Free The Burglar in the Rye by Lawrence Block Page B

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 tothree 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 oneof 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,