The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (14 page)

There was a light in the barn. That crossed glow in the window— had it been there all this time? No, it must have come on as she had stood watching the empty grass. Something wet was on her fingers, and she jumped, frightened, only to find it was Tycho, idiotically adoring her, panting, padding on ahead of her to the barn.

There were faint shouts behind her, but she didn’t turn. The men on the rooftop had caught a few shooting stars passing above the trees. A few early fireflies on the horizon, but nothing (unless you were drunk) worth shouting over.

Lydia did not turn; it was not the time to be looking up. She watched the grass unspringing from the shape of bodies, and walked on. She watched her own feet walking, wet and dark, and Tycho’s blob of movement far ahead of her, shaking back and forth and dipping into shadows and out again. There was no thought in her mind of
I remember being with my sister here,
or
I remember my mother standing in just this spot,
but instead she had a pleasant sensation looking at a wild rosebush on which a few of the yellow heads had shattered, leaving petals bright on the dirt. She knew she liked the bush, and this whole part of the farm, but she dropped the feeling before it had time to form—that this plant had come from their old house in Oakland, the only thing salvaged from that life before Berkeley, that her mother had worried over it on the car ride and kept repeating that transportation is the worst killer of rosebushes in the world. There was also a beloved hamster buried under some part of its root system; but, without a marker, only Tycho seemed able to find it now, sniffing endlessly before Lydia clicked her tongue and he ran off and disappeared.

She was talking to the woods now, quietly, proudly gesturing. She was pretending to be a superhero of some kind, hands on her hips, head high, peering boldly into the leaves.
I am not what I appear to be!
she whispered to the dogwoods.
I am not Lydia Swift, the dancing girl, at all.
… 7
am in disguise!
She came around the corner, raising her arms:
Behold!

The light in the barn had been lit by her father. He was there with the student she had seen earlier, the one with the white dress, the braids, the confidence that she must have stolen from a prettier girl. They were sitting on an old bale of hay, the gray strands crushed under their weight, splintering, and the light came from a hurricane lamp her father had hung on a nail over them. They sat on the bale, together, holding hands. Lydia moved back into a shadow.

The student was speaking: “I can’t, you know I can’t.”

Lit from above, Lydia’s father seemed more strikingly bald and worn. Every crease under his eye became prominent, and he seemed badly sewn, bulging at all seams although, in the light, he also seemed to be smiling. It was a trick of the light—it was the shadows around his eyes, and how his beard hid his mouth—but he seemed happy. His beard had strands that shone when he moved, so that it seemed like a net of something silver, coins, something bright. He gripped the woman’s hand with his left, not with fingers meshed but with them coupled, like two cars of a train, and his right palm lay open before her. Clearly the student had, just the moment before, taken a small black box from that palm, opened it, then closed it again. She held the box against her chest.

“Don’t decide now,” he was saying in his low voice, seeming to smile. “It’s too late to think, dear. Tell me in the morning, or whenever you feel right.”

But she was already giving the box back to him, and Lydia thought for once she looked beautiful in this light, her bright face cut off in shadow. The woman was already saying, “You’re such a brilliant, wonderful man….”

He would not let go of her hand as she stood. Lydia watched him rising with her from the bale, and a dozen strands of hay floated upward into the lamplight, then fell out of sight in the dark barn. Lydia was behind that darkness, keeping still, holding the edge of the barn with two hands, taking it all in without a word.

Her father was trying to give the box back, laughing, making jokes about comets and women. He seemed desperate, and he even said that to the woman before she kissed him on the cheek. He stopped his babbling, stopped laughing, paused to stare at her and quietly said, “Then think of me as desperate, Jenny.” These words made the woman stop, as if she were considering him seriously for the first time, once he had run out of argument and clever ammunition, once he’d tried all his memorized poems, his loving touches on her arm. Here was the famous Professor Swift, and she could have had him down on his knees in this rotting barn if she had wanted. Two wives behind him, and also all the girlfriends, the graduate students, the colleagues, the women at conferences—there were decades of competition there, and she was not his greatest, or smartest, or most beautiful love. Did she stop her movement, stop in the middle of a turn so that the fringes of her shawl whipped back on her, did she pause with that expression of pity and fear, did she still the ringing second with her hand because she knew she was his last?

Lydia watched the tall woman lean forward to kiss her father on his cheekbone, above his beard. She saw the woman’s eyes close, her hand touching his other cheek to comfort him, one braid falling down her shoulder to dangle between them. She saw her father’s eyes looking straight ahead of him, his arms, useless, reaching out to the woman. She saw his unblinking stare at this kiss. Then the woman gathered herself together, away from him, held the hem of her white dress and left the barn, whispering that she loved him.

Swift stepped slowly back, and ink poured into the creases of his face. “Ah,” he said, so quietly that Lydia could hardly hear him. “No you don’t.”

