The Cookbook Collector (4 page)

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

A
lthough 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.”

Now Jess saw what Emily wanted. She wanted Jess to talk sweetly to her father, after which he would help her, and they would get along again. Emily was a firm believer in getting along, no matter what, and seemed to think if you behaved considerately, real feeling followed. But how could affection bloom in rocky soil? What were words without love? Only dust. Jess could not live in such a xeriscape.

“You did call him,” Emily said.

“Of course.”

“And did you ask him?”

“Well … not yet.”

If only George had written her a check. He was so rich; he must be to own a store like Yorick’s. And he had heard of Veritech. He understood about technology and knew she’d pay him back immediately. But he had to say no. He loved saying no.

He was strange and self-absorbed. He asked questions and then wandered away before he heard the answers. Then when Jess asked a question of her own or tried to start a conversation, he interrupted.

“I’ve read some Trollope—” she would begin.

“And you were offended by the foxhunting?” George broke in.

“I see no reason,” she mused, “that books are more expensive because of who owned them. It’s—”

“The way things work,” George cut her off.

He was attractive and he knew it, but he pretended he had no idea. Therefore he was both vain and disingenuous. Tall, or so he seemed to Jess, he looked Italian with his dark skin and dark eyes. Very old—again, from Jess’s point of view—where anyone past thirty harked back to another era altogether. Despite his years, George had a powerful body, a broad chest, a face of light and shade, a glint of humor even in his frown. When he wasn’t lobbing his sarcastic comments, he seemed scholarly and peaceful, like a Renaissance St. Jerome at work in his cave of books. All he needed was a skull on his desk and a lion at his sandaled feet. He wore T-shirts, jeans, rimless reading glasses, sometimes tweed jackets. He had the deep didactic voice of a man who had smoked for years and then suddenly quit and now hated smokers everywhere. He never watched television, and he never tired of telling people so. But the most pretentious thing about him was his long hair. With his chestnut locks threaded gray, he was a fly caught in amber, the product and exemplar of a lost world.

“I’m working on the money,” Jess told her sister. “Could I just explain?”

“There’s nothing to explain.” Emily’s voice was tense. “You know what you have to do. Take care of it.”

Later, waiting for her laundry in the basement, Jess weighed her choices: angering Emily, or asking Richard.
Take care of it
. Easy for Emily to say. Financially independent Emily got along beautifully with Richard. Ah, Marx was right about so many things—especially the moral superiority money afforded.

Perched atop a churning washing machine, she heard the clank of metal. Had she left her keys in her jeans pocket? A handful of coins? She wished her grandfather were still alive and she could call him. She had been close to her father’s father.

Mrs. Gibbs wheeled in her laundry. She pushed it in a little cart with her detergent on top.

“Good evening.” Mrs. Gibbs produced a change purse segmented with compartments for each kind of coin. Extracting quarters, she began lining them up in the slots of the machine opposite Jess. “How are you?” Mrs. Gibbs inquired as she loaded her whites.

“I’m okay,” said Jess.

Mrs. Gibbs shot Jess a penetrating look.

“I’m fine.”

“Fine sitting down here all alone?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Fine isn’t good,” said Mrs. Gibbs. “Fine isn’t right.”

“I’m okay. My sister is annoyed with me. I said I’d do something and I can’t.”

“Breaking a promise,” Mrs. Gibbs intoned.

“No!”

“Mmm,” said Mrs. Gibbs and suddenly all the machines around Jess seemed to hum with disapproval.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Mmm.”

“I’m not depressed or anything,” Jess reassured her neighbor.

“Have you tried prayer?” Mrs. Gibbs reached up to clasp Jess’s hands in her own.

“Mrs. Gibbs,” said Jess.

“Put your hands together.”

“This is just a small thing,” said Jess. “It’s not a matter of life and death. I’m okay.”

“Dear Lord,” Mrs. Gibbs prayed, “help Jessamine Bach to keep her promise. Help her and guide her to honesty and truth. Keep her in righteousness and do not allow her to fall. And let us say, ‘Amen.’”

