The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (6 page)

“Wait,” she said, searching his face. “Did you say they were like little girls?”

Noticing her interest, he perked up, began to move his hands, elaborating. “Like little girls in their dark rooms, combing their long hair, it’s really the image of the hair, and we are, the astronomers, we’re sort of peeking in on them.”

“Like voyeurs? Watching little girls?”

“Well, I…”

She considered this, looking at a picture on the wall. “There’s something so sinister about that image. …”

He looked confused, a little angry, and another curl came loose over his forehead. “I… I didn’t mean it
that
way!”

“Oh,” Kathy said, facing him again, clearly disappointed. “You didn’t?”

But she’d sighted something odd about him, despite all his attempts to cover it. Every time she saw him, it became more clear that he was deeply strange and utterly wrong about himself: He was convinced he thought rationally and carefully, but in fact Kathy could see how he was ruled by contradictory passions, old beliefs, religious superstitions, cowardly prejudices of all kinds. She saw how his thoughts flew recklessly, never landing, and it excited her. Hour by hour, he became more fascinating to her.

“You look like a married man,” she told him one night in Provincetown, months after the party, when he had arranged for them to spend the night together. Until then, because of her indecision, they had never done anything more than kiss. How long would he seem wonderful to her? Would she reach some final strangeness and watch his personality wither back to normal? Kathy knew what this night meant; she could see how nervous Eli was, that his mind was full of countless ideas about how this night might go, for the better, for the worse, depending on her.

“Married? Me?” He held up his ringless hand, confused. They were sitting on the couch, in front of a fire, two feet apart. “You think I’m lying to you? You think I’m married and …”

“I didn’t say you
were
one, I said you
looked like
one, which you do.”

Kathy watched his desperate stare, his long face half in shadow, his eyes shining, and she saw how in love he was. He had told her the history of his heart, the girls he’d dated, how a beauty last year had toyed with him cruelly and left him childishly moping. Kathy saw in his look how that pain had been wiped away. He thought only of her. Amazing. In the darkness, it lit every inch of his face.

“I always wanted to look married,” he told her.

“It becomes you,” she had said as she stood up in the firelight and began to unbutton her blouse. She could hear him catch his breath.

On the overlook, Kathy watched her husband, a few years older, looking more like a married man than before as he and Denise whispered in the red glow of their flashlights. She watched another student approach, talk with them, then walk away. Denise glanced across the broad, dark stone and caught Kathy’s eye. They must have been talking about her. What would they have said? That she was as odd as ever, Kathy assumed. That’s what people had always said. She saw Denise look away, then back again. How could they be so similar, her husband and this WASP girl? Whispering like spies across the parapet—how had these friends found each other across the crowded plain of youth? Kathy had never done it. She had never found an ally. She had only held on to Eli, first because he fascinated her, then because she loved him, but never because he was like her. Nobody was. Turning away, she dismissed the thought as pathetic and terribly vain.

The cries of “Time!” were coming thickly now. She raised her head to see if she could catch a meteor, but the cries kept coming and she saw nothing. A bad fisherman. She longed for a book, but this was not allowed. What did they all see up there that kept them riveted past the hours for sleep? What had made her husband bike up a mountain as a boy? What had drawn Denise away from her comfort, her wealth, her family? Nothing seemed to change up in the darkness. Nothing made a sound. Kathy felt like a skeptic in a haunted house. These necks craned upward, these tense smiles of suspense—a creak on the stairs, the chandelier moving eerily—then the gasps around her while Kathy couldn’t see a thing.

What would it be like to have one single passion? The question worried her. She looked over at her husband, who sat alone now in his chair, head to the stars. He loved her. But he loved the dead sky a little more.

“Time!” she shouted loudly.

The only one who looked her way was Professor Manday, who nodded and scribbled in his notebook. So now she was part of their record. It would appear in a journal, that stray mark, that lie. They were so easy to fool, these true believers, taking any sign to be from their specific god.

“Time!” she cried again, grinning.

