The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (36 page)

“… and now I wondered if our little memorial could … excuse me for this Lydia, I hope it is all right….”

Lydia put the photos away and came out of her head. Dr. Manday had put his mustached face into the violet shadow of the parasol and was looking at her. His eyes were asking a question she hadn’t heard.

He continued, “I hope it is all right. Maybe it could, it could also be for one of our students, Dr. Denise Lanham.”

“Of course,” she said. She instantly felt that she had never liked Dr. Lanham—those funny glasses and hats, the bony nose and superior attitude—but she caught herself and felt ashamed. The woman was dead. How awful to remember her so badly, but those old feelings of distaste were just relics from her adolescence, mammals in the ice, left over from a time when Denise could steal the light from any room and she, Lydia, was left pouting in a corner, unable to understand a woman like that. So different from her mother, a woman who had fought to work in science and won. She felt the baby moving inside her, slipping its legs from whatever too-awkward position.

Dr. Manday turned to the others, out into the sunlight, saying, “There is a rotten irony. Two great… great astronomers, and here we are without them. Myself and you, Eli, attached to their comets, Swift-Manday, Lanham-Spivak"—and here Dr. Spivak grinned unhappily—"and that is all we have of them. But, you see, it is … they were both friends of mine, as well. I knew Martin was going to die. We all knew, and it was so terrible. But a year ago was Denise. I just wanted to mention Denise.”

No one said anything for a moment. The wind lay motionless, as if the sky had shut its shell, enclosing them in mother-of-pearl. A bee began to walk along the parasol, attracted by the flower painted there, and it cast an enormous shadow on Lydia’s face, crawling along her cheek in its vain search for nectar, its giant wings shivering across her lips.

Then Manday began to speak, and some others, telling stories of Denise Lanham as a young scientist. Lydia considered that if she’d met the woman now, she might have liked her. Then she noticed something: the parasol above her was quivering. She saw the dark bee struggling, shaken off and, as it fell, stepping its way back into the sky. She looked down from the shade, following the bamboo pole, and noticed that where he held the parasol, Dr. Spivak’s hairy fingers were trembling.

“So let us remember her, as we spread the ashes of an old friend. Beneath his Comet Swift,” Manday continued humbly, giving the name back at the one moment when it no longer mattered. “Denise and Martin clashed, yes, you know, at times…. He was not very modern about women in science. Never trust a comet or a woman, he used to say….”

The wind picked up, pulled at the parasol, and Lydia watched Dr. Spivak’s fingers tighten, not shaking now, but firm as the bamboo he held. She heard the paper of the parasol rustling in its struggle, and sun flashed into her eyes until the breeze died down. She felt sure that people, older ones especially, kept sorrows bottled inside them that you’d never guess. Maybe some young girl would look at her, one day, think her life so lovely, and not believe she’d ever felt the kick of a baby she wasn’t sure of, sent away a man who loved her, or seen her powdered father sitting on a wall, ants crawling on his aluminum coffin.

“Dr. Manday!” a shout came from the dome. The professor turned and was informed by a shocked-looking teenager that the boat had arrived, the boat from the mainland with journalists from around the hemisphere. The president was greeting them at the dock. Cocktails were prepared. Manday waved the boy away and smiled at Lydia. Yes, it was time to be done.

They said their last words. The sun appeared through the last remaining haze like a disk of pressed powder, and the rest of the clouds burned off, a promise that there would indeed be a meteor party tonight, and most of the men here would later paw through the dark sky (as Swift himself had often put it) “like dogs searching for buried bones.” The men stood on the overlook, though, staring stiffly out to sea, their ties being pulled by the breeze and their lashes blinking against the cloud of dust and sand emerging from the beach below. Dr. Spivak pulled at the placket of his shirt with a forefinger and thumb, unsticking it from his chest and letting the breeze cool him. The old telescope creaked in its skin of rust and Manday’s grandson, happy that something was happening at last, ran to it and shook off some of the oxidized flakes in his eagerness to point the device out to the ocean. Manday clicked his tongue and the boy came glumly back.

“Did you want to say something, Lydia?” the old man asked. He was clearly pleased with his speech, with how he’d managed to get this done the way he’d planned after all, with the grieving daughter properly silent and seated under a parasol (although, she knew, quite improperly pregnant) and the men passing around the pipe of memory.

“No, nothing,” she said and then, moving to stand up, added, “I’d like to do it now.” It took the men a moment to understand what she meant, and then they arrived to assist her. Dr. Spivak moved the parasol aside and two of the men offered her their right hands. Grabbing both palms, she pulled herself out of the chair, belly-first, and made her way to the urn.

