The Cookbook Collector (30 page)

“No, sweetheart,” said George.

“Really?” she asked yearningly, and he couldn’t tell whether she was questioning the
no
or the word
sweetheart
, which he had never used before.

He caressed her waist and the curve of her hip with his hand. “He never married her. He never got anywhere with her.”

“You always say that, but what evidence do you have?”

“The whole collection, every note he wrote.”

“People thought Troy was a myth too,” Jess reminded George, “and now those ruins have been found. Don’t laugh! I think he knew her. She wasn’t somebody that he saw once. He drew her as if he saw her every day.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“Yes, we will. I’m going to find out,” said Jess, clear-eyed, pure. She was so lovely. Not just her face, but her faith that there was such a thing as truth, her conviction that there were immutable answers if you took the trouble to find them out.

“Stay here tonight,” George whispered.

“That’s what you were going to ask?”

“Will you?”

He had said one of the things they did not say. “I thought we weren’t doing that.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Sleeping together is one thing, but …”

She buried her head in his pillow.

“Talking about it is another.”

He didn’t want to talk about it either. He wanted to remain in this dream state as long as possible. The outside world was all obstacles and complications. Leon. The Tree Savers. Their missions up to Humboldt County. George could say Leon was dangerous. He could tell Jess that she was wrong to get involved with him. What was he offering in return? A sinecure. A dependency. To be crass, his bed. He could say he loved her. Would he mean it? They enjoyed each other. They were friends, and he desired her. He knew himself well enough to doubt that such feelings would last. He was fully capable of breaking Jess’s heart.

As for Jess—she was mixed-up about George. She was at home with him. Calm and happy. She could think aloud. She never felt that way at the Tree House, and yet the people there shared her beliefs about the world. Philosophically, ideologically, she and Leon were a pair. She and George agreed on nothing politically. He had no interest in the environment. He recycled like everybody else, but he cared little for other species, and maligned Tree Savers as eco-terrorists. He was old that way, ill-informed and cynical, preferring books to social change, studying antique maps instead of current battlegrounds of deforestation. Living in the past, he turned his back on the future, and this was a position she deplored.

Then there was his money. She remembered Leon’s warning:
You’ll end up in his collection too
. She could see it happening. She was entranced by his house, his wine, his cookbooks, his quick smile. Recipe for disaster. She was falling in love with George, and she worked for him too. What would that make her? The young girlfriend. The mistress, the kept woman. She hated the thought.

Abashed, she read Haywood’s instructions to maidservants, advice on chastity preceding recipes for pickles, directions for choosing meat, best methods for
making all kinds of English wines
.

If you follow the advice I have already given you, concerning going as frequently as you can to hear sermons, and reading the holy scriptures and other good books, I need not be at the pains to inform you how great the sin is of yielding to any unlawful solicitations: but if you even look no farther than this world
—oh, practical Eliza, thought Jess—
you will find enough to deter you from giving the least encouragement to any address of that nature, though accompanied with the most soothing and flaterring pretenses
.

Jess sighed. She knew, in the long term, she and George were philosophically unsuited, financially unequal, generationally mismatched. Only in the short term did they agree. Only when it came to fingertips, and tongues and wrists. When he touched her and then slipped his wet fingers in her mouth and said, “This is how you taste.” In their laughter and the food he brought her, the freshest and most delicate of vegetables: watercress, fennel, dandelion greens dressed with champagne vinegar. They shared a private language in the cookbooks, and whispered inside jokes. Even their jokes were gentle. Tender buttons. He was tender with her.

She craved his company. The edges of her life were ragged, her feelings conflicted, her behavior incoherent, probably immoral, and at the same time, she was deeply happy, consuming nectarines, and Asian pears, sliced thin, and the pinot he poured for her.

“Try the wine now,” George instructed. Then, a little later, “Try it again,” and she tasted a new liquid altogether. Wine that had been tight and taciturn became mellifluous.

“It’s like finding a door,” she told George as they sat together in his kitchen. “It’s like stepping into a new room you never knew existed.”

“The pinot?”

“No,” she told him. “Everything.”

For she was becoming a researcher, tracing gorgeous threads, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the McClintock Collection, corresponding with scholars and librarians at the Schlesinger and the Huntington and at universities around the world. She had begun to study sweets—the sparing use of sugar in early cookbooks, and its ubiquity in eighteenth-century recipes. She checked out books from Bancroft. Deerr’s
History of Sugar
. Galway’s
The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914. Sweetness and Power
by Sidney W. Mintz. She spent days writing notes for an article she was planning on the cookbook as cultural emblem and bellwether for abundance and scarcity. Without an affiliation, outside any academic program, she began to imagine weaving together ecology and economics and material culture, embarking on a new career. Should she go back to school? Find herself a program and an advisor? Oh, but it was delicious to work unsupervised. Who had total access to books like these? And when it came to advisors, how could she do better than Tom McClintock, sensualist and lichenologist, artist, lover, ghost?

On a Friday, at the end of August, just before her twenty-fifth birthday, Jess sat alone in George’s dining room and unfolded a menu she had not seen before, one of the collector’s fantasies on graph paper. The menu was tucked inside
Le Livre de Cuisine
, but titled “McLintock,” and the dishes listed were all in English.

