The Cookbook Collector

  “Yoo-hoo,” the electrician said.

  Mel bristled. Carpenters didn’t bother him, nor did the badminton or the unpacking. He almost enjoyed the drag and pop of box cutters slicing cardboard—the long rips crisp and promising, like autumn and fresh school supplies—but he couldn’t conduct business with electricians wisecracking from above. “You can’t go wrong—they’re both terrific,” he explained to the new hire, as he gestured at the cable-dangling electrician to disappear. “And we do offer dental.” He stood, pulling the receiver with him, but the cord wasn’t long enough and his phone slid off the desk. Too quickly, he turned to scoop it up. A prickle, like an electric shock, raked his left side, an agonizing spasm. Pain held him in its vice.

  That had been six weeks ago. Now Mel had bad days and worse days. There were mornings he stood on the train, all the way from Canaan to South Station, because sitting was too painful. He took the Red Line to Kendall Square and counted stops. Just get me to Charles / MGH, just get me aboveground, he pleaded silently, trying to bargain with his back. All he had to do was make it until the train emerged from its tunnel to rattle over the bridge. Then he could look out at the icy river and dark trees, the boathouses rosy in the brief winter light. When the train descended again, he held the metal pole and told himself, Only one more stop and then the music, and he would try to hold on until Kendall Square Station where long levers in the wall were wired to chimes hanging between the inbound and outbound tracks. Like a parent trying to appease a child, he would treat himself to a gentle pull of a lever, and listen for the soft chime like temple bells in the midst of rushing trains and chattering students and the buskers playing amplified guitars.

  The commute was bad enough. One morning he could not get out of bed. If he lay perfectly still, he felt no pain, but the moment he shifted his weight, his muscles seized up again.

  “Barbara,” he called out, “I can’t move.”

  She rushed in from the living room.

  “You’ll have to call and tell them….”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “Oh, good. Thank God.” The reprieve relaxed him just a little. He could breathe, and even turn slightly.

  “Don’t try to get up,” Barbara warned.

  “I’m not. I can’t,” he said. He closed his eyes, and she brought his Motrin and a glass of water with a straw.

  “Don’t move. Relax,” she ordered, in what the children used to call her nurse voice. She reverted to crisp professionalism when anyone was hurt or sick. Mel used to tease her that she enjoyed their children’s illnesses. “I do not!” she had protested, but he knew she loved a damp, hot, docile child.

  He didn’t blame her. He’d loved the children that way too, and he missed them. Nostalgia overcame him as he lay pinned, and he longed to see Annie and Sam, not as they were now, but as they had been years ago, before their potential had hardened into the ordinary shell of adulthood.

  He had always hoped his children would be extraordinary. Wasn’t it nine-year-old Sam who had announced he would be an entomologist? How had he become a government major at Amherst? Annie was out in the Bay Area at the epicenter of the high-tech revolution. She had been so good at math. Why was she teaching kindergarten? Absurd that in late middle age Mel was about to make a fortune. Where were his kids? Couldn’t they see that the future belonged to their generation? True to the accelerated business cycle, Mel lay in bed and worried, even while his ISIS shares were still a gleam in his broker’s eyes, that his children lacked the initiative to achieve as he had done.

  Everyone gave Mel advice. Dave recommended a chiropractor. Jonathan suggested that he hit the gym.

  “I think,” Barbara said cautiously, “you might want to talk to Rabbi Zylberfenig.”

  “Zylberfenig! Because he knows so much about back pain?”

  “He knows a lot,” said Barbara.

  “How old is Rabbi Zylberfenig?” Mel demanded.

  “He’s got six children.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He’s older than we were at his age.”

  Everybody had a guru. Even Sorel Fisher, his newest hire, insisted, “I’ll give you the name of my Alexander teacher.”

  “Alexander teacher? What did he teach you?” Mel asked, wary.

  “Nothing,” Sorel said, bouncing slightly on the green exercise ball at her desk. She was a twenty-three-year-old programmer from London, a performance artist, and a chanteuse. “He was brilliant. He barely even touched me.”

