The Cookbook Collector

“It tasted like a meal.”

  “That was hunger.”

  “It’s the cookbooks,” she confessed.

  “Occupational hazard.” He leaned back against the edge of the kitchen table. Her eyes were greener than he’d ever seen them. Her shirt button was broken, third from the top. “Are you still hungry?”

  She thought of Leon. Tell me what happens when he comes home. “Not really,” she lied.

  “Let me cook you dinner.”

  She shook her head.

  “No?” George asked softly, as he took the kitchen towel from her hands.

  He was wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, and she saw the scar traveling from the back of his hand up the inside of his forearm. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “Someone tried to fillet me.”

  Forestalling her next question, he opened what she had assumed to be a bank of cabinets.

  “Ohh.” She gazed inside a pristine refrigerator with glassy shelves and perfectly arranged vegetables, packages wrapped in white paper, fresh lemons lined up in a row.

  “What can’t you eat?”

  For just a moment, she could not remember. Then he closed the door.

  “No meat, of course,” she began earnestly. “No poultry, no fish, no living creature of any kind, and no product of any living creature, so no milk, no cheese, no butter, no eggs, nothing dairy, and no refined sugar, no white flour, no white rice—nothing white …”

  “How about white wine?”

  He went to his butler’s pantry and brought back two glasses and a bottle, ever so slightly chilled. “This is a Kistler Chardonnay. See that?” He poured out what looked like liquid gold. “It’s known for its color.” He handed her a glass half full and watched her take the tiniest of sips. He could see she didn’t drink, and even the Chard was strong for her, and curious to her tongue. But she liked it, and quickly sipped again.

  “Yum.”

  “Yum?”

  “It’s good,” she said.

  “Do you taste citrus?” he asked her. “Mineral?”

  “No,” she admitted cheerfully. The wine was light and tickling, not heavy or too sweet like others she had tried. Sun poured through the kitchen’s tall windows and played across the floor so that the room felt warmer. George himself seemed different, slimmer than she remembered, and more fluid in his movements. A fish in water, she thought, as he took out pans and tongs and a cutting board.

  “All right, this is what I have. Dungeness crab. Fresh salmon—by which I mean, caught yesterday. And asparagus.”

  “I guess I could have that,” she said.

  “Crab and salmon and asparagus?”

  “The asparagus.”

  “Good, we’ll have asparagus—with salmon on the side.” He set a pan on the stove for the fish, and began washing and trimming the asparagus. He spread the stalks in a roasting pan, drizzled them with olive oil, and popped the pan in the oven. Then he unwrapped the pink salmon. “This is so fresh, you can almost eat it just like this. Sashimi.” He smiled to see Jess back away. “We’ll melt butter in the pan and sear the fish and then we’ll eat it with a squeeze of lemon—or at least I will. Did you finish that already?” He poured her more.

  She’d drunk two glasses by the time they sat down at the kitchen table, and she felt springy, a little bouncy in her chair as she nibbled her emerald-green asparagus, and he served himself the salmon.

  “I like this way of roasting,” she said.

  “Just remember to sprinkle kosher salt when you take them out of the oven.”

  “Salt sings,” said Jess. The collector had copied that from Neruda. “Have you seen McClintock’s asparagus drawings?”

  “Show me.”

  “Not while we’re eating!”

  “Right.” He poured out the last of the wine.

  “Have you noticed his thing for asparagus?”

  “And cabbages,” said George.

  “Yes! He’s got heads of cabbage and cross sections and there’s a drawing of this veined cabbage leaf. I think it must have been his botanical training.” Jess was talking faster than usual, but then, she never had a chance to discuss the cookbooks, and she was brimming with impressions. “He draws asparagus and cabbages, but he’s obsessed with artichokes. He draws them more than any other vegetable. Why artichokes?”

  George drained his glass. “The artichoke is a sexy beast. Thorns to cut you, leaves to peel, lighter and lighter as you strip away the outer layers, until you reach the soft heart’s core.”

  Jess laughed and finished her third glass.

  “Try this.” George offered her a bit of salmon on his fork.

  The laughter stopped. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t eat other creatures.”

  “This creature is already dead. You’re not hurting him. Let’s say he died for me. I’ll take the blame. I bought him so I killed him. Now you can have a taste.”

  She shook her head.

  “But it’s so good.” George offered her the flaky pink fish on his fork. “It tastes so good.”

  “I’m not eating that poor forked animal.”

  “Just try,” George cajoled, scooting his chair around the corner to her side of the table. “Just one bite.” He held the fork almost to her lips.

  “George,” she said, “don’t you have certain things you would never do—on principle?”

  “Arbitrary rules?”

  “Any rules. Not necessarily arbitrary ones.”

  “I have beliefs,” he said. “I have values. I think rules are overrated.”

  “Is that, like, a sixties thing?” She looked at him questioningly, as though she were gazing back at him through the mists of time.

  “Someday you’ll get asked about the Reagan years,” he said.

