The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (35 page)

“See, I told you she’d get the joke. It isn’t obscure,” the man with sideburns told another.

The other man shrugged and said something about Schwartzchild radii.

Dr. Manday gathered them together with his hands, saying, “How do you want us to do this, Lydia?”

His eyes were on her, and she could tell that there was a specific way he would do it, if she would just smile and gesture to him. Dr. Manday looked as if he’d thought carefully about how to dispose of his best friend’s ashes, had drawn diagrams at his kitchen table, shown them to his wife, grinned with satisfaction at their elegance. She could give a gesture, just a simple one, and he would set his whole plan in motion. After all, he had choreographed everything else about the weekend. She had seen him going over the glasses, spot by spot.

“I think we should each say something about my father,” she told him, leaning against the wall and resting her hand on her pregnant belly. “And then I’ll cast the ashes.” She could tell that Manday was not entirely pleased and that he was about to speak, so she added, “I’d like to do that part myself.”

“But perhaps we all,” the man said despite her statement, “we all could …” and here he made a cupping gesture.

“Let her do it herself.” It was Dr. Spivak, returned from the wall. He was sucking on his finger; it was red and swollen. An ant bite?

Manday grinned. “But some of you have come so far….”

Spivak cut him off with a shake of his head, still sucking on that finger. The wind picked up and blew a curtain of sea air onto the overlook, fresh and bitter. Lydia could see the men lift their heads to let it cool their necks. She closed her eyes.

The heat made her so tired, more tired than she was used to. In New York, she’d stood all day waitressing at different restaurants, running to galleries to coax them with her slides, standing in grade school art rooms and demonstrating some ridiculous project (always with wax or paper plates) in the intense blaze of a New York summer; but here, even at five months, she was fanning herself in any heat, unable to stand for more than an hour, even in running shoes. The whole pregnancy, in fact, felt like a long descent into herself—especially since the father, a musician and waiter, an old boyfriend who had returned for just three months of exceptional but unworkable romance, was not around. It wasn’t that he left her; in fact, he had asked her to marry him. They were in the bar where they’d spent so much of their youth in New York, and he had plucked the cherry from her Shirley Temple, tied it into a knot inside his mouth, and placed it on the napkin where, bleeding in a pinkish nebula, it formed a heart, arrow and all. Then he asked her to marry him. She considered, and thought of how she’d loved him when she was so young, in this very bar, standing on this sticky floor. No, she’d said. You need, you need to go away for a long time.

Lydia soon regretted it, but only because it was so hard to be alone and pregnant. Her friends were there, of course, and her mother tried to help by giving advice and making medicinal teas that Lydia refused to drink, since the smell of them nauseated her and because, secretly, she thought they might be potions—a “Rosemary" paranoia—something to make her lose the baby. Ridiculous, but her mother looked so witchy with white hair and that crazy smile. And she knew her— Lydia had seen her wandering in the snow with a martini—she knew that you could not exactly trust this woman with your life. She stuck to bottled water.

And her mother couldn’t help with the physical effort of her body. That became clearest on the afternoon when Lydia got the flu, standing in front of those fifth graders and explaining how to make scrimshaw (wax, again, trying to use up the school’s overordered supply) and beginning to feel so hot and angry. She had to sit down on the floor. Little girls gathered around her and begged to bring her water. Those next three days spent in bed were the hardest: calling her obstetrician to see what flu medicines she could take, worrying over how it would affect the baby, missing her old boyfriend. He would have stood over the bed and patted her forehead with a cloth. He would have whispered of an easy future. But she’d sent him away.

Lydia told them, “I need to sit. Is there a chair?”

Manday gave an imperious thrust of his arm into the air and a teenager, all in hot black cotton, came running with a chair. The boy scraped it underneath her so forcefully that she found herself losing her balance and falling onto it. The parasol was passed from Manday to Eli Spivak, who held it over her head, a kind eclipse. She felt mildly annoyed at all this attention. It was the fuss of men who didn’t know what to do, who were confused and were trying to hide it, a bustle of embarrassment.

“Dr. Manday,” she said once she was seated, “maybe you should start.”