She tried to feel good, solitary, strong—the way she had in college, the way she had before she’d married Eli, before she’d chosen him, before she’d fallen in love and found herself puttering and sulking when he was away. He didn’t know, he couldn’t understand her, he was nothing like her, but over the years she had come to need him. Kathy felt powerless. Why had it come upon her so unexpectedly, even after marriage, when she was sure she’d be safe? Why love him now? But there was nothing she could do. It was all right, anyway. She turned back, saw him tilted toward the sky. And once again, as always, a horse began to run in her heart.

She heard a woman say beside her, “It feels like we’re at war.”

It was Denise, sitting in a chair, her face pale and prominent. She went on: “War. You know… castle ramparts, the tense beachhead, the palm trees. The rockets’ red glare….” She smiled and Kathy wondered who had put her up to this.

“Who are we at war with?” Kathy asked. “I forgot….”

“Spain.”

“Oh that’s right,” she said, holding herself against the breeze. “Spain.”

“How are you doing?”

She looked over and examined Denise carefully. “Oh, I’m fine.”

Denise smiled, brushed an invisible hair from her face. She looked weary, maybe hungover, or tired from the pressure to forget. She said, “You seem a little off tonight. Is it being around all those stupid wives this afternoon? All the cocktail queens? Or something else?”

“You saw Carlos last week, right?”

Kathy saw Denise stiffen, and thought she might shake off the question, insist on probing Kathy’s own mood; but in the end Denise relented, saying, “That’s right. We had lemonade, if you can believe it. In his friend’s restaurant, and it had a lousy jukebox.”

“Did you say anything mean?”

“No.”

“I remember I used to say mean things. It doesn’t help, though.”

The way Denise looked at her suggested that she couldn’t imagine this: Kathy heartbroken, Kathy being cruel. As if she’d found Eli so easily, as a gift, perhaps, or by saving up on green stamps. “Of course not,” Denise said.

“I used to think you could win them back.”

Denise didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she grinned. “It’s stupid, isn’t it? Here I am, a grown woman. It’s just so stupid of me. And I just heard,” she said, talking slowly now because she hadn’t yet spoken these words, “Jorgeson said Carlos bought a new house with his wife. So it’s clear he’s not leaving her.”

“He was never going to leave her, Denise.”

“You know,” Denise said, smiling ironically and clucking her tongue, “I could never quite believe that.”

Kathy looked at her friend, beautiful in the night air but truly nothing like she seemed, somehow more like a child driving a beautiful car. She had no idea of how the world went. Kathy spoke the truth that came into her mind: “You have to stop loving him.”

“Oh, I don’t love him,” Denise said, shaking her head.

Kathy paused a moment and shouts came all around them, those calling out the falling stars and those of boys in a baseball game. Kathy felt a little angry, cheated. “You don’t?”

Denise leaned her head against her palm. “I must have, at some point, but I think it’s not about that. You know, I can’t even picture more than his face.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It isn’t love.” Denise grinned and looked away, saying, “It’s something else.”

Kathy, confused at her friend’s obscure heart, tried to be incisive.

“Maybe no one else ever had the last word before.”

Denise turned and looked at her, perhaps a little hurt. “No,” she said. Kathy wanted to retract her words, but Denise had clearly forgotten them already. She looked upward and merely repeated, “It’s something else. I have to get the feeling back. I can’t explain.”

Kathy loved something about this woman, although she couldn’t have said what. Her neuroses were so common, and it could anger anyone to watch her wasting herself on men, dressing in so matronly a way in her gloves and pearls, hiding her brilliance inside that ridiculous hairdo just to be admired. Yet Kathy loved her, perhaps because she was loyal, or because she was inscrutable like this, valuable and odd.

Denise gestured and said, “Look, the sultan wants to see the comet.”

The monarch stood regally, as Professor Swift tried to adjust the royal telescope nearby, which was old and full of brass dials and screws. He fiddled with it for a while, peering through the eyepiece now and then, and finally turned to the sultan and announced that the thing was rusted firmly in one position. The local boy was called over from his baseball game to help.

“Are you pregnant, Kathy?”

Kathy laughed, not looking at her but picking at her dress.

Denise stammered, her fingers tapping nervously, “I… I just… you seem…”

“You can go back and tell Eli I’m just anxious tonight. It’ll pass.”

