The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (24 page)

BOOK: The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel
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Eli got a call one Saturday afternoon while Kathy was off at a violin lesson. This was a new fascination of hers, since she had learned the violin as a child but, through lack of money and her own adolescent stubbornness, had given it up too early. Her forties brought her a kind of mission: to eradicate regret. The violin lessons were part of this—as were plans for closer contact with her sisters, with other details of her past that she was saving from the trash and reestablishing in her life. Kathy had just left and would be gone for hours, so Eli sat peacefully alone in the house, aware that he would soon leave this place, noticing the canisters of flour and sugar that soon, if he so chose, would no longer be his. Or they might be his and Denise’s. He could rearrange it all. This was 1978, five years before.

The call came.

“Eli, it’s Adam. I’m actually in town and wondered if you wanted to get lunch.”

“Well,” Eli said. “I’ve had lunch, and there’s some work I’ve been doing….” This reaction wasn’t unreasonable, since the Lanhams came down to L.A. often enough, and so meeting up wasn’t essential. Eli thought he could shrug it off this time.

But Adam would not let him go: “We need to have lunch. I need to talk to you.”

They met at a Jewish deli that made heart-shaped cookies filled with chocolate. Adam was already there when Eli arrived, and he looked very much the part of a writer: polo shirt, rumpled tweed jacket, thick sunglasses and a dazed, uneasy look. He never looked like this; he usually dressed carefully, like a younger man, and while Eli had often thought he looked foolish, this disheveled look was worse. Adam seemed as though he had not slept for many nights. They shook hands, sat down, ordered coffee and a sandwich for Adam, and then the man said what he had come all this way to say.

“Denise is having an affair.”

Eli tried very hard not to change his face, and not to appear to be trying so hard. He breathed very deeply in order to appear serene, yet he had panicked at the last word. He could imagine Adam finding out about the affair—he could even imagine Adam’s fear and desperation—but the man was so passive and shy. Eli would have expected poison in his coffee before this kind of confrontation. So Eli sat perfectly still while he thought of what to do next.

Adam took a weary sip of his coffee, staring and telling him, “I know, Eli. I know all about it.”

All Eli could think of was to ask a question: “Did Denise say something?”

“No,” Adam said, dismissing that as impossible. Yet it had occurred to Eli that Denise might treat her love affairs as methodically as her experiments. Adam shook his head. “No, of course not, but now it’s so obvious. I found letters.”

“Letters?” Eli asked. This made no sense; there had been no letters. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s that old boyfriend. She’s been seeing Carlos.”

Eli laughed. It came too loudly, out of relief, out of vanished fear, out of the giddy sensation of deep memory shooting suddenly to the surface of the brain. There was so much to worry about, so many sharp objects in that dark drawer in which Adam was rummaging, that it seemed ridiculous to have come up with Carlos. Eli laughed so loudly that Adam looked concerned, sad and almost angry. Eli swallowed the laugh and tried to calm himself. He had escaped disaster, and he had to hide it. He apologized, twice, patting Adam’s hand.

He said, “Oh no—God—Adam, there’s no way! It’s … I can’t tell you … listen, I met the guy.” Eli still knew to form his words very carefully, acting the role of a friend giving abstract advice instead of a man with intimate knowledge. “I met him, and I remember, and there’s no way. Carlos? He was an idiot. She didn’t give a shit about him. And that was, what, fifteen years ago?”

Adam would not accept this humorous attitude. Something in him seemed to bristle with anger. He said, “Thirteen. I asked her.”

“You confronted her?”

“Of course not,” he said, this time bitterly. “But you’re wrong, Eli. I know it sounds stupid. Like she wouldn’t be that stupid. But it’s more than letters.”

Eli smiled, waved the idea away. “Your hunch.”

“No, I saw them together.”

It took a moment for Eli to realize what had been said. It was ludicrous—he had been with Denise two weekends before, on that hillside under a quilt, whispering together.

“I don’t believe it.”

