The Cookbook Collector

  For once they could speak freely. Sandra was tending the front yard—at least for the moment. She never stepped outside for long, and when she did, hacking back the blackberry canes, she didn’t venture far. Through the window they could see her in her old straw hat.

  George told Colm, “If we bring in a specialist, we risk another rival.” He’d informed Sandra that he knew Raj was looking at the books, and he’d tried to find out who else she had invited in, but she only turned away.

  “You could get a scholar and pay him up front as a consultant and he doesn’t get to bid,” said Colm.

  “It wouldn’t work that way.”

  Colm whipped out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I think you’d get a more accurate estimate—maybe lower than what we would come up with.”

  “Maybe higher.” George turned back to the reference books and catalogs in front of him. “I just don’t know what Raj is offering,” he murmured. “If I had a …”

  His voice faded as Jess returned to the kitchen for another stack. How strange the disemboweled room looked with its cabinets open, emptied of their treasures. A skin-deep kitchen, cupboards bare, while the countertops remained cluttered with cheap cookware, spotted bananas, coupons, receipts, bills. A calligraphed card lay open next to the toaster.

  “Come in here! You have to see this.”

  “Don’t tell me you found another Gouffé,” Colm called back.

  “No, it’s really strange.”

  “Could you just bring it out?” George didn’t want to stop typing.

  But she was afraid to pick up the card. Dramatically, she thought: What if Sandra caught her prying? What if Jess’s fingerprints were on it? “No, you have to come here.”

  Reluctantly, Colm came in. He stood with Jess and the two of them gazed at the card. “George …,” Colm called in a weary voice, “you’d better have a look.”

  Evidently unworried about fingerprints, George picked up the card and read it twice.

  A DONATION TO THE GAY AND LESBIAN LEGAL ALLIANCE

  HAS BEEN MADE

  IN HONOR OF SANDRA MCCLINTOCK

  BY

  RAJEEV CHANDRA

  “Raj!” George was amazed at his ingenious friend.

  “I didn’t know Sandra was gay,” Jess said.

  The three of them stared at the card in George’s hand. “I don’t know what she is,” George said at last.

  “Maybe we should find out,” Colm suggested.

  “We aren’t even half done.”

  “Why isn’t Raj sorting?” Jess asked.

  “I’m sure he’s seen everything,” George said nervously.

  “How do you know?”

  Because that would be just like Raj, George thought, to assess everything in advance and on his own time and then make his own preemptive offer. “He’s very experienced,” George said. “And very clever.”

  “He knows Sandra,” Jess said. Softly, Geoffrey slipped into the room. On little cat feet, he sprang onto the kitchen counter. Unconsciously, Jess lowered her voice in front of the cat. “What have we found out about her?”

  “I know enough,” George said. “She needs money. She wants to play me against Raj for the best price. She claims she’s afraid to sell the books. She’s nuts.”

  “That’s not the way to think about it,” Jess said. “You’ve got everything backward.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “This strategy of assessing books is wrong.”

  “And what would you suggest, Jess?” George inquired.

  “Hmm,” Jess said, delaying her answer just a moment, for the simple reason that she enjoyed seeing George exasperated. “I would suggest that instead of focusing on the collection, you think about the owner.”

  “The lichenologist.”

  “No, I mean Sandra. She’s the one you should assess. You need to figure out what she really wants.”

  “Money,” said George.

  “That would be easy,” Jess said. “I don’t think it’s purely money that she’s after. I think she wants to tell someone her story.”

  “Oh, God,” said George.

  “She wants to be heard.”

  “Obviously, Raj has been listening.” Colm replaced the calligraphed card on the counter.

  “But she’s looking for the best listener.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” said George, “because hearing this woman’s superstitious, delusional …”

  “How do you know that she’s delusional?” Jess asked him.

  “I don’t have patience,” George said.

  “Don’t you want this collection?” Jess pressed. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  They heard Sandra at the door, and rushed back to their places.

