The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (28 page)

“Tell the president everything is going perfectly.” The girl departed, bowing. He saw two men walking along the path, surely some scientists arriving for this small ceremony. And then he recognized them: Jorgeson, Spivak. Such stout and healthy middle-aged men now, chatting as he used to with Swift on this very path, walking slowly to the palace. Spivak, rubbing his chin carefully and looking distractedly at a bird-of-paradise flowering gloriously beside them as they stepped from the shade of the palms. He had come after all. Suddenly, from within the golden dome of the stairway, came Manday’s grandson, walking toward him across the stones, carefully carrying Manday’s old parrot in its cage. The boy’s tongue showed between his lips: the look of concentration. The parrot, pale, disheveled, turned one eye to its master and cried “Salaam! Salaam!” as the little boy smiled and looked up to his grandfather at last. Manday motioned to the boy and grinned. He could see Lydia watching him; he didn’t care. “Do you see it?” he asked happily, pointing out to sea. Voices rang within the stairway’s nautilus.

On the water was the boat carrying the journalists, approaching from over the horizon. A little top hat floating on that pale meniscus. It was still a half hour or so away, but Manday could not keep from staring at it, feeling in his body the shivering, awkward hope of castaways. The day would be his; the comet would be his; it would all be worth it. The years of captivity in the stone hut, the decades of study and smiling and bowing in America, the years stolen from his family, from his sons, from Ali, the rough arrival back here on the island. The life as a scientist floating on a raft of unimportant papers, the phone calls that came from that blind man in Berkeley, begging to have his comet back before he died, the love and distaste that Manday felt around him. It would all be worth it. They were coming to honor him at last.

“Dad, don’t lift that. Let Henry get it.”

“Henry’s not here,” Adam said.

Josh held the box against his hip, pointing at his father. These were his things, his belongings wrestled from his canceled college life and carted across the bay to San Francisco where, under the watchful eye of his father, he might thrive again. Adam looked at his son: nineteen, but so commanding, so in control. “He’ll get it later. You bring the lamp,” Josh said, then went inside the house.

Adam put his box down, on which was written
Books A—J,
and turned to the thrift-store desk lamp beside him. “Just the lamp?” he asked, then looked around at the piles of heavy things his son would never let him carry. “Why am I even here?”

Josh was back, sweating heavily. “It’ll be over really soon, Dad. I don’t have much to move.”

“Well, I’ll take you to dinner in a little bit. Decide where you want to go.”

“I don’t care.”

“We should explore. It’s your new neighborhood.”

“I have time, Dad.”

That was true enough, Adam thought, but how did the boy know it? Wasn’t it the quality of youth to be impatient, to stretch out in time and yet, paradoxically, to feel that there was not one moment to be wasted, as if the hours spent asleep or alone would be counted against you in hell? But Josh seemed in no hurry, wiping the sweat from his head and then replacing his baseball cap, breathing heavily and lifting the very box he had forbidden his father:
Books A—J.
He had a nineteen-year-old son who alphabetized his books. The very soul of patience and order. And yet despite all his maturity he was still so young, and made mistakes, like this one. Not just the Christmas vacation surprise where Josh assembled a turkey-and-stuffing sandwich and announced he was taking the next semester off to pull himself together, to look at his life, but this mistake happening right now. This pile of broken furniture and boxes hauled into a Victorian flat. Josh had taken time off from college for this—of course to deal with his mother’s death, but obviously also for this—in order to move in with his boyfriend: Henry, the owner of the flat, a man of twenty-six. It was a mistake, the kind of mistake a parent can’t tell the kid about until it’s long over. The kind of mistake you worry about at night as you sleep alone, picturing your son sitting in a room of older men with wineglasses, your son wanly smiling and trying to seem bright as they all snicker. Hard to take, hard to take. We’ll see, Adam thought. He looked at a long crack in the entrance’s mosaic; one good sign, at least, that it had survived two earthquakes.

Josh lifted the box from under his father’s arm, and Adam noticed that he’d been wrong about the alphabetizing.
Books A—J,
yes. But it wasn’t Josh’s handwriting after all; it was Denise’s. Not Josh’s books, but theirs—his and Denise’s—from their last move to the city. A borrowed box. Yes, that seemed more right, he thought as Josh went inside again, appearing a moment later in the room above. His mother had been an alphabetizer for sure.

