The Burglar in the Rye (7 page)

“Not Elliott Roosevelt?”

“Always a possibility. Anyway, someone did a computerized textual analysis, the same kind that reporter did to prove Joe Klein wrote
Primary Colors,
and established that Fairborn was writing his own books. But he hasn’t been signing them.”

“Suppose he signed one.”

“Well, how sure could we be that he really did the signing? It’s not terribly difficult to scribble ‘Gulliver Fairborn’ on a flyleaf, especially when hardly anyone has seen an authentic signature.”

“Suppose the signature’s authentic,” she said. “And suppose it’s what I originally asked you about, not just a signed copy but an inscribed one.”

“Saying something about Timmy and his birthday?”

“Saying something like ‘To Tiny Alice—Rye can do more than Milt or Malt / To let us know it’s not our fault. Love always, Gully.’”

“Gully,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And I guess you’d be Tiny Alice.”

“You’re very quick.”

“Everybody tells me that. So your question’s not hypothetical. You’ve got the book, and you’re in a position to be sure of the signature.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me the inscription again.” She did, and I nodded. “He’s paraphrasing Housman, isn’t he? ‘Malt can do more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.’ A friend of mine used to recite that couplet just before he drank the fourth beer of the evening. Unfortunately he did it again with beers five through twelve, and one grew a little weary of it. ‘Rye can do more than Milt or Malt’—why rye, do you suppose?”

“It’s all he drinks.”

“You’d think he could find something better to drink, wouldn’t you? What with
Nobody’s Baby
still in print after…how many years?”

She answered before I could consult the copyright page. “About forty. He was in his mid-twenties when he wrote it. He’s in his early sixties now.”

“If the computer analysis is right, and he’s still alive.”

“He’s alive.”

“And you…know him?”

“I used to.”

“And he inscribed a book to you. Well, as far as the value’s concerned, all I could do is guess. If the copy came into my hands, I’d call a few specialists and see what I could find out. I’d get the handwriting authenticated. And then I’d probably consign the book to an auction gallery and let it find its own price, which I’d be hard put to guess at. Over two thousand, certainly, and possibly as much as five. It would depend who wanted it and how avid they were.”

“And if you had a few of them bidding against each other.”

“Exactly. And it wouldn’t hurt if you were somebody famous. Alice Walker, say, or Alice Hoffman, or even Alice Roosevelt Longworth. That would make it an association copy, and would render it a little more special for a collector.”

“I see.”

“On the other hand, the inscription’s interesting in and of itself. How did he come to sign it? For that matter, how did you happen to meet him? And, uh…”

“What?”

“Well, this may be a stupid question, but are you sure the man who signed your book was who he claimed to be? Because if no photos of the man exist, and if nobody knows where he lives or what he looks like…”

She smiled a knowing smile. “Oh, it was Gully.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well, I didn’t just run into him at a bookstore,” she said. “I lived with him for three years.”

“You lived with him?”

“For three years. Do you suppose that makes my book an association copy? Because you could say we had an association.”

“When did this happen?”

“Years ago,” she said. “I moved in twenty-three years ago, and—”

“But you would have been a child,” I said. “What did he do, adopt you?”

“I was fourteen.”

“You’re thirty-seven now? I’d have said early thirties.”

“And you’d have been sweet to say it. I’m thirty-seven, and I was fourteen when I met Gully Fairborn, and seventeen when we parted company.”

“And you were, uh…”

“We were.”

“No kidding,” I said. “How did you meet?”

“He wrote to me.”

“You wrote him and he wrote back? That’s remarkable in and of itself. For thirty-some years every sensitive seventeen-year-old in America has read
Nobody’s Baby.
Half of them write letters to Fairborn, and they never get an answer. He’s famous for never answering a letter.”

“I know.”

“But he answered yours? You must write a hell of a letter.”

“I do. But he wrote to me first.”

“Huh?”

“I was precocious,” she said.

“I can believe that,” I said. “But how would Gulliver Fairborn know of your precocity, or even of your existence? And what would move him to write you a letter?”

“He read something I wrote. And it wasn’t a letter.”

“Oh?”

“I read
Nobody’s Baby,
” she said, “but I wasn’t seventeen when I read it. I was thirteen.”

“Well, you already said you were precocious.”

“It makes an impression on most people, especially the ones who read it at an impressionable age. It certainly made an impression on me. There was a point when I was certain Gulliver Fairborn wrote the book with me in mind, and I thought of writing him a letter, but I didn’t do it.

