The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (21 page)

The lights were dimming and Alice, as if to rebel again at last, began to talk excitedly to her father and to her little daughter, who both shushed her loudly. Then the darkness became complete, and a teenage boy shouted and others laughed; and then suddenly the insectoid creature in the center of the room began to move, an angry god, pulling itself upright and spinning its multifaceted eyes to view them all. And then, as a dull voice began to speak of ancient times, across the whole great hemisphere of their vision came artificially, like dear false hopes, the stars.

Lydia stood in the faint spring rain, unable to believe what she saw. Perhaps she noticed the advertisement because she had never walked so slowly down this street before, though it was her own ginkgo-lined neighborhood in New York, and she had scurried through it countless times. This time she was in no hurry. She had left her place half an hour earlier for a quick pack of cigarettes, returned through the building’s broken front door, and reached her apartment to find her key didn’t work. Lydia stood there jiggling and coaxing the lock as she’d learned to do in so many apartments, knowing, after years of sublets, that there was a certain English to every copied key, but she finally stood back with the key in her tight fist, vanquished. She was not getting into this apartment, and it wasn’t because of any subtlety of the lock. With a smile, she realized that this was simply not her key. In her usual muddle, she must have grabbed one of her friends’ extras she had lying around, and here she was, a woman near the end of the century, foolishly locked out. Lydia opened her palm and stared at the key, astounded. What a tiny object to have altered her day so entirely. What a dull comic device.

It was a hopeless situation. Lydia had no secret key hidden anywhere. She had never befriended her neighbors. She had no money except the change from the cigarettes: two quarters and a dime, which might get her either a cup of coffee or two phone calls if she managed to remember anyone’s number, which she surely wouldn’t. She did not have her father’s mind for numbers; they flickered in black and white in the back of her brain whenever she tried to retrieve them, never to surface. The number of the boy she’d dated a month before, for instance, floated back there dimly—he might have an extra key, and would gladly help her—but her fading interest in him had made the number fade, so that only four wan digits remained. She knew it began with a five: five-three-two? It was hopeless—not that she had money for more than two phone calls anyway. And no umbrella against the rain, since she had left dressed only in sweats. No shoes— only slippers. No pockets. No tokens. No watch.

And this was going to be the day for her own work! This was going to be the day for art! She stood in that hallway, clenching the key in her fist, feeling the mouse-bite of its teeth, marveling at how life was turning out. It was always this way, always a joke. Great things—friends, trips, jobs—materialized for her out of the blue sky, unbidden, but whenever she longed for something, worked for it, no matter how minor and everyday, the world failed her. She would send a dress to the cleaners and the place would burn down. She would set a plate on a counter and the steampipe’s rattle would send it crashing to the floor. Some simple thing was wrong with her—she was a typewriter with a sticking key; she was a sorceress with a stutter.

But she had her art. Something to beg time for, something frustrating and thrilling all her own—a canvas and a photograph pinned to the wall beside it. Her tubes of paint. The idea, still forming, of what might happen there. Something her father would never understand.

What was there to do now? Plan some calls, find someone with an extra key. But surely the key in her hand wasn’t an office key; it had to be to someone’s apartment. And certainly someone who lived close by—what else would be the point of an extra key? So it was Kelly’s, or Angela’s, or her mother’s. Well, Lydia decided, turning in the hallway to descend the stairs, she might as well try them one by one. As she stepped outside into the rain, the day lost all its urgency and desperation; it seemed to widen before her. She lit her first cigarette: What a wonderful, unlucky pleasure.

It must have been her slow, pointless walk back down the street that made her notice the ad. Or her bored mind, which, having given up on her work, her calls, finally lay open to other interests. It could even have been something as simple as the bright pink-toned paper of the ad itself, or the slant of light through the clouds, or the awning of the travel agency which offered some protection from the rain which, Lydia realized, she would be suffering all day in slippers. But, looking back, Lydia would see herself at brokenhearted twenty-three and would believe it was deeper—that her future self had reached its bony arm through time, grabbed her young head and twisted it to look in the right place.

