The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (25 page)

Perhaps, Denise wondered as she heard him splashing around in his pond, he had shown the exhibit to another girl today. Perhaps another blonde, a twelve-year-old in pigtails, had asked in careful English how it worked and, seeing the empty room, the charged ball glowing there like the bald head of knowledge, he had shown her. Perhaps brave Josh had done what Denise never dreamed of in her youth—put his hand to the metal, feeling the little hairs on his head springing up, and kissed the girl tenderly (or puckering, she supposed, not knowing how to do it), while her own pigtails rose like pale wings above her head. It was improbable; but what seemed likely, with this vision in her head, was that Denise’s son had surely touched and kissed a girl by now. If not today, with the imaginary electrocuted girl, then surely before. He seemed so sure, fighting through his sickness to tell the story, spitting and singing to himself in the bathroom just now, more sure than she had ever been as a child. That’s all there was to it; he was getting to know love.

She approved, but from a great distance. His life was a foreign movie, and she watched in puzzlement, trying to catch the subtitles while the action moved on without her, squinting at the unfamiliar motives, nothing like her own life. Because where had she been at twelve, at thirteen? Out on the porch with two cardboard tubes, two lenses and a roll of tape. Trying to construct a telescope from instructions she’d found in a library book. The tube bent severely, and she couldn’t fix the lenses right, but the memory wasn’t unpleasant: squatting on the cold tile and peering through the tube at the stars, the moon, fly-casting her line across the sky, hoping some planet would bite the hook and leap into her eye. Two sweaters and a coat, her mother yelling from the kitchen. The numb feeling of her cold nose. There was a vivid passion to it—could she convince herself that this was anything like love? No, it was just childhood’s fever still unbroken.

His life would be different. It should be, it must. What was the point, otherwise? Her son would break a heart or have his broken within the next year or so, and she would silently rejoice. To see him woeful as he hangs up the phone, chewing on his gum and stomping up the stairs—it would mean he would be fine. Like measles, love was the kind of thing you had to catch in youth, dispel, so that it would not leap upon you in old age and kill you. So that you would not sit in some damned flat in Italy, she thought. So that you would not mark a postcard with scrawled equations, calculating the perihelion of an ill-named comet you once found with a lover on a hillside. So that you would not bend the equations to suit your hopes—that it will return in time to win him back, to take the chance you botched before—as you sit begging with the numbers like a penitent. Josh’s life would be different.

Denise turned back to her notes, breathing deeply and closing her eyes to give her body little breaks, little sips of sleep.
But gravity has a cure,
she wrote, and then stared at the ink, shining there on the yellow page until it dried. These were her notes: It has a cure. There are two moments that we know of when the universe is free of gravity, when it matters so little that it is barely worth the calculation. The first is at the beginning of the universe, say in the first one hundred millionth of a second, when all matter is jammed together into a speck and, next to the other great forces at work, gravity is insignificant. And then also at the end (as she believed), when matter will converge into that single point again and gravity will not matter. The cure rests at the beginning and the end.

These were her notes. She thought of what they meant to her. She thought of Adam again—she was trying so hard not to think of him, but he came to her, and she thought of the morning she left to come to Rome. They both had known, since that moment in the doorway, that she would not be coming back. Denise had even packed all her clothes in boxes in the basement, saying it was for space, and Adam had not said a word. Strangely, though, that last morning had been quiet and serene. They had awakened slowly to the radio, listening to the news. They had made love and then showered together. And then she had gone to the closet and put on the one dress still hanging there. She had kissed her husband without a word and gotten into the cab. He did not come out into the driveway to watch her leave, nor could she see him standing at the picture window watching; she assumed he went on with his day, also, arranging his notes, calling Josh, writing a plot in his head in which she had not left him. Denise did not think of it as leaving him; she considered herself to have lost him. And Kathy. No struggle could regain them. And Eli.

She never learned why he left her; in all those years, Eli kept a friendly silence on the subject, seeing her at conferences, the few times she was in L.A. Just as she had treated him a decade before. So Denise sat at her pad of paper, listening to her son’s watery noises in the other room, puzzling over how love had buried itself so quietly. Her husband never mentioned the affair with Carlos. Eli never mentioned it, as Adam knew he wouldn’t. And she never thought of that reason herself—because it wasn’t true.

