The Cookbook Collector Read Online Free PDF Page B

for him, even as his girlfriends branded him an opportunist and a libertine. In the worst of these love-storms, he applied himself in penance to his dissertation, and finished in record time. He had no interest in academia and scarcely remembered why he’d begun studying thermal dynamics in the first place. Therefore, he took the job at Microsoft and drove north to Seattle, where he worked long days building Excel. Yearning for substance apart from his share price, which was always rising, inexorably rising, he began to read. Reading, he began to buy.
    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