The Cookbook Collector

by Allegra Goodman

  “Three months,” George said as he was locking up. “I didn’t realize Save the Trees had been around that long.”

  “Are you, like, a neo-con?” Jess asked him.

  “No!” George shot back, surprised.

  “You’re so cynical,” said Jess.

  George considered this as they stood outside the door. “I’ve been around the block.”

  “You’re very disapproving,” she chided gently. “It’s not like I’ve done anything to you. It’s not like I’ve done anything you mentioned on your questionnaire.”

  “Not yet.”

  Six o’clock. A light rain fell, and a pile of blankets stirred in the doorway across the street. As the shops began to close, new salespeople emerged.

  Jess didn’t seem to notice. “Good night,” she said, and tugged the bottom of her jacket.

  George wanted to zip her up himself. “Where’s your bike?”

  “It’s in the shop,” Jess said. “I’m getting a tune-up.”

  “I’ll give you a ride,” he offered.

  “No, that’s okay, I’m just going to catch the bus …”

  “The bus?”

  “It’s hardly even dark,” she protested as George took her arm and steered her across the street to the garage where he parked his Mercedes.

  “You drive this big car all by yourself?” Jess asked, as he unlocked the door for her.

  “Yes,” George said. “I drive unassisted. Where are we going?”

  “Derby Street,” she said.

  That surprised him. He hadn’t pictured her there. Then he realized that she was going to Noah’s place.

  “A bunch of people live there.”

  Ah, the Save the Trees Co-op. George glanced at her quickly. He wanted to ask, Do you have any idea who owns this property? Have you checked the nonprofit status of this organization? Have you considered that Save the Trees could be a shell for something else? But she was a grown woman, apparently.

  He drove to Derby Street with its big old houses and tall fences and brambly gardens. “Thanks for the ride.” Jess dragged her backpack after her. “See you later.”

  George considered the brown shingled co-op on the corner. A great shambling Californian manse, probably as old as his, maybe even a Maybeck with its picturesque peaked roof and diamond-paned windows. There was a garden too, possibly a double lot. Now he was a little jealous. He saw a cottage peeking out above the slatted fence. Jess turned and waved. She seemed to be waving him away, but he stayed until the door opened.

  Jess had never been invited to a party at the Tree House before. Quickly she closed the door behind her. She didn’t want to introduce herself with a Mercedes idling in the background.

  “Hi. I’m early,” Jess apologized to the tiny woman who stood before her.

  “Hi. I’m Daisy.” The woman wore overalls and she had a buzz cut. She seemed both delicate and fierce and wore a T-shirt with HERE I STAND printed on it.

  Jess wondered if Daisy was the woman’s real name, or one of those forest names old-timers took in the interest of anonymity and protection. Names like Butterfly or Gypsy or Shakespeare, evoking expeditions, dangers that had passed, inside jokes from long ago. “Is Noah here?” Jess received no answer as Daisy led her down some stairs and up others, through open fire doors and finally into the depths of the house, where Daisy disappeared to answer her phone.

  She had never seen the Tree House at night. Vast and dark, lit with candles for the occasion, the rooms looked magical, the staircase a citadel, with its own strange inglenooks and deep dusty treads. In the fireplace, instead of wood, a great gong and mallet hung from a stand. The rooms were filled with couches and mismatched armchairs, and floor cushions, some with cats, and some without. Living ivy climbed to the ceiling and outlined every aperture. In the candlelight the ivy-framed bay window became a bower, the leafy doorways passages to secret gardens.

  “Didn’t anyone give you a drink?”

  Startled, Jess recognized the founder of Save the Trees. Leon was famous in his world, and famous for his look as well. He was over thirty, wire-thin, with black unruly hair, dark skin, and eyes startlingly blue. His jeans and faded T-shirt hung on his gaunt frame. She saw him on occasion leafleting, but she knew him from Brandeis, where he had been a graduate student briefly, her freshman year. Knew was probably too strong a word. She’d had a serious crush on him, but he had never spoken two words to her then, and he didn’t seem to recognize her now. She had heard the others talk about him, of course. He was a brilliant organizer, a heartbreaker, supposedly, and also somehow rich. He owned the house and rented it for nothing, a dollar a year, to Save the Trees, as headquarters and training camp and experiment in communal living.

