The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (15 page)

Young people, sons, daughters, everywhere on the beach. All of them shedding youth as quickly as they could, scrubbing it off like a stain. Eli thought it was a shame to bustle forward so impatiently, as if the doors might close before you made it to thirty, but then he remembered that he had felt that way ten years ago, in England, begging time to pass so he’d forget his indiscretions, so he’d learn to love his wife the way he had when they were younger. It was still a shame, but he couldn’t blame them. Lydia, flirting with all the men. Ali, anxious to leave his family. He couldn’t blame them.

Then the professors (for that’s what they were now, all of them) began to talk to Eli in tones of excitement. Not about his career in L.A., which was almost beneath their notice, but about his amateur forays.

“I wish I had the time,” one of them sighed, and Professor Swift kept slapping Eli’s back as if they were at last colleagues now, the mentor and the chosen son.

“I hope you hit the jackpot,” the old man said gruffly, coughing, and what he meant was that he hoped Eli found a comet like his, above them now, the Comet Swift. Because, on weekend nights now, Eli sat on a hillside with a small telescope and camera and searched for comets. He was a comet-hunter, a small hero to the group of stargazers who found themselves mired more and more in papers and committees. Eli, frustrated with his department, and with the encouragement of Kathy, had returned to boyhood romance in his free time, and had already found a minor comet with his partner. Thus all the congratulations. And who would have guessed it? His partner was on the island right now, in the trees, talking to his wife. His partner was Denise.

Jorgeson, bald now and sunburned, asked, “Now why did they put her name first? Periodic comet Lanham-Spivak. Why not Spivak-Lanham?”

“Alphabetical,” Eli explained, remembering the night of its discovery.

Swift put his finger on the side of his nose. “You’ve been hoodwinked, son. You should put it in order of contribution.”

Eli sighed. “Dr. Lanham gave the greatest contribution.”

Someone made a dirty remark and Eli blushed, turning away, letting them have the rest of their conversation without him. It confused him, sometimes, to realize his old colleagues had got through the sixties unscathed, unenlightened, and were turning into the same leering, jokey professors they’d loathed back when they were BAD-grads. But scientists were somehow impermeable to society. Fashion could not affect them, nor etiquette, nor politics nor the passage of time. It was wonderful, and kept them separate, honest; it was hideous, as well. Eli looked toward the jungle, but Kathy hadn’t returned. He noticed a figure above them all, on the overlook, but the relentless sun blinded his view. He sought the shadows and held on to a tree.

His collaboration with Denise had begun a year after his return to California. They saw each other very rarely, and usually in the company of her son and husband, that dull and likable football player to whom Eli had introduced her—introduced before he’d left for England, as a way to keep her happy. But hadn’t she realized it? That he’d never meant for her to marry him? Usually Adam was around, so their conversations were placid, with child stories, minutia of the suburban life, Adam’s store of WASPy jokes. But once, Denise had come down for business alone. Eli and Denise had sipped port together and finally talked about their favorite subject: the sky. How it always kept its word. There was something desperate in her that night which Eli had been yearning to see, hoping was not dead inside her, and he’d grabbed the chance. He talked about comet-hunting. He convinced her that it might bring the bloom back to her romance with the stars.

So it started. Every other Saturday, they drove from their respective cities to a midpoint near Tranquillity, a nothing town surrounded by pistachio and almond fields. The drive took each of them about three and a half hours, and they met in a diner and ate pancakes and drank coffee. Then he got into her car and they drove with their equipment partway up Ciervo Mountain. On a rocky overlook, she laid out the woolen blankets and arranged the folding chairs while he set up the sixteen-inch telescope and camera. Each imagined wild animals hooting and rustling, but they were never disturbed, not even by humans. Although they were here in an amateur capacity, they kept strict laboratory roles: Denise adjusted the telescope every six minutes to search the sky vertically, and Eli loaded the film, timed the aperture, and carefully preserved the images, which he developed the next day. He mailed the photographs to Denise and she studied them on her own that week. If they caught a comet on any night, therefore, they wouldn’t know it for days. Here, under the stars, they were merely gathering data, so they could relax; the young professor could bring out his college bongos and play to the sound of the trees, and his friend could stand, listening, gazing up at that old familiar view.

