The Cookbook Collector

19

The markets swooned. Like a beautiful diver, the Nasdaq bounced three times into the air and flipped, somersaulting on the way down. Tech stocks once priced at two hundred, and then seventy-three, and then twenty-one, now sold for less than two dollars a share. Companies valued in the billions were worth just millions, and with a blood rush, investors thought, So this is gravity, this is free fall. This is what the end feels like, ripping through water. But the end was not the end. There were still more ends to come.

Looking back, analysts could predict the crash. They spoke of weak fundamentals, softening in the tech sector, reckless speculation. But who can measure appetite, or predict the limits of desire? Who can chart love’s parabola, from acquaintance to infatuation to estrangement? Multiply by millions buying and selling. Small exits accrued into a great migration, darkening the sun. So many hearts beat rapidly together, so many investors rose up calling to one another as they took flight, that it seemed there were no buyers left, except the day traders screaming obscenities on message boards, scavenging and wheeling like gulls.

Rabbi Helfgott was one such day trader, although he did not post on message boards. Waking before dawn to log in as the markets opened in New York, he made a few dollars, even as the crash wiped out his portfolio. He blinked sometimes and shook his head, as his investments melted away. Veritech at two, Janus at a dollar fifty, ISIS at seventy-five cents. Nevertheless, he remained hopeful. He had a sanguine nature, prayed three times a day, and believed the Messianic age was imminent. Therefore, he was better prepared than most for market turbulence.

He himself had read some economics. In fact he had read The Wealth of Nations, a book Jessamine had recommended, and he saw in Adam Smith a very Jewish form of Providence. What was the invisible hand Smith always spoke about, but the hand of God? What was a correction, but the Creator’s recalibration of the world? Had he studied physics in college, Helfgott might have learned that what goes up comes down. But the rabbi had not attended college, only seminary, where he learned that what comes down, must rise again. Applying this principle, he believed that what the markets destroyed they would, God willing, speedily restore, and this belief sustained him, as did the knowledge that he owned the Bialystok Center of Berkeley free and clear. Many years before, he had saved the life of a young man, an addict in the ashram occupying the building, and the boy’s grateful father had purchased the property and then sold it to the rabbi for a dollar. Now the young man was married, living in New Jersey, and a father himself! Such was the marvelous circularity of exchanges. Such, with God’s help, was the world’s hopeful trend, difficult in the short term, but in the long run beautiful.

Others were not so philosophical. When ISIS hit a new low of seventy—not seventy dollars, but seventy cents—Jonathan took the debasement personally. His high-flying company was about to be delisted, too small to register on the Nasdaq stock exchange. He knew that ISIS would come roaring back. He knew because he would make it happen. In the meantime—well, he hated meantimes.

Sleepless, he paced his Somerville apartment. His roommates had moved on, but Jonathan still lived there and he hated that too. He hated the stasis, the stalemate developing between him and Emily. Although he and Emily had set the date for their October wedding, they had not bought a house, nor had she left Veritech. She was rolling out a new product. She was setting up a research group for Alex—an unfathomable idea—rewarding Alex for his bad behavior. Twice, three times, she postponed her move east, and then she pushed the wedding off as well.

She said she missed him. At the end of every visit her eyes filled with tears—but she returned to California anyway, and somehow she remained patient. Where did this excessive patience come from? Did she still have reservations? She had told him in her sweet teacherly way that now she was ready—they were ready—to be engaged, but he had no idea what she meant by readiness. Waiting, taking time, becoming ready—this was the vocabulary women used to divert attention from what they wanted. And what did women want? The same thing men did—only slower.

What would it be like to live without this level of intense anticipation? Like ancient nobles he and Emily waged wars and signed treaties, convening privy councils in their separate conference rooms. What would it be like when Emily abdicated to live with him full-time? Would she? Could she?

Hard times. He kicked an empty soda can across the bare floor. Thirty million invested at Goldman Sachs seemed a paltry sum, a pittance, next to the hundreds of millions he had once possessed on paper. What Jonathan had was nothing next to what he wanted. Prisoner of his enormous expectations, he paced the floor, plotting to reclaim what might have been.

Friday when the markets closed, ISIS had climbed a penny to seventy-one cents. Then Jonathan called a company meeting in the newly renovated lobby. Over one hundred Cambridge employees sat on the gray carpet, while oldsters like Dave sat in swivel chairs, and Jonathan, Orion, Aldwin, and Jake stood together in the center, all four of them in town at once, like a rock band reuniting without instruments, four accustomed to mosh pits of celebration, now gazing out at anxious upturned faces.

Shakespeare’s Henry rallied his troops at Agincourt: If we are mark’d to die, we are enow / To do our country loss, and if to live, / the fewer men, the greater share of honour. At a later date, George Washington tried to mollify his mutinous men: … let me entreat you, Gentlemen, … to rely on the plighted faith of your Country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress. Now Jonathan took the floor. “Okay, guys, listen up. There’s share price and there’s reality. Prices go up and they go down. There is a certain amount of randomness built into the system, a certain amount of envy and media shit, a certain amount of stuff happening in the market as a whole that for better or worse reflects on us. But the reality is our products, our services, and our customers. That’s what you have to wake up and think about every single day. Excellence, accountability, and the bottom line. We did not establish ISIS as some fly-by-night dot-com.”

“Yeah!” the programmers cheered.

“We established ISIS for the long haul, and we will be here for the long haul.”

“YEAH!” they cheered louder.

“You guys are not involved in a low-rent operation.”

“No kidding,” Aldwin said under his breath. The lease on the Kendall Square building cost almost two million a month, and he was looking for cheaper space.

“Stand up,” Jonathan ordered his people. “Everybody stand up.” Programmers and secretaries, marketing team and legal counsel all scrambled to their feet and scrummed together around their bold, ruddy-faced captain. “You guys are not geeks for hire,” Jonathan announced. “You didn’t come looking for a quick buck. You came to build something. You came to change the way the world does business. You guys are the best.”

“Whoooo!”

“You kick ass!” Jonathan shouted.

“Yesss!”

“You guys are animals!” This last unleashed such a frenzy that Jonathan couldn’t see Sorel pushing through the crowd. She had been on shift in the control center. And because everyone else was at the meeting, she alone, gazing at the bank of monitors, had seen the first signs of trouble in the ISIS security network. A single white dot representing a data center in Shanghai turned emergency red.

“Security breach!” Sorel cried, but even as she spoke, another dot turned red as well, and then all the dots around it until, like a plague, hundreds of white points all across the digital Earth broke out in red, a contagion spreading through thousands of ISIS data centers from Beijing to Baltimore.

She worked her way through the crowd, but she could not get close to the front. Only Orion saw her. He caught her eye and mouthed, “What’s wrong?”

She shouted, “Lockbox is down. Lockbox is broken.” But the screams and cheers continued, drowning her out, resolving into call and response.

“Who’s the best?” Jonathan shouted.

“We’re the best!”

“Who’s the rest?”

“Fuck the rest!”

Orion pushed his way to Jonathan. He told Jonathan softly, underneath the rising noise of the crowd, “Lockbox is broken.”

Jonathan didn’t hear him.

Orion cupped his hands and repeated directly into Jonathan’s ear, “Lockbox is broken.”

The blood drained from Jonathan’s face. His jaw tightened. He held up his hand for quiet and the roar died down. “All right!” he said. His voice was grim, but only Orion and Sorel knew why. The others heard grim satisfaction as he bellowed, “Back to work!”

What new hell was this? Hackers had targeted Lockbox and found the tiny chinks Orion had identified long ago. Those chinks were now fissures compromising the security system. Alarms were sounding all through ISIS as programmers, product testers, and Customer Care struggled to make Lockbox safe again. Clients were panicking, and every hour, the public-relations crisis grew.

For two days and two nights, the ISIS team struggled to make Lockbox right. Projects went on hold. Travel plans were canceled. A programmer sat at every computer, a Customer Care counselor manned every phone. The tide of empty soda cans was rising.

Orion and the Lockbox team were working as fast as they could, but the break was bad, and the news spread everywhere, from The Wall Street Journal to The Motley Fool. At the end of the second night, Dave broke precedent and made an executive decision. ISIS was recalling Lockbox. All Lockbox customers were being upgraded automatically for no charge to ChainLinx.

“No!” Jonathan cried out at the emergency board meeting. Even now he hated to admit that Lockbox was flawed.

“We’ve almost got it up again,” said Jake.

But Dave shook his head, as if to say, Boys, boys. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to look at the big picture. You have to think about our customers, our reputation, and our weakening position. We aren’t talking about saving Lockbox anymore. We’re talking about saving ISIS.”

Exhausted, Orion rested his head on his arms right there on the table. Bitterly, he thought of the old fights. If Jonathan had listened to him … If Jonathan had not been in such a rush … He looked up at Jonathan across the table. What were the chances that Jonathan would apologize? What were the chances he would show the slightest regret?

Nil. Jonathan didn’t even glance at Orion as he swept out of the glass-walled conference room.

