The Cookbook Collector

  Of course they had talked about getting engaged. Orion and Molly had lived together in their apartment off Putnam Avenue for three years. They had a routine; they had a life; they had a lot of stuff. Their third-floor warren opened onto a ramshackle but surprisingly large roof deck where they entertained. They kept a hibachi there, aluminum lawn chairs, and a camping table they had found on the street. On summer nights when friends came up for drinks, they passed around a pair of tweezers for the splinters that split off the sun-warped railings.

  Molly’s plan had been to get married when Orion finished graduate school, and he had always liked this idea—keeping marriage at an indeterminate distance, along with his degree. At the time, Orion’s professional and financial prospects had been pleasantly vague. Now, however, they were unavoidably bright. Five months after Orion broke Lockbox, the system was up and running, or as Jonathan put it, “running better than ever,” and ChainLinx was huge. Projected earnings were shooting through the roof, and this was not lost on Molly’s father. Nothing was.

  “You’ve been getting a lot of press,” lanky, white-haired Carl informed Orion in the buffet line at the restaurant, and Orion ducked his head, something between a nod and a shrug. Orion, Jonathan, Aldwin, and Jake had just appeared in Fortune magazine under the heading “Tycoons in Training.”

  “I liked the photo. I recognized the steps of Building Thirteen.” Carl loaded his plate with lox and whitefish, eggs and sausages.

  Orion watched Molly’s mother pause wistfully at the waffle station, and then settle on yogurt, fruit salad, and a bowl of Irish oatmeal. The resemblance between Deborah and Molly was striking: dark eyes, a heart-shaped face, lovely from the front, less so in profile. Molly had her mother’s slight bump in the nose and tiny chin. They were both petite, but Deborah was also zaftig, a short, wide gerontologist who wore tunic-length sweaters and long necklaces—silk cords hung with unusual pendants, a tiny woven bag or a many-hinged locket, a miniature kaleidoscope bouncing like a buoy on her vast bosom.

  “Well, this is nice,” said Deborah when they reconvened at the table.

  “Tell us about the IPO,” said Carl.

  How different Molly’s father seemed from the man Orion had first met, almost eight years before. The Eisenstats had driven up to see their daughter, and she’d brought her new boyfriend to breakfast. On that occasion, he and Molly had shared one side of a booth like brother and sister facing their parents. Orion’s wet blond hair had fallen in his eyes, and Molly’s short curls had been damp. They’d looked a little too clean to be entirely innocent, having just come from Mather House, where they’d shared a shower, but they sat straight with the seam of the upholstered booth running up between them. Molly’s mother had tried to make conversation, but Professor Eisenstat kept his eyes on Orion, who had tried not to bolt his food or gulp his juice, or think about the night before, lest some memory of warmth and nakedness flash across his face.

  Still, Carl had gazed at him with a grim, penetrating look. “I have a question for you.” Carl’s voice had been taut and slightly amused, as though he were sharpening cruel ironic skewers and looking forward to running Orion through. “How is it majoring in an auxiliary field?”

  “Auxiliary? You mean computer science?” Orion had been so busy guarding against attacks on his character that at first he didn’t recognize Carl’s scientific gambit as such.

  “Right. Auxiliary in that computer science is not a true science in itself, but a handmaid to math, physics, chemistry….”

  “I like CS,” Orion said stoutly.

  “But that’s my question,” Carl pressed. “What exactly do you like about it?”

  Orion paused. “Programming.”

  “Hmm.” Carl sipped his coffee.

  Twenty years old, Orion had gazed across the table at Molly’s father with a mixture of resentment and misery. He was good at math, of course, but he excelled at building little computer systems piece by piece. Orion had always loved to tinker. He was a puzzle solver, no deep-thinking puzzle maker. He had done well in his CS courses: programming, distributed systems, hardware, algorithms, and graphics, for which he’d rendered a faceted crystal vase filled with water and a single red rose so that it cast an accurate shadow on a wood-grain tabletop. Were these exercises at all important? In Carl’s presence he’d felt acutely that computer science lacked a certain—he would never say the word aloud—but, yes, the field lacked a certain majesty.

