The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (9 page)

So she had a whole smart act that she had perfected. Part of it, unfortunately, involved never admitting ignorance or asking any questions, so she could carry on whole conversations with those dull, moley graduate students as they talked (unaware, of course, of what would interest a child) about solar absorption, cometary ejection and ion tails, never knowing that this little girl did not understand a word. Manday was particularly dense about this, and regaled her for sunny hours as Lydia replayed hit radio songs in her head. But she could not let on; she could not ask about a word or, worse, act bored or stunned by knowledge. Instead, she wore her fascinated smart face at all times, gleaming like a paste tiara, and no one watched her closely enough to see the difference.

From the high peeling window of the barn, she could see Adam and Tycho making their way across the field toward the farmhouse, the man wandering in his careful way around the thorns, bladelessly machete-ing the weeds, sidestepping the hazards he imagined, some plaid and curly-haired explorer on safari, while the dog leaped freely forward, looking back, waiting, gnawing on something near the ground, then rushing out toward the lights and flames and insects of the patio where a barbecue was already smoking. Someone laughed loudly, already drunk—her father? Lydia hid her diary again under a red wool blanket (where her old brown doll also lay, torn and armless, a strand of scarlet thread dangling from its empty mouth) and set her foot on the first dry rail of the ladder, feeling, as she leaned back, the weight of her descent.

Denise, from where she sat on the patio with her son burbling into her arm, could see her husband coming toward her from the barn. He had finally found the dog. It always surprised her how he could appear from nowhere and delight her—a calm, pedestrian delight, just a thought of
Oh, it’s him!,
like passing a theater showing a favorite movie. There he was, somehow finding the struggle in an otherwise simple field of grass, the dog clearly frustrated with him, his hair (she loved his hair the most) in some kind of golden tussle with the wind. She felt he deserved a gnarled stick and a backpack to go with his ruddy expression. She felt he deserved a high alp. Then she was irked, for a moment, by the thought that he would never be this way: a stick, and alp, a high terrifying view. But of course she’d known that when she married him.

Adam waved. Denise tried to wave back, dealing with the gelatinous bundle of her son who jerked his arms around and stared, stared, always stared at the world. She could tell, though no one else could, how much her son looked like her, in the eyes, the color of his face. Something of her would continue now. She waved.

But these worries—her husband and her child—were only two of the many things that concerned Denise at that moment. There was, for instance, her worry over Manday, who seemed to be drinking a great deal of wine this evening and had come up to her already and jokingly demanded her passport, insisting on verification until she showed him a cocktail napkin and he stamped it and moved on. There was that worry. Then there was Swift, who seemed to be angry with her, although you could never tell, especially ever since his divorce; Denise knew, though, that she had to overcome this because she needed several professional favors of him. Then there was this grad student sitting in front of her now on a stool, wearing braids, a peasant skirt and an intense expression that Denise took for youthful political conviction (she seemed to be talking about Africa)—the conversation had to be kept up at least with “ohs" and “uhs" and an occasional statement of militant agreement. And then, finally, there was Denise’s main concern of the evening: to get invited to a Passover seder.

Each year at this time, she would realize how quickly it was approaching, and the idea of being invited overtook her. It had something to do with a change in her when she was younger, the change that came with her move from her parents’ house in northern San Francisco to that tiny apartment in Berkeley, to that two-burner electric stove and root drawer, the tattered curtains, the warped boards near the windows. A move into a crowd of people unlike anyone she’d met—opinionated and outspoken people, sometimes charming foreigners, sometimes silent intellectuals—and each year a few (who she hadn’t even known were Jewish) would invite her to these seders as if it were completely normal, even boring—
You don’t have to come, the wine is awful.
But Denise did come, and found it confusing and enervating. So oddly devout for a crowd of atheists (the songs and prayers in Hebrew, all the praise of God) and so unexpectedly volatile for a religious event (a rabbi and an astrophysics student arguing about the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, then about Israel, then about the Blacks). Something exciting, Denise felt, was going on, something important, and when had anything important ever happened in her church, or at her parents’ table? What really altered Denise in those first years in Berkeley was something atmospheric and profound across the bay (the protests, the red-hot anger in the air, the dizzy riots and freedoms), but she would never remember it that way. Denise would point to the tattered curtains, the warped boards and those evenings spent waiting impatiently for the brisket to arrive, listening to her new friends shake their heads in disagreement over Johnson, King, the deaths of the Egyptians’ sons.

