The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (34 page)

She was in San Francisco to visit her college friend Rita, the one now reading, and she kept telling herself that she would call Adam. She would call him so they could talk or, rather, so Kathy could at last have a crack at that strange man. So blond and right, so all-American, as handsome as an extra in a football movie—which was not to say stunning, but acceptable anywhere, at any barbecue. But she was convinced he was crazier than anyone she knew. That old hobby of hers had returned, picking at minds—what Rita called her “cocktail vampirism"—and she could hardly resist. After all, she knew what Adam had done to Eli and Denise.

Eli had told her, of course, in that terrible conversation before their divorce, but she herself had known about it, in her way, for years. Kathy guessed it in the moment that Eli, freshly paranoid from that breakfast with Adam in L.A., suddenly turned to her one night, magazine lowered in a glossy V, to ask if Denise had seen Carlos recently. A stern and careful look on his face. Kathy knew exactly what that meant; there was a thrill to it, knowing her husband was in terror of something, and that she herself was in terror. Something great and awful was rising in their lives. “Oh yes,” she lied to him. “Yes, they’ve become good friends, I think.” She heard herself say the lie, and that also delighted her—her lips were thinking faster than she could, acting without her. Her husband’s expression did not sink or weaken; it stiffened like meringue. That’s how she knew he had some idea, and that now, with what she’d said, it could not be disbelieved.

So they were accomplices, she and Adam. Criminals together. And yet, in the end, she had not called him. There was still time, but Kathy knew, sitting there with her book and friend, that she was not going to call him. Could she really tell him what she’d done to aid him? There seemed to be no point now. After all, nobody had gotten what they wanted.

“What are you reading?” Rita asked her, looking at her now. An old friend, kind and good with long hippyish blond hair gone gray behind her ears, skin lined from years in the sun, smart and unaware of how a fifty-year-old woman was supposed to look. The kind of friend who could sit with Kathy in a coffee shop and read a book. Long silences, polite pauses like this one, chances to return to the life she led inside her mind. A good woman; and while no great replacement for Denise, the same quality, the same kind of friend.

Kathy smiled and put down her book. The cover was a cheap painting, B-movie style. “Not what you might expect,” she said.

Rita leaned back, interested. “I don’t expect anything in particular, Kathy, not from you.”

“It’s a book about scientists.”

“Any good?”

Kathy paused. She wondered how she looked to Rita, if she had aged so thoroughly, her hair short and gray, her clothing out of style by a decade now, her glasses by even more; if she had changed so much as to be a disappointment. Not the brainy, solitary girl in woolen slacks and a beret passing under the bell tower with a book in her hand. Not the quiet one in class who simply shook her head angrily until the professor called on her. Or could it be that she had aged but stayed exactly the same? Ridiculously, stubbornly the same like this longhaired woman before her? She surprised herself by finding this was what she wanted: nose in her books, to have sidestepped time. But now she had lost track of the conversation.

“Sorry, I was thinking.”

“Any good?” Rita asked again.

Kathy tapped the cover. “Kind of the wrong question.”

Rita sighed, clearly a little tired of Kathy’s old games, but still intrigued, still friends with her for just this reason. “Well, are you enjoying it?”

Kathy looked at her and considered what to say. There was a story to tell, but Kathy wasn’t the kind of person who told stories or gave any background to her life. Her actions came with no context to explain them, but she had no need for explanation; she had no wish for other people to understand her, and the idea that understanding her might make them love her more—this was a strange idea, a strange motive, a bad one. Love didn’t come from understanding, did it? Love came from nothing. That was the whole point of love.

But something made her smile through chapped lips. Perhaps the men stepping from the window, their shadows removing themselves from her body, taking with them the odd murmurs of their conversation. A clean canvas of light thrown on the table, ready for her to paint it.

“It’s called
The Search,”
she said quietly, showing the cover to Rita, who leaned over to touch it with bitten nails. Two men in white lab coats, a red-haired buxom dame in a tight yellow dress and, of all things, pearls. “It’s from the thirties. About scientists.”

“Sexy scientists.”