“Amen,” said Jess. “But I’m not about to fall.”

“We could all fall at any moment,” Mrs. Gibbs said. “Remember that.”

“It’s just a little money thing….”

“There are no little money things,” Mrs. Gibbs said darkly.

“No, no, let me explain.” Jess told the story of Emily’s IPO and the Friends and Family deadline. Mrs. Gibbs listened in silence. At one point she closed her eyes, and Jess wondered if her neighbor was praying again silently, or simply appalled at how trivial Jess’s conundrum was.

“I have no money to lend you,” said Mrs. Gibbs at last.

“Oh, I wasn’t hinting!”

“But I will speak to my rabbi and see if he knows what to do.”

Jess hopped off her washer in surprise. “Your rabbi?”

Mrs. Gibbs gazed at Jess calmly. “Don’t you know, honey, that I am a Jew?”

“You’re kidding,” Jess blurted out.

“It’s not the color of your skin, but the feeling in your heart,” Mrs. Gibbs said.

“You’re right.” Abashed, Jess leaned against a washer. “I’m half Jewish,” she volunteered. “My mother was Jewish.”

Mrs. Gibbs nodded. “I’m a Jew by choice.”

“How did you choose?”

“I didn’t,” said Mrs. Gibbs, “the good Lord chose me.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“But how did you … how did He …?”

“Many years ago when I first moved to this town, I was at my Bible study reading Deuteronomy 7:6:
For thou art an holy people … the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people
…. Just as we read that verse, the good Lord spoke to me and said,
Who is the chosen? Who are the ones going to the Promised Land?

“That would be the Jews
, I answered.

“Correct
, He said.
Why then are you not among them, if they are the holy people?

“I told my Bible study about this conversation, and they prayed for me. However, they could not point to the text and deny that the chosen are the Jews. After many weeks and arguments, I took my Bible with me to the Berkeley Bialystok Center.”

Reentering her apartment with her clean clothes piled high in her laundry basket, Jess found Theresa studying for orals at the table.

“Mrs. Gibbs is a Jew,” said Jess.

“Yeah, right,” said Theresa, scarcely looking up from her Kristeva.

“Seriously.”

“Has she offered to debate the merits of Jesus Christ with you?” Theresa asked.

“No.”

“Has she asked you to come with her to Bible study?”

“No. She wants me to meet her rabbi.”

Now Theresa shut her book. “Do not go anywhere with that woman.”

“Why?”

“Look, I grew up with evangelicals,” said Theresa. “I understand them. Mrs. Gibbs wants to steal your soul. I’m serious. Stay the hell away from her. You’ll end up dropping out of school, marrying some holy roller, and becoming a Jehovah’s Witness in the Philippines.”

“I think you might be a little prejudiced,” said Jess, and she began telling Mrs. Gibbs’s story.

“Where have you been?” Theresa interrupted. “That is a standard conversion narrative. Listen to me. I grew up with these people. I wasn’t allowed to date ’til I was sixteen. Then I only dated Christians. Then I took a vow of abstinence. I had to spend my weekends saving souls door-to-door. You have no idea.”

“But you escaped,” Jess pointed out. “You aren’t evangelical now.”

“Ha. You never really escape,” Theresa shot back. “You’re naïve if you think you can.” And she spoke from long experience growing up in Honolulu where her strong-willed father had not allowed her to get a driver’s license. She spoke remembering her mother’s thousand prayers, offered up on every occasion, even for the family dog, a toy terrier who sat up front in the car and panted in the tropical heat. But Jess had never seen the little dog with its pink tongue, and she had never met Theresa’s parents.

“I’m not naïve,” Jess said.

“Didn’t I see you give money to Crazy Al on Telegraph? Didn’t you say you got your cards read, quote unquote, for fun?”

“Not for fun. As a thought experiment, and by the way, the guy knows his ‘Prufrock.’”

“You have something about you that attracts fanatics,” said Theresa. “You have this way of letting them in. It’s dangerous. It’s like you’re blowing some kind of high-pitched dog whistle: Take me, take me….”