Laura smiled ruefully. “Stop watching those kitchen shows.”
“We’ve had this amazing luck,” said Kevin. “Don’t be afraid to do something with it.”
“But it just seems …” She couldn’t help feeling that their ship had come in rather suddenly. Laura had taken the job at Veritech only to pay the bills while Kevin was in school, but working for Emily had proved more interesting than Laura had ever dreamed. How mysterious life was. Laura and Kevin still looked like the couple in their wedding pictures, those young sweethearts who could not afford floral arrangements and decorated the tables at their reception with autumn leaves, but now, they were interviewing architects. Kevin clipped pictures from magazines and talked about a kitchen opening out onto the garden, an airy light-filled space with double ovens and a breakfast bar. “It just seems like this will cost a fortune,” Laura said.
“But we have a fortune,” he reminded her.
“I’m afraid …”
“Afraid of what?”
“I’m worried about spoiling the children,” Laura said. “I want them to do chores.”
“Definitely. Everybody pitches in,” said Kevin.
“I would like a better kitchen,” Laura admitted, “but I want everything else to stay the same.”
Laura’s kind of constancy was Emily’s goal at Veritech. Level-headed optimism. Veritech’s products were essential, its culture young and happy, liberal in all the right ways—open, green, fun-loving, civic-minded; its people were building a corporation not only great, but good. Idealistic, and entirely invested in her creation, Emily believed this. After all, she had named Veritech to soar above the rest—to merge technology with truth.
Her concerns for Jess were real, but she went to work in high spirits, thrilled with Veritech’s price, its promise, its purchase on the future. She loved her job; she loved her colleagues. Even Alex had calmed down, working in his intense and solitary way on his own project.
When Alex presented his new work on fingerprinting to the board, Emily had settled into her cushioned chair, expecting the full flowering of her password-authentication idea. No one was more surprised than she when Alex unveiled his unadulterated electronic-surveillance plans.
He had spent six months on his prototype, a surveillance tool designed to record every time a user touched a cache of data, and to follow the user’s movements through the cache without his or her knowledge. A “lookup” function identified the user, a “markup” function linked the user’s searches and retrievals to those of others, and the whole system was so devious and paranoid that Emily interrupted him in the boardroom. “What happened to Verify? What happened to the password applications?”
And Milton chimed in, “Have you considered privacy at all?”
“Remember,” said Bruno, “we are like a strongbox, a safety-deposit box. We want to be as private as a Swiss bank account for our customers. We don’t want to sell the keys.”
Alex stood before them with the last slide of his PowerPoint presentation hovering on the wall, and nervously he clicked his laser pointer on and off, pointing the red light at the floor. “Look, a parking garage has security cameras. What if every car inside had its own security camera too, and when I took out my car I knew who had parked next to me, and who tried to hot-wire me, and who maybe dented me?”
“You’re talking about spyware, aren’t you?” said Emily. “You’re talking about bundling our storage services with spyware. That’s not what we discussed. That’s not—”
“That’s not what you wanted?” Alex shot back, and she felt his anger and his disdain. Who did she think she was? He was the artist here.
“You are suggesting we live with little cameras everywhere,” said Bruno.
Tight-lipped, Alex looked at Emily. He seemed to her at once bashful and arrogant. “It’s fair to everyone,” he said, “if everyone is watching.”
“It can’t be legal,” Emily told him. “And if it is legal, then it shouldn’t be.”
“That’s what Martin’s for,” said Alex, referring to the company’s in-house counsel.
“No,” murmured Emily, furious. “No. We won’t pursue this.”
“We won’t pursue this?” Alex cried in disbelief. His Russian accent flared, along with his temper. “Just like that? You liked the idea before. You were the one suggesting I develop it.” He snapped his laptop shut.
“We discussed how you would develop it,” said Emily. “We agreed that you would have free rein. You ignored everything I said, and you went off and did exactly what you wanted.”
“I don’t work for you, Emily,” Alex declared as Milton and Bruno looked on.
“Yes, but I thought that you were working with me!”
“You don’t design my projects,” Alex said.
“You lied to me! You agreed to do something that—”
“I never lied to you.”
“You told me you were working on a plan you had no intention of following. And it’s a dangerous plan. It’s a bad plan. It’s not where we want to go.”
“Why is that?” Alex demanded. “Because you’re prejudiced! You think the storage business should be warm and friendly, right? We should sell people what they want to hear.” His eyelashes were so long that they brushed against the lenses of his glasses. He was twenty-three years old. “This product doesn’t make you feel good—is that what you’re telling me?”
“Let’s take some time,” Bruno told them, and in the heat of battle they turned on him together, surprised at the interruption.
The war waged all that day and the next. Alex told Emily that she did not understand his project’s potential and thought she could dilute his ideas into some trivial password application. He said she did not care about innovation. He said that she masked her subjective opinions in ethical language, but she only did it to get her way. Finally, he stood in the parking lot next to his glossy black BMW, and he accused her of trying to manipulate him.
He stood close to her, too close. “You like my ideas when you think you can control them. When I express myself, you reject my projects out of hand.”
