The Cookbook Collector

  He saw that his Post-it had disappeared. Turning the key, he found the glass door unlocked, and stepped inside to find Jess, reading at his desk. Her hair was falling in her eyes, and she wore a wrinkled linen dress too big for her; she wore all her clothes that way—loose, voluminous—and then while working, she would push up her sleeves, revealing her forearms.

  “Long time, no see,” George sang out, taking his 1892 Leaves of Grass from Jess’s hands. “You found my note?”

  “I did.” She snatched up the utility knife.

  “You haven’t even opened the boxes.”

  “I was just about to!”

  “As soon as you finished ‘Song of Myself’? That’s all right, don’t bother.”

  “Don’t bother? What do you mean?” She looked up at him as she often did, all innocence, bright-eyed, polite—until she could determine if he was really angry with her or only bluffing. “Why are you so happy?” She squinted, examining him closely, and then smiled, triumphant. “You bought something!”

  He thought of telling her about the books. For just a moment he considered confiding in her, but he was superstitious until he closed a deal. “I didn’t buy anything.”

  “Really?” She leaned back in his desk chair.

  “Careful.”

  She sat up straight, all business with four chair legs on the floor. “I’ll shelve the books. Just let me take care of it.”

  “Jess,” he said, “you had all afternoon to take care of it. It’s four o’clock, I’m closing early, and now you’ve missed your chance.”

  Four o’clock. Her day had been so long that she couldn’t remember its beginning. She had been running since she woke up, and she was exhausted, the afternoon a blur of missed lunch, talking to the rabbi, sitting with Professor Sakamaki for almost two hours to discuss her Kant paper with its problems “in argumentation, structure, and style.” She had made a huge effort to get to the store.

  Now George shooed her away with his hands. “Go home.”

  “Don’t you want to know why I’m late?”

  He was honest. “No, not really.”

  “My professor wants me to take an Incomplete. He says my Kant paper is really two different papers and I have to separate them. And I already have an Incomplete in Philosophy of Language, and I have another … thing.”

  “A … thing?” George couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just a thing,” Jess said.

  Instantly George thought of Leon. Instinctively, he suspected her self-absorbed, voracious lover. George was old enough to read a whole story in Leon’s face—the charismatic opportunist alighting in Berkeley, the pseudo-intellectual, the rebel with an environmental cause, masking his appetites with altruism. But of course Jess could not interpret Leon as George did. She couldn’t even read George. She had no idea how George delighted in her funny ways, or watched her through the window as she stood outside, finishing an apple or nibbling sunflower seeds. She did not register his glances, his quick inventory of her clothes, his pleasure in her face and wrists. She did not know his heart.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked playfully, and then he changed his mind about her, as he often did, and decided that in fact she read him pretty well, and knew more than she let on.

  “I was just trying to assess the nature of the problem,” George said. “Legal trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Mortal danger?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?” she echoed

  “Well, what would you like me to say?”

  “Generally speaking,” she told him, “if you hear someone is not in mortal danger, you should say ‘good.’”

  He laughed. “Get out of here. Go home. I have people coming for dinner.”

  “You can go. I’ll lock up.”

  Then he understood. She wanted to finish reading his very-good-condition-with-only-slight-foxing Whitman. “You want to sit here alone with Leaves of Grass, don’t you? Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!” he read aloud. “Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! I’d like to see a liquid tree.”

  “If we keep on the way we’re going, you aren’t going to see any kind of trees,” Jess said.

  Despite his good mood—perhaps because of it—George refused to let this comment pass. “You know,” he said, “you worry too much about forests.”

  “You can’t worry too much,” Jess replied immediately.

  George snapped Whitman shut. “You go out there on weekends, confronting angry loggers, and risk your life for redwoods, but are you, personally, going to save them? Do you think that by saving a few trees here, you’ll have the slightest effect on the global environmental problem?”

  “Yes,” said Jess, “because of what we’ll prove to everyone.”

