The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (29 page)

“That cafe down there,” Josh said, pointing down the block where Adam could see only an empty metal chair on the sidewalk. “Henry was in there in the earthquake.”

“Really?”

“There’s a crack in the asphalt—look, see, here.”

“There’s a lot of those.”

“He said he was reading and he fell over. Not from the quake— from the surprise. Henry’s a little jumpy.”

Adam had been sleeping that morning of the quake, heard a crash, then run into the living room to see all the awful crystal figurines, ones Denise’s mother gave them years ago, falling to the floor. A poltergeist seemed to be picking them up, one by one, and dropping each of them with a tiny shattering. Adam was living alone in the house by then, and felt a particular joy at the violence of that day. Then he had called Eli. He didn’t know why; Adam was always calling Eli those days, trying to get him to chat, emote, anything. He had phoned him to tell him that an earthquake had happened but not to worry. Some of Denise’s crystal had broken, that’s all. Eli was silent on the other line.

Josh was still talking. “I think we were all a little jumpy. I hit my head on a lamp.”

The calls to Eli had grown important to Adam, ever since the day of her death when he found himself phoning the poor man from the scene of the accident. Adam had stood on that hillside looking at her body, enraged by his wife’s departure, by this eviction from his own life, and grabbed a police phone from a car. He got Eli on the line and that was when he felt it—as he heard Eli’s soft
hello
—felt what had happened to him. Adam began to sob, telling his wife’s old lover everything, every gruesome detail that he saw—her earlobes darkened with blood, her eyelids and jaw so stiff—wishing Eli could be there to embrace him. Eli would understand. Eli would hold him and whisper the kinds of words Denise would have offered, comforting words, lovers’ words, because Adam felt somehow that he and Eli were the closest thing to lovers; that now, with her gone, they were left together. Yet Eli had said nothing for a long time, until, before hanging up the phone, simply: “Thank you for telling me.”

“You want to eat there?” Adam asked.

“What, here?” Josh said, concerned. They had reached the cafe, which Josh mentioned had suffered only two broken plates in the earthquake. “Crepes or something?” The door was propped open, a dog leashed to a rail outside. Within, two women sat sipping coffee.

Adam said, “Crepes sound good.” He was trying to be flexible, to be anything for his son.

But he thought once again of what he’d done wrong. Perhaps he shouldn’t have packed up her equipment, her charts and textbooks and terrifying logs of stars. Perhaps he shouldn’t have given so many away to colleagues, or sold the rest, keeping only a few beautiful drawings for himself and Josh. Perhaps he should have done what he’d longed to do: buried it all with her. The way King Tut had been buried with his ships, his chariots and dogs, and three hundred servants for all the tasks he needed done in hell. If King Tut was to have tasks, Adam thought, then Denise would as well: to view the stars from the other side of the firmament, to look down on that etched globe of light. Or no, he thought; it would be an Egyptian hell, where the sky is a goddess. The sky is Nut spread naked above the earth, and so Denise would sit above her in a sling. An exalted servant, Denise would pick the stars, those burrs, from the goddess’s weary back.

“No,” Josh said after a moment. “If you’re paying, I want Thai.”

“There’s Thai in this neighborhood?”

Josh laughed. “Isn’t there always Thai?”

“I want to tell you something, Josh,” he said, stopping in the street.

“What?” Josh’s young face wore a blue veil of shadow from the awning, and a breeze brought in particles of fog that caught in his hair, on his lashes, a net of little beads spread over his worried face.

“I want to tell you,” he repeated, surprised by himself, and then Adam gave his son the story of his marriage. It made no mention of Carlos or Eli or the lie told before a heart-shaped cookie could be eaten. It made no mention of the rage on a cliff near a broken body. This was the version he wanted Josh to keep, the permanent version, the final draft to be published in his son’s mind. The story his son would tell Henry, maybe years from now, as they lay together in their own kind of marriage bed. This story began with the dinner party at the Spivaks, seeing his wife across the room in a zigzag dress. Her distracted heart, and how he won her. The struggles of her career, and his, their early poverty in Berkeley set against the splendor of the wedding her parents threw. And Josh’s birth, and the new house in Santa Cruz…. Josh looked interested but confused under the awning, sure these were details he already knew by heart, simply by being there himself, but Adam pressed on as their stomachs grumbled and the air dropped shawls of mist onto their shoulders. He told him details so he could imagine it, picture this life as real. He knew he was falling into the role of fathers, who will surprise you, oddly, by saying things like this so that their boys will love them.

