The Cookbook Collector

  “Who was Mrs. McClintock?” Jess blurted out.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you sure your uncle never married?”

  “He never married.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t marry a Janet McClintock?” Jess asked.

  “Of course I’m sure,” said Sandra. “Janet McClintock was my mother.”

  George did not know where Jess had gone. She had left her books out. McLintock lay open on the book cradle. The laptop stood open as well, as though Jess intended to return, but it was past five and she did not come back. He called her on her cell, but she didn’t answer.

  He poured himself a glass of wine and began to think of all the things he might have said or done to offend her. He remembered that the day before they’d had a little spat about her article. They were sitting in the living room on his couch, a massive low-slung piece with great wood slabs for arms. He said that she should write something quick and accessible with gorgeous illustrations for Gastronomica. She insisted that this was selling out, that she was developing an argument far more scholarly, with serious notes and tables. She said she had fifty-one pages already, and he’d laughed and warned her not to get lost in all that material.

  Then she’d demanded, “Do I look like someone who gets lost easily?”

  “Yes,” he’d teased, but she hadn’t been in the mood, and had snatched a heavy throw pillow, upholstered green, and smacked him upside the head.

  They had laughed at the time, but perhaps she was still angry. Or perhaps Leon had suddenly returned, and Jess had decided she would not see George again. Was there some change of heart? Or some emergency? Should he try to reach her sister?

  By the time Jess arrived, he had been waiting almost two hours, and he was in such an anxious state that he was almost in no mood to see her. But there she was, out of breath and streaked with sweat from racing up the stairs. “I’ve solved it,” she cried. “I know who she was.”

  And she showed George how she had picked out Janet from the menu, and told him how she had rushed to tell Sandra. “He was in love with Janet when he was young. I think Janet was McClintock’s Laura and his Beatrice, and that’s why he drew her over and over and he read her into all his cookbooks.”

  “What did Sandra say?”

  “She was very offended!” Jess exclaimed. “She said her uncle didn’t even like to eat. She said that he was extremely thin. She told me her mother was happily married for sixty-two years, and she was perfectly sensible and lucid until the day she died at eighty-three.”

  George smiled.

  But Jess was indignant. “I thought she’d thank me!”

  “For inventing an embarrassing story about her mother?”

  “I didn’t invent it,” Jess said. “I know I’m right. Maybe it was an unrequited love, but she was the one.”

  You’re the one, thought George.

  “You’d think she’d enjoy knowing,” Jess said. “She’s convinced she was a Russian princess in a past life. Why can’t Janet and Tom have had a past life too? Why is that so shocking?”

  “Let me take you out to dinner.”

  “George,” said Jess. “Look at me.”

  “I am looking at you.”

  “I’m covered with cat hair.”

  “Come take a bath.”

  “I don’t have fresh clothes.”

  “We’ll stop at your place and you can change.”

  Jess ignored this. “Charles Dickens was obsessed with his sister-in-law. He never got over her.”

  “Yes, and I’m sure the family loved to hear about it.”

  Jess folded her arms across her chest. “And Tolstoy didn’t really model Natasha on his wife.”

  “You’re upset,” George murmured.

  “It’s just so anticlimactic—to put together the pieces of the puzzle and then to be …”

  “Shh.” He kissed her.

  “Exactly. To be shushed like that. As though I were arriving on her doorstep to blackmail her or something. As though I had something on her. She says she’s upset about her grandchildren. Her daughter still can’t get custody.”

  “That explains it,” said George, frowning. “Don’t you think she’d be preoccupied?”

  “I thought she might be …”

  “She’s not going to be grateful to you for suggesting that her mother had some kind of affair with her husband’s brother. You got carried away, Jess.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Come here.”

  She didn’t come.

  He took her hand. “You have to be careful not to fall in love with your material.”

  She relented a little. “Maybe.”

  “I thought she’d be more imaginative,” Jess told George as he ran the water in the bath. She perched on the edge of the tub, which was claw-footed, fathoms deep, and she pulled off one grubby sock and George pulled off the other.

  “About her own family?”

  Jess wriggled out of her jeans. “Don’t fill it all the way.” She peeled off her T-shirt and bra. “It’s a waste of …”

  “Get in,” George said.

  She sat in the water, tucking her knees up to her chest. “If someone told me something about my mother, I wouldn’t be defensive like that. To me that kind of information would be golden.”

  “Why?” George climbed in after her.

  “Why? Because it’s … it’s contact. It means if you know how to read them, underneath the words there’s life.”

  He sat behind her, soaping her shoulders, her arms, her breasts. “You’re going to be a historian,” he said.

  “I am.” With a little splash, she turned over in the water and looked into his dark eyes, and she saw that he wasn’t laughing at her. He didn’t look bemused, or skeptical. She kissed him. She slipped into his arms, and they were closer than before.

  When they stepped inside Greens that night and stood together before the great piece of driftwood at the entrance, when they took their table at the wall-high windows and looked out at the Pacific, they were like travelers arriving in a new city. They were like newlyweds in fancy clothes. His sports jacket, her sleeveless dress; his tie, her mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. He ate fish and she ate polenta and they drank a bottle of ’97 Chateau Montelena. “Best year since ’94,” George told Jess, and they toasted the McClintocks, Tom, and Janet, and Mrs. McLintock too. They sat at the great windows and they watched the seagulls diving between waves and sky, and thought but didn’t say how strange it was to go out like other couples.

  Jess said, “Do you think marmalet of apples actually tasted like something?”

  And George said, “You never talk about your father.”

  “It couldn’t have been bitter like real marmalade,” Jess said.

  “You don’t get along with him, do you?” George said.

  “No,” Jess confessed. “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t like me very much.”

  George trapped her legs between his underneath the table. “That can’t be true.”

  “Well,” said Jess, “he’s all computers. He’s all math, and I’m humanities. He’s all for financial independence—and I am too! But I’m not … really independent yet. He has no time for religion, philosophy, or poetry. Fortunately, he’s got Emily.”

  “You must take after your mother,” George said.

  “Maybe.”

  “And he loved her.”

  “I think so,” Jess said. “But who knows? It was such a long time ago.”

  “When he reads your essay, he’ll understand what you can do,” George said.

  “I don’t care whether he reads my essay or not.” Jess drained her glass and he saw that her face was flushed. “You understand what I can do.”

  “That’s a complicated thing to say.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “I can’t take his place,” George said warily.

  Jess slipped off her shoes and rubbed her bar
e feet against George’s ankles until he couldn’t help smiling. “I never asked you to.”

  Giddy with each other and the wine, they strolled outside through the Presidio, the old fort now housing restaurants and galleries. Jess explained that she wanted to devise a matrix for scarcity and abundance, frugality and profligacy. She thought that sweetness represented, and in some periods misrepresented, a sense of surplus and shared pleasure. “I don’t think taste is purely biological,” she said. “I think it’s economically, historically, and culturally constructed as well. Sweetness means different things depending on availability, custom, farming, trade….”

  She was shivering, and George took off his jacket. “Here, sweetness.” He helped her into it and laughed at the way her hands disappeared inside the sleeves.

  “Context is key—so the question is, What carries over? What can we still know about sweet and sour? Bitterness. What persists from generation to generation? Do we taste the same things?”

  He kissed her, sucking her lower lip and then her tongue. “I think so,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Wait, I’m not finished.”

  “Continue,” he said. “Please.”

  Testing herself, pushing back against her fear of heights, she climbed atop the thick two-foot wall edging the Presidio’s park, and walked above him, while he held her hand, steadying her from below.

  “You see, I’m fine walking on this wall,” she declared, even as she gripped his fingers. “You see? I’ve been practicing, and I can climb very well.”

  George looked up at her. “You like to tower over me, don’t you?”

  She did. At that moment she wasn’t in the least afraid of towering. She was invincible. And she explained her theory about cloves, and she told him how the word sweet meant “unsalted” in English cookbooks. Sweet meant “fresh,” not “sugared” as one might think. She spoke of candying and conserves, and those mysterious syrups in McLintock. Syrup of Violets, Syrup of Clove Gelly-Flowers, Syrup of Red Poppies, Syrup of Pale Roses. How did pale roses taste?

  They reached the end of the wall and she kept talking. She grew more and more scholarly, investigative, joyful. Absorbed in her lecture, he didn’t expect her to jump down just when she did.

  “Give me a little warning!” he exclaimed as he caught her in his arms, but he didn’t want a warning, he wanted her, and he wrapped her in his arms, his chin brushing the rough weave of his own jacket.

  “What’s to become of us?” She laughed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just as long as we don’t really … you know …” She meant fall in love.

  “Too late,” George said.

  24

  Love was all very well, but in the world outside, survival mattered most. Veritech was strapped for cash, ISIS on the brink. Emily felt she had no time to breathe, and Jonathan grew warlike, confident as ever, but edgy from lack of sleep.

  “Mel!” Jonathan sang out when Mel returned from lunch. “Exactly the person I wanted to see.”

  Mel stood at the elevator, and his lower back tightened with the familiar mix of dread and pleasure to be singled out.

  “Job fair in L.A. September eleventh.”

  “I didn’t think we were hiring,” Mel replied.

  “I want the ISIS booth there anyway,” said Jonathan. “I want to make our presence known.”

  People were gathering, waiting for the elevators. Movers wheeled boxes out on handcarts. ISIS was decamping to cheaper, East Cambridge real estate.

  “Maybe we should discuss this in your office,” Mel suggested.

  Jonathan ignored him. “We’re going out there.”

  “I’m not sure what we have to offer at a job fair when we’re not hiring.”

  “This isn’t about now,” said Jonathan. “It’s about six months from now. I want the booth, the literature, the whole nine yards to extend to any programmers out there.”

  “But realistically,” Mel said, “what do we tell these kids?”

  “What do we tell them? We tell them who we are.”

  “Show the flag?”

  “Exactly. I need you to show the flag. I have a meeting in San Diego that week, so I might come out too.”

  “All right.” Mel sighed. “I’ll see if I can get someone to—”

  “No,” Jonathan said, “you.”