It was covered with ants. She brushed them off, suffering a few bites that felt like lit matches held against her skin. Below, the fallen ants, in a rage, were inciting the others, and a clump of them reached skywards for her fingers. She lifted the lid and set it on the wall for them to devour.

She waited for the wind. He was in here, her father, in those ashes already trying to blow away in the jungle breeze, nothing like ash from a campfire or a grate, she noticed, but something finer, whiter, more appropriate for what was to be done. He was in here somewhere. Then she saw an errant ant, a blazing red survivor, caught inside the urn and trekking its way across the desert that was her father. A stumble on the dunes, like an old, bad joke. Well, he would go down with the old man, poor fellow. She reached in and got a handful that included the ant, lifted it up and she could see his antenna turning as it noticed the shift in its world. She felt the ashes falling through her fingers, and with a flick of her wrist she sent them into the air.

“Bye, Dad,” she said.

A puff of smoke falling into the distance. She scooped again, enjoying the feel of the smooth and weightless substance on her fingers; he was in there. That whole great body that could block any sun, that mind of numbers and facts and coarse jokes, abridged here into a powder. She threw him over the edge. Another puff, and another, a smoke signal out on the old parapet that might have meant anything until the wind changed and the ashes were pulled down onto the beach below. A few larger flakes, ones that had not made it through the sieve or whatever they used at the crematory, floated mothlike in the island air. The sun broke through its veils and hit the water with a crash of light. She heard the old men shuffling behind her, murmuring and watching and, perhaps, saying their own goodbyes. Because this was the end of him.

“Goodbye.”

Handful after handful, sowing the air with her father until she was at the bottom of the urn and, weeping quietly now, she upturned what was left into her hand where it made too small a pile. She held her cupped palm over the edge and let her fingers melt and there, the ashes, blown up by a new hot wind, flooded over her shoulder to the crowd of scientists at the wall who shouted in muffled surprise. Lydia felt the ashes sticking to her tears.

She looked out at the plain, bright water. “Oh, Dad.”

Kathy sat up, listening. She looked around the cafe, but the voice she’d heard couldn’t belong to anybody here. Just students and old intellectuals like herself and Rita, who had traded books with her—
The Search
for
Nightwood
—and now sat reading happily through bifocals, sipping at a cold café au lait. Perhaps it had been a trick of the ear, or a woman passing on the street with a randomly similar voice, but for a moment, Kathy had felt sound bend the present like a needle pressing through thick leather: first deforming it, then piercing it in just one point, then withdrawing. It was an unpleasant sensation.

“Excuse me,” she said. Rita looked up. One of the few friends she had left, and Kathy knew this, and knew you could not “make" more the way people spoke of it. Kathy stood up and gave one of her rare smiles. “I’m going to use the phone.” Rita nodded.

Kathy pushed some chairs aside to get to the doorway, where the pay phone hung on the wall. Something was happening to her; she could not explain it, but it had to do with the voice she’d heard, and the note bleeding in the book. She needed to be alone. This wasn’t unusual for Kathy, even now, to flee company in order to attend to her mind, and over the years she had worked out sly ways of folding up a little privacy within even the most crowded of rooms. There were balconies, staircases, bathrooms. One could exit to a little-used hallway and stare at the art until some helpful soul came across you and broke the spell. In the café, Kathy calmly used another trick of hers. She leaned against the wall and held the receiver to her ear. It was warm from some recent caller. Bees hummed across the wire and she was alone.

She felt life working backward. The note, that moment on the boat in 1965 when Eli had scribbled so lovingly as he squinted in the sun, she remembered the moment for perhaps the first time ever. Before, when she thought back on that spring day when they were all so young, she thought of the boy who would die later that night; recently, she had begun to search the day for clues of the love affair that grew and died with her hardly noticing. A smile by Denise, a shared sip of bourbon, a tilt of the boat and how they were thrown together, laughing, as Kathy stood by the edge among the coils of rope and watched. But the note—suddenly she remembered. Yes, he had been writing in a book. The shadows of seagulls overhead, passing through the canopy, onto him, the scraps of lemon light across his body as he leaned against the railing and wrote in his cheap paperback. The look of serenity on his young face, the smile at the corner of his mouth—and to think, if she had never read his inked phrase, the smile would never have returned to her. It would have been lost. And the knowledge that she, just the thought of her, had caused it. His life’s great love.