But there was no point thinking about that now, when there was so much to do. There was the conversion of every Lockbox account to ChainLinx. There were phone calls. There were press releases. All through the hallways, up and down the stairwells, ISIS hummed with new activity. Even as the programmers gave up their nighttime vigil, the morning reinforcements arrived. Support staff trooped into the building with their cups of coffee, and Mel Millstein showed up at the quaint hour of nine. As Orion walked out into the hall and headed downstairs, he felt relief. The worst had happened, Lockbox was history. Now ISIS could rebuild. His resentment faded, and he felt pride instead, a strange pride at this resilient organism, this company of so many different parts and people—a society of its own, a world unto itself, a little planet against the hostile universe. He knew how Jonathan felt. Let the markets fall, let the siege begin, ISIS would outlast all comers, hackers, analysts, and doubters. Jonathan’s faith never wavered, and Orion began to feel partisan too.

“He’s very sure of himself, isn’t he?” Sorel said of Jonathan.

Orion was giving her a lift on his bicycle. She perched on the seat and he walked the bike, one hand on the frame, the other on the handlebars. Gently he wheeled her along, as a knight might lead a maiden on a palfrey.

“Well, he has a right to be,” Orion said.

“Are you defending his mistake?” The afternoon was sunny and might have been warm, if not for the brisk March wind that blew her skirt over her knees. She was wearing her long loose coat, and the black satin lining showed at the bottom, because her hem was down. She’d strapped on her guitar like a backpack. Her red-gold hair spilled over her shoulders. “He’s insufferable.”

“He gets results.”

“Not in this market.”

“If anyone can get the job done, it’s Jonathan,” Orion said.

“Oh, please! You sound like his henchman.”

“His henchman? No.”

She wondered, “Are you succumbing to some sort of Stockholm syndrome where you start identifying with your oppressor?”

“How is Jonathan my oppressor?” Orion protested. “He’s my colleague—and my old friend.”

She looked down on him for that. He could see the expression on her face, a kind of disdain coming over her. In her mind, Jonathan was the enemy.

“What’s wrong with working with people?” he asked defensively.

“Hmm. I liked you better before when you were more … disaffected. You were more original then.”

They were walking through Cambridgeport, where the streets were down to their last piles of ash-gray snow. The trees were bare, but the clapboard houses colorful, painted purple with teal trim, or ochre and bloodred, or lavender, or puce, and the yards were filled with art as well as cars—scrap-metal cats and penguins—ceramic pots bristling with fierce crocuses. They had been working day and night, troubleshooting ChainLinx to take on the massive new customer load.

“What day is it?” Orion asked as they arrived at her place.

“Monday,” she said. “No, I think Tuesday.”

Molly was on call. “I wish I could … come in.”

She shook her head. “Thanks for the lift.” She hopped off the bicycle in front of her ramshackle worker’s cottage. She’d done some work on it, but the house was still a work in progress. Wood supports propped up the porch. “Go home to bed.”

But he kissed her instead. Arms inside her unbuttoned coat, he found the gap between her skirt and soft wool sweater. She was so long and slender—sleek like the girl-women in his father’s poems, her breasts like buds under his fingers. She didn’t push him away. He felt the hollow inside her hip bone, and her shoulder blades were like folded wings.

“Don’t you want me to?” he whispered.

“No,” she said longingly, “not at all.”

“Not at all! Don’t overstate your case.”

“It’s a good case,” said Sorel. “It’s a strong case.”

“A Lockbox?”

“Right. Except that you can’t hack your way inside.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, but even as he released her, even as he watched her unlock her door, he longed to solve this puzzle, and find a way to her encrypted heart.

20

When the market sank, Bruno sent an e-mail about riding out the storm. Emily kept working without complaint, but a little furrow appeared between her eyes, a subtle wrinkle, not a worry line, but a mark of concentration. The stock price fell to forty on Tuesday, then to thirty-three on Wednesday, and finally hit a new low of sixteen on Thursday, and everyone was shocked, because there was no good reason for the steep decline, and yet the price was falling all the same.

On the upswing, every Veritech employee felt masterful. Now those masters felt like leaves tossed in unexpected storms. Laura read Winnie-the-Pooh at bedtime to her children in her unfinished house, and as she read about Pooh’s tumble through the branches of the oak tree, she held the baby, Katie, in her lap, and she thought: This is exactly what it’s like to lose half your net worth in three days.

“Oh, help!” said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet onto the branch below him.

“If only I hadn’t—” he said, as he bounced twenty feet on to the next branch.

“You see what I meant to do …”

“Of course it was rather—” he admitted as he slithered very quickly through the next six branches….

“More!” demanded Meghan from the bottom bunk.

And Justin sat up in the top bunk and said, “Why are you stopping, Mommy?”

And Katie pulled Laura’s hair.

But Laura could not help pausing to consider how well A. A. Milne described the falling sensation, the surprise and sudden thumps as one lost economic altitude, and began to wonder whether renovating in Los Altos was such a good idea, and then, whether private school made sense, and finally, whether leasing a car might be more prudent than paying cash.

Kevin told Laura, “We can’t panic. It would be terrible to sell all the stock we have left.”

“What do you mean, ‘the stock we have left’?” Laura asked him.

“We lost some,” he admitted as he helped her hook up the rolling dishwasher to the sink in their temporary kitchen.

“How do you lose stock?” Laura asked him.

He didn’t answer immediately.

“Kevin?”

“I borrowed on margin to pay the contractor,” he said.

“You what?”

“I didn’t want to sell, because I knew Veritech was going back up.”

She turned on him. “Can you hear what’s wrong with that?” she demanded. “Can you even hear?”

“I guessed wrong,” Kevin said.

“No, that’s not what I meant, Kevin James Miller. What’s wrong is that you didn’t ask me. What were you thinking, borrowing against my stock?”

“It was our stock. And I’m sorry, Laura.”

“I earned it,” she declared. “It was mine, and, yes, I made it ours. But it was never yours to do what you wanted. It was never yours to decide about without consulting me.”

“You never showed any interest in handling the money,” Kevin pointed out.

She had never been so angry. “You never asked.”

“Do you think you could have given me better advice? Whenever I asked about investments in the past, you trusted my judgment.”

Laura stood before him in their plywood makeshift kitchen, and she said, “Maybe I have a little more sense than you do. Or if I don’t, then maybe we’d make our mistakes together.”

“We’ve still got stock,” he soothed her. “Up ’til now, we’ve been very, very lucky.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you ever gamble with my hard-earned luck again.”

“I said I was sorry!”

“Because if you do, I’ll leave you,” she warned him, and she was half serious. “I’ll take the children and start a company of my own.”

He wasn’t sure quite how to take this. She had a sweet, soft voice; a patient, forgiving nature. She played the flute. “I always said you could start a bakery.” He tried to steer the conversation back to calmer waters. “You could sell your lemon—”

“I could sell truth serum,” she told him.

“Laura! I keep telling you—I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think I’d care?”

She cared enormously. Everybody did, but like all watched pots, the market would not boil.

At this moment George chose to buy. He bought Cisco at bargain-basement prices. He purchased IBM and Apple. And he paid cash for Tom McClintock’s cookbooks. He wrote a check for just under half a million dollars, exactly the money Sandra needed for her daughter’s legal fight.

Clever George. He knew the books were worth much more, and he unpacked them with guilt and pleasure, turning pages with sumptuous color plates, unfolding the collector’s notes, strange and brittle as pressed flowers. What rare and secret treasures, historical and also private. Not just a collection, but a reliquary. George had pulled off a bibliophile’s Louisiana Purchase, or rather, Jess had pulled off the deal for him.

His spring party, therefore, was mostly in Jess’s honor, although he did not advertise this. He presented the gathering as a viewing of the McClintock cookbooks, which he had installed in special cases in his great room.

The glass-fronted bookcases were quartersawn oak and built quite low, underneath his west windows. Atop the bookcases he had built illuminated glass display cases—the kind he had seen at the Huntington Library—so that on occasion he could show off certain volumes. For the party he had set up a little display of women’s cookbooks: the Brandenburg, the Salzburg, The Compleat Housewife. American Cookery. A New Present for A Servant-Maid, the expanded 1771 edition of Eliza Haywood’s 1743 handbook.

The cabinetry was exquisite, book-matched for George’s precious books. He did not fault his architect and carpenter for assuming the party was to celebrate their months of work. Sandra was coming, of course, along with her daughter, and George expected Nick and Julia, and antiquarian colleagues and Microsoft friends. Gracious in defeat, and hinting impishly at a purchase of his own, Raj accepted George’s invitation. Colm would be there. Colm had unpacked and installed the cookbooks. By the time the bookcases were ready, Jess had been traveling up north to chain herself to trees, to demonstrate in scenes George tried not to think about. Colm had done the work, but Jess was the one George thought about. She was the one he planned for. She had never been to the house, and he walked through the rooms, trying to imagine her impressions. He thought of her when he chose his champagne. He imagined her nibbling the strawberries he bought at the Farmers’ Market. She did eat strawberries, didn’t she? He prepared platters of cheese and biscuits, grapes, fresh figs, poached quince. He hired a pastry chef to bake lighter, smaller versions of the old recipes: bite-sized tarts, tiny crème brûlées. George’s housekeeper, Concepcion, climbed a painter’s ladder to dust the great beams, and then descended to polish the vintage typewriters. George hoped Jess understood that this party was for her. He imagined lifting his glass to thank her—if he could manage without sounding like a complete idiot.