Adam told him a story about how he had followed her one night and seen them together going into a movie theater, laughing like adolescents. He had bought a ticket for himself and entered after the movie began, listening for her voice, finding the two of them near the side of the theater, huddled close together. He sat two rows behind and watched them kiss and pet—his wife, nearly forty, and this handsome, ludicrous man from her past—until, after half an hour, he could take no more and left. When she returned home, Denise claimed she had been at the office, looking over Eli’s photographs from their comet hunt. There was no doubt.

“I don’t believe it.”

“But I do. I was there. Eli, you’re my friend—what do I do now?”

But Eli had nothing to say. It seemed as though someone had taken the sun’s lamp and flipped it over, shedding some harsh new light on the images that he thought he knew by heart: that night when the boy fell from the overlook, his time in England, the chill midnight of the comet hunt when she touched his shoulder, the humid evening on the island and all the other nights since then. He did not want to talk to Adam anymore, confront his guilt, comfort the man he’d wronged. He wanted to sit alone and rifle through her looks and phrases. He wanted to test each day scientifically, dip it into strong solutions that would reveal its composition, as if the days were beakered powders sitting by the dozens on a rack. He needed time to do this; he no longer wanted to be here. Somewhere far away a store alarm went off and rang dimly through his thoughts.

Adam rambled on: “If it’s just sex, I don’t care. That’s all right with me. But I don’t want to lose her.”

“Of course you don’t,” Eli said automatically.

“I’ve … I’ve had my own, you know … it’s not like I’m perfect. …”

Eli looked up, briefly distracted from his log of days. Adam’s own affairs! It had never occurred to him; nor to Denise, he supposed. But yes, Adam in a motel room with a student, a young poetess with suede boots and fluffy hair, Adam approaching her tentatively in the dark room, lit only by the louvered glare of streetlamps. Adam’s own desires, Adam’s own mistakes. He wished he had known this before.

The image passed, though, and it was replaced with a similar scene of Denise and Carlos, and in Eli’s mind his rival stood unaged, still twenty-seven or so, grinning like a young married man. Denise and Carlos. It was absurd, but not impossible. She had been so silent on the island, making no promises. He began to feel for doubt in his chest, like a patient searching for a tumor, and there it was: the hidden sense that Denise wasn’t sure about him. A few weeks before, on a comet hunt, she had even told him how good she was at lying. “Oh, but I’m a very good liar,” she’d said. The ridiculous idea was growing, second by second, into a possibility. Denise and Carlos. Eli tried to phrase his questions well.

“You really think she’s going to leave you for Carlos?”

Adam stared intently, asking, “Do
you
think so? Do you think she’d leave me?”

“Maybe I should talk with her.”

But Adam would not let him. He insisted that this was his problem, his marriage; and he wanted, he supposed, simply to tell someone who would understand, who remembered Carlos and what he’d meant to her once. “She’s so logical,” Adam said, “but I think that makes people… I don’t know… so sentimental somehow. It’s weird, you know? But he was the one. He was the first. It made a great difference in her life, I guess.”

Eli paid for lunch. He had the waitress bring them the famous cookies and for the first time Adam showed a little pleasure, closing his eyes and licking at the chocolate. It almost seemed to Eli that the funny man had forgotten—he could be so easily transported while Eli, his tongue numb, turned the conversation over and over in his head like a child’s puzzle, finding in its many sides new horrors.

It began there. The snap of some tiny electric spark that started the whole heavy machinery moving counterclockwise in his chest. It would take days for Eli to understand what Denise’s rumpled husband had told him over lunch. Only a week later, he would have it confirmed—by an unwitting Kathy, of all people—that indeed Denise had run into Carlos three months ago, on the street, and had mentioned him happily a few times. After two weeks, doubts would solidify, silently, still without evidence, into unscientific certainty as he lay awake in anger, deciding whether to say something or to simply let her go. Then a month would pass, and by that time, with another comet hunt approaching on the weekend, Eli would be changed, chill and resolute. He would sit in his plastic chair at dawn and bury his lover in stones.
We don’t need to have this conversation,
he would repeat to himself that night, somehow satisfied.
We don’t need to have this conversation.

