No One You Know (18 page)

“I was happy to see him sober, but I got the feeling he was still fragile, like his mind could crack at any moment and send him spiraling back into the abyss. In the conversation he kept referring to his demons. It was freaking me out a little bit.”

“What was he like as a musician?”

Ben thought for a moment. “He never quite got there, but he could have been a great one. When I saw him, he hadn’t entirely given up on the music. I was in a hurry, due down at KSAN to interview Sheryl Crow, but he insisted that I follow him out to his car several blocks away so that he could give me a tape. It was something he’d recorded in his brother’s basement, four new songs he’d written. I can’t tell you how many people have given me tapes over the years—in San Francisco, half the young guys you run into on the street have a band and a tape. But this was one I actually wanted to hear, because I knew what Boudreaux had been capable of.”

“How was it?”

“Pretty good. Nothing like the stuff with Potrero Sound Station, but there was definitely something to it. I might still have it lying around somewhere.”

I followed him downstairs, where the hallway was covered with black-and-white wedding photos—Ben in a mustache and shaggy seventies hair, his wife, Dianne, looking like an inspired emblem of the times with her pixie haircut and flowy white dress.

“Great pictures,” I said.

“Annie Leibovitz took them. There she is.” He pointed to a photo of him and Dianne lying across a bed. His face was deadpan, and she was laughing, like he’d just told some fabulous joke. The camera was aimed at the mirror, and Leibovitz herself was in the corner of the frame, her camera covering a portion of her face. “There’s Jann Wenner,” he said, pointing to another photo, “and this is Cameron Crowe.”

The office was down the hall. It had huge windows, a built-in desk that wrapped around the room, and floor-to-ceiling shelves. On the walls were photos of Ben with Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, George Harrison, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Bill Clinton.

“Wow,” I said. “You’re like Zelig.”

“I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Used to be you could hardly walk the streets of San Francisco without running into an up-and-coming rock star.”

“I just saw Damon Gough buying records last week at Street Light,” I said. “And a couple of years ago, I saw Nick Cave on Ocean Beach. It was this weird, foggy day, no one out but the surfers, I’m sitting on a log watching the waves, and this tall, rail-thin figure dressed all in black comes striding down the beach toward me. It scared me until I realized who it was. He said hello, and I managed to mumble something stupid like ‘Nice day for a walk.’ When I got home I checked the Pink Sheet—he was doing a show that night at the Fillmore.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ben said. “I was at that show, backstage. I interviewed him afterward. Nice guy.”

“Oh, neat.”

“Neat?” He grinned. I wanted to crawl under the desk. Being in Ben’s presence made me feel like I’d lived a pretty boring life. It was another hazard of life in San Francisco: people of my generation were destined to feel uncool.

On the shelves of Ben’s office were dozens of magazine files labeled by date and publication. While I browsed the shelves, he rifled through a desk drawer, looking for the tape.

“Are you in all of these magazines?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“It must be pretty cool to leave a record of yourself behind in the world.”

Ben looked up. “It’s not a record of me, my dear. I’m just the observer.”

I walked over and peered over his shoulder. There were hundreds of tapes in the drawer, which appeared to have no system of organization. After about ten minutes, he gave up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I may have loaned it out.”

Ben turned off the light and led me back upstairs. At the third-floor landing, he paused. “I’m curious,” he said. “Why are you doing this now, after all this time?”

I didn’t quite know how to answer. I could see how, from a stranger’s perspective, it might look pointless. “Can I show you something?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I retrieved my bag from the couch and pulled out Lila’s notebook. I told Ben the story of the notebook, how it came to be in my possession. “It may sound weird,” I said, “but having her notebook with me for the past few weeks, I’ve felt closer to Lila than I have since she died. It’s almost like hearing her voice.”

“I hear you.”

“Ever heard of the Kepler Conjecture?”

“Nope.”

I laid the notebook on the table and flipped through the pages. “It was first stated in 1611 by Johannes Kepler,” I said. “Kepler became interested in the problem while he was corresponding with an Englishman named Thomas Harriot, who was trying to help his friend Sir Walter Raleigh figure out the best way to stack cannonballs on ship decks. The goal was to find the densest possible spherical arrangement, in order to get as many cannonballs as possible onto a ship.”