He stood silent for a moment, the grin still on his face. His grandson stood beside him, clutching his linen pant leg, and the parrot made a fuss back at the staircase. He looked like he might not forgive her for something. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, of course.”

He turned to the group of men, his bald head exposed now to the sun and sweating, the white hairs lifting from it like heat waves from a boulder. He began what Lydia assumed to be a prepared speech: “Dr. Swift was my best friend. We met in Berkeley in 1949. And Martin was very crazy, and when I first met him he was… do you still say this … roaring drunk….”

She looked up through the shadow at Dr. Spivak. A thick but good-looking older man, with a red scar on his cheek and unkempt hair growing in a fuzz over his ears. A three-hilled forehead shining in the sun, the forehead of a careful thinker and, her mother would say, the forehead of a jealous man. Manday was still speaking, but Lydia didn’t listen. What was it she’d read? That only the jealous man knows perfect love. He knows his own love, and he knows that love perfected in the rival he imagines. What a funny thing to come to her, now, of all times. It was hard to see Dr. Spivak as a jealous or a passionate man. The lines falling from his eyes, his firm mouth as he listened. Whatever had made him ill from those photos had passed. Yes, she thought as Manday went into an anecdote, he was a man who controlled himself.

“… I remember, I think, I remember Martin my first time at the telescope. I had not slept well the night before because of… of a letter from my wife, if you must know … and I would nod off and he would hit me! Hit me with the back of a book!”

What had those pictures meant to him? She couldn’t guess. Maybe, like her father, a wish to hang on to youth, a longing not to grow old and distant from the world, not to be simply a moon, her father always said, slowly falling out of orbit. As Dr. Manday talked, Lydia stole another look at the pictures. She slipped them from the envelope and felt their sticky edges with her fingers. She flipped past the ones of the old people, the ones that had made Dr. Spivak cry. Those meant nothing to her; instead, she searched for herself. Little Lydia, pouting on the boat, naked in the forest, on that dark overlook playing with the monkey. All taken by Kathy Spivak, who had not come to this reunion, a woman whom she always remembered looking at her, wherever she was—a party, a meeting—looking at her from the shade of a tree, or from a window. It never worried Lydia, not even the time when she noticed Kathy Spivak watching her from this very overlook, following her path through the jungle to where she was supposed to meet Ali Manday. She had always found it comforting. Kathy Spivak, a worried soul watching over her. A kind of mute ghost in her life.

But there were also the pictures Kathy did not take, the ones Dr. Spivak had asked about. She had wondered about these herself, upon seeing them a few months before, after going through her father’s things with her sister. Alice had come with a box of her own to store what she desired, and she had ready-made arguments for why she deserved the TV, the silver, the files. Poor strange terrified Alice. But it was fine; Lydia was moving to the farm for her pregnancy. Alice had suggested it, in fact, so Lydia let her take what she wanted. It was pure luck, really, that she found it first: this envelope marked KATHY’S PHOTOS. She had pulled it from the box, puzzled, and then sighed loudly when she saw the first picture and felt the past threading through her. But very quickly she noticed the strange thing. The last three, the ones with Kathy in them, were taken by someone else. That meant the boy had just fallen over the edge, the cries were already coming from below near his broken body, the crowd was swarming to the wall—and someone had grabbed the camera. Someone had turned away from that and toward Lydia, fixing her on film. The face mangled with fright, a frozen cry. Why would someone do that?

Behind her, Alice began to ask about some charts and papers, some scribbles on pink construction paper of a comet, and that’s when Lydia choked on her breath, laughing despite herself. It had been her father.

He had taken those and then more as Kathy lifted her up in her arms and kissed her—picture after picture of his little girl at a milestone in her life: the first touch of death. First steps, first words, and this. It must have been laid out logically, just this way, in his mind.

Lydia could so easily see her father, at forty, with his great belly and beard, announcing the death to those gathered in the crowd. He would have seen his little girl standing alone out on the parapet and, noticing a camera abandoned in the panic, he would have considered this a moment not to be missed. It was the same mind that stayed out night after night in search of an irregular comet, some string of fiery beads pulsing against the sky, the mind that knew when to click the shutter. “Take the data now,” he had told his eager students over the decades, “and analyze it later.” So why not catch your daughter with shock-white eyes? Instead of running to hold her, instead of whispering that life is frightening but fine, why not fix her image on an emulsion?

