The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (10 page)

Denise remembered Kathy’s smile, her wave in the mist of the airport. Had Kathy known? Surely not; she would have said something. She would have found a way out of having that awkward breakfast. What had he told her? What excuse could he possibly have provided for doing the unthinkable—switching not just advisers or courses of study but
programs,
slowing his Ph.D. process by two years—and all to move to England, across the world? Denise could imagine no scene in their bright dining room that might end with Kathy patting his hand and agreeing. She could only see a wife bewildered by her husband’s insanity. Because of course he couldn’t tell her the real reason for his flight: his sudden and strained love affair with Denise.

It had surprised them both, standing there on the overlook six years before, looking down at that broken body. Broken, twisted, with his legs curled in one direction and his head facing the wrong way, flattened and bloody on a rock. Arms out, hands in loose fists among the seaweed. People were running around and screaming below, but they kept at a distance because a snake was in the rocks, apparently, stiffly terrified beside the body. Denise could not see the snake, only the body lit by torches and the women’s faces streaked with tears as they were held back. Her hand crept along the wall until it touched another’s—Eli’s. He grabbed her hand and held it tight, and she looked up into his eyes. In each pupil, a little torch flickered. She read there:
I
understand, Denise, I’m the only one who understands.

Kathy left on a boat the next day, waving to them in the hot, pale air, and when the boat was far enough away, Eli told Denise to meet him down the beach in a few hours. He walked away; she was confused. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand being alone there in the hot sun. Her studies could not console her, nor her books; and even the image of her old lover Carlos’s lips, which she used to love so dearly, meant nothing now.
It’s not enough, it’s not enough.
So she did as Eli said. That afternoon, while the other astronomers slept, she made her way down the jungle path to the beach, where she found him waiting in the shade of a frangipani, nervous, as serious as death. They made love in an old stone hut on a spit, sun flowing through the keyhole in a chesspiece of light, only because it seemed the most natural thing to do. Life was in crisis, somehow; this was the shelter. She simply did as Eli said. They kept their eyes closed when they were together— kissing, lying beside each other—which made the time so different from their afternoons arguing at the college, standing in the shining hallways with cups of coffee, staring at each other, shouting. Eyes closed; this was a secret they kept even from themselves. In the hut, on the plane. And when Denise arrived back home, when her mother greeted her at the terminal with a bouquet of white roses, she was able to tell the woman that it had worked. The trick, the deal: Denise had forgotten all about Carlos, her old lover. Her mother was so pleased.

Denise very quickly brought it to an end. Not consciously, not intentionally; but somehow she found ways in their long hours together in class, under the telescope, to avoid moments alone with him. They had not spoken, on the island, like lovers—they’d made no admissions, no promises or confessions to each other; it was simply that they understood, they were the only ones who understood. And now Denise acted almost practically, living around the secret, the way a family in a war-torn land might live around a hole in the floor. Of course she could see the pain in Eli’s face, but it began to anger her, how obvious he was. She would come to dinner at the Spivaks, and every time Kathy left the room he would turn quickly to face her, staring, those eyes wide and full of meaning—but meaning what? That they had shared a little portion of death, of love? What was there to discuss?

One night, months after the boy’s death, he finally caught her alone. She heard a knock on the door and it was Eli in a trench coat, hair glistening with fog, whispering that he’d come over to talk. He had driven across Berkeley, late at night, to talk with her. He cleared his throat and she knew he had been practicing this in the car, that he had left Kathy alone with some excuse and practiced a speech in the car all this way. Denise had practiced nothing; she had stuffed the whole event—the broken body, the frangipani, the chesspiece of light—behind her sweaters in the closet. If she let him speak now, so prepared, he might convince her. So she interrupted him with a hand in the air.

“We don’t need to have this conversation,” she said.

“Listen, I want to say I’m sorry. I was so confused….”

She held the door halfway closed, talking in the narrow space. “I’m not, don’t worry.”

Eli shuddered, cold, “Denise, you were in shock. I don’t know…. I know I shouldn’t have done that. But I wanted to tell you….”