“Eli’s owned it for years. Since we met. It’s one of his favorites and he always wanted me to read it when we were first married.” Her friend looked up and watched her. “I made him read Virginia Woolf, and I pretended I read this. I didn’t. I hate books that are ‘about’ things. Race. War. But I picked it up recently.”

“You were missing him?”

She was, but Kathy would never tell that to a soul. Longing was not a public act for her, and absence was simply that: an empty space, nothing to speak of. And, if she were to be honest, she was doing fine alone. Kathy was happy by herself. When she was a young woman, being alone had never been an option; but here, near the end of the century, it had been chosen for her and she discovered, like someone who has stepped into the wrong movie theater only to find herself transfixed, that she liked it. You did not really have to cook. You did not have to clean. You could read endlessly, stay up late reading and wake up Sunday morning with nothing ahead but a hundred cups of coffee and a million words in print. There was, of course, the debris of loneliness spread everywhere. But it was bearable. She did not long for a man in her life, after all; she only missed her husband.

Not that he had understood her. A number of women, somehow discovering Kathy’s divorce at a party or a meeting, held her hand and told her that they knew her sorrow: they, too, could never find another man to understand them. It seemed to Kathy such a bizarre comment. Understand you? How was that possible? Even if it were, even if you had found a man who understood your every whim and quirk and mood, could you really blame the poor fellow for moving on? Simply to stanch his boredom? But Kathy also knew that these were a different sort of woman from herself, the kind who, while much younger than she was, having come of age under Nixon or Johnson, still somehow kept refrigerated within their chests the frosty ideals of much earlier decades. Eisenhower. Truman. Kathy had trouble finding women like herself—thus her renewed friendship with this old college gal—or even people like herself. There was no longer, of course, the old argumentative Eli to provoke. That was gone. And another: Denise.

That terrible call in the afternoon, some relative she didn’t know who drew a picture of a car crumpled against the rocks, the confetti of glass, a pale forehead stained with a tree of blood. Hang up with a rattle, and it’s too clear: Despite it all, there never was any friend who got so close.

But she said nothing of this to Rita. She changed the subject to her book again, saying, “I picked it up because it’s a particular day today. There’s a comet that returns every twelve years, and a meteor shower that happens tonight. I’m old and I’ve gotten sentimental.”

“I don’t think so.”

She picked up the book and looked at it. “I don’t know how I got it. I know he loaned it to Denise for years.” Her old friend grimaced, because she knew all about Denise. Kathy had not confided; she had simply dropped information over time. “But somehow it ended up in our house again, and somehow it ended up with me. I don’t know why he didn’t take it.”

“Probably because of her.”

Kathy put the book down. A waitress refilled their coffees from a green-lipped decanter. She continued: “So I started reading it, and it isn’t terrible. It’s kind of interesting and antique. All about the glory and frustration of science. I’m sure it would be very comforting to a young astronomer, like those books they give adolescents about puberty, to reassure them. Everything that you’re going through is normal, that sort of thing. A quick read, amusing, a little drama. And then I came across a page. It happened yesterday.”

Here Kathy took the book from the table and opened it near the middle. She pressed it flat with the palm of her hand and the old paperback spine gave a little crack, settling into place. The smell of the old binding came into the air between them. She presented it to Rita. There, at the top right-hand corner of the page, was a sentence written in red ink.

“It’s Eli’s handwriting,” Kathy explained, still smiling. “Denise must have read it.”

It curved around the text and down the edge of the paper in a question mark, in ink that spotted and bled into the cheap paper. Kathy was shocked to feel it coming over her again, the deep chill of reading this for the first time yesterday, what she took to be some secret code passed between her husband and his now-dead lover. That bad, boyish cursive she recognized so well:

I knew you would read this, and I wanted to tell you what I never could say somehow… that you’re my life’s great love.

Kathy watched her friend’s reaction, a look of pity that she wanted to shake free from the woman’s face, shatter like a mask. She recalled sitting in her apartment in L.A. just the day before, sitting in the chair and staring at this page.
Everything,
she had thought with horror then.
Everything is haunted.