“Bring friends—bring your sister if you like,” he had told her on the phone.

“I think her boyfriend is going to be in town,” said Jess.

“Bring your boyfriend then,” he said. “I mean her boyfriend.” He felt strangely tongue-tied. He had been extremely nervous, and he knew it showed, but he tried not to think about that. He tried to concentrate on what he could control: the party, the glass display cases lit with LEDs. Over six months he had built a proper home for McClintock’s collection. These rare volumes would never see the inside of a cupboard, cutlery drawer, or oven again.

He had planned the party for early evening, and as his guests drifted in, the last sunlight sifted through the windows and danced across the floor. The musicians had already arrived with guitar and flute, and they were playing “Greensleeves” sweetly, a little too sweetly.

Concepcion grinned. “You getting married, George?”

“How about something livelier?” George told the guitarist, who obliged with Leo Brouwer.

So to the strains of Cuban music, George welcomed his guests and graciously accepted their congratulations on the collection, the cabinets, the house, the champagne, the sunset, and all the while he kept his eyes on the front door.

Sandra arrived in a long Guatemalan patchwork skirt. She wore a black shirt and silver jewelry, and she was almost beautiful with her long gray hair down her back. Nothing like her small tattooed daughter in a wife-beater tank top. What was that inked between her shoulder blades? A bar code, or a word? And if it was a word, partly exposed, what was it? Redemption? Or Reinvention? Raj came in with them, and George realized that the three had driven up together.

“Yes, I drove,” Raj said cheerfully as the two women admired the display cases. “That was the least I could do.”

“Still courting?” George asked. You never knew with Raj.

“I’ve bought the engravings,” Raj whispered. “I bought all McClintock’s framed engravings right off the walls for a hundred dollars apiece.”

“Which engravings?”

“The lichens over the couch. They’re originals from Flora Danica—pre-1800, hand-colored.”

If only the cat hadn’t bitten George, just as he’d leaned in for a closer look!

“They’re from the botanical atlas that was supposed to include plates of every plant in Denmark. These are the engravings Prince Frederick ordered copied on china for Catherine the Great. Every piece was supposed to bear an exact copy of a different plant from the collection. I’m getting them reframed….”

“The least you could do,” George said wryly. Once bitten, twice shy. He had not ventured near McClintock’s odd art again, although now, of course, he wished he had. The cookbooks were the real prize, and he knew it was churlish to begrudge Raj his find, but the competitor in him sulked. It took three glasses of champagne and two major compliments from his antiquarian friends to shake his pique.

The first compliment began to mollify him: “I have never heard of a private collection like this in Berkeley.”

The second delighted him: “There may be cookbooks here that no one has seen.”

All the dealers admired and envied George’s acquisition, and that potent mix set the party buzzing, just as tiny stinging bubbles enlivened the champagne. No toast, George decided. No need to congratulate himself. He spoke to Sandra and showed her the humidity sensors he had installed in the bookcases, and he spoke to Nick and Julia, just as Julia’s cell phone began ringing.

“It’s Henry,” she told Nick. “He says he doesn’t want his babysitter anymore. He wants to know when we’re coming home.” She turned back to her phone. “Why don’t you use the other bathroom, sweetie?”

And George kept circulating, and watched Raj flirt with Colm, who looked flustered and spoke rapidly about his dissertation. “The excerpt,” said Colm, “becomes a genre of its own.”

Raj smiled. “Yes, but is that genre at all interesting—on its own?”

Colm looked offended.

The sun was low, the sunset draining away, and George thought, This is the moment in Virginia Woolf where somebody lights the lamps. The golden light slipping into the Bay, the guests absorbed in conversation. George walked among them and he adjusted the lights, and while he turned the dimmers, he saw a tall woman enter the room with a square-shouldered blond athlete—and he realized that this was Emily and her boyfriend, both dressed in open blazers, as though they were going to a yacht club, and then he saw Leon with his long glossy black hair and his jeans and untucked white dress shirt. Had Jess told him to wear that? She was the last inside the door and seemed to look everywhere at once. Unconsciously she clasped her hands behind her, as though stepping into a museum. She wore a sleeveless shift, less a dress than a slip of gray silk so wrinkled it must have been the style. Approaching his bookshelves, she examined the titles, one after another. The famous Millay and the Plath, all the cloth-bound poetry.

“You can open them if you like,” he said.

That would have been enough for him, watching Jess open his books. Meeting her accomplished sister.

“Your house is lovely,” Emily said.

“Amazing!” exclaimed Jonathan. “Who’s your architect?”

“Bernard Maybeck,” George said.

“You should hire him for Veritech, when you guys move,” Jonathan told Emily. “Seriously.”

George couldn’t help smiling. The desserts were superb, the champagne subtly teasing, like a word on the tip of the tongue—methodological, perspicacious—the word that comes to you, playfully, when you think you have forgotten. Palimpsest. Irreversibility. Inamorata.

He would have been perfectly happy, if not for Leon. Why was it that the youngest, most innocent-looking women consorted with the creepiest men? Their boyfriends were not boys or friends at all, but shadowy familiars: bears, wolfhounds, panthers.

Leon cast an appraising eye over George’s collections, and bent down to look inside the display cabinets.

“Be careful,” Jess warned. She had indeed asked Leon to wear the white shirt, and she was a little nervous about bringing him to George’s house—not so much that he would break something, but that he would be bored, and therefore rude. She knew instinctively that Leon and George would bring out the worst in each other. Here it was, happening already.

“Elbows off the glass,” George said.

Leon did not apologize, but straightened up, smiled, and shrugged carelessly as if to say, What are you, a fag?

And George looked at Leon, and he thought, Have you really been with Jess a year and a half? And he imagined smashing Leon’s toothy mouth. But he tried, instead, to act the gracious host, and asked with only the slightest hint of mockery in his voice, “How are the trees?”

“The trees are well,” Leon answered, matching George’s satirical tone perfectly.

“You’ve been up north?”

“We’ve been everywhere,” said Leon.

“Success?” asked George.

“We’ve had good discussions,” Leon said smoothly. “Success is up to Sacramento.”

“So you don’t win your victories in the forest, but on the ground.”

Leon glanced at Jess as he said, “Nothing with trees happens on the ground.”

Jess traced the smooth edge of the display case with her finger. Despite her resolution in Muir Woods, despite her weeks up north with Leon, she had not overcome her fear of climbing.

“I’ll get you some champagne,” Leon offered Jess in a gentler voice.

“No, thank you.”

George searched Jess’s downcast face as Leon ambled to the bar. He wished he could talk to her alone; take her into a different room without seeming obvious.

“Are you all right?” George asked. That startled her, and he regretted the question. Too intimate. Too concerned. “Could I get you some strawberries?” he amended.

She shook her head and kept gazing at the rare cookbooks under glass.

“Please let me get you some.”

“Please?” She teased gently. “Have you started saying please to me?”

“A rare slip,” he said. “But I did buy the strawberries for you.”

“Why?”

Because I love you, he thought. “Because I owe you,” he said.

“You don’t owe me anything,” she replied in her easy way.

“You know I do. You got me these books.” His voice was low. “You made the deal, Jess.”

“True,” she conceded with a smile.

“Would you like to work on them?”

“Work on them how?”

“We need a descriptive catalog, for one thing. We have to sort the notes and store them separately with records of the page numbers where they were found. Colm started, but I need him at the store, and he’s got his dissertation. I was wondering if you would like to try.”

He opened the glass display case and took out the palm-sized 1814 American Cookery. The binding had cracked, and he held the book as if it were a fledgling with a broken wing.

“Independence Cake,” Jess read over George’s shoulder. “Twenty pounds flour, fifteen pounds sugar, ten pounds butter, four dozen eggs, one quart wine, one quart brandy …” She laughed softly. “Was this for the Founding Fathers reunion?” She turned the next several pages and found a black-ink drawing on a slip of typing paper, a nude woman holding a round fruit to her mouth. Jess plucked it out and read the collector’s tiny caption: “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

“Will you?” George asked, closing the book and placing it atop the cabinet.

“Maybe,” Jess said lightly. “Do you have any?”

“No peaches.”

“Oh, well. I can’t ruin this dress, anyway.”

Words he took as permission to look openly at her. The fabric of her dress, gray and wrinkled at first glance, was really silver. No one else would wear fabric like that, rustling with every breath.

“It’s Emily’s,” she said, disproving his idea immediately. She had borrowed the dress from her sister, although Emily thought it was too long on her.

“Will you take the job? Please?”

“Hmm.” Pensive, with just a touch of humor, she said, “I don’t think I like that word from you.”

“I’d pay you more,” George told her. Only half-joking, he declared, “I’d make you curator.”