We were all for study,
Lydia had sighed to herself as she looked at the photos from that box, her sister chattering beside her.
All of us, simply for study.
But she didn’t think of this with bitterness, the way she might have a few years earlier, back when she wasn’t talking to her father, when she considered him a kind but slightly inhuman old man, an antique book with gilt letters and a raised spine. She knew that what he’d felt for her was very simple. The long walks, the pompous speeches, the sad phone messages, the notes filed under
P,
the photos of her wild sorrow—he must have thought that this was love.

“And before I end,” Manday went on, wiping his forehead, “I would like each of you to add a little something, a little memory you have of our dear professor….”

The parasol began to flap overhead and the men began to speak, tell their old stories of Swift, re-creating younger versions of him that she couldn’t recognize. Lydia tried to pull herself out of memory; while so much of her had changed in the lap of years, she was still a woman who had little interest in the past. In the way that, as a girl, Lydia had acted only in the clear plain of the present, so now, even with a past worth thinking on, and a host of possible regrets, she tried not to linger over an old error or consider how a lost love might have gone differently. Even at night, when she closed her eyes and thoughts played on that screen there, that drive-in movie, even when some sudden image of the past came to her—her mother very kind and sane, her sister getting stoned, some party, some man—she watched it with impatience, as if it were the barely tolerable second feature of her thoughts. She was trying to shake the past from her, but the images wouldn’t fall away this time: the boy dropping from the cliff, Kathy’s face, and, most prominently now, her father’s dead body.

Perhaps Lydia focused on the body because she never saw it. He was cremated immediately, according to his wishes, and the memorial service, which she forced her mother to attend with her, was somehow empty without the body present. Fascinating, of course—three grad students sang a nerdy song, scientists gave speeches, old girlfriends appeared and glared territorially, two of his old communist friends gave sad and rousing speeches about his contribution to the revolution—but, without the body, it felt like an event without a context, like Christmas in the trenches, or a birthday message left on a machine: make-do, and something neither real nor right. “This is ridiculous,” her mother had said, wrapped in a garish shawl. “This isn’t like him at all.” Lydia agreed. So, also according to her father’s wishes, but against Alice’s, Lydia had arranged this event. This spreading of her father’s ashes beneath his (she had always thought of it as his) recovered comet.

“Almost a father to me,” Jorgeson was saying now, shading his eyes with a flat palm, “he taught me everything I know about mass spectrometry….”

And while it was obvious to think of him now, with Manday eliciting a few words from each of the gathered men, telling their anecdotes of her father’s drunken midnights at the telescopes, or his many women, or his cursing in front of presidents, Lydia had never really seen her father that way, and so was unmoved. It was his broken body that fascinated her. The one that lifted her by the legs so she could watch the fireworks upside down. The one that took those pictures, stomped in fury at her when she was a teenager, and stood as silent as a monument in his old age. She had held his dead body, of course. In the plane, on the way over, crunched in the window seat with her father’s urn upon her lap. That was what Lydia thought about as the men gave their memories; not a picture of her father at all—she had catalogued them all the day he died, nearly all the expressions she had never understood—but an image of his carbonized self neatly and heavily contained on her lap for those twelve hours. Being bored and lonely and longing to start some conversation with the ridiculous: a corpse.

Manday was ending his speech with gestures to the heavens: “A scientist who rose from what you call your Great Depression into a place in your university, and a good man, a discoverer and a friend….” A strange way to talk about her father—a bowdlerized version, a life story with the terror taken out—but just the way he would have wanted it. That he grew too blind to read about Halley’s Comet, that he made phone calls to all his enemies there at the end, that his life narrowed toward his death, it was so obvious. It needed no saying. Better with just these few brief statements of fact. Yes, she thought, describe him like a star. His ascension, his angle of declination, his magnitude and variability. It isn’t how we thought of him, but in the end it’s how he thought of us.