  “You should try rules,” she pressed. “Then your beliefs would have practical applications, and you wouldn’t have to drift from one meal to the next. Instead of being so ad hoc, you could rely on a consistent system. Instead of making up your life as you go along, you’d have a set path. You wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. I think actually structure might be the key to oneness.”

  “I think you’re a little drunk,” said George.

  “I think you’re trying to impeach me.”

  He laughed even as he protested. “That’s not true.”

  “Well, I’m not drunk at all,” she warned him.

  “And I’m not trying at all,” he retorted playfully.

  “Hmm.” Her expression was both tender and reproachful. Her delicate hands rested on the table.

  “Are you worried?” With his index finger George drew a question mark on her palm.

  Almost imperceptibly she shook her head.

  The light was shifting, the sky in the windows no longer bright, but watery, sea blue. They were close now, but the change was like nightfall. Neither knew exactly when it happened. They had been sitting apart, and now they found themselves in chairs pushed together. They had been talking, and now they touched instead, fingertips to wrists, and George could feel Jess’s quick pulse, and she could feel his.

  “Are you in love with him?” George said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Are you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “For the obvious reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “That I want to know.”

  Lightly her fingertip glided over the back of his hand, tracing his scar up his arm.

  “You’re tickling me.” He took her hand again.

  “Did it hurt?” she asked him.

  “Yes, it hurt,” he said.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “An old girlfriend.”

  “You must have been nasty to her.”

  “Why do you assume it was my fault?” he asked gently. “Even if it was—who goes after her lover with a paring knife? She was completely unbalanced. She did teach me how to cook.”

  “Maybe you were such a slo
w learner she got frustrated.”

  “I wasn’t a slow learner.”

  “No?” she teased. Her eyes were much darker in the evening light.

  “I’m a quick study,” he informed her. “I’m an excellent cook, but you’ll never know, because you don’t eat anything.”

  “I eat lots of things,” she said.

  “Judging from the peach, I’d say you eat a few things very well.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you?”

  His thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. “Because I wanted to.”

  “That’s the only reason?”

  “And because I never see you,” he added.

  “You can see me whenever you like,” she told him. “You stay away.”

  “Did you wish I would come home?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Did you ever look around the house? Did you go upstairs?”

  “No,” she said, although she had thought about it. Concepcion’s presence had prevented her. “I would never wander through your house without an invitation.”

  “Come.” He took her hand.

  She remembered climbing the stairs at the Tree House for the first time. “I think I am a little drunk.”

  “We’ll go slow,” he promised as he led her up the stairs. “These are my nautical charts and surveyors’ plans.” He turned on the lights in the stairwell, and she saw the antique charts, the hand-drawn schemes of San Francisco Bay. “You can see I have plenty of maps. This is original stained glass here on the landing. You can’t tell at night, but I had it cleaned and restored. This place was a mess when I bought it. We copied these stair treads and spindles. This is my office.” He showed her a spacious room with a great desk in the center, and a computer and a photocopier. “These are guest rooms.” He opened one door after another.

  “How many do you have?”

  “Three. This is my room.” He switched on the lights, and when she blinked in the sudden glare, he turned them down again. His room was huge, with great windows above the bed, stacks of books on the smooth floor, a low music stand and chair, a cello in an open case.

  Find someone musical, Jess thought. “Will you play for me?”

  “Of course.” He sat down in his chair, but he did not reach for his cello. He held out his arms for Jess instead.

  She sat on his lap and tucked up her legs, and he felt her weight, and her warmth, and he held still; he nearly held his breath, as she relaxed into his arms.

  “My mother wrote about music,” Jess said.

  “Was she a critic?”

  “I can hear your heartbeat,” she whispered, resting her head on his chest.

  “Was she a musician?” he asked her, as he stroked her hair.

  “I think she might have been, if she’d had the chance,” Jess said. “Or maybe not. She was an amazing baker too. That’s what everybody says.”

  “You only know from hearsay? Don’t tell me you were vegan even then.”

  “I wasn’t vegan. I was too young to remember.”

  George’s hand stopped for a moment, resting lightly on her head.

  “When will you play for me?” she asked him.

  “Soon.”

  “Did you learn as a child?”

  “Mm-hmm.” His lips brushed her ear.

  “I wish I’d kept playing the piano. Everybody says that, but of course you imagine you’d play well. You don’t imagine …”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “No.” She looked up at him quickly, as if to gauge his response. “I’ll tell you something terrible,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t even think about her. I’m sure Emily thinks about her all the time, but I don’t. I just …”

  “Just what?”

  “Don’t have her,” said Jess, muffled, burying her head again.

  He continued stroking her long hair. She kept her head down, and listened to his steady heart.

  “Jess?” he said at last.

  “What?”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.” She looked up at him and her eyes were bright, but no tears stained her face. “Don’t worry. I’m very cheerful.” She sat up straight to make the point. “I’m not a weepy person. I wouldn’t cry, even after too much wine.”

  “You can cry. I don’t have rules. You can do anything you want.”

  “Anything?”

  “Almost anything.”

  “So you have some rules.”

