The Burglar in the Rye

  “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.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  “So 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 wit
h 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.”