“I thought we were on the same page,” Emily said.
“You mean your page?”
“You said everything was going so well.”
“It was going well. Now you want to pull the plug on nine months’ work!”
“Could you stop blaming me for just a moment?” she retorted. “Could you just step back and consider what I’m saying?”
But he would not step back. “What you’re saying is totally defensive,” he told her. “You want to protect what Veritech has, and you won’t try anything new. Meanwhile the market is changing and you lag behind. We’re leaders now. Do you think that will last? Not if you’re afraid of innovation.”
“I’m not afraid of innovation,” she told him. “But we have to think about our direction.”
His face reddened. “Our direction means we’re going somewhere.”
“I don’t understand why you won’t listen to me,” she said.
“What? Do as you say? Obey you? Did you think you could manage me? Was that your idea? Why don’t you listen to me, for once? Or do you think I’m too young?”
Emily spoke quietly, although she didn’t feel quiet. “I thought I’d found a framework for you to pursue your work in keeping with Veritech’s goals.”
“I’m not interested in your frameworks, or your goals.” Alex clicked his BMW keys, and she saw the lights flash on and the driver’s seat adjust and the convertible top fold back like origami.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving.” Alex got in the car and slammed the door.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m leaving Veritech.”
“Wait—”
“I’m tired of waiting.” He gunned his engine.
“Contractually, the work you do here stays here,” she reminded him. “Remember that.”
Like an angry teenager—no backward loo
k, no seat belt, Alex roared away. If Emily could not contain him, he would take his brilliant, conspiratorial ideas elsewhere.
That was the frightening part—his dark imagination. Alex was so smart and irresponsible. It was obvious to Emily that bundling spyware with storage services was morally wrong. Why was that not obvious to him? It was obvious to her that she had encouraged his research, but never endorsed electronic fingerprinting as a product. Why then did he accuse her of leading him on? He was always projecting past the simple truth, sending her flowers, for example, after a Veritech party, where she made the mistake of dancing with him. But he’d behaved better the past few months. He had not e-mailed her excessively, or waited for her in the halls. She’d thought he was over his infatuation. Now, she sensed the situation was much worse. His voice, his stance, his eyes were threatening. What if he drove back again and found her? He had never hurt her, but for the first time, she began to feel that he might. The parking lot was well lit, and full of cars, but what had she been doing, fighting with him there, alone? She retreated to her Audi, and locked the doors.
She checked the time and dialed Jonathan on her cell. It was just after ten at night back east. “Hi,” she said, “it’s me.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Let me get inside my office.”
“I told Alex we weren’t going forward with fingerprinting.”
He didn’t answer for a moment.
“Are you there? Jonathan?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said.
“I feel terrible,” she said.
“Why? What did he do to you?” Jonathan asked sharply.
“He didn’t do anything specifically to me. He said he’s leaving.”
“Good.”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you ‘don’t know’?”
“I don’t know if I can let him go. It would be such a loss,” she said. “A tremendous loss.”
“What—the fingerprinting stuff?”
“No. I mean Alex. The surveillance project is all wrong for us.”
“Okay.” Jonathan wasn’t just relieved. He was delighted, liberated from the weight of Emily’s proprietary secret. He had been so careful for so long, and now he felt that electronic fingerprinting was practically in the public domain. “Forget fingerprinting, and tell Alex to fuck off and die.”
She laughed a little. “Oh,” she said, “I wish it were that easy.”
“It can be,” Jonathan told her.
“I wouldn’t let him have his way,” said Emily.
“Of course not.”
“And he absolutely could not accept my point of view.”
“Sweetie, he’s a shark. He’s not going to change course, ever. Why are you surprised?”
She was surprised because she was Emily, and she did not share Jonathan’s frank assessment of coworkers as losers, whiners, bozos, sharks. No, she imagined people were rational and courteous, as she was, and when they proved otherwise, she assumed that she could influence them to become that way. Dangerous thinking. When she was truthful, she expected to hear the truth. Reasonable, she expected reasonable behavior in return. She was young, inventive, fantastically successful. She trusted in the world, believing in poetic justice—that good ideas blossomed and bore fruit, while dangerous schemes were meant to wither on the vine. She had passions and petty jealousies like everybody else, but she was possessed of a serene rationality. At three, she had listened while her mother sang “Greensleeves” in the dark, and she’d asked: “Why are you singing ‘Greensleeves’ when my nightgown is blue?” Then Gillian had changed the song to “Bluesleeves,” and Emily had drifted off. Those songs were over now, Gillian long gone. Despite this loss—because of it—Emily was still that girl, seeking consonance and symmetry, logic, light.
18
“What’s that noise?” George asked.
“I have no idea.” Jess strained her ears to hear an odd trilling in the distance.
“Is that a cell phone?”