  George smiled. “Who’s everyone? Just other comfortably well-off tree savers like you.”

  “How am I comfortably well-off?” Jess asked.

  “This environmental theater of yours has limited impact.”

  She looked miserable for a moment, but George did not let up. “Look, I’m older than you are, and I know a few things about …” He was going to say, Types like Leon, but he said, “Organizations like Save the Trees. These are businesses-slash-cults started by refugees from the East Coast who come out here to graft their radical-chic plan onto some unsuspecting western species like the spotted owl, or the coastal redwood, or the Berkeley grad student. Ultimately their goals are self-serving. The money they collect supports their lifestyle. The signatures they gather justify a pyramid scheme. I sign on and then I get five friends to sign, and soon I’ve got a thousand friends supporting my incursions in the old-growth forests, where I do what? Hope someone will photograph me shouting down some logger? What’s the plan? And where are all the donations and the signatures going? Save the Trees is a self-sustaining public-relations firm. It’s not substantive or effective. It’s not real.”

  “As opposed to your rare-book store?” Jess countered. “What’s yours is real, and what’s mine must be imaginary?”

  “How is Save the Trees yours?” George asked her, and now he was quite serious. “In what way does it belong to you? You belong to it. Those people are taking advantage of you.”

  “You know nothing about Save the Trees. If you want to know about it, come visit, and I’ll show you around myself.”

  “No, thank you,” he said without a moment’s hesitation.

  “You have to admit, then, that you prefer your prejudices to actual knowledge. You don’t really know anything.”

  “I know you’re sitting in my chair,” George said.

  That startled her. She had forgotten. When she sprang to her feet, he knew he’d hurt her. She took the utility knife and silently began slitting open boxes.

  That night cooking, he regretted his words and his proprietary tone, his lecture on environmental politics. Again and again as he sautéed portobello mushrooms, he remembered how Jess looked at him when she jumped out of his desk chair. A glance both angry and reproachful. All the light in the room had drained away, her joy yielding to his pedantry. I’m sorry, he told Jess. Forgive me. And he imagined her forgiving him. He dreamed of that even as he stood there at the stove and watched the mushrooms softening. To be honest he had always dreamed of Jess—a girl so open and unself-conscious, so free. He had always imagined her. He lifted the pan and covered the Aga burner with its special lid.

  Enameled deepest, darkest green, a Craftsman color to match the tile backsplashes, the Aga oven was one of George’s few concessions to modernity, along with a dishwasher hidden inside a lower cabinet and a Sub-Zero refrigerator concealed behind a wall. Preservationist that he was, George had studied old photographs to re-create his kitchen’s 1933 layout with two open cupboards for dishes, scant counter space, and just one sink. No downdraft grill, no appliance hutches, no microwave, no island, only an oak table. George’s kitch
en was all air and light, with arched windows soaring almost sixteen feet to a peaked roof supported by trussed beams. Californian and medieval, the room was chapel-like, its woods ranging from gold to claret, its floorboards aged, its honed soapstone counters silky to the touch, luscious black when wet.

  He opened the first bottle of the evening, a crisp Soave by way of appetizer, and as he sipped, he parboiled new potatoes, blanched green beans, reduced the sauce for the béarnaise. He had learned his way in the kitchen from an old girlfriend, flame-haired, dark-eyed Margaret. She had been thirty, he’d been twenty-nine. She’d worked at Chez Panisse, and she taught George the mysteries of meat and fish, how to fillet a trout, and the best way to braise lamb and steam artichokes. She had explained the varieties of mushrooms and their uses, demonstrated the gentle stirring of risotto, how to select a perfect ripe tomato, and when to buy a peach. Margaret had taught him about wine as well. She had a discerning palate and a way with words, so that she could articulate the most elusive undertones. “Tobacco,” she would say, and that was it exactly. “Dried cherries.” And she was always right. She had prepared fantastic meals, feasts for all their friends in a student apartment with just two working burners. At the end of the night, exhausted and exhilarated, she and George would fall asleep with the scent of cinnamon or lemongrass or cardamom clinging to their hair and clothes. Yes, Margaret had been beautiful, talented, and wild as well. Fair to say that George had been scarred by the relationship. Like the vein on a leaf, his scar traveled from his right thumb all the way up his forearm, where Margaret had scored him in a fury with her paring knife.