“When’s Henry coming home?” Adam yelled when Josh reappeared.

The boy stood in the doorway, looking around at the boxes on the sidewalk, the empty truck parked across the street. Not much stuff in the life of a nineteen-year-old, even this one. Josh, hands on hips, a handsome boy.

“He usually gets out of work at seven.”

“So we have time for dinner.”

Josh smiled and stood there. So much of Denise in him, in his dusty reddened skin, the shape of his nose and the color of his eyes. A handsome boy; not stunning, but the kind of boy, Adam supposed, a man of twenty-six would cherish. There was something missing, though, of the cockiness Josh had as a youth, the brazen confidence and imagination. Something had hurt him a little, and Adam could only guess that it was love. What else could it be? He could only hope it wasn’t Henry, that it was some other man whom Adam hadn’t heard of. Surely there were some of those; Josh never confided in his father, certainly about these things, and Adam would not have known what to say in any case. A man breaking another man’s heart—what advice did he have for that? He merely hoped that this Henry was a good man, a kind and unclever man, the sort of man you settle for. That he loved Josh a little more than he was loved back.

“Does Henry keep beer in the fridge?” he asked, walking toward the door.

Josh stepped out of his way with a cynical expression. “No,” he said. “But I do.”

“Good. I need one,” Adam said, walking inside.

“And one for me!” he heard Josh shouting. But Adam didn’t go straight to the refrigerator. This was his first time in the flat alone, the first without Josh leading him from room to room explaining their functions ("and this is the bedroom" had been his favorite, gesturing to the clean white comforter as both father and son turned the same shade of red); like a child dressed up for company, the tour had been sweet and unconvincing. Something was not being said, but what more could be hidden? Two men in a Victorian flat: one teenage Josh and one much older Henry Wong, the son of a disgraced city planner—could there possibly be more to the story? He pictured the two of them that morning before his visit—Henry in his suit and tie and Josh in sweats—working quickly, taking photos off the walls and stuffing them into a filing cabinet. Adam opened the filing cabinet: nothing but files. He imagined them turning book spines inward on the bookshelf, thinking he wouldn’t notice; books that might point to some other portion of their lives. He pulled out the misordered books he found: old college literary theory, novels (not his own). In the medicine cabinet, just antibiotics and eye cream. In the refrigerator, just beer, leftovers, and half an onion swelling with moisture on the cold shelf. He took two beers and popped the caps. He sipped his beer, relieved.

“Hey, do I get a beer?”

Josh was standing in the kitchen, watching him.

“Here,” Adam said, handing it over. “And here’s to your new place. Here’s to you and Henry.”

Josh clinked bottles with him without a word and swallowed his beer greedily. Then he looked at his father with such precision that it made the older man shiver. It occurred to Adam that he might have this all wrong: What if their roles had been switched while he wasn’t looking? Then Josh would be the careful, worrying one, searching for a clue to heartache. And his father would be the irresponsible one, the headstrong man making bad choices, keeping old secrets. Maybe Josh thought his own life was fine, stable, with his youth and this new love to steer him, but that his father’s might topple at any moment. A lonely widower in San Francisco. A man who’d lied and fought to save his wife, and then could not even save her.

“You think Mom would like Henry?” Josh asked at last.

“Why do you ask that?” Adam heard himself giving this careful, parental answer.

His son looked at him as if it were obvious. He said, “I wonder all the time what she’d think. I hated it, how she always had opinions about what I did. It’s not like I miss that. But I guess I was so used to knowing.”

“I never learned to figure out what she’d like or wouldn’t.”

“You think she’d disapprove.”

Yes,
Adam thought.
Of course she would. Of course she’d want you to pick your life so carefully, because of how it sticks to you.
But he said, “No, of course she’d love him.”