But he also wanted Josh to know it would be good, his son’s own life. Like a lunatic, or a man in love, he went rifling through the drawers of his memory, picking out anything of value and handing it to his bewildered son—"She begged me to quit smoking, and would hit me with a wooden spoon if she smelled cigarettes on me!”; “I used to sit beside her at the telescopes, midnight, two in the morning, and hand her doughnuts"—piling old heirlooms in the poor boy’s arms because he wanted to give him the best. Not the truth, but the best. The best of his life, of his wife, of himself; the best lies, the important ones. So that he would finally see that fathers, meekly turning over steaks on grills, talking nonsense about money or grabbing their guts in front of mirrors, could be the walking cemeteries of old loves—just as Josh himself was. Just as this day was, with Josh stepping into a life with Henry Wong like a child stepping into a stranger’s car.

When he was done, Adam stood there panting, feeling excited and alive.

But his son simply looked at him, hands thrust firmly into his pockets, leaning against a wall and examining his father from the long distance of their years. “Dad, I know,” he said. A look of pain and amusement, a little love. “I know.” Around them, the fog, that flock of doves, fluttered in the failing twilight.

Eli had learned of his life’s mistake on the lip of a volcano. It was back in 1986 on a visit with his old colleague Jorgeson to the Mauna Kea observatories, as they stood on the crater struggling to breathe in the chill, thin air. It was just after the space shuttle had exploded, and scientific programs everywhere could feel the congressional finger on the switch, waiting for a word of funding, poised to close them down. So Eli and Jorgeson had come as experts to promote this project, and morning mists spread below them, filling with the sun’s faint ginger light and hiding the northern volcano, Mauna Loa. They had sipped their coffee on that morning, talking of the Keck domes to be built in the next decade; and of Swift, who was merely ill then; and of Kathy, of Denise. Then Eli, he didn’t know why, asked the ugly Swede about Carlos. It struck him, as the blond astronomer turned and blinked, that he had been here before. A different view, twenty years before, with Denise urging him to pry this same information from this same odd man. Eli had felt a nervous shiver as two distant pieces of his life touched, stuck briefly, and parted.

“Carlos?” Jorgeson repeated on that cold morning three years ago, wrinkling his soft face in concentration.

“Your friend Carlos. The handsome one.”

Then the man’s face settled; “Oh, you mean the military man. Did you know him? I haven’t heard from him since he was reassigned to Africa, I think. Back in the seventies. Is he okay?”

Eli shivered again. “Africa?”

“He’s been there for years. Never coming back. That’s right—he wrote me a letter in 1973 and I think I never replied. I always forget whose turn it is. People are so touchy.” Then Jorgeson, turning his back on the breathtaking view, pointed to the ground. “Ten-meter lenses! How will they do it? It dazzles me, Spivak, absolutely….”

Carlos in Africa, for years—the idea was still falling, as from a great distance, from Jorgeson’s chapped lips into Eli’s mind. Falling, turning, growing larger, forming a shadow on his eye as he looked up, unable to move, unready for the blow. Not in her bed—in
Africa.
And Adam, sitting in that L.A. restaurant, smiling as he licked the chocolate from his heart-shaped cookie. It seemed so improbable— conventional Adam, stuck in the concrete nouns of his novels, playacting for Eli’s benefit and building his little lie—how could it be true? Such a fragile lie, as well. One broken so easily, such as now, here, with this man. Carlos, the old lover whose face had burned in Eli’s mind so many sleepless mornings, driving him to destroy his affections—he had been in Africa all along. There was no man in a movie theater kissing sweet Denise. No letters hidden in coat pockets, no whispered calls. He saw Adam and that chocolate-smeared smile again. What a punch line to the whole affair.
Africa. For years.

And he understood, as Jorgeson rattled on about hexagonal mirror sections, that the lie was not so fragile after all. Adam had never depended on his own performance. He could never have hoped to be such an actor; in hindsight, even those sighs and expressions of fear that had seemed so convincing looked flimsy, amateurish. It occurred to Eli that the poor man must have been fighting down an urge to bare his teeth at Eli. Instead, those silly sighs. That chocolate smile. But of course what made the lie so strong was not its content, nor its likelihood, nor its presentation. It was Eli himself. He saw that. It was Eli’s own stubborn pride. The anger flashing in his skull, singeing every doubt. It amazed him most of all that Adam had known all about that and with a few easy sentences had twisted Eli’s heart, like the cartoon barrel of a gun, to shoot itself.

