The Night of the Comet (15 page)

Every night after his observations my father would fold up the telescope and return it to my room: “Night, son.” As soon as he was gone, I’d turn off my lights, set up the scope at my window, and train it on Gabriella’s house. I could spend an hour or more waiting for a glimpse of her. My back would ache, my neck would become sore; as I pulled away from the eyepiece, my vision would be blurry. But sometimes I was rewarded with a sighting, and that was enough to keep me watching.

I’d catch her crossing through the patio room, or see her sitting on the couch to watch TV with her parents. Other times I would find her in her bedroom, her shadow flitting back and forth behind the curtains of the French doors. Sometimes the curtains would be open and I could watch her sitting inside, talking on the phone, moving in and out of her powder room. She always closed the curtains before going to bed at night, however—evidence, I thought, of a certain polite modesty that must’ve been taught to well-bred girls like her. Or maybe, I thought, she suspected me; maybe she knew I was watching.

I felt vaguely uneasy spying on her like this, but at the same time, I reasoned, it didn’t seem to be hurting anybody. I thought of it as a kind of scientific study; I saw myself as another Dr. Kohoutek, perched up in the lonely observatory of my room, dedicating myself not to the investigation of heavenly bodies but of earthly ones. Through careful observations I might uncover truths not only about her, but about me, about us, about the world we lived in.

I learned that she favored Tab cola in the can, for instance. I only once ever saw her eat ice cream, oddly enough, and that appeared to be strawberry. From five to six-thirty twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, she attended ballet lessons; her mother drove her there and back, and afterward she wore her black tights for the rest of the evening in the house.

After dinner she usually watched TV for an hour or so with her father in the patio room. Two of her favorite shows were
Sonny and Cher
and
The Partridge Family
. When either of these came on, she would run from whatever corner of the house she was in and throw herself on the couch to watch. If her father made some comment or asked a question during the program, she would shush him with a wave of her arm. When the show ended, she’d stand and leave the room, jerking her hips and singing along to the closing theme song.

Regarding her study habits, she most often liked to do her homework at the same time as she watched TV. She had little patience for studying, though, and was easily distracted, so that as she sat on the couch in front of the TV with her schoolbook in her lap, she might not turn a page for half an hour at a stretch. But on nights before tests she would haul herself up to her room, close the door, and sit cross-legged on her bed with her papers spread around her, frowning and chewing determinedly on her pencil. She only read books that were assigned in class; otherwise, she read magazines. She subscribed to
Seventeen
, like my sister used to, and when she received a new issue she would lie back in bed and study it more seriously than she did any of her textbooks.

Her phone habits: She had a yellow Trimline Touch-Tone with an extra-long cord that allowed her to move it anywhere in her bedroom. I figured that she spoke about an hour a night for an average of roughly eight to ten hours per week on this phone. She made calls about twice as often as she received them. Once I saw her pick up the handset to call someone, then put it down, walk back and forth, pick it up again … She did this three times before making the call.

I learned to recognize the different attitudes she assumed while speaking on the phone, and from these I was able to make educated guesses as to probable conversation partners. She had one fairly upright, polite, but happy posture that she adopted for certain calls she received once or twice a week around eight o’clock in the evening; often at the end of these conversations she would report down to her parents. I took this caller to be a grandmother or an aunt—a close relative back in Shreveport.

When talking to girlfriends from school, however, she would bring the phone to her bed and lie down, sometimes hanging her head backward
over the edge of the mattress so that I would worry about her becoming dizzy. Other times she would flop down on the yellow shag carpet to talk. Best of all was when she stood and paced the room. Holding the phone to her ear with one hand, she practiced ballet moves—walking pointy-toed, or dipping and rising in front of the mirror with one arm arched over her head.

Through these observations I began to see her as less of a goddess and more of a person. She was funny, thoughtful, at times awkward. She was, in fact, someone not so different from me: a human being trapped inside a teenager’s body, waiting for the world to begin.