McLINTOCK
July-flower wine
Angelica
Nutmeg cream
Eel-pye
Neats Tongue

A strange, unappetizing bill of fare, wine and dessert, followed by eel pie and sheep’s tongue. It’s not like you, Jess thought, addressing the collector, to put together such an awkward menu. Elsewhere, McClintock sought out the most exotic and delectable combinations. Kisses to begin, new peas, or
muskmelon
, followed by some tender young thing, lamb or fawn, turtledoves to whet the appetite, and then fish, and a succulent main course like loin of veal. Fruit and cream to finish.
Quaking Pudding
. Candied violets, rose petals, tansies,
curran wine
 …

Why, then, these awkward dishes out of order, and no vegetable or fish or salad course? She read the menu twice and then a third time, and then she wondered if the words could rearrange themselves into something better.
July-Angelica-Nutmeg-Cream
 … and as her eyes played with the words, she saw a pattern in the first letters, an acrostic reading down:

J
uly-flower wine
A
ngelica
N
utmeg cream
E
el-pye
Neats Tongue

A name: Jane. Jane McClintock! Was this Mrs. McClintock? Was she the one? But what to do about
Neats Tongue?
A comment on Mrs. McClintock’s tongue? Or did she have a middle initial
N?
Jane N. McClintock? Or was it the
T
the collector referred to in his culinary code? Jane T? Janet!

She picked up George’s phone and called Sandra, but no one answered. She ran out and drove to Sandra’s house. She rang the bell, and rapped on the window, but no one came to the door. Should she leave a note? Try again tomorrow? No, her question wouldn’t keep.

She sat on Sandra’s porch in a raggedy wicker chair. Curled up in the window, Geoffrey seemed to recognize her, and wish her ill.

An hour passed before Sandra arrived carrying her groceries. Jess jumped up. “Hi!”

“Jessamine,” said Sandra, after a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Jess said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Could I help you carry those?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sandra told her.

“I’ve been working on the collection,” Jess said. “I’ve been working almost six months. The books are fabulous.”

“I’m glad.” Sandra pulled at her keys, which she wore on a plastic bracelet around her wrist.

“I’ve found some interesting material.” Jess followed Sandra to the door.

“Good.” Sandra stood on the porch, keys in hand, groceries at her feet, but she did not seem at all inclined to invite Jess inside. “I can’t let the cat out,” she reminded Jess as she gathered all her bags together to rush the door. “You can come in, but you have to be quick.”

“Oh, I understand.” Body-blocking Geoffrey, Sandra darted inside, and Jess followed.

“Would you like a glass of juice?” Sandra asked. “Would you like to take a seat? Not that one.” She warned Jess away from Geoffrey’s dark green couch, and Jess settled on a velvet chair instead.

“Who was Mrs. McClintock?” Jess blurted out.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you sure your uncle never married?”

“He never married.”

“Are you sure he didn’t marry a Janet McClintock?” Jess asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Sandra. “Janet McClintock was my mother.”

George did not know where Jess had gone. She had left her books out. McLintock lay open on the book cradle. The laptop stood open as well, as though Jess intended to return, but it was past five and she did not come back. He called her on her cell, but she didn’t answer.

He poured himself a glass of wine and began to think of all the things he might have said or done to offend her. He remembered that the day before they’d had a little spat about her article. They were sitting in the living room on his couch, a massive low-slung piece with great wood slabs for arms. He said that she should write something quick and accessible with gorgeous illustrations for
Gastronomica
. She insisted that this was selling out, that she was developing an argument far more scholarly, with serious notes and tables. She said she had fifty-one pages already, and he’d laughed and warned her not to get lost in all that material.

Then she’d demanded, “Do I look like someone who gets lost easily?”

“Yes,” he’d teased, but she hadn’t been in the mood, and had snatched a heavy throw pillow, upholstered green, and smacked him upside the head.

They had laughed at the time, but perhaps she was still angry. Or perhaps Leon had suddenly returned, and Jess had decided she would not see George again. Was there some change of heart? Or some emergency? Should he try to reach her sister?

By the time Jess arrived, he had been waiting almost two hours, and he was in such an anxious state that he was almost in no mood to see her. But there she was, out of breath and streaked with sweat from racing up the stairs. “I’ve solved it,” she cried. “I know who she was.”

And she showed George how she had picked out
Janet
from the menu, and told him how she had rushed to tell Sandra. “He was in love with Janet when he was young. I think Janet was McClintock’s Laura and his Beatrice, and that’s why he drew her over and over and he read her into all his cookbooks.”

“What did Sandra say?”

“She was very offended!” Jess exclaimed. “She said her uncle didn’t even like to eat. She said that he was extremely thin. She told me her mother was happily married for sixty-two years, and she was perfectly sensible and lucid until the day she died at eighty-three.”

George smiled.

But Jess was indignant. “I thought she’d thank me!”

“For inventing an embarrassing story about her mother?”

“I didn’t invent it,” Jess said. “I know I’m right. Maybe it was an unrequited love, but she was the one.”

You’re the one, thought George.

“You’d think she’d enjoy knowing,” Jess said. “She’s convinced she was a Russian princess in a past life. Why can’t Janet and Tom have had a past life too? Why is that so shocking?”

“Let me take you out to dinner.”

“George,” said Jess. “Look at me.”

“I am looking at you.”

“I’m covered with cat hair.”

“Come take a bath.”

“I don’t have fresh clothes.”

“We’ll stop at your place and you can change.”

Jess ignored this. “Charles Dickens was obsessed with his sister-in-law. He never got over her.”

“Yes, and I’m sure the family loved to hear about it.”

Jess folded her arms across her chest. “And Tolstoy didn’t really model Natasha on his wife.”

“You’re upset,” George murmured.

“It’s just so anticlimactic—to put together the pieces of the puzzle and then to be …”

“Shh.” He kissed her.

“Exactly. To be shushed like that. As though I were arriving on her doorstep to blackmail her or something. As though I had something on her. She says she’s upset about her grandchildren. Her daughter still can’t get custody.”

“That explains it,” said George, frowning. “Don’t you think she’d be preoccupied?”

“I thought she might be …”

“She’s not going to be grateful to you for suggesting that her mother had some kind of affair with her husband’s brother. You got carried away, Jess.”

She didn’t answer.