  “I’m sorry I’m so early,” Jess said, as Leon got her a rum and Coke. “I’m Jess. Noah’s friend.”

  “Oh, good, I’m Noah’s friend too,” said Leon coolly. “Did he give you the tour?”

  “I’m not sure where he is.”

  “Come take a look.”

  “This woodwork is incredible,” she said as she followed him up the stairs.

  “This is all old growth,” said Leon. “A lot of trees gave their lives in 1905.”

  “How did you find this place?”

  “Real estate agent,” Leon said.

  “You just asked for listings of fairy-tale houses?”

  Leon smiled.

  The second floor had a sweet musty smell of old wood and dust. The air was heavy, almost felted with smoke and dust motes. Hushed.

  “This landing here is so big we made it into another room with curtains. It doesn’t have a door, but it’s got a great view of the garden.” Leon pulled open a heavy drape spread over a brass rod and revealed a little room with a window seat the size of a twin bed. Noah and a couple of other guys sat there passing a joint.

  “Oh, there you are,” said Jess, and everybody laughed except for Leon, who watched her quietly. Forgive me, but he wasn’t worth it, Leon seemed to tell her with his eyes. Or was she imagining his response?

  Noah stood to greet her, but instinctively Jess stepped back. “I’ll be downstairs,” she said lightly.

  “Don’t go.” Noah followed her.

  The living room was louder on reentry, pulsing with music.

  “Let me get you a drink,” shouted Noah.

  “I have one.” Jess raised her glass to show him.

  “Okay.” He looked slightly nervous standing there, as though unsure if she was really angry. Something was dawning on him, the very thought she’d had upstairs: that they’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks; that their friendship was rather tenuous; that they hadn’t spent much time together.

  “Do I even know you?” Jess asked suddenly. The question might have been devastating in a quieter room, but Noah couldn’t hear.

  Comically, he cupped his hand behind his ear.

  “You look like an old man asking ‘What’s that, dear?’” Jess told him.

  He couldn’t hear that either.

  “I’m leaving,” Jess mouthed at him.

  He tried to take her hand, but she was tired of him and slipped away, escaping to the back of the house, wandering into an old-fashioned kitchen crowded with cooks and hangers-on drinking beer.

  “He’s got this humanist, class-warfare streak,” one of the guys was saying. “It always comes down to ‘other species are lesser.’”

  A dozen pie shells covered a long scarred table. A small buff woman with a tattoo of the god Shiva on her bicep was pouring quiche filling into each. Jess recognized her from leafleting. Her name was Arminda, and as she poured, she talked to another leafleter, a blond, blue-eyed girl from Idaho who went by Cat.

  Arminda was telling Cat, “I had one more conversation with Aisha where I said there are things that are so structural I didn’t know if we could repair them.”

  “And that was it?” asked Cat.

  “Well, not exactly. We’d have this post–breakup sex where it was supp
osed to be the last time, and then the next time was going to be the last time, but I was kind of into the idea of being single, and I thought I might have a straight moment, you know?”

  Cat giggled.

  “Because there was this guy who was kind of eying me. But then—you know Johanna, right? I had this thing with her, but afterward I felt so bad because she was such a sweetheart. She’s so sensitive! How do you tell someone you were just going through this crazy thing and you aren’t really interested in that person herself? I was behaving really badly. But that’s how I got the stomach flu—probably from Johanna. It was this really, really contagious, really virulent …”

  Jess eyed the quiches on the table.

  “I was trying to break up with Aisha and I was behaving so badly with Johanna, but I had to get everything out of my system,” Arminda continued as Jess walked out, feeling strange, and also invisible.

