No One You Know Page 8

  On my way back to the room to apologize, I stopped at a roadside stall to buy a present for Henry, a handmade silver lighter that he had admired the day before. Henry was the only man I had ever dated who smoked—“only cigars,” he rationalized, “and only on weekends”—and I knew that the gift of the lighter would be especially meaningful to him, because it was a full concession on my part, a display of genuine affection in that it asked him to change nothing. I paid extra to have the girl who sold me the lighter wrap it in printed yellow paper and add an elaborately tied ribbon, which she did slowly and with a show of great care.

  I had left the hotel in such haste that I’d forgotten to take my key, so when I returned to the room I had to knock. I waited for the sound of Henry walking to the door, but my knock was met with silence. I knocked again, called his name, and stood there for a good five minutes, knocking and calling to him with a rising sense of unease, before finally going downstairs and getting a key from the concierge. When I opened the door I saw that the bed had not been touched. Henry wasn’t there. His suitcase and passport were gone. I postponed my appointments and spent the next two days in the hotel, waiting for him, only going out for coffee and meals.

  On the third day, when I returned to the hotel after work, the concierge had a message for me. Henry had called from San Francisco. We could talk, he said, when I got back home. Over the next few days I attempted to reach him several times, to no avail. I had farms to visit, and another three days passed before I was able to return to California. When I did, it was too late. Henry had already begun packing his things. He said he had “reevaluated.” He was moving to the East Coast, starting over. No amount of reasoning, and ultimately pleading, on my part could dissuade him. I tried to give him the lighter—I didn’t know what else to do with it—but he wouldn’t accept it. I ended up putting it in a wooden box on my dresser, where I kept my meager collection of earrings and necklaces, and every time I opened the box to retrieve a piece of jewelry, there was the silver lighter, a reminder of our terrible, stupid fight, and of his subsequent departure. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to throw out the lighter or give it away, nor could I find a different, better place for it in my apartment, the apartment which Henry and I had shared for almost two years. Eventually I moved my jewelry to a smaller porcelain box, but the wooden one was still there on my dresser, a repository for an object that was neither usable nor disposable.

  I was lying on my bed in Diriomo, remembering that strange and painful time, remembering how the most significant relationship of my adult life had simply dissolved without warning in a room very similar to this one, when I glanced over at the bedside table and noticed that the small stack of books appeared to have grown in height. I picked them up one by one: a newly published history of the indigenous peoples of Nicaragua; a novel by a friend of a friend whom I’d met back home in San Francisco; the latest copy of Fresh Cup magazine. But underneath these familiar items was something else, book-sized, wrapped in plain brown paper. This, I knew for a fact, I had not brought with me.

  I got up and checked to make sure the door was locked, pulled the curtains closed, and stood there holding the package, as if it might contain something dangerous. Then I placed it on the desk and stared at it for a minute or two. Finally, I picked it up again, turned it over, and broke the two seams of tape with my fingernail. When I unfolded the paper and glimpsed the faded blue-plaid pattern on the cover, I could not, at first, believe what I saw. But when I opened it to the first page there was no mistaking what lay before me on the battered hotel desk: it was Lila’s notebook, the one that had gone missing with her almost twenty years before.

  Twelve

  HOW TO DESCRIBE THAT NOTEBOOK?

  To me, for whom mathematical formulae were opaque, impenetrable as hieroglyphs, it was like a book of mysteries. It had remained in my memory all these years, my sister’s notebook, the lost thing that I imagined held her deepest secrets. With a sense of awe I opened it, and there they were, just as I remembered them, the stately numerals, letters, and symbols marching across and down the page. Lila’s handwriting was beautiful in its precision. I admired the darker impression of the ink at the endpoint of each number, as if she had lingered there before moving on to the next, as if every single number was not merely part of a larger whole to her, not just a figure in a calculation, but individual, a world unto itself.

  On the first page of the notebook, in her tiny, neat cursive, was this:

  “A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.”

  G. H. Hardy

  Below the quote, she had used a black felt-tip pen to delineate the six stars of the constellation Lyra. In pencil, she had traced the jagged line among the stars and noted the names—Vega, Sheliak, Sulafat, Epsilon, Aladfar, Alathfar.

  “Who’s ever heard of Lyra?” I asked her once, when she told me it was her favorite constellation. We were lying in the cool, damp grass in our backyard, looking up at the sky. It was the summer before Lila started high school, there was a rare electrical blackout in our part of the city, and we had snuck outside in the middle of the night after our parents went to bed to eat cupcakes and plan our futures. I tasted the waxy sweetness of chocolate frosting on my lips, crunched the candy sprinkles between my teeth. All around us, insects ticked and chirped. These were sounds I’d only heard at our Russian River cabin, never in the city, and the effect of the night sounds, combined with the smell of grass and my mother’s newly planted star jasmine, made me feel as if we had entered a different world.

