The Cookbook Collector

by Allegra Goodman

  Emily lined up the stems on a cutting board and chopped the ends off with a cleaver. “The question is, what should I use for a vase?” Emily was just thinking aloud, but instantly she regretted asking. Alex looked so disappointed, standing in the kitchen doorway. The flowers were too big. They were all wrong. Poor guy. Sunflowers must have looked perfect in the store: prettiest and least symbolic—not like roses, for example.

  “Don’t worry,” Jess reassured Alex in the living room as Milton arrived.

  “What can I do? Am I pouring waffle batter?” Milton asked.

  “I’m going next door to ask the neighbors for a vase,” Jess called out.

  “Okay,” Emily said. “No, wait, don’t do that—the one next door works nights. He works in the ER at Stanford Hospital. Don’t knock on his—” But Jess was gone, and here was Emily’s assistant, Laura, and her husband, Kevin, and their two little children. They had come straight from church, bearing cinnamon buns.

  “I made half with pecans and half without,” said Laura. “You can warm them in the oven.”

  “You’re amazing.” Emily spoke to Laura, but she was smiling at three-year-old Justin, in his Bermuda shorts and blue plaid shirt and bow tie. One-year-old Meghan, in her yellow gingham sundress, was already heading for the stairs with Kevin close behind. Kevin was a graduate student in accounting. Laura was twenty-six, just three years older than Jess, but there she was with two children. They were so beautiful, blue-eyed like their mother, their hair even blonder than hers.

  “They’re easy to make,” Laura told Emily in the kitchen.

  “They don’t look easy,” Emily said, admiring the giant glossy rolls.

  “When I was a kid I had a summer job at Cinnabon,” Laura explained. “I took the recipe home and divided it by forty.”

  “What temperature do you want?”

  “Just very low, as low as you can.”

  “All right, let me see,” murmured Emily, fiddling with the controls. She was unfamiliar with her oven.

  “You don’t want to bake them any more, just keep the glaze gooey. Here, let’s put them on the counter.” Suddenly Laura looked a little pale.

  “Are you all right? Do you want a drink? Do you need to sit down?” Emily asked.

  “I’m fine. I’m pregnant again,” Laura whispered.

  “Really? When are you …?”

  “We aren’t telling anyone yet. We just found out,” said Laura, and almost imperceptibly she sighed.

  Emily wanted to talk further, but Milton manned the waffle iron just steps away. “The green light means they’re ready, right?” he asked.

  “Let me get you a platter.” Emily was reaching for one when Jess burst through the door bearing an umbrella stand for the sunflowers.

  “Come sit,” Emily told Laura. “You too,” she called to her sister, who was using the sprayer from the kitchen sink to fill the umbrella stand. “Everybody has to eat a lot of fruit salad.”

  “Did you get Bruno’s halcyon-days e-mail?” Milton asked as they sat down together, eight at the table, counting Meghan in Kevin’s lap.

  “Bruno’s out of town, so now it’s open season?” Emily asked lightly.

  “I had to look up halcyon,” said Laura.

  “These are the halcyon days,” Alex declaimed in his best imitation of Bruno. “But the days are numbered when we can spend as we choose and operate without scrutiny …”

  “With a public offering comes public accountability,” Milton chimed in with his own version of Bruno’s German-Swiss accent.

  “Move the syrup, hon,” Kevin warned Laura, as Meghan’s little hand stole across the table.

  “He talks too much,” Alex said of Bruno.

  “That’s his job,” Milton pointed out.

  Alex rolled his eyes.

  “Still angry?” Emily murmured.

  “Well, how would you feel?”

  “I think I’d be a little patient,” said Emily. “And wait for my idea to settle in, and see if maybe there were ways to develop it. If there was a different context …”

  Alex looked at her with his dark eyes. “It’s easier to be patient when you have some hope of success.”

  “He’s just got a crush on you,” Jess told Emily after the guests had left, “and you’re a little mean to him, don’t you think?”

