The Night of the Comet (35 page)

“I mean, sure, I’m forty years old and I’ve been out of college for a while, but that’s not necessarily a strike against me. I’ve kept up with developments in the field, more or less, and now that I’ve made something of a name for myself, I don’t see why they wouldn’t admit me—

“Hey! Think about that.” He stopped and looked up across the table at me; his broken glasses wobbled on his nose. “Maybe by the time you
finish high school and start at LSU, I’ll be teaching undergraduates by then. Wouldn’t that be neat? Alan and Alan Junior, together at college. Running across the quad to our classes. You could take my Introduction to Astronomy course.…”

After dinner, after I’d cleared the table, he’d pull out his books and papers and go back to work. When I went up to bed he’d still be sitting there beneath the weak bulb of the overhead lamp, the darkness of the room hanging around his shoulders like a cloak. I’d wake in the middle of the night to hear him stirring downstairs. The back door would carefully open and close, and his footsteps would creak across the wooden porch and down to the yard. I didn’t need to look out my window to see what he was doing; I knew what he was doing. In the morning when I came downstairs, he’d be as I left him the night before, sitting at the table, shirtsleeves rolled up, pen in hand, dried mud on his shoes. He might’ve never gone to bed at all. He’d look up and blink, as though surprised to see someone else in the house.

Maybe, I thought, his comet would still shine as brightly as he said it would. Maybe it would light up the sky day and night like a blazing fireball. Just because it hadn’t happened yet didn’t mean that it still couldn’t. What did I know, after all? This was the first comet I’d ever seen, so I hardly knew what to expect.

And yet, something was obviously not altogether right. There was a desperation to his conviction, as though he feared that if he admitted any doubt at all, the whole castle of his belief would crumble to the ground, and as the night of the comet approached, I watched him with a growing apprehension.

Sometimes while scribbling at his papers, he’d put down his pen, pull off his glasses, and press his hands over his eyes. He’d hold this pose for a long minute, jamming his palms so tightly to his face that his arms would begin to tremble. He’d make a pained sound, like a dog’s whimper, and then slide his hands away to reveal wet, bloodshot eyes. Then he’d blink, replace his glasses, take a deep breath, and resume his work.

Every time he did this, I wondered what he was seeing behind his covered-up eyes, what dark vision of the past or the future he was trying so hard to obliterate.

Late Sunday afternoon I sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper. My father had already left with Mr. Coot to go set up for the comet viewing. I was to meet Peter soon, and together we would bike downtown to join our fathers in the square. Outside, the light was low and
silvery, making mirrors of all the windows at the Martellos’ house. They were due back home from their vacation today, but I hadn’t seen any sign of them yet.

Like my father, I had high hopes for the evening. Three days ago I’d received a postcard from Gabriella, sent from Colorado. I’d already studied it exhaustively, but I looked over it again now while I waited for her family to return.

The front of the card was a color photograph of skiers coming down a mountainside; above them on the slope was a rustic lodge where more skiers were gathered. A chairlift cut across a backdrop of pines. Gabriella had playfully drawn a circle around one of the skiers, with an arrow and a label saying “Me!” She’d also drawn a tiny stick figure of a deer peeking out of the trees, with another arrow: “Deer!”

On the reverse was her message:

Here, finally, was the proof I’d been waiting for. She missed me; she’d been thinking of me during her vacation. Perhaps she’d even thought of me at the same time I was thinking of her, skiing down the slope in her hooded jacket. She’d seen the deer gathered against the trees, lifting their heads as she sailed past, and in that very moment she’d said to herself,
I’ll bet Junior would like this
. Later in the lodge—perhaps the same lodge in the photograph—her cheeks stinging from the cold, she’d stopped off at the gift shop, looked through the cards, and chosen one especially for me.

But most important was her message on the back, and I examined it again to see if there was anything I’d missed. I loved the offhanded intimacy
of her greeting, and the self-deprecating joke about her uncertain spelling skills, and then her expression of concern for my own holiday. “See you soon” with an exclamation mark was obviously another way of saying “I can’t wait to see you again.” But I puzzled long and hard over that word “friend.” Was it meant to be ironic? Another joke? Or was it sincere, a reminder of how much our friendship meant to her? Either way, the subtext of her entire message was revealed in the last thing she wrote, down at the very edge of the card, an impulsive admission of her true feelings for me, and a private reference to our magical night together:
kiss-hug, kiss-hug
.

Or maybe not.

Maybe I was misreading everything. Maybe her words and scratchings were just the ordinary conventions that a teenage girl used when she jotted a quick postcard. Or maybe Gabriella herself was confused about her feelings for me, and thus the confusing messages that I read in her card.

I propped her card up against a drinking glass and reviewed again all the evidence of our love: the smiles and whispers we’d shared in the corridors at school, the pinch she’d given me that one night, our handholding in the planetarium, her appearances on her balcony, our kiss (our kiss!), and now her card from Colorado with its closing “xoxo.” The facts seemed indisputable; it all added up. And yet, the closer I looked at it, the less clear it became. Despite all the evidence, I couldn’t get rid of a nagging doubt that told me I was only wishing into existence something that wasn’t there at all.

This, I saw, was where science failed you. All of my father’s talk about the “objective observation” and “trusting the evidence of your senses” was of little use when it came to trying to understand other people. People, I was beginning to believe, didn’t so easily conform to the rules of science. With people, it was all just guesswork. You might think you knew someone perfectly well, and that she knew you, but there was still that wall of flesh between you. And it wasn’t as if you could pin someone down on a laboratory table and cut her open like a frog to find out what was going on inside her. You could never know what was going on inside another person, not really.

Follow your heart, my mother would say, and the rest would follow.
That was the best you could do. In the uncertain seas of human relationships, the only reliable compass was your heart. And the heart—the heart never lied. Did it?