  Meanwhile, he had to keep advertising and interviewing and issuing ID cards. Everybody loved the new ones he had ordered. You clipped them to your belt and pulled the card out on an elastic string so that you could swipe and unlock doors or elevators after hours. The new fleeces were a big hit as well. Navy with ISIS embroidered in gold. Mel was good with merchandise. Proud, not loud. That was his motto. But the week after Thanksgiving when Dave asked to meet with him “to strategize,” Mel understood that this was it.

  A small voice inside whispered: Let Dave set you free; your back is breaking from the stress. But no. Mel could not imagine leaving. Not now, before his shares were vested. He didn’t want to miss what he knew would be a meteoric flight.

  On the day before his appointment with Dave, he took tiny steps to Jonathan’s office, traversing what seemed like miles of drab rust-red carpet, raveled at the edges. Mel stopped, clutching the top edge of a cubicle. The pain was worse. After three months, he had come to think of it as the pain—not his pain, but a larger, impersonal force. The pain—the way opera singers speak of their instrument, the voice.

  “Mel Millstein,” chided Sorel as she passed by, “you need to go to Alexander class.”

  I need to stay employed, thought Mel.

  “The trouble with you,” said Sorel, “is you’re misaligned.”

  Feet on the desk, Star Wars action figures lining the windowsill behind him, Jonathan was typing with his keyboard in his lap. “What’s happening?”

  Mel hesitated. He had planned what to say, of course, but scripts didn’t work with Jonathan—none of the scripts Mel knew.

  “I need help hiring,” Mel said. “I sense that HR needs restructuring, and I’d like to make that happen sooner rather than later.” Now, he added silently.

  “Okay,” said Jonathan. “What do you want?”

  My job, Mel thought. My life. Existence without pain. “Well, I have Zoë and Jessica right now …,” he began, “and I’m trying to get …”

  Jonathan considered his hapless HR director. At the computer-science department, Mel had been the go-to guy, straightening out green cards and foreign visas, grappling with bureaucracy. When Jonathan was jockeying for attention from professors, Mel had actually taken the time to ask, “How are things going?” To say, “Let me check his schedule. Maybe I can get you in.” Jonathan did not forget old kindnesses, nor did he forget how little he liked MIT, where cryptography profs favored students more theoretical, more purely mathematical.

  He had wanted only the best for Mel when he plucked him from his desk at the department. He’d never intended to kill the poor man.

  “Mel,” said Jonathan, “you don’t need help. You need a better attitude. Put on a happy face! This is not a submarine. This is a big fun start-up with a severe shortage of programmers, and all you need to do is go out there and say, ‘Hey you guys, come on over.’ Is that hard?”

  “There are a lot of other—” Mel began.

  “But, no, there aren’t. You don’t think about them,” Jonathan cut him off. “We’re better. It’s all attitude, man. You’re smart and talented, you’re meticulous—and you’re going to have zillions of dollars next year. Did you forget that?”

  Ah, yes. Mel remembered the conversation well. When Jonathan had offered him the job at ISIS, Mel had asked delicately about compensation. “Here’s the thing,” Jonathan replied, and he spoke in all seriousness. “We’re all going to be gazillionaires.”

  “You know what you?
??re doing—you just have to show your stuff to the prospective hires,” Jonathan explained now. “Be cool. Be confident….”

  “I don’t feel confident,” Mel confessed. “I feel that my position here is …”

  “Is what?”

  Mel couldn’t find the word. No, he knew the word, but couldn’t say it. He had to force himself. “Tenuous.”

  “Tenuous!” Jonathan looked at him as though he’d begun speaking in another language. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Dave wants to meet with me.”

  Jonathan looked at him almost tenderly. “No one’s firing you.”

  “I’m not so … I don’t feel so …,” Mel spluttered.

  Jonathan reassured him. “No one’s firing you right before our IPO. That would look terrible!”

  “I think Dave has a plan,” said Mel.

  “Yeah, he’s got lots of plans. Don’t worry about Dave. I’ll deal with him. You just do your job, okay?”

  “Okay.” He realized that this was Jonathan’s way of reaching out. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. Get out there and kick ass! I want twelve new programmers, and I want you to go out there and hire them with a smile on your face.”