Then there was Denise. The clouds were burning off, revealing the steep slope of the volcano and there, glittering beyond, the silver rind of the sea. There was Denise as he saw her just at this time of the morning, five years before with another mountain view—from Tranquillity, searching for a comet. There was Denise’s face as he told her it was all over, the look of something ruined by the rain, and her eyes in the car as she drove him down the mountain: two clenched fists. It had felt so gratifying to sit beside her and feel her hatred— it was the same brand he had felt. Eli had passed on that disease. He knew what it felt like to search for a word to save things; he knew what it felt like to know there was no word. All there in her eyes, locked tight, all there in her shaking hand on the gear shift. He knew she longed for him to take the hand in his. An inch away, an inch. And he would not do it. No, it occurred to him as he stood on the volcano looking back, you do not become a monster with a little lie, like Adam’s. You become a monster in the inch that might save someone, the inch you will not move.

He tried to think of what to do. Five years had passed: five years of minimal contact, friendly conversations at conferences and dinner parties, each day numbed like a tooth and then extracted. He could have spent those days with Denise—but he couldn’t run to her and tell her that. It’s what he knew he was supposed to do at a moment like this, grab the oversize military phone and make them contact Dr. Lanham in Santa Cruz, put her on a plane to Hawaii, lift her in a helicopter to this high observatory where, an oxygen mask held to her face, she would step onto the lava rocks and make a simple sign of forgiveness. Offer her mask for him to breathe. A man and a woman, forty-six by then, ready to begin what should have started half a lifetime ago. He could have done it if he wanted; he could have shut Jorgeson up and run to the observatory office. Eli stood there watching the twin volcano, Mauna Loa, appear from the mists. This wasn’t quite what he wanted; things were more complex. Time was passing, flowing quietly, taking everything with it. So much had changed.

Denise was still married; maybe it was best to say she had returned to marriage, had spent a lonely sabbatical on the Tiber watching the mechanical birds in the piazzas, and finally come back to Adam and Josh, unpacked her boxes in the basement, and begun at last the life she’d promised him. Why shouldn’t she? After all, Adam was the man who fought for her. It had always seemed so sad to Eli that she’d be left with Adam, that dull athlete, that meager partner for her life; but on the volcano Eli no longer saw it that way. You can either look around and long for the people who have left you, he thought, or you can forget them; you can turn to face the ones who stayed. There was something to be said for staying. And at middle age, why would Denise ever choose a different life? An old one that had always failed before? That would be the choice of a gambling woman, and Denise, for all he loved her, was never anything like that.

He did still love her. It was horrible, it was the first thing he felt, the thought that he loved her. Not in the way he first had, not in the dumb excess of youth when he ignored his marriage, whispered so many promises in that hut out on the spit, when he ran to her doorway in the fog to try to wreck their lives for this small chance. When he stood with his finger on the doorbell, unable to make it ring. This time was different; this was a young man and an older one listening to the same piece of music. The first is astounded that such a thing exists, that no one has ever played it for him before; he wants to stand up and shout his passion to the orchestra. The second is just surprised to hear it again, one he had sadly forgotten, and he’s listening carefully now for that rapturous second movement, just where the violins descend. It made Eli want to lie down on the lava rocks and sleep away the past five years. He struggled for breath in this airless place and saw his past rewritten, saw a woman set right. And he felt that whatever might come, he at least still had this. A page of that music. Such a different sensation from when he was young—but the same love, the same.

Yet his life had changed, also, and in ways that left him, oddly, no more free than Denise. All his choices had been based on the idea that he had to come up with something else to long for. Not that silly, obvious affair with a blond girl, but something real. A few months after the last comet search, he sat down with Kathy and told her everything that had happened, and she simply stared at him, face stained with red, and said “I know" with such finality and despair that he realized of course she’d known, of course she had. Kathy had simply expected his longing to be kept hidden, like a photographic plate, meant only for a special room of one’s mind. Now that he’d shown it to her, now that he’d turned the light at last onto his broken heart, it was ruined. They could no longer have this life.