“Oh, a title,” said Jess.

Why are you hesitating now? he thought. What have you been doing for the past six weeks? He had scarcely seen her at the store. Across the room, George’s friends were clustering at the dessert table like bees. Raj and Colm were discussing William Blake, while Jonathan was holding forth to Nick about how the Nasdaq would rise again. Stealthily, Leon walked among them. George assumed he was casing the joint. George should check Leon’s pockets before he left. Search him and then show Jess the content of her boyfriend’s character. After which George could comfort Jess, and then … he didn’t know what happened next.

Jess said, “I want to know who she was.”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

“The collector’s lover.”

“Why do you assume he had a lover?”

“Well, because—because look.” Jess held up the nude. “You’ve got the evidence right here.”

“You’re missing the point,” George told her. “She wasn’t his lover. That was why he wrote all the notes and drew the pictures.” He took the drawing from her, and his fingers brushed hers. She looked up at him, clear-eyed. Perspicacious. She understands, he thought. She knows.

But in the next moment she drew back her hand. “Actually, I think I would like a drink.”

As he showed her the way to the bar, he finished his thought under his breath, murmuring, “He didn’t have her, so he drew her instead.”

21

Jonathan was calm when ISIS rose to nine, and still confident when the shares retreated to five fifty. Those who whined and fretted only irritated him. Scared-straight venture capitalists did not impress him now any more than they had back in 1998 when they pleaded with Jonathan to take their cash. Where did they get their ideas about the new economy? From magazines? He did not bother reading publications like Fast Company, or Wired, or Forbes. So-called business cycles bored him. The news, whether paper or electronic, meant little as far as Jonathan was concerned. The news was already old. Weekly, daily, hourly, anything called news was already archival.

He understood that in this world there were news reporters and news makers, investors and innovators. Watchers and world beaters. In each case he took the active role. He did not know economic theory; he knew computers. He did not meditate on trends; he eyed the future. And so, at George’s party, when he talked to Nick, he spoke with perfect equanimity. “The strong survive, man,” he told Nick, and by strong he meant “Those with new technology.”

While Emily saw falling share price as a sad decay, a postlapsarian decline from larger, rounder numbers, Jonathan came to view the fall as opportunity. “Buy now,” he told anyone who asked, and he began to buy back shares himself, convinced of his company’s resilience.

In April when ISIS sank to four, Jonathan called a meeting. Dave, Aldwin, Oskar, and Jake gathered in Oskar’s office.

“Where’s Orion?” Jonathan asked.

“I’m not sure he came in today,” said Jake.

“No, I saw him,” said Aldwin, just as Orion walked through the door and took his seat in the corner.

“Okay,” said Jonathan, and then paused as Orion opened his cream soda. “Let me tell you what’s happening.”

“Cisco bought us,” Orion said, and for a second everybody froze in shock. “Just kidding.”

No one laughed.

“Anyone else want to take a guess?” Jonathan asked icily. Nobody spoke, so he continued. “It’s time for a paradigm shift. We are going to develop a new security product for electronic fingerprinting of every view and touch on a piece of data. We’re going to call this service Fast-Tracking, and we’ll sell it to every security client.”

“How would this work?” Dave asked.

“Look, with ChainLinx we encrypt transactions to safeguard the purchaser. Fast-Tracking is really a data-protection and surveillance tool for the vendor.” He stepped up to the board and began to draw the new scheme in green ink.

What did Eli Whitney feel when he arrived in America with plans for the cotton gin? What were Francis Cabot Lowell’s emotions when, from memory alone, he built a scale model of the Cartwright weaving machine? Elation? Mastery mixed with trepidation? Jonathan felt entirely himself as he played his card, the secret Emily had revealed to him eighteen months before. He was not copying detailed plans, but developing his own. Nor was he attempting to replicate an existing project at Veritech—for Emily had told him in no uncertain terms that electronic fingerprinting was a project that she would not pursue. Ever since that conversation, Jonathan had plotted his own course—a new product for ISIS, a new initiative for programmers, and, most important, a breakthrough to present to analysts and shareholders.

During the Industrial Revolution, memorizing machine parts might have been essential. In this Computational Era, the concept alone, the whispered idea, launched a thousand chips. Jonathan’s mind was quick and infinitely flexible, his timing uncanny, his presentation transformative as he made over electronic fingerprinting into new market share. He was not mathematically creative like Jake or Oskar, but he had an acquisitive intelligence, and when he appropriated an idea, he improved it, until his own version not only surpassed, but obliterated its source. Indeed, he no longer recalled electronic fingerprinting except with nostalgia, as he remembered other conversations with Emily, her head on his chest, her bare back under his hand, her thigh against his thigh. Her puzzling confidence became a gift. Her revelation shifted in his mind to inspiration. And Emily herself—he worshipped her. She was his muse. If he did not tell her about this meeting, if he neglected to mention his new plan for ISIS—Well, soon he planned to tell her this and everything.

Emily had promised to leave Veritech in June. She and Jonathan talked endlessly about finding an apartment in Cambridge, or simply buying a house. They had a real estate agent, and no price limit. Therefore Jonathan felt just right as he diagrammed his new Fast-Tracking system on the whiteboard. At last he was getting to the crux of the matter—the new technology that ISIS needed. He loved Emily, and he thanked her silently, although he did not mention her name in his visionary presentation. There was no need. There was no time. Oh, life was sweet.

Dazzled, the others watched Jonathan unveil his new plans. Always a little slow, Dave asked about the legal and ethical implications of the idea, while Jake and Oskar leapfrogged ahead with technical questions.

“Now this is interesting,” Oskar said, bestowing his highest praise.

As for Orion, he felt hopeful for the first time in months. Instead of lecturing about release dates, and talking up ISIS products, Jonathan was presenting new ideas. Instead of trying to shut down criticism, he was encouraging debate. In the past he’d sacrificed quality for speed and talked incessantly about market share. Now he proposed building a new system from scratch. Orion saw the plan opening, blossoming like fireworks trailing sparks and smoke in the night sky. They would tag and trace every touch on every piece of data, capture and collect what had been ephemeral. What possibilities for research! What challenges for new analysis! He understood the idea immediately, and the scribbles on the whiteboard were not scribbles to him, but poetry. The design Jonathan unveiled was that elegant.

Aldwin asked, “How will we staff this? Start a new group?”

“Yeah,” said Jonathan. “But we’ll keep the project confidential. No analyst or investor input! And we need somebody to spearhead it.”

“I will!” Orion surprised himself with his alacrity. “I’d like to,” he amended.

Jonathan smiled. It was not his fault that his smile looked so mischievous, that his blue eyes sparkled and the corners of his mouth curled as though anticipating some particularly delicious meal. He had always known his old friend would come around. Turn away long enough, and people think you have forgotten them entirely. Show your displeasure, and first they hate you, and then they despair, and finally, scarcely acknowledging it to themselves, they miss you. Change the game again, to see if they follow. The best ones can. The smart ones always do.

“You would have to leave what’s left of the Lockbox group,” Jonathan told Orion. “Would you be willing to do that?”

God, yes, Orion thought. “Definitely,” he said aloud.

“Maybe we could work something out,” Jonathan said. “I think that you’d be great.”

Such faith in him! For long months Orion’s efforts had been ad hoc, troubleshooting substandard code. But to start up this new Fast-Tracking venture, to head his own group, design and build a system to his own standards—to work with autonomy! The idea thrilled him. Orion was moved by Jonathan’s trust, and his gesture to restore their friendship. Jonathan had not given up on him; Jonathan still saw him as one of the founders.

“You would report directly to me,” Jonathan told Orion, “so I can keep an eye on you.”

Orion chose to take this as a compliment. He took this, as intended, as a formal job offer, and he nodded in agreement. He accepted.

Perhaps in the old days, men built their reputations, and then their fortunes. Orion had made his fortune first. He had not designed algorithms like Oskar and Jake, or established administrative systems like Dave and Aldwin, or sold Lockbox and ChainLinx to the first clients as Jonathan had, flying all night to charm his way into Disney and CNN when he was still a graduate student with one suit. Too diffident, too dreamy, too cautious, too much a programmer, Orion was worth over twenty million dollars even in this depressed market, but he had not been well employed. He did not sit on the executive board. He was not vice president of anything. Heading a new group, he would step up. He had a chance to justify his wealth, to prove that his success was more than accidental, to become a self-made man.

Meet me downstairs, Orion e-mailed Sorel as soon as he returned to his desk.

“I’m right here.” She was standing behind him, watching him type.

“What happened?” she asked him as they waited for the elevator.

“Shh!”

She looked at him questioningly. “What?”

“You won’t believe this …,” he told her in the elevator, but just then someone else joined them. Somebody from Marketing, ALOK on his badge. Orion could not keep track of the new hires anymore, nor did these recruits know him. Could they have any idea, for example, that Orion had named their company over beers in Somerville so many months ago? Jonathan said then that he wanted some kind of acronym for “Internet Security System,” and Orion had remembered his fourth-grade unit on Egyptians and his report on Isis—baker, spinner, weaver, daughter of the Earth and sky. This new guy, Alok, had no idea. There were no historical inscriptions at ISIS, no steles recording early triumphs. No hieroglyphs with bird-headed vulture capitalists and the four founders arrayed like boy kings on the elevator’s smooth gray walls.