  “I will,” Mel answered, stunned. He tried to smile without moving any other part of his body. He was afraid to jolt his standing equilibrium.

  “And I’ll tell you a secret,” Jonathan added, just as Mel was leaving. “We’re going to tell everybody at the end of the day, but I’ll tell you first. We’ve signed Yahoo! for premium ChainLinx protection.”

  “Yahoo!” Now Mel really was smiling.

  “Yeah!” Jonathan swung his feet up on the desk and resumed typing.

  Mel returned to his cubicle full of hope. ISIS had Yahoo! in the stable, their biggest client to date. This was huge, and Mel knew first. There was no greater sign of favor.

  He stood in the back as Jonathan made his announcement. All the employees in town packed the fifth floor near the windows. Outside, a light snow was falling. Inside, programmers perched atop desks, stood on chairs, and the whole company whooped and cheered.

  “This is your work,” Aldwin said.

  “You guys are super,” Dave chimed in.

  “You guys are animals!” Jonathan shouted, punching the air, and all the animals roared.

  Afterward the programmers milled together talking motorcycles, debating which were fastest and which were overpriced—not that it mattered anymore! They spoke of vacations. A company camping trip in the High Sierra. No, a voyage down the River Nile, a cruise to see the Pyramids. They were about to be gazillionaires. Yahoo! As Mel walked to the T station, he came upon Orion, hatless, walking his bike through heavy snow.

  “Hey,” Orion said.

  “Amazing night,” Mel said.

  “I guess so,” Orion said laconically.

  The kid was too young, Mel thought, to appreciate the situation. The snowflakes were wet and heavy, double flakes and triple flakes. Mel could almost touch the zillions in the air.

  12

  Orion had grown up in his father’s poetry, and because Lou Steiner was famous, Orion’s younger selves had been published and widely anthologized. Orion, naked wader, minnow-trader lived on the page, alongside the sleeper with the tiny fists. He didn’t take any of this too personally, not even his father’s collection, Star Boy. Growing up in Vermont, he knew many other poets’ children who had been immortalized. When it came to publicity, Orion thought his father’s wives and girlfriends had it worse, and he had often wondered how they liked word portraits mentioning birdlike physiques, small breasts, sad eyes. Orion tried to avoid Lou’s love poems, because he could put the name to each description, and then afterward he felt as though he’d seen his father’s lovers, including his own mother, naked. His father found this amusing, but he was entirely unself-conscious on and off the page.

  Lou’s fame was riverlike—deep and narrow in some places, then broadening unexpectedly into shallows. His books sold a thousand, maybe twelve hundred copies each, but schoolchildren everywhere studied his villanelle “Where Are the Bees?” His later style, increasingly aphoristic, had inspired critics to call him a new minimalist, and at seventy-five, with his unrepentant hippie politics and eloquent Forest Cycle, Lou had become an icon to environmentalists, who printed his verse on T-shirts and posters—usually without permission. Like Matisse cutouts, Steiner’s late pared-down poems were all space and edges on the page. The best-known was his found poem, “Tree.” One line, which read simply:

  Here I stand. I can do no other.

  Molly was honest. She said Orion’s father scared her. Over the years, Lou had grown shaggy, rambling, slightly unhinged. Orion’s mother, Diane, thought perhaps Lou was suffering from early Alzheimer’s. The idea frightened Orion, who preferred to think late-night rambles, naps on park benches, and tirades to writing classes were existential rather than neurological symptoms. End-stage poetry. Reading Shakespeare obsessively, drinking heavily, a man like Lou was supposed to turn Learlike when his hair went white.

  As a boy Orion had avoided Lou. Naturally, he’d taken his mother’s side in the divorce, and lived with her in run-down farmhouses where they grew tomatoes and trained pea plants up strings to the porch roof. He tried to comfort her by staying out of trouble and entering science fairs. His childhood sweetheart, Emily, had been his mother’s sweetheart as well, the daughter she had always hoped for, and even now, so many years later, Diane asked after Emily with a certain wistfulness—although she liked Molly very much. Then Orion felt a twinge of guilt, although he knew it was irrational, because he hated to disappoint his mother, even in imaginary ways. In college, where he might have grown wild, he’d settled in with Molly, and stayed with her.

