The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (23 page)

“But why even come up here? Isn’t it funny?”

“Maybe we’re bad liars. Bad liars always stay as close to the truth as possible.”

She remembered giving a sly smile and saying, “Oh, but I’m a very good liar,” and how he laughed and kissed her.

There was something in his face as he came back from kissing her—something of the old Eli, that distractable, exciting man leaning in her office door when they were very young—that made her pause and watch him as he loaded up the car. Denise thought for a moment she might do it; she might tear her easy life to bits for him; she might do the thing that would please him most. Back home, many hours later, she had already forgotten that feeling, caught up in her papers and the still light of her house at dusk.

On the third hunt, though, Eli seemed different. He wouldn’t eat his pancakes at the diner before their drive up the mountain, and when they arrived at the viewpoint, he brought out two plastic folding chairs that they hadn’t used since the beginning; they usually huddled together. He set them up quietly and brought out his pad and his red flashlight. It was typical for them to begin with work, with choosing a section of the sky to examine, discussing technique and variation and timing, but he scribbled and mumbled to himself instead of consulting her. She tried to ask him about his work on ion tails, but he smiled and tapped his pad, sending her away. It went on this way into the morning, the two of them in their separate chairs, wrapped in blankets, his ballpoint pen clicking and scratching in the darkness. And then, without turning to her, without lifting his pen, he said he couldn’t do these hunts anymore. His research had gained attention, and he didn’t have the time. He lied to her in profile. She knew it was a lie and, a little later, when she grew angry and confronted him, he sighed and talked about the impossibility of their lives together, which she knew was another lie. He gave her a story about Kathy’s fragility, and one about Denise’s own child, and Adam, and they were every one of them lies. Like the myth of a man buried in a pile of stones, each bearing the name of a god, so Denise was up to her chin in a cairn of gracious lies. Stones tossed her way: he was doing this for her; he was considering the future; he was thinking of their careers.

“You don’t believe that,” she finally said, shaking with confusion. “None of it. I know you don’t believe it.”

“I do. It’s true, Denise.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“We’re too old for it,” Eli said so wearily that she almost believed him. “Too fucking old.”

And as they silently packed their belongings into the car for the last time, she thought of how she should have known it would be this way. He was not like Adam; he would not cling forever, but would drop her with barely a word. She noticed the angry relief of his face in the early dawn; there was something else in his mind that she would never know. The hollow falseness of the occasion struck her, the cruelty, and with a shock she remembered Carlos. She thought:
We have been here before.

Denise drove them down the mountain again, and the hour’s drive was wordless, filled with the noise of the bumpy road and of their own jostling equipment. She felt Eli burning with silence beside her, and with a shock she realized that her hands wanted to send the car over the mountain, wreck everything, hurt them both, force them to share something again.
What is this?
she wondered. She slowed down and steadied her grip. The tires crackled on the road, and stones clanked against the underside of the car.
What is this?
She could see a plume of black smoke rising from the forest, some farmer burning his leaves, no doubt. She watched it rise and disappear into the air. So many wasted hours, lit recklessly, burned into smoke like this, gone. Hours at the telescope searching for a comet, in the hut avoiding Eli’s touch, in her marriage bed listening to her husband’s chatter, in the hallways of the school arguing a theory—a hundred thousand wasted hours. She had always thought there would be time enough— that you could lead a certain life and then, when it faded, exchange it for the one you’d always longed for—but time was over. It was burnt to ashes now. Here he sat beside her, brushing his leg against hers at every bump. Here he was. There was an hour when she could have taken his face in her hands and told him she would do his heart’s desire. But that hour had past long ago. Ashes. He sat beside her silently, and when they reached the bottom, he stepped out of the car, waved and drove away. She understood she had never been here before, not with Carlos, not with Adam.
What is this?
Not friendship, not comfort. Too late, she understood this was the love you’re supposed to fight for.

Josh was back with the food, running toward her in his shorts. He acted like her—the look of pride on his face now was hers, completely hers; it was her gift to him—but he did not look like her. He looked just like his father.