She had never swooned into the past’s waiting arms; she had never necked in a movie theater with her husband glaring behind her; none of it ever happened.

If she had been there at the restaurant five years ago with her husband and her lover, she would have been furious. She would have grabbed Eli’s shoulders and shaken him, yelling,
It’s not true! Don’t you see it?
And Eli should have seen it, if Adam’s careful words had not been axe-strokes on his spine. He should have noticed the man’s bitter glare across a breakfast table. He should have recognized the wooden characters in this tale of Denise and the long-lost lover, the unlikely setting, the flimsy motive—the work of a minor novelist desperate to keep his wife.

“Goodnight, Mom.”

That was years ago. Denise heard her son and, without turning, pictured handsome long-nosed Josh in the doorway, hand on hip, brown from all yesterday in the sun, burned on his nose and cheeks. His hair would be mussed; his mouth would be hanging open lazily with an unuttered vowel; his eyes would stretch their gray-blue wings impatiently.

Before turning, Denise carefully wrote her final line:
The cure for gravity is time.

Adam looked up from his book as if he had been struck by a stone. What made him think of it? Not of Denise packing her bags, or of his triumph over Eli at the cafe. Not those obvious ghosts. He thought of teenage Lydia, standing on a beach to dry her hair, utterly naked under the stars.

He sat on a folding chair in a Bay Area bookstore, signing copies of his book. It was a novel, what Adam called his “great novel of no importance,” and he wasn’t signing copies for fans; he was signing the store’s stock, moving through a stack of hardcovers with the assistance of a bored employee. Then he stopped, pen touching the page, as that memory of Lydia came to him.

It was after their swim and before she left him to go into the jungle. She stood there so young and beautiful, leaning sideways to let her hair drip down, darkening the sand. Adam remembered how she stared at him, and how he knew what this stare meant. He was a teacher; he had seen these stares from young women, had acted on them more than once. But this time was different. Lydia leaning sideways, body glowing in the moonless evening, nipples hardened from the cool breeze. The reddish pubic hair. The stare of longing. He felt his head burning with his sickness and the pot he’d smoked; he should have been in quarantine. But he felt aroused; a moment more, and he would not have been able to stop it.

The bitter doubts about his wife were true. When Lydia told him about the scientists making love out on the spit, hope had finally broken in him. Denise and Eli. It felt as though he’d found his marriage just now on the beach, a gold chain half-buried in the sand, something his wife had long since discarded. Now, in this memory, he held its broken clasp between his fingers. He could drop it, too, right here, back into the sand where it belonged. It would merely be an act of gravity then. He could step forward a few feet and take the towel from Lydia, kiss her, give her the simple thing she wanted. Wasn’t this what the moment asked of him? To give the girl what she wanted. He never could do that for Denise; what she wanted from him was too complex—change, variation, genius—no, he couldn’t give it. But this girl, twisting her hair onto the beach, staring at him with desire—it was much simpler. What he did now could make so many people happy: Lydia would feel like a conqueror, Eli and Denise could live guiltlessly together, and only he and Kathy would be left alone. It was simple. The balance of happiness fell heavily on one side. The seawater dripped from Lydia’s hair, traveling down her arm, down her naked body to the wet sand. People could be happy.

But your duty, Adam reminded himself in the present as he shook the memory from him, is not to make them happy. Your duty is to save your life.

The pen had leaked onto the page, making a black circle a half an inch in diameter. The employee had noticed, annoyed, and Adam tried to smile and sign and move on:
Adam G. Lanham, Adam G. Lanham.
But it came to him again: Lydia, leaning sideways, wringing out her hair. The seconds ticking, passing; the moment passing. The girl, impatient, picking up her clothes to leave. And then backward again, back to Lydia twisting her hair under the comet, staring with desire. He was aroused again, in the present, and Adam thought it was funny he’d be stuck there. His mind, a slide projector, stuck on a random image: not at the scene of Denise’s leaving, or of his cruel episode with Eli, but deeper in the past, on the beach with a girl of seventeen. A moment his wife would never guess as being crucial. The choice you didn’t make. A hard choice, the wrong choice. Because wasn’t he still left with this? Signing stock in a small bookstore, aroused by a girl who was grown by now; a lonely, loveless man. He was no friend to love, he felt, not after what he’d done. So—was this the life he’d fought to save?