“Instead, a couple of months later, I wrote an article. I handed it in for a school assignment and my teacher was over the moon about it. It’s not hard to understand why. The best anybody else managed was two or three ungrammatical pages, ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ di dah di dah di dah. I turned in a closely reasoned seven-thousand-word essay full of half-baked philosophy and sophomoric soul-searching.”

“And your teacher sent it to Fairborn?”

“I’m sure that never occurred to her. She did something far more outrageous. She sent it to
The New Yorker.
”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid I must. They accepted it, incredibly enough. I’d called it ‘How I Didn’t Spend My Summer Vacation,’ which made a kind of ironic sense, but only in context. They changed the title to ‘A Ninth-Grader Looks at the World.’”

“My God,” I said. “You’re Alice Cottrell.”

The essay was a sensation, and won the young author a good deal of attention. She had her fifteen minutes of fame, about which Edgar Lee Horvath had then only recently expounded, and was every op-ed writer’s flavor of the month. And then, just as the fuss was winding down, she got a letter in a purple envelope.

It was typed on paper of the same hue, and ran to
three single-spaced pages. It began as a response to her essay, a sort of essay in reply, but by the middle of the second page it had wandered far afield and overflowed with its middle-aged author’s musings on life and the Universe.

She knew almost from the first sentence who its author was, but even so the signature left her breathless.
Gulliver Fairborn,
in beautiful flowing script, and, beneath it, an address on a rural route in Tesuque, New Mexico. She looked it up in the atlas, and it turned out to be just north of Santa Fe.

She wrote back, careful not to gush, and his response came by return mail. He was living for the time being, he told her, in a three-room cottage outside Tesuque, which in fact was a small Indian pueblo. His residence was an adobe shack, thrown up in an unplanned fashion. But it was cozy, he wrote, and weren’t the best things often ones that just happened on their own, without preplanning? He’d written
Nobody’s Baby
without an outline, without any real clue, really, of what he was doing or where it was going, and it had turned out better than he could have planned.

His letter just ended, without the invitation that seemed to be implicit in it. She wrote back immediately, telling him his little house sounded perfectly charming. If she ever were to see it, she wrote, she was sure it would look familiar to her, as if she had lived there in a dimly recalled past life.

This time his reply was a little longer in coming. The letter itself, barely filling a single page, made no reference to anything either of them had previously written. Instead, he reported on a neighbor of his, who had two mixed-breed dogs. They were inseparable, he noted, though their temperaments were quite different, with one
of them considerably more venturesome than the other. When she finished the letter, she wasn’t even sure if the dogs existed, or if they were characters in some fiction crafted for the occasion, a little parable with its point unclear. This letter, like the others, was typed on purple paper, and came in a purple envelope. And it included an airline ticket from New York to Albuquerque.

Four days later she was on a plane. When it landed he was at the gate. Neither had seen a photograph of the other, but they recognized each other the instant their eyes met. He was tall and slender, darkly handsome. They waited for her suitcase to show up on the baggage carousel. She pointed it out, and he carried it to his car.

On the drive to Tesuque, he told her he’d foreseen all of this when he read her essay. “I knew I wanted you to come to me,” he said, “and I knew you would.”

The shack, overlooking an arroyo, was just as she’d pictured it, and every bit as comfortable as he’d claimed. They lived in it for the next three years.

“What I don’t get,” I said, “is where he got the nerve to write you, and where you got the nerve to accept. Did he know you were only fourteen years old?”

“He knew I was in the ninth grade in school. If I was much older than fourteen, I’d have to be retarded.”

“Didn’t it occur to him that your parents would try to find you? And that he might wind up facing criminal charges?”

“I don’t think any of that ever entered his mind,” she said. “Gully’s not reckless, but I don’t think he spends much time considering the consequences of his actions. He may not really believe that actions necessarily have consequences. You read
Nobody’s Baby.
”

“Yes.”

“So you know what he says about synchronicity. Anyway, he knew there wouldn’t be a problem. The same way he knew I would use the airline ticket.”

“And your parents?”

“They were a couple of old hippies,” she said. “My father was in Nepal at the time, staying stoned in Katmandu. My mom was back home in Greenwich, Connecticut, living on a trust fund and volunteering three days a week at that organization lobbying to legalize marijuana. NORML, though it and she were anything but.”

“So she didn’t object?”

“She drove me to the airport. Gully didn’t have a phone, but I called her a few days later from down the road and told her I would probably stay awhile. She thought that was cool.”

“And you were fourteen.”