“Here you go!”

“Fantastic. I’m starving—what took you so long?”

“Mom! It was tough, she tried to give me something else, then the …” Josh gave a staccato account of the interaction, and Denise tried not to smile. He never understood when she was kidding, but he would eventually, and she would miss it, this innocence that he tried to pass off as experience.

On the way back to the hotel room, Josh reminded her to call his father, who had a right to hear how things were going.
Adam,
she thought,
oh, I forgot.
He’d offered her so little after she returned from Tranquillity; it was suddenly so obvious. Adam was moody and irritable, but lacked genius as an excuse; he merely built a life out of reasonable hopes, a solid life that might steady him and his son, and Denise was to be part of that forever. She couldn’t, but she didn’t blame him for expecting it. For now, Denise simply wanted her husband to fade from her life without anger, a harmless local ghost whose manifestations would come quietly and sadly to her, glowing in a corner of her dark bedroom, talking the way he used to when she loved him.

Lydia remembered Adam. She thought of that older man as she sat in a plastic chair inside a copy shop on Seventh Avenue. She had found shelter from the rain. Memories of the island were floating through her head, and Lydia remembered Adam far better than she did Denise. He had meant something to her. Adam was different from all the scientists she had known when she was growing up in the department, in that youth she had spent playing in the offices with discarded vacuum tubes and lenses. He had treated the child like a child. Oddly, she had needed that—not condescension, but a patience and humor which none of the guffawing astronomers seemed to possess. Adam talked with her quietly, carefully; he made her feel safe. If she had never seen him again after her youth, she would still have remembered him fondly as that blond halo of hair in the barn, looking up at her with a grin as he petted her dog. But she had seen him again. She saw him when she was seventeen, six years ago on the island, at around midnight below the overlook when he emerged, stumbling in his fever, to find her smoking on the beach.

She sat indoors as she thought of this, eating a slice of pizza. Her luck had changed immediately after leaving her friend’s doorway; there, crunched in the space under the mailboxes and protected by the rain, was a baseball cap. Wearing a cap lessened the rain’s irritation by about half; the cold drops on her scalp had hurt and depressed her, but now she merely felt the chill moistness of her clothes. Things were looking up. At the next place, her friend Angela’s, her key didn’t work either, but now, with this cap, the day had lost its misery. She had some wild ideas about begging for money or jumping a turnstile, but it seemed too wet for people to stop for her on the sidewalk, and she actually got as far as the inside of a subway station, slippers in her hand, before deciding this was idiotic and she would surely get caught. So Lydia walked back to the surface, thinking of trying the key at her mother’s apartment, when she happened upon a party. A grand-opening party at a copy shop, with free copies and pizza. It was fairly empty except for an eager manager and a cheapskate art student hogging a machine to copy his portfolio. She sat down with her pizza and smiled at the manager, who seemed willing to let her wait out the rain.

And the thought of Adam came to her. She recalled Adam’s voice in the darkness of the beach, six years before, and how it had startled her. “Can I have a toke?” she heard, and it jolted her out of her contemplation of the midnight ocean. Here was the man in a T-shirt and jeans, sitting beside her with a pleasant, distant expression. The sand must have silenced his approach. She passed him the joint, and only a little while into their conversation did she realize he was the same man she’d seen in the barn as a child, Dr. Lanham’s husband. Then she understood that he was sick, feverish in the cooler night air, floating in the same haze she was in. That made it easier to talk, and to sit saying nothing as the fireflies winked out one by one.

“You’re a writer, Mr. Lanham?”

“Adam,” he corrected her. “I’m a writer.”

“I want to be a writer.”

“No you don’t,” he said seriously. “And I’m not really a writer anyway. Mostly I’m a liar. I tell a lot of lies, Lydia.”

“So do I.”

