“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.