The Cookbook Collector

  “Jess”—Emily unzipped the outer pocket of her rolling bag and produced a travel package of tissues—“come with me.” Emily wheeled her obedient suitcase back into the airport.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To rent a car,” said Emily.

  “But what will you …? How will you …?”

  “Please stop crying,” Emily begged her sister. “I have insurance. It’s just a car. It doesn’t matter. I’ll buy a new one.” And Jess recalled that her sister was worth more than $100 million. Emily never acted spoiled or materialistic—not in the ways you would expect, but at times like these the money showed.

  “Who are you calling?” Jess asked.

  “Laura.”

  “On Saturday morning?”

  “Hi, Laura. How are you? Really?” She smiled. “Listen, could you call the police and also Commerce Insurance about my car? We think it was stolen last night in Berkeley. I know!”

  “I need an assistant,” Jess said after Emily got off the phone.

  “Why?” said Emily. “You have me.”

  Do I? Jess thought. Emily could give her money, but Jess’s asking would have meant explaining how she’d donated her stock to Save the Trees. Emily could give advice as well about school, and Leon, and life in general, but none of the advice was what she wanted to hear.

  She felt like an item on Emily’s to-do list: (1) fly to Banff with Jonathan; (2) establish Veritech Foundation to promote math education in underserved communities; (3) ask Jess what she’s doing with her life.

  More like a fabulous old aunt than a sister, Emily began to pick up Jess every couple of weeks and take her to brunch at Greens, where she plied Jess with French toast, and Jess abstained and ordered blueberries with nothing on them. Then they would walk along the Presidio walls, with the wind whipping their hair, and they would gaze out at the ocean, and Emily would ask earnestly, “Are you sure you really want to be with Leon?”

  Or Jess would sleep over at Emily’s condo, and they would drive together to the White Lotus in San Jose for vegan Southeast Asian food. Coconut soup, summer rolls with peanut sauce, mock squid lo mein, mushroom hot pot, and no-dairy flan for dessert. And Emily would say, “Are you sure you want to be in grad school if you’ve taken so many Incompletes?”

  She had met Leon one day when she came to visit Jess at the Tree House, and her response had been about what Jess expected. “Totally inappropriate! What is he—forty? Who is he? Do you even know?” And she had taken the extraordinary step of assuming Jess’s share of the rent at her old apartment on Durant, simply because she could not bear the thought of Jess living in the Tree House.

  “It’s a waste of money, keeping that empty room for me,” Jess told Emily.

  “You need a home away from him,” her sister said. “You need somewhere to go.”

  Jess had begun to dread these conversations. Generally, Emily’s Outings, as Jess began calling them, coincided with weekends Jonathan had canceled a visit, and Jess was not above pointing this out. “You only want to see me when you can’t see him,” she complained on the phone one January night.

  “That’s not fair,” Emily said.

  “You mean that’s not nice of me to say.”

  “That too.”

  Undaunted, Emily asked, “Do you want to go to the city on Sunday?”

  “I have to work.” Jess sat cross-legged on the floor with her Logic text in front of her. George needed extra hours. Classes were beginning on Wednesday, and she still had Incompletes in Hegel, and Logic, and last year’s Incomplete in Philosophy of Language. She was in danger of losing her meager fellowship.

  “We could go to Muir Woods.”

  Jess hesitated. “I would,” she said, “but all you want to do is lecture me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Right, you don’t want to, but you think you have to,” Jess said.

  “We could drive the new car.”

  Jess felt a pang of guilt about the old one.

  “I’d like to go,” said Emily.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never been to Muir Woods before,” said Jess.

  “Never with you.”

  “You have to promise you won’t have an agenda.”

  “No agenda,” said Emily.

  “And no hectoring!”

  “How is hectoring different from lecturing?”

  “It’s louder.”

  Jess carried a volume of Robert Frost when Emily picked her up.

  “What’s that for?” Emily drove her new Audi along the coast, and the ocean rose and dipped in the sun.

  “To read. To meditate!” Jess said blithely, and she thought, To avoid hectoring if necessary.

  “Okay,” Emily said, bemused and, sensing Jess’s unsaid reason, a little hurt.

  “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” Jess intoned as they took the path down from the parking lot. She had imagined finding a spot to read and meditate, leaving Emily to walk alone for half an hour, but the trees were so tall, and the light filtering down so green that she forgot her stratagem, and her troubles as well. The saplings here were three hundred years old, their bark still purple, their branches supple, foliage feathery in the gloaming. They rose up together with their ancestors, millennia-old redwoods outlasting storms, regenerating after lightning, sending forth new spires from blasted crowns. What did Hegel matter when it came to old-growth? Who cared about world-historical individuals? Not the salamanders or the moss. Not the redwoods, which were prehistoric. Potentially posthistoric too.

  Jess closed her eyes to inhale the forest with its scents of earth and pine. “Couldn’t the Veritech Foundation be for forests?” Jess asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because our mission is math education.”

  “But without trees there would be no math,” Jess said. “Let alone math education. Without trees we’d suffocate—literally and figuratively.”

