The Night of the Comet (23 page)

While in her room next door to mine, my sister was biting her nails and studying the liner notes on a favorite album. I pictured her rocking back and forth on the rug below her black-light poster,
LOVE
shot through with bullet holes. She grabbed a fistful of her hair, frizzy and thick, and frowned at it. She thought of Joan Baez, how sleek and straight her hair was—like her face, her body, all sleek and long and dignified. She sighed, dropped her hair, and returned her thumb to her mouth. With her front teeth she chewed at a sliver of flesh at the corner of her cuticle until, giving a good yank, she ripped it free, drawing blood.…

While I, her brother, backed away from my window to resume practicing dance steps. I didn’t have a record player so I had to imagine the music in my head. I bent my knees and dipped my shoulders to a rim shot, then sprang back up, strutted, and turned. I thought I had it for a minute, felt I must’ve been dancing, but then I caught sight of myself in the mirror, a gangly fourteen-year-old kid jerking around in his tiny room, and I lost whatever confidence I had. I looked like a damn idiot. She would take one look at me and laugh out loud.

I stopped, caught my breath, and averted my eyes from the mirror. Then I started the record playing again in my head. I stood up straight, pulled my shoulders back, didn’t look down.

Gabriella
, I asked,
do you know this song? May I have this dance?

“AN
auspicious night,” my father called it.

The sky was clear and speckled with stars. A full moon climbed up from the horizon. Mars was high, a faint red pinpoint hanging overhead. As we walked along a line of parked cars to the party, he pointed out constellations to me, tracing their outlines with his finger: Gemini, Orion, Aquarius.

He reminded me that Luboš and his high-society pals were on the Queen Elizabeth right now, sailing out of New York Harbor for their comet cruise. Maybe they were looking at these very same stars, he said. We were luckier, though; we didn’t have to go out on a ship to see them: we got them for free. That was one advantage of living in a small town. “The greatest show on Earth, playing nightly. All you have to do is turn your eyes up.”

He talked about organizing some kind of town-wide comet viewing here in Terrebonne. Astronomers were planning these events all over the country, and there was no reason why we couldn’t have one, too.
“Wouldn’t that be fun? Get everybody to turn off their lights for a night and come out to watch the comet. Parents, kids, everybody out in the streets. Like the Fourth of July, only better.” He was trying to work out the best date for it now.

I agreed that it did sound fun. I could picture it: kids on bikes, lawn chairs on the sidewalks, everyone gazing skyward with the silvery light of the comet falling on their faces.

“Where is it now?”

He stopped, took my finger, and pointed with it to a spot below Orion. “Crossing through the orbit of Venus. Right about … there.” He stood up straight and squinted sideways at the sky, trying to see it with his peripheral vision; he might’ve been listening for it. “It’s close, it’s awfully close. It’s sneaking up on us.”

I listened, too. I didn’t hear any comet, but there was something, a suggestion of music in the air: notes from an electric piano, a guitar string being tuned, the
thump thump
of a bass drum.

Ahead of us stood the Martellos’ house. It was set back across a deep lawn, lit with spotlights and decorated for Christmas. Behind the house we could see lanterns in the trees and the white peak of a canvas tent. As we continued walking, I had the feeling of approaching a circus at night, that same sense of expectancy. The air was brisk but not too cold, and as my father and I turned down the walkway to their house, around the lit fountain, and up a flight of low stone steps to their porch, the stiff cloth of our winter coats brushed back and forth on itself with a whispered
yess, yess, yess, yess
.

Don’t gawk
, my mother would’ve said, but when we stepped through the front door it was hard not to stare.

The entrance hall opened up into an unexpectedly high ceiling lit by a crystal chandelier. A curved stairway led to a second floor balcony. On the walls on either side of the hall hung large, gold-framed portraits of the family: Mr. Martello standing beside a desk with one hand resting on a book, Mrs. Martello sitting regally in a high-backed chair, Gabriella as a girl holding a yellow bouquet of flowers and gazing off into the sunshine.

Below her painting stood the real Gabriella in a purple velvet dress, her hair tied up with ribbons, welcoming guests.