“I used to say I had an old soul. I don’t know that I believe that, but I wasn’t your average fourteen-year-old, either. And I never felt as though I was in over my head. I was right where I belonged.”

She told me some of this at the bookstore, with Raffles purring on her lap and other customers staying away in droves, as if they somehow sensed they would be intruding. She told me more at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, where we went after I closed for the day, and where she asked the waiter if they had rye whiskey. He came back to report that they had Old Overholt, and she ordered a double shot with water back.

I said I’d have the same, but on the rocks with a splash of soda. I asked her if it was good that way. She said it was better straight up, and I changed the order—double rye, straight up, water back.

We had two rounds of drinks at the Cedar, then
walked a couple of blocks to an Italian place I know that doesn’t look like much on the outside. The interior’s not too impressive either, but the food makes up for it. We ate osso buco and drank a bottle of Valpolicella, and the waiter brought us complimentary glasses of Strega with our espresso. The meal might have been better at a little trattoria in Florence, but I can’t imagine how.

She told me more while we ate and drank, and on the pavement outside the restaurant, in the wine-warmed cool of the evening, we gazed into one another’s eyes even as she and Fairborn had done in the Albuquerque airport, and she answered my question before I could ask it.

“Your place,” she said.

I held up a hand and a cab appeared. It was that kind of evening.

“S
o this is rye,” Carolyn said. “It tastes a little sweet to me, Bern. Compared to scotch.”

“I know.”

“But it’s not bad. The taste’s kind of interesting, once you get past the sweetness. There’s a real depth to the flavor, though you couldn’t put it in the same class with Glen Drumnadrochit.”

Glen Drumnadrochit is a rare single-malt scotch that we sampled on a weekend in the Berkshires, and it’s in a class by itself. You couldn’t compare anything to it, except perhaps whatever Bacchus was pouring for the heavy hitters on Mount Olympus.

“I thought rye was what you called a cheap blend,” she went on. “You know, one of those whiskeys with numbers.”

“Numbers?”

“Like Three Feathers, Bern. Or Four Roses.”

“Five Gold Rings,” I offered, and motioned to Maxine to bring us another round.

“Six Swans a-Swimming,” she said. “Seven Lords a-Leaping. When I was growing up, rye and ginger ale was what most of my aunts would have before family dinners, and that meant Three Feathers or Four Roses. Or Schenley’s, or something like that.”

“Blended whiskey,” I said. “Mostly grain neutral spirits. A lot of people call that rye, but properly speaking it’s not. Real rye is a straight whiskey, like scotch or bourbon, except that it’s made from a different grain. Scotch is made from barley and bourbon is made from corn.”

“And rye?”

“Rye is made from rye.”

“Who would have guessed it? Thanks, Maxine.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to crime, Bern.”

We were, as you’ve likely guessed, at the Bum Rap. I’d called Carolyn to cancel our usual after-work drink the night before, and then she’d called in the morning to cancel our usual lunch, so we were making up for lost time.

“It seems to me,” she said judiciously, “that this stuff gets better as you go along. That’s the test of a good whiskey, wouldn’t you say?”

“I think that just proves there’s alcohol in it.”

“Well, maybe
that’s
the test of a good whiskey. Rye, huh? That’s a grain?”

“Ever hear of rye bread?”

“Of course I have. But this stuff doesn’t taste anything like those little seeds.”

“Those are caraway seeds, for flavoring. Rye is what they make the flour out of.”

“And what they don’t bake into bread they turn into whiskey?”

I nodded. “And it’s the only thing Gully Fairborn drinks, and he evidently drinks a lot of it.”

“Well, more power to him. And it’s what she drinks, too? Alice Cottrell?”

“She also managed to put away some wine with dinner and a glass of Strega afterward. And I didn’t have any rye at my apartment, and she seemed to find my scotch perfectly acceptable. But rye’s what she drinks. That’s one lingering effect of three years with Fairborn.”

“And now you’re drinking rye,” she said, “and, come to think of it, so am I. You think there’s a trend forming here, Bern? You figure it’s going to sweep the country?”

“Probably not.”

“‘If rye whiskey don’t kill me, I’ll live till I die.’ You know that song, Bern?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’d sing it, but it’d take three or four more of these to get me in the mood. It goes ‘Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds I cry, If rye whiskey don’t kill me, I’ll live till I die.’”

“Why Jack of Diamonds?”

“How do I know, Bern?”

“And what kind of sense does it make, anyway? Everybody lives until they die, whiskey or no whiskey.”

