, I should like to be indelible for you
.

But what were these indelible memories? Gillian didn’t say. They lived between the lines, and underneath the letters, in that realm of secrets Jess could not ferret out. And Jess wondered, poetically, whether there had been some great love in her mother’s life—some other man she might have married (for she could not imagine her own father as a figure of romance). And she wondered whether there had been a secret hurt, a sad end to all of Gillian’s might-have-beens. Perhaps her parents forbade her to become a concert pianist, and this was why Gillian played Chopin Waltzes, in requiem. Late at night, in her pajamas, Jess was open to every dramatic possibility, for she had never felt a kinship with her mother before. She had never thought of Gillian as yearning or secretive. Her mother had died young, but now Jess saw that her mother had
been
young, and that was a different matter altogether. Her letters were no longer prescriptive, but searching, far more powerful now that Jess had a secret of her own.

She lived in the Tree House as before, and did her chores—cooking, cleaning, leafleting, supplying the tree-sitters in the Grove. She attended Rabbi Helfgott’s mysticism classes with Mrs. Gibbs, and typed the minutes for Tree House meetings, where she was official scribe. She slept in Leon’s bed, but he was away in Humboldt County, climbing, demonstrating, organizing, and who knew what else. He did call and ask her when she would come, but he did not call often, nor did he return to get Jess, and the longer Leon stayed away, the easier it became to slip into the collector’s world.

On weekday afternoons, she sat with the cookbooks at George’s table, and she lost herself in recipes for marzipan, illustrations of assorted ices, lists of berries for plucking in each season. She read the cookbooks along with their collector, noting where he paused to draw or quote or simply copy some delicious detail.
Take your Angelica when young and tender, which will be about the beginning of May
…. She worked with Tom McClintock’s ghost, and where he sighed, she sighed, and where he seemed to smile—
Syrup of Maiden-hair!!
—she smiled. And she examined each line drawing of the woman he adored, a lady with wide-set eyes, long wavy hair, small feet, and pointed toes. Jess was beginning to dream about this woman; she felt she knew her; she thought she almost knew her name.

She glided through the house, and ate the plums George left. She cut melons in the kitchen, and ate the dripping slices, cold and sweet.
Be careful with this knife
, he wrote on one of her note cards. Carefully, she slid George’s steel knife into round cantaloupe and honeydew and galia melons. And if she waited long enough, he came home. She listened for him now, and met him at the door. She stood on his feet so she could reach, and wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, and if he came from running, she licked his salt skin, and they kissed until he took her hand and led her upstairs. But they didn’t plan to see each other. They talked of everything else and kept their time a secret even from themselves; the food they shared, the wine they drank, the Bach he played for her, music rough and smooth.

He took her to Point Reyes, and they drove through fields of tall grass and wildflowers. Along the coast they smelled a mix of salt and eucalyptus, and as they sped down Sir Francis Drake Highway, they passed a tavern called the Golden Hind, but they did not stop there. They ate a picnic dinner at a beach called Heart’s Desire. At dusk when it was time to go, they lingered, and Jess took off her sandals and walked barefoot in the cove on Tomales Bay. The bay was round, green-gray under the round clear sky. Slick under her feet, sea grass tangled in her toes. She called to George, “It’s warm. Come in with me.”

He said, “No, it’s late. We should drive back.”

“Come on,” she said. “Just get your feet wet.”

She stretched out her arms to him until he unlaced his shoes and took off his socks to come and kiss her in the shallow water.

He took her to Santa Cruz, and to Santa Rosa, and to Half Moon Bay. He took her walking with him deep in Tilden Park, but only where he knew that they would be alone.

They were living in a bubble of their own, and when one of them began to speak of it, the other murmured, “No.” They were improbable, and at the same time all too predictable. He did not tell Nick or Raj. She did not confess to Leon, or so much as hint to Emily. They scarcely admitted to each other what they were doing. Even a single word could break the spell, and so they kissed instead of speaking, and drank instead of thinking. They heard the mermaids singing. When human voices woke them, they would drown.

Each had moments of lucidity.
You have to stop
, Jess told herself.
You need to see Leon. You need to go away and think
.

Slow down
, George told himself.
This is intoxicating
.

But they did not stop. They only delayed a little. He walked through the door and she said, “I have to show you this,” and she pulled him into the dining room to unveil that day’s discovery. A recipe for
pecokys
, which
schul ben pyarboyld and lardyd and etyn with gyngenyr
. And then she showed him instructions for broiling larks, and then McClintock’s handwritten quotations from Gertrude Stein.

“Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea,”
she read aloud as George stood behind her. Arms around her waist, he was unbuttoning her shirt.
“When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.”

She sat on the table with the slip of paper in her hand. “Doesn’t silver seller make you think of salt?”

“Not really,” he murmured, kneeling on the chair, kissing her bare skin.

“Her poetry wasn’t abstract at all.” She felt his breath and his rough tongue. “Don’t you think
Tender Buttons
is really about …?”

“Yes.”

Working in the August afternoons, she wondered what he would bring home for dinner, what strange fruit, what curious greens, or salty sea beans. He brought her plums, and Asian pears, and almonds, and she showed him her discoveries.

“Look at this,” she told George, dancing into his arms.

The volume was so slight that they had missed it in their first assessment. In fact, she found it tucked inside a larger book. Scottish, dated 1736, it was one of those palm-sized cookbooks, a handbook that fit literally in the hand. Its recipes were terse, not terribly poetic, nor was the book illustrated, except for some decoration on the first page, a little head of Bacchus, tame enough to be a house pet, surrounded by a couple of clumsy birds and vines. Why then was this book so stuffed with notes?

He laughed when he saw the title.
Mrs. McLintock’s Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work
. “You think Tom McClintock felt a kinship?”

“It’s rare,” she said.

“How rare?”

“It’s the first Scottish cookbook by a woman. I e-mailed the University of Aberdeen. There are only two known copies in the world, and they’re both in Glasgow.”

This was serious. Silently he began to calculate how much a book like this would be worth to the Schlesinger, to the Getty, to those private collectors who would bid for it.

“No one knows about this one,” she told him. “This is now the third!”

“Jess,” he said.

“We should call reporters,” she declared. “We should write an article.”

“You should write the article,” he said.

“But first I have to understand it better.”

“What do you mean?”

She couldn’t quite explain. She wanted to know the cookbook’s secret life. For days she studied it. She gazed at Mrs. McLintock’s name so long that in her mind the letters rearranged themselves:
lock, lint, clint, clit, cock, clock … McClintock. McLintock
. She imagined the two fit together, but she found no clues about McClintock in McLintock, and the collector’s love remained a mystery.

“George,” she said one evening as she lay in his arms.

“Jessamine.” His eyes were soft, his face unguarded, almost boyish in the low light.

“I have to ask you something.”

“I have to ask you something too.” He was wearing his wristwatch, a vintage Patek Philippe he’d forgotten to take off. She didn’t wear a watch, and so she wore nothing at all.

“Okay.” She had been lying with her head on his chest, and now she propped her chin up on her arms, a gesture both adorable and suffocating.

“No, you ask first,” he said, “because I can’t breathe.”

“I’m sorry!” She rolled off and she lay on her side, facing him. “I wanted to ask you about the cookbook. I doubt McClintock knew how rare it was. I don’t think he understood how much the books were worth, but he had a thing for women cookbook writers, and obviously he fixated on McLintock because of her name. So do you think there was a Mrs. McClintock in his life whom Sandra doesn’t know about? Do you think maybe he was married at some point when he was young, when he was buying all these books after the War?”