The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (16 page)

Then, to the east, she noticed Lydia making her way down the jungle path. She had thought about Lydia so often, remembering the few times she’d talked with her as a young girl. That subtle strangeness she’d found. Kathy no longer pulled at people’s oddities during dinner parties; it had grown exhausting for her, and men and women seemed less open these days, palming their true eccentricities and offering feigned ones: yoga and mysticism and sex. They were all adults now, and closeness was something too difficult to bear. With friends, with strangers. The people around her had made life choices they took to be permanent; now, whether confident in or afraid of their choices, they no longer allowed any examination; she could learn no more about them than about characters after a book had ended. She rarely went to parties anymore, afraid to come across another sad, perfected person. But Lydia was young, and Kathy thought there still might be something free in this girl, unaltered, something to be learned. Also, Kathy had brought a gift with her to the island, especially for Lydia. She watched the girl’s movements through the trees, wondering if she had the nerve to shout, call the girl up to the overlook, hand over what had been waiting twelve years in her pocket.

She had it by chance. Back in 1965, on the boat over from the mainland, Eli had slipped her a heavy camera and she’d taken it without questioning. She knew it was Denise’s, but Denise was drunk at the time and didn’t need it. Kathy had headed out to the bow to look at the island that was appearing on the horizon, holding the camera before her. She remembered someone shouting
Land ho!
and the little girl beside her saying that she couldn’t see it, and that’s when Kathy turned and took a picture—an angry child, her face red and squinting in the salt air, her hands thrown down to keep her dress from flying in the wind. Later, when others were sleeping in their huts, Kathy had wandered along the jungle paths until she found Professor Swift with Lydia again, the man washing his face in a tub and Lydia stark naked in the orchids, staring. Another picture. And on and on as the evening progressed, as they gathered in their stations on the overlook, all photos of Lydia, until Professor Swift told her to stop using the flash; it would ruin their eyes. Kathy gave the camera to him then and got it back the next morning, but in the flurry after the accident, those bleary-eyed days on the plane and alone in California, she apparently removed the roll of film and then forgot all about it. Denise got her camera back, but Eli’s sudden decision to move to England made it hard to keep track of the small objects. Most random junk went into a box, in storage, and the roll of film went in there as well. She did not think of it again. Not until a few years after their return, when going through the box to find a book, did she recover the film. Kathy pulled it out, the rattling jar of plastic, knew instantly what it was, and stopped herself from developing it. She knew what was on it—prying shots of Lydia as a girl—and Kathy decided it wasn’t for her to see first. The pictures had a painful innocence to them now that she didn’t dare expose; they were a record of Lydia just before the accident. To see them, then hand them over—it would be an ambush, a trick. No, she would keep it for the reunion, for Lydia to see alone.

That’s what Kathy held in her hand, which Eli had thought was a stone.

Kathy watched as the girl passed through a clearing, nodding her head at two women who sat smoking cigarettes. Lydia was moving toward the island’s interior, skirting the summer palace on whose overlook Kathy stood. She seemed to be making her way to the beach, brushing her hair back vainly and ripping the leaves out of the way. Angry youth, or impatient youth. Then she disappeared behind a curve in the path, and Kathy replaced her form with the memory of her that day on the beach. Taking that face from the age of five to here, seventeen, was like watching the expansion of a crumpled tissue dropped in water—the unkinking of the hair, bringing it to this shine, the outward floating of her features, the long kite-shapes of her eyes, the rosy pimpled chin, Swift’s upturned nose amid the faint pollen-scattering of freckles. It fascinated Kathy to consider what awful things the girl had got through to reach this age, and what she still might face.

She had thought of Denise this way, once, when they were young. The rich, heartless scientist too long ignored. But Denise was no longer that for her. The leave-taking long ago at the airport had been tense, interesting to Kathy, almost as if Denise could not bear to part with her and yet could not wait to drive home to her flat and begin new projects alone. And then no letters in England. No letters at all. Eli had not seemed surprised, but despite her eagerness for friendships to change, for people to change, it had broken Kathy’s heart. After a year, she had to give her friend over for good as one of those characters in an Elizabethan play who enters brilliantly in the second act banquet scene, has all the best lines, then never returns again. Kathy missed her, though; she and Eli talked about her. They said they missed her confusion, how she seemed perpetually unhappy but, oddly, good-humored. How she worried endlessly yet took for granted that she would succeed. How she nervously rubbed her face so that her makeup disintegrated over the course of a dinner party (Eli’s anecdote); how she beat the table when she argued and made the glasses ring (Kathy’s). In England, Denise seemed very far away, and Kathy assumed she’d lost her.