I came to learn more about Gabriella’s parents, too. Her father, for instance, preferred the patio room for relaxing in at the end of the day. I reasoned that this was because the patio room was the most open and casual room in the house, and Frank Martello himself was an open and casual person. He drank his beer straight from the bottle, no matter how often Barbara brought him a glass, and on Sunday afternoons he took over in the kitchen, stripping down to T-shirt and trousers, to cook a large pot of spaghetti and meatballs for the family. Other afternoons he joined the gardener in picking up twigs in the yard, and from time to time he uncoiled the garden hose and washed down his driveway himself. He’d stand in his business suit spraying water on the concrete until Barbara came out to berate him for working outside in his good clothes; he’d finish his spraying and, reluctantly it seemed, recoil the hose and go inside.

Barbara’s daily routine was still largely a mystery to me, but I knew that she always brought Gabriella to school in the mornings and picked her up in the afternoons in her sky-blue Town Car. Whenever I caught sight of Barbara, whether coming and going in the car or moving around inside the house, she was always nicely dressed, as though ready to meet company. She favored skirts and high-heeled shoes, and she spoke with an experienced, offhanded authority to their maid and gardener; she seemed to be a woman used to having things her way. On the weekends the whole family would sometimes disappear for a day or two, and then their house would stand quiet and abandoned, the shutters closed and the curtains drawn, the automatic pool sweep gliding around and around the sparkling blue water of their swimming pool.

The more I observed them, the better I knew them, until we seemed to be almost on familiar terms. I was, in a manner of speaking, a regular visitor to their house, following them home in the afternoon, and then settling in to watch TV with them in the evening, and then going upstairs to sit beside Gabriella on her bed as she did her homework or spoke on the phone. Soon I was spending more time with the Martellos than I was with my own family, and for good reason: their family was altogether more interesting and attractive than mine. I supposed the Martellos must’ve had their share of problems, but I never saw them; from where I stood, they looked all but perfect—like one of the charmed, well-lit families on the TV programs that Gabriella loved to watch.

Sometimes when Gabriella went out for the night with her family or friends, I’d turn the Celestron aside and pull my chair up to the window to wait for her return. During these long drowsy vigils, I would dream of meeting her again as we had on that night in my yard, but alone now, just the two of us. We would step out of our separate rooms and, like weightless astronauts on a space walk, wade through the air above our yards to meet in the dark sky above the bayou. Suspended there between the stars above and the Earth below, I would take her hand and we would soar together into the future, that unimaginable, that beautiful, perfect world.

FOR
our fall field trip to Baton Rouge, our class would visit the planetarium, tour the state capital, and see the museum before returning to Terrebonne in the afternoon.

The summer heat had broken at last and a clean, leafy scent was in the air. The change of seasons seemed to mark our own changes; we could all feel it, like a promise in the wind—the slipping away of our youth and the oncoming rush of adulthood. It caused students to talk more loudly and move more broadly. I’d noticed the change myself that morning when I went to put on my lightweight jacket and discovered that the sleeves were too short, as though I’d miraculously grown several inches overnight.

I’d been looking forward to the field trip as a chance to get closer to Gabriella, but Mark Mingis had gotten the jump on me. While we were boarding the bus at school, he slipped around everyone else, jogged up the steps, and dropped down next to her, as casually as if he belonged there. He sat beside her now, resting his arm along the back of her seat.
The wind tossed her hair around her shoulders. Creosote poles ticked past the windows, and the morning sun glinted off patches of water as our bus rumbled north along Highway 1.

“I can’t believe she’s with him,” I said to Peter, sitting beside me.

“Who?”

I pointed to the front of the bus. “Mark and Gabriella. What’s she doing with him?”

Coach DuPleiss was standing in the aisle beside the driver’s seat, holding on to the vertical silver pole, like a captain at the helm of his boat. He leaned over to talk to Mark, who looked up and nodded, his face dumb and earnest beneath a red baseball cap. Gabriella held her hair back in the wind, attending politely to whatever they were saying.

