Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  Finnegan’s athletic development had been carefully planned, a consequence of his desire for the recognition the best athletes receive even as children. Somewhat chubby as a child, he had one day caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror hanging in his parents’ bedroom. The rotund view startled him. Deciding that he wanted no future as a weeble, he dropped several pounds over the next two months through exercise and good diet.

  He saw, too, how his friends looked up to those few coordinated graceful ones whose physicality outpaced everyone else’s awkwardness. The best athlete in his group, Craig Masters, was the biggest, strongest and fastest among them, the one against whom they measured their own performances. Masters strutted around the schoolyard almost regally, but Finnegan found him to be arrogant, insensitive and a bit of a bully. He became obsessed with beating him in something, anything, some sport where Masters had always been considered unbeatable. Finnegan wanted to beat him simply for the joy of seeing him lose, of seeing that brash ego momentarily toppled.

  After school each day Finnegan worked on his body. He would shoot baskets in his driveway until dark, or throw a rubber baseball against the garage, or just run around with his dog, concentrating on keeping his feet in front of the small, quick spaniel so that he might develop similar quickness. Finnegan felt himself grow fast. He began to master the fundamental skills of the team sports, especially basketball, which seemed to come easiest. After a few schoolyard successes of his own that ran the risk of swelling his own ego, Finnegan decided to focus on basketball above all other sports. Even so, he knew he lagged behind Craig Masters, although he sensed himself closing the gap with each season.

  One afternoon following a practice during their first year of high school, Finnegan challenged Masters to a game of one-on-one. He had not planned on doing so quite this soon, but something inside him had launched a quiet fury. During practice Masters had ridden one of their teammates, an undeveloped, awkward boy who had little taste for the game, so viciously that the boy had been close to tears. The coach had no backbone for bringing his star into line. Finnegan watched, burning, at the cruelty of it, but said nothing until practice ended, when he issued his challenge. Masters stood three inches taller and was twice a strong, with muscles in places usually held together by soft tissue. He took Finnegan’s challenge with a smirk.

  Finnegan said nothing, did not smile, took the ball, and put the game into motion. He played superbly, better than he had thought himself capable. By game’s end the entire team had gathered around to watch what had become a close contest that no one expected. When Finnegan stole the ball off Masters’s dribble and then spun past him for a driving layup, the taller boy began to react desperately to the prospect of losing. In his tension he bounced the ball off his knee; it caromed to Finnegan, whose eyes now burned bright with focus. He drove to a spot fifteen feet from the basket, gave a quick head fake, and, with Masters off his feet, threw in a soft jumper for the game’s final basket. His stunned teammates cheered wildly.

  His academics took care of themselves. He knew himself to be intrinsically very bright. His intuitive mind usually arrived at the core of a topic several steps before others got there. He loved to read, and in his spare time he practically devoured whatever he could find—classic literature, history, poetry, current events. His teachers found him to be well organized, although they would have liked him to work harder. Finnegan had learned to gauge what it took to receive the grade he needed in each course. He would do as much as was necessary but no more, leaving him enough time for other things. In his first year of high school he misjudged an algebra teacher and came up a grade short. Mortified, he resolved never to make a similar mistake. Finnegan completed high school without further blemish, although during his final year he realized that his earlier error cost him the chance to graduate as valedictorian.

  As he grew older, his native restlessness emerged piece by piece. He became edgy and bored around the house, wanting, in the most naked sense, to see what was around him. At the mercy of others, he could only go where they went. That no longer satisfied him. After he reached the right age and showed the right competencies, from time to time his father allowed him the family car and he would drive to hills bordering the suburbs. There, with the sun dropping low and no one else around, he could see a distant outline of Los Angeles, twenty miles to the west, smell the wild grass and observe a blend of colors swarming amid the day’s dangling end. He could drive himself away from the mundanity of interchangeable streets, houses and lives to someplace new, someplace undeveloped and so virgin, as virgin as his own spawning emotions. Alone then, truly alone, he reflected upon the dynamics of his unfolding life, the marvelous potential there and the profound changes that lay ahead which he knew to be outside his comprehension. What he felt in those moments carried him forward for days. These sporadic wanderings captured the freedom he was coming to crave.