Her disappearance was, however, the product of Kathy’s own device. She and Eli had introduced her to the man who would become her husband—Adam—but Kathy hadn’t realized that this would change anything. She had only meant to salve Denise’s loneliness, and grabbed the closest thing at hand—an odd, bookish young man from the edge of their circle, an acquaintance, really—but, in the same way a quick fix on a table leg can hold for generations, that conventional Adam, also never made to be permanent, stayed. What could you say when it was love? How could you tell her that you’d never really meant for her to marry him?

Eight years passed. Christmas cards came, hilarious and weirdly upper-class things with a picture attached of a family Kathy could not imagine belonging to Denise. Was this the life she’d chosen? The smile seemed the same in each photo, and as the color processes improved over the years, her skin appeared to grow more natural and pink, her blouses more expensive. One year, the card came in the mail and Kathy laughed out loud to see that brain-heavy Denise had permed and frosted her hair into a kind of macaroon. She showed the photo to Eli, who simply repeated a dictum from his grandmother:
You can’t judge anything you didn’t pay for.
Oh what an awful world if that were true, she thought. And hadn’t they paid in some way for that macaroon? Wasn’t there an investment there— the Shabbat dinners, the sangria and fondue parties, the late nights, the neat package containing her future husband? Hadn’t they given her all this so that she’d yield something better than her mother’s life out in the foggy mansion, lunching at Neiman Marcus but buying,
bien s※r,
at Saks? Were these appalling cards to be the only dividend they’d ever see?

When Denise did finally reenter their lives, it was as Eli’s friend alone. Kathy was not hurt this time; she understood that she was no longer crucial to her old friend’s life, and had not been for some time. A husband, a son—it changes you. Denise had hardened into the place where she had fallen at thirty, and Kathy assumed that, like so many people, she couldn’t bear the analysis. There were to be no more late-night talks on the carpet or sitting on the steps outside a party whispering and complaining. Eli was an easier friend, rarely petty or hurt by anything you said, content never to delve deeper than a discussion of ion clouds. Kathy understood that Denise was happy, and she gave her husband freely to those comet-hunting nights. But she ceased admiring the woman.

Soon enough, she came to see a different side of Denise, the one her husband loved. It was at a party in L.A. years after their return, when Eli was beginning to have difficulties with his department and came home depressed, that Kathy and Denise were standing in the warm night air together. It was not an astronomical gathering, which made it all the nicer because it meant they could all admire the moon without any comment about how it ruined the stars. It was a neighbor’s backyard party, the weird seventies brand where all the men wore hemp bracelets and beads and all the women still came with their hair newly set. As the stars awoke, the two astronomers could point them out, delighting people as if they were all children, and had never noticed that Mars was red. Kathy remembered that the host came out with a pitcher of punch on a tray, full to the top with ice, and the hostess laughed and said, “Harry, you idiot! The ice’ll melt and it’ll spill all over everything!” Denise then flatly and innocently explained how it was a stupid thing to say, since ice, in contradiction to common sense, is more dense as a liquid:
Worry not, Harry; the ice will melt harmlessly.
The host and hostess stood stunned as oblivious Denise took a glass of offered punch, and Kathy saw that she was nothing like she’d thought she was. She had not become complacent or ordinary at all; these days, Denise merely said and did what she liked. And from Eli’s ecstatic face, Kathy saw he had always known this. Why had she never seen it? Was this the reason—had Kathy always held her back, tamped her friend down like brown sugar in a measuring cup, and so Denise had to be free of her? Was this why she had written no letters?

Lydia had made it to the beach, was already past the spit. She had stripped to her bikini, clothes in a bundle under her arm, and walked awkwardly across the sand, picking up her legs like a sandpiper, rearranging her hair against a hopeless breeze. Scandalous white girl in a green bikini. Seventeen years old and finally away from the crowd, away from her bullying father, the anger of his old age, away from the worthless handful of jerks down the beach. They couldn’t see her—she was on the most desolate strip of beach, and only Kathy, leaning a little over the wall, could make out the girl stepping through the hot sand toward a clump of coconut trees. She could finally see what a girl might do if you just left her alone.