  Sandra did not say hello. Well aware they had been whispering, she set her hat atop the bookcase full of cut glass and marched upstairs into—her bedroom? Her study? They heard her shut the door.

  Jess and Colm looked at each other. Jess mouthed to George, “Go talk to her.”

  George shook his head and put his finger to his lips.

  You’re making a mistake, she scribbled on a note card. They all looked at Sandra’s closed door. Something was up, Jess thought. One of them would have to speak to Sandra. One of them had to learn the thing Raj had already discovered: her history, her crisis, her fantasy.

  George tried to keep working but he stopped, hands hovering above the keyboard.

  Colm took off his glasses. He had to sneeze, but he could not. Then he had to sneeze again. He saw cat hair everywhere. “Send her,” he said, and he meant Jess. “Send her.”

  It was one thing to theorize about Sandra, and quite another to climb the creaky blond wood stairs and face her closed door. “Sandra,” Jess called softly, but she heard no sound.

  She descended the stairs halfway and looked back. Colm pantomimed his suggestion to knock again.

  Up she went. “Sandra,” Jess called, knocking louder.

  “It’s unlocked,” Sandra said, and Jess let herself in, shutting the door behind her.

  The study was so tight that when Sandra turned around in her swivel chair, she almost ran over Jess’s toes. The room was slanted, tucked under the heavy angled roof of the house; its single window, large and low, looking out on the riotous garden; the desk, rough boards, built under the window. The walls were lined with scientific journals. The Lichenologist, International Journal of Mycology and Lichenology, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Moss and Liverwort. A framed black-and-white photo stood on one shelf. A serious and homely looking man in wire-rimmed glasses.

  Sandra was wearing a long flowing batik dress, but her posture was schoolmarmish as she sat up paying bills, stamping and addressing envelopes; her mouth tight, puckered in concentration. Jess had a fleeting memory—or was it her imagination? The image of her mother sewing, with her mouth tight, full of pins.

  “What is it?” Sandra asked, glancing up.

  Jess took off her knit hat and held it in her hands. “Your cookbooks are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.”

  “Have you seen a lot of cookbooks?”

  “They’re the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen,” Jess amended. “I just want to assure you that we are treating them with respect. And we realize that they have sentimental value.”

  “They don’t have sentimental value for me,” Sandra said, and she turned back to her bills.

  “Oh!” Jess could not conceal her surprise. “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for?”

  “I misread you,” Jess said. “I thought you were upset.”

  “I am upset.” Sandra’s voice caught. “I’m upset about my daughter. I’m upset about my uncle. I’m upset about the situation.”

  Jess might have escaped then into the other room. Perhaps she should have, but she could hear the desperation in Sandra’s voice.

  She knelt down level with Sandra. “What is the situation?”

  “I promised my uncle I wouldn’
t sell.”

  “Do you think maybe he would understand?”

  Sandra thought about this. “No,” she said. “He was in the hospital. He weighed nothing. He had no children. He was ninety-three years old. He was very clear. He said, ‘Sandra, you’re my only niece. I’m leaving you the house. Do anything you want with it, but don’t sell the books.’”

  “Wow,” said Jess.

  Sandra nodded grimly, appreciating Jess’s awestruck response. “He said, ‘Promise me that you’ll take care of them.’”

  “But did you have any idea?”

  “No!”

  “Didn’t you come over to the house to see them? Didn’t you ever see them in the kitchen?”

  “I lived in Oakland. He lived here, and he was reclusive. We weren’t close. I came twice, and both times he offered me iced tea. He never invited me inside his kitchen. He wouldn’t even let me clear away my glass.”

  “When he said don’t sell the books, you thought he meant this stuff?” Jess pointed to the study bookcases.

  “Of course.”

  “How can you make a promise when you don’t know exactly what you’re promising?”

  Sandra closed her eyes. “That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I keep telling myself. I’m afraid of him.”