The doors parted, and Orion ushered Sorel through the lobby with its mobile of oblong mirrors, and its revolving doors of thick, rubber-edged glass.

Into the fresh spring air they hurried, away from ISIS. Sorel thought he wanted to buy lunch at the deli at One Kendall Square, but Orion saw too many ISIS worshippers there. He ushered her into the furniture store Pompanoosuc Mills, vast and airy, filled with handcrafted Shaker furniture—or rather the kind of furniture Shakers would have built if they had softened on celibacy and simplicity and fashioned bunk beds and glass-fronted china cabinets.

Sorel followed him to the back of the store where they admitted to the saleswoman that they were just looking, that they would indeed let her know if they had any questions about woods or pricing, and settled down together, pulling up two spindle-backed chairs to a cherry dining-room table.

Orion said, “Jonathan’s got a new plan.”

“He needs one.”

“Just listen!” Orion watched her face as he told her. He watched the way she sucked her lower lip, appreciating the new scheme immediately, savoring the news.

“You must be joking!”

“Wait. There’s more. I’m going to be the team leader of the Fast-Track group.”

“You?”

“What’s wrong with me?” He was a little offended. “Don’t you think I can?”

“Of course you can. I just wonder why Jonathan likes you now.”

“I think … it’s just … we go way back,” Orion struggled to explain. “I think when you go that far back with someone, the friendship never disappears completely, and sometimes, eventually, the relationship regenerates.”

“Like a starfish growing a new arm,” said Sorel.

“Don’t you think sometimes it works that way?”

“I don’t trust him, I’m afraid.”

“You don’t know him as well as I do,” said Orion.

“That’s why I’m in a better position to judge.”

“You’re a cynic,” he said.

“Probably.”

“I think with some people you have shared a history, and it’s very deep.”

“He says one kind word. You turn to mush.”

“Kind word? He’s giving me this huge new project.”

“The project sounds brilliant—if you can pull it off.” Sorel tilted her chair back. “I’m afraid he’s setting you up.”

“No,” Orion said. “He wouldn’t do that. This new group is real, and he wants me to run it. He’s finally found a way to use me.”

“That’s just it.”

“Sorel!” He turned on her in exasperation.

“Sorry.”

“You would make a good spy,” he said.

“Why?”

“You don’t trust anybody. You wear black overcoats. You admit you like disguises.”

“I don’t disguise myself from you.”

“No?” He turned toward her, and captured her hand in his. “Then why is your phone number unlisted?”

“Why did you try to find my phone number?” she asked, puzzled. “I only use my cell.”

“And why do you disappear all the time?”

“What do you mean, ‘disappear’?”

“You don’t show up, and I have no idea where you are.”

“I don’t have to tell you where I am. I’m touring!”

“Where are you touring? Davis Square?”

“I have a career.”

“You mean The Chloroforms? That’s your career?”

“You don’t think programming is my career, do you? I came here to be a performance artist and study physics. You don’t think I’m going to start rallying round ISIS and all that.”

“I’m sure you were perfectly happy with ISIS when you sold your stock,” Orion said, thinking of Sorel’s little house.

“Look, I’m the consistent one,” said Sorel. “I’ve always said ISIS is my day job. You’re the one obsessed with Jonathan. He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. You’re always looking for affection, even when the relationship is frayed. Even when it’s broken.”

“Let’s leave Molly out of this,” said Orion.

“You always do.” Sorel pushed her chair back from the table. “ISIS is a case in point. So is Jonathan. You’re loyal to everybody. It’s a shame, really, that I’m …”

“That you’re what?” Orion asked.

“So fond of you.”

22

Oneness. Jess read the word on the screen displaying Rabbi Helfgott’s PowerPoint presentation. He was speaking that evening at the Tree House, at Jess’s invitation.

What is Oneness?

Every particle in the universe desires to be One.

• raindrop

• spark

• soul

“It is amazing to think,” Rabbi Helfgott told the group of close to thirty Tree Savers, “that all through the world, every neshamah, every spirit, whether we know it or not, desires the Oneness that is God. This applies to every living being—animal, plant, insect—trees included. Oneness is our natural state. Our default condition. Unfortunately, too often in our lives, we fall away. The question is: How do we return?”

No one spoke. Some Tree Savers listened closely from where they sat on chairs and couches; others fidgeted, bemused, on the floor, and the rabbi watched them and gazed upon the Jewish faces among them—Jessamine Bach, Noah Levine—as he moved on to the next slide.

• Tefillah—Prayer

• Tshuvah—Repentance

• Tzedakah—Charity

“In our tradition, this is the magic formula,” the rabbi said. “This is the answer.”

Jess considered the rabbi’s three-part solution for reengagement with the eternal. “Does this cover everything a soul can possibly do?”

“Yes!” declared Rabbi Helfgott. “For sure. Yes!”

“What about civil disobedience?” Leon asked.

Now everyone was listening. “That would depend on various factors,” the rabbi said diplomatically. “Peaceful or violent? Legal or illegal? Safe or dangerous?”

The Tree Savers hemmed and hummed, debating among themselves, and Daisy said, “I think if you see people interfering with the Oneness of the world, you have to stop them.”

“But that’s the question,” said Jess. “Is stopping them actually some kind of charity? Or prayer? Or does civil disobedience come under the category of repentance? And is it only quiet, peaceful protests that count? Or social justice by any means necessary?”

“Who’s more Jewish?” Noah asked. “Mahatma Gandhi? Or Malcolm X?”

In his younger days, Rabbi Helfgott might have felt the discussion slipping away, but he had lived and worked in Berkeley for seventeen years. Magisterially, he raised both hands. “Let me put this on the table. Mahatma Gandhi or Malcolm X? These are very interesting people, but when it comes to more or less Jewish—the answer is simple. Neither was a Jew! However, let’s look in depth at our first point: Tefillah. Prayer.”

“Wait,” Jess interrupted once again. “I want to understand whether social action can be a kind of prayer.”

Rabbi Helfgott smiled. “No.”

“No!” She could not conceal her surprise.

“Social action is original,” said Rabbi Helfgott. “But praying is prescribed. In social action we improvise, depending on the situation. However, in the Jewish tradition when we pray, we read words already set down for us. Social action is ad hoc. Prayer is total catastrophic insurance, covering every possibility.”

“So you’re saying it’s better to be spiritually derivative than creative?” Jess asked.

“Absolutely!”

The room was silent. Ha! Helfgott thought. Who was radical now? The Tree Savers? Or their bearded guest speaker in his frock coat? Who was pious now? Students feeling their way on a unique spiritual journey? Or their rabbi who dared suggest that the soul’s journey was not unique at all, but scripted?

“This is the gift of our tradition,” the rabbi said. “You wish for Oneness—you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The wheel is already there for you. Spinning! You wish to speak to God? You know what to say for every occasion.” He lifted up a blue prayer book and watched the Tree Savers’ faces: some skeptical, some puzzled. All surprised.

“Therefore social action is not prayer. However, when it comes to charity, this is another story. And the word tzedakah, ‘charity,’ has another meaning. ‘Justice’!”

Rabbi Helfgott took a sip from his water bottle, for he did not drink or eat anything in nonkosher houses, not even Tree Houses.

“We look at the problems of the world. The poor, the homeless, the oppressed. We look at the endangered species of the world. We say, ‘What can I give? What can I do for those who have so little? For those who are silent?’ Prayer is one method. Giving of time and money is another. Are prayer and social action the same? No. Are they connected? Absolutely. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. Look to the sea. Look to the Earth. Look to the trees. If they aren’t God’s messengers, they are definitely His witnesses. Look to the world and unite with what is natural around us. I myself have discovered in California more evidence of the Shechinah, the Holy Presence, than I ever saw in my childhood. I myself grew up in an urban environment! One scraggly plant, one asphalt playground. What did I know from the natural world? Until I, who lived in Crown Heights, began driving my van through the golden hills along 280—what did I know? Until I, who grew up in books, took my family to Point Reyes National Seashore, to see the wildflowers blooming and the waves crash over the rocks—what did I understand? My wife and I saw the immensity of the ocean! Our children saw Tomales Bay. Then I, who never noticed the landscape, came to repent my ignorance. Then I dedicated my heart to the cliffs, the wind, the trees. To the refreshment of our planet speedily in our day.”

Silence.

Nervously, Jess scanned the faces around her. Some looked at Helfgott with respect. Others with curiosity. No one spoke. Then suddenly, Arminda said, “Yeah!”

Leon applauded, and the others joined in.

“He was great,” Leon told Jess that night as they cleaned the kitchen.

Jess twirled her mop happily. “I knew he would be!”

“Clergy are always great. We should have him write an op-ed for us. Something about Wood Rose Glen.”

“I don’t think he knows anything about Wood Rose Glen,” Jess said.