  Orion didn’t avoid his father anymore, but spent time with him when he could. As Diane said, “He is your dad, and he isn’t getting any younger.” Lou was charming in his fashion, his countercultural effusions refreshing now that Orion made his way in the material world. True, his father had recently been called to the dean’s office to explain an incident in a poetry workshop when he’d ripped up a student’s manuscript, dashing the pieces to the floor and stamping on them “like Rumpelstiltskin” as one witness averred in The Middlebury Campus. There was also Lou’s troubling history with young women poets, his musettes as Diane called them. But he had slowed down in this regard, and if his clothes were wrinkled and his beard untrimmed, he was an original, and it felt good to have a parent who worked in pencil and called Otter Creek his office. Lou had no idea what ISIS did. He had never owned a computer, and the one time he had met Molly’s parents, at Harvard graduation, he’d told them a long dirty joke, to see if they would laugh.

  He chortled when his son phoned one bright December Sunday. Orion was explaining that Molly’s parents had come up to visit and they were all having brunch that morning. “Who brunches these days?” Lou asked.

  “I guess I do,” Orion said.

  “Brunch when you’re old, sleep when you’re dead” was Lou’s advice.

  Orion glanced at the closed bathroom door where Molly was showering. Postcall, she’d come straight from Beth Israel Deaconess and had had no time to rest.

  “True story,” Lou said. This was how all his jokes began. True meant “Jewish.” “Three old ladies in Miami, poolside, brunching at the Fontainebleau. They see someone new: Velcome, velcome. How are you? Then one of the old-timers says, Nu, ve don’t have time for small talk. Let’s get some things out of the vay. Money? Money you have, or you vouldn’t be at the Fontinblow. Granchildren? You got? Show. She opens up her wallet and, you know, fans out the pictures on the table. Sex? … Vatvas, vas”

  “You think I’m living like an old lady.”

  “I leave you to extrapolate.”

  “You think youth is wasted on the …”

  “I do like a wasted youth,” Lou mused.

  Molly emerged in a cloud of steam and began s
earching for clean clothes. Wrapped in her towel, she glanced at Orion and took in his fisherman sweater, worn to threads at the elbows.

  “Why do you like a wasted youth, Dad?”

  “Listen, it’s like the man with his face pressed against the glass at the Ferrari dealership. If you have to ask …”

  “I should go,” said Orion, as Molly pointed at the clock-radio, but he did not get off the phone. “What are you doing today?”

  “I’ll be walking at Abbey Pond,” Lou replied. “You remember, don’t you?”

  Of course he did. In springtime Lou used to take little Orion to look for lady’s slippers. Double petals hanging from springy stems, flowers rising from mossy, mulchy ground. “I don’t think they look like lady’s slippers,” Lou had told Orion. “I think they look like lady’s something else.”

  “Drive carefully,” Orion said. “And take it easy out there.”

  Molly’s cell phone was ringing. Her parents were waiting downstairs to take them to Henrietta’s Table.

  “The ground’s uneven,” Orion reminded his father

  “Old and infirm as I am,” Lou intoned, “it’s so crowded in the woods these days that if I fall, I’m sure somebody will find me.”

  “Can we go?” Molly asked.

  “I was just waiting for you,” Orion replied, and then into the telephone, “bye, Dad.”

  “Farewell. And good-bye, Molly.”

  Molly’s father was famous too, in an entirely different way. Carl Eisenstat was a physicist, and not the garden-variety kind. He had been in one of Orion’s college textbooks as the Eisenstat Principle of something or other. Matter? Motion? Orion could not remember, although it was assumed that he knew which. The Eisenstats assumed many things. The last time they’d come up from Princeton, Carl had announced, “I take it the two of you are planning to get married.” Orion had started back, offended that Carl would touch on a matter so private and confusing, but Molly’s father pressed on implacably: “And I make that assumption because you’ve been seeing each other for so long.”