  Jess nodded. Instinctively, she understood what George did not. That as far as Sandra was concerned, Tom McClintock still hovered in the house.

  “I believe in past lives,” Sandra explained, and she opened her gray eyes. “I lived before.”

  Like a girl in a labyrinth, Jess tried to follow. “Really?”

  “I believe we’ve all lived before, and will again.”

  Someone else might have laughed, or cringed, or backed away. Jess asked, “What were you?”

  “A Russian princess,” Sandra said quite seriously. “In the days of the Tsars.”

  Which Tsar? Jess wondered, but thought it best not to inquire. She knew the kind of Russian princess Sandra meant: the kind who wore silk and velvet and danced in palaces and rode in sleighs through fairy-tale snows in the early pages of Tolstoy’s novels, until narrowly escaping execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. “What will you be next?”

  “That’s what frightens me,” said Sandra. “Every life hinges on the one before. And what I do now will shape …”

  “I understand,” said Jess. Emily would have asked: Why is it that those of us who were serfs in some past life never remember the experience? But Jess thought: How dreadful to feel that guilt accrues like debt from this world to the next.

  “Do you think your uncle is living a new life?”

  Sandra nodded.

  Jess looked at the photograph on the desk. Unsmiling, weak-chinned, the lichenologist seemed to peer out at the world from behind his glasses. “And do you think he’s sort of—watching you?”

  She closed her eyes again.

  “And you’ll join him there—and then maybe he’ll punish you?”

  She closed her eyes tighter.

  “You had no idea what he was giving you,” Jess said. “How could you have any idea what these books are worth?”

  Sandra’s eyes popped open. “How much are they worth?” she asked, and Jess felt a prick of fear; she felt the difficulty of her position, for Sandra was no longer keening and mystical.

  “We’ll have to finish the appraisal,” Jess said cautiously, “and then George will make the offer.”

  “I don’t like him,” Sandra said in a low voice. “I don’t think I can trust him.”

  “You can,” Jess assured her. “He may come off as impatient or arrogant at times, but he’s a good man.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I’ve worked for him more than a year.”

  “And what do you know about him?” Sandra asked.

  Jess considered the question. “He’s old-fashioned,” she said at last. “He has a sense of history. If he had a past life, he would have been a gentleman—even though he acts so adversarial. He loves books more than anything in the world.”

  “But will he keep the collection intact?”

  “I think so.”

  “Will he promise?”

  Jess thought about the books George flipped regularly, the Whitman he had sold within days of acquisition, the small collection of early twentieth-century poets he had bought from a dealer in Marin and quickly dispersed. “You’ll have to talk to him,” Jess said.

  “I don’t like talking to him,” said Sandra. “I don’t want to sell these books. Do you understand? They’re private. They are my uncle’s past life.”

  “Then maybe he doesn’t need them anymore?” Jess ventured.

  Sandra bristled, and instantly Jess saw her mistake. In Sandra’s mind everything was necessary. Every artifact counted in some grand celestial tally.

  “I don’t want to sell them. I would never sell them for myself. My daughter needs money.”

  For a moment Jess wondered whether this daughter was real. Perhaps she was imaginary too? A past daughter? But she followed Sandra down this passageway as well. She chose to believe her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s happened to her?”

  “She’s losing her children,” Sandra said.

  “What do you mean? Divorce?”

  “Leslie raised them, but her partner is the biological mother.”

  So Leslie is the one Raj meant to honor, Jess thought.

  “You have no idea what it’s like,” said Sandra.

  “I don’t,” Jess admitted humbly.

  “Leslie was the one who cared for them. She was the one who woke with them and fed them, and pushed them in the stroller to the playground every day. She was the stay-at-home mother. She dedicated her life to those boys. They’re all she’s got, and her ex took them to New Jersey.”

  That’s why she needs money. Legal fees, Jess thought.