“It’s like you said, the universal law of attraction and all that.”

“But they shouldn’t even be together. They don’t have anything in common.”

“How would you know?”

“I just know.”

Peter told me about Mark’s new car, a Camaro Z28. He’d seen it when Mark came to his daddy’s Conoco station the other day to fill it up. It was hot, Peter said: red with black racing stripes, a V8 engine, and a wind spoiler on the back. His father had bought it for him. Mark wasn’t even fifteen yet, but he had his learner’s permit, so he was practicing driving the car around town with his mother.

“To hell with him and his new car,” I said. “Look at that, he’s practically got his arm wrapped around her.”

“You really do like her, don’t you?”

“Everybody likes her.”

“You should ask her out.”

“Right.”

“Why not? You’re neighbors, she came over to your house. You talk to her at school. It’s like you’re friends now. You should just ask her.”

“But she’s sitting with him.”

“You need to kick his ass. Show him who’s boss. You’ve got to go up there and say, ‘Step aside, punk. This is my girl.’ ”

“I suppose that’s what you would do.”

Peter shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

Gabriella leaned across Mark Mingis to talk to the coach, looping her hair over her left ear, and I felt a painful squeeze in my chest. I continued to watch her, plotting how I might steal her away from Mark, as our bus rattled through Thibodaux, Supreme, Napoleonville. Islands of solid ground rose up out of the water as farmland replaced marshland. Students fell quiet; some dozed. My father sat at the front of the bus behind the driver’s seat, trading jokes with the science nerds around him.

We passed farm shacks, and cheap new brick homes set on bare plots of red dirt, and a line of cars waiting at a gas station. We passed a broken-down old truck on the shoulder of the road with a black man in overalls working under its hood.

“Pete, it’s your dad. It’s Pete’s dad!” someone said.

“It’s not my dad. Moron,” Peter answered, and bent back to his work. He was drawing something on the back of the seat in front of us. I leaned sideways to see.

“What’re you doing?”

“Art.”

The seat back was marked with old graffiti—curse words, sex words, obscure messages to unknown people: “LG + KP =
,” “I love you Debbie Contreau.” On the right-hand side, Peter was sketching a large penis. “
Homo erectus
,” he announced. He had to scratch the pen back and forth on the aluminum to make any kind of mark, and every time the bus hit a bump, his line went crooked. He laughed. “It’s got an elbow now.”

“Now for the woman,” he said, and began scratching a new set of lines nearby. “Observe.”

I stopped him. “Man. Someone’s going to see that.”

He pulled his hand away. “So?”

“So—it’s not cool.”

“This is human anatomy, Junior. It’s perfectly natural. Better get used to it,” he said, and went on drawing. As he worked, he sang to himself,
“Get back, honky cat, get back, honky cat, whoo!”

“But that’s not even right. That doesn’t even look like anything.”

“I’m not finished.” He drew some more. “She’s like a midget,” he explained. “She’s a midget with extremely long legs.” He stopped and rubbed at the drawing with his fingertips. “
Mm-mm
, yeah. Ooh, baby. Touch me there.”

“You pervert.”

“Ooh, yeah. I love it when you do that.”

Mark Mingis, his arm still resting along the back of Gabriella’s seat, turned around and grinned smugly to one of his football buddies across the aisle, and I felt the time that I should’ve been spending with her slipping miserably away with each passing mile. When the bus banked into the air and crossed the bridge high over the Mississippi River, students jumped up to look out the windows at the muddy water frothing below, the sprawling refineries, and the capitol tower rising above the city. Peter stuck his head out the window and howled like a dog, and it was then, during the general whooping and hollering as we dropped down into the streets of Baton Rouge, that Gabriella swiveled around in her seat, caught my eye, and smiled. That was all the encouragement I needed.