“Mr. and Mrs. Daigle. How are you? It’s great to see you. Thank you so much for coming,” she said, and the Daigles smiled and gushed in return. She was the perfect hostess: gracious, poised, friendly. Just seeing her made you glad you’d come. She passed the Daigles on to my sister, who sat at a white-draped table with a money box, dutifully ticking off names in a notebook.

While my father spoke with the girls about party arrangements, I looked back and forth from Gabriella to her painting, marveling again at her and the extravagant wealth of her family. I might’ve been easily intimidated by it all, but before we moved on, Gabriella reached out and tugged my sleeve.

“You’re looking sharp, Junior.”

This wasn’t true. My suit was an old two-piece from my eighth grade graduation, the jacket ridiculously small, the pants high-waters. But when Gabriella said I looked good, I could almost believe it was true, and my hopes for the evening were given a boost. We promised we’d see each other later, and I walked away rehearsing tricky dance steps in my mind.

We met Christine, our one-time maid, in the library. “They got me taking coats,” she said. We chatted as she hung ours up on a long rack. She asked my father about the latest comet news.

“Soon. Real soon,” he promised. In a few more weeks she’d have to duck her head to miss it.

“I’ll start saying my prayers.”

He chuckled. “No need for that. No, no.”

He paused to take in the room. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase covered most of one wall. There was a fireplace, leather chairs, a writing desk, antique maps in frames, a globe in a wooden stand: it was so handsome, so picture-perfect, it might’ve been a display room from D. H. Holmes—“Gentleman’s Study”—bought whole, taken apart, shipped here, and reassembled exactly as it appeared in the store.

My father gave a low whistle. “Man-oh-man.” He reached out and touched the spines of a few books in the case and then retracted his hand, as though he’d caught himself doing something he shouldn’t have.

He went off to find my mother, leaving me to wander on my own
through the rooms. There was more to the house than I had imagined; my telescope had never taken me this far inside. Opposite the library was a living room with plush furniture, flowers in vases, picture books on a table, and a cart with a silver tea set. A large, elaborately decorated Christmas tree stood at the window. Farther on was a dining room, the table gone and the chairs pushed back against the walls. I peeked into a billiard room, a music room, a breakfast room, a sun room, and other rooms and passageways whose functions I could only guess at. It was like walking through a museum, and as in a museum, I felt wary of touching or standing too close to anything.

At the rear of the house I found the patio room with its familiar armchair, sofa, and television. The sliding glass door stood open to the pool and yard, where lights were shining, music was playing, and people were moving.

“Gorgeous. Gorgeous home,” my mother had said. Seeing it myself, I understood why she liked visiting here so much, and why she always seemed so disappointed when she returned home to ours. It was obvious, wasn’t it? Who wouldn’t have wanted to trade their lives for this dream?

“JUNIOR
. Over here.”

Mark Mingis, my blond-haired, blue-eyed rival, was standing at the edge of the patio, a glass of cola in his hand.

“Cool party,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I can’t come to the party?”

“I didn’t think anyone else from school would be here.”

“I’m not supposed to say. It’s kind of a secret.” He took a sip of his Coke and looked away mysteriously.

I had no interest in talking to Mark, but we were the only two boys at the party, and so I stepped up beside him. We watched the yard fill with guests while we sipped our Cokes. He stood half a head taller than me and wore a crisp blue blazer over a white turtleneck sweater.

“You live somewhere around here, don’t you?” he asked.

“Over there across the water.”

He glanced across the bayou. “Over there?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” He nodded, as if the matter was settled.

The band had begun playing in the gazebo in the corner of the yard. People stood in small groups, talking and drinking. Others carried plates of food from the buffet under the tent and sat down at tables lit with candles and warmed by gas heaters placed around the lawn. At a bar near us, a slim black man in a white jacket snatched up bottles and poured out drinks, murmuring, “Yes sir, yes sir! What’ll you have? Yes, sir!”

I recognized a few locals from town, but the rest, men in suits, women in furs, were people I’d never seen before. They belonged to that privileged class of people who lived and moved in the golden sphere, playing golf at the country club in Thibodaux and spending their weekends at second homes on Grand Isle. Mark, I was surprised to see, knew many of them. He gestured with his glass as he pointed them out in a dull, bored manner.