The ad itself was merely a photocopy taped to the inside of the agency window, an offer for the kind of tropical package tour that Lydia and her friends never could have afforded, nor would have desired. Five days, four nights in a hut in a remote island paradise. Seafood buffets, the traditional rice dance, snorkeling, drinks with the general. And then a photo of a set of palm trees on a beach, in the background a ruined building on a spit. There was no mistaking it— it was Bukit, the island of the comet.

Lydia found it hard to breathe. What had existed as a kingdom of mystery to her—a hot, dry place that seemed almost a figment of her imagination in her early youth, and then a sultry warren in her cynical adolescence—was now no mystery at all. It had become obvious, bourgeois; perhaps it had always been that and she’d never seen it. Her anger built without direction—she had turned into the kind of young woman whose emotions came strongly and then went nowhere, spreading like a slow flood before retreating. Lydia didn’t know where to aim her fury—whether at herself, for her own naivete, for taking those two sunny weeks of her life for granted—or at time, whose tide seemed to approach while her back was turned, soaking her childhood sandcastles until they lost their shapes and crumbled. Her mother, her father, her island. All gone, or changed. But it was easiest of all to be angry at the man mentioned in the insipid invitation to “drinks with the general.” She had heard about him, about the changes on the island that had surely invited this ad, and, finally, she had heard about the death of Ali Manday.

It was during what the newspapers called a “bloodless coup.” What that meant, Lydia believed, was that the sultan had not been killed. When the army entered the overlook where the potbellied sultan lay sunbathing, his mistress by his side, he must have felt the coolness of their shadows over him and known it was over: the centuries of his family’s rule, the despotism, the riches, the benevolent changes he himself had made to undo clerical law. Oil gleaming on his dark skin, he must have decided that if he could keep the palace, he would give them the island. Perhaps it felt something like relief—a family relic stolen, gone forever, nothing to worry over now. Half the island’s men were not as pleased; the military rule would mean a right-wing kind of freedom that many of the pro-American boys were unwilling to swallow. Virtuous, wrongheaded, it was hard to say. But there were protests, some strict, unwise decisions on the general’s part, and one night Ali found himself in the wrong place and got a bullet in his gut. His friends took him home, choking with blood, where his mother cleaned his face and wounds, wailing, and watched him die. It made no newspapers.

Lydia looked at the picture again. The beach, those palm trees, the stone house on the spit. Only six years before, she had made love to tawny Ali Manday in that building. “You’re so beautiful,” the teenage boy had whispered, grinning, eyes closed, at his good fortune, breathing heavily into her neck, “You’re so beautiful.” The rough feel of the reed mat on her back, the cool air the stone had trapped for them, the light coming through the keyhole in the shape of a chess piece. A few afternoons of rough sex, that was all, and now he was dead. Sweet Ali Manday. The beach, the trees, the house—what seemed most awful was that these things would live on so heartlessly, unchanged in this picture, betraying Lydia and Ali. The trees would not break in despair and rot away; the stones would not sigh and collapse. Some rich businessman and woman, in swimwear from a catalog, would walk hand in hand and believe they were the first to see that palm, that sand, that stone, that color in the sky.
Nothing is
yours,
Lydia thought angrily,
not any landscape or painting or word you speak. Nothing will remember you.

The island was still on her mind as she stumbled in her damp slippers, ignoring the lights at the intersections as she swore over the fate of Ali Manday and that spit of sand. People passed and she did not see them; storefronts blinked with lights but she did not notice; Lydia had even forgotten that she wore only sweats in the chill air, though she clutched the mysterious key tightly in her hand. She had not changed in all this time—her mind still sent her body forward like a torpedo while she dove deeper into her thoughts. She practiced a conversation with the general while two taxis on Seventh Avenue screeched and swerved around her. She was the same as the little girl who cut through a field of wet grass without noticing the green stains on her socks or the nests she crushed underfoot. A ghost passing through a wall. It was not mere dreaminess—it had never been that—rather, she looked like a scientist working out a formula. Lydia would have hated that, knowing she looked anything like her father.

