Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“About her own family?”

Jess wriggled out of her jeans. “Don’t fill it all the way.” She peeled off her T-shirt and bra. “It’s a waste of …”

“Get in,” George said.

She sat in the water, tucking her knees up to her chest. “If someone told me something about my mother, I wouldn’t be defensive like that. To me that kind of information would be golden.”

“Why?” George climbed in after her.

“Why? Because it’s … it’s contact. It means if you know how to read them, underneath the words there’s life.”

He sat behind her, soaping her shoulders, her arms, her breasts. “You’re going to be a historian,” he said.

“I am.” With a little splash, she turned over in the water and looked into his dark eyes, and she saw that he wasn’t laughing at her. He didn’t look bemused, or skeptical. She kissed him. She slipped into his arms, and they were closer than before.

When they stepped inside Greens that night and stood together before the great piece of driftwood at the entrance, when they took their table at the wall-high windows and looked out at the Pacific, they were like travelers arriving in a new city. They were like newlyweds in fancy clothes. His sports jacket, her sleeveless dress; his tie, her mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. He ate fish and she ate polenta and they drank a bottle of ’97 Chateau Montelena. “Best year since ’94,” George told Jess, and they toasted the McClintocks, Tom, and Janet, and Mrs. McLintock too. They sat at the great windows and they watched the seagulls diving between waves and sky, and thought but didn’t say how strange it was to go out like other couples.

Jess said, “Do you think marmalet of apples actually tasted like something?”

And George said, “You never talk about your father.”

“It couldn’t have been bitter like real marmalade,” Jess said.

“You don’t get along with him, do you?” George said.

“No,” Jess confessed. “Not really.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t like me very much.”

George trapped her legs between his underneath the table. “That can’t be true.”

“Well,” said Jess, “he’s all computers. He’s all math, and I’m humanities. He’s all for financial independence—and I am too! But I’m not … really independent yet. He has no time for religion, philosophy, or poetry. Fortunately, he’s got Emily.”

“You must take after your mother,” George said.

“Maybe.”

“And he loved her.”

“I think so,” Jess said. “But who knows? It was such a long time ago.”

“When he reads your essay, he’ll understand what you can do,” George said.

“I don’t care whether he reads my essay or not.” Jess drained her glass and he saw that her face was flushed. “You understand what I can do.”

“That’s a complicated thing to say.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I can’t take his place,” George said warily.

Jess slipped off her shoes and rubbed her bare feet against George’s ankles until he couldn’t help smiling. “I never asked you to.”

Giddy with each other and the wine, they strolled outside through the Presidio, the old fort now housing restaurants and galleries. Jess explained that she wanted to devise a matrix for scarcity and abundance, frugality and profligacy. She thought that sweetness represented, and in some periods misrepresented, a sense of surplus and shared pleasure. “I don’t think taste is purely biological,” she said. “I think it’s economically, historically, and culturally constructed as well. Sweetness means different things depending on availability, custom, farming, trade….”

She was shivering, and George took off his jacket. “Here, sweetness.” He helped her into it and laughed at the way her hands disappeared inside the sleeves.

“Context is key—so the question is, What carries over? What can we still know about sweet and sour? Bitterness. What persists from generation to generation? Do we taste the same things?”

He kissed her, sucking her lower lip and then her tongue. “I think so,” he said. “Yes.”

“Wait, I’m not finished.”

“Continue,” he said. “Please.”

Testing herself, pushing back against her fear of heights, she climbed atop the thick two-foot wall edging the Presidio’s park, and walked above him, while he held her hand, steadying her from below.

“You see, I’m fine walking on this wall,” she declared, even as she gripped his fingers. “You see? I’ve been practicing, and I can climb very well.”

George looked up at her. “You like to tower over me, don’t you?”

She did. At that moment she wasn’t in the least afraid of towering. She was invincible. And she explained her theory about cloves, and she told him how the word sweet meant “unsalted” in English cookbooks. Sweet meant “fresh,” not “sugared” as one might think. She spoke of candying and conserves, and those mysterious syrups in McLintock. Syrup of Violets, Syrup of Clove Gelly-Flowers, Syrup of Red Poppies, Syrup of Pale Roses . How did pale roses taste?

They reached the end of the wall and she kept talking. She grew more and more scholarly, investigative, joyful. Absorbed in her lecture, he didn’t expect her to jump down just when she did.

“Give me a little warning!” he exclaimed as he caught her in his arms, but he didn’t want a warning, he wanted her, and he wrapped her in his arms, his chin brushing the rough weave of his own jacket.

“What’s to become of us?” She laughed.

“I don’t know.”

“Just as long as we don’t really … you know …” She meant fall in love.

“Too late,” George said.

Love was all very well, but in the world outside, survival mattered most. Veritech was strapped for cash, ISIS on the brink. Emily felt she had no time to breathe, and Jonathan grew warlike, confident as ever, but edgy from lack of sleep.

“Mel!” Jonathan sang out when Mel returned from lunch. “Exactly the person I wanted to see.”

Mel stood at the elevator, and his lower back tightened with the familiar mix of dread and pleasure to be singled out.

“Job fair in L.A. September eleventh.”

“I didn’t think we were hiring,” Mel replied.

“I want the ISIS booth there anyway,” said Jonathan. “I want to make our presence known.”

People were gathering, waiting for the elevators. Movers wheeled boxes out on handcarts. ISIS was decamping to cheaper, East Cambridge real estate.

“Maybe we should discuss this in your office,” Mel suggested.

Jonathan ignored him. “We’re going out there.”

“I’m not sure what we have to offer at a job fair when we’re not hiring.”

“This isn’t about now,” said Jonathan. “It’s about six months from now. I want the booth, the literature, the whole nine yards to extend to any programmers out there.”

“But realistically,” Mel said, “what do we tell these kids?”

“What do we tell them? We tell them who we are.”

“Show the flag?”

“Exactly. I need you to show the flag. I have a meeting in San Diego that week, so I might come out too.”

“All right.” Mel sighed. “I’ll see if I can get someone to—”

“No,” Jonathan said, “you.”

“Me?” Only Mel’s associate directors flew west. That was long established. Mel’s back could barely withstand the Boston–New York–D.C. shuttle.

“You,” said Jonathan.

“I’ll prepare everything on this end,” Mel said. “I’ll prep Keith and Ashley, and they can go together.”

“Sorry, man,” said Jonathan. “I had to let them go this morning.”