“Bern, it’s a folk song, for God’s sake. ‘Go tell Aunt Rhody the old gray goose is dead.’ Does that make any sense? Who’s Aunt Rhody? What does she care about a goose, gray or otherwise? Folk songs aren’t supposed to make any sense. That’s why they’re written by ordinary people and not by Cole Porter.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t believe you don’t know the song. Didn’t you ever have an affair with a folksinger?”

“No, and when did you…Oh, of course. Mindy Sea Gull.”

“Née Siegel. Remember her?”

“The guitar player.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call her a guitar player, Bern. She only knew three chords and they all sounded the same. She just strummed the guitar to accompany herself when she sang.” She shrugged. “She didn’t have much of a voice either, as far as that goes.”

“She had a nice little body, though.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say, Bern.”

“Don’t tell me it was a sexist remark, because you were just about to make it yourself. ‘She didn’t have much of a voice, but she had a nifty little body.’ Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

“It’s different if I say it. You’re not supposed to notice what kind of a body she had.”

“Mindy Sea Gull? Who could miss noticing a pair of wings like those?”

“Bern…”

“And what do you mean, I’m not supposed to notice? Because she’s gay? You notice straight women. You even hit on them, and sometimes you get lucky.”

“Short-term lucky, Bern. Long-term miserable. And not because Mindy was gay. You weren’t supposed to notice her neat little body because she was my girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“But she’s not anymore,” she said, drinking her drink, “and you’re right, she had a set of wings on her that could fly you to the moon, so the hell with it. How about you?”

“No wings to speak of.”

“I meant how about you and Alice Blue Gown. You get lucky?”

I lowered my eyes.

“Bern?”

“A gentleman never tells,” I said.

“I know, Bern. That’s why I picked you to ask instead of Prince Philip. So? How’d you make out?”

When a woman invites herself to your place, a flop in the feathers seems like a foregone conclusion. But I wasn’t about to jump to it. We’d spent most of the evening talking about her affair with another man, a man who just happened to be a legendary figure of mystery and romance, and what kind of prelude is that for a game of slap and tickle?

So, when I picked out music to play, I left my Mel Tormé record on the shelf. It’s got an amazing track record, but in this instance I wasn’t sure it was appropriate.

While Coltrane played for us, she told me some more about Gulliver Fairborn. How he would reinvent himself every couple of years, taking a new name, adopting a new lifestyle, moving to a new part of the country. It was easy for him to remain undiscovered, she explained, because nobody knew what he looked like, and thus no one would be able to recognize him at the gas station or the supermarket. He paid cash for most of his purchases, and when he had to write a check, it was in whatever name he was using at the time, and he’d have a wallet full of ID to back it up.

And he didn’t socialize, didn’t make friends. “We kept to ourselves,” she said. “It was easy enough, living out in the country like that. He’d get up first,
before daybreak, and he’d get the day’s writing done before breakfast, which he always cooked for us. Then we’d hang out. We took a lot of long walks, we went for drives, we paid a few visits to different Indian pueblos. He got very interested in San Ildefonso pottery and found out who was the best potter in the pueblo. We spent a couple of hours with her and he wound up buying a little round bowl that her mother had made. We brought it home to Tesuque and he put it on a table and recited the Wallace Stevens poem about placing a jar on a hill in Tennessee. You know the poem?”

I nodded. “But I’m not sure I know what it means.”

“Neither do I, but it seems to me I did then. I still have the bowl, or jar, or whatever you want to call it.”

“He bought it for you?”

“He left it for me. The day I moved in he told me he wanted me to stay as long as I wanted, and that he hoped I would never leave him. But that he would leave me.”

“He told you that?”

“He stated it as a fact. The sky is blue, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and the day will come when you’ll wake up and I’ll be gone.”

“It could be a country song,” I said, “except that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny would be tough for Garth Brooks to sing with real conviction.”

“And then one morning I woke up,” she said, “and he was gone.”

“Just like that? You never saw it coming?”

“Maybe I should have, but I can’t say I did. In fact at first I didn’t know he was gone. He’d left the car and all but the clothes on his back. He’d mailed off the manuscript of his book just a couple of weeks earlier. I
thought he’d gone for a walk before breakfast—he did that sometimes. Then I found the note.”

“‘It’s been great fun, but it was just one of those things.’”

“Actually, that’s close. It was from Swinburne. ‘One love grows green, one love turns gray. Tomorrow has no more to say to yesterday.’”

“That’s a lot clearer than Wallace Stevens.”