“Look at the bottom,” she said quietly. Kathy herself had not noticed this at first. She had put the book down on her chest with the strangest feeling of sorrow because, as always with her, she loved to watch her own reactions. Part of her stayed in that chair, and part of her moved to a seat across the room where she watched the body stiffening as it stopped the sobs from coming, the glasses removed and held out in one shaking hand, the teeth clenched so tightly that the bones of the jaw, on either side of her face, appeared beneath the skin. She knew books often held these extraliterary objects—pressed flowers, bent photographs, dollars used as bookmarks—but she had never before come across anything more than an old receipt. Here, however, she could touch Eli’s old note, and it was surprising how— though she had known about his indifference to her, though she had felt it, had heard him all but tell her—it had never been real until now. Ideas were changeable, but this was not. Her old husband— with this short phrase, with the prick of each letter, he had tattooed his feelings on time’s rough skin and now it could not ever be removed. In a way, Kathy enjoyed the image: time, tanned and burly, covered with these foolish admissions that people would come to regret, flexing a muscle to make some dead love dance. Eli had made so many bad mistakes. It was only hours later that Kathy, her forehead wringing with anger, found herself in that chair once again, bent over, paging through the book to find that curve of fiery letters, and noticed, there near the bottom, a figure made nearly indecipherable by the bleeding of the ink:
3-65.

“It’s a date?” Rita asked, blinking to make out the numbers.

Kathy’s expression didn’t change, but she pulled the book from her friend’s fingers and shut it, holding it flat against the tabletop. “March of 1965. We were very young. We were on a boat then, headed toward an island.”

“He wrote it for her twenty-five years ago. I don’t understand.”

Kathy looked out the window. The fog sat overhead in heaps, like snow. “It took me a moment. It’s funny, his ‘life’s great love.’He didn’t write that for her at all,” she said. Kathy stood up to go to the ladies’ room and crumpled her napkin onto the table. It unfolded like a poppy. She felt her expression weakening, so she looked away from her friend for a moment while she composed herself. She did not cry in front of people, not even Rita, and especially not over something that had happened so long ago. She turned back to her friend with a calm appearance under her glasses.

“It was for me,” she said. “For me.”

It was time to spread the ashes.

“Shall we begin?” Dr. Manday said, and Lydia couldn’t believe the callousness of this old man. First to steal her father’s star. Then to bring reporters to record it all. Then to look at his watch, smile, and shove the urn over the edge.

And there was Dr. Spivak, bundled against the wall, a round and bald man in a too-hot jacket sweating through the day, his hand outstretched as red ants marched across his fingers, jostling each other as they climbed over the mark where he’d once worn a ring. He had noticed it on her, as well, that empty left hand. It was strange to think of him without Mrs. Spivak at his side, but so much time had passed, and she supposed he was happy. A new woman, he’d told her, and a new ring on that finger soon. What was the name, the fiancee he mentioned? Some girlish name. Jenny?

Some of the men began to introduce themselves. She tried to be polite, smiling and shaking hands and nodding, listening to the little stories they told about when they’d seen her at a party, dancing, or read to her when she was too little to sit out all night under the stars. She had been beautiful, then, they told her, a little wild and distracted but adorable. And they repeated, these men, how much her father loved her. She watched them telling her this. They were the same. The same as she remembered: brilliant, careless men playing at conversation the way a drunk would play at darts, tossing the right phrases at you but somehow, absently, not quite hitting it right. They could smile like this and insult you or confuse you, and yet, how could you blame them? They did not know what they were doing. Mumbling through their gray mustaches, glaring through thick glasses and gesticulating with their broad fingers stained with ink or (she noticed this on two of them) penned with calculations above the thumb. Lydia loved these men and their odd jokes, their clever ideas, the way they reminded her of her father. But were they really “friends" the way she knew friends? Did they call each other up late at night, weeping? Did this tall one here, Jorgeson, did he fly out to surprise this one on his birthday, this one with the ridiculous sideburns? Or were they in love? Jorgeson and the man with sideburns, having their decades-long homosexual affair. Lydia began to laugh.