The Cookbook Collector (14 page)

He stood in the back as Jonathan made his announcement. All the employees in town packed the fifth floor near the windows. Outside, a light snow was falling. Inside, programmers perched atop desks, stood on chairs, and the whole company whooped and cheered.

“This is your work,” Aldwin said.

“You guys are super,” Dave chimed in.

“You guys are animals!”
Jonathan shouted, punching the air, and all the animals roared.

Afterward the programmers milled together talking motorcycles, debating which were fastest and which were overpriced—not that it mattered anymore! They spoke of vacations. A company camping trip in the High Sierra. No, a voyage down the River Nile, a cruise to see the Pyramids. They were about to be gazillionaires. Yahoo! As Mel walked to the T station, he came upon Orion, hatless, walking his bike through heavy snow.

“Hey,” Orion said.

“Amazing night,” Mel said.

“I guess so,” Orion said laconically.

The kid was too young, Mel thought, to appreciate the situation. The snowflakes were wet and heavy, double flakes and triple flakes. Mel could almost touch the zillions in the air.

12

O
rion had grown up in his father’s poetry, and because Lou Steiner was famous, Orion’s younger selves had been published and widely anthologized. Orion,
naked wader, minnow-trader
lived on the page, alongside
the sleeper with the tiny fists
. He didn’t take any of this too personally, not even his father’s collection,
Star Boy
. Growing up in Vermont, he knew many other poets’ children who had been immortalized. When it came to publicity, Orion thought his father’s wives and girlfriends had it worse, and he had often wondered how they liked word portraits mentioning birdlike physiques, small breasts, sad eyes. Orion tried to avoid Lou’s love poems, because he could put the name to each description, and then afterward he felt as though he’d seen his father’s lovers, including his own mother, naked. His father found this amusing, but he was entirely unself-conscious on and off the page.

Lou’s fame was riverlike—deep and narrow in some places, then broadening unexpectedly into shallows. His books sold a thousand, maybe twelve hundred copies each, but schoolchildren everywhere studied his villanelle “Where Are the Bees?” His later style, increasingly aphoristic, had inspired critics to call him a new minimalist, and at seventy-five, with his unrepentant hippie politics and eloquent
Forest Cycle
, Lou had become an icon to environmentalists, who printed his verse on T-shirts and posters—usually without permission. Like Matisse cutouts, Steiner’s late pared-down poems were all space and edges on the page. The best-known was his found poem, “Tree.” One line, which read simply:

Here I stand. I can do no other
.

Molly was honest. She said Orion’s father scared her. Over the years, Lou had grown shaggy, rambling, slightly unhinged. Orion’s mother, Diane, thought perhaps Lou was suffering from early Alzheimer’s. The idea frightened Orion, who preferred to think late-night rambles, naps on park benches, and tirades to writing classes were existential rather than neurological symptoms. End-stage poetry. Reading Shakespeare obsessively, drinking heavily, a man like Lou was supposed to turn Learlike when his hair went white.

As a boy Orion had avoided Lou. Naturally, he’d taken his mother’s side in the divorce, and lived with her in run-down farmhouses where they grew tomatoes and trained pea plants up strings to the porch roof. He tried to comfort her by staying out of trouble and entering science fairs. His childhood sweetheart, Emily, had been his mother’s sweetheart as well, the daughter she had always hoped for, and even now, so many years later, Diane asked after Emily with a certain wistfulness—although she liked Molly very much. Then Orion felt a twinge of guilt, although he knew it was irrational, because he hated to disappoint his mother, even in imaginary ways. In college, where he might have grown wild, he’d settled in with Molly, and stayed with her.

Orion didn’t avoid his father anymore, but spent time with him when he could. As Diane said, “He is your dad, and he isn’t getting any younger.” Lou was charming in his fashion, his countercultural effusions refreshing now that Orion made his way in the material world. True, his father had recently been called to the dean’s office to explain an incident in a poetry workshop when he’d ripped up a student’s manuscript, dashing the pieces to the floor and stamping on them “like Rumpelstiltskin” as one witness averred in
The Middlebury Campus
. There was also Lou’s troubling history with young women poets, his musettes as Diane called them. But he had slowed down in this regard, and if his clothes were wrinkled and his beard untrimmed, he was an original, and it felt good to have a parent who worked in pencil and called Otter Creek his office. Lou had no idea what ISIS did. He had never owned a computer, and the one time he had met Molly’s parents, at Harvard graduation, he’d told them a long dirty joke, to see if they would laugh.

He chortled when his son phoned one bright December Sunday. Orion was explaining that Molly’s parents had come up to visit and they were all having brunch that morning. “Who brunches these days?” Lou asked.