  Despite his overriding self-confidence in most of what he did, Finnegan had never been assertive with the girls who attracted him with greater frequency as he grew older. Buried in his subconscious was the image of the round, awkward child reflected back in his parents’ mirror, and so he could not fully believe that any girl might be interested in what he had to offer. On those occasions when he spoke with an attractive girl, he lost his usual fluidity, becoming tentative, nervous and unsteady, the fragile stem of a dandelion in a high wind.

  All that changed at the start of his final year when, feeling the pressure of friends who were far more active than he was, he stammered an invitation to Elaine Sturgis to attend the formal homecoming dance. She accepted, and the mystical fear of his young psyche began to fade away, replaced with a burgeoning confidence that he welcomed with relief.

  Elaine—tall, thin, beautiful and wickedly intelligent—became another status symbol. She showed herself to be witty, well-rounded and a bit vulnerable. The daughter of an investment banker, she had grown up with certain advantages. Elaine played the piano, had been to Europe twice, dressed impeccably. Finnegan perceived himself to be in a faster lane than he had previously thought.

  But to his surprise, Finnegan found that he enjoyed her company for its own sake. Elaine challenged him, made him look at life differently, more gently, and opened him to what might be. They continued to see each other after the autumn formal. Finnegan tried to dispel his naiveté through contrived sophistication. He attempted to impress her as much as she impressed him. He took her to dinner at very good restaurants, he took her to the theater, he took her to museums. Always he affected an air of false confidence, acting as if he knew what he was doing in these rare places. To Elaine’s delight, he never totally succeeded. Always there was the uncertainty of which fork to use for the salad, or how much to tip the parking valet. Finnegan had indeed impressed her, but not in the way he had planned. Rather, he had impressed her merely by the effort, and because of his awkward efforts she developed a genuinely sympathetic warmth that ran as deep as weakly shaped emotions allowed.

  After those early attempts, they spent most of their time together in simple ways: walking along the beach, driving to the mountains for picnics, studying together or just talking in each other’s backyard. Elaine faithfully attended every basketball game, although she never liked the sport. Finnegan would find her in the stands, and he would play to her. He always knew where she was.

  It all meant nothing, of course. They each knew that their time together was little more than lessons for later relationships. What had begun as a search for status had yielded a serendipitous friend, a new dimension to the time-honored social rituals. Finnegan was extremely pleased. Through Elaine’s gentle effort and his own receptivity to what she offered, the final element of a beautifully conceived panorama fitted into place. Life in that most favored of years ran full and high.

  ***

  For Tom McIlweath, with the winding down of his final year of high school, another relocation loomed. This one, though, he would control.

  College had a
lways been a foregone conclusion. From his first days in a classroom when he learned to read, write and finger-paint, he had been conditioned to expect that his education was pointing him to four years of higher study, at least a bachelor’s degree and possibly something beyond. Now, with college looming as a practicality rather than an abstraction, McIlweath recognized the need for some decisions.

  John McIlweath often reinforced in his son the notion that college provided opportunity. To his son, that opportunity transcended formal education, a degree of some value, and the birthing of a profession. If opportunity beckoned, then Tom McIlweath sought its full advantage, and that meant, in the simplest sense, a redefinition.

  In fact, this past year’s lingering sense of isolation had wounded him at his core. It was more than just the people who surrounded him, generally ignored him and denied him, as an awkward outsider, entrance into the well-established patterns of their lives. They seemed to McIlweath little more than reflections of the general tenor of the place, which he considered sterile, designed to sedate rather than stimulate.