  “I’m worried,” Sandra said. “I can’t sleep at night. My daughter hasn’t seen her children in over a year. And I’m afraid …” Here, her voice broke entirely. “They’re only five and three. I’m sure they don’t remember her.”

  Jess answered gently. “You never know what children can remember. I lost my mother when I was five, but I still remember her. I think I remember her sewing, and I remember standing on a chair and baking with her. And also …” Jess searched for another memory she could put into words, some event she might produce, although most of her memories were flickers: light and shadow, hedges along the sidewalk, her mother’s white hands pulling her away when she tried to lick—what was it?—a fence? She loved the tang of metal. The ladder to the slide?

  “You’re missing the point,” said Sandra.

  Again Jess felt that this was a test, and it was no ordinary exam: not a test of what Jess knew, but of what Sandra believed. “Your situation is more complicated than your uncle could have imagined,” said Jess. “You wouldn’t be selling for a profit. You’d sell to pay your lawyers. In that case, don’t you think that he’d approve?”

  Sandra searched Jess’s face.

  “I don’t know Raj. I don’t know what Raj would do with these books, but George appreciates them. He’ll study them—and so will I, and so will Colm. We’re not just collectors. We’re readers.”

  Sandra nodded.

  Emboldened, Jess continued, “And wherever your uncle is, he’ll understand, because the point is, children shouldn’t have to remember their mother.”

  Then tears started in Sandra’s eyes. All the tension seemed to leave her body, and she sighed, a drawn-out sigh. “Yes,” she said, and then, almost a sob, “Yes. That’s true.”

  When Sandra opened the study door, George and Colm started up. Colm raised his eyebrows questioningly; George searched her face, anxious for the verdict. Jess didn’t say a word in front of Sandra. She couldn’t gloat. She pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. Oh, she’d done well—and George and Colm didn’t even know it yet. There they were, waiting in suspense. She bit her lip, determined to keep a
poker face, but her cheeks began to dimple anyway. She’d passed the test: She’d got Sandra’s Sphinxian riddle right. Princess in the morning. Bitter in the afternoon. Grandma in the evening. What am I? Lonely.

  Eager, mystified, George looked at Jess, and she met his gaze. Who knew that Jess, who was such a terrible salesman, would be a brilliant buyer? Jess hadn’t known herself—but here she was, victorious. Didn’t you think that I’d win her over? Jess asked George with her eyes. Didn’t you think that I could win these books for you?

  PART FIVE

  Free Fall

  March through August 2001

  19

  The markets swooned. Like a beautiful diver, the Nasdaq bounced three times into the air and flipped, somersaulting on the way down. Tech stocks once priced at two hundred, and then seventy-three, and then twenty-one, now sold for less than two dollars a share. Companies valued in the billions were worth just millions, and with a blood rush, investors thought, So this is gravity, this is free fall. This is what the end feels like, ripping through water. But the end was not the end. There were still more ends to come.

  Looking back, analysts could predict the crash. They spoke of weak fundamentals, softening in the tech sector, reckless speculation. But who can measure appetite, or predict the limits of desire? Who can chart love’s parabola, from acquaintance to infatuation to estrangement? Multiply by millions buying and selling. Small exits accrued into a great migration, darkening the sun. So many hearts beat rapidly together, so many investors rose up calling to one another as they took flight, that it seemed there were no buyers left, except the day traders screaming obscenities on message boards, scavenging and wheeling like gulls.

  Rabbi Helfgott was one such day trader, although he did not post on message boards. Waking before dawn to log in as the markets opened in New York, he made a few dollars, even as the crash wiped out his portfolio. He blinked sometimes and shook his head, as his investments melted away. Veritech at two, Janus at a dollar fifty, ISIS at seventy-five cents. Nevertheless, he remained hopeful. He had a sanguine nature, prayed three times a day, and believed the Messianic age was imminent. Therefore, he was better prepared than most for market turbulence.