  Emily tore off plastic wrap to cover the fruit bowl. “How am I mean to Alex?”

  “You ignore him.”

  “I do not.”

  “You pretend you don’t know how he feels.”

  This was true, but Emily didn’t know any other way to behave. She needed to work with Alex.

  He thought he loved her, but what did he know? He had finished college at eighteen and founded a company before he could drink legally. To Emily’s knowledge, he’d never had a girlfriend. He’d fixed on her the way a hatchling fixes on the first moving thing it sees. He looked at her longingly, helplessly. Watched her as she walked down the hall, e-mailed her logic puzzles he thought she might enjoy, left chocolate on her desk.

  “It’s strange,” Emily said. “It’s difficult. It’s like having a secret Valentine every day of the week.”

  Jess knelt down and rearranged the sunflowers in the umbrella stand. “You have to give the guy a little credit.”

  Emily leaned over the counter to glimpse Jess in the pass-through between kitchen and dining room. “I can’t lead him on,” she said.

  “But he’s devoted,” Jess murmured. “You have to give him that.”

  That night, as Emily lay alone in bed, she called Jonathan.

  “Are you excited?” he asked her.

  “Well …”

  “Emily!”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. And nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “So much is happening, and so much is changing.”

  “Nothing really changes.” Jonathan’s deep voice was totally assured. This was one of Jonathan’s great gifts, the voice of experience even where he had none. His own company was only a little over a year old, but he and his partners were storming the data-security market. They had developed a product called Lockbox, which encoded data and transactions for a growing array of Internet vendors. An image of a tiny treasure chest, the Lockbox logo was beginning to pop up at the bottom of Web pages everywhere.

  Fast Company called Jonathan a wunderkind. Red Herring dubbed him a tech genius—but there were many tech wunderkinder starting companies. Jonathan was something rare. He was brilliant cryptographically, with a command of every aspect of his company’s Internet security products. And he was also an intuitive businessman—fearless, pragmatic, unyielding at the negotiating table where he always got his way. He upended all the stereotypes. He was like a fighting Quaker. A charismatic geek. “The only thing that changes is people’s perceptions,” Jonathan reasoned. “You just keep on working like you did before.”

  “Don’t you think perceptions are important?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “Facts are important. Tomorrow everybody’s rich. Anyone who has a problem with that is either ungrateful or jealous.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Hey, you earned that jealousy! Enjoy it.”

  “It’s complicated,” Emily confessed.

  “Is Alex giving you a hard time again? Is he making you nervous? Fuck him. Seriously, Emily. You’ve been working toward this for how long?”

  “Three years.” She couldn’t help laughing at herself. She knew the time frame was absurd.

  But Jonathan’s background was in computers, not business. He measured companies in dog years. “Now you get to reap the rewards.”

  “I love you.” Emily laughed.

  “Tomorrow is going to be amazing.” He spoke thinking of his own company as well, his own IPO, a dazzling coming-out party for ISIS in a matter of weeks. “Say it.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Repeat after me. Tomorrow is going to be amazing. Incredible. Fucking ridiculous.”r />
  It was so good to hear his voice. He said the things she only whispered to herself.

  “Tomorrow is going to be historic!”

  “Well, every day is history eventually,” she teased.

  “You know what I mean.”

  She sighed happily. “I know what you mean.”

  “So don’t be modest. You don’t have to be modest with me. Just think what you did! There was nothing in that space and you …”

  “… and Alex and Milton …”

  “… said: Let there be Veritech. And there was Veritech. And it grew and grew….”

  Squeezing her eyes shut, she remembered an old film from science class where flowers bloomed in time-lapse photography. Rain drenched the desert and suddenly, petal by petal, second by second, in saturated Technicolor, all the cactus flowers opened.

  This will be the final boarding call….

  She started from her reverie. “Is that your flight?”

  “Yeah, I’m going,” said Jonathan.

  “Well, hurry.”

  “Enjoy it,” he told her. “And just remember …”

  “I don’t want you to miss your plane.”