So this was the beginning of his speech. Apology, and then some rare admission. “We don’t need to have this conversation,” she repeated, feeling she had struck upon a phrase that might save her. Then she added: “I can’t afford it.”

He got almost angry, whispering, “Listen to me, listen to me….”

She shook her head without looking at him. “I’m the expert on this one. I’m the expert on married men. Go home, please,” she said. “Please.” Eli didn’t move, but stood there silently, as if he knew this was his great chance, that this was the only time they would speak of this while they were young, and so he stood there. She understood, as he must have, that it was just a crisis on an island, that they would not fall in love, that they would be fine; still some perfect combination of words might alter them both, open them to a terrible adventure. She could see his mind already searching for those words, tossing its net, catching them one by one. She could not let it happen; she could not bear it. So she talked through the moment. She killed it: “We don’t need to have this conversation. I’m fine. We’ll be fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Then Denise closed the door on him, turned off the light, walked to her kitchen to sit down at the table and put her hand over her mouth. She heard a car start up and drive away.
Two torches flickering in his pupils.
She sat there for a long time, hot and stiff in that placid light, before the sobs broke through her fingers.

The image that came to Denise’s mind, however, six years later at Swift’s party, was not Eli filled with longing in her doorway, or his checkered hat in the airport fog, or even some moment of him sunburnt and smiling on the island, lying on the beach with sand stuck to his naked body as he held her hand. He did not come to her that way. The moment the student mentioned his name, the man she saw was Eli as he had been when she first met him. It was after the male grad students had visited her on that awful “field trip" of theirs, after they had stood gazing awkwardly at her, shaking her hand, and left in a group full of nervous laughter. It was after they were gone, when she stood up to close the door, worried and upset, that Eli suddenly appeared in the hallway. “Are you Denise?” he asked, grinning. “The comet girl?” He gave her a few quick words of advice about Swift, then invited her to dinner with his new wife, who sat waiting out in the car. Slouched against the door frame, hands moving as his ideas flew everywhere, face goateed, hair long and curly and voice full of passion. A young Eli, anxious, exciting—a person who no longer, of course, existed.

Eli in the hallway. Eli standing on this slate patio, young and curly-haired, breathing chill air. How strange. She thought of him as a dead person.

“How are they?”

The student pulled herself into a batik bundle on the chair. “I didn’t see Eli, but Kathy was fine. She’s working for a publishing house over there, pretty cool stuff. It was a book conference I’m talking about here. I went with a guy I was dating,” she said, giving a cryptic smile.

“Kathy’s in British publishing now?” Denise pictured old Kathy in her pinched ponytail, laughing in the kitchen over frying potatoes. She tried to place a new life on the woman, like a paper dress folded over a doll—the professional sweater, the manuscript, the blue pen— but it kept refusing to fit.

“Oh yeah,” the student was saying, looking around toward Swift, who turned his sweet-smelling kabobs with a flourish. “She’s doing great. Good overseas job, no kids.”

“A real woman of the seventies.”

The student laughed. “I don’t know about
that.
…” she said, grinning, and Denise got the impression that women like Kathy were too old to represent this decade.

“And what about Eli?” Denise asked, although she had to turn away because her son was fidgeting, awake and anxious. She had a sense that he was hungry.

The woman looked confused. “Job at Tech. You know they’re moving back here, don’t you?”

But then the baby began to cry, loudly, and Denise cooed and tended to him. His face was red and sorrowful, wadded in anguish, the tiny fists beating the air, and something in his cry resounded in her. As if she had a taut wire running from her skull right down her spine, and he had plucked it. She stroked his face and talked low, whispering
Look at you, look at you, look at you.
Denise brought out her breast into the cold air for him to feed at. She did not notice the graduate student sitting quietly, fascinated, then gathering her drink and leaving. She did not see her husband, his cigarette extinguished, watching her. Or Dr. Manday, leaning against a tree in the darkness, doing the same. They were all gone, and Kathy was gone, and Eli, who had so suddenly flourished in her mind like a flower taken for dead, was gone. Her son was here. If you asked, she would tell you that this was the great change in her life. She would say she was a different person now, a mother. All old grief was in the past.