  “The lyre was given to Orpheus by Apollo,” Lila said. “When Orpheus played it, the sound was so beautiful that even the animals were entranced. One day, his wife, Eurydice, was killed by a snake. Orpheus was devastated. He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep, all he could do was think about his beautiful dead wife. Finally, he went to the Underworld and played his lyre for Pluto and Persephone. Like everyone else, the king and queen of the Underworld found his music irresistible, and so they gave Orpheus permission to take Eurydice back to the land of the living with him, on one condition.”

  I held my breath. To be under the stars with Lila, in the backyard on a night without electricity, when everything about our little plot of land in the city seemed entirely different and new, was wonderful. She must have felt it, too, because she reached across the grass and took my hand in hers. “What condition?” I whispered.

  “He couldn’t look back until he had left the Underworld, or Eurydice would be taken from him.”

  “What happened?”

  “For the longest time he kept his promise,” Lila said. “He held his wife by the hand, leading her up, step by step, to the surface of the earth. They had almost reached the surface when he couldn’t stand it another second, he had to see her beauty, and he looked back.”

  “And then?” I asked. Surely, I thought, the gods would understand. After all, he’d made it most of the way. And he loved her so much.

  “When Orpheus reached out to put his arms around her,” Lila said, “she slipped away into the darkness. He had to return to earth alone. Back in Thrace, his hometown, Orpheus was so devastated at losing his wife a second time that he completely ignored the company of women. The women of Thrace were so angry they stoned him and tore him to pieces, and threw his head and his lyre into the river.”

  I heard a noise over the fence and gripped Lila’s hand harder.

  “It was Zeus who retrieved the lyre from the river and tossed it into the sky,” Lila said. “Come here.”

  I scooted closer, and she raised her hand, still clutching mine, up to the sky and pointed. “At the tip of my finger is Vega, see?”

  I strained to make out the star. There were so many, and they were so far away, how could I tell which one she meant for me to see?

  “It’s the upper right point of the summer triangle, the brightest star visible from the Northern Hemisphere. If you can find Vega, you can f
ind Lyra.”

  We lay out there for a long time. At some point, I fell asleep. When I woke up Lila was standing over me, her long hair wet from the grass. “Get up,” she whispered, reaching down to take my hand.

  A few nights after Lila went missing, I stepped into our backyard and tried to find Vega. I lay on the grass, just as we had as children, but the city lights were bright, so that only a few stars were visible. I looked for the second brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere. Just when I thought I had spotted it, and was attempting to trace a line in the sky with my eyes to the upper left point of Orpheus’s harp, I realized my star was moving. It wasn’t Vega, just a satellite.

  It had been a long time since Lila had mentioned Lyra, a long time, in fact, since we’d had a conversation of any significance. At that point I was aware that something was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t have imagined that she was actually gone. The next day, we would receive the phone call from Guerneville.

  To me, the cruelest part of Orpheus’s story was not that he had lost Eurydice twice, but that, as she was slipping away from him the second time, he was unable to touch her. When we were children, Lila and I had been in constant physical contact—braiding one another’s hair, tumbling on the floor, dancing together to my mother’s old records. But the older we got, the less we touched, so that by the time she was in graduate school, the only time our skin made contact was when we accidentally brushed against one another in passing—or when I crossed her invisible boundary, putting a hand on her arm to bring her back from some deep concentration. Unlike me, Lila was not a physically affectionate person, and on those rare occasions—a birthday, a good-bye at the airport when I was dropping her off for one of her trips to a math conference—when I tried to hug her, I could sense her reluctance the moment my arms circled her neck.

  The night that I lay alone in the backyard, searching for Lyra, it occurred to me that it had been a very long time since I had hugged my sister. And I decided that when I saw her again, I’d pull her close and hug her for a long time, whether she liked it or not. It did not occur to me, even for a moment, that she might never be coming home.

  Thirteen

  EVERY STORY ENTAILS A CONTRACT WITH THE reader,” Thorpe used to say. “The contract is laid out in the first page, possibly the very first line: the setting, the main characters, the rhythm of the language, and most important, the point of view—who is telling the story, from what distance. At any point in the story, if the point of view wavers, the contract with the reader is broken. The foundation falls apart, and the reader is reminded that it’s all just a fiction.”

  I’d gone through life believing a certain story about my own history, a story which happened to be told from Thorpe’s point of view. The person I was as an adult was deeply influenced by this story. If Lila could be murdered by the man she cared most about, the one man she had invited into her life, then how was it possible to trust anyone? Since Lila’s murder, I had allowed myself the luxury of complete trust only once—with Henry; only with him had I truly let down my guard. When that relationship fell apart, I threw myself into my work. I convinced myself that the way to happiness was to excel at the thing I did best. When I felt lonely, I could travel to a coffee farm or retreat into my cupping notes. This was the shape my life had taken, and I had made peace with it. It wasn’t the life I’d imagined for myself, and it wasn’t the life my parents would have chosen for me—they wanted a son-in-law, grandchildren. Somehow, though, it was a good enough life.

  As much as I hated what Thorpe had done, I realized that his book, his answers, had provided a kind of relief. But now, like a mathematical structure that had been built upon a faulty theorem, all the certainties of my life had come crashing down.