  “You’re too selfish to marry anyone,” Margaret told George when she left. And, of course, as soon as she said these words, she was exactly right.

  He had tried to prove her wrong. He had always imagined sharing this kitchen and this view out over the Bay and through the Golden Gate. The lights below like tiny jewels, the sky past sunset, more silver than gray, clouds like a pearl silk dress in a ter Borch painting. Endlessly he had searched for his love, and when he couldn’t find her, he looked for signs, traces of her beauty in books and maps. He surrounded himself with talismans and reliquaries, but he never stopped desiring the one he couldn’t find. Superstitious heart: He began to see her reflected in impossibilities—the Rackham illustration of Miranda dancing, Jess’s delighted laughter. The one he couldn’t find became the one he couldn’t have.

  “Close your eyes,” he told Jess in his dream, and he would lead her to these windows and stand behind her, hands on her shoulders. Unconsciously, he closed his own eyes as he stood there at the stove.

  The doorbell. A surprise and a relief. “It’s unlocked!” he called, and Nick appeared in fresh pressed clothes, a plum-colored shirt, Italian shoes.

  “You look good.” George poured him a glass.

  “What do you mean?”

  He meant that Nick looked entirely different away from Julia, free from the kid. “You look yourself,” George said.

  Nick sat at the kitchen table, and George set before him dishes of olives and pickled eggplants the size of grapes, a platter of French bread, a saucer of sea salt. “How is everybody? How go the renovations?”

  “Behind schedule.”

  “Your kitchen couldn’t take as long as mine,” George said, by way of encouragement.

  “Yes, well, you weren’t trying to live in the house with a small child.”

  “True,” George said. “I planned that well.” He liked to flaunt his freedom once in a while, even as Nick flaunted his domestic bliss. They were each a little jealous, and like brothers they provoked each other.

  “I noticed someone stole your hood ornament again,” Nick said.

  This was a sore point. “It’s happening while I’m at Yorick’s. I pay to park in a garage, and they’re supposed to have security cameras.”

  “Must be an inside job,” said Nick. “You should buy a screw top you can take with you.”

  “Either that or I should start biking again and give up driving altogether.” By biking, George meant motorcycles, and he knew full well that when it came to motorbikes, Nick was not allowed.

  “You’re too old,” Nick said. “But how about—” he disappeared into the front hallway where he had left his backpack and returned with a bottle wrapped in white rice paper—“this.” It was a 1970 Chateau Latour.

  “Nick!”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “We’ll drink your Latour along with my Heitz.”

  “Oh, good,” said Raj as soon as he walked in and saw Nick’s bottle. Perfect, George thought. Raj was carrying a 1975 Chateau Petrus, peer and rival to the Latour.

  Small, dark, and handsome, Raj wore shades of black and gray. His glasses were gold-rimmed, his hair parted on the side. His body was slight, and his eyes unusually large and beautiful. He had been an academic once, and then a lawyer, but at the moment he spent most of his time wrangling with an unreliable Bentley, two Westies, and a rich ex-boyfriend. He lived in a cottage in Palo Alto, the pocket-sized guesthouse of a larger estate where, as he put it, he worked at home, buying, trading, and selling rare books.

  “We’re going to have a competition,” George explained from the stove where he was searing tournedos of beef. “Nick’s Latour versus your Petrus. And both against my Heitz.”

  When George decanted the Latour, the friends watched with some solemnity, each anticipating the taste to come. The two French wines which promised greatness. The luscious Californian, from a year they knew to be exceptional.