Because the way she remembered it was that he gave no sign of love. His eyes glowed when she first undressed for him, and hope thudded behind his lashes when he asked her to marry him, but after that she never thought of him as the man who loved her. He was the man who knew her best, and then he was the man who left her. As a young woman, she was the one who watched him while he worked or thought; she was the one who looked up from her book to catch the light gleaming off his forehead, and felt a horse begin to run in her heart. She never believed that he loved her the same way, especially after the evening when he sat her down and told her everything, but she was wrong. Once, he had loved her. And she had even been there, watching, at that very moment, and it wasn’t quite that she’d missed it; she had seen it and forgotten. How funny for things to work backward like this, she thought. For the future to seem so inevitable, for the past to keeping changing form.

The receiver began to talk to her in a recorded voice. She pressed her finger to the cradle’s metal tongue and the peaceful hum returned. Alone again. But what Kathy longed for now was not to be alone, but to be back there again, on that boat, with the gulls turning overhead. With the lines erased from their faces, the pains from their backs, and their minds freed from knowing how things would go. To not know that. She thought of the boy she’d met years ago now, a tall dancer with long fingernails, a boy who almost believed in shadow doctors, who had never left his island and, thrown out by shame, took his family fortune to greet the world outside. Thirteen years had passed—what ever happened to him? Kathy could guess. You can’t pretend a fortune in the mind will change so easily to gold. A boy like that, alone in Borneo or China: He would be dead by now.

But she remembered his face on the boat that night. Their own faces as they hurried across the South China Sea. No boy fallen from a cliff, no stars streaking across the sky, no lovers made or unmade, all of them simply eager for life to begin. The first sight of that island, Lydia shouting that she could not see it, and Kathy pointing it out for her: a rabbit-shaped clump of green on the horizon. Eli smiling nearby. In his hand, a book with a note fresh in its margin. To be there again.

Kathy held the receiver tight to her ear, tossed a quarter in the slot, and heard the silence and then a mechanical catch. She fished the wrinkled paper from her pocket and dialed the number. A few rings, an expectant hello.

“Yes, Adam?”

Josh sat watching the curtain on the door. Periodically he saw, with each passing car, the shadow of the front gate cast upon the fabric, a set of pointed lines, and it floated against the movement of the headlights, a dark hand waving at the window, until the car was gone and what remained was that pleated canvas glowing from the streetlight. The cold beer bottle was nestled in his lap and he rocked back and forth, singing to the radio. He was drunk, worried; it would happen any minute; Henry would appear any minute; where was he? Giddy from the beer and music, young Josh saw his life as a page of music—he had not been listening, but here were all the struggling chords in order, penned down, and here came this very moment. It had all been building to this; it all depended on this moment. This moment had come first, and the rest trailed before it in a bee-swarm of notes. Something great or terrible could happen now.

Where was Henry? He could feel a pain, a bite in his stomach, the tick of doubt settling there, and he looked around, wondering what he would do if it all went wrong. Call his dad? Move his stuff back, find a job, talk his way back into college? He had made no plans for it; he had bet everything on a lover doing as he promised. The stars will fall on this day, yes, on this one—but what if the sky stood fixed and dark? Another bite inside him.

He thought of his mother again. On that balcony, smiling. He wished he’d told her, then, at thirteen, what it felt like to have that man touching his forehead. Josh now believed she would have held his young hand; she would have understood. Something great rising within you. Something to change your life. He thought, looking back, that he’d seen it once in her. They had gone on one of their long walks where he chattered confidently about the day, giving his impressions, hiding his fears, and they stopped once for ices and once more at a fountain so he could take off his shoes and step inside. She unbuttoned her leather coat and sat on a park bench. It was overcast, calming the shadows and bringing out the age-old stains of the statues and buildings around them, and it was a little noisy because this was the hour for children to be moved about by old women. Josh stepped into the fountain and felt the coins on the bottoms of his feet. Foreign coins, of all shapes, against his skin. He looked back to see if she was watching him, but she had changed. On the bench, his mother stared straight ahead but blankly, absently. Something in her was moving away, and she disappeared for a long time as the water grew cold around his shins, and it frightened him to think, for the first time, there might be something inside her that he’d never guessed. He did not move to break her spell. Young Josh stood in the water and watched his mother sitting there, hands limp on her lap with her purse, face still and shadowless under the Italian clouds. In a moment, she would smile at him and yell, “Get your shoes, time to go,” and he would leap out of the water, glad to have her back, but that unmoving face was what he would remember. A woman staring at the past, yes, but it was only years later that he recognized it in full: a woman taking a long last look.