Lydia watched her father as the bits of hay flew through the lamplight. The old man rested one hand against a pillar of wood, staring out the back door where he must have seen that triangle of white fluttering into the weeds. There must have been a longer speech beforehand, when the lamp had first gone on and Lydia had been admiring the couple on the grass. It must have been a stirring speech, careful and loving, reaching back in time and taking lines he had given to Lydia’s mother, when he and she were thirty, rewrapping them, presenting them with dusty hands to this young woman. His words were always miraculous to Lydia. She watched him staring out the door. Apparently, this once, it hadn’t mattered what he said.

He turned and sat down on the hay, hiding the box inside his palm. Lydia grew aware of herself at last, her mind still hazy, aware that she stood only yards away from him in the gray darkness of the barn. There was a sound, and her father faced the loft; an owl was in there with them. How would Lydia ever turn and leave now? She could not be softer than an owl. Would things be better if he saw her there shivering in the doorway? Or would life sour in a second?

The wind blew, and Lydia felt the lipstick that mottled her body like a plover’s egg. He was a great man to her. This man on the bale of old hay had held her on his shoulders in Golden Gate Park so she could see the buffalo. He had dangled her by her ankles over the grass many times before she grew too tall. And once he made her believe that he had invented chocolate. What would happen if he turned and saw her, knew that she had witnessed this scene in the barn? She felt the red lips all along her legs, her arms and neck, her cheeks, trembling in red pairs, and then before she could stop herself the lips were parting, coughing, gasping in the dusty air.

And even if he did hear her, would all of this—the girl, the long night, the whole family and life—would it go under
P
?

How many other bodies besides these comets

move in secret, never rising before the eyes of

men?

—Seneca,
Natural Questions

"You know, I never think about him.”

They were on the beach, Kathy and Eli, just as before. A little older, their faces had fallen into the expressions people would always think of them as wearing—hers in grim amusement, his in perplexity—and they stood close enough to create a shadow between them, a coolness they could talk into. The Spivaks were slightly apart from everyone else, the crowd of scientists who had come to see the comet Swift, which had returned. It was found—"recovered,” that was the phrase—at the last moment this past December by a team of Australians who, thinking they had found a major comet, threw a party for themselves until the CBAT informed them they had documented the return of the famous Comet Swift. Professor Swift himself called the Australians late that night, awakening them, thanking them, extending an invitation to his perihelion party, never hearing their sleepy tones of disappointment. He didn’t care; he was already pulling strings at the NSF to raise money for yet another meteor investigation in the South Seas. A reunion with the comet. So here they were, the old crowd, some bald, some fat, most of them calmer and happier than before, with wives and teaching positions. It was a smaller crowd than twelve years ago; the ones who had failed or given up on science had not returned. These were the survivors.

“Who?” Eli asked her.

Kathy looked at him as if it were obvious, saying, “That little boy—we don’t even know his name—the one who died. I never think about him.”

No one thought about him. No one had mentioned the accident, though high above them they could still make out the crumbled part of the wall, how the cement was darker than that around it, despite more than a decade of blazing sun. The topic, somehow, had been banned from conversation. Maybe, in contrast to all the rationality of these scientists, it was a superstitious silence, or perhaps—and more likely—time had dulled that memory. The cry, so stark in their minds after the accident, had softened, faded behind more personal sorrows. The witnesses had to admit to themselves that they had never noticed the dark-eyed boy before he died, and that the grief (now more than a decade old) had never been over him, a clumsy foreign child. It had always been for themselves, so young then, learning that you could not tailor your hopes like a suit and expect them to fit forever.

Eli sipped his gin and tonic, smiling at a grad student whose name he didn’t know. He said, “Well, you just thought about him now, so—"

“I wasn’t done,” Kathy said without expression, taking his glass away. “It was Jorgeson’s wife—she came up to me and—first it was very strange—she said she’d missed seeing me around all these years, and missed how close we’d been. What did she mean? I’m not sure we ever talked.” Kathy sipped the drink. They all had drinks, all twenty or so of them out there in the hot glare of the beach. The island ban on alcohol had been lifted five years before, after the old sultan died, buried in his gold slippers and cap.

Eli pointed at his wife, smiling. “In fact, you used to make fun of her and say she was a mail-order bride.”

She stared, confused. “I never said that.”

“You did.” His look was insistent, then he wiped some sweat from his nose and said, “We’ll ask Denise.”

The name seemed to change the moment, as if stirred by a breeze. Kathy handed his drink back to him and looked around for one for herself, continuing, “Anyway, then she looked at me very dim-wittedly and said, ‘I think about that boy every single day.’”

“Are we bad people? Are we selfish people?”

Kathy was shaking her head. “I never think about him.”

