Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

But he kissed her instead. Arms inside her unbuttoned coat, he found the gap between her skirt and soft wool sweater. She was so long and slender—sleek like the girl-women in his father’s poems, her breasts like buds under his fingers. She didn’t push him away. He felt the hollow inside her hip bone, and her shoulder blades were like folded wings.

“Don’t you want me to?” he whispered.

“No,” she said longingly, “not at all.”

“Not at all! Don’t overstate your case.”

“It’s a good case,” said Sorel. “It’s a strong case.”

“A Lockbox?”

“Right. Except that you can’t hack your way inside.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, but even as he released her, even as he watched her unlock her door, he longed to solve this puzzle, and find a way to her encrypted heart.

When the market sank, Bruno sent an e-mail about riding out the storm. Emily kept working without complaint, but a little furrow appeared between her eyes, a subtle wrinkle, not a worry line, but a mark of concentration. The stock price fell to forty on Tuesday, then to thirty-three on Wednesday, and finally hit a new low of sixteen on Thursday, and everyone was shocked, because there was no good reason for the steep decline, and yet the price was falling all the same.

On the upswing, every Veritech employee felt masterful. Now those masters felt like leaves tossed in unexpected storms. Laura read Winnie-the-Pooh at bedtime to her children in her unfinished house, and as she read about Pooh’s tumble through the branches of the oak tree, she held the baby, Katie, in her lap, and she thought: This is exactly what it’s like to lose half your net worth in three days.

“Oh, help!” said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet onto the branch below him .

“If only I hadn’t—” he said, as he bounced twenty feet on to the next branch .

“You see what I meant to do …”

“Of course it was rather—” he admitted as he slithered very quickly through the next six branches ….

“More!” demanded Meghan from the bottom bunk.

And Justin sat up in the top bunk and said, “Why are you stopping, Mommy?”

And Katie pulled Laura’s hair.

But Laura could not help pausing to consider how well A. A. Milne described the falling sensation, the surprise and sudden thumps as one lost economic altitude, and began to wonder whether renovating in Los Altos was such a good idea, and then, whether private school made sense, and finally, whether leasing a car might be more prudent than paying cash.

Kevin told Laura, “We can’t panic. It would be terrible to sell all the stock we have left.”

“What do you mean, ‘the stock we have left’?” Laura asked him.

“We lost some,” he admitted as he helped her hook up the rolling dishwasher to the sink in their temporary kitchen.

“How do you lose stock?” Laura asked him.

He didn’t answer immediately.

“Kevin?”

“I borrowed on margin to pay the contractor,” he said.

“You what?”

“I didn’t want to sell, because I knew Veritech was going back up.”

She turned on him. “Can you hear what’s wrong with that?” she demanded. “Can you even hear?”

“I guessed wrong,” Kevin said.

“No, that’s not what I meant, Kevin James Miller. What’s wrong is that you didn’t ask me . What were you thinking, borrowing against my stock?”

“It was our stock. And I’m sorry, Laura.”

“I earned it,” she declared. “It was mine, and, yes, I made it ours. But it was never yours to do what you wanted. It was never yours to decide about without consulting me.”

“You never showed any interest in handling the money,” Kevin pointed out.

She had never been so angry. “You never asked.”

“Do you think you could have given me better advice? Whenever I asked about investments in the past, you trusted my judgment.”

Laura stood before him in their plywood makeshift kitchen, and she said, “Maybe I have a little more sense than you do. Or if I don’t, then maybe we’d make our mistakes together.”

“We’ve still got stock,” he soothed her. “Up ’til now, we’ve been very, very lucky.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you ever gamble with my hard-earned luck again.”

“I said I was sorry!”

“Because if you do, I’ll leave you,” she warned him, and she was half serious. “I’ll take the children and start a company of my own.”

He wasn’t sure quite how to take this. She had a sweet, soft voice; a patient, forgiving nature. She played the flute. “I always said you could start a bakery.” He tried to steer the conversation back to calmer waters. “You could sell your lemon—”

“I could sell truth serum,” she told him.

“Laura! I keep telling you—I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I’d care?”

She cared enormously. Everybody did, but like all watched pots, the market would not boil.

At this moment George chose to buy. He bought Cisco at bargain-basement prices. He purchased IBM and Apple. And he paid cash for Tom McClintock’s cookbooks. He wrote a check for just under half a million dollars, exactly the money Sandra needed for her daughter’s legal fight.

Clever George. He knew the books were worth much more, and he unpacked them with guilt and pleasure, turning pages with sumptuous color plates, unfolding the collector’s notes, strange and brittle as pressed flowers. What rare and secret treasures, historical and also private. Not just a collection, but a reliquary. George had pulled off a bibliophile’s Louisiana Purchase, or rather, Jess had pulled off the deal for him.

His spring party, therefore, was mostly in Jess’s honor, although he did not advertise this. He presented the gathering as a viewing of the McClintock cookbooks, which he had installed in special cases in his great room.

The glass-fronted bookcases were quartersawn oak and built quite low, underneath his west windows. Atop the bookcases he had built illuminated glass display cases—the kind he had seen at the Huntington Library—so that on occasion he could show off certain volumes. For the party he had set up a little display of women’s cookbooks: the Brandenburg, the Salzburg, The Compleat Housewife. American Cookery. A New Present for A Servant-Maid , the expanded 1771 edition of Eliza Haywood’s 1743 handbook.

The cabinetry was exquisite, book-matched for George’s precious books. He did not fault his architect and carpenter for assuming the party was to celebrate their months of work. Sandra was coming, of course, along with her daughter, and George expected Nick and Julia, and antiquarian colleagues and Microsoft friends. Gracious in defeat, and hinting impishly at a purchase of his own, Raj accepted George’s invitation. Colm would be there. Colm had unpacked and installed the cookbooks. By the time the bookcases were ready, Jess had been traveling up north to chain herself to trees, to demonstrate in scenes George tried not to think about. Colm had done the work, but Jess was the one George thought about. She was the one he planned for. She had never been to the house, and he walked through the rooms, trying to imagine her impressions. He thought of her when he chose his champagne. He imagined her nibbling the strawberries he bought at the Farmers’ Market. She did eat strawberries, didn’t she? He prepared platters of cheese and biscuits, grapes, fresh figs, poached quince. He hired a pastry chef to bake lighter, smaller versions of the old recipes: bite-sized tarts, tiny crème brûlées. George’s housekeeper, Concepcion, climbed a painter’s ladder to dust the great beams, and then descended to polish the vintage typewriters. George hoped Jess understood that this party was for her. He imagined lifting his glass to thank her—if he could manage without sounding like a complete idiot.