  “When you see the—” His phone cut out as it sometimes did, possibly low battery, possibly call waiting, and he left her wide-awake in bed, with the rush of his voice in her ear.

  She was too excited to sleep. She lay on her back in the dark, and her thoughts seemed to fill the room with rustling wings. She thought about her new plan for Alex, the new system she called Verify. She considered her new fortune, the new funds for Veritech, all the opportunities that money could buy: expansion, new hires, charitable giving. How could she fall asleep and dream, when all her dreams were coming true, first thing in the morning?

  All her dreams? No, not quite all. She thought of Laura’s children. Kevin, holding Meghan on his lap, the trays of cinnamon buns warming in the oven until the white glaze dripped down their sides, warm and gooey to the touch.

  Once, Laura had had car trouble and Emily had driven her home. She’d driven up Palm Drive into the Stanford campus through the winding roads of Escondido Village, where married graduate students lived.

  “That’s the one,” Laura said. “Seventy-six C.”

  The brown town house glowed with light. Kevin stood at the door, holding Meghan in his arms. “Come in,” he said.

  When Emily stepped inside, she saw toys everywhere, and baskets of yarn for Laura’s knitting. A high chair, a baby swing, stuffed animals on the couch. Kitchen counters covered with clear canisters of flour and sugar, muffin tins, and a standing mixer. A plate of freshly baked corn muffins.

  “Would you like one?” Laura asked immediately. “Oh, you probably want a napkin, don’t you? Please excuse the mess. Justin!” He must have been under two at the time. “Don’t touch. No!”

  “No! No!” Justin echoed cheerfully as he stood in his pajamas, pushing the buttons of the stereo.

  “He thinks all electronics are called No,” Laura said.

  “Hey, buddy, can you say hi to Emily?” Kevin asked, and Emily saw how round Justin was. Round tummy, round cheeks and chin.

  “Say hello when people are here,” Laura said gently.

  “Hello, people,” Justin said.

  Now Emily felt the longing come over her. Brief but intense, a kind of homesickness, a desire to paint herself into Laura’s family. It was strange. She knew how hard Laura worked. Laura was her assistant, after all. She knew Laura was exhausted. She could not forget Laura’s news and quiet sigh that meant no, not planned. No, not ready. No, we’d never get rid of it, but now? So soon?

  She knew she idealized Laura’s existence. Still, the night before the IPO, Emily imagined Laura’s life. How might she find a piece of that? Not everything. Not so many pregnancies, or so much church, but could she have a bit of Laura’s lamp-lit home? Could she divide the fullness of Laura’s days by forty?

  She got to sleep so late that she had trouble waking. At first all she wanted was to doze in the soft morning light. Then her jitters returned. She showered, dressed quickly, and drove to Veritech with wet hair, and Starbucks coffee for her breakfast.

  Veritech was a three-story building, a former self-storage warehouse of white cinder block with tinted glass windows. The company had already moved twice, and there was talk of new construction. In the meantime, the start-up had gutted the warehouse with the classic contradictory goals of opening up the space and at the same time packing in as many desks as possible. The result was a hollowed-out building with a freight elevator and a web of metal staircases and balconies overlooking a central lounge that Veritech’s architect called the Living Room.

  Now software engineers swarmed the oversized beanbag chairs. Every Veritecher in town had come to watch the company’s debut. There must have been eighty programmers sitting on the floor.

  “Take my place,” Alex told Emily, and he gave up his spot on one of the couches to kneel on the rug and open his laptop.

  “No, that’s okay,” said Emily. “I’ll find a chair.”

  “Please,” said Alex softly, and she smiled and took the seat. He was cute, trying to act chivalrous.

  Wild applause. Whoops of delight. Alex was projecting Veritech’s newly minted stock symbol, VERI, on a roll-down movie screen.

  Stamping feet and whistles at the graph plotting VERI’s numbers. Six in the morning. The Nasdaq had just opened in New York, and VERI’s price was climbing, scaling jagged peaks from eighteen dollars a share to thirty-six and then eighty-nine. Applause again. Wait. One hundred and three. One hundred and three dollars a share!