  Back home in San Francisco the morning after my return, I unpacked my suitcase. Everything smelled like travel, the chemical air of the airplane mixing with the green, wet smell of my hotel. I had stashed three pounds of coffee beans in a side pocket of the suitcase, so the shirts and skirts and everything else bore the aroma of coffee as well. After tossing my clothes into the washing machine, I showered and chose a clean pair of jeans, T-shirt, and sweater. The neighborhood outside my window was sunny, but I could see the fog bank to the west, a wall of brilliant white, and knew that, out in the avenues, it would probably be damp and fifteen degrees cooler.

  I walked to Twenty-fourth Street and bought a small coffee at Tully’s. It was my tide-me-over coffee. With the first sip, I felt the mental cobwebs clearing. I found a vacant table in the corner and opened Lila’s notebook. On the third page, she had made a list entitled Unsolved. Unsolvable? The first, the Goldbach Conjecture, took up more than half of the notebook, and the rest of the pages were devoted to the remaining problems. The second item on the list was the Poincaré Conjecture: Every simply connected compact three-manifold (without boundary) is homeomorphic to a three-sphere.

  I stared at the problem for a long time, unable to make heads or tails of it. It amazed me that Lila—with whom I shared the same genes, the same loving parents, the same good schools, the same summer weekends at the Russian River—could get her mind around this sentence.

  Although the meaning of Poincaré’s conjecture eluded me, I remembered the man himself for one reason: during our backpacking trip through Europe, Lila and I had gone to the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, where Poincaré was buried. Beside his gravesite, she had told me his story. Poincaré was known as The Last Universalist; he excelled in every field of mathematics, both pure and applied, that existed during his lifetime. But what had caught my interest was the story of his testimony on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer who was charged with treason by anti-Semitic colleagues and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in 1895. Poincaré’s attack on the invalid scientific claims made by Dreyfus’s accusers was in large part responsible for Dreyfus’s exoneration.

  Lila placed a piece of paper on Poincaré’s gravestone and rubbed over it with a pencil. Then she helped me locate someone else on the cemetery map: Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir had been buried just a year before in the same grave as Sartre. The ivory-colored gravestone with its simple double inscription—names and dates—was laden with fresh flowers and gifts. I’d read The Second Sex and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, I’d read The Words, but the only line I could conjure at that moment was by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions—She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront/As she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance.

  “Can you imagine being so deeply in love that you want to have your body tossed on top of your lover’s bones?” I asked.

  Lila didn’t even take a moment to consider the question. “No.” She didn’t have to elaborate. I knew her perspective on romance, marriage: it would only get in the way of her work.

  One might argue that true universalism is no longer possible. Surely even Poincaré would be unable to keep up with all the esoteric fields of his subject, as they existed a century after his death. But there was a part of me that liked to think Lila might have had it in her to at least approach universalism. I believed that she might have been, if not the great mathematician of her time, certainly one of them. And this was where the cosmic numbers seemed to be all out of whack, this is what my parents must have considered a thousand times over the years, though they would never, ever say it: they had two daughters. To subtract me from the equation would have been to rob the world of some decent cupping notes, a well-trained palate, a few articles for trade journals about the more elusive qualities of the world’s finest coffees. But it didn’t happen that way. The subtraction that was made turned out to be a far crueler one. Who knows what Lila might have discovered, what problems she might have solved, what elegant proofs she might have constructed, had she been given time? Unlike me, she was poised to do important work, work with significant repercussions.

  In hindsight, it was easy for me to see what I was doing in the year immediately following Lila’s death, when, over and over
again, I found myself drunk and in bed with some guy from school, or someone I’d met at a party. I wasn’t just trying to forget what had happened to Lila. I was trying to forget that I was the product of a warped mathematics that had managed to end the life of a genius while allowing her sister, who was ordinary in every way, to live.

  “It’s like I’m wandering through a house,” Lila used to say, as a way of explaining her frequent silences. “I happen to step into another room, and the door shuts behind me. Everything else sort of vanishes.”

  Sometimes I felt as though I’d wandered into the wrong room twenty years ago, and the door had shut behind me. On one side of the door was my parallel life, the one I was supposed to have. On the other side, the room where I was trapped, was the life I had stumbled into in the aftermath of Lila’s death. I wanted to go back to where I had started before I crossed the threshold, but the door was shut so tight, there was no way out.

  Like all condemned men, Dreyfus had been convicted because the judges believed a certain story about him. Poincaré came forward with a different version of the story, and it changed the course of Dreyfus’s life. Was there a different story for Lila as well, one that might change the course of McConnell’s life, and perhaps my own?

  I had never, in thirty-eight years, done a single extraordinary thing. I often told myself that it was a matter of circumstance—that I had neither the talent nor the opportunity to make much difference for anyone. Maybe this was my opportunity. McConnell was the one person outside our immediate family whom Lila had let into her life, the one person she had trusted. Like Dreyfus, McConnell had been hanged in the court of public opinion on the basis of a story—quite possibly a fraudulent one. Maybe, after all, I could do one thing right; maybe I could restore to McConnell something of what he had lost.