  Perhaps it was that rare time of life in a young man’s evolution when discontent manifested itself bitterly, and disproportionately. Perhaps he would have reached the same conclusion had he stayed in one place most of his life, coming to interpret stability as stagnation. But regardless of its genesis, the conclusion stood firm, and Tom McIlweath knew that a change was needed. He did not know precisely where he belonged, but he knew—with a certainty born of a year’s frustration, a year’s cold regard of the unchallenged and unchallenging faces that swirled around him, a year’s rapping at doors that would not open—that it was not here.

  Truly his father’s son, Tom sensed the nameless, inarticulate longing for something broader, something purer, something more deserving of his best efforts. Had he been born in the south of France or in the Peruvian Andes he would most likely have stoked the same fires, for such are a function of character more than circumstance. Yet circumstance fed the fires as the year ran on, and caused them to burn hot.

  In November Tom McIlweath had received a letter from the swim coach at Rutgers encouraging him to apply for admission there. An alumnus of the college swam at McIlweath’s club, and had a daughter on the Rutgers swim team. He took note of McIlweath’s times and forwarded them to the college coach, who saw a spot for a butterfly specialist in his struggling program. The letter McIlweath received went on for several pages and traced the history of the program, described the facilities in exaggerated detail, and promised great academic rewards at one of the country’s oldest and most recognized universities. McIlweath applied without accepting the coach’s offer of a weekend campus tour. New Jersey, McIlweath reasoned, had to be different, and, if nothing else, could never be like these cold, closed suburbs. Several weeks later he received his acceptance letter, and three days after that came notification of a full tuition waiver with a handsome stipend for room and board.

  In May Tom entered his father’s study to tell him of his decision. Hearing it, his father leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  “New Jersey, right? That’s a hell of a long way away.” John McIlweath paused. “I suppose that’s part of the attraction.” He folded his hands in front of his face, then leaned forward to prop his elbows on the arms of his chair. “You know, you won’t know a soul.”

  “That’s bound to be the case wherever I go, don’t you think? That’s been the case before. Every time.”

  “Have you considered that you’ll be totally on your own there? Totally, with no one to bail you out and no place to go if you get bored or lonely or tired or just want a good meal? Few things are as frightening, and it can change your entire personality. You start to make compromises for the sake of the moment.”

  “Spoken from experience, I presume.”

  The elder McIlweath smiled. “Of course. But I think I might have been better prepared when I headed out. I was harder, Tom. I had sharper edges.”

  “I would have thought you’d have a bit more faith in your bloodlines. But maybe I need the chance to sharpen my own edges. And at the very least, I won’t be under anyone’s shadow there.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Dad, with all due respect, you’ve set the terms for every move we ever made. All I could do was follow. This time I’ll be making my own move.”

  “You must know that I moved us for our own good. Every time. I moved us to something better.”

  “Maybe. But it always seemed to me that you moved for the sake of moving. You moved because you got bored. In any case, you did what you thought was necessary, even if it wasn’t. That’s all I’m doing now.”

  John McIlweath turned his head away from his son. He stared at a bookshelf for several seconds, his gaze following the shapes of the letters on the book spines without noting the words they spelled. For whatever reason, his son wanted to go away, as far afield as he could. John did not fully understand it, and could not see all of what lay behind the young man’s ambiguous reasoning. And, despite that reasoning, John McIlweath did not empathize. Hurt crouched behind the hedges of this surprise, obscuring any recognition of the same impulses he himself had felt so many years ago. But John McIlweath knew, in these few moments, that the leaving was inevitable. He could not stop it, nor did he particularly want to. It all seemed too soon, though. And a remote echo reverberated within him that would play itself over and over again inside his thoughts for the rest of his life.

  His youth was gone, and with it his power, agility and innovation. He recognized the last two decades as a futile attempt to preserve what could not be preserved, and so should have been left to die with dignity. He had made his Mephistophelean bargain, but the rewards had never fully materialized. The basic joys had turned sour. They had been souring for years although he deluded himself into thinking them still sweet and fresh. His passionate efforts to compromise responsibility with self-indulgence had failed. They had been doomed to fail from the start, as any rational and mature man would have seen. Tom’s impending departure punctuated his folly. He knew himself, then, through his son, and shuddered at the grim reflection.