  “I said ‘almost’ so you’d think I was less of an ancient libertine,” he said.

  “Libertine? You mean old hippie.”

  “I was never a hippie.”

  “Right. You’re just a libertine from the ancien régime.”

  He couldn’t help laughing at the playful way she turned on him.

  “Am I so funny?” she asked, laughing with him. She rubbed her nose against his. “Am I?”

  “Come here, you.” He pulled her closer.

  “I’m here now,” she said, and her voice was so warm and low that for a moment he closed his eyes. “I’m here already.”

  She caressed his cheek, and touched the tender skin under his eyes. His lips brushed her chin, her nose, her forehead, and finally her soft mouth, as they began to kiss.

  PART SIX

  Risk

  August 2001

  23

  Emily sensed that Jess was keeping something from her. She could tell by the way her sister hid behind her hair.

  “Is your cell still working?” Emily asked her.

  “I think so.”

  “Then why don’t you use it?”

  “I do. Sometimes.” Her hair fell like a curtain over her face.

  They were sitting in Emily’s white condo, in the living room, and they were sharing a vegan chocolate cake Jess had brought for Emily’s thirtieth birthday. The big celebration was going to be with Jonathan that weekend at Lake Tahoe, but Jess had come for the actual day, August 8, and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the collection of Gillian’s birthday letters, hers and Emily’s together, in her lap.

  For your eleventh birthday … For your twelfth birthday … For your twentieth birthday … I would like to see you at twenty. I think that you’ll be tall, and I want to know if I am right.

  “What you should do,” said Jess, “is print these out on archival stock and make a scrapbook. This isn’t good paper, and this ink”—she pointed to the dot matrix printing—“see, it’s already fading.”

  I do miss knowing you at twenty, Emily. Sometimes I’m quite sad about it, and then at other times I think I should be grateful for knowing you as long as I have. I’m greedy, like everybody else. I want to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. It’s never enough, is it? It’s not enough to have children. We want to see birthdays, and weddings, and grandchildren as well. I’d like to see them all. Of course there are other children I might have had, or other lives I might have lived, but I don’t dwell on those. Why, then, should I mourn this one? Because this is the life I know, and you and your sister are the daughters I love. All the rest slips into the background—the realm of the unborn. That’s another way to look at death, isn’t it? Simply the part of life that’s unexpressed. The might-haves and could-have-beens …

  “Jess,” said Emily, “what’s going on with you?”

  Jess looked up, startled. “Nothing,” she lied.

  “You seem …”

  “What?”

  “Evasive.”

  “Who, me?”

  “Why are you so quiet?”

  “Because I’m reading,” said Jess.

  “You never liked to read her letters before.”

  Jess thought about this for a moment. “But they’re more interesting now.”

  She was spending the night at Emily’s place, and long after her sister went to sleep, Jess stayed up reading and rereading her mother’s letters. What was it about them? What was it she had overlooke
d before? Their secrecy. The obliqueness of the language drew her in, where before it had confused and bored her. I might have been someone else, her mother wrote. I might have married someone else. I might have lived a different way, but I chose this life, and I chose you.

  The might-haves and could-have-beens, undescribed and unexplained. How had Jess missed them? She had been curious enough at twelve to read Gillian’s letters all at once, devouring those messages to her older self, but she had always looked for information. Her mother was guarded about her illness, and her feelings, and her past, all the things that Jess wanted to find out, and after reading the letters one after another, Jess had turned away in disappointment. It was Gillian’s reserve that made the letters interesting now. Those sentences Jess had always read as generalities looked different. I might have lived a different way. What did Gillian mean? I might have married someone else. Who would that have been? Perhaps after weeks with the cookbooks, Jess was overly sensitive. After so many hours pondering the collector’s notes, she saw subtexts and secrets everywhere. Even so, she began to read her mother’s words as coded messages. Dear Emily, at sweet sixteen. Never been kissed? Wished you’d been kissed? Wonder if you might have been? I didn’t wonder about kissing when I was your age, although I would later. I didn’t like to think about the future when I had one, and now that my future is running out, I think about it all the time.

  “Gillian!” Jess whispered in surprise. She stared at the picture her mother had enclosed, a color photo of a laughing freckled woman in a sundress and a floppy yellow hat. An outdoor picture, a lawn chair in the background, her mother holding out a piece of chocolate cake. And as she looked, it occurred to her that she had never seen an earlier image of her mother. There were no black-and-white photos in the albums in her father’s house. No baby pictures or childhood-recital photos. Hadn’t Gillian performed in piano recitals for her teacher? And didn’t anybody take pictures? There were none. There was only the story Richard told, which was that Gillian never got along with her parents in London. That they had been so angry when she’d married a non-Jew that they cut her off completely. Therefore, Jess and Emily had never met their Jewish grandparents, or anyone from that side of the family. Gillian’s parents never spoke to her again, and she never spoke of them—or wrote about them either. And yet she said in her letters to Emily, I know from my own experience that some memories are indelible. This comforts me, because, of course, I should like to be indelible for you.