“Oh, it must be mine.” Jess jumped up. “Sorry.” She tripped over Sandra’s cat, and he snarled in outrage as she ran to the entryway where she and George and Colm had left their coats and bags. The outside pocket of her backpack glowed. “Hello? Hello? Hi, Emily. No, I didn’t lose it. I forgot I had it.” She held the phone too tightly and it beeped. “Could I call you later? I’m working…. Yes. It’s a huge project and we’re on deadline! Why are you laughing? Do you think I’m joking?” Jess looked back at the pair of camping tables George had set up in the living room. The tables were piled with folios and quartos arranged by language and by century. Colm was carrying in more books from the kitchen. “Seriously, I can’t talk,” Jess said. “I’ll call you later.”
They had just two more days to appraise the cookbooks. Colm and Jess were carrying and sorting, and George was typing in titles on his laptop. Conditions were difficult. Sandra hovered. Colm was allergic to the cat. They couldn’t wear shoes in the house, so they padded around in thick socks. In January Sandra seemed to skimp on heat. Colm wore a vest over his button-down shirt, and a tweed jacket on top of that. George wore a thick black pullover, and Jess a giant brown cardigan with a red knit hat pulled down over her ears. George had to suppress a smile the first time he saw the hat.
“What?” Jess demanded.
“Nothing.” George tried not to look at her.
They worked long hours like a sequestered jury, deliberating at the tables with copious evidence before them. There were eighteenth-century German cookbooks with fold-out diagrams of table settings, plates and platters arrayed like planets, little dishes orbiting larger courses. There were cookbooks small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, and others gargantuan, so that George used special foam book cradles to hold them open and protect their bindings. To assess these volumes was to consider tastes both delicate and omnivorous, to view exquisite illustrations like the French engravings of dessert spoons, or grotesque—like the plate in Le Livre Cuisinaire of tête de veau en tortue, a savory tart garnished with red crustaceans, a still life with claws and tentacles and beady eyes. The task would have been daunting even without the collector’s bookmarks, notes, and clippings; his menus on scrap paper, where he drew up imaginary feasts with inky thumbnails of partridges and steaming puddings: Pudding boiled, pudding of cream, pudding quaking, pudding shaking … Often as the collector wrote, his firm hand grew tremulous. His print would wobble, and his notes burst into erotopoetic menus, as recitative lifts into song:
First course:
Rabbits
Second:
Cockles
Third:
Loin of Veal
Fourth:
Quails
Fifth:
Sparrows
Sixth:
Jellies
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal so sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
“He knew his Wyatt.” Colm leaned back in his chair, pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up, ran his hand through his thick brown hair. Young fogey that he was, nearly British after his long studies of English literary history, he flushed red in patches on his Shropshire-lad cheeks, and fanned himself with one of George’s auction catalogs.
“Did you see this?” Jess plucked a small sheaf of notes from The Accomplisht Cook. The papers bookmarked a passage titled “To dress Tortoise.” Cast off the head, feet, and tail, and boil it in water, wine, and salt, being boil’d pull the shell asunder, and pick the meat from the skins, and the gall from the liver, save the eggs whole if a female, and stew the eggs, meat and liver in a dish with some grated nutmeg, a little sweet herbs minced small, and some sweet butter … “He went to town with this one.” Jess read the collector’s notes under her breath. “To begin with, Turtle soup, / to sail with, Turtle soup … / to dine on mince, and slices of quince, / to eat with a runcible spoo
n … What is a runcible spoon anyway?” She unfolded the collector’s notes to see his drawing. “That’s not a spoon! That’s more of a … hmm …”
“Focus,” George admonished as he examined Anna Wecker’s tiny 1679 Neu, Köstlich, und nutzliches Koch-buch. Worms had drilled through the later chapters, and the title page was much worn, but George marveled at the gorgeous typeface, so feminine, capitals all curves.
They had to hurry, but the longer they looked, the more convinced they became that they were holding treasures in their hands, and the more convinced they became, the harder it was to evaluate the books. The recipes entranced, and the collector’s notes distracted. They could not stop peeking at McClintock’s black-ink menus and thumbnail sketches.
“Jess!” George told her. “Put that back.”
She took a last look at the turtle-soup drawings, replaced them, and turned to another treasure, a fragile American quarto titled The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by “A Lady.” The book fell open in her hands to “Chap. XV.: Of Making Cakes &c.” To Ice a great Cake, Jess read, Take the whites of twenty-four eggs … and even as she read, new sketches fluttered onto her lap. A woman’s arm, a torso, three different drawings of a pair of legs. Legs crossed, legs spread, legs pressed close together—each study small, but revealing—tendrils of pubic hair, pointed toes—all drafted with a naturalist’s attention.
“I wonder who she was.”
“That’s Hannah Glasse,” George said after a quick search online. “And watch the binding please.”
“I didn’t mean the author.” Jess folded the little nudes away again.
“Oh, my God,” George gasped. “This is a signed Mrs. Fisher.”
Jess leaned over the table to view the book he held open in his hands. The book was slender, the pages smooth and unspotted, with clear simple type. Recipes for Sweet Pickle Pears, Sweet Pickle Prunes, Sweet Watermelon Rind Pickle, Onion Pickles.
Colm shook his head. “I think you’ve got to bring somebody in.”