The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (17 page)

Several hours later, the comet was even more visible. Dr. Manday lay asleep, but his wife sat wakeful by the window of their hut. She noticed the scratch in the blue above; her husband had told her where it would be, what it would look like, and she wasn’t a fool. She’d seen it twice before herself; she remembered the day they’d found it, how Swift had burst in, yelling for the sultan; how they gathered in the little Japanese communication office to send that telegram. She remembered her drunken husband later that night, Dr. Swift in his open Hawaiian shirt, that giant awful man. She remembered with bitterness, too, the contents of their telegram:
comet discovered in centaurus by swift stop.
A
stop
where her husband’s name should have been. A
stop
instead of a
manday.
She turned away from Comet Swift; it was a stolen jewel, and she would not gaze on it in awe, or admire it or consider what its appearance might now foretell.

The sun moved lower in the sky. Lydia sat at the bar, and this time the comet was plain to see above the water. She hardly noticed. It was her third gin and tonic, on top of a little pot Ali had given her, and she was glad to have planned it so well that none of the scientists would be around—they were all still having their stargazer naps, or reading their journals, or scribbling in their notebooks. It was just her and the bartender, a stout man who never asked her age and who happily put it all on her father’s bill. She stared out at the high tide, at the ocean-gutted rocks, the perfect curve of a palm bending like an open hand, the poisonous gemlike corpse of a jellyfish on the wet sand. She was so different from everybody else. She and Ali. She’d guessed it for a long time, but the conversation she’d overheard about the boy who fell from the overlook, this sick, secret anniversary—it had confirmed it; they were disposable. She, Ali, anyone who wasn’t one of the scientists, the squares. She thought of Dr. Lanham’s husband, Adam, and how she’d always liked him, ever since she’d met him in the barn; how he was sick today, but they didn’t care. The journals, the notebooks. Hadn’t she even seen Dr. Lanham walking on the beach with the Jewish guy? The bartender brought her another drink and she smiled. He smiled back. God, how was she going to hide the alcohol on her breath this time?

She was right: The scientists were asleep or studying. Most were only a few years into their teaching positions, still assistant professors with loads of low-level classes to teach, desperate for a few hours to finish their research. They still had hopes of greatness, those of them who had landed at major institutions; and those who had fallen lower—they still labored as though they might break free. Denise, in her signature glasses, was working with Dr. Swift’s new calculator, an object as rare and valuable back then as a diamond. Eli edited a collaborative paper, nervously chewing the tip of his pen, Kathy asleep behind him. The others all busied themselves with figures of the sky before the sky itself appeared; they were young, as scientists go, their time eaten up by committees or, for those who had not made tenure, by a desperation too close to be ignored for sun or sand.

And all around them, so easy to forget in its maroon and pea-green undulation, lay the forest. Millions of trembling leaves, each with an insect sticking to the pale undersurface, sailors on rafts riding out the wind. The wind changed its mind. The leaves, with their castaways, bucked wildly in the forest. On the overlook, the sultan’s old telescope creaked in its joints. The comet did not seem to move an inch.

Deep in the cluster of huts, surrounded on two sides by banana groves, a man lay moaning in his bed; he had hardly seen more than the beach since his arrival. Some bad beef stew the night before, a sensitive stomach, and he’d been attacked by beads of sweat like an army of ants. He was recovering now, alone, staring around the walls of his hut. It was Denise’s husband, Adam, and he felt he just might lose his mind.

It was the cry that did it. He was coming off his fever, lying in the sweaty darkness, the late afternoon sun parting the curtains of the single window, and every time he tried to rest his eyes at last, he was awakened by a piercing, mysterious cry. Adam was the kind of man who couldn’t ignore a sound like that, or any distraction—each night before they went to sleep, he carefully swept any dirt or crumbs out of the bed, and Denise always watched him, smiling, softly ridiculing his sensitivity by saying he was like a Poe character. He couldn’t sleep with the sound, therefore, this cry piercing his heated brain. At first, deep in his fever, he had worried that it was a child fallen outside his hut, wounded, crying for its mother, and that he was the only one who could hear it, but soon the regularity of the cry made this impossible. No, it was no child. The noise, then the silent shadowed room, then the noise again. What was it? He was driven mad trying to figure out the source until a lucky gust of wind blew open the window and he could see, plain and calm, a large parrot hanging in a cage across the way. It seemed to turn and sneer at him before the wind died, the curtain fell, and he heard once again that maddening cry. He knew what made the sound, but it had not calmed him. Now Adam had to figure out what the parrot was saying: “
Help
it"? “
Hop
it"? “
Stop
it"? What had they taught it to say? He could not sleep. Normally, sleepless, he would try to think about his novel, move the characters around like a boy playing with toy soldiers, but he’d given up on those thoughts half a year ago. Instead, he lay there for hours in his fevered dreams, waiting for Denise to arrive.

