No One You Know (24 page)

“I’m not cut out for farm life,” I’d said to Lila once, when we sat just a stone’s throw from this very spot, on the porch of the big white farmhouse. We’d been sitting in rocking chairs, drinking lemonade. The lemonade was tart and pulpy, with little bits of sugar that hadn’t melted. “I like this part,” I’d said, as the ice cubes clinked in my plastic cup. “The lemonade, the porch, the rocking chairs. It’s like something out of
The Waltons.
But I wouldn’t care for the rest of it—digging for potatoes, slopping the pigs, mucking the horse’s stall, waking up at the crack of dawn.”

“You’d get used to it,” Lila said.

“I don’t think so.”

She rocked back and forth, her face turned to the sun, and she talked to me with her eyes closed. “You have this idea of what your life is, what it should be, and you’re afraid to veer too far from it. But if you had to—I mean, say, for argument’s sake, the big one hit and the city went up in flames, and somehow you ended up living in the country, and the only way you could survive was to raise your own food—you could do it. You might even like it. You might decide it actually suited you
better
than the life you have now.”

“Would I have MTV?” I asked, pouring myself a second helping of lemonade from the cold metal pitcher.

“No.”

“Would I get to drive into the city to shop and borrow books from the library?”

“No, all the stores burned down. The library, too. There’s nothing. You have to make your own clothes out of drapes, just like Scarlett O’Hara. For entertainment, you have to tell stories in the evening by firelight.”

“Couldn’t do it,” I said. “I’d starve and go naked and ultimately die of boredom.”

“But you
could,
” she insisted. “You’d just have to adapt your mind to the idea of an altered reality, a new set of rules.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What if you could no longer practice math?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “There will always be math. It’s the most fundamental building block of the universe. Humankind can live without MTV and Banana Republic—even, in a pinch, without literature—but not without math.”

“For argument’s sake,” I insisted, “let’s just say that’s part of the deal. No math for you. Ever.”

“That’s different,” she said. “Everything in your life right now is just a hobby, it’s expendable. But math is my calling. You don’t give up your calling, no matter what.”

I stood up and stepped away, tossing the last of my lemonade on the ground. It quickly sunk into the earth, leaving a dark spot on the dirt. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

“Don’t be so sensitive,” Lila said.

“This calling of yours. What has it gotten you? No friends, that’s for sure. No boyfriends. Maybe I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life, but at least I won’t die a virgin.” It was the meanest thing I could think of to say. Later, I would regret it, but at the time I wanted to hurt her, the way she’d hurt me by pointing out what I feared was my greatest shortcoming. For a genius, finding one’s life’s purpose was easy. For the rest of us, it was a considerably more difficult task.

After that, I sat in the car in the driveway, doors open, Billy Idol cranked up high on the tape deck. From behind my sunglasses, I watched Lila riding Dorothy through the pasture. She looked natural on the horse, like she was meant to be there. It was almost two hours before she came out to the car. At some point I dozed off. When I woke up the tape had run out, and Lila was sitting in the driver’s seat, trying to get the car to start. “I think you killed the battery,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. You’re going to be great at whatever you do.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled. I wasn’t entirely ready to forgive her yet, but I appreciated the apology. The weird thing about Lila was that she could say a thing like that—about my having no calling—without any malice; to her, it was simply a matter of stating the truth. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that her honesty might be hurtful.

“I mean it,” she said. “You
will.
” She gave my arm a little squeeze. “I’ll go find William and ask him to give us a jump-start.”

A few minutes later, she came out of the house with a big guy in overalls and a Giants cap. I couldn’t tell if he was wearing the overalls ironically or not. “William, meet my sister, Ellie,” Lila said. “Ellie, William.”

William tipped his hat and mumbled, “Nice to meet you,” then went off to get his truck and jumper cables. He hooked up the cables and Lila sat in the driver’s seat, turning the ignition on command. He had our car running again in a couple of minutes. When he was finished, he propped his forearms on Lila’s open window, leaned into the car, and said, “Should be all right as long as you keep the engine running.”

“He smells like sweat and apple pie,” I said to Lila, as we pulled out onto the main road.