“I guess I do,” Orion said.

“Brunch when you’re old, sleep when you’re dead” was Lou’s advice.

Orion glanced at the closed bathroom door where Molly was showering. Postcall, she’d come straight from Beth Israel Deaconess and had had no time to rest.

“True story,” Lou said. This was how all his jokes began. True meant “Jewish.” “Three old ladies in Miami, poolside, brunching at the Fontainebleau. They see someone new:
Velcome, velcome. How are you?
Then one of the old-timers says,
Nu, ve don’t have time for small talk. Let’s get some things out of the vay. Money? Money you have, or you vouldn’t be at the Fontinblow. Granchildren? You got? Show
. She opens up her wallet and, you know, fans out the pictures on the table.
Sex? … Vatvas, vas”

“You think I’m living like an old lady.”

“I leave you to extrapolate.”

“You think youth is wasted on the …”

“I do like a wasted youth,” Lou mused.

Molly emerged in a cloud of steam and began searching for clean clothes. Wrapped in her towel, she glanced at Orion and took in his fisherman sweater, worn to threads at the elbows.

“Why do you like a wasted youth, Dad?”

“Listen, it’s like the man with his face pressed against the glass at the Ferrari dealership. If you have to ask …”

“I should go,” said Orion, as Molly pointed at the clock-radio, but he did not get off the phone. “What are you doing today?”

“I’ll be walking at Abbey Pond,” Lou replied. “You remember, don’t you?”

Of course he did. In springtime Lou used to take little Orion to look for lady’s slippers. Double petals hanging from springy stems, flowers rising from mossy, mulchy ground. “I don’t think they look like lady’s slippers,” Lou had told Orion. “I think they look like lady’s something else.”

“Drive carefully,” Orion said. “And take it easy out there.”

Molly’s cell phone was ringing. Her parents were waiting downstairs to take them to Henrietta’s Table.

“The ground’s uneven,” Orion reminded his father

“Old and infirm as I am,” Lou intoned, “it’s so crowded in the woods these days that if I fall, I’m sure somebody will find me.”

“Can we go?” Molly asked.

“I was just waiting for
you,”
Orion replied, and then into the telephone, “bye, Dad.”

“Farewell. And good-bye, Molly.”

Molly’s father was famous too, in an entirely different way. Carl Eisenstat was a physicist, and not the garden-variety kind. He had been in one of Orion’s college textbooks as the Eisenstat Principle of something or other. Matter? Motion? Orion could not remember, although it was assumed that he knew which. The Eisenstats assumed many things. The last time they’d come up from Princeton, Carl had announced, “I take it the two of you are planning to get married.” Orion had started back, offended that Carl would touch on a matter so private and confusing, but Molly’s father pressed on implacably: “And I make that assumption because you’ve been seeing each other for so long.”

Of course they had talked about getting engaged. Orion and Molly had lived together in their apartment off Putnam Avenue for three years. They had a routine; they had a life; they had a lot of stuff. Their third-floor warren opened onto a ramshackle but surprisingly large roof deck where they entertained. They kept a hibachi there, aluminum lawn chairs, and a camping table they had found on the street. On summer nights when friends came up for drinks, they passed around a pair of tweezers for the splinters that split off the sun-warped railings.

Molly’s plan had been to get married when Orion finished graduate school, and he had always liked this idea—keeping marriage at an indeterminate distance, along with his degree. At the time, Orion’s professional and financial prospects had been pleasantly vague. Now, however, they were unavoidably bright. Five months after Orion broke Lockbox, the system was up and running, or as Jonathan put it, “running better than ever,” and ChainLinx was huge. Projected earnings were shooting through the roof, and this was not lost on Molly’s father. Nothing was.

“You’ve been getting a lot of press,” lanky, white-haired Carl informed Orion in the buffet line at the restaurant, and Orion ducked his head, something between a nod and a shrug. Orion, Jonathan, Aldwin, and Jake had just appeared in
Fortune
magazine under the heading “Tycoons in Training.”

“I liked the photo. I recognized the steps of Building Thirteen.” Carl loaded his plate with lox and whitefish, eggs and sausages.

Orion watched Molly’s mother pause wistfully at the waffle station, and then settle on yogurt, fruit salad, and a bowl of Irish oatmeal. The resemblance between Deborah and Molly was striking: dark eyes, a heart-shaped face, lovely from the front, less so in profile. Molly had her mother’s slight bump in the nose and tiny chin. They were both petite, but Deborah was also zaftig, a short, wide gerontologist who wore tunic-length sweaters and long necklaces—silk cords hung with unusual pendants, a tiny woven bag or a many-hinged locket, a miniature kaleidoscope bouncing like a buoy on her vast bosom.