  Now, in the glass and farmhouse restaurant with its baskets and bouquets of chili peppers, Carl seemed thrilled with Orion’s programming habit. He actually whipped out that morning’s Boston Globe and read aloud. “Asked about his heroes, company cofounder Orion Steiner cites computer pioneer Donald Knuth, and maverick free-software activist Richard Stallman.”

  What a strange effect money, or even the idea of money, had on people. Orion could not avoid wealth, or Carl either. How could he put off shopping for a ring? In six months, he could afford any ring or bracelet or necklace; he could afford anything. Orion looked at Carl’s smooth, close-shaven cheeks and his hawkish gray eyes and he saw what wealth would mean: not just traveling the world and buying toys, but paying huge complicated taxes and living in a house with Molly forever—not forever in the romantic sense—forever like her parents, with a loud dog and yellowing houseplants. Molly would gain a hundred pounds, and Orion would have to start collecting ugly paintings. They’d have a three-car garage and seven bathrooms, and they would sit around at night and debate whether it was better to time-share or buy planes.

  “How many employees are you up to now?” Carl asked.

  “I think we’re at …,” Orion hesitated, distracted by the cell phone in his pocket, buzzing against his leg. “Eighty-three?” he ventured, checking the caller ID. “Ninety-three?” It was Jonathan, but Orion ignored the call.

  Deborah focused on Orion with a look of quiet pride. Carl leaned forward, keen and curious. Only their daughter paid no attention. Molly had closed her eyes and left him to entertain her parents’ expectations on his own. Exhausted, she was still sitting upright in her chair, but she had fallen fast asleep.

  Carl and Deborah were driving home immediately to beat the traffic, and they dropped off Molly and Orion on the way. He helped her up the stairs, and she leaned against the wall as he unlocked the apartment. Then dropping her bag just inside the door, she bolted for the bedroom.

  “Wait,” Orion said. “Molly?”

  Fully clothed, she lunged for the bed and seized her pillow. Gone again.

  “Aren’t you going to take off your shoes?” Orion tugged at one shoe and then the other. Her legs were dead weights in his hands. He reached around her waist, unbuckled her belt, and unzipped her pants. “Ouch,” he murmured. Her belt had cut into her soft stomach and left red marks. He tried to unbutton her blouse, but she clung to the pillow, and he couldn’t get it off. “I give up,” he said.

  The dressertop was strewn with bills and mail, bank statements from Fleet. Orion didn’t bother opening them. Despite his huge equity in ISIS, he had, of course, no money to speak of in his account. Molly’s damp towel lay in a heap on the floor. She had good reason to avoid inviting her parents up to the apartment.

  Orion scanned his e-mail. Seventy new messages, two from Jonathan. Subject: URGENT. Message: Get your butt over here now. His cell phone rang again. He didn’t have to look. His bike had a flat, and he knew he should get moving if he was walking to Kendall Square. He stuffed his computer into his backpack.

  “Okay, Molly, I’m going.” He bent down over her curly head. “Bye.”

  She turned, her face tender with sleep. When she reached out and wrapped her arms around him, she was warm, her skin smoother than the silky blouse that she was wrinkling. Her eyes opened. Her lips parted, and he was about to kiss her, when suddenly she spoke. “Get milk,” she said.

  “Where the hell have you been?” It was uncanny, as if Jonathan had been standing in front of the elevator the whole time. He pla
yed laser tag like that, appearing suddenly, bearing down on you.

  “I was having brunch,” Orion said.

  “Brunch?” Jonathan echoed, as if he’d never heard the word before. Lou was right, Orion thought. Brunch when you’re old.

  They were walking through what had recently been the second-floor wilderness of the company. At one time, Jonathan and Orion had played a form of indoor badminton here, but new cubicles had been installed to pack more programmers together. There were private offices here as well, for Aldwin the CFO, and Jonathan the CTO. Jake was the chief programmer. Only Orion wasn’t chief of anything. That had been his choice. They’d offered him some sort of vice presidency, but at the time, the whole thing had sounded too ridiculous, like aspiring to Communications Minister of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Of course, Orion had been wrong about this. ISIS was a cash-rich powerhouse, no fictional Grand Duchy. The CFO and CTO were, in fact, piloting the company, along with Dave, who was much given to navigational language, along with Mission Statements, foam-core credos posted throughout the building like slogans from Orwell’s Ministry of Love. We are a community. We value excellence. We believe in the capacity of each individual to make a difference….