Eli’s voice changed, became louder now that he had something to say, an affectation he’d picked up from years of lecturing: “Well, I thought about him on the plane. I thought about how we’d all be talking about him and staring at the wall where he fell, and how children would be kept away from the parapet this time.”

Kathy kept watching Swift and his daughter, now a teenager. “There are no children this time.”

“Are we that old? What happened to all the children?” He felt Kathy take his hand.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”

He kissed her forehead. “Let’s not talk about that again. We’ll see Denise and Adam.”

The name again. Another shadow thrown briefly on the sand.

She turned for a moment, head sideways against the blast of sun. In silhouette, Kathy looked the same as ever to him. The triangular profile, the giant glasses and the ponytail. She said, “But isn’t it terrible? I think we all wish it hadn’t happened, but not because it was awful for the boy. Just that it makes things so awkward now.”

“Kath…”

“It ruins our fun.” She looked back at him, grinning, and she was older again, silver in her hair. He touched her face and she said something about needing the shade, and another drink, and the touch crumbled as she was off across the sand toward a set of palm trees. He saw, too, teenage Lydia standing near the bar, talking, fanning herself with a hat. He knew his wife well enough to realize her interest had, as always, turned elsewhere; she had to know how this particular strange girl had turned out. It was a reunion, after all.

They were in a different world again, this group of scientists. Not in space; in time. Twelve years before, they had stormed the beaches with their intelligence and pride, sure that the world would soon be theirs; now, however, they felt gray and tired and confused. In 1977, the country felt like a man recovering from a heart attack—the parties were over, the night terrors, and it was time to be quiet and kind. Nixon had been followed quickly by the bicentennial, girls marching through towns in red-white-and-blue high boots, and two presidents who vowed forgiveness: the draft dodgers were urged to come home, and even traitorous Tokyo Rose, a sixty-year-old woman now, was pardoned. Science was grand and awful again: a space shuttle that would fly between stars, a neutron bomb that promised a softer, more invisible death. The panic of youth had passed, but still these scientists felt tentative, as if they stood inside a giant ball that had been shaken over and over by a child. Dizzy, stumbling, they had at last found the door. But would they ever be the same?

Eli stood in the blazing white heat of the beach in this crowd of men and watched his wife make her way to the shade, eavesdropping on the red-haired girl. He watched her standing alone: dark and segmented like an ant’s body, hips and breasts and the implied antenna touching the words she overheard, the view, some unknown thought. She read everything around her like a book. He tossed her an inquisitive glance, and she caught it in time to raise her eyebrows and let him know that everything was all right with her—the heat, the red-haired girl nearby, these dull old men and their hairy stars. She was only here for the day, on her way to a conference in Japan. She felt no need to mingle; among these men, her presence always faded against the sand—she would stand there, biting her lip, features dilated down to neutral—why did she dim herself like that? Or was she like those star clusters, hidden in constellations, that glimmer beautifully in the night sky until a car’s headlights pass by and the eye, so frail, deletes the cluster in the wash of light?

He had loved Kathy in England. He’d run there to escape, and he had done it. He had found a few great postdoc positions that enabled him to work on his research on cometary nuclei, struggling for a faculty position, then finally settled for something slightly lower than he’d hoped. Eli felt bitter at the ease of positions in America, but he’d found a way to stay in London, and the transition was complete. They got a few letters from Denise, but Eli tore them up and never answered them, so they dwindled into yearly Christmas cards that made him smile to remember her at such a safe distance. Kathy, finally as comfortable in a place as Eli was, worked editing books for an independent press and helped a friend put out a poetry journal with an electric typewriter and a ditto machine they kept in their flat’s kitchen. The hot smell of the machine kept them both content, feeling they had not sold their hard-won intellectual freedom unwisely—at least, at least there was bad English poetry around in sheaves of purple ink! And the foreignness of their lives in England never lost its appeal (although, after the fourth year, they had stopped finding the English “fascinating" and instead felt most of them were hidebound and homicidally obsessed with class), nor did the shops in London wear thin, nor the new funny accents they came across, nor the sight of ugly Americans stumbling through Piccadilly. They struggled together, made mistakes together, fought, and this at last was marriage. The time in England, difficult and impoverished as it was, would come to seem, later, a charmed and impossible phase, colored, like art from a lost empire, in simple platinum and blue.

Then in 1973, out of nowhere, he was offered a position in Los Angeles based on his research of cometary nuclei and, though the school was less impressive than the institutions his old classmates had found out of postdoc, Eli saw it as his last chance to move up in his career. Scientists get ranked so early on, and the English were not eager to give any American a step up, so if Eli wanted a career, he had to look west. He swallowed his pride and, in a move he would sometimes regret, he took the job. The Spivaks moved back to California, to a bungalow, and for a little while they were astonished at their old country, at the excesses and gaudy beauty of it, the prickly dryness of their western landscape, and they could notice already some of the hippie men and women turning back into the corn-fed cheerleaders and quarterbacks they once had been. Money, careers, apathy and hot tubs. They felt so changed, and it was wonderful to know that they had changed together, had an alliance against their strange homeland. Within a month, they got their first visit from Denise.