Leon stopped scrubbing the stove. “We could explain what Pacific Lumber is doing and why we need to stop them—and he could put it in his own words.”

“Wouldn’t that be like using him?” Jess asked.

“Only in the best possible way.”

Jess thought about this. “Even if it’s for the best, I wouldn’t want to. I mean, I couldn’t use a rabbi for publicity.”

“No, of course not. No more than he wants to use you, taking your invitation to preach.”

“Couldn’t you imagine a free exchange of ideas?”

“Everyone’s got an agenda,” Leon said wearily. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“If you want him to write an op-ed, then you ask him,” Jess said.

“I’ll be up north.”

“Don’t go,” Jess murmured as she mopped, moistening the tiles at his feet.

“Come with me,” Leon said.

“I can’t. I have to work. I promised George.”

“And what did you promise him, exactly?”

“It’s just such a great opportunity.”

Leon turned his back on her and finished scrubbing the commercial stove with steel wool. “You keep saying that.”

“It’s true.”

Jess was cataloging the McClintock cookbook collection. Arriving at noon and leaving in the late afternoon, she spent at least five hours every weekday with the books. George was never home in the afternoons. He had given Jess a code of her own for the security system: 1759, the year the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were published, and she came and went as she pleased. Apart from Concepcion, who cleaned three times a week, Jess worked alone.

At first she had felt overwhelmed by the house, its airy symmetry, its silence. Now she was accustomed to the place, but she caught herself wondering, Is this still Berkeley? George’s neighborhood felt as far from Telegraph as the hanging gardens of Babylon. You could get a good kebab in Jess’s neighborhood, and a Cal T-shirt, and a reproduction NO HIPPIES ALLOWED sign. Where George lived, you could not get anything unless you drove down from the hills. Then you could buy art glass, and temple bells, and burled-wood jewelry boxes, and dresses of hand-painted silk, and you could eat at Chez Panisse, or sip coffee at the authentically grubby French Hotel where your barista took a bent paper clip and drew cats or four-leaf clovers or nudes in your espresso foam. You returned home with organic, free-range groceries, and bouquets of ivory roses and pale green hydrangeas, and you held dinner parties where some guests got lost and arrived late, and others gave up searching for you in the fog. That was George’s Berkeley, and even in these environs, his home stood apart, hidden, grand, and rambling; windows set like jewels in their carved frames, gables twined with wisteria of periwinkle and ghostly white.

Jess had the use of one of George’s old cars, a Honda Accord, that she drove from the flats to his enchanted hills. Like a pilgrim, she climbed the outdoor staircase, opened the door, and slipped off her shoes. She skated in socks over silken floors to the oak table in the dining room, where George had left her a laptop and a reading light, book cradles, magnifying glass, note cards, sharpened pencils, archival file boxes, Mylar sleeves, references and bibliographies—Bitting, Vicaire, Lowenstein, Maclean, Driver. George had them all. With these tools, she set to work, one book at a time—typing title and publication details into her database, adding descriptive notes: two cookbooks bound as one, wormholes in section vi.

Jess had always been the less responsible sister, the whimsical daughter, the girl with the flyaway hair. Openhearted, she had always trusted others, but no one had returned the favor so generously. She was aware, always, of George’s faith, his conviction that, working independently, she would not mar these precious volumes, or pocket a small cookbook for herself, or dog-ear pages, or cut out an engraving, as some thieves did, even in great libraries, with staff and guards.

She had never spent time in such beautiful rooms. Lofty ceilings and massive beams, windows glowing with sun and cloud and distant ocean. She had never worked with such material.

She studied each cookbook minutely, turning pages one by one, extracting the collector’s drawings, pulling off his paper clips. Removing these artifacts to file, she noted exactly where they occurred, between recipes for pottage, or instructions for preparing trout or carp or pike. She cross-referenced each, as an archaeologist might preserve every tooth and shard of bone.

Who are you? she asked silently, as she laid away the collector’s quotations, his drawings, his scraps of famous poetry: Come live with me and be my love … interleaved with menus: oysters, fish stew, tortoise in its shell, bread from the oven, honey from the honeycomb. The books were unsplattered but much fingered, their pages soft with turning and re-turning, like collections of old fairy tales. Often Jess thought of Rapunzel and golden apples and enchanted gardens. She thought of Ovid, and Dante, and Cervantes, and the Pre-Raphaelites, for sometimes McClintock pictured his beloved eating, and sometimes sleeping in fields of poppies, and once throned like Persephone, with strawberry vines entwined in her long hair.

Whom did you love? she wondered to herself, but she found no name for the mysterious woman, and no description. Only the ink drawings, beautifully detailed, and McClintock’s fantastic menus, culled from recipes that read like poetry.

To make a tarte of strawberyes, wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four egges, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it. And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant’s Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast. Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.

Cooks turned pigeons out of pies, plumped veal with tongue and truffle, stuffed bustard with goose, with pheasant, with chicken, with duck, with guinea fowl, with teal, with woodcock, with partridge, with plover, with lapwing, with quail, with thrush, with lark, with garden warbler, so that each bird contained the next, each body enveloping one more delicate in mystic sequence, until at last the cook stuffed the warbler with a single olive, as though revelers might finally taste music, arriving at this round placeholder for breath and open voice. Edible decibels. Savory olive for sweet song.

Modern recipes were clean and bloodless by comparison, suppressing violence between cook and cooked. Not so here. Truss them …, lard them, boil them quick and white. This, Jess read, was how to prepare rabbits. Cut your woodcocks in four quarters and put them in a sauce-pan; but remember to save the Entrails…. Incantatory, hortatory. All verbs in the imperative: Raise the skin; tie up the necks; parboil them; roast them. Adjectives sparing, nouns succulent and rich, bespeaking bacon, and crisp skin curling from roast fowl.

Jess herself had not eaten fowl or roast or even fish in years, but the books awakened memories of turkey and thick gravy, and crab cakes, and rib-eye roasts. Redolent of smoke and flame, the recipes repelled and also reminded her of pink and tender meat, and breaking open lobster dripping with sweet butter, and sucking marrow out of bones.

Hunger drew her into George’s garden, where she devoured the food she’d brought along, her sprouts and avocado sandwich, her carob muffin. Cold pastoral. She returned to epic tales of fish and wild boar, every course a canto, every feast a bestiary. And all these interleaved with the collector’s private fantasies, no longer strange to Jess, but familiar, even comforting. Scribbled lines from Jonson seemed the right response to instructions for whole pike and suckling pig, and swans dressed for the table. A reclining nude with grapes was really not so out of place. The food in these cookbooks not at all moral or metaphysical, but dug from the earth, plucked from the garden, slain in the woods. Animals still quivered with life, and required cleaning after slaughter. Red deer ran with blood, broths seethed.

Jess knew some French, but little German and no Dutch. Those works were more mysterious, and also less distracting to catalog. The English cookbooks with their joints and forced meat, their Bacon stuck with Cloves, read like Jacobean tragedies. Jess devoured them, scarcely looking up, until Concepcion’s vacuum startled her. Then she realized the afternoon was gone, the sky was deepening, and she was hungry once again.

She began to bring more food, a second snack for the end of the day. Rice cakes and a thermos full of miso soup. She ate snap peas and bags of almonds on George’s sunny kitchen deck, and bent to sniff the herbs his gardener cultivated in pots. She closed her eyes and smelled basil, thyme and rosemary, spearmint, peppermint, chocolate mint, dill, parsley, lemon grass. Thus fortified, she shouldered her backpack and drove home to the Tree House, where she lived her other life.

In July Leon came to the Tree House for several days to work and re-provision. He assumed that she would drive north with him, and when she told him she needed more time with the books he said, “Jess!” almost like Emily.

“What?” she asked him.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m working,” she said once again. “I know you think cookbooks are trivial.”

He nodded. “Completely.”

“You think rare books are frivolous—but actually when you sit down with them …”

“When you sit down with them or when you sit down with him?”

“Don’t be rude!” she said, half-laughing. He was already dressed. She had just come from the shower.

“This job is a total setup.”

Bending over, drying her thick hair, she told him about the Brandenburg cookbook. “It’s got a clasp like a locket. It’s a jewel,” she told him. “And wait, when you open it and you look at the frontispiece—can I tell you …?”

“Can I tell you about Wood Rose Glen?” he countered. “We’ve got rangers up there every day, and loggers with megaphones harassing everyone who tries to defend.”

She dressed in silence, chastened. “I’ll come up in two weeks.”

“Come because you want to come. Come because you need to come,” said Leon. “Don’t do me any favors.”

“I do want to. It’s just …”

“Just what?”

How could she explain to him what she could scarcely articulate to herself? The cookbooks weren’t trivial at all. They were, in and of themselves, an entirely new world. She had never felt this way. She dreamed about the books at night. Their collector haunted her. She lived in suspense, speculating about his life, his love, his strange dark handwriting. Sometimes she could hardly bear it—the edge of discovery. “To have a chance to work with a collection like this—” she began.

Leon cut her off. “Watch out or you’ll end up in the collection too.”