  “A toast,” Raj insisted.

  “Well,” George began, “the markets are down….”

  “For the moment,” Nick said.

  “Bush and Gore are neck and neck.”

  “Not an attractive image,” said Raj.

  “I don’t think we can toast necks.” George fingered his glass. He knew what he would be toasting secretly. His great new find.

  “What, then? Or whom?” Raj asked pointedly.

  “I don’t have a whom,” George said.

  “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you get so boring, darling,” Raj confided. “Love does not become you.”

  “To old friends, then.” Nick raised his glass.

  The wines were great, and better by the minute, even as the drinkers softened. Just as wines opened at the table, so the friends’ thirst changed. Their tongues were not so keen, but curled, delighted, as the wines deepened. Nick’s Latour was a classic Bordeaux, perfumed with black currant and cedar, perfectly balanced, never overpowering, too genteel to call attention to itself, but too splendid to ignore. Raj’s Petrus, like Raj himself, more flamboyant, flashier, riper, ravishing the tongue. And then the Californian, which was in some ways richest, and in others most ethereal. George was sure the scent was eucalyptus in this Heitz, the flavor creamy with just a touch of mint, so that he could imagine the groves of silvery trees. The Heitz was smooth and silky, meltingly soft, perhaps best suited to George’s tournedos, seared outside, succulent and pink within, juices running, mixing with the young potatoes and tangy green beans crisp enough to snap.

  They finished dinner with lemon sorbet garnished with fresh mint, and carried their glasses and their bottles into the enormous living room where they sat on George’s monumental chairs, built like heartwood thrones. George lit a fire, and as the three friends watched the flames in the great fireplace, Nick became dreamier, Raj more argumentative, and as for George, he found himself discoursing on every subject—from books to cars to the economy to the school shootings in Columbine.

  “Kids are numb,” George said. “They live in a simulated world, a gaming cyber world, and they lose the distinction between the virtual and the real. They want to feel. This is a fin de siècle problem.”

  “I disagree,” said Raj. “It’s a First World problem. Americans, Japanese, Koreans live a virtual life because they can afford a violent simulated world. In other countries th
e real is quite real. All too real. If you walk through Calcutta, the real will find you, and chase you down the street and try to kill you or steal from you or both.”

  “Granted,” George said, a little miffed. Generally an unrepentant aesthete, Raj turned political and brought up India when you least expected it. “But I’m making a different point. Violence isn’t just a matter of impaired judgment. It comes from sensory deprivation.”

  “This is First World deprivation that you’re talking about,” said Raj. “Boredom, anomie, et cetera. Other people can only aspire to that sort of spiritual bankruptcy.” He smiled rakishly. “I know I do.”

  “Even now?” asked Nick.

  “Of course. Having achieved a certain level of comfort, I look for more, whenever possible.” Raj took a long sip of the Latour.

  “Then you’re never content,” said Nick.

  “If I have the luxury to choose, then I prefer the chase; I like pursuit better than so-called fulfillment. Everybody does.”

  Nick shook his head. “Not true.”

  “You’re no exception,” Raj insisted. “You love risk. It’s an erotic pleasure.”

  “It is not.”

  “Look at your positions in Veritech and Inktomi. Look at you playing with Angelfire. It’s just gambling, and gambling is just like risky sex.”

  “You forget,” Nick told Raj, “that I’m actually interested in new technology. I’m not a thrill seeker. I’m investing in the information revolution.”

  Raj held out his glass for George to refill. “Violence is luxury, and in America the revolution comes with a prospectus and a public offering.”

  “Do you really think we’re all so decadent?” asked George.

  Raj cast his eyes over the enormous room with its bookcases like upended treasure chests, its massive beams, its woods glowing in the firelight and resonating with the crackling logs so that the whole house seemed cello-like. “We’ve got an acquisitive gene. We want and want, and there’s no way around it.”