The Night of the Comet (22 page)

“Look, I’ll be honest with you, Junior. It’s difficult, this business of love. When you’re young, your head’s filled with all these romantic notions that you get from songs and stories and movies, telling you how great and magical and mysterious love is. How it’s going to last forever. Love love love. And sure, that’s good, that’s fine. That’s part of being young. You need that kind of … kind of belief.”

He grimaced again, a single twitch on the left side of his face.

“But as you get older … as you get older, you realize that those are just, you know, stories. They’re kind of like fairy tales that we tell each other, tell our kids, to keep us going. Because they’re not real, you know. Not really. Real life isn’t like that, not like in movies and songs. Real life is about hard work, and family, and responsibility. So as you grow older, you buckle down, you get busy with your job, you try to do good work, try to take care of your family. And pretty soon you don’t worry about love so much anymore. Maybe you stop thinking about it altogether. And I’m not saying that’s bad. That’s just the way it is. That’s part of growing up. That’s what they call becoming an adult.”

What was my father saying? That the story about the boy and the girl in the drugstore wasn’t true? Or that he didn’t love her? Or she him? Or, worse, that love didn’t even exist? That it was just a made-up story for children and fools?

I felt queasy. It was like he had led me to the edge of a bottomless pit and pointed over the side. I could feel the chilly air rushing up from the black depths, smell the rank odor of death.
Take a good look
, he might’ve been telling me.
See? There’s nothing there. Nothing at all
.

He put his glasses back on and gave a quick sniff as he settled them into place on his nose. When he lifted his head, the light coming in from the window fell on the lenses so that they were like two small, flashing shields.

He stood up and brought his plate to the sink. He stopped behind me and quietly rested a hand on my shoulder.

“But hey. Don’t worry about all that. You’re still young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Now’s the time for you to be having fun. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

But too late: the damage had been done. He’d taken that white worm of doubt and planted it in me. He might have called it a healthy dose of skepticism, or even objective reality. But his worm would stay with me, and even though I could tamp it down, forget about it for weeks at
a time, the worm would always be there, a wriggling reminder of my worst fears:

That life wouldn’t get any easier as I got older. If anything, it would only get harder as I grew up to the realization, as he apparently had, that all our beliefs were built on a flimsy scaffolding of stories, and that happiness was nothing but a wish and love was only a lie.

MY
mother closed the front door behind her. She wore a scarf over her head and carried a shoe box full of paperwork. It was late in the evening. Megan was upstairs in her room, the kitchen was clean, the house quiet and cool. I sat with a magazine in the corner of the couch.

“What took you so long?” my father said, looking up from his papers at the table.

“We had to go into Thibodaux,” she answered.

“You did? Who? What for?”

“We had to see about the lights. The lights for the decorations.”

“That took you all day?”

“Guess who might come? The mayor.”

She shoved my father’s papers aside and set her box on the table, talking all the while about their arrangements for the ball. Frank had spoken to the mayor—he knew him, naturally—and the mayor said he would talk to his wife. Now Barbara was worried that the party might get too big, but my mother figured the Martellos’ house could easily
accommodate three hundred people. They could open up the yard, have tents and gas heaters out there in case it got cold.

She took off her scarf and shook out her hair. “We should’ve done tickets and invitations, I know. I’m always thinking too small, that’s my problem.”

Frank, she went on, was going to get a crew to lay a dance floor in front of the gazebo. He had sketched out some plans while they were chatting in the living room,
zip zip zip
, just like that.

“Thank god for Frank,” my father said.

“What?”

“Frank Frank Frank. What would a party be without Frank?”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Your playboy across the water there.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be absurd. He’s been very helpful. In fact, you should be thanking him. We’re doing this for you, you know.”

“I don’t need any favors.”

I left my magazine and sat down beside my father at the table. “What about the dancing?”

“What’s that, honey?”

“Who’s going to dance?”

“Everybody, I hope. It’s a ball. That’s what you do at balls. You dance. Which reminds me, we still have to find clothes for you and Megan.” She went to the kitchen to fix herself a drink, turning on lights in the house as she moved. I talked to her through the doorway.