“You’re jealous!”

“No,” Leon told her coolly. “You can have him.”

“Have who? Have George? But I don’t want him.”

“Maybe you don’t, but he wants you.”

Jess thought of the exquisite, empty house. “He’s never even there.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Leon’s anger was never desperate or uncontrolled, but he was angry. Cold as liquid nitrogen, he burned.

They heard footsteps overhead, and talking in the hall. When they fought, the other Tree Savers could overhear. She kept her voice down. “You have no right to speak to me that way, when you always leave me here alone.”

“I don’t leave you here. You choose to stay.”

“I want to climb with you,” she said, “but I can’t.”

“That’s bullshit, Jess, and you know it. You told me six months ago you were going to climb—and every time, you decide at the last minute that you can’t. The truth is that you can, Jess. You can. But you won’t. You have an irrational—”

“I know it’s irrational. I know it’s an irrational fear.”

“Well, if you know it’s irrational, then why don’t you do something about it?”

“Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” Jess said.

“Call it whatever you want, it’s childish.”

“Why are you so nasty?” Jess asked him.

He didn’t answer.

“You’re nasty, and accusatory, and paranoid.”

“I’m not paranoid,” Leon said.

“Oh, so you admit to nasty and accusatory.” She almost laughed, but he did not.

“Irrational or not, it’s your choice, so don’t whine about getting left behind.”

Whenever she defended herself, or called him on something, Leon said don’t be stupid, or accused her of whining. She took a breath. “I’m pointing out that my job is real too.”

“And your so-called job is to work for your patron in his house.”

“You have patrons! You have that guy from Juniper Systems, and that woman, that actress with the house in the city. You just wish that George were funding you.”

“Right, if he were funding us that would be different.”

“You’re jealous. You really are.”

He turned away slightly.

“Don’t you think for once you might possibly be wrong?”

“Wrong about your rich friend? I’m not wrong about him,” said Leon.

“You don’t know him,” said Jess.

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Jess said.

Leon answered, “Just tell me what happens when he comes home.”

That afternoon, while working in George’s dining room, she felt something new, a strange apprehension. She jumped to hear the house settle, and started at Concepcion’s key in the lock, but George did not burst in on her that day, nor did he visit her the next. He never came home early. While Jess talked to him on occasion, when she stopped in at Yorick’s, she never saw him at the house. She left him notes. Still working on the Salzburg. Also, McClintock lists three recipes for swan.

He rarely wrote in reply, or if he did, he simply scribbled, Good. Or Back up the index as you go. He could follow her progress on the laptop, where she was creating the annotated bibliography. She knew that he was reading it, because he used the Track Changes tool, and sometimes added to her descriptions of the books, inserting details in red. Occasionally he left books out for her in their foam cradles. Weighted strings held them open to reveal a beautiful engraving, or some particular recipe he had noticed.

Once he left the Haywood out for her with a page number on a scrap of paper, and she opened the book to recipes for “Distillation.” Jess laughed at the page George had found for her. There, between instructions to make rose water and clove water, were instructions to make jessamine water: Take eight ounces of the jessamine flowers, clean picked from their stalks, three quarts of spirit of wine, and two quarts of water: put the whole into an alembic, and draw off three quarts. Then take a pound of sugar dissolved in two quarts of water, and mix it with the distilled liquor. George left no comment on the recipe, but she read, and read it over, aware that he was thinking of her.

Still, he did not come home, and as weeks passed she relaxed again, for despite Leon’s warning, she saw only the housekeeper cleaning the already-clean rooms, rubbing the glowing wood furniture, more, Jess imagined, to warm the chairs, than to polish them. Concepcion kept the house as one might wind a watch, or tune and play stringed instruments to prevent them from cracking with disuse.

The place was lightly lived in. Jess was sure she was the only one who used the first-floor bathroom with its cool stone tiles, and the kitchen looked almost entirely unused as well, although she assumed George ate at home occasionally like everybody else. He kept a wicker basket of onions under one counter, and another basket of potatoes, a can of olive oil near the stove, a braid of garlic heads hanging from a hook, along with a bunch of dried red chili peppers. But she never found a dish left out. Not so much as a coffee mug.

Therefore, she was doubly surprised, the first day of August, to see a piece of fruit lying on the pristine kitchen table. A peach, slightly unbalanced, so that it listed to one side, its hue the color of an early sunrise. Had George remembered their conversation at the party and left the peach for her to eat? Strange. For a moment she thought it might be a trompe l’oeil work of art, some fantastic piece of glass. She leaned over and sniffed. The blooming perfume was unmistakable. She touched it with the tip of her finger. The peach was not quite ripe, but it was real.

The next day, she checked the kitchen as soon as she arrived. The peach lay there still, blushing deeper in the window light. She bent to smell, and the perfume was headier than before, a scent of meadows and summers home from school. Still unripe. Was George waiting to eat this beauty? On a note card she penciled: Is this a proprietary peach? She placed the card on the table, but changed her mind immediately, folding her stiff query into quarters and then eighths and finally sixteenths, and then stuffing it into her backpack in the dining room. There she returned to her apportioned books.

This is just to say, she wrote in her notebook, I’ve been eying the peach you left on the table and were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. It looks delicious…. She gave up on her Williams imitation and continued: If you did leave it for me, that was … She tore out the page, crumpled, and tossed it in the recycling bin without writing the next word: sweet.

On the third day, she smelled the fruit as soon as she came in. She followed the scent to the kitchen, and the peach was radiant, dusky rose and gold, its skin so plush she thought her fingertip might bruise it. This was the day, the very hour to eat—and she had come prepared, but she didn’t want Concepcion to see her. She waited until the housekeeper shouldered her leather-handled canvas bag and left.

Then Jess unwrapped the organic peach she’d bought that morning. Slightly smaller, slightly harder, but decently rosy, the peach listed left—just the right direction—when she set it on the table.

Leaving this changeling for George, she washed his ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then flesh dissolved in a rush of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist. She had forgotten, if she’d ever known, that what was sweet could also be so complicated, that fruit could have a nap, like fabric, soft one way, sleek the other. She licked the juice dripping down her arm.

“Jess.”

When had he arrived? How had she not heard him? “What are you doing here?” she blurted out.

“Well, I live here,” George said, standing in the kitchen doorway.

“True,” she said.

He looked, bemused, from the peach in her hand to the peach on the table. “You brought me a replacement? Jessamine,” he chided, picking up the substitute. “This is rock hard.”

“Well …,” she began.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

She gave up and laughed at herself, even as she stood, holding the beautifully ripe fruit.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Finish it.”

She tried to bite, and then she turned the peach and tried again. “You’re making me nervous.”

Suppressing a smile, he walked into the living room, and she quickly devoured what was left.

Eaten in haste, the fruit tasted different, juicy, but not quite so luscious, cut-velvet, but no longer so luxurious. Unsure whether George composted, she set the peach pit on the counter, washed her hands and wrist and arm, and called out, “Do you have a kitchen towel?”

He returned and took a striped towel from a drawer. As she dried herself, she asked, “Why did you come home so early?”

“It’s not so early,” he told her. “You stayed late.”

“Oh, so you weren’t planning to run into me.”

“No,” he said. “Not exactly.”

He was at least three steps away, but he looked at her so intently that he seemed much nearer. He’d cut his long hair so that it was not quite shoulder length, and he wasn’t wearing glasses, as he did in the store. “Was it good?”

“The most delicious meal I have ever eaten,” she told him honestly.

“A peach is not a meal.” He couldn’t help glancing at his oven and his knife drawer. Thinking of his grill on the deck and how he might roast chicken or lamb or even fish, along with pearl onions and vine-ripened tomatoes.

“It tasted like a meal.”

“That was hunger.”

“It’s the cookbooks,” she confessed.

“Occupational hazard.” He leaned back against the edge of the kitchen table. Her eyes were greener than he’d ever seen them. Her shirt button was broken, third from the top. “Are you still hungry?”

She thought of Leon. Tell me what happens when he comes home. “Not really,” she lied.

“Let me cook you dinner.”

She shook her head.

“No?” George asked softly, as he took the kitchen towel from her hands.

He was wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, and she saw the scar traveling from the back of his hand up the inside of his forearm. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

“Someone tried to fillet me.”

Forestalling her next question, he opened what she had assumed to be a bank of cabinets.

“Ohh.” She gazed inside a pristine refrigerator with glassy shelves and perfectly arranged vegetables, packages wrapped in white paper, fresh lemons lined up in a row.

“What can’t you eat?”

For just a moment, she could not remember. Then he closed the door.

“No meat, of course,” she began earnestly. “No poultry, no fish, no living creature of any kind, and no product of any living creature, so no milk, no cheese, no butter, no eggs, nothing dairy, and no refined sugar, no white flour, no white rice—nothing white …”

“How about white wine?”

He went to his butler’s pantry and brought back two glasses and a bottle, ever so slightly chilled. “This is a Kistler Chardonnay. See that?” He poured out what looked like liquid gold. “It’s known for its color.” He handed her a glass half full and watched her take the tiniest of sips. He could see she didn’t drink, and even the Chard was strong for her, and curious to her tongue. But she liked it, and quickly sipped again.