  No one acknowledged her as she walked down the hall. She saw couples in the bathroom, but no one looked at her. She didn’t recognize anybody. Were the other guests all strangers? That couldn’t be, but at the moment she couldn’t tell any of them apart. She felt light-headed in the hazy, mazy house. The smell of beer mixed with the cloying smoke upstairs and made her queasy. She stepped out the back door and descended creaky steps for air.

  How overgrown the garden was. Picking her way through ferns and banana trees, she almost stepped into a pocket-sized pond choked with lily pads. The Save the Trees office looked like a witch’s house in the dark, its peaked roof and walls overhung with ivy. Behind the witch’s house, a massive oak filled the sky. No stars pricked this tree’s canopy, no moonlight sifted through these leaves, but a swing hung down on ropes so long that, in the dark, Jess scarcely saw where they began. She tugged at one; the rope held, and the wood swing bumped her hip. Shivering, she sat down and tucked her skirt under her legs.

  Suddenly Leon appeared behind her. She jumped up.

  “You forgot your jacket.”

  “How did you know it was mine?”

  “Wallet in the pocket,” he said. “Probably not a great place for it, by the way.” He looked amused when she tried to take the jacket from him. It took her a moment to realize that he was holding it for her so that she could slip her arms inside. “Too many friends of friends in there.”

  “Well, that’s what I am,” she pointed out. “Or was.”

  “You and Noah?” Leon asked.

  “Is that what he told you?”

  Leon hesitated a moment, but only a moment, before he nodded.

  “I barely know him.” Jess sat down again and pushed off with her feet to start the swing, but the ropes were so long she only swayed a little. She kicked off again.

  “Do you want a push?”

  “Sure.” She hoped that sounded diffident enough, as if to say, Since you’re just standing there, you might as well, but she wasn’t diffident at all. She lifted off as he pushed gently, hand between her shoulder blades. When she returned to him, he pushed lower on her back. A strange sensation, the brief contact, and then the long downstroke of anticipation. “My sister used to push me,” she told him.

  “I have sisters.”

  “Really?”

  “Are you surprised?”

  She stretched her legs and leaned back to swing higher. Her hair blew over her shoulders. Her skirt came loose and billowed over her knees. He was watching her, and as she rose and fell, she felt his gaze as radiant warmth. Of course she knew all about the male gaze, and she resented being gazed upon, but she was young enough that her resentment was purely theoretical. She was a paper feminist, just as Emily was a paper millionaire.

  “You don’t look like the kind of person who has sisters,” she said.

  “What do I look like?”

  She thought for a moment as she swung forward. When she returned to him, she said, “An only child.”

  “Too selfish for siblings?” She was almost horizontal now, leaning back as she held the ropes.

  “Way too selfish.”

  He pushed hard with both hands, and she shot forward, laughing. It felt so good to plunge feetfirst into the night. She felt a rush of air as she vaulted up into the dark branches. Too quickly she sank down again, the ground rose up, and the blood rushed to her head and dizzied her. She dragged her feet to slow herself, but she couldn’t stop all at once. Twice, then three times, she braked with her feet, until Leon caught the ropes from behind. He was close enough for her to feel his breath against her hair. “Are you all right?”

  “Just tree-sick.”

  He held her by the shoulders, as if to steady her, but she still felt the garden rushing toward her, and the sickening rush of air.

  He touched her collarbone with his fingertips. “I remember you from Brandeis.”

  “Really? You remember me! Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I thought I’d wait,” he said.

  “How do you remember me?”

  “I remember you as … lovely,” he said.

  She slipped off the swing to face him, laughing in disbelief—not just that he’d find her lovely, but that he would use such a delicate word.

  “I asked people about you.”

  She shook her head at him and he couldn’t help smiling. She was so innocent. Delicious. “Why didn’t you ask me about me?”