“There’s the mayor. That’s the manager of the bank. That’s a friend of my dad’s—he’s in oil, Ted Freely. There’s another one, Mr. Burns. He’s in oil, too, from Lake Charles, I think. Him, too. It’s a good turnout. All the oil folks.

“Gabby’s dad, over there,” Mark said, nodding. “He’s cool. He’s buying new jerseys for our team.”

Frank Martello stood with a group of men all about his age, all sharing his same rugged handsomeness. He squeezed the shoulder of one, relit the cigarette of another. He turned to shake the hand of someone who’d been waiting to introduce himself. You could see the party gathering and circling around Frank; people recognized his importance and instinctively gravitated toward him.

Barbara stood in another corner of the yard talking to a clutch of wives. She wore a dark navy-blue outfit trimmed with black fur. She might’ve stepped from the pages of a magazine, so rich and elegant she looked—the perfectly turned-out woman of the house.

And there—over there was my mother. I caught sight of her flitting around the edges of the party in a new lime-green dress with a kind of short yellow cape. She looked like a parakeet escaped from its cage,
fluttering excitedly around the yard and bouncing off people’s shoulders. She spotted her old friend Dale Landry and swooped in to say hello. She put her hand on his arm, leaned in to exchange some words, and then threw her head back and laughed. I could hear her laughter all the way across the yard, bright and startling.

She fluttered over to Frank’s circle and landed beside him. Frank slid an arm around her waist, pulled her in close, and introduced her to the men gathered around. They raised their eyebrows as my mother talked and gestured animatedly. Frank bent over and whispered something in her ear. She slapped his arm, and the men all chuckled and shook their shoulders.

Beside me, Mark had begun talking about football. He looked straight ahead, not at me, as if he were addressing an invisible roomful of people. He said what a fine team they had this year, and how Coach DuPleiss really knew his business. The man was tough but fair, and the players respected him for that. Mark was just a freshman, but the coach had seen his potential and given him a shot at outside linebacker in their last game. He had the weight, he had the strength; now he just had to work on his speed, he said.

“Who do you like?” he asked, turning abruptly to me.

“What?”

“Who’re your teams?”

I didn’t know anything about football, so I said LSU.

“LSU!”

Mark cursed the team and said he used to like them, too, until they got their asses kicked by Alabama. Then it was like they just rolled over and played dead. There was no excuse for a team like that, he said, a team that had everything going for it, a team that could win all season and then toss in everything at the end. He couldn’t believe they’d lost their last game to Tulane.

“Can you believe that? Tulane.”

He shook his head disgustedly and let out another string of curses against LSU.

If there had ever been any doubt about my feelings for Mark, there wasn’t anymore: I couldn’t stand the guy. There was something mean
and stupid in his nature. It showed in his thick nose and blunt forehead, and in the way his eyebrows lowered when he swore. He was only talking about a football team, but he could as easily have been cursing the blacks, or the Communists, or anybody else he took it into his mind to hate. He was strong and unforgiving, a bully, and I saw that he would be that way for the rest of his life; and for this same reason I suspected that he would always be successful in whatever he did, and I despised and feared him for that.

I was glad when my mother swooped up from the lawn and interrupted us.

“Boys! Boys!” she said breathlessly. “Are you having fun? Did you get something to eat? Isn’t this fabulous?” She had a drink in one hand; her eyes were bright, her face flushed. She grabbed Mark’s arm. “I need you now. I need you right now. Are you ready?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mark finished his Coke in a swallow and looked around for a place to put his glass. My mother took his glass and handed it to me.

“Where’re you going?”

“You’ll see. In a minute,” she answered, and spirited Mark away into the house.

The band finished a song and started another one. Guests mingled on the dance floor in front of the gazebo; they crossed the lawn, passed in and out of the house, and stood at the edges of the swimming pool, looking around as though waiting for something to happen. I saw my father lead the mayor out through the gates of the patio and down the yard toward the Martellos’ dock. They stopped on the grass, and my father took the mayor’s arm and pointed up at the sky. The mayor, a short man with a white crew cut, nodded and pointed along with my father.