It was far from Tranquillity, though, deep into their sixth month of searching, that Denise made the discovery that would lend them small immortality. They had decided to search the photographs using stereo imagery, an uncommon procedure at the time. Eli stacked the hundreds of images in order, mailed them to Denise, and she, sitting in her bathrobe while she heard her husband typing in the other room, would fit two photos into her stereomicroscope and peer within. It was something like the turn-of-the-century stereopticons— two sepia photos (usually of a dour mandarin in front of the Yangtze River) were placed side by side with a barrier between them, and the viewer looked through a glass that sent only one image to each eye. The optical effect, because of slight differences in the angle of the photographs, was three-dimensional, and the sepia mandarin appeared to float angrily in front of his muddy river. For the comet search, Denise would put a photographed square of sky on one side and another photo taken six minutes later on the other. When she looked through the eyepiece, anything exactly the same in both photos would stay flat, but any object that had moved in those six minutes would appear, like the mandarin, to float mysteriously above the other stars. This is exactly what Denise Lanham saw that afternoon in May.

“Adam! Call Eli!”

Eli flew to Berkeley to see what she thought she’d found. There, in the eyepiece, in a close shot of Scorpius near dawn, hovered a smudge of light—which was just how a still-distant comet would look. Eli brought out his edition of the
Uranometria
to confirm it was not a known star or a Messier object. There was nothing known in Scorpius. Denise searched her shelves for the
IAU Circular
for March, as well as the
Minor Planet Circular,
and she and Eli, dizzy from a lack of sleep and pale with hunger, put their shaking fingers to the long ephemerides for bright comets present in the skies, moving down the columns in search of one in Scorpius, nervous as snakebite victims searching for an antidote. But there was, again, nothing. They had discovered a new object in the sky. Yet the scientific method could not end there, so they spent another anxious and slightly drunken night out on the rocky overlook, focusing, this time, entirely on that square of Scorpius before dawn, when comets glow coldly near the sun.

“I want this comet,” she told him forcefully as he loaded the film. She lay on the blanket with a bottle of wine.

“I know,” he said.

She shook her head. “No, I mean I really do. Remember when we were grad students? And we all secretly wanted the Nobel Prize?”

He thought about it for a moment. She seemed so sure, so like she used to be in school. She frightened him again, the same way. “No, I never wanted that. Astronomers don’t win Nobels….”

“But you did want it, you did,” she said, sitting up and resting her hands on her knees. The only light was a red flashlight, which lay on the Messier catalog. “I know, you thought you had a chance. We all did. We thought it was just a matter of being smart and being lucky, that we were all young Hubbies and Halleys, but you learn it’s not true. You don’t just get smarter and smarter until finally you’re a genius. Being a genius is something else entirely.”

“I never thought I was a genius,” he said, having at last a chance to tell her how he’d always felt about himself, but knowing she wouldn’t hear it that way. She would just hear modesty.

“I thought I was,” she admitted, smiling, touching her thick wool sweater. “But I’m not. It’s all right, it’s fine, I found out early on when I couldn’t land a job and everyone else could. I’m a woman, I know, but a genius woman would have gotten a faculty position. I worked for the government, and the government lets you know you’re no genius. So I gave up on that, but I wanted something else.”

“I hope it wasn’t money.”

“I wanted an effect. An effect or an object. I wanted people to talk about calculating the ‘Lanham effect’ on a white dwarf, or the complex rotation of a ‘Lanham object.’Maybe a ‘Lanham force,’ or a ‘Lanham diagram’ or—hell—even a ‘Lanham tube.’Something named after me. And the funny thing is, even with Dr. Swift around all the time, I never thought I’d get a comet.”

He paused, then asked, “Is that why you agreed to this?”

“Of course that’s why. You can’t just do all this science and die.”

Then she stood up to readjust the telescope, and he recognized the stern, impressive tone in her voice. He had heard it before, standing in the San Francisco fog outside the doorway to her apartment. It had been just this way, just this tone, with different words: “We don’t need to have this conversation.” Such focus, direction, control. He had always seen her as so fragile, but it wasn’t true. She always got exactly what she wanted. And, of all things, instead of heartbreak, this new vision of her thrilled him. Denise would find this comet for him; she would save his career, and would not even expect to be thanked. There was no one like her.