Eli sat in the deli after Adam left. The distant store alarm rang rhythmically in his head, endlessly turning. His heart was slowing down, gently, pedaling to the stop where it rested for a moment. Then it began to spin in the other direction. The terror and freshness of that moment had a beauty to it. Not often in a life can one point to a scene and shiver, remembering all the ways things might have gone. Eli put the cookie in his pocket and stood up to leave. His mind could not shake the alarm, not for hours and hours, and he was still filled with doubt and worry over how his heart had turned. This was five years ago, though; by 1983, it was all over and done.

Four and a half million miles away, the dark, icy shard of debris was falling slowly away from them all, on a curve toward a globular star cluster, but slowing every minute, shifting by degrees to imitate, though tilted far below them, the orbits of the planets. The planets were hundreds of millions of miles farther still, just discs of light, eggs hidden in the deep black field. No constellation was visible; the stars had been thrown into the junk drawer and pulled out again tangled, glittering, and nothing made a sound as the rock rotated opposite the sun. Dust came in a haze from its surface. It began a slow freefall again, but this side of its orbit became stretched out by Jupiter’s nearby mass, like the pulled string of a bass, so that its approach became erratic. This was not a unique moment. Millions of other stones and icy balls also were falling through space, also hissing near the sun, also becoming cold flares. This was happening everywhere.

If you turned Earth in your hand, you could see the hemisphere of darkness rotating behind the movement of the Sun. Turn it, and you could see the lights of New York City coming on, one by one, in the late afternoon, and Lydia sipping a beer. She had found the place where her ex-boyfriend tended bar, and, after debating the wisdom of this choice, squeezed the rain from her hair and walked in to see him washing glasses. He loaned her dry clothes, set the jukebox to a favorite song of hers, bought her a beer and, over the course of an hour, quietly tried to win her back. Lydia let him do this. She watched him be in love with her; but all the time she knew it wasn’t in her heart to give him what he wanted. So he talked, full of hope, and she sadly listened.

Turn the globe further, and Italy was far behind the line of darkness. Denise and her son had just finished dinner. Josh had told a story about the museum he had just visited, a boy he’d met, and an experiment with static electricity. His mother listened to him happily, trying not to touch his hair where it glowed in the light of the kitchen, trying not to take his hand and keep him here beside her. Then he left to get ready for bed.

Gravity is a disease,
she wrote on the legal pad before her. Josh was off in the bathroom, and she could hear the rhythmic sound of him brushing his teeth, a restless sound, a bird fussing at its nest. In two days, he would be gone, back to California to live again with his father. She was never going back there, not to his father. Denise had decided a month before that she would buy a house of her own— her old family wealth could bring that freedom—and start a new, simple life without Adam. He already knew it; he had sensed it and asked, before she left for Italy, when she was coming back. “In August,” she’d said, perplexed, “you know.” But they both had known what he really meant. Adam in the doorway, bald and handsome, one hand touching the sill above him, a man stretched as far as he could go. A meaningful phrase, a meaningful look, and she wondered if this was it, if this was Adam fighting to keep her.

You catch it from everything around you.
She wrote this on the thin blue line beneath her first words. These were notes; this was an outline of the lecture she would give tomorrow. Denise was as careful a speaker as she was a scientist; her notes were exact, extensive, but loose enough to leave room for a natural voice, free enough to let her look out at her students and persuade them. Here, she just wrote down the phrases she wanted to make sure to say:
Everything is grabbing at everything.
From the bathroom came a loud series of gargling noises, and Denise put her hand to her mouth, stifling a laugh. These walrus sounds, a silence, then a definitive spit. Her son loved to make a production.

At dinner, he had told her a story about the science museum. Wheezing from a cold that had suddenly come upon him, staring at her bleary-eyed with his minor illness, he related his encounter with the static electricity exhibit, where a dashing young instructor had touched a charged metal ball and talked in Italian as his hair stood on end. Then, apparently, the handsome man had grabbed a nearby German tourist, a terrified blonde, and kissed her straight on the mouth. Her long hair, as Josh put it, flew straight up “like in a horror movie" (though Denise could not imagine any movie like this). The tourist had not expected the kiss, Josh claimed, but took part in it willingly while this crowd of schoolboys stared and giggled, astonished and, Denise guessed, aroused. Why else had Josh mentioned it? What else would he have been thinking of? And yet there was something else to the story. He was not telling it all, and she would never find him out.

BOOK: The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel
13.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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