Adam dreamed for a long time about the boy he had thought lay outside his window. This was not uncommon; he often found it hard to rid his mind of terrible images. He would walk down a street and see the sharp edge of a broken window, thinking,
I’ll hurt myself on that,
and even though he never did, he saved the mental picture of his bleeding hand for hours. So he dreamed about the boy lying wounded, bitten by a serpent, and then about his own son, whom he missed terribly. His son Josh, a proud and creative boy whose talents his mother could not see. To Denise, the blond kid seemed wonderful but not exceptionally bright, no good at math, at science, only happy playing soccer or drawing. Adam felt that only he saw the boy’s great confidence and charm, something Denise would never value. Then Adam dreamed of himself as a boy, as the sunlight suddenly entered his room like the angry husband of a lover. He remembered being in Connecticut at his grandparents’ house in winter, before his family had moved to Hollywood, where he would spend the majority of his life. He was in Milford, Connecticut, in the backyard of the house, and in this dream both the house and the yard took on plantation-sized proportions—a brick mansion with a widow’s walk, an impossibly unmowable lawn acres wide, striped and gilded with winter sun, yellow leaves floating in the crisp air. In reality, he knew it to be a suburban lot backing onto a stream. He made the stream into a brown flowing winter river, chinked with ice and black twigs, and in this memory he stood on a small cliff looking into a dark eddy in which twirled a soup can. Memory moved lightninglike to the next shocking moment, when he found himself in the icy stream, looking up toward the overhang where there was just blue sky. Adam was taken downstream, suffering, frozen, calling, but nobody came and he was sure he was going to die until, just as suddenly, he found himself clutching the dead arm of a tree branch. He pulled himself out and staggered, almost blind with fright, into the mud room where he changed his clothes and appeared in time for dinner. This was just after the war, and his disbelieving family still kept their windows blacked against attack, so he walked into a warm box of a room, sat down and ate. No one ever noticed that his being alive was the most amazing aspect of the meal.

The door opened and in came Denise, lifting him from his fever so that he tried to smile, feeling relieved. Bits of the dream still clung to the room, though, and for a few moments his wife seemed to wade through icy water, pushing cracked branches out of her way, moving forward to save him.

“You’re back!” he said.

“You look better,” she told him merrily, although she didn’t approach. She took off her ridiculous white hat and put it on a post, then removed her sunglasses. Tall, all in thin white fabric, a weightless being near his bed. She walked across the room to open the curtains. The sunlight she let in cast a wavering lemon parallelogram across the mosquito netting, and it moved in the wind like something afloat. The parrot began its cry, and Adam sat up, overjoyed that he could share it with her.

“Listen!” he insisted.”Listen to that!”

She still looked out the window. “It’s Manday’s parrot.”

Adam pounded the sheets like a child. He asked, “What’s it saying? What do you think it’s saying?”

They listened to the noise together and Denise leaned against the wall, considering. The broken capillary on her nose looked blue in the cool, dark room, almost a bruise where she had fallen.

“
Hopeless,”
she said at last, turning to look at him. So serious, so sure.

“Really?” he asked, shifting in the bed and feeling the stubble on his chin. “I don’t think so, I think it’s a little more like ‘
help it.’”

“What would that mean? No, it’s ‘
hopeless.’

Adam said, “It’s been driving me crazy. It’s all I think about.” Then, wanting to smooth the serious look from her face, he said, “Does this mean I’m in love?”

