Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

Still, he did not come home, and as weeks passed she relaxed again, for despite Leon’s warning, she saw only the housekeeper cleaning the already-clean rooms, rubbing the glowing wood furniture, more, Jess imagined, to warm the chairs, than to polish them. Concepcion kept the house as one might wind a watch, or tune and play stringed instruments to prevent them from cracking with disuse.

The place was lightly lived in. Jess was sure she was the only one who used the first-floor bathroom with its cool stone tiles, and the kitchen looked almost entirely unused as well, although she assumed George ate at home occasionally like everybody else. He kept a wicker basket of onions under one counter, and another basket of potatoes, a can of olive oil near the stove, a braid of garlic heads hanging from a hook, along with a bunch of dried red chili peppers. But she never found a dish left out. Not so much as a coffee mug.

Therefore, she was doubly surprised, the first day of August, to see a piece of fruit lying on the pristine kitchen table. A peach, slightly unbalanced, so that it listed to one side, its hue the color of an early sunrise. Had George remembered their conversation at the party and left the peach for her to eat? Strange. For a moment she thought it might be a trompe l’oeil work of art, some fantastic piece of glass. She leaned over and sniffed. The blooming perfume was unmistakable. She touched it with the tip of her finger. The peach was not quite ripe, but it was real.

The next day, she checked the kitchen as soon as she arrived. The peach lay there still, blushing deeper in the window light. She bent to smell, and the perfume was headier than before, a scent of meadows and summers home from school. Still unripe. Was George waiting to eat this beauty? On a note card she penciled: Is this a proprietary peach? She placed the card on the table, but changed her mind immediately, folding her stiff query into quarters and then eighths and finally sixteenths, and then stuffing it into her backpack in the dining room. There she returned to her apportioned books.

This is just to say , she wrote in her notebook, I’ve been eying the peach you left on the table and were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. It looks delicious …. She gave up on her Williams imitation and continued: If you did leave it for me, that was … She tore out the page, crumpled, and tossed it in the recycling bin without writing the next word: sweet .

On the third day, she smelled the fruit as soon as she came in. She followed the scent to the kitchen, and the peach was radiant, dusky rose and gold, its skin so plush she thought her fingertip might bruise it. This was the day, the very hour to eat—and she had come prepared, but she didn’t want Concepcion to see her. She waited until the housekeeper shouldered her leather-handled canvas bag and left.

Then Jess unwrapped the organic peach she’d bought that morning. Slightly smaller, slightly harder, but decently rosy, the peach listed left—just the right direction—when she set it on the table.

Leaving this changeling for George, she washed his ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then flesh dissolved in a rush of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist. She had forgotten, if she’d ever known, that what was sweet could also be so complicated, that fruit could have a nap, like fabric, soft one way, sleek the other. She licked the juice dripping down her arm.

“Jess.”

When had he arrived? How had she not heard him? “What are you doing here?” she blurted out.

“Well, I live here,” George said, standing in the kitchen doorway.

“True,” she said.

He looked, bemused, from the peach in her hand to the peach on the table. “You brought me a replacement? Jessamine,” he chided, picking up the substitute. “This is rock hard.”

“Well …,” she began.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

She gave up and laughed at herself, even as she stood, holding the beautifully ripe fruit.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Finish it.”

She tried to bite, and then she turned the peach and tried again. “You’re making me nervous.”

Suppressing a smile, he walked into the living room, and she quickly devoured what was left.

Eaten in haste, the fruit tasted different, juicy, but not quite so luscious, cut-velvet, but no longer so luxurious. Unsure whether George composted, she set the peach pit on the counter, washed her hands and wrist and arm, and called out, “Do you have a kitchen towel?”

He returned and took a striped towel from a drawer. As she dried herself, she asked, “Why did you come home so early?”

“It’s not so early,” he told her. “You stayed late.”

“Oh, so you weren’t planning to run into me.”

“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”

He was at least three steps away, but he looked at her so intently that he seemed much nearer. He’d cut his long hair so that it was not quite shoulder length, and he wasn’t wearing glasses, as he did in the store. “Was it good?”

“The most delicious meal I have ever eaten,” she told him honestly.

“A peach is not a meal.” He couldn’t help glancing at his oven and his knife drawer. Thinking of his grill on the deck and how he might roast chicken or lamb or even fish, along with pearl onions and vine-ripened tomatoes.

“It tasted like a meal.”

“That was hunger.”

“It’s the cookbooks,” she confessed.

“Occupational hazard.” He leaned back against the edge of the kitchen table. Her eyes were greener than he’d ever seen them. Her shirt button was broken, third from the top. “Are you still hungry?”

She thought of Leon. Tell me what happens when he comes home . “Not really,” she lied.

“Let me cook you dinner.”

She shook her head.

“No?” George asked softly, as he took the kitchen towel from her hands.

He was wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, and she saw the scar traveling from the back of his hand up the inside of his forearm. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

“Someone tried to fillet me.”

Forestalling her next question, he opened what she had assumed to be a bank of cabinets.

“Ohh.” She gazed inside a pristine refrigerator with glassy shelves and perfectly arranged vegetables, packages wrapped in white paper, fresh lemons lined up in a row.

“What can’t you eat?”

For just a moment, she could not remember. Then he closed the door.

“No meat, of course,” she began earnestly. “No poultry, no fish, no living creature of any kind, and no product of any living creature, so no milk, no cheese, no butter, no eggs, nothing dairy, and no refined sugar, no white flour, no white rice—nothing white …”

“How about white wine?”

He went to his butler’s pantry and brought back two glasses and a bottle, ever so slightly chilled. “This is a Kistler Chardonnay. See that?” He poured out what looked like liquid gold. “It’s known for its color.” He handed her a glass half full and watched her take the tiniest of sips. He could see she didn’t drink, and even the Chard was strong for her, and curious to her tongue. But she liked it, and quickly sipped again.

“Yum.”

“Yum?”

“It’s good,” she said.

“Do you taste citrus?” he asked her. “Mineral?”

“No,” she admitted cheerfully. The wine was light and tickling, not heavy or too sweet like others she had tried. Sun poured through the kitchen’s tall windows and played across the floor so that the room felt warmer. George himself seemed different, slimmer than she remembered, and more fluid in his movements. A fish in water, she thought, as he took out pans and tongs and a cutting board.