  Jonathan marched to the conference room, while Orion followed slowly, looking in on the programmers, who were writing Lockbox 2.0. Clarence was typing away, as were Umesh and Nadav, and there was the new girl, Sorel. He was always conscious of her, working among the guys. She was tall, long-limbed, lithe, and kept a guitar under her desk. She wore odd black clothes and she had fair skin and strawberry-blond hair almost as long as his. She had the palest eyes he had ever seen; he wasn’t sure of the color—they were like water.

  Her first day, Mel Millstein had brought her in and introduced her in his fussy way.

  “Let’s welcome Sorel Fisher. I’m sure everybody here will do their best to help her feel at home.” He’d pulled out a swivel chair. “This is your desk,” Mel told Sorel.

  “Thanks very much,” she said, and Orion had been surprised by her English accent.

  “What’s your name again?” he’d asked after Mel left.

  “Sorel,” she said. “Like the plant.”

  Her accent was wonderful, and her voice as well, which was lower than you would expect, and at the same time a little breathy. Sometimes Orion talked to her, just to get her to say words like corollary, which she pronounced with the stress in the middle, a little bump and then a rush of speed at the end: “corollary.” She glanced at him quizzically now as he passed by.

  “I’m going to the conference room,” he told her with mock gravity.

  “Oh.” Sorel suppressed laughter as she turned back to her computer. “I won’t be seen talking to you, then.”

  He knew everyone would see him with Jonathan, however. The conference room cut right into the open-plan programmers’ space, and the walls were glass, another of Dave’s brilliant ideas.

  Jonathan and Aldwin perched atop the oval table with the Globe strewn before them.

  “I’ve been getting e-mails all morning from investors,” Jonathan informed Orion.

  “About what?”

  “About this.” Jonathan shook the newspaper at Orion.

  “You cite Richard Stallman as your hero,” Aldwin said.

  “I happen to admire Stallman’s ideas about sharing information.”

  “Not now, you don’t,” said Jonathan. “Not one week before our IPO.”

  “Are you really that nervous?” Orion asked.

  Aldwin folded his hands on his knee. With his baby face and mild manners, his well-groomed curly hair, clean clothes, and matching socks, he seemed, literally, best suited of the founding four for corporate life. Jonathan was the star, but Aldwin was Dave’s favorite. Everyone knew that. Of course the idea of Dave’s favor was strange, to say the least. The four of them had hired Dave, and at the time, Jonathan had privately conceded Orion’s contention that Dave wasn’t particularly bright. “You do see that we’re in business?” Aldwin asked Orion now.

  “ISIS is not the local branch of the Free Software Foundation,” Jonathan said.

  “You do see how our investors are hoping to make money here?” Aldwin continued.

  “Free Software is free as in freedom,” Orion retorted. “Not free as in free lunches. I never said I don’t want to make money.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Jonathan exploded. “We are selling a proprietary security system. You are going to reporters, scaring our investors, talking about giving stuff away.”

  “I never said anything about giving stuff away. I mentioned Richard Stallman’s name.”

  “He’s a nut case.”

  “He happens to be a visionary,” said Orion, “and I find his questions very interesting. Like, when you think about it, the whole notion of intellectual property is an oxymoron. How can you own something intangible? It’s like, you can’t own souls, can you?”

  “Are you trying to make me angry?” Jonathan asked.

  “Maybe you should take your name off our patents,” Aldwin suggested.

  “I said I admired him. I never said I wanted to be him. Jesus.” Orion turned away from the CTO and CFO, once his closest friends, and he looked through the glass wall at the programmers in their cubicles. Several guys were crowded around Sorel’s desk. Had she got the new high score in Quake III? She was keeping her head down. “I happen to have my own ideas,” Orion murmured. “I have my own opinions.”

  “Your ideas are—occasionally—great,” Jonathan told him. “Your opinions suck.”

  Orion sighed and turned back to listen to the rest of the tirade.

