Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

For a moment ISIS went dark, and its vast network, all its points of light, disappeared. It was as if the stars themselves had vanished from the sky, the whole fabulously rich ISIS enterprise, the solar system, the galaxy, the entire Milky Way had vaporized. And then power returned. Overhead lights blazed white again. The electronic map glowed, the ISIS security network restored itself onscreen in all its particulars. The soft whirring of the building’s myriad machines resumed, replacing harsh silence to reassure the ear.

“Just a brownout,” Sorel murmured. Like all brief frights, this one was instantly forgotten.

They walked outside between the half-built laboratories and biotech offices of Kendall Square. Orion carried the guitar as they picked their way around the slushy puddles.

“Did you ever see such ugly code?” Orion asked her.

“Disgusting,” Sorel said. “I suppose Jonathan thinks there will be time to straighten out Lockbox later on, but by then everyone will be too rich to care. I know I will.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t you want to be fabulously wealthy?” she asked him.

He considered a moment. “I think I’d like to buy my mom a new car. And I’d buy my dad a house. He probably wouldn’t stay in it, but …”

“Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. I’d buy Mum a car if she promised to leave my dad.”

“You don’t like your father?”

“Well, he’s just my stepdad, really. Why wouldn’t yours stay in a house?”

“Oh, my dad’s a little bit … Sometimes he falls asleep on park benches,” Orion said. “He’s a professor at Middlebury, but since he doesn’t dress that well, sometimes he looks kind of—homeless. Once he fell asleep on a bench, and when he woke up, he found two dollars in his hat.”

“Oh, no!” She laughed, and as she looked at him, sidelong, her cheeks were pink in the chilly air, her long hair spilled red-gold over her black cloth coat. She was so tall. He didn’t have to bend down to look at her. The light caught in her eyes.

“Wait, stop a minute.” They stopped walking, and right there on the sidewalk, he looked into her eyes. “Green.”

“Yes, thanks, I knew that.”

They hurried on through Central Square, with its piles of dirty snow and flattened cardboard, its closed shops and somnolent bars. The Plough & Stars, the Cantab Lounge, the Middle East.

“Coffee?” Orion asked.

“Absolutely.” They bought coffee and donuts at the Store 24 near the Central Square bus stop. Sorel devoured her donut while Orion paid. “Sorry,” she said. “They’re very small!”

Orion felt an almost overwhelming desire to kiss the corner of Sorel’s mouth. He wanted to lick the powdered sugar from her lips. The young cashier in her head scarf startled him with her question: “Anything else?”

They walked all the way down Pleasant Street to the river, icy in the middle, brackish at the edges. Sorel handed the rubber chicken to Orion, who sat on a bench with the coffee cups and guitar. He watched her fumble for her cigarettes.

“Don’t you want to throw it?” he asked her.

“I suppose.” She was a little distracted, irritated that she hadn’t found what she was looking for. Sorel walked right up to the edge of the muddy riverbank and balanced on a wobbly rock.

“You do the honors,” Orion encouraged her.

She lifted the rubber chicken like a football and then stopped. “If I get arrested, they’ll deport me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m on a student visa. And I think there’s something in there about never throwing chickens in the water.”

“I’m sure they meant live chickens,” Orion said.

“Oh, that’s all right then.”

She hurled the rubber chicken into the air, and it sailed for an instant above the water. Then it splashed down and floated, sickly yellow on the surface.

“I’m going to write about you,” she called after the chicken. She returned to Orion on the bench, opened her guitar case, and unwrapped her instrument, which she’d swaddled in soft T-shirts. “I got it at a pawnshop. Isn’t that sad? It’s a bit scarred here, but it’s a good traveling instrument.” Experimentally she tried some chords, and then launched into song.

Ugly little chicken

Where have you gone?

Don’t you be pickin’

Where you don’t belong.

He laughed with surprise. Her throaty voice was not English or European, but bluesy African-American. “Those Folkways records,” he said, thinking of his dad’s LPs. “You listened to them too.”

“I listen to everything.” Leaning back, Sorel felt his arm on the bench, against her shoulders. “Everything American. Do you think that’s strange?”

When he looked into her lively eyes, Orion saw the possibilities before him, each spreading outward, the branches of a decision tree. He could answer her. He could keep quiet. He could make some excuse to leave. He could kiss her. He imagined kissing her. “I don’t want to go public,” he confessed.

She shook her head at him. “Poor you! When the time comes, you’ll just have to find the strength.” She strummed out a second verse.

Rich little chicken

Keep movin’ on

“Stop! I get it!” He pulled her toward him and tickled her.

“No tickling!”

He stopped.

“Hold on.” Carefully she put her guitar away, and then she turned to him, and he did kiss her, softly, on the lips.

“Sorry,” he said immediately.

“What do you mean?”

“If I surprised you,” he said.

“It’s all right.” She spoke as though she weren’t the most lovely girl he’d ever seen. Sensibly, she said, “It’s just a kiss.”

That was when he began to fall in love with her. He felt a wave of sleepiness, or possibly just contentment, hearing her calm voice, sitting there with her, sharing the illusion that they would remain nothing more than friends.

“What do you really think of ISIS?” Sorel asked him.

“I don’t like it as much as I did.”

“Just because you were fighting with Jonathan?”

He didn’t answer.

“I saw you through the glass,” she said. “And I could hear you too.”

“Useless conference room.”

“I heard you defending the Free Software Foundation and all that.”

“I happen to believe in the free exchange of ideas,” Orion said. “And the individual’s right to privacy and self-expression …”

“You can afford to,” Sorel pointed out.

“It’s not a question of affording to believe something,” Orion said.

“Well,” said Sorel, “I can’t afford to believe quite so many things. I’m just a graduate student—supposedly. I used to be, until Mel hired me.”

“What were you studying? Computer science?”

“Physics.”

“Oh, physics. Molly’s father would like you then,” he mused.

“Who’s Molly’s father?”

“Carl Eisenstat.”

She sat up straight. “You know Carl Eisenstat?”

There was Molly’s father again with Orion in his sights. There was Carl, sometimes disdainful, sometimes delighted, always examining Orion with his quick hawk’s eye.

“The Eisenstat Principle of Viscosity,” said Sorel.

“So that’s what it’s a principle of. I always forget.”

“You didn’t know?” she asked him, and then, “Who’s Molly?”

“My girlfriend.” He darted a look at her. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the space between them had grown. “I guess I should have mentioned her earlier.”

“But she didn’t come up,” Sorel said.

“No.”

She smiled and said, “Right. I should get breakfast.”

“I’ll go with you,” he told her.