No One You Know

by Michelle Richmond

  “I meant to ask you, why is it that you write in the middle of the night?”

  “My mind is clearer.”

  “I see.”

  “As I was saying, I’ll be sitting right here in my office, struggling to squeeze out the next sentence, and then I’ll hear your key in the lock. I won’t get up, you won’t even have to come say hello. But I’ll hear you walking around downstairs, fixing yourself a bite to eat in the kitchen, taking a book down from the shelf. Maybe I’ll even be able to hear you turning pages. And as I write I’ll be imagining you as my ideal reader. The words I put on the page, they’ll all be directed at you. Forever ago, a writing teacher told me you have to always think of the audience. I never could figure out what he meant. How does anyone know who his audience will be?”

  “I’m probably not it,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your audience.”

  “You could be.”

  “I prefer fiction, remember?”

  “You’re in luck. My novel is really coming along. Who knows, maybe you’ll like it.” Thorpe gestured toward the desk chair. “Have a seat.” He was perched on some sort of ergonomic stool, clad in a beat-up pair of flannel pajamas.

  “That doesn’t look very comfortable,” I said, eyeing the stool.

  “I got it on the recommendation of my life coach. Align the body before you can align your mind, that sort of thing.”

  I remained standing and surveyed the desk, which was covered with papers and Post-it notes. Beside the keyboard was a white sheet of paper bearing a pencil sketch. I picked it up and looked more closely. The sketch was of my old house. There, on the second-floor window frame, was the little Victorian birdhouse.

  “Look,” Thorpe said. “What do I have to do to make it up to you? What do I have to say to make it so we can be friends again?”

  He smelled like cigarettes. I almost felt sorry for him. I knew how hard he’d tried to break the habit. What if my doctor told me I had to give up coffee? I was pretty sure I couldn’t do it.

  “You were wrong about Billy Boudreaux,” I said.

  Thorpe raised an eyebrow. Everything about him looked bushier tonight. His hair, his beard, the eyebrows. He’d put on weight since I’d last seen him. There was something else about his hair, too. There were tiny follicle dots along the hairline where he used to be bald.

  He smiled slightly. “How so?”

  “He would have made a good character.”

  “You met him?” Thorpe looked a bit surprised.

  “Yes.” I didn’t tell Thorpe that it had been over twenty years ago when we met. Or that he had since committed suicide. I didn’t really want to tell him anything. I could see his book title now: Music and Madness: The Unauthorized Biography of Billy Boudreaux. When I drove to Thorpe’s house, intending to confront him about the extent of his lies, I wasn’t sure what I would say when I got there. But now I understood something of my own motivation that hadn’t been clear to me before. I was here to prove to myself that, for once, I had the upper hand. I wasn’t going to tell Thorpe anything—who killed Lila, or why. He didn’t deserve to have that information handed to him. He could read about it just like everyone else. I knew just who could handle the story.

  “You really should have included him,” I said. “Steve Strachman, too. And the janitor, James Wheeler. Don Carroll, all of them.”

  “Red herrings,” Thorpe said, and then he smiled again, as if he was waiting for me to say something. “Red herrings, right?”

  “Maybe, but any one of them, if you looked closely enough, would have been enough to build a chapter on. Earlier today, I remembered something you told me once, when we were reading Brighton Rock in class.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “We were talking about Pinkie, those gold crowns on the red-upholstered chairs in his hotel. Some guy raised his hand and asked why Graham Greene spent so much time on Pinkie, when he was just a minor character. And you said that, in order for a book to be really good, it’s not enough to develop the major characters. The minor ones, too, have to be distinct. When readers close the book, they shouldn’t just remember the protagonist and antagonist. They should remember everyone who walks across the page.”

  Thorpe reached up and fingered the dots on his forehead, as if he’d just remembered they were there. “I said that?”

  “Because that’s what life is, you said. It’s not just about the major characters and the big events. It’s about everyone, everything, in between.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds familiar.”

  “Do you still believe it?”

  “I’m not sure I ever believed it. Maybe it was just something I said, a way to fill the time in class.”

  “Well, I was thinking about it when I was driving over here. And while it’s probably true for books, I don’t think it’s true for real life. Here I am, closing in on forty, and I can count on my fingers the people who have really mattered.”

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “Lila, of course. My parents. Peter McConnell. Henry.” I paused. “You.”

  “Me?”

  “I was barely twenty years old when I read your book,” I said. “And I believed every word of it. You wrote the story of my life before I’d had a chance to live it. You said I was directionless, but how could you have known that? I was still so young. But I thought you were so smart, I thought you knew the answers. No one had ever examined me as closely as you did, no one had ever taken as keen an interest. I figured you’d seen into my core and could make out, better than anyone else, who I was. It wasn’t very smart on my part. I know I’m as much to blame as you—or more—but I became that character.”

  “I also wrote that you were smart,” Thorpe said, “and beautiful. I wrote that you were passionate.”

  “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “It’s there.”

  “You referred to Lila as ‘the good daughter.’”

