The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (20 page)

“Visiting the island?” she asked him at last. It turned out his name was Nasur.

He shook his head and the curls of his black hair, down to his ears, trembled. He exhaled his cigarette smoke and said, “No, I live there my whole life.”

“So … hmm … maybe this is your first time away.”

He looked at her, his wrists resting on the railing, hands dangling, smoke being pulled away by the wind. “First time for a person of my family,” he told her, but again without emotion.

She said quietly, “You don’t seem excited.”

“My family asked me to go,” he said, and then, seemingly embarrassed by this confession, he walked away to another part of the boat. Within a few minutes, he had returned, crumpling the little paper cup and standing again at the railing, wrists crossed, hands dangling. She asked him, this time, about the shadow doctors she’d heard of on the island, and he nodded, smiling, telling of the time when he was a little boy with a fever and his mother brought him to a shadow doctor, and the man had stood him naked in front of a bright lantern (though now they used electric) and let his shadow fall clear and dark onto a white mat. The old, awkward, grasshopper-like man sewed and cut at the mat for an hour, at the shadow, of course, then sent the boy away. He was cured.

“I don’t believe in it,” he added. “But I remember.”

Slowly, over the ride to the main island, with the minutes passing now beneath them rapidly, foaming in the wake as they watched, she had him tell her more about his family. Kathy did it carefully, as one would remove a tick. This was her old favorite hobby back again, a patient one, which now worked only on the very young. Nasur mentioned a few more times that his family had “asked him to go,” and she could tell, through the repetition, that he really meant that they had sent him away. He had done something awful, and they had sent him away. Over the rest of the crossing, Kathy thought she guessed at what he’d done.

“You have beautiful nails,” she said, smiling for the first time that night, keeping her lips tight over her teeth. “And necklace.”

He leaned over, embarrassed again, staring at his nails. “I think in the world I need to cut them?”

She shook her head, saying, “No, keep them. They’re beautiful. Girls will be envious. See,” and here she held her hands out, plain and pale, “mine are chewed away.” He did indeed look at her hands, interested, then showed her his own, shining in the light above them, each slightly brown, translucent, curved like a little sword.

One of those ideas was creeping over her just now, just as she held her hand against that of the young man: Eli would have an affair tonight. Perhaps that was why she had leaned uncharacteristically against the stern rail of a ship, pink shawl-fringe flapping, in this sentimental pose, searching the darkness for a sign of what she supposed. They had talked, theoretically with friends, about affairs and the foolishness of marriage, but she knew, although some couples had tried out alternatives, that for them it was just talk. Yet somehow she also knew he wanted one. Not even sex (though clearly all men wanted that, always), but some intellectually pleasing affair. Something in a rented garret in a major city—not L.A., but San Francisco. Kathy thought a man could have an affair so easily in San Francisco. An affair with Denise—because she had assumed for some years now that she and Eli had slept together back in ’65 when they first watched this comet come around and the boy had died, on that wild trip to the island when they were young and nervous, when Denise clearly had such a crush on her husband. And he on her, of course, one of the blond goyim. She remembered how lovely they both had been in ’65, and she recalled the breathtaking view from the overlook—the moonlight on the beach, and the fireflies. Who, at twenty-five, wouldn’t succumb?

So perhaps thirty-seven wouldn’t be so different. It worried her, made her afraid, but also somehow pleased her, to think that tan Denise and schlumpy Eli could have their steamy island moment once every twelve years, on the occasion of this comet’s return. It was one of her pet ideas. To think of them each, guiltily, terribly, looking forward for
twelve years
to that evening when they would be left alone in one of those see-through huts. She was almost happy to give that to him, even if it was purely imaginary; to give him the shivering adolescent expectation, even more than the adultery itself; to give him a little something to look forward to. She didn’t believe that they were lovers at home, during their comet-hunting on that hillside. That would have been too much. Kathy tortured herself with the idea for a while; here was one of her more fascinating, nastier pets: it bit.