  “Aldwin and I have been in Mountain View all week,” Jonathan continued. “Jake is still in London. We are taking care of customers and signing partners. We are preparing for the biggest IPO of the year. The three of us have not been home. We have not had brunch. And we do not want to come in here and find that you, with your two million shares, have been …”

  “Just don’t talk to reporters right now,” said Aldwin.

  “Do not talk to anyone.” Jonathan pointed his index finger directly at Orion’s chest, but Orion didn’t flinch. He had been an athlete too, although his sport was skiing and involved no contact, only swift descents.

  “When you get phone calls, refer them to Vicki,” said Aldwin. “That’s her job.”

  They were ganging up on Sorel. Orion could see the guys spinning her swivel chair around, forcing her to look at them.

  “And another thing …,” said Aldwin.

  Orion strode out of the conference room. Under his breath he murmured, “Fuck you.”

  Clarence, Umesh, and Nadav were standing over Sorel.

  “Lockbox went down again,” Umesh told Orion.

  “She crashed the system,” Clarence said.

  “What—the new version?”

  “She checked in buggy code,” Umesh said.

  “She gets the rubber chicken.” Menacingly, Nadav swung the rubber chicken in Sorel’s face. It was the sort of plucked rubber chicken you found in joke shops, its limp body yellow and gelatinous.

  “Oh, stop,” said Sorel. She sounded indifferent, almost bored, but Orion could see that she was upset.

  “You crash the system,” said Clarence, “you get the chicken.”

  Nadav pitched the rubber bird directly into Sorel’s lap.

  “Put that chicken nicely on her desk,” Orion ordered.

  Clarence hesitated for a moment. Orion acted like one of the guys, and now he pulled rank on them.

  “Now,” Orion said, and he waited until Clarence pitched the chicken onto Sorel’s desk. “She’s going to debug the code now,” Orion announced. “Party’s over.”

  When the little crowd dispersed, Orion pulled up a chair next to Sorel. He watched her long fingers on the keyboard as she scrolled through code on the screen. “I break stuff all the time.”

  “I know.” She smiled.

  “So let me help you.”


  “Aren’t you busy?”

  Orion thought of Molly sleeping after thirty-six hours at the hospital. He considered Jake in London and Jonathan and Aldwin, who didn’t brunch. “Not really.”

  Slowly, line by line, they combed Lockbox 2.0. He took the workstation next to hers, and they worked in parallel on separate computers. As they searched, they turned up little items and oddities: missing comments, obscure bugs, strange bits of circuitous reasoning, the dust bunnies in the code. Hours passed. They didn’t speak, but mumbled to themselves. “What happens when this line executes?”

  “And what happens here?”

  “What’s the value of the variable now?”

  They worked until numbers seemed to imprint themselves on Orion’s eyes. The chambers of the program drew Orion and Sorel deeper and deeper into the software’s formal logic. They counted their steps as they descended into dark passageways. The voices all around grew muffled, the ambient light on the floor began to dim. Orion’s phone rang, but he didn’t even glance at it.

  Night came. Programmers departed, and others took their place. Jonathan and Aldwin were long gone. Still, Orion and Sorel kept hunting underground, watching for errors, listening for rushing water, tapping walls.

  “Why are you smiling?” Sorel asked at one point.

  “I’m just concentrating,” he murmured, half to himself. Then he confessed, “Actually I love doing small repetitive things.”

  “I don’t,” she confessed. “I need fresh air.”

  “You can go home if you’re tired,” he told her. “I’ll finish.”

  “No. I can’t go home. I’m responsible. I’m just going out for a minute.”

  Suddenly he realized that she was going down alone into the dark. “Wait!” He ran after her. “I’ll come down with you.”

  “No, don’t,” she said. She stepped into the elevator and as the doors closed she confessed, “I just want to smoke.”

  How could she smoke? She was so beautiful. He hated that she smoked. While she was gone, he raided the company kitchen for salt-and-vinegar potato chips and jelly beans. He took four cans of black-cherry soda from the fridge, and lined them up on her desk. He wasn’t sure why he did that. They looked silly. He brought them to his own desk and kept working. When he heard the elevator bell he kept his head down, pretending he hadn’t been waiting for her.