“I only…”

“No, I’m not. It’s okay.”

Her friend smiled. “Okay.”

The two women moved closer, shivering slightly as the night grew colder, feeling the lightless hulk of the island behind them. Around them were the scuttling students, the redhead tossing a baseball, the boy working on the telescope, the girl propped on a lambskin, the waves and the stars.

Denise spoke again. “You don’t want one, do you?”

Kathy said nothing, and did not move. She felt Denise’s gaze burning the side of her face, and it made her smile, but she didn’t feel the need to explain. Denise had this habit of saying everything she was thinking at the moment she was thinking it, unable to wait. Here, in the cool, quiet air, the words were wasted. Kathy thought it funny that she had often heard Denise complain about this very same trait in her mother yet didn’t see it in herself. Kathy smiled at her odd friend, pleased and annoyed.

“They’re doing that all wrong,” Denise said finally, standing up and pointing to the men and the boy at the telescope. She dusted off her pants and said quietly, “I’ll be back later.” Then she was gone.

Bats were crossing invisibly again. Kathy ducked; everyone on the overlook was ducking, so used to a sky that couldn’t touch them. Bats—hidden children spoiling the view, blind, careless, knocking down the lamps, the pictures, the portents.

Kathy looked back to see her husband, only to find that both chairs were empty at the post; Denise was walking back across the stone, and Eli had disappeared somewhere in the red-spotted darkness. Where was he? It panicked her. Then she saw him: He was approaching Manday’s wife, pointing to her golden combs. What was he doing over there? He squatted beside the woman’s chair and began to talk. She heard a boy shouting happily in English, but she ignored it. Later, she would recall that he had shouted “Catch! Catch!”

Another call of “Time!” Kathy looked up and saw not a meteor, but the comet up there in Centaurus. She admired comets, creatures that didn’t race violently through the sky but quietly and coldly burned above without burning out, returning; they were things to count on. She looked down and saw Lydia lying on her lambskin. She thought of what her husband had said on the night she had met him. Comets, girls with long pale braids. Careless girls. Girls with heads full of thoughts, full of details from the tiring day. Girls walking slowly toward their vanities, undressing, blind to the thousands watching them from below. She felt they were in danger.

At the time, she hardly noticed their positions: Denise walking back to her seat, stopping and pointing; Eli squatting near Manday’s wife; Kathy herself craning her neck to look at Lydia. A perfect triangle. It meant nothing; yet, looking back, this triangle on the sultan’s parapet would seem like such a crucial sign to miss. Such a clear image. That was when it happened.

She would remember this moment all wrong. She would place Denise’s shout one second before the accident itself, nearly in time, and she would make it into a warning shout and not what it was: a call of annoyance, a shout that they were doing things wrong. In memory, she would wreathe the scene with worry. But there was no worry. There was no time for it. The baseball went flying from a boy’s freckled hand, through the dark meteor-spangled air toward the telescope—so low that Swift or Manday or even the sultan could have caught it if they had been looking—into the awkward palm of the grinning island boy. No one could have reacted yet—it was just a thrown ball—but someone watching might have noticed how wrong the next moment looked: the curled position of the boy’s arm, his jagged stance on the ladder, his other arm flying up to balance in the air. That was the moment to yell; not before, where she would place Denise’s warning shout. For some reason, though, she needed to remember it that way.

Everyone turned at the boy’s cry, but it was just a fall from a short ladder. Eli would describe it later as a yelp, a crack of worry but not of terror, which somehow would seem wrong but true. The boy’s arm was tangled in the telescope, and he began to pull it with him. The only one who took action was Swift: He held the telescope upright so that the boy fell free of it. He fell, his arm unloosed, and this made his body turn so that he landed with his full weight against the wall of the overlook; and the wall, a bad repair from the war, crumbled beneath him. There was no cry this time. It was too quick to catch—the interval between the boy hitting the wall and his disappearance over the cliff.

The first silence was of curiosity. Where had he gone? Surely… surely… and then the second silence came in a white burning flash. Kathy still craning her neck, Denise still pointing, Swift still holding the telescope from danger. This silence was the moment when their eyes revealed to their minds, like terrified messengers, what had to be true.