  “Well,” said John, turning back to the incarnation of a long-dead soul, “We’ve still got some time to get ready for all this.”

  ***

  Conor Finnegan, by contrast, took a somewhat different approach to his decisions. He strutted through that final year as Alexander through Macedonia—young, respected and thoroughly in control. His successes seemed endless, his capabilities infinite. Gratified by the domination of circumstances he himself had crafted, yet hardly surprised, he kept himself alert for additional challenges.

  From October to March basketball consumed him. The team had been at the top of the rankings for most of the season, ultimately to suffer its only loss in the semifinals of the state tournament. Finnegan had played a key role, providing stability and leadership each time he stepped between the lines. Twice he scored as many as thirty points, and in half a dozen games he recorded more than ten assists. Such work had not gone unnoticed: at season’s end Finnegan was named All-California, Honorable Mention. In early spring, several colleges recruited him to play ball, in the process offering him as much financial assistance as he would ever need.

  But Finnegan resisted their seductions. Having confirmed his abilities on the hardwood, he lost interest in both the sport and what it promised him as the season came crashing down. He knew beyond the slightest doubt that there was more to him than a jump shot or a quick pass. As a result he dismissed out of hand those colleges who wanted him only for his basketball skills. There was nothing more to prove.

  By spring he had secured his academic position in the top five of his very large class. He had scored well on a national scholarship competition, and had attained the highest college entrance board scores the school had seen in a decade. Local service organizations awarded him their achievement grants, and featured him in their newsletters.

  In fact, Finnegan took his intelligenc
e for granted; he was proud of the fact that he did so. Academics were just another sport. Those colleges that did not need him to play basketball courted him for his scholarly abilities, or what they perceived those abilities to be. Beginning in October, he would come home each day to find another letter, more likely a group of letters, asking him to apply. This university offered diversity, that college provided intimacy, the other boasted an experimental curriculum. It all became a bit tiresome.

  What mattered to Finnegan was not size or atmosphere or reputation. What mattered was challenge. The prospect of challenge invigorated him, and speared his imagination. He wanted to shape the soggy loam that was the nexus of his fine spirit into a sleek and glossy statue, the highest expression of personal dignity, the most refined manifestation of his remarkable potential. He weeded through countless offers with an eye toward that singular compulsion.

  Finnegan began dismissing the smaller colleges. Instinctively he gravitated toward the larger, nationally recognized universities. There, with their conglomeration of intellects and personalities, an opportunity to prove himself amid the strongest competition would be available. As the year wore on and his self-confidence deepened, Finnegan eliminated everything local, even the best multidimensional universities. He toyed with the notion of going away and, as he played with it, the notion grew stronger. Its shadow lengthened across his imagination.

  The drunken exhilaration of youth ensnared Finnegan more deeply by the day. He considered that his greatest challenge would lie in cutting the rope. He had done well amid the security of familiar scenes and familiar faces. He had shouldered a broad space for himself among his peers, all the while reinforced by the fundamental concept of home. Therein lay his security, and hence his confidence, dancing on a high-wire above a thick and pliable cushion.

  If that indeed were the case, then he needed to take away the cushion. He concluded that the most stimulating places were elsewhere, in new territory, under new ground rules, surrounded by the best, most diverse minds and bodies of his time. And so, in an exuberant hubris fed by the remarkable course of his unsullied youth, Finnegan weeded out every college and university that did not fit into his now rigidly conceived pattern of what must come next. He weeded them all out, and when he was done, only one solitary stem remained, a cosmopolitan blend of intellectual heterogeneity, distance, reputation and affordability. He would go east, nearly as far as the continent permitted, to find his unopened oyster.