“Yum.”

“Yum?”

“It’s good,” she said.

“Do you taste citrus?” he asked her. “Mineral?”

“No,” she admitted cheerfully. The wine was light and tickling, not heavy or too sweet like others she had tried. Sun poured through the kitchen’s tall windows and played across the floor so that the room felt warmer. George himself seemed different, slimmer than she remembered, and more fluid in his movements. A fish in water, she thought, as he took out pans and tongs and a cutting board.

“All right, this is what I have. Dungeness crab. Fresh salmon—by which I mean, caught yesterday. And asparagus.”

“I guess I could have that,” she said.

“Crab and salmon and asparagus?”

“The asparagus.”

“Good, we’ll have asparagus—with salmon on the side.” He set a pan on the stove for the fish, and began washing and trimming the asparagus. He spread the stalks in a roasting pan, drizzled them with olive oil, and popped the pan in the oven. Then he unwrapped the pink salmon. “This is so fresh, you can almost eat it just like this. Sashimi.” He smiled to see Jess back away. “We’ll melt butter in the pan and sear the fish and then we’ll eat it with a squeeze of lemon—or at least I will. Did you finish that already?” He poured her more.

She’d drunk two glasses by the time they sat down at the kitchen table, and she felt springy, a little bouncy in her chair as she nibbled her emerald-green asparagus, and he served himself the salmon.

“I like this way of roasting,” she said.

“Just remember to sprinkle kosher salt when you take them out of the oven.”

“Salt sings,” said Jess. The collector had copied that from Neruda. “Have you seen McClintock’s asparagus drawings?”

“Show me.”

“Not while we’re eating!”

“Right.” He poured out the last of the wine.

“Have you noticed his thing for asparagus?”

“And cabbages,” said George.

“Yes! He’s got heads of cabbage and cross sections and there’s a drawing of this veined cabbage leaf. I think it must have been his botanical training.” Jess was talking faster than usual, but then, she never had a chance to discuss the cookbooks, and she was brimming with impressions. “He draws asparagus and cabbages, but he’s obsessed with artichokes. He draws them more than any other vegetable. Why artichokes?”

George drained his glass. “The artichoke is a sexy beast. Thorns to cut you, leaves to peel, lighter and lighter as you strip away the outer layers, until you reach the soft heart’s core.”

Jess laughed and finished her third glass.

“Try this.” George offered her a bit of salmon on his fork.

The laughter stopped. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t eat other creatures.”

“This creature is already dead. You’re not hurting him. Let’s say he died for me. I’ll take the blame. I bought him so I killed him. Now you can have a taste.”

She shook her head.

“But it’s so good.” George offered her the flaky pink fish on his fork. “It tastes so good.”

“I’m not eating that poor forked animal.”

“Just try,” George cajoled, scooting his chair around the corner to her side of the table. “Just one bite.” He held the fork almost to her lips.

“George,” she said, “don’t you have certain things you would never do—on principle?”

“Arbitrary rules?”

“Any rules. Not necessarily arbitrary ones.”

“I have beliefs,” he said. “I have values. I think rules are overrated.”

“Is that, like, a sixties thing?” She looked at him questioningly, as though she were gazing back at him through the mists of time.

“Someday you’ll get asked about the Reagan years,” he said.

“You should try rules,” she pressed. “Then your beliefs would have practical applications, and you wouldn’t have to drift from one meal to the next. Instead of being so ad hoc, you could rely on a consistent system. Instead of making up your life as you go along, you’d have a set path. You wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. I think actually structure might be the key to oneness.”

“I think you’re a little drunk,” said George.

“I think you’re trying to impeach me.”

He laughed even as he protested. “That’s not true.”

“Well, I’m not drunk at all,” she warned him.

“And I’m not trying at all,” he retorted playfully.

“Hmm.” Her expression was both tender and reproachful. Her delicate hands rested on the table.

“Are you worried?” With his index finger George drew a question mark on her palm.

Almost imperceptibly she shook her head.

The light was shifting, the sky in the windows no longer bright, but watery, sea blue. They were close now, but the change was like nightfall. Neither knew exactly when it happened. They had been sitting apart, and now they found themselves in chairs pushed together. They had been talking, and now they touched instead, fingertips to wrists, and George could feel Jess’s quick pulse, and she could feel his.

“Are you in love with him?” George said.

She didn’t answer.

“Are you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“For the obvious reason.”

“Which is?”

“That I want to know.”

Lightly her fingertip glided over the back of his hand, tracing his scar up his arm.

“You’re tickling me.” He took her hand again.

“Did it hurt?” she asked him.

“Yes, it hurt,” he said.

“Who did that to you?”

“An old girlfriend.”

“You must have been nasty to her.”

“Why do you assume it was my fault?” he asked gently. “Even if it was—who goes after her lover with a paring knife? She was completely unbalanced. She did teach me how to cook.”

“Maybe you were such a slow learner she got frustrated.”

“I wasn’t a slow learner.”

“No?” she teased. Her eyes were much darker in the evening light.

“I’m a quick study,” he informed her. “I’m an excellent cook, but you’ll never know, because you don’t eat anything.”

“I eat lots of things,” she said.

“Judging from the peach, I’d say you eat a few things very well.”

“You were watching me?”

“Yes.”

“Why were you?”

His thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. “Because I wanted to.”

“That’s the only reason?”

“And because I never see you,” he added.

“You can see me whenever you like,” she told him. “You stay away.”

“Did you wish I would come home?”

She didn’t answer.

“Did you ever look around the house? Did you go upstairs?”

“No,” she said, although she had thought about it. Concepcion’s presence had prevented her. “I would never wander through your house without an invitation.”

“Come.” He took her hand.

She remembered climbing the stairs at the Tree House for the first time. “I think I am a little drunk.”

“We’ll go slow,” he promised as he led her up the stairs. “These are my nautical charts and surveyors’ plans.” He turned on the lights in the stairwell, and she saw the antique charts, the hand-drawn schemes of San Francisco Bay. “You can see I have plenty of maps. This is original stained glass here on the landing. You can’t tell at night, but I had it cleaned and restored. This place was a mess when I bought it. We copied these stair treads and spindles. This is my office.” He showed her a spacious room with a great desk in the center, and a computer and a photocopier. “These are guest rooms.” He opened one door after another.

“How many do you have?”

“Three. This is my room.” He switched on the lights, and when she blinked in the sudden glare, he turned them down again. His room was huge, with great windows above the bed, stacks of books on the smooth floor, a low music stand and chair, a cello in an open case.

Find someone musical, Jess thought. “Will you play for me?”

“Of course.” He sat down in his chair, but he did not reach for his cello. He held out his arms for Jess instead.

She sat on his lap and tucked up her legs, and he felt her weight, and her warmth, and he held still; he nearly held his breath, as she relaxed into his arms.

“My mother wrote about music,” Jess said.

“Was she a critic?”

“I can hear your heartbeat,” she whispered, resting her head on his chest.

“Was she a musician?” he asked her, as he stroked her hair.

“I think she might have been, if she’d had the chance,” Jess said. “Or maybe not. She was an amazing baker too. That’s what everybody says.”

“You only know from hearsay? Don’t tell me you were vegan even then.”

“I wasn’t vegan. I was too young to remember.”

George’s hand stopped for a moment, resting lightly on her head.

“When will you play for me?” she asked him.

“Soon.”

“Did you learn as a child?”

“Mm-hmm.” His lips brushed her ear.

“I wish I’d kept playing the piano. Everybody says that, but of course you imagine you’d play well. You don’t imagine …”

“Do you miss her?”

“No.” She looked up at him quickly, as if to gauge his response. “I’ll tell you something terrible,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t even think about her. I’m sure Emily thinks about her all the time, but I don’t. I just …”

“Just what?”

“Don’t have her,” said Jess, muffled, burying her head again.

He continued stroking her long hair. She kept her head down, and listened to his steady heart.

“Jess?” he said at last.

“What?”

“Are you crying?”

“No.” She looked up at him and her eyes were bright, but no tears stained her face. “Don’t worry. I’m very cheerful.” She sat up straight to make the point. “I’m not a weepy person. I wouldn’t cry, even after too much wine.”

“You can cry. I don’t have rules. You can do anything you want.”

“Anything?”

“Almost anything.”

“So you have some rules.”

“I said ‘almost’ so you’d think I was less of an ancient libertine,” he said.

“Libertine? You mean old hippie.”

“I was never a hippie.”

“Right. You’re just a libertine from the ancien régime.”

He couldn’t help laughing at the playful way she turned on him.

“Am I so funny?” she asked, laughing with him. She rubbed her nose against his. “Am I?”

“Come here, you.” He pulled her closer.

“I’m here now,” she said, and her voice was so warm and low that for a moment he closed his eyes. “I’m here already.”

She caressed his cheek, and touched the tender skin under his eyes. His lips brushed her chin, her nose, her forehead, and finally her soft mouth, as they began to kiss.