It had all ended, though, when her friends moved on to postgraduate work elsewhere, when she met and married Adam and they were left (as the young never expect to be) alone with each other, two WASPs in a yellow house near Santa Cruz. March became a wasteland—nothing but drear, pastelly Easter with her mother in that ridiculous hat.

The problem was, of course, that Denise couldn’t throw a seder herself. (Did you “throw" one?) They were both gentile, and she could come up with no justifiable reason for having one at their house, so she gave it up. It was like when she was a child and stared at the tall glass cabinet in the living room, the upper level of which was filled with porcelain birds. She had to wait for some adult to open it; otherwise, she could only stare. But Denise missed the seders too much—the politics, the fervor, the insipid wine—and her new plan this year was to get invited even if she had to crash the congregation of B’nai Israel. Mentally, she had a list of Jewish colleagues and graduate students who were possibilities. She was feeling them out, one by one. The young student of Swift’s before her now— Denise wasn’t sure.

This obsession was, perhaps, a detail. One of many in a life which had not turned out the way she had expected. Denise always thought that life would build upon itself, that people would multiply, events would crowd for time, that life at thirty would seem like twice of twenty. She thought it might overgrow itself like a garden. But it wasn’t turning out this way. Your twenties choked with flowering vines; your thirties thinned to only what you tended. People disappeared, and events, and opportunity.

Her career, for instance, was not what everyone had expected. She had published with Swift upon graduation, but she had also published on her own, laboring alone with the equipment, writing alone, putting no one’s name on the papers except her own. She did this pragmatically, because an older female astronomer had advised her once never to publish with a man; everyone would assume he had done all the work. Her solo publishing lent her distinction; it also raised eyebrows on search committees. Her graduating colleagues (Eli, Jorgeson, the rest) were being given postdoctoral positions across the country, and some even had faculty positions, but Denise was left in interviews calmly trying to explain that it truly had been her work alone. She was offered nothing. The best in her class, the field wide open with Sputnik money, dozens of interviews, and she was offered nothing. So she married Adam and, eventually, took a government position in Santa Cruz. It was a humbling choice. Few people did research there, or even published; it was nothing like the brilliant industry of grad school, but felt instead like a kind of occupational heat death. Only hard work could bring you out, and she worked hard. Denise was also the only woman there, and her supervisor often showed her lab to visiting scientists as a curiosity:
We are proud to have one of the few female astronomers with us, Dr. Lanham. Denise, are you free for a moment?
Denise complained about this habit to Adam, calling it “feeding time.” It reminded her of how the male BADgrads had all visited her office when she’d first arrived at Berkeley, a “field trip" to see the female student. She had assumed it would all change once she published. Nothing changed.

But she was in a wonderful mood tonight, Dr. Denise Lanham with a baby on her lap. This woman amused her, she amused herself, and there was her husband clambering ridiculously through the grass. She had a child, a glass of wine, a breeze. It was all right. Life was wonderful, every particle of it.

“And what does your husband do?” the young student wanted to know, which was a surprise because she had talked only about herself for twenty minutes now, as if it were a strict exercise in sticking to a topic.

Denise adjusted her son in her lap. “He’s a writer,” she said. She looked up to the sky, dimming now, the purple shredded clouds moving in the wind, wool caught on a barbed-wire fence. Her first thought was: We won’t see the meteors tonight. Her second: It’s getting too cold for Josh.

“What kind of writer?”

“He writes fiction. Novels.”

The woman brought out a stick of gum and began to chew it, her expression deepening, and Denise thought to herself,
They’re so serious, this generation, they say they’re so fun and free, hut look how dark and serious they are.
The woman asked, “What kind of fiction? Science fiction?”

People always asked that question at astronomical parties; it was all anybody ever read. “No,” Denise said, adjusting her son and watching her husband appear from the weeds in a scattering of seeds. “No, like novels that take place a long time ago.” She was groping here, always finding it difficult to describe these things her husband made. “Historical novels, I guess.”