  “Yes, but I didn’t call you the bad daughter.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  Thorpe glanced at a clock on the wall, then turned away from me and looked out the window. I followed his gaze. Moments later, someone moved in front of the window of my old bedroom. The shade went down, the light went off.

  Thorpe got up and flipped the switch on the wall, flooding his office with light.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking back toward me.

  “What?”

  “She lowers the shade and turns off the light at precisely this time every night. Twelve forty-five. I could set my clock by her. Immediately thereafter I switch on my light. It’s this game I play. I like to think she notices my light going on—as if we’ve choreographed it, a silent form of communication. At five minutes past seven every morning, she opens the shade. Except Sunday. Sunday she pulls up the shade at six-thirty, emerges from the front door at seven-fifteen, and walks down the hill to St. Paul’s. Coming and going during the week, she always looks very stylish—sleek black dresses, black boots, elegant scarves. But on Sunday, on her way to Mass, she wears this ill-fitting yellow coat. Every week without exception, no matter the weather.”

  “Maybe the church is cold,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “You followed her there?”

  “It’s a church. All souls welcome, right? I was just curious. She lives alone, and I had this idea that she would be alone at Mass, too. But she isn’t. She meets a fellow there, a guy with a limp, and they sit together in the back row.”

  “What else have you uncovered about her? Date of birth? Favorite color? Her first heartbreak?”

  “That’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t have to. She’s the subject of my novel. I get to make all that stuff up.”

  “Let’s say she reads the book one day,” I said.

  “That’s quite a leap of faith, isn’t it? I don’t even know if I can publish it. Maybe no one wants a novel from a writer of true crime books, especially a love story.”

&nb
sp; “It’s a love story?”

  “Yes. I’m tired of blood. I wanted to write about something beautiful. Something I’ve experienced. All these books about murder—I’m an outsider, not a participant.”

  “What about Second Time’s a Charm? That was a love story.”

  “That book was as much a farce as my marriage. No, this one is about true love. Not sexual love, something deeper. The kind of love that exists even when it isn’t returned. The kind of love that can keep on going for a lifetime, with no reciprocation. Tragic love, if you will.”

  “Some would call that obsession, not love.”

  His left eye twitched. It was just the tiniest movement, but I knew I had gotten to him. For once, my words were the ones that stung. I was surprised to discover that I felt no satisfaction. I would have liked to take it back. Maybe that’s what makes books so dangerous; the record is permanent, indelible.

  “The woman who lives in your old house,” Thorpe said. “I’ve seen her playing the piano, hosting dinner parties, going to church, but I’ve never once seen her read. If I am able to publish this novel, it may come and go without fanfare. But even if it magically jumps all the hurdles and becomes a hit, I’d say the chances of her reading it are very slim.”

  “For the sake of argument, what if she does? Will she recognize herself?”

  Thorpe turned to me, hands in his pockets. He sat on his little stool again. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’ve been looking for the perfect opportunity to stick it in conversation, but it hasn’t really come up.”

  I couldn’t imagine what sort of shoe he’d drop now. It occurred to me that I was ready for all of this to be over. When I walked out his door, I was certain I’d never come back. From now on, new chapters, new plot, my story.

  “There’s this guy out in L.A.,” Thorpe said, “Wade Williams. He was just a college kid when he first read the book, but now he’s this hotshot Hollywood producer. He wants to do a film adaptation of Lila’s story.”

  I knew what was coming. In literature, characters have a habit of undergoing major transformations by the final chapter. But in reality, most people don’t change. You can throw anything at them, and they will remain, in every way that really matters, the same. I turned to go.

  “Wait,” Thorpe said, putting a hand on my arm. “It’s been a dream of mine, ever since I started writing, to see one of my books make it to the big screen.”

  I was already at the door to the office, my back to him. There was a weird smell in the hallway—those vanilla candles again.

  “I was all set to make the deal,” Thorpe said, “but then you came along. And I told him no.”

  I stopped, just stood there for a moment. Then I turned to him. I needed to see his face, to know if he was telling the truth.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I just want you to know the movie isn’t going to happen. And I’m not going to be talking about the book anymore. It’s what everyone wants to talk about when I do events—always that one, never the others. For the longest time, my ego has been living off that book. But I want you to know I’m finished with that.”

  I was leaning against the door frame. There was a crack on the wall across from me, stretching in a crooked diagonal from the ceiling, halfway down the wall, ending somewhere behind the desk. Every building in the city had them. The house I grew up in had them. Every time an earthquake hit, my mother would do a walk-through, looking for new telltale lines in the walls and floors. As a kid I’d been certain that one day, we’d get a crack so big the house couldn’t keep standing; it would just fall apart.

  “Why?” I asked Thorpe.

  “When I wrote that book, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I had tunnel vision. All I could see was my opportunity, my way out of teaching and into this thing that I wanted so much I could taste it. I wanted so desperately to be a writer, I forgot about everything else. So I guess this is my way of saying I’m sorry. Granted, it may be too late. But I mean it, Ellie. I’m sorry. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Thank you.”

  He was looking at me, as if there was more he wanted to say. I was grateful to him for not saying it.