They were very different people, now. It had come, of course, in both of them, with age. Swift had grown increasingly difficult, nervous from all the habits he had been forced to quit, weary from his research and terrified that his reputation would crack somehow. He tried to stay young, though, and this was the worst for Lydia because, while he was holding on to a younger version of himself, she was trashing everything about her youth, and could not stand it when he would appear in the basement with beer for her friends. Or his round, hairy body in the hot tub as he passed around a joint. It was the usual teenage hatred, but in Lydia it burned bright—she considered her life possessed by this demon, and she longed for an exorcism. It came in the strangest form: the return of her mother.

Altered, faded, sad, but free of madness, her mother began to call and invite Lydia and her sister Alice out for lunches, trying to undo those terrifying evenings they had spent while in her custody, the nights alone, or worse, when she woke them to hold them to her. Alice, already deep in college with a boyfriend, rejected her mother’s attempts, but Lydia readily accepted them. She did this because she’d been so young when her mother went mad, and therefore kept all her memories cloudy at the edges, still hopeful. But she also went because these meetings infuriated her father. Half an hour before she was to leave, Swift would begin to stomp around the house, shouting, almost weeping. Lydia felt such a conquest when she stepped out the door and drove away to seek her mother’s dimmed presence.

None of these events really tore the two of them apart. There was no particular scene, no one terrible phrase that shattered their affection. Instead, Lydia knew she and her father had grown distant in the way the stars grow distant—because of time’s simple expansion— and even this metaphor made Lydia wince. Her last few visits with him in Berkeley had produced no fights nor raised any deep issues, but each conversation frustrated her. For her, the main frustration revealed itself as her father’s too-literal mind. On a walk along a high hill, she would point out to the bay, saying how it looked like crumpled tinfoil, hoping to impress him with this line she’d heard in a play; but the old man always frowned, shook his head, saying that was nonsense. The bay was exactly what it was. Tinfoil? Lydia so often described life in these metaphors and vagaries, but Swift would not accept them; he wanted to know how it
really
was, and Lydia did not understand what he meant. They would see a movie, and as they exited the theater, she would talk about the characters with whom she identified. “Identify?” he frequently asked, stopping in the lobby. “You think you’re like those people?” She tried to explain how her life seemed similar in some way or another. “But they’re
French
!”
he’d insist, throwing out his arms. She showed her life to him in moments and impressions, but he could not see it. And she could not paint it any other way. Nowadays she was less worried by this blindness. They simply never spoke.

But Lydia did know what day this was. The ad had reminded her, but she would not have forgotten. It was a day taught sternly to her in her youth: the aphelion of Comet Swift. No, she remembered, not Comet Swift. It was now called Comet Swift-Manday. Everything was changing this way.

She lit her second cigarette. She was close to Kelly’s now, just two blocks away. The rain had increased and Lydia stuck close to the awnings, hiding the burning end of her cigarette in her hand. The rusty odor which had permeated the morning was gone, and even the usual scent of bread and garbage in her neighborhood had been flattened by the rain. All the windows in the Village were closing one by one against the downpour, and to Lydia the city seemed to curl into itself. The streets looked emptier, and the water which had previously drained away now stood deep and unmoving at every corner. People stopped at the intersections, working up the nerve to jump the puddles, and one such man lifted his head to look at Lydia. She did not see him at first; she felt his eyes on her skin, and turned in his direction to look: a handsome young man in an old-fashioned hat and coat, earrings in both ears, staring at her in the private way people do when they don’t expect you to notice. But she had noticed, and she felt surprise. That long bluish face staring out of the dim city. She felt as if the rain had cleared a space for her on the sidewalk, and she stood dry and bare for a moment before his eyes.

As soon as the young man realized she saw him, he turned away. He held his hat and leaped across the puddle; his coat flew out; he landed flat-footed and stumbled, glancing back to see if she’d noticed, then continued on down the street. She realized she was soaked through, from her sweats down to her slippers. She saw herself as pale, fat, drowned—what had he seen to make him turn? She ran for cover in a phone booth, holding herself and feeling the water in her clothes. It was funny; the boy had changed her slightly. Until she saw him, she hadn’t felt lonely all day.