She looked at Nasur, at his black curls, his left foot held sideways in memory of some dance, his girl’s hands. She knew that she was right about him. It was more than shame, though, that sent him away from his island. She learned this as he began to tell her the truth about his life. Nasur, head low as he watched her, told her that after shaming his family, after some discovery down on a dark beach, they had not merely asked him to leave. His father and mother had sat him down one night alone and handed him a leather bag with all the family’s fortune, weeping, begging him to go away.

“So I am very rich now,” he told her, grinning, then cautiously, “Don’t tell a person!”

“I won’t tell anybody. You get a whole new life! It’s kind of lucky,” she said, seeing he would believe this easily. She wondered what it must have felt like in that hut, seeing the bag of coins weighed against your childhood, and what a young man like him would do with a fortune, how he could possibly approach the world. She wondered if he imagined what was in store for him, or if it still felt like an extension of his former life. Did he, like her, want that old life to be done?

“The first thing I do I buy a car,” Nasur told her seriously. “A Cadillac.”

What was it her husband had said when she got on the boat tonight? “I hope I’m doing the right thing.” He had bent his long face down to hers, all eyebrows and shadows, and she had put her arms around his thick, comfortable body and held him and he had said, “I hope I’m doing the right thing.” What was it he was doing? Letting her go on this trip away from him? Or was it something else she hadn’t seen until now?

Nasur was nodding, his black curls shining, and he was still talking to her: “On the main island, with a Cadillac, a servant and …” Here he trailed off. “They give me … twenty thousand rupees in the bag,” he said, raising his eyebrows like someone impressed with something you have told him. Then he spread his mouth in a grin, holding his long-nailed hands against his neck, closing his eyes, imagining it.

“How much is that?” she asked.

Nasur turned, as if just noticing her, and said: “Much. That is, I think, seven hundred dollars.”

Seven hundred dollars. Kathy smiled and kept her face clear of emotion. She said nothing; she felt terrified of life. She thought,
I miss Eli, I want him here, I can’t help this boy, I can’t help him.
But time was moving too quickly; under the boat, away from her, like scarves ripped from her body. Plans were moving forward. A streamer passed over a star, and another—the meteor shower was beginning. Oh, they must be side by side now in their folding chairs, her husband and that woman, lying back to face the fires above them. Perhaps the sight would be enough for her poor husband. The meteors were coming faster now, brilliant, a few sharp teeth of night’s violet panther appearing as it paused, stretching its velveteen back, yawning for the public, quickly retreating into its black leaves. Below, head back in his chair, breath shuddering in his chest, he might pause and gasp at such a thing. He might. But the hand of a woman who does what she likes, one warm hand meeting a thigh, and a man’s gaze is brought down even from the sight of falling stars. Oh, the heavens hardly matter.

Her hand trembling, Kathy begged a cigarette from the young man. There was nothing to be seen of the island now, and they smoked together from the stern, watching the stars come loose and drop into the sea.

I feel rather at a disadvantage in speaking of

comets to you; comets nowadays are not what

they used to he.

—Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1909

Manday could not be forgiven.

Martin Swift slowly climbed the sandstone steps of the planetarium, lifting each leg stiffly like a traveler abroad making his astounded way through the mud. He had a cane, but it was no help at all, and neither, he believed, was his daughter Alice, who kept a firm grip on his left cane-arm, nor his granddaughter Benedicta, who pulled on his right middle finger. Swift felt that the two females made this trip up the steps much harder than it needed to be; it was the famous Three-Body Problem. This astronomical issue states that while the Newtonian calculation for one body in space is simple, and while that for two bodies interacting (such as Earth and the Moon) is only somewhat harder, the equation for three bodies and their differing gravities is so infinitely difficult that it can’t be done. The math was the same for this left-hand woman in her pink college sweatshirt and fresh perm, this right-hand beribboned little girl proudly scuffing her “party" shoes, and the rough old mountain swaying in between. Any astronomer would have thrown down his mechanical pencil in despair. The way Professor Emeritus Martin Swift paraphrased it under his breath was,
We’ll never get to the top of these fucking stairs.
And Manday could not be forgiven.