“What kind of dancing?”

“Hm?”

“What kind of dancing will there be?”

“Any kind. Every kind. You do know how to dance, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Where am I going to learn how to dance? School?”

“Oh, but every young man should know how to dance. It’s a requirement. Women expect it. Society demands it. A man who can’t dance is like a … like a horse without a saddle. I’ll have to teach you.”

“When?”

She came back into the living room. “How about right now?”

“The lights,” my father said, pointing. “You left the lights on.”

“Oh, pooh.” She switched off the lights in the kitchen and came back. “Stand.”

“What?”

“You can’t dance sitting down. Get up. Help me move this.”

My father stayed seated while we pulled the sofa back and cleared a space in the living room.

“When I was your age everyone knew how to dance. We went to dances all the time. Every weekend. Gosh, it was fun. Boys lining up to get inside the gym …”

“Your mother’s golden years,” my father said. “Hundreds of boyfriends, lining up for their turn.”

“Thousands,” she said, snapping her chin at him. She positioned herself in the middle of the floor. “Come on. I’ll be the girl. You be the boy.”

“Good plan.”

“Wowser, you’re getting tall. Okay, first you should politely approach the girl and ask, ‘May I have this dance?’ ”

“May I have this dance?”

“Oh my god. Nobody does that,” said Megan, coming down the stairs.

“Shh,” said my mother. “Why, of course you may. I’d be delighted. Now, left hand up … like that. Your right hand goes here on my back. Stand up straight.”

“I am.”

“Straighter. We’ll begin with something easy. A waltz.”

“That’s useful,” Megan said. “Why not teach him to jitterbug, too?” She went to the kitchen for leftover pumpkin pie and ice cream.

“Ignore the armchair critics,” my mother said. “We’ll start slow. One-two-three, one-two-three. Just like that. Follow my feet. Ready? Here we go.”

I mouthed the numbers with her as we shuffled around on the stained rug. Gabriella, of course, would know how to dance. She studied ballet, after all. I imagined she danced like an expert—waltzes, jitterbugs, anything.

“Oops. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You’re getting it. One-two-three.”

I concentrated on the steps until I was able to see them in terms of geometry, invisible squares and diagonals traced on the floor.

“Oh my god, you dance like your father. Try not to look so grim. Smile! It’s supposed to be fun. Girls like boys who smile.” She stopped to take a swallow of her drink. “Okay, here we go again. Stand up straight. Relax. Don’t look down.”

After a while I could do it without tripping up too badly, but it wasn’t what I would have called fun, exactly. While we practiced, my mother offered more advice about girls. Girls liked boys who took the lead, she said—men who showed confidence and acted like they knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t. It was best to be forthright, too; I should just come right out and say what I was thinking. Girls were gifted with many amazing powers, but telepathy wasn’t one of them. Also, I should look for opportunities to be polite, to offer small favors whenever I could. I could offer to get a girl a glass of punch, for instance, even if she said she didn’t want one. Girls loved to be waited on like that. I’d be surprised how much could be achieved with one well-timed glass of punch.

“Oh, and by the way—don’t be put off by the competition,” she said.

“What competition?”

“Well, you know—pretty girls are always popular at dances. There’s no getting around that. That’s why you need to be especially polite and friendly. Polite and friendly beats out the competition every time.”

“What competition?” I asked again.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

She taught me how to break in on a couple, and what to say to the girl while we were dancing. “Compliments. Nothing but compliments. Try it. Say ‘I like your dress.’ ”

“I like your dress.”

“I like your hair.”

“I like your hair.”

“I like your nose.”

“I like your nose.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Wait. What?”

“Just kidding on that one. You don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself.”

She pulled away, brushing stray hair from her mouth. “Not bad. You’re getting the hang of it. Now when you’re finished, you’re supposed to bow and say ‘Thank you for the lovely dance.’ ”

“Thank you for the lovely dance,” I said, and she cracked up. “What?”