Lydia could hardly believe it: The key fit in the lock.

It was late, four o’clock by now, and the sidewalks had been filling ever since the rain had stopped. She’d stayed at the bar with Max far longer than she expected; but with the warmth of the room, the free beer and food, the comfort of this man playing all his tricks to win her back, it was hard to leave. People began to come into the bar— some regulars, some groups of blond women nervously looking the place over and almost leaving—but Max always dealt with them quickly and came back to talk to her. She told him about her father and his lost comet and the sad half-birthday today represented. She told him about the island and her foggy memory of a boy’s fall to his death, almost twenty years before. Max leaned his elbow on the bar and rested his chin in his hand—a classic pose from a sculpture— and for that hour or so she regretted that she didn’t love him. It seemed like such a waste that she’d be heartbroken over her most recent boyfriend, and here was a decent man, a rare moment, yet she couldn’t feel it. There should be a scene here, she thought, with a silent stare across the bar, a drinking bet, a quiet dance under the neon sculpture while Tom Waits growled on the jukebox. But we don’t pick them, she thought as she watched him talking. You love them or you don’t, and there’s not much you can do about it. So Lydia drank her beer, enjoyed the time, and when Max leaned too close and began to whisper in her ear, she smiled. She kissed his cheek and walked away. She felt bad that Max had played it all wrong that afternoon—it was not the time to state one’s heart’s desire.

Lydia had made her way through the crowds to the one address she had left. Perhaps it wasn’t a spare key after all, she considered. Perhaps it was some old key left from a former apartment, a former office or a former car. A key from her college dorm—that women’s college that her father always ridiculed, snidely telling people it lay on the “famous Lesbionic River"—or something even older. A former house. The farm back in Sonoma, which she had not seen in nearly a decade, or a key to the barn out back where her old doll must still lie hidden in the hay. The key could be a useless relic, knowing only itself where it belonged. So when Lydia stood at that apartment house on Grove, the smells of a soul-food restaurant next door coming through a vent, she had no expectations. She slipped the key in out of duty. And it fit, caught, and turned. The front door opened and the scent of ammonia floated toward her. She stared at the brass object in her hand. All this time, she had been holding the key to her mother’s door.

Lydia had been in her mother’s apartment building before, but there was something different about walking up the stairs and knowing her mother wasn’t there, knowing she was about to enter an empty place. There would be the couch she’d imagined, and the cat. There would be something to drink in the fridge and a dusty bottle of wine in a high cabinet. The late sun now appearing would flow from the wide windows and, filtered by the blinds and palms set in its way, would Crosshatch the floor in an etching of light. This once, though, she would be alone. Lydia felt an excitement building in her, one she recognized as childish, something brought over from her girlhood like a rare orchid brought over on a steamer from the South. There would be filing cabinets unlocked, with records going back thirty years or more. Perhaps even a file marked
Lydia.
Dental records, school reports, complaints from teachers and principals. There would be hatboxes, perhaps, which Lydia would open to discover were stuffed with the letters she had sent her mother in the institution, the unanswered letters. Carefully ordered by date, each ripped neatly at the top—by a younger version of her mother, a woman who, even on pills in some therapeutic-pink room, might have taken her sharp thumbnail, slit the envelope’s creamy throat, and blown into the wound to make it gape. On the shelves, there would be photo albums posing as books. Perhaps containing pictures she had never seen, photos of them all together in the sixties—young, jolly father, beautiful mother with her thick eyeglasses, caterpillar Alice, and baby Lydia held in everybody’s arms. Photos of some vacation which came to Lydia only in sparks of memory—a cabin with yellow jackets, herself being bathed in a water pail, Alice with an inner tube—now shown in true scale. Photos of the island.