“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Lila said.

“Isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer.

“I think he likes you,” I said.

“William?” she said, laughing. “We’ve got absolutely nothing in common. Actually, he’s more your type than mine.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s really into music. He was in some weird band.”

It was a nothing comment, something I quickly forgot. I rarely went back to the farm, and the only other time I saw William was on the day, a year or two later, when I went out there with Lila to sell Dorothy. Now, as I sat on the stool in front of the cow, swishing the warm milk around in a plastic cup, I thought about that afternoon so long ago, the good-looking guy who seemed to have a little crush on Lila. At the time, it had seemed so insignificant. William, Billy—it was starting to make sense.
What have I done my beautiful one/what have I done?

A
FTER MILKING THE COWS, FRANK TOOK THE KIDS
on a hayride. “What about seat belts?” said the blonde woman who’d been struggling to get her kids out of their car seats when I arrived.

“It’s a hay wagon, honey,” Frank said. “Doesn’t come with seat belts.”

“I don’t know,” the mom said, but her kids screamed until she let them ride.

Afterward, Frank showed everyone to the smokehouse, where a whole pig hung by its feet, head dangling. The throat had been slit, but the face still looked alarmingly piglike. The boy who had led the “Drink it!” cheer after I milked Tabitha ran out of the smokehouse, sobbing.

After the smokehouse there was a pumpkin-carving contest. At precisely four-thirty, Frank thanked everyone for coming and sent them all home with a free slice of sugar pie. I stood with him in front of the house and watched the last car roll slowly down the driveway.

Thirty-five

T
HE FOYER OF THE FARMHOUSE WAS LARGE
and square, with wide-plank floors and fading floral wallpaper. In the center of the room was a wrought-iron sewing machine table, on which stood a vase filled with sunflowers. Upon stepping inside, I was struck by a profound sense of déjà vu. I must have been in the house with Lila on one of my handful of visits to the farm, although I had no distinct memory of it. The place smelled of floor polish, potpourri, and the musty, burnt odor that lingers after a rug has been cleaned with an old vacuum cleaner. In the room to the right, which was filled with old settees and high-backed chairs, the pale green carpet bore the marks of a recent vacuuming.

Across from the front door, a staircase led up to the second floor. There was a sudden movement upstairs, followed by the creaking of the floorboards, and I glanced up to see someone retreating into one of the upstairs rooms—a white flash of elbow, the dark shadow of a shoe. Swirls of dust circulated in bars of light at the top of the staircase.

“This way,” Frank said, leading me through the carpeted room, past a large flat-screen television and a bookcase crowded with videos and DVDs, into the kitchen. The kitchen was spacious and light-filled. A gleaming, stainless-steel refrigerator towered next to an antique Wedgwood stove. A diner-style booth, complete with red vinyl seats, had been built into the bay window. The effect was charming and somewhat unsettling. I imagined the way a marriage and family would unfold inside this house, indecisively, haphazard as the décor. I suspected most houses shared more in common with this place than with my own childhood home, where each piece of furniture was chosen with an eye for its relationship to the others, and where every object had its proper place.

“Have a seat,” Frank said. The vinyl squeaked as I slid into the booth. The seats smelled as though they’d been scoured with Lysol, and the gleaming windows reeked of Windex.

“Regular or decaf?” Frank asked.

“Regular, please.”

He took a canister of chicory coffee down from the cupboard and measured the ground coffee into an old percolator. Just as he was setting it on the stove, a phone rang, and he excused himself. He was gone for several minutes. When the percolator began rattling, I turned off the burner and poured the coffee into cups, glad to have something to do. I wandered around the kitchen, hoping to find something that would give me clues about the elusive Billy Boudreaux. But the photos on the fridge were mainly of a little girl—elementary school shots, Girl Scout camp, high school graduation, what appeared to be a Hawaiian vacation. A collection of ceramic cookie jars shaped like various Disney characters lined a high shelf, and a set of copper pots and pans hung from a metal rack above the island.

Frank returned. “Sorry about that. It was my daughter.”

“The one in the pictures?”