“No, no, she’ll love it.”

She told Megan to run upstairs and get some of her records, the fun ones, the ones you could dance to. Megan came down with a stack of 45s and they shuffled through them. “Try this,” our mother said, and they put a disc on the turntable. I recognized the song immediately; it’d been playing all fall on the radio. It began with a few pleasant notes in the upper registers of an electric piano, like something a girl would pluck out at a recital. She turned up the volume.

“The speakers—” my father complained.

“Forget everything I just taught you,” my mother said over the music, slipping off her shoes. “The only rule to dancing to music like this is that there are no rules. Anything goes. If it feels good, do it.”

She grabbed my hands and twisted with me, humming and singing along to the record. “That’s it. You’ve got it.” She drew away, danced to the end of the sofa, did a kind of shimmy, turned, and came back. I watched, amazed. She didn’t look stupid, she didn’t look like someone’s mother trying to dance. She looked … she looked lovely.

“Don’t just stand there, silly. Come on. Move! It’s fun.”

I closed my eyes and made a few tentative steps. The song had a ridiculously simple arrangement, just a single piano, guitar, bass, and drums. It told about a party where everybody came together to have a good time. The Moon was bright; they danced, and people felt warm and alive. Then the whole thing repeated itself, and then again—there was almost nothing to it. But when the chorus broke in, the bounce in the rhythm and the invitation in the words was so irresistible that I felt myself lifted up on the swell of its refrain and soon I was dancing along with everyone in the moonlight. This, I understood in a flash, was why
people liked to dance. It made you forget who you were and at the same time remember who you were always meant to be. You became more than yourself. You became, as the song put it,
su-per-na-tu-ral
. You flew.

“Oh my god,” said Megan.

When the record finished, my mother stepped back clapping. “Wowser. Honey, that was great. You’ll slay all the girls.”

We played the record again, and then again, until Megan gave up sitting and joined us. Our father refused to stand, however, saying that he didn’t understand this kind of dancing.

“Fuddy-duddy. Fuddy-duddy, you had your chance,” my mother said.

So we danced without him. We stomped on the ruined rug, we turned circles between the sagging furniture and bumped against the old TV. This room, these things, didn’t normally inspire celebration, but tonight it might’ve been Christmas in our home, or New Year’s, or a holiday that none of us had known until now but were inventing at that very moment: the Holiday of Hope with the Dance of Possibility on the Eve of the Comet.

BY
late November it had crossed the Earth’s orbit and was speeding toward Venus, traveling at 250,000 miles an hour. Its coma had already grown to more than 100,000 miles across, its tail 5 million miles long. We still couldn’t see it with our bare eyes, but with the telescope we could find it hanging just above the southwestern horizon, hovering near the archer’s hand in Sagittarius. In the lens it appeared as a flickering blue flame giving off a wispy trail of smoke. From night to night the tail moved and changed, fanning out, coming together, corkscrewing, breaking in half and then restoring itself. It looked, I thought, powerful and determined. Inexhaustible. Indomitable.

My father kept up his nightly vigil in the backyard. From my window, I watched him shivering in his Sears McGregor raincoat. He’d zipped in the synthetic wool liner, but he didn’t think to put on a sweater, and late at night the air off the bayou could be chilly. His right eye glued to the lens of the telescope, he moved his lips as he muttered under his breath, as though he were whispering into the ear of a lover:
Yes. Yes. There you are. I see you. Come on. Come on, you beautiful thing.…

While downstairs, in her room below me, his wife, my mother, sat at her vanity, cleaning her face with cold cream and tissues. Her hair would’ve been tied back, her legs crossed under her nightgown, one slippered foot bobbing up and down.
You’re not that old yet
, I could imagine her telling herself.
You’ve still got some looks
. She smiled to remember the movie stars of her youth, glamorous women leaning their heads back, their pale throats curving forward as they closed their eyes to receive the lips of their leading men, and in an instant she became all those women, leaning her head back to kiss the man who was all those men.…