The student nodded, the pink gum appearing in her mouth every few seconds, a bright spot in the darkness. “Have I seen them?” she asked.

“No, they’re not published,” Denise said.

She hated saying that. The face on the student now, the puzzled face of science staring at art—she hated it. They were so literal: A scientist without papers is a charlatan, and a writer without books is a fake. Always this puzzled face—as if Adam were one of those madmen scribbling letters to astronomy departments (Denise had read dozens), claiming to have found a message hidden in a nebula. It was an act of faith to call him a writer, the kind of faith a wife should have, must have. And yet, Denise’s anger came because, partly, she didn’t quite have it. She had read his failed novels and hadn’t understood or liked them; they seemed static and a little dull.
I’m wrong, though, of course,
she thought to herself. Surely she had made the right choice. Surely he, too, was a genius.

Adam was moving from group to group like a bee pollinating a field of clover, picking up a drink along the way (a martini, which seemed very unlike him). As he reached a group, he would lean his head forward and nuzzle it between two people so he could address someone, and then, fairly quickly, he would take off for the next. Sweat was showing just under his hairline, glimmering in the torchlight. There was the smell of smoke everywhere. Denise knew what he was doing—he was bumming cigarettes. He had supposedly quit, but the calendar was a checkerboard of quitting and resuming the habit. Denise smiled because it was all right with her; she had never tried to have any control over him; and anyway, he was younger than she was by two years and deserved more time to make mistakes, time to wean himself of the habits of his youth. She had to give him things like that. But still it made her husband seem, sweating in that light, a little dwarfish and pathetic, dipping into crowds begging for a cigarette, pointlessly stooping so his wife wouldn’t notice—a boy cheating badly at cards.

Denise got back to the point: “So, are you looking forward to next week?”

“What’s next week?” the woman asked.

“You know,” Denise said, stroking her son’s head and thinking it was odd how he could suspend a bubble on his lip for ten minutes, in defiance of known physics. “You know, the holidays.” She was fishing for Passover now, hoping she wouldn’t get Easter.

But the student, straightening the part in her hair with two fingers, laughed and brushed the entire topic aside. “Oh that, oh no—oh, I don’t do Western congregational religions anymore. I’m into meditation.” She said this almost as a challenge.

“TM?” Denise asked wearily, but the conversation was on automatic now as the student went on happily about the wonders of a trance state, and alpha waves and all the pseudoscience Denise was used to hearing from young people these days. Here was something Denise did not understand, not at all, this need for religion. She felt pure, this way, needing nothing but light through a lens to explain her world. She understood this was snobbery; she could not resist it. In any case, the girl, Jewish or not, was not inviting Denise to any seder.

Adam had found a cigarette and seemed happy. That was good. He was talking to a spouse with old-fashioned peroxide hair (like something from a billboard), smoking, looking handsome, and the woman was laughing. Good. Denise would grant him all kind of pardons tonight if he’d look happy for her.

“And in London,” the student was saying now, taking the gum from her mouth, “I hear there’s an amazing swami. Kathy was talking about him at the conference, if you can believe it.”

“Kathy who?”

“Spivak, Eli’s wife.”

Denise tensed. How strange: Here was this young woman with pink gum in her mouth, talking nonsense, and then out of nowhere here was Eli. How unexpected. Who knew conversations could be as haunted as old houses?

She had not seen or talked to Eli in years. That summer after the comet’s return, a cold green summer faintly echoing with that cry they’d heard, the boy’s cry from the overlook, Eli had abruptly transferred his studies to a lab in England, and within a month was on a plane with Kathy through the fog of San Francisco. Denise remembered their breakfast in the airport lounge, stiff scrambled eggs and coffee sipped loudly through the silence. Eli would not look at her, and Kathy kept an inscrutable smile on her face, somehow thrilled by all the mess and frenzy of this unexpected change, this flight from San Francisco. But it was a good-natured leaving. Kathy had waved to her from the tarmac, brown suede gloves in her hand, that green-apple-colored kerchief wrapped so tightly around her head, and Eli had not looked back but moved resolutely through the rain, hat-first. It was these two, of course, who had invited Denise to all the seders. And here she had forgotten it.