It was only ten steps, however, to the planetarium entrance, a beautiful dark square set in an enormous carved scallop, so that each visitor got to be a Venus skidding along the foam, surrounded on all sides by fanciful, engrossing and inaccurate portraits of the constellations of the zodiac. It was a wealthy neighborhood down on the flat, sandy marina of San Francisco, with views of the bridge and the Golden Gate and the lumpy green anatomy of Marin across the water. It was beautiful—a lake, swans, willows planted long ago in the twenties when it seemed they could build nothing wrong in this city, but now the houses here seemed wan and faded beneath the translucent day, rain-streaked, as if this part of town were the skylit back room of some museum, hung with glorious time-darkened masterpieces in need of restoration.

Swift was here because he had promised for years to take his granddaughter Benny to this place. Actually, he had promised Alice. The last five years had been full of promises to Alice, who, after years of therapy, had shed fifty pounds and returned to his life with a bag of issues to be worked out between them, like those stories of mailmen ringing doorbells and then dropping canvas sacks on old ladies’ porches, sacks of undelivered love letters sent forty years before by their dead husbands in the war. He was forever rifling through Alice’s bag, finding some new wrong to right, or some event that his daughter clearly misremembered. One particular note—
You were never there for us, Daddy
—twanged such a wire within him that almost every weekend he pulled himself out of his retired torpor to bring joy to his grandchild. His divorce from their mother, the ink on the papers dry now for fifteen years, felt to Martin Swift like a gambling debt that he would never stop repaying. That’s marriage, he thought, that’s being a father. Never trust a comet or a woman.

Martin Swift could not see the zodiacal friezes he was approaching at the planetarium entrance; he could not see mud-bellied swans stepping from the water; when his granddaughter let go of his finger and ran ahead to where a man sold piñatas and balloons, he quickly lost sight of her and simply knew, from his calculations, that she must be somewhere in that hazy cotton-candy nebula of color. Despite all the last-minute precautions of his sixties (the diet, the abstinence from smoke or drink), and his own indomitable will not to grow old, the diabetes that forever haunted his family had caught up with him as well—the Hound of the Baskervilles, he called it, as in “The fucking Hound has me by the throat today.” Professor Emeritus Martin Swift would find himself standing in dark lecture halls, dizzy, unable to see anything of the slide projected on the screen, his mouth still reciting the lecture he had been giving for over forty years:
Note how the hot star in the center excites the interstellar dust and causes it to glow….
The mind whirs on, the mind whirs on.

Old age had fallen on Martin Swift from the trees, when he had built the strongest fortifications against it on all sides. It was unfair; it was the most terrible unfairness of the century, because he
wasn’t
old. He was only seventy! He was only seventy, with hair thick on his head, a fearsome singing voice, and the stomach (but not the chance) for ten whiskeys a night. He had ideas; he had plans to travel; he was a senior project designer of a European spacecraft which, in three years, would take photographs of Halley’s Comet on its way around again. Photographs! Of Halley’s Comet! He had done this! And yet now, bent over in a chair, he would sit in the meadow near his Sonoma farm and have his granddaughter point him north so he could describe the sky for her, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Serpens, because he could no longer see the stars himself. He suspected, sometimes, on those summer nights, he suspected that she pointed him the wrong way, or put him under cloudy skies, merely fascinated to see the old man perform his useless art beneath a dark, blank sky.

But Martin Swift, more than just growing weak and blind with his disease, had fallen into that invisible trap of age which he had always avoided so cautiously before. At seventy he believed the world to be proceeding strangely, badly, coldly. He no longer found anything good in what was new, in the tin, sickly music of the eighties, the candy-shop fashions, the politics that brought out the young communist in him once again: Reagan, MX missiles, Lebanon—it could hardly be believed. Sixty years after Emma Goldman, twenty after King, and Swift felt nothing had been accomplished in the world. The world no longer seemed about him: Martin Swift, who never used to look back for a moment, who used to be impossible to get a childhood story from, now openly longed for bygone days. And not just the days when he was still vibrant, still “with it,” in the seventies or even the sixties. Martin Swift, struggling up the last step with a roar of triumph, fell into the past deeply, as a weary traveler might into a soft, white bed. He longed for the twenties, the thirties, pieces of that era. He had become a creature of the past.