It was hard to have no friends. Nearing forty, with everyone around you stuck in their personal tar pits, complaining about the loud music these days, the clothes, the morals, and the death of the English language on the lips of the young—did they really believe the seventies were the end of the world? Couldn’t they recognize all these phrases from their parents’ mouths? They were simply growing old. They had turned thirty-five and put a full stop on their lives. Where did this leave Kathy? Watching a girl who might grow up a little different.

Then a dark form came from the jungle, walking at an angle to meet the girl. Kathy could see Lydia still walking, not noticing, just fussing with her hair and with the bundle of clothes, looking out to sea. But Kathy could make it out: a man walking swiftly toward her, an island man. Shirtless, long pants, his arms hanging as he made his way. And then Lydia saw him. She froze, dropped her bundle, standing hands-on-hips in false bravado. Perhaps the man said something as he approached, perhaps the girl yelled back; Kathy never knew. It was distant mime play for her, a dark form and a light one under the hot sun. The man drew next to Lydia. Kathy leaned over to see, inching for a view, terrified. Should she yell? They wouldn’t hear. Should she call a guard? It was too late. Yes, now he was soundlessly talking to her, his hand on the girl’s shoulder. Then she saw: It was Ali, Dr. Manday’s son. And also: Now Lydia’s hand was on the back of his head; now they were kissing.

From there, Kathy let time move quickly. She leaned back from the wall as the distant figures kissed and groped like the teenagers they were, as he undid the bikini and the girl let it fall to the beach with the rest of her clothes. Kathy walked away from the view as the boy took the girl’s hand and led her down a spit to an old stone hut. She turned from the sight now. This was some other kind of youth, some foreign land, and she no longer knew how to read it. An innocent girl on a beach, a dark man. And to think she had almost screamed. Maybe she was old, too. She went through the gilt entrance to the stairs, making her way down through the shadowed spiral, then down the cut stone steps, her hand against the wall. The night ferry was many hours away, but she might still pack. Rest on her bed, read her book. There would be dinner, talking with Eli and Denise. God, there was so much time to kill before she could leave.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she handed the film canister to the sultan’s guard, telling him to give it to Dr. Swift’s daughter. They had some trouble working this out. Dr. Swift, his daughter, Dr. Swift. Then the guard grinned and took the roll and Kathy was in the cool of the forest again. And she could not know it, she would never know it, but this comet would come around again before Lydia saw those pictures.

By four o’clock, you could see the comet in the sky. This day in March was the perfect time to view it; the comet had already passed out of the blinding halo of the sun, but still reflected the sun’s light, making it bright and clear. A greater comet had come the year before, Comet Kahoutek, and astronomers had grown excited, proclaiming it to be the comet of the century. It had sizzled, though, and hopes were high for Periodic Comet Swift. The same thing had happened: Comet Swift was faint, a scribble in the daytime sky, possibly with two tails this time, but nothing like it should have been. Few on the island were watching; they were all chatting or sleeping now, or awake in the hot darkness of their huts.

One was watching: Dr. Swift, sneaking a bourbon at the abandoned bar. He was not supposed to drink or smoke, but who was there to stop him now? Where was the lady in white robes who would tsk-tsk at his weaknesses, grab the bottle from him, stub out the strong cigars? Who would be enraged by anything he did to himself now? No one. There was just this broad, hot beach in its glittering Tiffany case. So he looked up at his comet and it brought his burning mind to a furious boil. A wait of twelve years, only his third viewing, and such a disappointment. Even now, near perihelion, it hadn’t ever blazed or smoked bright blue with ions. The professor had said nothing to anyone, but he had a private reason for his anger: He was ill. He considered the notion that this might be his last sight of his comet. At sixty-four, twelve years felt both too short and too long; that length of time, in the past, had seemed to move by so quickly, but now of course it seemed unreachable. His research was waning, he had fewer grad students and papers; life seemed to tire him. So this might be the last time, and the old man, dreaming of its fiery approach from Mars, had wanted housewives to gasp from their kitchen windows. He had wanted kings to shake in fear. He looked up from the fringed beach. A white scratch on the perfect sky.