  “How do you suffocate figuratively?”

  “You box yourself into received ideas, so you can’t breathe. You can’t even see where you are and you just … die from lack of perspective. Did you know that tribal peoples aren’t even nearsighted? Nearsightedness is a result of reading and staring at computer screens.”

  Emily took off her glasses and gazed up at the blurry canopy. When she slipped her glasses on again, she much preferred the finer view. She saw the fertile detail all around her, the spores speckling the underside of ferns, the pinecones extending from every branch, pine needles drifting down and carpeting the mossy ground. Fecund, furrowed, teeming with new life—even the fallen trees blossomed forth with lichen and rich moss and ferns. Every rock and stump turned moist and rich, every broken place gave birth. Each crevice a fresh opening, each plant a possibility, putting forth its little hook or eye.

  “You see?” said Jess. “And this place is tame. Up north you feel like an ant looking up at a blade of grass.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to feel like an ant.”

  “Why not? Don’t you like to feel small sometimes?”

  “No,” Emily said honestly.

  “I do. I like it. I prefer feeling insignificant,” said Jess.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I didn’t say worthless, I said insignificant, as in the grand scheme of things.”

  “But why?”

  “Because humans have such a complex. We’re so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is.”

  And Jess was right. Numbers didn’t matter here. Money didn’t count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore down reputations had no meaning in this place. The air was moist. Fallen leaves, spreading branches, and crisscrossing roots wicked water, so that the trees seemed to drink the misty air.

  Jess said, “All your worries fade away, because …”

  Emily finished her thought. “The trees put everything in perspective.”

  “R
ight. It’s like your soul achieves its focal distance.”

  The word soul startled Emily from her reverie. She turned on Jess. “You’re dropping out of school, aren’t you?”

  “No—I never said that! I might take the semester off, just so I can catch up. And we’ve got a major appraisal coming up at Yorick’s….”

  “Jess …”

  “I was actually making a serious point.”

  “And I was asking a serious question.”

  “I’m not talking about graduate school. I’m talking about how you can come out here and know your place in the universe.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Very small. Very tangential,” Jess said cheerfully.

  “You’re so bright,” said Emily.

  “I thought we said no hectoring.”

  “It’s not hectoring—it’s my … I just want you to do well.”

  “I would rather be well than do well,” Jess said beatifically, and laughed at her sister’s yelp of frustration.

  “You actually seek out platitudes.”

  “I only do it to annoy.”

  “But you believe that stuff.”

  “Yeah, that’s the disturbing part, isn’t it?” Jess said wickedly.

  Emily folded her arms across her chest. “When are you going to embark on a career?”

  “Don’t you think,” Jess asked, with just the slightest edge in her voice, “that you have enough career for both of us?”

  “I worry about you.”

  “Well, I worry about you,” Jess countered. “You’re in this crazy industry where people eat each other alive. No, wait”—she stopped Emily from interrupting—“it’s in all the newspapers and the chat groups. Microsoft taking out Netscape. Veritech suing Janus.”

  “You heard about that?” Frankly, Emily was surprised to hear that Jess followed any news at all.

  “Yeah, I read this whole article—did you see it? Anything you can do I can do better: Janus takes on the storage sector. Veritech fights back. It’s online, on The Motley Fool.”

  “You read The Motley Fool?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” Jess asked. “Actually,” she confessed, “Dad sent me the link. Are you really suing Janus for eighty million dollars? Isn’t that, like, an expensive thing to do?”

  “It’s just part of doing business,” said Emily, affecting a calm she didn’t feel. Lawsuits, particularly the big one against Janus, were a huge drag on Veritech’s finances and corporate energy. “We can afford the legal fees, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “That’s not what I mean. There you are, getting and spending, and you’re with this guy who’s in the thick of it—but you’re not really with him, because he’s so careerist he won’t come out here to be with you.”

  Emily started walking, brisk and purposeful, as though they had to complete the trail loop. “I don’t think you should bring boyfriends into this. I don’t think you should talk about Jonathan—who actually works—when you’re with someone with no visible source of income or direction….”

  “Direction! Leon travels for his beliefs. Jonathan travels for his share price. There’s a difference, don’t you think? Leon has a cause. Jonathan is just another greedy, techno-freak gazillionaire.”

  They waited on a wooden bridge for a Japanese family taking pictures. A couple sauntered along, with hands in each other’s back pockets. A small girl, only three or four years old, sprinted past in a green hooded sweater, and her little feet beat against the wood planks as she raced away, to hide, to fly. Her parents called after her nervously, “Wait for us, honey. Not so fast!” Now Emily stood perfectly still, and she said nothing, and Jess knew by her silence that she was truly angry.

  “You worry about me,” Jess ventured nervously, “so why can’t I worry about you?”

  Emily said nothing.

  “You know Mom would have hated both of them,” Jess cajoled.

  “She would have hated Leon,” Emily said, with feeling. “She would have despised him.”

  “She’d have hated Jonathan too.”

  “How do you know that? You don’t know that.”

