Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

As it turned out, a windfall came in handy. Aldwin’s parents were celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary, so he rented a villa in the south of France for a family reunion. Sorel’s landlord raised the rent, so she moved out and bought a decrepit worker’s cottage in East Cambridge that she planned to paint purple and restore as a house cum studio. Orion bought his first car, a silver BMW. Jonathan found Emily a ring.

He took Emily shopping on Newbury Street. They spun through Shreve, Crump & Low with its sapphires and china, Cartier with its square-cut gems and gleaming watches. Brodney Antiques & Jewelry was piled with detritus from every decade: old lamps and dusty tea sets, rows of opera glasses and ugly broaches—gold bees with diamond wings, little frogs with ruby eyes. Emily could not find anything she liked. She looked and looked, and Jonathan got hungry waiting, and they went to lunch at L’Espalier where they sat wedged into a corner table in a room adorned with antique mirrors and crystal chandeliers, and they ate a dandelion salad and the smallest sirloin steak Jonathan had ever seen, along with matchstick potatoes.

“These,” Jonathan told Emily, “are exactly the way I always thought matchsticks would taste. Except real matchsticks have sulfur tips, so they’re probably better.”

Emily laughed. “I think they’re good.”

He took her hand in his. “I think you need a ring.”

“We’ll find one eventually.”

She spoke in such a patient voice, and the restaurant with its pillows and silk curtains felt like such an overpriced tea party that he rebelled, jumping to his feet. “Wait here. Have some dessert.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back. Get yourself some coffee.”

And he returned to Shreve, Crump & Low, and told the first saleswoman he saw, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Prathima,” she said in a soft voice.

“So, Prathima, what’s the best diamond you have in stock?”

She was really a very small saleslady, delicate and easily affronted in her navy suit. She sat down with Jonathan at a table, as a loan officer might sit down with a client at the bank, and she showed him a chart, and a color portfolio with “Diamonds Are Forever” printed on it, and her voice grew ever softer as she explained the four Cs of diamonds. She pointed to various photographs. “This is our signature series,” she whispered, as if she were in church. “Each diamond is inscribed with a—”

He cut her off. “You do sell real diamonds here, right?”

“Of course.” Prathima looked offended.

“Okay, could you just bring out the most highly rated diamond you have?”

“In which category?” she asked.

“In all categories.” He demonstrated his newfound knowledge, reciting: “Cut, color, carat, clarity.”

“Well …”

“My fiancée is waiting at L’Espalier,” he announced, as another sales associate joined them, and a third called a guard to open the safe. “I don’t want any loose gems. I need something ready to go.”

When he returned to Emily, she was waiting with a cup of coffee and a crème brûlée. “I saved some for you.”

“Mmm.”

“It’s very sweet,” she said, dying of curiosity and at the same time conscious of the other people in the restaurant.

“No, it’s not too sweet.” He spooned up the dessert. “It’s just right.” He knew he was keeping her in suspense. His eyes were shining, but he kept a straight face. “It’s good.”

“Jonathan!”

“Yes, Emily?”

“Did you …”

“Did I what?”

She burst out laughing, even as he pulled a velvet box from his pocket. Then the laughter stopped as he opened the box to reveal a ring that cost more than a suburban house in most parts of the country, platinum set with three diamonds, small, flawless, dazzling white. “Oh, they’re so beautiful,” she whispered.

For a moment he didn’t know what to say and hesitated, and she loved his hesitation more than his reply. The hesitation was all him. His reply was heartfelt but conventional. “Not as beautiful as you.”

Their visits were brief, their hours islands in a sea of time apart. They wanted to wake up together and spend all day together and fall asleep wrapped in each other’s arms. When the markets rose all this seemed possible, but within months the Nasdaq fell back again, and they couldn’t leave their posts. By the end of October, Veritech had lost more than half its value. ISIS, which had soared to $133, dipped below sixty and then hovered at thirty. Dave put his private plane on hold. Orion garaged his car on Green Street and continued biking to work from his ratty apartment. There would be time enough for spending when the markets revived. No one wanted to cash out before the next zephyr, the expected gust of buoyant air.

Everyone was waiting, except Mel, who panicked days after he moved into his palatial house. He sold all his stock at thirty-three, a move that angered Jonathan.

“I couldn’t sleep at night,” Mel confessed. Already he regretted selling as the share price rose again.

“Man,” Jonathan said disdainfully. “You’re old.”

Jess was out of the game as well, but for a different reason. She had donated her shares to Save the Trees. She did not mention this to Emily. Her sister did not approve of Leon.

“You have a way of losing yourself in other people,” Emily warned Jess on the phone.

“Don’t you think,” Jess countered, “that maybe sometimes they lose themselves in me?”

“No,” Emily said decidedly. “You’re the one at risk. You’re the one behaving dangerously.”

“You always say that.” Jess sat up in Leon’s bed, sans Leon, who was in Oregon.

“You’re moving in with a guy ten years older than you, and you plan to do—what? Live with him in this amorphous environmental group, which you yourself admit includes other women that he’s dated? Where do you think this is going?”

“Stop,” Jess said.

“Someone has to ask,” said Emily.

“You can ask as much as you like,” said Jess.

“And you can’t answer.”

“And you can’t be my mother.”

“Just go back and read her letters. Look at what she says about this kind of situation.”

“She never wrote about real situations,” said Jess.

“Oh, really? Let me show you. Let me bring it up for you….” Emily kept all her birthday letters on her laptop.

“You should know the difference between loving and being in love,” Emily read aloud. “Loving is calm and good, and being in love is so much better and so much worse. You might— ”

“Do you know the difference?” Jess challenged Emily. “Do you?”

She hung up and buried her face in Leon’s pillow. How did he get by with so little rest? He made her feel lazy and impractical. Her father had tried to make her feel that way. Emily attempted to jolt her awake, but Leon succeeded where they could not. His energy awed and attracted and piqued her as well, because living with him, hiking with him, making love half the night with him, exhausted her. She felt sleepy in contrast to Leon, but she was also sleepy because of him. Jess pulled the sheet over her bare body and sat up in bed to contemplate her dirty clothes. She sighed and wrapped herself in a blanket to pad down the hall to the communal bathroom.

When she was with Leon she belonged, but when he was gone, she felt like a stowaway. Strangely, the more time she spent with him, the closer they became, the more difficult her position in the house. Now that she’d moved in, she was no longer a regular leafleter. She was Leon’s girlfriend, with all the resentment that entailed. When would he return? When would she see him again? She could forget the others when she was studying the brown flecks in Leon’s eyes, his words, soft with surprise, his whisper—You’re beautiful—his body, not diffident at all when they were alone, not cool, but heated, trembling.