“Okay,” Ben said. He must have wondered where I was going with all this, but he listened patiently, as if it was perfectly normal for him to have a strange woman standing in his living room, lecturing him on math.

“Kepler’s conjecture holds that the greatest density of stacked spheres that can be achieved is this.” I held out the notebook for him to see Lila’s notation:

“To achieve this density, the bottom level of the stack should be arranged in a hexagonal lattice, and the next layer should be placed on the lowest points atop the first layer. Each layer should follow this principle until the top layer of the pyramid—a single sphere—is reached—basically, the way grocers stack oranges.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding.

“Kepler’s conjecture
seems
perfectly sound,” I said.

“That it does,” Ben said.

“But here’s the thing. The conjecture has never been proved, to this day. I looked it up and discovered that, in 1998, a proof had finally been put forward by an American mathematician named Thomas Hales. In 2003, a committee that had been assigned to verify Hales’s work confirmed that they were ninety-nine percent certain of the proof’s correctness. But that one percent was key. The mathematical world is still waiting for the publication of the data that will prove the Kepler Conjecture definitively.”

“Sucks for Thomas Hales,” Ben said.

“I agree. But it makes sense that they have to be certain, doesn’t it? The thing is, I’m ninety-nine percent sure that Peter McConnell didn’t kill Lila, but until I find the final piece of evidence, until I can stack it all up in a neat configuration and make sense of it, everything is just conjecture. I just need to know for sure. Does that make sense?”

“It makes perfect sense,” Ben said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “I wish you luck, my friend.”

Twenty-six

O
NE
F
RIDAY SIX MONTHS AFTER
L
ILA’S
death, I walked into her bedroom, following my mother’s request to “see what you can do.” Already, I realized I would not be able to throw away a single thing. The fact that Lila had never been a pack rat should have made it easier, but what her possessions lacked in quantity was made up for by the intensity of her attachment to them. Each item in the room had been cherished by her. There was little organizing to be done, as Lila had been obsessively neat. Most of her possessions fit into a series of red file boxes that she kept in the floor-to-ceiling shelves beside her desk, each box labeled with a white card on which she had typed the contents:
keepsakes, financial papers, correspondence.
Her math notebooks were arranged by date, left to right, on a bookshelf above her desk. Her sewing machine sat on a wooden table that fit snugly into the bay window; beneath the table was a basket containing bobbins, thread, scissors, a pincushion, and a slim metal sewing ruler. In the days before her disappearance, she had been working on a a patchwork skirt, and on the table to the left of the sewing machine was a neat stack of silk squares in various prints and colors. I picked up the stack and arranged the squares across her bed. None of them seemed to go together, but I knew that if Lila had finished the skirt it would have somehow worked. Lila had been sewing since third grade, when she’d taken a kids’ class at City College. After the class was over, she’d gone on to teach herself new techniques, becoming more competent with every garment. She’d tried more than once to teach me, but I’d never had the patience. My hems came out messy, my zippers and buttons off-kilter, the proportions all wrong.

“Why do you do it?” I’d asked her once, during one of those hopeless sewing lessons. “You know how Mom is about clothes. She’ll buy you whatever you like.”

Lila had a needle between her teeth and a seam-ripper in her hand, and was in the process of tearing out a dart I’d botched on a simple A-line skirt. “It makes me feel calm,” she said, her words slightly slurred by the needle. “Sewing has a lot in common with math. You’re looking for the most elegant outcome, putting things together in a way that’s precise, unexpected, and ultimately beautiful.” She held the fabric up to the light. “There!” she said, having extracted the dart. “Now, let’s start from scratch.”

That Friday, alone in Lila’s room, I could still hear her voice as clearly as if she were there with me, but I wondered how long that would last. My parents hadn’t bought a camcorder until a couple of years before. We had very few recordings of Lila’s voice. I knew there must be some point at which the basic imprints of a personality begin to fade in the mind. I dreaded the day when my memories of Lila would become foggy.