  He walked me downstairs. Above the mantel was the Munkácsi photograph he’d told me about before—two men on a dark street, locked in battle, their arms wrapped around one another. The photograph was violent, yet somehow beautiful, full of life.

  In the entryway, something was different—the silence. In the dim streetlight that shone through the front window I could see that the fountain was empty, it had been scrubbed clean. Thorpe opened the door for me. Just as I stepped outside, he took my hand in his, pulled me toward him. I didn’t resist. I let him hug me, and for a second or two I hugged him back.

  As I was driving home, I thought again about what Thorpe had said all those years ago in class. Life isn’t just about the major characters and the big events. It’s about everyone, everything, in between.

  Thirty years from now, would I remember Jesus at the farm, Maria at the café in Nicaragua, my boss Mike? At thirty-eight, I could recollect the names of only three or four of the teachers I’d had in my life, and it wasn’t necessarily the best ones that stuck in my memory. I remembered Mrs. Smith from kindergarten only because she chewed with her mouth open, mean Mrs. Johnson from third grade only because her dresses always rode up too high on the backs of her puffy legs, my P.E. teacher from seventh grade only because she had once shamed me in front of my classmates for failing to catch a fly ball. I remembered the men I had slept with, but only by name; for the most part, details escaped me. I knew in the end that Thorpe would never leave my memory, nor would McConnell, or Frank Boudreaux.

  I wished I could go back in time and pose this question to Lila. Her short history was made up primarily of my parents, me, and Peter McConnell. Before that night when she ran into Billy Boudreaux at the Muni station, would she have bothered to mention him in her list of relevant people? It seemed unlikely.

  Heading down Clipper and across Castro, I found myself stuck on Thorpe. All through the conversation, I felt as if there was something more he had wanted to say. I put him off, thinking I already knew what it was—something about me, about us. But there, alone in the car, it occurred to me that perhaps it was something else entirely.

  “Red herrings,” he had said, “right?” Earlier, when I had first mentioned Billy Boudreaux’s name, he had smiled ever so slightly. Was it possible that he had known, all along, much more than he let on?

  I thought of that first address Thorpe gave me as we stood in his garage in the early morning—the innocent janitor, living out his final days in his modest house in Bernal Heights. Did Thorpe know it was a name that would lead nowhere? After that, though, it was Boudreaux and then Strachman. Was Thorpe thanking me for coming back each time? Was he thanking me for giving him a second chance? I was the one who had undertaken the search, but it was Thorpe who gave me the tools.

  He was still Thorpe. And yet, I had a hard time admitting to myself, in some essential way, he had changed. It had been twenty years. I’d always thought that people changed only in books, not in real life. But here was Thorpe—this living, breathing person doing something I never would have thought him capable of. After all this time, he had managed to surprise me.

  Thirty-nine

  IT WAS OCTOBER, THE TAIL END OF THE rainy season, and Diriomo was cool and wet, the whole town blanketed in orchids. I had arrived on a Tuesday morning, following an uneventful red-eye and a bumpy bus ride from Managua, and checked into my usual hotel. That afternoon, I would go to the co-op to taste some new samples. I had gifts for Jesus’s children—a book of bird illustrations for Rosa, a paint set for Angel. But first, there was someone I wanted to see.

  I changed into a sundress and sandals and set out on foot. On the makeshift baseball field, children were playing with sticks and an old tennis ball. Soon I was standing on the familiar doorstep, ringing the familiar copper bell. I h
eard shuffling from within, and Maria appeared, her gray hair draped over one shoulder in a long braid, tied with a yellow ribbon.

  “Welcome,” she said, smiling.

  The place smelled the same as it had three months before, when Peter McConnell walked up to my table and said, “Do you know who I am?” Then, as now, there was the salty-rich smell of frying pork, the deep aroma of coffee, the mild scent of cornmeal. But that night the place had been dark, lit only by candles. Now sun flooded in through the windows, illuminating the surprised faces of Maria’s porcelain dolls. The red curtain leading into the kitchen was pulled aside, and through it I could see Maria’s stove, drenched in sunlight.

  “What are you serving today?”

  “Nacatamal,” she said. “Está usted sola?”

  “Sí, señora. I am alone.”

  She shook her head and put a hand to her heart, as if it pained her to see me return, once again, in such a state. I sat at my usual table. Moments later, she brought coffee, then disappeared into the kitchen. I reached into my bag and took out Lila’s notebook.

  I had been over the notebook so many times, but each new perusal of it offered up some fresh surprise. This time, it was a tiny line of handwritten text pressed up close to the binding halfway through the notebook, so that the pages had to be forced open to read it. I brought it close to my eyes and struggled to make out the words. An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.

  Maria brought out the nacatamal. It was delicious, as always. When she came to clear away my plate, I asked her in my clumsy Spanish about the gentleman I’d met three months before in her restaurant.

  “Ah, sí, Señor Peter!” she said.

  “Sí,” I said. “Dónde vive?”

  She went to the kitchen and came back with a pen and a piece of paper, on which she drew a map. “Estamos aquí,” she said, pointing to a little square box with a stick figure of a woman standing in front of it. “Él está aquí.” She drew a circle around another box, which was connected to the first by a series of winding roads.