  Emily held her cup of coffee in two hands and watched Veritech, flying high. Thousands were trading Veritech stock, thousands were paying thousands to buy. A company that had been a couple of rooms and cast-off office furniture was shooting into the stratosphere. Emily knew that Veritech was still a fledgling. She knew her company was not profitable, nowhere near profitable. She knew her start-up floated on millions of dollars of venture capital. She knew all this. She was a sensible young woman. And yet she gazed at the projection on the screen and the numbers were hypnotic. She told herself to look away, but she could not. She felt the first stirrings of a notion strange but compelling: that Veritech’s skyrocketing value reflected the company’s real worth. Emily had never looked at a graph and felt this way before. Although she enjoyed math, her pulse had never quickened at the sight of numbers. Now her heart was racing. Her creation had a price, and then a better price, and then a new price better still. Each number shone brighter than the one before, and she who had always been so rational watched Veritech’s ascent and began to fall in love.

  The programmers were cheering like sports fans, like NASA officials at a shuttle launch. High fives. Hugs. Emily and Milton told each other how relieved they were. Yes, relief was the word that felt permissible. Relief after the long, complicated filing and the brief, torturous delays. All along, Alex had worried that the wave might crest before Veritech arrived. Now here they were in November 1999, and the wave was bigger than any of them had imagined. One hundred nineteen dollars a share. They were on track for listing in the top ten IPOs of the year.

  Other emotions remained unspoken. While the group rejoiced in its collective fortune, a private calculus commenced. As one of the three company cofounders, with three million shares, Emily had come into a personal fortune on paper of $357 million. Emily’s assistant, Laura, as employee four, owned half a million shares. As of that morning, she had $59.5 million. And so on down the line, for each of Veritech’s 156 employees, from the oldest, with over two years’ seniority, to the newest, who had signed on to work for options. True, everyone’s stock was locked up for six months, after which—who knew? The shares were volatile. Theoretically the whole industry could go up in flames, but on-screen, Veritech continued to rise, breaking new ground, etching a new social order. Newly minted millionaires like company chef, Charlie, gazed with awe and quiet jealousy at Veritech’s cof
ounders, now fabulously wealthy. Newly comfortable Miguel, the cleaning engineer, gazed quietly at Charlie. And Veritech, which had been a team where everybody was so free and easy, first names only, could no longer pretend to be a classless society.

  “All right,” said Alex, after giant cookies had been delivered and more coffee served. “All right, you guys.”

  Despite the early hour, the others followed him upstairs to work. No one knew the precise etiquette for becoming wealthy in an instant, but it felt wrong to sit and watch the stock price for more than thirty minutes as a group. From now on the programmers would check Veritech’s progress every thirty seconds on their desktops.

  PART TWO

  Light Trading

  Thanksgiving Week 1999

  6

  George was courting a collection. He wasn’t sure how many books there were. One hundred? One thousand? He had seen only two. The seller was secretive. She said she had inherited a collection of rare books from her uncle, and George assumed the volumes had sentimental value. The two she brought George were intriguing. The first, an 1861 Mrs. Beeton, was not rare by any means, but it was in exceptionally good condition. Beeton’s Book of Household Management was so thick that most copies ended up in three pieces because their bindings didn’t hold. This copy was a good little brick with its red leather binding still intact. The second volume the seller brought was much older. The long title began: The whole duty of a woman, or a guide to the female sex from sixteen to sixty … and included a promise to provide choice receipts in physick and chirugery with the whole art of cookery, preserving, candying, beautifying, etc. The book had been published in London in 1735 and would have been valuable, except that it was so badly worn. The cover was falling off and the pages warped and spotted. The title page was torn.

  The Beeton was the sort of book listed in catalogs as a “wonderful gift” for the everyday book lover. It would not tempt a serious collector. George could sell Mrs. Beeton for four or five hundred dollars. He was doubtful about The whole duty.