The Cookbook Collector

by Allegra Goodman

  “Yeah, she’s the CEO.”

  “She could just give you the money herself.”

  “She wants me to stop thinking like a student.”

  He suppressed a smile and said nothing.

  “So will you?”

  “No,” George said slowly. “I think your parents would be a better bet.”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, you don’t want to ask, but they’re the ones to do it.”

  “Eighteen hundred is less than the complete Ruskin,” Jess blurted out. “You want two thousand for that.”

  “The Ruskin is thirty-seven volumes in morocco,” George said.

  “So?”

  “Just ask your mom and dad.” She frowned.

  “Here, I’ll show you.” George unlocked his glass-fronted bookcase and took down the first volume and handed it to her.

  Her fingers couldn’t help caressing the red leather, as he knew they would. Unconsciously, she lifted the book to her face and brushed it against her cheek.

  “Ruskin’s worth two thousand, don’t you think?”

  “No,” said Jess. “I don’t like him,” and she returned the book.

  “I think I’m going to make Yorick’s by appointment only,” George told his friend Nick Eberhart that Sunday at Nick’s house, a Craftsman Style extravaganza. Nick was younger than George, and taller. When he started to lose his hair he had shaved his head so that he had a sleek and streamlined look. He had left Microsoft some years after George and amused himself with designing and selling screen savers: fish that appeared to swim across the computer monitor, shooting stars, flying toasters with tiny wings. After the flying toasters became the subject of a contentious lawsuit with another screen-saver company, Nick gave up the business and began dabbling as a private investor. He built his house a few blocks away from George’s place and became a model citizen, serving on the neighborhood council. A couple of times a week, he and George went running in Tilden Park.

  “It’s cute the way you call it running,” said Nick’s wife, Julia, and she laughed as she went searching for Nick’s knee braces. Julia was a curiosity to George. Ten years younger than Nick, she was blond, athletic, green-eyed. A Jewish girl from Malibu.

  George remembered the housewives of his youth. His own mother, Shirley, for example. She and her friends had raised the children and looked after their husbands. They’d volunteered in the schools, maintained the social fabric of the neighborhood. Remembered birthdays, planned parties, kept track of what belonged to whom and who belonged to which. Long before George heard of feminism, his mother had taught him the plight of women. Shirley had been unusually direct, Midwestern.

  “I have bad news.” George remembered his mother’s matter-of-fact voice as he sat with his sister at the kitchen table after school. He was eight, his sister, Susan, six. “Robbie’s mother is in the hospital.”

  “Why?” Susan asked, while George remembered that Robbie had not come to school that day.

  “Well, she collapsed.”

  “Doing what?” George asked.

  “Doing everything.” Shirley poured the children cups of milk.

  “But how did she collapse?” asked George.

  “She got depressed.”

  “Why?”

  Susan didn’t understand; she was too young, but what Shirley said next shocked George more than anything he’d heard in his whole childhood—far more than his father’s so-called facts of life. “The truth is, it’s exhausting to take care of other people.”

  He thought he was dreaming in the yellow kitchen. The floor shifted under his feet. That was how it felt to suspect for the first time that he might be other people.

  But there was Julia, returning triumphant with the black knee braces, and kissing Nick good-bye. She did not look depressed at all, this latter-day housewife with the MBA and the beautiful two-year-old son, Henry.

  As Nick drove up Wildcat Canyon Road, George said, “The problem with a brick-and-mortar store is dealing with people all the time.”

  Nick glanced at George as he powered up the hill in his SUV. “I thought that was the point of the store.”

  “I don’t really like people,” said George. “I think I’d rather just work as a private dealer and have done with it. If I could get decent help, it would be different.”

  “The new one quit on you?”

  “I’m sure she will. They don’t even give notice; they just leave. It’s tedious. I’m tired of it.”

  “You get tired easily,” Nick pointed out.

  “No, I don’t.” Nick missed the point. George didn’t tire, he was constantly disappointed. Dissatisfied. He was always looking for the next thing. He had the mind of a researcher, restlessly turning corners, seeking out new questions. But he was not a researcher; he was simply rich.

  Nick parked at Inspiration Point with its view of hills and reservoirs like winding rivers far below.

  “I don’t like kids,” George grumbled.

  “You’re great with kids,” Nick countered with a new father’s evangelism. “Henry loves you.”

  “No, I mean the kids who work for me. I don’t like dealing with them. I’m supposed to be, you know, employer, confessor, personal banker. It’s ridiculous. And they’re so ignorant. God.”

  “You’re talking about the new one.” A little of the old Nick came through here, a smile, as if to say, You bring her up a lot, when of course George had only mentioned Jess once, or possibly twice, in passing.