Adam looked over at a picture on the kitchen table: Josh and Henry at the beach, grinning. It was a photograph like this that had first made Adam understand about his son: on the wall of his college dorm, in a nice frame, just a photo of Josh and a friend. Some young man he didn’t know, tall and blond, standing beside his son. Nothing overt. But something about their smiles, something about the expense to which Josh had gone for that frame, its careful placement, had made everything quite clear.

But his son was speaking: “I know what I’m doing, Dad.”

“I never said you didn’t,” Adam said.

“I love him, Dad.”

Oh, that isn’t what I want to hear,
Adam thought as he smiled. He patted his son’s hand, looking at his face, which was so pained and unsure.
It turns out that doesn’t matter at all.

He thought briefly of Denise, as Josh must have been doing. It happened all the time—whenever he threw away her junk mail, or used her old shampoo or answered the phone and realized it would never be her. The image that came to him was not one of the stock images he kept of Denise—posed for his memory in the kitchen, in the shower, in the bedroom smiling—this one was of her arriving wearily from Rome through that airport gate. The tired expression and blond-streaked hair all out of place, the odd Italian jacket, the overstuffed purse weighing down one shoulder. She came out of the gate and he saw her, not knowing whether he should hug her, and then he rushed forward anyway and held her and she whispered in his ear,
I’m coming back, Adam.
Not that she
was
back, but that she was
coming
back; she was still on her way. She slept for days after that. The image was of Denise at the gate, so exhausted and unpretty and old, longing to fall into his arms. Not love, not passion. Just the sense to know that he was all she had. It was the most he could ask for.

After Rome they had only three years together. Had he known, he would have quit his stalled novel and taken her around the world, indulged her with presents of gold and diamonds, fed her dangerous foods and filled her up with wine. He would have talked her into sex in a minaret over Istanbul, no birth control, just the two of them the way they’d been as young people back in Berkeley. A passionate gamble, little chances taken again. Rather than hold her close and hoard her, he would have pushed her out of airplanes, screaming happily; made her swim with sharks; run with her across a war-torn nation— he would have taken every risk because why not? What worse thing could happen than what was already going to happen? Of course he had not known. So, instead, he trapped her at home as much as he could; he kept her safe, watching TV while their son was off at college. She would fall asleep on the couch with her mouth open, and he would lead her into bed. Years passed like this.

Then the call, the police. He had been in his office, struggling over a new novel long overdue at the publisher, and the phone’s light began to blink. A phone for the deaf, something he had purchased to keep himself undistracted, but it didn’t help at all; he always watched it as it blinked, made its silent plea. This time, a rare time, he picked it up. A torrent of information, carefully given to him in a list. It was easy to take as a list: first an accident, then trapped inside the car, and no not alive, and you can identify her here or at the morgue. He took it all very calmly, packing his papers and getting his car from the lot, driving through traffic to the Headlands road and even taking note of the view from the Golden Gate Bridge. A hawk hovering in the hot blue. Because it wasn’t true, of course. Even when he saw her on the hill, it wasn’t true; on that beautiful high point with the trees all touching his shoulders, patting him with every breeze that blew. The men had just laid her out on a plaid blanket on an incline of grass, her arms and legs outstretched not in the way a person would lie, but in the way a child would draw a person. A hand bent the wrong way. The men were very proud of their effort, the hours wrenching her from the car, the careful way they had arranged her broken body before taking her to the ambulance. They presented his wife, and stood in a row, looking at him as if he should applaud. He smiled and felt bizarre. Denise, wearing her new jewelry of broken glass, the gleaming strands of hair caught on her lips, and a tree of blood on her forehead. What he felt upon seeing her was rage—and not at some abstract Fate, not at the neglectful sun which moved, unstopping, in the sky, but at her. At his wife and this new betrayal. The thoughtless dead.

Adam was sitting at the kitchen table, caught in a box of gray light, with his son staring at him again. Both of their beers were empty. Yes, his son was the worrier and he was the one on the edge.

“Let’s go,” he said, and Josh’s face lit up as it had when he was a little boy.

They were quickly up and outside, dizzy from the beer, breathing in the city air, colder now that the fog had settled. Adam was wearing one of Henry’s coats, brown wool, expensive, wonderful to feel. Josh was beside him, walking quietly with a little smile. Such a bad life?