I checked her house again. Still no sign of them. Feeling inspired, I found some typing paper and wrote a note for her; I had to redo it three times before I was satisfied with it. I welcomed her home and said I hoped she had a good holiday. I reminded her about the comet viewing in the square and said I hoped I’d see her there. I would look for her tonight, I wrote, adding that there was something important I needed to tell her. I signed it “Your friend, Junior. xoxoxo.” Then I tucked the paper into an envelope, along with one of my father’s fliers, and wrote her name on the outside.

I stood and looked out the window to see how the weather was holding up. A scattering of low, well-formed clouds drifted under a blue-gray sky. They moved slowly, like cardboard cutouts being thoughtfully arranged here and there by an invisible hand. What were they? Stratus? Cumulus? Cirrus? My father would’ve known; he knew how to read clouds, could say exactly what they meant and what weather they portended. I tried to decipher them myself, looking for a sign that would tell me how the evening would turn out. One cloud looked like a mountain on fire. Another looked like a rabbit hiding behind a bush. Still another, if I squinted in a certain way, looked like Gabriella lying back on a pillow, her hair scattered extravagantly around her shoulders.…

I grabbed my coat, went out the back door, and was just pulling my bike from the side of the shed when a movement across the bayou caught my eye. I turned to see our Rambler roll up and stop at the curb in front of the Martellos’ house.

What was this? The light fell on the car windows so that I couldn’t make out who was driving. Sensing something odd about it being there, though, I stepped behind the corner of the garage shed to watch. Our car sat there for some time. When another car passed behind it on the street, the driver quickly turned her head as if to hide her face, and then I saw that it was my mother. She studied our house for a moment, shifting to see it better through the trees. Then she turned forward again, put both her hands on the steering wheel, and stared straight
ahead, like she was sitting at an intersection waiting for a light to change.

By then I had an idea of what she was doing at the Martellos’ house, and seeing my mother waiting in the street like this for Frank to come home from his vacation—so hopeful, so vulnerable—made my heart go out to her.

Fifteen minutes later, my legs were tired, I was beginning to shiver from the cold, and she was still waiting there. Brown leaves tumbled across the Martellos’ driveway. Nearby in the trees, two crows had begun arguing back and forth, their caws sounding sharp and angry in the winter air.

At last the Martellos appeared. They rolled up in their white Cadillac, coming from the direction of the Beau Rivage Estates sign. Their car turned into the driveway, crossing in front of our Rambler, and then stopped with two tires on the drive, two in the street. I could just make out Frank and Barbara in the front seat. They looked sideways through their windows at our car; they exchanged some words with each other, and then Frank resumed driving down to their garage. I hid myself more carefully behind the shed as the automatic door opened and he turned in.

A moment later, the Martellos all walked out of their garage. Gabriella wore sunglasses and carried a blue airline travel bag over one shoulder. Mr. and Mrs. Martello both wore alpine-style sweaters and dark pants. The whole family looked tanned and fit, the picture of health and prosperity. They stood in their driveway staring up at our car. Mr. Martello pointed for Gabriella to go inside. She hesitated. He repeated his order, and she turned and slumped into the garage, looking back over her shoulder.

Frank and Barbara argued briefly at the bottom of their drive, the wind blurring their words so that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then my mother stepped out of the car, closed the door behind her, and began walking down the driveway. The Martellos stopped arguing and turned to watch her.

She wore an outfit I’d never seen on her before, an attractive navy-blue suit with a snug skirt and a matching jacket trimmed in black fur.
On her feet, black high-heeled shoes. Her hair was freshly styled, and she wore a white pearl necklace. She looked, I thought, not quite like herself, but rather the self she wished to be. As she walked down the concrete drive toward the Martellos, she carried herself with an erect, shaky determination.

Ooh love
, I thought:
look at what it had done to her
.

I felt queasy with dread. I hated to see this, but at the same time I couldn’t pry my eyes away. I leaned into the side of the shed, scratching at flakes of old paint with my fingernail while I watched the scene play out across the water like it was a movie with the sound turned off. Only this movie, I feared, wasn’t one of those old-style Hollywood romances that my mother loved so much, but a bleaker, more modern movie, one featuring imperfect people making bad decisions that led to endings that weren’t guaranteed to be happy.

Frank left his wife and walked up to meet my mother halfway down the drive. Her face, I could see as she came nearer, was made up, her lips bright red. Frank acted puzzled to see her; he shook his head and opened out his hands. She nodded and spoke seriously to him for a minute. Frank pointed to his house, where Barbara stood watching from the bottom of the drive. Gabriella was watching, too; I saw her standing just inside the garage door, peeking out.

My mother kept talking. At one point she looked like she might begin crying. She put her hand on Frank’s shoulder and touched her fingers to the back of his neck. He grabbed her hand and moved it away. Then he took my mother by the elbow and steered her up the drive, away from his house.

That was it. That was all it took—that one public gesture of Frank’s, him removing my mother’s hand from his shoulder and leading her away from his house—to show everyone exactly where she stood. He put her in the Rambler and closed the door, returning her, as it were, to her place. He stepped back … but then my mother stubbornly opened the door and got out again. He went to put her back in the car, but as he grabbed her, her knees went sideways and she crumpled like a broken doll onto the sidewalk.

My poor, poor mother. I wanted to do something to help her, but
what could I have done? Shouted to Frank to leave her alone? Swum across the bayou and carried her home? Frank tried to pick her up by the arm, but she yanked it away from him and refused to move. He started to walk away, shouting something at her. She dropped her head pathetically over her arms. Then Frank came back and tried again. He hauled her up from the sidewalk and managed to get her seated in the car. He closed the door and pointed for her to go, like you would point for a stray dog to get out of your yard.