On seeing her in the doorway, trim in a yellow linen dress, a wooden necklace crossing her breasts, her neck beginning to cord with age, her eyebrows plucked quite high, Eli saw how fine she was, how totally fine and not lost at all. He also saw himself as she must have seen him, realized how bald and fat he had become in those eight years, and had the strangest feeling of relief—even more so when she showed him a picture of Adam and he saw how much handsomer the man had become in that time, fuller, more muscle and jaw than ever—and thought to himself,
Now we’re safe, now there’s no danger, we can be friends.
Immediately after it came into his head, he swallowed the thought, cracked it like ice between his teeth, and forgot it. They embraced, and then she and Kathy embraced, and it was all right.

He watched Kathy trudging back toward him through the sand, her face turned away. He saw the dark oval of sweat forming on the back of her shirt, under the ponytail with its old-fashioned leather barrette. He saw two silver hairs slipping from the knot, one straight and glittering, the other kinky, waving behind her now in the faint breeze. What an old, familiar sight. How strange to see it projected again onto the rough green head of that volcano, this panel of hot sky, those dragonflies knitting into an emerald near her hand. He felt a knot of worry.

“I couldn’t hear anything. I’m going down to the huts.” Kathy was beside him, shaking the sand from her shoes.

“Why? Denise will be here in a minute.”

“Someone said Adam was sick and she was still in the huts. I want to go down to meet her.”

He understood that she wanted to meet Denise alone. They all lived in California now, but Santa Cruz and L.A. were farther apart than it seemed when they were younger, and the kinds of private moments that Kathy loved couldn’t happen over the phone, or with that child around, or that husband. He knew Kathy didn’t want to see Denise in this crowd of men, this professional setting where the first comments were bound to be about Denise’s university work and about her recent collaborations with Eli that had brought them both so much attention and jealousy. Eli knew how Kathy needed friends in private, how crowds dispersed her feelings.

“You’re not going to be morbid and look for where the boy fell….”

“I’m not going to be morbid.”

It had been years since they discussed children; but once in a while this fascination of hers became apparent, glittered like an old coin in a muddy fountain, though he didn’t dare to touch it. He let her fret and worry over others’ children: kids on the street, Denise’s son, this boy. If he touched it, that meant talking about it, and he felt the topic was too precariously balanced for any talking. He did not want children now, although twelve years before, on this same island, he had longed for her to be pregnant. Now, it seemed, their positions were reversed. She pined; he changed the topic. Eli had all kinds of clever diversions, funny conversation pieces about how children changed people, aged them in a weekend, how kids’ awful tastes infiltrated their parents and ruined them forever. But these were just bits. He still loved children, but he knew how a child with Kathy would lead him further into a life that, already in the past year, had begun to look like a maze.

“Okay,” Eli said. “Don’t wander too long, I’m not going to see you for a while.”

“You’ll see me.”

“But
really
see you. Don’t fall asleep in the sun—come back for lunch.”

“I’ll come back for lunch,” she said, but she wouldn’t.

He watched her entering the shade of the jungle path, waving to the guards who seemed to be everywhere on this island. So recently back from England, she was beginning to have a life without him. As though returning to the States was like returning to her childhood room, looking around and remembering how she used to want things—quiet, separate, free—and beginning to put the old things back in their places. He did not mind it; he preferred it. All on her own, Kathy had saved him a great deal of trouble.

He went over to the group around Swift, gathered under a parasol, and began to talk to them about the comet. A few old jokes were made and the men laughed. Professor Swift seemed smaller, older and less patient than before, restless as he talked; he had quit cigarettes and alcohol and was still getting used to it. He wore a shirt patterned like graph paper and dotted with sweat, and he kept patting the breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Manday, in a white suit with the jacket thrown over his arm, rubbing the dark crescents under his eyes, had stepped forward slightly from the others, and just the tip of his nose escaped the parasol’s violet shade, a sunlit knob. Beside him was a young man of about nineteen, whom Eli had not noticed before, but who now tapped Manday on the shoulder and whispered to him. It was Manday’s beloved son, Ali. He was one of the youngest on the beach, handsome with a long, dark face and a body that wanted to move, his hands restlessly tapping his thighs, his head nodding. Manday whispered back and looked at his watch, then held his son’s arm and kissed him on the mouth. Ali smiled and ran across the beach into the trees, released from his father’s astronomy, which, in bright daylight, became mere theory and conjecture. Manday explained proudly that his son needed to study for his American college classes.