Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

He looked at her exhausted face. “That life is long.”

“It’s not long for everyone.”

“Don’t be sad,” George murmured. “You’re so young.”

“Oh, I’m tired of being young. Being young gets old.”

“Be old with me, then,” George told her. “Stay with me. Come home with me. Share my books with me. Cook with me. Marry me.”

“You’d let me cook with you?”

He pulled her closer. “That’s just like you to evade the question.”

“How was that a question?” she challenged lightly. “I’m the only one who asked a question.”

“It would be your kitchen too.”

“What about your friends?”

“I was wrong before. I didn’t know…. Forgive me.”

“I thought you’d rather be alone.”

“No,” he said. “I’d rather be alone if not for you. Please, Jess.”

“Please?”

“I’ll teach you how to cut onions properly.”

“Oh, in that case …,” Jess said.

“And devote my life to you.”

Jess shook her head. “Don’t.”

“Let me.”

“We have to be equal, or it doesn’t work.”

“Then we’ll be equal. We’ll share everything.”

“And what if I say I don’t want everything, I’d rather give all your stuff away?”

He hesitated and then he said, “We’d fight.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, we’d fight? Or yes, you’ll marry me?”

“What do you think?”

“I know we’d fight. We do fight,” George said. “But not so often.”

“Give us time.”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “We need more time.”

“We’ve had time.”

He looked away. “More time together. Not more time waiting.”

“How long were you waiting?” she asked gently. “Ten days?”

“Forty-one years.”

“You kept busy,” she reminded him. “You were out there getting rich and learning to cook and breaking hearts. You fell in love lots of times before me.”

Her hair was curlier under the damp trees. He pulled a lock to watch it spring back. “It wasn’t lots of times—just for the record.”

“Just once or twice?”

“Don’t hold it against me that I didn’t meet you before.”

“I don’t,” Jess protested. “Not exactly.”

“At least I didn’t make you watch.” He was thinking of Noah and Leon.

“I never made you do anything,” Jess said.

“You made me love you.”

“Not on purpose.”

“That’s how you did it. Not on purpose. You just walked in. You filled out the questionnaire, and you said I was the kind of guy who reads Tristram Shandy over and over again.”

“You were lonely,” she pointed out.

George sat on the log, and helped her down as well. “You’re missing the point.”

“How many times have you read Tristram Shandy?” Jess asked him.

“Marry me.”

“Five times? Six times?”

“Eleven,” George said. “Marry me.”

She didn’t answer.

“Please. Jess. Don’t be upset. Listen to me. The things I have, the money I made, the house, the collections, the cookbooks, they’re all proxies. The life I’ve led has been”—he struggled for the word—“acquisitive. I was always chasing quartos, folios, maps….”

“I’m not a quarto or a folio.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe a map.”

“You know what I mean. You’re the one I gave up looking for. I’d live for you and live with you. Say yes. Will you?”

The afternoon was fading. A cool breeze riffled through the ferns below.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Really?” He clasped her hands in his.

“Ow!”

“Sorry!” He kissed her fingertips. “Jess—”

She interrupted. “You made up eleven, didn’t you? You just picked any number.”

“Ah, you caught me,” George said.

Then Jess said, “I love you too.”

It was dark when they approached the ranger’s cabin near the parking lot, and left fifteen dollars for a permit to spend the night.

Jess went to the campground restrooms, and she showered, and washed and combed her hair. Since she didn’t have dry clothes, she wore George’s sweats, his T-shirt, his black fleece. They carried the cooler and the tent down to the campsite, a dark hollow, a solemn, mystic place, a conference of redwoods called the Philosophers’ Grove.

“Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,” George named the three tallest trees.

“No, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza,” Jess said dreamily. “And that one there …” She pointed to a deformed, double-trunked pine. “That’s Hegel.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s convoluted and full of obfuscations and …”

“Eat,” George said. And he served her apples that he’d brought from home, and figs, and even some comté cheese, which she devoured despite her vegan prohibitions because she was so hungry.

He cleared sticks and branches to pitch his tent with its arching supports. He took a rock and hammered the tent stakes into the ground. When he was done, he spread a fly sheet for rain. He smoothed his open sleeping bag and then a heavy blanket on the nylon floor.

“Come in.”

She bent down to enter, and he followed.

“Is it true that they spin fleece from soda bottles?” she asked, as he unzipped her.

“I think so.”

“That’s alchemy then.”

“Are you warm enough?” He pulled off her T-shirt.

“That’s a funny thing to ask when you’re undressing me.”

“Are you warmer now?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Yes.”

They didn’t know under the trees what day it was, or how the market closed, or how the sun rose bright on the East Coast where Jess’s father woke early, to run and glower at the McMansion abutting his property. They didn’t know it was September 11, but no one else did either.

The McMansion’s three-car garage opened, and Mel drove away in his black Lexus, while Barbara stood as usual in her bay window, with her black prayer book in her hands. On Alcott Street, Rabbi Zylberfenig’s little boys were dressing, pulling out all the clothes from their shared bureau onto the floor.

In Cambridge, by the Charles, Jonathan went running, even as Orion and Sorel sat together on a bench on the riverbank and talked of Fast-Track. The team was combing every line of code before the October rollout.

“Last night was pretty smooth,” Orion said with pride.

And Sorel agreed. “Fast-Track is the Second Coming for this company!”

Breathing deep, Jonathan ran along the river, because he could not fly cross-country without exercise. He kept up his quick pace and thought of the day ahead at Tech World, the night he’d spend with Emily, the news he’d bring her, that ISIS was nearly ready to ship its new product, the surveillance system inspired by electronic fingerprinting. He had waited to tell her, but convinced himself that he was right to wait. He recognized that the conversation might be tricky, given his long silence, but he had to prepare her for the rollout. Emily , he told her in his mind, if we’re together , then we share success. What you do and what I do are almost the same. Emily , he rehearsed for her, if we have a life together, then your money and mine, your company and mine, your decisions and mine—we hold them all in common . Admittedly, he had not kept her secret. Admittedly, he had not confided in her about the flaws in Lockbox that winter night she’d asked. But that had been almost two years ago. Running on the riverbank, he envisioned a life with no barriers or limits. Marriage without borders. He saw the future, as he ran to the Eliot Bridge and back again, under the allée of sycamores with their silvery trunks and their green-gold leaves. Orion and Sorel could not have been farther from his mind. Nor did he consider Mel Millstein, who was driving in from Canaan to Logan Airport, bad back and all, to show the flag for ISIS, and to do his bidding. Jonathan thought about his day, not other peoples’. He meted his own stride.