The Cookbook Collector

On the day before his appointment with Dave, he took tiny steps to Jonathan’s office, traversing what seemed like miles of drab rust-red carpet, raveled at the edges. Mel stopped, clutching the top edge of a cubicle. The pain was worse. After three months, he had come to think of it as the pain—not his pain, but a larger, impersonal force. The pain—the way opera singers speak of their instrument, the voice.

“Mel Millstein,” chided Sorel as she passed by, “you need to go to Alexander class.”

I need to stay employed, thought Mel.

“The trouble with you,” said Sorel, “is you’re misaligned.”

Feet on the desk, Star Wars action figures lining the windowsill behind him, Jonathan was typing with his keyboard in his lap. “What’s happening?”

Mel hesitated. He had planned what to say, of course, but scripts didn’t work with Jonathan—none of the scripts Mel knew.

“I need help hiring,” Mel said. “I sense that HR needs restructuring, and I’d like to make that happen sooner rather than later.” Now, he added silently.

“Okay,” said Jonathan. “What do you want?”

My job, Mel thought. My life. Existence without pain. “Well, I have Zoë and Jessica right now …,” he began, “and I’m trying to get …”

Jonathan considered his hapless HR director. At the computer-science department, Mel had been the go-to guy, straightening out green cards and foreign visas, grappling with bureaucracy. When Jonathan was jockeying for attention from professors, Mel had actually taken the time to ask, “How are things going?” To say, “Let me check his schedule. Maybe I can get you in.” Jonathan did not forget old kindnesses, nor did he forget how little he liked MIT, where cryptography profs favored students more theoretical, more purely mathematical.

He had wanted only the best for Mel when he plucked him from his desk at the department. He’d never intended to kill the poor man.

“Mel,” said Jonathan, “you don’t need help. You need a better attitude. Put on a happy face! This is not a submarine. This is a big fun start-up with a severe shortage of programmers, and all you need to do is go out there and say, ‘Hey you guys, come on over.’ Is that hard?”

“There are a lot of other—” Mel began.

“But, no, there aren’t. You don’t think about them,” Jonathan cut him off. “We’re better. It’s all attitude, man. You’re smart and talented, you’re meticulous—and you’re going to have zillions of dollars next year. Did you forget that?”

Ah, yes. Mel remembered the conversation well. When Jonathan had offered him the job at ISIS, Mel had asked delicately about compensation. “Here’s the thing,” Jonathan replied, and he spoke in all seriousness. “We’re all going to be gazillionaires.”

“You know what you’re doing—you just have to show your stuff to the prospective hires,” Jonathan explained now. “Be cool. Be confident….”

“I don’t feel confident,” Mel confessed. “I feel that my position here is …”

“Is what?”

Mel couldn’t find the word. No, he knew the word, but couldn’t say it. He had to force himself. “Tenuous.”

“Tenuous!” Jonathan looked at him as though he’d begun speaking in another language. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Dave wants to meet with me.”

Jonathan looked at him almost tenderly. “No one’s firing you.”

“I’m not so … I don’t feel so …,” Mel spluttered.

Jonathan reassured him. “No one’s firing you right before our IPO. That would look terrible!”

“I think Dave has a plan,” said Mel.

“Yeah, he’s got lots of plans. Don’t worry about Dave. I’ll deal with him. You just do your job, okay?”

“Okay.” He realized that this was Jonathan’s way of reaching out. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Get out there and kick ass! I want twelve new programmers, and I want you to go out there and hire them with a smile on your face.”

“I will,” Mel answered, stunned. He tried to smile without moving any other part of his body. He was afraid to jolt his standing equilibrium.

“And I’ll tell you a secret,” Jonathan added, just as Mel was leaving. “We’re going to tell everybody at the end of the day, but I’ll tell you first. We’ve signed Yahoo! for premium ChainLinx protection.”

“Yahoo!” Now Mel really was smiling.

“Yeah!” Jonathan swung his feet up on the desk and resumed typing.

Mel returned to his cubicle full of hope. ISIS had Yahoo! in the stable, their biggest client to date. This was huge, and Mel knew first. There was no greater sign of favor.

He stood in the back as Jonathan made his announcement. All the employees in town packed the fifth floor near the windows. Outside, a light snow was falling. Inside, programmers perched atop desks, stood on chairs, and the whole company whooped and cheered.

“This is your work,” Aldwin said.

“You guys are super,” Dave chimed in.

“You guys are animals!” Jonathan shouted, punching the air, and all the animals roared.

Afterward the programmers milled together talking motorcycles, debating which were fastest and which were overpriced—not that it mattered anymore! They spoke of vacations. A company camping trip in the High Sierra. No, a voyage down the River Nile, a cruise to see the Pyramids. They were about to be gazillionaires. Yahoo! As Mel walked to the T station, he came upon Orion, hatless, walking his bike through heavy snow.

“Hey,” Orion said.

“Amazing night,” Mel said.

“I guess so,” Orion said laconically.

The kid was too young, Mel thought, to appreciate the situation. The snowflakes were wet and heavy, double flakes and triple flakes. Mel could almost touch the zillions in the air.

12

Orion had grown up in his father’s poetry, and because Lou Steiner was famous, Orion’s younger selves had been published and widely anthologized. Orion, naked wader, minnow-trader lived on the page, alongside the sleeper with the tiny fists. He didn’t take any of this too personally, not even his father’s collection, Star Boy. Growing up in Vermont, he knew many other poets’ children who had been immortalized. When it came to publicity, Orion thought his father’s wives and girlfriends had it worse, and he had often wondered how they liked word portraits mentioning birdlike physiques, small breasts, sad eyes. Orion tried to avoid Lou’s love poems, because he could put the name to each description, and then afterward he felt as though he’d seen his father’s lovers, including his own mother, naked. His father found this amusing, but he was entirely unself-conscious on and off the page.

Lou’s fame was riverlike—deep and narrow in some places, then broadening unexpectedly into shallows. His books sold a thousand, maybe twelve hundred copies each, but schoolchildren everywhere studied his villanelle “Where Are the Bees?” His later style, increasingly aphoristic, had inspired critics to call him a new minimalist, and at seventy-five, with his unrepentant hippie politics and eloquent Forest Cycle, Lou had become an icon to environmentalists, who printed his verse on T-shirts and posters—usually without permission. Like Matisse cutouts, Steiner’s late pared-down poems were all space and edges on the page. The best-known was his found poem, “Tree.” One line, which read simply:

Here I stand. I can do no other.

Molly was honest. She said Orion’s father scared her. Over the years, Lou had grown shaggy, rambling, slightly unhinged. Orion’s mother, Diane, thought perhaps Lou was suffering from early Alzheimer’s. The idea