“Benny, you hold your grandfather’s hand,” his daughter was saying. Swift watched the blurry interactions of the woman and the cashier, hearing children’s voices dropping like coins all around him, and motherly whispers, and the crowlike barking of teenagers coming in a crowd behind him. Teenagers frightened Martin Swift a little, although he hid it, angry at himself. He felt his granddaughter’s hand in his even as he heard her complain that his palm was hot.

“You’ll live,” he told her, turning to face the vague flower of his daughter’s face. “Make them give me my ridiculous discount.”

“And one senior.”

“One senior astronomer!” he thundered, with no further explanation for the people who turned their heads. Martin Swift felt the little girl pulling him along toward deeper darkness. He was very fond of her, but he thought sometimes that little Benedicta treated him like a pet gorilla. “Where’s Benedicta?” he teased, gazing around in blind mockery of himself.

“I’m here!”

“Where’s Benedicta?”

“I’m here!” he heard her say, a little frightened, and he grabbed her roughly so she laughed. They were in the planetarium proper now, a huge, brightly lit room where the professor could make out at its center the machine that would produce the stars, that monstrous many-eyed insect, asleep and glistening.

Martin Swift wanted his granddaughter to ask him questions, plague him with her worries, her concerns as she found her little world growing unbelievable—he was waiting for the moment when tiny Benedicta with her froth of lemon hair and agate eyes would look at a dark fizzing soda and think,
What are those bubbles, why doesn’t water bubble, why doesn’t air bubble?
Grandpa Swift even had a simple, elegant answer for questions about the color of the sky, and he kept it ready in a soft box like a present of a ring. But Benedicta never asked. Not questions like those. She worried about her friends and why they couldn’t come, or why Daddy had to leave or why she wasn’t allowed to go running down to the water. Her face would fold over and darken, but never did he see it smooth and bend in curiosity. In fact, little Benedicta had almost a horror of the inner workings of things—she would recoil if her tape player were opened to replace a battery, and she regarded her father’s dark basement workshop with its gray TV tubes, circuit boards and unwired transistors as an abattoir. Perhaps it would pass. Perhaps, though, his eldest daughter (her dreidel-shaped head turning a knowing facet toward him as she indicated the plush crimson seat where he was to sit) had poisoned little Benny against curiosity, against her father’s decades-long armchair babbling. Hadn’t even his younger daughter, Lydia, the one time she had flown over from New York for Thanksgiving— hadn’t she, in the middle of a riveting discussion of nuclear power, thrown down her napkin in heart-rent despair to proclaim,
You’re nothing, Daddy, but one of those intellectuals!
What did she mean,
those
intellectuals? Were there others she preferred? And if Alice felt the same, wanted her little girl to think like a picture book ("the stars are flowers in the sky!”), then why take her to a planetarium, a carved temple for the city-bound and curious? There was no understanding people, Martin Swift decided, settling onto his narrow cushion, ignoring the sticky armrest, grinning at a blurry child’s face turned hind-to from the seat before him. People, Swift thought, like Indian gods, came at you every minute in a different form.

“Daddy,” his elder daughter was asking him, leaning over little Benny, coming close because she knew her father’s eyes, and tried to enter his sphere of vision when she talked to him, emerging now from the darkness as a gum-pink mouth and a chin knife-sharp from dieting, “Don’t be shy. You shout out if they make a mistake. These recordings are probably ten years old.”

Martin Swift laughed. “I hope they tell us Mars has jungles, like they used to. Ones that flourish when the ice caps melt. But I can’t shout that out in a crowded room!” he added, teasing, putting on a crotchety old-movie voice: “
By God, man, it’s a lie!”
He guffawed again at the image. “There’ll be a panic!”