  “Find someone musical,” Jess quoted, for she was not above citing Gillian’s letters in a pinch, and she knew Jonathan could not carry a tune. “Find someone giving. Find someone who will sacrifice for you.”

  “You do look at the letters,” Emily said.

  “Every once in a while.”

  “And what do you think?”

  Jess watched a thick, yellow banana slug squirm at her feet. “I think, probably, we aren’t turning out the way that she intended.”

  “You could change that.”

  “I could? How about you?”

  “I’m going to marry him.”

  “You keep saying that.” Jess glanced at Emily’s sparkling ring. “Do you have a date?”

  Emily shook her head. “I can’t—”

  “Good for you!”

  “Shh!”

  Jess couldn’t help smiling at the way Emily shushed her, even in front of trees.

  “I meant we can’t set a date right now.” Neither she nor Jonathan could move cross-country yet. Not at this moment in their companies’ young lives. “We’re not ready.”

  “This is true,” said Jess. “This is more than true. Jonathan will never be ready for you.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I know enough. I’ve known him for three years! And I told you—I read about him in the papers, taking down Green Knight….”

  “The stuff in the papers isn’t true.”

  “Couldn’t you just meet someone else?” Jess asked winsomely.

  “You know, Jess,” Emily exploded, “I’m supposed to sit by while you drop out of school and move in with your tree lover, and it seems to me that, for someone who demands so much unconditional support, you are strangely judgmental. You stand here talking about the natural world, and how humanity is insignificant, and then you have the nerve to tell me what to do. How do you intend to change your life? Just what exactly is your plan?”

  Jess thought for a moment. “All right,” she said. “You be my witness.”

  With a sinking feeling Emily watched her sister place her right hand on Robert Frost. “This year,” Jess vowed, “I swear I will overcome my fear of climbing.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. I swear on …” Jess opened her book at random and looked inside. “I swear on a dimpled spider, fat and white, that I will climb this year.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  “This year,” Jess said, “I’m going to climb Galadriel.”

  “You need a job,” Emily told her.

  “I have a job.”

  “You need a regular income. And health insurance! What if something happens to you? What if, for example, you fall out of a redwood?”

  “I’d just die,” said Jess dramatically, “so I wouldn’t need medical care.” When she saw the look on Emily’s face she amended. “Sorry.”

  “Please don’t face your fears.”

  “I want to.” Jess looked up at the forest canopy.

  “Jess, I’m serious. You’re making a huge mistake. You’re afraid of heights for a reason. You of all people should not be climbing in Wood Rose Glen. And don’t think you’re going to impress Leon.”

  “This has nothing to do with him!” Jess retorted. “This is just for me.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It might sound New Ageist, but I don’t want to live like a coward on the ground.”

  “I don’t want you to crack your head open.”

  “Since when are you so risk averse?” Jess asked. “Wasn’t coming out to California a risk? Wasn’t founding Veritech a risk?”

  “I never risked my life,” said Emily.

  “Okay, granted, technically you risk other people’s money, but you put your life into the company, right? You invest yourself. Isn’t that true? In Veritech, in the stock mar
ket, in Jonathan.”

  Emily looked at Jess as if to say: Where do you come from? Her analogies were so fanciful. “Yes, I’m sure every choice involves some kind of risk—but tree climbing is life-and-death.”

  Jess stood on the wood bridge and saw birds flying in the forest light. She saw herself flying upward, ascending to the treetops in the clouds.

  But Emily interrupted, “You fall from a tree like this, that’s it. You don’t get another chance.”

  “And don’t you think you can die too?” Jess countered. “Don’t you think your decisions are life-and-death too?”

  17

  Emily did not treat business decisions as life-and-death. If she was nervous, she didn’t let it show. She worked with cool confidence and inspired everyone around her. Her success inspired her employees to start dot-coms of their own. Even Charlie, the company chef, launched his own restaurant, and flush with stock, Laura’s husband dropped out of his accounting program.

  Laura was a little anxious when Kevin left school, and jittery as well about purchasing a two-million-dollar fixer-upper in Los Altos.

  “We always said that you would teach accounting,” Laura reminded her husband at their wood-grain kitchen table in Escondido Village. “That’s why we came here.”

  “I don’t like accounting,” Kevin confessed.

  Laura set down her mug of herbal tea. “You never said that before.”

  “I couldn’t afford to say it before.”

  Laura knit her brow. She had a gentle manner, and her sweet voice belied her reservations. “I’m just not sure we should change all our plans so quickly.”

  “What plans? Our plans were to have a family and be happy,” Kevin said. “We have the family, and now we have a chance to build a house and spend time with the kids. We’re going to have a swimming pool, teach the kids to swim. You’ll have a dream kitchen!”

  “I don’t need a fancy kitchen.” She glanced at her cluttered counters.

  “Don’t you want more space?”

  “I’d be happy with a regular kitchen with more space, not a—”

  “But you deserve one. You’re amazing, Laura. Just think what you could do with counter space and pull-out pantries, and you could have a whole baking station with a marble inset….”