  “I was shy,” he said, and that was true enough, although his shyness had been situational. He’d been unhappily involved.

  “Shy?” She remembered him as arrogant, eloquent, and also tough. She’d heard him at a press conference, denouncing violence against the logging industry. He never hesitated at the microphone.

  He couldn’t resist asking, “Did you start volunteering because you remembered me?”

  “Not only shy, but vain!”

  The swing hung between them, but he grasped the ropes above her head.

  “I was interested in halting systematic deforestation of the planet and petitioning for the ballot proposal to ban clear-cutting in Northern California,” she said, “… and I did remember you.”

  “Oh, you did.”

  “Well, vaguely.”

  “Only vaguely?”

  “Very, very vaguely. Just that you were busy, and you never even looked at me. When I got to Save the Trees you stayed true to type.”

  “Now I’m a type.”

  “Well …”

  They were standing so close their noses almost touched. She looked up at him and wondered how his eyes were so blue and his skin so dark, and how he could be shy and also confident, and most of all, what he was thinking, but she didn’t dare ask. And he saw her wondering, and he gazed at her delicate upturned face and felt a sudden tenderness for her, a little pang of responsibility. I’ll never never hurt you, he promised silently, even as he imagined taking her into the office and locking the door. He spoke with a cautious sincerity he didn’t feel. “I know you’re dating Noah and I won’t interfere with that.”

  “Dating is a relative term.”

  “Relative to what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Really?” His lips brushed hers.

  “I didn’t take offense that you ignored me,” she explained, “because what interests me is what you do.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “I meant your work.” Her mouth grazed his. “I wasn’t talking about … right now.”

  At first they kissed so lightly, there was no decision. They kissed the way they might trail their fingers in the water. I’m not really standing here with him, Jess thought, and she kissed him more deeply, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She touched the corner of his mouth with the tip of her tongue; she sucked his lower lip and tasted wine, and he was surprised, and also charmed, because he saw that she’d surprised herself. She was so curious. She trembled with curiosity.

  They flew apart as two wailing fire engines careened down the street. Flashing lights illuminated the yard.

  “That must have been t
he smoke alarm.” Leon stood for a moment, watching as the firemen approached in full regalia—boots, jackets, hats. “Wait here,” he told Jess. “Stay by the tree, and I’ll send someone to take you home.”

  “Shouldn’t I …?”

  “No, I don’t want you to come in. Stay here.”

  Already partiers were streaming out, gathering in the front yard and on the sidewalk. There were hundreds, more than Jess would have thought possible, even in that rambling house. Two police cars pulled up. The hordes spilled onto the sidewalk. Jess stayed in shadow, sheltered by the oak.

  Two officers entered and instantly a hush fell over the assembled. Jess could actually hear a pall fall over the blazing Bacchanalian house. It took her a second to realize that what she heard was the plug pulled on the sound system. The cops had stopped the music.

  One officer stood on the landing, talking to Leon. “We’ve got noise ordinances, and we’ve got more than one complaint.” She couldn’t hear Leon’s reply, but she saw that he was perfectly calm and quiet. “Generally speaking, if we have a smoke alarm on top of a noise situation …,” the officer continued loudly and laboriously. “When alcohol is served …” She couldn’t catch all the words, but did hear inebriation mentioned and underage.

  Leon interrupted here, objecting.

  “Let’s put it this way: There are students on and off campus; there have been incidents on and off campus. You think you’ve got a friendly gathering…. In the morning you may find yourself with a situation. By situation, I mean someone dead. This has happened in the past. I don’t like to spell it out for you, but that’s my job—to spell it out for you.”

  Through the lit windows of the house, Jess glimpsed the firemen tramping through the rooms. What would they find there? She didn’t see Noah in the crowd.

  “Okay, let’s go,” someone ordered Jess. Her breath caught. Irrationally, she thought, They’ve come looking for me too. Then she recognized Daisy, small, fierce, humorless. “I’m taking you home. You have everything you need?”