“Yep. She’s doing a semester down in the Florida Keys, studying the effect of global warming on sponge life and coral reefs. They have this underwater laboratory down there called Aquarius, sixty feet below the surface, and they broadcast in real time over the Internet. It’s addictive. First thing in the morning I’m sitting at my computer, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tally with the tanks strapped to her back.”

He put a plate of brownies on the table between us. “I’d have never guessed she’d decide on a career in marine biology,” he continued. “Her mother and I are completely land-bound. I’m ashamed to confess I don’t even know how to swim. But that’s what kids do—they surprise you. You have any?” He glanced at my left hand.

“Not yet.”

For a few more minutes we made small talk, as if neither of us quite knew how to broach the obvious subject. We talked about Tally, and the farm, and his wife’s previous career as the curator of a small art gallery in the city. I asked him about the large collection of DVDs and videos I’d seen in the other room, to which he replied that he was something of a movie buff. “Actually, I inherited them from my brother, Will,” he said. “More than half of those are his. Over the years I’ve been expanding the collection.”

“Inherited?”

“He has no use for them now, of course.”

I waited for him to say more by way of explanation. But he didn’t elaborate. For a few seconds neither of us spoke. Frank kept nibbling at the brownies, like a nervous habit. He must have eaten four of them before we finally got around to the subject we’d been dancing around all day.

“You said you’ve been waiting for me,” I said finally. “Why?”

“One thing I’ve learned in this life is that the past always resurfaces. It simply stood to reason that you’d come around one day. You’ve been here before. It’s all a big circle, right?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

He looked up at me. His eyes were dark brown, the pupils so large as to make his eyes appear almost black. My mother had once told me that, because the iris expands in the dark, and because juries tend to look to a person’s eyes as a sign of whether or not they’re telling the truth, a dimmer room works in your favor when one of your witnesses is on the stand. “It’s human nature to feel trust when someone has large pupils,” she said. “If you can keep it in the vault, I’ll tell you a little trick I use. Immediately before going in front of the jury for closing arguments, I intentionally blur my vision by looking down at my notes and crossing my eyes until I lose focus. This dilates the pupils, so that when I stand up in front of the jury I look wide-eyed and honest as Abe.”

It had provided an interesting window into my mother’s nature, into the person she was capable of becoming when she was at work, but I wasn’t sure it was a side of her I wanted to see. After she told me that, I found myself wondering if I could really trust her emotions. When she looked into my eyes and said she was proud of me, was she telling the truth, or was she simply feeding me a line, calculated to convince me of my own worth and thereby turn me into a better person?

“Do you like stories?” Frank asked, pushing the plate of brownies aside.

“Everyone likes stories.”

“I have one for you.”

I took a deep breath. “Go on.”

“Early one morning in December 1989, my younger brother Will showed up at our door. A month before that, we had kicked him out. He’d been living with us for quite a while, trying to get clean, and he’d been doing great, so great that I thought he might really do it this time, he might really turn his life around for good. But then he had a relapse. We’d given him so many chances, and we had a new baby at the time, and my wife, Nancy, understandably, didn’t want him around. When Will was sober, he was a huge help on the farm—a hard worker, kind to the animals, got along with everyone. While Nancy was pregnant, he treated her so well, you’d have thought she was carrying
his
baby. He’d come in the house several times during the day to check on her, and when he finished with his work he’d do chores around the house so she wouldn’t have to. He’d go out in the middle of the night to get milk from one of the cows—he’d gotten this idea in his head that she should have only the freshest milk, if it had sat in the refrigerator for more than an hour it wasn’t good enough. ‘Straight from the teat is the only way,’ he’d say. ‘It’ll make the baby stronger.’ And to this day I’m not convinced there wasn’t something to that; after Nancy drank fresh milk, the baby would invariably start kicking up a storm. Anyway, for months, that baby was all Will could talk about.