He saw Alice’s smile wax in a crescent before she moved away into obscurity again, talking in a kind, girlish voice to her child. He liked Alice, certainly more now than when she’d been a sluggish, angry teenager escaping from her boarding school to run off with boys and scratch initials into her arm. Clearly she’d had some private vision at the age of twenty-four (perhaps a bad trip with that boyfriend whom she now called only Final Straw) that transformed her into this new woman: a careful mother, a good cook, a part-time administrator in an old age home (a job that terrified Martin Swift). Alice seemed happy at last, trim and comfortable in her jeans and sneakers, beautiful now in a practical way, and dewy and frost-blond as a Chablis. Martin Swift was grateful for the change, and liked her; yet somehow she irritated the hell out of him.

It was Lydia he missed. He would not have told anyone; he would not have let himself think it, but he missed her. He missed her as a little girl asleep on the overlook as his comet burned overhead and stars fell around her. He missed her as the devoted daughter who chose him over her mother, who went to trial and wept because she chose him. He missed the questions she asked, because in them she showed the same curiosity he’d had as a boy. Not exactly the same, of course, but in a different form—questions about color and living things. He did not know why she was gone. There were fights, and years of distant smiles and brief telephone calls, but mostly what he remembered was that line:
You’re nothing, Daddy, but one of those intellectuals!
That laughable phrase stayed with him, ached inside him like flak from an old battle. He felt that some clue to their estrangement must lie in that angry statement, but it was beyond him. Wasn’t she an intellectual? He didn’t often think of it, but he wanted her near him. Instead Alice was near. It turns out that you don’t end up with the people you really love; by definition, you end up with the ones who stay.

It’s the price for having only daughters,
Swift thought to himself, looking down at the next feminine generation beside him, clicking the heels of her shoes on a seat-back.
They’re smarter, but sons are easier all around.
The teenage boys were shouting at some girls across the aisle from them, lobbing their voices over the crowd, outdoing each other, speaking harmless nonsense in a fight to appear brave and handsome. Swift heard them, pictured what they looked like and two painful thoughts attached to the moment like photos clipped to a line to dry. The first was of Lydia at that age, loud and argumentative, wearing a baseball cap, but he hastily put that image aside. The second took its place: Professor Emeritus Martin Swift, just yesterday while visiting his old office in a false search for important papers, had heard from the secretary that Manday’s son Ali was dead.

The news had turned the old professor rigid in the office, standing with a misty can of soda and a pencil. The sincere sadness in the woman’s voice, the tilt of her head and eyes when she said it, prefacing it all with a regret she had to be the one to tell him—it was all a challenge to his mind. Fate had brought this as a test, not for Manday, but for Martin Swift. Because of course the father couldn’t be forgiven, no matter what. There had been a coup on the island, a year before; the sultan had been toppled, rebels had taken to the trees—all this Swift had already known. But little tawny Ali Manday dead. He had sat by him on that night, laughing as they caught the meteors together like bugs in a jar—yet it didn’t matter. Manday couldn’t be forgiven. Nothing could stir a friendship once entombed.

Three years before, the Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams had discussed, as a last item of a meeting, the name status of P/Swift, also known as comet 1953 d, 1953 II, 1965 III, 1977 II; also known as Comet Swift. Apparently, a petition had been brought to the bureau containing information regarding the 1953 discovery of that comet and the calculation of its period and return. The petition had been prepared by none other than retired Professor Hayam Manday, and it had been granted. P/Swift was forever dead; now in the skies, innocently burning, there would only be P/Swift-Manday. Martin Swift had found this out only through a clipping left anonymously on his desk, under an abstract paperweight. Swift had put on his thick lenses, lifted the heavy stone and read (marked by a red circle, like a tick bite) the bureau’s cold correction and its author. Ah, he’d thought, you cannot keep your kids from dying.