The Cookbook Collector

“Good.” Sandra stood on the porch, keys in hand, groceries at her feet, but she did not seem at all inclined to invite Jess inside. “I can’t let the cat out,” she reminded Jess as she gathered all her bags together to rush the door. “You can come in, but you have to be quick.”

“Oh, I understand.” Body-blocking Geoffrey, Sandra darted inside, and Jess followed.

“Would you like a glass of juice?” Sandra asked. “Would you like to take a seat? Not that one.” She warned Jess away from Geoffrey’s dark green couch, and Jess settled on a velvet chair instead.

“Who was Mrs. McClintock?” Jess blurted out.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you sure your uncle never married?”

“He never married.”

“Are you sure he didn’t marry a Janet McClintock?” Jess asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Sandra. “Janet McClintock was my mother.”

George did not know where Jess had gone. She had left her books out. McLintock lay open on the book cradle. The laptop stood open as well, as though Jess intended to return, but it was past five and she did not come back. He called her on her cell, but she didn’t answer.

He poured himself a glass of wine and began to think of all the things he might have said or done to offend her. He remembered that the day before they’d had a little spat about her article. They were sitting in the living room on his couch, a massive low-slung piece with great wood slabs for arms. He said that she should write something quick and accessible with gorgeous illustrations for Gastronomica. She insisted that this was selling out, that she was developing an argument far more scholarly, with serious notes and tables. She said she had fifty-one pages already, and he’d laughed and warned her not to get lost in all that material.

Then she’d demanded, “Do I look like someone who gets lost easily?”

“Yes,” he’d teased, but she hadn’t been in the mood, and had snatched a heavy throw pillow, upholstered green, and smacked him upside the head.

They had laughed at the time, but perhaps she was still angry. Or perhaps Leon had suddenly returned, and Jess had decided she would not see George again. Was there some change of heart? Or some emergency? Should he try to reach her sister?

By the time Jess arrived, he had been waiting almost two hours, and he was in such an anxious state that he was almost in no mood to see her. But there she was, out of breath and streaked with sweat from racing up the stairs. “I’ve solved it,” she cried. “I know who she was.”

And she showed George how she had picked out Janet from the menu, and told him how she had rushed to tell Sandra. “He was in love with Janet when he was young. I think Janet was McClintock’s Laura and his Beatrice, and that’s why he drew her over and over and he read her into all his cookbooks.”

“What did Sandra say?”

“She was very offended!” Jess exclaimed. “She said her uncle didn’t even like to eat. She said that he was extremely thin. She told me her mother was happily married for sixty-two years, and she was perfectly sensible and lucid until the day she died at eighty-three.”

George smiled.

But Jess was indignant. “I thought she’d thank me!”

“For inventing an embarrassing story about her mother?”

“I didn’t invent it,” Jess said. “I know I’m right. Maybe it was an unrequited love, but she was the one.”

You’re the one, thought George.

“You’d think she’d enjoy knowing,” Jess said. “She’s convinced she was a Russian princess in a past life. Why can’t Janet and Tom have had a past life too? Why is that so shocking?”

“Let me take you out to dinner.”

“George,” said Jess. “Look at me.”

“I am looking at you.”

“I’m covered with cat hair.”

“Come take a bath.”

“I don’t have fresh clothes.”

“We’ll stop at your place and you can change.”

Jess ignored this. “Charles Dickens was obsessed with his sister-in-law. He never got over her.”

“Yes, and I’m sure the family loved to hear about it.”

Jess folded her arms across her chest. “And Tolstoy didn’t really model Natasha on his wife.”

“You’re upset,” George murmured.

“It’s just so anticlimactic—to put together the pieces of the puzzle and then to be …”

“Shh.” He kissed her.

“Exactly. To be shushed like that. As though I were arriving on her doorstep to blackmail her or something. As though I had something on her. She says she’s upset about her grandchildren. Her daughter still can’t get custody.”

“That explains it,” said George, frowning. “Don’t you think she’d be preoccupied?”

“I thought she might be …”

“She’s not going to be grateful to you for suggesting that her mother had some kind of affair with her husband’s brother. You got carried away, Jess.”

She didn’t answer.

“Come here.”

She didn’t come.

He took her hand. “You have to be careful not to fall in love with your material.”

She relented a little. “Maybe.”

“I thought she’d be more imaginative,” Jess told George as he ran the water in the bath. She perched on the edge of the tub, which was claw-footed, fathoms deep, and she pulled off one grubby sock and George pulled off the other.

“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.”