“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.”