Except—those evenings when she would sit in the darkness of their living room, in an old rocking chair, listening to her husband upstairs washing her son. Then she would think,
There’s time.
Time yet for another life, after this one. At forty, at fifty.
Little torches flickering in his pupils.
Then, ashamed, she would hide the image in that room where no one else would ever find it.

Denise was whispering to her son:
Look at you, you’re wonderful.
It was as if she had a lapel-full of old medals, her old hopes for herself, tarnished things. It was as if she were unclasping them one by one from the past, wiping them clean, pinning them bloodlessly onto the future—onto him.

The last twilight flickered and moved west, and, with the growing chill of the air, people moved inside to eat. Swift handed off his tongs to other husbands and men who stood in threes around the grill, drinking and shivering and laughing. Inside, they were balancing paper plates on their laps, eating the greasy shish kebabs with food other people had brought: three-bean salad, pasta, a Julia Child recipe for quiche. Swift told some of his stories about science in the Sputnik years, about his Communist parents and his own fear of being discovered, and people sat and listened because it seemed, in his words, so long ago they needn’t fear it anymore. There was so much new to fear. Adam was sitting with the baby, smoking another cigarette in the living room, listening to the long, dull travails of some bald astronomer. Denise was off with the women in the kitchen, mixing drinks. Lydia sat on the floor with a girl of five or six, explaining, with growing frustration, about sex. Time passed, falling like the darkness in veils around their feet. The bats left the barn and wandered drunkenly in search of insects. The coals in the grill died and turned to ash.

Out near the orbit of Jupiter, the comet, which had been moving more and more slowly each hour, measured in yards now, now feet, inched to a cold point in space and held still for a moment. Every other object in the universe seemed to continue its task, spinning or dying or blasting fire into the void, but this lattice of ice held still. It had not been in this place since 12.2 years ago, and (though no one on Earth knew this) it was not an old comet; had only come around twenty times since it was first caught in orbit. To human eyes, it would seem to catch its breath. Distant rocks were falling toward the sun’s gravity well; far away, a bright blue star was being born within a cloud. The moment passed, the aphelion, and slowly the rock began to move back toward Saturn, gaining speed each instant, already growing warmer for the time, six years from now, when it would race through the inner solar system, a white tail burning behind it. It moved, the dead thing, coldly toward them.

The wind changed in northern California, bringing warm air up to Sonoma, surrounding the farm, brushing the field’s long hair. The guests, done with eating and (the older ones) feeling slightly guilty about what they ate and how much, broke from their clusters and reassembled in groups of two or three, wandering into the gardens and the abandoned tennis court, walking quietly and softly and talking more honestly now under a bright moon which, with the hour and the warm air, had appeared. With it had come all of the stars.

Dr. Manday sat on a low stone wall, searching for his cigar. A moment before it had been in his hand. A moment before he had been so happy, full of red wine, talking to the little girl and puffing at his cigar, and now they were all gone—his glass was missing, the girl was gone, his hand felt light and empty. Had he missed something? Had he jumped forward ten minutes and lost them all? He turned right and then left, peering in the dark bushes for where he might have dropped his smoke, but, strange for an astronomer, he could see nothing glowing down there. He could smell it—the earthy chocolate odor of it—but where could it be?

It was resting a foot away on the wall where he had put it just the moment before. The end was burning away, turning the tobacco into collars of white ash; in a minute or two, it would burn enough to topple into the very bushes Manday was searching. That had not yet occurred.

But the girl was back, and with her, the wine. Life was wonderful again.

“Here you go. Is this okay?” she was asking, offering the full glass with both hands.

He received it like a chalice, saying, “You are a joy. You are a terrible joy.” He must have asked her to refill it. As he watched, the liquid tilted inside and left dark elliptic rings that turned to droplets, running down in lines—a subtle and beautiful effect. “A joy.”