Eli was careful but trembling in the Berkeley darkroom the next morning as he looked over the photographs they had taken, breathless in the red light as he saw the faint fuzzy spot appearing in the emulsion, this time teardropped with a tail. Then it was hurriedly lent to Denise in the next room. She panted, placing it in her stereo-microscope, turning the dials and he waited, pacing, holding his hands before him. After a minute or so, she stood up, and he could see she was weeping. She looked at him, then yelled for a telegram to be sent:
new comet in scorpius magnitude 8 stop 8 hours ut stop discoverers lanham comma spivak comma professionals in amateur capacity stop right ascension….

And here she was.

Stepping from the shadows of the jungle, in the sunglasses and the white straw hat that students now associated with her, bending a banana leaf out of her way, Denise appeared. She nodded and waved to people, so unlike the timid girl Eli had known in Campbell Hall, yet somehow still consciously awkward. She had done well, produced important papers despite her constraining governmental position. Her success showed in the scientists’ response: They were nudging each other, ridiculing or admiring her, and she walked right through the group of them, using her gesturing hand like a machete to cut past the conversations they threatened to start. About her comet, her papers, her ideas. She spoke briefly with Swift and promised to come back. She made her way through the sunlight to Eli. Blue beads around her neck. Here she was.

Denise touched his arm and whispered, “Just give me a quick kiss, because your wife is on the overlook.”

Automatically, he obeyed, feeling angry once more at the commands she’d always given to people, especially him, but his anger faded as he kissed each cheek. He let himself look up to the great white concrete parapet above them. It was Kathy up there, leaning over the edge, coiled within herself like a heavy knot, and she held something in her hand—a berry, a butterfly, a stone?

“I just saw her in the jungle,” Denise said.

“She headed out to meet you. You’re her best friend these days, you know.”

Denise laughed, and whispered, “I want to talk about her. But people are listening, so we’ll use a code name for her. We’ll call her Bob.” Then she began to talk in her loud, natural voice: “Bob doesn’t seem very happy….”

He was staring at this woman in her late thirties, that stiff trapezoidal nose high in the jungle air, its bump darkened with a broken capillary; he was listening to her talk in code about his wife; he was watching the circular gestures she made to append her words; and all he could think of was how it had begun again. She might change everything about herself over the years—the makeup overdone with blue around her eyes, her thick hair bleached, some lilac scent spreading as she waved her arms—but still the actual rare presence of her warmed him entirely. He carried on this coded conversation with her, but he felt that they were discussing something else—not their collaboration, because that no longer existed as others believed. In this last year, their record of the sky had turned back into romance, into that old affair as easy as a familiar room, so easy it hardly seemed illicit. They both leaned against a palm tree as they talked, and she lowered her hand slightly, rubbing against his. They were lovers now. A blanket on a hillside, a clear veil of stars—something else besides the comet had been recovered.

Kathy glanced down from the overlook. She could not see the beach—she faced the jungle and watched Lydia making her way down the cut path from the huts, headed toward a clearing where the Mandays had their home. Kathy took great pleasure in this, although she knew it was childish, watching a girl like a boat you’d set free down a creek. It was good, though, to see someone else who couldn’t stand the crowd out on the beach. Women so rarely chose to be alone.

Kathy’s greeting of Denise had been brief—they saw each other so often, of course. Denise had not brought her son, after all, and Adam lay feverish and miserable in the hut. No, it was probably best that no one visit him. Kathy could recognize some terrible happiness in Denise’s voice, and she wanted to tell her,
It’s all right, you can be glad you’re on your own today,
but they didn’t talk like that anymore. Denise was Eli’s friend now. Afterward, Kathy had made her way up the long cut stairs to the overlook, curious to see the old place, since she’d be leaving so soon, before the count of meteors. She entered the spiral stairs, and emerged from the golden dome as if from the lip of a honey jar, realizing that she’d never seen this view in daytime. There was the place she’d sat twelve years before. And there was the wall where the boy had fallen. Would he have been nineteen now, twenty? She walked over to the edge and down below she saw Eli, standing alone and looking out to sea. It pleased her that he stood apart from the scientists, that he hadn’t seized her absence as a time to plunge back into the world that upset him. The bundle of hatless men in the sun. The water glinting like a chandelier.