A novel-length
co-author for serious writers.

I had promised myself I would stop reading her letters after dinner. I had promised, too, that the promise would hold — and it did, most nights, until the small hour when the house was quiet enough that I could hear my own handwriting. She wrote to me from Trieste, which I had never seen, and she wrote of ordinary things — the salt in the wind, the price of oranges, the argument she had lost with the concierge — but she wrote them the way other people play the piano, and by the seventh letter I understood, with the awful clarity of a lock turning, that I would answer her tomorrow, and every tomorrow, until one of us stopped. Her handwriting slanted forward, as if it were leaving the paper. Mine had begun, without my permission, to do the same.