“Then Tally came, and Will was amazing. She was colicky, spent the first six months of her life screaming up a storm, but her crying didn’t bother him one bit. When he was out working on the farm, she could scream for hours, and nothing Nancy did seemed to work. But when Will walked into the house, he’d wash up real quick and then go take Tally out of Nancy’s arms, and start blowing in her ear, making this weird, musical rumbling sound—he had such a voice, you should have heard it, I always thought he should have been the front man in his band—and her screams would turn to little cries, then peter out to a whimper, and within a minute or two she’d be completely quiet and happy. Honestly, I don’t know how we’d have gotten through those first few months without him.

“At any rate, about a year after Tally was born, Will was running errands in Petaluma when he ran into some guy he used to know in the music business. He called from the guy’s recording studio to tell us he wouldn’t be home for dinner, and he didn’t come home that night or the next, and when he finally did show up a week later he was a complete wreck—unshaven, unshowered, with that familiar paranoid look in his eyes. He went to pick Tally up from her playpen and Nancy told him she didn’t want him anywhere near the baby. He denied falling off the wagon, but it was obvious. Nancy insisted that he go back to rehab, and I backed her up on it, but he refused. At one point in the argument he put his fist through the wall right there.”

I looked where Frank was pointing. You could still see where the wall had been repaired and painted over.

“That was when Nancy told him to pack his bags and get out,” Frank said. “I tried to persuade her to give him one more chance. I was worried that without us, he’d completely fall apart. I was afraid for his life. After all, he was my baby brother. I remembered when he was born. I remembered playing ball with him when we were kids, and helping him pick out his first guitar, bailing him out of jail the first time he got in trouble for driving under the influence. Nancy told me point-blank that it was him or her, and even though I loved my brother to death, I wasn’t about to lose Nancy or my baby over him. Will pleaded with me to let him stay, he promised he wouldn’t do it again, but I told him what I was really feeling at the time—that I’d given up on him. To this day I regret saying it, but at the time it was true.

“Ultimately I had to pack his bags for him, because he refused to do it. I’m not sure how I finally got him out to his car, but I did, and I drove him to the city, paid for a couple of weeks at a hotel out by the beach, gave him a few hundred dollars to get by. We spent that night in the hotel room, talking things out. He was alternately contrite and angry, crying and yelling, but he promised me he’d stay out of trouble and find work, and that I’d see him again in three months’ time, clean and sober and gainfully employed. ‘Maybe I’ll even write some songs,’ he said. There was such hope in his voice, I wanted to believe him.

“The next day, Nancy drove to the city and picked me up. I’m ashamed to admit that I felt like a burden had been lifted. I told myself that he wasn’t my responsibility anymore, that he’d have to sink or swim on his own. Of course I know now it was the wrong thing to do—if I’d managed somehow to keep him out here at the farm, all the terrible stuff that came later never would have happened, and maybe he’d still be alive—but at the time I was so fed up, I just wanted him off my hands. You never know the repercussions until it’s too late, do you?”

It seemed like more than a rhetorical question—as if he was actually waiting for an answer—but I was still stuck on that other part. “He’s dead?”

“Six years ago,” Frank said. “Tally was the one who found him, out in his car. He’d hooked a hose up to the exhaust and threaded it through the window.”

“But I thought…”

“Hmm?”

“When we came in, I saw someone upstairs. I thought—”

“Oh, Roy,” Frank said. “That’s Tally’s fiancé. His lease just ran out on his apartment in the city. He’s staying with us for a couple of weeks until he finds a place.”

“Oh.”

Frank paused. “You were hoping to see him.”

I nodded.

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you trace him out here? He kept a low profile for a long time.”

I told Frank about Ben Fong-Torres, about the article he’d written, and his chance meeting with Billy in the Haight, and the tape.

“A tape? He never told me he was writing new songs. I’d hear him playing the guitar sometimes, up in his room, even singing on occasion, but I figured it was old stuff. I tried to get him to play for us, but he wouldn’t. He said all that was part of another life. Every now and then he’d play for Tally, but not if anyone else was around.” He leaned forward. “Do you have it with you?” he asked. “The tape?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t tell you how much it would mean to me to hear it.”

We went into the green-carpeted room, and Frank inserted the tape into an old cassette deck. “Wait,” I said. “Before you play it, please. I’d like to hear the rest of the story.”