The Cookbook Collector

hang out with his friends, none of whom were women. He inhaled women too quickly, devouring what he most admired: their salt-sweet taste, their arch and sway. In that experimental age—George’s teens and twenties, America’s seventies—he took what he wanted, running girls and nights together in a haze of pot and alcohol.

Death shook George. His younger sister overdosed, and he lost his taste for the so-called counterculture. As he approached thirty he took stock—considering the women he had seduced, the drugs he had abused—and a new desire consumed him: to live better, or at least less self-indulgently, to give more, to start a family. The resolutions were heartfelt, the results were mixed. He lived with one woman and then another, and willed himself to fall in love, but he did not, and so he grew more solitary, even as he hungered for companionship. He mourned that no one in the world was right for him, even as his girlfriends branded him an opportunist and a libertine. In the worst of these love-storms, he applied himself in penance to his dissertation, and finished in record time. He had no interest in academia and scarcely remembered why he’d begun studying thermal dynamics in the first place. Therefore, he took the job at Microsoft and drove north to Seattle, where he worked long days building Excel. Yearning for substance apart from his share price, which was always rising, inexorably rising, he began to read. Reading, he began to buy.

From the beginning, he had expensive taste. A copy of The Whale, later known as Moby-Dick, inscribed by Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first self-published poetry that Robert Frost pressed into his sweetheart’s hand. An 1831 Audubon with its black-eyed birds poised to fly, beating their plumed wings against the page. He dealt with ordinary books, of course, but only rarities excited him. Pushing forty, George was hard to please, and difficult to surprise. He had established bulwarks of skepticism against disappointment. And yet he hungered for the beautiful, and the authentic—those volumes and experiences impossible to duplicate. How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.

3

Although Jess was antimaterialistic, she thought about money all the time. Independent-minded, she was insolvent. There was her graduate stipend, of course—enough to keep her in brown rice and sprouts—and, fortunately, the job at Yorick’s, but none of this sufficed.

Not this time, she told herself. Not this time, as if she were still a child. And she put off calling her father from one day to the next. She lay awake at night trying to figure out how to raise the Friends and Family funds without falling back upon the patriarchy.

Even when she didn’t ask for help, conversations with her computer-scientist father were difficult. Jess had not followed Emily to MIT, but matriculated at Brandeis instead. Nor had she studied applied math like her sister, but declared philosophy her major. If she had pursued analytic philosophy, logic, even linguistics, her father might have understood, but Jess avoided these areas, and spent college contemplating Plato’s dialogs, Renaissance humanism, and the philosophes, abandoning the future, as her father saw it, and consigning herself to the dead languages and footnotes of the past.

If Richard disapproved of philosophy as a major, he liked it even less as a doctoral program, and often asked Jess what she intended to do with her degree, and where she thought she would find a job. These questions offended Jess and also bored her; they were so transparent. Her father had a new family, and he would be paying for college yet again when he was old. “Have you considered how you will support yourself?” he inquired, but what Jess heard was, “My resources are not infinite.” She was not about to ask for an extra eighteen hundred dollars and listen to him carry on about her “theoretical phase.”

She wished Emily hadn’t told her about the Friends and Family offering. Money had never interested her before, and now she wanted it. If she had the Veritech money she wouldn’t have to worry about the overdraft on her bank account or wonder how she would make ends meet over the summer between TAships. She did think like a student. That’s what she was.

Of course Jess had never wanted wealth, but the idea of a little money entranced her. Suppose her hundred shares at eighteen dollars became one hundred shares at one hundred dollars. She would have ten grand. As she drifted off to sleep, she dreamed her eighteen hundred shares were growing like Jack’s beanstalk outside her window. Ten thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars—enough to live on and to give away! In her dreams the money climbed from seed to vine. Emily’s company would work its magic. All Jess needed was a handful of beans.

She tried to borrow from her roommates, but Theresa was broke and Roland skeptical. He read the Veritech prospectus and pointed out, “It says here the company doesn’t make a profit.”

“I don’t think that matters,” Jess said. “Hardly any companies make profits these days.”

“Really?”

“I mean, not yet.”

“And it says this is a high-risk investment.”

“But it’s Emily’s company. It’s not high-risk,” said Jess.

Roland shook his head. “Call me old-fashioned.” He returned the prospectus.

“I’d pay you right back.”

“But you can’t be sure the stock will go up.”

“Why do you have to be my roommate?” Jess demanded, half-laughing. “Why do I get the only person in the entire country who doubts Veritech is going way up?”

“I don’t doubt,” said Roland loftily, “I suspend judgment. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative, baby.”

Jess’s ten days were almost over. Still, she didn’t mention the Friends and Family offering when she spoke to her father on the phone.

“Everything’s okay?” Richard asked.

“Yup, how are you?”

“We’re all fine. Heidi had a paper deadline this week. Lily had an ear infection.”

“Oh, poor Lily.”

“She’s fine,” said Richard, after which Jess spoke to the three-year-old on the phone.

“One potato, two potato, three potato four, five potato, six potato, eleven potato more, five potato, six potato, seven potato eight …”

After several minutes, Jess asked, “Could I talk to Dad?”

“Hello, this is Blue Bear. Hello. Come to my house.” Blue Bear’s voice sounded like a balloon running out of air. “A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, elemenopee,” Blue Bear chanted faster and faster. Lily began giggling. “QRSTUVWXYandZ. ABCDEFGQRSTelemenopee.”

“Could I talk to your daddy?” Jess asked again, but Blue Bear hung up, and Richard didn’t call her back.

“I can’t believe you haven’t taken care of it,” Emily scolded on the phone. “What are you waiting for?”

“Well …” She could hear Emily typing in the background, multitasking as usual.

“It’s not very difficult,” Emily said.

“I don’t have eighteen hundred dollars.”

“Didn’t you call Dad? All you have to do is ask him nicely.”

Now Jess saw what Emily wanted. She wanted Jess to talk sweetly to her father, after which he would help her, and they would get along again. Emily was a firm believer in getting along, no matter what, and seemed to think if you behaved considerately, real feeling followed. But how could affection bloom in rocky soil? What were words without love? Only dust. Jess could not live in such a xeriscape.

“You did call him,” Emily said.

“Of course.”

“And did you ask him?”

“Well … not yet.”

If only George had written her a check. He was so rich; he must be to own a store like Yorick’s. And he had heard of Veritech. He understood about technology and knew she’d pay him back immediately. But he had to say no. He loved saying no.