I wrapped the fabric in tissue paper and placed it in the top drawer of my dresser. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. Not a skirt, as Lila had planned—I’d only make a mess of it. But I thought perhaps I could pay someone to sew the squares into a quilt. I liked the idea of having them close—something tangible that I could touch, that would somehow convey her spirit. Dozens of times in the months to follow, I would remove them from my drawer, unwrap the tissue, and lay them out across my bed, arranging and rearranging them for hours, searching for some sign of her in the elaborate patterns. When I moved out of my parents’ house my junior year of college, I took them with me. When I traveled alone to Europe several years after she died, I sewed a couple of silk squares to the interior lining of my backpack. In later years, wherever I traveled, one or two of them made the trip with me.

I went back to Lila’s room and opened the closet door. All of the hangers were white and faced the same direction. Shirts came first, then skirts, pants, and dresses. “Keep the clothes you can wear and give the rest away to Lila’s friends,” my mother had said that morning before heading to Napa with my father for a friend’s wedding. In hindsight, as an adult, I would consider it so strange that they had left me alone to deal with the ghosts in Lila’s room, but at the time, I simply chalked it up to the absentmindedness and weird behavior that had hounded both of them since Lila’s death.

Standing alone in Lila’s small walk-in closet, sliding the hangers across the rack, I thought back to what my mother had said that morning. What world was she living in, that she believed in some bevy of phantom friends waiting in the wings to accept Lila’s old clothing? For all their attempts to be loving, involved parents, my parents had never really understood how solitary an individual Lila was. And I began to wonder if I, too, had been wrong about her all along. I had assumed that she spent all those weekend nights of high school and college at home with the family out of choice, because that was where she wanted to be. But maybe she
had
wanted friends and boyfriends, but hadn’t known how to go about it.

Ultimately, I ended up going to the hardware store a couple of blocks away and buying several large rubber containers, into which I placed the red file boxes, the sewing basket, the books and notebooks and bed linens. The only thing I kept for myself was Lila’s well-worn copy of G. H. Hardy’s
A Mathematician’s Apology
, a slim volume that I would read several times in the years to come, impressed by the simplicity with which Hardy described the beauty of pure mathematics.

One by one I carried the rubber containers into my parents’ closet, then pushed them through the small door that led into the crawl space. Once all the boxes were all inside, I took a flashlight and ventured into the stale, hot space, climbing through cobwebs and balls of dust. I shoved the boxes to the farthest corner. No one ever went in there. It was with no small degree of guilt that I contemplated the fact that Lila’s belongings would be completely alone. I knew my mother would not ask what I had done with them. Embedded in my parents’ departure that morning for Napa was an unspoken command: they wanted Lila’s things to disappear, and the responsibility was mine.

Later I would regret the fact that on that afternoon, I had called the one person in whom I could confide, Andrew Thorpe. Still reeling from the events of the day, I let him into our home and told him everything.

“Can I see?” he had asked.

So I led him up to my parents’ room and opened the door to the crawl space, and watched as he stooped and went inside, shining a flashlight on the boxes. I could not fathom why he would want to see that dusty attic space, could not make sense of his interest in Lila’s old things. Only later would I realize that he’d gone in there for the sake of authenticity—so he could describe the cramped dimensions of the crawl space, its musty smell, the blue sheen of the cheap rubber boxes.

Many years later, when my mother was preparing to sell the house and move to Santa Cruz, I received a phone call from her. “I went into the crawl space,” she said, her voice breaking. “I thought you’d given those things away.”

I realized that, for all those years, she had been unaware that Lila’s things were stored just a few yards from the bed where she slept. I left work early and drove to the house where I grew up. Together my mother and I went through the boxes. Among the things we found was an album by Cat Stevens called
Numbers,
which was released in 1975. Although it was part of a three-album box set, along with
Izitso
and
Back to Earth,
Lila had only
Numbers.
There was a period of several months when she played it every day after school, so often that the songs became stuck in my mind. At some point she stopped playing it, and I had forgotten all about it. I dusted it off and read the song titles on the back of the jacket, at which point some synapse fired in my brain, setting off a tangled stream of melodies and their accompanying lyrics. My first thought was to play the album, but then I realized I had nothing to play it on. My parents had long since done away with the turntable, and I couldn’t think of a single person who owned one.

“If you really want to hear it, I’m sure you can find a record player on eBay,” she said.

“Maybe I will,” I said, but I never did.