  “All of them,” he said doggedly, and Nick knew, even as they walked up to the trailhead and stretched and started jogging up the Ridge Trail with its canyon views, that George was in one of his apocalyptic moods, half bemused, half horrified. Pedantic. Of course Nick had heard George fume before about the end of Western Civilization, the death of books, the literary tradition either forgotten or maligned. Unfortunately, George didn’t quietly despair about these matters; he wrote letters on the subject and served on the board of something called the Seneca Foundation that opposed bilingual education in the schools. George was always reading, not just voraciously, but systematically, the way scientists read, the way technocrats read when they decide to take a position on Western Civilization. Plato first, then Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas—chronologically, George had built his portfolio of great books. Years ago, he’d read Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Thomas Pynchon. Now he pored over Dante and Herodotus. He’d become one of those people who felt he had to defend Shakespeare. He had not aged gracefully. “They’re all ignorant,” George said. “The new one actually reads, but only to pass judgment. This is the way kids learn today. Someone told them how you feel is more important than what you know, and so they think accusations are ideas. This is political correctness run amok.”

  Nick picked up the pace, hoping to outrun George’s rant. He passed a man walking a brown and white beagle, and an elderly couple in straw hats.

  “What was it Jess said today …?” George panted, trying to keep up. “Ruskin is a dogmatic, self-indulgent, sexually repressed misogynist with an edifice complex.”

  Nick smiled. “Sounds just like you.”

  Was he dogmatic? George asked himself as he drove home on switchbacks between trees, Bay views, and sky. Maybe, but only for good cause. Self-indulgent? Only sometimes, and at least he admitted to the fault. He should get some credit for that. Sexually repressed? No, easily bored. Misogynist? He took a hairpin turn. Hardly. He loved women!

  George pulled off Buena Vista onto Wildwood, then parked halfway over the curb and collected his mail. Edifice complex hit close to home. George adored his house, and as Nick could attest, he had become obsessed with its restoration. He’d spent years and more money than he cared to admit. Still, even here, he pleaded innocent. Obsession, yes. Self-indulgence, no. The restoration was about Bernard Maybeck, not George Friedman. He was just a steward to Maybeck’s vision. The research he and his designers had done, the ceramic tile, the salvaged wood, the light fixtures, and th
e hardware had been a labor of love, not ego. He had been patient, looking for the perfect door hinges. He had allowed his shingles to weather naturally, enduring months when his Californian beauty looked like a molting bird, until at last the cedar darkened and his wisteria came into its own.

  Walking under a wooden trellis built like a Shinto torii, he climbed two flights of winding outdoor stairs, past eucalyptus, oak, and pine. Tree house and temple, George’s home seemed bigger inside than outside. Tossing his mail onto a table, he switched on lights so that his great beamed living room glowed bloodred and deepest green and glinting gold. The fireplace was manorial. The square staircase turned and turned again in the entryway, and all the way up, George could view his framed collection of antique maps. Early novels filled his personal library, first editions of Austen, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett. American poets, almost all signed. He owned a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Harp-Weaver inscribed to her lover George Dillon: To my darling George. A signed copy of Sandburg’s The People, Yes as well as Frost, Cummings, Ezra Pound. He collected first editions of dystopian satires: Gulliver’s Travels, Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, Erewhon. His dictionaries were magnificent, all English and American. First editions of Webster’s, first fascicles of the OED, and, most precious, a 1765 Dictionary of the English Language that had belonged to Mrs. Thrale.

  Oak tables displayed platoons of typewriters: downstrike typewriters, upstrike typewriters, vintage World War I typewriters, turn-of-the-century typewriters—a 1901 Armstrong, a Densmore 1, a brass 1881 Hamilton Automatic, even an 1877 Sholes & Glidden in its case—each perfect in its kind, primed and polished so the metal shone.

  He scarcely glanced at any of these things, but he needed them nonetheless. The collections illustrated each of George’s interests in turn, from vintage machines, to poetry, to maps; just as fish give way to bears, and bears to beaked birds’ heads on carved totem poles. Some kept journals. Some raised children. George told his life history with objects. His boyish treasures and pirate games now took the form of Northwest explorers’ charts. His childhood superheroes metamorphosed into a complete run of Classic Comics, sealed in archival sleeves in the glass cabinets of his butler’s pantry. The gold evenings of his youth he stored up in Ridge, Heitz, and Grgich, his California wines.

  In the kitchen he minced shallots with his good Japanese knife. He poured himself a glass of Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, and admired its deep almond hue. Liquid possibly too good for cooking, but he used it anyway, poaching the sole with shallots in the wine and butter. He set a place in the dining room, poured another glass of the Chard, and ate his dinner. He was nothing if not civilized.

  And yet, he was dissatisfied. The fish tasted bland, the Chard too buttery. Over time, his appetites had changed. He had been young, of course, like everybody else. He had loved a girl and she had hurt him, as first girlfriends did, and he had recovered and avenged himself, more or less, on all the others—although he never considered his behavior vengeful. In his youth his desires had been simple: to drink, to smoke, to screw, and to 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.”