Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“Bring friends—bring your sister if you like,” he had told her on the phone.

“I think her boyfriend is going to be in town,” said Jess.

“Bring your boyfriend then,” he said. “I mean her boyfriend.” He felt strangely tongue-tied. He had been extremely nervous, and he knew it showed, but he tried not to think about that. He tried to concentrate on what he could control: the party, the glass display cases lit with LEDs. Over six months he had built a proper home for McClintock’s collection. These rare volumes would never see the inside of a cupboard, cutlery drawer, or oven again.

He had planned the party for early evening, and as his guests drifted in, the last sunlight sifted through the windows and danced across the floor. The musicians had already arrived with guitar and flute, and they were playing “Greensleeves” sweetly, a little too sweetly.

Concepcion grinned. “You getting married, George?”

“How about something livelier?” George told the guitarist, who obliged with Leo Brouwer.

So to the strains of Cuban music, George welcomed his guests and graciously accepted their congratulations on the collection, the cabinets, the house, the champagne, the sunset, and all the while he kept his eyes on the front door.

Sandra arrived in a long Guatemalan patchwork skirt. She wore a black shirt and silver jewelry, and she was almost beautiful with her long gray hair down her back. Nothing like her small tattooed daughter in a wife-beater tank top. What was that inked between her shoulder blades? A bar code, or a word? And if it was a word, partly exposed, what was it? Redemption? Or Reinvention? Raj came in with them, and George realized that the three had driven up together.

“Yes, I drove,” Raj said cheerfully as the two women admired the display cases. “That was the least I could do.”

“Still courting?” George asked. You never knew with Raj.

“I’ve bought the engravings,” Raj whispered. “I bought all McClintock’s framed engravings right off the walls for a hundred dollars apiece.”

“Which engravings?”

“The lichens over the couch. They’re originals from Flora Danica— pre-1800, hand-colored.”

If only the cat hadn’t bitten George, just as he’d leaned in for a closer look!

“They’re from the botanical atlas that was supposed to include plates of every plant in Denmark. These are the engravings Prince Frederick ordered copied on china for Catherine the Great. Every piece was supposed to bear an exact copy of a different plant from the collection. I’m getting them reframed….”

“The least you could do,” George said wryly. Once bitten, twice shy. He had not ventured near McClintock’s odd art again, although now, of course, he wished he had. The cookbooks were the real prize, and he knew it was churlish to begrudge Raj his find, but the competitor in him sulked. It took three glasses of champagne and two major compliments from his antiquarian friends to shake his pique.

The first compliment began to mollify him: “I have never heard of a private collection like this in Berkeley.”

The second delighted him: “There may be cookbooks here that no one has seen.”

All the dealers admired and envied George’s acquisition, and that potent mix set the party buzzing, just as tiny stinging bubbles enlivened the champagne. No toast, George decided. No need to congratulate himself. He spoke to Sandra and showed her the humidity sensors he had installed in the bookcases, and he spoke to Nick and Julia, just as Julia’s cell phone began ringing.

“It’s Henry,” she told Nick. “He says he doesn’t want his babysitter anymore. He wants to know when we’re coming home.” She turned back to her phone. “Why don’t you use the other bathroom, sweetie?”

And George kept circulating, and watched Raj flirt with Colm, who looked flustered and spoke rapidly about his dissertation. “The excerpt,” said Colm, “becomes a genre of its own.”

Raj smiled. “Yes, but is that genre at all interesting—on its own?”

Colm looked offended.

The sun was low, the sunset draining away, and George thought, This is the moment in Virginia Woolf where somebody lights the lamps. The golden light slipping into the Bay, the guests absorbed in conversation. George walked among them and he adjusted the lights, and while he turned the dimmers, he saw a tall woman enter the room with a square-shouldered blond athlete—and he realized that this was Emily and her boyfriend, both dressed in open blazers, as though they were going to a yacht club, and then he saw Leon with his long glossy black hair and his jeans and untucked white dress shirt. Had Jess told him to wear that? She was the last inside the door and seemed to look everywhere at once. Unconsciously she clasped her hands behind her, as though stepping into a museum. She wore a sleeveless shift, less a dress than a slip of gray silk so wrinkled it must have been the style. Approaching his bookshelves, she examined the titles, one after another. The famous Millay and the Plath, all the cloth-bound poetry.

“You can open them if you like,” he said.

That would have been enough for him, watching Jess open his books. Meeting her accomplished sister.

“Your house is lovely,” Emily said.

“Amazing!” exclaimed Jonathan. “Who’s your architect?”

“Bernard Maybeck,” George said.

“You should hire him for Veritech, when you guys move,” Jonathan told Emily. “Seriously.”

George couldn’t help smiling. The desserts were superb, the champagne subtly teasing, like a word on the tip of the tongue —methodological, perspicacious —the word that comes to you, playfully, when you think you have forgotten. Palimpsest. Irreversibility. Inamorata .

He would have been perfectly happy, if not for Leon. Why was it that the youngest, most innocent-looking women consorted with the creepiest men? Their boyfriends were not boys or friends at all, but shadowy familiars: bears, wolfhounds, panthers.

Leon cast an appraising eye over George’s collections, and bent down to look inside the display cabinets.

“Be careful,” Jess warned. She had indeed asked Leon to wear the white shirt, and she was a little nervous about bringing him to George’s house—not so much that he would break something, but that he would be bored, and therefore rude. She knew instinctively that Leon and George would bring out the worst in each other. Here it was, happening already.

“Elbows off the glass,” George said.

Leon did not apologize, but straightened up, smiled, and shrugged carelessly as if to say, What are you, a fag?

And George looked at Leon, and he thought, Have you really been with Jess a year and a half? And he imagined smashing Leon’s toothy mouth. But he tried, instead, to act the gracious host, and asked with only the slightest hint of mockery in his voice, “How are the trees?”

“The trees are well,” Leon answered, matching George’s satirical tone perfectly.

“You’ve been up north?”

“We’ve been everywhere,” said Leon.

“Success?” asked George.

“We’ve had good discussions,” Leon said smoothly. “Success is up to Sacramento.”

“So you don’t win your victories in the forest, but on the ground.”

Leon glanced at Jess as he said, “Nothing with trees happens on the ground.”

Jess traced the smooth edge of the display case with her finger. Despite her resolution in Muir Woods, despite her weeks up north with Leon, she had not overcome her fear of climbing.

“I’ll get you some champagne,” Leon offered Jess in a gentler voice.

“No, thank you.”

George searched Jess’s downcast face as Leon ambled to the bar. He wished he could talk to her alone; take her into a different room without seeming obvious.