It was hard to think of herself back then without laughing. She thought he was handsome—she thought every man was handsome when she was seventeen, and she flirted heavily with boys in school, with Ali on the island, thinking that if she could trick them into adoring her she would have won some prize. What was the prize? The memory of the adoration itself. She hoarded these memories, spending them on herself when she felt worthless and alone. But she didn’t usually sleep with these men and boys: It was enough to know they wanted to sleep with her. It was enough, in a crowded bus, fully clothed, to feel a college boy’s hand on her thigh, squeezing, his eyes blank with desire. She would catch the look and feel it inside her— the coin of his passion clanking on her heart’s metal floor.

So it was enough that night with Dr. Lanham’s husband on the beach. To talk about her boyfriends and her dalliance with Ali that very afternoon. He seemed interested, amused, but she could tell he asked more questions than a married man should. About how she met these men, about the beach, about the little stone hut out on the spit. She wished she could show him, she said suggestively, puffing the last of the pot, but someone else was in the hut right now. She had just come from there. Two white people were having sex in there.

“Who? Who is it?” he asked. Something had gone wrong with his smile.

She told him she didn’t know. Two of the scientists, she assumed, a chubby white guy and a blonde. Some married couple trying to relight the spark, and at the word “spark" she flicked her lighter and smiled. “Time to go skinny-dipping!” she announced.

It was enough to see his face melt like wax as she stripped off her bikini. Married men were so complicated, and she wasn’t even going to seduce him; she had just wanted to know that perhaps she could. The story about the people in the hut seemed to have changed him, and she was afraid he’d gone cold, but then suddenly he was lifting his shirt over his head. Off went the shoes, the pants, and he stood there looking a little dazed and sad, fat around his middle and his balls hanging low from the island heat. That moment was enough. After their swim, which was colder than she’d expected of the South China Sea, she put her clothes back on and said goodbye. Adam stood there, stoned, sick, confused, holding his shirt over his half-hard penis. “Yes, you should go,” he said seriously.

“I’m supposed to be counting meteors,” young Lydia explained with a sly grin, pulling back her wet hair. She had enjoyed his desire when they were swimming, but now his numb look had dulled her pleasure. His body looked so old to her now, all hair and muscle that had turned to fat. She felt faintly disgusted.

“You shouldn’t do this, Lydia.”

“What do you mean?”

Adam stood shaking his head, looking down the beach to where a clump of coconut trees cut off the view. “You know. Neither should I… oh, Jesus….”

“Don’t be so square, Adam,” she said, laughing, holding her sandals in one hand. She used her usual lines: “It’s just skinny-dipping. It’s just bodies.”

“True,” he said. Adam was still half-naked, troubled, one hand to his head. Then he looked up at her with an expression of concern: “But not for you, I don’t think.”

Lydia sighed and turned away, saying, “I’ve gotta go. Good night.”

She was off into the deeper darkness of the path, her feet feeling the sharp end of twigs in the sand, when she heard him shout to her “I’m sorry!” and she was more perplexed than ever. He was sorry, when he should have been ashamed or angry. Why sorry? Lydia was unsure of what had happened, and of what she had won this time.

In the copy shop she felt a wave of shame for her old self. She put down the pizza and let out an angry sigh, making the art student turn his head in concern. Lydia rarely did this—tortured herself with how she had acted in the past. There was no reliving and undoing the events, yet once in a while they still felt very real to her, very much in the present. She wanted to go back and speak to each different girl she’d been—the heartbroken twenty-year-old artist, the cocky adolescent slut, the lonely stupid child—and give them a good talking-to. Lydia did not feel as though they were part of her, but rather that these former selves were the team that had built her; and, like a monster ashamed of its creation, she wanted to confront her makers. She knew, though, that even if she could, she would not have had the nerve—they would have stood before her, shaking, merely children.

Lydia used the manager’s phone to call her office once again. Lucas said that her mother still had not arrived. He suggested taking a cab, saying that he would pay for it, but Lydia found herself turning him down and hanging up the phone. The manager grinned at her under his mustache, starting a chat about the rain. He was still in mid-sentence when she left the store and headed up Seventh Avenue. She lit her fifth cigarette.

Here is how it happened: