Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“I will,” Mel answered, stunned. He tried to smile without moving any other part of his body. He was afraid to jolt his standing equilibrium.

“And I’ll tell you a secret,” Jonathan added, just as Mel was leaving. “We’re going to tell everybody at the end of the day, but I’ll tell you first. We’ve signed Yahoo! for premium ChainLinx protection.”

“Yahoo!” Now Mel really was smiling.

“Yeah!” Jonathan swung his feet up on the desk and resumed typing.

Mel returned to his cubicle full of hope. ISIS had Yahoo! in the stable, their biggest client to date. This was huge, and Mel knew first. There was no greater sign of favor.

He stood in the back as Jonathan made his announcement. All the employees in town packed the fifth floor near the windows. Outside, a light snow was falling. Inside, programmers perched atop desks, stood on chairs, and the whole company whooped and cheered.

“This is your work,” Aldwin said.

“You guys are super,” Dave chimed in.

“You guys are animals!” Jonathan shouted, punching the air, and all the animals roared.

Afterward the programmers milled together talking motorcycles, debating which were fastest and which were overpriced—not that it mattered anymore! They spoke of vacations. A company camping trip in the High Sierra. No, a voyage down the River Nile, a cruise to see the Pyramids. They were about to be gazillionaires. Yahoo! As Mel walked to the T station, he came upon Orion, hatless, walking his bike through heavy snow.

“Hey,” Orion said.

“Amazing night,” Mel said.

“I guess so,” Orion said laconically.

The kid was too young, Mel thought, to appreciate the situation. The snowflakes were wet and heavy, double flakes and triple flakes. Mel could almost touch the zillions in the air.

Orion had grown up in his father’s poetry, and because Lou Steiner was famous, Orion’s younger selves had been published and widely anthologized. Orion, naked wader, minnow-trader lived on the page, alongside the sleeper with the tiny fists . He didn’t take any of this too personally, not even his father’s collection, Star Boy . Growing up in Vermont, he knew many other poets’ children who had been immortalized. When it came to publicity, Orion thought his father’s wives and girlfriends had it worse, and he had often wondered how they liked word portraits mentioning birdlike physiques, small breasts, sad eyes. Orion tried to avoid Lou’s love poems, because he could put the name to each description, and then afterward he felt as though he’d seen his father’s lovers, including his own mother, naked. His father found this amusing, but he was entirely unself-conscious on and off the page.

Lou’s fame was riverlike—deep and narrow in some places, then broadening unexpectedly into shallows. His books sold a thousand, maybe twelve hundred copies each, but schoolchildren everywhere studied his villanelle “Where Are the Bees?” His later style, increasingly aphoristic, had inspired critics to call him a new minimalist, and at seventy-five, with his unrepentant hippie politics and eloquent Forest Cycle , Lou had become an icon to environmentalists, who printed his verse on T-shirts and posters—usually without permission. Like Matisse cutouts, Steiner’s late pared-down poems were all space and edges on the page. The best-known was his found poem, “Tree.” One line, which read simply:

Here I stand. I can do no other.

Molly was honest. She said Orion’s father scared her. Over the years, Lou had grown shaggy, rambling, slightly unhinged. Orion’s mother, Diane, thought perhaps Lou was suffering from early Alzheimer’s. The idea frightened Orion, who preferred to think late-night rambles, naps on park benches, and tirades to writing classes were existential rather than neurological symptoms. End-stage poetry. Reading Shakespeare obsessively, drinking heavily, a man like Lou was supposed to turn Learlike when his hair went white.

As a boy Orion had avoided Lou. Naturally, he’d taken his mother’s side in the divorce, and lived with her in run-down farmhouses where they grew tomatoes and trained pea plants up strings to the porch roof. He tried to comfort her by staying out of trouble and entering science fairs. His childhood sweetheart, Emily, had been his mother’s sweetheart as well, the daughter she had always hoped for, and even now, so many years later, Diane asked after Emily with a certain wistfulness—although she liked Molly very much. Then Orion felt a twinge of guilt, although he knew it was irrational, because he hated to disappoint his mother, even in imaginary ways. In college, where he might have grown wild, he’d settled in with Molly, and stayed with her.

Orion didn’t avoid his father anymore, but spent time with him when he could. As Diane said, “He is your dad, and he isn’t getting any younger.” Lou was charming in his fashion, his countercultural effusions refreshing now that Orion made his way in the material world. True, his father had recently been called to the dean’s office to explain an incident in a poetry workshop when he’d ripped up a student’s manuscript, dashing the pieces to the floor and stamping on them “like Rumpelstiltskin” as one witness averred in The Middlebury Campus . There was also Lou’s troubling history with young women poets, his musettes as Diane called them. But he had slowed down in this regard, and if his clothes were wrinkled and his beard untrimmed, he was an original, and it felt good to have a parent who worked in pencil and called Otter Creek his office. Lou had no idea what ISIS did. He had never owned a computer, and the one time he had met Molly’s parents, at Harvard graduation, he’d told them a long dirty joke, to see if they would laugh.

He chortled when his son phoned one bright December Sunday. Orion was explaining that Molly’s parents had come up to visit and they were all having brunch that morning. “Who brunches these days?” Lou asked.

“I guess I do,” Orion said.

“Brunch when you’re old, sleep when you’re dead” was Lou’s advice.

Orion glanced at the closed bathroom door where Molly was showering. Postcall, she’d come straight from Beth Israel Deaconess and had had no time to rest.

“True story,” Lou said. This was how all his jokes began. True meant “Jewish.” “Three old ladies in Miami, poolside, brunching at the Fontainebleau. They see someone new: Velcome, velcome. How are you? Then one of the old-timers says, Nu, ve don’t have time for small talk. Let’s get some things out of the vay. Money? Money you have, or you vouldn’t be at the Fontinblow. Granchildren? You got? Show . She opens up her wallet and, you know, fans out the pictures on the table. Sex? … Vatvas, vas”

“You think I’m living like an old lady.”

“I leave you to extrapolate.”

“You think youth is wasted on the …”

“I do like a wasted youth,” Lou mused.

Molly emerged in a cloud of steam and began searching for clean clothes. Wrapped in her towel, she glanced at Orion and took in his fisherman sweater, worn to threads at the elbows.

“Why do you like a wasted youth, Dad?”

“Listen, it’s like the man with his face pressed against the glass at the Ferrari dealership. If you have to ask …”

“I should go,” said Orion, as Molly pointed at the clock-radio, but he did not get off the phone. “What are you doing today?”

“I’ll be walking at Abbey Pond,” Lou replied. “You remember, don’t you?”

Of course he did. In springtime Lou used to take little Orion to look for lady’s slippers. Double petals hanging from springy stems, flowers rising from mossy, mulchy ground. “I don’t think they look like lady’s slippers,” Lou had told Orion. “I think they look like lady’s something else.”