“It didn’t leave me wondering. And there was a PS, which I used to know by heart, but I got over it. He said to stay as long as I wanted, and that the rent was paid through the end of June, which was about six weeks off. There was some cash in the top dresser drawer along with a ticket to New York; I could use the ticket or cash it and go somewhere else. I could do what I wanted with everything in the house. He’d signed the car registration over to me, and the title was in the glove compartment, so I could drive it or sell it, whatever I wanted.”

“Could you drive? Last I heard you were fourteen.”

“I was seventeen by this point, but no, I hadn’t gotten around to learning. I was going to ask a neighbor to drive it to a dealer so I could sell it, but in the end I just left it there, along with just about everything else. I packed the suitcase I’d brought from Greenwich, and I took the black San Ildefonso pot, wrapping it in my clothes so it wouldn’t break. And it didn’t. I still have it.”

“And you flew back to New York?”

“Almost. I took a bus to the airport and got a boarding pass. Then when they called my flight I didn’t get on it. I just picked up my bag and walked out of the terminal. I suppose there was a way to cash in my ticket, but it just felt like too much of a hassle. I had enough money left for a ticket to San Francisco on Greyhound, and that’s where I went.”

“With your clothes and your black bowl.”

“I got a room in the Tenderloin. I put my clothes in the closet and I put the bowl on the dresser. I didn’t recite any poems.”

“You were seventeen.”

“I was seventeen. I was a published writer, and I’d spent three years with a famous novelist who’d given me daily lectures on writing, but I hadn’t written a word since I left Connecticut. And I was still a virgin.”

Coltrane had finished, and what we were listening to now was Chet Baker.

I said, “A virgin. Do you mean that metaphorically or…”

“Literally.
Virga intacta,
or however it goes in Latin.”

“He, uh, wasn’t interested?”

“He was vitally interested. We had sex just about every day.”

I thought about it. “He’d been to the Amazon,” I suggested, “and he went skinny-dipping and ran into a candiru.”

She shook her head. “No surgery,” she said, “and no performance problems. He just wouldn’t put the usual protrusion into the usual orifice. He did all manner of other things, but the girl who went to San Francisco was still technically a virgin.”

“How come?”

“He never said. Gully wasn’t much on explaining himself. It may have had something to do with my age, or my being a virgin. Or he may have been the same with other women. He may have had a morbid fear of fathering children. Or it may just have been an experiment of his, or a stage he was going through. I tried not to ask questions I sensed he didn’t want to answer. He’d
just get this disappointed look on his face, and he’d never answer anyway, so I learned not to ask.”

“So it was something you didn’t talk about.”

“One of many things we didn’t talk about. You get so you take it for granted. And there were plenty of other things we
did
talk about. And it’s not as though my sexual education was being neglected, because there were plenty of things we did.”

And she commenced to tell me about some of them. She sat a little closer to me on the sofa, and she settled her head on my shoulder and she talked about the things she’d done twenty years ago with a man old enough to be her father.

“Bernie? Where are you going?”

“I’ll be right back,” I told her. “I want to put a record on. I hope you like Mel Tormé.”

“Well,” I said a little later, “you’re not a virgin now.”

“Silly. I stopped being a virgin my second week in San Francisco. And the only reason I lasted that long was that every cute guy I met turned out to be gay.”

“Well, San Francisco.”

She’d stayed in San Francisco for a year and a half, which was how long it took her to write a first draft of a novel. When she was done she set it aside for a week. Then she read it and decided it was terrible. She would have burned it in the fireplace, but she didn’t have a fireplace. Instead she tore it up, tore all the pages in half and then in half again, and let the garbage men take it away.

She’d been supporting herself by waiting tables in a coffeehouse, but she was sick of that, and sick of San Francisco. She moved, San Ildefonso pot and all, to Portland, and then to Seattle. She found a room off
Pioneer Square, got a job in a bookstore, and wrote a short story. She sent it to
The New Yorker,
and when it came back she sent it to Anthea Landau, the only agent she knew of. Fairborn had written to Landau occasionally and got occasional letters from her, sent to him at General Delivery in Santa Fe.

“She sent the story back,” she said, “along with a letter saying it struck her as derivative and unconvincing, though skillfully crafted. And she said she was no longer representing Gulliver Fairborn, and I gathered that mentioning his name might have been a strategic error.”

She reread the story and decided that the agent was right. She tore it up, and a day or two later she came home from the bookstore with a Harlequin romance in her purse. She read it that night, and another the next night, and five more over the weekend. Then she sat down at the typewriter and within a month she had a book written. She sent it directly to the publisher and they sent her a check and a contract.