“Well, this is nice,” said Deborah when they reconvened at the table.

“Tell us about the IPO,” said Carl.

How different Molly’s father seemed from the man Orion had first met, almost eight years before. The Eisenstats had driven up to see their daughter, and she’d brought her new boyfriend to breakfast. On that occasion, he and Molly had shared one side of a booth like brother and sister facing their parents. Orion’s wet blond hair had fallen in his eyes, and Molly’s short curls had been damp. They’d looked a little too clean to be entirely innocent, having just come from Mather House, where they’d shared a shower, but they sat straight with the seam of the upholstered booth running up between them. Molly’s mother had tried to make conversation, but Professor Eisenstat kept his eyes on Orion, who had tried not to bolt his food or gulp his juice, or think about the night before, lest some memory of warmth and nakedness flash across his face.

Still, Carl had gazed at him with a grim, penetrating look. “I have a question for you.” Carl’s voice had been taut and slightly amused, as though he were sharpening cruel ironic skewers and looking forward to running Orion through. “How is it majoring in an auxiliary field?”

“Auxiliary? You mean computer science?” Orion had been so busy guarding against attacks on his character that at first he didn’t recognize Carl’s scientific gambit as such.

“Right. Auxiliary in that computer science is not a true science in itself, but a handmaid to math, physics, chemistry….”

“I like CS,” Orion said stoutly.

“But that’s my question,” Carl pressed. “What exactly do you like about it?”

Orion paused. “Programming.”

“Hmm.” Carl sipped his coffee.

Twenty years old, Orion had gazed across the table at Molly’s father with a mixture of resentment and misery. He was good at math, of course, but he excelled at building little computer systems piece by piece. Orion had always loved to tinker. He was a puzzle solver, no deep-thinking puzzle maker. He had done well in his CS courses: programming, distributed systems, hardware, algorithms, and graphics, for which he’d rendered a faceted crystal vase filled with water and a single red rose so that it cast an accurate shadow on a wood-grain tabletop. Were these exercises at all important? In Carl’s presence he’d felt acutely that computer science lacked a certain—he would never say the word aloud—but, yes, the field lacked a certain majesty.

Now, in the glass and farmhouse restaurant with its baskets and bouquets of chili peppers, Carl seemed thrilled with Orion’s programming habit. He actually whipped out that morning’s
Boston Globe
and read aloud.
“Asked about his heroes, company cofounder Orion Steiner cites computer pioneer Donald Knuth, and maverick free-software activist Richard Stallman.”

What a strange effect money, or even the idea of money, had on people. Orion could not avoid wealth, or Carl either. How could he put off shopping for a ring? In six months, he could afford any ring or bracelet or necklace; he could afford anything. Orion looked at Carl’s smooth, close-shaven cheeks and his hawkish gray eyes and he saw what wealth would mean: not just traveling the world and buying toys, but paying huge complicated taxes and living in a house with Molly forever—not forever in the romantic sense—forever like her parents, with a loud dog and yellowing houseplants. Molly would gain a hundred pounds, and Orion would have to start collecting ugly paintings. They’d have a three-car garage and seven bathrooms, and they would sit around at night and debate whether it was better to time-share or buy planes.

“How many employees are you up to now?” Carl asked.

“I think we’re at …,” Orion hesitated, distracted by the cell phone in his pocket, buzzing against his leg. “Eighty-three?” he ventured, checking the caller ID. “Ninety-three?” It was Jonathan, but Orion ignored the call.

Deborah focused on Orion with a look of quiet pride. Carl leaned forward, keen and curious. Only their daughter paid no attention. Molly had closed her eyes and left him to entertain her parents’ expectations on his own. Exhausted, she was still sitting upright in her chair, but she had fallen fast asleep.

Carl and Deborah were driving home immediately to beat the traffic, and they dropped off Molly and Orion on the way. He helped her up the stairs, and she leaned against the wall as he unlocked the apartment. Then dropping her bag just inside the door, she bolted for the bedroom.

“Wait,” Orion said. “Molly?”

Fully clothed, she lunged for the bed and seized her pillow. Gone again.

“Aren’t you going to take off your shoes?” Orion tugged at one shoe and then the other. Her legs were dead weights in his hands. He reached around her waist, unbuckled her belt, and unzipped her pants. “Ouch,” he murmured. Her belt had cut into her soft stomach and left red marks. He tried to unbutton her blouse, but she clung to the pillow, and he couldn’t get it off. “I give up,” he said.