  “Me?” Only Mel’s associate directors flew west. That was long established. Mel’s back could barely withstand the Boston–New York–D.C. shuttle.

  “You,” said Jonathan.

  “I’ll prepare everything on this end,” Mel said. “I’ll prep Keith and Ashley, and they can go together.”

  “Sorry, man,” said Jonathan. “I had to let them go this morning.”

  “You did what?”

  “Yeah, we’re making some cuts.”

  “But you never—”

  “It’s a top–down thing,” said Jonathan. “But it’s all good. Feel free to upgrade to business class. Just a second.” Jonathan’s phone was ringing. “Hey!” he told Emily. “Could you hold on? I’m just finishing a meeting.”

  Some meeting, Mel thought, standing in the lobby. “Jonathan, I don’t think I can physically—I don’t know if I can manage that flight and still function in L.A.”

  “Mel, you underestimate yourself,” said Jonathan. “You always do.”

  “What if I trained Juliet?”

  Now Jonathan grew impatient. “Juliet is your secretary, Mel. You’re the HR director. You’re the one they need to see.” He put his phone to his ear and began walking to the stairs. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and even as he listened, he turned and pointed straight at Mel. Like a latter-day Uncle Sam, he mouthed, You.

  “It’s Jess,” said Emily. “She’s driving up to Arcata. She says a bunch of them are going up together….”

  “She’s been there before,” said Jonathan.

  “But this time she’s going to climb. She says that she’s been practicing.”

  “Good for her.” Jonathan took the stairs two at a time.

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s really dangerous for her.”

  “How is it more dangerous for her than for anybody else?”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s doing and she’s afraid of—”

  “She’ll be with experienced people.”

  “Do you think it’s rational to try to climb a two-hundred-foot redwood when you’re afraid of heights?” Emily demanded.

  “I don’t know—it sounds like fun. When is she going?”

  “September fourth through September eleventh,” said Emily.

  “That’s when I’m coming out for Tech World,” said Jonathan. “You can meet me in L.A.”

  He didn’t understand that Jess could hurt herself, and sometimes Emily thought he didn’t care. He had never liked her sister. From his point of view, she was always in trouble of one kind or another. Impatient, he did not hear Emily’s fear that this time was worse.

  “Why do you have to go?” Emily asked Jess on the phone.

  Jess said, “I can’t be a coward all my life.”

  Emily sat in her office with her picture of Jonathan on the screen saver in front of her. “You aren’t a coward. Why do you say that?”

  “I can’t keep floating from one thing to the next.”

  “What is going on with you?”

  “I have to grow up sometime,” Jess said.

  “Growing up is not something you do on a tree-climbing expedition,” Emily protested. “Tree climbing is the opposite of growing up!”

  “You remember when I made my vow,” Jess said.

  “That ridiculous thing you said in Muir Woods?”

  “It was not ridiculous. It was serious. And I said that in January. That was almost nine months ago. The year is almost up, and I haven’t followed through. It’s now or never.”

  “What are you talking about?” Emily demanded. “Are you trying to prove something to Leon? Is that it?”

  “No,” said Jess.
“I’m proving this to myself. It’s not about Leon.” She added silently, Or George.

  In truth, she was frightened. Her time with George was so intense. Not just the time with him, but the time away from him. She heard his voice. She saw him in her dreams. She had had a dream that she was flying with him through the trees in winter. They were flying slowly, drifting through the air, and she was wearing a long silk skirt that caught in bare branches. Don’t worry, said George as he floated down to untangle her. But she did worry. She thought about him constantly. She was sleeping over now, and spending mornings with him, as well as evenings. When he left, she missed him. While she worked, thoughts of George distracted her. She was no longer contemplating rose water. She contemplated him. She was no longer simply archiving the collector’s notes. She had become the collector, dreaming, doodling. She was altogether infatuated. And she wondered: How did this happen to me? How did I fall in love like this when I’m with someone else? And sometimes she and George seemed overdetermined, destined from the start. At other times, the relationship, if that’s what it now was, terrified her, because it wasn’t just George, but his things that entranced her, and she could not separate him from his possessions. His gorgeous home, his fresh sheets, his garden, his collections.

  At the Tree House, Jess pitched in, like everybody else. The Tree Savers cooked and cleaned together, creating their own sanctuary. At George’s house Concepcion took care of everything. Sheets and towels reappeared magically, clean and white. Dishes returned sparkling to their shelves. At the Tree House, Jess was part of a team, but at George’s house she worked alone, reading, writing, gorging herself on McClintock’s fantasies.

  To be with George was pure luxury, and she mourned, Oh, I am more materialistic than I thought. Oh, I am no idealist at all. I just want to be stroked and fed. And she was disgusted with herself. The affair was so obvious and degrading. She had nothing, and he was rich. She slept with him and read his books and drank his wine as though she were a little scholar-geisha, when she should be with Leon at the front, fighting against the Pacific Lumber Company. She was an aesthete, just when she should have been an ascetic and a revolutionary. The fact that she loved talking to George, and kissing him and falling asleep in his arms and waking up with him in the morning made the situation a thousand times worse.