The Cookbook Collector

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.

“Are you all right?” George asked. That startled her, and he regretted the question. Too intimate. Too concerned. “Could I get you some strawberries?” he amended.

She shook her head and kept gazing at the rare cookbooks under glass.

“Please let me get you some.”

“Please?” She teased gently. “Have you started saying please to me?”

“A rare slip,” he said. “But I did buy the strawberries for you.”

“Why?”

Because I love you, he thought. “Because I owe you,” he said.

“You don’t owe me anything,” she replied in her easy way.

“You know I do. You got me these books.” His voice was low. “You made the deal, Jess.”

“True,” she conceded with a smile.

“Would you like to work on them?”

“Work on them how?”

“We need a descriptive catalog, for one thing. We have to sort the notes and store them separately with records of the page numbers where they were found. Colm started, but I need him at the store, and he’s got his dissertation. I was wondering if you would like to try.”

He opened the glass display case and took out the palm-sized 1814 American Cookery. The binding had cracked, and he held the book as if it were a fledgling with a broken wing.

“Independence Cake,” Jess read over George’s shoulder. “Twenty pounds flour, fifteen pounds sugar, ten pounds butter, four dozen eggs, one quart wine, one quart brandy …” She laughed softly. “Was this for the Founding Fathers reunion?” She turned the next several pages and found a black-ink drawing on a slip of typing paper, a nude woman holding a round fruit to her mouth. Jess plucked it out and read the collector’s tiny caption: “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

“Will you?” George asked, closing the book and placing it atop the cabinet.

“Maybe,” Jess said lightly. “Do you have any?”

“No peaches.”

“Oh, well. I can’t ruin this dress, anyway.”

Words he took as permission to look openly at her. The fabric of her dress, gray and wrinkled at first glance, was really silver. No one else would wear fabric like that, rustling with every breath.

“It’s Emily’s,” she said, disproving his idea immediately. She had borrowed the dress from her sister, although Emily thought it was too long on her.

“Will you take the job? Please?”

“Hmm.” Pensive, with just a touch of humor, she said, “I don’t think I like that word from you.”

“I’d pay you more,” George told her. Only half-joking, he declared, “I’d make you curator.”

“Oh, a title,” said Jess.

Why are you hesitating now? he thought. What have you been doing for the past six weeks? He had scarcely seen her at the store. Across the room, George’s friends were clustering at the dessert table like bees. Raj and Colm were discussing William Blake, while Jonathan was holding forth to Nick about how the Nasdaq would rise again. Stealthily, Leon walked among them. George assumed he was casing the joint. George should check Leon’s pockets before he left. Search him and then show Jess the content of her boyfriend’s character. After which George could comfort Jess, and then … he didn’t know what happened next.

Jess said, “I want to know who she was.”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

“The collector’s lover.”

“Why do you assume he had a lover?”

“Well, because—because look.” Jess held up the nude. “You’ve got the evidence right here.”

“You’re missing the point,” George told her. “She wasn’t his lover. That was why he wrote all the notes and drew the pictures.” He took the drawing from her, and his fingers brushed hers. She looked up at him, clear-eyed. Perspicacious. She understands, he thought. She knows.

But in the next moment she drew back her hand. “Actually, I think I would like a drink.”

As he showed her the way to the bar, he finished his thought under his breath, murmuring, “He didn’t have her, so he drew her instead.”

21

Jonathan was calm when ISIS rose to nine, and still confident when the shares retreated to five fifty. Those who whined and fretted only irritated him. Scared-straight venture capitalists did not impress him now any more than they had back in 1998 when they pleaded with Jonathan to take their cash. Where did they get their ideas about the new economy? From magazines? He did not bother reading publications like Fast Company, or Wired, or Forbes. So-called business cycles bored him. The news, whether paper or electronic, meant little as far as Jonathan was concerned. The news was already old. Weekly, daily, hourly, anything called news was already archival.

He understood that in this world there were news reporters and news makers, investors and innovators. Watchers and world beaters. In each case he took the active role. He did not know economic theory; he knew computers. He did not meditate on trends; he eyed the future. And so, at George’s party, when he talked to Nick, he spoke with perfect equanimity. “The strong survive, man,” he told Nick, and by strong he meant “Those with new technology.”

While Emily saw falling share price as a sad decay, a postlapsarian decline from larger, rounder numbers,