“Oh yes,” he heard her sigh, coming toward him at last, smiling. “I always knew I’d lose you to a cockatoo.” As his wife approached, she blocked the light a little more, so that he could make out less and less of her face in the shadow she created. He closed his eyes and felt her weight near him on the bed. He could hear her undoing the little knot he’d made in the netting, and the swish as the fabric fell behind her. Then a pause as she wiped back his hair. He tried to guess how cool her wrist would feel on his forehead when it came, to gauge his own temperature, and when it touched him, he was surprised to feel each bone and tendon of hers moving, like block and tackle under the skin, as she adjusted her hand. He opened his eyes, and there she was, his wife, shining with perspiration and the faint early glow of sunburn, wearing on her forehead her mother’s crease of worry.

“I’m fine,” he said, to make the crease go away. It irritated him when he saw Denise disappear inside herself, replaced by some ancestral woman who was efficient with sickness and death and impatient with sorrow. He could not fit this person into his wife, and at times he wondered whether perhaps everyone suffered a variable personality and inside any head lived a thousand starving understudies, waiting for the lead to break her leg.

“I’ll tell you when you’re fine,” his wife said, breathing deep and looking at him, tapping her fingers on his arm. He saw the muscles moving in her wrist again as she did this. He felt he could see through her. “I talked to Josh long-distance.”

“What did he say?”

She waited a moment to tell him, hands together on her lap. “He said you’d promised to bring back a butterfly with big turquoise dots on the wings.”

Adam smiled. “He remembered that? I’ll find one.”

“Alive?”

“Whichever way they’ll let it out. I’ll sew it into the hem of my coat if I have to. Anything else?” But he knew she wasn’t going to tell him anything else; she was jealous enough that Josh had thought first of his father, of some private wish which only Daddy, always magical Daddy, could perform. There was always some whispering when she left the room, some planning of the wonderful thing the two boys held in secret from her. Adam knew she heard them; he saw her face turning in the hall, lit blue by a Batman night-light.

Denise had her own secrets, is how he felt, though she would never call them “secrets,” exactly; she kept them hidden to spare others. Her work, of course, which she dismissed modestly when people asked her, even though this silence made her even more mysterious in the candlelight of dinner, leaning over to scrape peas onto her fork. At first he thought she didn’t know it, how people talked to him during drinks and said how wonderful, how smart and fascinating his wife was, and it made him proud that she cared so little about the effect she had on others; now, though, he suspected that Denise cultivated this religion. He knew this much of her secret life—that she longed to share it. But Adam knew he would not do.

Her father’s death was treated the same way, and this time it was Denise and her mother together guarding the secret. The man had been dying for years, from smoking illnesses and cancers, though it was clear in Denise’s last call to him that morning that this heart attack was different. There was an operation that would save him, but his heart was too weak for it, and what would it mean to “save" him, her father asked? He was a man who could admit no change in his routines; who, when he visited Adam and Denise down in Santa Cruz, insisted on parking in the same place each time, even if it meant sitting in the bay window, waiting for the space to open. He would die with no change also. Denise called her mother at the hospital that night as her father lay sleeping, and ten minutes after she’d hung up, the phone rang again and Adam watched his wife huddled in the chair they never sat in, weeping, the phone cord trickling from her hand onto the floor. She said nothing for the entire call, not “hello,” not “I’m sorry, Mother,” but absorbed it all into herself. Adam could only stand and watch and try to decipher the moment. He had thought of Walter, her father, the stooped, skinny man with the hook nose and bulging eyes you see in WPA photos of workers (only, he was a rich man), with a mustache to hide his dwindled upper lip, and a small diamond in his lapel from some obscure association. His kind wife, his big house, his parking space. A good life forbidden to change—was that so terrible?

Denise and her mother wouldn’t allow Josh to go to the funeral, so Adam didn’t go either, but took his son up to the San Francisco Zoo, where they stood in the cold sea air, watching an elephant chained to a cement wall, as they swatted the seagulls away from their vinegar-soaked french fries. It wasn’t that Grandpa Walter’s death was a secret from children; it was a secret from the whole world. It was a club with two members in beautiful black dresses. This club, at their annual graveside meetings, would argue furiously over dull dead Walter, but it was only theirs to argue. Adam was not to say a word.